"There is one political party in this country, and that is the party of money.
It has two branches, the Republicans and the Democrats, the chief difference between which is
that the Democrats are better at concealing their scorn for the average man."
-- Gore Vidal
“The Democrats are the foxes, and the Republicans are the wolves – and they both want to
devour you.” So what does that make Libertarians? Avian flu viruses?”
-- Leonard Pinkney
The race is no contest when you own both horses. That is why no matter which political party
is in power nothing really changes other than the packaging. The puppets who drink at the champagne
fountains of the powerful do the bidding of their masters. The people are superfluous to the process.
In the “democracy” that America has evolved to, money counts more than people.
In past elections, the votes were counted, now they are going to start weighing them.
“(T)he rich elites of (the USA) have far more in common with their counterparts in London,
Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves
from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place
to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and
ruling it, but not of it.”
-- Mike Lofgren
Due to the size the introduction (written in the heat of election campaign) was moved to a separate page:
Note: (April 5, 2017): With the attack on Syria after possibly "false flag" operation in the
spirit of 2013 false flag sarin attack (
Khan Sheikhoun gas attack) Trump base is so angry that I think his chances for reelection might
be close to zero. Very few people from anti-war right will vote for him again.
The main issue in this election is that the Neoliberal Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have
abandoned the pretense of "Coke Pepsi" two party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests,
with WikiLeaks detailing the gory details of their corruption and malfeasance. In this game Trump
was not supposed to win, it is an anomaly which defied the concerted rigging of election be
neoliberals including Wall Street money and the mainstream media presstitutes.
Neoliberalism has gutted, or, more correctly, is in the process
of gutting, the USA society: American people will be voting for Trump because they now understand the
neoliberalism destroyed their well-being and continue to do so. They want, after "serial
betrayer" Obama "bait and switch" maneuver, so to speak, to lob a hand grenade into the Capitol and
White House.
It is not an exaggeration to see in 2016 Presidential election as a referendum on neoliberal globalization.
But the political power still belongs to Neoliberals, which dominates both the government and
the economy (transnationals are the cornerstone of neoliberal world order). It's
a big question if the American people will be able to change neoliberal dogma,
the official civil religion of the USA without a violent revolution...
I wonder if the various powers that be assembled some kind of "Committee to Defend the Liberal
Order" when Trump began to make noises about re-assessing Nato.
> ...some kind of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" when Trump began to make noises about
re-assessing Nato.
A very interesting and pretty plausible hypothesis... That actually is the most deep insight
I got from this interesting discussion. In such case intelligence agencies are definitely a part
of "Committee to Defend the Liberal Order" which is yet another explanation of their strange behavior.
I can't claim that a mere mortal like me actually has the slightest clue what is really going
on. All I will hazard is that, whatever it is, it's a bunch of scams, lies and public manipulation
schemes.
Where this kind of high level foreign policy is involved, the US government and intelligence
services blew their cred with me long ago. I disbelieve them now on as a strong and resilient
prior.
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks
to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment
and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source
and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.
You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from
a document dump that is almost
entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact
Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the
period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.
These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important
for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source.
This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the
meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.
What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive
contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?
The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA)
and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps
who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").
We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking
of the DNC in 2015).
This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests,
https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but
then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public
is skeptical of their claims'.
The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their
hand on the scale.
Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are
trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the
mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't
support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.
I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in
the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.
What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the
Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance
with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them
to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie
that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.
From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole
thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews
by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national
security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got
their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.
Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered
to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.
Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was
not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?
The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law
enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as
'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.
It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of
agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'
It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely,
both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately
involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information
to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.
An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back
channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.
A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the
supposed termination.
When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue
to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:
"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be
forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."
At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me
a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would
it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance
of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?
Another crucial paragraph:
'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in
London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence
probes in American history.'
The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.
As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he
created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments
of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.
I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large
measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures
close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication
which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.
The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky
Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.
(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at
http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who
sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)
The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent
'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'
Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No
mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian
Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether
the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson
were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important
issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.
Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including
McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense.
So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.
Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem
to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with
the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted
his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation
culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian
Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was
potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get
'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously
I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt
on Trump...how is this not the same...?
Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential
candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact
the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him?
Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this
have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence
source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation
that may have already begun?
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete),
his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated
desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting
others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has
not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too
big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing
agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant
thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)?
'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's
"raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they
would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,
" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching
him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "
That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance
authorization?.
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the
NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws
they have that prohibits spying on their people.
Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about
a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered
as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years
ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In
my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them
are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these
people think they are.
It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.
"... Meanwhile, Sater is still working for the FBI , according to two current FBI agents. Moreover, he has relationships with at least six members of Robert Mueller's team, "some going back more than 10 years." ..."
Felix Sater, the man at the center of a controversial email "tying" President Trump to
Russia while trying to work a business deal, has come forward in a comprehensive
BuzzFeed News Exposé, which if Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Cormier and
co-author Jason Leopold hadn't verified - nobody would believe.
Sater went from a "Wall Street wunderkind" working at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, to
getting barred from the securities industry over a barroom brawl which led to a year in prison,
to facilitating a $40 million pump-and-dump stock scheme for the New York mafia, to working
telecom deals in Russia - where the FBI and CIA tapped him as an undercover intelligence asset
who was told by his handler " I want you to understand: If you're caught, the USA is going to
disavow you and, at best, you get a bullet in the head ."
... ... ...
Meanwhile, Sater is still working for the FBI , according to two current FBI agents.
Moreover, he has relationships with at least six members of Robert Mueller's team, "some going
back more than 10 years."
To this day, Sater continues to cooperate with the FBI and Justice Department, he said in
his statement to the House Intelligence Committee. He wouldn't disclose additional details,
except to say that he works on "international matters." Two US officials confirmed Sater
continues to be a reliable asset.
As for his regular life, when he relocated back to the US in 2010, he recalled, "Donald
said, 'Where have you been?'" Sater said Trump asked him to join the Trump Organization.
"That's when I became senior advisor to him," he said. The Trump Organization and the White
House declined to comment. - BuzzFeed
In effect, Sater - at least according to BuzzFeed , is more or less a rockstar opportunist
spy with a shady past, who redeemed himself as an asset for the CIA, the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) and the FBI. During the course of his work for the agencies, all unpaid, BuzzFeed
confirmed the following exploits:
He obtained five of the personal satellite telephone numbers for Osama bin Laden before
9/11 and he helped flip the personal secretary to Mullah Omar, then the head of the Taliban
and an ally of bin Laden, into a source who provided the location of al-Qaeda training camps
and weapons caches.
In 2004, he persuaded a source in Russia's foreign military intelligence to hand over the
name and photographs of a North Korean military operative who was purchasing equipment to
build the country's nuclear arsenal.
Sater provided US intelligence with details about possible assassination threats against
former president George W. Bush and secretary of state Colin Powell. Sater reported that
jihadists were hiding in a hut outside Bagram Air Base and planned to shoot down Powell's
plane during a January 2002 visit. He later told his handlers that two female al-Qaeda
members were trying to recruit an Afghan woman working in the Senate barbershop to poison
President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.
He went undercover in Cyprus and Istanbul to catch Russian and Ukrainian cybercriminals
around 2005. After the FBI set him up with a fake name and background, Sater posed as a money
launderer to help nab the suspects for washing funds stolen from US financial institutions
.
"... I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation. Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. ..."
"... Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of Power. ..."
"... American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy." ..."
"... Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities: Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious. ..."
"... There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government. ..."
"... If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!" ..."
"... I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them. ..."
"... She was put in charge there not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect. ..."
"... furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states " For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition? ..."
"... Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be considered in the contexts of these words. ..."
Nothing will say more about who we are, across three American administrations -- one that demanded torture, one that covered it
up, and one that seeks to promote its bloody participants -- than whether Gina Haspel becomes director of the CIA.
Haspel oversaw the
torture of human beings in Thailand as the chief of a CIA black site in 2002. Since then, she's worked her way up to deputy director
at the CIA. With current director Mike Pompeo slated to move to Foggy Bottom, President Donald Trump has proposed Haspel as the Agency's
new head.
Haspel's victims waiting for death in Guantanamo cannot speak to us, though they no doubt remember their own screams as they were
waterboarded. And we can still hear former CIA officer
John Kiriakousay : "We did
call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because
they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information."
It was Kiriakou who exposed the obsessive debate over the effectiveness of torture as false. The real purpose of torture conducted
by those like Gina Haspel was to seek vengeance, humiliation, and power. We're just slapping you now, she would have said in that
Thai prison, but we control you, and who knows what will happen next, what we're capable of? The torture victim is left to imagine
what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, creating his own terror.
Haspel won't be asked at her confirmation hearing to explain how torture works, but those who were waterboarded under her stewardship
certainly could.
I met my first torture victim in Korea, where I was adjudicating visas for the State Department. Persons with serious criminal
records are ineligible to travel to the United States, with an exception for dissidents who have committed political crimes. The
man I spoke with said that under the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee he was tortured for writing anti-government
verse. He was taken to a small underground cell. Two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with
one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked no questions. They barely spoke to him at all.
Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, he said the subsequent humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what
really affected his life. It destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting
pen to paper again. The men who destroyed him, he told me, did their work, and then departed, as if they had others to visit and
needed to get on with things. He was released a few days later and driven back to his apartment by the police. A forward-looking
gesture.
The second torture victim I met was while I was stationed in Iraq. The prison that had held him was under the control of shadowy
U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. Inside, masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said they
neither asked him questions nor demanded information. They did whip his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of
his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar
ordinarily used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What destroyed him was the feeling of utter helplessness, the inability
to control things around him as he once had. He showed me the caved-in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation
with faint signs of metal grooves.
Gina Haspel is the same as those who were in the room with the Korean. She is no different than those who tormented the Iraqi.
As head of a black site, Haspel had sole authority to halt the questioning of suspects, but she allowed torture to continue.
New information
and a redaction of earlier reporting that said Haspel was present for the waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah (she was
actually the station chief at the black site after those sessions) makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture
of all of the prisoners there, but pay it little mind. The confusion arises from the government's refusal to tell us what Haspel
actually did as a torturer. So many records have yet to be released and those that have been are heavily redacted. Then there are
the tapes of Zubaydah's waterboarding, which Haspel later pushed to have destroyed.
Arguing over just how much blood she has in her hands is a distraction from the fact that she indeed has blood on her hands.
Gina Haspel is now eligible for the CIA directorship because Barack Obama did not prosecute anyone for torture; he merely signed
an executive order banning it in the future. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured that almost all government documents
on the torture program remained classified. He did not prosecute the CIA officials who destroyed videotapes of the torture scenes.
Obama ignored the truth that sees former Nazis continue to be hunted some 70 years after the Holocaust: that those who do evil
on behalf of a government are individually responsible. "I was only following orders" is not a defense of inhuman acts. The purpose
of tracking down the guilty is to punish them, to discourage the next person from doing evil, and to morally immunize a nation-state.
To punish Gina Haspel "more than 15 years later for doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told
were lawful orders, would be a travesty and a disgrace,"
claims one of
her supporters. "Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well,"
said Michael Hayden,
who headed the CIA during the height of the Iraq war from 2006-2009.
Influential people in Congress agree. Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will soon review
Haspel's nomination,
said , "I know Gina personally and she has the right skill set, experience, and judgment to lead one of our nation's most critical
agencies."
"She'll have to answer for that period of time, but I think she's a highly qualified person,"
offered Senator
Lindsey Graham. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson
defended Haspel's
actions, saying they were "the accepted practice of the day" and shouldn't disqualify her.
His fellow Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, signaled her likely acceptance,
saying , "Since my concerns were raised over the torture situation, I have met with her extensively, talked with her She has
been, I believe, a good deputy director." Senator Susan Collins
added that Haspel "certainly has the expertise and experience as a 30-year employee of the agency." John McCain, a victim of
torture during the Vietnam War,
mumbled only that Haspel would have to explain her role.
Nearly alone at present, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he will
oppose Haspel's nomination. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, have told Trump she is unsuitable and will
likely also vote no.
Following World War II, the United States could have easily executed those Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, or thrown them
into some forever jail on an island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who wouldn't have supported brutally torturing
them at a black site. Instead, they were put on public trial at Nuremberg and made to defend their actions as the evidence against
them was laid bare. The point was to demonstrate that We were better than Them.
Today we refuse to understand what Haspel's victims, and the Korean writer, and the Iraqi insurgent, already know on our behalf:
unless Congress awakens to confront this nightmare and deny Gina Haspel's nomination as director of the CIA, torture will have transformed
us and so it will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of
We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. He tweets@WeMeantWell.
Covering up torture is quite possibly the worst thing Obama did. (I'd put it neck-and-neck with targeted killing.) This nation
desperately needs a president who will expose all of these horrors, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute these acts
as war crimes.
Trump likes waterboarding. He said so himself. One assumes he meant, being a whimpering coward himself, when someone else does
it to someone else. But who knows? Enjoy judge Gorsuch.
"doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders"
To complete the parallel, we would need to prosecute and punish those who asked her to do it, and those who told her those
orders were lawful. Instead, some are doing paintings of their toes, some are promoted to be Federal judges, and some are influential
professors at "liberal" law schools. Why punish *only* her?
I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation.
Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. I am in full support of Mr. Van Buren's thesis. However, Pro Publica, which seems
to have been the source of much reporting of Haspel's torture record, has retracted the claim that Haspel had tortured in Thailand.
Mr. Van Buren quotes another source from his blog that supports the thesis that Haspel is a torturer. How does one know what to
believe? Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate
and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of
Power.
Its because we lost our sense of what makes us who we are. We are an empire that dances for private interests. In Rome they were
called families and led by patricians, they had money private guards, gladiators, and even street people supporting them. In the
Modern USA they are called Interest Groups and/or Corporations. They are lead by CEOs and instead of gladiators they have Lawyers.
Our being better matters less then their own squabbles which is why a torturer could reach the highest seat in intel. The majority
of Americans have lost their sense of being Americans instead they are Republicans, Democrats, etc, etc. Things that once use
to be part of an American have come to define us.
American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always
virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military
governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy."
At least this appointment along with the election of Trump shows the true face of the United States in international affairs.
When we face the fact we are (a) an oligarchy and (b) a brutal Empire we might have a chance to return to something more human.
Few readers, even of TAC, will want to look at our recent history of stunning brutality and lack of interest in even being in
the neighborhood of following international law.
CIA has purposefully refused to disclose Haspel's role for a decade+ They have selectively released information last week to discredit
those criticizing her. I don't think we should play their game, letting them set the agenda. Instead, I declaim torture itself
and any role she played in it, whether she poured the water or kept the books.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of the CIA's Haspel put him at risk?
In the 2003 film "Love Actually" the British Prime Minister (played by Hugh Grant) jokes with a Downing Street employee Natalie
(Martine McCutcheon):
"PM: You live with your husband? Boyfriend, three illegitimate but charming children? –
"NATALIE: No, I've just split up with my boyfriend, so I'm back with my mum and dad for a while.
"PM: Oh. I'm sorry.
"NATALIE: No, it's fine. I'm well shot of him. He said I was getting fat.
"PM: I beg your pardon?
"NATALIE: He said no one's going to fancy a girl with thighs the size of big tree trunks. Not a nice guy, actually, in the end.
"PM: Right You know, being Prime Minister, I could just have him murdered.
"NATALIE: Thank you, sir. I'll think about it.
"PM: Do – the SAS are absolutely charming – ruthless, trained killers are just a phone call away."
It's just a film. It's just a joke. But the joke works because the public knows that – in reality – the security services have
the skills-sets and the abilities, to do damage anyone they want to do damage to -- and to probably get away with it.
Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect
Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities:
Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even
for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious.
Fast forward again to yesterday, March 17, 2018: Former CIA Director John Brennan wasn't joking when he reacted to the firing
of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- and President Donald Trump's tweeted celebration of it -- by tweeting this attack against
Trump:
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America America
will triumph over you."
Obama UN Representative Samantha Power followed up on the Brennan tweet with this:
"Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan."
When public officials and former public officials -- like Shumer, Brennan and Power -- make such public statements it must
necessarily have a chilling effect on public criticism of the security services.
After all, none of the three are joking. They're serious. And the American people know that they're serious.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of CIA operative Haspel put him at risk?
New information makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture of all of the prisoners at her black site, but pay it little
mind. The confusion is because the government refuses to tell us what Haspel actually did as a torturer. Arguing over just how
much blood she has on her hands is a distraction when she indeed has blood on her hands.
The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient to disqualify her from heading the Agency. If the
Agency wishes to clarify her role, as was done via trial for the various Nazis at Nuremberg, we can deal with her actions more
granularly.
Since we have not had any more successful attacks on the scale of 9-11, it is very easy to be scrupulous regarding rough treatment
of terrorists.
But if we had suffered a dozen or more such attacks, of increasing magnitude and maybe involving nuclear weapons, how many
of you would still be condemning Mrs Haspel et al.? Or would you then be complaining they had not used water-boarding enough?
The 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was caught weeks before 9-11. Investigators figured out he was up to no good, tried
to get permission to search his computer, but were denied. The U.S. Government carefully protected his privacy rights. So are
you pleased with the outcome, Mr van Buren?
I'm sorry – this whole piece is a massive non sequitur. Ms. Haspel has no 'blood' on her hands as US extreme interrogation techniques
(sleep deprivation, uncomfortable positions, waterboarding) didn't draw any. They are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating
the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones. US techniques might have been bad policy – won't argue – but lets not fall
for a false equivalency.
Ms. Haspel was an agent of her government, acting on it's orders under it's policies and guidelines. Which leads to
Nuremberg. The Nuremberg tribunals (they were military tribunals – not trials) were conducted by a victorious military force
against a defeated military force. They were widely criticized as vengeance even by such august people as Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court Stone and associate Justice Douglas. There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the
United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government.
And lastly there's this from a comment of the authors: "The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient
to disqualify her from heading the Agency." Utter nonsense. That was the mission of the Agency at that time. It's like saying
a 33yr old Drone Pilot who takes out an ISIS/Al Qaida operative as well as 15 civilians is disqualified to be the Sec Def 2 decades
later.
If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth
that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!"
We demonize Russia at every opportunity, but I don't see Russia rewarding torturers by appointing them to high office.
I didn't know too much about this woman's background until I read that Rand Paul opposes her nomination. I tend to take notice
whenever Rand Paul holds forth on any subject. All I can say is that if her actual record even approximates what has been alleged,
then this woman is unfit for the post–Nuremberg or no Nuremberg.
"As we've proved, we're not better than them. Any of them." Oh, -PLEASE-, spare us the hyperbole! WE burn alive captives held
in cages? WE saw off their heads?
Thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
(S.E.R.E.) training programs.
All of the torturers should be brought to justice. So should all of the officials who ordered or authorized torture.
There is no statute of limitations on capital Federal crimes. For a U.S. citizen to kill via torture is a capital Federal crime,
no matter where the torture took place. If statutes of limitations make it too late to prosecute some acts of torture, it is not
too late to bring about some measure of justice by making torturers pariahs. As many sexual harassers have recently learned, there
is no statute of limitations in the court of public opinion.
The story linking her to torture has been formally retracted. She had nothing to do with torture anywhere. How about a retraction
of this story and an apology.
I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School
of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know
better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them.
Personally,
I prefer that the cruelty should be, as Lincoln once put it, "unalloyed by the base metal of hypocrisy"
bob sykes: you should read Pro Publica's retraction (
https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture
) of the claim that Haspel was in charge of the Thai black site when Abu Zubaydeh was tortured. She was put in charge there
not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding
at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect.
Winston: why do you suppose "thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs"? Is it not to prepare them for the possibility of what we call torture when
used by our adversaries?
furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals,
pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states "
For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,
is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition?
Wilfred, the problem was not that the Feds protected Zacarias Moussaoui's right to privacy. The problem is that it let any of
the 20 Arab Muslims into the US in the first place. Closing our borders and mass deportations would have been the best thing to
do in the aftermath of 9/11, not torture and invasions.
Very well put. Lest we forget: Bush also delivered the stern warning that "war crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be
punished, and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders'."
Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter
and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be
considered in the contexts of these words.
Chris Mallory (Mar 19 @1:47 p.m.), I agree with you. We shouldn't be letting them in.
But if someone had sneaked-a-peek at Moussaoui's laptop during the 3 weeks they had him before 9-11, we might have been able
to thwart the attack altogether. (And the Press has been strangely incurious about investigating whoever it was who issued the
injunction protecting Moussie's precious computer). This type of hand-wringing cost us 3,000 lives. Even more, considering the
Afghan & 2nd Iraq wars would never have been launched, were it not for 9-11.
Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of
civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top
brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of
secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the
USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
Availability of unaccounted financial
resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
Notable quotes:
"... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
"... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
"... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
"... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
"... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
"... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover,
the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its
director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.
Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned
into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry
Truman (1943-53) reportedly
characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five
decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?
J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists
and other public figures, according to
biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid
private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions
so as to serve his interests.
And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.
Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against
homosexuals in public life.
It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist
inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and
freedom of expression continues to this day.
One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots
of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is
suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual
tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.
Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public
statements.
Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the
presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).
As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50
Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising
information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would
be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your
career". Enough said.
JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and
extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once
confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made
the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ.
Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ
into the White House.
However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly
anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy
pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt
led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample
evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep
State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald –
a cover-up that persists to this day.
As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications
with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968.
Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace
talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize.
LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his
vice president Hubert Humphrey.
Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on,
and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long
coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.
But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was
classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is
possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating
in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.
These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and
subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the
people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as
some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion
as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the
media's own compromised complicity.
Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one
individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.
Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not
alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not
just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the
Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.
Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government
– does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power
through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of
American dissenters.
The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of
the American Deep State.
Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix
the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.
So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies,
as the US intelligence chiefs once again
chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!
The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American"
agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.
US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate
how they are being manipulated.
We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of
the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt
by the people.
Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by
Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully
and that shows.
Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the
main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people)
This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with
uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is
for you.
Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and
again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military.
It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of
"enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of
immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive
ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil
religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with
neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the
national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class
fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking
foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish)
out.
It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination
of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other
investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often
consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower
middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the
humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent
weapon to achieve this goal.
Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem
within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic
or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards
to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think
they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to
all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism
is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on
those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political
ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s
included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the
dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the
center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites,
anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more
educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health
care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power,
what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem-
ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to
the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the
sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy
or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and
women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense
that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier
it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing
to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the
near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have
an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music,
incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which
others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be
aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the
future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men"
and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed,
"a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy
that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate
authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And
that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the
technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to
connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women
act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case,
but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of
personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to
home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist
government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March,"
said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we
protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies
on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist
organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false
narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception:
repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The
Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is
neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major
political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the
years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism
entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are
required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The
doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside
down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their
rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between
Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny,
autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a
former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is
someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is
unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary --
including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be
a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over
scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war
with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why
they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A
Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down,
Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and
the firepower to strike first.
Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the
most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily
attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq
official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was
Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with
the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history
that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of
them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think
the price is worth it.
While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much
more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a
whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on
the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative
syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking
for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in
single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how
do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme
her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous
Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid
getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or
Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of
fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise,
a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of
pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say
is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is
left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and
only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street",
then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as
Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head
of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her
perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of
the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national
leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of
Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law
enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city
neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's
unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain
ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership
responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and
Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad
course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high
responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of
the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those
not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances
Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership
allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are
afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an
average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of
Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice
guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while
Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a
drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or
anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good
national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I
would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that
continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a
population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding
of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young
person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects.
Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it
takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only
after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that
individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats
will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors.
Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field
criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem
attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage
conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these
skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing
communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a
journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of
responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the
media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or
mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism
becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress.
When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor
problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward
progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills,
not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the
norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that
fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think
then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed;
question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulation
These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that
can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great
story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going
forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would
have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of
history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about
positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the
actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both
of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist
Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration
policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism,
but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to
her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited
rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us
about.
Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of
fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist
ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are
essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or
regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events
and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax
(and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the
current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the
biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and
regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and
individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the
dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of
a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made
me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it
is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history
relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal:
the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never
outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and
what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the
end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a
belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of
anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic
religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems
to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances
I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything,
the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent
stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and
other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of
capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and
everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like
Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea
of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still
recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current
world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need
of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the
world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making
it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are,
deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets
she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen
are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria
would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia)
does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US
governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never
intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at
heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their
buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to
swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across
as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars
Trite and opaque
We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it
came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a
2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when
she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US
interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany
ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his
death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon
turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked
nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise
assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito
was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for
invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and
Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods.
Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is
communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural
history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic
torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in
China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to
mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to
work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had
intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk
Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost
extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on
gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was
conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as
infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew
was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several
children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband
grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939,
in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an
asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a
nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think
again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody
despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is
waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because
Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called
Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of
unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the
Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western
Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders
Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been
so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are
countries where you can go and openly be fascist.
To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning
about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is
unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend
against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or
quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand
any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or
a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial
or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded
from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she
does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda
to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies.
What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate
fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing
things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of
using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules
to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use
"our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little
that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez
or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these
dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The
circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules,
methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be
easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and
learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book
is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also
debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and
are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have
in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such
tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being.
Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and
intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks
from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions,
like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more.
Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both
are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the
book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more
informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either
socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She
squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like
Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in
Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater
from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember
than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready
made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders
and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable
Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are
"the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of
human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos
(Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has
to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says
Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but
needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no
mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with
performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted
in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.
The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more
informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban
in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what
our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for
our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for
weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership
continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
Carlson is saying Trump's not "capable" of sustained focus on the sausage-making of right-wing policy.
The clickbait (out of context) headline makes it sound like a more general diss. I'm not supporting Trump here [standard disclaimer],
but these gotcha headlines are tiresome.
Politically Obama was a "despicable coward", or worse, a marionette.
Notable quotes:
"... A 50 state strategy, or no 50 state strategy, it really doesn't matter. Democrats were going to take losses. The key is, making sure the party is unified enough to run public policy courses. ..."
"... Your points make little sense in the face of what people wanted in 2016 that Obama could have delivered without interference from the Republicans. Things like anti-trust enforcement, SEC enforcement aka jailing the banksters, not going into Syria, not supporting the war in Yemen (remember he did both of those on his own without Congress), not making the Bush tax cuts permanent, not staying silent on union issues and actually wearing those oft mentioned comfortable shoes while walking a picket line, the list of what could have been done and that people supported goes on and on. None of which required approval from Congress. ..."
"... And speaking of the ACA, we know that Obama and others did whatever they could to kill single payer and replace it with Romneycare 1.5. The language in the bill and the controversy surrounding it show that no one thought this would give them a short term political advantage. If anything, the run up to the vote finally made enough citizens realize that they didn't hate government insurance, they just hated insurance. And here were the Democrats and Obama, forcing people to buy expensive insurance. ..."
"... He had a mandate for change. He had a majorities in both houses. He had the perfect bully pulpit. He chose not to use any of it. He and others killed the support for local parties. The Democrats needed the JFA with Hillary because Obama had pretty much bankrupted the party in 2012. A commitment to all 50 states would have been huge and would have helped Hillary get on the ground where she needed to shore up support by a few thousand votes. ..."
"... Obama and the Democrats took losses from 2008 on because they promised to do what their constituents voted them in to do and then decided not to do it. ..."
"... People don't have Republican fatigue. They don't have Democrat fatigue. They simply don't see the point in voting for people who won't do what they're voted in to do. ..."
"... The citizens of this country want change. They want higher wages and lower prices. They want less war. They want less government interference. They want their kids to grow up with more opportunities than they did. ..."
"Democratic left playing a long game to get 'Medicare for All'" [Bloomberg Law]. "'We don't have the support that we need,'
said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who will co-chair the Progressive Caucus. She said that she'd favor modest expansions
of Medicare or Medicaid eligibility as a step toward Medicare for All. 'I am a big bold thinker; I'm also a good practical
strategist,' Jayapal said.
'It's why the Medicare for All Caucus was started, because we want to get information to our members so people feel
comfortable talking about the attacks we know are going to come.'" • So many Democrat McClellans; so few Democrat Grants.
"Progressives set to push their agenda in Congress and on the campaign trail. The GOP can't wait." [NBC]. "While the party
has moved left on health care, many Democrats seem more comfortable offering an option to buy into Medicare or a similar public
plan rather than creating one single-payer plan that replaces private insurance and covers everyone. Progressives, led by Rep.
Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and her Medicare For All PAC, plan to whip up support for the maximalist version and advance
legislation in 2019." • The "maximalist version" is exactly what Jayapal herself, quoted by Bloomberg, says she will not seek.
Not sure whether this is Democrat cynicism, sloppy Democrat messaging, or poor reporting. Or all three!
The problem is unlike 1933 large sections of the electorate just wanted more Republican
economics to "deal" with the aftermath. That is the difference between a moderate
recession(historically) and a collapse like the early 1930's had when the British Empire and
the de Rothschild dynasty finally collapsed.
40% didn't want anything the Obama Administration came up with succeed. 40% wanted more
than they could possible politically come up with and that left 20% to actually get something
done. You see why the Democrats had to take losses.
Even if Health Care, which was controversial in the party was nixed for more "stimulus",
Democrats look weak. Politically, Stimulus wasn't that popular and "fiscal deficit" whiners were going to whine
and there are a lot of them.
Naked Capitalism ignores this reality instead, looking for esoteric fantasy. I would argue
Democrats in 2009-10 looked for short term political gain by going with Health Care reform
instead of slowly explaining the advantage of building public assets via stimulus, because
the party was to split on Health Care to create a package that would satisfy enough
people.
Similar the Republican party, since Reagan had done the opposite, took short term
political gain in 2016, which was a mistake, due to their Clinton hatred.
Which is now backfiring and the business cycle is not in a kind spot going forward, which
we knew was likely in 2016.
So not only does "Republican fatigue" hurt in 2018, your on the political defensive for
the next cycle. Short-termism in politics is death.
A 50 state strategy, or no 50 state strategy, it really doesn't matter. Democrats were
going to take losses. The key is, making sure the party is unified enough to run public
policy courses.
I truly don't understand your point of view. I also don't understand your claim that NC
deals in fantasy.
Your points make little sense in the face of what people wanted in 2016 that Obama could
have delivered without interference from the Republicans. Things like anti-trust enforcement,
SEC enforcement aka jailing the banksters, not going into Syria, not supporting the war in
Yemen (remember he did both of those on his own without Congress), not making the Bush tax
cuts permanent, not staying silent on union issues and actually wearing those oft mentioned
comfortable shoes while walking a picket line, the list of what could have been done and that
people supported goes on and on. None of which required approval from Congress.
There's even the bland procedural tactic of delaying the release of the Obamacare exchange
premium price increases until after the election in 2016. He could have delayed that notice
several months and saved Hillary a world of hurt at the polls. But he chose not to use the
administrative tools at his disposal in that case. He also could have seen the writing on the
wall with the multiple shut down threats and gotten ahead of it by asking Congress that if
you are deemed an essential employee you will continue to be paid regardless of whether your
department is funded during a shutdown. With 80% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck
that would have been a huge deal.
And speaking of the ACA, we know that Obama and others did whatever they could to kill
single payer and replace it with Romneycare 1.5. The language in the bill and the controversy
surrounding it show that no one thought this would give them a short term political
advantage. If anything, the run up to the vote finally made enough citizens realize that they
didn't hate government insurance, they just hated insurance. And here were the Democrats and
Obama, forcing people to buy expensive insurance.
Obama took a huge organization that could have helped him barnstorm the country (OFA) just
like what Bernie is doing now and killed it early in his first term. He had a mandate for
change. He had a majorities in both houses. He had the perfect bully pulpit. He chose not to
use any of it. He and others killed the support for local parties. The Democrats needed the JFA with Hillary because Obama had pretty much bankrupted the party in 2012. A commitment to
all 50 states would have been huge and would have helped Hillary get on the ground where she
needed to shore up support by a few thousand votes.
Obama and the Democrats took losses from 2008 on because they promised to do what their
constituents voted them in to do and then decided not to do it. By the time 2016 rolled
around, there were estimates which placed 90% of the counties in the US as not having
recovered from the disaster in 2007. Hillary ran on radical incrementalism aka the status
quo. Who in their right mind could have supported the status quo in 2016?
The Democrats lost seats at all levels of government because of their own incompetence,
because of their cowardice, because of their lazy assumptions that people had nowhere else to
go. So when record numbers of people didn't vote they lost by slim margins in states long
considered True Blue. There is nothing cyclical about any of that.
People don't have Republican fatigue. They don't have Democrat fatigue. They simply don't
see the point in voting for people who won't do what they're voted in to do.
The citizens of
this country want change. They want higher wages and lower prices. They want less war. They
want less government interference. They want their kids to grow up with more opportunities
than they did.
Obama and Hillary and all the rest of the Democrats stalking MSM cameras could
have delivered on some of that but chose not to. And here we are. With President Trump. And
even his broken clock gets something right twice a day, whereas Team Blue has a 50/50 chance
of making the right decision and chooses wrong everytime.
Please provide better examples of your points if you truly want to defend your
argument.
And, that often mentioned reason for voting for Democrats, the Supreme Court. Neither
Obama nor the Democrats fought for their opportunity to put their person on the Supreme
Court. Because of norms I guess. Which actually makes some sense because it broke norms.
Because they simply don't care
I truly don't understand why you think any of that. Most mystifying is your claim that
anyone thought ACA would provide short term political benefit?
You know how Obamacare could have given Hillary a short term political gain? If Obama had
directed HHS to delay releasing any premium increase notices until after the election.
Otherwise, you'd have to support your argument a lot better. NC has the least fantastical
commentary base of any website I've seen.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Your calling depicting NC as "fantasy" is a textbook
example of projection on your part.
The country was terrified and demoralized when Obama took office. Go read the press in
December 2008 and January 2009, since your memory is poor. He not only had window of
opportunity to do an updated 100 days, the country would have welcomed. But he ignored it and
the moment passed.
Obama pushed heath care because that was what he had campaigned on and had a personal
interest in it. He had no interest in banking and finance and was happy to let Geither run
that show.
As for stimulus, bullshit. Trump increased deficit spending with his tax cuts and no one
cares much if at all. The concern re deficit spending was due to the fact that the Obama
economic team was the Clinton (as in Bob Rubin) economics team, which fetishized balanced
budgets or even worse, surpluses. We have explained long form that that stance was directly
responsible for the rapid increase in unproductive household debt, most of all mortgage debt,
which produced the crisis.
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
"... Special Counsel Robert Mueller has gone so far down the rabbit hole in his $25 million (taxpayer funded) Russia investigation -- going so far as to have "collected a nude selfie " to satisfy his probe. ..."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has gone so far down the rabbit hole in his
$25
million (taxpayer funded) Russia investigation -- going so far as to have "collected a nude selfie " to satisfy his probe.
The claim, according to The Hill was contained within a court filing by Russian firm Concord Management and Consulting - one of
three businesses indicted by Mueller in February along with 13 individuals for election meddling.
In the Thursday court
filing accusing Mueller's team of illegally withholding information in the case, Concord attorney Eric Dubelier made mention
of the "nude selfie," asking " Could the manner in which he collected a nude selfie really threaten the national security of the
United States? "
"... On December 19, Donald Trump announced in a Twitter message: "Our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now. We won". Shortly thereafter, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement: "We have started the process of returning US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign". ..."
"... The temperature is heating up for Trump following the midterms, as the Democrats prepare to take command of the House of Representatives in January, something that Trump had always hoped to avert. He surrounded himself with generals, in the forlorn hope that this would somehow protect him. If the last two years of his presidency were constantly under the cloud of Mueller's investigation, or insinuations of being an agent of Putin, from January 2019 the situation is going to get much more complicated. The Democratic electoral base is baying for the President's impeachment, the party already in full pre-primary mode, with more than 20 candidates competing, with the incumbent of the White House offering the rallying cry. ..."
"... Given that 70% of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, the more that the mainstream media attacks Trump for his decision to withdraw, the more they direct votes to Trump. In this sense, Trump's move seems to be directed at a domestic rather than an international audience. ..."
"... The decision to get out of Syria is timed to coincide with another move that will also very much please Trump's base. The government shutdown is a result of the Democrats refusing to fund Trump's campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. ..."
"... The choice to announce to his base, via Twitter, a victory against ISIS and the immediate withdrawal of US troops was a smart election move with an eye on the 2020 election. ..."
"... Macron has for now reacted angrily at Trump's decision, intensifying the division between the two, and is adamant that the French military presence in Syria will continue. ..."
"... The military-industrial-intelligence-media complex considers Trump's decision the worst of of all possible moves. Mattis even resigned on account of this. ..."
"... For Israel, it is a double disaster, with Netanyahu desperate to survive, seeking to factor in expected elections in a now-or-never political move. Trump probably understands that Bibi is done for, and that at this point, the withdrawal of troops, fulfilling a fundamental electoral promise, counts more than Israeli money and his friendship to Bibi. ..."
On December 19, Donald Trump announced in a Twitter message: "Our boys, our young women,
our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now. We won". Shortly thereafter,
Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement: "We have started the process of returning
US troops home from Syria as we transition to the next phase of the campaign".
The reasons for Donald Trump's move are many, but they are mainly driven by US domestic
concerns. The temperature is heating up for Trump following the midterms, as the Democrats
prepare to take command of the House of Representatives in January, something that Trump had
always hoped to avert. He surrounded himself with generals, in the forlorn hope that this would
somehow protect him. If the last two years of his presidency were constantly under the cloud of
Mueller's investigation, or insinuations of being an agent of Putin, from January 2019 the
situation is going to get much more complicated. The Democratic electoral base is baying for
the President's impeachment, the party already in full pre-primary mode, with more than 20
candidates competing, with the incumbent of the White House offering the rallying cry.
The combination of these factors has forced Trump to change gears, considering that the
military-industrial-intelligence-media-complex has always been ready to get rid of Trump, even
in favor of a President Pence. The only option available for Trump in order to have a chance of
reelection in 2020 is to undertake a self-promotion tour, a practice in which he has few peers,
and which will involve him repeating his mantra of "Promises Made, Promises Kept". He will list
how he has fought against the fake-news media, suffered internal sabotage, as well as other
efforts (from the Fed, the FBI, and Mueller himself) to hamper his efforts to "Make America
Great Again".
Trump has perhaps understood that in order to be re-elected, he must pursue a simple media
strategy that will have a direct impact on his base. Withdrawing US troops from Syria, and
partly from Afghanistan, serves this purpose. It is an easy way to win with his constituents,
while it is a heavy blow to his fiercest critics in Washington who are against this decision.
Given that 70% of Americans think that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, the more that the
mainstream media attacks Trump for his decision to withdraw, the more they direct votes to
Trump. In this sense, Trump's move seems to be directed at a domestic rather than an
international audience.
The decision to get out of Syria is timed to coincide with another move that will also very
much please Trump's base. The government shutdown is a result of the Democrats refusing to fund
Trump's campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border. It is not difficult to
understand that the average citizen is fed up with the useless wars in the Middle East, and
Trump's words on immigration resonate with his voters. The more the media, the Democrats and
the deep state criticize Trump on the wall, on the Syria pull out and on shutting down the
government, the more they are campaigning for him.
This is why in order to understand the withdrawal of the United States from Syria it is
necessary to see things from Trump's perspective, even as frustrating, confusing and
incomprehensible that may seem at times.
The difference this time around was that the decision to withdraw US troops from Syria was
Trump's alone, not something imposed on him by the generals that surround him. The choice to
announce to his base, via Twitter, a victory against ISIS and the immediate withdrawal of US
troops was a smart election move with an eye on the 2020 election.
It is possible that Trump, as is his wont, also wanted to send a message to his alleged
French and British allies present in the northeast of Syria alongside the Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF) and US soldiers. Trump may be now taunting: "Let's see what you can do without the
US!"
It is as if Trump is admonishing these countries in a more concrete way for not lifting
their weight in terms of military spending. Trump is vindictive and is not averse, after taking
advantage of his opponent, to kicking him once he is down. Trump could be correct in this
regard, and maybe French and British forces will be forced to withdraw their small group of 400
to 500 illegal occupiers of Syrian territory. Macron has for now reacted angrily at Trump's
decision, intensifying the division between the two, and is adamant that the French military
presence in Syria will continue.
There is also a more refined reason to justify the US withdrawal, even if Trump is probably
unaware of it. The problem in these cases is always trying to peer through the fog of war and
propaganda in order to discern the clear, unadulterated truth.
We should begin by listing the winners and losers of the Syrian conflict. Damascus, Moscow,
Tehran and Hezbollah have won the war against aggression. Riyadh, Doha, Paris, London, Tel Aviv
and Washington, with their al Qaeda, Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist proxies, failed to
destroy Syria, and following seven years of effort, are forced to scurry away in defeat.
Those who are walking a tightrope between war and defeat are Ankara and the so-called SDF.
The withdrawal of the United States has confirmed the balance on the ledger of winners and
losers, with the clock counting down for Erdogan and the SDF to make their next determinative
move.
The enemies of Syria survive thanks to repeated bluffs. The Americans of the
military-industrial-intelligence apparatus maintain the pretence that they still have an
influence in Syria, what with troops on the ground, attacking Trump for withdrawing. In fact,
since the Russians have imposed a no-fly-zone across the country, with the S-300 systems and
other sophisticated equipment that integrate the Syrian air-defenses into the Russian air
defenses, US coalition planes are for all intents and purposes grounded, and the same goes for
the Israelis.
Of course the French and British in Syria are infected with the same delusional disease,
choosing to believe that they can count for something without the US presence. We will see in
the near future whether they also withdraw their illegal presence from Syria.
The biggest bluff of all probably comes from Erdogan, who for months threatened to invade
Syria to fight ISIS, the Kurds, or any other plausible excuse to invade a sovereign country for
the purposes of advancing his dreams of expanding Turkish territory as far as Idlib (which
Erdogan considers a province of Turkey). Such an invasion, however, is unlikely to happen, as
it would unite the SDF, Damascus and her allies to reject the Turkish advance on Syrian
territory.
The Kurds in turn seem to have only one option left, namely, a forced negotiation with
Damascus to give back to the Syrian people, in exchange for protection, the control of their
territory that is rich in oil and gas.
Erdogan wants to eliminate the SDF, and until now, the only thing that stood in his way was
the US military presence. He even threatened to attack several times, even in spite of the
presence of US troops. Ankara has long been on a collision course with NATO countries on
account of this. By removing US troops, Trump imagines, relations between Turkey and the US may
also improve. This of course is of little interest to the US deep state, since Erdogan, like
Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), is considered unsuitable, and is accordingly branded a
"dictator".
Trump probably believes that with this move, as with his defense of MBS concerning
Khashoggi, that he can try and establish a strong personal friendship with Erdogan. There are
even talks about the sale of Patriot systems to the Turks and the extradition of Gulen.
When Will They Leave, and Cui Prodest?
It remains to be confirmed when and to what extent US troops will leave Syria. If the US had
no voice in the future in Syria, with 2,000 men on the ground, now it has even less. Leaving
behind 200 to 300 special forces and CIA operatives, together with another 400 to 500 French
and British personnel, will, once they are captured with their Daesh and al Qaeda friends, be
an excellent bargaining chip for Damascus, as they were in Aleppo.
The military-industrial-intelligence-media complex considers Trump's decision the worst of
of all possible moves. Mattis even resigned on account of this. The presence of US troops in
Syria allowed the foreign-policy establishment to continue to formulate plans (and spend money
to pay a lot of people in Washington) based on the delusion that they are doing something in
Syria to change the course of events. For Israel, it is a double disaster, with Netanyahu
desperate to survive, seeking to factor in expected elections in a now-or-never political move.
Trump probably understands that Bibi is done for, and that at this point, the withdrawal of
troops, fulfilling a fundamental electoral promise, counts more than Israeli money and his
friendship to Bibi.
Erdogan has two options before him. On the one hand, he can act against the Kurds. On the
other hand, he can sit down at the negotiating table with Damascus and the SDF, in an Astana
format, guided by Iran and Russia. Putin and Rouhani are certainly pushing for this solution.
Trump, on the other hand, would like to see Turkey enter Syria in the place of US forces, to
demonstrate he concluded a win-win deal for everyone, beating the deep-state at their own
game.
Erdogan does not really have the military force necessary to enter Syria, which is the big
secret. He would be against both the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the SDF, though the two not
necessarily in an alliance.
There is a triple bluff going on, and this is what is complicating the situation so much. On
the one hand, the SDF is bluffing in not wanting help from Damascus in case Erdogan sends in
his forces; on the other hand, Erdogan is bluffing in suggesting he is able to conquer the
territory held by the SDF; and finally, the French and British are bluffing by telling the SDF
they will be able to help them against both Erdogan and/or Assad.
Iran, Russia, Syria are the only ones who do not need to bluff, because they occupy the best
position – the commanding heights. They view Trump's decisions and his allies with
distrust. They know very well that these are mostly moves for internal consumption by the
enemies of Syria.
If the US withdraws, there is so much to be gained. The priority then becomes the west of
Syria, sealing the borders with Jordan, removing the pockets of terrorists from the east, and
securing the al-Tanf crossing. If the SDF will request protection from Damascus and will be
willing to participate in the liberation of the country and its reconstruction, Erdogan will be
done for, and this could lead to the total liberation of Idlib. It would be the best possible
outcome, an important national reconciliation between two important parts of the population. It
would give Damascus new economic impetus and prepare the Syrian people to expel the remaining
invaders (ISIS and the FSA/ Turkish Armed Forces) from the country, both in Idlib and in the
northeast in Afrin.
Russia is aware of the risk that Erdogan is running with the choices he will take in the
coming days. Perhaps the reason why Putin chose diplomacy over war with Turkey after the
downing of a Russian Su-24 in 2015 was in order to arrive at this precise moment, with as many
elements as possible present to convince Erdogan to stick with Russia and Iran instead of
embracing Trump's strategy and putting himself on an open collision course with Damascus,
Moscow and Tehran.
Putin has always been five moves ahead. He is aware that the US could not stay long in
Syria. He knows that France and the UK cannot support the SDF, and that the SDF cannot hold
territory it holds in Syria without an agreement with Damascus. He is also conscious that
Turkey does not have the strength to enter Syria and hold the territory if it did. It would
only be able justify an advance on Idlib with the support of the Russian Air Force.
Putin has certainly made it clear to Erdogan that if he made such a move to attack the SDF
and enter Syria, Russia in turn would militarily support the SAA with its air force to free
Idlib; and in case of incidents with Turkey, the Russian armed forces would respond with all
the interest earned from the unrequited downing of the Su-24 in 2015.
Erdogan has no choice. He must find an agreement with Damascus, and this is why he found
himself commenting on Trump's words the following day, criticizing US sanctions on Iran in the
presence of Iranian president Rouhani. The SDF know that they are between a rock and a hard
place, and have already sent a delegation to start negotiations with Damascus.
Trump's move was driven by US domestic politics and aimed at the 2020 elections. But in
doing so, Trump inevitably called out once and for all the bluffs built by Syria's enemies,
infuriating in the process the neoliberal imperialist establishment, revealing how each of
these factions has no more cards to play and is in actual fact destined for defeat.
Anybody who believe that hillary was derailed by Russians is iether idiot or neocon or both.
Notable quotes:
"... Since receiving an $11 million investment from venture capital firm, GGV Capital, in August 2017, New Knowledge has positioned itself as one of the leading private intelligence firms taking on the scourge of Russian disinformation. The outfit made its biggest splash on December 17th when it published one of the two Senate Intelligence Committee-commissioned reports. ..."
"... Of the dozens of conservative Alabamian Facebook pages the Watson campaign messaged, the New Knowledge-run page was the only one that responded to it. "You are in a particularly interesting position and from what we have read of your politics, we would be inclined to endorse you", they wrote. New Knowledge then "asked Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super PAC that could receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his appeal to disenchanted Republican voters." While Watson communicated with the deceptive Facebook page, the New Knowledge operators never revealed their identity, and the page disappeared the day after the vote. "It was weird," Watson commented to the New York Times. "The whole thing was weird." ..."
"... New Knowledge then sought to manufacture a link between Roy Moore's campaign and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of his Twitter followers were Russian bots. Mainstream media outlets credulously ran with the narrative, insinuating that the Christian theocrat Moore was secretly backed by Russia. ..."
"... While the impact of the disinformation campaign on the Alabama senate race may never be quantified, the cynicism behind it is hard to understate. A group of Democratic Party operatives with close ties to the national security state waged a cynical campaign of online deception against the American public while marketing themselves as the guardians against foreign interference. Few, if any, Russian hackers could have done as much damage to the already worn fabric of American democracy as they have. ..."
Grayzone Project
-- On December 17, two reports detailing ongoing Russian interference operations commissioned by the
Senate Intelligence Committee were made public. They generated a week's worth of headlines and sent members of Congress and cable
news pundits into a Cold War frenzy. According to the report, everything from the Green Party's
Jill
Stein
to I
nstagram
to
Pokemon
Go
to the
African
American population
had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the
Internet Research Agency.
Nevermind that 56% of the troll farm's pages
appeared
after
the
election
, that 25% of them were seen by no one, or that their miniscule online presence paled in comparison to the millions
of dollars spent on social media by the two major presidential campaigns and their supporters to sway voters. This was an
act
of war
that demanded immediate government action.
According to Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the reports were "a wake up call" and a
"bombshell" that was certain to bring "long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media". His Republican counterpart on the
committee, North Carolina Senator Richard Burr,
hailed
the
research papers as "proof positive that one of the most important things we can do is increase information sharing between the
social media companies who can identify disinformation campaigns and the third-party experts who can analyze them."
But the authors of one of the reports soon suffered a major blow to their credibility when it was revealed that they had engaged
in what they called a "Russian style" online disinformation operation aimed to swing a hotly contested special senate election.
The embarrassing revelation has already resulted in one of the authors
having
his Facebook page suspended
.
The well-funded deception was carried out by New Knowledge, a private cyber intelligence firm founded by two self-styled
disinformation experts who are veterans of the Obama administration: Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox.
'It may be designed to manipulate you'
Morgan began his
career
as
a product manager at AOL before founding a series of start ups, some with funding from the United States Agency for International
Development and Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidyar's Omidyar Network. Once a Brookings Institution researcher and special
advisor to the Obama White House and State Department, Morgan founded Data for Democracy, a volunteer organization said to use
"public data to monitor the election system for signs of fraud." Morgan also developed technology for the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the arm of the Department of Defense created for basic, applied technological research, and
futuristic war toys.
Rising through the ranks of the national security apparatus, Morgan ultimately emerged as a go-to source for credulous reporters
seeking to blame Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump on Russian disinformation.
In an
interview
with
the local CBS affiliate in Austin, Texas, Morgan told viewers that feelings of discontent were telltale signs that they had been
duped by Russian disinformation.
"If it makes you feel too angry or really provokes that type of almost tribal response, then it
may be designed to manipulate you. People should be concerned about things that encourage them to change their behavior," he
warned.
Fox, for his part, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency and was a computer analyst for the Joint Special
Operations Command (JSOC) military unit. JSOC is notorious for its spree of atrocities across the Middle East including digging
their bullets out of dead pregnant women's bodies in Afghanistan. Comparatively little information is available about Fox's
background.
Since
receiving
an $11 million investment
from venture capital firm, GGV Capital, in August 2017, New Knowledge has positioned itself as one
of the leading private intelligence firms taking on the scourge of Russian disinformation. The outfit made its biggest splash on
December 17th when it published one of the two Senate Intelligence Committee-commissioned reports.
The report, titled
"The
Tactics and Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,"
was oversseen by Renee DiResta, a former Wall Street trader and tech
specialist who was recruited by Obama's State Department to devise strategies for combating online ISIS propaganda. The New York
Times
described
DiResta
as one among a small group of "hobbyists" who "meticulously logged data and published reports on how easy it was to manipulate
social media platforms."
The hobby lobby of online obsessives converged at New Knowledge this year to sound the alarm on supposed Russian disinformation.
In a New York Times
op-ed
published
as Americans went to cast their votes in the midterm elections, Morgan and Fox alleged that the Kremlin was secretly running
hundreds of propaganda websites in an effort to swing the outcomes. That assertion ran counter to the narrative the two
operatives had been spinning out just months before.
In an interview earlier in the year, Ryan
Fox
suggested
that despite the Trump administration's multiple rounds of sanctions against Russia, Vladimir Putin was so
satisfied with the state of U.S. affairs that the Kremlin had actually cut back on its supposed interference. "Strategically, are
they content with the way things are? Does it play in their favor to do anything right now? That's a valid question," Fox said.
"Keep up the momentum, keep poking away. But do they have to implement drastic measures like hacking the DNC and exposing
thousands of emails? Probably not."
More recently, Fox
claimed
to
have identified hundreds of Russian-controlled Facebook and Twitter accounts active in France's Yellow Vest movement, which has
raged against the country's neoliberal leadership and sparked anxiety among centrist elites across the Atlantic.
"There has been some suspect activity," a French cybersecurity official said. "We are in the process of looking
at its impact."
https://
on.wsj.com/2EzeS5c
However, Fox produced no evidence to support his incendiary accusation, prompting reporters to qualify his assertions as "
very
likely
" and write that he merely "
believes
"
Russian interference took place.
Drafting the dubious bot dashboard
Morgan is also one the developers of the
Hamilton
68 dashboard
, an online project dedicated to inflaming public outrage over online Russian bots. Funded by the German Marshall
Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – which is itself backed by NATO and USAID – Hamilton 68 claims to track hundreds of
accounts supposedly linked to Russian influence operations. The effort has largely succeeded in drawing positive media attention
despite one of its founders, Clint Watts, admitting that the Twitter accounts it follows may actually be real people who are not
Russian at all.
When Morgan was
asked
what
techniques Hamilton 68 uses to identify Russian influence operations, he offered a confident-sounding but ultimately empty
answer: "We developed some techniques for determining who matters in a conversation Using some of those techniques, we've
identified a subset of accounts that we're very confident are core to furthering the Russian narrative in response to mainstream
events."
Because Morgan and his colleagues have explicitly refused to name the accounts monitored by Hamilton 68, his claims can never be
proven.
In a lengthy
profile
of
the musicologist-turned-New Knowledge "online detective" Kris Shaffer, Foreign Policy described the supposed methodology he
employed to identify Russian disinfo operations: "By working with massive datasets of tweets, Facebook posts, and online
articles, he is able to map links between accounts, similarities in the messages they post, and shared computer infrastructure."
The article added an extraordinarily revealing disclaimer: "This method of analysis is in its infancy, remains a fairly blunt
instrument, and still requires human intervention. It sometimes mistakes real people who post anti-imperialist arguments about
U.S. foreign policy for Kremlin trolls, for example."
It may have been that New Knowledge had no knowledge at all of Kremlin botnets, but their reports were nonetheless treated as
gospel by droves of credulous reporters eager to make their name in the frenzied atmosphere of Russiagate.
"We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation"
According to an internal New Knowledge report
first
seen by the New York Times
, the firm carried out a multi-faceted influence operation designed to undermine a 2017 bid by
right-wing Republican former state supreme court judge Roy Moore for an open Alabama senate seat. By its own admission, New
Knowledge's campaign capitalized on the the sexual assault allegations against Moore to "enrage and energize Democrats" and
"depress turnout" among Republicans.
To accomplish this, the New Knowledge team created a Facebook page aimed at appealing to conservative Alabamians by encouraging
them to endorse an obscure patio supply salesman-turned-write-in candidate named Mac Watson. They hoped the subterfuge would peel
votes away from Moore. It was precisely the kind of tactic that New Knowledge claims Russian troll farms carry out to sow
divisions among the American electorate.
Morgan told the New York Times the effort stopped there. But the New Knowledge report says the Facebook page "boosted" Watson's
campaign and even arranged interviews for him with The Montgomery Advertiser and the
Washington
Post
. At the same time, Watson's Twitter following mysteriously jumped from 100 to about 10,000.
One of the articles New Knowledge took credit for during its disinformation campaign.
Of the dozens of conservative Alabamian Facebook pages the Watson campaign messaged, the New Knowledge-run page was the only one
that responded to it. "You are in a particularly interesting position and from what we have read of your politics, we would be
inclined to endorse you", they wrote. New Knowledge then "asked Mr. Watson whether he trusted anyone to set up a super PAC that
could receive funding and offered advice on how to sharpen his appeal to disenchanted Republican voters."
While Watson communicated with the deceptive Facebook page, the New Knowledge operators never revealed their identity, and the
page disappeared the day after the vote. "It was weird," Watson commented to the New York Times. "The whole thing was weird."
New Knowledge then sought to manufacture a link between Roy Moore's campaign and the Kremlin by claiming thousands of his Twitter
followers were Russian bots. Mainstream media outlets credulously ran with the narrative, insinuating that the Christian theocrat
Moore was secretly backed by Russia.
Today, as can be seen below, Mother Jones is using a bogus story generated by a disinformation campaign to raise funds for more
Russiagate coverage.
As the Russian bot narrative peaked, Moore blamed the Jones campaign for manufacturing the scare. "It's not surprising that
they'd choose the favorite topic of MSNBC and the Fake News outlets -- the Russia conspiracy. Democrats can't win this election on
the issues and their desperation is on full display."
Moore's opponent, Jones, said he had no knowledge of the operation.
Moore was roundly mocked in liberal circles as a conspiratorial crank, but New Knowledge's internal report contained a stunning
admission: "We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on
social media by a Russian botnet," its authors revealed.
While the New York Times says the internal report does not confirm that New Knowledge purchased the bot account themselves, the
accounts' flagrant use of Cyrillic language and profile pictures of famous singers including Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera
and Avril Lavigne strongly suggest that whoever bought them went to extreme lengths to leave the appearance of a Russian hand.
The Alabama disinformation campaign was carried out through a network of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and former Obama
administration officials who have joined the private sector to leverage liberal anti-Trump outrage into profits.
Billionaire Reid Hoffman, who co-founded the employment networking site LinkedIn,
provided
$100,000
for the black ops campaign. The money was then pipelined through American Engagement Technologies, which is headed by Mikey
Dickerson, a former Google engineer who founded the United State Digital Service. Dickerson is also Executive Director of the New
Data Project, an organization dedicated to "testing new approaches" and "serving as an advanced technology research lab for
progressives."
A colleague of Hoffman's claimed the purpose of his investments was to "strengthen American democracy."
Since the New York Times' exposé, Facebook released a statement announcing its suspension of "five accounts run by a multiple
individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior," including Morgan's account. The social media platform has opened
an investigation, though it has not revealed what the other pages are or who operated them.
The
headline
of
the New York Times story about the Facebook suspensions appeared to have been crafted to keep the focus on Russia while
deflecting scrutiny from the group of Democratic Party-linked hustlers that orchestrated the disinformation operation. It read:
"Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race."
For his part, Sen. Jones has
demanded
an
investigation. "I think we've all focused too much on just the Russians and not picked up on the fact that some nefarious groups,
whether they're right or left, could take those same playbooks and start interfering with the elections for their own benefit,"
he said. "I'd like to see the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department look at this to see if there were any laws
being violated and, if there were, prosecute those responsible."
Facing an inquiry for possible violations of election laws, Morgan issued a mealy-mouthed statement claiming he "did not
participate in any campaign to influence the public and any characterization to the contrary misrepresents the research goals,
methods and outcome of the project."
While the impact of the disinformation campaign on the Alabama senate race may never be quantified, the cynicism behind it is
hard to understate. A group of Democratic Party operatives with close ties to the national security state waged a cynical
campaign of online deception against the American public while marketing themselves as the guardians against foreign
interference. Few, if any, Russian hackers could have done as much damage to the already worn fabric of American democracy as
they have.
Top Photo | Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., right, with Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.,
left, updates reporters on the status of their inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, at the Capitol in
Washington, Oct. 4, 2017. J. Scott Applewhite | AP
Dan Cohen
is
a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine.
Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @
DanCohen3000
.
"... America's presence in Syria, like Jim Mattis himself, is an artifact of another era, the failed GWOT. As a Marine, Mattis served in ground combat leadership roles in Gulf Wars I and II, and also in Afghanistan. He ran United States Central Command from 2010 to 2013, the final years of The Surge in Iraq and American withdrawal afterwards. There is no doubt why he supported the American military presence in Syria, and why he resigned to protest Trump's decision to end it: Mattis knew nothing else. His entire career was built around the strategy of the GWOT, the core of which was to never question GWOT strategy. Mattis didn't need a reason to stay in Syria; being in Syria was the reason. ..."
"... So why didn't Trump listen to his generals? Maybe because the bulk of their advice has been dead wrong for 17 years? ..."
"... The war on terror failed. It should have been dismantled long ago. Barack Obama could have done it, but instead became a victim of hubris and bureaucratic capture, and allowed it to expand. His supporters give him credit for not escalating the war in Syria, but leave out the part about how he also left the pot to simmer on the stove instead of removing it altogether. ..."
"... Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of ..."
"... . He is permanently banned from federal employment and Twitter. ..."
"... The GWOT was not only a failure, it was a fraud. Saddam's Iraq was secular and had nothing to do with terrorism. The same can be said for Libya and Syria. We armed and trained jihadis for the purpose of overthrowing Assad. How is that fighting terrorism? The war on terror was a deception, to cover for wars which were aggressive and unjustified. These wars were not just a failure, they were criminal and should be a source of shame and sorrow for our country. The men who orchestrated these wars did so by lying to the American people every step of the way, with the media repeating their every lie and distortion with robotic consistency. The neocon planners and all their willing accomplices deserve a special place in hell for the death and destruction they have wrought. Thank God the neocon era seems to be coming to a close. Thank God for Donald Trump, with all his flaws, for having the guts and decency to put an end to this prolonged military outrage. ..."
"... It's strange that Mr. van Buren celebrates the exit of Mattis as symbolizing the end of a long-discredited policy when Mattis was hired less than 2 years ago, many years after that policy became discredited, and after Mattis's hirer ran for President on a platform diametrically opposed to the discredited policy while denouncing the discredited policy. Now we find out belatedly that the only reason President Trump hired Mattis was because Mattis was fired for insubordination by former President Obama which incumbent President Trump hates, and for which a strong motivating factor is doing everything opposite of Obama. So now incumbent President Trump finds to his dismay that Mattis is insubordinate to himself as well. And yet Mr. van Buren thinks the important focus of this development is Mattis ..."
"... "The raw drive to insta-hate everything Trump does is misleading otherwise thoughtful people. So let's try a new lens: during the campaign Trump outspokenly denounced the waste of America's wars. Pro-Trump sentiment in rural areas was driven by people who agreed with his critique, by people who'd served in these wars, whose sons and daughters had served, or, given the length of all this, both. Since taking office, the president has pulled U.S. troops back from pointless conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Congress may yet rise to do the same for American involvement in Yemen. No new wars have been started It is time for some old ideas to move on." ..."
"... The GWOT was a repudiation of the Powell Doctrine. Almost 20 years on, Powell looks like genius and the neocons like a bunch of morons. ..."
"... The retreat from Syria does not mean a U.S. retreat from its role as the Global Cop Gorilla. The Pentagon is merely changing its primary target set from the GWOT actors to the "revisionist powers". ..."
"... The National Defense Strategy Commission's report, ironically and perversely released by the "United States Institute of Peace", validates the fear-monger claims and also the claims to more TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to feed the Gorilla as it marauds around the perimeter of Asia. ..."
"... "There is no pleasure in watching Jim Mattis end his decades of service with a bureaucratic dirty stick shoved at him as a parting gift." ..."
"... "Don't make me have to kill you" ..."
"... It's no coincidence that Netanyahu's government fell apart today. Another good riddance. May the Israelis elect a new PM who actually wants peace in the Mideast. ..."
"... The War Party is still The War Party -- which is why so many of us who are strong Trump supporters have never joined the Republican Party and have no plans to join. This moment in history is particularly instruction. The Democrats have blown their cover. The Democratic Party is as much The War Party as the Republican Party. ..."
The New York Times , its journalists in mourning over the loss of a war,
ask , "Who will protect America now?" Mattis the warrior-monk is juxtaposed with the
flippant commander-in-Cheeto. The Times sees strategic disaster in an "abrupt and
dangerous decision, detached from any broader strategic context or any public rationale, [that]
sowed new uncertainty about America's commitment to the Middle East, [and] its willingness to
be a global leader."
"A major blunder," tweeted Senator Marco Rubio.
"If it isn't reversed it will haunt America for years to come." Senator Lindsey Graham called
for congressional hearings. And what is history if not irony? Rubio talks of haunting foreign
policy decisions in Syria seemingly without knowledge of previous calamities in Iraq. Graham
wants to hold hearings on quitting a war Congress never held
hearings on authorizing.
That's all wrong. Jim Mattis's resignation as defense secretary (
and on Sunday , Brett McGurk, as special envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS) and Trump's
decision to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan are indeed significant. But that's because they
mark the beginning of the end of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the singular, tragic, bloody
driver of American foreign policy for almost two decades.
Why does the U.S. have troops
in Syria?
To defeat the Islamic State? ISIS's ability to hold ground and project power outside its
immediate backyard was destroyed somewhere back in 2016 by an unholy coalition of American,
Iranian, Russian, Syrian, Turkish, and Israeli forces in Iraq and Syria. Sure, there are
terrorists who continue to set off bombs in ISIS's name, but they are not controlled or
directed out of Syria. They are most likely legal residents of the Western countries they
attack, radicalized online or in local mosques. They are motivated by a philosophy, which
cannot be destroyed on the ground in Syria. This is the fundamental failure of the GWOT: that
you can't blow up an idea.
Regime change? It was never a practical idea. As in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, there was
never a plan for what to do next, for how to keep Syria from descending into complete chaos the
day Assad was removed. And though progressives embraced the idea of getting rid of another
"evil dictator" when it came through the mouthpiece of Obama's own freedom fighter Samantha
Power, the same idea today has little drive behind it.
Russia? Overwrought fear of Moscow was once a sign of unhealthy paranoia satirized on The
Twilight Zone . Today, Russia hate is seen as a prerequisite to patriotism, though it still
makes no more sense. The Russians have long had a practical relationship with Syria, having
maintained a naval base at Tartus since 1971, which they will continue to do. There was never a
plan for the U.S. to push the Russians out -- Obama in fact saw the Russian presence are part
of the solution
in Syria. American withdrawal is far more of a return to status quo than anything like a win
for Putin. (Elsewhere at TAC , Matt Purple
pokes more holes in Putin paranoia.)
The Kurds? The U.S.-Kurd story is one of expediency over morality. We've used them only
because, at every sad turn, there's been no force otherwise available in bulk. The Kurds have
been abandoned many times by America: in 1991 when it refused to assist them in breaking away
from Saddam Hussein following Gulf War I, when it insisted they remain part of a "united Iraq"
following Gulf War II, and most
definitively in 2017 following Gulf War III when the U.S.
did not support their independence referendum, relegating them to Baghdad's forever
half-loved stepchild.
After all that, America's intentions toward the Kurds in Syria are barely a sideshow-scale
event. The Kurds want to cleave off territory from Turkey and Syria, something neither nation
will
permit and something the U.S. quietly understands would destabilize the region. Mattis, by
the way, supported NATO ally Turkey in its fight against the Kurds, calling them an "active
insurgency inside its borders."
Iran? Does the U.S. really have troops in Syria to brush back Iranian influence? As with
"all of the above," that genie got out of the bottle years ago. Iranian power in the greater
Middle East has grown dramatically since 2003, and has been driven at every step by the
blunders of the United States. If the most powerful army in the world couldn't stop the
Iranians from essentially winning Gulf Wars II and III, how can 2,000 troops in Syria hope to
accomplish much?
The United States, of course, wasn't even shooting at the Iranians in Syria; in most cases
it was working either with them or tacitly alongside them towards the goal of killing off ISIS.
Tehran's role as Assad's protector was set as America rumbled about regime change. Iran has
since pieced together a
land corridor to the Mediterranean through Iraq and Syria, which it will not be giving up,
certainly not because of the presence of a few thousand Americans.
What remains is that once-neocon, now progressive catch-all: we need to stay in Syria to
preserve American credibility. While pundits can still get away with this line, the rest of the
globe already knows the empire has no clothes. Since 2001, the United States has spent some $6
trillion on its wars, and killed multiple 9/11s worth of American troops and foreign civilians.
The U.S. has
tortured , still maintains its gulag at Guantanamo, and, worst of all credibility-wise, has
lost on every front. Afghanistan after 17 years of war festers. Nothing was accomplished with
Iraq. Libya is a failed state. Syria is the source of a refugee crisis whose long-term effects
on Europe are still being played out. We are the "indispensable nation" only in our own minds.
A lot of people around the world probably wish America would just stop messing with their
countries.
So why does the U.S. have troops in Syria? Anyone? Bueller? Mattis?
America's presence in Syria, like Jim Mattis himself, is an artifact of another era, the
failed GWOT. As a Marine, Mattis served in ground combat leadership roles in Gulf Wars I and
II, and also in Afghanistan. He ran United States Central Command from 2010 to 2013, the final
years of The Surge in Iraq and American withdrawal afterwards. There is no doubt why he
supported the American military presence in Syria, and why he resigned to protest Trump's
decision to end it: Mattis knew nothing else. His entire career was built around the strategy
of the GWOT, the core of which was to never question GWOT strategy. Mattis didn't need a reason
to stay in Syria; being in Syria was the reason.
So why didn't Trump listen to his generals? Maybe because the bulk of their advice has
been dead wrong for 17 years? Instead, Trump plans a dramatic
drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. presence in Iraq has dwindled from combat to
advise and assist. Congress seems poised to end U.S. involvement in Yemen
against Mattis's advice.
There is no pleasure in watching Jim Mattis end his decades of service with a bureaucratic
dirty stick shoved at him as a parting gift. But to see this all as another Trump versus the
world blunder is very wrong. The war on terror failed. It should have been dismantled long
ago. Barack Obama could have done it, but instead became a victim of hubris and bureaucratic
capture, and allowed it to expand. His supporters give him credit for not
escalating the war in Syria, but leave out the part about how he also left the pot to
simmer on the stove instead of removing it altogether.
The raw drive to
insta-hate everything Trump does is misleading otherwise thoughtful people. So let's try a
new lens: during the campaign Trump outspokenly denounced
the waste of America's wars. Pro-Trump sentiment in rural areas was
driven by people who agreed with his critique, by people who'd served in these wars, whose
sons and daughters had served, or, given the length of all this, both. Since taking office, the
president has pulled U.S. troops back from pointless conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Congress may yet rise to do the same for American involvement in Yemen. No new wars have been
started. Though the results are far from certain, for the first time in nearly 20 years,
negotiations are open again with North Korea. Mattis's ending was clumsy, but it was a long
time coming. It is time for some old ideas to move on.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for
the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan . He is permanently
banned from federal employment and Twitter.
I'm about as left wing as they come and have had a distain for Trump for decades. But, if he
can put an end to the GWOT and truly pull America out of those disasters I protested against
back in 2001-2002 (not to mention Libya and Yemen) then he will be my favorite modern
president. Granted, that's a low bar. I've not had one in my lifetime that was worth
admiring, but would be a welcome change.
I have my doubts he'll be able to pull it off but even if he manages to just not start any
new wars that would be a novel new direction for us.
It's good for Van Buren to remind people that our relationship with the Kurds has long been one
of support when it is convenient and abandonment when it is not. For left and right to feign
concern now is quite hypocritical.
Reading this offers some hope though the bulk of coverage on the Syria withdrawal from left
and right has been most depressing. May Mattis (and his ilk) go far and may it be soon!
Amen to everything in this article. I voted for Trump because of the way he strongly denounced
the Iraq war and our policies of interventionism and nation building in general. It has taken
two full years, but finally he is delivering what I hoped for. The media is trying to turn this
into another Trump smear issue, but I expect them to fail at this. At this point in time how
many people take the news channel narrative seriously? Especially if Trump removes our troops
from Afghanistan, I expect his popularity to soar.
The GWOT was not only a failure, it was a fraud. Saddam's Iraq was secular and had
nothing to do with terrorism. The same can be said for Libya and Syria. We armed and trained
jihadis for the purpose of overthrowing Assad. How is that fighting terrorism? The war on
terror was a deception, to cover for wars which were aggressive and unjustified. These wars
were not just a failure, they were criminal and should be a source of shame and sorrow for our
country. The men who orchestrated these wars did so by lying to the American people every step
of the way, with the media repeating their every lie and distortion with robotic consistency.
The neocon planners and all their willing accomplices deserve a special place in hell for the
death and destruction they have wrought. Thank God the neocon era seems to be coming to a
close. Thank God for Donald Trump, with all his flaws, for having the guts and decency to put
an end to this prolonged military outrage.
It's strange that Mr. van Buren celebrates the exit of Mattis as symbolizing the end of a
long-discredited policy when Mattis was hired less than 2 years ago, many years after that
policy became discredited, and after Mattis's hirer ran for President on a platform
diametrically opposed to the discredited policy while denouncing the discredited policy. Now we
find out belatedly that the only reason President Trump hired Mattis was because Mattis was
fired for insubordination by former President Obama which incumbent President Trump hates, and
for which a strong motivating factor is doing everything opposite of Obama. So now incumbent
President Trump finds to his dismay that Mattis is insubordinate to himself as well. And yet
Mr. van Buren thinks the important focus of this development is Mattis
"The raw drive to insta-hate everything Trump does is misleading otherwise thoughtful
people. So let's try a new lens: during the campaign Trump outspokenly denounced the waste of
America's wars. Pro-Trump sentiment in rural areas was driven by people who agreed with his
critique, by people who'd served in these wars, whose sons and daughters had served, or, given
the length of all this, both. Since taking office, the president has pulled U.S. troops back
from pointless conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Congress may yet rise to do the same
for American involvement in Yemen. No new wars have been started It is time for some old ideas
to move on."
The President made the right decision. I WISH it had been reached in a more traditional manner
-- going thru the NSC and such, but we had no achievable strategic goals and were really only a
bit player. The very real danger was that we were dancing around the Russians like two
porcupines making love with the current "Russia!Russia!Russia!" political freakout preventing
what could have been a genuine opportunity for cooperation in at least one area. Syria will not
be any more chaotic for our departure, infact given less scrutiny and no danger of accidental
WW III, the Russians/Iranians/Syrian gov't may be able to wrap this up more faster.
Russia also has interest in Kurdish welfare and as 15% of Israelis ARE Russians, their
wellfare as well. In an administration that needed to project credibility, SEC Mattis was a
good choice and has done some great things cutting alot of uneeded red tape & worthless
'training' and giving clear priorities for the services. But, he's opposed almost everything
the President including the Trans ban so it was 'when not if'.
It all makes sense once you understand that by "restraint" they mean "leave American soldiers
as hostages to fortune in Syria!" and "unlimited mulligans for failed generals in Afghanistan!"
and "let's provoke Erdogan into releasing two or three million refugees into Europe!"
The Times sees strategic disaster in an "abrupt and dangerous decision, detached from any
broader strategic context or any public rationale, [that] sowed new uncertainty about
America's commitment to the Middle East, [and] its willingness to be a global leader."
Geez. I can also come up with something like this artwork by the Times journalists.
Here: "The lack of correlation between convergences caused an unwanted bifurcation of
idiosyncratic dichotomies". Twaddle? But how badass is sounds! Just read it aloud -- and you'll
see the credibility glittering like Swarovski crystals all over the place.
Merry Christmas to the MSM. I wish them to start writing something meaningful next year.
The retreat from Syria does not mean a U.S. retreat from its role as the Global Cop
Gorilla. The Pentagon is merely changing its primary target set from the GWOT actors to the
"revisionist powers".
Mattis fronted the updated National Defense Strategy. It again fear-mongers out the wazoo
about Russia and China with the only solution being "more, more, more" for the War Machine.
The National Defense Strategy Commission's report, ironically and perversely released by
the "United States Institute of Peace", validates the fear-monger claims and also the claims to
more TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to feed the Gorilla as it marauds around the perimeter of
Asia.
Re: "There is no pleasure in watching Jim Mattis end his decades of service with a
bureaucratic dirty stick shoved at him as a parting gift."
Au Contraire , there is much pleasure watching that sanctified War-Monger and
Pentagon Hack with his contrived "Don't make me have to kill you" schtick ride off
into the sunset.
Unfortunately for those of us not deluded into the Cult of Military Exceptionalism, Mattis
will no doubt segue to Fox News as yet another "Wizened Sage" of Pentagon wisdom and insight,
where he'll live very large for simply gas-bagging his "Warrior Hero" script. And perhaps Mad
Dog will even meander back to General Dynamics to pimp yet again for the Merchants of
Death.
Make no mistake, Mattis and his General pals are enemies of the taxpayers and rank apostates
of the Founders' principles. Mattis may soon be gone, but unfortunately, he won't be
forgotten.
It's good to see Trump finally realizing that he is the president, and not his generals and
"advisors" that no one elected. Goodbye and good riddance to Mattis, Haley et al. Next to go
should be John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner.
It's no coincidence that Netanyahu's government fell apart today. Another good riddance.
May the Israelis elect a new PM who actually wants peace in the Mideast.
"'A major blunder,' tweeted Senator Marco Rubio. 'If it isn't reversed it will haunt America
for years to come.' Senator Lindsey Graham called for congressional hearings. And what is
history if not irony? Rubio talks of haunting foreign policy decisions in Syria seemingly
without knowledge of previous calamities in Iraq. Graham wants to hold hearings on quitting a
war Congress never held hearings on authorizing."
The War Party is still The War Party -- which is why so many of us who are strong Trump
supporters have never joined the Republican Party and have no plans to join. This moment in
history is particularly instruction. The Democrats have blown their cover. The Democratic Party
is as much The War Party as the Republican Party.
Article of interest at link below.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Send the Mad Dog to the Corporate Kennel
by Ray McGovern Posted on December 22, 2018
No wonder Mr. Van Buren is banned from federal employment and Twitter. His clarity and surgical
observations of American interventionism are indeed enlightening. Deep State forces must cringe
when reading his missives.
I don't agree with everything Trump does, but I have high hopes for his intent to extract
American military forces from the Middle East. Having cost trillions of dollars and countless
lives, these profit-motivated, failed expeditions could never be morally justified even if they
were successful.
Being the world's policeman does not make America a benevolent, inspiring global leader. The
opposite is true, as much of the world now perceives America to be a disruptive force,
conspiring against global peace for the benefit of the military industrial complex and
multinational corporations.
Let's pray for a changing tide that steers us further from the brink.
"Now Trump, the guy everyone expected to start new wars"
Hillary supporters said that. The rest of us knew that she was the danger of more and bigger
wars. That was a prime reason to defeat her. Too bad the only way to defeat her was to elect
Trump, but that is on the DNC, since they offered her, and every other Republican was even
worse (Cruz!).
He has announced his order to withdraw US troops from Syria.
His Defense Secretary James Mattis has resigned. There are rumors National Security
Adviser John Bolton may go too. (Please take
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with you!)
He announced a start to withdrawing from Afghanistan.
He now says he will veto a government funding bill unless he gets $5 billion for his
Wall, and as of 12:01 AM Washington time December 22 the federal government is officially
under partial shutdown.
All of this should be taken with a big grain of salt. While this week's assertiveness
perhaps provides further proof that Trump's impulses are right, it doesn't mean he can
implement them.
Senator Lindsey Graham is demanding
hearings on how to block the Syria pullout . Congress hardly ever quibbles with a
president's putting troops into a country, where the Legislative Branch has legitimate
Constitutional power. But if a president under his absolute command authority wants to pull
them out – even someplace where they're deployed illegally, as in Syria – well hold
on just a minute!
This will be a critical time for the Trump presidency. (And if God is really on his side, he
soon might get
another Supreme Court pick .) If he can get the machinery of the Executive Branch to
implement his decision to withdraw from Syria, and if he can pick a replacement to General
Mattis who actually agrees with Trump's views, we might start getting the America First policy
Trump ran on in 2016.
Mattis himself said in his resignation letter, "Because you have the right to have a
Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these [i.e., support for
so-called "allies"] and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my
position."
Right on, Mad Dog! In fact Trump should have had someone "better aligned" with him in that
capacity from the get-go. It is now imperative that he picks someone who agrees with his core
positions, starting with withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan, and reducing confrontation with
Russia.
Former Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel complains that "our government is not a one-man show." Well, the "government"
isn't, but the Executive Branch is. Article II,
Section 1 : "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of
America." Him. The President. Nobody else. Period.
Already the drumbeat to saddle Trump with another Swamp critter at the Pentagon is starting:
"Several possible replacements for Mattis this week trashed the president's decision to pull
out of Syria. Retired Gen. Jack Keane called the move a "strategic mistake" on Twitter.
Republican Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) signed a letter demanding
Trump reconsider the decision and warning that the withdrawal bolsters Iran and Russia." If
Trump even considers any of the above as Mattis's replacement, he'll be in worse shape than he
has been for the past two years.
On the other hand, if Trump does pick someone who agrees with him about Syria and
Afghanistan, never mind
getting along with Russia , can he get that person confirmed by the Senate? One possibility
would be to nominate someone like Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney specifically
to run the Pentagon bureaucracy and get control of costs, while explicitly deferring
operational decisions to the Commander in Chief in consultation with the Service Chiefs.
Right now on Syria Trump is facing pushback from virtually the whole Deep State
establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as the media from Fox News , to NPR ,
to MSNBC . Terror has again gripped the establishment that the Trump who was elected president
in 2016 might actually start implementing what he promised. It is imperative that he pick
someone for the Pentagon (and frankly, clear out the rest of his national security team) and
appoint people he can trust and whose views comport with his own. Just lopping off a few heads
won't suffice – he needs a full housecleaning.
In the meantime in Syria, watch for another "Assad poison gas attack against his own
people." The last time Trump said we'd be
leaving Syria "very soon " was on March 29 of this year. Barely a week later, on April 7,
came a supposed chemical incident in Douma, immediately hyped as a government attack on
civilians
but soon apparent as likely staged . Trump, though, dutifully took the bait, tweeting that
Assad was an "animal." Putin, Russia, and Iran were "responsible" for "many dead, including
women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack" – "Big price to pay." He then for the
second time launched cruise missiles against Syrian targets. A
confrontation loomed in the eastern Med that could to have led to war with Russia. Now, in
light of Trump's restated determination to get out,
is MI6 already ginning up their White Helmet assets for a repeat ?
Trump's claim that the US has completed its only mission, to defeat ISIS, is being compared
to George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner following defeat of Iraq's army and the
beginning of the occupation (and, as it turned out, the beginning of the real war). But if it
helps get us out, who cares if Trump wants to take credit? Whatever his
terrible, horrible, no good, very bad national security team told him, the US presence in
Syria was never about ISIS. We are there as Uncle Sam's Rent-an-Army for the Israelis and
Saudis to block Iranian influence and especially an overland route between Syria and Iran (the
so-called
"Shiite land bridge" to the Mediterranean ).
For US forces the war against ISIS was always a sideshow, mainly carried on by the Syrians
and Russians and proportioned about like the war against the Wehrmacht: about 20% "us," about
80% "them." The remaining pocket ISIS has
on the Syria-Iraq border has been deliberate ly left alone, to keep handy as a lever to
force Assad out in a settlement (which is not going to happen). Thus the claim an American
pullout will
lead to an ISIS "resurgence " is absurd. With US forces ceasing to play dog in the manger,
the Syrians, Russians, Iranians, and Iraqis will kill them. All of them.
If Trump is able to follow through with the pullout, will the Syrian war wind down? It needs
to be kept in mind that the whole conflict has been because we (the US, plus Israel, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom, etc) are the aggressors. We sought to use
al-Qaeda and other jihadis to effect regime change via the tried and true method. It
failed.
Regarding Trump's critics' claim that he is turning over Syria to the Russians and Iranians,
Assad is nobody's puppet. He can be allied with a Shiite theocracy but not controlled by it;
Iran, likewise, can also have mutually beneficial ties with an ideologically dissimilar
country, like it does with Christian Armenia. The Russians will stay and expand their presence
but unlike our presence in many countries – which seemingly never ends, for example in
Germany, Japan, and Korea, not to mention Kosovo – they'll be there only as long and to
the extent the Syrians want them. (Compare our eternal occupations with the Soviets' politely
leaving Egypt when Anwar Sadat asked them, or leaving Somalia when Siad Barre wanted them out.
Instead of leaving, why didn't Moscow just do a " Diem " on them?) It
seems that American policymakers have gotten so far down the wormhole of their paranoid
fantasies about the rest of the world – and it can't be overemphasized, concerning areas
where the US has no actual national interests – that we no longer recognize classic
statecraft when practiced by other powers defending genuine national interests (which of course
are legitimate only to the extent we say so).
Anyway, if this week's developments are the result of someone putting something into
Donald's morning Egg
McMuffin , America and the world owe him (or her) a vote of thanks. Let's see more of
the wrecking ball we Deplorables voted for !
Trump thought that by bringing the swamp into his fold he might be able to defang it. He
bent the knee, played nice and kissed the ring but still they kept at him. I think Trump has
had enough of giving a mile for getting an inch. I like Trump when he presents himself as a
human wrecking ball to all the evil plans of the Washington establishment and if he continues
like this I honestly believe he will be reelected in 2020, and one day will be acknowleged as
a true chapion for every day Americans but if he shrinks back into his shadow and gives the
likes of Bolton and Pompeo free reign to **** all over the globe with their insane scheming
he will be a one term failure.
Don't get too excited about the possibility that there may be more kinds of viagra to try
out, Jattras. If Trump recently seems to be more like the candidate we voted for, the real
reason for his reversion back is because the midterm elections are over and Trump kept the
Senate.
Check with me before you start making a lot of crack-pot statements
America's
trade policy is in incoherent shambles. Decades of neoliberal "free trade" pacts -- which as
often as not simply gave corporations an end run around the state, or their very own rigged,
pseudo-legal system -- have created terrible social carnage around the world and a furious
political backlash. And President Trump's incoherent, haphazard response has done little to
change the system, let alone reform it in a sensible fashion.
Overhauling such a gargantuan, world-spanning system is a dizzying task. But Timothy Meyer
and Ganesh Sitaraman at the Great Democracy Initiative have a
new paper that presents a solid starting point for developing a fundamental reform of
American trade structure.
Meyer and Sitaraman identify three large problems with the status quo, and propose policy
solutions for each:
The complicated and unbalanced structure of the bureaucracy that oversees trade
policy
The enormous pro-rich bias that is built into trade deals
How the inequality resulting from trade routinely goes totally unaddressed
Let's take these in turn.
The extant trade bureaucracy -- as usual for the American state -- is highly fragmented and
bizarrely structured. There is the Department of Commerce, the United States Trade
Representative, the Export-Import Bank, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, plus the
International Development Finance Corporation coming soon. Then there are a slew of other
agencies that have some bearing on trade-related security or economic development.
Meyer and Sitaraman logically suggest combining most of these functions into a single
Department of Economic Growth and Security. The point is not just to streamline the trade
oversight structure, but also to make it consider a broader range of objectives. Neoliberals
insist that trade is simply about making the self-regulating market more "efficient," but trade
very obviously bears on employment, domestic industry, and especially security.
For instance, for all its other disastrous side effects, Trump's haphazard tax on aluminum
has dramatically
revived the American aluminum industry . Ensuring a reasonable domestic supply of key
metals like that is so obviously a security concern -- for military and consumer uses
alike -- that it wouldn't have even occurred to New Deal policymakers to think otherwise. It
takes a lot of ideological indoctrination to think there's no problem when a small price
disadvantage causes a country to lose its entire supply chain of key industrial
commodities.
Then there is the problem of pro-rich bias. Put simply, the last few decades of trade deals
have been outrageously biased towards corporations and the rich. They have powerfully enabled
the growth of
parasitic tax havens , which allow companies to book profits in low-tax jurisdictions,
starving countries of rightful revenue (and often leading to companies piling up gargantuan
dragon hoards of cash they don't know what to do with).
Corporations, meanwhile, have gotten their own fake legal system in the form of
Investor-State Dispute Settlement trade deal stipulations. As I have written before ,
the point of these arbitration systems is to create a legal system ludicrously slanted in favor
of the corporation -- allowing them not just to win almost every time, but to sue over
nonsensical harms like "taking away imaginary future profits."
Meyer and Sitaraman suggest renegotiating the tax portions of trade deals to enforce a
"formulary" tax system -- in which profits are taxed where they are made, not where they are
booked. This would go a considerable distance towards cracking down on tax havens -- who knows,
perhaps Luxembourg might even develop some productive business.
Finally, there is the problem of distributive justice. Again contrary to neoliberal dogma,
trade very often creates winners and losers -- witness the wreckage of Detroit and the fat
salaries of the U.S. executive class. Meyer and Sitaraman suggest new mechanisms to consider
the side effects of trade deals (and ways to compensate the losers), to take action against
abusive foreign nations (for example, by dumping their products below cost, or violating
environmental or labor standards), and finally directly taxing the beneficiaries.
Something the authors don't discuss is the
problem of trade imbalances . When one country develops a surplus (that is, it exports more
than it imports), another country must of necessity be in a deficit. The deficit country in
turn must finance its imports, usually by borrowing. That can easily create a severe economic
crisis if the deficit country suddenly loses access to loans -- which then harms the exporting
country, though not as much. This has been a disastrous problem in the eurozone.
The U.S. does have extremely wide latitude to run a trade deficit, because it controls the
global reserve currency, meaning a strong
demand for dollar-denominated assets so other countries can settle their international
accounts. But this creates its own problems, as discussed above.
To be fair, this is not exactly an omission for a paper focused on domestic policy. Creating
a specifically international trade architecture would require an entire paper of its own, if
not a book or three. But it would be something future trade policymakers will have to
consider.
At any rate, it's quite likely that trade policy will be a major topic of discussion in 2020
-- if for no reason other than Trump's ridiculous shenanigans in the area. However, even that
demonstrates an important fact: The U.S. president has a great deal of unilateral authority
over trade. Democrats should be thinking hard about how they would change things.
This paper is a great place to start.
President Donald Trump is planning on using his executive powers to cut food stamps for more
than 700,000 Americans.
The United States Department of Agriculture is proposing that states should only be allowed
to waive a current food stamps requirement -- namely, that adults without dependents must work
or participate in a job-training program for at least 20 hours each week if they wish to
collect food stamps for more than three months in a three-year period -- on the condition that
those adults live in areas where unemployment is above 7 percent,
according to The Washington Post . Currently the USDA regulations permit states to waive
that requirement if an adult lives in an area where the unemployment rate is at least 20
percent greater than the national rate. In effect, this means that roughly 755,000 Americans
would potentially lose their waivers that permit them to receive food stamps.
The current unemployment rate is 3.7 percent.
The Trump administration's decision to impose the stricter food stamp requirements through
executive action constitutes an end-run around the legislative process. Although Trump is
expected to sign an $870 billion farm bill later this week -- and because food stamps goes
through the Agriculture Department, it contains food stamp provisions -- the measure does not
include House stipulations restricting the waiver program and imposing new requirements on
parents with children between the ages of six and 12. The Senate version ultimately removed
those provisions, meaning that the version being signed into law does not impose a conservative
policy on food stamps, which right-wing members of Congress were hoping for.
"Congress writes laws, and the administration is required to write rules based on the law,"
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told The New York Times (Stabenow is the top Democrat on the
Senate's agriculture committee). "Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology. I do
not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families."
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from
Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His
work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
So at the moment when everybody assumed that Trump lost control of the foreign policy, he
does this. It's a real surprise. Kind of Christmas gift to his voters. And that's with neocon
Pompeo as his State Secretary and neocon Bolton as his national security advisor.
The War Party project of regime change in Tehran suffered a severe setback with the U.S.
pullout from Syria.
Notable quotes:
"... Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose Recep Tayyip Erdogan. ..."
"... And Erdogan regards the YPG as kinfolk and comrades of the Kurdish terrorist PKK in Turkey. A week ago, he threatened to attack the Kurds in northern Syria, though U.S. troops are embedded alongside them. What kind of deal did Trump strike with Erdogan? Turkey will purchase the U.S. Patriot anti-aircraft and missile defense system for $3.5 billion, and probably forego the Russian S-400. Trump also told Erdogan that we "would take a look at" extraditing Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen whom the Turkish president says instigated the 2016 coup attempt that was to end with his assassination. ..."
"... The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either crippling sanctions leading to insurrection or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria. ..."
"We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there," wrote President Donald
Trump as he ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria, stunning the U.S. foreign
policy establishment.
Trump overruled his secretaries of state and defense, and jolted this city and capitals
across NATO Europe and the Middle East.
Yet Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his campaign. And what his decision
seems to say is this:
We are extricating America from the forever war of the Middle East so foolishly begun by
previous presidents. We are coming home. The rulers and peoples of this region are going to
have to find their own way and fight their own wars. We are not so powerful that we can fight
their wars while also confronting Iran and North Korea and facing new cold wars with Russia and
China.
As for the terrorists of ISIS, says Trump, they are defeated.
Yet despite the heavy casualties and lost battles ISIS has suffered, along with the collapse
of the caliphate and expulsion from its Syrian capital Raqqa and Iraqi capital Mosul and from
almost all territories it controlled in both countries, the group is not dead. It lives on in
thousands of true believers hidden in those countries. And like al-Qaeda, it has followers
across the Middle East and inspires haters of the West living in the West.
The U.S. pullout from Syria is being called a victory for Vladimir Putin. "Russia, Iran,
Assad are ecstatic!" wailed Senator Lindsey Graham.
Graham was echoed by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who called the withdrawal a "retreat" and
charged that Trump's generals "believe the high-fiving winners today are Iran, ISIS and
Hezbollah."
But ISIS is a Sunni terrorist organization. And as such, it detests the Alawite regime of
Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah and Iran, both of which are viewed by ISIS as Shiite heretics.
"Russia, Iran, Syria are not happy about the US leaving," Trump tweeted, "despite what the Fake
News says, because now they will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us."
If Putin, victorious in the Syrian civil war, wishes to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS, the last
major enemies of Assad in Syria, why not let him?
The real losers?
Certainly the Kurds, who lose their American ally. Any dream they had of greater autonomy
inside Syria, or an independent state, is not going to be realized. But then, that was never
really in the cards.
Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in
NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the
stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose Recep Tayyip
Erdogan.
And Erdogan regards the YPG as kinfolk and comrades of the Kurdish terrorist PKK in
Turkey. A week ago, he threatened to attack the Kurds in northern Syria, though U.S. troops are
embedded alongside them. What kind of deal did Trump strike with Erdogan? Turkey will purchase
the U.S. Patriot anti-aircraft and missile defense system for $3.5 billion, and probably forego
the Russian S-400. Trump also told Erdogan that we "would take a look at" extraditing Muslim
cleric Fethullah Gulen whom the Turkish president says instigated the 2016 coup attempt that
was to end with his assassination.
National security advisor John Bolton, who said U.S. troops would remain in Syria until all
Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias have been expelled, appears not to have been speaking
for his president. And if the Israelis were relying on U.S. forces in Syria to intercept any
Iranian weapons shipments headed to Hezbollah in Lebanon through Damascus, then they are going
to have to make other arrangements.
The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either crippling
sanctions leading to insurrection or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe
setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria.
However, given the strength of the opposition to a U.S. withdrawal -- Israel, Saudi Arabia,
the GOP foreign policy establishment in Congress and the think tanks, liberal interventionists
in the Beltway press, Trump's own national security team of advisors -- the battle to overturn
Trump's decision has probably only just begun.
From FDR's abandonment of 100 million East Europeans to Stalin at Yalta in 1945 to the
abandonment of our Nationalist Chinese allies to Mao in 1949 and of our South Vietnamese allies
in 1975, America has often been forced into retreats leading to the deaths of allies. Senator
Sasse says Trump is risking the same outcome: "A lot of American allies will be slaughtered if
this retreat is implemented."
But is that true?
Trump's decision to pull out of Syria at least has assured us of a national debate on what
it will mean to America to extricate our country from these Mideast wars. It is the kind of
debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into invading Iraq.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and
read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at
www.creators.com .
I believe "Syria" is a war crime planned and plotted by some western governments and their
allies. They are even reportedly financing and assisting terrorists. Which is criminal and
treasonous
-- -- --
"With their command and control centre based in Istanbul, Turkey, military supplies from
Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular were transported by Turkish intelligence to the border
for rebel acquisition. CIA operatives along with Israeli and Jordanian commandos were also
training FSA rebels on the Jordanian-Syrian border with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons.
In addition, other reports show that British and French military were also involved in these
secret training programmes. It appears that the same FSA rebels receiving this elite training
went straight into ISIS – last month one ISIS commander, Abu Yusaf, said, 'Many of the
FSA people who the west has trained are actually joining us.'" Nafeez Ahmed http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/how-the-west-created-the-islamic-state/
-- -- -- -- --
"Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda,
ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or
ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for
years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and
other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to
overthrow the Syrian government.[i] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, December 8, 2016,Press Release.
https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/video-rep-tulsi-gabbard-introduces-legislation-stop-arming-terrorists
-- -- -- -- --
There is further abundant evidence available at links below: http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-christmas-report-on-crimes-of-war.html
"At the very least, America will have its first serious debate on its Mideast wars since 2003
. It is the kind of debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into
invading Iraq."
Finally Mr Buchanan and I agree on something of substance. And I cannot believe I am in
agreement with Trump on this too (even though it was quite clumsy). Will wonders never
cease?
I hate that Trump will probably throw the Kurds under the bus since they acted as our
allies and suffered for it. And if I was Mr Fethullah Gulen I would be packing my bags for
Canada.
However, well done, sir. Now let the debate begin.
I think what is to be accomplished by the US staying in the Middle East? Hasn't over 17 years
and $600 billion spent and over a million dead been price enough? Hopefully, Syria is the 1st
step in ending American military involvement in the Middle East. America has enough to do in
taking care of serious issues here at home. As for the Middle East, let Israel, Saudia
Arabia, Turkey, Iran and other countries and ethnic groups who reside there solve their own
damn problems.
As a European it feels strange to feel this pro-Trump all of a sudden. Before you know it,
I'll order a MAGA cap (I'm always safe with that because carnaval is coming).
Russia just landed a nuclear bomber in Venezuela. Russia and China are making SIGNIFICANT
inroads in the Caribbean, Central America, South America and Africa.
If Israel comes under serious threat, the US will be there to assist in its defense but
the time has come when the US has to admit that the parasite freeloader nations like Europe
and Israel are coming at to high a cost a cost that is both distracting and obstructing the
US from being where it is really needed to deal with China and Russia.
People sit on their collective fat asses inside The Beltway within the confines of some book
lined conference room and make decisions involving the lives of thousands of young men and
women–other people's sons and daughters (never their own)– who may be dispatched
to take a bullet in anger. And over what? Making the MidEast "free for democracy"?
I dislike Trump even though I reluctantly voted for him only to keep the Congenital Liar
out of the White House. One of the few positives he exhibited was a desire to extricate the
United States from that MidEast hell-hole. For once at least he has delivered. Whether he
will succeed, however, remains to be seen. After all, the Beltway is swarming with chicken
hawks.
Very zero sum gain way of thinking. How can the US not spending hundreds of billions on a
lost cause be a win for Russia? Sounds more like a win for the US. I think the Syrian
government with Russia and Iran should be enough to demolish the physical caliphate.
Destroying ISIS ? Good luck with that suppress it OK but destroy easier said then done. How
have we done against, the Mafia? the IRA? drug cartels and so on and so forth. For those who
want to stay is there ever a set of conditions which would be satisfied allowing you to
leave? We are still in Germany, I think the Nazis are gone you can relax, if it was the
Soviets you worry about also gone by about 3 decades. If we can't accept that Germany is
sufficiently stable to no longer be blessed with our presence when oh when would Syria be
viewed as stable?
I have regretted voting for trump for many reasons. I concede that IF USA military leaves
Syria, this is a very positive development. He should now do the same for Afghanistan and
many other places around the world.
Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian military have done a fine job of keeping IS on the
run. Let's hope they can finish the job.
In this issue at least I support Trump a hundred percent, and I think a lot of Americans
agree.
He's finally doing what he promised to do during the campaign.
I have been very unhappy with him, but if he follows through on this I'll give him credit.
Given the lock that the elites and establishment have on the media, it took guts. It's good
to see he has some.
While I didn't vote for this excrescence in The White House, I will give credit where credit
is due. Hillary's neocon impulses would have been infinitely worse here.
Still, looking at this past week, I can't help thinking about that whole Flight 93 thing.
But two years into The Trump presidency, it's starting to look more like that disaster movie
camp-fest Airport 1975, where we have crossed-eyed stewardess Karen Black trying to land the
stricken 747. In her immortal words to flight control: "Something hit us! There's no one left
to fly the plane! HELP US! OH MY GOD HELP US!!!"
"... According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy "our institutions." ..."
A central theme of the hysteria over alleged "Russian meddling" in US politics is the
sinister effort supposedly being mounted by Vladimir Putin "to undermine and manipulate our
democracy" (in the words of Democratic Senator Mark Warner).
According to the narrative fabricated by the intelligence agencies and promoted by the
Democratic Party and the corporate media over the past year and a half, Putin and his minions
hacked the Democrats and stirred up social divisions and popular grievances to secure the
election for Donald Trump, and they have been working ever since to destroy "our
institutions."
Their chosen field of battle is the internet, with Russian trolls and bots infecting the
body politic by taking advantage of lax policing of social media by the giant tech companies
such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
To defend democracy, the argument goes, these companies, working with the state, must
silence oppositional viewpoints -- above all left-wing, anti-war and socialist viewpoints --
which are labeled "fake news," and banish them from the internet. Nothing is said of the fact
that this supposed defense of democracy is a violation of the basic canons of genuine
democracy, guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution: freedom of speech and
freedom of the press.
But what is this much vaunted "American democracy?" Let's take a closer look.
The
two-party monopoly
In a vast and complex country with a population of 328 million people, consisting of many
different nationalities, native tongues, religions and other demographics, spanning six time
zones and thousands of miles, two political parties totally dominate the political
system.
The ruling corporate-financial oligarchy controls both parties and maintains its rule by
alternating control of the political institutions -- the White House, Congress, state houses,
etc. -- between them. The general population, consisting overwhelmingly of working people, is
given the opportunity every two or four years to go to the polls and vote for one or the
other of these capitalist parties. This is what is called "democracy."
The monopoly of the two big business parties is further entrenched by the absence of
proportional representation, which it makes it impossible for third parties or independent
candidates to obtain significant representation in Congress.
The role of corporate
money
The entire political process -- the selection of candidates, elections, the formulation of
domestic and foreign policies -- is dominated by corporate money. No one can seriously bid
for high office unless he or she has the backing of sponsors from the ranks of the richest 1
percent -- or 0.01 percent -- of the population. The buying of elections and politicians is
brazen and shameless.
Last month's midterm elections set a record for campaign spending in a non-presidential
year -- $5.2 billion -- a 35 percent increase over 2014 and triple the amount spent 20 years
ago, in 1998. The bulk of this flood of cash came from corporations and multi-millionaire
donors.
In the vast majority of contests, the winner was determined by the size of his or her
campaign war chest. Eighty-nine percent of House races and 84 percent of Senate races were
won by the biggest spender.
Democratic candidates had a huge spending advantage over their Republican opponents,
exposing the fraud of their attempt to posture as a party of the people. The securities and
investment industry -- Wall Street -- favored Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 52
percent to 46 percent.
Elections are anything but a forum to openly and honestly discuss and debate the great
issues facing the voters. The real issues -- the preparation for new wars, deeper austerity
and further attacks on democratic rights -- are concealed behind a miasma of attack ads and
mudslinging. The research firm PQ Media estimates that total political ad spending will reach
$6.75 billion this year. In last month's elections, the number of congressional and
gubernatorial ads rose 59 percent over the previous, 2014, midterm.
The setting of policy and passage of legislation is helped along by corporate bribes,
euphemistically termed lobbying. In 2017 alone, corporations spent $3 billion to lobby the
government.
Ballot access restrictions
A welter of arcane, arbitrary and anti-democratic requirements for gaining ballot status,
which vary from state to state, block third parties from challenging the domination of the
Democrats and Republicans. These include filing fees and nominating petition signature
requirements in the tens of thousands in many states. Democratic officials routinely
challenge the petitions of socialist and left-wing candidates who are likely to find support
among young people and workers.
Media blackout of third party candidates
The corporate media systematically blacks out the campaigns of third party and independent
candidates, especially left-wing and socialist candidates. The exception is candidates who
are either themselves rich or who have the backing of wealthy patrons.
Third party candidates are generally excluded from nationally televised candidates'
debates.
In last month's election, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for Congress in
Michigan's 12th Congressional District, Niles Niemuth, won broad support among workers, young
people and students for his socialist program, but received virtually no press
coverage.
Voting restrictions
Since the stolen election of 2000, when the Supreme Court shut down the counting of votes
in Florida in order to hand the White House to the loser of the popular vote, George W. Bush,
with virtually no opposition from the Democrats or the media, attacks on the right of workers
and poor people to vote have mounted.
Thirty-three states have implemented voter identification laws, which, studies show, bar
up to 6 percent of the population from voting. States have cut back early voting and absentee
voting and shut down voting precincts in working class neighborhoods. A number of states
impose a lifetime ban on voting by felons, even after they have done their time. In 2013, the
Supreme Court gutted the enforcement mechanism of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with no real
opposition from the Democrats. The United States is one of the few countries that hold
elections on a work day, making it more difficult for workers to cast a
ballot.
Government of, by and for the rich
The two corporate parties have overseen a social counterrevolution, resulting in a
staggering growth of social inequality. In tandem with this process, the oligarchic structure
of society has increasingly found open expression in the political forms of rule. Alongside
the erection of the infrastructure of a police state -- mass surveillance, indefinite
detention, the militarization of the police, Gestapo raids on workplaces and attacks on
immigrants, the ascendancy of the military in political affairs, internet censorship -- the
personnel of government have increasingly been recruited from the rich and the
super-rich.
More than half of the members of Congress are millionaires, as compared to just 1 percent
of the American population. All the presidents for the past three decades -- George H. W,
Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama -- have either been multi-millionaires going
in or have cashed in on their presidencies to become multi-millionaires afterward. In the
person of the multi-billionaire real estate speculator and con man Donald Trump, the
financial oligarchy has directly taken occupancy of the White House.
In The State and Revolution , Vladimir Lenin wrote: "Bourgeois democracy,
although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under
capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for
the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor."
ISIS was created by the US as a part of its divide and conquer strategy. General Flynn blew
the whistle on it which is why he has been vilified. Flynn spoke the truth on ISIS and lied
to the FBI! Horrors.
Now ISIS has been "defeated" and the US Quixote can focus on other windmills.
Except now comes the Syria encore, Afghanistan. Chalk up another loss for team USA.
One of the participants in the scheme, Jonathan Morgan, is the CEO of cybersecurity firm
New Knowledge. Morgan wrote a blistering account of Russian social media operations during
the 2016 election released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Another angle to this big @nytimes story... Guess who participated in using a Russian
style disinformation campaign to influence the Alabama Senate election AND hoped to frame
Russia for it? The CEO of the company that wrote the Senate Intel report on 2016 election
meddling. https://t.co/uSu8HYCl15
-- Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) December 20, 2018
"... What Are the Democrats Hiding?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html "Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) demanded that Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa return equipment belonging to her office that was seized as part of the investigation -- or face "consequences." ..."
"... "FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back." ..."
"... This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers. Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning and Assange? ..."
Virtually no one [from MSM] is paying attention to the fact that a group of Pakistani
Muslims, working for a Jewish Congresswoman from Florida, had full computer access to a large
number of Democrat Representatives. Most of the press is disinterested in pursuing this
matter."
"FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's information technology (IT) administrator, according to two
sources with knowledge of the investigation. Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand
IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately
tried to get the hard drives back."
This is not your phony Russia-gate or McCain-commissioned funny dossier on Trump. This
is the documented "serious, potentially illegal, violations of the House IT network," which
is a case of a free access to classified information by a group of the proven blackmailers.
Would this matter be treated with the same urgency of "patriotism" as the cases of Manning
and Assange?
CrowdStrike is a high-profile cybersecurity firm that worked with the DNC (Democratic
National Committee) in 2016 and was called in due to a suspected breach. However, CrowdStrike
appears to have first started working with the DNC approximately five weeks prior to this and
approximately just five days after John Podesta (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager for the
2016 election) had his Gmail account phished. Nothing was mentioned about this until after the
five weeks had passed when the DNC published a press release stating that
CrowdStrike had been at the DNC throughout that period to investigate the NGP-VAN issues
(that had occurred three months before Podesta was phished).
Upon conclusion of those five weeks, CrowdStrike was immediately called back in to
investigate a suspected breach. CrowdStrike's software was already installed on the DNC network
when the DNC emails were acquired but CrowdStrike failed to prevent the emails from being
acquired and didn't publish logs or incident-specific evidence of the acquisition event either,
the latter of which is odd considering what
their product's features were advertised to be even if they were just running it in a
monitoring capacity .
"... He might call it a "higher loyalty", but it looks to us peons like a true double-standard. Democrats get Wall Street Bankster treatment, while the rabble get tossed in the slammer. ..."
Former FBI Director James Comey appeared December 17th, 2018, for a
second round of questions by a joint House committee oversight probe into the DOJ and FBI
conduct during the 2016 presidential election and incoming Trump administration.
The Joint House Committee just released the transcript online (full pdf below).
Trey Gowdy grilled Comey on his vastly different handling of comments by Trump and Obama.
When Trump asked Comey whether he could see his way clear to easing up on Flynn, Comey
memorialized the conversation in a memo and distributed it to his leadership team, including
Andrew McCabe and James Baker.
However, when President Obama on 60 Minutes publicly exonerated Hillary Clinton's
mishandling of classified information -- setting the stage for true obstruction of justice --
Comey did nothing. He never talked to the president about potential obstruction, he never
memorialized his observations, and he didn't leak anything to the press. These were all things
he did with Trump.
He might call it a "higher loyalty", but it looks to us peons like a true double-standard.
Democrats get Wall Street Bankster treatment, while the rabble get tossed in the
slammer.
2. According to Comey, Flynn had no right to counsel
This is interesting:
Mr. Gowdy. Did Mr. Flynn have the right to have counsel present during that interview?
Mr. Comey. No.
Oooooooookay.
3. Comey confirmed McCabe called Flynn to initiate "entrapment";
contradicts himself on counsel
And:
Mr. Gowdy. Why not advise General Flynn of the consequences of making false statements to
the FBI?
Mr. Comey. ...the Deputy Director [McCabe] called him, told him what the subject matter
was, told him he was welcome to have a representative from White House Counsel there...
So Comey is saying that Flynn didn't have the right to counsel (item 2), and then states
that he does have the right to a White House counsel attending the meeting.
The lies are getting harder and harder to keep straight with this egregious
individual.
4. Comey lied about McCabe's conversation with Flynn
When asked whether McCabe was trying to set Flynn up by asserting no counsel was needed in
the interview, Comey claimed he was unaware of that critical fact. But McCabe, in a written
memo, asserted that he told Flynn, "[i]f you have a lawyer present, we'll need to involve the
Department of Justice".
In other words, McCabe was trying to ensure Flynn had no counsel present during the
interview.
5. Comey still falls back on the Logan Act scam to justify his actions
Yes, the Logan Act. When former secretary of state John Kerry meets with various Mullahs
while President Trump is unwinding the disastrous Iran deal, there's no crime there !
But let Flynn, a member of the Trump transition team, have a perfectly legitimate
conversation with a Russian diplomat, we get:
Mr. Comey. And I hesitate only with "wrong." I think a Department of Justice prosecutor
might say, on its face, it was problematic under the Logan Act because of private citizens
negotiating and all that business.
What a lying sack of gumbo. At the time, Flynn was not a private citizen. He was a member of
the incoming administration, and had anyone bothered to prosecute prior transitions for similar
"crimes", the entire Obama and Clinton posses would be breaking rocks at Leavenworth.
6.
Comey Throws James Clapper Under the Bus
When asked by Jim Jordan about his private meeting with the President to brief him on a very
tiny portion of the "salacious and unverified" (Comey's words under oath) dossier, Comey
claimed ODNI James Clapper had orchestrated the entire fiasco.
Mr. Comey. ...ultimately, it was Clapper's call. I agreed -- we agreed that it made sense
for me to do it and to do it privately, separately. So I don't want to make it sound like I
was ordered to do it.
He wasn't ordered to do it, but it was Clapper's call.
Oooooooookay.
7. Jordan Torches Comey Over His Dossier Comments
I'll just leave this here. Comey may need to put some ice on that.
Mr. Jordan. So that's what I'm not understanding, is you felt this was so important that
it required a private session with you and the President-elect, you only spoke of the
salacious part of the dossier, but yet you also say there's no way any good reporter would
print this. But you felt it was still critical that you had to talk to the President-elect
about it. And I would argue you created the very news hook that you said you were concerned
about...
...it's so inflammatory that reporters would 'get killed' for reporting it, why was it so
important to tell the President? Particularly when you weren't going to tell him the rest of
the dossier -- about the rest of the dossier?
8. Comey Concealed Critical National Security Concerns About Flynn From the
President
This is quite unbelievable: in a private dinner with the president, Comey neglected to
mention that just three days earlier he had directed the interview of Trump's ostensible
National Security Advisor.
Mr. Comey. ...at no time during the dinner was there a reference, allusion, mention by
either of
us about the FBI having contact with General Flynn or being interested in General Flynn
investigatively.
Mr. Jordan. That was what I wanted to know. So this is not just referring to the President
didn't bring it up. You didn't bring it up either.
Mr. Comey. Correct, neither of us brought it up or alluded to it.
Mr. Jordan. Why not? He's talking about General Flynn. You had just interviewed him 3 days
earlier and discovered that he was lying to the Vice President, knew he was lying to the Vice
President, and, based on what we've heard of late, that he lied tyour agents. Why not tell
his boss, why not tell the head of the executive branch, why not tell the President of the
United States, "Hey, your National Security Advisor just lied to us 3 days ago"?
Mr. Comey. Because we had an open investigation, and there would be no reason or a need to
tell the President about it.
Mr. Jordan. Really?
Mr. Comey. Really.
Mr. Jordan. You wouldn't tell the President of the United States that his National
Security Advisor wasn't being square with the FBI? ... I mean, but this is not just any
investigation, it seems to me, Director. This is a top advisor to the Commander in Chief. And
you guys, based on what we've heard, felt that he wasn't being honest with the Vice President
and wasn't honest with two of your agents. And just 3 days later, you're meeting with the
President, and, oh, by the way, the conversation is about General Flynn. And you don't tell
the President anything?
Mr. Comey. I did not.
Mr. Meadows. So, Director Comey, let me make sure I understand this. You were so concerned
that Michael Flynn may have lied or did lie to the Vice President of the United States, but
that once you got that confirmed, that he had told a falsehood, you didn't believe that it
was appropriate to tell the President of the United States that there was no national
security risk where you would actually convey that to the President of the United States? Is
that your testimony?
Mr. Comey. That is correct. We had an --
The more we learn, the dirtier a cop Comey ends up appearing.
9. Gowdy Destroys the
Double Standard of Clinton vs. Flynn
Check this out:
Mr. Gowdy. ...we are going to contrast the decision to not allow Michael Flynn to have an
attorney, or discourage him from having one, with allowing some other folks the Bureau
interviewed to have multiple attorneys in the room, including fact witnesses. Can you see the
dichotomy there, or is that an unreasonable comparison?
Mr. Comey. I'm not going to comment on that. I remember you asking me questions about that
last week. I'm happy to answer them again.
Mr. Gowdy. You will not say whether or not it is an unreasonable comparison to compare
allowing multiple attorneys, who are also fact witnesses, to be present during an interview
but discouraging another person from having counsel present?
Mr. Comey. I'm not going to answer that in a vacuum...
10. Comey May Have Been Involved With the Infamous Tarmac Meeting
Another interesting vignette, this time from John Ratcliffe :
Mr. Ratcliffe. Okay. So it would appear from this that there had been some type of
briefing the day before, with reference to yesterday, June 27, 2016, where you had requested
a copy of emails between President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Comey. I see that it says that.
Mr. Ratcliffe. ...The significance of that is, as we talked about last time, June 27th of
2016 was also the date that Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton met on a
tarmac in Phoenix, Arizona. Do you recall whether or not this briefing was held at the FBI
because of that tarmac meeting, or was it just happened to be a coincidence that it was held
on that day? Mr. Comey. It would have to have been a coincidence. I don't remember a meeting
in response to the tarmac meeting.
Muh don't know!
11. Comey confirms Obama knew Hillary Clinton was using a compromised,
insecure email server
Well, spank me on the fanny and call me Nancy!
Mr. Ratcliffe. ...Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama were communicating via email
through an unsecure, unclassified server?
Mr. Comey. Yes, they were between her Clinton email.com account and his -- I don't know
where his account, his unclassified account, was maintained. So I'm sorry. So, yes, here were
communications unclassified between two accounts, hers and then his cover account.
Mr. Ratcliffe. ...Did your review of these emails or the content of these emails impact
your decision to edit out a reference to President Obama in your July 5th, 2016, press
conference remarks?
If Trump had done 1/1,000,000th of this crap, he'd be -- yes -- breaking rocks in
Leavenworth right now.
But there's no double-standard, rabble! Just keep buying iPhones and playing Call of Duty
!
...Aaaaaaaaand I'm spent.
Okay, done for now.
But let's recap the activities of Dr. "Higher Loyalty" Comey:
Did not investigate the felony leak to the press of the conversation between the Russian
Ambassador and Flynn.
Did not advise Congress of the "investigation" into Trump-Russia collusion as required by
statute.
Lied to the FISA court -- another felony -- about Carter Page being "an agent of a
foreign power".
Wrote an exoneration memo for Hillary Clinton before more than a dozen witnesses,
including Clinton herself, had been interviewed.
But, no, there's no double-standard for the aggressiveness of law enforcement when it comes
to Democrats like Clinton and Obama.
"... These intercepted communications provided the means to identify George Papadopoulos as a potential target. ..."
"... British intel was worried about Trump's stated positions in 2015 on Syria and NATO, which were inimical to British interests. ..."
"... Meanwhile, back in my country, Jim Clapper at DNI and John Brennan at CIA started to conspire against Trump. ..."
"... if I may add this also proves an imperial mindset. Anyone dangerous to the influence of the Imperium must destroyed. Right now primarily through Justizmord, but as things turn south (and they will) physically too. ..."
"... My apologies if I missed this in the article, but WHY do these US gov't agencies want to take Donald down? I didn't vote for him, but it seems like he is doing things the GOP wants. ..."
"... IMO they have sensed from the beginning that because of his egomania he would never be truly controllable. As TTG and I have stated before we would never have tried to recruit this man as an intelligence asset. To be worthwhile such an asset must be controllable. Trump is demonstrating now in the Syria matter that he is NOT controllable. He is likely to withdraw from Afghanistan in spite of the "counsel" of the generals' club and the waning influence over him of the neocons. With regard to Syria I think that Natanyahu has already abandoned regime change in Syria. The Russians are probably responsible for this. ..."
"... Excellent summary, Mr Johnson! It is extremely concerning that this information is known but no one has the balls to start nailing some people. I read that it is all about timing, release will be in response to demo atks, etc. I read that x number of sealed indictments are out there but no progress seems to be forthcoming. You are correct, no one is defending the Constitution, it is all personalized against trump, who seems to disengaged from the active fight. ..."
"... Chuck Schumer: "You take on the intelligence community, they have 6 ways from Sunday of getting back at you." Play Hide ..."
On the threshhold of the second anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration, the details of
the coup to force him from the Presidency are emerging and should alarm all Americans
regardless of political party affiliation. Although many facts remain to be discovered, what
has emerged paints a shocking picture of criminal activity by FBI and CIA officials. That
explains in part why both agencies are going to great lengths to hide documents that provide
indisputable proof of their malfeasance.
When American law enforcement and officials, who carry Top Secret clearances and authority
to collect intelligence or pursue a criminal investigation, decide to employ lies and
intimidation to silence those who worked for Donald Trump's Presidency, our Republic is
endangered.
My interest is not in protecting or defending Donald Trump. I am talking about defending the
rule of law and ensuring that the Constitutional limitations on the powers of the Federal
Government are protected.
What evidence do I offer of the attempted coup? Here is what we know for certain:
Foreign
intelligence entities started collecting intelligence on Donald Trump and his associates in
2015. The names of more than 200 people connected to the Trump campaign listed in those reports
were unmasked by the Obama Administration. The FBI used two paid informants -- Christopher
Steele and Stefan Halper -- to target Trump and members of his team and coordinated this effort
with British MI-6 and the CIA. The FBI had additional informant with direct access to Trump who
specialized in targeting Russian spies and Russian mobsters. His name? Felix Sater. Yet, Sater
appears never to have been tasked to provide any incriminating information on Donald Trump.
Bill Priestrap, the FBI Assistant Director for Counter Intelligence since December 2015, relied
on Felix Sater in a major operation against Russian spies and then had oversight of the
investigation into Donald Trump. So far, no indictment has surfaced from Special Prosecutor
Mueller's efforts implicating Trump with the Russian government.
The operation against Donald Trump is pure and simple covert action. But it is covert action
on a massive scale and has involved coordinated actions between U.S. law enforcement, U.S.
intelligence agencies and foreign intelligence agencies, including both the British Government
and the Australian Government.
There are eight major components to this covert action. This is not a confirmed complete
list. More elements may surface in the coming days. But these are what we know for certain:
British and other foreign intelligence services were collecting on persons working with and
for Donald Trump. GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between
figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK
intelligence said. Thisintelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of
information, they added. Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western
agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians,
sources said. This "intelligence" was then used by the Obama Administration to "unmask"
Americans named in the intelligence who were working with Donald Trump. The European
countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included
Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the "Five Eyes" spying alliance that also
includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said. (Luke
Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins Exclusive: GCHQ is said to have alerted US
agencies after becoming aware of contacts in 2015 Thu 13 Apr 2017 09.39 EDT, THE
GUARDIAN)
February/March 2016--George Popadopoulus was specifically targeted by a combined MI-6/CIA
operation. GCHQ started collecting on the Trump team in the summer of 2015. These
intercepted communications provided the means to identify George Papadopoulos as a potential
target. But this was more than a mere GCHQ routine collection. MI6 also was involved.
British intel was worried about Trump's stated positions in 2015 on Syria and NATO, which
were inimical to British interests.
Meanwhile, back in my country, Jim Clapper at DNI and John Brennan at CIA started to
conspire against Trump. They did not believe that Trump would be elected but still
decided to take steps to discredit him using the Russia meme. I have this solidly sourced. In
other words, US intel and British intel started working against Trump independently at the
outset. This effort subsequently was coordinated through the JIC. What is alarming is that
despite the targeting of Trump NO intel of any value on the Trump/Russian angle was ever
produced. I thank you for the excellent piece you did on Mifsud. Mifsud's "arrival" at the
London Center for International Law Practice (LCILP) was not, in my view, a mere coincidence.
Papadopoulos was then recruited, unwittingly, to join LCILP as part of a broader intel op
intended to compromise him as a Russian enthusiast.
May 6, 2016--DNC Computer supposedly was hacked by Russian government agents and an outside
firm, Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm that was brought in at the recommendation of Mark
Elias (the same attorney who had hired Fusion GPS) is on the record claiming it started
working in early May to counter the Russian threat. It was Crowdstrike, not the FBI, that
claimed in mid-June that the email theft from the DNC was carried out by Russian hackers.
However, the available forensic evidence clearly shows that the information was downloaded by
someone with access to the DNC computers. At no time was the FBI given forensic access to the
DNC computer to conduct an independent investigation.
A "retired" MI-6 officer, Christopher Steele, was hired by Fusion GPS (which had been
retained by a lawyer acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign) to assemble a "dossier" on
Trump and his relationship with Russia. However, turns out that Steele also was a fully
signed up FBI informant since 2013. He was fired in October 2016 by the FBI for leaking to
the media. Despite being funded by a political opponent of Trump, the dossier was a major
justification for seeking a FISA warrant against Carter Page, who was affiliated with the
Trump campaign. ( https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/14/russia-dossier-fbi-trump-obama-1066643
)
Summer 2016--Carter Page targeted by the FBI and collected on by NSA and CIA. Page had no
relationship with Trump other than being named as an advisor to a group of foreign policy
experts. He never met Trump and never spoke with Trump. But the Steele Dossier fingers Page
as playing a lead role in bringing Russian influence into the Trump campaign. This unproven
allegation the major impetus for obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page.
August/September 2016--FBI Informant Stefan Halper was used to try to entrap at least three
people associated with Donald Trump. Halper, the son-in-law of a retired famous CIA officers,
also was known to work with the CIA and MI-6 on other matters. In September Halper sought a
meeting with George Papadopoulus to pitch him on writing a policy paper for $3000 and then
traveling to London at Halper's expense. Towards the end of the meeting Halper asked
Papadopoulos: 'George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?'" Papadopoulus
denied any knowledge of such activity.
DNI Jim Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan both engaged in continuous leaks to feed the
meme that Trump was colluding with the Russians even though they knew they had no relevant
intelligence to support their claims. They engaged in a deliberate covert information
operation to poison the media against Trump. A retired FBI agent writing in the Wall Street
Journal noted that, "Robert Hannigan, then head of Britain's Government Communications
Headquarters, to pass information to Mr. Brennan. With only these suspicions, Mr. Brennan
pressured the FBI into launching its counterintelligence probe."
The FBI had an informant with expertise about the Russians planted inside the Trump
organization since 2003, but apparently did not use him. FBI Informant Felix Sater, who
started working with the Trump organization since 2003 and a boyhood friend of Trump's
lawyer, Michael Cohen, had worked with the FBI in making several cases against Russian
intelligence officers and Russian mobsters. Yet, during the 12 years he worked with the Trump
organization, not a single indictment was ever brought against Trump or his employees prior
to the start of his campaign for President. Even though Sater played a key role in the failed
Moscow project, his role with the FBI only involved providing evidence that Michael Cohen
lied to the Senate about the project.
The effort to destroy Donald Trump remains active. Trump, unfortunately, is proving to be
quite feckless in defying this threat and protecting himself. But this should not be about
protecting Trump and his reputation. This goes to something more profound and fundamental --
are those charged with collecting foreign intelligence and investigating crime permitted to act
with impunity against someone they define as a political foe. Such actions and attitudes
reflect an authoritarian government, not a Republic.
Likbez
An excellent narrative of this special operation. I would call it a color resolution against
Trump, as methods are the same. Thank you.
In other words, US and British intelligence started
working closely against Trump very early. May be from the very beginning.
The role of the British Intelligence here deserves more attention. I think you are right that
pursuing UK geopolitical interests (which are similar to US neocons) required derailing of Trump
and that's why they jumped into action. It might be that the idea to hire Steele by Fusion GPS was
injected from overseas.
They also might well push the Brennan faction of CIA into action by feeding his faction the
required disinfo. And Brennan required very little pushing, if any at all.
In this sense DNC "post-hack" investigation looks more and more like a false flag operation
were Crowstrike people were patsies in a bigger game assigned a predetermined task.
The Eastern timezone setting found in Guccifer 2's documents published on July 6, 2016 is
significant, because as we showed in Guccifer 2.0 NGP/Van Metadata Analysis, Guccifer 2 was likely
on the East Coast the previous day, when he collected the DNC-related files found in the ngpvan.7z
Zip file. Also, recall that Guccifer 2 was likely on the East Coast a couple of months later on
September 1, 2016 when he built the final ngpvan.7z file.
There are four additional episodes that can be added to the provided outline:
Michael Rogers intervention to save Trump transition team from surveillance in the Trump
tower and subsequent attempt by Brennan and Co. to fire him.
A very interesting and unexplainable episode is Avan brothers and their connection to Debbie
Wassermann. Theoretically that provided Debbie capability of conduct her own false flag operation.
It is clear that nobody wants to prosecute them. But why ?
The "insurance" folder on Wiener laptop (and probably some other interesting dat on it) and
Comey treatment of this information: https://www.theamericancons...
if I may add this also proves an imperial mindset. Anyone dangerous to the influence of
the Imperium must destroyed. Right now primarily through Justizmord, but as things turn south
(and they will) physically too.
You say: I am talking about defending the rule of law and ensuring that the Constitutional
limitations on the powers of the Federal Government are protected... And I can tell you with
absolute certainty that the US government has engaged in extrajudicial political
assassinations with total impunity, and this is repulsive way beyond what you outlined
here...
Trump is a criminal and has been all his adult life. He's been a liar since he was old enough
to tell a lie. Maybe no more or more less than others; the difference being dumb enough to
expose himself by running for the presidency and getting caught. It's on him.
My apologies if I missed this in the article, but WHY do these US gov't agencies want to take
Donald down? I didn't vote for him, but it seems like he is doing things the GOP wants. And I
was aware even before he ran for office that his past business dealings were shady. Are these
agencies going to try to bring him down using his past business dealings poss. involving the
Russians? Also, what does Mueller get out of this situation? Not a troll, just someone with
an OPEN mind.
IMO they have sensed from the beginning that because of his egomania he would never be truly
controllable. As TTG and I have stated before we would never have tried to recruit this man
as an intelligence asset. To be worthwhile such an asset must be controllable. Trump is
demonstrating now in the Syria matter that he is NOT controllable. He is likely to withdraw
from Afghanistan in spite of the "counsel" of the generals' club and the waning influence
over him of the neocons. With regard to Syria I think that Natanyahu has already abandoned
regime change in Syria. The Russians are probably responsible for this.
Bad: The "deep state" exists and will do whatever it takes to preserve its self-important and
self-enriching place in the Imperial City (the swamp).
Good :The "deep state" is composed mainly of inept blunderers, bureaucratic drones.
My favorite example is Strzok - the FBI "star" - who carried on his "plotting" (and adultery)
through texting on a government phone which apparently this "star" didn't know was being
archived.
Could this dimwit spell "OPSEC?"
As for Trump, two things:
The Clinton crime family is not in the WH.
Two Supreme Court Justices NOT appointed by a Democrat.
Excellent summary, Mr Johnson! It is extremely concerning that this information is known but no one has the balls to
start nailing some people. I read that it is all about timing, release will be in response to
demo atks, etc. I read that x number of sealed indictments are out there but no progress
seems to be forthcoming. You are correct, no one is defending the Constitution, it is all personalized against
trump, who seems to disengaged from the active fight.
Then there is the business of Q, whatever the hell that means-we read, trust the plan,
trust Sessions, trust Rod, trust Mueller. This may be counter productive to the 4th level of
chess but it seems like it is about time to haul some of these bastards off in a perp
walk.
Flynn "treason" is not related to Russia probe and just confirm that Nueller in engaged in witch hunt.
I believe half of Senate and House of Representative might go to jail if they were dug with the ferocity Mueller digs Flynn's past.
So while Flynn behavior as Turkey lobbyist (BTW Turkey is a NATO country and not that different int his sense from the US -- and you
can name a lot of UK lobbyists in high echelons of the US government, starting with McCabe and Strzok) is reprehensible, this is still a witch hunt
When American law enforcement and intelligence officials, who carry Top Secret clearances and authority to collect intelligence
or pursue a criminal investigation, decide to employ lies and intimidation to silence or intimidates those who worked for Donald
Trump's Presidency, we see shadow of Comrage Stalin Great Terror Trials over the USA.
Former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn passes by members of the
media as he departs after his sentencing was delayed at U.S. District Court in
Washington, U.S., December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
By Jan Wolfe and Ginger Gibson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge fiercely criticized President Donald
Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Tuesday for lying to
FBI agents in a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and
delayed sentencing him until Flynn has finished helping prosecutors.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan told Flynn, a retired U.S. Army
lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
that he had arguably betrayed his country. Sullivan also noted that Flynn had
operated as an undeclared lobbyist for Turkey even as he worked on Trump's
campaign team and prepared to be his White House national security adviser.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his December 2016
conversations with Sergei Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador in Washington,
about U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow by the administration of Trump's
Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, after Trump's election victory but before
he took office.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the investigation into possible
collusion between Trump's campaign team and Russia ahead of the election, had
asked the judge not to sentence Flynn to prison because he had already
provided "substantial" cooperation over the course of many interviews.
But Sullivan sternly told Flynn his actions were abhorrent, noting that
Flynn had also lied to senior White House officials, who in turn misled the
public. The judge said he had read additional facts about Flynn's behavior
that have not been made public.
At one point, Sullivan asked prosecutors if Flynn could have been charged
with treason, although the judge later said he had not been suggesting such a
charge was warranted.
"Arguably, you sold your country out," Sullivan told Flynn. "I'm not hiding
my disgust, my disdain for this criminal offense."
Flynn, dressed in a suit and tie, showed little emotion throughout the
hearing, and spoke calmly when he confirmed his guilty plea and answered
questions from the judge.
Sullivan appeared ready to sentence Flynn to prison but then gave him the
option of a delay in his sentencing so he could fully cooperate with any
pending investigations and bolster his case for leniency. The judge told Flynn
he could not promise that he would not eventually sentence him to serve prison
time.
Flynn accepted that offer. Sullivan did not set a new date for sentencing
but asked Mueller's team and Flynn's attorney to give him a status report by
March 13.
Prosecutors said Flynn already had provided most of the cooperation he
could, but it was possible he might be able to help investigators further.
Flynn's attorney said his client is cooperating with federal prosecutors in a
case against Bijan Rafiekian, his former business partner who has been charged
with unregistered lobbying for Turkey.
Rafiekian pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to those charges in federal court
in Alexandria, Virginia. His trial is scheduled for Feb. 11. Flynn is
expected to testify.
Prosecutors have said Rafiekian and Flynn lobbied to
have Washington extradite a Muslim cleric who lives in the United States
and is accused by Turkey's government of backing a 2016 coup attempt. Flynn
has not been charged in that case.
'LOCK HER UP!'
Flynn was a high-profile adviser to Trump's campaign team. At the
Republican Party's national convention in 2016, Flynn led Trump's
supporters in cries of "Lock her up!" directed against Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton.
A group of protesters, including some who chanted "Lock him up,"
gathered outside the courthouse on Tuesday, along with a large inflatable
rat fashioned to look like Trump. Several Flynn supporters also were there,
cheering as he entered and exited. One held a sign that read, "Michael
Flynn is a hero."
Flynn became national security adviser when Trump took office in January
2017, but lasted only 24 days before being fired.
He told FBI investigators on Jan. 24, 2017, that he had not discussed
the U.S. sanctions with Kislyak when in fact he had, according to his plea
agreement. Trump has said he fired Flynn because he also lied to Vice
President Mike Pence about the contacts with Kislyak.
Trump has said Flynn did not break the law and has voiced support for
him, raising speculation the Republican president might pardon him.
"Good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting
to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him,
about Russian Collusion in our great and, obviously, highly successful
political campaign. There was no Collusion!" Trump wrote on Twitter on
Tuesday morning.
After the hearing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters
the FBI had "ambushed" Flynn in the way agents questioned him, but said his
"activities" at the center of the case "don't have anything to do with the
president" and disputed that Flynn had committed treason.
"We wish General Flynn well," Sanders said.
In contrast, Trump has called his former long-time personal lawyer
Michael Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to separate charges, a "rat."
Mueller's investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and
whether Trump has unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe has cast a shadow
over his presidency. Several former Trump aides have pleaded guilty in
Mueller's probe, but Flynn was the first former Trump White House official
to do so. Mueller also has charged a series of Russian individuals and
entities.
Trump has called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt" and has denied
collusion with Moscow.
Russia has denied meddling in the election, contrary to the conclusion
of U.S. intelligence agencies that have said Moscow used hacking and
propaganda to try to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump's
chances against Clinton.
Lying to the FBI carries a statutory maximum sentence of five years in
prison. Flynn's plea agreement stated that he was eligible for a sentence
of between zero and six months.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe and Ginger
Gibson; Additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Kieran Murray and
Will Dunham)
"... christophere steele admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent covering the story.. educate yourselves ..."
1 hour ago
When I read articles like this I look to see who wrote it, printed it etc. When I see
Bloomberg, Yahoo, HuffPo I approach it as fake news. Now I no longer watch any of Fox news
as they are fast becoming just like the rest of the propaganda outlets. This is just
inflammatory anti Trump drivel with no basis in fact.
O 1 hour
ago Was this the interview report that was written 7 months after the interview?
R 44 minutes ago
Actually this story is not accurate. Mueller released copies of the 302 memos, which are in
effect official documentation to a case file. The 302 was dated seven months after the
interview, when the FBI policy requires such reports to be filed within five days. The
judge will ask tomorrow for copies of agent's contemporaneous interview notes and any other
documents supporting what is written in the 302, as well as an explanation for the delay in
filing the memo. 1
hour ago You mean the notes the FBI, in the person of one Peter Strzok, (yes that Strozk)
made seven months after he was interviewed? with the required 302 documents that are either
to be taken extemporaneously or done within days of the interview being dated months later?
You mean those notes?!!!! Nice try Bloomberg, but no amount of yellow journalism spin will
stop this case from being thrown out! 15 minutes ago christophere steele
admitted before a british court today that he was hired by the clintons/obama/DNC to make
up the dossier as a weapon to use against trump as a backup plan in case he won the
election.. this proves the DNC lied, paid for a fake dossier, and comey admitted he knew
the fake dossier was false before using it to get a FISC warrant and to spy on trump, which
was used as an excuse for the mueller investigation.. yahoo news and leftwing media arent
covering the story.. educate yourselves 1 hour ago Not so bias garbage news .. they
entrapped him what 302 form you want to go with .. FBI doctored the original.. FBI
curuption runs rampant.. comey lied so much about knowing about fake dossier.. then what
the hell was he doing.. comey the tall guy phony
On Friday, 14 December 2018, the office of "special counsel" Robert Mueller filed a reply to Gen. Michael Flynn's sentencing
memorandum by the court's deadline, as noted on the court clerk's docket sheet--
"12/14/2018 56 REPLY by USA as to MICHAEL T. FLYNN to Defendant's Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing (Attachments: # 1 Attachment
A, # 2 Attachment B)(Van Grack, Brandon) (Entered: 12/14/2018)".
Judge Emmet Sullivan in an order on 12 December stated: "In 50 defendant's memorandum in aid of sentencing, the
defendant quotes and cites a 'Memorandum dated Jan. 24, 2017.' See page 8 n. 21, 22. The defendant also quotes and cites a 'FD-302
dated Aug. 22, 2017.' See page 9 n. 23-27. The defendant is ORDERED to file on the docket FORTHWITH the cited Memorandum and FD-302.
The Court further ORDERS the government to file on the docket any 302s or memoranda relevant to the circumstances discussed on
pages 7-9 of the defendant's sentencing memorandum by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December 14, 2018."
In response to Judge Sullivan's order, the Mueller group attached to its reply memo two noticeably blacked out (redacted) documents,
which turned out to be the same ones that were referred to in Flynn's memo raising the issue of FBI conduct surrounding his interview,
and were nothing additional or new!
The government's reply and two documents that were filed are here--
The two redacted documents are the "January 24, 2017" memo and the "FD-302 dated Aug. 22, 2017", which were cited in the court's
order and which Flynn's lawyers apparently already had, or knew what they were about. Judge Sullivan ordered the Mueller
group to produce "any 302s or memoranda relevant to the circumstances discussed on pages 7-9
of the defendant's sentencing memorandum", not just the two that were already known [emphasis added]. The "Attachment B"
is not the form 302 by an agent who interviewed Flynn on 24 January 2017, but rather is a 302 report by an unknown person of an
interview of now former FBI agent Peter Strzok on 20 July 2017, in which Strzok allegedly talks about some things that happened
on 24 January.
Unless the "special counsel" filed a complete set of unredacted documents with a motion (request) for leave to file them under
seal, the reply is on its face a violation of the court's disclosure order.
As 'blue peacock' said in a comment to the posting
on this issue of 14 December, it will be interesting to see what Judge Sullivan does about the response by the Mueller group.
Both documents are heavily blacked out. The form 302 does include the language that the agents at the Flynn interview
"had the impression at the time that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying". Since this had already been
revealed in news and mass media reports, they basically had to disclose that little part, otherwise it probably would have
been redacted as well.
On the bottom right corner of each page is a number, which is usually referred to as a "Bates stamp", after the name of
the numbering machines that are often used to number and identify documents that are produced in a lawsuit [1]. The pages
on the form 302 are numbered DOJSCO-700021201 to 05. The one-page typed paper (Attachment A) has number DOJSCO-700021215.
There are nine pages between those pages, but what those might be is not disclosed.
The Justice Department, FBI, and other federal departments are capable of trying to play semantic word games with requests
for information, such that if the exact name or abbreviation of the document or class of documents is not requested, they will
leave them out of their response. In this instance, the judge asked for "any 302s or memoranda" relevant to the circumstances.
The FBI has guidelines about the different types of records it keeps and they can have different names, such as LHM (letterhead
memorandum), EC (electronic communication), original note material, the FD-302, and so forth. There are also different
types of files and records systems. Thus, there may be some ducking and dodging of the court's order on the theory that
the exact types of records were not in the order.
Documents and records may also be generated when any investigative activity is started or requires approval, such as an
assessment, preliminary investigation, or a full investigation. Furthermore, an interesting issue is the type of authorized
activity the Flynn interview was part of: an assessment, preliminary investigation, or full investigation. Although
it is significantly redacted (in this instance whited out instead of blacked out), the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations
Guide contains some useful information for trying to figure out what is going on with this issue [2].
If this problem with disclosure is not bad enough, on 11 December the Justice Department Inspector General (OIG) issued
a report with the bland title, "Report of Investigation: Recovery of Text Messages from Certain FBI Mobile Devices"-- https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2018/i-2018-003523.pdf
The OIG investigation began when it was discovered that there was a "gap in text message data collection during the period
December 15, 2016, through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mobile devices assigned to FBI employees
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG's Oversight and Review Division". Those
names are familiar. Thousands of the text messages were recovered.
In addition, the report states: "In view of the content of many of the text messages between Strzok and Page, the
OIG also asked the Special Counsel's Office (SCO) to provide to the OIG the DOJ issued iPhones that had been assigned to Strzok
and Page during their respective assignments to the SCO".
The result? After Strzok was forced to leave the special counsel's office, his iPhone was given to another FBI agent
and reset, wiping out the data. The Mueller group's "records officer" told the inspector general's office that "as part
of the office's records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok's DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO
and determined it contained no substantive text messages". In other words, after the Strzok and Page scandal erupted
because of text messages while Strzok was at the special counsel's office, the Mueller group decided itself that his other
cellular phone issued to him by the Department of Justice for the special counsel's office had no "substantive" messages on
it.
Strzok's paramour, Lisa Page, also had an iPhone issued to her by the Justice Department while she was at the special counsel's
office. The Mueller group said it could not find her phone, but it eventually was located at the DOJ's Justice Management
Division. It had been reset, wiping out the data, on 31 July 2017.
"...the officer reviewed Strzok's DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive
text messages"..."
So what is the officer's name, what criterea was used in the review and just what relationship to the extended cast of characters
does this individual have?
It seems to me that this is very big news. Can it be that the Straight Arrow is bent, after all? This is amazing. There is
an article in the Daily Caller: "Powell: New Facts Indicate Mueller Destroyed Evidence..."
dailycaller.com/2018/12/16/...
As a former/retired Agent, I have combed through every piece of information regarding Mike's case, as if I was combing through
evidence in the hundreds of cases I have successfully handled while in the FBI.
The publicly reported Brady material alone, in this case, outweighs any statement given by any FBI Agent (we now know
at least one FD-302 was changed), Special Prosecutor investigator report, and any other party still aggressively seeking
that this case remain and be sentenced as a felony. Quite simply, I cannot see justice being served by branding LtG. Michael
Flynn a convicted felon, when the truth is still being revealed while policies, ethics, and laws have been violated by those
pursuing this case.
We now know all FBI employees involved in Mike Flynn's case have either been fired, forced to resign or forced to retire
because of their excessive lack of candor, punitive biases, leaking of information, and extensive cover-up of their deeds.
Michael Flynn has always displayed overwhelming candor and forthrightness.
Trump never ceases to crack me up. While his (terrible) current lawyer, declares on TV
that there was collusion but it just didn't last long, Trump calls his former lawyer/fixer at
"Rat".
This is just too funny, I mean this is the President of the United States calling his
former personal lawyer a "Rat" which of course is a common mob term for a witness testifying
against you.
Of course it never happened, just like Manafort didn't make 3 trips to London to meet
Julian Assange. These fictions were just used as a pretext for diving into the backgrounds of
Trump's political supporters and find crimes to charge them with.
The Cohen raid was particularly egregious, a likely violation of attorney-client
privilege. Not suprisingly the American Bar Association is silent.
So, Manafort never laundered money and failed to report taxes? Did Flynn never fail to
report his work as a foreign agent? Did he also not report income taxes?
Look at all these poor crooks, unfairly being prosecuted for cheating and stealing.
All that could have been prosecuted by a district attorney. They looked at all of
Manafort's dealings 10 years ago and passed because he was working with the Podesta Group at
the time and thus protected by Hillary Clinton's influence.
Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of Alex Jones' controversial site, InfoWars, filed
a lawsuit on Sunday which claims that special counsel Robert Mueller threatened him with prison
unless he agreed to falsely confess to being a liaison between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
and Republican political strategist Roger Stone, who was an adviser to Trump's presidential
campaign.
The suit, which seeks $100 million in actual damages and $250 million in punitive damages,
also accuses the FBI, CIA and NSA of having placed Corsi under illegal surveillance "at the
direction of Mueller."
CIA democrats are still determined to sink Tramp, and continues to beat the dead cat of
"Russian collision". What is interesting is that Jacob Schiff financed Bolsheviks revolution in
Russia.
Yahoo comments reflect the deep split in the opinions in the society, which is positioned
mainly by party lines. Few commenters understadn that the problem is with neoliberalism, not
Trump, or Hillary who represent just different factions of the same neoliberal elite.
Notable quotes:
"... Schiff said Deutsche Bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the state of New York for laundering Russian money, and that it was the one bank willing to do business with the Trump Organization. ..."
"... In an interview with the New Yorker that was posted on line on Dec. 14, Schiff said the Intelligence Committee is "going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start." ..."
"... A Senate investigation, which Warren and Van Hollen want to see followed by a report and a hearing, could put further pressure on the lender. The written request from the senators, sent Dec. 13, cites Deutsche Bank's "numerous enforcement actions" and a recent raid by police officers and tax investigators in Germany. ..."
"... Schiff, a target of Trump's on Twitter, also referred to reported comments by the president's sons some years ago that they didn't need "to deal with U.S. banks because they got all of the cash they needed from Russia or disproportionate share of their assets coming from Russia." He said Sunday he expects to learn more about that claim through financial records. ..."
The incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee joined Democratic colleagues in
questioning ties between Deutsche Bank AG and President Donald Trump's real estate
business.
Representative Adam Schiff of California said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that any type
of compromise needs to be investigated. That could add his panel's scrutiny to that of
Representative Maxine Waters, who's in line to be chair of the House Financial Services
Committee and has also focused on the bank's connections to Trump.
Schiff's comments came three days after Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts
and fellow Senate Democrat Chris Van Hollen called for a Banking Committee investigation of
Deutsche Bank's compliance with U.S. money-laundering regulations.
Schiff said Deutsche Bank has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the state
of New York for laundering Russian money, and that it was the one bank willing to do business
with the Trump Organization.
"Now, is that a coincidence?" Schiff said. "If this is a form of compromise, it needs to be
exposed."
In an interview with the New Yorker that was posted on line on Dec. 14, Schiff said the
Intelligence Committee is "going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the
Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start."
More Pressure
A Senate investigation, which Warren and Van Hollen want to see followed by a report and
a hearing, could put further pressure on the lender. The written request from the senators,
sent Dec. 13, cites Deutsche Bank's "numerous enforcement actions" and a recent raid by police
officers and tax investigators in Germany.
It also notes the lender's U.S. operations being implicated in cross-border money-laundering
accusations such as in a recent case involving Danish lender Danske Bank A/S and the movement
of $230 billion in illicit funds.
"The compliance history of this institution raises serious questions about the national
security and criminal risks posed by its U.S. operations," the senators said in their letter.
"Its correspondent banking operations in the U.S. serve as a gateway to the U.S. financial
system for Deutsche Bank entities around the world."
Troy Gravitt, a Deutsche Bank spokesman, responded that the company "takes its legal
obligations seriously and remains committed to cooperating with authorized investigations."
Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, had questioned the Federal Reserve earlier this year about
how it would keep the White House from interfering with oversight of the lender, which had been
a major lender to Trump's real estate business.
Schiff, a target of Trump's on Twitter, also referred to reported comments by the
president's sons some years ago that they didn't need "to deal with U.S. banks because they got
all of the cash they needed from Russia or disproportionate share of their assets coming from
Russia." He said Sunday he expects to learn more about that claim through financial
records.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Hamilton in Washington at
[email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jesse Westbrook at
[email protected], Mark Niquette, Ros Krasny
55 seconds ago A
special Special Prosecutor must be appointed with a billion dollar budget. Where will the
money come from? Fines, penalties, and restitution by the Godfather.
U 46 seconds ago With
all these investigations, who should die hard Republicans vote for in 2020? Should it be
Donald Trump or Individual 1 or David Dennison? Gonna' be a hard choice next year.
F 1
minute ago Investigations of Trump are just getting started! hahaha
A 7 minutes ago Don
the Con is certainly getting a lot of probes of his illegal, criminal business deals. He
was a total idiot to become president and draw all this attention considering all the
crimes he has committed.
W 3 minutes ago
"Shifty" Schiff....doing everything to bring America together again!
D 17 minutes ago Lets investigate SLIMEY SHIFTLESS SCHIFF for leaking to
the News Media and running faster than a speedy bullet to a microphone and running his
loose lips !
B 3 minutes ago One of
the problem is that politicians, like schiffhead, have never had a real job and only have
scammed their donors and havent a clue how the real world works.
The decision to indict Flynn ruins " esprit de corps " in the USA intelligence community. So
Partaigenosser Mulkler trying to depose Trump oversteped the "norms" of intelligence community.
And if CIA allied with FBI against DIA that's a bad sign. It looks like the US elite was split
into two warring camps that will fight for power absolutely ruthlessly.
As for "In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn 'clearly saw the FBI agents
as allies.' " the question arise how he got the to position of the head of DIA with such astounding level of naivety.
If anyone from FBI does not want your lawyer to be present you should probably have a lawyer present.
Notable quotes:
"... "The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview," the Flynn memo says. ..."
"... According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed , and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport." ..."
"... McCabe, who has since been fired for lying to the DOJ's Office of Inspector General about leaking information to the media, also asked Flynn not to have his lawyer present during the initial meeting with the FBI agents. ..."
"... On Thursday, FBI Supervisory Agent Jeff Danik told SaraACarter.com that Sullivan must also request all the communications between the two agents, as well as their supervisors around the August 2017 time-frame in order to get a complete and accurate picture of what transpired. Danik, who is an expert in FBI policy, says it is imperative that Sullivan also request "the workflow chart, which would show one-hundred percent, when the 302s were created when they were sent to a supervisor and who approved them." ..."
"... Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI. Supporters of Flynn have questioned Mueller's tactics in getting the retired three-star general to plead guilty to this one count of lying. ..."
"... In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn "clearly saw the FBI agents as allies." Flynn is described as discussing a variety of "subjects." The report includes his openness regarding Trump's "knack for interior design," the hotels he stayed at during his campaign, as well as other issues. ..."
"... It would appear that the branch of government that may be out of control (by the Supreme Court) is the judiciary. It is the court rules and failure of the Supreme Court to act and weed its subordinate courts, that allowed much of this to happen. The FISA Court has been a rubber stamp. No judge is held accountable for failure to obtain justice in their court. ..."
"... Could Mueller's whole appointment be meant to protect the Clinton empire? ..."
The Special Counsel's Office released key documents related to former National Security
Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn Friday. Robert Mueller's office had until 3 p.m. to get the
documents to Judge Emmet Sullivan, who demanded information Wednesday after
bombshell information surfaced in a memorandum submitted by Flynn's attorney's that led to
serious concerns regarding the FBI's initial questioning of the retired three-star general.
The highly redacted documents included notes from former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
regarding his conversation with Flynn about arranging the interview with the FBI. The initial
interview took place at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017.
The documents also include the FBI's "302" report regarding Flynn's interview with
anti-Trump former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka when they met with him at
the White House. It is not, however, the 302 document from the actual January, 2017 interview
but an August, 2017 report of Strzok's recollections of the interview.
Flynn's attorney's had noted in their memorandum to the courts that the documents revealed
that FBI officials made the decision not to provide Flynn with his Miranda Rights, which
would've have warned him of penalties for making false statements.
"The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false
statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview," the Flynn memo
says.
According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the
agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they
wanted Flynn to be relaxed , and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely
affect the rapport."
McCabe, who has since been fired for lying to the DOJ's Office of Inspector General about
leaking information to the media, also asked Flynn not to have his lawyer present during the
initial meeting with the FBI agents.
The July 2017 report, however, was the interview with Strzok. It described his interview
with Flynn but was not the original Flynn interview.
Apparent discrepancies within the 302 documents are being questioned by may former senior
FBI officials, who state that there are stringent policies in place to ensure that the
documents are guarded against tampering.
On Thursday, FBI Supervisory Agent Jeff Danik told SaraACarter.com that Sullivan must also request all the
communications between the two agents, as well as their supervisors around the August 2017
time-frame in order to get a complete and accurate picture of what transpired. Danik, who is an
expert in FBI policy, says it is imperative that Sullivan also request "the workflow chart,
which would show one-hundred percent, when the 302s were created when they were sent to a
supervisor and who approved them."
He stressed, "the bureau policy – the absolute FBI policy – is that the notes
must be placed in the system in a 1-A file within five days of the interview." Danik said that
the handwritten notes get placed into the FBI Sentinel System, which is the FBI's main record
keeping system. "Anything beyond five business days is a problem, eight months is a disaster,"
he added.
In the redacted 302 report Strzok and Pientka said they "both had the impression at the time
that Flynn was not lying or did not think he was lying." Information that Flynn was not lying
was first published
and reported by SaraACarter.com.
Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI. Supporters of Flynn have
questioned Mueller's tactics in getting the retired three-star general to plead guilty to this
one count of lying.
In the report, the two agents describe Flynn as being very open and noted said Flynn
"clearly saw the FBI agents as allies." Flynn is described as discussing a variety of
"subjects." The report includes his openness regarding Trump's "knack for interior design," the
hotels he stayed at during his campaign, as well as other issues.
"Flynn was so talkative, and had so much time for them, that Strzok wondered if the
national security adviser did not have more important things to do than have a such a
relaxed, non-pertinent discussion with them," it said.
The documents turned over by Mueller also reveal that other FBI personnel "later argued
about the FBI's decision to interview Flynn." Tags Law Crime
Basically McCabe and others in his unit are totally discredited. He should have this
quashed and the case thrown out of court. No Miranda rights, therefore no lying to FBI.
Why didn't Flynn demand his day in court? He would have won. I am not buying the ********
argument about him being run into bankruptcy. Hell, he could have represented himself and
still won the case at trial. In addition, I am not buying this ******** argument that he
agreed to plead guilty because he was afraid the Mueller would go after his son. Does anyone
know what Flynn's son does for a living? Why would he be afraid?
Flynn was found guilty by Mueller on one count of lying to the FBI.
No! Flynn was not f ound guilty by Mueller on one count of lying. The FBI is an
investigative body (at best) not a judicial body. Only a jury or a judge acting in lieu of a
jury can find someone guilty of anything.
Flynn plead guilty to one count of lying because to have plead innocent would have
bankrupted him in legal fees. However, it's interesting that this ZH article stated that
Mueller found Flynn guilty. In federal courts these days, once you're charged with a crime
you will be found guilty. FBI, DEA, BATF, IRS...whoever, you do not get a fair trial. Federal
judges are hard-wired to find guilt. Vicious and ambitious federal prosecutors have only one
interest, to rack up successful prosecutions. Federal juries are intimidated by the brute
force of the federal system and, I suspect, fear that if they don't bring in a verdict
satisfactory to the prosecutor, they may be investigated themselves. "Investigation" in the
federal sense means that they will be relentlessly harassed forever by the federal
government
My small experience as a juror is that state prosecutors and judges are no different than
what you describe for the federal system. We found a guy non-guilty (not a close call either)
that the judge wanted convicted, and he came back and questioned us about our logic. Casually
of course. I just said the guy was innocent beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge wasn't
pleased.
Flynn is an idiot.... why agree to talk to the FBI at all.... as Martha Stewart found
out.... if they can't make the case for what they're investigating... they'll just find some
statement in your "interview" that they claim was not true.... no matter if it was your
intention to lie or just a recollection that was wrong... and charge you with that!
Simple answer is that if law enforcement wants to "talk" to you they're looking to get
information to charge you.... simple reply.... FU... I want a lawyer!
The compromise of classified docs was really sort of candy-assed, everybody knew it . .
.
Rewind the tape, and you will find the contrite Petreaus in front of any and all
microphones confessing to his affair with Broadwell, which he repeatedly stated began on some
certain date . . .conveniently AFTER his confirmation as CIA director . . .
. . .certainly Petreaus was asked in his FBI background interview if he was involved in
any affairs. And he certainly said no.
So, Paula, since I'm on all the networks at the moment, I know you can hear me, our affair
started on X date, in case the FBI gets a notion to ask you (which they did not.)
See, the FBI takes lying seriously. But somebody must have said something along the lines
of: hey, Petreaus is a good guy, I hope you can find a way to let him off easy.
But when faced with financial destruction, your kids being threatened, and false evidence
against you, you sometimes admit to the charges to make a deal...
The military is realizing they are not on the same team with FBI, CIA, DOJ.
Why do you think they have tried so hard to keep NSA under military leadership? Wink,
wink...
Leguran
It would appear that the branch of government that may be out of control (by the Supreme Court) is the judiciary. It
is the court rules and failure of the Supreme Court to act and weed its subordinate courts, that allowed much of this to
happen. The FISA Court has been a rubber stamp. No judge is held accountable for failure to obtain justice in their court.
The Chief Justice has refused to accept that judges can employ personal poliltical beliefs in court. All courts are
subordinate to the US Supreme Court and therefore the Supreme Court has a duty to ensure justice not just to decide whether
cases are 'sufficiently mature' to come before the Supreme Court. In other words, the Judiciary needs to be disturbed from
their lifetime appointments and made conditional appointments. The Supreme Court needs to deal with incapacity within its own
ranks. All told, this shocking miscarriage of justice came about because the Judicial Branch of government allowed it to
happen. The Judicial Branch has run amok.
lizzie dw
IMO, Judge Emmet Sullivan needs to demand and receive the original UNREDACTED 302 about the Strzok/Pientka interview with
General Flynn. But, really, just by reading the pre-interview discussions of the FBI members involved, the whole thing sounds
fishy.
Caloot
Hedge headline:
Could Mueller's whole appointment be meant to protect the Clinton empire?
Like Trump or not, there are serious cracks appearing in the Clintons foundation.
Two days ago, federal judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington D.C.
ordered the "special counsel" Robert Mueller group to do the following by 3:00 p.m. eastern
time today, as shown on the court clerk's docket sheet--
"12/12/2018 MINUTE ORDER as to MICHAEL T. FLYNN. In 50 defendant's memorandum in aid of
sentencing, the defendant quotes and cites a 'Memorandum dated Jan. 24, 2017.' See page 8 n.
21, 22. The defendant also quotes and cites a 'FD-302 dated Aug. 22, 2017.' See page 9 n.
23-27. The defendant is ORDERED to file on the docket FORTHWITH the cited Memorandum and
FD-302. The Court further ORDERS the government to file on the docket any 302s or memoranda
relevant to the circumstances discussed on pages 7-9 of the defendant's sentencing memorandum
by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December 14, 2018. Should the parties seek to file such material
under seal, the parties may file motions for leave to do so. The government is also ORDERED to
file its reply to the defendant's sentencing memorandum by no later than 3:00 p.m. on December
14, 2018. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on 12/12/2018. (lcegs3) (Entered: 12/12/2018)"
Judge Sullivan is a Black lawyer who came up the hard way, going to Washington D.C. public
schools and Howard University and its law school. Howard University has been a reputable
university with a full curriculum as it provided education to Black Americans from the time of
segregation. He was appointed by three different U.S. presidents to judicial positions, by
Reagan, Bush sr, and Bill Clinton [1].
The actions and investigation regarding Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.) beginning when he was
removed as National Security Advisor to president Trump have seemed odd and not to square with
past behavior and the normal course of things. With little information available publicly it is
very difficult to look at the issue and pick through information, since it has been mainly
hidden behind the skirts of the Mueller "investigation", which was supposed to look at
"interference" by the Russian government in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Flynn's sentencing is set for next Tuesday, 18 December. However, that is subject to change,
depending on what is filed today. I will try to provide some relevant items from the court
clerk's file that you can read to bring yourself up to date about the court case from what is
available; some items are still filed under seal, and the probation office presentence
investigation report (PSI) is kept private as a matter of federal judicial policy.
That defense would be more effective if Flynn was a bewildered youth or someone with
diminished mental capacities being badgered in a police interrogation room.
Flynn certainly acted like a bewildered, naive person.
Did he think that the FBI was showing up to ask about his health?
Was he really the Director of DIA......or did he just stay in a Holiday Inn?
Thank you Robert. It's good to have someone like judge Sullivan presiding over this case.
We'll have to wait and see, but a lot of what I have gathered so far suggests Gen. Flynn is a
man of honorable character who has been raked over for mostly political reasons.
In the meantime, has anyone investigated the leak that supposedly caught Flynn talking to the
Russian Amb?
That apparently did harm sources and methods.
But,noooooooooo, no investigation.
The swamp cares not a whit for national security, but yet constantly lectures us
"deplorables" about their great talent and dedication - they'd all be Fortune 500 CEO's if
they weren't so dedicated.
There are probably a few dedicated talented people trying to do the right thing, but the
bureaucracy - including the Intel. agencies/FBI (VERY important people "risking" their lives,
BTW) - has shown over and over to be populated mostly by self-enriching slugs.
The leak was that USI and LE were listening in on the Russian Ambassador's conversations by
turning his smartphone into a hot mic by exploiting well-known SS7 vulnerabilities. This
hardly reveals anything new about sources and methods. Any one who wants to keep secrets
shouldn't be carrying a smartphone and any ambassador who thinks the host government doesn't
keep him under surveillance is hopelessly naive.
Was it a leak or was it just an assumption of the obvious surveillance of Kislyak? Pence is
the one who confirmed Flynn talked to Kislyak about lifting sanctions and lied to him about
it.
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz has asked SaraACarter.com to post her letter to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan
in support of her friend and colleague retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will be
sentenced on Dec. 18. The Special Counsel's Office has requested that Flynn not serve any
jail time due to his cooperation with Robert Mueller's office. Based on new information
contained in a memorandum submitted to the court this week by Flynn's attorney, Sullivan has
ordered Mueller's office to turn over all exculpatory evidence and government documents on
Flynn's case by mid-day Friday. Sullivan is also requesting any documentation regarding the
first interviews conducted by former anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok and FBI Agent Joe Pientka
-known by the FBI as 302s- which were found to be dated more than seven months after the
interviews were conducted on Jan. 24, 2017, a violation of FBI policy, say current and former
FBI officials familiar with the process. According to information contained in Flynn's
memorandum, the interviews were dated Aug. 22, 2017.
Read Gritz's letter below... (emphasis added)
The Honorable Emmet G. Sullivan. December 5, 2018 U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia
333 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20001
Re: Sentencing of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn (Ret.)
Dear Judge Sullivan:
I am submitting my letter directly since Mike Flynn's attorney has refused to submit it as
well as letters submitted by other individuals. I feel you need to hear from someone who was an
FBI Special Agent who not only worked with Mike, but also has personally witnessed and reported
unethical & sometimes illegal tactics used to coerce targets of investigations externally
and internally.
About Myself and FBI Career
For 16 years, I proudly served the American people as a Special Agent working diligently on
significant terrorism cases which earned noteworthy results and fostered substantial
interagency cooperation. Prior to serving in the FBI I was a Juvenile Probation Officer in
Camden, NJ. Currently, I am a Senior Information Security Metrics and Reporting Analyst with
Discover Financial Services in the Chicago Metro area. I have recently been named as a Senior
Fellow to the London Center for Policy Research.
While in the FBI, I served as a Special Agent, Supervisory Special Agent, Assistant
Inspector, Unit Chief, and a Senior Liaison Officer to the CIA. I served on the NSC's Hostage
and Personnel Working Group and brought numerous Americans out of captivity and was part of the
interagency team to codify policies outlining the whole of government approach to hostage
cases.
In November 2007, I was selected over 26 other candidates to become the Supervisory Special
Agent, CT Extraterritorial Squad; Washington Field Office (WFO) in Washington, DC. At WFO, I
led a squad of experts in extraterritorial evidence collection, overseas investigations,
operational security during terrorist attacks/events, and overseas criminal investigations. I
coordinated and managed numerous high profile investigations (Blackwater, Chuckie Taylor,
Robert Levinson, and other pivotal cases) comprised of teams from US and foreign intelligence,
military, and law enforcement agencies. I was commended for displaying comprehensive leadership
performance under pressure, extensive teamwork skills, while conducting critical investigative
analysis within and outside the FBI.
In December 2009, I was promoted to GS-15 Unit Chief (UC) of the Executive Strategy Unit,
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate (WMDD). While the UC, I codified the WMDD five-year
strategic plan, formulated goals and objectives throughout the division, while translating the
material into a directorate scorecard with cascading measurements reflecting functional and
operational unit areas. This was the only time in Washington, DC when I did not work with of
for McCabe.
From September to December 2010, I was selected as the FBI's top candidate to represent the
FBI, and the USG in a rigorous, intellectually stimulating; 12 week course for civilian
government officials, military officers, and government academics at the George C. Marshall
Center in Garmisch, Germany, Executive Program in Advanced Security Studies. The class was
comprised of 141 participants from 43 countries.
I have received numerous recommendations and commendations for my professionalism, liaison
and interpersonal ability and experience . Additionally, I have been rated Excellent or
Outstanding for my entire career, to include by Andrew McCabe when I was stationed at the
Washington Field Office. Further, other awards of note are: West Chester University 2005 Legacy
of Leadership recipient, Honored with House of Representatives Citation for Exemplary record of
Service, Leadership, and Achievements: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Awarded with a framed
Horn of Africa blood chit from the Department of Defense and Office of the DASD (POW/MPA/MIA)
for my work in bringing Americans Out of captivity, "Patriot, Law Enforcement Warrior, and
Friend."
Length of Association with Flynn, McCabe, and Mueller
I met Michael Flynn in 2005, while working in the Counterterrorism Division (CTD) at FBI
Headquarters (FBIHQ).
I met then Supervisory Special Agent Andrew McCabe, when he reported to CTD at FBIHQ, around
the same time. McCabe subsequently was the Assistant Section Chief over my unit, my Assistant
Special Agent in Charge at the Washington Field Office, and the Assistant Director (AD) over
CTD when I encountered the discrimination and McCabe spearheaded the retaliation personally
(according to documentation) against me.
I have known both men for 12-13 years and worked directly with both throughout my career.
They are on the opposite spectrum of each other with regard to truthfulness, temperament, and
ethics, both professionally and personally.
I regularly briefed former FBI Director and Special Prosecutor Mueller on controversial and
complex cases and attended Deputies meetings at the White house with then Deputy Director
Pistole. I got along with both and trusted both. Watching what has been done to Mike and
knowing someone on the 7th floor had to have notified Mueller of my situation (Pistole had
retired), has been significantly distressing to me.
Lt.G. Michael T. Flynn:
Mike and I were counterparts on a DOJ-termed ground-breaking initiative which served as a
model for future investigations, policies, legislation and FBI programs in the Terrorist Use of
the Internet. For this multi-faceted and leading-edge joint operation, I was commended by Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, Gen. Keith Alexander (NSA Director), and LtG. Michael Flynn as well as
others for leading the FBI's pivotal participation in this dynamic and innovative interagency
operation. I received two The National Intelligence Meritorious Unit Citation (NIMUC) I for my
role in this operation. The NIMUC is an award of the National Intelligence Awards Program, for
contributions to the United States Intelligence Community.
Mick Flynn has consistently and candidly been honest and straightforward with me since the
day I met him in 2005. He has been a mentor and someone I trust to give me frank advice when I
ask for his opinion. His caring nature has shown through especially when he saw me being torn
apart by the FBI and he felt compelled to write a letter in support of me. He further took the
extra step to comment on my character in an NPR article and interview exposing the wrongdoings
in my case and others who have stood up for truth and against discrimination/retaliation.
Senator Grassley also commented on my behalf. NPR characterized this action against me as a
"warning shot" to individuals who stood up to individuals such as McCabe.
The day after I resigned from the FBI, while I was crying, Mike reached out and
congratulated me on my early retirement. I really needed to hear that from someone I respected
so much. His support for the last 13 years has been unparalleled and extremely valuable in
helping me get through the trauma of betrayal, unethical behavior, illegal activity executed
against me and to rebuild my life. Additionally, his support has helped my family in dealing
with their painful emotions regarding my situation. My parents wanted me to pass on to you that
they are blessed that I have had a compassionate and supportive individual on my side
throughout this trying time.
Mike has been a respected leader by his peers and by FBI Agents and Analysts who have
interacted with him. I personally feel he is the finest leader I have ever worked with or for
in my career. Our continued friendship and subsequent friendship with his family has helped all
of us cope with the stress a situation like this puts on individuals and families.
It is so very painful to watch an American hero, and my friend, torn apart like this. His
family has had to endure what no family should have to. I know this because of the damaging
effect my case had on my parent's health, finances, and emotional well-being. Mike and I both
had to sell our houses due to legal fees, endured smear campaigns (mostly by the same
individual, McCabe). I ended up being deemed homeless by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was
on public assistance and endured extensive health and emotional damage due to the retaliation.
Mike kept in touch and kept me motivated. He has always reached out to help me with whatever he
could.
The Process is the Punishment
Thomas Fitton of Judicial Watch commented to me that the "Process is the punishment." This
is the most accurate description I have heard regarding the time Mike has gone through with
this process and the year and a half I was ostracized and idled before I resigned. This process
is one which many FBI employees, current, retired and former, feel was brought to the FBI by
Mueller and he subsequently brought this to the Special Prosecutor investigation.
It also fostered the behavior among FBI "leadership" which we find ourselves shocked at when
revealed on a daily basis. Is this the proper way to seek justice? I say no. I swore to uphold
the Constitution while protecting the civil rights of the American people. I believe many
individuals involved in Mike's case have lost their way and could care less about protection of
due process, civil and legal rights of who they are targeting. Mike has had extensive
punishment throughout this process. This process has punished him harder than anyone else
could.
Andrew McCabe
I believe I have a unique inside view of the mannerisms surrounding Andrew McCabe, other FBI
Executive Management and Former Director Mueller, as well as the unethical and coercive tactics
they use, not to seek the truth, but to coerce pleas or admissions to end the pain, as I call
it. They destroy lives for their own agendas instead of seeking the truth for the American
people. Candor is something that should be encouraged and used by leadership to have necessary
and continued improvement. Under Mueller, it was seen as a threat and viciously opposed by
those he pulled up in the chain of command.
I am explaining this because numerous Agents have expressed the need for you to know
McCabe's and Mueller's pattern of "target and destroy" has been utilized on many others,
without regard for policies and laws. I, myself, am a casualty of this reprehensible behavior
and I have spoken to well over 150 other FBI individuals who are casualties as well.
I am the individual who filed the Hatch Act complaint against McCabe and provided
significant evidentiary documents obtained via FOIA, open source, and information from current,
former, and retired Special Agents. The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) asked why my filing of
the complaint was delayed from the actual acts. I said I personally thought I was providing
additional information to what should have been an automatic referral to OSC by FBI OPR. I was
notified I was the only complainant. This illustrates not only a fatal flaw in OPR AD Candice
Will not making the appropriate and crucial referral, but also shows the fear of those within
the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
While serving at the CIA, detailed by the FBI in January 2012, I was responsible for
overseas investigations, as opposed to Continental United States-based (CONUS) cases.
Unfortunately, during my assignment at the CIA, I encountered extensive discrimination by two
FBI Special Agents and subsequently, in 2012, I filed an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)
complaint. Instead of addressing the issues, then CTD Assistant Director Andrew McCabe chose to
authorize a retaliatory Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation against me,
five days after my EEO contact. The OPR referral he signed was authored by the two individuals
I had filed the EEO complaint against. In his signed sworn statement, McCabe admitted he knew I
had filed or was going to file the EEO.
Numerous members of my department at the CIA requested to be spoken with by CTD executive
management, regarding my work ethic and accomplishments. However, CTD, Inspection Division, and
OPR disregarded the list of names and contact numbers I submitted. This is an example of
knowing you are being targeted and the truth is not being sought.
Although my time at this position was short, I was commended by my CIA direct supervisor
for: "having already contributed more than your predecessor in the short time you have been
here." My predecessor had been assigned to the post for 18 months; I had been there four
months.
In contrast and showing lack of candor, McCabe wrote on official documents the following
statement, contradicting the actual direct supervisor I worked with daily:
"SA Gritz had to be removed from a prior position in an interagency environment, due to
inappropriate communications and general performance issues"
This is one of many comments McCabe used to discredit my reputation and to ostracize me.
McCabe knew me as someone who told the truth, worked hard, got results, and was always willing
to be flexible when needed. He was also acutely aware of the excellent relationships I had
formed in the USG interagency due to comments made by individuals from numerous agencies. Yet,
he continued to make false statements on official documents. He has done this to numerous other
very valuable FBI employees, destroying their careers and lives. He used similar tactics of
lies against Flynn. It should be noted, McCabe was very aware of my professional association
with Mike Flynn.
In July 5, 2012, I was involuntarily pulled back to CTD from the CIA. I was told McCabe made
the decision. A year and a month later, I resigned from the job I absolutely loved and was good
at. All because of the lack of candor of numerous individuals within the FBI.
Unethical and
dishonest investigative tactics
Throughout the last year, I have kept abreast of the revelations surrounding anything
related to Mike's case. I believe, from my years at the FBI and in exposing corruption and
discrimination, the circumstances surrounding the targeting, investigation, leaking, and
coercion of him to plea are all consistent with the unethical process I and many others have
witnessed at the FBI. The charge which Mike Flynn plead to was the result of deception,
intimidation, and bias/agenda. Simply, Mike is being branded a convicted felon due to an
unethical and dishonest investigation by people who were malicious, vindictive, and corrupt.
They wished to silence Mike, like they had once silenced me.
The American people have read the Strzok/Page text messages, the conflicting testimony and
lack of candor statements of former Director Comey, the perceived overstepping of the
reasonable scope of the Special Prosecutor's investigation, the extensive unethical,
untruthful, and outright illegal behavior of Andrew McCabe, to include slanderous statements
against Flynn, and the facts found within FOIA released documents and Congressional testimony.
As a former/retired Agent, I have combed through every piece of information regarding Mike's
case, as if I was combing through evidence in the hundreds of cases I have successfully handled
while in the FBI.
The publicly reported Brady material alone, in this case, outweighs any statement given by
any FBI Agent (we now know at least one FD-302 was changed), Special Prosecutor investigator
report, and any other party still aggressively seeking that this case remain and be sentenced
as a felony. Quite simply, I cannot see justice being served by branding LtG. Michael Flynn a
convicted felon, when the truth is still being revealed while policies, ethics, and laws have
been violated by those pursuing this case.
We now know all FBI employees involved in Mike Flynn's case have either been fired, forced
to resign or forced to retire because of their excessive lack of candor, punitive biases,
leaking of information, and extensive cover-up of their deeds.
Summation
Michael Flynn has always displayed overwhelming candor and forthrightness. One of the main
individuals involved in his case is Andrew McCabe, who used similar tactics against me in my
case, of which Mike Flynn defended me by penning a letter of character reference and is a
witness. Seeing McCabe was named as a Responding Management Official in my case, he should have
recused himself with anything having to do with a character witness on my behalf against him
and DOJ.
I'm told by numerous people, but have been unable to confirm, that McCabe was asked why he
was so viciously going after Flynn; my name was mentioned. I do know, from experience with
McCabe, he is a vindictive individual and I have no doubt Mike's support of me fueled McCabe's
disdain and personally vindictive aggressive unethical activities in this case . It matches his
behavior in my case.
Reliable fact-finding is essential to procedural due process and to the accuracy and
uniformity of sentencing. I'm unsure if the fact-finding in this case is reliable, nor do I
think we currently have all the facts.
The punishment which LtG. Flynn has already endured this past year, due to the nature of the
case, legal fees and reputation damage, is punishment enough. He is a true patriot, a loving
husband and father, a devoted grandfather, a trusted friend, and has a close knit family made
up of compassionate and honest individuals. To be branded a felon, is a major hit to a hero who
protected the American people for 33 years. I do not think society would benefit from Mike
Flynn going to jail nor being branded as a convicted felon. Not knowing the sentencing
guidelines for this charge but if there is any chance that the case can be downgraded to a
misdemeanor, this would be an act of justice that numerous Americans need to see to stay
hopeful for further justice.
This lady is seriously brave. She confirms one more reason i strongly support our Second
Amendment; it's to protect us from tyrants and corrupt people like McCabe, Ohr, Comey and
Mueller. Oh yes. I almost forget Rosenstein who should be hung for treason also.
WOW...all this time I had been asking where are the whistle blowers and kept saying,
certainly not all the FBI are this corrupt -and further asked are they being threatened to
not come forward?"
Well, the later sure seems true when you consider Ms. Gristz statements, particularly "
the fear of those within the FBI to report individuals like McCabe for fear of retaliation.
"
This is the level of corruption that ought to bring this entire cabal to their knees and
place them behind bars. Hopefully Judge Sullivan's intuitions will be bolstered by Ms.
Gristz' letter.
The FBI is corrupt to the core...from top to bottom. If she joined the FBI to "uphold the
Constitution" or "serve the American People" or some other horseshit then that was her first
mistake. The FBI is a completely corrupt & unconstitutional organization that protects
only the (((globalists))) and other enemies of freedom. The Hoover Buliding should be
padlocked and all of the agents of evil put on trial for treason.
Flynn was an example to the rest of the Trump supporters. His guilt or innocense was/is
meaningless and irrlevant to the Prog Attack Dogs. The message was/is clear:
"We are the Power. Resistance is futile. Bend your knee or we will destroy you."
It is prudent for reasonable people to believe that the Progs have spent the past couple
years destroying evidence that can be used against their gods (Obama, Clinton, Soros, etc.)
and their cohorts.
There is no penalty or negative consequence for the Mueller team who engaged in
"unethical" activity. None of them will have to answer to anyone or disgorge the millions of
dollars in "fees" they have been paid by the Sheeple.
All Progs must hang.
Christopher Wray must hang next.
Update 5: Cohen has been sentenced to 36 months in prison for his crimes, far below the
guideline of 51 - 63 months laid out by New York prosecutors. The Judge noted that the
guidelines aren't binding and had the ability to issue a lesser sentence.
Cohen has also been hit with forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million and a fine
of $50,000. He will be allowed to voluntarily surrender on March 6 .
Update 4: Judge Pauley has responded following Cohen's statement, saying "Mr. Cohen's crimes
implicate a far more insidious crime to our democratic institutions especially in view of his
subsequent plea to making false statements to Congress," adding that Cohen's crimes warrant
"specific deterrence."
Update 3: Cohen has spoken, telling the Judge: "Recently the president tweeted a statement
calling me weak and it was correct but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was
because time and time again i felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds." Judge William
Pauley, meanwhile, noted that Cohen pleaded guilty to a " veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent
conduct ," which was motivated by "personal greed and ambition."
Update 2: Petrillo, Cohen's attorney, continues to reference Cohen's desire to cooperate
further with prosecutors to answer future questions - however Manhattan prosecutors don't
appear to care, according to Bloomberg banking reporter Shahien Nasiripour. In a memo last week
to the court, they said that Cohen's promise to cooperate further is worthless - especially
since there would be nothing requiring him to do so once he's already been sentenced.
Meanwhile, Jeannie Rhee - an attorney with Robert Mueller's office, told the court that
while Cohen lied to the special counsel's team during his first interview in July, he has been
truthful since.
Manhattan Assistant US Attorney Nicolas Roos, however, says that any reduction in sentence
"should be modest."
Roos added that Cohen "has eroded faith in the electoral process and compromised the rule of
law," and that he engaged in " a pattern of deception of brazenness and greed ."
Update: Cohen's attorney, Guy Petrillo, says Cohen thought that President Trump would shut
down the Mueller probe, and has argued that his client's cooperation warrants a lenient
sentence.
"Mr. Cohen's cooperation promotes respect for law and the courage of the individual to stand
up to power and influence," said Petrillo.
"His decision was an importantly different decision from the usual decision to cooperate,"
added Petrillo. "He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our
country. He did so not knowing what the result would be, not knowing how the politics would
play out and not even knowing that the special counsel's office would survive."
"The special counsel's investigation is of the utmost national significance... Not seen
since 40 plus years ago in the days of Watergate." -Guy Petrillo
Petrillo has asked the judge to "consider Cohen's "life of good works" in his decision,
adding that Cohen's cooperation stands in "profound contrast" to others who havern't cooperated
and who "have continued to double-deal while pretending to cooperate."
***
Michael Cohen, former longtime personal lawyer for President Trump, has shown up to a New
York courthouse where he will be sentenced on Wednesday for a laundry list of crimes - some of
which implicate Trump in possible wrongdoing, but most of which have nothing to do with the
president. Judge William Pauley, meanwhile, noted that Cohen pleaded guilty to a " veritable
smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct ," which was motivated by "personal greed and ambition."
Update 2: Petrillo, Cohen's attorney, continues to reference Cohen's desire to cooperate
further with prosecutors to answer future questions - however Manhattan prosecutors don't
appear to care, according to Bloomberg banking reporter Shahien Nasiripour. In a memo last week
to the court, they said that Cohen's promise to cooperate further is worthless - especially
since there would be nothing requiring him to do so once he's already been sentenced.
Meanwhile, Jeannie Rhee - an attorney with Robert Mueller's office, told the court that
while Cohen lied to the special counsel's team during his first interview in July, he has been
truthful since.
Manhattan Assistant US Attorney Nicolas Roos, however, says that any reduction in sentence
"should be modest."
Roos added that Cohen "has eroded faith in the electoral process and compromised the rule of
law," and that he engaged in " a pattern of deception of brazenness and greed ."
Update: Cohen's attorney, Guy Petrillo, says Cohen thought that President Trump would shut
down the Mueller probe, and has argued that his client's cooperation warrants a lenient
sentence.
"Mr. Cohen's cooperation promotes respect for law and the courage of the individual to stand
up to power and influence," said Petrillo.
"His decision was an importantly different decision from the usual decision to cooperate,"
added Petrillo. "He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our
country. He did so not knowing what the result would be, not knowing how the politics would
play out and not even knowing that the special counsel's office would survive."
"The special counsel's investigation is of the utmost national significance... Not seen
since 40 plus years ago in the days of Watergate." -Guy Petrillo
Petrillo has asked the judge to "consider Cohen's "life of good works" in his decision,
adding that Cohen's cooperation stands in "profound contrast" to others who havern't cooperated
and who "have continued to double-deal while pretending to cooperate."
***
Michael Cohen, former longtime personal lawyer for President Trump, has shown up to a
New York courthouse where he will be sentenced on Wednesday for a laundry list of crimes - some
of which implicate Trump in possible wrongdoing, but most of which have nothing to do with the
president.
Cohen, who went from claiming he would "take a bullet" for President Trump to stabbing his
former boss in the back, faces sentencing on nine federal charges , including campaign finance
violations based on a hush-money scheme to pay off two women who claimed to have had affairs
with Trump, as well as making false statements to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Prosecutors alleged that Cohen paid off two women at the "direction" of "Individual-1,"
who is widely assumed to be Trump.
Prosecutors said the payments amounted to illegal campaign contribution s because they
were made with the intent to prevent damaging information from surfacing during the 2016
presidential election, which Cohen pleaded guilty to in August.
Legal experts view the filing as an ominous sign for Trump , suggesting prosecutors have
evidence beyond Cohen's public admissions implicating the president in the payoff scheme.
While the Justice Department has said previously that a sitting president cannot be indicted,
that would not stop prosecutors from bringing charges against Trump once he leaves office. -
The Hill
New York prosecutors have recommended that Judge William Pauley impose "a substantial term
of imprisonment" on Cohen - which may be around five years. Cohen's attorneys, meanwhile, have
asked Pauley for a sentence which avoids prison time - citing his cooperation with the Mueller
probe and other investigations which began prior to his guilty plea last summer. Mueller said
that Cohen had "gone to significant lengths to assist the Special Counsel's investigation,"
having met with Mueller's team seven times where he reportedly provided information useful to
the Russia investigation. The special counsel's office has recommended that any sentence Cohen
receives for lying to Congress should run concurrently with the charges brought by the
Manhattan federal prosecutors.
Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty in August to tax evasion,
lying to banks and violating campaign finance laws - charges filed by the US Attorney's Office
for the Southern District of New York.
The campaign finance charges relate to his facilitation of two hush-money payments to porn
star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal shortly before the 2016 presidential
election. Both women say they had sex with Trump in the prior decade. The White House has
denied Trump had sex with either woman.
Prosecutors say the payments were made "in coordination with and at the direction of"
Trump, who is called "Individual-1" in a sentencing recommendation filed last week.
Cohen's crimes were intended "to influence the election from the shadows," prosecutors
wrote. -
CNBC
In November Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Organization's
ill-fated plans to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow - a project floated by Cohen and longtime
FBI asset who had been in Trump's orbit for years, Felix Sater. Cohen claims he understated
Trump's knowledge of the project. He also lied to Congress when he said that the Moscow project
talks ended in early 2016, when in fact he and the Trump Organization had continued to pursue
it as late as June 2016.
On Wednesday, Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti - who is in attendance at Cohen's
sentencing, said in a Wednesday tweet that Cohen "thought we would just go away and he/Trump
would get away with it. He thought he was smart and tough. He was neither. Today will prove
that in spades."
Trump's paying around $280,000 in " hush money " .. out of his own pocket is
dwarfed into virtual insignificance by Obama's Presidential Campaign in 2008..,.
BEING FOUND "GUILTY" OF ILLEGAL USE OF 2 MILLION IN CAMPAIGN MONEY
barely reported by the media that saw THE OBAMA DOJ decide not to prosecute Obama and
instead quietly dispose of this
"REAL CRIME" with a fine of 375 thousand dollars by the US FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISION.
Welcome to the two tier Justice System we all live under..
One for the Deeeep State Globalist Elite and .. the other...
"... Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of ..."
"... Yes, he (and I) read the filings. They are merely the assertions of overzealous Democrat prosecutors in the SDNY that used to work for Preet Bharara and have political/personal axes to grind. Witness past much more egregious instances of what they claim as a felony that have been resolved without charges by fines – most recently, Barak Obama's campaign finance violations. ..."
We last
looked at what Mueller had publicly -- and what he didn't have -- some 10 months ago, and I
remained skeptical that the Trump campaign had in any way colluded with Russia. It's worth
another look now, but first let's give away the ending (spoiler alert!): there is still no real
evidence of, well, much of anything significant about Russiagate. One thing that is clear is
that the investigation seems to be ending. Mueller's office has
reportedly even told various defense lawyers that it is "tying up loose ends." The moment
to wrap things up is politically right as well: the Democrats will soon take control of the
House; time to hand this all off to them.
Ten months ago the big news was Paul Manafort flipped; that seems to have turned out to be
mostly a bust, as we know now he lied like a rug to the Feds and cooperated with the Trump
defense team as some sort of mole inside Mueller's investigation (a heavily-redacted memo about
Manafort's lies, released by Mueller on Friday, adds no significant new details to the
Russiagate narrative.)
George Papadopoulos has already been in and out of jail -- all of two weeks -- for his
sideshow role. Michael Avenatti is now a woman beater who is just figuring out he's
washed up. Stormy Daniels owes Trump over $300,000 in fees after losing to him in court.
There still is no pee tape. And if you don't recall how unimportant Carter Page and Richard
Gates turned out to be (or even who they are), well, there is your assessment of all the
hysterical commentary that accompanied them a few headlines ago.
The big reveal of the Michael Flynn sentencing memo on Tuesday was that he will likely do no
prison time. Everything of substance in the memo was redacted, so there is little insight
available. If you insist on speculation, try this: it's hard to believe that something really
big and bad happened such that Flynn knew about it but still wasn't worth punishing for it, and
now, a year after he started cooperating with the government, still nobody has heard anything
about whatever the big deal is. So chances are the redactions focus on foreign
lobbying in the U.S.
This week's Key to Everything is Michael Cohen, the guy who lied out of self-interest
for Trump until last week when we learned he is also willing to lie, er, testify
against Trump out of self-interest. If you take his most recent statements at face
value, the sum is the failed negotiations to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, which went on a few
months longer than was originally stated, and that we all knew about already.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York submitted a
sentencing memo Friday
for Cohen, recommending 42 months in jail. In a separate filing, Mueller made no term
recommendation but praised Cohen for his "significant efforts to assist the special counsel's
office." The memos reveal no new information.
Call it sleazy if you want, but looking into a real estate deal is neither a high crime nor
a misdemeanor, even if it's in Russia. Conspiracy law requires an agreement to commit a crime,
not just the media
declaiming that "Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin!" Talking about meeting
Russian persons is not a crime, nor is meeting with them.
The
takeaway that this was all about influence shopping by the Russkies falls flat. If Putin
sought to
ensnare Trump, why didn't he find a way for the deal to actually go through? Mueller has to
be able to prove actual crimes by the president, not just twist our underclothes into weekly
conspiratorial
knots . For fun, look here at the
creative writing needed to even suggest anything illegal. That doesn't sound like Trump's
on thin ice with hot shoes.
Sigh. It is useful at this point of binge-watching the Mueller mini-series to go back to the
beginning.
The primordial ooze for all things Russiagate is less-than-complete intelligence alleging
that hackers, linked to the Russian government, stole emails from the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) in 2016. The details have never been released, no U.S. law enforcement agency
has ever seen the server or scene of the crime, and Mueller's dramatic indictments
of said hackers, released as Trump met with Putin in
Helsinki, will never be heard of again, or challenged in court, as none of his defendants
will ever leave Russia. Meanwhile, despite contemporaneous denials of the
same, is it somehow now accepted knowledge that the emails (and Facebook ads!) had some
unproven major effect on the election.
The origin story for everything else, that Trump is beholden to Putin for favors granted or
via blackmail, is opposition research purchased by the Democrats and carried out by an MI6
operative with complex
connections into American intelligence, the salacious
Steele Dossier . The FBI, under a Democratic-controlled Justice Department, then sought
warrants to
spy on the nominated GOP candidate for president based on evidence paid for by his
opponent.
Yet the real spark was the media, inflamed by Democrats, searching for why Trump won
(because it can't be anything to do with Hillary, and "all white people and the Electoral
College are racists" just doesn't hold up). Their position was and is that Trump must have done
something wrong, and Robert Mueller,
despite helping
squash a Bush-era money-laundering probe, lying about the Iraq
War, and
flubbing the post-9/11 anthrax investigation, has been resurrected with Jedi superpowers to
find it. It might be collusion with Russia or Wikileaks, or a pee tape, or taxes, packaged as
hard news but reading like Game of Thrones plot speculation. None of this is journalism
to be proud of, and it underlies everything Mueller is supposedly trying to achieve.
As the New York Times said in a rare moment of candor, "From the day the Mueller
investigation began, opponents of the president have hungered for that report, or an indictment
waiting just around the corner, as the source text for an incantation to whisk Mr. Trump out of
office and set everything back to normal again."
The core problem -- at least that we know of -- is that Mueller hasn't found a crime
connected with Russiagate that someone working for Trump might have committed. His
investigation to date hasn't been a search for the guilty party -- Colonel Mustard in the
library -- so much as a search for an actual crime, some crime, any crime. Yet all he's
uncovered so far are some
old financial misdealings by Manafort and chums, payoffs to Trump's mistresses that are not
in themselves
illegal (despite what prosecutors simply assert in the Cohen sentencing report ,
someone will have to prove to a jury the money was from campaign funds and the transactions
were "for the
purpose of influencing" federal elections, not simply "protecting his family from shame"),
and a bunch of people lying about unrelated matters.
And that's the giveaway to Muller's final report. There was no base crime as the starting
point of the investigation. With
Watergate , there was the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters. With Russiagate you
had Trump winning the election. (Remember too that the FBI concluded
forever ago that the DNC hack crime was done by the Russians, no Mueller needed.)
Almost everything Mueller has, the perjury and lying cases, are crimes he created through
the process of investigating. He's Schrodinger's Box : the
infractions only exist when he tries to look at them. Mueller created most of his booked
charges by asking questions he already knew the answers to, hoping his witness would lie and
commit new crimes literally in front of him. Nobody should be proud of lying, but it seems a
helluva way to contest a completed election as Trump enters the third year of his term.
Mueller's end product, his report, will most likely claim that a lot of unsavory things went
on. But it seems increasingly unlikely that he'll have any evidence Trump worked with Russia to
win the election, let alone that Trump is now under Putin's control. If Mueller had a smoking
gun, we'd be watching impeachment hearings by now.
Instead, Mueller will end up concluding that some people may have sort of maybe tried to
interfere with an investigation into what turned out to be nothing, another "crime" that exists
only because there was an investigation to trigger it. He'll dump that steaming pile of legal
ambiguity into the lap of the Democratic House to hold hearings on from now until global
warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea. That or the 2020 election,
whichever comes first.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for
the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan .
As the American people are dragged through the media hysteria, one has to know, millions of
Americans have other issues on their minds, and be it right or wrong, don't care about about
Mueller's investigation. Simply put, our political system is far from holier than thou, as
they say. For numerous reasons, people had to decide, of the two personalities we had to
choose from, were a reflection of where our politics is. Clintons or Trumps.
@Kevin – (1) Most campaign finance violations are treated as minor offenses with fines.
Obama's campaign got a fine for a $2 million campaign finance violation. Why is this one, if
it is a crime at all, being treated as a felony?
(2) No court has ever held, and no court will ever hold, that paying your mistress for
silence is a campaign finance violation. Mixed motive payments can't be campaign finance
violations. How about a politician who gets cosmetic surgery before an election? If one of
her purposes is to appear younger and appeal to voters, is that a campaign finance violation
if she doesn't report to the government her payments to the surgeon? No court is going to
accept that theory.
"Good Grief. Did you read the filings? Directing someone to commit a felony?"
Good grief, do you know the difference between a prosecutor trying to make a case in a
one-sided filing versus actually bringing a case to a jury and having to prove elements of a
crime with evidence?
You don't give specifics (typical) but you're presumably referring to the payoffs to keep the
women quiet right? Thing is, that's not illegal unless it was provably for political reasons.
If he was trying to save his marriage, there was no crime. Besides, John Edwards did worse
and skated scot-free. You going to condemn him? If not, you're a hack so be quiet.
Mueller was FBI Director when Hillary was committing national security violations in using
her private server and other unauthorized devices. His conflicts of interest in overseeing an
investigation originating from a case involving those emails are obvious. He was either
incompetent, derelict of duty, and/or complicit in shielding Hillary from prosecution then
and and definitely now given the conspiracy surrounding the Steele dossier by her campaign
proxies, foreign operatives (including Russians), and corrupt Obama administration officials
who engaged in official misconduct to clear her and initiate a campaign to inflence the
election, illegally surveil Trump associates, and illegally circulate salacious, unverified
innuendos or unmasked names.
Mueller is involved in protecting his own reputation. He has obvious conflicts of interest
and was involved in possible official misconduct. He should not be given immunity from
examination, accountability, and disciplinary action. No official should be above the law. Is
he now the American Sulla or Marius?
There were crimes committed by those Mueller is shielding – officials he worked with in
the Obama administration, Clinton and her proxies, and foreign operatives (including
Russians.)
It's not a "felony" unless you prove it the money came from campaign funds, which it didn't.
And Trump only "directed" it according to a known liar trying to get a lighter sentence for
his own financial crimes.
Yes, I do remember who Carter Page is. He is an American citizen -- a bit of a doofus
American citizen I'll admit but still an American citizen -- and he was attacked by the
American Gestapo led by Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama, Podesta, the women that unmasked
other American citizens, and Crapper like no American citizen has ever been attacked before.
Carter Page is me and the same can happen to me if it can happen to Carter Page.
The criminal laws in the United States are broad and far reaching enough that an aggressive
prosecutor can always find a crime to charge anyone with. This is especially true for anyone
involved in higher level business or politics.
Even if the charges cannot be made to stick (and usually they can), the expense and hassle
of fighting the case will ruin most of us who are not very rich or married to a team of
criminal defense attorneys with loads of leisure time.
At the same time, even the FBI does not have the resources to charge every crime that it
comes across or could bring an indictment for.
This is entirely intentional. There is always a perfectly legal pretext to punish those
whom the establishment want to punish, and a means to keep everyone else in line.
This is not to suggest that the 1% hold a secret email vote every month to decide whom to
kick off the island. Rather, most prosecutors are glorified politicians, and they know whom
to please.
If, for instance, a prosecutor were to bring charges against HRC (and there are numerous
bases on which to do so), the howls of establishment outrage would be deafening. So nothing
was done. In fact, the FBI was very careful to interview her associates in a group (so that
they could get their stories straight) and to avoid interviewing The Queen at all, so as to
avoid a perjury trap, or forcing Her Majesty to have to lie, and thus putting the FBI in an
embarrassing position as to why it did not prosecute.
By contrast, Trump probably has also committed numerous crimes, even if they don't rise to
the breathless speculation of russiagate conspiracy theorists, nor will any crimes charged
relate to Trump's real crimes in foreign policy (because those crimes are the DC consensus).
However, the establishment didn't want the man in the first place, and it sure wants Trump
gone now.
Therefore, Trump will not enjoy the same protection. "Rule Of Law" and all that.
For my part, I will not be sorry to see him go. As I indicated, the man is a criminal, as
were his predecessors in office.
To all the commenters pointing out the Stormy Daniels payoff. What has that to do with
Russian collusion? The Mueller investigation went way off track finding unrelated crimes in
order to get flip leverage. Its been a "show me da man, I'll find the crime" exercise. In
other words, a witch hunt. If Trump is removed by any means other than an election, it will
be viewed as a coup, and the destruction of our democratic republic.
Yes, he (and I) read the filings. They are merely the assertions of overzealous Democrat
prosecutors in the SDNY that used to work for Preet Bharara and have political/personal axes
to grind. Witness past much more egregious instances of what they claim as a felony that have
been resolved without charges by fines – most recently, Barak Obama's campaign finance
violations.
As was said in the article, those claims would have to be proven in court –
according to the letter of the law – and it is a very high bar for the SDNY to get over
to get a conviction. You can indict a ham sandwich, but if it turns out to in fact be a steak
or cheese and crackers your case isn't worth anything.
Finally, as pointed out, contracting for a NDA is not illegal. It is, point of fact, a
contract that parties willingly enter into. Trump is a business and a brand, so trying to
prove that protecting that brand by spending his own money was NOT the purpose of the NDA is
pretty darn difficult.
Paying off mistresses isn't a felony. Even if it used campaign dollars and even if someone
else involved pleads guilty. Ask John Edwards Kevin.
I also concur that if Mueller could prove that Trump colluded with the Russians, Paul Ryan
(who f*cking hates Trump's guts) would have absolutely started impeachment hearings.
"... One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here? ..."
I believe you are spot on in your analysis of the Trump methods. No doubt based on your
personal observations up close of similar sole proprietor business hustlers. I think one
problem that Trump methods face is that he needs people around him who can make things happen
despite the byzantine ways of the vast federal bureaucracy who have their own agenda.
One thing that has puzzled me about Trump methods is his constant tweeting of witch
hunt with respect to Mueller but his unwillingness to actually disclose what Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, et al actually did by declassifying all the documents and communications
among them. In your opinion what is he trying to accomplish with his method here?
"... I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the
Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the
system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. ..."
"... I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration
before Trump arrived in Washington. ..."
"... Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side
cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but
they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer. ..."
"... I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies
are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on
our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to
be wise. ..."
"... it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't
really feel the crisis. ..."
"... If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west,
you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing.
They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster.
..."
"... That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does
not work in a democracy... ..."
"... If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans.
In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy. ..."
"... The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich. ..."
"... He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing
them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them
and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing. ..."
"... In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class.
..."
"... I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them
whether we want it or not. ..."
"... I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely,
there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque
to me. It would've been grotesque to them. ..."
"... The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons
which they rejected, and I do too. ..."
"... We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels. ..."
"... Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change
the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed
is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change. ..."
"... In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again. ..."
"... Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime? ..."
"... How close to a revolution is your country? ..."
"... The country is getting redder and bluer. ..."
"... Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration? ..."
The Swiss are very suspicious of anybody who is boastful. That's why I have a question about Trump
I hate that about him. I hate that it's not my culture. I didn't grow up like that.
In your book you speak a lot about people who attack Trump, but you actually don't say very much about Trump's record.
That's true.
Do you think he has kept his promises? Has he achieved his goals?
No. He hasn't?
No. His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done
any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's
role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think
he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress
is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that.
I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration
before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but
that was not a staple of political debate at all. Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should
we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was
to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions
that no one could answer.
Apart from asking these very important questions has he really achieved nothing?
Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.
Why should he be not capable?
Because the legislative process in this country by design is highly complex, and it's designed to be complex as a way of diffusing
power, of course, because the people who framed our Constitution, founded our country, were worried about concentrations of power.
They balanced it among the three branches as you know and they made it very hard to make legislation. In order to do it you really
have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative
process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you
need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.
The title of your book is "Ship of Fools". You write that an irresponsible elite has taken over America. Who is the biggest
fool?
I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies
are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really
on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you
need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders
fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.
When did you first notice that this elite is getting out of touch with the people?
Well, just to be clear, I'm not writing this from the perspective of an outsider. I mean I've lived in this world my whole life.
Which world exactly?
The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south.
It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always
lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that
I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis.
If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west,
you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing.
They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster.
Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should
have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind
of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy...
You become Venezuela.
You write about vanishing middle class. When you were born over 60 % of Americans ranked middle class. Why and when did
it disappear?
If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans.
In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy.
The Democratic Party is out of touch with the working class.
Well, that's the remarkable thing. For 100 years the Democratic Party represented wage earners, working people, normal people,
middle class people, then somewhere around-- In precisely peg it to Clinton's second term in the tech boom in the Bay Area in Francisco
and Silicon Valley, the Democratic Party reoriented and became the party of technology, of large corporations, and of the rich. You've
really seen that change in the last 20 years where in the top 10 richest zip codes in the United States, 9 of them in the last election
just went for Democrats. Out of the top 50, 42 went for Democrats. The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of
average people is now the party of the rich.
Donald Trump, who is often seen as this world-changing figure is actually a symptom of something that precedes him that I sometimes
wonder if he even understands which is this realignment. He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican
Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was
this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still
ongoing.
In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class.
The Republican Party which has never represented the middle class doesn't want to. That is the source of really all the confusion
and the tension that you're seeing now. I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our
voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not.
They have to, or they will lose.
They have to, or they will die. Yes.
You're writing in an almost nostalgic tone about the old liberals? People like Miss Raymond, your first-class teacher. You
describe her wonderfully in the book. You say that they have vanished. What happened?
I find myself in deep sympathy with a lot of the aims of 1970s liberals. I believe in free speech, and I instinctively side with
the individual against the group. I think that the individual matters, I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary
wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would
send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them.
The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons
which they rejected, and I do too. They were also suspicious of market capitalism. They thought that somebody needed to push
back against the forces of the market, not necessarily because capitalism was bad, capitalism is not bad, it's also not a religion.
We don't have to follow it blindly. We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed
beneath its wheels.
Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change
the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed
is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change.
Is that really so? Look at the grassroot movement on the left: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist group. It is probably
a 100 years ago when Americans last saw a socialist movement of substance emerging?
Yes. You're absolutely right. That's the future.
In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again.
Well, you're absolutely right. You're incisive correct to say that the last time we saw this was 100 years ago, which was another
pivot point in our economic and social history. Where, after 10,000 years of living in an Agrarian society, people moved to the cities
to work in factories and that upended the social order completely. With that came huge political change and a massive reaction.
In the United States and in Western Europe labor unions moderated the forces of change and allowed us to preserve capitalism in
the form that we see it now... You're seeing the exact same dynamic play out today, we have another, as I said, economic revolution,
the digital age, which is changing how people work, how they make money, how families are structured. There is a huge reaction to
that, of course, because there always is, because normal people can't handle change at this pace. People are once again crying out
for some help. They feel threatened by the change. What bothers me is that there is no large group of sensible people asking, how
can we buffer this change? How can we restrain it just enough, not to stop it, but to keep people from overreacting and becoming
radical?
Talking about radical. Recently, a radical left-wing group have threatened to storm your Washington home. How is your wife?
How is your family?
They are fine, they're pretty tough. They're rattled.
The Antifa-mob came right to the door of your home?
Yes, they did and threatened my wife.
Which must have been absolutely scary?
Yes, it was. My wife was born in the city, my four children were born here, we're not moving.
Your attackers have a goal, they're trying to silence you.
Of course. I would never, of course, that's a cornerstone of Western civilization is expression and freedom of conscience. You
can tell me how to behave, you can force me not to sleep or take my clothes off in public, that's fine. Every society has the right
to control behavior. But no one has the right to control what you believe. You can't control my conscience, that's mine alone. Only
totalitarian movements do that, and that's what they're attempting. Of course, I would die first I'm never going to submit to that.
Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime?
No, I've never seen anything like this. What's so striking is that [chuckles] this is really... The radicalism is not on behalf
of people who are actually suffering, fellow Americans who are suffering, on behalf of the 70,000 people who died of drug ODs last
year, or on behalf of the people displaced by automation in GM, or whatever, on behalf of those dying American low class, it's really
on behalf of theoretical goals.
They're saying that I [Tucker Carlson] am saying naughty things that shouldn't be allowed to be expressed in public. Basically,
it's a totalitarian movement. Totally unhelpful. I would say childish. What they're really doing is defending the current order.
They're the shock troops of the elites actually. Actually, what you're seeing is something amazing, you're seeing for the first time
in history a revolution being waged against the working class. When does that happen?
Your way of debating is very tough. You're sitting there, hammering your guests. Sometimes we have a bit of a problem to
understand that. For us it's a bit disturbing.
Of course, it is. It's disturbing for me too!
How tough do you need to be nowadays to have an audience?
Less, I think than sometimes we put into it or I put into it. I'm actually, in my normal life, I think a pretty gentle person.
I've never had a yelling fight with my wife in 34 years. I mean, I've never yelled at my children. No, I don't ever.
Never?
Not one time. No, it's not how I communicate. I never want to be impolite. I have been impolite. I've lost my temper a couple
times, but I don't want to. I don't like that. I believe in civility.
... ... ...
How close to a revolution is your country?
By revolution, let me be clear, I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides
for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably
too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable
with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence,
but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states.
If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, "Would
you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?" Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, "no, I'm not okay
with that. I'm not for that." Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different
race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion.
"I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal", someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures,
but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental
country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're
Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.
Orange County is now purely Democrat.
That's exactly right. You're going to move and if you're very liberal, are you really going to want to live in Idaho? Probably
not.
The country is getting redder and bluer.
Exactly.
This revolution you are warning about - What needs to be done to stop it from happening?
Just the only thing you can do in a democracy which is address the legitimate concerns of the population and think more critically
and be more wise in your decision making. Get a handle on technology. Technology is the driver of the change, so sweep aside the
politics, the fundamental fact about people is they can't metabolize change at this pace because as an evolutionary matter, they're
not designed to, they're not. If you asked your average old person what's the most upsetting thing about being old? You expect them
to say, "Well, my friends are dead". But that's not what they say. Or "I have to go to the bathroom six times a night". That's not
what they say.
You know what they say? "Things are too different. This is not the country I grew up in. I don't recognize this." All people hate
that. It doesn't mean you're a bigot, it means you're human. Unless you want things to fall apart, become so volatile that you can't
have a working economy, you need to get a handle on the pace of change. You have to slow it down.
How important is migration in terms of change?
It's central because nothing changes the society more quickly or more permanently than bringing in a whole new population and
that's not an attack on anybody. There are lots of populations- there are lots of immigrants who are much more impressive than I
am. I have no doubt about that. I'm not attacking immigrants. I'm merely saying that the effect on the people who already live here
is real and they're not bigots for feeling that way.
You come from an ancient country with a series of ancient cultures within it and if you woke up one morning and everyone was speaking
Amharic and you didn't recognize any of your surroundings, that would be deeply upsetting to you.
What you saying, it's necessary to slow it down, control it?
You have to slow it down. Look at the Chinese. I abhor, I despise the Chinese government. However, I'm willing to acknowledge
wise behavior when I see it. The Chinese would never accept this pace of demographic change not simply because they're racist, though
of course, they are, but that's not the point. The point is because they don't want their society to fall apart because they're in
charge of it.
The childlike faith that we have in America, and America is the worst at this, that all change is good and that progress is inevitable
and if something is new and fresh and more expensive, it's got to be better.
It is kind of refreshing for Europeans that even Hillary Clinton tells Europeans, "You have got to stop this. You've got
to get control of migration or you disintegrate."
John Kerry said the same thing, amazingly. They're telling the truth.
Do you think Europe is going to be able to get in control of that? We have 28 countries in the EU. And Switzerland is not
a member?
So smart, so smart... You know why? Because they're mountain people. Love them. You know why? Because they're suspicious, that's
what I like about them.
[laughter]
Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration?
The EU has been doomed since the first day because it's inconsistent with human nature. The reason we have nation states is because
people wanted them, it's organic. A nation-state is just a larger tribe and it's organized along lines that make sense. They evolved
over thousands of years. To ignore it and destroy it because you think that you've got a better idea, is insane!
[And with that, our interview concludes. It has already run far past the allotted 40 minutes. I offer to take Carlson, who seems
to be very passionate about Switzerland, on a ski run in our Alps soon. Perhaps a smoke in one of the outdoor saunas I tell him smell
like rotten eggs. Ambassador Grenell is on the phone line patiently waiting.]
"... Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so well). ..."
You realize 2 years of Flynn under Mueller's microscope yielded nothing? And the fact he's
facing sentencing means he's not going to be called as a witness to anything.
Everything Flynn had to say implicated Obama, Clapper & Brennan but the corrupt cabal
isn't subject to the laws of unwashed inbreds like you and I and the other 320 million
Americans (including those who THINK they're part of the club because they virtue signal so
well).
Says Summer Sausage who was of course not in the room. You think you know stuff? You know
stuff from the koolaide you've swallowed for the past 20 years...
The author is tried to deceive: Flynn lobbed Russians on behave of Israel.
Muller dirty trick with Flynn (entrapment during the FBI interview) will eventually backfire
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's memo noted that federal investigators' curiosity about Flynn's role in the presidential transition seemed to have been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016 ..."
"... But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller's disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials -- including, as was already known, several conversations with Kislyak in December 2016. Those included a discussion about lifting economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed on Russia and about a separate matter involving a United Nations resolution on Israel. ..."
All of that, plus Flynn's "substantial assistance," early cooperation, and acceptance of "responsibility for his unlawful conduct,"
led Muller's team to ask the court to grant Flynn a lenient sentence that doesn't include prison time, according to
a highly anticipated sentencing memo the special counsel's office filed Tuesday night.
And there wasn't much more than that in 13 concise and heavily redacted pages that let down anyone expecting the document to be
another public narrative fleshing out lots of fresh detail about Mueller's investigation. Still, the filing, and some new details
in it, should give pause to members of Trump's inner circle -- especially the president's son-in-law and senior White House adviser,
Jared Kushner.
Mueller's memo noted that federal investigators' curiosity about Flynn's role in the presidential transition seemed to have
been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in December
2016 . The filing also detailed a series of lies Flynn told about his contacts with and work for the Turkish government while
serving in the Trump campaign. (Given that Trump and a pair of his advisers had been pursuing
a real estate deal in Moscow during the first half of 2016, Flynn might mistakenly have seen wearing two hats as noncontroversial.)
But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller's disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about
interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials -- including, as was already known, several conversations
with Kislyak in December 2016. Those included a discussion about lifting economic sanctions the Obama administration had imposed
on Russia and about a separate matter involving a United Nations resolution on Israel.
Flynn lied to federal agents who questioned him about those chats on Jan. 24, 2017, and that was a crime (as, possibly, were his
efforts as a private citizen to meddle with a sitting government's foreign policy). The former general
acknowledged lying ,
pleaded guilty a year ago, and
then began cooperating with Mueller's
probe.
The timeline around Flynn's conversations
is crucial because it shows what's still in play for the president and Kushner -- and why Mueller may have been content to lock
in a cooperation agreement that carried relatively light penalties, as well as why Flynn's assistance seems to have subsequently
pleased the veteran prosecutor so much.
Kushner's actions are also interesting because the Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined
his
own communications with Kislyak -- and Kushner reportedly encouraged Trump to fire his FBI director,
James Comey , in the
spring of 2017, when Comey was still in the early stages of digging into the Trump-Russia connection.
Comey, and his successor, Mueller, have been focused on possible favor-trading between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. We
know that Russian hackers directed by Russian intelligence operatives penetrated Democrat computer servers in 2016 and gave that
information and email haul to WikiLeaks to disseminate as part of an effort to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential bid. Trump
was also pursuing that
business deal in Moscow in 2016 and had other projects over the years
with a Russian presence . What might the Kremlin have been expecting in return? A promise to lift U.S. economic sanctions?
Kushner also had personal financial issues weighing on his mind at the time. He had spent much of 2016 trying to bail out his
family from his ill-considered and pricey purchase of a Manhattan skyscraper,
666 Fifth
Avenue .
After a meeting in Trump Tower with Kislyak on Dec. 1, 2016, which Flynn and Kushner
attended together ,
the ambassador arranged another gathering on Dec. 13 for Kushner and a
senior Russian
banker with Kremlin ties, Sergei Gorkov. The White House has
said that meeting was
innocent and part of Kushner's diplomatic duties. In a
statement
following his testimony before Congress in the summer of 2017, Kushner said that his interactions with Flynn and Kislyak on Dec.
1 only involved a discussion of Syria policy, not economic sanctions. He said that his discussion with Gorkov on Dec. 13 lasted less
than 30 minutes and only involved an exchange of pleasantries and hopes for better U.S.-Russian relations -- and didn't include any
discussion of recruiting Russians as lenders or investors in the Kushner family's
real estate business .
Kislyak enjoyed continued lobbying from the White House after his meetings with Kushner. On Dec. 22, Flynn asked Kislyak to delay
a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for building settlements in Palestinian territory. Flynn later told the FBI that
he didn't ask Kislyak to do that, which wasn't true.
Court documents filed last year
said that a "very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team" directed Flynn to make an overture to Kislyak about the sanctions
vote. According to reporting from my
Bloomberg Opinion colleague Eli Lake and
NBC News , Kushner was that "senior member."
Bloomberg News reported that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus also pushed Flynn to lobby Kislyak on the
U.N. vote. (Kushner didn't discuss pressing Flynn to contact Kislyak in his statement last summer and instead noted how infrequent
his direct interactions were.)
Kushner's role in these events isn't discussed in Mueller's sentencing memo for Flynn. The absence of greater detail might cause
Kushner to worry: If Flynn offered federal authorities a different version of events than Kushner -- and Flynn's version is buttressed
by documentation or federal electronic surveillance of the former general -- then the president's son-in-law may have to start scrambling
(a possibility
I flagged
when Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017).
Other portions of the 2016 and early 2017 timelines still matter, too.
On Dec. 28, less than a week after Flynn called Kislyak about the U.N. vote, the ambassador contacted Flynn, according to court
documents. The Obama administration had just imposed economic sanctions on Russia because of the Kremlin's effort to sabotage the
2016 election. Kislyak apparently told Flynn that Russia would retaliate because Flynn asked him to "moderate" Russia's response.
Flynn
reportedly discussed these conversations with a former Trump adviser, K.T. McFarland, on Dec. 29.
In the weeks that followed, Sally Yates, then acting U.S. attorney general, warned the Trump administration about Flynn's duplicity
and said he was a national security threat. She was fired days after that for refusing to enforce Trump's executive order seeking
to ban immigration from seven Islamic nations. The White House forced Flynn out in February of last year, and Trump fired Comey three
months later. The president subsequently began using "witch hunt" to describe the investigation that Mueller inherited from Comey.
Since then, as the White House and Trump have surely absorbed and as Flynn's sentencing memo reinforces, Mueller's hunt has now
ensnared a number of witches.
Essentially Mueller witch hunt repeat the trick invented by Bolsheviks leadership during
Stalin Great Terror: the accusation of a person of being a foreign agent is a 'slam dank" move
that allows all kind to nasty things to be performed to convict the person no matter whether he
is guilty of not.
Consolidation of power using Foreign Counter Intelligence as a tool is a classic and a very
dirty trick.
Notable quotes:
"... It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway ..."
"... This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. ..."
"... It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does. ..."
"... IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant innuendo. ..."
"... In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money laundering that took place over a decade ago ..."
"... Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp rhetoric. ..."
"... Mueller may have created more crimes than existed before his inquiry. ..."
It would be of great value to know what the underlying predicate crime(s) are that are
sustaining Mueller's scorched earth approach to what looks to be 'all things Trump,' whether
the crimes relate to counter intelligence jurisdiction (treason, espionage), illicit overseas
business transactions relating to sanctions violations or something of that sort, or election
law violations, the smoke of which got the whole Mueller jihad underway .
It certainly does give every appearance, at least from the outside perspective, of an
investigation looking for a crime.
This would not be unusual in a Foreign Counter Intelligence case which are almost by
definition open ended; it would be very unusual, in fact prohibited, in a criminal case where
a factual predicate needs to be articulated that constitutes reasonable suspicion that a
crime has been committed.
It seems Mueller has been riding the FCI horse whither he pleases to round up
interviews, compare them, and then take the chicken shit route of charging 1001 violations to
leverage his way forward. If that seems to smell bad, it is because it does.
Precisely the same approach could have been taken vis a vis the Uranium mattter or any of
the Clinton Foundation speaker forays into foreign lands and almost certainly a boatload of
1001 violations would have come into port.
IMO, Trump is not helping himself or the American people get to the objective truth by
declassifying all the documents and communications. Unless all the documents are released
unredacted, all we have are theories and speculation. And Trump will be on the losing end of
that as the news media and their Deep State collaborators have all the means to drive the
narrative and attempt to convict in the court of public opinion through constant
innuendo.
In the mean time the Mueller investigation itself creates the crimes as pretty much
most Trump associates have been indicted for perjury. Even Manafort was prosecuted for money
laundering that took place over a decade ago .
There have been no claims from Mueller that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to
steal the 2016 election.
Trump has stated that he doesn't want to declassify as the American people shouldn't
know how corrupt their government is. This seems to contradict his Drain the Swamp
rhetoric. With the Democrats gonna run the House come January. I think Trump will come
under increased pressure from all sides. I don't believe the Mueller investigation will ever
wind down until Trump is defeated either via impeachment or loss of the next presidential
election.
"... I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services. ..."
Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies
The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its
production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6
mouthpiece
Luke Harding of the Guardian.
Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian,
this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified "Russians" to
the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that
Manafort's plea deal was over.
The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor
logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these "Russians" are in the visitor logs.
This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict
Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure
was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was
accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log.
Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained
until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.
There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the "Russians" would
have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so
exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed
Ecuadorean "intelligence report" of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean
government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is
impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security –
would not know the identity of these alleged "Russians".
Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government
regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they
follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller's
pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the
Presidency.
My friend William Binney, probably the world's greatest expert on electronic surveillance,
former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that
it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a
download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting
a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at
the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC "security consultants"
Crowdstrike.
I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be
established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive "Big
Lie" will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack
of the DNC servers.
Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even
considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a
personal assurance of them.
I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York
Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security
services.
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a
particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to
create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the
US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the
security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange's support prior to expelling
him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of
espionage.
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and
has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever
be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York
Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are
seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the
"liberal media" no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of
the people, they are an instrument of elite control.
My opinions are conflicted, but I'd rather give Assange a Nobel Peace Prize than a criminal
conviction. He definitely deserves a Nobel Prize more than Obama. I was in an eatery in
Cambridge, MA, when I heard Obama's prize announced, and even there people where aghast and
astounded.
The Guardian was bought by Soros, a few years ago.
Washpost, NYT and CNN, Deep State mouthpieces.
That the USA, as long as Deep State has not been eradicated completely from USA society, will
continue to try to get Assange, and of course also Snowdon, in it claws, is more than
obvious.
So what are we talking about ?
Assange just uses the freedom of information act, or how the the USA euphemism for telling
them nothing, is called.
How Assange survives, mentally and bodily, being locked up in a small room without a
bathroom, for several years now, is beyond my comprehension.
But of course, for 'traitors' like him human rights do not exist.
"I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times
have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services."
These outfits are largely state-run at this point. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff
Bezos, a man with deep ties to the CIA through his Amazon company (which depends upon federal
subsidies and has received security agency "support") and the Guardian is clandestinely
funded through UK government purchases, among other things. MI6 has also effectively
compromised the former integrity and objectivity of that outlet by threatening them with
prosecutions for revealing MI6 spy practices. And the NYT has always been state-run. See
their coverage of the Iraq War. The Israelis have bragged about having an asset at the Times.
The American government has several.
It's amazing to see the obvious progression of the lies as they take hold in an anti-Trump
elite who seem completely impervious to understanding his victory over Clinton. All these
people who claim to be so cosmopolitan and educated seem to think Assange or Manafort would
have any interest in meeting each other. (Let alone in the company of unspecified
'Russians'.)
At first it was that Assange was wrong to publish the DNC leaks because it hurt Clinton
and thus helped Trump.
Then it was that Assange was actively trying to help Trump.
Now it's that Assange is in collusion with Trump and the 'Russians'.
The same thing happened with the Trump-Russian nonsense which goes ever more absurd as
time goes on. Slowly boiling the frog in the public's mind. The allegations are so
nonsensical, yet there are plenty of educated, supposedly cosmopolitan people who don't
understand the backgrounds or motives of their 'liberal' heroes in the NYT or Guardian who
believe this on faith.
None of these people will ever question how if any of this is true how the security
services of the West didn't know it and if they supposedly know it, how come they aren't
acting like it's true. They are acting like they're attempting to smear politicians they
don't like, however.
Luke Harding is particularly despicable. He made his name as a journalist off privileged
access to Wilkileaks docs, and has been persistently attacking Assange ever since the Swedish
fan-girl farce.
Assange did make a mistake (of which I am sure he is all too aware now) in the choice to,
rather than leave the info. open on-line, collaborate with the filthy Guardian, the sleazy
NYT, and I forget dirty name of the third publication.
@anon Since you
are posting as Anon coward, I am not expecting a reply, but would be interested in (and would
not doubt) state funding of the 'Guardian'?
As for the NYT, they are plainly in some sense state-funded, but the state in question is
neither New York nor the U.S.A., but the state of Israel.
@Che Guava
Perhaps he is referring to the sheer volume of ads the British government places for public
sector appointments. As for the paper edition, most of it seems to be bought by the BBC!
"... At this time, there is no "factual basis" or "statement of the offense" filed in the clerk's file to support the guilty plea. This is unusual, as normally the factual basis is in writing and filed as part of the plea papers. Thus, as in his earlier criminal case in the same courthouse, the factual basis was probably done orally in open court at the time of the plea, and the only way to find out what it was is to get a transcript of the hearing from the court reporter. ..."
"... Most unusual of all is that Cohen is prosecuted for making a false statement to Congress. During the last 10 years or so, has anyone else made a materially false or misleading or fraudulent statement, or covered up or concealed a material fact to Congress, in violation of any U.S. law? Does anything come to mind causing a person wonder whether or not that has happened, such as Fast and Furious gun running, or maybe on the subject of domestic surveillance ...? ..."
Michael Cohen pleads guilty again, this time to the Mueller group As has by now been
plastered all over the mass media, Michael Cohen, a former attorney for president Donald Trump,
today went into federal court in Manhattan, New York City, to plead guilty as part of a deal in
a second case, filed this time by the "special counsel" Robert Mueller group. Also as before,
the deal was telegraphed by a "John Doe" paper filed yesterday in a U.S. District Court in the
Southern District of New York--
The charging document is once again an "information", since it was agreed to and not the
result of a grand jury indictment. It alleges that Cohen made false statements to the U.S.
Congress directed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about a "branded property in
Moscow, Russia", obviously referring to a Trump property, and is based on Title 18, U.S. Code,
section 1001(a) and (c), the proverbial false statement statute [1]--
Since he was pleading guilty through the agreed charging paper filed today, he signed a
waiver giving up his right to be charged by an indictment for a felony--
Page 8 of the plea agreement indicates that Cohen talked to the Mueller group at least on 7
August 2018, 12 and 18 September, 8 and 17 October, and 12 and 20 November.
His lawyer filed a letter requesting that this new case be consolidated with his other
criminal case in the Southern District of New York, and be transferred to Judge William Pauley
III, in whose court the earlier case is pending--
Cohen is presently scheduled to be sentenced on 12 December 2018. The request to transfer
the case was granted, as noted on the court clerk's docket sheet--
"11/29/2018 Notice of Case Reassignment as to Michael Cohen, to Judge William H. Pauley,
III. Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr no longer assigned to the case. (ma) (Entered:
11/29/2018)".
At this time, there is no "factual basis" or "statement of the offense" filed in the
clerk's file to support the guilty plea. This is unusual, as normally the factual basis is in
writing and filed as part of the plea papers. Thus, as in his earlier criminal case in the same
courthouse, the factual basis was probably done orally in open court at the time of the plea,
and the only way to find out what it was is to get a transcript of the hearing from the court
reporter.
Most unusual of all is that Cohen is prosecuted for making a false statement to
Congress. During the last 10 years or so, has anyone else made a materially false or misleading
or fraudulent statement, or covered up or concealed a material fact to Congress, in violation
of any U.S. law? Does anything come to mind causing a person wonder whether or not that has
happened, such as Fast and Furious gun running, or maybe on the subject of domestic
surveillance ...?
The Manchurian Candidate conspiracy theories stopped being farcical a while ago -- IMO
they are now in a class by themselves, perhaps a class shared with The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion and other massively destructive lies.
The birther thing was awful, but at least it didn't get anyone killed, while this
thing will lead Trump to do stupid things to disprove it and might get us all killed.
I'm trying to wrap my mind around what precisely Trump is supposed to have done --
told Putin that he'd do anything he wanted in exchange for a real estate opportunity in
Moscow? I'm sure that Putin would have paid cash, no real estate required, for such a
privilege.
And yet the vast majority of people I've met believe that Trump is a Russian puppet
and that aggressive action is needed against Russia for the simple reason that
Trump=Russia=bad.
President Trump's ex-longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen worked with an FBI informant
known as "The Quarterback" to negotiate a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during the 2016 US
election, according to
BuzzFeed News .
"The Quarterback," Felix Sater - a longtime FBI and CIA undercover
intelligence asset who was busted running a $40 million stock scheme, leveraged his
Russia connections to pitch the deal, while Cohen discussed it with Putin's press secretary,
Dmitry Peskov, according to BuzzFeed , citing two unnamed US law enforcement
officials.
Sater told BuzzFeed News today that he and Cohen thought giving the Trump Tower's most
luxurious apartment, a $50 million penthouse , to Putin would entice other wealthy buyers
to purchase their own. "In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the
same building as Vladimir Putin," Sater told BuzzFeed News. "My idea was to give a $50
million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units. All the
oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin." A second source confirmed
the plan. -
BuzzFeed
The Trump Tower Moscow plan is at the center of Cohen's
new plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller after he admitted to lying to
congressional committees investigating Trump-Russia collusion.
According to the
criminal information filed against Cohen Thursday, on Jan. 20, 2016 he spoke with a
Russian government official, referred to only as Assistant 1, about the Trump Tower Moscow
plan for 20 minutes. This person appears to be an assistant to Peskov, a top Kremlin
official that Cohen had attempted to reach by email.
Cohen "requested assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to
build the proposed tower and financing the construction," the court document states.
Cohen had previously maintained that he never got a response from the official, but in
court on Thursday he acknowledged that was a lie. -
BuzzFeed
While the deal ultimately fizzled, "and it is not clear whether Trump knew of the
intention to give away the penthouse," Cohen has said in court filings that Trump was
regularly briefed on the Moscow negotiations along with his family.
Sater and Cohen "worked furiously behind the scenes into the summer of 2016 to get the
Moscow deal finished," according to BuzzFeed - although it was claimed that the project was
canned in January 2016, before Trump won the GOP nomination.
Sater, who has worked with the Trump organization on past deals, said that he came up with
the Trump Tower Moscow idea, while Cohen - Sater recalled, said "Great idea." "I figured,
he's in the news, his name is generating a lot of good press," Sater told BuzzFeed earlier in
the year, adding "A lot of Russians weren't willing to pay a premium licensing fee to put
Donald's name on their building. Now maybe they would be."
So he turned to his old friend, Cohen, to get it off the ground . They arranged a
licensing deal, by which Trump would lend his name to the project and collect a part of the
profits. Sater lined up a Russian development company to build the project and said that
VTB, a Russian financial institution that faced US sanctions at the time, would finance it.
VTB officials
have denied taking part in any negotiations about the project. -
BuzzFeed
Two FBI agents with "direct knowledge of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations" told
BuzzFeed earlier this year that Cohen had been in frequent contact with foreigners about the
potential real estate project - and that some of these individuals "had knowledge of or
played a role in 2016 election meddling."
Meanwhile, Trump reportedly personally signed the letter of intent to move forward with
the Trump Tower Moscow plan on October 28, 2015 - the third day of the Republican primary
debate.
Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced on December 12. By cooperating with the DOJ, he is
hoping to avoid prison.
In 1998, Sater pleaded guilty to his involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme
orchestrated by the Russian Mafia , and became an informant
for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and federal prosecutors, assisting with organized crime investigations.
In 2017, Sater agreed to cooperate with investigators into international money laundering schemes.
Left, right and centre in contemporary USSA politics are rotten and corrupt. Bernie
Sanders proved that even he is susceptible to dodgy business decisions. Trump is no more
rotten and adverse to dodgy/boarderline legally tenuous deals than anybody in politics on
Capitol Hill. Do I care about this? No, because there are far more important issues to be
dealt with by a magnitude of 90000 times.
Both sides on this issue are imbeciles. One side is pushing guilt, when compared to what
Killary and the Clinton foundation got up to, it is a complete non-story. The other side
are completely absolving Orange Jesus of any guilt and making out he has morals beyond
reproach.
I rarely comment on the Trump/Russia angle, because most of it is overblown, the
narrative is distorted and context is deliberately misinterpreted.
President Trump's ex-longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen worked with an FBI
informant known as "The Quarterback" to negotiate a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during
the 2016 US election, according to BuzzFeed News.
There is nothing about this sentence which carries any credibility at all.
Honestly, you might not have bothered writing it, or the rest of the article. No. I
didn't read it, and am not going to waste any of my life doing so either.
Can somebody just give me the short, simple, dumbed-down version of what any of this
means? What does this amount to? Is this any kind of game-changer? Does it change
anything?
" ...an un-named source" ..... another fantastical fairytale from a failed american
media company by yet another un-named source. How very convenient. President Vladimir
living in an american themed cramped badly designed apartment building ? Please, I do not
like to laugh much but this is starting to make me smile. Our President has a State owned
mansion in the best part of our glorious capital ....like me he owns almost nothing and
works all the time ....why would anybody with sanity in their brain believe that he would
make this change, especially to be associated with ANYTHING american. Also no Russian
businessman that I know has ever bought a property in a trump complex .... the build
quality and design is rubbish. Westerners should take time to view some of our exceptional
office and residential towers along the Moskva River to see where wealthy people want to
invest, work and live here. Get real West !!
OK thought experiment, given that he "only" earns perhaps 150k, how is Putin going to
pay for the upkeep of such a White Elephant? Imagine if he had to pay for maintenance of
the complementary hot n cold running whores that inevitable come with such an apartment
.... what if something breaks and needs replaced?
It's like giving a Ferrari to an Amish. Thanks, but no, thanks. Not his style.
Because Putin wants to live in a building with a bunch of mobsters.
And small world - wouldnt you know the Russians who try to do hotel deals are also into
hacking illegal, unsecure servers?
And though this indicates nothing, true or not, about the election - here's the secret :
the judeocorporate media has got the public trained to react to 'Russia' and 'Putin' purely
emotionally - so much so the Maddows of the world will shriek that this proves 'collusion'
- when it does no such thing.
More Deep State smoke and mirrors.
If you havent watched any Dan Bongino speeches on youtube its worth a look.
Crooks and criminals took over worldwide. Now even US-citizens elected one for
President. It´s a shame. How long will it take until the killer squads of Blackstone
financed by Blackrock prowl through the streets to kill anybody who isn´t useful in
their view? They have been practicing for years in foreign countries, paid with taxpayers
money.
Why did the FBI or Muller zero in on this guy Michael Cohen?
Because they got everything on him, Trump and his family and associates, long before any
investigations were initiated.
NSA collected all the phone records, emails, text messages, internet usages, banking
records, library loan records, etc, . . . on EVERY Americans. All they need to do is type
in a name, like you type in a search phrase on Google, and everything associated with that
person would come up, on the screen.
The FBI knew everything they need to know about Michael Cohen, and General Michael
Flynn.
All they need to get them or entrap them is to ask them questions, which they already
knew the answers, and wait for them to "lie" or misrepresent themselves.
BINGO!
They are charged with lying to the FBI.
Trump was smart that he refused to be "interview" with the Muller, the Inquisitor. His
lawyers knew Muller will try to trap into "lying" to the FBI.
"... It is quite clear from the charging document that Sater, not Cohen, was the one who was extending the invitation from Russian officials for Cohen to travel to Russia. What remains unknown is whether Felix Sater was doing this on his own initiative or was acting on instructions from his FBI handler to "bait" Cohen with this opportunity. ..."
"... A criminal complaint filed by the FBI in January 2015 shows that the FBI's Counter Intelligence Division directed a Confidential Source of the FBI, who matches the description of Sater, to use the Trump Organization as bait to go after Russian intelligence officers. ..."
"... CS-1 posed as the representative of a wealthy investor looking to work with Bank-1 to develop casinos in Russia. ..."
"... discussed an email to BURYAKOV regarding the potential development of casinos in Russia ..."
"... Worth noting that this operation was carried out while E. W. "Bill" Priestap was the FBI special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division in the New York Field Office. Ten months after the success of this case, Priestap was promoted to assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ) in Washington, DC. It was Priestap's Counterintelligence Division that subsequently played a key role in going after the Trump campaign for allegedly working with the Russians in 2016. ..."
"... Yet, Priestap surely knew that the previous contacts between Trump's organization and the Russians had been brokered at the behest of the FBI. ..."
"... Felix Sater was not just some run of the mill snitch. He was a very important informant and asset for both the FBI and the CIA. Don't take my word for it. That is what former Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. When Loretta Lynch was nominated for US Attorney General, she was pressed by Senator Orin Hatch to divulge information on Sater to satisfy all of the people who had been defrauded in the failed Fort Lauderdale Trump Towers venture. Here's Loretta Lynch's response: ..."
"... 'The defendant in question, Felix Sater , provided valuable and sensitive information to the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors from my Office, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and law enforcement agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies, providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially sealed.' ..."
"... Was Felix Sater operating as an FBI informant when matters related to Russia were discussed with members of Donald Trump's business enterprise? ..."
"... During the time that the FBI directed Felix Sater to use the Trump business enterprise as bait to entrap foreign spies and mobsters, was Trump witting of this ploy? ..."
"... I reiterate a point I made in my previous post. Felix Sater worked with Trump starting in 2003. At no point prior to Trump's June 16, 2015 announcement that he was running for President did the FBI pursue any criminal charges against Donald Trump or any member of his business organization. There are only two possibilities to explain that. Number one -- Donald Trump did not commit any overt acts that would have met the standard for a criminal indictment. Number two -- Donald Trump also was an informer for the FBI and was granted immunity and all records sealed. I believe the later is highly unlikely. Given the level of animus directed at Trump by many senior FBI officials, I find it improbable that such a secret could be kept. ..."
"... We really need to know what the FBI knew about Trump's Russia contacts that were facilitated by their informant, Felix Sater, and when they knew it. I do not think that the FBI will be eager to provide such answers. ..."
Sater is not named in the charging statement filed by the Special Prosecutor but Felix Sater
matches the description of "Individual 2." The charging statement clearly shows that Sater
played a key role in trying to promote contacts with the Russians, including Vladimir
Putin:
COHEN and Individual 2 discussed efforts to obtain Russian governmental approval for the
Moscow Project. (page 5)
COHEN and Individual 2 discussed on multiple occasions traveling to Russia to pursue the
Moscow Project. (page 5)
On or about May 4, 2016, Individual 2 wrote to COHEN,"I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the
trip does happen the question is before or after the convention . . . Obviously the pre-meeting
trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but the 2 big guys where [sic] the question. I said
I would confirm and revert." (page 6)
On or about May 5, 2016, Individual 2 followed up with COHEN and wrote, "[Russian Official
1] would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia's Davos
it's June 16-19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either [the
President of Russia] or [the Prime Minister of Russia], as they are not sure if 1 or both will
be there. . . . He said anything you want to discuss including dates and subjects are on the
table to discuss."
On or about May 6, 2016, Individual 2 asked COHEN to confirm those dates would work for him
to travel. COHEN wrote back, "Works for me."
From on or about June 9 to June 14, 2016, Individual 2 sent numerous messages to COHEN about
the travel, including forms for COHEN to complete. However, on or about June 14, 2016, COHEN
met Individual 2 in the lobby of the Company's headquarters to inform Individual 2 he would not
be traveling at that time.
The day after COHEN's call with Assistant 1, Individual 2 contacted him, asking for a call.
Individual 2 wrote to COHEN, "It's about [the President of Russia] they called today."
It is quite clear from the charging document that Sater, not Cohen, was the one who was
extending the invitation from Russian officials for Cohen to travel to Russia. What remains
unknown is whether Felix Sater was doing this on his own initiative or was acting on
instructions from his FBI handler to "bait" Cohen with this opportunity.
A criminal complaint filed by the FBI in January 2015 shows that the FBI's Counter
Intelligence Division directed a Confidential Source of the FBI, who matches the description of
Sater, to use the Trump Organization as bait to go after Russian intelligence officers. Felix Sater appears to have played a critical role in taking down three Russian Non Official Cover
officers -- Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev and Viktor Podobnyy -- who were charged by the FBI
in January 2015 for espionage. The alleged spying by these Russian NOCs commenced in 2012. We
do not know how the FBI discovered their activities, but the Russians became targets of an FBI
Counter Intelligence Division investigation. The complaint filed by FBI agent Gregory Monaghan,
shows how Confidential Source 1 (who fits the role played by Sater in the Trump organization)
used his relationship with Donald Trump's company as bait:
As set forth below, in the summer of 2014, EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a "Zhenya," the defendant,
met numerous times with a confidential source working for the FBI ("CS-1"). CS-1 posed as
the representative of a wealthy investor looking to work with Bank-1 to develop casinos in
Russia. . . BURYAKOV's statements and conduct reflected his strong desire to obtain
information about subjects far outside the scope of his work as a bank employee, and consistent
with his interests as a Russian intelligence agent. These meetings established BURYAKOV's
willingness to solicit and accept documents that CS-1 claimed he had obtained from a U.S.
government agency and which purportedlycontained information potentially useful to the Russian
Federation.
Monaghan's complaint, however, also reveals evidence that the Russians were quite skeptical
of Sater.
On or about July 22, 2014, EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a "Zhenya," and IGOR SPORYSHEV, the
defendants, had a conversation. BURYAKOV and SPORYSHEV discussed an email to BURYAKOV
regarding the potential development of casinos in Russia . BURYAKOV stated that the
subject of the email was concerning "some sort of fucking nonsense" relating to casinos.
SPORYSHEV stated, "It's unclear . Casino, Russia, like, some sort of a set up. Trap of some
sort. I cannot understand what the point is." SPORYSHEV added, "You could meet [an associate of
CS-1] if you want - you will look and decide for yourself."
Notwithstanding their doubts, the Russians went ahead with a meeting with Sater in Atlantic
City, where Sater fulfilled his role on behalf of the FBI and set the hook in the Russians by
having them accept a U.S. Government document:
On or about August 8, 2014, CS-1 met with EVGENY BURYAKOV, a/k/a "Zhenya," the defendant,
and Male-2 in Atlantic City. The meeting lasted from around noon to 7:00 p.m. and included a
tour of casinos in Atlantic City. At the end of the day, CS-1 took BURYAKOV and Male-2 to
CS-l's office, where CS-1 gave a PowerPoint presentation on the proposed casino project in
Russia. At the end of the PowerPoint presentation, CS-1 noted that U.S. sanctions against
Russia could have an impact on their project. CS-1 also presented BURYAKOV with a United States
Government document ("Government Document-1"), labeled "Internal Treasury Use Only," which
contained a list of Russian individuals who had been sanctioned by the United States. CS-1
stated that CS-1 had a contact in the United States Government and could get more information
about sanctions if BURYAKOV was interested. BURYAKOV replied that he was interested in such
information. At the end of the meeting, BURYAKOV asked if he could keep Government Document-1,
which CS-1 then handed to BURYAKOV. BURYAKOV took the document with him and left the
meeting.
Worth noting that this operation was carried out while E. W. "Bill" Priestap was the FBI
special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division in the New York Field Office. Ten
months after the success of this case, Priestap was promoted to assistant director of the
Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ) in Washington, DC. It was Priestap's
Counterintelligence Division that subsequently played a key role in going after the Trump
campaign for allegedly working with the Russians in 2016.
Yet, Priestap surely knew that the
previous contacts between Trump's organization and the Russians had been brokered at the behest
of the FBI. The Monaghan affidavit does not paint a picture of "CS-1" acting unilaterally to
cultivate Russian intelligence officers.
So how do we know that Sater really was an FBI registered informant? The answer lies with
the failed Trump Tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Michael Sallah, writing for the Miami
Herald, was the first I could find that wrote about Sater and his FBI ties:
When Felix Sater and his partners launched a plan to put up a Trump tower in Fort Lauderdale
-- luring scores of investors -- he had already been charged in an explosive securities scam
with New York mob figures.
He had pleaded guilty and was awaiting sentencing in the $40 million swindle.
But investors in the Trump tower never knew.
Sater had already been prosecuted in secret -- his arrest records shut down and every trace
of his role in the New York stock scandal stripped from public view. . . .
In a rare move, lawyers are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede in a bitter debate
over the practice of concealing criminal cases from the public.
For now, Sater -- an FBI informant who owns a $4.8 million Fisher Island condo -- has become
the poster boy of the fight over whether judges have the power to bury all traces of someone's
criminal history. The Miami Herald, July 1, 2012 Sunday by Michael Sallah
Sallah provided the first comprehensive summary of Sater's shady past:
Born in the former Soviet Union and raised in New York, Sater began his rise in financial
circles as a young stock broker in the 1990s.
But his career took a wrong turn when he was arrested after getting into a bar fight where
he stabbed another broker in the face with the stem of a shattered margarita glass.
After a stint in prison, he was released on parole. But he got into trouble again, this time
in the stock fraud with members of the Genovese and Colombo crime families in 1998.
After pleading guilty to racketeering -- and the case sealed -- Sater went on to launch a
new career in real estate that would take him across the country, including South Florida.
After he joined the Bayrock Group in New York as an executive in 2003, the firm unveiled a
series of big developments, while licensing Trump's name.
They announced the stunning 24-story high-rise on Fort Lauderdale's beach that became one of
the biggest condo-hotel deals in Florida. The Miami Herald, July 1, 2012 Sunday by Michael Sallah
Felix Sater was not only an FBI informant, but he did some sensitive work for the CIA.
Sallah also broke this angle of the story about Sater:
Charged in a New York securities scandal, the 46-year-old businessman traveled to his native
Russia where he took on a unique role that went far beyond flipping on dangerous criminals.
He began spying for the CIA.
Tapping into the vast underground of the former Soviet Union, Sater was able to track down a
dozen Stinger missiles equipped with powerful tracking devices on the black market.
With the backing of U.S. agents, Sater agreed to buy the weapons -- keeping them out of the
hands of terrorists. In return, the CIA pledged to keep Sater from going to jail in the stock
scam he concocted with New York organized crime figures. . . .
What remains sealed is the work that Sater performed for the government in the past 14 years
that's now the topic of the court fight.
During one hearing, the judge said the case had reached top members "of a national law
enforcement security agency. I should say agencies -- plural." But he didn't elaborate.
The fight has been taken so seriously the judge is using the name John Doe instead of Sater
to hide his identity and to "protect the life of the person." The Miami Herald, September 8, 2012 Saturday by Michael Sallah
Felix Sater was not just some run of the mill snitch. He was a very important informant
and asset for both the FBI and the CIA. Don't take my word for it. That is what former Attorney
General Loretta Lynch said. When Loretta Lynch was nominated for US Attorney General, she was
pressed by Senator Orin Hatch to divulge information on Sater to satisfy all of the people who
had been defrauded in the failed Fort Lauderdale Trump Towers venture. Here's Loretta Lynch's
response:
'The defendant in question, Felix Sater , provided valuable and sensitive information to
the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For
more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors from my Office, the United States Attorney's
Office for the Southern District of New York and law enforcement agents from the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies, providing information crucial to national
security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing
massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially
sealed.'
The FBI and Robert Mueller, who ran the FBI during the time that Sater operated as an FBI
informant, need to answer two key questions.
Was Felix Sater operating as an FBI informant when matters related to Russia were
discussed with members of Donald Trump's business enterprise?
During the time that the FBI directed Felix Sater to use the Trump business
enterprise as bait to entrap foreign spies and mobsters, was Trump witting of this
ploy?
I reiterate a point I made in my previous post. Felix Sater worked with Trump starting
in 2003. At no point prior to Trump's June 16, 2015 announcement that he was running for
President did the FBI pursue any criminal charges against Donald Trump or any member of his
business organization. There are only two possibilities to explain that. Number one -- Donald
Trump did not commit any overt acts that would have met the standard for a criminal indictment.
Number two -- Donald Trump also was an informer for the FBI and was granted immunity and all
records sealed. I believe the later is highly unlikely. Given the level of animus directed at
Trump by many senior FBI officials, I find it improbable that such a secret could be
kept.
We really need to know what the FBI knew about Trump's Russia contacts that were facilitated
by their informant, Felix Sater, and when they knew it. I do not think that the FBI will be
eager to provide such answers.
Summary: George Papadopoulos and his wife Simone Mangiante approached in Greece by a
known CIA/FBI operative, Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlists George as a business
consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and hands him $10,000
in cash to take back to the U.S. Upon arrival at the Dulles airport Robert Mueller had
FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and searched; however, he never had the
cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Further:
[W]hen he was arrested at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from
Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint. The
complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in
Washington.
On a tangential but related note, earlier today I saw an article at Zero Hedge that
was sourced from this Daily Caller article:
EXCLUSIVE: FBI Raids Home Of Whistleblower On Clinton Foundation, Lawyer Says
https://dailycaller.com/201...
FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who
privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a
government watchdog, according to the whistleblower's attorney.
The Justice Department's inspector general was informed that the documents show that
federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian
company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News
Foundation alleges.
The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to
investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian
government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges.
Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with
Russia during the 2016 election.
"The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton
Foundation and Uranium One," the whistleblower's lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF,
noting that he considered the FBI's raid to be an "outrageous disregard" of whistleblower
protections.
----------------------------
In one of those "it's a small world" scenarios, one of the WalkAway YouTubers (former
SJW turned conservative) that I follow is the sister-in-law of this whistleblower! Here
is her video today about the raid
Witch hunt has its own dynamics and it is not necessary to get any facts to inflict great damage. Mueller, the key person in 8/11
investigation, is first and foremost a loyal neocon/neolib establishment stooge, not so much a lawyer. So the shadow of McCarthyism
fall on the Washitnton, DC.
Felix Sater was FBI asset from the very beginning.
Which such Byzantium politics in Washington and intrigues between almost identical parties worth of Madrid court it is not
accidental that FBI coves with upper hand in its struggle with Russian intelligence, Russians can't get such training in
viciousness, double dealing and false flag operations anywhere.
Notable quotes:
"... Disappearing for the midterms , Russiagate has re-emerged front and center. This week's barrage of developments in the cases of indicted Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and George Papadopoulos have renewed long-running declarations of a presidency in peril . ..."
"... They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. ..."
"... Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already been resolved. The FBI began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails. ..."
"... The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information that led to his investigation is even more suspect. ..."
"... But its a key source for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime... ..."
"... Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case underscored that he worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is not Russia, but Israel . ..."
"... Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank." ..."
"... It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying stint in Ukraine. ..."
They coincide with a fresh round of alarm over the fate of Mueller's investigation following Trump's ouster of attorney
general Jeff Sessions and the installation of Matthew Whitaker in his place. Leading Democrats now see the probe as so paramount
that, despite having re-captured the House running on health-care issues, protecting the investigation has been deemed "our top priority"
(Representative Jerry Nadler) and "at the top of the agenda," (Representative Adam Schiff).
There is nothing objectionable about wanting to safeguard the Mueller investigation, nor about concerns that Trump's appointment
of an unqualified loyalist may jeopardize it. Mueller should complete his work, unimpeded. The question is one of priorities. After
all, the fixation on Mueller has not just raised anticipation of Trump's indictment, or even impeachment -- it has also
overshadowed many of
the actual policies that those seeking his political demise oppose him for. At this highly charged moment, it seems prudent to re-consider
whether the probe remains worthy of such attention and high hopes.
Although Mueller's final report has yet to be released, the issue that sparked the FBI investigation he inherited has already
been resolved. The FBI
began eyeing potential Trump-Russia ties in July 2016 after getting a tip that unpaid campaign aide George Papadopoulos may have
been informed that Russia was in possession of stolen Democratic Party emails well before WikiLeaks made them public. But that trail
went cold. It turns out that a London-based professor, Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos that the Russian government might possess
thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails.
The FBI interviewed Mifsud in Washington, DC, in February 2017, but Mueller has never alleged that Mifsud works with the Russian
government. Papadopoulos was ultimately sentenced to just 14 days behind bars for lying to the FBI about the timing and nature of
his contacts with Mifsud. He reported to a federal prison on Monday.
The Russia probe's other instigating figure, Carter Page, was also a low-level, unpaid campaign official. The information
that led to his investigation is even more suspect. In its October 2016 application for a surveillance warrant on Page,
the FBI claimed it "believes that [Russia's]
efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [the Trump campaign]." But its a key source
for that supposition turned out to be the Steele dossier -- the salacious, Democratic Party-funded opposition research compiled by
former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. And while the FBI got Papadopoulos on lying to them, Page has not been accused of any crime...
With the Russia investigation's catalysts coming up all but empty, there is little reason to expect that the remaining campaign
members who face prison time will reverse that trend. Former national security adviser Michael Flynn awaits sentencing in the coming
weeks on charges similar to Papadopoulos's. Just as the evidence used in Manafort's bank and tax fraud case
underscored that he
worked against Russian interests in Ukraine , Flynn's indictment turns up another inconvenient fact for the collusion
hopeful: The foreign government that Flynn colluded with on Trump's behalf -- against the US government -- is
not Russia, but Israel .
Despite much hoopla to the contrary, Muller's new indictment of former Trump fixer Michael Cohen contains more inconvenient facts.
Cohen has pleaded guilty to a single count for lying to Congress about his role in a failed attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
According to the plea document, Cohen gave Congress false written answers in order to "minimize links," between the Moscow project
and Trump, and to "give the false impression" that it was abandoned earlier than it actually was. Cohen
told the court that
he made these statements to "be loyal" to Trump and to be consistent with his "political messaging."
As I noted in The Nation
in October 2017 , the attempted real-estate venture in Russia "does raise a potential conflict of interest" for Trump, who
"pursued a Moscow deal as he praised Putin on the campaign trail." But nothing in Cohen's indictment incriminates Trump. Much of
what it details was previously known, and rather than revealing an illicit, transatlantic collusion scheme, it reads more like a
slapstick mafia buddy comedy. As
Buzzfeed News reported in May , Cohen communicated extensively with Trump organization colleague Felix Sater -- identified
in the Cohen plea as "Individual 2″ -- who had promised to secure Russian financing for the proposed Moscow project. But the
Russians never signed on, and Cohen only grew increasingly frustrated with Sater's failure to live up to his lofty pledges. "You
are putting my job in jeopardy and making me look incompetent," Cohen wrote Sater on December 31, 2015. "I gave you two months and
the best you send me is some bullshit garbage invite by some no name clerk at a third-tier bank."
Cohen then took matters into his own hands. As was previously known, he did not have an email address for a Russian contact, so
he wrote to a generic email address at the office of Dmitri Peskov, the press secretary for Vladimir Putin ("Russian Official 1,"
in the indictment). We now learn from Cohen that he managed to reach Peskov's assistant, who asked him "detailed questions and took
notes." But as The New York Times noted when the Trump
Moscow story first emerged: "The project never got [Russian] government permits or financing, and died weeks later." Sater tried
to save the project. He discussed arranging visits to Russia by both Cohen and Trump, but Cohen ultimately backed out after allegations
of Russian email hacking surfaced in June 2016.
According to Buzzfeed , Sater even proposed giving Putin a $50 million penthouse as an enticement, but "the plan never went anywhere
because the tower deal ultimately fizzled, and it is not clear whether Trump knew of "Sater's idea."
Cohen now claims that he spoke to Trump about the project more than the three times that he informed Congress about. For their
part, Trump's attorneys
do not seem concerned, saying that his recently submitted answers to Mueller align with Cohen's account. That Cohen perjured
himself to Congress raises problems for him, but it is hard to see how his lies about a project that failed and a proposed trip to
Russia that never happened can hurt Trump. That could only change if, as part of his new cooperation deal with Mueller, Cohen has
more to give.
As for Manafort, his case took a major turn when Mueller canceled their cooperation agreement and accused him of "crimes and lies."
The crucial questions are what does Mueller allege he lied to him about and what evidence is there to substantiate that charge. Mueller
is expected to provide details in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we can only speculate.
The revelation that
Manafort's lawyers shared information with Trump's attorneys even after the plea deal was struck in September has inevitably
fueled speculation that Manafort is lying to benefit Trump, or even hide evidence of a Russia conspiracy. That is certainly possible.
But theories that Manafort is then banking on a pardon from Trump do not square with the
prevailing
view that his
agreement with Mueller -- which included admitting to crimes that could be re-charged in state court -- was "
pardon proof ."
It is also possible that Manafort's alleged lies have nothing to do with a Russia conspiracy; after all, his case, and that
of his deputy Rick Gates, pertained not to Russia or the 2016 campaign, but instead to financial crimes during Manafort's lobbying
stint in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal suggests that is the case,
reporting that Manafort's alleged lies "don't appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election
that Mr. Mueller is investigating." Earlier this month,
ABC News claimed , citing "multiple sources," that Mueller's investigators are "not getting what they want" from Manafort's cooperation
deal. When it comes to collusion, perhaps there is just nothing to get.
Watergate had tragic Shakespearean overtones , with Nixon as King Lear, but Russia-Gate -
perhaps the last gate America goes through on its giant slalom run to collapse - is but a
Chinese Fire Drill writ large.
The reason? In 1973, we were still a serious people. Today, the most lavishly credentialed
elite in history believe the most preposterous "stories," or, surely even worse, pretend to
believe them for political advantage.
Now, an epic battle of wills is setting up as Robert Mueller's investigation concludes its
business and its primary target, the Golden Golem of Greatness, girds his loins to push back.
Behind the flimsy scrim of Russia collusion accusations stands a bewildering maze of criminal
mischief by a matrix of federal agencies that lost control of their own dark operation to
meddle in the 2016 election.
The US intel community (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc), with the Department of Justice, all colluded
with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the intel agencies of the UK and Australia, to derail Mr.
Trump as a stooge of Russia and, when he shocked them by getting elected, mounted a desperate
campaign to cover their asses knowing he had become their boss.
The Obama White House was involved in all this, attempting to cloak itself in plausible
deniability, which may be unwinding now, too. How might all this play out from here?
One big mystery is how long will Mr. Trump wait to declassify any number of secret files,
memoranda, and communications that he's been sitting on for months .
My guess is that this stuff amounts to a potent weapon against his adversaries and he will
wait until Mr. Mueller releases a final report before declassifying it. Then, we'll have a fine
constitutional crisis as the two sides vie for some sort of adjudication.
Who, for instance, will adjudicate the monkey business that is already on-the-record
involving misdeeds in the Department of Justice itself? Will the DOJ split into two contesting
camps, each charging the other? How might that work? Does the Acting Attorney General Mr.
Whitaker seek indictments against figures such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, et
al. Will he also rope in intel cowboys John Brennan and James Clapper? Might Hillary find
herself in jeopardy -- all the while on the other side Mr. Mueller pursues his targets,
characters like Mr. Manafort, Michael Cohen, and the hapless Carter Page?
Or might Mr. Mueller, and others, possibly find themselves in trouble, as spearheads of a
bad-faith campaign to weaponize government agencies against a sitting president? That might
sound outlandish, but the evidence is adding up. In fact the evidence of a Deep State gone
rogue is far more compelling than any charges Mr. Mueller has so far produced on Trump-Russia
"collusion." An example of bad faith is former FBI Director James Comey's current campaign to
avoid testifying in closed session before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- he
filed a motion just before Thanksgiving. Mr. Comey is pretending that an open session would be
"transparent." His claim is mendacious. If he were questioned about classified matters in an
open session, he would do exactly what he did before in open session: decline to answer about
"sensitive" matters on the basis of national security. He could make no such claims in a closed
session. The truth is, his attorneys are trying to run out the clock on the current composition
of the house committees, which will come under a Democrat majority in January, so that Mr.
Comey can avoid testifying altogether.
There are other dicey matters awaiting some kind of adjudication elsewhere.
For instance, who is going to review the chain of decisions among the FISA judges who
approved of warrants made in bad faith to spy on US citizens? Perhaps the shrinking violet, Mr.
Huber, out in the Utah Prosecutor's Office of the DOJ, is looking into all that. He's been at
something for most of the year (nobody knows what). He has to answer to Mr. Whitaker now, or
the permanent AG who replaces him. And why is Mr. Trump dragging his heels on nominating a
permanent AG? I suppose the FISA court matter will fall to the Supreme Court, but how does that
process work, and how long might it take?
The potential for a stand-off exists that will confound any effort to untangle these things,
and I can see how that might lead to an extraordinary crisis in which Mr. Trump has to declare
some form of emergency or perhaps martial law to clean out this suppurating abscess of
illegality and sedition .
That can only be the last and worst resort, but what if the US judicial system just can't
manage to clean up the mess it has made?
If Trump doesn't go on a major offensive within the next couple of weeks he's fucked
because once the new ... House is sworn in on January 3rd he will be dealing with so many
different distractions at the same time it will make his attempt to fight back almost
impossible...
If Kunstler is right in his prediction of collapse. The Deep State is going to go the way
of the Stasi. Systemic collapse will usher in a purge the scope of which none of us can
fathom.
The CIA was running the entire show. The FBI was the CIA's dog.
Stefan Halper has been mislabeled by MSM as an FBI informant. Stefan Halper is a CIA
operative. He is the smoking gun.
Both the CIA and MI6 were colluding to prevent Trump from being elected and then working a
coup after election.
It all leads back to former CIA director Brennan and national security advisor Clapper.
Both worked under the authority of Obama, thus both believe what they were doing was
authorized by Obama, particularly Clapper who took his marching orders from Obama. They both
believed Clinton would win and everything would be brushed under the rug as usual.
Mueller is a cover up man and yes man with plenty of felonies. Rosenstein wrote the memo
Comey needed to be fired, because he wanted to replace Comey with Mueller. Rosenstein worried
Comey would talk, would begin to release data and start investigation to protect himself and
the FBI, so when Trump refused to appoint Mueller to FBI director, Rosenstein appointed
Mueller to take out Trump.
The MSM and everyone says how good Mueller is, but he's committed countless felonies and
no one at the DOJ has honor to be an American. The DOJ is political and is against this
nation, against the truth.
Sessions was cover up man and a yes man. He was also afraid of being indicted by Mueller.
His main purpose was illegal immigration, that's all he cared about. He didn't care what
happened to Trump and figured Pence would let him stay because of his mission on illegal
immigration and cannabis. Sessions believed he would roll back the legalization of cannabis
and Pence would follow him. Sessions believed Trump was soft on cannabis. That seems petty,
but that's the way Sessions thought.
No one follows the law anymore, this has trickled down to the people. These people have
set a bad example and the people have no respect for the system anymore.
The only way to make it respected again is for these criminals like Mueller, must be
killed. But because of the malaise caused by the criminals no one cares about America
anymore. No one cares enough to kill criminals like Mueller. The MSM is responsible for doing
incredible damage to the character of our nation. It's because of them all of this happened
because they will not tell the truth.
Just 6 corporations - all interlocking - own 95% of America's mainstream media. There's
the problem. Evil controls the narrative and fools the public. For example, ANTIFA - who are
they really, what are their roots, where do they come from? None of THIS will you get from
the MSM:
"The potential for a stand-off exists that will confound any effort to untangle these
things... might lead to an extraordinary crisis in which Trump has to declare some form of
emergency or perhaps martial law to clean out this suppurating abscess of illegality and
sedition ..."
The crooks will not give up without a fight and Trump will have to call in the
military?
Michael Cohen To Plead Guilty To Lying About Trump Russian Real-Estate Deal
by Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/29/2018 - 09:19 128 SHARES
Four months after
he pleaded guilty to campaign finance law violations, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has
copped to new charges of lying to congressional committees investigating Trump-Russia
collusion, according to
ABC . His latest plea is part of a new deal reached with Special Counsel Robert Mueller,
which had been said to be winding down before its latest burst of activity, including an
investigation into Roger Stone's alleged ties to Wikileaks. Stone ally
Jerome Corsi this week said he had refused to strike a plea deal with Mueller's
investigators, who had accused him of lying.
To hold up his end of the deal, Cohen sat for 70 hours of testimony with the Mueller probe,
he said Monday during an appearance at a federal courthouse in Manhattan where he officially
pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements.
According to
the Hill, Cohen's alleged lies stem from testimony he gave in 2017, when he told the House
Intelligence Committee that a planned real-estate deal to build the Trump Moscow Hotel had been
abandoned in January 2016 after the Trump Organization decided that "the proposal was not
feasible." While Cohen's previous plea was an agreement with federal prosecutors in New York,
this marks the first time Cohen has been charged by Mueller.
As part of his plea Cohen admitted to lying in a written statement to Congress about his
role in brokering a deal for a Trump Tower Moscow - the aborted project to build a
Trump-branded hotel in the Russian capitol. As has been previously reported, Cohen infamously
contacted a press secretary for President Putin to see if Putin could help with some red tape
to help start development, though the project was eventually abandoned.
Though, according to Cohen's plea, discussions about the project continued through the first
six months of the Trump administration. Cohen had discussed the Trump Moscow project with Trump
as recently as August 2017, per a report in the
Guardian.
As a reporter for NBC News pointed out on twitter, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman
Richard Burr and ranking member Mark Warner foreshadowed today's plea back in August after
Cohen pleaded guilty to the campaign finance violations.
Also notable: The plea comes just as President Trump is leaving for a 10-hour flight to
Argentina. In recent days, Trump appeared to step up attacks on the Mueller probe, comparing it
to
McCarthyism and questioning why the DOJ didn't pursue charges against the Clintons.
Cohen will be sentenced on Dec. 12, as scheduled. By cooperating, Cohen is hoping to avoid
prison, according to his lawyer. While this was probably lost on prosecutors, Cohen's admission
smacks of the "lair's paradox."
Senate Republicans have offered President Trump a degree of relief from his Mueller-related
anxieties by blocking a bill that would have protected the Mueller probe from being disbanded
by the president, but with the special counsel continuing his pursuit of
Roger Stone and
Jerome Corsi , and Congressional Democrats sharpening their knives in anticipation of
taking back the House in January, President Trump is once again lashing out at Mueller and the
FBI, declaring that the probe is an "investigation in search of a crime" and
once again highlighting the hypocrisy in the FBI's decision to give the Clintons a pass for
their "atrocious, and perhaps subversive" crimes.
Reiterating his claims that the Mueller probe bears many similarities to Sen. Joseph
McCarthy's infamous anti-Communist witch hunt, Trump also blasted the DOJ for "shattering so
many innocent lives" and "wasting more than $40,000,000."
"Did you ever see an investigation more in search of a crime? At the same time Mueller and
the Angry Democrats aren't even looking at the atrocious, and perhaps subversive, crimes that
were committed by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. A total disgrace!"
"When will this illegal Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt, one that has shattered so many
innocent lives, ever end-or will it just go on forever? After wasting more than $40,000,000
(is that possible?), it has proven only one thing-there was NO Collusion with Russia. So
Ridiculous!"
As CBS
News' Mark Knoller notes , this is the 2nd day in a row, Pres Trump likening the Mueller
investigation to the Joe McCarthy witch hunt of the 50s , known for making reckless and
unsubstantiated accusations against officials he suspect of communist views. McCarthy was
eventually censured by the Senate in 1954.
Last night, President Trump threatened to release a trove of
"devastating" classified documents about the Mueller probe if Democrats follow through with
their threatened investigations. He also declared that a pardon for soon-to-be-sentenced former
Trump Campaign executive Paul Manafort was still "on
the table.
My suspicion is that the left, since the special counsel was never actually given a
legitimate crime to investigate, will want this left in place permanently. That's just my
guess though.
Without a crime however, it's hard to argue that the special counsel has any legitimacy,
since the law specifies that there must be a crime.
With that said, how can the results of what Mueller does be looked at as anything but
illegitimate?
Yes, and that I can agree with you on, however, the focus of the investigation has been
misplaced on Trump when it should have been on the Clintons. So again I can say that the
legitimacy of the counsel is in question because with Trump there was no crime.
If anything the criminal activity was perpetrated on Trump by the deep state.
The difference is that McCarthy was right about everything. The similarity is that the
press wanted to talk about everything but the contents of McCarthy's folders. It's like the
Podesta emails - "Russia hacked muh emails!" but no one seems to want to discuss their
contents.
My comments here may try to be humorous but this video needs watched to fully understand
the Mueller probe--and forward to friends........... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aevtHHULag
Trump is right that Mueller is trying to create a crime where there is nothing but
politics as it is played today. Listen to former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who now
characterizes the Mueller investigation as 'a clown show', explain in great detail:
The crimes have been found.....and HRC and the democrats and their fbi pals committed
them. Mueller is not "in search of crimes", he's in search of crimes by trump associated
people.
You can see many similarities between the way the Democrats handled the Kavanaugh
nomination and Muellers investigation. If the GOP is smart they will start consolidating all
the facts about the FISA abuse, FBI abuse, IRS abuse, Mueller abuse and start a campaign
about it in time for the 2020 elections. If the Democrats were smart they would drop this
ASAP since it isn't going any where and hope people forget about it. Somehow, I doubt that
the Democrats are that smart... After all there was a movie about Watergate... and seems like
a lot of these people are trying to live Watergate all over again, but it's really about an
abuse of power, by the government and the media.
**** off, the government isnt going to do a ******* thing to these enterprise
criminals.
I find it completely demoralizing and a slap in the face to a country when you have these
enterprise criminals not being indicted and a president threatening to expose them because HE
doesnt like something. This is not about you Trump, this is about THE UNITED STATES.
I mean come-on Trump stop with the BS. DO YOUR ******* JOB.
What in the hell people, I personally find this to be a constant gut punch when these
criminals just commit crimes over and over and it becomes a Hannity or Limbaugh bullet point
for 3 hours.
How ******* stupid of Americans to sit idle while all of this in your face bank robbing
going on. Put another way the bank robber walks from the door of a bank with a sack of cash
to the car and the police say oh look a bank robber, and they turn to their partner and shrug
their shoulders drinking covfeffe
It's the Anglo-zionist entente that meddled in U.S. elections and if Americans don't get
upset about that then they are cucks who deserve their servile fate.
"In his foreword to my book, Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the
old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they
wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a
technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, " Show me the man
and I'll find you the crime ." That really is something that has survived the Soviet
Union and has arrived in the good old USA. "Show me the man," says any federal prosecutor,
"and I can show you the crime." This is not an exaggeration. "
The only reason Mueller exists is for Trump to flog the Dems with. Thats the only reason
Trump keeps him around. The problem is losing the house means losing the power of subpoena,
so this should get interesting. The Repubs have it in for Trump too. Why else would they lose
a supermajority and the power of subpoena while still retaining the power to crush any bill
that the House pushes through? He's doomed, unless he can pull a rabbit out of his ***.
You don't actually believe that, do you? I suppose you still actually believe that they
even bother to count the votes. Trump was INSTALLED, not elected.
To create the illusion of division, which in turn keeps the population divided. It's
theater. Look at everything that's gone down; it's way too stupid to be real and I am
referring to both sides when I say that. The whole thing is custom tailored to stir the
emotions of a population with an average IQ of 100.
The fact that anybody is still clinging to hope in political solutions to anything is
sad and pathetic.
I don't think the political system will solve any of my problems, but Obama made it
abundantly clear that the political system will create plenty of problems.
Does anyone still believe that we have a political solution to our challenges.
1) More invaders than ever flooding our country.
2) Our most notorious criminals still walking our streets.
3) Fed, et al still manipulating our economy.
4) Law abiding citizens still being thrown into jail.
5) Surveillance state becoming ever more all seeing, and all invasive.
6) The push to war stronger than it has ever been in recent times.
7) Over 150 military bases strung across the planet.
8) Open criminality and rampant lies by press and politicians... I realize I already made
mention of the criminals, but thought this deserved emphasis.
9) Big news today... Supremes may limit the degree to which local government can encroach
on eighth amendment... wow... that this is even a debate.
10) The white population is being ordered into silence and obscurity... though no one has
forgotten to collect taxes... while the chimps and thugs are being encouraged to loot what is
left of the asylum...
I could go on... tell me, what is your vote going to accomplish? We are living on borrowed
time, and time has just about run out...
That's why voting is a waste of time because you're simply exchanging one sociopath for
another and I gave up on the notion long ago that we're living in the "land of the free".
That's the biggest line of BS the state has ever pushed but the rubes still believe it.
Progressive income tax, property taxes, central banking and they're all tenet's of communism,
in fact we have attained all ten planks of the communist manifesto. Read the IRS code or the
federal register and you'll see exactly how much freedom you have.
all you need to know about Mueller is his professional position on 9/11/01. From Judicial
Watch:
Under Mueller's leadership, the FBI tried to discredit the story, publicly countering
that agents found no connection between the Sarasota Saudi family and the 2001 terrorist
plot. The reality is that the FBI's own files contained several reports that said the
opposite, according to the Ft. Lauderdale-based news group's ongoing investigation . Files
obtained by reporters in the course of their lengthy probe reveal that federal agents found
"many connections" between the family and "individuals associated with the terrorist attacks
on 9/11/2001." The FBI was forced to release the once-secret reports because the news group
sued in federal court when the information wasn't provided under the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA).
Though the recently filed court documents reveal Mueller received a briefing about the
Sarasota Saudi investigation, the FBI continued to publicly deny it existed and it appears
that the lies were approved by Mueller. Not surprisingly, he didn't respond to questions
about this new discovery emailed to his office by the news organization that uncovered it.
Though the mainstream media has neglected to report this relevant development, it's difficult
to ignore that it chips away at Mueller's credibility as special counsel to investigate if
Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election. Even before the Saudi coverup documents
were exposed by nonprofit journalists, Mueller's credentials were questionable to head any
probe. Back in May Judicial Watch reminded of Mueller's
misguided handiwork and collaboration with radical Islamist organizations as FBI
director.
"... Everyone knows it's the US presence in the Middle East which creates terrorists, both as proxies of and in resistance to the US imperial presence (and often one and then the other). So reading Orwellian language, Pompeo is saying the US wants to maximize Islamic terrorism in order to provide a pretext for creeping totalitarianism at home and abroad. ..."
"... The real reason is to maintain the petrodollar system, but there seems to be a conspiracy of silence never to mention it among both supporters and opponents of Trump. ..."
"... everyone knows why the usa is in the middle east.. to support the war industry, which is heavily tied to the financial industry.. up is down and down is up.. that is why the usa is great friends with ksa and israel and a sworn enemy of iran... what they don't say is they are a sworn enemy of humanity and the thought that the world can continue with their ongoing madness... ..."
"... The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF ..."
Trump also floated the idea of removing U.S. troops from the Middle East, citing the lower price of oil as a reason to withdraw.
"Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel ," Trump said. "Oil is becoming less and less
of a reason because we're producing more oil now than we've ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point
where you don't have to stay there."
It is only Israel, it is no longer the oil, says Trump. But the nuclear armed Israel does not need U.S. troops for its protection.
And if it is no longer the oil, why is the U.S. defending the Saudis?
Trump's Secretary of State Mike Pompeo disagrees with his boss. In a Wall Street journal op-ed today he claims that
The U.S.-Saudi Partnership
Is Vital because it includes much more then oil:
[D]egrading U.S.-Saudi ties would be a grave mistake for the national security of the U.S. and its allies.
The kingdom is a powerful force for stability in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is working to secure Iraq's fragile democracy
and keep Baghdad tethered to the West's interests, not Tehran's. Riyadh is helping manage the flood of refugees fleeing Syria's
civil war by working with host countries, cooperating closely with Egypt, and establishing stronger ties with Israel. Saudi
Arabia has also contributed millions of dollars to the U.S.-led effort to fight Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.
Saudi oil production and economic stability are keys to regional prosperity and global energy security.
Where and when please has Saudi Arabia "managed the flood of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war". Was that when it
emptied its jails of violent criminals and sent them to wage jihad against the Syrian people? That indeed 'managed' to push
millions to flee from their homes.
Saudi Arabia might be many things but "a powerful force for stability" it is not. Just ask 18 million Yemenis who, after years
of Saudi bombardment, are near to death for lack of
food .
Pompeo's work for the Saudi dictator continued today with a Senate briefing on Yemen. The Senators will soon vote on a resolution
to end the U.S. support for the war. In his prepared remarks Pompeo wrote:
The suffering in Yemen grieves me, but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot
worse.
What could be worse than a famine that threatens two third of the population?
If the U.S. and Britain would not support the Saudis and Emirates the war would end within a day or two. The Saudi and UAE
planes are maintained by U.S. and British specialists. The Saudis still
seek 102 more U.S. military personal to
take care of their planes. It would be easy for the U.S. to stop such recruiting of its veterans.
It is the U.S. that
holds up an already
watered down UN Security Council resolution that calls for a ceasefire in Yemen:
The reason for the delay continues to be a White House worry about angering Saudi Arabia, which strongly opposes the resolution,
multiple sources say. CNN reported earlier this month that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, "threw a fit" when
presented with an early draft of the document, leading to a delay and further discussions among Western allies on the matter.
There is really nothing in Trump's list on which the Saudis consistently followed through. His alliance with MbS brought him
no gain and a lot of trouble.
Trump protected MbS from the consequences of murdering Jamal Khashoggi. He hoped to gain leverage with that. But that is not
how MbS sees it. He now knows that Trump will not confront him no matter what he does. If MbS "threws a fit" over a UN Security
Council resolution, the U.S. will drop it. When he launches his next 'adventure', the U.S. will again cover his back. Is this
the way a super power is supposed to handle a client state?
If Trump's instincts really tell him that U.S. troops should be removed from the Middle East and Afghanistan, something I doubt,
he should follow them. Support for the Saudi war on Yemen will not help to achieve that. Pandering to MbS is not MAGA.
Posted by b on November 28, 2018 at 03:12 PM |
Permalink
Comments Pompeo: "Saudi Arabia has also contributed millions of dollars to the U.S.-led effort to fight Islamic State and other
terrorist organizations."
Everyone knows it's the US presence in the Middle East which creates terrorists, both as proxies of and in resistance to
the US imperial presence (and often one and then the other). So reading Orwellian language, Pompeo is saying the US wants to maximize
Islamic terrorism in order to provide a pretext for creeping totalitarianism at home and abroad.
The real reason is to maintain the petrodollar system, but there seems to be a conspiracy of silence never to mention it among
both supporters and opponents of Trump.
There is really nothing in Trump's list on which the Saudis consistently followed through. His alliance with MbS brought him
no gain and a lot of trouble.
He did get to fondle the orb - although fuck knows what weirdness was really going on there.
thanks b... pompeo is a very bad liar... in fact - everything he says is about exactly the opposite, but bottom line is he is
a bad liar as he is thoroughly unconvincing..
everyone knows why the usa is in the middle east.. to support the war industry, which is heavily tied to the financial
industry.. up is down and down is up.. that is why the usa is great friends with ksa and israel and a sworn enemy of iran... what
they don't say is they are a sworn enemy of humanity and the thought that the world can continue with their ongoing madness...
oh, but don't forget to vote, LOLOL.... no wonder so many are strung out on drugs, and the pharma industry... opening up to
the msm is opening oneself up to the world george orwell described many years ago...
Take a wafer or two of silicon and just add water. The oil obsession has been eclipsed and within 20 years will be in absolute
disarray. The warmongers will invent new excuses.
A hypothetical: No extraordinary amounts of hydrocarbons exist under Southwest Asian ground; just an essential amount for domestic
consumption; in that case, would Zionistan exist where it's currently located and would either Saudi Arabia, Iraq and/or Iran
have any significance aside from being consumers of Outlaw US Empire goods? Would the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes/Picot
Secret Treaty have been made? If the Orinoco Oil Belt didn't exist, would Venezuela's government be continually targeted for Imperial
control? If there was no Brazilian offshore oil, would the Regime Change effort have been made there? Here the hypotheticals end
and a few basic yet important questions follow.
Previous to the 20th Century, why were Hawaii and Samoa wrested from their native residents and annexed to Empire? In what
way did the lowly family farmers spread across 19th Century United States further the growth of its Empire and contribute to the
above named annexations? What was the unspoken message sent to US elites contained within Frederic Jackson Turner's 1893 Frontier
Thesis ? Why is the dominant language of North America English, not French or Spanish?
None of these are rhetorical. All second paragraph questions I asked of my history students. And all have a bearing on b's
fundamental question.
b says, "And it its no longer the oil, why is the U.S. defending the Saudis?"
The US has a vital interest in protecting the narrative of 9/11. The Saudis supplied the patsies. Mossad and dual-citizen neocons
were the architects of the event. Hence, the US must avoid a nasty divorce from the Saudis. The Saudis are in a perfect blackmailing
position.
Of course, most Americans have no idea that the U.S. Shale Oil Industry is nothing more than a Ponzi Scheme because of the
mainstream media's inability to report FACT from FICTION. However, they don't deserve all of the blame as the shale energy
industry has done an excellent job hiding the financial distress from the public and investors by the use of highly technical
jargon and BS.
S.A. is a thinly disguised US military base, hence the "strategic importance" and the relevance of the new Viceroy's previous
experience as a Four Star General. It's doubtful that any of the skilled personnel in the SA Air Force are other than former US/Nato.
A few princes might fancy themselves to be daring fighter pilots. In case of a Anglo-Zio war with Iran SA would be the most forward
US aircraft carrier. The Empire is sustained by its presumed military might and prizes nothing more than its strategically situated
bases. Saud would like to capture Yemen's oil fields, but the primary purpose of the air war is probably training. That of course
is more despicably cynical than mere conquest and genocide.
Trump is the ultimate deceiver/liar. Great actor reading from a script. The heel in the Fake wrestling otherwise known as US politics.
It almost sounds as if he is calling for an end of anymore significant price drops now that he has got Powell on board to limit
interest rate hikes. After all if you are the worlds biggest producer you dont want prices too low. These markets are all manipulated.
I cant imagine how much insider trading is going on. If you look at the oil prices, they started dropping in October with Iran
sanctions looming (before it was announced irans shipments to its 8 biggest buyers would be exempt) and at the height of the Khashoggi
event where sanctions were threatened and Saudi was making threats of their own. In a real free market prices increase amidst
supply uncertainty.
Regardless of what he says he wants and gets now, he is already planning a reversal. Thats how the big boys win, they know
whats coming and when the con the smaller fish to swim one way they are lined up with a big mouth wide open. Controlled chaos
and confusion. For every winner there must be a loser and the losers assets/money are food for the Gods of Money and War
As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. My money is on the US to be in Yemen to protect them
from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis while in reality we will be there to secure the enormous oil fields
in the North. Perhaps this was what the Khashoggi trap was all about. The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to
deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international finance/IMF
@ Pft who wrote: "The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order
to feed international finance/IMF"
BINGO!!! Those that control finance control most/all of everything else.
Saudi Arabia literally owns close to 8% of the United States economy through various financial instruments. Their public investment
funds and dark pools own large chunks from various strategic firms resting at the apex of western power such as Blackstone. Trump
and Pompeo would be stupid to cut off their nose to spite their face... It's all about the petrodollar, uncle sam will ride and
die with saudi barbaria. If push comes to shove and the saudis decide to untether themselves from the Empire, their sand kingdom
will probably be partitioned.
The oil certainly still plays an important role, the u.s. cannot maintain the current frack oil output for long. For Tronald's
term in office it will suffice, but hardly longer. (The frack gas supplies are much more substantial.)
Personal interests certainly also play a role, and finally one should not make u.s. foreign policy more rational than it is.
Much is also done because of traditions and personal convictions. Often they got it completely wrong and the result was a complete
failure.
Let us watch what Trump does with this or if the resolution makes it to daylight:
Senate advances Yemen resolution in rebuke to Trump
The Senate issued a sharp rebuke Wednesday to President Trump, easily advancing a resolution that would end U.S. military support
for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen's civil war despite a White House effort to quash the bill.
The administration launched an eleventh-hour lobbying frenzy to try to head off momentum for the resolution, dispatching
Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Capitol Hill in the morning and issuing a veto threat
less than an hour before the vote started.
But lawmakers advanced the resolution, 63-37, even as the administration vowed to stand by Saudi Arabia following outcry
over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"There's been a lot of rhetoric that's come from the White House and from the State Department on this issue," said Sen.
Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. "The rhetoric that I've heard and the broadcasts that we've
made around the world as to who we are have been way out of balance as it relates to American interests and American values."
[/] LINK
TheHill
But Mattis says there is no smoking gun to tie the Clown Thug-Prince to Kashoggi's killing.
TheHill
And Lyias @ 2 is a bingo. Always follow the fiat.
Soon, without any announcements, if they wish to maintain selling oil to China, KSA will follow Qatar. It will be priced in
Yuan...especially given the escalating U.S. trade war with China.
2019 holds interesting times. Order a truckload of popcorn.
Midwest For Truth , Nov 28, 2018 7:29:46 PM |
link
You would have to have your head buried in the sand to not see that the Saudi "Kings" are crypto-Zionistas. Carl Sagan once said,
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even
to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." And Mark Twain also
wrote "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."
Gee, not one taker amongst all these intelligent folk. From last to first: 1588's Protestant Wind allowed Elizabeth and her cronies
to literally keep their heads as Nature helped Drake defeat the Spanish Armada; otherwise, there would be no British Empire root
to the USA, thus no USA and no future Outlaw US Empire, the British Isles becoming a Hapsburg Imperial Property, and a completely
different historical lineage, perhaps sans World Wars and atomic weapons.
Turner's message was with the Frontier closed the "safety valve" of continental expansion defusing political tensions based
on economic inequalities had ceased to be of benefit and future policy would need to deal with that issue thus removing the Fear
Factor from the natives to immigrants, and from wide-open spaces to the inner cities. Whipsawing business cycles driving urban
labor's unrest, populist People's Party politics, and McKinley's 1901 assassination further drove his points home.
Nationwide, family farmers demanded Federal government help to create additional markets for their produce to generate price
inflation so they could remain solvent and keep their homesteads, which translated into the need to conduct international commerce
via the seas which required coaling stations--Hawaii and Samoa, amongst others--and a Blue Water Navy that eventually led to Alfred
T. Mahan's doctrine of Imperial Control of the Oceans still in use today.
As with Gengis Khan's death in 1227 that stopped the Mongol expansion to the English Channel that changed the course of European
history, and what was seen as the Protestant Wind being Divine Intervention, global history has several similar inflection points
turning the tide from one path to another. We don't know yet if the Outlaw US Empire's reliance on Saudi is such, but we can see
it turning from being a great positive to an equally potential great negative for the Empire--humanity as a whole, IMO, will benefit
greatly from an implosion and the relationship becoming a Great Negative helping to strip what remains of the Emperor's Clothing
from his torso so that nations and their citizens can deter the oncoming financialized economic suicide caused by massive debt
and climate chaos.
Vico's circle is about to intersect with Hegel's dialectic and generate a new temporal phase in human history. Although many
will find it hard to tell, the current direction points to a difficult change to a more positive course for humanity as a whole,
but it's also possible that disaster could strike with humanity's total or near extinction being the outcome--good arguments can
be made for either outcome, which ought to unsettle everyone: Yes, the times are that tenuous. But then, I'm merely a lonely historian
aware of a great many things, including the pitfall inherent in trying to predict future events.
"The suffering in Yemen grieves me, but if the United States of America was not involved in Yemen, it would be a hell of a lot
worse." And I'll bet Pompeo said that with a straight face, too. lmfao
And as for "...keep[ing] Baghdad tethered to the West's interests and not Tehran's," I'm guessing the "secretary" would have
us all agree "yeah, fk Iraqi sovereignty anyway. Besides, it's not like they share a border with Iran, or anything. Oh,
wait..."
p.s. Many thanks for all you have contributed to collective knowledge, b; I will be contacting you about making a contribution
by snail mail (I hate PayPal, too).
"... a powerful force for stability in the Middle East."
"Instability" more like it.
Paid for military coup in Egypt. Funding anti-Syrian terrorists. Ongoing tensions with Iran. Zip-all for the Palestinians.
WTF in Yemen. Wahhabi crazy sh_t (via Mosque building) across Asia. Head and hand chopping Friday specials the norm -- especially
of their South-Asian slave classes. Ok, so females can now drive cars -- woohoo. A family run business venture manipulating the
global oil trade and supporting US-petro-$ hegemony recently out of goat herding and each new generation 'initiated' in some Houston
secret society toe-touching shower and soap ceremonies before placement in the ruling hierarchy back home. But enough; they being
Semites makes it an offence to criticize in some 'free' democratic world domains.
Instead of the "rebuke to Trump" meme circulating around, I found
this statement to be more accurate:
"'Cutting off military aid to Saudi Arabia is the right choice for Yemen, the right choice for our national security, and the
right choice for upholding the Constitution,' Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for policy and political affairs at Peace Action,
declared in a statement. ' Three years ago, the notion of Congress voting to cut off military support for Saudi Arabia would
have been politically laughable .'" [My Emphasis]
In other words, advancing Peace with Obama as POTUS wasn't going to happen, so this vote ought to be seen as an attack on Obama's
legacy as it's his policy that's being reconsidered and hopefully discontinued.
Trump, Israel and the Sawdi's. US no longer needs middle east oil for strategic supply. Trump is doing away with the petro-dollar
as that scam has run its course and maintenance is higher than returns. Saudi and other middle east oil is required for global
energy dominance.
Energy dominance, lebensraum for Israel and destroying the current Iran are all objectives that fit into one neat package.
Those plans look to be coming apart at the moment so it remains to be seen how fanatical Trump is on Israel and MAGA. MAGA
as US was at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As for pulling out of the Middle East Bibi must have had a good laugh. Remember when he said he wanted out of Syria. My money
is on the US to be in Yemen before too long to protect them from the Saudis (humanitarian) and Iranian backed Houthis, while in
reality it will be to secure the enormous oil fields in the North. Perhaps this was what the Khashoggi trap was all about.
The importance of oil is not to supply US markets its to deny it to enemies and control oil prices in order to feed international
finance/IMF .
@16 karlof1.. thanks for a broader historical perspective which you are able to bring to moa.. i enjoy reading your comments..
i don't have answers to ALL your questions earlier.. i have answers for some of them... you want to make it easy on us uneducated
folks and give us less questions, like b did in his post here, lol.... cheers james
The US Senate has advanced a measure to withdraw American support for a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen.
In a blow to President Donald Trump, senators voted 63-37 to take forward a motion on ending US support.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis had urged Senators not to back the motion, saying it would
worsen the situation in Yemen.
...
The vote in the Senate means further debate on US support for Saudi Arabia is expected next week.
However, correspondents say that even if the Senate ultimately passes the bipartisan resolution it has little chance of
being approved by the outgoing House of Representatives.
That is quite a slap for the Trump administration. It will have little consequences in the short term (or for Yemen) but it sets
a new direction in foreign polices towards the Saudis.
Pompeo is a Deep State Israel-firster with a nasty neocon agenda. It is to Trump's disgrace that he chose Pompeo and the abominable
Bolton. At least Trump admits the ME invasions are really about Israel.
Take a look at some of the - informed - comments below the vid to which you linked. Then think again about an 'all electric
civilisation within a few years'. Yes, and Father Christmas will be providing everything that everyone in the world needs for
a NAmerican/European standard of living within the same time frame. Er - not.
'Renewables' are not going to save hitech industrial 'civilisation' from The Long Descent/Catabolic Collapse (qv). Apart from
any other consideration - and there are some other equally intractable ones - there is no - repeat NO - 'renewable' energy system
which doesn't rely crucially on energy subsidies from the fossil-hydrocarbon fuels, both to build it and to maintain it. They're
not stand-alone, self-bootstrapping technologies. Nor is there any realistic prospect that they ever will be. Fully renewable-power
hitech industrial civilisation is a non-deliverable mirage which is just drawing us ever further into the desert of irreversible
peak-energy/peak-everythig-else.
@16 karlof1. I also find your historical references very interesting. We do indeed seem to be at a very low point in the material
cycle, it will reverse in due course as is its want, hopefully we will live to see a positive change in humanity.
For example we know Tesla didn't succeed in splitting the planet in half, the way techno-psychotics fantasize. As for that
silly link, how typical of techno-wingnuts to respond to prosaic physical facts with fantasies. Anything to prop up faith in the
technocratic-fundamentalist religion. Meanwhile "electrical civilization" has always meant and will always mean fracking and coal,
until the whole fossil-fueled extreme energy nightmare is over.
Given the proven fact that the extreme energy civilization has done nothing but embark upon a campaign to completely destroy
humanity and the Earth (like in your Tesla fantasy), why would a non-psychopath want to prop it up anyway?
It is still the oil, even for the US. The Persian Gulf supplies 20% of world consumption, and Western Europe gets 40% of its oil
from OPEC countries, most of that from the Gulf. Even the US still imports 10% of its total consumption.
Peter AU 1 | Nov 28, 2018 9:44:50 PM | 20
b | Nov 29, 2018 2:33:04 AM | 23
USD as a world reserve currency could be one factor between the important ones. With non US support the saud land could crash
under neighbours pressure, that caos may be not welcomed.
Humble people around where I live have mentioned that time is speeding up its velocity; there seems to be a spiritual (evolutionary)/physical
interface effect or something...
Tolstoy, in the long theory-of-history exposition at the end of War and Peace, challenges 'the great man' of History idea,
spreading in his time, at the dawning of the so-called: European Romantic period of Beethoven, Goerte and Wagner, when
the unique person was glorified in the name of art, truth, whatever (eventually this bubble burst too, in the 20th C. and IMO
because of too much fervent worship in the Cult of the Temple of the Money God. Dostoyevki's great Crime and Punishment is all
about this issue.)
Tolstoy tries to describe a scientifically-determined historical process, dissing the 'great man of History' thesis. He was
thinking of Napoleon Bonaparte of course, the run-away upstart repulican, anathema to the established order. Tolstoy describes
it in the opening scene of the novel: a fascinating parlor-room conversation between a "liberal" woman of good-birth in the elite
circles of society and a military captain at the party.
...only tenuously relevant to karlofi1's great post touching upon the Theory of History as such; thanks.
Now as to the question: ¿Why is Trump supporting Saudi Arabia? Let me think about that...
Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico "Theory" Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was
Planted By Russians
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/28/2018 - 20:25 105 SHARES
After The Guardian attempted to shovel what appears to be a wholly fabricated story down our
throats that Trump campaign manager met with Julian Assange at the London Embassy - Politico
allowed an ex-CIA agent to use their platform to come up with a ham-handed cover story ever;
Russia tricked The Guardian into publishing the Manafort-Assange propaganda.
To that end, The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Guardian ) ripped Politico an
entirely new oriface in a six-part Twitter dress down.
Greenwald also penned a
harsh rebuke to the Guardian 's "problematic" reporting in a Tuesday article titled: "It Is
Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other
Evidence Showing This."
In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of
viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly
sketchy aspects to the story.
It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself
"secretly" visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. It's possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim
Jong Un joined them.
And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form
of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it . Thus far, no such evidence has been
published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than
doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence
before forming a judgment?
The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough
people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story
would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets
would hyperventilate over it , and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of whether the
story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to
be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other. -
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
In short, The Guardian tried to proffer a load of easily disprovable claims - which if not
true, are pure propaganda. Once it began to blow up in their face, Politico let an
ex-CIA operative try to save face by suggesting Russia did it . Insanity at its finest.
Ever since Alan Rusbridger. left the Guardian as Chief Editor and made room for Assange
and Snowden etc., it seems that they have been infiltrated by the CIA and Luke H. gets
attention for his stories and Russia-hatred. The ENglish have been conditioned to hate Russia
and the Guardian will do anything to discredit Russia with whatever silly stories. Now they
are begging for money to survive: well, NO, because you went along with fake news to get some
money: corrupt, unlike Alan Rusbridger, Assange, Manning and Snowden.
Doesnt matter, 1/2 of our population is convinced, that our governmemt would never do to
the USA. what they do to other countries for the past 60 years.
Yep, the Russian Collusion / interference is so weak. Look at this story, it's breaking
and will be huge. Epstine's dirty details released, Muller looks pretty bad.
Funny stuff happens when a judge tells a plaintiff she has to
pay $341,500 for the legal expenses of a lawsuit she lost. All of a sudden
Stormy Daniels is saying her CPL, Michael Avenatti, was acting against her wishes:
Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico "Theory" Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was
Planted By Russians
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/28/2018 - 20:25 105 SHARES
After The Guardian attempted to shovel what appears to be a wholly fabricated story down our
throats that Trump campaign manager met with Julian Assange at the London Embassy - Politico
allowed an ex-CIA agent to use their platform to come up with a ham-handed cover story ever;
Russia tricked The Guardian into publishing the Manafort-Assange propaganda.
To that end, The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Guardian ) ripped Politico an
entirely new oriface in a six-part Twitter dress down.
Greenwald also penned a
harsh rebuke to the Guardian 's "problematic" reporting in a Tuesday article titled: "It Is
Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other
Evidence Showing This."
In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of
viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly
sketchy aspects to the story.
It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself
"secretly" visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. It's possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim
Jong Un joined them.
And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form
of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it . Thus far, no such evidence has been
published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than
doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence
before forming a judgment?
The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough
people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story
would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets
would hyperventilate over it , and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of whether the
story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to
be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other. -
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
In short, The Guardian tried to proffer a load of easily disprovable claims - which if not
true, are pure propaganda. Once it began to blow up in their face, Politico let an
ex-CIA operative try to save face by suggesting Russia did it . Insanity at its finest.
Ever since Alan Rusbridger. left the Guardian as Chief Editor and made room for Assange
and Snowden etc., it seems that they have been infiltrated by the CIA and Luke H. gets
attention for his stories and Russia-hatred. The ENglish have been conditioned to hate Russia
and the Guardian will do anything to discredit Russia with whatever silly stories. Now they
are begging for money to survive: well, NO, because you went along with fake news to get some
money: corrupt, unlike Alan Rusbridger, Assange, Manning and Snowden.
Doesnt matter, 1/2 of our population is convinced, that our governmemt would never do to
the USA. what they do to other countries for the past 60 years.
Yep, the Russian Collusion / interference is so weak. Look at this story, it's breaking
and will be huge. Epstine's dirty details released, Muller looks pretty bad.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
After Democratic party was co-opted by neoliberals there is no way back. And since Obama the trend of Democratic Party is
toward strengthening the wing of CIA-democratic notthe wing of the party friendly to workers. Bought by Wall Street leadership is
uncable of intruting any change that undermine thier current neoliberal platform. that's why they criminally derailed Sanders.
Notable quotes:
"... When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism. ..."
"... To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!" ..."
"... "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad." ..."
"... "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party." ..."
"... "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats ..."
"... It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class. ..."
"... First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious! ..."
"... from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/... ..."
they literally ripped this out of the 2016 Green Party platform. Jill Stein spoke repeatedly
about the same exact kind of Green New Deal, a full-employment, transition-to-100%-renewables
program that would supposedly solve all the world's problems.
When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address
the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism,
would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non
threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism.
In 2016, when the Greens made
this their central economic policy proposal, the Democrats responded by calling that platform
irresponsible and dangerous ("even if it's a good idea, you can't actually vote for a
non-two-party candidate!"). Why would they suddenly find a green new deal appealing now
except for its true purpose: left cover for the very system destroying the planet.
To quote
Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!"
"Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to
everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions
currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad."
Their political position not only lacks seriousness, unserious is their political
position.
"It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent
upon the Democratic Party."
For subjective-idealists, what you want to believe, think and feel is just so much more
convincing than objective reality. Especially when it covers over single-minded class
interests at play.
"And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical
policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and
exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth
face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of
world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting
the Democrats
It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically
fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient
facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of
establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with
delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of
their class.
First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the
Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back
into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious!
Only an International Socialist program led by Workers can truly lead a "green revolution" by
expropriating the billionaire oil barons of their capital and redirecting that wealth into
the socialist reconstruction of the entire economy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is a nice laugh. Really, it sure is funny hearing
these lies given any credence at all. This showmanship belongs in a fantasy book, not in real
life. The Democratic Party as a force for good social change Now that's a laugh!
Lies, empty promises, meaningless tautologies and morality plays, qualified and conditional
declarations to be backpedalled pending appropriate political expediencies, devoid any
practical content that is what AOC, card carrying member of DSA, and in fact young energetic
political apparatchik of calcified political body of Dems establishment, duty engulfs. And
working for socialist revolution is no one of them.
What kind of socialist would reject socialist revolution, class struggle and class
emancipation and choose, as a suppose socialist path, accommodation with oligarchic ruling
elite via political, not revolutionary process that would have necessarily overthrown ruling
elite.
What socialist would acquiesce to legalized exploitation of people for profit, legalized
greed and inequality and would negotiate away fundamental principle of egalitarianism and
working people self rule?
Only National Socialist would; and that is exactly what AOC campaign turned out to be all
about.
National Socialism with imperial flavor is her affiliation and what her praises for
Pelosi, wife of a billionaire and dead warmonger McCain proved.
Now she is peddling magical thinking about global change and plunge herself into falacy of
entrepreneurship, Market solution to the very problem that the market solutions were designed
to create and aggravate namely horrific inequality that is robbing people from their own
opportunities to mitigate devastating effects of global change.
The insidiousness of phony socialists expresses itself in the fact that they lie that any
social problem can be fixed by current of future technical means, namely via so called
technological revolution instead by socialist revolution they deem unnecessary or
detrimental.
The technical means for achieving socialism has existed since the late 19th century, with the
telegraph, the coal-powered factory, and modern fertilizer. The improvements since then have
only made socialism even more streamlined and efficient, if such technologies could only be
liberated from capital! The idea that "we need a new technological revolution just to achieve
socialism" reflects the indoctrination in capitalism by many "socialist" theorists because it
is only in capitalism where "technological growth" is essential simply to maintain the
system. It is only in capitalism (especially America, the most advanced capitalist nation,
and thus, the one where capitalism is actually closest towards total crisis) where the dogma
of a technological savior is most entrenched because America cannot offer any other kind of
palliative to the more literate and productive sections of its population. Religion will not
convince most and any attempt at a sociological or economic understanding would inevitably
prove the truth of socialism.
Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own
stooge on the line of fire.
Notable quotes:
"... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
"... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
"... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
"... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
"... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
"... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
"... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
"... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
Kremlin
critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned
with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe
against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected
investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after
being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in
connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder
accusing Russian officials of killing him.
Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with
Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new
criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his
extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money
laundering.
The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom
died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay
Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November
2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial
detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008
and September 2008, respectively.
Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health
complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a
rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being
poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver,
according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been
opened.
Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within
months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely
that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony
against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told
journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia
didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but
several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.
The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of
Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the
latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his
cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false
statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle
taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.
The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after
obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for
Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.
Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion.
The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The
prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new
criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.
Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of
allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was
prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the
UK seemed like the land of law and order.
He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy,
having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management
fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning
millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail
Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal
wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too
numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President
Vladimir Putin.
The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader
started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the
foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian
taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances,
was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British
businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been
assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.
The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of
Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for
his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by
Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin
as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic
competition.
Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin
helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed
international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention
in Spain last May.
Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part
of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian
government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was
apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its
architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to
US lawmakers and media outlets.
In the wake of the sending of bomb-like devices of uncertain capability to prominent critics
of US President Donald Trump and of a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue (
both Trump's fault , of course) – plus a migrant invasion approaching the US through
Mexico – there have been widespread calls for toning down harsh and "divisive" political
rhetoric. Of course given the nature of the American media and other establishment voices,
these demands predictably have been aimed almost entirely against Trump and
his Deplorable supporters , almost never against the same establishment that unceasingly
vilifies Trump and
Middle American radicals as literally Hitler , all backed up by the evil
White-Nationalist-in-Chief,
Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Those appealing for more civility and a return to polite discourse can save their breath.
It's much, much too
late for that .
When Trump calls the establishment media the enemies of the people, that's because they
– together with their
passive NPC drones and active Antifa enforcers – are enemies, if by "the people" we
mean the historic American nation. Trump's sin is that he calls them out for what they are.
Trump didn't cause today's polarization, he only exacerbates it because he punches back.
Good, may he continue to do so. Pining for a more well-mannered time in a country that belongs
to another, long-gone era is futile.
American politics is no longer about a narrow range of governing styles or competing
economic interests. It is tribal. Today's "tribes" are defined in terms of affinity for or
hostility to the founding American ethnos characterized by European, overwhelming
British origin (a/k/a, "white"); Christian, mainly Protestant; and English-speaking, as
augmented by members of other groups who have totally or partially assimilated to that
ethnos or who at least identify with it (think of
Mr. Hamadura in The Camp of the Saints ).
(Unfortunately we don't have a specific word for this core American ethnic identity to
distinguish it from general references to the United States in a civic or geographic sense.
(Russian, by contrast, makes a distinction between ethnic
русский (russkiy) and civic/geographical российский (rossiiskiy).)
Maybe we could adapt Frank Lloyd Wright's " Usonian "? "Or Americaner," comparable to Afrikaner?
"Or Anglo-American
"?)
Since the Left gave up on its original focus on industrial workers as the revolutionary
class, the old bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy is out. Tribes now line up according to
categories in a plural
Cultural Marxist schematic of oppressor and victim pairings , with the latter claiming
unlimited redress from the former. As the late Joe Sobran said, it takes a lot of clout
to be a victim in America these days. The following is a helpful guide to who's who under
the new dispensation:
In most of the above categories there are variations that can increase the intensity of
oppressor or victim status. For example, certified victimhood in a recognized category confers
extra points, like Black Lives Matter for race (it is racist to suggest that " all
lives matter ") or a defined religious group marginalized by "hate" (mainly anti-Jewish or
anti-Muslim , but not something like anti-Buddhist, anti-Rastafarian, or even anti-atheist
or anti-Satanist because no one bothers about them; anti-Christian victimhood is an oxymoron
because "Christian" is inherently an oppressive category). In addition, meeting the criteria
for more than one category confers enhanced victimhood under a principle called "
intersectionality ."
In the same way, there are aggravating factors in oppressor categories, such as being a
policeman (an enforcer of the structure of oppression regardless of the officer's personal
victim attributes, but worse if straight, white, Christian, etc.) or a member of a "hate"
subculture (a Southerner who's not vocally self-loathing
is a presumed Klan sympathizer ; thus, a diabetic, unemployed, opioid-addicted Georgia cracker is an
oppressor as the beneficiary of his "white privilege" and "toxic masculinity," notwithstanding
his socio-economic and health status). Like being Southern, living
while genetically Russian is also an aggravating factor.
Creatively shuffling these descriptors suggests an entertaining game like Mad Libs , or perhaps an endless series of
jokes for which you could be fired if you told them at work:
Two people walk into a bar.
One is a Baptist, straight, male Virginia state trooper whose ancestors arrived at
Jamestown
.
The other is a one-legged, genderqueer
, Somali
DervishWIC recipient
illegally in the US on an expired student visa.
So the bartender says [insert your own punch line here] .
The victim side accuses its opponents of a litany of sins such as racism, sexism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, etc., for which the solution is
demographic and ideological replacement – even while
denying that the replacement is going on or intended. This is no longer ordinary political
competition but (in an inversion of von Clausewitz attributed to Michel Foucault) politics "
as the
continuation of war by other means ." In its immediate application this war is a second
American civil war, but it can have immense consequences for war on the international stage as
well.
To attain victory the forces of victimhood championed by the Democratic Party need to
reclaim part of the apparatus of power they lost in Trump's unexpected 2016 win. (Actually,
much of the apparatus in the Executive Branch remains in Democratic hands but is only of
limited utility as a "resistance" under the superficial Trumpian occupation.) As this
commentary appears it is expected that on November 6 the GOP will retain control of the US
Senate but the House of Representatives will flip to the Democrats.
First, on the domestic political front, while Democrats and their MSM echo chamber have
cooled down talk of impeaching Trump, it will return with a vengeance on November 7
(coincidentally, Great
October Socialist Revolution Day ) if the House changes hands. In contrast to the GOP's
dithering in the area of investigations and hearings relevant to the
US-UK Deep State conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election (which will be buried forever),
the Democrats will be utterly ruthless in using their power with the single-minded purpose of
getting Trump out of office before 2020. They won't waste much time on the phony Russian
"collusion" story (Robert Mueller's report will be an obscenely expensive dud), they'll focus
like a laser on getting Trump's tax returns and dredging up anything they can from his long
involvement in the sharp-elbowed, dog-eat-dog world of New York property development and
construction, confident they can find something that qualifies as a high crime or
misdemeanor. ( Some racist
language couldn't hurt, either.) The model will be Richard Nixon's Vice
President Spiro Agnew , who was forced out of office on charges relating to his time in
Maryland politics years earlier. Even the GOP's retention of the Senate would be far from a
guarantee that Trump won't be removed. It's easily foreseeable that a dozen-plus Republican
Senators would be thrilled to get rid of Trump and restore the party's status quo ante with
Mike Pence in the Oval Office. As with Nixon, Republicans will panic at whatever dirt the
Democrats dig up and demand Trump resign for the "good of the country and the party," as
opposed to the way Democrats formed a protective phalanx around Bill Clinton. Unlike Nixon,
Trump might choose to fight it out in the Senate and might even prevail. In any case, a
change in control of just one chamber means an extended political crisis that will keep Trump
boxed in and perpetually on the defensive.
Third and most ominously, chances of a major war could increase exponentially. If Trump
is fighting for his life, chances of purging his
terrible, horrible, no good, very bad national security team will go from slim to none.
Any hope of a
national interest-based policy along the lines Trump promised in 2016 – and which
still seems to be his personal preference – will be gone. Thankfully, South Korea's
President Moon Jae-in has run with the ball through last year's opening and hopefully
the momentum for peace in Northeast Asia will be self-sustaining. With any luck, the
Khashoggi
imbroglio between Washington and Riyadh will lead to America's " downplaying and
eventually abandoning the anti-Iranian obsession that has so far overshadowed our
regional policy" and to an end the carnage in Yemen, even as the Syria war
lurches toward resolution . Still, the US remains addicted to
ever-increasing sanctions , and despite warnings from both Russia and China that they are
prepared for war – warnings virtually ignored by the US media and political class
– the US keeps pressing on all fronts: outer space, the Arctic, Europe (withdrawal from
the INF treaty),
Ukraine , the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait,
Xinjiang , and elsewhere. Trump is expected to meet with Putin and Chinese President Xi
Jinping following the US election, but they may have to conclude that he is not capable of
restraining the war machine nominally under his command and will plan accordingly.
"... On a more serious note, it was 22 months ago that I challenged Schiff as the "Russian hacking" accusations were proliferating. In the 2-minute clip , Schiff recites language highly relevant today as the Deep State tries desperately to brand Julian Assange a "known participant" – that is, an active conspirator with Russia, and not merely Russia's "useful idiot." ..."
"... Some of our "Justice" officials today apparently think they can detour around 1st amendment hurdles if they can dredge up, or manufacture, "evidence" enabling them to use the Espionage Act of 1917 against Assange. ..."
"... At think tanks like the Center for American Progress, hope springs eternal. Impatience too. As poor Schiff knows, Mueller has been at it for a year and a half – and FBI super-sleuth Peter Strzok for a half-year before that, after which he complained to FBI lawyer/girlfriend Lisa Page that "there is no big there there." But when Schiff takes the chair in January, God knows what they'll find! ..."
Adam Schiff doesn't believe DHS saying ISIS or MS-13 are real threats but he DOES
believe a Russian Oligarch who told him Medvedev was followed everywhere he went by a man
called "The Pillow Carrier" who's job was to smother Medvedev in his sleep if he made Putin
mad.
(hat tip to Rosie Memos @almostjingo for tweeting)
Rep. Adam Schiff, who takes the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in January, has
a nose for hot tips about his bete noire, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as a
strong bent toward credulousness. On October 23, 2018, Schiff solemnly told a young audience
at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta Center for American Progress Action Fund that he had
been told that Putin has one of his henchmen follow Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
around with a pillow to smother him in his sleep if he ever gets out of line.
No, the video contains no hint that Schiff was speaking tongue in cheek. Perhaps worse, no
one in the audience laughed (where do they recruit such credulous young folks?).
Be sure to scroll down for images of the pillow-carrier caught in action. :-)) He
apparently has no reason to fear "identification," since, according to Schiff's source,
"Medvedev is nothing."
On a more serious note, it was 22 months ago that I challenged Schiff as the "Russian
hacking" accusations were proliferating. In the 2-minute clip , Schiff recites
language highly relevant today as the Deep State tries desperately to brand Julian Assange a
"known participant" – that is, an active conspirator with Russia, and not merely
Russia's "useful idiot."
Some of our "Justice" officials today apparently think they can detour around
1st amendment hurdles if they can dredge up, or manufacture, "evidence" enabling them to use
the Espionage Act of 1917 against Assange.
At think tanks like the Center for American Progress, hope springs eternal. Impatience
too. As poor Schiff knows, Mueller has been at it for a year and a half – and FBI
super-sleuth Peter Strzok for a half-year before that, after which he complained to FBI
lawyer/girlfriend Lisa Page that "there is no big there there." But when Schiff takes the
chair in January, God knows what they'll find!
Meanwhile back at the ranch, President Donald Trump and his chief advisers give no
indication they are aware of what to expect, if Trump continues to allow the Justice
Department to slow-walk his order to declassify crucial documents that could – in a
lawful world – land ex-FBI Director James Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch,
former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. behind bars.
The stakes are very high. By all indications Trump is afraid – and not only of
pillows.
Those wishing more background on the rudderless Schiff may wish to click on:
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world
military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems
still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
"... On a more serious note, it was 22 months ago that I challenged Schiff as the "Russian hacking" accusations were proliferating. In the 2-minute clip , Schiff recites language highly relevant today as the Deep State tries desperately to brand Julian Assange a "known participant" – that is, an active conspirator with Russia, and not merely Russia's "useful idiot." ..."
"... Some of our "Justice" officials today apparently think they can detour around 1st amendment hurdles if they can dredge up, or manufacture, "evidence" enabling them to use the Espionage Act of 1917 against Assange. ..."
"... At think tanks like the Center for American Progress, hope springs eternal. Impatience too. As poor Schiff knows, Mueller has been at it for a year and a half – and FBI super-sleuth Peter Strzok for a half-year before that, after which he complained to FBI lawyer/girlfriend Lisa Page that "there is no big there there." But when Schiff takes the chair in January, God knows what they'll find! ..."
Adam Schiff doesn't believe DHS saying ISIS or MS-13 are real threats but he DOES
believe a Russian Oligarch who told him Medvedev was followed everywhere he went by a man
called "The Pillow Carrier" who's job was to smother Medvedev in his sleep if he made Putin
mad.
(hat tip to Rosie Memos @almostjingo for tweeting)
Rep. Adam Schiff, who takes the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in January, has
a nose for hot tips about his bete noire, Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as a
strong bent toward credulousness. On October 23, 2018, Schiff solemnly told a young audience
at the old Hillary Clinton/John Podesta Center for American Progress Action Fund that he had
been told that Putin has one of his henchmen follow Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
around with a pillow to smother him in his sleep if he ever gets out of line.
No, the video contains no hint that Schiff was speaking tongue in cheek. Perhaps worse, no
one in the audience laughed (where do they recruit such credulous young folks?).
Be sure to scroll down for images of the pillow-carrier caught in action. :-)) He
apparently has no reason to fear "identification," since, according to Schiff's source,
"Medvedev is nothing."
On a more serious note, it was 22 months ago that I challenged Schiff as the "Russian
hacking" accusations were proliferating. In the 2-minute clip , Schiff recites
language highly relevant today as the Deep State tries desperately to brand Julian Assange a
"known participant" – that is, an active conspirator with Russia, and not merely
Russia's "useful idiot."
Some of our "Justice" officials today apparently think they can detour around
1st amendment hurdles if they can dredge up, or manufacture, "evidence" enabling them to use
the Espionage Act of 1917 against Assange.
At think tanks like the Center for American Progress, hope springs eternal. Impatience
too. As poor Schiff knows, Mueller has been at it for a year and a half – and FBI
super-sleuth Peter Strzok for a half-year before that, after which he complained to FBI
lawyer/girlfriend Lisa Page that "there is no big there there." But when Schiff takes the
chair in January, God knows what they'll find!
Meanwhile back at the ranch, President Donald Trump and his chief advisers give no
indication they are aware of what to expect, if Trump continues to allow the Justice
Department to slow-walk his order to declassify crucial documents that could – in a
lawful world – land ex-FBI Director James Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch,
former CIA Director John Brennan, et al. behind bars.
The stakes are very high. By all indications Trump is afraid – and not only of
pillows.
Those wishing more background on the rudderless Schiff may wish to click on:
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as
Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William
Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world
military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems
still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .
She thought the investigation might have about six months left, although if Trump refuses a
face-to-face meeting, Mueller could seek a subpoena to put him before the grand jury. That
could be fought all the way to the supreme court.
There is a precedent, US v Nixon, when the justices ruled that the president must deliver
subpoenaed materials to a district court. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.
If Mueller decides not to have that fight, he could write a report saying he believed the
president obstructed justice. If he does not reach that conclusion, the Democratic-led House
could issue its own subpoenas.
"It is a chess match," said Milgram. "We'll have to see how it plays out in the next
year."
In Homage to
Catalonia (1938), his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell describes how his
wife was rudely woken by a police-raid on the hotel room she was occupying in Barcelona:
In the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men marched
in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions about the room,
obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms (there was a bathroom
attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded the walls, took up the mats, examined
the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer
and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up to the light. ( Homage to Catalonia , ch.
14)
The police conducted this search "in the recognized OGPU [then the Russian
communist secret-police] or Gestapo style for nearly two hours," Orwell says. He then notes
that in "all this time they never searched the bed." His wife was still in it, you see, and
although the police "were probably Communist Party members they were also Spaniards, and to
turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently
dropped, making the whole search meaningless."
Orwell's story suggests a new word to me: typhlophthalmism , meaning "the practice
of turning a blind eye to essential but inconvenient facts" (from Greek typhlos
, "blind," + ophthalmos
, "eye"). But it's a long word, so let's call it typhlism for short. Shorter is
better, because the term could be used so often today. Orwell's story is an allegory of modern
Western politics and social commentary, where so many essential but inconvenient facts are
"silently dropped" from analysis.
The world according to Trump -- notice a trend here?
Reporter: "Who should be held accountable?" [for Jamal Khashoggi's murder]
Trump: "Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a vicious place. The world is a very, very vicious
place. " -- November 22, 2018.
2007:
" The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we're civilized. In truth, it's a cruel world and people are ruthless.
They act nice to your face, but underneath they're out to kill you." Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald
Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 71.
"Life is not easy. The world is a vicious, brutal place. It's a place where people are looking to kill you, if not
physically, then mentally. In the world that we live in every day it is usually the mental kill. People are looking to put you
down, especially if you are on top. When I watched Westerns as a kid, I noticed the cowboys were always trying to kill the fastest
gun. As a kid, I never understood it. Why would anyone want to go after the fastest gun?
"This is the way it is in real life. Everyone wants to kill the fastest gun. In real estate, I am the fastest gun, and everyone
wants to kill me. You have to know how to defend yourself. People will be nasty and try to kill you just for sport. Even your
friends are out to get you!" Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 139.
2018:
"Well, not all people. But it's a vicious place. The world is a vicious place. You know, the lions and tigers, they
hunt for food, we hunt for sport. So, it can be a very vicious place. You turn on the television and you look at what's happening."
Interview with John Barton, Golf Digest , October 13, 2014.
" This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious, it's full of lies, deceit and deception. You make a deal
with somebody and it's like making a deal with– that table." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes , October 15,
2018.
"This is a r– this is a vicious place. Washington DC is a vicious, vicious place. The attacks, the– the bad mouthing,
the speaking behind your back. –but – you know, and in my way, I feel very comfortable here." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS
60 Minutes , October 15, 2018.
Karl Kolchak , November 23, 2018 8:54 pm
The world is a vicious place -- that is utterly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels, and will be until civilization
finally collapses.
ilsm , November 24, 2018 7:19 am
Newly posted DNC democrat Bill Kristol thinks regime change in China a worthwhile endeavor.
The "world is a vicious place" designed, set up, held together, secured by the capitalist "post WW II world order" paid for
by the US taxpayer and bonds bought by arms dealers and their financiers.
The tail wagging the attack dog being a Jerusalem-Medina axis straddling Hormuz and Malacca .
An inept princely heir apparent assassin is far better than Rouhani in a "vicious place".
October
23, 2018globinfo
freexchange
Through his own humorous style, comedian Lee Camp pointed out something quite
serious. As he explained, Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, fulfilled all the
conditions necessary to run for president of the United States.
One key condition is certain and obvious: tons of money.
Another one, is to pretend to be religious. And this condition is, of course, particularly
important in the America of Donald Trump. Indeed, as Camp says, the former Atheist Mark
Zuckerberg has suddenly found religion.
And the most recent fulfilled condition by Facebook's boss, was to secure the alliance with the
US deep state.
Indeed , on October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251
accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of " spam and coordinated
inauthentic behavior. " The primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that
they are critics and/or opponents of the American political "mainstream" or
"establishment."
Also, as Ben Norton of the Real
News points out, Facebook has done this multiple times now. We've seen numerous
pages that have been removed. We've also seen the scare of so-called fake news. And what's
troubling about this is that some of the partners Facebook has in its crackdown on so-called
fake news, vetting pages like these that have been removed, one of the partners is the
Atlantic Council . The Atlantic Council is essentially a kind of unofficial NATO,
funded by the United States government and the European Union along with NATO. Among the other
fact-checkers that have partnered with Facebook to screen so-called fake news is the Weekly
Standard . The Weekly Standard is a neo-conservative website that itself published
false information in the lead-up to the Iraq war, which it strongly supported.
And what about Jeff Bezos? He invested on the mainstream media propaganda power by buying "
one of the leading daily American newspapers, along with The New York Times, the Los Angeles
Times, and The Wall Street Journal. The Post has distinguished itself through its political
reporting on the workings of the White House, Congress, and other aspects of the U.S.
government. " Quite influential on the US political developments.
Right after this key move, Alternet immediately identified the conflicts of interest since the Washington Post would never
reveal the fact that Bezos signed a $600 million contract with the CIA.
It seems that another multi-billionaire rushed to proceed in the necessary actions that could
build a bridge towards the US presidency.
And recently, Jeff Bezos attempted to fix his image by raising minimum wage to $15 an hour for
Amazon workers. The move came out from the pressure exercised by Bernie Sanders and the
progressive movement. Yet, it seems to be another neoliberal-style trick
.
All these indications point to the fact that the liberal plutocracy is determined to 'fire' its
faithful political puppets in the Democratic party, who are rapidly losing popularity and have
become 'inefficient' to serve its interests.
Besides, the progressive movement has already marked some significant victories in the
ideological battlefield. For example, big money and wealthy donors become more and more
repulsive in the eyes of progressive voters and younger generations. And this has become clear
in practice, with the unprecedented victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives
who beat establishment Democrats without the help of the big money.
As the liberal plutocrats understand that it is now pointless to spend money for buying
politicians, they will attempt to take over the Democratic party by themselves. Otherwise, the
party will fall in the hands of the progressives and they will be left without political power.
The liberal plutocrats will use the power of the corporate media to sell themselves as the sole
antidote to Donald Trump.
It is highly unlikely to see this in the 2020 presidential election. The liberal plutocrats
probably prepare the ground to take over the Democratic party in 2024. We may see Mark
Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos fighting in the Democratic primaries and then, fighting for the
presidency against someone from the Trump 'school', like Nikki
Haley .
The anti-globalist part of the big capital that supported Trump will prefer this development
instead of an uncontrollable progressive movement that will hold political power. Then,
plutocrats of all sides will do what the big capital always does. They will clear up things
between them. In one thing they are unquestionably united: crushing the resistance of the
ordinary people from below.
The world according to Trump -- notice a trend here?
Reporter: "Who should be held accountable?" [for Jamal Khashoggi's murder]
Trump: "Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a vicious place. The world is a very, very vicious
place. " -- November 22, 2018.
2007:
" The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we're civilized. In truth, it's a cruel world and people are ruthless.
They act nice to your face, but underneath they're out to kill you." Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald
Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 71.
"Life is not easy. The world is a vicious, brutal place. It's a place where people are looking to kill you, if not
physically, then mentally. In the world that we live in every day it is usually the mental kill. People are looking to put you
down, especially if you are on top. When I watched Westerns as a kid, I noticed the cowboys were always trying to kill the fastest
gun. As a kid, I never understood it. Why would anyone want to go after the fastest gun?
"This is the way it is in real life. Everyone wants to kill the fastest gun. In real estate, I am the fastest gun, and everyone
wants to kill me. You have to know how to defend yourself. People will be nasty and try to kill you just for sport. Even your
friends are out to get you!" Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life , Donald Trump & Bill Zanker, 2007, p. 139.
2018:
"Well, not all people. But it's a vicious place. The world is a vicious place. You know, the lions and tigers, they
hunt for food, we hunt for sport. So, it can be a very vicious place. You turn on the television and you look at what's happening."
Interview with John Barton, Golf Digest , October 13, 2014.
" This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious, it's full of lies, deceit and deception. You make a deal
with somebody and it's like making a deal with– that table." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes , October 15,
2018.
"This is a r– this is a vicious place. Washington DC is a vicious, vicious place. The attacks, the– the bad mouthing,
the speaking behind your back. –but – you know, and in my way, I feel very comfortable here." Interview with Lesley Stahl, CBS
60 Minutes , October 15, 2018.
Karl Kolchak , November 23, 2018 8:54 pm
The world is a vicious place -- that is utterly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels, and will be until civilization
finally collapses.
ilsm , November 24, 2018 7:19 am
Newly posted DNC democrat Bill Kristol thinks regime change in China a worthwhile endeavor.
The "world is a vicious place" designed, set up, held together, secured by the capitalist "post WW II world order" paid for
by the US taxpayer and bonds bought by arms dealers and their financiers.
The tail wagging the attack dog being a Jerusalem-Medina axis straddling Hormuz and Malacca .
An inept princely heir apparent assassin is far better than Rouhani in a "vicious place".
"... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
"... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a
trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service
" in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from
Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.
The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established
in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated
Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."
And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's
historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report
on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network
RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb
hackers are at work here.
Operating on a budget
of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists,
military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference
in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.
The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin,
with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing
Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked
documents states. -
RT
The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway,
Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its
sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .
The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts
embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government
agencies."
The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the
US State Department , the
documents allege.
Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian
sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. -
RT
Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:
Spanish "Op"
In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block
the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half
hours to accomplish, brags the group in the
documents .
"The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian
and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca
in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.
Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to
geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." -
RT
The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.
In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist
reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.
"... It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" ..."
"... "The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016." ..."
"... "Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele dossier..." ..."
"... this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war ..."
"... Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same laws as the rest of the UK. ..."
"... The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth ..."
"... British hypocrisy publicly called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me ..."
"... It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint does not bode well for such relations ..."
"... A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants? ..."
"... I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins. ..."
"... The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's explicit approval. ..."
"... Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda ..."
"... This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap. ..."
"... Pat Lang posted a report that strongly implies that charges of Russian influence on Trump are a deliberate falsification ..."
"... It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6 meddling ..."
"... As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was the best candidate for the job. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love? ..."
"... They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass psychological pathology among the elites. ..."
"... The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist "order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation. ..."
"... Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is Strength." The three pillars of political power. ..."
"... Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK government. ..."
British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear CampaignsSteveg , Nov 24,
2018 11:43:44 AM |
link
In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream.
We have already seen
many consequences of this and similar programs which are designed to smear anyone who
does not follow the anti-Russian government lines. The 'Russian collusion' smear campaign
against Donald Trump based on the Steele dossier was also a largely British operation but
seems to be part of a different project.
The ' Integrity
Initiative ' builds 'cluster' or contact groups of trusted journalists, military
personal, academics and lobbyists within foreign countries. These people get alerts via
social media to take action when the British center perceives a need.
On June 7 it took the the Spanish cluster only a few hours to derail the appointment of
Perto Banos as the Director of the National Security Department in Spain. The cluster
determined that he had a too positive view of Russia and launched a coordinated social media
smear
campaign (pdf) against him.
The Initiative and its operations were unveiled when someone liberated some of its
documents, including its budget applications to the British Foreign Office, and
posted them under the 'Anonymous' label at cyberguerrilla.org .
The Integrity Initiative was set up in autumn 2015 by The Institute for Statecraft in
cooperation with the Free University of Brussels (VUB) to bring to the attention of
politicians, policy-makers, opinion leaders and other interested parties the threat posed
by Russia to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, across Europe and North
America.
It lists Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council as "partner organisations" and
promises that:
Cluster members will be sent to educational sessions abroad to improve the technical
competence of the cluster to deal with disinformation and strengthen bonds in the cluster
community. [...] (Events with DFR Digital Sherlocks, Bellingcat, EuVsDisinfo, Buzzfeed,
Irex, Detector Media, Stopfake, LT MOD Stratcom – add more names and propose cluster
participants as you desire).
The Initiatives Orwellian slogan is 'Defending Democracy Against Disinformation'. It
covers European countries, the UK, the U.S. and Canada and seems to want to expand to the
Middle East.
On its About page
it claims: "We are not a government body but we do work with government departments and
agencies who share our aims." The now published budget plans show that more than 95% of the
Initiative's funding is coming directly from the British government, NATO and the U.S. State
Department. All the 'contact persons' for creating 'clusters' in foreign countries are
British embassy officers. It amounts to a foreign influence campaign by the British
government that hides behind a 'civil society' NGO.
The organisation is led by one Chris N. Donnelly who
receives (pdf) £8,100 per month for creating the smear campaign network.
To counter Russian disinformation and malign influence in Europe by: expanding the
knowledge base; harnessing existing expertise, and; establishing a network of networks of
experts, opinion formers and policy makers, to educate national audiences in the threat and
to help build national capacities to counter it .
The Initiative has a black and white view that is based on a "we are the good ones"
illusion. When "we" 'educate the public' it is legitimate work. When others do similar, it
its disinformation. That is of course not the reality. The Initiative's existence itself,
created to secretly manipulate the public, is proof that such a view is wrong.
If its work were as legit as it wants to be seen, why would the Foreign Office run it from
behind the curtain as an NGO? The Initiative is not the only such operation. It's
applications seek funding from a larger "Russian Language Strategic Communication Programme"
run by the Foreign Office.
The 2017/18 budget application sought FCO funding of £480,635. It received
£102,000 in co-funding from NATO and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense. The 2018/19
budget application shows a
planned spending (pdf) of £1,961,000.00. The co-sponsors this year are again NATO
and the Lithuanian MoD, but
also include (pdf) the U.S. State Department with £250,000 and Facebook with
£100,000. The budget lays out a strong cooperation with the local military of each
country. It notes that NATO is also generous in financing the local clusters.
One of the liberated papers of the Initiative is a talking points memo labeled
Top 3 Deliverable for FCO (pdf):
Developing and proving the cluster concept and methodology, setting up clusters in a
range of countries with different circumstances
Making people (in Government, think tanks, military, journalists) see the big
picture, making people acknowledge that we are under concerted, deliberate hybrid attack
by Russia
Increasing the speed of response, mobilising the network to activism in pursuit of
the "golden minute"
Under top 1, setting up clusters, a subitem reads:
- Connects media with academia with policy makers with practitioners in a country to impact
on policy and society: ( Jelena Milic silencing pro-kremlin voices on Serbian TV )
Defending Democracy by silencing certain voices on public TV seems to be a
self-contradicting concept.
Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:
We engage only very discreetly with governments, based entirely on trusted personal
contacts, specifically to ensure that they do not come to see our work as a problem, and to
try to influence them gently, as befits an independent NGO operation like ours, viz;
- Germany, via the Zentrum Liberale Moderne to the Chancellor's Office and MOD
- Netherlands, via the HCSS to the MOD
- Poland and Romania, at desk level into their MFAs via their NATO Reps
- Spain, via special advisers, into the MOD and PM's office (NB this may change very soon
with the new Government)
- Norway, via personal contacts into the MOD
- HQ NATO, via the Policy Planning Unit into the Sec Gen's office.
We have latent contacts into other governments which we will activate as needs be as the
clusters develop.
A look at the 'clusters' set up in U.S. and UK shows some prominent names.
Members of the Atlantic Council, which has a contract to
censor Facebook posts , appear on several cluster lists. The UK core cluster also
includes some prominent names like tax fraudster William Browder , the daft Atlantic Council
shill Ben Nimmo and the neo-conservative Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum. One person
of interest is Andrew Wood who
handed the Steele 'dirty dossier' to Senator John McCain to smear Donald Trump over
alleged relations with Russia. A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah
Haynes, David Aaronovitch of the London Times, Neil Buckley from the FT and Jonathan Marcus
of the BBC.
A ' Cluster
Roundup ' (pdf) from July 2018 details its activities in at least 35 countries. Another
file reveals (pdf) the local
partnering institutions and individuals involved in the programs.
The Initiatives Guide
to Countering Russian Information (pdf) is a rather funny read. It lists the downing of
flight MH 17 by a Ukranian BUK missile, the fake chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun and the
Skripal Affair as examples for "Russian disinformation". But at least two of these events,
Khan Sheikun via the UK run White Helmets and the Skripal affair, are evidently products of
British intelligence disinformation operations.
The probably most interesting papers of the whole stash is the 'Project Plan' laid out at
pages 7-40 of the
2018 budget application v2 (pdf). Under 'Sustainability' it notes:
The programme is proposed to run until at least March 2019, to ensure that the clusters
established in each country have sufficient time to take root, find funding, and
demonstrate their effectiveness. FCO funding for Phase 2 will enable the activities to be
expanded in scale, reach and scope. As clusters have established themselves, they have
begun to access local sources of funding. But this is a slow process and harder in some
countries than others. HQ NATO PDD [Public Diplomacy Division] has proved a reliable source
of funding for national clusters. The ATA [Atlantic Treaty Association] promises to be the
same, giving access to other pots of money within NATO and member nations. Funding from
institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed by internal
disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to have been
resolved and funding should now flow.
The programme has begun to create a critical mass of individuals from a cross society
(think tanks, academia, politics, the media, government and the military) whose work is
proving to be mutually reinforcing . Creating the network of networks has given each
national group local coherence, credibility and reach, as well as good international
access. Together, these conditions, plus the growing awareness within governments of the
need for this work, should guarantee the continuity of the work under various auspices and
in various forms.
The
third part of the budget application (pdf) list the various activities, their output and
outcome. The budget plan includes a section that describes 'Risks' to the initiative. These
include hacking of the Initiatives IT as well as:
Adverse publicity generated by Russia or by supporters of Russia in target countries, or by
political and interest groups affected by the work of the programme, aimed at discrediting
the programme or its participants, or to create political embarrassment.
We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.
Posted by b on November 24, 2018 at 11:24 AM |
Permalink
"The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to
prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election
meddling investigation. ... much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil
throughout 2016."
"Gregory R. Copley, editor and publisher of Defense & Foreign Affairs, posited that
Sergei Skripal is the unnamed Russian intelligence source in the Steele dossier. ... In
Skripal's pseudo-country-gentleman retirement, the ex-GRU-MI6 double agent was selling
custom-made "Russian intelligence"; he had fabricated "material" that went into the Steele
dossier..."
For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.
this movement in the west by gov'ts to pay for generating lies, hate and
propaganda towards russia is really sick... it is perfect for the military industrial complex
corporations though and they seem to be calling the shots in the west, much more so then the
voice of the ordinary person who is not interested in war.. i guess the idea is to get the
ordinary people to think in terms of hating another country based on lies and that this would
be a good thing... it is very sad what uk / usa leadership in the past century has come down
to here.... i can only hope that info releases like this will hasten it's demise...
Seems to me that this shows the primacy of the City of London, with its offshore network of
illicit capital accumulation, within Britain. It is a state within a state or even a
financial empire within a state, which, for deep historical reasons isn't subject to the same
laws as the rest of the UK.
The UK's pathological obsession with Russia only makes sense to
me as the city's insistence on continued 90s style appropriation of Russia's wealth
@6 ingrian... things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of Russia after the fall of
the Soviet Union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit Russia
fully, as they'd intended...
Let the Doxx wars begin! Sure, Anonymous is not Russian but it will surely now be targeted
and smeared as such which would show that it has hit a nerve. British hypocrisy publicly
called out. How this all unravels is one to watch. Extra large popcorn and soda for me.
I think we've all noticed the euro-asslantic press (and friends) on behalf of, willingly
and in cooperation with the British intelligence et al 'calling out' numerous Russians as
G(R)U/spies/whatever for a while now yet providing less than a shred of credible
evidence.
It seems to me that the UK has far more to lose from doxxing than Russia does. The
interference in sovereign allied states to 'manage' who the UK thinks they should appoint
does not bode well for such relations.
Meanwhile in Brussels they are having their cake and eating it, i.e. bemoaning Europe's
'weak response' to Russian propaganda:
"A separate subcluster of so-called journalists names Deborah Haynes, David Aaronovitch of
the London Times and Neil Buckley from the FT." Subcluster. Love it. Just how crap do you
have to be to fail to make it to membership of a full cluster of smear merchants?
Yet another example of the pot calling the kettle black when in fact the kettle may not be
black at all; it's just the pot making up things. "These Russian criminals are using
propaganda to show (truths) like the fact the DNC and Clinton campaigns colluded to prevent
Sanders from being nominated, so we need to establish a clandestine propaganda network to
establish that the Russians are running propaganda!"
"In 2015 the government of Britain launched a secret operation to insert anti-Russia
propaganda into the western media stream."
I doubt very seriously that the British launched this operation without the CIA's implicit
and explicit support. This has all the markings of a John Brennan operation that has been
launched stealthily to prevent anyone from knowing its real origins.
The Brits don't act alone, and a project of this magnitude did not begin without Langley's
explicit approval.
Now check out the wording in the above document: "Funding from institutional and national governmental sources in the US has been delayed
by internal disputes within the US government, but w.e.f. March 2018 that deadlock seems to
have been resolved and funding should now flow." Think about that. What would have blocked the flow of USG support for this project?? Why, the allegations of collusion against Trump, of course. Naturally, the Republicans are
not going to provide money to an operation that threatens to destroy the head of their own
party. So, there has been no bipartisan agreement on funding for anti-Russia propaganda
BUT...the author assures us that the "deadlock seems to have been resolved and funding
should now flow" Huh?? In other words, the fix is in. Mueller will pardon Trump on collusion charges but the
propaganda campaign against Russia will continue...with the full support of both parties. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it...
This mob was created in the autumn of 2015, according to their site. That would have been
about the time -- probably just after -- the Russians intervened in Syria. The Brits had
plans for an invasion of Syria in 2009, according to their fave Guardian fish wrap.
A lot of
sour grapes with this so-called 'integrity initiative', IMO. BP was behind a lot of this, I
would also think. When Assad pulled the plug on the pipeline through the Levant in 2009, the
Brits hacked up a fur ball. It's gone downhill for them ever since. Couldn't happen to a
nicer lot. If you can't invade or beat them with proxies, you can at least call them names.
If Trump was taking dirty money or engaged in criminal activity with Russians then he
was doing it with Felix Sater, who was under the control of the FBI... And who was in
charge of the FBI during all of the time that Sater was a signed up FBI snitch? You got it
-- Robert Mueller (2001 thru 2013) ...
It seems quite possible that what is alleged as "Russian meddling" is actually CIA-MI6
meddling, including:
Steele dossier: To create suspicion in government, media, and later the public
Leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks (but calling it a "hack"):
To help with election of Trump and link Wikileaks (as agent) to Russian election
meddling
Cambridge Analytica: To provide necessary reasoning for Trump's (certain) win of the electoral college.
Note: We later found that dozens of firms had undue access to Facebook data. Why did the
campaign turn to a British firm instead of an American firm? Well, it had to be a British
firm if MI6 was running the (supposed) Facebook targeting for CIA.
As I have said before, MAGA is a POLICY RESPONSE to the challenge from Russia and China. The
election of a Republican faux populist was necessary and Trump, despite his many flaws, was
the best candidate for the job.
The Integrity Initiative's goal is to defend democracy against the truth about Russia. All this is so Orwellian. When will we get the Ministry of Love?
"things didn't go as planned for the expropriation of russia after the fall of the soviet
union.. it seems the west is still hurting from not being able to exploit russia fully, as
they'd intended..."
They shot at an elephant and failed to kill it. So yes, out of the combo of frustration, resentment, and fear they hate the resurgent
Russia and prefer Cold War II, and if necessary WWIII, to peaceful co-existence. Of course
the usual corporate imperative (in this case weapons profiteering) reinforces the mass
psychological pathology among the elites.
The ironic thing is that Putin doesn't prefer to challenge the neoliberal globalist
"order" at all, but would happily see Russia take a prominent place within it. It's the US
and its UK poodle who are insisting on confrontation.
Great article! It reminded me of what I read in George Orwell's novella "1984." He summed it
all up brilliantly in nine words: "War is Peace"; "Freedom is Slavery"; "Ignorance is
Strength." The three pillars of political power.
Since UK has always blocked the "European Intelligence" initiative, on the basis of his
pertenence to the "Five Eyes", and as UK is leaving the European Union, where it has always
been the Troyan Horse of the US, one would think that all these people belonging to the so
called "clusters" should register themselves as "foreign agents" working for UK
government...and in this context, new empowerished sovereign governemts into the EU should
consider the possibility expelling these traitors as spies of the UK....
Country list of agents of influence according to the leak:
Germany: Harold Elletson ,Klaus NaumannWolf-Ruediger Bengs, Ex Amb Killian, Gebhardt v Moltke, Roland
Freudenstein, Hubertus Hoffmann, Bertil Wenger, Beate Wedekind, Klaus Wittmann, Florian
Schmidt, Norris v Schirach
Sweden, Norway, Finland: Martin Kragh , Jardar Ostbo, Chris Prebensen, Kate Hansen Bundt, Tor Bukkvoll, Henning-Andre
Sogaard, Kristen Ven Bruusgard, Henrik O Breitenbauch, Niels Poulsen, Jeppe Plenge, Claus
Mathiesen, Katri Pynnoniemi, Ian Robertson, Pauli Jarvenpaa, Andras Racz
Netherlands: Dr Sijbren de Jong, Ida Eklund-Lindwall, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rianne Siebenga, Jerry Sullivan,
Hunter B Treseder, Chris Quick
Spain: Nico de Pedro, Ricardo Blanco Tarno, Eduardo Serra Rexach, Dionisio Urteaga Todo, Dimitri
Barua, Fernando Valenzuela Marzo, Marta Garcia, Abraham Sanz, Fernando Maura, Jose Ignacio
Sanchez Amor, Jesus Ramon-Laca Clausen, Frances Ghiles, Carmen Claudin, Nika Prislan, Luis
Simon, Charles Powell, Mira Milosevich, Daniel Iriarte, Anna Bosch, Mira Milosevich-Juaristi,
Tito, Frances Ghiles, Borja Lasheras, Jordi Bacaria, Alvaro Imbernon-Sainz, Nacho Samor
US, Canada:
Mary Ellen Connell, Anders Aslund, Elizabeth Braw, Paul Goble, David Ziegler
Evelyn Farkas, Glen Howard, Stephen Blank, Ian Brzezinski, Thomas Mahnken, John Nevado,
Robert Nurick, Jeff McCausland
Todd Leventhal
UK: Chris Donnelly
Amalyah Hart William Browder John Ardis
Roderick Collins, Patrick Mileham Deborah Haynes
Dan Lafayeedney Chris Hernon Mungo Melvin
Rob Dover Julian Moore Agnes Josa David Aaronovitch Stephen Dalziel Raheem Shapi Ben
Nimmo
Robert Hall Alexander Hoare Steve Jermy Dominic Kennedy
Victor Madeira Ed Lucas Dr David Ryall
Graham Geale Steve Tatham Natalie Nougayrede Alan Riley [email protected]Anne Applebaum Neil Logan Brown James Wilson
Primavera Quantrill
Bruce Jones David Clark Charles Dick
Ahmed Dassu Sir Adam Thompson Lorna Fitzsimons Neil Buckley Richard Titley Euan Grant
Alastair Aitken Yusuf Desai Bobo Lo Duncan Allen Chris Bell
Peter Mason John Lough Catherine Crozier
Robin Ashcroft Johanna Moehring Vadim Kleiner David Fields Alistair Wood Ben Robinson Drew
Foxall Alex Finnen
Orsyia Lutsevych Charlie Hatton Vladimir Ashurkov
Giles Harris Ben Bradshaw
Chris Scheurweghs James Nixey
Charlie Hornick Baiba Braze J Lindley-French
Craig Oliphant Paul Kitching Nick Childs Celia Szusterman
James Sherr Alan Parfitt Alzbeta Chmelarova Keir Giles
Andy Pryce Zach Harkenrider
Kadri Liik Arron Rahaman David Nicholas Igor Sutyagin Rob Sandford Maya Parmar Andrew Wood
Richard Slack Ellie Scarnell
Nick Smith Asta Skaigiryte Ian Bond Joanna Szostek Gintaras Stonys Nina Jancowicz
Nick Washer Ian Williams Joe Green Carl Miller Adrian Bradshaw
Clement Daudy Jeremy Blackham Gabriel Daudy Andrew Lucy Stafford Diane Allen Alexandros
Papaioannou
Paddy Nicoll
"... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
"... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
"... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is
use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko
buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also
explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.
The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated
that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the
people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.
The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent
sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion
firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.
The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those
who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape
Karma.
The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its
aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national
leader has.
Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:
Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru
communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of
Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair
and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.
Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??
Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and
that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in
a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going
around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war.
Imagine that, an informed sheople.
Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.
"250,000 from the US State
Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.
"During the third
Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like
project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way
to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some
politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........
***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"
Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is
a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate
ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered
in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport
layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG
NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.
The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to
companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in
turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool
the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose
Law Firm."- patriots4truth
When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with
plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.
FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting
memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news
and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are
exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms
for political speech, especially without using True Names.
Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating
here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most
surreal propaganda psy-ops.
But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.
Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is
remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is
what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed
fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of
the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means
justify the ends".
Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to
overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin.
This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is
obviously a Russian spy.
Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.
A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy
leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire
accounts.
This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have
such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the
WEST? This is nuts.
Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to
find it?
Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to
the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the
latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious
people.
Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of
accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I
wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.
Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions
A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living
and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.
Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living
conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained
deaths.
England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for
the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets
because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.
More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to
flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as
usual.
This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and
agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism).
The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers
are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to
the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.
Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity
Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel,
scientists and academics))).
The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian
interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes,
the documents claim.
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
"... For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years, I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth. ..."
Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we
see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and
the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation
that can't navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and
happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good
enough.
The main message from the financials is that the global debt barge has run aground, and with
it, the global economy. That mighty engine has been chugging along on promises-to-pay and now
the faith that sustained those promises is dissolving. China, Euroland, and the USA can't
possibly meet their tangled obligations, and are running out of tricks for rigging, gaming, and
jacking the bond markets, where all those promises are vested. It boils down to a whole lot of
people not getting paid, one way or the other -- and it's really bad for business.
Our President has taken full credit for the bubblicious markets, of course, and will be
Hooverized as they gurgle around the drain. Given his chimerical personality, he may try to put
on an FDR mask -- perhaps even sit in a wheelchair -- and try a few grand-scale policy tricks
to escape the vortex. But the net effect will surely be to make matters worse -- for instance,
if he can hector the Federal Reserve to buy every bond that isn't nailed to some deadly
derivative booby-trap. But then he'll only succeed in crashing the dollar. Remember, there are
two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can have plenty of worthless
money.
On the social and political scene, I sense that some things have run their course. Is a
critical mass of supposedly educated people not fatigued and nauseated by the regime of "social
justice" good-think, and the massive mendacity it stands for , starting with the idea that
"diversity and inclusion" require the shut-down of free speech. The obvious hypocrisies and
violations of reason emanating from the campuses -- a lot, but not all of it, in response to
the Golden Golem of Greatness -- have made enough smart people stupid to endanger the country's
political future. A lot of these formerly-non-stupid people work in the news media. It's not
too late for some institutions like The New York Times and CNN to change out their editors and
producers, and go back to reporting the reality-du-jour instead of functioning as agit-prop
mills for every unsound idea ginned through the Yale humanities departments.
Shoehorned into the festivity of the season is the lame-duck session in congress, and one of
the main events it portends is the end of Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. The
Sphinx-like Mueller has maintained supernatural silence about his tendings and intentions. But
if he'd uncovered anything substantial in the way of "collusion" between Mr. Trump and Russia,
the public would know by now, since it would represent a signal threat to national security. So
it's hard not to conclude that he has nothing except a few Mickey Mouse "process" convictions
for lying to the FBI. On the other hand, it's quite impossible to imagine him ignoring the
well-documented evidence trail of Hillary Clinton colluding with Russians to influence the 2016
contest against Mr. Trump -- and to defame him after he won. There's also the Hieronymus Bosch
panorama of criminal mischief around the racketeering scheme known as the Clinton Foundation to
consider. Do these venal characters get a pass on all that?
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) has announced plans to call Federal Attorney John Huber (Utah
District) to testify about his assignment to look into these Clinton matters. It's a little
hard to see how that might produce any enlightenment, since prosecutors are bound by law to not
blab about currently open cases. The committee has also subpoenaed former Attorney General
Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and others who have some serious 'splainin' to
do. But if both Huber and Mueller come up empty-handed on the Clintons it will be one of the
epic marvels of official bad faith in US history.
There is a core truth to the 2016 Russia collusion story, and the Clintons are at the heart
of it. Failure to even look will have very dark consequences for the public interest.
It ought to be obvious to just about everyone who is paying attention and not a
Corporate-Whore Democrat that the "The Russians Did It" delusion and the accompanying Mueller
"investigation" is only a distraction to draw attention away from the obvious and numerous
crimeS of H. Clinton, including running an electronic drop-box for U.S. state secrets using a
server in her basement, charity fraud, pay-to-play bribe-taking, the uranium to Russia case,
etc. And, that's not counting the inexcusable Unprovoked War of Aggression WAR CRIME against
Libya. (Of course, she had an excuse: "Destroy a country in order to save a few
"protesters".
Mueller is the Deep State (Corporations [especially Military Industrial Complex
Death-Merchants, who direct the politicians and foreign policy actions (continual
War-For-Humongous-Profits that has taken and takes multiple trillions of dollars away from
potential domestic programs & Wall Street bankster-fraudsters who bankrupted the country
with the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial fiasco and who sent U.S.
industrial production jobs to other countries] and Oligarchs who reap the profits of such
crimes and their results) operative who apparently was brought in the head the FBI to fail to
prevent and to coverup the real actors and actions that occurred in association with the
downing of buildings at the New York City World Trade center on 9/11.
Sorry, nobodies going to jail and all will be swept under the rug. We will have war to
cover their tracks along with all the other frauds. The political buddy buddy system at the
upper levels is set up to protect the guilty, and nobody has to pay the price lest the whole
thing crumble. It's built that way.
Our only way out is a crash and a reset, with no guarantee what happens on the other
side.
I used to be optimistic, but the level of lies, double speak and university factories
pumping out marxist leftists portends a bleak future. How anyone thinks we can reason our way
out of this situation is fooling themselves about human nature.
Nice to see Kunstler focusing on some serious issues like the Uranium One scandal for a
change. He seems to be on the concluding end of a cold-turkey or other rehab from some
long-term unholy influence. As a result, he has been producing increasingly readable articles
for the past several months. Congratulations are due him but with the warning that recovery
is always one day at a time.
" Remember, there are two main ways you can go broke: You can run out of money; or you can
have plenty of worthless money". Both pretty much sums up America's predicament. Americans
are deep in debt, and their money is worthless.
Mueller isn't going to touch the Clintons - they have way too much criminal dirt on him.
And Huber is an unknown lightweight with no Malicious Seditious Media support.
Sooooo . . . there is only one thing to do once the new Congress takes its oath: Trump
gets DOJ Acting AG to appoint the long-awaited Special Prosecutor.
There are more than enough recognized felonies to go after - unlike the Mueller fishing
expedition. That will put the Democrat investigation on ice - mainly because lots of Demo
chairs and members will be part of the investigation.
Any serious investigation of the Clinton Foundation would reveal that "Russian Collusion"
has everything to do with distraction from the crimes of the Clinton family. The fact that
Bill and Hillary have escaped accountability for their heinous crimes is one of the greatest
miscarriages of justice in US history. It is truly quite frightening.
There is a reason why the DOJ, Congress (both parties), MSM, the MIC, the Deep State don't
want ANYONE to look into corruption ... because they are ALL ******* guilty as sin and buried
neck deep in ****. Its long past time for the whole ******* thing to come down. We're all
fucked.
Weiner laptop For The Win. Give us that hard drive, Mr. President! We'll have it all
analyzed in one weekend.
Meanwhile, Seth Rich awaits Mueller's OH SO DILIGENT investigation.
Can you believe that the 'core' of Mueller's 'case' ends up being about WIKILEAKS?
What the serious ****.
If he's done zero serious looks at Seth Rich all Mueller's work will just be thrown out
of court anyway.
Ham sandwich my fat turkey-enriched ***.
For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of
Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years,
I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.
This guy is dreaming if he thinks anything is going to happen to the clintons, the MSM/DOJ
is protected those 2 scumbags with the line that if they are investigated trump is going
after his political opponents, just like a banana republic. But truthfully nothing reaks more
of banana repubicism more then letting the high and mighty of on crimes.
If they weren't all on the same side, that of the international bankster cabal, Trump
would order his justice department to prosecute those people you mentioned.
The purpose of the Russia investigation is to fool you into thinking there are two sides,
and to demonized Russia to create public opinion in favor of attacking Russia because it is
not on board with the jwo totalitarian world government. WTFU.
For decades, it has been rumored that the Clintons have FBI files on most members of
Congress and use these files for blackmail purposes. Given the events of the past few years,
I actually believe this rumor to be grounded in truth.
Mueller long ago gave up the fruitless hunt for Russian collusion involving President
Trump and is now desperately seeking overdue library books or unpaid parking tickets on
anyone remotely connected to President Trump to justify his mooching taxpayer dollars.
Comey knows where all the skeletons are buried and has nothing to fear, apart from a
stitch-up behind closed doors hanging, where nobody gets to see. We all know Comey is a Deep
State puppet. This hearing is all for show, to give the dunces the illusion of a functioning
dumbocracy.
Pretty rich that he's worried about leaks....but then again, he would know.
He is damned worried about private testimony as doing so would open him up to suspicion
from guilty parties concerned he might rat them out to save his hide.
Select leaks, even if untrue (fake news turned against them) could bring great pressure
upon his life.
Former
FBI Director James Comey announced over Twitter on Thursday that he has been subpoenaed by
House Republicans.
He has demanded a public testimony (during which legislators would be unable to ask him
questions pertaining to classified or sensitive information), saying that he doesn't trust the
committee not to leak and distort what he says.
"Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans," he tweeted " I'm still happy to
sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a "closed door" thing because I've
seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion . Let's have a hearing and invite
everyone to see." In October Comey rejected a request by the House Judiciary Committee to
appear at a closed hearing as part of the GOP probe into allegations of political bias at the
FBI and Department of Justice, according to Politico
.
"Mr. Comey respectfully declines your request for a private interview," said Comey's
attorney, David Kelly, in a repsonse to the request.
The Judiciary Committee, chaired by Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) didn't appreciate Comey's
response.
" We have invited Mr. Comey to come in for a transcribed interview and we are prepared to
issue a subpoena to compel his appearance ," said a committee aide.
Goodlatte invited Comey to testify as part of a last-minute flurry of requests for
high-profile Obama administration FBI and Justice Department leaders, including former
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. He threatened
to subpoena them if they didn't come in voluntarily. -
Politico
The House committee has been investigating whether overwhelming anti-Trump bias with in the
FBI and Department of Justice translated to their investigations of the President during and
after the 2016 US election.
Didn't Gowdy deal with this already? "When did the FBI conduct an interview limited to 5
minutes?" "When did the FBI ever conduct an interview in public?" And the rest. Sauce for the
goose is sauce for the gander.
(I happen to think Gowdy is compromised, but the points remain.)
The crook knows a public hearing will allow him to defer answering EVERY question because
it "involves a current investigation", "it's classified", "I don't recall" and every other
dodge under the sun. Put this creep away for good!
Comey knows he can't withstand real questioning. He will be forced to take the 5th. A lot
of desperation showing here. He won't show and time will run out on the House, so Lindsay
Graham needs to take up the cause.
The content of the email is irrelevant to me. It's the appearance of the same disregard
for rules that the rest of the swamp displays . Of course she wasn't sending special
access info, setting up her own server or trying to bypass FOIA.
It's unprofessional and unnecessary. Nothing good can come from it.
RE: Is Ivanka really that stupid? (Posted: Yesterday, 02:59 PM) (This post was last
modified: Yesterday, 03:02 PM by Dr Evil .)
(Yesterday, 01:47 PM)Яudis Wrote: I got this feeling She Is BAITING
the Dems!
And I bet the Content of these Emails is Exceeding Low Security!
I Mean its NOT like She Bought a BlackBerry CellPhone/Email Server and 26 Blackberry
Phones!
For her self and all her aids, So Send Top Security Government SECRETS!
To AVOID Using Gov Devices and Servers! Then Used BleachBit to SCRUB THe DRIVES!
Then Started SMASHING Laptops and Phones With Sledge Hammers!
I don't SEE Ivanka Murdering over 30 People to Cover a Career In CRIME and
Corruption!
She is definitely baiting them. This is the statement from her spokesman:
Quote: Later today Ivanka's spokesman, Peter Mirijanian, released a
blistering statement to the liberal anti-Trump press.
"Like most people, before entering into government service, Ms. Trump used a private
email. When she entered the government, she was given a government email account for
official use. While transitioning into government, until the White House provided her
the same guidance they had to others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes
used her private account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her
family.
To address misinformation being peddled about Ms. Trump's personal email, she did
not create a private server in her house or office, there was never classified
information transmitted, the account was never transferred or housed at Trump
Organization, no emails were ever deleted, and the emails have been retained in the
official account in conformity with records preservation laws and rules.
When concerns were raised in the press 14 months ago, Ms. Trump reviewed and
verified her email use with White House Counsel and explained the issue to
congressional leaders. "
Note how that statement carefully mentions all the major crimes Killary committed in
relation to her server. That's not an accident.
They're going to let the idiot media go on and on and on about this. Then sometime
within the recent memory of the sheeple one of the Senate committees will release all the
material on Killary's server and the sheeple will believe it since it comes from govt
sources and they will wait expectantly for their beloved MSM to cover it as extensively
as they covered Ivanka and they will witness nothing of the sort and millions of them
will finally realise they've been being played like idiots by the media and because
people hate that they will become very angry and that anger will drive them to review in
their minds everything the media's been telling them since Trump was elected and when
it's all over the Great Awakening will have a few million more converts. You need about
10% of the people to get on board with something before it becomes an avalanche because
that's approximately the threshold where enough people in the office know the same things
you do that you feel safe voicing your opinions at the water cooler without fear of
ridicule.
That seems to be the plan and it'd be very interesting to know who leaked this to whom
in the media because clearly this was a leak because otherwise why haven't the media
previously covered it? Nothing is more vigorously defended than a vested interest
disguised as an intellectual conviction.
This is long overdue for so many reasons, but the corruption is so pervasive that reform
is nigh impossible (which I'm sure will reassure certain hearts).
I've been rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter (between episodes of schizoid
lamentation) listening to Russophobes (e.g., David Sanger of the NYT) rant on in alarmism
about the perils of RUSSIAN COLLUSION, all the while ignoring the elephant from Israel
standing right next to their shoulders.
Seriously, who can coherently argue that any hazard to democracy posed by Russia's
election influence was remotely comparable to the interference of Israel and Britain? And why
should the latter 2′s intentions any more than the former's?
"... Even then, the Russophobes have been frantically making a mountain out of a molehill. We investigated the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, for example, and found that it was actually the hobby horse of a mid-sized Oligarch. The latter had been minding his own business trolling the Russian Internet, as the oligarchs of that country are wont to do – until the US sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 became the occasion for Washington's relentless vilification of Russia and Putin. ..."
"... Still, there is no evidence that this two-bit hobby farm was an instrument of Kremlin policy or that its tiny $2 million budget could hold a candle to the $200 million per year round-the-clock propaganda of Voice of America, and multiples thereof by the other Washington propaganda venues. ..."
"... In any event, turning the Trump Tower meeting into evidence of Russian meddling and collusion actually gives the old saw about turning a molehill into a mountain an altogether new meaning. That is to say, on any given evening Anderson Cooper will be interviewing a lathered-up ex-general or ex-spook admonishing that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually a nefarious Russian "cut out" sent by Putin to infiltrate the Trump campaign. ..."
"... The fact is, the meeting happened because Veselnitskaya wanted to reach the Trump campaign in behalf of her anti-Magnitsky Act agenda, and to do so used the good offices of what appears to be the Russian Justin Bieber! ..."
"... Specifically, the offer came to Don Trump Jr. via a London-based PR flack named Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who knew the Trumps through the Miss Universe pageant that was held in Moscow in 2013. Goldstone didn't know his head from a hole in the ground when it comes to international affairs or Russian politics, but he did represent the Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov, whose father was also a Trump-style real estate developer and had been involved in the 2013 pageant ..."
"... More fantastically yet, Natalia had meet with Simpson both before and after the Trump Tower meeting apparently to be coached by him on her anti-Magnitsky pitch to the Trump campaign. ..."
"... So if Veselnitskaya was part of a Russian collusion conspiracy, then so was the Glenn Simpson, the midwife of the Trump Dossier! ..."
Political War! Washington Goes Full Retard on the Russia Hoax
by David
Stockman Posted on
August 08, 2018 August 7, 2018 It's hard to identify anything that's more uncoupled from
reality than the Donald's Trade War and reckless Fiscal Debauch. Together they will soon
monkey-hammer today's delirious Wall Street revilers and send main street's aging and anemic
recovery back into the drink.
Except, except. When it comes to unreality, Trump's crackpot economics is actually more
than rivaled by the full retard Russophobia of the MSM, the Dems and the nomenclatura of
Imperial Washington.
In fact, their groupthink mania about the alleged Russian attack on American democracy is
so devoid of fact, logic, context, proportion and self-awareness as to give the Donald's
tweet storms an aura of sanity by comparison.
Their endless obsession with the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian nobody by
the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya proves the point. She was actually in New York doing god's
work, as it were, defending a Russian company against hokey money-laundering charges related
to the abominable Magnitsky Act and its contemptible promoter, Bill Browder.
The latter had pulled off an epic multi-billion swindle during the wild west days of
post-Soviet Russia and was essentially chased from the country in 2005 by Putin for hundreds
of millions in tax evasion. Thereafter he turned the murky prison death of his accountant,
Sergei Magnitsky, who was also charged with massive tax evasion, into a revenge crusade
against Putin.
That resulted in a huge lobbying campaign subsidized by Browder's illicit billions and
spearheaded by the Senate's most bloodthirsty trio of warmongers – Senators McCain,
Graham and Cardin – to enact the 2012 Magnitsky Act.
The latter, of course, is the very excrescence of Imperial Washington's arrogant meddling
in the internal affairs of other countries. It imposes sweeping sanctions on Russians (and
other foreigners) deemed complicit in Magnitsky's death in a Russian jail and for other
alleged human rights violations in Russia and elsewhere.
Needless to say, imperial pretense doesn't get any more sanctimonious than this. Deep
State apparatchiks in the US Treasury Department get to try Russian citizens in absentia and
without due process for vaguely worded crimes under American law that were allegedly
committed in Russia, and then to seize their property and persons when involved in any act of
global commerce where Washington can browbeat local satrapies and "allies" into
cooperation!
Only in an imperial capital steeped in self-conferred entitlement to function as global
hegemon would such a preposterous extraterritorial arrangement be even thinkable. After all,
what happens to Russians in Russian prisons is absolutely none of Washington's business
– nor by any stretch of the imagination does it pose any threat whatsoever to America's
homeland security.
So the irony of the Trump Tower nothingburger is that the alleged Russian agent was here
fighting Washington's meddling in Russia , not hooking up with Trump's campaign
to further a Kremlin plot to attack American democracy.
You could properly call this a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but Imperial
Washington and its shills among the ranks of Dem politicians and megaphones in the MSM
wouldn't get the joke in the slightest. That's because Washington is in the business of
meddling in the domestic affairs of virtually every country in the world – friend, foe
and also-ran – on a massive scale never before imagined in human history.
That's what the hideously excessive $75 billion budget of the so-called
17-agency "intelligence community" (IC) gets you. To wit, a backdoor into every access point
and traffic exchange node on the entire global internet, and from there the ability to hack,
surveil, exfiltrate or corrupt the communications of any government, political party,
business or private citizen virtually anywhere on the planet.
And, no, this isn't being done for the noble purpose of rooting-out the terrorist needles
in the global haystack of communications and Internet traffic. It's done because the IC has
the resources to do it and because it has invested itself with endless missions of global
hegemony.
These self-serving missions, in turn, justify its existence, keep the politicians of
Washington well stocked in scary bedtime stories and, most important of all, ensure that the
fiscal gravy train remains loaded to the gills and that the gilded prosperity of the beltway
never falters.
Indeed, if Washington were looking for corporate pen name it would be Meddling "R" Us. And
we speak here not merely of its vast and secretive spy apparatus, but also of its completely
visible everyday intrusions in the affairs of other countries via the billions that are
channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy and the vast NGO network funded by the
State Department, DOD and other organs of the national security complex.
The $750 million per year Board For International Broadcasting, for example,
is purely in the propaganda business; and despite the Cold War's end 27 years ago, still
carries out relentless "agit prop" in Russia and among the reincarnated states of the old
Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of
America.
For example, here is a Voice of America tweet from this morning falsely charging Russia
with the occupation of the former Soviet state of Georgia.
In fact, Russia came to the aid of the Russian-speaking population of the breakaway
province of South Ossetia in 2008; the latter felt imperiled by the grandiose pretensions of
the corrupt Saakashvili government in Tbilisi, which had unilaterally launched an
indiscriminate military assault on the major cities of the province.
Moreover, even an EU commission investigation came to that conclusion way back in 2009
shortly after the events that the inhabitants of South Ossetia feared would lead to a
genocidal invasion by Georgia's military.
An investigation into last year's Russia-Georgia war delivered a damning indictment of
President Mikheil Saakashvili today, accusing Tbilisi of launching an indiscriminate
artillery barrage on the city of Tskhinvali that started the war.
In more than 1,000 pages of analysis, documentation and witness statements, the most
exhaustive inquiry into the five-day conflict dismissed Georgian claims that the artillery
attack was in response to a Russian invasion
The EU-commissioned report, by a fact-finding mission of more than 20 political,
military, human rights and international law experts led by the Swiss diplomat, Heidi
Tagliavini, was unveiled in Brussels today after nine months of work.
Flatly dismissing Saakashvili's version, the report said: "There was no ongoing
armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation Georgian claims of a
large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive
could not be substantiated
The point is, whatever the rights and wrongs of the statelets and provinces attempting to
sort themselves out after the fall of the Soviet Union, this was all happening on Russia's
doorsteps and was none of Washington business even at the time. But wasting taxpayer money 10
years later by siding with the revanchist claims of the Georgian government is just plain
ludicrous.
It's also emblematic of why the Imperial City is so clueless about the rank hypocrisy
implicit in the Russian meddling hoax. Believing that America is the Indispensable Nation and
that Washington operates by its own hegemonic rules, they are now Shocked, Shocked! to find
that the victims of their blatant intrusions might actually endeavor to fight back.
Even then, the Russophobes have been frantically making a mountain out of a molehill.
We investigated the Russian troll farm in St. Petersburg, for example, and found that it was
actually the hobby horse of a mid-sized Oligarch. The latter had been minding his own
business trolling the Russian Internet, as the oligarchs of that country are wont to do
– until the US sponsored coup in Kiev in 2014 became the occasion for Washington's
relentless vilification of Russia and Putin.
Accordingly, this particular Russian patriot hired a few dozen students at $3-4 per hour
who mostly spoke English as a third-language. Operating on 12-hour shifts, they randomly
trolled Facebook and other US based social media, posting crude and sometimes incoherent
political messages from virtually all points on the compass – messages that were
instantly lost in the great sea of social media trivia and mendacity.
Still, there is no evidence that this two-bit hobby farm was an instrument of Kremlin
policy or that its tiny $2 million budget could hold a candle to the $200
million per year round-the-clock propaganda of Voice of America, and multiples
thereof by the other Washington propaganda venues.
In any event, turning the Trump Tower meeting into evidence of Russian meddling and
collusion actually gives the old saw about turning a molehill into a mountain an altogether
new meaning. That is to say, on any given evening Anderson Cooper will be interviewing a
lathered-up ex-general or ex-spook admonishing that Natalia Veselnitskaya was actually a
nefarious Russian "cut out" sent by Putin to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
Really?
We have no brief for Vlad Putin, but one thing we are quite sure of is that he is anything
but stupid. So would he really send a secret agent to Trump Tower – who neither speaks
nor writes a word of English and has been to America only once – in order to plot a
surreptitious attempt to manipulate the American election?
The fact is, the meeting happened because Veselnitskaya wanted to reach the Trump
campaign in behalf of her anti-Magnitsky Act agenda, and to do so used the good offices of
what appears to be the Russian Justin Bieber!
Specifically, the offer came to Don Trump Jr. via a London-based PR flack named Rob
Goldstone, a music publicist who knew the Trumps through the Miss Universe pageant that was
held in Moscow in 2013. Goldstone didn't know his head from a hole in the ground when it
comes to international affairs or Russian politics, but he did represent the Russian pop
singer Emin Agalarov, whose father was also a Trump-style real estate developer and had been
involved in the 2013 pageant .
Said the London PR flack in an email to Don Jr:
"Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting .The
Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered
to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would
incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your
father .( this is) "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
And a very big so what!
For one thing, the last "Crown prosecutor of Russia" was assassinated by the Bolsheviks in
1917, suggesting Goldstone's grasp of the contemporary Russian government was well less than
rudimentary.
Secondly, there was neither a crime nor national security issue involved when a campaign
seeks to dig-up dirt from foreign nationals. The crime is when they pay for it, and do not
report the expenditure to the Federal Elections Commission.
Of course, that's exactly what Hillary Clinton's campaign did with its multi-million
funding of the Trump Dossier, generated by foreign national Christopher Steele and
intermediated to the FBI and other IC agencies by Fusion GPS.
And that gets us to the mind-boggling silliness of the whole Trump Tower affair.
Self-evidently, the dirt on Hillary suggestion was a come-on so that Veselnitskaya (through
her Russian translator) could make a pitch against the Magnitsky Act; and to point out that
after 33,000 Russian babies had been adopted by Americans before its enactment, that avenue
of adoption had been stopped cold when the Kremlin found it necessary to retaliate.
Don's Jr. emails to his secretary from the meeting long ago proved that he immediately
recognized Natalia's bait and switch operation, and that he wanted to be summoned to the
phone so he could end what he saw was a complete waste of the campaign's time.
But here's the joker in the woodpile. Its seem that Glenn Simpson, proprietor of Fusion
GPs, had also been hired by Veselnitskaya Russian clients to make a case in Washington
against the Magnitsky Act, and to also dig up dirt on the scoundrel behind it: Bill
Browder.
More fantastically yet, Natalia had meet with Simpson both before and after the Trump
Tower meeting apparently to be coached by him on her anti-Magnitsky pitch to the Trump
campaign.
So if Veselnitskaya was part of a Russian collusion conspiracy, then so was the Glenn
Simpson, the midwife of the Trump Dossier!
It doesn't get any crazier than that – meaning that the Donald could not be more
correct about this entire farce:
This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged
Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is
totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace
to USA!
In truth, the only basis for Natalia Veselnitskaya's alleged Putin ties was through
Russia's prosecutor general, Yuri Chaika.
And exactly why was Chaika interested in making American contacts?
Why, because he was pursuing one Bill Browder, fugitive from Russian justice and the
driving force behind the abominable Magnitsky Act – an instrument of meddling in the
domestic affairs of foreign countries like no other. As one report described it:
Chaika's foray into American politics began in earnest in April 2016. That is when his
office gave Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and three other US representatives a
confidential letter detailing American investor Bill Browder's "illegal scheme of buying up
Gazprom shares without permission of the Government of Russia" between 1999 and 2006, one
month after Rohrabacher returned from Moscow.
As it happened, Veselnitskaya had apparently brought a memo to the Trump Tower meeting
that contained many of the same talking points as one written by Chaika's office two months
earlier.
There you have it.
At the heart of the Russian collusion hoax and the wellspring of the current Russophobia
is nothing more than a half-baked effort by Russians to tell their side of the Magnitsky
story, and to expose the real villain in the piece – a monumentally greedy hedge fund
operator who had stolen the Russian people blind and then conveniently gave up his American
citizenship so that he would neither do time in a Russian jail or pay taxes in America.
Spoiler Alert for next part: When both economic policy and politics have gone full retard
in the Imperial City is there anything which could possibly go wrong – that might
pollute the punch bowl on Wall Street?
Don't hold your breath for it, but there should be an abject apology coming from US
politicians, pundits, media and intelligence agencies.
For months leading up to the midterm elections held last week, we were told that the Kremlin
was deviously targeting the ballot, in a replay of the way Russian hackers allegedly interfered
in the 2016 presidential race to get Donald Trump into the White House.
Supposedly reliable news media outlets like the New York Times and heavyweight Senate panels
were quoting intelligence sources
warning that the "Russians are coming – again".
So what just happened? Nothing. Where were the social media campaigns of malicious
Russian-inspired misinformation "sowing division"? Whatever happened to the supposed army of
internet bots and trolls that the Kremlin command? Where are the electoral machines tampered
with to give false vote counts?
Facebook said it had
deleted around 100 social media accounts that it claimed "were linked" to pro-Russian
entities intent on meddling in the midterms. How did Facebook determined that "linkage"? It was
based on a "tip-off" by US intelligence agencies. Hardly convincing proof of a Kremlin plot to
destabilize American democracy.
If elusive Russian hackers somehow targeted the midterm Congressional elections they
certainly seem to have a convoluted objective. Trump's Republican party lost the House of
Representatives to Democrat control. That could result in more Congressional probes into his
alleged collusion with Russia. It could also result in Democrats filing subpoenas for Trump to
finally disclose his personal tax details which he has strenuously refused to do so far.
Moreover, having lost control of one of the two Congressional chambers, Trump will find his
legislative plans being slowed down and even blocked.
Thus, if Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin are the purported "puppet masters"
behind the Trump presidency, they have a very strange way of showing their support, as can be
seen from the setbacks of the midterms.
A far simpler, more plausible explanation is that there was no Russian hacking of the
midterms, just as there wasn't in the 2016 presidential election. Russian interference,
influence campaigns, malign activity, "Russia-gate", and so on, are nothing but myths conjured
up by Trump's domestic political opponents and their obliging media outlets.
Now that all the dire warnings of Russia hacking into the midterms have been shown to be a
mirage, the US intelligence agencies seem to be adopting a new spin on events. We are told that
they "prevented Russian interference".
In a Bloomberg
article headlined 'One Big Loser of the Midterms – Russian Hackers', it is claimed:
"Security officials believe [sic] they prevented cyberattacks on election day." However, they
added, "it's hard to tell."
In other words, US security officials have no idea if putative Russian hackers were
targeting the elections. The contorted logic is that if there were no hacking incidents, then
it was because US cybersecurity prevented them. This is tantamount to invoking absence to prove
presence. It's voodoo intelligence.
President Trump has a point when he lambastes Democrats and their supportive media for
crying foul only when they lose an election. In various midterm races, it was apparent that
Democrats would protest some alleged electoral discrepancy when their candidate lost against a
Republican. But when Democrats came out on top, there were no irregularities.
One can imagine therefore that if the Democrats had failed to win control over the House of
Representatives, then they and their intelligence agency and media supporters would have been
clamoring about "Russian interference" to help Republicans retain the House.
As it turned out, the Democrats won the House, so there is no need to invoke the Russian
bogeyman. In that case, it is claimed, Russian hackers "did not succeed" to penetrate the
electoral system or pivot social media.
Nonetheless, there was indeed rampant interference in the recent US election. For one thing,
some 28 pro-Israeli Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals spent around $15
million to promote 80 candidates in the Congressional elections, according to the organization If
Americans Knew. This foreign influence on US voters in favor of Israeli interests is nothing
new. It is standard practice in every election.
During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Israeli-American billionaire Sheldon Adelson
reportedly donated $25 million to Trump's campaign. Undoubtedly that legalized bribery is
why Trump on becoming president has pushed such a slavishly pro-Israeli Middle East policy,
including his inflammatory declaration of Jerusalem as the sole capital of the Zionist
state.
But there is no outcry about "Israeli influence campaigns" and "hacking" from the US media
or from Democrats over this egregious interference in American democracy. No, they prefer to
obsess about the phantom of Russian meddling.
Another evident source of electoral hacking was of the homegrown variety. There seem to be
valid grievances among ordinary American voters about gerrymandering of electoral districts by
incumbent parties, as well as voter disenfranchisement, especially among poor African-American
and Latino communities. There were also reported cases of phone canvassers making malicious
calls to discredit candidates, as was claimed by the beaten Democrat contenders in Florida and
Georgia.
Clearly, there are huge flaws in the US electoral system. Most glaringly, the gargantuan
problem of campaign funding by corporations, banks and other representatives of the oligarchic
system.
A further chronic problem is yawning voter apathy. The recent midterms were said to have
seen a "record turnout" of voters. The official figure is that only 48 per
cent of voters exercised their democratic right. That is, over half the voting population view
the ballot exercise as not worth while or something worse. This is a constant massive disavowal
of American democracy expressed in every US election.
The midterm elections demonstrate once again that American democracy has its own inherent
failings. But the political establishment and the ruling oligarchy are loathe to fix a system
from which they benefit.
When the system becomes unwieldy or throws up results that the establishment does not quite
like – such as the election of uncouth, big mouth Trump – then the "error" must be
"explained" away by some extraneous factor, such as "Russian hacking".
However, the latest exercise in American democracy, for what it is worth, gave the salutary
demonstration of the myth of Russian interference – at least for those who care to
honestly see that.
Another valuable demonstration was this: if supposedly reliable news media and an
intelligence apparatus that is charged with national security have been caught out telling
spectacular lies with regard to "Russian hacking", then what credibility do they have on a host
of other anti-Russia claims, or, indeed, on many other matters?
The Democrats are politically responsible for the rise of Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... As Obama said following Trump's election, the Democrats and Republicans are "on the same team" and their differences amount to an "intramural scrimmage." They are on the team of, and owned lock stock and barrel by, the American corporate-financial oligarchy, personified by Trump. ..."
"... The Democrats are, moreover, politically responsible for the rise of Trump. The Obama administration paved the way for Trump by implementing the pro-corporate (Wall Street bailout), pro-war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, drone killings) and anti-democratic (mass surveillance, persecution of Snowden, Assange, Manning) policies that Trump is continuing and intensifying. And by breaking all his election promises and carrying out austerity policies against the working class, Obama enabled the billionaire gangster Trump to make an appeal to sections of workers devastated by deindustrialization, presenting himself as the anti-establishment spokesman for the "forgotten man." ..."
"... This was compounded by the right-wing Clinton candidacy, which exuded contempt for the working class and appealed for support to the military and CIA and wealthy middle-class layers obsessed with identity politics. Sanders' endorsement of Clinton gave Trump an open field to exploit discontent among impoverished social layers. ..."
Pelosi's deputy in the House, Steny Hoyer, sums up the right-wing policies of the Democrats,
declaring: "His [Trump's] objectives are objectives that we share. If he really means that,
then there is an opening for us to work together."
So much for the moral imperative of voting for the Democrats to stop Trump! As Obama said
following Trump's election, the Democrats and Republicans are "on the same team" and their
differences amount to an "intramural scrimmage." They are on the team of, and owned lock stock
and barrel by, the American corporate-financial oligarchy, personified by Trump.
The Democrats are, moreover, politically responsible for the rise of Trump. The Obama
administration paved the way for Trump by implementing the pro-corporate (Wall Street bailout),
pro-war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, drone killings) and anti-democratic (mass
surveillance, persecution of Snowden, Assange, Manning) policies that Trump is continuing and
intensifying. And by breaking all his election promises and carrying out austerity policies
against the working class, Obama enabled the billionaire gangster Trump to make an appeal to
sections of workers devastated by deindustrialization, presenting himself as the
anti-establishment spokesman for the "forgotten man."
This was compounded by the right-wing Clinton candidacy, which exuded contempt for the
working class and appealed for support to the military and CIA and wealthy middle-class layers
obsessed with identity politics. Sanders' endorsement of Clinton gave Trump an open field to
exploit discontent among impoverished social layers.
The same process is taking place internationally. While strikes and other expressions of
working class opposition are growing and broad masses are moving to the left, the right-wing
policies of supposedly "left" establishment parties are enabling far-right and neo-fascist
forces to gain influence and power in countries ranging from Germany, Italy, Hungary and Poland
to Brazil.
As for Gay's injunction to vote "pragmatically," this is a crude promotion of the bankrupt
politics that are brought forward in every election to keep workers tied to the capitalist
two-party system. "You have only two choices. That is the reality, whether you like it or not."
And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy
is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting
you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today --
falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war.
The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation "graveyard of social protest
movements," and for good reason. From the Populist movement of the late 19th century, to the
semi-insurrectional industrial union movement of the 1930s, to the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s, to the mass anti-war protest movements of the 1960s and the eruption of
international protests against the Iraq War in the early 2000s -- every movement against the
depredations of American capitalism has been aborted and strangled by being channeled behind
the Democratic Party.
So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much
worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
"... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
"... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
"... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
"... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
"... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
"... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
The Inspector General expressed concern about "potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality" and "chilling effect"
Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.
The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures
are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept
secret until now.
In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during
"routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and
the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to
whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might
have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."
The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch,
is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence
agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.
"Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats
and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss
(R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type
of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but
"I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive
Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community
Inspector General 2014
The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The
fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers
raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,"
wrote Grassley in a statement.
According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with
"bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."
Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence
officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community
Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
History of alleged surveillance abuses
Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the
possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's
response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be
saved or reported up to CIA management.
"In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring
user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported
to agency leadership under an insider threat program."
However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:
"CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually
shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy
Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."
Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency
(NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
"During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance,"
said
Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.
"Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."
Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.
Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S.
citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured
in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only
allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed
that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.
Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of
President Trump.
Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!
All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against
our Constitution would be in full swing!
When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter.
Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged
and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance
and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a
horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.
Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties
before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump
won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas
as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.
From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's
US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy"
closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."
Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"
I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And
the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified
material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing
incriminating evidence.
Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew
the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since
our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when
(((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.
The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive
order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.
America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.
A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an
increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the
master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.
What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would
they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!
"... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
"... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
"... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
"... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
"... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
"... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
"... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
"... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
"... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
"... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
"... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
"... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
"... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
"... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
"... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
"... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something
very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies.
There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to
testify before congress.
That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his
people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in
at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic
he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you
inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 (
http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in
the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort
of thing that undermines their position with me!)
Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.
But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch
change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time
you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.
"Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie,
the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."
There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce
its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.
"While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise
is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just
want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee."
- BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women
The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.
While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies
to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in
the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.
Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of
colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources
and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."
In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another
'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite
an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]
The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of
its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months.
The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war.
We are in an age of new mccarthyism
What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction
they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told
to!
just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are
capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count
on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they
let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy
theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great
failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no
time at all and executed..
A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without
them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11
events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry
out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada
on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast
US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying
the response, among other things.
Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes,
coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or
since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse
first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?
It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the
front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then
"disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.
For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new,
including:
Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised
structurally).
A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim
ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)
The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged
in a 767 crash). "
Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575º in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized
by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575º is far below the point at which structural steel
specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.
All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there
was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention
that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos
or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then
"disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".
Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called
it as soon as the buildings imploded!
"The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."
By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly
and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel
and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to
the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!
Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.
the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they
are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better
off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory"
of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the
the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most
effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party
Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party
are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form
a "Political Revolution against Empire"
While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is
concerned.
There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing
grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they
would have been much weaker to counter.
Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality
is maintained.
What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse
to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.
As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch
of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.
She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true
internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.
Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans
--- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted
totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against
EMPIRE.
As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"
"Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America,
is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised',
'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!
Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially
ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others
less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear
is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects'
of this monsterous EMPIRE."
Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to
others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin
slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.
HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather
rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!
Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a
major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against
the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business
organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out
that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel.
Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions
of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs
major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both
inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.
It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities
that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct
mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into
websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and
funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering
and heavy handed.
The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
<http:
www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.
The strategy
is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate
slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?
"... "Would you rather have a professional assassin after you or a frothing maniac with a meat cleaver? I'd rather have a maniac with a meat cleaver after me, so I think Cheney is way worse. And also, if you look at the body count, more than 600,000 people died in Iraq. It's not even close, right? ..."
The
Wall Street Journal's Maureen Dowd appears to have had enough of the hyperbole,
hyper-short-memories, and hyped up virtue-signaling from the establishment. Reflecting on Adam
McKay's new movie "Vice" with Christian Bale playing Dick Cheney, Dowd gently nudges America
back from the edge of the divisive Midterms to remember that much evil has come before...
Donald Trump is running wild - and running scared.
He's such a menace that it's tempting to cheer any vituperative critic and grab any handy
truncheon. But villainizing Trump should not entail sanitizing other malefactors.
And we should acknowledge that the president is right on one point: For neocons,
journalists, authors, political hacks and pundits, there is a financial incentive to demonize
the president, not to mention an instant halo effect. Only Trump could get the pussy-hat crowd
to fill Times Square to protest Jeff Sessions's firing.
We make the president the devil spawn and he makes us the enemy of the people and everybody
wins. Or do they? To what extent is lucrative Trump hysteria warping our discourse?
Trump may not be sweaty and swarthy, but he makes a good bad guy. As with Nixon and
Watergate, the correct moral response and the lavish remunerative rewards neatly dovetail.
Even for Washington, the capital of do-overs and the soulless swamp where horrendous
mistakes never prevent you from cashing in and getting another security clearance, this is a
repellent spectacle. War criminals-turned-liberal heroes are festooned with book and TV
contracts, podcasts and op-ed perches.
Those who sold us the
"cakewalk" Iraq war and the outrageously unprepared Sarah Palin and torture as "enhanced
interrogation," those who left the Middle East shattered with a cascading refugee crisis and a
rising ISIS, and those who midwifed the birth of the Tea Party are washing away their sins in a
basin of Trump hate.
The very same Republicans who eroded
America's moral authority in the 2000s are, staggeringly, being treated as the new
guardians of America's moral authority.
They bellow that Trump is a blight on democracy. But where were these patriots when the Bush
administration was deceiving
us with a cooked-up war in Iraq?
Michelle Obama has written in her memoir that she will never forgive Trump for pushing the
birther movement. Yet the Pygmalions of Palin, who backed Trump on the birther filth, are now
among the most celebrated voices in Michelle's party.
The architects and enablers of the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib are still being listened to on
foreign policy, both inside
the administration (John Bolton and Gina Haspel) and out. NeverTrumper Eliot Cohen wrote
the Washington Post op-ed after the election telling conservatives not to work for Trump; Max
Boot, who urged an invasion of Iraq whether or not Saddam
was involved in 9/11, is now a CNN analyst, Post columnist and the author of a
new book bashing Trump; John Yoo, who wrote the unconstitutional torture memo, is suddenly
concerned that Trump's appointment of his ghastly acting attorney general is
unconstitutional.
MSNBC is awash in nostalgia for Ronald Reagan and W.
So it's a good moment for Adam McKay, the inventive director of "The Big Short," to enter
the debate with a movie that raises the question: Is insidious destruction of our democracy by
a bureaucratic samurai with the soothing voice of a boys' school headmaster even more dangerous
than a self-destructive buffoon ripping up our values in plain sight?
How do you like your norms broken? Over Twitter or in a torture memo? By a tinpot demagogue
stomping on checks and balances he can't even fathom or a shadowy authoritarian expertly and
quietly dismantling checks and balances he knows are sacred?
McKay grappled with the W.-Cheney debacle in 2009, when he co-wrote a black comedy with
Will Ferrell called "You're Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush." In the Broadway
hit, Ferrell's W. dismissed waterboarding as a Bliss spa treatment and confided that he had
once discovered Cheney locked in an embrace with a giant goat devil in a room full of
pentagrams.
When McKay was home with the flu three years ago, he grabbed a book and began reading up on
Cheney. He ended up writing and directing "Vice," a film that uses real-life imagery, witty
cinematic asides and cultural touchstones to explore the irreparable damage Cheney did to the
planet, and how his blunders and plunders led to many of our current crises.
With an echo of his Batman growl, Christian Bale brilliantly shape-shifts into another
American psycho, the lumbering, scheming vice president who easily manipulates the naïve
and insecure W., deliciously played by Sam Rockwell. While W. strives to impress his father,
Cheney strives to impress his wife, Lynne, commandingly portrayed by Amy Adams.
Before we had Trump's swarm of bloodsucking lobbyists gutting government regulations from
within, we had Cheney's. Before Trump brazenly used the White House to boost his brand, we had
Cheney wallowing in emoluments: He let his energy industry pals shape energy policy; he pushed
to invade Iraq, giving no-bid contracts to
his former employer, Halliburton , and helping his Big Oil cronies reap the spoils
in Iraq.
The movie opens at Christmas, but it's no sugary Hallmark fable. It's a harrowing cautionary
tale showing that democracy can be sabotaged even more diabolically by a trusted insider,
respected by most of the press, than by a clownish outsider, disdained by most of the
press.
After a screening of "Vice" Thursday, I asked McKay which of our two right-wing Dementors
was worse, Cheney or Trump.
"Here's the question," he said.
"Would you rather have a professional assassin after you or a frothing maniac with a meat
cleaver? I'd rather have a maniac with a meat cleaver after me, so I think Cheney is way
worse. And also, if you look at the body count, more than 600,000 people died in Iraq. It's
not even close, right? "
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal
centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic
Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the
left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win.
The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running
to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring
agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."
The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some
countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an
elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a
trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973
respectively.
In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of
Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that
a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in
the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless
response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach
across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010.
Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round,
Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to
Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf
of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century
Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields.
A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul
Weyrich.
Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included
working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities
during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover
Investment Group.
John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest
fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack
Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up
with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the
American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.
Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a
counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in
the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications
landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the
House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a
contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which
were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.
With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that
their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the
national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare
state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like
sugar-coating a bitter pill.
In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria
defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA
analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also
helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve
her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew
Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is
something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."
For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is
seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the
fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than
Montclair.
There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president
was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on
Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.
Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative,
confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.
On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and
she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular
talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.
"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it
sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.
The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around
her candidacy.
For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it
was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community
college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used
the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.
"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't
want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he
remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.
It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting
a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry
past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe
Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.
No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead
trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective,
working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left
politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her
campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million
just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able
to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to
defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a
massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the
capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination
of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.
Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of
how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut.
Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no
intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy
Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can
only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.
Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his
executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their
stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put
it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate
Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the
public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the
currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The
president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent
order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to
run."
For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any
deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy
that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints
on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had
a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in
Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that
would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they
complained too much.
By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as
Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch
Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior
of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected
government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to
push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the
courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is
unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens
to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.
"... Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious exchange during a news conference. ..."
"... "I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I haven't made that decision. But it could be others also." ..."
"... On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings... Hold them once a month ..."
"... the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences. the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them. ..."
Having barred his CNN arch nemesis Jim Acosta from the White House,
on Friday the president lashed out at another CNN reporter at the White House over his
appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting AG as well as Whitaker's views towards the special
counsel investigation.
During a Friday morning gaggle with White House reporters before Trump's trip to Paris,
CNN's Abby Phillip asked the president if he was hoping Whitaker, who previously criticized
Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation, would "rein in" the Russia probe. " Do you want
[Whitaker] to rein in Robert Mueller?" Phillip asked.
Trump's response left the stunned reported speechless. "What a stupid question that is,"
Trump said and, just in case it was lost, repeated "what a stupid question."
"But I watch you a lot," Trump continued. "You ask a lot of stupid questions."
Trump then demonstrably walked away, leaving the shocked reporters screaming more questions
in his wake.
Earlier, Trump said he has not spoken to acting AG Matt Whitaker about the Russia
investigation, which Whitaker now oversees. Trump defended Whitaker as a "very well respected
man in the law enforcement community" but claimed he does not know him personally. "I didn't
speak to Matt Whitaker about it. I don't know Matt Whitaker," Trump told reporters at the White
House before leaving for a trip to Paris.
While Trump sought to place personal distance
between himself and Whitaker, he made it clear he stood by his decision to place a loyalist in
charge of the Justice Department, a move many see as an effort to seize control of special
counsel Robert Mueller's probe. The president also rejected suggestions that Whitaker is
ineligible to serve as attorney general, a position held by some legal experts who say the
Justice Department leader must be confirmed by the Senate.
The acting AG has raised eyebrows, and in some cases prediction of a constitutional crisis,
because before joining the DOJ, Whitaker was an outspoken critic of Mueller's investigation and
many Democrats and legal scholars have said he should recuse himself from leading the probe.
Whitaker also claimed there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
interference efforts in the 2016 election, which is the central question of the Mueller
probe.
Trump lamented the criticism of Whitaker's past commentary, saying "it's a shame that no
matter who I put in, they go after him."
Trump then reiterated his plans to have Whitaker serve in an acting capacity, but declined
to reveal who might be Sessions' permanent replacement. He said he likes Chris Christie, who is
under consideration , but said he has not spoken to the former NJ governor about the post.
Christie was at the White House on Thursday for an event on prison reform but Trump said he did
not speak to him.
* * *
Trump wasn't finished, however, and during the same gaggle, he suggested he could pull press
credentials from other reporters who don't show him "respect" two days after the president
suspended the press pass of CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta after a contentious
exchange during a news conference.
"I think Jim Acosta is a very unprofessional man," Trump explained and when asked how long
Acosta's credentials will be suspended, the president replied: "As far as I'm concerned, I
haven't made that decision. But it could be others also."
Trump also went after April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks as a "loser" who "doesn't
know what the hell she is doing."
Keyser 15 minutes ago
On this one Trump needs to take a hint from Obozo, stop doing daily press briefings...
Hold them once a month, then hand-pick which reporters you want in the room... And if a
reporter publishes a story you don't like, prosecute them... What we have now is what happens
when the lunatics are given free reign...
dcmbuffy 55 minutes ago remove
the stooge press/talking heads have made a cottage industry off of the press conferences.
the msm sends stooges to sell their product. trump is 100% correct- the msm doesn't have the
guts to cull their stooge legions- oh dear- the white house will do their job for them.
"... Mueller's investigation has been at the center of a McCarthyite-style campaign against Russia spearheaded by the intelligence agencies and the Democratic Party, based on fabricated claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the presidential election to undermine the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. It has been used as a weapon in the drive by the Democrats and sections of the military/intelligence establishment to force Trump to adopt a more aggressive posture against Moscow and in the war for regime-change in Syria. ..."
"... The aim of shifting the Trump administration to a war footing against Russia has been achieved to the extent that there is now a substantial risk of nuclear conflict between the US and the second-leading nuclear power ..."
"... Though promoted in the media and sponsored by over 50 Democratic Party-linked organizations, including MoveOn.org, the rallies on Tuesday were small, reflecting the lack of support in the general population for the anti-Russia crusade. The protests were notable primarily for their unvarnished right-wing and neo-McCarthyite character. ..."
"... Two of the largest were in Washington DC and New York City, which each drew roughly 1,000 demonstrators, many of whom held hammer and cycle posters with Putin's image. Sessions began his career as a segregationist in Jim Crow Alabama and went on to become a right-wing Republican senator from the state. Mueller, for his part, was director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, during which time he helped institute mass domestic surveillance and other sweeping attacks on democratic rights linked to the so-called "war on terror." ..."
"... At the Washington demonstration, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin led those in attendance in a round of applause for Sessions. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, appealed to the military against Trump, declaring, "You are the defenders of our democracy," and led a chant of "protect Mueller." ..."
The Democrats and their fake "left" allies held war-mongering demonstrations in a number of
cities on Thursday in defense of the fired far-right attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and the
anti-Russia investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Wednesday's ouster of Sessions and his replacement by Trump ally Matthew G. Whitaker has
brought forth a wave of condemnation from Democratic Party figures and their media allies,
including the New York Times and Washington Post , asserting that the move is
the prelude to Trump's closing down of the Justice Department probe into allegations of Russian
"meddling" in the 2016 elections and possible collusion by the Trump campaign.
Trump had repeatedly denounced Sessions for having recused himself from the Russia
investigation in March of 2017, leaving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a defender of
the investigation, in overall charge of its conduct. Whitaker, a former US attorney and now
acting attorney general and therefore responsible for overseeing the Mueller probe, is on
record criticizing Mueller and suggesting that the Justice Department could cut off funding for
his office.
Mueller's investigation has been at the center of a McCarthyite-style campaign against
Russia spearheaded by the intelligence agencies and the Democratic Party, based on fabricated
claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the presidential election to
undermine the candidacy of Democrat Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. It has been used as a
weapon in the drive by the Democrats and sections of the military/intelligence establishment to
force Trump to adopt a more aggressive posture against Moscow and in the war for regime-change
in Syria.
To the extent that the Democrats oppose the right-wing Trump administration, it is on this
entirely reactionary basis. In the lead-up to Tuesday's midterm elections, they not only called
no demonstrations, they were entirely silent on Trump's fascistic attacks on immigrants, his
deployment of troops to the border against the caravan of Central American asylum seekers, and
his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship -- a cornerstone
of the Bill of Rights.
Following the election, in which the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives,
the party leadership called repeatedly for bipartisan unity and collaboration with Trump,
underscoring their essential agreement with his policies of war, austerity and repression. It
was only when Trump fired Sessions, a right-wing anti-immigrant zealot, that they swung into
action, reviving their denunciations of Trump as a stooge of Putin.
The aim of shifting the Trump administration to a war footing against Russia has been
achieved to the extent that there is now a substantial risk of nuclear conflict between the US
and the second-leading nuclear power . War could quickly erupt in a number of flash
points, especially Syria, where Russian soldiers, sailors and airmen carry out combat
operations within miles of their American counterparts, as well as US-allied Islamist proxies
armed by Saudi Arabia.
Though promoted in the media and sponsored by over 50 Democratic Party-linked
organizations, including MoveOn.org, the rallies on Tuesday were small, reflecting the lack of
support in the general population for the anti-Russia crusade. The protests were notable
primarily for their unvarnished right-wing and neo-McCarthyite character.
Two of the largest were in Washington DC and New York City, which each drew roughly
1,000 demonstrators, many of whom held hammer and cycle posters with Putin's image. Sessions
began his career as a segregationist in Jim Crow Alabama and went on to become a right-wing
Republican senator from the state. Mueller, for his part, was director of the FBI from 2001 to
2013, during which time he helped institute mass domestic surveillance and other sweeping
attacks on democratic rights linked to the so-called "war on terror."
At the Washington demonstration, Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin led those in
attendance in a round of applause for Sessions. Randi Weingarten, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, appealed to the military against Trump, declaring, "You are the
defenders of our democracy," and led a chant of "protect Mueller."
In defending Sessions, the Democrats and their allies are rallying around the most
right-wingattorneygeneral in
American history, who, prior to joining the Trump cabinet, had won a well-earned reputation as
a bitter opponent of civil rights. As attorney general, Sessions will primarily be remembered
for the persecution of immigrants, most notably the separation of immigrant children from their
parents and their imprisonment in detention camps built in the desert.
The task of spearheading the attack on immigrants and democratic rights will now fall,
pending the installation of a permanent attorney general, to Whitaker, who has boasted that he
interprets the Constitution from a biblical standpoint. His very first act as head of the
Department of Justice was to issue, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, a
directive stripping the right to asylum from anyone who enters the US over the Mexican border
and has not first gained legal status -- a move that is tantamount to abolishing the right to
asylum, which is guaranteed under international and US law.
This move, a new landmark in the attack on immigrants, due process and basic democratic
rights, has been virtually ignored by the media and the Democratic Party. It was not mentioned
in the press release calling Thursday's demonstration, nor by speakers at the demonstrations in
Washington and New York.
Gold age of the USA (say 40 years from 1946 to approximately 1986 ) were an in some way an aberration caused by WWII. As soon
as Germany and Japan rebuilt themselves this era was over. And the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (or more correct Soviet
nomenklatura switching sides and adopting neoliberalism) only make the decline more gradual but did not reversed it. After
200 it was clear that neoliberalism is in trouble and in 2008 it was clear that ideology of neoliberalism is dead, much like
Bolshevism after 1945.
As the US ruling neoliberal elite adopted this ideology ad its flag, the USA faces the situation somewhat similar the USSR
faced in 70th. It needs its "Perestroika" but with weak leader at the helm like Gorbachov it can lead to the dissolution of
the state. Dismantling neoliberalism is not less dangerous then dismantling of Bolshevism. The level of brainwashing of both
population and the elite (and it looks like the USA elite is brainwashed to an amazing level, probably far exceed the level of
brainwashing of Soviet nomenklatura) prevents any constructive moves.
In a way, Neoliberalism probably acts as a mousetrap for the country, similar to the role of Bolshevism in the
USSR. Ideology of neoliberalism is dead, so what' next. Another war to patch the internal divisions ? That's probably
why Trump is so adamant about attacking Iran. Iran does not have nuclear weapons so this is in a way an ideal target.
Unlike, say, Russia. And such a war can serve the same political purpose. That's why many emigrants from the USSR view the current
level of divisions with the USA is a direct analog of divisions within the USSR in late 70th and 80th. Similarities are
clearly visible with naked eye.
Notable quotes:
"... t is well known that legendary American gangster Al Capone once said that 'Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class', - and I have commented on the links between organised crime and capitalist accumulation before on this blog, but I recently came across the following story from Claud Cockburn's autobiography, and decided to put it up on Histomat for you all. ..."
"... "Listen," he said, "don't get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system. The American system..." As though an invisible chairman had called upon him for a few words, he broke into an oration upon the theme. He praised freedom, enterprise and the pioneers. He spoke of "our heritage". He referred with contempuous disgust to Socialism and Anarchism. "My rackets," he repeated several times, "are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way"...his vision of the American system began to excite him profoundly and now he was on his feet again, leaning across the desk like the chairman of a board meeting, his fingers plunged in the rose bowls. ..."
"... A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of The Times . He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I explained that when I had come to put my notes together I saw that most of what Capone had said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. Mr Walter, after a moment's wry reflection, admitted that probably my idea had been correct.' ..."
"... The biggest lie ever told is that American hegemony relies on American imperialism and warmongering. The opposite is true. America is weak precisely because it is trying so hard to project strength, because anyone with half a brain knows that it is projecting strength to enrich oligarhcs, not to protect or favor the American people. ..."
"... please mr. author don't give us more globalist dribble. We want our wealth back ..."
"... America the empire is just another oligarchic regime that other countries' populations rightly see as an example of what doesn't work ..."
"... It's the ruling capitalist Predator Class that has been demanding empire since McKinley was assassinated. That's the problem. ..."
"... And who do you suppose are the forces which are funding US politicians and thus getting to call their shots in foreign policy? Can you bring yourself to name them? ..."
"... The US physical plant and equipment as well as infrastructure is in advanced stages of decay. Ditto for the labor force which has been pauperized and abused for decades by the Predator Class... ..."
"The only wealth you keep is wealth you have given away," said Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD),
last of the great Roman emperors. US President Donald Trump might know of another Italian,
Mario Puzo's Don Vito Corleone, and his memorable mumble : "I'm going to make him
an offer he can't refuse."
Forgetting such Aurelian and godfather codes is propelling the decline and fall of the
American empire.
Trump is making offers the world can refuse – by reshaping trade deals, dispensing
with American sops and forcing powerful corporations to return home, the US is regaining
economic wealth but relinquishing global power.
As the last leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Mikhail Gorbachev's
perestroika (restructuring) led to the breakup of its vast territory(22 million square
kilometers). Gorbachev's failed policies led to the dissolution of the USSR into Russia and
independent countries, and the end of a superpower.
Ironically, the success of Trump's policies will hasten the demise of the American empire:
the US regaining economic health but losing its insidious hold over the world.
This diminishing influence was highlighted when India and seven other countries geared up to
defy Washington's re-imposition of its unilateral, illegal sanctions against Iran, starting
Monday.
The US State Department granting "permission" on the weekend to the eight countries to buy
Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the
station
The US State Department granting "permission" on the weekend to the eight countries to buy
Iranian oil was akin to waving the green flag at a train that has already left the station.
The law of cause and effect unavoidably delivers. The Roman Empire fell after wars of greed
and orgies of consumption. A similar nemesis, the genie of Gorbachev, stalks Pennsylvania
Avenue, with Trump unwittingly writing the last chapter of World War II: the epilogue of the
two rival superpowers that emerged from humanity's most terrible conflict.
The maverick 45th president of the United States may succeed at being an economic messiah to
his country, which has racked up a $21.6 trillion debt, but the fallout is the death of
American hegemony. These are the declining days of the last empire standing.
Emperors and mafia godfathers knew that wielding great influence means making payoffs.
Trump, however, is doing away with the sops, the glue that holds the American empire together,
and is making offers that he considers "fair" but instead is alienating the international
community– from badgering NATO and other countries to pay more for hosting the US legions
(800 military bases in 80 countries) to reducing US aid.
US aid to countries fell from $50 billion in fiscal year 2016, $37 billion in 2017 to $7.7
billion so far in 2018. A world less tied to American largesse and generous trade tarrifs can
more easily reject the "you are with us or against us" bullying doctrine of US presidents. In
the carrot and stick approach that largely passes as American foreign policy, the stick loses
power as the carrot vanishes.
Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) in The Godfather. Big payoffs needed for big influence. A
presidential lesson for Don Trump
More self-respecting leaders will have less tolerance for American hypocrisy, such as
sanctioning other countries for nuclear weapons while having the biggest nuclear arsenal on the
planet.
They will sneer more openly at the hysteria surrounding alleged interference in the 2016 US
presidential elections, pointing to Washington's violent record of global meddling. They will
cite examples of American hypocrisy such as its sponsorship of coups against elected leaders in
Latin America, the US Army's Project Camelot in 1964 targeting 22 countries for intervention
(including Iran, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia), its support for bloodthirsty dictators, and its
destabilization of the Middle East with the destruction of Iraq and Libya.
Immigrant
cannon fodder
Trump's focus on the economy reduces the likelihood of him starting wars. By ending the
flood of illegal immigrants to save jobs for US citizens, he is also inadvertently reducing the
manpower for illegal wars. Non-citizen immigrants comprise about 5% of the US Army. For its
Iraq and Afghanistan wars, US army recruiters offered citizenship to lure illegal immigrants,
mostly Latinos.
Among the first US soldiers to die in the Iraq War was 22-year old illegal immigrant
Corporal Jose Antonio Gutierrez, an orphan from the streets of Guatemala City. He sneaked
across the Mexican border into the US six years before enlisting in exchange for American
citizenship.
On March 21, 2003, Gutierrez was killed by friendly fire near Umm Qasr, southern Iraq. The
coffin of this illegal immigrant was draped in the US flag, and he received American
citizenship – posthumously.
Trump policies targeting illegal immigration simultaneously reduces the availability of
cannon fodder for the illegal wars needed to maintain American hegemony.
Everything comes to an end, and so too will the last empire of our era.
The imperial American eagle flying into the sunset will see the dawn of an economically
healthier US that minds its own business, and increase hopes for a more equal, happier world
– thanks to the unintentional Gorbachev-2 in the White House.
I am sure that many of us are OK with ending American Empire. Both US citizens and other
countries don't want to fight un-necessary and un-ending wars. If Trump can do that, then he
is blessed.
See a pattern here? Raja Murthy, you sound like a pro-American Empire shill. 1964 Project
Camelot has nothing to do with the current administration. Raja, you forgot to wear your
satirical pants.
The idea and catchy hook of 2016 was Make America Great Again, not wasting lives and
resources on the American Empire. You point out the good things. Who might have a problem
with the end of the American Empire are Globalists. What is wrong with relinquishing global
power and not wasting lives and money?
"The only lives you keep is lives you've given away" That does not ring true. The only
lies you keep are the lies you've given away. What? You're not making any sense, dude. How
much American Empire are you vested in? Does it bother you if the Empire shrinks its death
grip on Asia or the rest of the world? Why don't you just say it: This is good! Hopefully
Trump's policies will prevent you from getting writers' cramp and being confusing--along with
the canon fodder. Or maybe you're worried about job security.
America is a super power, just like Russia. Just like England. However, whom the US
carries water for might change. Hope that's ok.
Trump is an empirial president, just like every other US president. In fact, that's what
the article is describing. MAGA depends upon imperialist domination. Trump and all of US
capitalism know that even if the brain-dead MAGA chumps don't.
Capitalism can't help but seek to rule the world. It is the result of pursuing
capitalism's all-important growth. If it's not US capitalism, it will be Chinese capitalism,
or Russian capitalism, or European capitalism that will rule the world.
The battle over global markets doesn't stop just because the US might decide not to play
anymore. Capitalism means that you're either the global power who is ******* the royal ****
out of everyone else, or you're the victim of being fucked up the *** by an imperialist
power.
The only thing which makes the US different from the rest of the world is its super
concentration of power, which in effect is a super concentration of corruption.
Another day and another ZeroHedge indictment of American capitalism.
And how refreshing that the article compares US capitalism to gangsterism. It's a most
appropriate comparison.
--------------------
Al Capone on Capitalism
It is well known that legendary American gangster Al Capone once said that 'Capitalism is the
legitimate racket of the ruling class', - and I have commented on the links between organised
crime and capitalist accumulation before
on this blog, but I recently came across the following story from Claud Cockburn's autobiography, and decided
to put it up on Histomat for you all.
In 1930, Cockburn, then a correspondent in America for the Times newspaper,
interviewed Al Capone at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago, when Capone was at the height of his
power. He recalls that except for 'the sub-machine gun...poking through the transom of a door
behind the desk, Capone's own room was nearly indistinguishable from that of, say, a "newly
arrived" Texan oil millionaire. Apart from the jowly young murderer on the far side of the
desk, what took the eye were a number of large, flattish, solid silver bowls upon the desk,
each filled with roses. They were nice to look at, and they had another purpose too, for
Capone when agitated stood up and dipped the tips of his fingers in the water in which
floated the roses.
I had been a little embarrassed as to how the interview was to be launched. Naturally the
nub of all such interviews is somehow to get round to the question "What makes you tick?" but
in the case of this millionaire killer the approach to this central question seemed mined
with dangerous impediments. However, on the way down to the Lexington Hotel I had had the
good fortune to see, I think in the Chicago Daily News , some statistics offered by an
insurance company which dealt with the average expectation of life of gangsters in Chicago. I
forget exactly what the average was, and also what the exact age of Capone at that time - I
think he was in his early thirties. The point was, however, that in any case he was four
years older than the upper limit considered by the insurance company to be the proper average
expectation of life for a Chicago gangster. This seemed to offer a more or less neutral and
academic line of approach, and after the ordinary greetings I asked Capone whether he had
read this piece of statistics in the paper. He said that he had. I asked him whether he
considered the estimate reasonably accurate. He said that he thought that the insurance
companies and the newspaper boys probably knew their stuff. "In that case", I asked him, "how
does it feel to be, say, four years over the age?"
He took the question quite seriously and spoke of the matter with neither more nor less
excitement or agitation than a man would who, let us say, had been asked whether he, as the
rear machine-gunner of a bomber, was aware of the average incidence of casualties in that
occupation. He apparently assumed that sooner or later he would be shot despite the elaborate
precautions which he regularly took. The idea that - as afterwards turned out to be the case
- he would be arrested by the Federal authorities for income-tax evasion had not, I think, at
that time so much as crossed his mind. And, after all, he said with a little bit of
corn-and-ham somewhere at the back of his throat, supposing he had not gone into this racket?
What would be have been doing? He would, he said, "have been selling newspapers barefoot on
the street in Brooklyn".
He stood as he spoke, cooling his finger-tips in the rose bowl in front of him. He sat
down again, brooding and sighing. Despite the ham-and-corn, what he said was probably true
and I said so, sympathetically. A little bit too sympathetically, as immediately emerged, for
as I spoke I saw him looking at me suspiciously, not to say censoriously. My remarks about
the harsh way the world treats barefoot boys in Brooklyn were interrupted by an urgent angry
waggle of his podgy hand.
"Listen," he said, "don't get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the
idea I'm knocking the American system. The American system..." As though an invisible
chairman had called upon him for a few words, he broke into an oration upon the theme. He
praised freedom, enterprise and the pioneers. He spoke of "our heritage". He referred with
contempuous disgust to Socialism and Anarchism. "My rackets," he repeated several times, "are
run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way"...his vision of the
American system began to excite him profoundly and now he was on his feet again, leaning
across the desk like the chairman of a board meeting, his fingers plunged in the rose
bowls.
"This American system of ours," he shouted, "call it Americanism, call it Capitalism, call
it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it
with both hands and make the most of it." He held out his hand towards me, the fingers
dripping a little, and stared at me sternly for a few seconds before reseating himself.
A month later in New York I was telling this story to Mr John Walter, minority owner of
The Times . He asked me why I had not written the Capone interview for the paper. I
explained that when I had come to put my notes together I saw that most of what Capone had
said was in essence identical with what was being said in the leading articles of The
Times itself, and I doubted whether the paper would be best pleased to find itself seeing
eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago. Mr Walter, after a moment's wry
reflection, admitted that probably my idea had been correct.'
This article was obviously written by someone who wants to maintain the status quo.
America would be much stronger if it were not trying to be an empire. The biggest lie ever
told is that American hegemony relies on American imperialism and warmongering. The opposite
is true. America is weak precisely because it is trying so hard to project strength, because
anyone with half a brain knows that it is projecting strength to enrich oligarhcs, not to
protect or favor the American people.
I truly believe that "America First" is not selfish. America before it went full ******
was the beacon of freedom and success that other countries tried to emulate and that changed
the world for the better.
America the empire is just another oligarchic regime that other
countries' populations rightly see as an example of what doesn't work.
Empire is a contrivance, a vehicle for psychopathic powerlust. America was founded by
people who stood adamantly opposed to this. Here's hoping Trump holds their true spirit in
his heart.
If he doesn't, there's hundreds of millions of us who still do. We don't all live in
America...
America is weak precisely because it is trying so hard to project strength, because
anyone with half a brain knows that it is projecting strength to enrich oligarhcs [sic],
not to protect or favor the American people.
And who do you suppose are the forces which are funding US politicians and thus getting to
call their shots in foreign policy? Can you bring yourself to name them? Oligarchs...you're
FULL of ****. Who exactly pools all (((their))) money, makes sure the [s]elected officials
know (((who))) to not question and, instead, just bow down to them, who makes sure these
(((officials))) sign pledges for absolute commitment towards Israel--or in no uncertain
terms-- and know who will either sponsor them/or opposes them next time around?
JSBach1 called you a 'coward', for being EXACTLY LIKE THESE TRAITOROUS SPINELESS
VERMIN who simply just step outside just 'enough' the comfort zone to APPEAR 'real'. IMHO, I
concur with JSBach1 ...your're a coward indeed, when you should know better .....
shame you you indeed!
There is little evidence, Trump's propaganda aside (that he previously called Obama
dishonest for) that the US economy is improving. If anything, the exploding budget and trade
deficits indicate that the economy continues to weaken.
Correct. The US physical plant and equipment as well as infrastructure is in advanced
stages of decay. Ditto for the labor force which has been pauperized and abused for decades
by the Predator Class...
the US can't even raise an army... even if enough young (men) were
dumb enough to volunteer there just aren't enough fit, healthy and mentally acute recruits
out there.
"... The move means that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will no longer oversee the federal Russia investigation, which he has looked over since Sessions recused himself early last year due to his work on Trump's campaign. ..."
President Trump's pick to replace ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to take over
oversight of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ)
confirmed Wednesday. "The Acting Attorney General is in charge of all matters under the purview
of the Department of Justice," DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement to The
Hill.
The move means that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will no longer oversee the
federal Russia investigation, which he has looked over since Sessions recused himself early
last year due to his work on Trump's campaign.
Trump on Wednesday afternoon announced Matthew
Whitaker, who served as Sessions's chief of staff at the DOJ, as his temporary replacement atop
the department after ousting Sessions.
"... There is only the Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty. The Titanic is dead in the water, lights out, bow down hard. The Rich, the Corporate Profiteers and the Military-Political Establishment have pulled away in their fur and jewel-encrusted life boats. It's one minute after midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the hands have fallen off the Debt Clock, the skies are burning and seas are rising (they say), and we are in WW3 in 8 nations. Or is it 9? ..."
"... So the Democrat faction of the Corporate One-Party took back control of the House from the Republican faction. (It's one hard-right party, of course; only liars and those ignorant of history call the Dems "centrist". By any objective or historical standard they're a right-wing party.) ..."
"... I made no prediction on what would happen in this election, but I've long predicted that if/when the Democrats win control of either house they'll do nothing with that control. Jack squat. Status quo all the way, embellished with more retarded Russia-Derangement stuff and similar nonsense. ..."
"... If there really were a difference between these corporate factions, here's the chance for the House to obstruct all Senate-passed legislation. ..."
"... They claim there's a difference between the two parties? ..."
"... But I predict this House won't lift a finger vs. the Senate, and that it'll strive to work with the Senate on legislation, and that it'll fully concur with the Senate on war budgets, police state measures, anything and everything demanded by Wall Street, Big Ag, the fossil fuel extractors, and of course the corporate welfare state in general. ..."
"... Nothing I've talked about here is anything but what is possible, what is always implicitly or explicitly promised by Dembots, and what it would seem is the minimum necessary given what Dembots claim is the scope of the crisis and what is at stake. ..."
It's not even decent theatre. Drama is much lacking, character development zilch. The outcome that dems take congress,& rethugs
improve in senate is exactly as was predicted months ago.
The dems reveal once again exactly how mendacious and uncaring of
the population they are. Nothing matters other than screwing more cash outta anyone who wants anything done so that the DC trough
stays full with the usual crew of 4th & 5th generation wannabe dem pols guzzling hard at the corporate funded 'dem aligned' think
tanks which generate much hot air yet never deliver. Hardly suprising given that actually doing something to show they give a
sh1t about the citizenry would annoy the donor who would give em all the boot, making all these no-hopers have to take up a gig
actually practising law.
These are people whose presence at the best law schools in the country prevented many who wanted to be y'know lawyers from
entering Harvard, Cornell etc law school. "one doesn't go to law school to become a lawyer It too hard to even pull down a mil
a year as a brief, nah, I studied the law to learn how to make laws that actually do the opposite of what they seem to. That is
where the real dough is."
Those who think that is being too hard on the dem slugs, should remember that the rethugs they have been indoctrinated to detest
act pretty much as printed on the side of the can. They advertise a service of licking rich arseholes and that is exactly what
they do. As venal and sociopathic as they are, at least they don't pretend to be something else; so while there is no way one
could vote for anyone spouting republican nonsense at least they don't hide their greed & corruption under a veneer of pseudo-humanist
nonsense. Dems cry for the plight of the poverty stricken then they slash welfare.
Or dems sob about the hard row african americans must hoe, then go off to the house of reps to pass laws to keep impoverished
african americans slotted up in an over crowded prison for the rest of his/her life.
Not only deceitful and vicious, 100% pointless since any Joe/Jo that votes on the basis of wanting to see more blackfellas
incarcerated is always gonna tick the rethug box anyhow.
Yeah- yeah we know all this so what?
This is what - the dems broke their arses getting tens of millions of young first time voters out to "exercise their democratic
prerogative" for the first time. Dems did this knowing full well that there would be no effective opposition to rethug demands
for more domestic oppression, that in fact it is practically guaranteed that should the trump and the rethug senate require it,
in order to ensure something particularly nasty gets passed, that sufficient dem congress people will 'cross the floor' to make
certain the bill does get up.
Of course the dems in question will allude to 'folks back home demanding' that the dem slug does vote with the nasties, but
that is the excuse, the reality is far too many dem pols are as bigoted greedy and elitist as the worst rethugs.
Anyway the upshot of persuading so many kids to get out and vote, so the kids do but the dems are content to just do more of
the same, will be another entire generation lost to elections forever.
If the DNC had been less greedy and more strategic they would have kept their powder dry and hung off press-ganging the kids
until getting such a turnout could have resulted in genuine change, prez 2020' or whenever, would be actual success for pols and
voters.
But they didn't and wouldn't ever, since for a dem pol, hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens living on the street isn't
nearly as problematic for them, as the dem wannabe pol paying off the mortgage on his/her DC townhouse by 2020, something that
would have been impossible if they hadn't taken congress as all the 'patrons' would have jerked back their cash figuring there
is no gain giving dosh to losers who couldn't win a bar raffle.
As for that Sharice Davids - a total miss she needed to be either a midget or missing an arm or leg to qualify as the classic
ID dem pol. Being a native american lezzo just doesn't tick enough boxes. I predict a not in the least illustrious career since
she cannot even qualify as the punchline in a circa 1980's joke.
As you said, nothing will get out of the House, Pelosi can't lead. They can easily swing 3 Democrats, then Mike Pence puts
the hammer down. If anything manages to crawl through, it won't even be brought to a vote in the Republican Senate. Trump can
still us his bully pulpit to circle the White wagons, fly in even more than his current 1,125,000 H-visa aliens, and No Taxes
for the Rich is now engraved in stone for the Pharoahs.
The imminent $1,500B Omnibus Deficit Bill Three will be lauded as a 'bipartisan solution' by both houses, and 2020 looks to
be a $27,000B illegal, onerous, odious National Debt open Civil War.
There is only the Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty. The Titanic is dead in the water, lights out, bow down hard. The Rich,
the Corporate Profiteers and the Military-Political Establishment have pulled away in their fur and jewel-encrusted life boats.
It's one minute after midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the hands have fallen off the Debt Clock, the skies are burning and seas
are rising (they say), and we are in WW3 in 8 nations. Or is it 9?
Smart money is moving toward the exits. This shyte is gonna blow. Let's move to Australia, before it becomes part of Xi's PRC
String of Girls.
Reading most of the comments explaining how the D's won/lost,,, the R's won/lost,,, Trump and company won/lost,,, but couldn't
find one post about how America is losing due to the two suffocating party's and a greedy, disunited, selfish, electorate that
wants it all free.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the Majority discovers it can vote itself
largess out of the public treasury,,,,,,, After that the Majority always votes for the candidate 'promising the most' ,,,,,,,
Alex Fraser.
So the Democrat faction of the Corporate One-Party took back control of the House from the Republican faction. (It's one hard-right
party, of course; only liars and those ignorant of history call the Dems "centrist". By any objective or historical standard they're
a right-wing party.)
It's no big surprise. Last two years it's been the normally self-assured Republicans who, because of their ambivalence about Trump,
have uncharacteristically taken on the usual Democrat role of existential confusion and doubt. Meanwhile the Democrats, in a berserk
batsh$t-insane way, have been more motivated and focused.
So what are these Democrats going to do with this control now that they have it?
I made no prediction on what would happen in this election, but I've long predicted that if/when the Democrats win control of
either house they'll do nothing with that control. Jack squat. Status quo all the way, embellished with more retarded Russia-Derangement
stuff and similar nonsense.
If there really were a difference between these corporate factions, here's the chance for the House to obstruct all Senate-passed
legislation. And as for things which are technically only in the power of the Senate such as confirming appointments, here's the
chance for the House to put public moral pressure on Democrats in the Senate. And there's plenty of back-door ways an activist
House can influence Senate business. Only morbid pedantry, so typical of liberal Dembots, babbles about what the technical powers
of this or that body are. The real world doesn't work that way. To the extent I pay attention at all to Senate affairs it'll be
to see what the House is doing about it.
They claim there's a difference between the two parties? And they claim Trump is an incipient fascist dictator? In that case there's
a lot at stake, and extreme action is called for. Let's see what kind of action we get from their "different" party in control
of the House.
But I predict this House won't lift a finger vs. the Senate, and that it'll strive to work with the Senate on legislation, and
that it'll fully concur with the Senate on war budgets, police state measures, anything and everything demanded by Wall Street,
Big Ag, the fossil fuel extractors, and of course the corporate welfare state in general.
Nor will any of these new-fangled fake "socialist" types take any action to change things one iota. Within the House Democrats,
they could take action, form any and every kind of coalition, to obstruct the corporate-Pelosi leadership faction. They will not
do so. This "new" progressive bloc will be just as fake as the old one.
Nothing I've talked about here is anything but what is possible, what is always implicitly or explicitly promised by Dembots,
and what it would seem is the minimum necessary given what Dembots claim is the scope of the crisis and what is at stake.
"... The House dems will create even more severe sanction bills against the Russians looking to gain politically by making Trump and gopers look pro-Putin and anti-patriotic, plus serving business interests in pushing out euro and Russian competitors. ..."
The House dems will create even more severe sanction bills against the Russians looking
to gain politically by making Trump and gopers look pro-Putin and anti-patriotic, plus
serving business interests in pushing out euro and Russian competitors. Domestically
House dems may work with gopers to cut social security and medicare much as Obama tried to
do. Russian xenophobia will go through the proverbial roof.
"... The House dems will create even more severe sanction bills against the Russians looking to gain politically by making Trump and gopers look pro-Putin and anti-patriotic, plus serving business interests in pushing out euro and Russian competitors. ..."
The House dems will create even more severe sanction bills against the Russians looking
to gain politically by making Trump and gopers look pro-Putin and anti-patriotic, plus
serving business interests in pushing out euro and Russian competitors. Domestically
House dems may work with gopers to cut social security and medicare much as Obama tried to
do. Russian xenophobia will go through the proverbial roof.
"... There is only the Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty. The Titanic is dead in the water, lights out, bow down hard. The Rich, the Corporate Profiteers and the Military-Political Establishment have pulled away in their fur and jewel-encrusted life boats. It's one minute after midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the hands have fallen off the Debt Clock, the skies are burning and seas are rising (they say), and we are in WW3 in 8 nations. Or is it 9? ..."
Anton Worter , Nov 7, 2018 11:13:25 AM |
57 ">link
@9
As you said, nothing will get out of the House, Pelosi can't lead. They can easily swing 3
Democrats, then Mike Pence puts the hammer down. If anything manages to crawl through, it
won't even be brought to a vote in the Republican Senate. Trump can still us his bully pulpit
to circle the White wagons, fly in even more than his current 1,125,000 H-visa aliens, and No
Taxes for the Rich is now engraved in stone for the Pharoahs.
The imminent $1,500B Omnibus Deficit Bill Three will be lauded as a 'bipartisan solution'
by both houses, and 2020 looks to be a $27,000B illegal, onerous, odious National Debt open
Civil War.
There is only the Deep Purple Mil.Gov UniParty. The Titanic is dead in the water,
lights out, bow down hard. The Rich, the Corporate Profiteers and the Military-Political
Establishment have pulled away in their fur and jewel-encrusted life boats. It's one minute
after midnight on the Doomsday Clock, the hands have fallen off the Debt Clock, the skies are
burning and seas are rising (they say), and we are in WW3 in 8 nations. Or is it 9?
Smart money is moving toward the exits. This shyte is gonna blow. Let's move to Australia,
before it becomes part of Xi's PRC String of Girls.
It's true that progressives lost a bunch of very close races in deep-red districts, but many
of the biggest losses of the night were center-right Democrats. Senator Joe Donnelly of
Indiana, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota were
just some of those so-called "moderate" losers.
I say good riddance.
"... Investigating Trump for the rest of his tenure will keep them from having to do their jobs for Americans. ..."
"... They're going to spend millions of dollars and better yet, millions of hours babbling on and on about Taxes and Trump. ..."
"... With Sessions now out they're already screaming again about Rosenstein and Mueller for Gods sake. And they'll keep that up right until Nov 2020. ..."
"... In many cases, the people have won. The fresh blood going into the House in particular and some new governorships are more important than people realize yet. ..."
"... There are now over 100 women in the House -- a first. ..."
"... I hope the dems stand firm on protecting both programs plus not raising the retirement age. But with Pelosi who knows. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi: Democrats Don't Want a New Direction ..."
should not spend their time "investigating" Trump. Leave that to real journalists (there
are still some around).
If they play it right, the Dems could triple Trump's anxiety and paranoia levels by
keeping relative silence over his corruption, rather than starting a war of words with him.
He wins if they let him weasel his way out of things. Besides that, the Dems will do a
lousy job of trying to go after Trump. They need to spend their time going after Trump's
policies period.
up 13 users have voted. --
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
The corporate Dems have no policies that represent the people who elected them. However,
they are no longer completely surrounded by like thinkers. While the number of progressives
may still be smaller than the numbers of establishment Dems, those progressives DO have an
agenda and the people who want progress MUST support them and let the old guard know that
they will not support obstruction of progressive policies.
Start by telling your congress critter to vote no on Pelosi.
@WindDancer13
The Democrats should be doing everything they can to build up themselves by aggressively
pursuing policies that benefit the people. The Democrats need to stand FOR something.
Otherwise they are just like the old guy shaking his fist at the sky. They can investigate
Trump all they want, but it is waste of time, money, and there will be no impeachment hearing
in the Senate. Besides many of them have so big skeletons in their closets too.
should not spend their time "investigating" Trump. Leave that to real journalists
(there are still some around).
If they play it right, the Dems could triple Trump's anxiety and paranoia levels by
keeping relative silence over his corruption, rather than starting a war of words with
him. He wins if they let him weasel his way out of things. Besides that, the Dems will do
a lousy job of trying to go after Trump. They need to spend their time going after
Trump's policies period.
Investigating Trump for the rest of his tenure will keep them from having to do their jobs
for Americans. The republicans came out with their balls on fire and rescinded and passed
legislation right and left and now that the democrats have the house they're going to look at
Trump's tax returns. For gawd's sake why? Okay.. they find that he did something wrong on
them. Then what? Do they think that if they show he cheated on them then he'll be kicked out
of office? Nope
Look at how many people who Obama tried to appoint were guilty of not paying theirs.
Daschle who came from a medical lobbying firm was supposed to be his secretary of health, but
he hadn't paid his taxes for a decade. Did he go to prison over it? Why no he didn't. Why?
Two Americas. Only little people go to prison for doing .... fill in the blank.
Pelosi is also spouting bipartisanship. Gack! WTF again Nancy? Don't forget pay as you
go.
#3.2 The
Democrats should be doing everything they can to build up themselves by aggressively
pursuing policies that benefit the people. The Democrats need to stand FOR something.
Otherwise they are just like the old guy shaking his fist at the sky. They can
investigate Trump all they want, but it is waste of time, money, and there will be no
impeachment hearing in the Senate. Besides many of them have so big skeletons in their
closets too.
@snoopydawg
Like really? They're going to spend millions of dollars and better yet, millions of hours
babbling on and on about Taxes and Trump. But they'll only go so far as that mess effects all
of them and they good and well know it. But it keeps the divide going and the utter fallacy
of someday sticking it to Trump. They'll come up with nothing and stone wall anything that
threatens their status quo. With Sessions now out they're already screaming again about
Rosenstein and Mueller for Gods sake. And they'll keep that up right until Nov 2020.
destroying the departments they're in charge of. If squeezed, will they sing
like canaries? Cry like babies? Youth wants to know.
If the Democrats think they are going to waste Taxpayer Money investigating us at
the House level, then we will likewise be forced to consider investigating them for all
of the leaks of Classified Information, and much else, at the Senate level. Two can
play that game!
He did not "win," not by a long shot. Neither did the corporate Dems. It was never really
expected (except maybe by some totally unrealistic people) that the Dems would take the
Senate. The seats that were up for grabs were too limited and in some very, very red areas.
However, we need to pay attention to just how close many of those races were. Some major
dents were put into Rep armor and have left some wounds.
I too was very happy to see McCaskill and Heitcamp defeated. They were both totally
worthless. This could be viewed as the start to cleaning out the "bad" Dems, even if we have
to put up with a few Republicans to do so.
Suppression played a huge role in the results (especially governorships), and that must
not be forgotten. In fact needs to be a focal point for the next two years along with getting
corporate money out of the election system.
Another issue that needs to be dealt with is stopping Trump from dominating the news
cycle. Anyone else notice just how many non-news stories popped up regarding Kavanaugh in the
last week? The public does not need to see Dems foaming at the mouth in response to or in
imitation of Trump. If they do, let the culprit from your voting district know how displeased
you are with their actions (get a few friends to also comment).
In many cases, the people have won. The fresh blood going into the House in particular and some new governorships are
more important than people realize yet. For diversity alone, there were huge strides made yesterday. Seeing so many
progressives take a seat in the House will encourage others for 2020 who will have a lot better chance now to remove some of
the riffraff.
There are now over 100 women in the House -- a first. This means that we are still less than
half way to parity. This needs to be worked on for 2020 along with more progressives. (No,
not all women are equal--I remember Phyllis Shaffly only too well, and there is still HRC to
silence, but overall, women and certainly progressive women have different priorities most of
which align with what people really want and need.) Message to all...less time writing and
contemplating and more time taking action.
In short, I see this as a victory--albeit not as large as we would like--for
progressives.
I hope the dems stand firm on protecting both programs plus not raising the retirement
age. But with Pelosi who knows. I would like to think that she would get major push back if
she tries an Obama grand bargain bullshit. But she lives in a such a bubble though.
This is why people don't vote for the Democratic Party and why the big blue wave of cash
won't win the 2018 midterm elections for them:
In December of 2016 – right after Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic
candidates lost big to Trump, the worst presidential candidate of all time – what
happened? Their leader, Nancy Pelosi was asked directly what the Democratic Party was going
to do to change this heinous defeat.
Know what she said? Do you remember? I do.
She said the Democratic Party wasn't going to change anything. Keep the same policies
they lost the 2016 elections on. Know what they were going to change?
Their marketing. Change the marketing so people "get the message."
Same shit. Different wrapper.
Nancy Pelosi: Democrats Don't Want a New Direction
When people who voted for Obama realized the Obama is a fraud with strong CIA connections it
was too late...
When people who voted for Trump realized that Trump was a fraud with strong Israeli
connections it was too late.
Notable quotes:
"... Nor does the caravan 'fix' or even illuminate decades of US abuses in Central and South America. It simply gives Trump an opportunity to grandstand and urge his voters to go to the polls. ..."
...And it seems likely, if not certain, that the caravan is a political stunt that will
end in disappointment for the caravan migrants. So I fail to see why you are so angry Debs.
Our discussion doesn't ignore the realities. Nor does the caravan 'fix' or even
illuminate decades of US abuses in Central and South America. It simply gives Trump an
opportunity to grandstand and urge his voters to go to the polls.
We are being played by an establishment that wants to move the country to the right. MAGA!
is a bi-partisan effort fueled by the challenge from China and Russia. This is clear from
Democratic Party priorities and actions as well as what they don't say or do.
Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said
in a statement, "No one is above the law and any effort to interfere with the Special
Counsel's investigation would be a gross abuse of power by the President. While the President
may have theauthority to replace the Attorney General, this must not be the first step in an
attempt to impede, obstruct or end the Mueller investigation."
The leader of Communist China, Chairman Mao, warned the country that revisionists were
threatening to erase all the progress made since the Communist Revolution which brought Mao to
power.
It had been almost 20 years since the bloody revolution, and Mao wanted to reinvigorate the
rebel spirit in the youth. He instructed students to root out any teachers who wove subtle
anti-communist sentiments in their lessons.
Mao encouraged students to rebel against any mindless respect for entrenched authority,
remnants, he said, of centuries of capitalist influence.
Students at Yizhen Middle School, like many others, quickly took up the task. They "exposed"
capitalist intellectual teachers and paraded them around in dunce caps with insulting signs
hung around their necks.
Teachers were beaten and harassed until they confessed to their crimes most of which were,
of course, false confessions to avoid further torture.
It only escalated from there.
What ensued puts Lord of the Flies to shame.
One teacher killed himself after being taken captive by students. Most teachers fled.
Soon the students were left entirely in charge of their school. Two factions quickly
emerged, one calling themselves the East is Red Corps, and the other the Red Rebels.
One student was kidnapped by the East is Red Corps, and suffocated to death on a sock
stuffed in his mouth.
A girl was found to be an East is Red spy among the Red Rebels. She was later cornered with
other East is Red students in a building. She shouted from a window that she would rather die
than surrender. Praising Chairman Mao, she jumped to her death.
Some Red Rebels died from an accidental explosion while making bombs.
Many were tortured, and another student died from his injuries at the hands of the East is
Red Corps.
A female teacher refused to sign an affidavit lying about the cause of death. She was beaten
and gang-raped by a group of students.
Although it might be tempting to see what happened at YMS as mostly relevant to group
adolescent behavior what happened at the school occurred throughout China in government
offices, factories, within the army, and among Chinese of all ages in an eerily similar
way
The students' repressed resentment at having to be so obedient now boiled over into anger
and the desire to be the ones doing the punishing and oppressing
In the power vacuum that Mao had now created, another timeless group dynamic emerged.
Those who were naturally more assertive, aggressive, and even sadistic pushed their way
forward and assumed power , while those who were more passive quietly receded into the
background becoming followers
Once all forms of authority were removed and the students ran the school, there was
nothing to stop the next and most dangerous development in group dynamics. The split into
tribal factions
People may think they are joining because of the different ideas or goals of this tribe or
the other, but what they want more than anything is a sense of belonging and a clear tribal
identity.
Look at the actual differences between the East is Red Corps and the Red Rebels. As the
battle between them intensified it was hard to say what they were fighting for, except to
assume power over the other group.
One strong or vicious act of one side called for a reprisal from the other, and any type
of violence seemed totally justified. There could be no middle ground, nor any questioning of
the rightness of their cause.
The tribe is always right. And to say otherwise is to betray it.
I write this on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections.
And like Mao handing down his orders to dispose of capitalist sympathizers, such have the
leaders of each major US political party rallied their supporters.
This is the most important election of our lifetime, they say.
No middle ground. Violence is justified to get our way. Betray the tribe, and be considered
an enemy.
Just like Mao, they have manufactured a crisis that did not previously exist.
The students had no violent factions before Mao's encouragement. They had no serious
problems with their teachers.
Is there any natural crisis occurring right now? Or has the political establishment whipped
us into an artificial frenzy?
This isn't just another boring election, they say. This is a battle for our future.
The students battled over who were the purest revolutionaries.
The voters now battle over who has the purest intentions for America.
Do the factions even know what they are fighting for anymore?
They are simply fighting for their tribe's control over the government.
The battle of the factions at schools across China were "resolved" when Mao came to support
one side or the other. In that sense, it very much did matter which side the students were
on
The government came down hard against the losing faction.
They had chosen wrong and found themselves aligned against the powerful Communist Party.
It won't be a dictator that hands control to one faction or another in this election. It
will be a simple majority. And those in the minority will suffer.
The winners will feel that it is their time to wield power, just as the students were happy
to finally have the upper hand on their teachers.
If Mao didn't have so much power, he could have never initiated such a violent crisis.
And if our government didn't have so much power, it would hardly matter who wins the
election.
Yet here we are, fighting for control of the government because each faction threatens to
violently repress the other if they gain power.
It is a manufactured crisis. A crisis that only exists because political elites in the
government and media have said so.
They decided that this election will spark the USA's "Cultural Revolution."
And anyone with sympathies from a bygone era will be punished.
You don't have to play by the rules of the corrupt politicians, manipulative media, and
brainwashed peers.
When you subscribe to The Daily Bell, you also get a free guide:
How to Craft a Two Year Plan to Reclaim 3 Specific Freedoms.
This guide will show you exactly how to plan your next two years to build the free life of
your dreams. It's not as hard as you think
Tribal warfare? You clearly don't understand what's happening here. The Globalist cartel
has created division between two parties to incite chaos and violence. The "warfare" you
reference will be nothing but protesting ->rioting ->anarchy ->police restraint of
the Democrat incited sheeple.
There's no tribalism associated with upholding and preserving the Constitution.
I think the globalists will try to cool it off before things spin out of (((their)))
control. Either that or move to the next phase...world war... so they can just slaughter us
and not have to bother trying to herd the increasingly "woke" goyim live stock.
I have NOT heard about a SINGLE CREDIBLE violent incident where people got hurt FROM THE
RIGHT. All the incidents of "White Fascist Violence" look like FALSE FLAGS and contrived
incidents. The foregoing CAN NOT be said of the Leftist Antifa types including racist La Raza
supporters, racist Blacks who want something for nothing, immigrants from any country who
want to be fully supported because they BREATHE and the Top Group (pun intended) Whites who
do not believe in boundaries, standards or quality of life UNLESS it's their lives. NOT all
Blacks, Hispanics and Immigrants are in the Left; but most Blacks, Hispanics and Immigrants
are on the Left and havn't a clue they are responsible for their own prisons because they
cannot REASON and virtue signaling is more important so they are part of the GROUP. Misplaced
EMPHASIS on what is important in creating a CIVILIZED and SAFE society.
"... Dems are fucking bonkers with the caravans. It's as if these fools didn't know Europe does exist and had the same thing happen, on a far bigger magnitude, or didn't learn the lesson - as if Brexit, Le Pen, Lega, Orban and others didn't really exist in their strictly America-centered world. ..."
IMO b is
right. The image works for Trump, not against, on two issues; the border and the ME.
Border
Yes the US Constitution prevents US Troops being used within the country for military
purpose. But the troops are only providing support at the Border.
The reality is the people on the march to the US border all refused an offer from Mexico to
settle in two southern (Mexican) states and receive jobs, free housing, free food, free
education and free healthcare. So much for the PR story of this group as economic
immigrants and sanctuary seekers. They are seen as being in search of the Free Lunch.
These people are being paid (not sure how much) from what I have read and the march is to
create a story of poor souls prevented (by Trump) from obtaining the supposed American
dream.
For voters in the US southwest especially this group is seen as a bunch of scroungers and
Trump as the guy who will keep them out.
The ME
I am not aware of anyone who thinks the US belongs in the ME. Yes, Israel is all for it,
but in the US no one wants troops there. We have lost country after country after country
and some military head just said that after 17 years we are not "winning" in Afghanistan.
These wars are a financial scam in the eyes of many and are for Israel's benefit in the
eyes of many others. I doubt if any troops in recent years have signed up to fight in the
ME so that statement itself is one the NYT will choke on.
But it is the Times, and they play to their now somewhat limited audience who must be told
that the lies they believe are true. If Trump paid for this cartoon, he could probably not be more pleased.
"It's not really possible to excuse the pretense that a band of beggars who plan to ask
for asylum constitute an invasion."
I suppose that is what Assad and the Syrian government thought when the CIA death squads
started trickling into their country under the pretense that they were refugees from the
violence in Libya.
The CIA built lots of death squads in Latin America.
While most of the the "band of beggars" are harmless useful idiots recruited for
the optics, there is a very real possibility that the CIA's death squads from Honduras and
possibly Mexico (have to get out now that AMLO is cracking down) are mingling amongst them.
Why? Page borrowed from the textbook CIA/State Department manual on regime change:
1) Bring protesters into conflict with authorities. 2) Death squads embedded among the protesters kill both protesters and law enforcement
officers. 3) Riots ensue. 5) Complicit corporate mass media winds up the echo chamber forcing the meme that the
violence was the authorities' fault. 6) Profit!
Anywho, it is tough to take serious any accusations of slander against a population that
has been heavily brainwashed since birth. As with a pair of bluejeans that have been washed
several times per day since they were manufactured, over-laundered minds get limp, floppy
and full of holes. Americans' minds are so frayed from daily reprogramming that they cannot
remember what they believed yesterday, much less why they would have believed it.
The possee commitatus law which prohibited federal troops from engaging in domestic law
enforcement has been repealed.
Also, you are aware that Israel is a rogue state in that it does not have a
constitution, it has never defined its borders, it has repeatedly attacked its neighbors,
it is an apartheid state, it has 200-400 illegal nuclear warheads, it engages in mass
punishment of 6 million Arabs the are the dominant peoples of Palestine, and it has pulled
strings to lure the US into wars with Iraq, Syria, Lybia, and Iran.
For these reasons it is perfectly reasonable and accurate and truthful to label such a
rogue state a 'Zionist regime.'
(Now you are informed. Now you should apologize to b.)
One wonders why the NYT is willingly playing into his hands with this.
Because the NYT (and mainstream media in general) have been such psychopathic warmongers
for so long that by now they're really incapable of understanding that there could be any
alternative idea or action. In many states they'd meet the legal definition of
insanity.
Of course Trump is just as insane. He merely wants to do both/and rather than either/or,
as the NYT would have it.
Given that the only characters with speaking parts in the cartoon are hi-profile
non-combatant pro-"Israel" warmongers masquerading as brain-washed grunts, the message it
sends is so mixed that it means whatever the consumer wants it to mean. An attempt at reverse psychology?
Posted by: morongobill | Nov 5, 2018 8:48:58 AM | 5 "I'm a deplorable and proud of it and I believe that this nation needs to make it
crystal clear that the borders mean something."
I don't reckon native americans would agree, particularly since most of those arriving
are indigenous to america. amerika the abortion, has never considered the property rights,
cultures or ethos of other humans anywhere on this old rock. Not in the ME, Asia or more
recently Africa, much less those concerns as they relate to native americans be they those
indigenous to the area that comprises amerika or those who are indigenous to other portions
of the american continents, so I reckon that using this nonsense now to justify racism is
just hypocritical, That it is about as low as it is possible to go. That is compounded to
the n th degree when one considers that the failed states which most of the caravan
peoples originate from suffered failure because amerika the abortion of a place,
deliberately engineered the failures to make amerika's theft of all resources in latin
america, easier and less expensive. Run along and study exactly how amerika has deliberately destroyed Guatemala and Honduras
then come back here and try to justify the attacks on a few hundred thousand of those
people fleeing lawlessness and corruption that the amerikan government has caused in your
name.
Not that it matters - trump or any of his ilk have no chance of preventing the Latin
American influx. Once again if you study history you will discover that over the millennia numerous other
populations have attempted to prevent needs driven migration into what they have
arbitrarily decided are 'their' lands and have used exactly the same techniques the trump
scumbags propose. They inevitably fail. Mass migrations are relentless they cannot be
'blocked' the only viable strategy has been to remove the attraction by ensuring economic
improvement in the areas that migrants come from.
If amerikans actually want to stop the migration, which is debatable since the rich who
control amerika believe increasing the population to be an excellent way to go since they
profit from more humans and increased population density, but let's pretend that ordinary
citizens actually have a say in what happens in amerika, then amerikans need to fix that
which they f**ked. Central amerikans have endured decades of corrupt amerikan installed
'governments' which regarded their primary mission (after trousering all funds in their
purview) to be confiscating all land from the people who have lived on it going back at
least a few thousand years, then selling that stolen land to amerikan corporations, hedge
funds, retirement schemes, AKA any & all of Wall St's scams.
None of the migr Everybody in amerika has been aware of this even tho they pretend they are ignorant of
their culture's rapacious thefts it is impossible for anyone with half a brain not to see 2
+ 2 = 4. So quit whining and either assist the new arrivals or, get yer arse into gear & ensure
your mendacious leadership sets about making amends for the damage done in your name.
nobody remembers anglo persian oil that was ares those iranian gypsy stole it the gas
fields 2. it was not fare fair they kicked are shar out 2 trumped is doing molechs work here hare here. it is vital that latest push on these yemeni ports is a success with a strong tail wind
victory is at hand. a redrawing of the maps is needed and an exodus of musslamics and arab and children of
christ into scotland wales,detroit noray denmark and lovely sweden germany france a big idea may need a new marshall plan trillions of dollars in bonds must be made like
lend lease in great britain it may take 50 years to pay off the debts for this final
solution maybe 100 years or more. never again the man said we must protect the innocent khazar ashkanazi from brutal
goyim. lets do this as paul greengrass said lets roll
Should several thousand knuckle heads attempt to force entry into the United States,... The news story should read as such,... 'Today, a couple thousand knuckleheads attacked our border. We shot them.'
Second: this mass immigration from Latin America is fruit of inumerous American backed
regime changes, aimed at stifling industrialization of the region, thus empoverishing its
peoples.
This
is true even for the Monroe Doctrine poster boy, Mexico .
Dems are fucking bonkers with the caravans. It's as if these fools didn't know Europe
does exist and had the same thing happen, on a far bigger magnitude, or didn't learn the
lesson - as if Brexit, Le Pen, Lega, Orban and others didn't really exist in their strictly
America-centered world.
As a matter of fact, any deliberately illegal entry of anyone into a foreign country
represents per se an invasion. it's just that it's minimal when it's a couple of people,
and not all invasions are armed gangs of conquistadores ready to loot the gold from the
temples, or Mongols on rampage. Not all invasions require military will kill on sight
orders, though. Some measure is required.
Now, where Dems are bloody idiots is that only a part of the progressive wing will see
the caravans as nice people to be welcome. Part of the uber-capitalist wing will see them
as a great opportunity as well, but for very different reasons. The thing is, the inner
subconscious of a majority of Westerners will basically have 2 very different
interpretations of a vast column of people walking towards their border.
One, which is quite recent, occurs if it's a large group of unarmed civilians and
families from a neighbouring country, fleeing it under direct threat of closeby invading
and advancing enemy armies; in this case, the obvious reference in Western psyche,
specially European one, will be WW II and the hosts of panicked civilians fleeing before
the enemy onslaught.
The other reference from the collective psyche, which obviously is the one that lurks in
the mind of most Westerners who saw the vids and pictures of the huge crowds of migrants
back in 2015/16 - and which will likely occur for some Americans as well, with the caravans
-, is obviously the far older picture of the Barbarian Invasions. The ones ironically
called nowadays as "Migration period" by revisionist history in German and Anglo-Saxon
areas, for obvious reasons (they didn't want to tarnish their ancestors by reflecting they
were bloody savages that nearly wiped out civilization, by fear that it would reflect badly
on them); karmic justice puts them now in a bad spot since they're quite forced to consider
the current wave as mere "migration" and no big deal at all, just like in 406.
Of course, there's also karmic justice in having the US tear itself apart and being
slowly invaded by those whose countries it has wrecked beyond recognition for the last
century. But we must be absolutely honest about it. Allowing masses of migrants into the US
isn't about Central Americans deserving a better life in the US, it's about punishing the
US by wrecking it and by pushing it's ever-polarizing political sides towards civil
war.
Section 1076 of the 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization titled "Use of the
Armed Forces in major public emergencies," provides that "The President may employ the
armed forces... to... restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when,
as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency,
terrorist attack or incident, or other condition... the President determines that...
domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the
State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order... or [to] suppress, in a
State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such...
a condition... so hinders the execution of the laws... that any part or class of its people
is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and
secured by law... or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or
impedes the course of justice under those laws."
So then the Possee Comitatus Act is repealed by the John Warner Act. The federal
government may send troops to the border to kill any American (Central) that throws a rock.
Killing rock-throwers = MAGA.
In answer to your question, IMHO we are witnessing a very choreographed effort at
political theater on the part of both establishment R's and D's to generate interest in the
election. The ultimate point is to divide the country, which from my perspective, as a
lefty who lives and thrives among R's is not that divided as evidenced by the 2016
election. The game is divide and rule.
The elites of the US are very perturbed that Senator Sanders had such a following in the
last go around with 75% popularity while both running establishment candidates had
negatives ratings greater than their positive ones.
Looking at polling in the US it has been reported that a great majority of people in the
country want Single Payer Health Care, including ~50% R's. Additionally, some 80% of the
population agree that climate change is a major issue and want the government to do
something about it. This cuts across both parties. Meanwhile, neither party is actively
pushing Single Payer, while some Democrats show support, while the establishment is
campaigning to save the insurance and pharmaceutical industies' bonanza of ObamaCare.
IMO we have the makings of a united insurrection on our hands and it is a requirement to
keep Americans at war with each other, rather than them realizing they have been fooled by
the media and sociopathic politicians.
Also interestingly, the biggest fear people have in the US, according to the following
poll is corrupt politicians. How do you campaign against that when you have your fingers in
the till?
Additionally, according to this poll the biggest fears other than crooked politicians,
are primarily related to the environment. Neither party is attempting to address this
issue.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here. ~William Shakespeare
Notable quotes:
"... Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don't bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother? ..."
"... One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week's elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats. ..."
"... "In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector ," The New York Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs. ..."
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political system than the Senate race in New Jersey.
Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election, was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman
Salomon Melgen, who was convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The senator had flown to the Dominican Republic
with Melgen on the physician's private jet and stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican women who
allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political favors for Melgen, including helping some of the Dominican women
acquire visas to the United States. Menendez was indicted in a federal corruption trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung
jury.
Menendez has a voting record as sordid as most Democrats'. He supported the $716 billion military spending bill, along with 85
percent of his fellow Senate Democrats. He signed
a letter , along with other Democratic leaders, calling for steps to extradite
Julian Assange to
stand trial in the United States. The senator, the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, is owned by the lobby for Israel
-- a country that routinely and massively interferes in our elections -- and supported moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He helped
cause the 2008 global financial crisis by voting to revoke
Glass-Steagall
, the Depression-era law enacted to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks.
His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is
Bob Hugin , whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200
million by conspiring to keep generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a model of everything that
is wrong with our for-profit health care system, paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused the firm
of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby
defrauding Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of
the cancer drug Revlimid to some $20,000
for a supply of 28 pills.
The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive issues. It is dominated by both candidates' nonstop personal
attacks and negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.
Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don't bother to vote? When all
you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother?
One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive
House districts in this week's elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department.
Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats.
The securities and finance industry
has backed Democratic congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the
Center for Responsive Politics . Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8 million, compared
with Republicans' $33.4 million, the center reported. The broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given
$174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And
Michael Bloomberg
, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.
"In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described
an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector ," The New York Times reported about current campaign
contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.
Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of
the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed,
as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and
critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man's party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will
still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are
in for it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his
refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not
to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn't vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and
the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic
control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing
on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party
of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump!
This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency
after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast
elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Elections USA, Inc: "Scum Vs. Scum." When I went looking for Hedges's weekly column today I
rather expected him to be onto the next Bigger Picture item that he is always adroit at
tackling.
So it was a little surprising that he chose instead to lead with an example of the midterm
races in his state of NJ, the one between disgraced Democratic Senator Robert Menendez and
Republican Bob Hugin.
He never disappoints.
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political
system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election, was
censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman
Salomon Melgen, who was convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The
senator had flown to the Dominican Republic with Melgen on the physician's private jet and
stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican women who
allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political favors for Melgen,
including helping some of the Dominican women acquire visas to the United States. Menendez
was indicted in a federal corruption trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung
jury.
Menendez has a voting record as sordid as most Democrats'. He supported the $716 billion
military spending bill, along with 85 percent of his fellow Senate Democrats. He signed a
letter, along with other Democratic leaders, calling for steps to extradite Julian Assange
to stand trial in the United States. The senator, the ranking member of the Foreign
Relations Committee, is owned by the lobby for Israel -- a country that routinely and
massively interferes in our elections -- and supported moving the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem. He helped cause the 2008 global financial crisis by voting to revoke
Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law enacted to create a firewall between commercial and
investment banks.
In what is so emblematic of how pathetic and corrupt the opposition party, their
presidential candidate came out to throw her support behind such an odious criminal and
corporate whore and to campaign with him. While at the same time the Dems have made no secret
about their intention to crush any candidate who espouses socialist values.
Vote if you want, but it's a charade in which the Duopoly will remain beholden to the same
money interests who paid for both the Red and Blue campaigns.
Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million
Americans don't bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother?
One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week's
elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the
State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are
corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as
Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic congressional
candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the
Center for Responsive Politics. Democratic candidates and political action committees have
received $56.8 million, compared with Republicans' $33.4 million, the center reported. The
broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given $174 million to
Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And Michael Bloomberg, weighing
his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.
"In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who
raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and
excitement from the finance sector ," The New York Times reported about current campaign
contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.
Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But
should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence
as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw
with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward
prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man's party
of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the
favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped
from us. Either way we are in for it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a
sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort
to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say
that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn't vote for the Democratic
scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street
and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of
the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with
another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political
system is deep and terminal.
"Plus ça change, Plus c'est la même chose."
But it is always necessary to remind folks that the Greatest Democracy In The World is
not. It is An Auction House To The Highest Bidder.
He goes on to talk about fascism, its characteristics, its incarnation today, and the
elements that pave the way for, which are economic instability, concentrated wealth,
monopoly, a police state, imperialism, etc. It is Neoliberalism which has ushered in fascism
across the globe, plain and simple.
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press
has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The
banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our
emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured
events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including
sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of
this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the
modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs
corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans,
which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national
discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a
vast con game.
You cannot use the word "liberty" when your government, as ours does, watches you 24
hours a day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in
perpetuity. You cannot use the word "liberty" when you are the most photographed and
monitored population in human history. You cannot use the word "liberty" when it is
impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot
use the word "liberty" when the state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate
lethal force against unarmed citizens in the streets of American cities. You cannot use the
word "liberty" when 2.3 million citizens, mostly poor people of color, are held in the
largest prison system on earth. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. The
choice is between whom we want to clamp on our chains -- a jailer who mouths politically
correct bromides or a racist, Christian fascist. Either way we are shackled.
American Exceptionalism reigns supreme to the Nationalist. He refuses to acknowledge that
the real idea of "freedom" is not owning a munitions factory full of weaponry and putting a
flag on the back of a pickup. It is instead the freedom to not have to live in the shadow of
being foreclosed upon for a medical emergency, to not have to spend almost all of one's
income on rent or mortgage debt, to have more time to spend with loved ones or doing what you
love instead of working a dead end job just to pay the bills. In other words, a socialist
economy heavily regulating the banks and corporations, in which debt peonage would largely
become a thing of the past.
And then there it is. "We are being shackled incrementally," by unseen, unelected and
unacknowledged vipers who use their wealth and power to also make sure we're ignorant and
impotent to the real story.
Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate
fascism. It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of neoliberalism that
consolidates power and wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs. The political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin, refining Gross' thesis, would later characterize this corporate
tyranny or friendly fascism as "inverted totalitarianism." It was, as Gross and Wolin
pointed out, characterized by anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics,
the Constitution and the iconography and symbols of American patriotism but internally had
seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were
being shackled incrementally. Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He
wrote that "a friendly fascist power structure in the United States, Canada, Western
Europe, or today's Japan would be far more sophisticated than the 'caesarism' of fascist
Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no charismatic dictator nor even a titular head it
would require no one-party rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the State, no
dissolution of legislatures, no denial of reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an
outgrowth of present trends in the Establishment."
As far as I'm concerned America has been fascist for a long time, at least since 9/11 but
probably longer. We've been captured by Inverted Totalitarianism. Trump just puts the ugly
villainous face to that Fascism which has been rampant for a long time. Lewis Lapham had a
great piece called, "Due Process: Lamenting the death of
the rule of law in a country where it might have always been missing" that lays out the
case for a how concentrated wealth has pretty much ruled with impunity since the beginning.
(h/t to wendy davis)
How long will we continue to participate in this elaborate Lesser of Two Evil voting
sham?
And these days those who do will surely let you know too. All the Good Zombies will be
smiling for their selfies with their, "I Voted" stickers (now an added bonus to your "voting
experience," as if it were a child's toy inside of a cereal box or something). How long will
it be until we're handed little candies as a reward for voting? In step with the continuation
of the infantilization of interaction in America. Civics? Nah. Stickers? Yeah.
Seems we're fucking doomed. But not unless people turn off the tv's and social media to
begin talking to one another in public as fellow human beings, who as the 99% pretty much
have so many of the same concerns in common.
Partisan ideology, blasted night and day on the propaganda networks, keeping us divided
and conquered, with fear, manufactured distraction and celebrity gossip thrown in, to keep
the lemmings hypnotized from what's really going on.
But he also pulled back from saying one shouldn't vote for the Dems to stem Trump's
insanity, although he quickly added that it wouldn't stop the onslaught of corporate
tyranny.
The only thing giving me hope lately is taking the longview, and the emergence of
whistleblowers/journalists exposing the inner workings of the corporate coup. To what degree
it matters will depend on how many people they reach.
"... Opposition to the unending and expanding wars of American imperialism has been completely excluded from the election campaigns of both the Democrats and Republicans. ..."
"... The Democrats represent a political alliance of Wall Street and privileged sections of the middle class. Over the past two years, their central focus, in addition to the anti-Russia campaign, has been the promotion of the politics of race and gender, particularly through the #MeToo campaign. ..."
"... The aim has been to divide the working class while advancing the interests of factions within the top 10 percent that are competing over positions of power, money and privilege. ..."
"... Trump is himself the product of a protracted decay of democratic forms of rule. Nodal points in this process were the Clinton impeachment in 1998, the theft of the 2000 election, the launching of the "war on terror" after the 9/11 attacks, accompanied by the erection of a massive apparatus of domestic spying, and the Obama administration's policy of drone assassination, including of US citizens. ..."
Whatever the rhetoric, and however the seats of the Senate and House of Representatives are
allocated, the basic factors that drive American politics will persist. These are:
1. The determination of the ruling class to maintain the global position of American
capitalism through military force, including world war:
This central strategy has dominated American policy for decades. Seventeen years of the "war
on terror," including wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, have devastated entire
countries and left more than one million people dead. The Trump administration has officially
announced the end of the "war on terror" and ordered the military to begin preparing for "great
power conflict" with Russia or China.
In the weeks leading up to the elections, the administration withdrew from a key Cold
War-era nuclear arms agreement (the INF Treaty) and threatened to launch preemptive strikes
against Russia. At the same time, it effectively declared a new "cold war" against China. With
no public discussion and on a bipartisan basis, the administration has initiated the largest
military buildup since the end of the Cold War.
Opposition to the unending and expanding wars of American imperialism has been
completely excluded from the election campaigns of both the Democrats and Republicans.
The Democrats fully support the strategic aim of the American ruling class to maintain its
global supremacy through military force. From the beginning of the Trump administration, the
Democrats, channeling powerful sections of the military and intelligence apparatus, have
centered their opposition to Trump on the concern that he was pulling back from war in the
Middle East and confrontation with Russia.
2. The staggering levels of social inequality, which cannot be changed by any election, and
which infect every institution of the capitalist state:
Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, social inequality is at historic highs. Three
individuals now possess more wealth than the bottom half of the population, and just three
families have a combined fortune of $348.7 billion, four million times the median family
wealth. The vast majority of the population confronts the many manifestations of social crisis
-- declining wages, soaring health care costs, a drug overdose epidemic and decaying social
infrastructure.
These conditions are the product of the policies of the Obama administration, which
supported and oversaw the bailout of the banks following the financial meltdown in 2008. Since
Trump's election, the Democrats have collaborated in the implementation of massive tax cuts for
the rich, which they have no intention of rolling back whatever the outcome of the
elections.
The Democrats represent a political alliance of Wall Street and privileged sections of
the middle class. Over the past two years, their central focus, in addition to the anti-Russia
campaign, has been the promotion of the politics of race and gender, particularly through the
#MeToo campaign.
The aim has been to divide the working class while advancing the interests of factions
within the top 10 percent that are competing over positions of power, money and
privilege.
3. The crisis of democratic forms of rule and the turn to authoritarianism:
The crisis of American democracy, of which the Trump administration is an extreme
expression, expresses the alignment of political forms with the oligarchical character of
American society.
While Trump pursues his strategy of developing an authoritarian movement, the Democrats
likewise support the destruction of democratic rights, but in a different way. They have
focused on demands that social media companies censor the internet, under the guise of
combating "fake news" and blocking organizations that "sow discontent." In the course of their
conflict with Trump, they have hailed such enemies of democratic rights as former CIA Director
John Brennan, responsible for torture and domestic spying.
Trump is himself the product of a protracted decay of democratic forms of rule. Nodal
points in this process were the Clinton impeachment in 1998, the theft of the 2000 election,
the launching of the "war on terror" after the 9/11 attacks, accompanied by the erection of a
massive apparatus of domestic spying, and the Obama administration's policy of drone
assassination, including of US citizens.
span y gjohnsit on Mon, 11/05/2018 - 1:47pm By "win" I mean "Democrats take over the
house".
Here's my humble opinion:
1) For the Democratic establishment it won't mean much. If the drubbings in 2010, 2014, and
2016 can't cause a leadership change, or even an autopsy, then nothing will.
If anything they will blame progressives and embrace a neoliberal center-right agenda even
more.
2) For the Democratic base, OTOH, it'll be devastating. Democratic activists will lose heart
and it will begin the real start of America being a one-party state. The reason I think this is
after you call the other guy a traitor and fascist, and that still isn't enough to defeat him,
what else can you do to motivate your voters?
Expect progressive voter activism to plummet in 2020. The Green Party will probably grow,
but not as fast as the Democrats shrink.
The party is the neoliberal/neoconservative party.
The Democrats do not deserve to win. As a party, they have no policy positions and have
based their entire campaign on the we're not as bad. That does not put food on the table,
create health care security, or create living income jobs. The Democrats showed their true
colors when they voted along with the Republicans to increase the DoD budget beyond what
Trump requested and expanded the powers of surveillance under the President that they
loathe.
Most people do not want to see a phony impeachment hearing which does nothing but drain
all resources away from helping the people. If the Democrats truly wanted to win, they would
be proposing an ambitious platform aimed at helping the American people.
One more thing, would this country be better off with President Pence instead of Trump? As
bad as Trump is, I think Pence would be espousing similar hatred and therefore, would far
worse with his theocratic ideas.
Their voting base will believe the lies over the evidence before their own eyes.
I agree with most points, but disagree with this:
Expect progressive voter activism to plummet in 2020.
Given the option to just let the country turn into a full-fledged Fascist state, the
logical thing to do would be for the progressives to fight even harder. Bernie Sanders is an
example of turning a loss into more action on behalf of the people. (For those who constantly
disparage Sanders because he is not perfect, get over it...no one is and no one will ever be.
Amazon screwed their workers, not Sanders.).
Getting more and more progressives in down ballot positions will be extremely important,
no matter their label.
if the Democrats win . There are other possibilities if the corruptocrats lose -
more likely is that the true left could finally be forced to admit that the theory that the
corporatist fifth column can be reformed was always a pollyannish delusion and (for example)
Bernie will run as a Green. Without a fascist Democratic Party sabotaging him he will win
easily. (Ironically a fascist Dem, in a 3 way race, would only win NY and CA, but draw off
enough votes from Bernie so that he could lose the popular vote but would win the Electoral
College. Trump would only win AZ, TX, MS, ID, AL and SC. the final: Bernie 379, Hillscum 84,
Trump 77) On the other hand, what If 60 million people turn out and vote Democratic, and then
the corruptocrats stab them in the back again? You worry about disillusionment?
Actually it might depend on how the Democrats win or lose. I would rather see 100 Dems but 75
of them Berniecrats rather than 225 "Democrats".
Or maybe you're afraid of a racist/theocratic right coup? That is a very legitimate fear. We
have backed them up against a wall, but we don't know if they're a rat or a tiger. But they
have had 50 years to show us which, and the tiger is still hasn't eaten us. Identity politics
however, (unless you count anti-porn feminism) is less than a decade old and has already
achieved more than racism could hope for. I fear the PC SMERSH more than the racist
Gestapo.
1. For current Democratic incumbents who lose, it will mean a job change with a higher
salary.
For a while, we wondered how Democrats could be so stupid as to engage in behaviors that
might cause their constituents to primary them or vote against them in the general.
Eventually, it became clear: to ensure obedience from officeholders, their owners had been
giving officeholders unemployment insurance in the form of cushy, prestigious, well-paying
jobs to be awarded to officeholders who lost their elected slots. This insulated
officeholders very nicely from the need to cater to pain-in-the-neck constituents.
Take for example, the post-Senate career move of Senator Dodd:
Motion Picture Association of America
In February 2011, despite "repeatedly and categorically insisting that he would not work
as a lobbyist,"[23][24] Dodd replaced Dan Glickman as chairman of and chief lobbyist for
the Motion Picture Association of America.[25][26]
On January 17, 2012, Dodd released a statement criticizing "the so-called 'Blackout Day'
protesting anti-piracy legislation."[27] Referring to the websites participating in the
blackout, Dodd said, "It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely
on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power... when the
platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite
their users in order to further their corporate interests."[27] In further comments, Dodd
threatened to cut off campaign contributions to politicians who did not support the
Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property
Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, legislation supported by the Motion Picture Association
of America.[28]
Whatever do you suppose qualified Dodd to head the Motion Picture Association?
As an aside, I wonder how Dodd views censorship and/or skewing by the likes of google,
which long since started doing evil, its motto to the contrary; facebook; and twitter
For all other Democratic pols, all over the country, it will mean another two years in
which they make a public show of attacking Trump while just enough of them in D.C. vote for
his budgets, judges, etc. to give him and their corporate sponsors what they want.
2. For the Democratic base, those who eagerly vote blue, no matter who, it will mean--Oh,
screw it. Let's be candid. No one, including the Democratic Party, cares.
3. For Republicans, it would mean a minimum of two more years to be in control of the Oval
Office, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, which is better than a demotion to a
mere trifecta. Continued control typically means larger donations to the controlling party
and its incumbents.
While some may vacillate publicly as to whether or not Trump is good for the Party (*gives
Senator Graham and his ilk the side eye fish eye*), they will, in private, be giddy with glee
about both the money and power, thereby having it both ways, the wet dream
scenario of US politicians.
span y Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 11/05/2018 - 5:05pm
Hillary drops out of the 2020 race and spends the next two years lawyering up.
Meanwhile the Democratic party implodes in an angry round of fingerprinting that
eventually leads to all out street fight between Bernie supporting Progressives and
Establishment Liberals in the run up to the 2020 primary.
Obama tries to play mediator and runs his own slate of phony change agents, but
Berniecrats and lost Hillbots are both hip to the con and aren't having it.
Bernie decides on another run from within, fighting a green tide of corporate payola and
corrupt machine Dems that ends up in a brokered convention.
I hate it when someone only picks out one point of my argument to respond to. Don't
you?
Meanwhile, I suddenly had a picture in my head of HRC running around with a bottle of ink,
a pad to pour it onto, a roller to saturate it with and some unwilling soul grasped by the
wrist and forced to spread their fingers for said fingerprinting.
Crystal ball haze suddenly lifts, and we see the Emerald City in the distance. (Monkeys?
What monkeys?)
Hillary drops out of the 2020 race and spends the next two years lawyering up.
Meanwhile the Democratic party implodes in an angry round of fingerprinting that
eventually leads to all out street fight between Bernie supporting Progressives and
Establishment Liberals in the run up to the 2020 primary.
Obama tries to play mediator and runs his own slate of phony change agents, but
Berniecrats and lost Hillbots are both hip to the con and aren't having it.
Bernie decides on another run from within, fighting a green tide of corporate payola
and corrupt machine Dems that ends up in a brokered convention.
the rich will continue to get richer, the poor more poor, the middle class will continue
to shrink, the war and U.S. imperialism will continue, the deficit and debt will keep going
up, we won't get a nationalized health care system, climate change will continue unabated,
and we still won't live in a democracy. Then the ruling class and it's corporate media will
prepare the sheeple for another election in less than two years.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But
should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as
a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the
pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic
politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man's party of the president retain
control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political
control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for
it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham.
Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to
destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if
only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn't vote for the Democratic scum, tools of
the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel
industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very
little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis
brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that
has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics,
Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is
ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing
another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political
heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill
corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Bertram
Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that
fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is
embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a
captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies
real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from
fascism's iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States'
form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true
intentions behind its "friendly" face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most
cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.
"Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly
across America," Gross wrote. "Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a
corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to
enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or
unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these
consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the
poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our
constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international
politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion."
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has
replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal
and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions
are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are,
at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality
television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment.
Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman
arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is
called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we
cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from
us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game.
You cannot use the word "liberty" when your government, as ours does, watches you 24 hours a
day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in perpetuity. You
cannot use the word "liberty" when you are the most photographed and monitored population in
human history. You cannot use the word "liberty" when it is impossible to vote against the
interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word "liberty" when the
state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed citizens
in the streets of American cities. You cannot use the word "liberty" when 2.3 million citizens,
mostly poor people of color, are held in the largest prison system on earth. This is the
relationship between a master and a slave. The choice is between whom we want to clamp on our
chains -- a jailer who mouths politically correct bromides or a racist, Christian fascist.
Either way we are shackled.
Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism.
It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of neoliberalism that consolidates power
and wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs. The political philosopher Sheldon
Wolin , refining Gross' thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly
fascism as "inverted totalitarianism." It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out, characterized by
anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution and the
iconography and symbols of American patriotism but internally had seized all of the levers of
power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were being shackled incrementally.
Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He wrote that "a friendly fascist power
structure in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, or today's Japan would be far more
sophisticated than the 'caesarism' of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no
charismatic dictator nor even a titular head it would require no one-party rule, no mass
fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution of legislatures, no denial of
reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an outgrowth of present trends in the
Establishment."
Gross foresaw that technological advances in the hands of corporations would be used to trap
the public in what he called "cultural ghettoization" so that "almost every individual would
get a personalized sequence of information injections at any time of the day -- or night." This
is what, of course, television, our electronic devices and the internet have done. He warned
that we would be mesmerized by the entertaining shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave as we
were enslaved.
Gross knew that the most destructive force against the body politic would be the war
profiteers and the militarists. He saw how they would siphon off the resources of the state to
wage endless war, a sum that now accounts for half of all discretionary spending. And he
grasped that warfare is the natural extension of corporatism. He wrote:
Under the militarism of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism violence was openly
glorified. It was applied regionally -- by the Germans in Europe and England, the Italians in
the Mediterranean, the Japanese in Asia. In battle, it was administered by professional
militarists who, despite many conflicts with politicians, were guided by old-fashioned
standards of duty, honor, country, and willingness to risk their own lives.
The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. It is global in scope.
It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that Hitler could dream of but never
achieve. It is based on an integration between industry, science, and the military that the
old-fashioned fascists could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close
integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the civilian leaders
-- such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitze -- tend to be much more bloodthirsty than any
top brass. In turn, the new-style military professionals tend to become corporate-style
entrepreneurs who tend to operate -- as Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul
L. Savage have disclosed -- in accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old
buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer subservience to
the interests of transnational corporations and the continuing presentation of threats to
some corporate investments as threats to the interest of the American people as a whole.
Above all, in sharp contrast with classic fascism's glorification of violence, the friendly
fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of modern warfare behind
such "value-free" terms as "nuclear exchange," "counterforce" and "flexible response," behind
the huge geographical distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through
missiles or even on the "automated battlefield," and the even greater psychological distances
between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might be consigned to quick or
slow death.
We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they
do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic
Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build
progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The
Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to
corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And
this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and
more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there
is no fight in us.
The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it. Take a look
at the flight roster of the billionaire
Jeffrey Epstein , who was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up
spending 13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both parties
and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as "Orgy Island," on his jet,
which the press nicknamed "the Lolita Express." Some of the names on his flight
roster, which usually included unidentified women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips,
Alan
Dershowitz , former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the
Candide -like
Steven Pinker ,
whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better and better, and Britain's Prince Andrew. Epstein
was also a friend of Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago.
We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have crumbled in the
same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we learn from history is "that people
and governments never have learned anything from history." We will not arrest the decline if
the Democrats regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate
engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable. Corporate power will
do its dirty work regardless of which face -- the friendly fascist face of the Democrats or the
demented visage of the Trump Republicans -- is pushed out front. If you want real change,
change that means something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two
political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.
33 Trillion Reasons Why The New York Times Gets It Wrong on Russia-gate
Facebook Said 80,000 Russian Posts Were Buried in 33 Trillion Facebook Offerings Over
Two-Year Period Further Undermining NYT ·s Case
by Gareth Porter Posted on
November 05, 2018 November 3, 2018 Even more damning evidence has come to light
undermining The New York Times ' assertion in September that Russia used social media
to steal the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
The Times '
claim last month that Russian Facebook posts reached nearly as many Americans as actually
voted in the 2016 election exaggerated the significance of those numbers by a factor of
hundreds of millions, as revealed by further evidence from Facebook's own Congressional
testimony.
Further research into an earlier Consortium News
article shows that a relatively paltry 80,000 posts from the private Russian company
Internet Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on
Facebook over a two-year period before and after the 2016 vote.
That was supposed to have thrown the election, according to the paper of record. In its
10,000-word
article on Sept. 20, the Times reported that 126 million out of 137 million
American voters were exposed to social media posts on Facebook from IRA that somehow had a
hand in delivering Trump the presidency.
The newspaper said: "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their
effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate
images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook
alone." The paper argued that 126 million was "not far short of the 137 million people
who would vote in the 2016 presidential election."
But Consortium News , on Oct. 10,
debunked that story, pointing out that reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti failed to
report several significant caveats and disclaimers from Facebook officers themselves, whose
statements make the Times' claim that Russian election propaganda "reached" 126
million Americans an exercise in misinformation.
The newspaper failed to tell their readers that Facebook account holders in the United
States had been "served" 33 trillion Facebook posts during that same period -- 413 million
times more than the 80,000 posts from the Russian company.
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified before the Senate Judiciary
Committee on October 31, 2017 is a far cry from what the Times claims. "Our best
estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served one of
these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period," Stretch said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established fact. He said
an estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story
from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period, but over 194 weeks during the
two years 2015 through 2017 – including a full year after the election.
That means only an estimated 29 million FB users may have gotten at least one story
in their feed in two years. The 126 million figure is based only on an assumption that they
shared it with others, according to Stretch.
Facebook didn't even claim most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It
offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people were.
In addition, Facebook's Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri,
acknowledged in 2016 that FB subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the
stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA
stories that actually make it into a subscriber's news feed on any given day are actually
read.
And now, according to the further research, the odds that Americans saw any of these IRA
ads – let alone were influenced by them – are even more astronomical. In his Oct.
2017 testimony, Stretch said that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed
to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds."
To put the 33 trillion figure over two years in perspective, the 80,000 Russian-origin
Facebook posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time.
Shane and Mazzetti did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New York
Times ' own coverage of that 2017 Stretch testimony explicitly
stated , "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount
of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds
everyday."
The Times ' touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million voters, while not
reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most
spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national
security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on
the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be contacted
at [email protected] .
Reprinted from Consortium
News with the author's permission.
by Justin Raimondo Posted on
November 05, 2018 November 4, 2018 After all the screaming headlines and hysterical talk
of "treason," the Russia-gate hoax was almost entirely absent from the midterms. One would
think that the other party being in the hands of a ruthless foreign dictator who has it in
for America would be a major campaign issue – that is, if the Democrats actually
believed their own propaganda. However, we've seen neither hide nor hair of Putin in all
those campaign ads, or at least hardly a glance: that's because Russia-gate has always been a
fraud, a setup, and really a criminal conspiracy to take down a sitting US President on the
basis of a gigantic lie.
As the promulgators of that lie are exposed – the Deep State amalgam that includes
foreign intelligence agencies as well as Trump's domestic opponents – Democrats are
backing away from what has suddenly become, for them, a very messy narrative. For what has
happened is that the narrative has turned on them, and now implicates them in a massive
scheme to embroil the Trump campaign in a web of foreign influencers.
The campaign to penetrate the Trump campaign appears to have been initiated abroad as much
as it was started by the Clinton campaign – who inherited the operation from a very
mysterious Republican donor after the GOP primaries. The "former" MI6 agent Christopher
Steele, now working for an ostensibly independent spy network, didn't consider the job of
digging up dirt on Trump just a normal job: he was passionately dedicated to stopping Trump
from ever reaching the White House. One can easily impute the same motivations to the little
group that took it upon themselves to break into the Trump campaign and put it under
surveillance, all of them attached to British intelligence:
Cambridge professor and foreign policy maven Stefan Halper ,
with longtime connections to MI6 and the CIA, who made a point of approaching the Trump
campaign early on and offering his "services." He later cultivated George Papadoupoulos, a
low-level aide to the campaign then living in London.
Sir Richard
Dearlove, the former head of MI6, who advised the spy ring and helped pass their
information to US government authorities, is very close to Halper.
"Professor"
Joseph Mifsud , a mysterious figure who first introduced target George Pappadoupolos to
the idea that the Russians had incriminating material on Hillary Clinton, and who has since
mysteriously disappeared (although his lawyer seems to know where he is).
Alexander Downer , formerly Australia's ambassador to the UK, arranged to meet a low
level Trump advisor in a London bar and reportedly learned about Mifsud's contention.
Downer went to the FBI, and Operation Regime Change, Washington, was launched.
That's just the tip of the iceberg: the "intelligence community" has its tentacles
everywhere, and while this has always been the case today our spooks are getting more brazen
than ever before. As an indication of their evolution from government agencies charged with
protecting the country into a coherent and very organized political force, a good number of
these former agents ran as Democratic candidates for Congress on a platform of hurt feelings.
"As someone who is from the intelligence community," former spook and Democratic
congressional candidate Elissa Slotkin
whines , "it is worrisome the way that President Trump has demonized the institutions
where people are working hard every day to keep us safe." The American reverence for the
military doesn't extend to the clandestine services: the public knows too much about their
history of dirty tricks, assassinations, and regime-change antics abroad to trust them much
on the home front.
Slotkin's lament is part and parcel of the great ideological shift when it comes to
matters of national security: it is the Democrats who are now the party of militarism, which
is the natural corollary of the globalist mentality that drives the "progressive" agenda.
These candidates, however, are operating at a disadvantage, as Russia-gate proves to be a
mirage and Robert Mueller continues to produce a bunch of low-level indictments that have
nothing to do with Russian "collusion."
The
polling on the Russia-gate "scandal" puts it somewhere between the 49 th and
the 100 th concern of voters, a number that dramatizes the great gulf that has
opened up between ordinary folks and the political class. The former are barely aware of
Russia-gate: even now, all knowledge of it is fading from their memories. The latter have
been obsessed with Russia-gate for two solid years – and now, when the narrative has
all but fallen apart and the only people left at the party are Louise Mensch and some guy who
keeps saying " It's time for some game
theory! ", will once respectable outlets like The New Yorker admit that they have
covered themselves in shame?
A NOTE TO MY READERS: I apologize for this rather short column, but I am still
recovering from an unfortunate relapse that has made it hard for me to do anything, let alone
write. This glitch was due to a change in my medication, which has now been corrected.
However, this also means I'm back to square one: the heavy chemotherapy in addition to the
Keytruda. I'm making a lot of progress recently and I expect to continue to improve.
Meanwhile, bear with me: the best is yet to come.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes
deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out
loud.
Absent independents, Republicans are running away with it. And independents are most assuredly witnessing the insanity that has gripped the
Democratic Party, and will vote for Republicans at least 9:1.
Well, hang in there, sport. Yes, the US does seem to be going down the tubes, in that it's
lost all respect in the world; we still fear it, but don't respect it. Sic transit
gloria , or something like that...
"... Trump has succeeded in implementing some of his campaign ideas and not all of them are 100% evil or wrongheaded. He has shaken the long term calcification of the US foreign and trade policy, has introduced tariffs especially to combat clearly unfair Chinese trade practices while demanding European and Asian allies pay more for their defense of empire. ..."
"... As b stated recently, Trump is an astute salesman (unfortunately, that is all he is) but what is left unmentioned is that he is of the sales school that is totally unmoored for any sense of ethical, moral or legal responsibility. ..."
"... The US political system was invested with an ability to self-correct, or self-police through separation of powers within the tripartite political system. It is hardly news this system is about dead, starting not with Trump of course, but now reaching its absolute low point under his rule and the acquiescence of the spineless GOP. ..."
That is, he started off on the wrong foot. Campaigning as a populist who eschewed accepted
mainstream "progressive" and "conservative" political positions, he completely cratered the
unpopular Republican orthodoxy during the 2016 primaries by promising such heretical ideas as
a non-interventionist foreign policy, protection for Medicare/Medicaid and social security,
improvement on Obamacare, higher taxes on the wealthiest and a massive infrastructure program
to rebuild the decaying facilities of this so-called once grate nation.
These are all ideas that gained the support of enough Obama voters and independents in
just the right flyover states to lead Trump to an improbable victory while being soundly
thrashed in the popular voting nationwide. A stunning, historical accomplishment as much as
and as much in reaction too, the 2008 Obama victory.
Of course, to those of us who understand the modern GOP and the history of the lying-ass
self promotion of the Trump entertainment spectacle its own self, we were neither duped nor
surprised when the initial 2017 legislative agenda items proferred were none of the populist
agenda but instead were the repeal of Obamacare, massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the
reversal of all Obama executive orders, most notably in the areas of refugee resettlement and
immigration.
Trump, the so-called change agent who in fact was and still is clueless regarding how to
function as President simply let the craven Obama opposition leaders of the prior 8 years,
McConnell and Ryan set out the typical GOP legislative agenda, which is opposed by a
majority, in some cases overwhelming majority, of Amerikkkans.
Obamacare repeal failed memorably based on but one late night thumb's down taken more out
of personal revenge than the ideology of a very soon to be dead Senator.
Trump's ruling style in large part has substituted for any sense of a coherent agenda in
that he obviously cares only about his base (an obdurate block of 36% of the electorate
consisting almost entirely of white, entitled, racist baby boomers who have devolved into
anti-democratic fascists now that they no longer represent a majority of the US population
and believe (falsely) they have something to protect).
Trump has succeeded in implementing some of his campaign ideas and not all of them are
100% evil or wrongheaded. He has shaken the long term calcification of the US foreign and
trade policy, has introduced tariffs especially to combat clearly unfair Chinese trade
practices while demanding European and Asian allies pay more for their defense of
empire.
While I have my own view of whether any of Trump's policies contain great value from a
long term historical perspective, I do recognize Trump's appeal to certain sectors of the
internet, including most obviously certain useful idiots of the ultra left.
I do not believe his victory to be a fluke of nature but rather in keeping with the
current worldwide trend borne of aging whitebread fear, cyncism and disenchantment with
elitist political/economic establishments and which has been amped to a viral degree by a
staggering wealth disparity, but only as it impacts the formerly entitled feeling, aging
white people situated in western countries.
The natural response to any socially or cultural threat is to band together tribally and
fight back. And the main threat, when it is boiled down, is the fear of overpopulation (and
its accompnaying unstoppable environmental degradation) driven by what is viewed
through the Trump voter political lens as non-white, primitive, illsuited people from
shithole countries who are and will continue to ruin Amerikkka and Western Europe.
As perfectly illustrated by the migrant caravan heading to Tijuana.
Unfortunately, Trump through disinterest or incompetence or both hasn't followed through
either with enough of the promises he made that are actually meaningful to most people,
whether GOP or Democratic. He has been able to bind his tribe to him and conquer the GOP
political apparatus simply because the Party platform was already so badly decayed
(overcooked Reagan leftovers) and out of touch with reality pre-Trump that the Donald could
bend delusional conservative tropes in any way he saw fit to his electoral advantage. As long
as he infotained well, and he has indeed, he would dominate.
As b stated recently, Trump is an astute salesman (unfortunately, that is all he is)
but what is left unmentioned is that he is of the sales school that is totally unmoored for
any sense of ethical, moral or legal responsibility.
In other words, Trump is that quintessential Amerikkkan salesman: the grifter. This
particular breed of business person is not an exception in the US but rather the rule. In
fact, the US system has devolved to the point where laws and regulations now enfranchise what
previously had been considered illegal activity. Amerikkkans are heavily incentivised these
days by the call to a form of monopolistic, crony capitalism and institulionised rigged
gambling ("Wall Street"), which in more quaint times was considered mobsterism.
Institutions have been purposefully compromised so they no longer support whatever
criminal laws still exist. It is not by accident that the IRS is now chronically understaffed
and has no effective way to stop income tax cheating or collection of the minimal taxes now
due.
It is not by accident that Trump's main role as President is to weaken institutions such
as the media, to further debase language and kill whatever generally accepted objective truth
remain extant in the land. He is recognisable to all Amerikkkans as a CEO in support of this
ongoing wave of legal criminality through which the 1% and their lackeys section have
prospered at the expense of the 99%.
The US political system was invested with an ability to self-correct, or self-police
through separation of powers within the tripartite political system. It is hardly news this
system is about dead, starting not with Trump of course, but now reaching its absolute low
point under his rule and the acquiescence of the spineless GOP.
And no, I don't believe the Demotardic Party to be absolved of blame in any way. Rather,
the Demotards have entirely gone along to get along with this same trend because of course
the Party leaders have been able to criminally enrich themselves and their cronies along the
way too.
However, let's be real for minute and drop all pretense of holier than thou keyboard
revolutionism. The ultimate solution of the world's disease is not going to be resolved in
2018 through a political revolution, especially one inspired by the disharmony and fraud of
internet based social media and its acolytes. D'uh.
Look around. Since we have been blogging our lives away the world has only grown further
away from leftism. We live in a fascist police state owned and operated by teh ultra wealthy
who have dropped pretense of any humanitarian or religious concern for those less firtunated
than themselves.
Donald Trump has one more chance to make himself truly into the transformational leader he
believes himself to be in his degraded soul.
The first bill on the 2019 legislative needs to be a bipartisan infrastructure bill of
such scope and magnitude that it will serve not only a political change of direction but also
redirect the economy in such way that wealth is re-directed from the wealthy to the rest of
us, particularly those able bodied non-college educated people who have suffered through the
last several decades without hope or gain.
Trump must dictate to his party that Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security will not only
be maintained but strengthened through improved benefits.
Am I dreaming? Yes, I admit that I am. But I'm also calling out to the criminal conman in
chief: it's not too late to reclaim your own legacy.
"... The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the permanent bureaucracy looking to always expand itself, and the various ethnic and sexual minorities whose needs and grievances are serviced by that bureaucracy. It's the last group that has become the party's most public face while the party's other activities – many of them sinister -- remain at least partially concealed. ..."
"... the Republicans are being forced to engage on some real issues, such as the need for a coherent and effective immigration policy and the need to redefine formal trade relations. (Other issues like the insane system of medical racketeering and the deadly racket of the college loan industry just skate along on thin ice. And then, of course, there's the national debt and all its grotesque outgrowths.) ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of bad ideas and bad faith, starting with the position that "diversity and inclusion" means shutting down free speech, an unforgivable transgression against common sense and common decency. It's a party that lies even more systematically than Mr. Trump, and does so knowingly (as when Google execs say they "Do no Evil"). Its dirty secret is that it relishes coercion, it likes pushing people around, telling them what to think and how to act. Its idea of "social justice" is a campus kangaroo court, where due process of law is suspended. And it is deeply corrupt, with good old-fashioned grift, new-fashioned gross political misconduct in federal law enforcement, and utter intellectual depravity in higher education. ..."
"... I hope that the party is shoved into an existential crisis and is forced to confront its astounding dishonesty. I hope that the process prompts them to purge their leadership across the board. ..."
Back in the last century, when this was a different country, the Democrats were the "smart"
party and the Republicans were the "stupid" party.
How did that work?
Well, back then the Democrats represented a broad middle class, with a base of factory
workers, many of them unionized, and the party had to be smart, especially in the courts, to
overcome the natural advantages of the owner class.
In contrast, the Republicans looked like a claque of country club drunks who staggered
home at night to sleep on their moneybags. Bad optics, as we say nowadays.
The Democrats also occupied the moral high ground as the champion of the little guy. If not
for the Dems, factory workers would be laboring twelve hours a day and children would still be
maimed in the machinery. Once the relationship between business and labor was settled in the
1950s, the party moved on to a new crusade on even loftier moral high ground: civil rights,
aiming to correct arrant and long-lived injustices against downtrodden black Americans. That
was a natural move, considering America's self-proclaimed post-war status as the world's Beacon
of Liberty. It had to be done and a political consensus that included Republicans got it done.
Consensus was still possible.
The Dems built their fortress on that high ground and fifty years later they find themselves
prisoners in it. The factory jobs all vamoosed overseas. The middle class has been pounded into
penury and addiction.
The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons
seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the
permanent bureaucracy looking to always expand itself, and the various ethnic and sexual
minorities whose needs and grievances are serviced by that bureaucracy. It's the last group
that has become the party's most public face while the party's other activities – many of
them sinister -- remain at least partially concealed.
The Republican Party has, at least, sobered up some after getting blindsided by Trump and
Trumpism. Like a drunk out of rehab, it's attempting to get a life. Two years in, the party
marvels at Mr. Trump's audacity, despite his obvious lack of savoir faire. And despite a
longstanding lack of political will to face the country's problems,the Republicans are being
forced to engage on some real issues, such as the need for a coherent and effective immigration
policy and the need to redefine formal trade relations. (Other issues like the insane system of
medical racketeering and the deadly racket of the college loan industry just skate along on
thin ice. And then, of course, there's the national debt and all its grotesque outgrowths.)
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of bad ideas and bad faith, starting
with the position that "diversity and inclusion" means shutting down free speech, an
unforgivable transgression against common sense and common decency. It's a party that lies even
more systematically than Mr. Trump, and does so knowingly (as when Google execs say they "Do no
Evil"). Its dirty secret is that it relishes coercion, it likes pushing people around, telling
them what to think and how to act. Its idea of "social justice" is a campus kangaroo court,
where due process of law is suspended. And it is deeply corrupt, with good old-fashioned grift,
new-fashioned gross political misconduct in federal law enforcement, and utter intellectual
depravity in higher education.
I hope that Democrats lose as many congressional and senate seats as possible.I hope that
the party is shoved into an existential crisis and is forced to confront its astounding
dishonesty. I hope that the process prompts them to purge their leadership across the board. If
there is anything to salvage in this organization, I hope it discovers aims and principles that
are unrecognizable from its current agenda of perpetual hysteria. But if the party actually
blows up and disappears, as the Whigs did a hundred and fifty years ago, I will be content. Out
of the terrible turbulence, maybe something better will be born.
Or, there's the possibility that the dregs of a defeated Democratic Party will just go
batshit crazy and use the last of its mojo to incite actual sedition. Of course, there's also a
distinct possibility that the Dems will take over congress, in which case they'll ramp up an
even more horrific three-ring-circus of political hysteria and persecution that will make the
Spanish Inquisition look like a backyard barbeque. That will happen as the US enters the most
punishing financial train wreck in our history, an interesting recipe for epic political
upheaval.
Not sure the Trump "guns instead of butter" policy is so widely supported. He proved to be a regular neocon marionette and as such
might pay the price during midterm elections, although, of course, domestics issues dominate.
Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to gain a majority. Of the 48 seats that are in play only 16 seem likely to change in their favor. In the Senate they need to take gain two seats to become a majority, but at least one of the Democrats' current seats is endangered and polls for the other 9 seats that potentially might change show a tossup. ..."
"... The Democrats have neither a program nor a leadership that incites to vote fro them. They wasted two years with hyping a non-existent Russiagate that no one but Washington insiders and the media cares about. Did they actually oppose anything Trump did? They tried a #metoo stunt around a Supreme Court nomination but how effective was that? On Clinton: the more she squawks the more republicans vote and the less democrats vote. That is my theory. This loser takes the fire out of everyone that counts other than her diminishing blind adherents. I think sometimes that Trump should lock her up for the greatest national security breach of all time but having her come out now blatantly proposing a rerun for president is such good luck for Trump. ..."
What are the chances that the mid-term elections in the United States, one week from now, will change the majority in the House
or Senate?
The Democrats
need to
pick up 23 seats in the House to gain a majority. Of the 48 seats that are in play only 16 seem likely to change in their favor.
In the Senate they need to take gain two seats to become a majority, but at least one of the Democrats' current seats is endangered
and polls for the other 9 seats that potentially might change show a tossup.
My personal hunch is that the Republicans will keep both houses and may even gain a few seats.
The U.S. economy is doing relatively well. The recent drop in share prices points to a more mixed outlook from here on, but
so far everything held up.
The Democrats have neither a program nor a leadership that incites to vote fro them. They wasted two years with
hyping a non-existent Russiagate
that no one but Washington insiders and the media cares about. Did they actually oppose anything Trump did? They tried a #metoo
stunt around a Supreme Court nomination but how effective was that? On Clinton: the more she squawks the more republicans vote
and the less democrats vote. That is my theory. This loser takes the fire out of everyone that counts other than her diminishing
blind adherents. I think sometimes that Trump should lock her up for the greatest national security breach of all time but having
her come out now blatantly proposing a rerun for president is such good luck for Trump.
She should be tried for her email breach of security just the same. And Trump and company tried for being hucksters and shaking
down investors. Bad luck USA you have been mugged for the past 6 decades or whatever. Can't see much chance for change either
with your totally kaput election system. Losers!
"... Today's Blue elite represents the greatest concentration of wealth and power in the United States. Moreover, such wealth is scattered across a mosaic of pristine, manicured, gated communities physically and socially divorced from the realities of normal American life -- glittering bubbles of sovereign privilege . This is the very oligarchy Founders like John Adams so feared . While both Red and Blue elites represent themselves as the people's champion, Blue's protests ring the most false . ..."
Today, two righteous paths are gridlocked in opposition. Both perceive themselves as
champions of national renewal, of cleansing corrupted ideals, and of truly fulfilling America's
promise. Both fervently believe that they alone own virtue. Yet the banners of each course are
absolutist mirrors of one another, pro and contra, all or nothing. Moreover, lightning rod
issues, as in the 1770s and 1850s, make the space between battle lines a no man's land, forcing
majority moderates and compromising fence-sitters to choose or be called out as willing
collaborators with the other.
Today's lightning rods -- a feminist reordering of jurisprudence , a
state-promoted LGBT agenda, closed or open borders, full gun rights guarantees -- should not be
seen as mere hot-button issues that can be manipulated at will by political party elites. These
are way-of-life banners for two warring coalitions. Iconic issues that now represent the future
of two tribal alliances are taking the place of a former, single nation. The time for
compromise is over.
Othering. Here, the barren and
inhospitable new civic space is dominated along looming, fortified lines. Warring
identities have concluded that the only solution is the complete submission of the enemy party,
and both sides are beginning to prepare for an
ultimate showdown . Othering is a transforming process, through which former kin are
reimagined as evil, an American inner-enemy, who once defeated must be punished. The most
familiar metaphor of American othering was the 1770s practice of tarring and feathering .
This less-than-lethal mob punishment corresponds -- in shaming power and severity -- to mob
vengeance pervasive today on social media outlets such as Twitter.
Hence, to work fully as othering, the process must be public, result in the shame of the
transgressor, and show that true virtue is in command. More than anything, othering is a
ceremonial act designed to bring shame not just on the single person being tarred and
feathered, but the entire community to which he belongs. The political object of #MeToo is not
the numerically bounded set of guilty men, but rather the entire population set of
all men . The political object of Black Lives Matter is not racists, but rather all
whitepeople . The
political object of the LGBT movement is not homophobes, but
rather the whole of straight cisgender
society whose reality compass they seek to transform.
The targeted other, equally seized by virtue, operates today from an angry defensive crouch.
Thus do corporate elites support marquee Blue "social justice" agendas on Twitter, Facebook,
and YouTube while censoring counterarguments and comment by Red. This is exactly the goal in
this struggle: namely, to condition moderates to widespread acquiescence of a loud and
insistent Blue agenda, while subtly coercing them to choose sides. They do this by arraigning
Red as social losers, the future minority tribe, on their eventual way to the dustbin of
history.
Red and Blue already represent an irreparable religious schism, deeper in doctrinal terms
even than the 16th-century Catholic-Protestant schism. The war here is over which faction
successfully captures the (social media) flag as
true inheritor of American virtue.
The Decision. Othering's most decisive effect is to condition the whole of society to
believe that an existential clash is coming, that all must choose, and that there are no
realistic alternatives to a final test of wills. Remember, in past times, Jacobins on both
sides were small minorities. Yet for either one of these two angry visions to win, there must
be a showdown. This demands, perversely, that they work together to bring on open conflict,
successfully coercing the majority of Americans to buy into its inevitability. At that point,
only a trigger pull is needed.
This was what the Boston Massacre did to push colonials against Britain in 1770, and this is
what
John Brown's Pottawatomie Massacre and Congressman Preston Brooks's
caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor did to push people toward civil war in 1856.
This is what the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh and the nearly two-year effort to
delegitimize and overthrow President Donald Trump may doing today: getting the two halves of
the former nation to pull that trigger.
The Fight. If the political balance shifts dramatically, then conflict checks -- held
in place by lingering political norms and a longstanding electoral standoff -- disintegrate.
Suddenly, both newly advantaged and disadvantaged parties rush to a test of wills sooner rather
than later. A triggering incident becomes a spark -- yet the spark itself does not ignite.
Rather, it is the readiness for combat in this emerging "community of violence" that makes a
fight the natural way forward. In 1774, the Sons of Liberty were spoiling for a fight. In the
1850s, Jayhawkers and Border Ruffians were equally primed to hit back. That pushed the nation
to civil war.
Evidence from history and our own eyes tells us that we are deep into phase four. Three
takeaways show us how close we are to real battle.
Both sides rush to tear down the constitutional order. Just since the 2016 election,
we have witnessed a rolling thunder of Blue and Red elite rhetoric -- packing
the
SupremeCourt,abolishing
the ElectoralCollege , repealing
the
SecondAmendment
, wholesale state nullification of federal law, shackling of voter rights, and Deep State
invocation of the 25th Amendment. These are all potential extremities of action that would not
only dismantle our constitutional order, but also skew it to one side's juridical construct of
virtue, thus dissolving any semblance of adherence to law by the other. Over time each party
becomes emotionally invested in the lust to dismantle the old and make something new.
Hence, constitutional norms exist only conditionally, until such time as they finally be
dismantled, and only as long as a precariously balanced electoral divide holds firm. A big
historical tilt in favor of one party over the other would very quickly push the nation into
crisis because the party with the new mandate would rush to enact its program. The very threat
of such constitutional dismantling would be sure casus belli . Such tilts in the
early 1770s against Britain, and later in
the 1850s against the slaveholding party, were the real tipping points. Not only was
Dred Scott v. Sandford just such a tipping point in 1857, but subconsciously its legacy
weighs heavily on Americans today, as they contemplate -- often with hysterical passion -- the
dread consequences of a Kavanaugh appointment.
The dead hand of the last civil war grabs us from the grave. It is eerie how today's
angst pulls us back to the 1860s -- and shows us what is likely to happen in our third civil
war. If the poisonous hatreds of the 1860s again inform our civil anger today -- i.e. battles
between the alt-right and antifa -- then this should tell us that we are literally on the cusp
of another time of rage, where the continuity of strife is stronger than any hopes for
reconciliation. What is clear is that two warring parties will accept nothing less from the
other than submission, even though the loser will never submit. Moreover, each factional ethos
is incapable of empathizing with
the other.
Yet we should remember that "unconditional surrender" is like an Old Testament doctrine --
meaning that its invocation hearkens unmistakably to God's judgment. It became the
Federal rallying cry throughout the Civil War, a substrate trope in the Versailles Treaty,
the president's official position for the end of World War II, and even our complacent
conviction during the decomposition of the Soviet Union. It is an apocalyptic vision deeply
embedded in both Blue and Red. Such visions presage existential crisis that puts what is left
of the nation at real risk. If, at war's end, the sacred scrolls, artifacts, and symbols -- the
archaeology of a once-cherished identity -- cannot be restored or repurposed, then our entire
history must be destroyed, and the "we" that once was wiped clean. Civil war -- the battle over
how, or whether, we belong to one another -- thus demands nothing less than transformation.
Disbelieving war makes it inevitable. People will always
disbelieve that we could come to blows, until we do. Delegates at the "Democracy" party
convention in Charleston, in the summer of 1860, were still in denial of
the coming fury . No one dares imagine another civil war playing out like the last, when
two grimly determined American armies fought each other to the death in bloody pitched battles.
It is unlikely that a third American civil war will embrace 18th and 19th century military
dynamics. Antique Anglo-American society -- organized around community "
mustering " -- was culturally equipped to fight civil wars. Today's screen-absorbed
Millennials are not. So what?
But the historical consequences of a non-military American civil war would be just as severe
as any struggle settled by battle and blood. For example, the map of a divided America today
suggests that division into functioning state and local sovereignties -- with autonomy over
kinship, identity, and way of life issues -- might be the result of this non-bloody war. This
could even represent de facto national partition -- without de jure secession, achieved through
a gradual process of accretive state and local
nullification .
So what would a non-military civil war look like? Could it be non-violent? Americans are
certainly not lovers, but they do not seem really to be fighters either. A possible path to
kinship disengagement -- a separation without de jure divorce -- would here likely follow a
crisis, a confrontation, and some shocking, spasmodic violence, horrifyingly amplified on
social media. Passions at this point would pull back, but investment in separation would not.
What might eventuate would be a national sorting out, a de facto kinship separation in which
Blue and Red regions would go -- and govern -- their own ways, while still maintaining the
surface fiction of a titular "United States." This was, after all, the arrangement America came
to after 20 years of civil war (1857-1877). This time, however, there will be no succeeding
conciliation (as was achieved in the 1890s). Culturally, this United States will be, from the
moment of agreement, two entirely separate sensibilities, peoples, and politics.
♦♦♦
The winding path to civil war has yet another wrinkle: the people-elite divide. In the 1770s
and the 1850s, American fissuring was championed by opposing elites. In the 1770s, two elites
had emerged: one was the colonial, homegrown elite -- such as Washington, Hamilton, and Adams
-- and the other was the metropole,
trans-Atlantic
British elite , celebrated by royally endowed landowners such as Lord Fairfax , whose holdings
were in the thousands of square miles. Yet the British aristocracy was less intimately engaged
in the colonies, and the loyalist elite a more sotto voce
voice in colonial politics.
Not so the proto-Confederacy, the celebrated "Slave Power." In the looming struggle between
North and South, the Southern elite was the dominant economic force in the nation, thanks to
its overwhelming capital stored in human flesh. In fact, planter aristocracy capital formation
in 1860
equaled all capital invested in manufacturing, railroads, banks, and all currency in
circulation -- combined. This was the power of chattel slavery as the wealth ecology of the
antebellum South. In
defiant opposition to them were the Northern
anti-slavery elites , nowhere as privileged and rich as their Southern counterparts. The
new Republicans were further thwarted by the indissoluble alliance of planter aristocracy and
the nation's financial hub: New York City. There was an unholy bond between a dominant
slaveholder elite and an equally dominant New York slave-enabling elite. To make the point, in
1859, New York shipbuilders outfitted
85 slave ships for the hungry needs of the Southern planter class.
The dominant cultural position occupied by the overlords of chattel slavery has its analogy
today in the overlords of America's Blue elite. While there is a vocal Red elite, the Blue
elite dominates public life through its hold on the Internet, Hollywood, publishing, social
media, academia, the Washington bureaucracy, and the global grip of corporate giants. Blue
elite's power, in its hold on the cultural pulse and economic lifeblood of American life,
compares granularly to the planter aristocracy of the 1850s.
Ruling elites famously overthrown by history -- like the Ancien Régime in
France, Czarist Russia, and even the Antebellum South -- were fated by their insatiable
selfishness, their impenetrable arrogance, and their sneering aloofness from the despised
people -- "the deplorables" -- upon whom their own
economic status feasted .
Today's
Blue elite represents the
greatest concentration of wealth and power in the United States. Moreover, such wealth is
scattered across a mosaic of pristine, manicured, gated communities physically and socially
divorced from the realities of normal American life
-- glittering bubbles of
sovereign privilege . This is the very oligarchy Founders like John Adams
so feared . While both Red and Blue elites represent themselves as the people's champion,
Blue's protests ring the
most false .
America is divided today not by customary tussles in party politics, but rather by
passionate, existential, and irreconcilable opposition. Furthermore, the onset of battle is
driven yet more urgently by the "intersection" of a culturally embedded kinship divide moving
-- however haphazardly -- to join up with an elite-people divide.
Tragically, our divide may no longer be an outcome that people of goodwill work to overcome.
Schism -- with our nation in an ideological Iron Maiden -- will soon force us all to submit,
and choose.
Michael Vlahos teaches strategy and war at Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs and
formerly, at the Naval War College. He is the author of the book
Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change .
Likbez
I think that the key for understating the political crisis in the USA is to understand its
connection with the crisis on neoliberalism as an ideology which was encompassed as the USA
national ideology after WWII.
The US neoliberal elite lost the support of the population, and the is what the current
crisis is about. Also, the level of degeneration of the current elite demonstrated by Haley
appointed to the UN and several other disastrous appointments also signify the Us approaching
the situation of " let them eat cakes."
The same time the power of surveillance state is such that outside of random acts of
violence like we observed recently, insurrection is impossible and political ways to change
the situation are blocked.
Neoliberals came to power with Carter, so more than 40 years ago (although formally Reagan
is considered to be the first neoliberal president.) Now they are are losing political power
and popular support.
Trump attempt to reform "classic neoliberalism" into what can be called "national
neoliberalism" or neoliberalism without globalization is probably doomed to be a failure and
not only due to Trump weaknesses as a political leader. He trying increase the level of
neoliberaliztion with the USA failing to understand that the current problems stem from
excessive levels of deregulation (and associated level of corruption), the excessive power of
military industrial complex (supported by Wall Street) which led to waiting for trillion of
arms race and destruction of New Deal Social protection mechanisms.
With the collapse of neoliberalism of global ideology, international standing of the USA
greatly deteriorated, and now in some areas (especially with unilateral Iran sanctions and
behavior in Korea crisis), Trump administration approaches the status of a pariah nation.
My impression is the neoliberalism just can't be reformed the way Trump is trying it to
reform into what can be called "national neoliberalism."
That's probably why intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of the Democratic party,
closely connected to Wall Street launched a color revolution ("Russiagate) against him in
late 2016, trying to depose him and install a more "compliant" leader, who would support
kicking the can down the road.
So the two warring camps now represent "classic neoliberalism" with its idea of the global
neoliberal empire (and related "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine) and "revisionists" of
various flavors (including Trump and Sanders supporters)
BTW neocons, who dominate the USA foreign policy, are also neoliberals, just moonlighting
as lobbyists of the military industrial complex.
I think that globalization as an immanent feature and trump policies this will fail.
As the same, the opposition to neoliberalism on the ground level of the US society demand
reforms and retreat form the globalization, which they connect with outsourcing and
offshoring.
That's why Trump's idea of "national neoliberalism" -- an attempt to retreat from
"globalization" and at the same time to obtain some economic advantages by brute force and
bilateral treaties instead of multilateral organizations like WTO got some initial support.
Along with his fake promises to improve the economic position of the middle class, squeezed
by globalization.
the truth is that the "classic neoliberals" (which are represented by Clinton wing of Dems
and Paul Ryan wing in Republicans ) lost popular support.
Dems, for example, now rely as their major constituency fringe groups and elements of
national security state (that's why so many of their candidates for midterm are associated
with intelligence agencies and military). So they are trying to mobilize elements of national
security state to help them to return to power. That gambit, like Russiagate before it,
probably will fail.
Republicans are also in limbo with Trump clearly betraying his electorate, but still enjoy
some level of ground support.
IMHO his betrayals which is very similar to Obama betrayal(in no way he wants to improve
the condition of the lower middle class and workers, it just hot air) might cost him two
important group of voters who will vote for independent candidates if they vote at all:
1. Anti-war republicans
2. People who want the return of the New Deal.
Factions which are against imperial wars and for more fair redistribution of income in the
society, a distribution which were screwed by 40 years of neoliberalism dominance in the
USA.
So the US electorate have a classic political choice between disastrous and unpalatable
policies once again ;-)
whether that will eventually lead to a military coup in best LA style, we can only
guess.
AP-NORC
Poll national survey with 1,152 adults found 8 in 10 Americans believe the country is
divided regarding essential values, and some expect the division to deepen into 2020.
Only 20% of Americans said they think the country will become less divided over the next
several years, and 39% believe conditions will continue to deteriorate. A substantial majority
of Americans, 77%, said they are dissatisfied with the state of politics in the country , said
AP-NORC.
... ... ...
The nationwide survey was conducted on October 11-14, using the AmeriSpeak
Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Overall, 59% of
Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling his job as president, while 40% of Americans
approve.
More specifically, the poll said 83% of Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the
job, while 92% of Democrats and 61% of Independents strongly disagree.
More than half of Americans said they are not hearing nor seeing topics from midterm
campaigns that are important to them. About 54% of Democrats and 44% of Republicans said vital
issues, such as health care, education, and economic activity, Social Security and crime, were
topics they wanted to hear more.
Looking at their communities, most American (Republicans and Democrats) are satisfied with
their state or local community. However, on a national level, 58% of Americans are dissatisfied
with the direction of the country, compared to 25%, a small majority who are satisfied.
Most Americans are dissatisfied with the massive gap between rich and poor, race relations
and environmental conditions. The poll noticed there are partisan splits, 84% of Democrats are
disappointed with the amount of wealth inequality, compared with 43% of Republicans. On the
environment, 77% of Democrats and 32% Republicans are dissatisfied. Moreover, while 77%
Democrats said they are unhappy with race relations, about 50% of Republicans said the
same.
The poll also showed how Democrats and Republicans view certain issues. About 80% of
Democrats but less than 33% of Republicans call income inequality, environmental issues or
racism very important.
"Healthcare, education and economic growth are the top issues considered especially
important by the public. While there are many issues that Republicans and Democrats give
similar levels of importance to (trade foreign policy and immigration), there are several
concerns where they are far apart. For example, 80% of Democrats say the environment and
climate change is extremely or very important, and only 28% of Republicans agree. And while
68% consider the national debt to be extremely or very important, only 55% of Democrats
regard it with the same level of significance," said AP-NORC.
Although Democrats and Republicans are divided on most values, many Americans
consider the country's diverse population a benefit.
Half said America's melting pot makes the country stronger, while less than 20% said it
hurts the country. About 30% said diversity does not affect their outlook.
"However, differences emerge by party identification, gender, location, education, and
race . Democrats are more likely to say having a population with various backgrounds makes
the country stronger compared to Republicans or Independents. Urbanities and college-educated
adults are more likely to say having a mix of ethnicities makes the country stronger, while
people living in rural areas and less educated people tend to say diversity has no effect or
makes the country weaker," said AP-NORC.
Overall, 60% of Americans said accusations of sexual harassment with some
high-profile men forced to resign or be fired was essential to them. However, 73% of women said
the issue was critical, compared with 51% of men. The data showed that Democrats were much more
likely than Republicans to call sexual misconduct significant.
More than 40% of Americans somewhat or strongly disapprove of Supreme Court Justice Brett
Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court after allegations of sexual harassment in his
college years. 35% of Americans said they heartily approved of Kavanaugh's confirmation.
The evidence above sheds light on the internal struggles of America. The country is divided,
and this could be a significant problem just ahead.
Why is that? Well, America's future was outlined in a book called "The Fourth Turning: What
Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous With Destiny."
In the book, which was written in the late 1990s, authors William Strauss and Niel Howe
theorize that the history of civilization moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called "saecula."
The idea behind this theory dates back to the Greeks, who believed that at given saeculum's
end, there would come "ekpyrosis," or a cataclysmic event.
This era of change is known as the Fourth Turning, and it appears we are in the midst of one
right now.
The last few Fourth Turnings that America experienced ushered in the Civil War and the
Reconstruction era, and then the Great Depression and World War II. Before all of that, it was
the Revolutionary War.
Each Fourth Turning had similar warning signs: periods of political chaos, division, social
and economic decay in which the American people reverted from extreme division and were forced
to reunite in the rebuild of a new future, but that only came after massive conflict.
Today's divide among many Americans is strong. We are headed for a collision that will rip
this country apart at the seams. The timing of the next Fourth Turning is now, and it could
take at least another decade to complete the cycle.
After the Fourth Turning, America will not be the America you are accustomed to today. So,
let us stop calling today the "greatest economy ever" and start preparing for turbulence.
Among the many untruths told about Donald Trump is the claim that his is not a movement of
ideas. As a candidate in 2016, Trump may not have spoken the language of the policy wonks. But
unlike those Republicans who did, his view of the world was not a stale ideological cliche. It
was instead refreshingly frank: about a foreign policy that couldn't win the wars it waged, an
economy that imperiled middle- and working-class America, and an immigration regime only the
employers of illegal nannies could love. Trump recognized reality, and that drew to his cause
independent-minded intellectuals who had also done so. The Trump movement suffers not from a
dearth of ideas or thinkers, but a dearth of institutions. It has thinkers but no think
tank.
F.H. Buckley, Foundation Professor at George Mason University's Scalia School of Law, is one
of its thinkers. His new book, The Republican Workers Party , comes from a publisher --
Encounter -- led by another, Roger Kimball. Buckley is no relation to William F., who as
writer, editor, and Firing Line host did more than anyone to make conservatism a byword
for eloquence in the latter half of the 20th century. But much as the other Buckley remade the
Right by founding National Review in 1955, this one aims to bring about a profound
change of heart and mind among conservatives. He wants to make good on the promise of the GOP
as a party for American workers.
It was a promise made right from the beginning, when in the mid-19th century the Republicans
were the party of free labor against the slavocracy. But the GOP and the country lost their
way. Today, in Buckley's telling, a self-perpetuating "New Class" of administrators and
mandarins runs the country from perches of privilege in the academy and nonprofit sector, as
well as the media, government, and much of the business world. Republicans of the Never Trump
variety are as much a part of this ruling caste as Clinton-Schumer-Pelosi Democrats are. And if
you might wonder whether someone in Buckley's position isn't part of the same professional
stratum, his answer is that he very much aspires to be a traitor to his class, just as Donald
Trump is.
Trump, writes Buckley, is "unlike anything we've seen before, for the simple reason that
he's up against something that we've never seen before: a liberalism that has given up on the
American Dream of a mobile and classless society." Those who today style themselves as
progressives are nothing of the sort -- they are not revolutionaries but the new aristocrats:
"They are Bourbons who seek to pass themselves off as Jacobins. They have bought into a radical
leftism, while resisting the call to unseat a patrician class that leftists in the past would
have opposed."
This is an eloquent explanation for an inversion that has puzzled many observers. Today's
Left, at least the mainstream Left represented by the Democratic Party, is now
establishmentarian. The Republican Right is now populist, if not downright revolutionary. "When
the upper class is composed of liberals who support socialist measures to keep us immobile and
preserve their privileged position," Buckley argues, "class warfare to free up our economy by
tearing down an aristocracy is conservative and just, as well as popular."
Buckley came to these conclusions before the rise of Donald Trump. They are at the heart of
his last two books, The Way Back and The Republic of Virtue . He recognized in
Trump a force for salutary change. So in early 2016, he signed up as a speechwriter for the
candidate and his family. At one point, this attracted unwanted attention: a speech delivered
by Donald Trump Jr. was found to have plagiarized an article in . Except it wasn't plagiarism:
Buckley was the author of both. I was editor of the magazine at the time, and Buckley is
correct when he says in The Republican Workers Party that I enjoyed the non-scandal --
because it brought attention to an essay I thought deserved a brighter spotlight than it had
initially received.
A further disclosure or two is in order: I also published some of the material that appears
in The Republican Workers Party in the journal I now edit, Modern Age , and I'm
thanked in the book's acknowledgments. My warm words for Buckley's last volume are quoted on
the dust jacket of this one. The review you're reading now is honest, but subjective -- I'm a
part of the story. Only a small one, however: Buckley reveals many details of the Trump
campaign and post-election transition that I had never heard before, including how Michael
Anton came to be hired and fired.
The campaign memoir is intriguing in its own right, but it's in the service of the book's
larger purpose. I've known Buckley to refer to himself as an economic determinist, and he's
also said that the future will be decided by a fight between the right-wing Marxists and the
left-wing Marxists. But those are exaggerations, and The Republican Workers Party isn't
primarily about economics: quite the contrary, it's about solidarity, humanity, and the
Christian spirit of brotherhood. The book is informed by a religious sensibility as much as it
is by policy acumen. But it's a religious sensibility that addresses the soul through material
conditions. Buckley is critical of attempts at a "moral rearmament crusade" that amounts to
shaming the poor and blaming them for their own condition.
On this, Buckley is at odds with what movement conservatism has promoted over the last
30-odd years, which is a pure moralism alongside a theoretically pure free-market economism,
each restricted to its own categorical silo. An economic conservative or libertarian might thus
approach Buckley's book with the trepeditation of a holy Inquisitor fearful that a friend will
be found committing heresy. But there is little in these pages that a free-market conservative
can quibble with at the policy level: rather it is the spirit in which economic conservatives
conduct politics that Buckley criticizes. He is even on the side of conservative orthodoxy,
more or less, when it comes to tariffs. He's a free trader at heart, though not a dogmatic
one.
On immigration, he favors a more Canadian-like, points-based system that would prioritize
skills, with a view toward providing maximum benefit for our current citizens, especially the
least well off among them. The present system "admits people who underbid native-born Americans
for low-skill jobs, while refusing entry to people with greater skills who would make life
better for all Americans." Canada lets in many more immigrants in proportion to its population
than the United States does, but "Canadians see an immigration policy designed to benefit the
native-born, so they don't think their government wants to stick it to them," even when it
comes to generous admission of refugees.
Buckley speaks from experience about immigration and Canada -- he was born, brought up, and
lived most of his life there before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2014. Like Alexander Hamilton,
whose Caribbean origins gave him a view of America's national economy unprejudiced by sectional
interests, Buckley's Canadian background gives him an independent vantage from which to
consider our characteristic shibboleths unsparingly. The separation of powers, for one, is a
dismal failure that "has given us two or more different Republican parties: a presidential
party, which today is the Republican Workers Party, but also congressional Republican parties
rooted in the issues and preference of local members. There's the Freedom Caucus composed of
Tea Party members, the more moderate Main Street Partnership and whatever maverick senators
were thinking this morning." Federalism too is a mixed bag. These are themes touched lightly
upon here but worked out in detail in such earlier Buckley books as The Once and Future
King .
That's not to say there's something alien about Buckley's ideas. He's an heir to Viscount
Bolingbroke, as were many of the Founding Fathers. (He contrasts Bolingbroke's disinterested
ideal of a patriot king, for example, with the identity-driven politics of the Democratic
Party.) But Buckley is also an heir to George Grant and the Anglo-Canadian tradition of Red
Toryism, a form of conservatism that does not bother itself with anti-government formulas that
never seem to reduce the size of government one iota anyway. Buckley's heroes are "leaders such
as Disraeli, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's father) and even Winston Churchill himself."
"They were conservative" but "they supported generous social welfare policies."
The policies that Buckley is most concerned about, however, are those that generate social
mobility. Education is thus high on his agenda. He is a strong supporter of vouchers and school
choice and points again to Canada as a success story for private schools receiving public
funds. But America is a rather different country, and as popular as vouchers are on the Right,
some of us can't help but wonder whether they would lead to the same outcome in primary and
secondary education that federal financial aid has produced in higher education. With the money
comes regulation, and usually soaring prices, too.
But Buckley is right that the defects of our present education system go a long way toward
explaining the rise of the new status class, and other countries have found answers to the
questions that perplex American politics -- or some of them at least. More adventurous thinking
is required if anything is to be saved of the American dream of mobility, in place of the
nightmare of division into static castes of winners and losers.
Libertarian economists and blame-the-poor moralizers are not the only figures on the Right
Buckley criticizes. He has no patience for the barely disguised Nietzscheanism of certain "East
Coast" Straussians, who imagine themselves to be philosopher-princes, educating a class of
obedient gentlemen who will in turn dominate a mass of purely appetitive worker bees and cannon
fodder.
Buckley's book is an argument against right-wing heartlessness. Its title may conjure in
some minds phantoms of the National Socialist German Workers Party or America's own penny-ante
white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party, on which the media has lavished a certain
amount of attention in recent years. But fascists are not traditionalists, workers, or even,
properly speaking, socialists -- they simply steal whatever terms happen to be popular. Buckley
refuses to concede their claims and appease them.
He is eloquent in his American -- not white -- nationalism. "There isn't much room for white
nationalism in American culture," he writes, "For alongside baseball and apple pie, it includes
Langston Hughes and Amy Tan, Tex-Mex food and Norah Jones. You can be an American if you don't
enjoy them, but you might be a wee bit more American if you do." It's populism, not
nationalism, that he considers a toxic term, its genealogy tracing to figures like "Pitchfork
Ben" Tillman, a Jim Crow proponent and defender of lynch mobs.
He is right to defend the honor of nationalism, but Buckley may be mistaken in his animus
toward "populism," a word that for most people is more likely to bring to mind William Jennings
Bryan than the Ku Klux Klan.
Buckley's project in The Republican Workers Party parallels on the Right the task
taken up by Mark Lilla on the Left in last year's The Once and Future Liberal . Like
Lilla, Buckley wants to see a revival of mid-20th-century liberalism. For both, politics is
ultimately class-based, not identity-based. Lilla trains his fire on the identity-parsing Left,
while Buckley rebukes the Right for failing to fight the class war -- or rather, for fighting
on the wrong side, that of the self-serving New Class, the aristocracy of education,
connections, and right-thinking opinion.
This may seem nostalgic, but it's not: Buckley does not expect a return to JFK or Camelot,
even if, like Lilla, he once borrowed a title from T.H. White. The 21st century can only give
us a new and very different Kennedy or Disraeli -- an insurgent from the Right to retake the
center. In Donald Trump, F.H. Buckley found such a figure, but a movement needs a program as
well as a leader, and the program has to be grounded in an idea of humanity and the limits of
politics. The nation defines those limits, and while not every Trump supporter will agree with
Buckley's policy thought in all its specifics, the spirit of Buckley's endeavor represents what
is finest in the Trump moment, and what is best in conservatism, too.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has
released a new audit of a computer network at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Earth
Resouces Observation and Science (EROS) Center satellite imaging facility in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota.
OIG initiated an investigation into suspicious internet traffic discovered during a regular
IT security audit of the USGS computer network. The review found that a single USGS employee
infected the network due to the access of unauthorized internet web pages.
Those web pages were embedded with harmful malware, and then downloaded onto a
government-issued laptop, which then "exploited the USGS' network."
A digital forensic team examined the infected laptop and found porn. After further review,
it was determined the USGS employee visited 9,000 web pages of porn that were hosted mainly on
Russian servers and contained toxic malware.
OIG found the employee saved much of the pornographic content on an unauthorized USB drive
and personal smartphone, both of which were synced to the government computer and network.
"Our digital forensic examination revealed that [the employee] had an extensive history of
visiting adult pornography websites" that hosted dangerous malware, the OIG wrote.
"The malware was downloaded to [the employees'] government laptop, which then exploited
the USGS' network."
The forensic team determined two vulnerabilities in the USGS' IT security review: website
access and open USB ports. They said the "malware is rogue software that is intended to damage
or disable computers and computer systems." The ultimate objective of the malware was to steal
highly classified government information while spreading the infection to other systems.
The U.S. Department of the Interior's Rules of Behavior explicitly prohibit employees from
using government networks to satisfy porn cravings, and the IOG found the employee had agreed
to these rules "several years prior to the detection."
The employee was discharged from the agency, OIG External Affairs Director Nancy DiPaolo
told
Nextgov.
However, this is not the first time government workers have been figuratively caught with
their pants down.
Over the last two decades, similar incidents have occurred at the Environmental Protection
Agency, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the IRS.
Last year, a D.C. news team uncovered "egregious on-the-job pornography viewing" at a dozen
federal agencies and national security officials have reportedly found an "unbelievable" amount
of child porn on government devices, said Nextgov.
It seems that porn watching on government devices is so widespread that Rep. Mark Meadows,
R-N.C., introduced legislation banning porn at federal agencies -- three separate times.
Government workers have a porn addiction problem, and it is now jeopardizing national
security.
"... As to your question about who votes for Bolsonaro, I think we can break this down into three or four categories. His hard core is the sort of middle class of small business owners, plus members of the police and the armed forces. This would be, I guess, your classic fascist constituency, if you want to call it that. But you know, that's a very small proportion. ..."
"... Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is a former academic sociologist who was exiled during the military dictatorship and was president of Brazil in the late '90s. He has yet to endorse Haddad, despite the fact that Bolsonaro previously said something about 10 years ago that Fernando Henrique Cardoso should have been killed by the military dictatorship. This is a real, in my opinion, a real failure of character, a real cowardice from the Brazilian supposedly-centrist elite to defend democracy against the very obvious threat that Bolsonaro poses. ..."
As to your question about who votes for Bolsonaro, I think we can break this down into
three or four categories. His hard core is the sort of middle class of small business owners,
plus members of the police and the armed forces. This would be, I guess, your classic fascist
constituency, if you want to call it that. But you know, that's a very small proportion.
And certainly in terms of his voters, in terms of his voter base, that's a small proportion.
What you have, then, is the rich, amongst whom he has a very significant lead. He polls 60-65
percent amongst the rich. And these people are motivated by what is called [inaudible]machismo,
which is anti-Worker's Party sentiment, which is really a sort form of barely-disguised class
loathing which targets the Worker's Party, rails against corruption, but of course turns a
blind eye to corruption amongst more traditional right-wing politicians.
These are the people who, at the end of the day, are quite influential, and have probably
proved decisive for Bolsonaro. But that isn't to say that he doesn't have support amongst the
poor, and this is the real issue. Bolsonaro would not win an election with just the support of
the reactionary middle class and the rich. He needs the support amongst the broad masses, and
he does have that to a significant degree, unfortunately.
What are they motivated by? They're motivated by a sense that politics has failed them, that
their situation is pretty hopeless. The security situation is very grave. And Bolsonaro seems
to be someone who might do something different, might change things. It's a bit of a rolling of
the dice kind of situation. And you know, here the Worker's Party does bear some blame. They've
lost a large section of the working class. A large section of the poor feel like they were
betrayed by the Worker's Party, who didn't stay true to its promises. The Worker's Party
implemented the austerity in its last government under Dilma, which led to a ballooning of
unemployment. And you know, there's a sense that- well, what have you done for us? A lot of
people don't want to return to the path. They want something better, and kind of roll the dice
hoping that maybe Bolsonaro does something, even though all evidence points to the fact that
he'll be a government for the rich, and the very rich, and for the forces of repression.
GREG WILPERT: So finally, in the little time that we have remaining, what is
happening to Brazil's left? Is it supporting the Haddad campaign wholeheartedly?
ALEX HOCHULI: Yes, absolutely. It's pretty much uniform amongst the left. Certainly
in terms of, you know, in terms of individuals, in terms of groups, in terms of movements.
Everyone, from even the kind of far-left Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party who
hate PT have told its members that they should vote for Fernando Haddad who, it should be
noted, is a figure to the right of that of PT, I guess, within the party. He's a much more
centrist figure. So that's kind of notable.
What hasn't happened is a broad front against fascism. That hasn't really materialized,
because the Brazilian center has failed to defend its democratic institutions against the very
obvious threat that Bolsonaro represents. You know, just to highlight one thing, Eduardo
Bolsonaro, who is Jair Bolsonar's son and a congressman, has threatened the Supreme Court,
saying that you could close down the Supreme Court. All you have to do is send one soldier and
one corporal, and they'll shut down the Supreme Court. I mean, this is a pretty brave threat
against Brazilian institutions. And a lot of the center has failed to really manifest itself,
really failed to take a stand. Marina Silva, who was at one point polling quite high about six
months ago, who is a kind of an environmentalist and an evangelical and a centrist, and who is
known for always in her speeches talking about doing things democratically, even she- it took
her until this week to finally endorse Haddad, lending Haddad critical support.
The center right, which should be the, you know, the Brazilian establishment, the ones
upholding the institutions, have broadly failed to endorse Haddad as the democratic candidate.
Which is really, really striking. I mean, just to give you one example, probably the best known
figure for your viewers outside of Brazil who might not know the ins and outs and all the
players involved, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is a former academic sociologist who was
exiled during the military dictatorship and was president of Brazil in the late '90s. He has
yet to endorse Haddad, despite the fact that Bolsonaro previously said something about 10 years
ago that Fernando Henrique Cardoso should have been killed by the military dictatorship. This
is a real, in my opinion, a real failure of character, a real cowardice from the Brazilian
supposedly-centrist elite to defend democracy against the very obvious threat that Bolsonaro
poses.
GREG WILPERT: Wow. Amazing. We'll definitely keep our eyes peeled for what happens on
Sunday. We'll probably have you back soon. I'm speaking to Alex Hochuli, researcher and
communication consultant based in Sao Paulo. Thanks again, Alex, for having joined us
today.
The Blue Wave seems to be receding. The reason; Democrats rule for the Elite 10%. They are
globalists rich from transnational world trade. They expect to cycle back into power.
However, there is no bull pen. They work against policies that would mitigate the neoliberal
winner takes all society and preserve the middle class. The Cold War restarted. Republican
Corporatists, nationalists or not, are no alternative.
The Western political-economic system, with no feedback corrections from democracy, is
tearing itself into pieces. Even though, corporate media continues to say how great things
are.
"... Third party candidates appear to have popped up in important KS races where far-right candidates might not get enough R votes, but where a 3rd party candidate could draw off moderate R votes that might otherwise to go the D candidate. ..."
"... Since getting the nomination, it seems that they caved to the establishment and diluted their platforms to tripe - Eastman did it within days of winning her primary. Same is true in solid Democrat districts that were never part of this series - I can't even view the change in MA-07 as much of a win, since on policy at least, Presley appears to have defeated Capuano from the right, not the left. I'm not at all surprised that this process leaves only 2 genuine leftists remaining, plus AOC. ..."
I sure hope the Dems take over the House. After McConnel said out loud on teevee that he
plans to Gut Social Security and Medicare to fix the deficit (created by the Trump taxcuts
for the Rich), Repubs have become a frightening breed. And what else will they attack? The
Trump presidency has turned from awful to Nightmarish. I'm not even a fan of the corporate
Dems but Congressional gridlock is our only hope.
If I'm completely honest with myself, I think it would be better for Rs to keep the house.
The D/R charade just gives hope to leftists while preventing meaningful institutional reform.
IMO things need to get worse before they can get better, and having a split Congress will
delay that. I think it'll take 3-4 terms of solid R rule before the left has a chance to make
meaningful change.
Here's a thought experiment: suppose the Dems had solid control of both houses: what would
they do? If you aren't excited about that outcome, why vote for it?
I have had similar thoughts in wondering what would be best. Maybe a complete humiliation
for the Ds in the House, like the GOP gaining 10 seats, but then a flip of the Senate, which
doesn't seem likely. It would have to be by several seats to counter Manchin, etc. I voted
straight D. It's all just speculation on my part; damned if I even know anymore what would be
best.
Historically, "the worse the better" hasn't worked out, unless you're hoping for
revolutionary conditions.
Otherwise, most people are pretty unprincipled at the end of the show -- they'll run to
join the crowd.
And the "revolutionary solution" is really, really bad historically. Really bad.
What you really want is the Dems to kick-ass, even if they're total sell-outs, to create
space on the left. But if they lose? You get a whole lot of people becoming radical right
wingers to be on the side of the winners.
flora, October 25, 2018 at 12:19 pm
KS-02 Paul Davis (D) vs Steve Watkins (R) (Jenkins is retiring, not running again.) with a libertarian candidate thrown in
as a 3rd party.
Trump was in town to rally with Watkins a short while ago. Lot of moderate Rs won't vote for far-right* Watkins, even
though this is an R district. Should be an interesting election.
Third party candidates appear to have popped up in important KS races where far-right candidates might not get enough
R votes, but where a 3rd party candidate could draw off moderate R votes that might otherwise to go the D candidate. Who
is funding these 3rd party candidates remains a mystery.
*on the same spectrum as Kris Kobach, imo.
Big River Bandido, October 25, 2018 at 12:20 pm
I think your approach of filtering out who the real candidates are from the left is correct. Dana Balter and Kara Eastman
have been particularly disheartening as general-election candidates; Eastman, especially, talked a great game on health care
back in the primary. Since getting the nomination, it seems that they caved to the establishment and diluted their
platforms to tripe - Eastman did it within days of winning her primary. Same is true in solid Democrat districts that were
never part of this series - I can't even view the change in MA-07 as much of a win, since on policy at least, Presley appears
to have defeated Capuano from the right, not the left. I'm not at all surprised that this process leaves only 2 genuine
leftists remaining, plus AOC.
"... Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. ..."
"... Another case of "Arkancide"? ..."
"... I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air. ..."
"... And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death. ..."
"... Guccifer 2.0 was nothing but an elaborate joke. ..."
If Russia had actually "hacked" the DNC emails then the National Security Agency would have had proof of such activity. In fact,
the NSA could have tracked such activity. But they did not do that. That lack of evidence did not prevent a coordinated media campaign
from spinning up to pin the blame on Russia for the "theft" and to portray Donald Trump as Putin's lackey and beneficiary.
Any effort to tell an alternative story has met with stout opposition. Fox News, for example, came under withering fire after
it published an article in May 2017 claiming that Seth Rich, a young Democrat operative, had leaked DNC emails to Julian Assange
at Wikileaks. The family of Seth Rich reacted with fury and sued Fox, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, but that suit subsequently
was dismissed.
Now there is new information, courtesy of the National Security Agency aka NSA, that confirms that the NSA has Top Secret and
Secret documents that are responsive to a FOIA request for material on Seth Rich and his contacts with Julian Assange. While the
content of these documents remain classified for now, they may provide documentary proof that Seth Rich "dropped boxed" the emails
to Julian. If these documents are declassified, a big hole could be blown in the claim that Russia hacked the DNC.
PT, thank for the very detailed description of the entire story surrounding the supposed Russian hack of the DNC emails.
I always find myself screaming at the T.V. whenever a supposed reporter mentions the supposed Russian hack of the DNC computers
as if such an event is settled history.
I came to this summary today after I had turned my T.V. off since all the news is now about the "bombs" being mailed to the
Clintons and Obamas. (I was afraid a story line would soon continue that the bombs were from Russia via the White House. I can no longer feel certain that anything reported in the "news" is true and wonder what part of it is made up from thin air.
And I am sad that such a huge number of American citizens simply no longer care what is true or what is not true. They believe
only what they want to believe. Mostly I am sad that Seth Rich lived and died and few seem to want to know the facts surrounding his death.
"... I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests, and have very little to do with elections and popular will. ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... ideas and opinions ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @The Voice In the Wilderness ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @enhydra lutris ..."
"... @The Liberal Moonbat ..."
"... , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges ..."
"... "There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have." ..."
We can soon forget Russia's "meddling" in the 2016 election (or
lack of meddling ), because the Justice Department is already throwing down indictments for
meddling in the
2018 midterm elections.
Russians working for a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin are engaging in an elaborate campaign of "information warfare"
to interfere with the American midterm elections next month, federal prosecutors said on Friday in unsealing charges against a
woman whom they labeled the project's "chief accountant."
Information warfare? That sounds serious. So what exactly is her objectives?
But this time, prosecutors said the operatives appeared beholden to no particular candidate. Russia's trolls did not limit themselves
to either a liberal or conservative position, according to the complaint. They often wrote from diverging viewpoints on the same
issue.
Uh, that's called trolling, and if trolling is against the law then 4Chan should watch out. It seems that trolling now equals
fraud .
It isn't just Russia. China and Iran are
meddling as well.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland
Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies
, but that the campaigns have spread "disinformation" and "foreign propaganda."
"We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies," the statement said. "These activities also
may seek to influence voter perceptions and decision making in the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections."
So how exactly are they defrauding the American public? As for "undermine confidence in democratic institutions", we already know
that we are an oligarchy
, not a democracy. So I think the burden of evidence is on our government to prove otherwise, not on Russia.
I've come to the realization that the MSM and our government are using a very different definition of "democracy" and "democratic
institutions" than the one in the dictionary. Their version of "democracy" is all about national security and financial interests,
and have very little to do with elections and popular will.
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this. But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
@gjohnsit AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA. Are foreign
ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this. But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
RT aired a documentary about the OccupyWall Street movement on 1, 2, and
4 November. RT framed the movement as a
fight against "the ruling class" and described
the current US political system as corrupt and
dominated by corporations.
RT advertising
for the documentary featured Occupy
movement calls to "take back" the
government. The documentary claimed that
the US system cannot be changed
democratically, but only through "revolution."
After the 6 November US presidential
election, RT aired a documentary called
"Cultures of Protest," about active and often
violent political resistance
RT's reports often characterize the United
States as a "surveillance state" and allege
widespread infringements of civil liberties,
police brutality, and drone use
RT has also focused on criticism of the US
economic system, US currency policy, alleged
Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to
Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US
financial collapse
#1
AFAIK, all those facebook posts would be legal if posted by someone in the USA.
Are foreign ideas illegal now? are ideas and opinions illegal?
Basically, this Russian woman is being indicted for doing the books for a Russian entity that incorporated a number of US businesses.
These businesses had persons write and post under pen names a number of articles dealing with political subjects. That has been
interpreted by the Special Counsel as a conspiracy to violate a federal campaign law that forbids contributions to US election
campaigns. That's right, the indictment construes written opinion to be the same as money contributions.
The case would probably be thrown out -- nobody has been prosecuted for this before -- however the woman indicted will never
be in court to defend herself, as the prosecutor and FBI know. Mueller is getting desperate to come up with indictments to fill
in his jig saw puzzle.
@enhydra lutris@enhydra lutris@enhydra lutris
speech is constitutionally protected and can't be limited by campaign finance legislation. Mueller appears to have decided on
his own to abrogate the Citizens United decision.
That would be okay, if he applied it to prosecute political mouthpieces such as AIPAC, along with corporate fronts owned by
the Saudis, Chinese, British and 100 other countries who similiarly post anonymously.
It's now undeniable: Mueller is the prosecutorial weapon of a very selective political vendetta.
But somewhere on the left, right around the fault line where Barack Obama is deemed to have been a bad president, opinion
turns back again toward skepticism.
It gets worse from there. I'm betting that this was written by someone from the Atlantic Council or maybe Friedman's twin brother.
This person sure went to a lot of work to deride anyone who doesn't believe in Russia Gate didn't he?
Facebook has almost admitted that they are censoring people and websites because of Russia's ads on it that they say affected
the election. BTW. Didn't Obama also use Cambridge Analytics during his campaign and did the same things that Trump did? Pretty
sure that he did. But I guess that was different because of reasons. Yep. That's why.
You would think from the MSM that Russiagate is "liberals" versus Trump, and that everyone on "the left" is OK with this.
But even some in the media have noticed that leftists that don't identify as Democrats are Russiagate skeptics.
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the voting
policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want to
war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
Months before the 2016 election they were already calling Jill Stein a "Nader spoiler" (
here , here , and
here )
Funny how 3rd parties are demonized in this "democracy"
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the
voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want
to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
There is so much BS in that article it's hard to choose which one is the worst but I'm going with this one.
But Stein's willingness to praise Russian propaganda outlets and push Kremlin talking points didn't end in Moscow. Indeed,
she challenged – and arguably surpassed – Trump in crafting the most Moscow-friendly campaign of 2016.
For instance, Stein made the strange claim multiple times that NATO had "surrounded" Russia with nuclear weapons. As she
told The Intercept, "This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, on steroids – in fact, on crack." (Less than 10 percent of
Russia's land border touches any NATO member-states.) She also said last year that NATO is only fighting "enemies we invent
to give the weapons industry a reason to sell more stuff."
This is what she actually said about NATO and Russia.
Stein: I think this is an issue where something does need to be said--but it's important to understand where they are coming
from. The United States, under Bush 1, had an agreement when Germany joined NATO--Russia agreed with the understanding that
NATO would not move one inch to the east. Since then NATO has pursued a policy of basically encircling Russia--including the
threat of nukes and drones and so on.
Okay and this one too.
Likewise, Stein claimed that Ukraine's 2014 revolution was, in reality, a "coup" that the U.S. "helped foment." Only two
other leaders have described Ukraine's toppling of former president Viktor Yanukovych as a "coup": Putin and Kazakhstani President
Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose country remains a security ally of Russia. Stein even spent time last year saying that "Russia
used to own Ukraine."
Pretty sure that during Obama's presidency the Ukraine government was overthrown by this country and now we're arming neo Nazis
with some very bad weapons.
ThinkProgress says it's being targeted by ad networks for producing 'controversial political content'. I'm thinking it's more
because they lie their asses off to people who read its website. This is the most blatant lying I've seen from a website. How
many people believed every word written there?
Join us on Sunday 10/28 to meet Jill Stein and Alameda/SF County Green candidates: Laura Wells, Saied Karamooz, Aidan Hill
and Mike Murphy. to support our candidates. People,... https://t.co/EtWyo6fism
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.
I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment, aka
the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially in election
years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that gives you the
shits until you're dead.
We are concerned about ongoing campaigns by Russia, China and other foreign actors, including Iran, to undermine confidence
in democratic institutions and influence public sentiment and government policies,
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by its
gerrymandering and its voter ID policies. Look at what's happening in Georgia (?) where the guy running is in charge of the
voting policies and is kicking thousands of people off the voting rolls.
Influence government policies you say? If millions of Americans can't do that then how could a foreign country do it? BTW.
This is already happening what with all the lobbyists and super PACs. But sure. Let's blame the 3 countries that they want
to war with. Anyone who believes this shit ... well I'll not finish this sentence.
The GOP has made it so that over 10% of the population can't vote this year. I think it's in Georgia where thousands are being
kicked off the voting rolls almost every day by the dude that is in charge of it and he is also running for an office. They have
been gerrymandering the country and other things. Of course the democrats don't seem to be doing much to make it easier for people
to vote. But yeah, both parties are just as corrupt.
Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is a huge
conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are suing him
for?
Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or Trump's
voters though.
BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate
got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?
Isn't it Brian Kemp who is not only running for office, but he is also in a position to purge the voting rolls? This is
a huge conflict of interest and some judge should have stopped him from being able to do that. I guess that's what people are
suing him for?
Close to 500,000 people were not able to vote in one of the states that Trump won in. Not sure if they were Hillary's or
Trump's voters though.
BTW. People are upset with Jill Stein because they think that her votes cost Hillary the election when the libertarian candidate
got more votes than Jill did. And yet he's not blamed for her loss. I wonder why that is?
First off the GOP is doing a hell of a job undermining confidence in democratic institutions and the voting process by
its gerrymandering and its voter ID policies.
I agree with your whole comment. Just wanted to make sure we don't leave out the monster that is the Dem establishment,
aka the other half of the single body that screws us every chance it gets. Supposed differences are only spoken, especially
in election years. When it gets down to the meat and potatoes, our representatives are one big symbiotic meal -- the kind that
gives you the shits until you're dead.
Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation. The
charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral process.
Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply enough
voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them after the
election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste time and
money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating, but he's
really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.
@snoopydawg
, its like a nuclear submarine calling the teapot black.
Robert Mueller's indictment of the Russians who interfered in our election is a milestone in an ongoing investigation.
The charges focus on the Russians who used online social networking platforms to divide voters and disrupt the electoral
process.
Changed any votes? Party affiliations? Removed people from the voting rolls? Closed down voting precincts? Didn't supply
enough voting machines for high voting areas? Nope. Nope. Nope and nope. Just placed a few ads on Fakebook and most of them
after the election was over. It's taken Mueller two years to look into this? If he hasn't found any evidence yet then why waste
time and money worrying about China and Iran doing anything? I'm thinking that Mueller is just pretending to be investigating,
but he's really spending his time golfing or whatever his favorite activities are.
we were going to receive at Fitzmas? Hoping the Establishment is going to finally reveal its sausage-making, really is a flight of fancy. McSausage for the McResistance. The Public are to be seen at voting stations, and not heard.
Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of Homeland
Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed any tallies,
At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:
Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass
"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their
lives being mocked and marginalized."
#Mueller#TrumpRussiahttps://t.co/eN349xhjG3
We had Great discussion about
Caitlin's article. Lots of good comments.
Hell I am surprised they even mentioned that first part.
In a joint statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Justice Department, FBI and Department of
Homeland Security said they "do not have any evidence" that foreign countries have disrupted the voting process or changed
any tallies,
At any rate cracked up when I read Caitlin on FB this morning:
Politico Report Says Russiagaters Should Prepare To Kiss My Ass
"In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely and spend the rest of their
lives being mocked and marginalized."
#Mueller#TrumpRussiahttps://t.co/eN349xhjG3
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it. I have
followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made, and
those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the Western
powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance of
dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All issues
lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan news".
-- John "Squinty Forehead Man" Graziano (@jvgraz)
October 18, 2018
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it.
I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made,
and those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the
Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance
of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All
issues lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan
news".
computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls, but
the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree that Russia
interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda is so powerful.
The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.
About those FB ads that swayed the election ...
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered
it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.
https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
Actually, I am thinking nuclear war with Russia may be the terminus point, but in terms of propaganda we are seeing it.
I have followed the Russia hysteria since 2015 when it was in its infant stage here in the States, but advancing in Europe.
There are still some charges that Russians broke into certain accounts as Microsoft has claimed a few months back, but the
claims go no where as they have to admit they had absolutely no proof. And the story fades away until a new charge is made,
and those now are hard to make up.
As previous posters before in have commented above, basically the terminus point is ascribing all dissent within the
Western powers as Russian created. In this charge it is impossible to to argue as no proof is needed except for the existance
of dissent. No more charges which can be proved such as an actual hack. And that dissent can be for or against an issue. All
issues lead to Moscow.
The huge censorship of various sites done by Facebook and Twitter begin and are justified by the Russia hysteria and "fan
news".
computer that wasn't even hooked up to the internet. Brennan said that Russia tried to meddle in 21?state's voting rolls,
but the states said that never happened. But just like people are still saying that all 17 intelligence (3) agencies agree
that Russia interfered with the election people still think that the other stuff is true. This is why spreading propaganda
is so powerful. The lies are what they remember, not the retractions if they're ever given.
About those FB ads that swayed the election ...
The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered
it because it doesn't align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.
https://t.co/2dL8Kh0hof
A Washington federal judge on Thursday ordered special counsel Robert Mueller's team to clarify election meddling claims
lodged against a Russian company operated by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Bloomberg.
Concord Management and Consulting, LLC. - one of three businesses indicted by Mueller in February along with 13 individuals
for election meddling , surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges
. Mueller's team tried to delay Concord from entering the case, arguing that thee Russian company not been properly served,
however Judge Dabney Friedrich denied the request - effectively telling prosecutors 'well, they're here.'
*
Concord pleaded not guilty in May. Their attorney, Eric Dubelier - a partner at Reed Smith, has described the election meddling
charges as "make believe," arguing on Monday that Mueller's indictment against Concord "doesn't charge a crime."
"There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office
alleged a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have."
Concord is one of the corporations that Mueller said placed ads on FB to sway people's opinion on Trump and Hillary. The ads
that most were placed after the election.
In a new article titled " Mueller
report PSA: Prepare for disappointment ", Politico cites information provided by defense
attorneys and "more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning
Watergate to the 2016 election case" to warn everyone who's been lighting candles at their
Saint Mueller altars that their hopes of Trump being removed from office are about to be dashed
to the floor.
"While [Mueller is] under no deadline to complete his work, several sources tracking the
investigation say the special counsel and his team appear eager to wrap up," Politico
reports.
"The public, they say, shouldn't expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of
Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump - not to mention an explanation
of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller
sleuths," the report also says, adding that details of the investigation may never even see
the light of day.
An obscene amount of noise and focus, a few indictments and process crime convictions which
have nothing to do with Russian collusion, and this three-ring circus of propaganda and
delusion is ready to call it a day.
This is by far the clearest indication yet that the Mueller investigation will end with
Trump still in office and zero proof of collusion with the Russian government, which has been
obvious since the beginning to everyone who isn't a complete fucking moron. For two years the
idiotic, fact-free, xenophobic Russiagate conspiracy theory has been ripping through mainstream
American consciousness with shrieking manic hysteria, sucking all oxygen out of the room for
legitimate criticisms of the actual awful things that the US president is doing in real life.
Those of us who have been courageous and clear-headed enough to stand against the groupthink
have been shouted down, censored, slandered and smeared as assets of the Kremlin on a daily
basis by unthinking consumers of mass media propaganda, despite our holding the philosophically
unassailable position of demanding the normal amount of proof that would be required in a
post-Iraq invasion world.
As I
predicted long ago , "Mueller isn't going to find anything in 2017 that these vast,
sprawling networks wouldn't have found in 2016. He's not going to find anything by 'following
the money' that couldn't be found infinitely more efficaciously via Orwellian espionage. The
factions within the intelligence community that were working to sabotage the incoming
administration last year would have leaked proof of collusion if they'd had it. They did not
have it then, and they do not have it now. Mueller will continue finding evidence of corruption
throughout his investigation, since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish, but he
will not find evidence of collusion to win the 2016 election that will lead to Trump's
impeachment. It will not happen." This has remained as true in 2018 as it did in 2017, and it
will remain true forever.
None of the investigations arising from the Russiagate conspiracy theory have turned up a
single shred of evidence that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016
election, or to do anything else for that matter. All that the shrill, demented screeching
about Russia has accomplished is manufacturing support for
steadily escalating internet censorship , a
massively bloated military budget , a hysterical McCarthyite atmosphere wherein anyone who
expresses political dissent is painted as an agent of the Kremlin and any dissenting opinions
labeled "Russian talking points" , a complete lack of accountability for the Democratic
Party's brazen election rigging, a total marginalization of real problems and progressive
agendas, and an overall diminishment in the intelligence of political discourse. The
Russiagaters were wrong, and they have done tremendous damage already.
In a just world, everyone who helped promote this toxic narrative would apologize profusely
and spend the rest of their lives being mocked and marginalized. In a world wherein pundits and
politicians can sell the public a war which results in the slaughter of a million Iraqis and
suffer no consequences of any kind, however, we all know that that isn't going to happen.
Russiagate will end not with a bang, but with a series of carefully crafted diversions. The
goalposts will be moved, the news churn will shuffle on, the herd will be guided into
supporting the next depraved oligarchic agenda , and almost nobody will have the intellectual
honesty and courage to say "Hey! Weren't these assholes promising us we'll see Trump dragged
off in chains a while back? Whatever happened to that? And why are we all talking about China
now?"
But whether they grasp it or not, mainstream liberals have been completely discredited. The
mass media outlets which inflicted this obscene psyop upon their audiences deserve to be driven
out of business. The establishment which would inflict such intrusive psychological
brutalization upon its populace just to advance a few preexisting agendas has proven that it
deserves to be opposed on every front and rejected at every turn.
And those of us who have been standing firm and saying this all along deserve to be listened
to. We were right. You were wrong. Time to sit down, shut up, stop babbling about Russian bots
for ten seconds, and let those who see clearly get a word in edgewise.
* * *
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see
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Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book
Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .
It's not over until every corrupt "player" who had a material role in the DemoRats'
corrupt scheme to fraudulently frame Trump is brought to justice. Not to do so means there's
absolutely no deterrent to prevent the DemoRats from repeatedly fraudulently weaponizing
government agencies to attack their political opponents (defined as "Obamunism'). After all,
this was the most egregious fraudulent and illegal political conspiracy in our nation's
history. The DemoRat players must spend a decade or more in the big house. You'd think the
MSM would like that, as the trials of the traitors to America would give the MSM fodder for
their endless psycho-babble and shift attention away from the MSM's complicity in
Obamunism.
That ******* **** Maddow is the deep state's Tokyo Rose and should be yanked from the
airwaves and prosecuted for seditious lies and slander. She has plenty of company at the
other major news networks as well.
Can you imagine all of the "Deer-Caught-In-The-Headlights" looks if Mueller were to come
out with an indictment of Hillary, the Decepticrats and the DNC? I can!
All of this Russia ******** has been a diversion to distract the current administration
and to inhibit the discovery of the real crimes that have been committed against the US and
the world since 1991 when GHWB took office... Everything from 9-11 to WMDs in Iraq to
billions of $$$ in cash being airlifted to Iran to Barry Soetoro being a stooge for Saudi
Arabia... They have bought themselves two years in the process, but they cannot stop the
truth coming out...
I spoke to an ex-pat Indian, now an American citizen; settled there for three decades and
more. Well knowledgeable. He praised Pres. Trump but told me, "But Trump did not win fair."
When I told him that this Russia probe is going to wind up, admitting no collusion, he was
surprised. Then I told him that his favourite media are lying to him; he was confused. Then I
asked him to google "Seth Rich"; he was stunned. Finally it dawned on him he was the Truman
without the benefit of a show. By the time I did my talk over, about 20 minutes later, he was
a much chastised man. He had the intellectual integrity to admit that he was wrong, that he
had been fooled and he ought to have been more careful.
Thank you Caitlin, you have been a truth advocate from the beginning. We have been waiting
for #Russiagate ******** to end and embarrass the Democrats. Unfortunately, President Trump
is starting to be hostile towards Russia now. What a pity it was, that Democrats ruined a
chance of Peace !
The entire Mueller probe is based on a lie... Rosenstein called for a special counsel
without evidence of a crime being committed and no, collusion is not a crime on the
books...
Why all of this has taken 2 years to come to light is beyond me.. The only answer is that
the entire affair has been a giant kabuki show on both sides of the aisle to keep the people
distracted and divided...
Not just the Obama admin spying on Trump, but to tie his hands in investigating everything
from billions of $$$ in cash being delivered to Iran, to who controls Barry Soetoro himself,
to Uranium one, to the Clinton Foundation and on and on and on... There is ample evidence
that the US was infiltrated by a Manchurian Candidate that was hell-bent on destroying the
country, but what we have gotten as a by-product is half of the country hating the US... Weak
minded lemmings that want socialism... The US is fucked and has been for decades... All part
of the reason I left...
The best part is, I hope Carter page , George papadopolous, Paul manafort, and myriad
Russian defendants drag their lawsuits out forever and bring unlimited documents into
discovery, pulling these **** head shill lawyers into never ending court circuses and
hopefully sue Mueller's team to recoup the wasted taxpayer millions. BTW much of this is the
fault of shills like McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, and the other neocon
establishment who would rather see Trump taken down by Democrat hoax operations than
legitimately beat them.
This is ridiculous, the result could not be clearer:
If there's any suggestion that Mueller's report cannot be released then we know without a
doubt that the report contains absolutely nothing of consequence.
Otherwise, why would they do so much preparation for disappointment.
I too hope that all the people who have been ruined by this debacle bring countless legal
actions that require public disclosure of alleged 'secret' documents.
In the end Trump will have to, regardless of protest from the UK or anyone else for that
matter, have to declassify the whole lot of it so that his false accusers are laid bare on
the alter of shame for all to see.
They never could win legitimately so they cheated like no other, and of course as the
foundation they used the queen cheater Hillary Clinton herself. I hope she does run for
election in 2020, it will be 3 strikes and the bitch is out. What an embarassement for
Hillary.
Obama was a neocon, Trump is a neocon. what's new ?
Chinese leaders appeared to be acting on the advice of the 6th century BC philosopher and general Sun Tzu, who wrote in The Art
of War, "there is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare."
Candidate Trump railed against the invasion of Iraq during his campaign, at one point blaming George W. Bush directly and saying,
"we should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East." As president-elect, Trump continued to promise a very
different foreign policy, one that would "stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be
involved with."
The election of Donald Trump gave the international community pause: Trump appeared unpredictable, eschewed tradition, and flouted
convention. He might well have followed through on his promise to move the U.S. away from its long embrace of forever war. China's
government in particular must have worried about such a move. If the U.S. focused on its internal problems and instead pursued a
restrained foreign policy that was constructive rather than destructive, it might pose more of an impediment to China's rise to global
power status.
But the Chinese need not have worried. With a continued troop presence in Afghanistan and Syria, a looming conflict with Iran,
and even talk of an intervention in Venezuela, Trump is keeping the U.S. on its perpetual wartime footing.
This is good news for Beijing, whose own foreign policy could not be more different. Rather than embracing a reactive and short-sighted
approach that all too often ignores second- and third-order consequences, the Chinese strategy appears cautious and long-ranging.
Its policymakers and technocrats think and plan in terms of decades, not months. And those plans, for now, are focused more on building
than bombing.
This is not to say that China's foreign policy is altruistic-it is certainly not. It is designed to cement China's role as a great
power by ensnaring as many countries as possible in its economic web. China is playing the long game while Washington expends resources
and global political capital on wars it cannot win. America's devotion to intervention is sowing the seeds of its own demise and
China will be the chief beneficiary.
So intelligence agencies are now charged with protection of elections from undesirable candidates; looks like a feature of neofascism...
Notable quotes:
"... The Department of Justice admitted in a Friday court filing that the FBI used more than one "Confidential Human Source," (also known as informants, or spies ) to infiltrate the Trump campaign through former adviser Carter Page, reports the Daily Caller ..."
"... Included in Hardy's declaration is an acknowledgement that the FBI's spies were in addition to the UK's Christopher Steele - a former MI6 operative who assembled the controversial and largely unproven "Steel Dossier" which the DOJ/FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Page. ..."
"... In addition to Steele, the FBI also employed 73-year-old University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, a US citizen, political veteran and longtime US Intelligence asset enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election . Halper received over $1 million in contracts from the Pentagon during the Obama years, however nearly half of that coincided with the 2016 US election. ..."
"... In short, the FBI's acknowledgement that they used multiple spies reinforces Stone's assertion that he was targeted by one. ..."
"... Stefan Halper's infiltration of the Trump campaign corresponds with the two of the four targets of the FBI's Operation Crossfire Hurricane - in which the agency sent former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and others to a London meeting in the Summer of 2016 with former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who says Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that the Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails. ..."
"... Interestingly Downer - the source of the Papadopoulos intel, and Halper - who conned Papadopoulos months later, are linked through UK-based Haklyut & Co. an opposition research and intelligence firm similar to Fusion GPS - founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums ..."
"... Downer - a good friend of the Clintons, has been on their advisory board for a decade, while Halper is connected to Hakluyt through Director of U.S. operations Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books. (h/t themarketswork.com ) ..."
The Department of Justice admitted in a
Friday court filing that the FBI used
more than one "Confidential Human Source," (also known as informants, or spies ) to infiltrate the Trump campaign through former
adviser Carter Page, reports the Daily Caller
.
"The FBI has protected information that would identify the identities of other confidential sources who provided information or
intelligence to the FBI" as well as "information provided by those sources," wrote David M. Hardy, the head of the FBI's Record/Information
Dissemination Section (RIDS), in court
papers submitted Friday.
Hardy and Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys submitted the filings in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit
for the FBI's four applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page. The DOJ released heavily
redacted copies of the four FISA warrant applications on June 20, but USA Today reporter Brad Heath has sued for full copies of
the documents. - Daily Caller
Included in Hardy's declaration is an acknowledgement that the FBI's spies were in addition to the UK's Christopher Steele
- a former MI6 operative who assembled the controversial and largely unproven "Steel Dossier" which the DOJ/FBI used to obtain a
FISA warrant to spy on Page.
The DOJ says it redacted information in order to protect the identity of their confidential sources, which "includes nonpublic
information about and provided by Christopher Steele," reads the filing, " as well as information about and provided by other confidential
sources , all of whom were provided express assurances of confidentiality."
Government lawyers said the payment information is being withheld because disclosing specific payment amounts and dates could
"suggest the relative volume of information provided by a particular CHS. " That disclosure could potentially tip the source's
targets off and allow them to "take countermeasures, destroy or fabricate evidence, or otherwise act in a way to thwart the FBI's
activities." - Daily Caller
Steele, referred to as Source #1, met with several DOJ / FBI officials during the 2016 campaign, including husband and wife team
Bruce and Nellie Ohr. Bruce was the #4 official at the DOJ, while his CIA-linked wife Nellie was hired by Fusion GPS - who also employed
Steele, in the anti-Trump opposition research / counterintelligence effort funded by Trump's opponents, Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
In addition to Steele, the FBI also employed 73-year-old University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, a US citizen, political
veteran and longtime US Intelligence asset enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during
the 2016 US election . Halper received over $1 million in contracts from the Pentagon during the Obama years, however nearly half
of that coincided with the 2016 US election.
Stefan Halper
Halper's involvement first came to light after the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross reported on his involvement with Carter Page and
George Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign aide. Ross's reporting was confirmed by the NYT and WaPo .
In June, Trump campaign aides Roger Stone and Michael Caputo claimed that a meeting Stone took in late May, 2016 with a Russian
appears to have been an " FBI sting operation " in hindsight, following
bombshell reports in May
that the DOJ/FBI used a longtime FBI/CIA asset, Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, to perform espionage on the Trump campaign.
Roger Stone
When Stone arrived at the restaurant in Sunny Isles, he said, Greenberg was wearing a Make America Great Again T-shirt and
hat. On his phone, Greenberg pulled up a photo of himself with Trump at a rally, Stone said. -
WaPo
The meeting went nowhere - ending after Stone told Greenberg " You don't understand Donald Trump... He doesn't pay for anything
." The Post independently confirmed this account with Greenberg.
After the meeting, Stone received a text message from Caputo - a Trump campaign communications official who arranged the meeting
after Greenberg approached Caputo's Russian-immigrant business partner.
" How crazy is the Russian? " Caputo wrote according to a text message reviewed by The Post. Noting that Greenberg wanted "big"
money, Stone replied: "waste of time." -
WaPo
In short, the FBI's acknowledgement that they used multiple spies reinforces Stone's assertion that he was targeted by one.
Further down the rabbit hole
Stefan Halper's infiltration of the Trump campaign corresponds with the two of the four targets of the FBI's Operation Crossfire
Hurricane - in which the agency sent former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and others to a London meeting in the Summer of
2016 with former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who says Papadopoulos drunkenly admitted to knowing that the Russians had
Hillary Clinton's emails.
Interestingly Downer - the source of the Papadopoulos intel, and Halper - who conned Papadopoulos months later, are linked
through
UK-based Haklyut & Co. an opposition research and intelligence firm similar to Fusion GPS - founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums .
Alexander Downer
Downer - a good friend of the Clintons, has been on their advisory board for a decade, while Halper is connected to Hakluyt
through Director of U.S. operations Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has
co-authored two books. (h/t
themarketswork.com )
Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. Downer said that in May 2016, Papadopoulos told him during a
conversation in London about Russians having Clinton emails.
That information was passed to other Australian government officials before making its way to U.S. officials. FBI agents flew
to London a day after "Crossfire Hurricane" started in order to interview Downer.
It is still not known what Downer says about his interaction with Papadopoulos, which TheDCNF is told occurred around May 10,
2016.
Also interesting via
Lifezette - " Downer is not the only Clinton fan in Hakluyt. Federal contribution records show several of the firm's U.S. representatives
made large contributions to two of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign organizations ."
Halper contacted Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 according to The Caller - flying him out to London to work on a policy paper
on energy issues in Turkey, Cyprus and Israel - for which he was ultimately paid $3,000. Papadopoulos met Halper several times during
his stay, "having dinner one night at the Travellers Club, and Old London gentleman's club frequented by international diplomats."
They were accompanied by Halper's assistant, a Turkish woman named Azra Turk. Sources familiar with Papadopoulos's claims about
his trip say Turk flirted with him during their encounters and later on in email exchanges .
...
Emails were also brought up during Papadopoulos's meetings with Halper , though not by the Trump associate, according to sources
familiar with his version of events. T he sources say that during conversation, Halper randomly brought up Russians and emails.
Papadopoulos has told people close to him that he grew suspicious of Halper because of the remark. -
Daily Caller
Meanwhile, Halper targeted Carter Page two days after Page returned from a trip to Moscow.
Page's visit to Moscow, where he spoke at the New Economic School on July 8, 2016, is said to have piqued the FBI's interest
even further . Page and Halper spoke on the sidelines of an election-themed symposium held at Cambridge days later. Former Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 and a close colleague of Halper's, spoke at the event.
...
Page would enter the media spotlight in September 2016 after Yahoo! News reported that the FBI was investigating whether he
met with two Kremlin insiders during that Moscow trip.
It would later be revealed that the Yahoo! article was based on unverified information from Christopher Steele, the former
British spy who wrote the dossier regarding the Trump campaign . Steele's report, which was funded by Democrats, also claimed
Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on the collusion conspiracy. -
Daily Caller
A third target of Halper's was Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, whose name was revealed by the Washington Post on Friday.
In late August 2016, the professor reached out to Clovis, asking if they could meet somewhere in the Washington area, according
to Clovis's attorney, Victoria Toensing.
"He said he wanted to be helpful to the campaign" and lend the Trump team his foreign-policy experience, Toensing said.
Clovis, an Iowa political figure and former Air Force officer, met the source and chatted briefly with him over coffee, on
either Aug. 31 or Sept. 1, at a hotel cafe in Crystal City, she said. Most of the discussion involved him asking Clovis his views
on China.
"It was two academics discussing China," Toensing said. " Russia never came up. " -
WaPo
Meanwhile, Bruce Ohr is still employed by the Department of Justice, and Fusion GPS continues its hunt for Trump dirt after having
partnered with former Feinstein aide and ex-FBI counterintelligence agent, Dan Jones.
It's been nearly three years since an army of professional spies was unleashed on Trump - and he's still the President, Steele
and Downer notwithstanding.
"Made up a crime to fit the facts they have" is a normal mode of operation for federal
prosecutors. Hopefully the judge throws out all charges, but unlikely to have a broader
impact on non-stop fabrications by US attorneys.
What this accusation boils down to is saying that the Russian firm's deception is "proof"
that they thought they were violating US law, and that this intention to break a non-existent
law constitutes a framework under which they can be convicted of breaking a non-existent law.
The crazy never stops. Mueller and his minions should be disbarred.
Why is there any requirement to identify oneself beyond an alias, unless there are
obligations of debt involved. Even there, the LLC places a barrier between an individual and
the creditor.
I post with a pseudonym. My pseudonymous identity bears responsibility for its own
reputation.
ELECTION MEDDLING (as defined by Mueller and Kravis): every VPN blogger and/or user with
more than one GMail account.
But NOT multi-million dollar foreign "contributions" to the Clinton Foundation. That have
dried up since November of 2016. Oh no, nothing meddling about over there.
By participation, do they mean like polls that consistently show the USA as the greatest
impediment to global peace and tranquility? Or the numerous opinion sharers that the US
government is depraved? Or like the kind of participation of Victoria "**** the EU" Nuland?
Or like the Western sponsored Jihadi headchoppers hired to interfere in Syrian elections? Or
like the US military fueled aggression against Yemeni sovereignty? Or like the US/Clinton
sponsored destabilization of Libyan democracy? Or like the Obama/US sponsored destabilization
of Egypt? Or like the US/Western sponsored failed coup in Turkey?
Or most crucially, the US/neoconservative never ending direct interference in internal
Russian affairs?
These need to be clarified so folks can understand what meddling/interference/intervention
means. It's not enough to point fingers, when worse activities have been, are being carried
out by the pointers. Any society that abandons basic ethics, is one destined for the scrap
heap of history.
Americans have forgotten what it means to be Americans, and this desperate gambit by the
DOJ highlights viscerally, that the American system of government, one based on ethical
values, is no more! It demonstrates the fragility of the system.
God alone knows if salvage is possible now, the USA has in the blink of an eye, become the
erstwhile USSR, overly sensitive to the unworkability of its sociopolitical system. It is the
end game of unsustainable imperium.
"Rather, the allegation is that the company knowingly engaged in deceptive acts that
precluded the FEC, or the Justice Department, from ascertaining whether they had broken the
law. -
Bloomberg " I didn't know Prof. Irwin Corey worked for the US Attorney's office. By this
explanation whether you break a law or not you can be guilty of precluding these agencies
from determining that you did not break a law, even if whatever you did to prevent such
determination was not illegal.
didn't the Judge in Manaforts trial do something similar when he called out the Mueller
team on their motivation's for bringing Manafort up on old charges the DOJ had previously
declined to prosecute him on?
Amerika is 180 degree turn from my logic. Mueler presented fake evidence and fabricated
Lockerbie trial. He was working with Steele.
So this is great guy to head FBI and bull sheet Russia medling. In normal country, guy
like Mueler is so discredired that can be hapi to have county investigator job, not
government job
LOL, Mueller's investigation is fucked. Indeed, they are going to have to bring forth the
evidence via discovery.
It will come to light they manufactured a crime without the evidence. Also, if they don't
drop the case they're running the risk of exposing even more crimes they committed.
This is where the American people should rise up and repeal prosecutorial immunity and
make the real criminal's pay the price for manufacturing crime's! Care to speculate how many
prosecutor's wouldn't even touch a potential criminal with doubt of innocence, if indeed
prosecutors were held accountable for their own crimes???
Like I've said, people have NO idea how raunchy and corrupt this manufactured Mueller
investigation is, once the unredacted FISA warrant and 302's are released, the people will
realize both the seditious and traitorous behavior that went on in the ObamaSpy ring to frame
Trump!
A Washington federal judge on Thursday ordered special counsel Robert Mueller's team to clarify election meddling claims lodged against
a Russian company operated by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to
Bloomberg .
Concord Management and Consulting, LLC. - one of three businesses indicted by Mueller in February along with 13 individuals for
election meddling, surprised the special counsel in April when they actually showed up in court to fight the charges. Mueller's team
tried to delay Concord from entering the case, arguing that thee Russian company not been properly served, however Judge Dabney Friedrich
denied the request - effectively telling prosecutors '
well,
they're here .'
Concord was accused in the indictment of supporting the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian 'troll farm' accused of trying
to influence the 2016 US election.
On Thursday, Judge Freidrich asked Mueller's prosecutors if she should assume they aren't accusing Concord of violating US laws
applicable to election expenditures and failure to register as a foreign agent.
Concord has asked Dabney to throw out the charges - claiming that Mueller's office fabricated a crime, and that there is no law
against interfering in elections.
According to the judge's request for clarification, the
Justice Department has argued that it doesn't have to
show that Concord had a legal duty to report its expenditures to the
Federal Election Commission . Rather, the allegation
is that the company knowingly engaged in deceptive acts that precluded the FEC, or the Justice Department, from ascertaining whether
they had broken the law. -
Bloomberg
On Monday, Friedrich raised questions over whether the special counsel's office could prove a key element of their case - saying
that it was "hard to see" how allegations of Russian influence were intended to interfere with US government operations vs. simply
"confusing voters," reports
law.com .
During a 90-minute hearing, Friedrich questioned prosecutor Jonathan Kravis about how the government would be able to show
the Russian defendants were aware of the Justice Department and FEC's functions and then deliberately sought to skirt them.
" You still have to show knowledge of the agencies and what they do. How do you do that? " Friedrich asked.
Kravis, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, argued that the government needed only to
show that Concord Management and the other defendants were generally aware that the U.S. government "regulates and monitors" foreign
participation in American politics . That awareness, Kravis said, could be inferred from the Russians' alleged creation of fake
social media accounts that appeared to be run by U.S. citizens and "computer infrastructure" intended to mask the Russian origin
of the influence operation.
" That is deception that is directed at a higher level ," Kravis said. Kravis appeared in court with
Michael Dreeben , a top Justice Department appellate lawyer on detail to the special counsel's office. -
law.com
Concord pleaded not guilty in May. Their attorney, Eric Dubelier - a partner at Reed Smith, has described the election meddling
charges as "make believe," arguing on Monday that Mueller's indictment against Concord "doesn't charge a crime."
"There is no statute of interfering with an election. There just isn't," said Dubelier, who added that Mueller's office alleged
a "made-up crime to fit the facts they have."
Dubelier added that the case against Concord Management is the first in US history "where anyone has ever been charged with defrauding
the Justice Department" through their failure to register under FARA .
United States District Judge S. James Otero issued an order and ruling today dismissing
Stormy Daniels' defamation lawsuit against President Trump. The ruling also states that the
President is entitled to an award of his attorneys' fees against Stormy Daniels. A copy of
the ruling is attached. No amount of spin or commentary by Stormy Daniels or her lawyer, Mr.
Avenatti, can truthfully characterize today's ruling in any way other than total victory for
President Trump and total defeat for Stormy Daniels. The amount of the award for President
Trump's attorneys' fees will be determined at a later date.
Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti responded to the dismissal, tweeting: "We will appeal the
dismissal of the defamation cause of action and are confident in a reversal," while stating
that Daniels' other claims against Trump and Cohen "proceed unaffected."
Re Judge's limited ruling: Daniels' other claims against Trump and Cohen proceed
unaffected. Trump's contrary claims are as deceptive as his claims about the inauguration
attendance.
We will appeal the dismissal of the defamation cause of action and are confident in a
reversal.
Last week Trump's legal team argued that it made no sense for them to keep fighting in court
over a $130,000 hush payment received by Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, as she
invalidated the non-disclosure agreement she signed with Trump's longtime fixer and lawyer,
Michael Cohen.
The lawsuit is moot because Trump has consented that the agreement, as she has claimed,
was never formed because he didn't sign it and he has agreed not to try to enforce it, Trump
said in his court filing. The company created by Cohen to facilitate the non-disclosure
agreement, which initially said Clifford faced more than $20 million in damages for talking,
said in September that it wouldn't sue to enforce the deal. -
Yahoo
Michael Avenatti's terrible October
This month has not treated Stormy's attorney well. Michael Avenatti went from Democrat
darling during his representation of Daniels, to scapegoat over Justice Brett Kavanaugh's
nomination to the Supreme Court after he introduced an 11th hour claim by a woman who said
Kavanaugh orchestrated gang-rape parties in the early 1980s - an allegation thought by many to
have derailed otherwise legitimate claims against the Judge.
Less than two weeks later Avenatti came under fire after he launched a now-deleted
fundraising page for Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke.
In the fine print, O'Rourke supporters discovered that half the proceeds went to Avenatti's
Fight PAC , which he formed a little over
seven weeks ago .
Avenatti called the criticism "complete nonsense," noting that Senators Elizabeth Warren and
Kamala Harris "do the same thing." Perhaps sensing he'd made a huge mistake, Avenatti deleted
the page - telling the Daily Beast in a text message: "It wasn't worth the nonsense that
resulted from people that don't understand how common this is."
The question now is; after three strikes, is Avenatti out?
Given his free $50 million in publicity, and the amount of GoFundMe he's gonna get or has
gotten, I'd say "losing" is entirely in the eye of the beholder, lol.
Avenatti is the best thing that has happened to Trump.
It's almost like he is intentionally doing stupid and outrageous things to make the dems
look even more unhinged than they are.
I wouldn't be surprised if we find he has been secretly working for Trump all along. Trump
did run a reality show after all so that would be a great plot twist ;)
The best thing about Avenatti and the Clintons is that they won't stop until they bring
the entire Democratic Party down. It reminds me of Anthony Weiner and Elliot Spitzer,
scumbags who keep coming back and discredit the entire party because of their own glorious
egos.
Fascism is always eclectic and its doctrine is composed of several sometimes contradicting each other ideas. "Ideologically speaking,
[the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..." (Ideologically speaking,
[the program] was a wooly, eclectic mixture of political, social, racist, national-imperialist wishful thinking..."
)
Some ideas are "sound bite only" and never are implemented and are present only to attract sheeple (looks
National Socialist Program ). he program championed
the right to employment , and called for the institution of
profit sharing , confiscation of
war profits , prosecution of usurers and profiteers,
nationalization of trusts , communalization of department stores,
extension of the old-age pension system, creation of a
national education program of all classes, prohibition
of child labor , and an end to the dominance of
investment capital "
There is also "bait and switch" element in any fascism movement. Original fascism was strongly anti-capitalist, militaristic and
"national greatness and purity" movement ("Make Germany great again"). It was directed against financial oligarchy and anti-semantic
element in it was strong partially because it associated Jews with bankers and financial industry in general. In a way "Jews" were codeword
for investment bankers.
For example " Arbeit Macht Frei " can be viewed as
a neoliberal slogan. Then does not mean that neoliberalism. with its cult of productivity, is equal to fascism, but that neoliberal
doctrine does encompass elements of the fascist doctrine including strong state, "law and order" mentality and relentless propaganda.
The word "fascist" is hurled at political / ideological opponents so often that it lost its meaning. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) originated
as a working-class political party . This is not true about
Trump whom many assume of having fascist leanings. His pro white working class rhetoric was a fig leaf used for duration or elections.
After that he rules as a typical Republican president favoring big business. And as a typical neocon in foreign policy.
From this point of view Trump can't be viewed even as pro-fascist leader because first of all he does not have his own political
movement, ideology and political program. And the second he does not strive for implementing uniparty state and abolishing the elections
which is essential for fascism political platform, as fascist despise corrupt democracy and have a cult of strong leader.
All he can be called is neo-fascist s his some of his views do encompass ideas taken from fascist ideology (including "law and order";
which also is a cornerstone element of Republican ideology) as well as idealization and mystification of the US past. But with Bannon
gone he also can't even pretend that he represents some coherent political movement like "economic nationalism" -- kind of enhanced
mercantilism.
Of course, that does not mean that previous fascist leaders were bound by the fascism political program, but at least they had one.
Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher writes that, "To [Hitler,
the program] was little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had
brought him to power, it became pure decoration: 'unalterable', yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation,
for land reform and 'breaking the shackles of finance capital'. Yet it nonetheless fulfilled its role as backdrop and pseudo-theory,
against which the future dictator could unfold his rhetorical and dramatic talents."
Notable quotes:
"... Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. ..."
"... Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present, these myths become the basis of the nation's identity under fascist politics. ..."
"... In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal cosmopolitanism, and respect for "universal values" such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the face of real and threatening challenges to the nation's existence. ..."
"... fascist myths distinguish themselves with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests and civilization-building achievements. ..."
"... The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology -- authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle. ..."
It's in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their "point of view." It's in the name of tradition, the long, historical
past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told, you will never belong here.
-- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
It is only natural to begin this book where fascist politics invariably claims to discover its genesis: in the past. Fascist
politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously
pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist
mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago.
Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals,
its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation. In the present,
these myths become the basis of the nation's identity under fascist politics.
In the rhetoric of extreme nationalists, such a glorious past has been lost by the humiliation brought on by globalism, liberal
cosmopolitanism, and respect for "universal values" such as equality. These values are supposed to have made the nation weak in the
face of real and threatening challenges to the nation's existence.
These myths are generally based on fantasies of a nonexistent past uniformity, which survives in the traditions of the small towns
and countrysides that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities. This uniformity -- linguistic, religious,
geographical, or ethnic -- can be perfectly ordinary in some nationalist movements, but fascist myths distinguish themselves
with the creation of a glorious national history in which the members of the chosen nation ruled over others, the result of conquests
and civilization-building achievements. For example, in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal
gender roles. The fascist mythic past has a particular structure, which supports its authoritarian, hierarchical ideology. That past
societies were rarely as patriarchal -- or indeed as glorious -- as fascist ideology represents them as being is beside the point.
This imagined history provides proof to support the imposition of hierarchy in the present, and it dictates how contemporary society
should look and behave.
In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared:
We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. . . . Our myth is
the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total
reality, we subordinate everything.
The patriarchal family is one ideal that fascist politicians intend to create in society -- or return to, as they claim. The patriarchal
family is always represented as a central part of the nation's traditions, diminished, even recently, by the advent of liberalism
and cosmopolitanism. But why is patriarchy so strategically central to fascist politics?
In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is
the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the
father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife. The
leader provides for his nation, just as in the traditional family the father is the provider. The patriarchal father's authority
derives from his strength, and strength is the chief authoritarian value. By representing the nation's past as one with a patriarchal
family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure, one that finds
its purest representation in these norms.
Gregor Strasser was the National Socialist -- Nazi -- Reich propaganda chief in the 1920s, before the post was taken over by Joseph
Goebbels. According to Strasser, "for a man, military service is the most profound and valuable form of participation -- for the
woman it is motherhood!" Paula Siber, the acting head of the Association of German Women, in a 1933 document meant to reflect official
National Socialist state policy on women, declares that "to be a woman means to be a mother, means affirming with the whole conscious
force of one's soul the value of being a mother and making it a law of life . . . the highest calling of the National Socialist
woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for
her people." Richard Grunberger, a British historian of National Socialism, sums up "the kernel of Nazi thinking on the women's question"
as "a dogma of inequality between the sexes as immutable as that between the races." The historian Charu Gupta, in her 1991 article
"Politics of Gender: Women in Nazi Germany," goes as far as to argue that "oppression of women in Nazi Germany in fact furnishes
the most extreme case of anti-feminism in the 20th century."
Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist
politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology -- authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity,
and struggle.
With the creation of a mythic past, fascist politics creates a link between nostalgia and the realization of fascist ideals. German
fascists also clearly and explicitly appreciated this point about the strategic use of a mythological past. The leading Nazi ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the prominent Nazi newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter, writes in 1924, "the understanding of and the
respect for our own mythological past and our own history will form the first condition for more firmly anchoring the coming generation
in the soil of Europe's original homeland." The fascist mythic past exists to aid in changing the present.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished
Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context;
More about Jason Stanley
This could have been such a helpful, insightful book. The word "fascist" is hurled at political / ideological opponents so
often that it has started to lose its meaning. I hoped that this book would provide a historical perspective on fascism by examining
actual fascist governments and drawing some parallels to the more egregious / worrisome trends in US & European politics. The
chapter titles in the table of contents were promising:
- The Mythic Past
- Propaganda
- Anti-Intellectual
- Unreality
- Hierarchy
- Victimhood
- Law & Order
- Sexual Anxiety
- Sodom & Gomorrah
- Arbeit Macht Frei
Ironically (given the book's subtitle) the author used his book divisively: to laud his left-wing political views and demonize
virtually all distinctively right-wing views. He uses the term "liberal democracy" inconsistently throughout, disengenuously equivocating
between the meaning of "representative democracy as opposed to autocratic or oligarchic government" (which most readers would
agree is a good thing) and "American left-wing political views" (which he treats as equally self-evidently superior if you are
a right-thinking person). Virtually all American right-wing political views are presented in straw-man form, defined in such a
way that they fit his definition of fascist politics.
I was expecting there to be a pretty heavy smear-job on President Trump and his cronies (much of it richly deserved...the man's
demagoguery and autocratic tendencies are frightening), but for this to turn into "let's find a way to define virtually everything
the Republicans are and do as fascist politics" was massively disappointing. The absurdly biased portrayal of all things conservative
and constant hymns of praise to all things and all people left-wing buried some good historical research and valid parallels under
an avalanche of partisanism.
If you want a more historical, less partisan view of the rise of fascist politics, I would highly recommend Darkness Over Germany
by E. Amy Buller (Review Here). It was written during World War II (based on interviews with Germans before WWII), so you will
have to draw your own contemporary parallels...but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The vast regime of
torture created by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks
continues to haunt
America.
The political class and most of the media have never dealt honestly with the
profound constitutional corruption that such practices inflicted. Instead, torture enablers are
permitted to pirouette as heroic figures on the flimsiest evidence.
Former FBI chief James Comey is the latest beneficiary of the media's "no fault" scoring
on the torture scandal.
In his media interviews for his new memoir,
A Higher Loyalty:
Truth, Lies, and Leadership
, Comey is portraying himself as a Boy Scout who sought only to do
good things. But his record is far more damning than most Americans realize.
Comey continues to use memos from his earlier government gigs to whitewash all of the
abuses he sanctified.
"Here I stand; I can do no other," Comey told George W. Bush in 2004
when Bush pressured Comey, who was then Deputy Attorney General, to approve an unlawful
anti-terrorist policy. Comey was quoting a line supposedly uttered by Martin Luther in 1521, when
he told Emperor Charles V and an assembly of Church officials that he would not recant his sweeping
criticisms of the Catholic Church.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations did excellent
reports prior to Comey's becoming FBI chief that laid out his role in the torture scandal. Such
hard facts, however, have long since vanished from the media radar screen.
MSNBC host
Chris Matthews recently declared, "James Comey made his bones by standing up against torture. He
was a made man before Trump came along."
Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria, in
a column declaring that Americans should be "deeply grateful" to lawyers such as Comey, declared,
"The Bush administration wanted to claim that its 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were lawful.
Comey believed they were not .
So Comey pushed back as much as he could.
"
Martin Luther risked death to fight against what he considered the scandalous religious
practices of his time. Comey, a top Bush administration policymaker, found a safer way to oppose
the worldwide secret U.S. torture regime widely considered a heresy against American values:
he approved brutal practices and then wrote some memos and emails fretting about the
optics.
Losing Sleep
Comey became deputy attorney general in late 2003 and "had oversight of the legal
justification used to authorize" key Bush programs in the war on terror,
as a Bloomberg
News analysis noted. At that time, the Bush White House was pushing the Justice Department to again
sign off on an array of extreme practices that had begun shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A 2002
Justice Department memo had leaked out that declared that the federal Anti-Torture Act "would be
unconstitutional if it impermissibly encroached on the President's constitutional power to conduct
a military campaign." The same Justice Department policy spurred a secret 2003 Pentagon document on
interrogation policies that openly encouraged contempt for the law: "Sometimes the greater good for
society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law."
Photos had also leaked from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq showing the stacking of naked
prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution from a wire connected to a man's penis,
guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers
celebrating the sordid degradation.
Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh
published extracts in the New Yorker from a March 2004 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba that
catalogued other U.S. interrogation abuses: "Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric
liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle
and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and
perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with
threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee."
The Bush administration responded to the revelations with a torrent of falsehoods,
complemented by attacks on the character of critics.
Bush declared, "Let me make very
clear the position of my government and our country . The values of this country are such that
torture is not a part of our soul and our being." Bush had the audacity to run for reelection as
the anti-torture candidate, boasting that "for decades, Saddam tormented and tortured the people of
Iraq. Because we acted, Iraq is free and a sovereign nation." He was hammering this theme despite a
confidential CIA Inspector General report warning that post–9/11 CIA interrogation methods might
violate the international Convention Against Torture.
James Comey had the opportunity to condemn the outrageous practices and pledge that the
Justice Department would cease providing the color of law to medieval-era abuses. Instead, Comey
merely repudiated the controversial 2002 memo.
Speaking to the media in a
not-for-attribution session on June 22, 2004, he declared that the 2002 memo was "overbroad,"
"abstract academic theory," and "legally unnecessary." He helped oversee crafting a new memo with
different legal footing to justify the same interrogation methods.
Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboarding
, which sought to break
detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S.
government since the Spanish-American War. A practice that was notorious when inflicted by the
Spanish Inquisition was adopted by the CIA with the Justice Department's blessing. (When Barack
Obama nominated Comey to be FBI chief in 2013, he testified that he had belatedly recognized that
waterboarding was actually torture.)
Comey wrote in his memoir that he was losing sleep over concern about
Bush-administration torture polices. But losing sleep was not an option for detainees, because
Comey approved sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique.
Detainees could be
forcibly kept awake for 180 hours until they confessed their crimes. How did that work? At Abu
Ghraib, one FBI agent reported seeing a detainee "handcuffed to a railing with a nylon sack on his
head and a shower curtain draped around him, being slapped by a soldier to keep him awake."
Numerous FBI agents protested the extreme interrogation methods they saw at Guantanamo and
elsewhere, but their warnings were ignored.
Comey also approved "wall slamming"
-- which, as law professor David Cole wrote,
meant that detainees could be thrown against a wall up to 30 times. Comey also signed off on the
CIA's using "interrogation" methods such as facial slaps, locking detainees in small boxes for 18
hours, and forced nudity. When the secret Comey memo approving those methods finally became public
in 2009, many Americans were aghast -- and relieved that the Obama administration had repudiated
Bush policies.
When it came to opposing torture, Comey's version of "Here I stand" had more loopholes
than a reverse-mortgage contract.
Though Comey in 2005 approved each of 13 controversial
extreme interrogation methods, he objected to combining multiple methods on one detainee.
The Torture Guy
In his memoir, Comey relates that his wife told him,
"Don't be the torture guy!"
Comey apparently feels that he satisfied her dictate by writing memos that opposed
combining multiple extreme interrogation methods. And since the vast majority of the American media
agree with him, he must be right.
Comey's cheerleaders seem uninterested in the damning evidence that has surfaced since
his time as a torture enabler in the Bush administration.
In 2014, the Senate Intelligence
Committee finally released a massive report on the CIA torture regime -- including death resulting
from hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods
on broken legs, and dozens of cases where innocent people were pointlessly brutalized.
Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of
prisoners. From the start, the program was protected by phalanxes of lying federal officials.
When he first campaigned for president, Barack Obama pledged to vigorously investigate the Bush
torture regime for criminal violations. Instead, the Obama administration proffered one excuse
after another to suppress the vast majority of the evidence, pardon all U.S. government torturers,
and throttle all torture-related lawsuits. The only CIA official to go to prison for the torture
scandal was courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou. Kiriakou's fate illustrates that telling the
truth is treated as the most unforgivable atrocity in Washington.
If Comey had resigned in 2004 or 2005 to protest the torture techniques he now claims to
abhor, he would deserve some of the praise he is now receiving.
Instead, he remained in
the Bush administration but wrote an email summarizing his objections, declaring that "it was my
job to protect the department and the A.G. [Attorney General] and that I could not agree to this
because it was wrong." A 2009 New York Times analysis noted that Comey and two colleagues "have
largely escaped criticism [for approving torture] because they raised questions about interrogation
and the law." In Washington, writing emails is "close enough for government work" to confer
sainthood.
When Comey finally exited the Justice Department in August 2005 to become a lavishly paid senior
vice president for Lockheed Martin, he proclaimed in a farewell speech that protecting the Justice
Department's "reservoir" of "trust and credibility" requires "vigilance" and "an unerring
commitment to truth." But he had perpetuated policies that shattered the moral credibility of both
the Justice Department and the U.S. government. He failed to heed Martin Luther's admonition, "You
are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say."
Comey is likely to go to his grave without paying any price for his role in
perpetuating appalling U.S. government abuses.
It is far more important to recognize
the profound danger that torture and the exoneration of torturers pose to the United States. "No
free government can survive that is not based on the supremacy of the law," is one of the mottoes
chiseled into the façade of Justice Department headquarters. Unfortunately, politicians nowadays
can choose which laws they obey and which laws they trample.
And Americans are supposed
to presume that we still have the rule of law as long as politicians and bureaucrats deny their
crimes.
Tags
Comey was the hand-picked schlub that was placed in a position of
power to be a firewall... Nothing more and he has been rewarded
handsomely for playing this role... One can only hope that one day he
becomes a liability to his handlers and that there is a pack of
hungry, wild dogs that will rips him apart... Hopefully on PPV...
The Absolute, Complete,
Open, in our Faces Tyrannical Lawlessness began.
Unabated. Like a malignant Cancer.
Growing to Gargantuan proportions.
Irrefutable proof of the absolute, complete, open Lawlessness by
the Criminal Fraud UNITED STATES, CORP. INC., its CEO & Board of
Directors.
1. Torture .
2. WMD lie to the American People.
3. Lying the American People into War.
4. Illegal Wars of Aggression.
5. Arming, funding & training of terror organizations by the State
Dept. / CIA & members of CONgress.
6. BENGAZI
7. McCain meets with ISIS (Pics available).
8. Clapper lies to CONgress.
9. Brennan lies to CONgress & taps Congressional phones / computers.
10. Lynch meets Clinton on tarmac.
11. Fast & Furious deals with the Sinaloa Cartel.
12. Holder in Contempt of CONgress.
13. CIA drug / gun running / money laundering through the tax payer
bailed out TBTFB.
14. Illegal NSA Spying on the American People.
15. DNC Federal Election Crime / Debbie Wasserman Shultz.
16. Hillary Clinton email Treason.
17. Clinton Foundation pay to play RICO.
18. Anthony Weiner 650,000 #PizzaGate Pedo Crimes.
19. Secret Iran deal.
20. Lynch takes the Fifth when asked about Iran deal
21. FBI murders LaVoy Finicum
At the current moment we're completely Lawless.
We have been for quite some time. In the past, their Criminality
was "Hidden in plain view."
Now it's out in the open, in your face Criminality & Lawlessness.
Complete debachary.
Thing is, the bar & precedent has been set so high among these
Criminals I doubt we will ever see another person arrested in our
lifetime.
Comey thinks he is above the law. He and his associates feel they are
not bound by the rules and laws of the US, they are the ELITE. Comey
should go to JAIL, HARD CORE not Country Club, along with his
associates, Yates, Rosenstein, Brennan, McCabe, Stzrock, Paige and
etc. Lock him up
Changing the rules, talks of changing the constitution, and the status of the SC because
Dems can't find a positive message, or a positive candidate, or persuade the candidate to
recognize and reach out to voters the Democratic party abandoned, reeks of defeatism and
worse.
Exactly.
Clinton neoliberals (aka soft neoliberals) still control the Democratic Party but no longer
can attract working-class voters. That's why they try "identity wedge" strategy trying to
compensate their loss with the rag tag minority groups.
Their imperial jingoism only makes the situation worse. Large swaths of the USA population,
including lower middle class are tired of foreign wars and sliding standard of living. They see
exorbitant military expenses as one of the causes of their troubles.
That's why Hillary got a middle finger from several social groups which previously supported
Democrats. And that's why midterm might be interesting to watch as there is no political party
that represents working class and lower middle class in the USA.
"Lesser evil" mantra stops working when people are really angry at the ruling neoliberal
elite.
control of the Senate, a relentlessly undemocratic institution
likbez 10.08.18 at 6:24 am (no link)
I think the US society is entering a deep, sustained political crisis and it is unclear what
can bring us back from it other then the collapse, USSR-style. The USA slide into corporate
socialism (which might be viewed as a flavor of neofascism) can't be disputed.
Looks like all democracies are unstable and prone to self-destruction. In modern America,
the elite do not care about lower 80% of the population, and is over-engaged in cynical
identity politics, race and gender-mongering. Anything to win votes.
MSM is still cheering on military misadventures that kill thousands of Americans,
impoverish millions, and cost trillions. Congress looks even worse. Republican House leader
Paul Ryan looks like 100% pure bought-and-paid-for tool of multinational corporations
The scary thing for me is that the USA national problems are somewhat similar to the ones
that the USSR experienced before the collapse. At least the level of degeneration of
political elite of both parties (which in reality is a single party) is.
The only positive things is that there is viable alternative to neoliberalism on the
horizon. But that does not mean that we can't experience 1930th on a new level again. Now
several European countries such as Poland and Ukraine are already ruled by far right
nationalist parties. Brazil is probably the next. So this or military rule in the USA is not
out of question.
Some other factors are also in play: one is that a country with 320 million population
can't be governed by the same methods as a country of 76 million (1900). End of cheap oil is
near and probably will occur within the next 50 years or so. Which means the end of
neoliberalism as we know it.
Tucker states that the USA's neoliberal elite acquired control of a massive chunk of the
country's wealth. And then successfully insulated themselves from the hoi polloi. They send
their children to the Ivy League universities, live in enclosed compounds with security
guards, travel in helicopters, etc. Kind of like French aristocracy on a new level ("Let them
eat cakes"). "There's nothing more infuriating to a ruling class than contrary opinions.
They're inconvenient and annoying. They're evidence of an ungrateful population Above all,
they constitute a threat to your authority." (insert sarcasm)
Donald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never hid that. Voters knew it.
They just concluded that the options were worse -- and not just Hillary Clinton and the
Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican
leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate
executives and Hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created
the world as it was in the fall of 2016: the people in charge. Trump might be vulgar and
ignorant, but he wasn't responsible for the many disasters America's leaders created .
There was also the possibility that Trump might listen. At times he seemed interested in
what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren't. Virtually none of their
core beliefs had majority support from the population they governed .Beginning on election
night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer
action movie: Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters. Trump won because
Russian agents "hacked" the election. Trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces
were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links.
From a reader review:
The New Elite speaks: "The Middle Class are losers and they have made bad choices, they
haven't worked as hard as the New Elite have, they haven't gone to SAT Prep or LSAT prep so
they lose, we win. We are the Elite and we know better than you because we got high SAT
scores.
Do we have experience? Uh .well no, few of us have been in the military, pulled KP, shot
an M-16 . because we are better than that. Like they say only the losers go in the
military. We in the New Elite have little empirical knowledge but we can recognize patterns
very quickly."
Just look at Haley behavior in the UN and Trump trade wars and many things became more
clear. the bet is on destruction of existing international institutions in order to save the
USA elite. A the same time Trump trade wars threaten the neoliberal order so this might well
be a path to the USA self-destruction.
On Capital hill rancor, a lack of civility and derisive descriptions are everywhere.
Respect has gone out the window. Left and right wings of a single neoliberal party (much like
CPSU was in the USSR) behave like drunk schoolchildren. Level of pettiness is simply
amazing.
The fundamental rule of democratic electoral politics is this: tribes don't win elections,
coalitions do. Trump's appeal is strongly tribal, and he has spent two years consolidating
his appeal to that tribe rather than reaching out. But he won in 2016 (or 'won') not on the
strength of that tribal appeal, but because of a coalition between core Trumpists and more
respectable conservatives and evangelicals, including a lot of people who find Trump himself
vulgar and repellent, but who are prepared to hold their noses. The cause
célèbre (or cause de l'infâme) that Kavanaugh's appointment became
ended-up uniting these two groups; the Trumpists on the one hand ('so the Libs are saying we
can't even enjoy a beer now, are they?') and the old-school religious Conservatives,
for whom abortion is a matter of conscience.
Given the weird topographies of US democratic process, the Democrats need to build a
bigger counter-coalition than the coalition they are opposing. Metropolitan liberals are in
the bag, so that means reconnecting with the working class, and galvanising the black and
youth votes, which have a poor record of converting social media anger into actual ballot-box
votes. But it also means reaching out to moderate religious conservatives, and the Dems don't
seem to me to have a strategy for this last approach at all. Which is odd, because it would
surely, at least in some ways, be easier than persuading young people to vote at the levels
old people vote. At the moment abortion (the elephant in the Kavanaugh-confirmation room) is
handled by the Left as a simple matter of structural misogyny, the desire to oppress and
control female bodies. I see why it is treated that way; there are good reasons for that
critique. But it's electorally dumb. Come at it another way instead, accept that many
religious people oppose abortion because they see it as killing children; then lead the
campaign on the fact that the GOP is literally putting thousands upon thousands of
children in concentration camps . Shout about that fact. Determine how many kids
literally die each year because their parents can't access free healthcare and put that stat
front and centre. Confront enough voters with the false consciousness of only caring about
abortion and not these other monstrosities and some will reconsider their position.
And one more thing that I have never understood about the Dems (speaking as an outsider),
given how large a political force Christianity is in your country: make more of Jimmy Carter.
He's a man of extraordinary conscience as well as a man of faith; the contrast with how he
has lived his post-Presidential life and the present occupier of the White House could
hardly, from a Christian perspective, be greater. If the Dems can make a love-thy-neighbour
social justice Christianity part of their brand, leaving Mammon to the GOP, then they'd be in
power for a generation.
adopted false US personas online to get
people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is
that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)
Whether those efforts even came close to swaying US voters in the 2016 presidential
election, as Shane and Mazzetti claimed, is another matter.
Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they are merely citing figures published by the social
media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to report the detailed
explanations behind the gross figures used in each case, which falsified their
significance.
Their most dramatic assertions came in reporting the alleged results of the IRA's efforts on
Facebook. "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media," they wrote, "the reach of their
effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate
images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook
alone."
Then, to dramatize that "eventual audience" figure, they observed, "That was not far short
of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential elections."
But as impressive as these figures may appear at first glance, they don't really indicate an
effective attack on the US election process at all. In fact, without deeper inquiry into their
meaning, those figures were grossly misleading.
A Theoretical Possibility
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch actually said in testimony before the Senate
Judiciary Committee last October was quite different from what the Times reporters
claimed. "Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served
one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period," Stretch
said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established accomplishment.
Facebook was saying that it estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at
least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period but over 194 weeks
during the two years 2015 through 2017. That, figure, in turn, was based on the estimate that
29 million people might have gotten at least one story in their Facebook feed over that same
two-year period and on the assumption that they shared it with others at a particular rate.
The first problem with citing those figures as evidence of impact on the 2016 election is
that Facebook did not claim that all or even most of those 80,000 IRA posts were
election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million
people was, in fact, election-related. But Stretch did testify that IRA content over that
two–year period represented just four thousandths (.0004) of the total content of
Facebook newsfeeds.
Thus each piece of IRA content in a twitter feed was engulfed in 23,000 pieces of non-IRA
content.
That is an extremely important finding, because, as Facebook's Vice President for News Feed,
Adam Moseri,
acknowledged in 2016 , Facebook subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the
stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories
that actually make it into a subscriber's news feed on any given day are actually read.
Facebook did conduct research on what it calls "civic engagement" during the election
period, and the researchers concluded
that the "reach" of the content shared by what they called "fake amplifiers" was "marginal
compared to the volume of civic content shared during the US elections." That reach, they said,
was "statistically very small" in relation to "overall engagement on political issues."
Shane and Mazzaetti thus failed to report any of the several significant caveats and
disclaimers from Facebook itself that make their claim that Russian election propaganda
"reached" 126 million Americans extremely misleading.
Tiny IRA Twitter Footprint
Shane and Mazzetti's treatment of the role of Twitter in the alleged Russian involvement in
the election focuses on 3,814 Twitter accounts said to be associated with the IRA, which
supposedly "interacted with 1.4 million Americans." Although that number looks impressive
without any further explanation, more disaggregated data provide a different picture: more than
90 percent of the Tweets from the IRA had nothing to do with the election, and those that did
were infinitesimally few in relation to the entire Twitter stream relating to the 2016
campaign.
Twitter's
own figures show that those 3,814 IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets during the ten
weeks of the election campaign, but that only 8.4 percent of the total number of IRA-generated
Tweets were election-related.
Twitter estimated that those 15,000 IRA-related tweets represented less than .00008 (eight
one hundred thousandths) of the estimated total of 189 million tweets that Twitter identified
as election-related during the ten-week election campaign. Twitter has offered no estimate of
how many Tweets, on average were in the daily twitter stream of those people notified by
Twitter and what percentage of them were election-related Tweets from the IRA. Any such
notification would certainly show, however, that the percentage was extremely small and that
very few would have been read.
Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University on 2.9 million Tweets
from those same 3,814 IRA accounts over a two year period has
revealed that nearly a third of its Tweets had normal commercial content or were not in
English; another third were straight local newsfeeds from US localities or mostly non-political
"hashtag games", and the final third were on "right" or "left" populist themes in US
society.
Furthermore, there were more IRA Tweets on political themes in 2017 than there had been
during the election year. As a graph of those tweets over time shows,
those "right" and "left" Tweets peaked not during the election but during the summer of
2017.
The Mysterious 50,000 'Russia-Linked' Accounts
Twitter also determined
that another 50,258 automated Twitter accounts that tweeted about the election were associated
with Russia and that they have generated a total to 2.1 million Tweets – about one
percent of the total number election-related tweets of during the period.
But despite media coverage of those Tweets suggesting that they originated with the Russian
government, the evidence doesn't indicate that at all. Twitter's Sean Edgett told
the Senate Intelligence Committee last November that Twitter had used an "expansive
approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account". Twitter considered an account
to be "Russian" if any of the following was found: it was created in Russia or if the user
registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email; the user's display name
contains Cyrillic characters; the user frequently Tweets in Russian, or the user has logged in
from any Russian IP address.
Edgett admitted
in a statement in January, however, that there were limitations on its ability to determine
the origins of the users of these accounts. And a past log-in from a Russian IP address does
not mean the Russian government controls an account. Automated accounts have bought and sold
for many years on a huge market, some of which is located in Russia. As Scott Shane reported
in September 2017, a Russian website BuyAccs.com offers tens and even hundreds of thousands
of Twitter accounts for bulk purchase.
Twitter also observed that "a high concentration of automated engagement and content
originated from data centers and users accessing Twitter via Virtual Private Networks ("VPNs")
and proxy servers," which served to mask the geographical origin of the tweet. And that
practice was not limited to the 50,000 accounts in question. Twitter found that locations of
nearly 12 percent of the Tweets generated during the election period were masked because of use
of such networks and servers.
Twitter identified over half of the Tweets, coming from about half of the 50,000 accounts as
being automated, and the data reported on activity on those 50,000 accounts in question
indicates that both the Trump and Clinton campaigns were using the automated accounts in
question. The roughly 23,000 automated accounts were the source of 1.34 million Tweets, which
represented .63 percent of the total election-related Tweets. But the entire 50,000 accounts
produced about 1 percent of total election-related tweets.
Hillary Clinton got .55 percent of her total retweets from the 50,000 automated accounts
Twitter calls "Russia-linked" and .62 percent of her "likes" from them. Those percentages are
close to the percentage of total election-related Tweets generated by those same automated
accounts. That suggests that her campaign had roughly the same proportion of automated accounts
among the 50,000 accounts as it did in the rest of the accounts during the campaign.
Trump, on the other hand, got 1.8 percent of this total "likes" and 4.25 percent of his
total Retweets for the whole election period from those accounts, indicating his campaign was
more invested in the automated accounts that were the source of two-thirds of the Tweets in
those 50,000 "Russia-linked" accounts.
The idea promoted by Shane and Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to
determine the winner of the election does not hold up when the larger social media context is
examined more closely. Contrary to what the Times' reporters and the corporate media in
general would have us believe, the Russian private sector effort accounted for a minuscule
proportion of the election-related output of social media. The threat to the US political
system in general and its electoral system in particular is not Russian influence; it's in part
a mainstream news media that has lost perspective on the truth.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national
security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on
the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book is
Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare . He can be contacted at
[email protected] . Reprinted from
Consortium News with the author's
permission.
"Jessica Morse, a former State Department and AID official in Iraq, running in the Fourth
District of California, blasts the Trump administration for "giving away global leadership to
powers like China and Russia. Our security and our economy will both suffer if those
countries are left to re-write the international rules."
Former FBI agent Christopher Hunter, running in the 12th District of Florida, declares,
"Russia is a clear and present danger to the United States. We emerged victorious over the
Soviet Union in the Cold War. We must resolve anew to secure an uncompromising victory over
Russia and its tyrannical regime."
Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA agent and Pentagon official running in Michigan's Eighth
Congressional District, cites her 14 years of experience "working on some of our country's
most critical national security matters, including U.S.-Russia relations, the counter-ISIS
campaign, and the U.S. relationship with NATO." She argues that "the United States must make
investments in its military, intelligence, and diplomatic power" in order to maintain "a
unique and vital role in the world."
Max Rose, a combat commander in Afghanistan now running in New York's 11th Congressional
District (Staten Island and Brooklyn), calls for "recognizing Russia as a hostile foreign
power and holding the Kremlin accountable for its attempts to undermine the sovereignty and
democratic values of other nations." Rose is still in the military reserves, and took two
weeks off from his campaign in August to participate in small-unit drills.
Joseph Kopser, running in the 21st District of Texas, is another anti-Russian firebrand,
writing on his website, "As a retired Army Ranger, I know first hand the importance of
standing strong with your allies. Given Russia's march toward a totalitarian state showing
aggression around the region, as well as their extensive cyber and information warfare
campaign directed at the U.S., England, and others, our Article 5 [NATO] commitment to our
European allies and partners is more important than ever." He concludes, "Since the
mid-twentieth century, the United States has been a principal world leader -- a standard that
should never be changed."
Four national-security candidates add North Korea and Iran to China and Russia as specific
targets of American military and diplomatic attack.
Josh Welle, a former naval officer who was deployed to Afghanistan, now running in the
Fourth Congressional District of New Jersey, writes, "We have to stand together in the face
of threats from countries like North Korea and Iran. The human rights violations and nuclear
capabilities of these countries pose a direct threat to the stability of this world and
therefore need to be met with strong military presence and a robust defense program to
protect ourselves."
Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state for human rights, running in New
Jersey's Seventh District, calls for maintaining economic sanctions on Russia "until it stops
its aggression in Ukraine and interference in our democracy," effusively endorses the state
of Israel (whose government actually interferes in US elections more than any other), and
calls for stepped up sanctions against North Korea.
Mikie Sherill, a former Navy pilot and Russian policy officer, running in New Jersey's
11th District, writes, "I have sat across the table from the Russians, and know that we need
our government to take the threat they pose seriously." She adds to this a warning about
"threats posed by North Korea and Iran," the two most immediate targets of
military-diplomatic blackmail by the Trump administration. She concludes, referring to North
Korea's nuclear program, "For that reason I support a robust military presence in the region
and a comprehensive missile defense program to defend America, our allies, and our troops
abroad."
Dan McCready, an Iraq war unit commander who claims to have been born again when he was
baptized in water from the Euphrates River, calls for war to be waged only "with overwhelming
firepower," not "sporadically, with no strategy or end in sight, while our enemies like Iran,
North Korea, Russia, and the terrorists outsmart and outlast us." He is running in North
Carolina's Ninth Congressional District, adjacent to the huge military complex at Fort
Bragg.
One military-intelligence candidate cites immigration as a national-security issue,
echoing the position of the Trump administration, which constantly peddles scare stories that
terrorists are infiltrating the United States disguised as immigrants and refugees. That is
Richard Ojeda, running in the Third Congressional District of West Virginia, who publicly
boasts of having voted for Trump in 2016, in the same election in which he won a seat in the
West Virginia state senate running as a Democrat.
Ojeda writes on his web site, "We must also ensure that terrorists do not reach American
soil by abusing our immigration process. We must keep an up to date terror watch list but
provide better vetting for those that go onto the watch list."
A career Army Airborne officer, Ojeda voices the full-blown militarism of this social
layer. "If there is one thing I am confident in, it is the ability of our nation's military,"
he declares. "The best way to keep Americans safe is to let our military do their job without
muddying up their responsibilities with our political agendas."
He openly rejects control of the military by civilian policy-makers. "War is not a social
experiment and I refuse to let politics play a role in my decision making when it comes to
keeping you and your family safe," he continues. "I will not take my marching orders from
anyone else concerning national security."
Only one of the 30 candidates, Ken Harbaugh, a retired Air Force pilot running in the
Seventh Congressional District of Ohio, centered on the industrial city of Canton,
acknowledges being part of this larger group. He notes, "In 2018, more vets are running for
office than at any moment in my lifetime. Because of the growing inability of Washington to
deal responsibly with the threats facing our nation, veterans from both sides of the aisle
are stepping into the breach."
Referring to the mounting prospect of war, he writes, "Today, we face our gravest
geopolitical challenge since 9/11. Our country remains at war in Afghanistan, we have troops
engaged in North Africa, Iraq and Syria, and Russia continues to bully our allies. Meanwhile,
North Korea has the ability to directly threaten the American mainland with nuclear
missiles." He concludes, "we need leaders with the moral authority to speak on these issues,
leaders who have themselves been on the front lines of these challenges."
These statements, taken cumulatively, present a picture of unbridled militarism and
aggression as the program of the supposed "opposition" to the Trump administration's own
saber-rattling and threats of "fire and fury like the world has never seen."
Perhaps even more remarkable is that the remaining 17 national-security candidates say
nothing at all about foreign policy (in 11 cases) or limit themselves to anodyne observations
about the necessity to provide adequate health care and other benefits to veterans (two
cases), or vague generalities about the need to combine a strong military with diplomatic
efforts (four cases). They give no specifics whatsoever.
In other words, while these candidates tout their own records as part of the
national-security apparatus as their principal credential for election to Congress, they
decline to tell the voters what they would do if they were in charge of American foreign
policy.
Given that these 17 include intelligence agents (Abigail Spanberger and Gina Ortiz Jones),
a National Security Council Iraq war planner (Andy Kim), and numerous other high-level State
Department and military commanders, the silence can have only the most ominous
interpretation.
These CIA Democrats don't want to tell voters about their plans for foreign policy and
military intervention because they know these measures are deeply unpopular. They aim to gain
office as stealth candidates, unveiling their program of militarism and war only after they
take their seats, when they may very well exercise decisive influence in the next
Congress."
I don't see the republicans being the Nazis. The US war party is composed of both Democraps
and Rethuglicans. The Republican base has values closer in line with paleocons and not the
neocons.
The values of the Democraps are pure imperialist, exceptionalist and totalitarian in the
name of PC. Obummer was neocon tool like W. Bush.
Thus it is the Democraps that are the proper heirs of the Nazis and their 4th Reich global
domination project. Paleocons are isolationist nationalists that actually believe in the
constitutional values that the USA claims to espouse. The Democraps are all about lust for
power and dirty tricks to enable the seizing of power.
Obummer weaponized the FBI and CIA into partisan instruments giving us the Russia meddling
inquisition. Truman was a foaming at the mouth racist cold warrior.
Eisenhower at least warned about the creeping influence of the MIC. Clinton was a
slimeball that continued the Reich agenda in the Balkans. And so on.
"... Why should a robed, unelected politician be redefining marriage? ..."
"... Many people here still don't get it. This fake left vs right paradigm is just a show and is no different than either professional football or wrestling. The public cheer on their teams and engage in meaningless battle while the controllers pilfer everything of value. ..."
"... Peter Hitchens has remarked that demonstrations are actually indicators of weakness rather than power or authority (something that seems to have eluded Flake and Murkowski), however shrill and enraged that they may be. ..."
"... I'm an aging New Deal Democrat. I have not changed but my former party changed with the tenure of the immoral and ethically challenged rapist, Bill Clinton and his enabler wife. In their previous lives, both were Goldwater Republicans. They switched to the Democrat Party to win elections but they never strayed too far from teats of the the Bushes and their destructive political roots. I"m willing to bet thousands of dollars that if given a fair chance at a quiz about the Clintons, most of the young SJW's, rabid homo's and the poor suckers who follow them know very little about the real Clintons. ..."
"... The Democrat party today is less a party than it is a mob of homosexuals and rabid social justice warriors duped into believing they are oppressed by the extremist college courses in Social Justice. Yet, what they have offer the world is not justice. They offer chaos and anarchy as we saw with the mob of racists black and stupid white kids attacking a man who looked lost and confused, and as it turns out, rightfully frightened by the crowd of social justice terrorists from the Alt-Left. ..."
"... The Democrat Party is gonzo, the same as Hillary and Bill Clinton's speaking tour is destined to be. ..."
Mr. Buchanan, you forgot the "treacherous" work of porn lawyer Michael Avenatti who offered
the straw that broke the camel's back by presenting such an abysmal "witness" such as Julie
Swetnick. Ms. Ramirez' alleged allegations also came down to nothing. Even the so-called Me
too movement suffered a big blow. They turned a fundamental democratic principle upside down:
The accused is innocent until proven guilty. They insisted instead that the accuser is right
because she is a woman!
I watched the whole confirmation circus on CNN. When Dr. Ford started talking my first
thought was; this entire testimony is a charade initiated by the Dems. As a journalist, I was
appalled by the CNN "colleagues." During the recesses, they held tribunals that were 95
percent staffed by anti-Trumpets. Fairness looks different.
For me, the Democratic Party and the Me too movement lost much of its credibility. To
regain it, they have to get rid of the demons of the Clinton's and their ilk. Anyone who is
acquainted with the history of the Clinton's knows that they belong to the most politically
corrupt politicians in the US.
@utu
You're thinking of Justice Kennedy, another Republican choice for whom young Mr. Kavanaugh
clerked before helping President Cheney with the Patriot Act to earn his first robe on the
Swampville Circuit. Chief Justice Roberts was the one who nailed down Big Sickness for the
pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
Like the "federal" elections held every November in even-numbered years and the 5-4
decrees of the Court, these nailbiting confirmation hearings are another part of the show
that keeps people gulled into accepting that so many things in life are to be run by people
in Washington. Mr. Buchanan for years has been proclaiming each The Most Important Ever.
I'm still inclined to the notion that the Constitution was intended, at least by some of
its authors and supporters, to create a limited national government. But even by the time of
Marbury, those entrusted with the powers have arrogated the authority to redefine them. In my
lifetime, the Court exists to deal with hot potato social issues in lieu of the invertebrate
Congress, to forebear (along with the invertebrate Congress) the warmongering and other
"foreign policy" waged under auspices of the President, and to dignify the Establishment's
shepherding and fleecing of the people.
Why should a robed, unelected politician be redefining marriage? Entrusted to
enforce the Constitutional limitations on the others? Sure, questions like these are posed
from time to time in a dissenting Justice's opinion, but that ends the discussion other than
in the context of replacing old Justice X with middle-aged Justice Y, as exemplified in this
cliche' column from Mr. Buchanan. Those of us outside the Beltway are told to tune in and
root Red. And there are pom pom shakers and color commentators just like him for Team
Blue.
Many people here still don't get it. This fake left vs right paradigm is just a show and
is no different than either professional football or wrestling. The public cheer on their
teams and engage in meaningless battle while the controllers pilfer everything of value.
Buchanan knows this but is too afraid to tell "the other half of the story."
It was a costly victory, but not a Pyrrhic one. The Left will no doubt raise the decibel
and octave levels, but if they incur a richly-deserved defeat a month from now, they won't
even make it to the peanut gallery for at least the next two years.
Peter Hitchens has remarked that demonstrations are actually indicators of weakness
rather than power or authority (something that seems to have eluded Flake and Murkowski),
however shrill and enraged that they may be. Should the Left choose to up the ante, to
REALLY take it to the streets well as the English ditty goes: We have the Maxim Gun/And they
have not.
Pat, you are one of the few thinkers with real common sense.
I'm an aging New Deal Democrat. I have not changed but my former party changed with
the tenure of the immoral and ethically challenged rapist, Bill Clinton and his enabler wife.
In their previous lives, both were Goldwater Republicans. They switched to the Democrat Party
to win elections but they never strayed too far from teats of the the Bushes and their
destructive political roots. I"m willing to bet thousands of dollars that if given a fair
chance at a quiz about the Clintons, most of the young SJW's, rabid homo's and the poor
suckers who follow them know very little about the real Clintons.
The Democrat party today is less a party than it is a mob of homosexuals and rabid
social justice warriors duped into believing they are oppressed by the extremist college
courses in Social Justice. Yet, what they have offer the world is not justice. They offer
chaos and anarchy as we saw with the mob of racists black and stupid white kids attacking a
man who looked lost and confused, and as it turns out, rightfully frightened by the crowd of
social justice terrorists from the Alt-Left.
They all slept through the Obama disaster thinking the globalist open borders would make
the world Shang Ri La instead of crime ridden, diseased, and under attack from Muslims and
their twisted ides about God and Sharia Law. Look at the Imam who proclaimed yesterday they
Sharia is the law of Britain and that Muslims are at war with the British government. Yet,
Tommy Robinson gets jailed for pointing out their sated intentions. Messed up. We cannot let
this happen in America.
They ignore the fact that the emasculated Obama failed to fight to pick a Supreme Court
Justice. Even though he was going to choose Neil Gorsuch, not a leftist, the Alt-Left no
doubt would have remained silent if he had. Why? Because Obama was black. But the Alt-Left is
shallow and they could not see that the oreo president was black on the outside but rich and
creamy white on the inside. No doubt, Obama was more like a 1980′s Republican than he
was a Democrat as I understood them to be for decades.
The Democrat Party is gonzo, the same as Hillary and Bill Clinton's speaking tour is
destined to be.
@Ludwig
Watzal Vis-a-vis #PayAttentionToMeToo, it really was a win-win. Rightists successfully
defended the firewall and kept it contained to the left. Perfect. As far as leftists are
concerned, it's still perfectly legitimate – the leftist circular firing squads will
continue.
Many people here still don't get it. This fake left vs right paradigm is just a show and
is no different than either professional football or wrestling.
Well I get it and have been saying so. Trump knows damn well that the people he has
surrounded himself with are Deep Staters Trump is a part of the Deep State. Trump has done
nothing of significance for the 99%. Trump hasn't prosecuted anyone for criminal activity
'against' his campaign or administration. Trump hasn't built a wall (he won't either).
Instead of reducing conflict and war Trump has been belligerent in his actions toward Russia,
China, Syria and Iran .risking all out war. All these things are being done to increase the
wealth and power of the Deep State. For the past ten years Republican House members have been
promising investigations and prosecutions of Democrats for criminal activities .not one god
damn thing changed. Kabuki theater is the name of the game. With such inane bullshit as
Dancing With The Stars on TV and the fake Republicans v Democrats game, it is all meant to
keep the proles from knowing how they are being screwed .a rather easy task at that.
@utu
Same sex marriage is basically irrelevant. Less than 10% of homosexuals co-habitate with a
partner. Perhaps 10% of the general population is openly homosexual (and that's definitely an
over-estimation.).
This means that if all homosexuals that cohabitate with a partner are married, it's less
than 1% of the population we're talking about.
This is a "who really cares?" situation. There's more important things to worry about when
the nation has been at war for 16 years straight, started over a bunch of lies starting with
George W. Bush and continuing with Barak Obama. We have lost the moral high ground because of
those two, identical in any important way, scumbags.
Democrats are enraged and have seen the GOP for the white supremacist evil institution
that it is
This from a group of people that have been endlessly complaining that the Butcher of
Libya, who voted for the Authorization to Use Force in Iraq (what you know as the 2nd Iraq
War) wasn't elected president just because she was running a fraudulent charity, was storing
classified information on an unsecured and compromised server illegally, and is telling you
absolutely morally bankrupt and unprincipled individuals that you have the moral high ground
because she's a woman after all, not just another war criminal like George W. Bush is, and
Obama is.
Caligula's horse would have beaten Hillary Clinton, if the voter base had any sense.
Clinton was the worst possible candidate ever. Anybody, and I mean anybody, that voted for
the Iraq War should be in prison, not in government. They are all traitors.
@Realist
Agree Big money interets have broguht us Trump not only for the tax cuts but to destroy
America's hemegomony. to start the final leg of the shift from west to east. A traitor of the
highest order Pat Buchanan has led the grievence brigade of angry white men for decades
distracted and deluded over the social issues meanwhile the Everyman/woman has lost ground
economically or stayed static no improvement.
@Jon
Baptist You can just about guarantee that the losers in the false 'Right' versus 'Left'
circus will be We The People.
Big Government/Big Insider Corporations/Big Banks feed parasitically off the population.
The role of the lawyers wearing black dresses on the SC, is to help hide the theft. They use
legal mumbo jumbo. The economists at the Fed use economics & mathematical mumbo
jumbo.
Much of current Western society is made up of bullsh*t.
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Washington of making a "colossal" but "typical"
mistake by exploiting the dominance of the dollar by levying economic sanctions against regimes
that don't bow to its whims.
"It seems to me that our American partners make a colossal strategic mistake," Putin
said.
"This is a typical mistake of any empire," Putin said, explaining that the US is ignoring
the consequences of its actions because its economy is strong and the dollar's hegemonic
grasp on global markets remains intact. However "the consequences come sooner or later."
These remarks echoed a sentiment expressed by Putin back in May, when he said that Russia
can no longer trust the US dollar because of America's decisions to impose unilateral sanctions
and violate WTO rules.
... ... ...
With the possibility of being cut off from the dollar system looming, a plan prepared by Andrei Kostin, the head of Russian
bank VTB, is being embraced by much of the Russian establishment. Kostin's plan would facilitate the conversion of dollar
settlements into other currencies which would help wean Russian industries off the dollar. And it already has the backing of
Russia's finance ministry, central bank and Putin.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin is also working on deals with major trading partners to accept the Russian ruble for imports and exports.
In a sign that a united front is forming to help undermine the dollar, Russia's efforts have been readily embraced by China
and Turkey, which is unsurprising, given their increasingly fraught relationships with the US. During joint military exercises
in Vladivostok last month, Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that their countries would work together to counter
US tariffs and sanctions.
"More and more countries, not only in the east but also in Europe, are beginning to think about how to minimise dependence on
the US dollar," said Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesperson. "And they suddenly realise that a) it is possible, b) it needs to
be done and c) you can save yourself if you do it sooner."
strip away the right of Corprati0ns to have the legal standing of a person in a Court of
Law .
when we could just abolish the institution of incorporation without remorse? This
would like treating a cause of widespread disease with an ounce of inexpensive
prevention.
Buh-bye limited liability parasitism. Buh-bye rootless, world-wandering capital with scant
interest in the hosts' long-term wellbeing.
I suppose that there would be a shrill outcry of protest from the many little fire teams,
squads, and platoons of mind rapists (e.g. A. Cockburn) who have a career interest in
complaining for a living. But so what? It would be fun to watch "social justice" factions
twist and squirm as a chorus of abolitionists asks why the "Resistance" never resisted
"corporatocracy" with abolitionism. The rapists will "spew" much sanctimonious b.s.
defensively between artful meals in nice restaurants, but the chorus will know a real
reason. Lefty humanist finds incorporation very useful for cultivating the intense
concentration of wealth and power which he pretends to oppose.
Eventually the chorus will get around to asking lefty internationalist about his
contemporary plans to merge every firm with government without looking like an old fashioned
commie expropriationist. The chorus might ask the mind rapists still more embarassing
questions:
Righteous Lefty, why would you establish incorporation now if it wasn't a feature of
commerce already? Because you would not then have a little handful of company shares to
trade in a stock exchange? Nor be planning to exploit a stock tip from an ally who is
married to a corporate go-getter with C-level knowledge of plans?
Traditional labor unions, TOO, have been involved with the racketeering of incorporation.
Take the UMWA, for example. Where in the eleven points of its constitution is there any hint
that labor organizers and their Blair Mountain warriors were thinking about abolishing a
pernicious institution which had done so much to slant market power in favor of neverlaboring
mine operators?
It's been obvious for some time that the allegedly right wing "ALT RIGHT" is another
faction with little interest in getting rid of the corporation. It is sympathetic,
however, to old fashioned communist schemes like "Social Security" and communist health care
finance. So what, um, pecuniary interest does its leading lights have in maintaining the
incorporated status quo? Explain, please.
In other words CIA Democrats actually are running on classic Republican foreign policy platform with some neo-McCarthyism
flavor added for appetite. . Such a convergence of two parities.
The Democratic Party is widely favored to win control of the House of Representatives in the
US midterm elections November 6, with projections that it will gain 30 to 50 seats, or even
more, well above the net gain of 23 required for a majority.
The last time the Democratic Party won control of the House from the Republicans was in
2006, when it captured 30 Republican seats on the basis of a limited appeal to the massive
antiwar sentiment among working people after three years of disastrous and bloody warfare in
Iraq, and five years after the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
In stark contrast, there is not a hint of an antiwar campaign by the Democratic challengers
seeking Republican seats in the 2018 elections. On the contrary, the pronouncements of leading
Democrats on foreign policy issues have been strongly pro-war, attacking the Trump
administration from the right for its alleged softness on Russia and its hostility to
traditional US-led alliances like NATO.
This is particularly true of the 30 Democratic congressional nominees in competitive races
who come from a national-security background. These challengers, previously identified by the
World Socialist Web Site as the CIA Democrats , constitute the
largest single grouping among Democratic nominees in competitive seats, more than state and
local officials, lawyers or those wealthy enough to finance their own campaigns.
The 30 national-security candidates include six actual CIA, FBI or military intelligence
agents, six State Department or other civilian national security officials, 11 combat veterans
from Iraq and Afghanistan, all but one an officer, and seven other military veterans, including
pilots, naval officers and military prosecutors (JAGs).
The range of views expressed by these 30 candidates is quite limited. With only one
exception, Jared Golden , running in the First District of Maine, the military-intelligence
Democrats do not draw any negative conclusions from their experience in leading, planning or
fighting in the wars of the past 25 years, including two wars against Iraq, the invasion of
Afghanistan, and other military engagements in the Persian Gulf and North and East Africa.
Golden, who is also the only rank-and-file combat veteran -- as opposed to an officer -- and
the only one who admits to having suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, criticizes
congressional rubber-stamping of the wars of the past 20 years. "Over the past decade and a
half, America has spent trillions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on other conflicts
across the globe," his campaign website declares. "War should be a last resort, and only
undertaken when the security interests of America are clearly present, and the risks and costs
can be appropriately justified to the American people."
These sentiments hardly qualify as antiwar, but they sound positively radical compared to
the materials posted on the websites of many of the other military-intelligence candidates. In
some ways, Golden is the exception that proves the rule. What used to be the standard rhetoric
of Democratic Party candidates when running against the administration of George W. Bush has
been entirely scrapped in the course of the Obama administration, the first in American history
to have been engaged in a major military conflict for every day of its eight years.
All the other national-security candidates accept as a basic premise that the United States
must maintain its dominant world position. The most detailed foreign policy doctrine appears on
the website of Amy McGrath , who is now favored to win her contest against incumbent Republican
incumbent Andy Barr in the Sixth Congressional District of Kentucky.
McGrath follows closely the line of the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton
presidential campaign, supporting the Iran nuclear deal that Trump tore up, embracing Israel,
warning of North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, and declaring it "critical that the US
work with our allies and partners in the region to counter China's advances" in the South China
Sea and elsewhere in Asia.
But Russia is clearly the main target of US national-security efforts, in her view. She
writes, "Our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has testified that Russia is the greatest
threat to American security. Russia poses an existential threat to the United States due to its
nuclear weapons and its behavior in the past several years has been disturbing. Russia's
aggression in Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria has been alarming. It's becoming more
assertive in the Arctic, likely the most important geostrategic zone of competition in the
coming decades. The US should consider providing defensive arms to Ukraine and exerting more
pressure on Moscow using economic sanctions."
She concludes by calling for an investigation modeled on the 9/11 Commission into alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Five other national-security candidates focus on specific warnings about the danger of
Russia and China, thus aligning themselves with the new national security orientation set in
the most recent Pentagon strategy document, which declares that the principal US national
security challenge is no longer the "war on terror," but the prospect of great power conflicts,
above all with Russia and China.
Jessica Morse , a former State Department and AID official in Iraq, running in the Fourth
District of California, blasts the Trump administration for "giving away global leadership to
powers like China and Russia. Our security and our economy will both suffer if those countries
are left to re-write the international rules."
Former FBI agent Christopher Hunter , running in the 12th District of Florida, declares,
"Russia is a clear and present danger to the United States. We emerged victorious over the
Soviet Union in the Cold War. We must resolve anew to secure an uncompromising victory over
Russia and its tyrannical regime."
Elissa Slotkin , the former CIA agent and Pentagon official running in Michigan's Eighth
Congressional District, cites her 14 years of experience "working on some of our country's most
critical national security matters, including U.S.-Russia relations, the counter-ISIS campaign,
and the U.S. relationship with NATO." She argues that "the United States must make investments
in its military, intelligence, and diplomatic power" in order to maintain "a unique and vital
role in the world."
Max Rose , a combat commander in Afghanistan now running in New York's 11th Congressional
District (Staten Island and Brooklyn), calls for "recognizing Russia as a hostile foreign power
and holding the Kremlin accountable for its attempts to undermine the sovereignty and
democratic values of other nations." Rose is still in the military reserves, and took two weeks
off from his campaign in August to participate in small-unit drills.
Joseph Kopser , running in the 21st District of Texas, is another anti-Russian firebrand,
writing on his website, "As a retired Army Ranger, I know first hand the importance of standing
strong with your allies. Given Russia's march toward a totalitarian state showing aggression
around the region, as well as their extensive cyber and information warfare campaign directed
at the U.S., England, and others, our Article 5 [NATO] commitment to our European allies and
partners is more important than ever." He concludes, "Since the mid-twentieth century, the
United States has been a principal world leader -- a standard that should never be
changed."
Four national-security candidates add North Korea and Iran to China and Russia as specific
targets of American military and diplomatic attack.
Josh Welle , a former naval officer who was deployed to Afghanistan, now running in the
Fourth Congressional District of New Jersey, writes, "We have to stand together in the face of
threats from countries like North Korea and Iran. The human rights violations and nuclear
capabilities of these countries pose a direct threat to the stability of this world and
therefore need to be met with strong military presence and a robust defense program to protect
ourselves."
Tom Malinowski , former assistant secretary of state for human rights, running in New
Jersey's Seventh District, calls for maintaining economic sanctions on Russia "until it
stops its aggression in Ukraine and interference in our democracy ,"
effusively endorses the state of Israel (whose government actually interferes in US elections
more than any other), and calls for stepped up sanctions against North Korea.
Mikie Sherill , a former Navy pilot and Russian policy officer, running in New Jersey's 11th
District, writes, "I have sat across the table from the Russians, and know that we need our
government to take the threat they pose seriously." She adds to this a warning about "threats
posed by North Korea and Iran," the two most immediate targets of military-diplomatic blackmail
by the Trump administration. She concludes, referring to North Korea's nuclear program, "For
that reason I support a robust military presence in the region and a comprehensive missile
defense program to defend America, our allies, and our troops abroad."
Dan McCready , an Iraq war unit commander who claims to have been born again when he was
baptized in water from the Euphrates River, calls for war to be waged only "with overwhelming
firepower," not "sporadically, with no strategy or end in sight, while our enemies like Iran,
North Korea, Russia, and the terrorists outsmart and outlast us." He is running in North
Carolina's Ninth Congressional District, adjacent to the huge military complex at Fort
Bragg.
One military-intelligence candidate cites immigration as a national-security issue, echoing
the position of the Trump administration, which constantly peddles scare stories that
terrorists are infiltrating the United States disguised as immigrants and refugees. That is
Richard Ojeda , running in the Third Congressional District of West Virginia, who publicly
boasts of having voted for Trump in 2016, in the same election in which he won a seat in the
West Virginia state senate running as a Democrat.
Ojeda writes on his web site, "We must also ensure that terrorists do not reach American
soil by abusing our immigration process. We must keep an up to date terror watch list but
provide better vetting for those that go onto the watch list."
A career Army Airborne officer, Ojeda voices the full-blown militarism of this social layer.
"If there is one thing I am confident in, it is the ability of our nation's military," he
declares. "The best way to keep Americans safe is to let our military do their job without
muddying up their responsibilities with our political agendas."
He openly rejects control of the military by civilian policy-makers. "War is not a social
experiment and I refuse to let politics play a role in my decision making when it comes to
keeping you and your family safe," he continues. "I will not take my marching orders from
anyone else concerning national security."
Only one of the 30 candidates, Ken Harbaugh , a retired Air Force pilot running in the
Seventh Congressional District of Ohio, centered on the industrial city of Canton, acknowledges
being part of this larger group. He notes, "In 2018, more vets are running for office than at
any moment in my lifetime. Because of the growing inability of Washington to deal responsibly
with the threats facing our nation, veterans from both sides of the aisle are stepping into the
breach."
Referring to the mounting prospect of war, he writes, "Today, we face our gravest
geopolitical challenge since 9/11. Our country remains at war in Afghanistan, we have troops
engaged in North Africa, Iraq and Syria, and Russia continues to bully our allies. Meanwhile,
North Korea has the ability to directly threaten the American mainland with nuclear missiles."
He concludes, "we need leaders with the moral authority to speak on these issues, leaders who
have themselves been on the front lines of these challenges."
These statements, taken cumulatively, present a picture of unbridled militarism and
aggression as the program of the supposed "opposition" to the Trump administration's own
saber-rattling and threats of "fire and fury like the world has never seen."
Perhaps even more remarkable is that the remaining 17 national-security candidates say
nothing at all about foreign policy (in 11 cases) or limit themselves to anodyne observations
about the necessity to provide adequate health care and other benefits to veterans (two cases),
or vague generalities about the need to combine a strong military with diplomatic efforts (four
cases). They give no specifics whatsoever.
In other words, while these candidates tout their own records as part of the
national-security apparatus as their principal credential for election to Congress, they
decline to tell the voters what they would do if they were in charge of American foreign
policy.
Given that these 17 include intelligence agents ( Abigail Spanberger and Gina Ortiz Jones ),
a National Security Council Iraq war planner ( Andy Kim ), and numerous other high-level State
Department and military commanders, the silence can have only the most ominous
interpretation.
These CIA Democrats don't want to tell voters about their plans for foreign policy and
military intervention because they know these measures are deeply unpopular. They aim to gain
office as stealth candidates, unveiling their program of militarism and war only after they
take their seats, when they may very well exercise decisive influence in the next Congress.
"... As the hoax unravels, the real story of "foreign collusion" comes out ..."
"... This entire episode has Her Majesty's Secret Service's fingerprints all over it. Steele's key role is plain enough: here was a British spook who was not only hired by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump but was unusually passionate about his work – almost as if he'd have done it for free. And then there was the earliest approach to the Trump campaign, made by Cambridge professor and longtime spook Stefan Halper to Carter Page. And then there's the mysterious alleged "link" to Russian intelligence, Professor Joseph Mifsud, whose murky British-based thinktank managed to operate openly despite later claims it was a Russian covert operation. ..."
"... It was Mifsud who orchestrated the Russia-gate hoax, first suggesting that the Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails, and then disappearing into thin air as soon as the story he had planted percolated into plain view. Some "Russian agent"! ..."
"... Trump's decision to walk back his announcement that the key Russia-gate intelligence would be declassified tells us almost as much as if he'd tweeted it out, unredacted. For what it tells us is that public knowledge of the contents would constitute a major break in relations with at least one key ally. ..."
"... So here we have it at last, the final truth of Russia-gate: yes, there was indeed foreign collusion in the 2016 election, but it came from the opposite direction than the media are telling us. We weren't attacked by Russia: a few thousand dollars in Facebook ads that nobody saw did not put Trump in the White House. Our democratic process was undermined, not by the supposedly omnipotent Vladimir Putin but by the intelligence agencies of some of our more beloved "allies." We were attacked by a tag -team, both foreign and domestic, intent on ousting a democratically-elected President by any means necessary. ..."
"... When those subsidies, subventions, and special privileges are threatened, as they are by the nationalist cheapskate Trump, who would gladly demolish the whole decrepit, dated, and dangerous cold war architecture with a wave of his hand. A US President who puts America first? They can't allow it. ..."
"... The global Establishment has risen up against the People. ..."
As the hoax unravels, the real story of "foreign collusion" comes out
The
conspiracy to overthrow a sitting US President extends far beyond our own "Deep State." As I've
been
saying in this space for quite some time, it's been an international team effort from the
beginning. Setting aside the British origins of the obscene "dossier" compiled by "ex"-MI6
agent Christopher Steele, we now have further confirmation of foreign involvement in President
Trump's
decision to delay (perhaps indefinitely) the declassification of key Russia-gate documents.
While US intelligence officials were expected to oppose the move, "Trump was also swayed by
foreign allies, including Britain, in deciding to reverse course, these people said. It wasn't
immediately clear what other governments may have raised concerns to the White House."
But of course the Washington Post knows perfectly well which other governments would
have reason to raise "concerns" to the White House. It's clear from the public record that the
following "allies" have rendered the "Resistance" essential assistance at one time or
another:
United Kingdom – This entire episode has Her Majesty's Secret Service's
fingerprints all over it. Steele's key role is plain enough: here was a British spook who was
not only hired by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on Trump but was unusually passionate
about his work – almost as if he'd have done it for free. And then there was the
earliest approach to the Trump campaign, made by Cambridge professor and longtime spook
Stefan Halper to Carter
Page. And then there's the mysterious alleged "link" to Russian intelligence, Professor
Joseph Mifsud, whose murky British-based thinktank managed to operate openly despite later
claims it was a Russian covert operation.
It was Mifsud who orchestrated the Russia-gate hoax, first suggesting that the Russians
had Hillary Clinton's emails, and then disappearing into thin air as soon as the story he had
planted percolated into plain view. Some "Russian agent"!
Australia – Why would the former Australian High Commissioner to the UK seek
out George Papadopoulos, a low-level semi-advisor to the Trump campaign, and milk him for
information while getting him drunk?
Israel – So how did Papadopoulos find himself spilling his guts at a bar
with a top Australian intelligence figure? The Times reports that "The meeting at the
bar came about because of a series of connections, beginning with an Israeli Embassy official
who introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to another Australian diplomat in London."
Estonia – The Times and other outlets report that a "Baltic
intelligence agency" was the first to relay "concerns" about Russian influence over the Trump
team. I'm willing to bet it was the Estonians, who have always been the most actively
anti-Russian actors in the region.
Ukraine – Democratic National Committee members actually met with Ukrainian
government leaders in an attempt to uncover dirt on Trump. Working together with the DNC,
Democratic official and Ukrainian lobbyist Alexandra Chalupa received active assistance from
the Ukrainian embassy, which became a veritable
locus of Clintonian campaign operations.
This is part of the price we pay for our vaunted "empire," and the "liberal international
order" the striped-pants set is so on about. As that grizzled old "isolationist" prophet, Garet
Garrett, described the insignia of empire at the dawn of the cold war:
"There is yet another sign that defines itself gradually. When it is clearly defined it may
be already too late to do anything about it. That is to say, a time comes when Empire finds
itself –
"A prisoner of history.
"The history of a Republic is its own history . A Republic may change its course, or
reverse it, and that will be its own business., But the history of Empire is a world history,
and belongs to many people."
A Republic may restrain itself, wrote Garrett, but "Empire must put forth its power" –
on whose behalf? There are many claimants whose wealth, position, and prestige depend on the
Imperial largesse. When that claim is threatened, the "satellites" turn against their
protector. This is what the Russia-gate covert action -- carried out by coordinated action of
our "allies" – is all about. We now have clear evidence of just how far our "client"
states are willing go to ensure that the American gravy train of free goodies continues to
flow.
Trump's decision to walk back his announcement that the key Russia-gate intelligence would
be declassified tells us almost as much as if he'd tweeted it out, unredacted. For what it
tells us is that public knowledge of the contents would constitute a major break in relations
with at least one key ally.
So here we have it at last, the final truth of Russia-gate: yes, there was indeed foreign
collusion in the 2016 election, but it came from the opposite direction than the media are
telling us. We weren't attacked by Russia: a few thousand dollars in Facebook ads that nobody
saw did not put Trump in the White House. Our democratic process was undermined, not by the
supposedly omnipotent Vladimir Putin but by the intelligence agencies of some of our more
beloved "allies." We were attacked by a tag -team, both foreign and domestic, intent on ousting
a democratically-elected President by any means necessary.
Here is the final irrefutable argument against America as the "world leader," designated
champion of the "liberal international order" – we become, as Garrett noted, a prisoner
of history. Indeed, we are no longer entitled to write our own history, but must endure the
lobbying and aggressive interventions of our ungrateful and spiteful "allies," whose welfare
states could not exist without generous US "defense" subsidies.
When those subsidies, subventions, and special privileges are threatened, as they are by the
nationalist cheapskate Trump, who would gladly demolish the whole decrepit, dated, and
dangerous cold war architecture with a wave of his hand. A US President who puts America first?
They can't allow it.
And that's really the essence of the fight, the issue that will determine the woof and warp
of American politics in the new millennium. The global Establishment has risen up against the
People. There's no telling what the outcome will be, but one thing I know for sure: I know what
side I'm on. Do you?
"... the last two Democratic presidents were centrists in favor of a big tent Democratic Party (the Clintons were co-founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Obama considered Joe Lieberman his mentor in the Senate) and they oversaw the collapse of their party in the states and Congress. Centrists are mainly concerned with keeping Wall Street and Silicon Valley happy, and have been purging "old-fashioned" New Deal liberals from the party for the better part of 30 years. ..."
"... It is not the Sandernistas OR the Democratic Socialists of America who are pushing identity politics or demonizing white or religious people (it's the Hillary bots at Daily Kos who go nuts when anyone on the left wing of the party expresses any interest in winning over working class Trump voters, or dares to view said Trump voters as anything but racist deadenders). ..."
Werd "I can't understand their (progressives) tactics. Why push Transgenderism literally 5
seconds after gay marriage got passed?"
Because it keeps the Democratic base from focusing on economic issues inimical to the
interests of the Democratic funding elite.
Werd "Why push poor minorities into becoming socialist identitarians instead of being the
calm centrist big tent party?"
First, Pelosi and Clinton have made it very clear that they are capitalists, and it's
their supporters "identitarian" wave (Daily Kos had an "In defense of Nancy Pelosi" article
not that lone ago), not the "socialist" or Sandernista wing of the party. Second, the
last two Democratic presidents were centrists in favor of a big tent Democratic Party (the
Clintons were co-founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Obama considered Joe
Lieberman his mentor in the Senate) and they oversaw the collapse of their party in the
states and Congress. Centrists are mainly concerned with keeping Wall Street and Silicon
Valley happy, and have been purging "old-fashioned" New Deal liberals from the party for the
better part of 30 years.
Werd "Why fire up the Republican base literally right before the midterm? Why turn the
dude who would've been the next Anthony Kennedy into a far-right gang rapist? The Dems and
their media apparatus just keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."
Stupidity? Arrogance? To keep their base within the Democratic Party, which is more
concerned about cultural issues than economic ones (like a certain part of the GOP
coalition), fired up, while demobilizing voters with mainly economic concerns?
Werd "When Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham are calling you insane, you've become
insane."
Collins and Graham are hacks, and when it comes to foreign affairs, Graham IS insane (I
exaggerate, but only a little). This may be Collins' statesmanship moment (kind of like
Democratic hack John Murtha's in 2004 over the Iraq War), but I have my doubts. As one other
commentator here said, she was always likely to vote for Kavanaugh after putting on a show of
hemming-and-hawing.
Werd "I've never voted for a Republican presidential candidate, had things stayed the
same I probably never would. Why not just wait 20 years to admit you want socialism, hate
white people and hate religious people?"
It is not the Sandernistas OR the Democratic Socialists of America who are pushing
identity politics or demonizing white or religious people (it's the Hillary bots at Daily Kos
who go nuts when anyone on the left wing of the party expresses any interest in winning over
working class Trump voters, or dares to view said Trump voters as anything but racist
deadenders).
Werd "The Blue Dogs really need to make a come back. At the very least, they might do
some trust busting and wouldn't make Donald Trump look like the sane one."
Since Fritz Hollings backed protectionism and some of the John Murtha-types voted against
NAFTA, when have any Blue Dog Democrats backed trust busting, investigating the banks and
brokerage houses that brought us the Great Recession, or backed any economic policy to the
left of (or less popular than) raising the minimum wage?
Werd, I think you should investigate the Democrats who actually call themselves
socialists. I may not vote for them – too wishy-washy reformist for me – but I
think you may actually find them to be surprisingly on your wavelength. It's the "Hillary is
TOO just as progressive as Bernie is!" types that you want to avoid.
given the years of pointless investigations of the Clintons and all the nonsense about
Obama, aren't we due an investigation or two of our own?
Harve, like all good liberals, wants to grow up to be just like the Republicans. That's
how we get progressive presidents leading us into full participation in the Great Imperialist
War.
Werd "I can't understand their (progressives) tactics. Why push Transgenderism
literally 5 seconds after gay marriage got passed?"
Because it keeps the Democratic base from focusing on economic issues inimical to the
interests of the Democratic funding elite.
There it is folks. The plain truth. I keep telling you, only socialism can save America
from the liberals.
It might not go away, but a lot of Democrats probably will. We may have to build new
prisons to hold them.
Nah. We send Scott Walker to a tropical island for an episode of "Survivor," with that
Democratic state senator who was literally in bed with a PayDay Loan lobbyist. (The lobbyist
was female, or at least identified as such in public.)
I can't understand their (progressives) tactics. Why push Transgenderism literally 5 seconds
after gay marriage got passed? Why push poor minorities into becoming socialist identitarians
instead of being the calm centrist big tent party? Why fire up the Republican base literally
right before the midterm? Why turn the dude who would've been the next Anthony Kennedy into a
far-right gang rapist? The Dems and their media apparatus just keep snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory. When Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham are calling you insane, you've become
insane. I've never voted for a Republican presidential candidate, had things stayed the same
I probably never would. Why not just wait 20 years to admit you want socialism, hate white
people and hate religious people? The Blue Dogs really need to make a come back. At the very
least, they might do some trust busting and wouldn't make Donald Trump look like the sane
one.
Werd (October 6, 9:27 am) "I can't understand their (progressives) tactics. Why push
Transgenderism literally 5 seconds after gay marriage got passed?"
It's important to remember that gay marriage didn't get "passed." Gay marriage arrived
nationwide as the result of a 2015 5-4 US Supreme Court decision authored by Justice Anthony
Kennedy, who retired from the Court in July.
I write this as a very moderate conservative who didn't vote for Trump and who has never been
fond of the GOP: Next month, and probably in 2020, I'll be voting for the Republicans. For
all their horrible flaws, they don't claim "illegitimacy" every time they lose, they don't
harass people in restaurants or on their front porches–as I see on the news the
"women's march" activists are doing to Senator Collins this afternoon. If Republicans did
this crap, the same people would be weeping about incipient fascism.
The GOP is dreadful. Trump is a buffoon. But I'm tired of 1960s-style activist anarchy,
which I consider worse for our national life than Republican directionlessness. I'm voting
against the "hey hey, ho ho " Democrats. Enough of this crap.
"... A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not Guilty. ..."
"... This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory information favoring the accused corporations. ..."
A few months ago, a dozen Russian individuals were charged with cyber-crime offenses that
Mueller knew would never be tested at trial b/c the charged individuals would never be
extradited. However, the indictment included charges against two Russian corporations that
cleverly hired American lawyers to appear on their behalf, and enter pleas of Not
Guilty.
This tactic should have set the pre-trial discovery process to begin, causing Mueller
to be obliged to turn over evidence supporting the charges as well as any exculpatory
information favoring the accused corporations.
As any reference to this case can't seem to be found, can anyone help with info as to the
present status of the case?
"... James Baker, a former top FBI lawyer, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that the Russia probe was handled in an "abnormal fashion" and was rife with "political bias" according to Fox News , citing two Republican lawmakers present for the closed-door deposition. ..."
"... Lawmakers did not provide any specifics about the interview, citing a confidentiality agreement signed with Baker and his attorneys, however they said that he was cooperative and forthcoming about the beginnings of the Russia probe in 2016, as well as the FISA surveillance warrant application to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. ..."
"... According to Fox , Baker "is at the heart of surveillance abuse allegations, and his deposition lays the groundwork for next week's planned closed-door interview with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein." ..."
James Baker, a former top FBI lawyer, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that the
Russia probe was handled in an "abnormal fashion" and was rife with "political bias" according
to
Fox News , citing two Republican lawmakers present for the closed-door deposition.
"Some of the things that were shared were explosive in nature," Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C.,
told Fox News. "This witness confirmed that things were done in an abnormal fashion. That's
extremely troubling."
Meadows claimed the "abnormal" handling of the probe into alleged coordination between
Russian officials and the Trump presidential campaign was "a reflection of inherent bias that
seems to be evident in certain circles." The FBI agent who opened the Russia case, Peter
Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page and others sent politically charged texts, and have since left
the bureau. -
Fox News
Baker, who worked closely with former FBI Director James Comey, left the bureau earlier this
year.
Lawmakers did not provide any specifics about the interview, citing a confidentiality
agreement signed with Baker and his attorneys, however they said that he was cooperative and
forthcoming about the beginnings of the Russia probe in 2016, as well as the FISA surveillance
warrant application to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
"During the time that the FBI was putting -- that DOJ and FBI were putting together the
FISA (surveillance warrant) during the time prior to the election -- there was another source
giving information directly to the FBI, which we found the source to be pretty explosive,"
said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
Meadows and Jordan would not elaborate on the source, or answer questions about whether
the source was a reporter. They did stress that the source who provided information to the
FBI's Russia case was not previously known to congressional investigators. -
Fox News
According to Fox , Baker "is at the heart of surveillance abuse allegations, and his
deposition lays the groundwork for next week's planned closed-door interview with Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein."
As the FBI's top lawyer, baker helped secure the FISA warrant on Page, along with three
subsequent renewals .
Rosenstein is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill on October 11 for a closed-door interview,
according to Republican House sources, "not a briefing to leadership," and comes on the heels
of a New York Times report that said Rosenstein had discussed secretly recording President
Trump and removing him from office using the 25th Amendment.
Rosenstein and Trump pushed off a scheduled meeting into limbo amid speculation of his
impending firing.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Wednesday the meeting remains in
limbo.
But in blaming "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" for the sexual misconduct allegations
against him, the Supreme Court nominee is drawing new attention to his time on the Kenneth
Starr team investigating Bill Clinton. And in doing so, he's shown he can deliver a Trump-like
broadside against detractors even if it casts him in a potentially partisan light.
As a young lawyer, Kavanaugh played a key role on Starr's team investigating sexual
misconduct by then-President Bill Clinton, helping to shape one of the most salacious chapters
in modern political history.
Kavanaugh spent a good part of the mid-1990s jetting back and forth to Little Rock,
Arkansas, digging into the Clintons' background, according to documents that were made public
as part of his nomination to the Supreme Court
The Kavanaugh confirmation process has been a missed opportunity for the United States to
face up to many urgent issues on which the bi-partisans in Washington, DC are united and
wrong.
Kavanaugh's career as
a Republican legal operative and judge supporting the power of corporations, the security
state and abusive foreign policy should have been put on trial. The hearings could have
provided an opportunity to confront the security state, use of torture, mass spying and the
domination of money in politics and oligarchy as he has had an important role in each of
these.
Kavanaugh's behavior as a teenager who likely drank too much and was inappropriately
aggressive and abusive with women, perhaps even attempting rape, must also be confronted. In an
era where patriarchy and mistreatment of women are being challenged, Kavanaugh is the wrong
nominee for this important time. However, sexual assault should not be a distraction that keeps
the public's focus off other issues raised by his career as a conservative political
activist.
The Security State, Mass Spying and Torture
A central issue of our era is the US security state -- mass spying on emails, Internet
activity, texts and phone calls. Judge Kavanough
enabled invasive spying on everyone in the United States . He described mass surveillance
as "entirely consistent" with the US Constitution. This manipulation of the law turns the
Constitution upside down a it clearly requires probable cause and a search warrant for the
government to conduct searches.
Kavanaugh
explained in a decision, "national security . . . outweighs the impact on privacy
occasioned by this [NSA] program." This low regard for protecting individual privacy should
have been enough for a majority of the Senate to say this nominee is inappropriate for the
court.
Kavanaugh ruled multiple times that police have the
power to search people, emphasizing "reasonableness" as the standard for searching people.
He ruled broadly for the police in searches conducted on the street without a warrant and for
broader use of drug testing of federal employees. Kavanaugh applauded Justice Rehnquist's views
on the Fourth Amendment, which favored police searches by defining probable cause in a flexible
way and creating a broad exception for when the government has "special needs" to search
without a warrant or probable cause. In this era of police abuse through stop and frisk, jump
out squads and searches when driving (or walking or running) while black, Kavanaugh is the
wrong nominee and should be disqualified.
Kavanaugh also played a role in the Bush torture policy. Torture is against US
and international law , certainly facilitating torture should be disqualifying not only as
a justice but
should result in disbarment as a lawyer . Kavanaugh was appointed by President Trump, who
once vowed he would "bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse than
waterboarding." Minimizing torture is demonstrated in his rulings, e.g. not protecting
prisoners at risk of torture and not allowing people to sue the government on allegations of
torture.
Torture is a landmine in the Senate, so
Kavanaugh misled the Senate likely committing perjury on torture . In his 2006
confirmation, he said he was "not involved" in "questions about the rules governing detention
of combatants." Tens of thousands of documents have been kept secret by the White House about
Kavanaugh from the Bush era. Even so, during these confirmation hearings documents related to
the nomination of a lawyer involved in the torture program showed
Kavanaugh's role in torture policies leading Senator Dick Durbin to write : "It is clear
now that not only did Judge Kavanaugh mislead me when it came to his involvement in the Bush
Administration's detention and interrogation policies, but also regarding his role in the
controversial Haynes nomination."
Durbin spoke more broadly about perjury writing: "This is a theme that we see emerge with
Judge Kavanaugh time and time again – he says one thing under oath, and then the
documents tell a different story. It is no wonder the White House and Senate Republicans are
rushing through this nomination and hiding much of Judge Kavanaugh's record -- the questions
about this nominee's credibility are growing every day." The long list of
perjury allegations should be investigated and if proven should result in him not being
confirmed.
This should have been enough to stop the process until documents were released to reveal
Kavanaugh's role as Associate White House Counsel under George Bush from 2001 to 2003 and
as his White House Staff Secretary from 2003 to 2006. Unfortunately, Democrats have been
complicit in allowing torture as well, e.g. the Obama administration never prosecuted anyone
accused of torture and advanced the careers of people involved in torture.
Shouldn't the risk of having a torture facilitator on the Supreme Court be enough to stop
this nomination?
Corporate Power vs Protecting People and the Planet
In this era of corporate power, Kavanaugh sides with the corporations. Ralph Nader
describes him as a corporation masquerading as a judge . He narrowly limited the powers of
federal agencies to curtail corporate power and to protect the interests of the people and
planet.
This is evident in cases where Kavanaugh has favored
reducing restrictions on polluting corporations. He dissented in cases where the majority ruled
in favor of environmental protection but has never dissented where the majority ruled against
protecting the environment. He ruled against agencies seeking to protect clean air and water.
If Kavanaugh is on the court, it will be much harder to hold corporations responsible for the
damage they have done to the climate, the environment or health.
Kavanaugh takes the side of businesses over their workers with a consistent history of
anti-union and anti-labor rulings. A few examples of many, he ruledin favor of the Trump Organizatio
n throwing out the results of a union election,
sided with the management of Sheldon Adelson's Venetian Casino Resort upholding the
casino's First Amendment
right to summon police against workers engaged in a peaceful demonstration -- for which
they had a permit, affirmed the Department of Defense's discretion to negate
the collective bargaining rights of employees, and overturned an NLRB ruling that allowed
Verizon workers to display pro-union signs on company property despite having given up the
right to picket in their collective bargaining agreement. In this time of labor unrest and
mistreatment of workers, Kavanaugh will be a detriment to workers rights.
Kavanough
opposed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling in favor of net neutrality,
which forbids telecom companies from discrimination on the Internet. He argued net neutrality
violated the First Amendment rights of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and was beyond the
power granted to the FCC. He put the rights of big corporations ahead of the people having a
free and open Internet. The idea that an ISP has a right to control what it allows on the
Internet could give corporations great control over what people see on the Internet. It is a
very dangerous line of reasoning in this era of corporations curtailing news that challenges
the mainstream narrative.
Kavanaugh will be friendly to powerful business and the interests of the wealthy on the
Supreme Court, and will tend to stand in the way of efforts by administrative agencies to
regulate them and by people seeking greater rights.
On the third day of his confirmation hearings, Judge Brett Kavanaugh seemed to refer to the
use of contraception as "abortion-inducing drugs ." It was a discussion of a case where
Kavanaugh dissented from the majority involving the Priests for Life's challenge to the
Affordable Care Act (ACA). Kavanaugh opposed the requirement that all health plans cover birth
control, claiming that IUDs and emergency contraception were an infringement of their free
exercise of religion.
Kavanaugh clerked for Judge Kosinski who he describes as a mentor. Kosinski was forced to
resign after being accused of harassing at least 12 women in the sanctity of his judicial
chambers. Kavanaugh swears he never saw any signs that the judge was sexually harassing
women, but the Democrats did not ask a single question about it.
Multiple accusers
have come forward to allege Kavanaugh's involvement in sexual assault and abuse. While Dr.
Christine Blasey Ford is viewed as credible – she was the only witness allowed to testify
– it is not clear these allegations will be thoroughly reviewed. After being approved by
the committee, the Republican leadership and President Trump agreed on a limited FBI
investigation. It is unclear
whether the FBI will be allowed to follow all the evidence and question all the witnesses.
As we write this newsletter, the outcome has yet to unfold but Jeffrey St.
Clair at Countpunch points out, "the FBI investigation will be overseen by director
Christopher Wray, who was two years behind Brett-boy at both Yale and Yale Law. After
graduation, they entered the same rightwing political orbit and both took jobs in the Bush
Administration. How do you think it's going to turn out?"
Why don't Democrats, as Ralph Nader
suggests , hold their own hearing and question all the witnesses? If there is corroborating
evidence for the accusers, Kavanaugh should not be approved.
During his confirmation process, in response to the accusations of assault, he claimed they
were "a calculated and orchestrated political hit" and "revenge on behalf of the Clinton's." He
demonstrated partisan anger and displayed a lack of judicial temperament, making him unfit to
serve on the Supreme Court.
Kavanaugh exposes the true partisan nature of the highest court, which is not a neutral
arbiter but another battleground for partisan politics. The lack of debate on issues of spying,
torture and more shows both parties support a court that protects the security state and
corporate interests over people and planet. Accusations of sexual assault must be confronted,
but there are many reasons Kavanaugh should not be on the court. The confirmation process
undermines the court's legitimacy and highlights bi-partisan corruption.
An interesting hypothesis. CIA definitly became a powerful political force in the USA -- a rogue political force which starting from JFK assasination tries to control who is elected to important offices. But in truth Cavanaugh is a pro-CIA candidate so to speak. So why CIA would try to derail him.
Notable quotes:
"... I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments. ..."
"... An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
"... So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped. ..."
"... Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized. ..."
"... She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office. ..."
I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim
that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family
homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments.
Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with
attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment
There's a unit It's a stove 2 ft counter space and sink. The stoves electric and plugs into an ordinary household electricity.
It's backed against the bathroom wall. Break through the wall, connect the pipes running water for the sink. Add an outside door
and it's a small apartment.
Assume they didn't want to make it an apartment just a master bedroom. Usually the contractor pulls the permits routinely.
But an outside bedroom door is complicated. The permits will cost more. It might require an exemption and a hearing They night
need a lawyer. And they might not get the permit.
So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to
counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife
makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could
have escaped.
Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college
found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school
and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized.
She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts.
And she runs a CIA recruitment office.
America's two mainstream political parties agree furiously with one another on war,
neoliberalism, Orwellian surveillance, and every other agenda which increases the power and
profit of the plutocratic class which owns them both. The plutocrat-owned mass media plays up
the differences between Democrats and Republicans to hysterical proportions, when in reality
the debate over which one is worse is like arguing over whether a serial killer's arms or legs
are more evil.
Well, I don't know. My sister is an executive assistant. I thought I knew what that meant and
you probably do too. But then one day I sat down with her and we actually talked about her
job, and I quickly realized that not only was my understanding of her job so shallow as to be
effectively meaningless, but it was so shallow that I didn't even understand how much I was
missing. I'd just glanced at the title and said to myself "yep, executive assistant, assist
executives, that's what she does" and at no point had it ever even occurred to me that there
was anything past that. In fact, it was even worse than that, because half the stuff I
imagined she might do wasn't part of her job at all (hint, if you think "executive assistant"
and "secretary" are remotely similar you are just as far off track as I was).
I still don't understand what she does but at least now I know how little I know. If she
came to me for career advice there's no chance I'd be able to offer her anything other than
meaningless platitudes, because I don't even know enough right now to know if her current job
is a good one or a bad one. If she'd asked me before I realized how much I don't know I'd be
in the same boat, only probably rolling my eyes that she would get so worked up over x, y, or
z when her job was so simple and straightforward that there's no possible way it could be
that stressful.
Yeah.
All of this is to say that unless your friends are on a career path similar to yours they
probably not only fail to understand your job, but they probably fail so bad that they don't
even know how far off they are. That's not because your friends are stupid or because IT is
so impenetrably complex that only the chosen few can grasp it; its just that most of us don't
have a lot of expertise in careers outside of our own. Lacking context, we turn to pop
culture for reference. Picture the stereotypical Hollywood "computer guy" (or, if you must,
"hacker"). That's probably what your friends think your job is like. Now imagine that guy
coming to you complaining about how hard and stressful his job is. How hard could it be
anyway? I have a computer at home and don't have to do much to keep it running. These things
all basically run themselves, don't they?
So, point is his friends aren't necessarily assholes or in denial. They probably just
don't know enough to understand how little they know, as is true for all of us, and are
trying to give well-intentioned advice; OP asked, after all, and they want to help their
friend. But you can't give good advice if you don't have all the facts, and especially not if
you don't even know how much you're missing.
The executive assistants I know (to VPs, presidents, CEOs) practically run the company. Not
entirely, but a good chunk of it.
Filter what their executive knows and doesn't know, what meetings that take and don't,
and what their priorities are. If the EA isn't on your side, you're not getting to their
exec.
This influences strategy for the company, which means the EA is often helping direct
strategy.
Because they are spending 100% of their time with the exec (compared to the, say, 2
hours I get every other month as one of the department heads), they have a huge amount of
influence. They are trusted. And they have heard about everything that is happening at the
company. They know more than I do about what's really happening.
As to what they do, on the surface, it does look like secretary work. Schedule
appointments. Schedule venues for meetings/conferences. Book travel. Make sure the exec is
prepared for the appointments (knows what they need to know; has met with the right people in
advance to get briefed; leaves on time to get to the appointment). Answer emails and phone
calls.
But the level of knowledge they need to perform those tasks for an executive is much
higher.
Well, sure, that's an unfortunate commute. You're basically saying "I would take getting paid
for X for y hours of work over getting paid (x - costs of transportation ) for y + 4.5 or
more hours of work.
It's a decent jumping-off point for a middle management role of your own, if one opens up at
the same company. You're playing a huge role in running your exec's department
already, so you've got the lay of the land and you're clearly a competent wrangler of humans.
Who promoted herself from Harvey's legal secretary to the COO in a span of two episodes,
didn't skip a beat, and kept doing exactly what she was doing before.
Well, seeing as my last post was a big long thing about how I don't fully understand what
they do this is a limited view, but a short pithy summary would be that she handles all the
stuff her boss should be doing but doesn't have time to actually do. That's everything from
negotiating phone plans and insurance rates to making sure all the certifications and permits
they need to function are taken care of to planning and booking meetings and seminars. It's
very wide ranging and is a ton of responsibility. As noted elsewhere a good EA practically
runs the company.
I work from home 2 days a week. My wife thought I was nuts when I brought home a gaming
headset and 2nd monitor for the PC I use at home.
She thought I was sitting at home playing minecraft all day.
The reality is I need lots of screen space to doy job and I have conference call meetings
several times a day. I can actually hear and be heard with the headset.
I agree the downside is getting tagged for late day or after hours emergency work because
I can respond quickly.
I ended up buying an egpu so I could hook up a third monitor to my laptop. Currently trying
to figure out how to arrange stuff on my desk to fit a fourth; may have to start mounting
them on swivel arms. I want as much screen space as I can get when I doy job.
I also have an hdmi switch to change the monitors to my gaming machine when it's Minecraft
time. Tax deductible 4k 27 " monitors are good for that too.
Got a stud above/behind your desk? The fourth one on the wall angled down can work pretty
well, throw your notifications bar up there, calendar, anything you rarely glance at but
should be able to see without moving another program or window.
All of these makes sense, but I am just going to add the following: - Your friends should
recognize if you are yourself or if you are frustrated, close to being burned out. That is a
clear indicator if you are at right job or not. - Your friends should also be able to help
you figure out if you are appreciated and in a company with good culture
Good companies/management do everything they can to empower employees, provide adequate
training, and set realistic expectations. All of that increases employees' morale and
confidence. Without those two, company is bound to fail sooner or later.
Your friends should recognize if you are yourself or if you are frustrated, close to
being burned out. That is a clear indicator if you are at right job or not.
Your friends should also be able to help you figure out if you are appreciated and in
a company with good culture
And, as your friend, you might want to listen to us if we point out these things more than
a few times. There are one off vent sessions over a beer then there are long-term, consistent
complaints.
Yes, sometimes you just want to vent, but if someone is pointing out the same thing
constantly, they may have a point and it's up to you to start on a path to changing the
situation.
This. Many resources out there clearly state that your friends either support your success or
place negative labels on your success.
Go check out 7 habits of highly effective peeps. Will give you a completely new
perspective. Not just about friends but yourself and how you interact with others.
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No, he just needs to understand that people give generic advice that they think sounds good
but they really don't understand your job or have never been in your situation. And he does.
Being able to empathize with your friends concerns, to understand their feelings without
understanding exactly what they're going through, is a talent that not everybody has. Neither
is being self-aware enough to recognize when you lack such a talent and instead say "wow,
that sounds tough, I don't have any advice, but good luck." But these are not the only
attributes that make someone friend-worthy.
On the other hand, not everybody can tolerate having friends that lack empathy and
understanding. So for some the answer "they need new friends" may be true, I just don't think
OP necessarily does. In fact, I think it's the same kind of generic, bad advice that I'm
talking about to say that he does.
Neither is being self-aware enough to recognize when you lack such a talent and instead
say "wow, that sounds tough, I don't have any advice, but good luck."
When I'm in situations like this (I can't advise because I lack context or experience) I
advise flipping a coin. Quit after finding a new job or stay and keep trying to change the
place, heads or tails. After you've flipped the coin and seen the result, examine your
feeling... disappointed or relieved? There's your answer regardless of the coin toss you know
how you really feel, and should trust your gut.
This! When my friend(s) complain about their current workplace/position/etc I always
recommend they get their feelers out and start looking. It may take a while but you'll
eventually find something.
It took me almost a year to find something comparable or better but didn't land the final
interview this past year. But, my old job lost our largest client and I am now working for
said client. Couldn't be happier!
You don't know what someone deals with & those people may want to bend over backward to
help this person if they could. Don't automatically label them shitty friends. You don't even
know them.
No. I trust them and usually come to them when I'm emotionally invested/upset and yelling
about a situation at work. Making decisions in this mindset is always a bad idea. I was
talked off a ledge long enough to make a smart, calculated decision.
You probably figured this out already, but the whole "go hire someone" thing was a ploy to
keep you around a little longer. They gave you permission to recruit, not authority to hire.
They were never going to green light the position.
You also facilitated management's bad behavior by putting too much effort into doing the
right thing. You weren't valued or appreciated, you were just taken advantage of.
Spot on. I was given the illusion of great authority, but in the end - not on the things that
matter. I borderline want to say the word 'budget' doesn't exist here.
This. Why would they hire someone when you're doing it all. IT employees have a much better
stress level, work life balance, and career when they learn how to say no or "that's not my
role". Unless you're trying to get into that area, never volunteer you do work that should be
done by another area. It'll start becoming the norm and will never stop. Good luck on your
next gig though!
Yeah. I learned at my old job that the "what can we do to keep you?" question is bullshit.
It's a way for them to determine what they can lie to your face about to string you along as
far as possible. I asked for a team change, and they managed to string me along saying I was
approved for almost 9 months, until suddenly I'm not approved anymore and there's not even a
spot open for me.
Never again will I attempt to be honest with my manager. You can know that I'm thinking
about leaving when I give you my 2 weeks notice.
Thanks for the story, and the perspective. I'm the sole SA at a smallish entertainment-based
development studio, didn't understand half the tech you reference and I do have a senior
network architect I can (remotely) fall back on, but many days I'm totally overwhelmed. We
had a major product success last year and we've been ramping up like crazy. More office
rollout, more servers, more users, more developers (so like users but worse), more backup
needs, more bandwidth, more "and can you get better teleconference speakers for the meeting
rooms", more baroque software licensing to figure out, also do I have batteries? Mouse pads?
Highlighters? Why are you asking me for highlighters? No I can't fix your chair. Etc etc. And
I'm waiting for that one crucial system to break that I won't know how to fix.
I guess I'm just saying your post gave me some much-needed perspective. Cheers.
The best time to look for a job is when you don't need a job
Hell yeah! I quit about 6 months ago and don't even look. I get sporadic emails from
LinkedIn and other avenues and if things look good, I'll apply, otherwise the hell with it.
I've had a few interviews but sadly most places look like they have issues with
understaffing, overworked, etc.
Ah well, in the next few years I'm sure something good comes up.
Had my jr get assigned 2 more standing desks this week (about 8 installed in the last 2
months and I guess we literally can't trust someone to unplug their 3 cables from the little
NUC...). I wrote him an email discussing the core parts of his job and how no one cares about
how many standing desks are or are not installed at any given time. Focus on doing your job
well, please talk to me or CIO if you are getting stressed by any workload (we all know that
sometimes it feels like the tickets just stream in and you make no headway no matter what you
do). We'll do whatever is needed to either take care of em.
I have also done some stand up desk troubleshooting and installation, if it has a wire in it
or on it, or even holds something with a sufficient number of wires people can claim it is
confusing, it's your problem. 15 years of working in the IT/SA field and I'm unboxing a desk
because 'my computer has all the wires and I'll probably just mess it up if I try to move
everything myself'. Fortunately our users are very reasonable in general.
How about one of those tiny space heaters? A user asked me if I could figure out why it
wasn't working, and all I did was flip a big red switch marked "ON."
Start to say no. Do the hours in your contract and go home. When stuff doesn't get done tell
them you need more people. Either they get more people or you search for a new job. But if
they don't get more people you would search for a new job anyway. Just burned out.
Seems to me like a lot of horror stories here are because people either care too much or
are deeply afraid of looking for a new job. These conditions exist because you let them.
Years ago a manager from a different department (non IT obviously) walked over to us to let
us know a toilet was clogged. We all just looked at him and laughed. I was also yelled at
once for not helping someone move a file cabinet during an office move, while we still had
tons of PC's left to setup.
IT has always been the "well, we don't have above whose responsibility it is to take care
of this, so IT can do it" field.
I'm going through a similar situation to you OP but for a different reason.
I left a good MSP job (busy and at times frustrating) for a larger employer and the job I
was expecting to have is not at all like the one I applied for it's very boring and quite
slow with too much idle time sometimes which is weird since it's an operations roles for a
billion dollar business but probably half of the "work" I'm doing now is "hey sorry to wake
you but we got this alarm and we've raised an incicent can you take a look" when I used to
design and manage environments end to end.
My job for some people would be the jackpot but for me it's awful and I'm considering
leaving to go back to my way more stressful MSP job.
My problem is I have too many resources to call on (multiple teams to escalate to) and I'm
just left watching the screens because of it.
This is what I'm afraid of as well but I need more friggin money. The screen watchers
actually make more because they exist in big companies with lots of money.
We definantely do some automation but maybe not enough.
The alarms are mostly validation checks (is it actually p1? Is that event due to a
change?) and anything that can be automated is and we don't get alerts for it.
Our alarm dashboard is an aggregator of a ton of systems that all send their alarms to
it.
Unfortunately once the infrastructure and databases become self healing we're all out of a
job.
Same boat here. "is this really going to happen again before this system is decommed?" Should
I spend a few hours making a good test that will determine if its really this problem again
and fixing it + reporting the result of the fix? Or should I spend the 6 minutes it takes to
fix this and move on with my life.
Re: Self healing - out of a job. Oh PLEASE! We're not out of a job when stuff is self
healing; we're into a new one. I'm just a regular sys admin and even I am starting to think
about how I can use machine learning to solve issues I face or to improve our business. It'll
be QUITE some time before I actually start doing anthing with ML, let alone something useful.
I'd LOVE to have more time to play with new stuff.
We use ansible for automation. I do love it but it's fairly time consuming to setup (half the
stuff is in a txt doc waiting for a playbook to be built)
Management jobs usually require some management experience and I have a little bit of team
leading experience but not the sort of "manage this budget and this department" management
experience I'm also torn between making that jump to management and getting "off the tools"
or doing a deep dive into a specific set of technical tools.
My dad was an engineer for various semiconductor factories for years. He hit that same point
in his role - but there was a much bigger push to go to management, which he did. after about
5 years of that he quit - he was way to burnt out and hasn't returned to corporate life
since. The money was good but the job wasn't worth it.
Hell, the only job he's had in years was as a general contractor putting in sinks and
stuff making what I do as a help desk monkey.
I'm sort of going into a remote management position. Working for a MSP as problem escalation
for 8 techs. Finding 'teachable moments' (probably all of them!) to train on troubleshooting
process. In my spare time I'll be getting amazon aws certs and I'll eventually move into a
different role. Sounds challenging enough not to be bored :)
Oh I can do their jobs they're like "tier 3" while we're "tier 2" and we can do actual work
(permissions allowing) our team holds the same level of certs they do (MCSA, MCSE etc) were
just in at a different layer of the business which is changing.
I don't just watch for alarms and escalate it's just a small part of the role really but
it's the most prominent part when you're on the graveyards which always makes me a bit
resentful of my own choice to come here.
No, he said he had to sweep snow off a satellite dish because it's heater was broke. He said
nothing about being on the roof. Sweeping dishes after a heavy snowfall is not uncommon. I
had to do the same thing this morning while on-call.
I work in a small environment incredibly similar to OP's, Calix, Metaswitch, etc. We have
a SME for each area; one for voice, one for IP/IT systems (me), one for video, and two
outside plant guys. We cover/triage each others duties during on-call rotation. It works well
enough for us, but sounds like OP is doing it all. It would be one thing if he had to only
deal with the non-IT stuff on occasion, but if all those responsibilities are solely his,
thats untenable.
If it's a small company everyone needs to chip in beyond their official responsibility to
make things work, but they also need to be compensated at the rate of their top skills and
not driven into the ground. IMO
The problem here is that you kept the ship running, even though you told management you
needed help, things were still getting done.
Management will not do anything about thing until they break, so while you bust your ass
keeping things going they don't care how you did it. All they know is things are still
running.
You either have to show them things breaking or put your foot down negotiate a commitment to
hire a hand.
Just out of interest what was their reaction when you handed in your notice? Did they counter
or they simply decided to hire a replacement. They must have been in a world of hurt if it
was the latter and you were the only one doing that role.
Yep, a recruiter bringing someone in will cost 15-25k. Giving someone an internal referral
for 7k is comparative peanuts, AND you get two happy employees because of that.
Heya, I don't know how far into your career you are, but I'm 45, pretty senior level (I've
been a c-level exec) and wanted to tell you:
Don't ever compromise. Ever.
I am in a similar situation at an MSP (I'm in a leadership role) and have the same kinds
of conversations about resources and losing valuable workers because there's no help. The
management above me isn't listening and we are going to lose a very fine employee (like
yourself -- someone with skill who is trying to make it better but is not being
heard -- and it's because management don't know how to run an ITIL-based shop and hire to
that kind of skill set. I put toghether a framework to measure qualifications of our
employees and they all measure up to Tier 1 analysts/engineers (in both experience and quals)
and some of them are considered Tier 3 employees and they can't do something as simple as
read and interpret a Wireshark packet capture. And I keep being told either "we have to make
do with what we have" or "you're not seeing what good they can do". So clearly in my case
there's a division in vision for leadership and I'm giving up and probably moving on. In your
case, you tried, gave your input, and, if they're not gonna listen to you, move on. Your
expectations are NOT too high. Their expectations aren't high enough. Move on to somewhere
there's a fit. You can only help someone from burning their hand on the stove so many times
before you give up and go watch TV.
Yes. They all are 6 months to 1 year out of technical school. They are able to accomplish
SOME tasks. They are unskilled at anything above Tier 1 despite someone saying "you know
about X. Here, go do it."
For instance, a windows admin should be able to implement GPO and know what it's about.
Maybe have an MS cert. but our main windows admin is working towards his CCNA and has been
out of school for 6 months. Not exactly a right fit for that job.
I've been in a similar situation, the problem is not necessarily an issue with vision. More
than likely upper management have been given the mandate to keep costs down or at least
same.
So they will come up with any excuse not to hire more people or if someone of good quality
leaves they will only hire someone lower quality i.e. lower pay.
That is the problem with corporate culture everyone is there looking only after number one,
as long as the job is getting done they don't care how much those doing it care about the
company or that they are doing their jobs efficiently, cost effective or to a high
standard.
All they care about is that the job is getting done.
Stories like this is why I gave up trying. Used to, I would change my plans to do a last
minute cutover on the weekend because you changed the date 3 different times. These days, my
response is always, "I have an opening 3 weeks from now".....because I don't let it fuck up
my life anymore. Frankly, nothing has happened since I started giving those answers. What are
they going to do anyways? Hire someone else? pffft.
Christ, I felt bad for myself when I quit MY job but goddamn, you were in a
shithole! Glad you found something better.
I still hear from people at my old job that nothing has changed. They hire someone else
but never fix the problems. Overworked, understaffed, complaints are listened too with great
concern and then ignored.
It does sound very much like they're, perhaps unwittingly, taking advantage of you and you're
right to want to leave a job that's damaging your life so terribly.
I mean, works sucks most of the time, but it doesn't have to suck ALL the time and there
should be at least enough people to have the work ease off from time to time or you just go
manic from the stress.
Everybody expects different things from their job and not all jobs are right for all
people. IMO, life is too short to spend it doing a job you hate or working in a toxic
environment. I applaud your efforts to try and improve things but ultimately you've got to
draw a line where enough is enough and just move on. Do what's right by you, because your
company is working every day to do what's right by them and not necessarily what's good for
you.
Something sounds off. You talked to the ceo about what they can do, and they have their own
headend, but won't outsource the printers? That's always the first thing that needs to be
sourced out because it's petty shit like toner or pain in ass like the fuser.
Sounds like they needed someone to streamline the processes, and have 2-3 more people on
board. A senior network guy and two more minions eager to learn and take those 'patch cable
broken' or port security tickets.
You were used hard and long and have been fed bad advice. You should have left that place
long ago and hopefully this lesson will stick with you forever.
The same two questions, every time, before you go looking. And then the third, when you have
an offer on the table (sometimes it's one you went looking for, sometimes it's one that just
appeared in your inbox).
Are you happy? If not, why not?
Will a different job make you happier?
Will this opportunity make you happier?
Sometimes the problem is at home, and changing your work life might help (if it brings
more money or a shorter commute), and sometimes it won't. Sometimes the problem is at work,
and you can influence change either within the organization or within yourself (changing your
expectations, adjusting your work schedule to be earlier or later, discussing with your
management group about changes to your role, etc) in order to improve the situation. Or you
improve your work situation by leaving it behind, if there is no way to improve it or the
people who can help improve it are unwilling (or themselves unable) to do so.
Yes, sometimes the easy opportunities for change just aren't there, and you need to make
harder decisions about the change your life needs. In those moments one should be grateful
for what they have, but it doesn't necessarily mean they should accept that this is their lot
in life. Maybe you need to move. Maybe you're looking for a remote position. Maybe you take
the plunge and live off savings for a few months -- though unless you're on the verge of a
breakdown, this can cause complications later; it's generally true that it is easier to find
a job if you have a job. Not universally, but generally. Maybe you give up IT and become a
Birthday Clown, because you enjoy making children happy more than you enjoy clicking buttons
anymore.
Best of luck to you in your new place, hopefully it works out!
Are your friends in IT in any way? I find that most people have no idea what IT means, or the
individual fields. They expect the same person who helps them with spreadsheets also
makes/updates the websites, sets up the phone system, maintains the network.. and may even
think they plug in their power bar. Most people can't discern the difference between
facilities, an electrician and someone in one of the many fields of IT in my experience.
Heck, at my company the executives have no idea what I do. They ask me to do things from
investigate and roll out MDM.. to go to one of our communities and setup one of the
resident's televisions. I've even been asked to install generator power outlets.. I've just
learned to say "no" and explain to them who's responsibility it is. If they are unwilling to
hire someone or even just bring the proper person from within the organization, the problem
can stay a problem.
Your friends may not be crappy, they might just be clueless.
The CEO found out and we sat down ... He puts that responsibility on me.
I've seen my own managers do the same, and still am thinking through if, when and how it's
a mistake. Managers are there to support and enable important things happening. If it's a
small thing then all they need to do is give you permission to do it. But if it's a big thing
then they need to mange it, e.g track it, ask how it's going, ask what you need, get
other people involved, set priorities etc. Not just give a pep talk, say "it's on you now"
and wash hands of it. That basically means, "cheer up, but I don't care". If I wanted someone
to listen carefully and then do nothing about it I'd go to therapy, thanks.
Being that IT is generally a self-taught field, where we can play around with and test things
before doing them in production...
I recommend sticking to jobs where you're doing commonly reproducible/testable software
stuff. i.e. standard Windows/Linux servers + standard software. Basically things that can be
completely learned and tested in virtual machines, without needing any special hardware at
all.
I reckon all the proprietary "black box" / vendor specific devices etc you mentioned make
working in "IT" much much more stressful. You basically have to learn a whole heap of
different systems where what you learn is only applicable to one device. And you can't easily
play around with them like you can with pure software and virtual machines etc. So you're
often learning & testing in production, and even then, only once something has already
failed. And you're likely not going to have spare parts, or even be able to get them easily.
The same goes for network engineers dealing with lots of cisco routers etc to a certain
degree. Basically anything that involves hardware except for standard PCs and servers running
Windows or Linux.
I worked for a post-production company for a while, and yeah it was similar. I was busy as
fuck with the regular standard everyday IT shit, yet still had the responsibly to figure out
all there proprietary devices etc that I'd never even heard of before. And because they're
not commonplace IT stuff, there's fuckall information on the internet to learn about them and
troubleshoot etc. And of course learning about that shit doesn't translate into useful skills
you can take elsewhere in other IT jobs.
So yeah these days, I'm 100% software. I actually do IT consulting part time, and even
when my clients want to buy hardware, I just give them some recommendations and get them to
order it directly from Dell or whoever. I don't want to be responsible for hardware failures,
of which I have zero control over.
OP I'm in the same boat. COO found out that my medial issues I may jump ship. Had a chat and
he said he would do everything to get people hired. My boss has had approval for hiring for
weeks now and not one person has been interviewed. I have also been thinking about getting
medicated because I'm in denial with work. I'm going to jump ship soon take time off and see
what happens.
That is what MSP is. MSP is the environment where self-driven, stoic people survive and other
people crumble. MSP is especially tough in the role like yours as you have no one to rely on
anymore, but everyone else is coming to you to fix a problem they can't figure out. I am
there, been there for awhile. People think you are smarter than them, but all you are is more
persistent and willing to sacrifice your sanity and your free time to figure out a problem by
going to 10th page of google and performing advanced search queries on reddit.
I think MSP life after age of 35 is impossible to do unless you are crazy. :)
You were in an impossible situation with really shit poor management. Don't waste a second
thought. They'll either figure out why they can't keep people or they'll fail in spectacular
fashion. The bottom line is you have to protect yourself and your interests, you owe that
company nothing. The only time you owe a company that isn't your own is if the company makes
significant investment in your and your career, which your former company clearly didn't.
Good for you on recognizing that you had options. In many ways in that former situation you
were the one with the power and its great that you exercised it.
I went through practically the same thing. Found a nice job down the street from my house I
could just walk to. They had a full web team to handle all their websites and web problems,
but their skills were about 20 years old. At first I didn't notice because I would handle IT
/ network problems all day.
Then eventually I started getting web site issues pushed to me, then web design issues.
Eventually I was building all their web sites and running their entire web platform while
everyone else on that team just sat around all day making emails. All this extra work never
came with any pay increase and everyone would always say "You do everything here, if you
leave we're screwed".
A day came when there was a landslide of issues combined with an HR nightmare and nobody
seemed to wanted to handle anything. By the end of the day I realized I had wanted to leave
the job for over a year and I was only staying to keep things together until I got everything
to a stable point. Unfortunately this place could never reach a stable point because their
management was an absolute shit show and never wanted to step up to face any big
problems.
This seems really common after reading some stories here. A good amount of IT people
probably feel obligated to keep things running even when they hate their job.
I also found a remote job with a ridiculous salary increase after going through so many
interviews to the point of utter mental exhaustion. The grass definitely can be greener
sometimes its just much harder to find than you would ever think.
Iberiano says:
September 29, 2018 at 11:47 am GMT 300 Words Looking at that photo of the former primary
contenders, reminded me of all the holier-than-though talk we got from the right-of-center,
about how Trump was too gruff, and crass, about everything, including sexual topics,
interactions with women, etc.
What these hearings demonstrated, that we already knew, was that the Puritan-Jew alliance is
obsessed with all things sexual, perverted, distasteful theirs is a world of, as you
point out, "preppy white boy" fantasies, where the bad guys look like the blond jock in Karate
Kid, and drive around in their Dad's 1982 Buick Regal or their own '79 Camero, looking to
"score" with virginal know-nothing, Red Riding Hoods, that happen to find themselves at 'gang
rape parties' (?), out of nowhere. Who go on to have Leftist careers only to resurrect
repressed memories 35 years later–projected in front of the world
It's a silly framework from which they obsess, but it's similar to Kinsey, Mead and others
of the Left. Sex. Projection, doubling-down, and an absence of due process to punish people for
the very things that actually occupy their minds. Even in her advanced age, you could
tell, Feinstein was enjoying the open air discussions regarding sexual topics.
Let the Right / Never-Trumpers be on notice–Trump is light fare compared to where the
Left will go and has been, regarding women, sex, and all things crass.
Those are signs of political crisis, not the other way around
Notable quotes:
"... The historical parallel is American social and political polarization in the decades prior to the American Civil War. It is conceivable martial law and military power will resolve the conflict and contradictions not reconciled by rule of law and politics. ..."
I am concerned about dysfunction and incivility
in American culture and politics.
The historical parallel is American social and political polarization in the decades
prior to the American Civil War. It is conceivable martial law and military power will resolve
the conflict and contradictions not reconciled by rule of law and politics.
This topic was raised when Senator Lindsey Graham questioned Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the
confirmation hearings.
See YouTube video: Senator Lindsey Graham Questions Brett Kavanaugh Military Law vs Criminal Law.
"... My take on Rosenstein is he went to the WH to force Trump to accept his resignation or fire him or keep him and thus shut him up either way because even as large a fool as Trump can't be so stupid as to fire RR before the midterms. A trap laid by the Deputy AG not the media imho to also take heat off Mueller. ..."
Last Friday the New York Times published
a story that reflected negatively on the loyalty of Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein towards President Trump. Rosenstein, the NYT claimed, suggested to
wiretap Trump and to remove him by using the 25th amendment. Other news reports contradicted
the claim and Rosenstein himself denied it.
The report was a trap to push Trump towards an impulsive firing of the number two in the
Justice Department, a repeat of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre . The
Democrats would have profited from such an ' October surprise ' in the November 6
midterm elections. A campaign to exploit such a scandal to get-out-the-votes was already
well prepared .
The trap did not work. The only one who panicked was Rosenstein. He feared for his
reputation should he get fired. To prevent such damage he offered to resign amicably. He
tried this at least three times:
By Friday evening, concerned about testifying to Congress over the revelations that he
discussed wearing a wire to the Oval Office and invoking the constitutional trigger to
remove Mr. Trump from office, Mr. Rosenstein had become convinced that he should resign,
according to people close to him. He offered during a late-day visit to the White House to
quit, according to one person familiar with the encounter, but John F. Kelly, the White
House chief of staff, demurred.
...
Also over the weekend, Mr. Rosenstein again told Mr. Kelly that he was considering
resigning. On Sunday, Mr. Rosenstein repeated the assertion in a call with Donald F. McGahn
II, the White House counsel. Mr. McGahn -- [...] -- asked Mr. Rosenstein to postpone their
discussion until Monday.
...
By about 9 a.m. Monday, Mr. Rosenstein was in his office on the fourth floor of the Justice
Department when reporters started calling. Was it true that Mr. Rosenstein was planning to
resign, they asked.
...
At the White House the deputy attorney general slipped into a side entrance to the West
Wing and headed to the White House counsel's office to meet with Mr. McGahn, who had by
then been told by Mr. Kelly that Mr. Rosenstein was on his way and wanted to resign.
McGhan punted the issue back to Kelly and finally Rosenstein spoke with Trump. Trump did
not fire him nor did he resign. It is now
expected that he will stay until the end of the year or even
longer :
President Trump told advisers he is open to keeping Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
on the job, and allies of the No. 2 Justice Department official said Tuesday he has given
them the impression he doesn't plan to quit.
The trap did not work. Neither did Trump panic nor did the White House allow the panicking
Rod Rosenstein to pull the trigger. The people who set this up, by leaking some dubious FBI
memo to the NYT , did not achieve their aims.
There are only six weeks left until the midterm elections. What other October surprises
might be planned by either side?
Posted by b on September 26, 2018 at 11:20 AM |
Permalink
This account gives an interesting twist, that Trump wants to keep Rosenstein
as leverage.
I think it is not in the interest of Trump to do anything that could look like hampering the
Mueller investigation. It might be in his interest to try to force Mueller to show what he
has bevore the midterm elections, but that could also be seen as a form of hampering.
I think there are already lots of indications that the whole Russiagate collusion story
was fabricated. The messages between Peter Strzok und Lisa Page point towards this direction,
and it seems that different stories that were used for Russiagate were connected.
It seems that the Steele dossier played a crucial role for getting warrants for spying on
the Trump campaign and for starting the media campaign about Trump-Russia "collusion".
Obviously, the Steele dossier is a rather implausible conspiracy theory (allegedly, Russia
made preparations for Trump's candidacy years earlier when hardly anyone thought Trump would
have the slightest chance of being nominated by a major party), contains no evidence for the
allegations, and the elements that can be verified are either banal and don't show collusion
or they are false (e.g. Trump's lawyer going to Prague, it seems he has an alibi, and there
are leaks that there was another person named Michael Cohen, without a connection to Trump,
who flew to Prague, so Steele probably had access to flight data, but did not do further
verifications).
A further strand of "Russiagate" is the story around Papadopoulos. First, it should be
noted that it hardly shows foreknowledge of the DNC leaks when someone may have speculated
that Russia may have e-mails from Hillary Clinton - at that time, the deleted mails from
Clinton's private server were talked about a lot, and one of the concerns that was often
mentioned was that Clinton's private server may have been hacked by Russia or China. None of
the versions of what Papadopoulos was allegedly told by Mifsud and told Downer specifically
mention DNC or Podesta e-mails. Second, the people involved had close connections to Western
intelligence services. Mifsud had close ties with important EU institutions and was connected
with educational institutions used by Western intelligence agencies (mainly Italian, British,
FBI). If he really was a Russian spy, there would have been larger consequences, and the FBI
would hardly have let him go after questioning him. According to a book by Roh and Pastor who
have known Mifsud for a long time, he denies having told Papadopoulos anything about damaging
material about Hillary Clinton (Mifsud also said that in an interview), and Mifsud suspects
Papadopoulos of being a provocateur of Western intelligence services - Papadopoulos
forcefully tried to create connections between the Trump campaign and Russians, but both
sides were not willing to go along (a representative of a Russian think tank which
Papadopoulos asked to invite Trump answered that the Trump campaign should send an official
request, which never followed). Papadopoulos was in (probably frequent) contact with FBI
informer Stefan Halper, and it may be that Papadopoulos was an unwitting provocateur because
of events Stefan Halper arranged. The Australian diplomat Downer has connections to the
Clinton foundation (he helped arranging large payments by Australia) and Western secret
services. Third, what has exactly been said by whom is disputed. As mentioned, Mifsud denies
mentioning anything about damaging material on Hillary Clinton to Papadopoulos (the only one
who claims this is Papadopoulos), and Papadopoulos denies mentioning e-mails to Downer. It
seems, Papadopoulos were only half-willing participants in the setup arranged by Stefan
Halper whose goal was to have some background for the message that could be received from
Downer. Papadopoulos' wife has shared a picture of Stefan Halper and Downer together, which
also fits the idea that this story was set up by FBI informant Halper with Downer.
The visit of the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya was arranged by Fusion GPS, and she met with
him before and after the meeting she met with Glen Simpson.
Of course, we are just in the beginning, there is certainly enough concrete material for
starting an investigation (unlike with the alleged Trump-Russia collusion), but many details
are still open. Those who presumably set up the collusion story went from offensive to
defensive, even if that might not be clear if someone reads particularly biased media. Now,
the time until the midterms certainly is not enough for conducting and concluding such an
investigation. But it should be enough for unclassifying and publishing some documents that
shed further light on these events.
The time for more decisive action against those who set up Russiagate may be after the
midterm elections, and how easy that will be probably partly depends on the election result.
Therefore, I suppose that Trump and other Republicans will strongly press for important
documents being unclassified and published before the elections.
Trump admin and GOP Congress are doing almost everything possible to alienate the majority of
the public on a wide spectrum of issues that's also helped threaten the positions of
Republicans masquerading as Democrats. The fallout from the 2016 Primary and subsequent
disclosures about Clinton and DNC corruption and law breaking--meddling in elections and
caucuses--has emboldened numerous people--particularly women--who were previously politically
apathetic, not just to run for office, but also to work to get like-minded candidates
elected. Sanders called for an insurrection--and yes, he's still sheep dogging--and it's
emerged and isn't totally controlled by the DemParty despite its efforts: The cat's out of
the bag.
Now I expect the usual attacks using the trite adage that voting doesn't matter. Well,
guess what, Trump's election proves that adage to be 100% false. There's only one path to
making America Great and that's by getting the neoliberals and neocons out of government; and
the only way to do that is to run candidates with opposing positions and elect
them--then--once in office, they need to oust the vermin from the bureaucracy--Drain the
Swamp, as Trump put it. I know it can be done as it's been done before during two different
epochs of US History. And the System was just as rigged against popular success than as it is
now.
Karlof1 I agree w you 100%. Voters can make a difference and change is still possible however
unlikely and rare. The problem is voter complacency which is fed by cynicism. Ironically
younger liberal voters tend to be the most complacent especially at the midterm elections.
This year complacency doesn't appear to be an issue so we will probably see a Dem House in
January if not also a Dem Senate.
My take on Rosenstein is he went to the WH to force Trump to accept his resignation or
fire him or keep him and thus shut him up either way because even as large a fool as Trump
can't be so stupid as to fire RR before the midterms. A trap laid by the Deputy AG not the
media imho to also take heat off Mueller.
Trump could shock the world by being on his best behavior for a few weeks. (j/k don't hold
your breath).
Just a little review:
In November, Dems are expected to take the House of Representatives by a modest margin.
The House, not the Senate determines impeachment. Impeachment is like an indictment -- the
Senate would then have a "trial" of sorts, and then to convict, you need 2/3 majority of
Senators. Nobody expects that.
Nixon actually resigned out of shame after being impeached. Clinton didn't. Trump gives
zero f**ks so this outcome isn't even worth discussing.
The Senate is more important. It is just barely within reach for Democrats if everything
goes in their favor. If they win every single seat that is competitive, Democrats get 51/100
seats, plus 2 independents who side with them, but minus a couple of Democrats-in-name-only
who regularly vote with Republicans (West Virginia's Manchin for example). Recall that the
Vice President (Pence) is the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
More realistically, in a still optimistic scenario, Democrats will lose one or more of the
competitive races, and end up with 49-50 votes in the Senate. (they are expected to win big
in 2 years in 2020, due to many more Republicans facing re-election then).
Only someone morbidly partisan within the Corporate One-Party would bother seeking the
impeachment of a fungible geek like a US president. Indeed, those fixated on impeachment
evidently have no rationale beyond Trump Derangement Syndrome. To replace Trump with Pence
would be no improvement and most likely would make things worse. Trump and Pence share the
corporate globalization ideology and goals, but Trump's more chaotic execution is more likely
to lead to chaotic, perhaps system-destructive effects more quickly than a more disciplined
execution. The same is true of any Democrat we could envision replacing Trump in 2020.
That's why it was a good thing that Trump won in 2016: He's more likely to bring about a
faster collapse of the US empire and of the globalization system in general. Not because
these are his goals, but because his indiscipline adds a much-needed wild card to the
deck.
Needless to say, humanity and the Earth have nothing to lose, as we're slowly but surely
being exterminated once and for all regardless.
@Justsaying
Trump's infamous campaign slogan of MAGA quickly mutated into MIGA which is the originally
intended version anyways. Obedience to Israel has become a norm in presidential election
campaigns. Even the disenfranchised minority caucuses, including and especially the Black one
is firmly in Israel's pockets now. The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced
to making the odd noise after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop.
"The Black leadership role has now been essentially reduced to making the odd noise
after the shooting of an unarmed Black by a White cop."
As a brown person in Asia I grew up inculcated with the idea that I must always be in
solidarity with black people in America and they would be with me (it was the 1970s, Malcolm
X was still a fresh memory, Muhammad Ali still strode the scene like a colossus, and Martin
Luther King Jr was still thought of as a hero in most circles).
Today, black Americans are people so wallowing in self abnegation that they mass voted for
the racist war criminal Killary Clinton, owing to whose actions black people in America were
incarcerated in hitherto unknown numbers; due to whose crimes black people in Haiti were
looted to destitution; because of whom black people in Libya are literally being sold as
slaves. Black Americans parade around saying "black lives matter", but are more than happy
voting for war criminals who loot Haitian blacks, enslave Libyan blacks, massacre Somali
blacks, deprive Sudanese blacks of life saving drugs, and plot to imperialistically occupy
Africa, a continent of black people. Forget about us brown people, to American blacks in
2018, black lives do *not* matter.
Only virtue signalling and tribal identity matters. Nothing else.
CNN: Former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo weighs in on who he believes wrote the
anonymously authored op-ed published in the New York Times that was highly critical of
President Donald Trump.
Caputo also said the real writer of the piece is a ghostwriter in terms of looking for the
person behind the piece. Caputo said he believes the person is a woman.
"The language of the op-ed is useless to look at because it's a ghostwriter," he said.
"I think, first of all, this person will never admit it. In my mind, the author of this
op-ed believes that she is a hero to the American people," Caputo also said.
MICHAEL CAPUTO, FMR. TRUMP ADVISOR: I'm fairly certain I know who it is. I've been going
through this parlor game like everybody else has and I am also completely 100% certain that
the person who wrote this is on the list of people who said they didn't write it.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN HOST: Alright. So who do you think it is?
CAPUTO: I'm not going to go into that. My attorney tells me it's a bad idea. But I can
tell you think...
WHITFIELD: You consulted your attorney. You said I think I know who this is based on
certain language that was and you consulted your attorney and your attorney says don't reveal
it?
CAPUTO: Right. Based on language. Based on the fact that I believe these kinds of people
leave a trail of crumbs when they are trying to deceive people around them. This is the way
it is always is. And if the president looks at key departments of his government that has
been purged of all Trump supporters that is a good place to start, and that actually exists.
Trump supporters have been purged from this government for 18 months. Last week I spent the
evening with several friends of mine from the Trump campaign: all of them have been forced
out of the Trump administration. ...
I don't think this person is in the White House... this person really has to be high up.
It's got to be a deputy, secretary-level, or higher, otherwise The New York Times is
misleading people.
WHITFIELD: Do you believe it is someone who has taken an oath?
CAPUTO: I believe so...
The White House political office and others have kind of shrugged off the idea about
losing the House and maybe being impeached because the Senate won't do anything. They won't
convict the president on the charges of impeachment. But I think when we find out who this
person is, and the president team should find out, we're going to find out this person has
real deep and abiding ties to Congress and this op-ed is one step closer not just to
impeachment but conviction...
I started with this. Who is the person who I believe hates the president the most? Who is
the person in the administration who has screamed about him in their own private office and
gone forward and purged their entire office of Trump people? ...
I think, first of all, this person will never admit it. In my mind, the author of this
op-ed believes that she is a hero to the American people.
Sic Semper Tyrannis has published a response to the Rosenstein fantastic "Indictment of
Trolls" (Part II): "Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU," by Publius Tacitus
http://www.turcopolier.typepad.com
"Assistant Attorney General Rosenstein announced a bizarre indictment against Russian
military intelligence operatives today that, rather than confirming the case of "Russian
meddling" in the U.S. 2016 Presidential election raises more questions. Here are the major
oddities:
1. How did the FBI obtain information about activity on the DNC and DCCC servers when the
DNC/DCCC refused to give the Feds access to the servers/computers?
2. Why does Crowdstrike get credit as being a competent computer security firm when,
according to the indictment, they completely and utterly failed to stop the "hacks?
"
3. Why does the indictment refuse to name Wikileaks by name as the Russian collaborator? Here
is the bottomline–if US officials knew as early as April that Russia was hacking the
DNC, why did it take US officials more than six months to stop the activity? The statement of
"facts" contained in the indictment also raises another troubling issue–what is the
source of the information? For example, if the FBI was not given access to the DNC/DCCC
servers and computers then how do they know what happened on specific dates as alleged in the
complaint?"
-- Why does the US national security hang on the opinions and concoctions of a visceral
Russophobe Dm. Alperovitch (a ziocon) who is an "expert" (together with the badly uneducated
Elliot Higgins) at the thoroughly corrupted and zionized Atlantic Council?
-- What kind of antisemite has been working hard to make the US Jewry at large suspected in a
massive conspiracy and treason against the United States of America?
Here is the context for the "Indictment of Trolls" (Paty II):
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/62c97j/the_awan_brothers_compromised_at_least_80/
"The Awan brothers compromised at least 80 congressional computers and got paid 5 million to
do it. We may never know the extent of the breach.
After compromising the Congress' networks for 12 years they do a quick cleanup by breaking in
to 20 congressional offices, store data in an off site server before running of to Pakistan
and the D.C. Police are investigating. But wait there's more
Imran Awan has a longtime relationship with some members of Congress, including working for
Meeks and Becerra starting in 2004 and joining Wasserman Schultz's office in 2005. The IT
staffer position expanded to include more than 30 representatives, including work under
congressional members who were members of top secret level congressional committees (DHS,
Foreign affairs, Select intelligence committee).
Although personal office computers are not supposed to be used for Intelligence Committee
business or classified material, accessing these computers is a high priority for foreign
intelligence services because of the information they could glean about the committee's work
from unclassified emails.
• The brothers are suspected of serious violations including accessing members' computer
networks without their knowledge and stealing equipment from Congress, over billing congress
for work and parts, transferring data to a remote server, and bypassing normal security
protocols for IT staff. Their Democrat benefactors allowed the breech of policy for the sake
of convenience.
• The Awans operated an external server, which is against all protocols concerning
secured government information.
Further, there were instances where House information was discovered in an external "cloud"
server. The contractors in question reportedly were sending and storing House-related
information in that off-site server.
• The Awans had special access to the White House and for Visas.
• Multiple Democratic lawmakers have yet to cut ties with House staffers under criminal
investigation for wide-ranging equipment and data theft."
– Hey, Mueller! Hey, Rosenstein! Do your job.
The letter from the Democrats on the Gang of 8 to Coats, Rosenstein and Wray is
something. Asking them to be insubordinate by refusing the order of the President to
release unredacted documents & communications. What were the verbal assurances these
apparatchiks gave the Democrats? Did they agree to withhold information from their boss?
As Col. Lang has stated numerous times the President is the ultimate classification
authority except for atomic secrets. Coats, Rosenstein & Wray I'm sure know that. If
they disagree with his declassification order they can always resign. Insubordination is
a fireable offense.
Journalist Sara Carter told Sean Hannity during his Wednesday radio show that the FBI has
two sets of records in the Russia investigation, and that "certain people above Peter Strzok
and above Lisa Page" were aware of it - implicating former FBI Director James Comey and his #2,
Andrew McCabe.
Hannity : Sara, I'm hearing it gets worse than this–that there is potentially out
there–if you will, two sets of record among the upper echelon of the FBI–one that
was real one that was made for appearances . Is there any truth to this?
Carter : Absolutely, Sean . With the number of sources that I have been speaking with as
well as some others that there is evidence indicating that the FBI had separate sets of
books.
I will not name names until all of the evidence is out there, but there were certain
people above Peter Strzok and above Lisa Page that were aware of this . I also believe that
there are people within the FBI that have actually turned on their former employers and are
possibly even testifying and reporting what happened inside the FBI to both the Inspector
General and possibly even a Grand Jury.
First, let me say I voted for Trump as a "Disrupter" and to that end he has exceeded
expectations.
The book starts out great through the first 5 or 6 chapters, but then becomes a bit
convoluted. The bottom line of the book and reality is that Trump is surrounded by apprentice
scoundrels, and that he is the boss scoundrel.
He demands loyalty but gives none. As a Former Marine I would not follow him into battle;
I would never have the opportunity because he and his sons would never go into harm's
way.
The best of the book was the hinted forthcoming bombshells, that never exploded. Woodward
dropped the ball on this one, and as an author myself, it's nice to see even the big boys,
Simon & Schuster, have editing issues.
None of the Times' sources are named - except one: Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, or rather his memos about the
meetings with Rosenstein and other officials.
The number two official at the Justice Department wanted to secretly record President Donald Trump so as to impeach him, claims
the New York Times. Spoiler Alert: Rod Rosenstein denies the claim, but does it matter in the swamp?
"Rod Rosenstein Suggested Secretly Recording Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment" the Times blared in a breaking news headline
on Friday afternoon, adding that the deputy attorney general also discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the
constitutional provision for removing Trump from office.
The Times would have its readers believe that Rosenstein was surprised when Trump used his memo to justify the firing of FBI
Director James Comey in May 2017, and sought to enlist AG Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly –now the
White House chief of staff– to support him in ousting Trump.
Hard to know the truthfulness of anything coming from the NYT. Rosenstein denies the story and says there is no basis for
invoking the 25th amendment against Trump. The story might be disinformation to provoke a response from Trump.
Still Rosenstein has been slow walking the release of FISA related documents, and it's hard to trust him. This Russia
investigation is a witcvh hunt , and Rosenstein has been right at the center of it. If Rosenstein was fair minded he would have
shut this yard sale down a long time ago. In the meantime, Trump is looking more and more like a victim. I'd probably wait for the
documents to come out and let the pressure build on Sessions and Rosenstein.
If this latest revelation from the New
York Times doesn't drive President Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, or
convince Congress to impeach him, then we can't imagine what would.
In a shocking report citing a bevy of anonymous DOJ officials, the NYT recounted on Friday
an aborted mutiny attempt organized by Rosenstein, who allegedly tried to organize members of
Trump's cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment to oust Trump from office. In an attempt to
persuade the clearly reluctant members of Trump's cabinet, Rosenstein suggested that he or
other officials should secretly tape Trump "to expose the chaos" he said was engulfing the West
Wing. According to NYT, the sources were either briefed on Rosenstein's plans, or learned about
it from the files of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired after being
disgraced by an inspector general investigation.
ABC News, which also reported the story, cited sources familiar with McCabe's files. A
grand jury is also weighing whether to press charges against McCabe for allegedly misleading
the inspector general.
Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th
Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials.
Several people described the episodes, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal
deliberations. The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by
F.B.I. officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, then the acting bureau director, that
documented Mr. Rosenstein's actions and comments.
None of Mr. Rosenstein's proposals apparently came to fruition. It is not clear how
determined he was about seeing them through, though he did tell Mr. McCabe that he might be
able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of
homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the
25th Amendment.
According to the NYT, this all happened during the spring of 2017, shortly after Trump cited
a letter that Rosenstein had penned criticizing former FBI Director James Comey's handling of
the Clinton probe as justification to fire Comey. Rosenstein reportedly felt he had been "used"
by the president as an excuse to fire Comey. Rosenstein soon began telling colleagues that he
would ultimately be "vindicated" for his role in Comey's firing. Around the same time, he began
to express his displeasure with Trump's handling of the hiring process for Comey's
replacement.
The president's reliance on his memo caught Mr. Rosenstein by surprise, and he became
angry at Mr. Trump, according to people who spoke to Mr. Rosenstein at the time. He grew
concerned that his reputation had suffered harm and wondered whether Mr. Trump had motives
beyond Mr. Comey's treatment of Mrs. Clinton for ousting him, the people said.
A determined Mr. Rosenstein began telling associates that he would ultimately be
"vindicated" for his role in the matter. One week after the firing, Mr. Rosenstein met with
Mr. McCabe and at least four other senior Justice Department officials, in part to explain
his role in the situation.
During their discussion, Mr. Rosenstein expressed frustration at how Mr. Trump had
conducted the search for a new F.B.I. director, saying the president was failing to take the
candidate interviews seriously. A handful of politicians and law enforcement officials,
including Mr. McCabe, were under consideration.
Rosenstein also tried to recruit some of his would-be co-conspirators to surreptitiously
record Trump in the Oval Office.
Mr. Rosenstein then raised the idea of wearing a recording device or "wire," as he put it,
to secretly tape the president when he visited the White House. One participant asked whether
Mr. Rosenstein was serious, and he replied animatedly that he was.
However, although Rosenstein "appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional" during what can
only be described as a coup attempt against a sitting president, even the paper admit that his
conduct in attempting to solicit the illicit wiretapping of a sitting president was extremely
reckless and unwarranted, and that, if uncovered, it could be used as grounds to fire
Rosenstein.
If not him, then Mr. McCabe or other F.B.I. officials interviewing with Mr. Trump for the
job could perhaps wear a wire or otherwise record the president, Mr. Rosenstein offered.
White House officials never checked his phone when he arrived for meetings there, Mr.
Rosenstein added, implying it would be easy to secretly record Mr. Trump.
The suggestion itself was remarkable. While informants or undercover agents regularly use
concealed listening devices to surreptitiously gather evidence for federal investigators,
they are typically targeting drug kingpins and Mafia bosses in criminal investigations, not a
president viewed as ineffectively conducting his duties.
In the end, the idea went nowhere, the officials said. But they called Mr. Rosenstein's
comments an example of how erratically he was behaving while he was taking part in the
interviews for a replacement F.B.I. director, considering the appointment of a special
counsel and otherwise running the day-to-day operations of the more than 100,000 people at
the Justice Department.
The Times and ABC reported that Rosenstein told McCabe that he believed Attorney General
Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly would go along with the plan.
Another source said they believed Rosenstein was being sarcastic when he made the comment about
recording Trump
One source who was in the meeting confirmed that Rosenstein did make a remark about
recording Trump with the use of a wire. But the source insists: "The statement was sarcastic
and was never discussed with any intention of recording a conversation with the
president."
Rosenstein has decried the story as "factually incorrect" and said that "based on my
personal dealings" with the president, that there isn't any basis to invoke the 25th amendment.
This, of course, is tantamount to a deep state insider admitting that there is no factual basis
to impeach Trump.
Mr. Rosenstein disputed this account.
"The New York Times's story is inaccurate and factually incorrect," he said in a
statement. "I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are
obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let
me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis
to invoke the 25th Amendment."
A lawyer representing McCabe told CNN and the Times that his client had documented his
conversations in Rosenstein in a series of memos, which he later turned over to Mueller more
than a year ago. However, a set of those memos was left at the FBI when McCabe departed.
McCabe's lawyer, Michael Bromwich, said in a statement to CNN that his client "drafted
memos to memorialize significant discussions he had with high level officials and preserved
them so he would have an accurate, contemporaneous record of those discussions."
"When he was interviewed by the special counsel more than a year ago, he gave all of his
memos - classified and unclassified - to the special counsel's office. A set of those memos
remained at the FBI at the time of his departure in late January 2018. He has no knowledge of
how any member of the media obtained those memos," Bromwich added.
The
Washington Post reported that FBI lawyer Lisa Page (the former lover of disgraced FBI
special agent Peter Strzok) was also at the meeting where wiretapping was discussed. WaPo also
said that McCabe had pushed for the DOJ to open an investigation into the president, to which
Rosenstein replied, "what do you want to do Andy, wire the president?"
While Rosenstein and Trump clearly never saw eye to eye, the level of resentment that
Rosenstein harbored toward the president was not previously known. Unsurprisingly, the story
has already fired up speculation that Rosenstein may have been the anonymous administration
official who penned a critical op-ed that was published earlier this month in the New York
Times. Underscoring the seriousness of these allegations, CNN
reported that the McCabe memos that were described to ABC and the Times have been turned over
to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
iinthesky , 13 minutes ago
Try to remember this is the New York Times. This is suspect and there is a motive in
publishing this now.. they want Trump to fire Rosenshmuck before the elections.
Debt Slave , 12 minutes ago
Recall Strzok's behavior during his testimony. It couldn't be more obvious if they took
out a full page ad in the New York Times.
LaugherNYC , 1 hour ago
This is coming from McCabe.
Trying to get a deal. Remember what he screamed when he heard that he was under
investigation: "If they **** with my pension I will burn this place to the ground!!"
Well, he's got the gas and the matches. He doesn't want to go to prison where Hillary's
people can shank him. He's letting some tidbits out now to convince Huber he will do more
damage from outside than inside.
I say **** HIM. Let him burn it down. Sessions is recused - not his fault.
McCabe needs to do 3-5 in a FedPen for his lies and cover-ups. Tried to quash the Weiner
laptop and impede a Federal investigation. Repeatedly leaked information to misdirect and
interfere with a Federal investigation.
A top, trained intel officer. Lock him the hell up. This is the kind of "patriot" who
comes up through the Deep State system to run the alphabet agencies that work day and night
to protect America from the sunlight its intel community so desperately needs on those who
sell out the rank-and-file, hardworking true patriots for their own boundless ambition.
Strzok and Page come next.
Burn out the poison vipers' nests.
1970SSNova396 , 1 hour ago
Read the article and you better understand why the NYT is throwing Rosenstein under the
bus.
Holy shite. I'm getting a feeling that this is ready to EXPLODE on the world stage. And
implicate Britain and Australia as in on the scam. I'm getting the sense, the Brits called
Trump and begged him not to let this come completely to light. Trump has ALL these
motherfuckers by the balls now. I just hope and pray that ******* arrogant poser Obama is
sweating bullets right now.
I cant even imagine how this all plays out. These arrogant ******* Nee World Order pieces
of ****,especially both Clinton's, Obama and most if not ALL of his senior administration
just felt entitled to do whatever the **** they wanted, the ends justify the means, the
Constitution and the people be damned. These people really to need to endure a special type
of hell. If this charade doesn't warrant it, what does? To Big To Fail comes to mind, though.
This might be SO big, Trump actually has to manage the shitshow...or the train goes off the
rails.
This guy quit the week before The Don took the keys to the white house.....Imagine that.
As you might recall Judge Nap at Fox stated that the Obama Cabal used the brits to spy on
Trump and then was place in timeout for 2 weeks. He returned and double downed on his
statement.
KimAsa , 16 minutes ago
The swamp turning on each other. Love it.
dems will lose 5 senate incumbent seats at midterms and offset one. The dems will not win
over the Senate.
the dem running in AZ has a bit of a past that is catching up to her now.
The dems will lose the House handily.
Keyser , 25 minutes ago
Enough is enough... Time to drag rat-faced Rosenstein out of the FBI in chains, then put
him on an airplane to Gitmo and charge him with sedition... This scum sucking ****** needs a
refresher course in the LAW, military law that is...
iinthesky , 23 minutes ago
Not now.. after november
pelican , 13 minutes ago
**** it
iinthesky , 13 minutes ago
Try to remember this is the New York Times. This is suspect and there is a motive in
publishing this now.. they want Trump to fire Rosenshmuck before the elections.
bigrooster , 14 minutes ago
Hmm the last name seems like a Tribe member. I am sure that there is no connection. But
Trump's daughter and granddaughter are now members of the Tribe. I would die before taking
that mark. I guess we now know what the Number of The Beast is...join the Tribe or die/starve
in the near future. Good thing we of faith know who wins in the end.
SunRise , 15 minutes ago
"Fired", That's all? No jail? They're attempting to frame the conversation, so a low
penalty for High Treason seems normal in the minds of the Public.
Goldennutz , 16 minutes ago
HAHAHAHAHA!!
NOTHING will happen to ANYONE!!!
Ohhh...they might get someone to fall on the sword for a few mill in a Swiss account but
that's about it!
All these career uncivil serpents will walk away with a fat goobermint pension with free
lifetime bennies courtesy of us suckas , get a fat self-serving book deal and a cushy million
dollar job with some firm.
Meantime us ZH-ers will still be here typing away and blubbering about how unfair this all
is.
BWWWWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
inosent , 28 minutes ago
"public servant"? puhleeez, give it a rest!
Shelby cobra , 28 minutes ago
The news just keeps getting worse each day for these swamp monsters ,but there is a better
chance of hell freezing over than any of them going to jail!
Is-Be , 38 minutes ago
From an outsiders perspective, this is not a Jewish problem. It is a monotheist
problem.
How can anyone blame the Jews and worship his God?
Are we all Semites now?All Jews? With you-know-who in charge being the font of all our
troubles.
Soon we will all be one.
Soon each will know his place.
Indeed, Dr. Jacobs.
All is clear to Odin. But what of Thor?
No wonder Mrvl comix is keen to abuse our Gods and Goddesses. It's what they do.
Of cause they'll let loose their Muslims upon us as enforcers if we stray from their
plan.
Secrecy, dear Goy. No light please.
It was not for nothing that Odin hung for 9 days on Yggdsdril, the tree of life.
And the squirrel runs up and down the Sacred tree, telling tales.
romanmoment , 35 minutes ago
Rosenstein needs to be fired, right now.
Debt Slave , 33 minutes ago
You can't trust one of them. The truth may be inconvenient and unacceptable in our
current, political climate, but you can not trust a god damned one of them.
If it is a bad thing to recognize the facts of life, then proceed at your own peril.
The Swamp Got Trump , 35 minutes ago
Please fire this **********.
debtserf , 23 minutes ago
He will only fire him if he doesnt do exactly as he is told from now till November.
Hass C. , 52 minutes ago
Putin must be getting irritable bowel from too much popcorn.
Aerows , 49 minutes ago
What a big flaming bag of dog **** on the doorstep of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Except this isn't a prank, it affects our government at the highest of levels.
Harvey's-Rabbi , 49 minutes ago
I made up mind that today my posted comments will contain as much relevant materiel as
possible, other than that which may implicate legendary destroyers of their host culture. I
have kept this in mind while commenting on this guy and what he as attempted to do, even
trying to enlist other sectors of the nation's leadership.....
Thank you for reading.
Debt Slave , 25 minutes ago
I think you are doing a fine job of it.
History and the study of pathological behavior are .the greatest of endeavors. Only then
can a man recognize the reality of his world without any artificially induced delusions.
It really is an exercise of maturity.
divingengineer , 56 minutes ago
Yeah, they knew enough about Trump this early in his term to justify spying and
impeachment/removal?
Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure.
apocalypticbrother , 1 hour ago
Rod Rodentstein is a dirty rat.
Debt Slave , 22 minutes ago
He certainly does resemble one.
EscondidoSurfer , 55 minutes ago
NYT wanted to get ahead of Trump before he released this and other sensitive information,
sources and procedures.
Hass C. , 1 hour ago
Are they setting Trump up for some sort of confrontation? After all, the NYT is not
exactly a Friend of Trump these days.
Vigilante , 1 hour ago
High time the evil kikester gets the boot. Isn't he who also hired Mueller to start his
bogus investigation?
Debt Slave , 21 minutes ago
I believe he did, yes. Odd that Trump can't seem to get rid of him.
Victory_Garden , 1 hour ago
Of course this is a firable evil deed.
Like, phuck! This evil ziobot phuckin phaggot phucker pile of shat should have been
phuchin french fried and thrown out the phucking building shiteter years ago. Phuckin-A,
PERIOD!
Question is, will the Sir Pres fire this cikesucxker?
Take a look at the commie news networks view of this and be darn sure to keep this bfore
they erase it. This will make good eatin for this costa crow and wolfie bafaronizer and all
the, they suck hitlery cunthags big plastic kak purple hippie tie wareing dweebs of drool.
Phuckin phaggots.
Speaking of isreall. What the phuck are those phuckin crazy arsehole woarmongers up to
now?
chinese censorship SUCKS!
.
GoingBig , 1 hour ago
The drivel that you people post is hilarious!
1970SSNova396 , 1 hour ago
You should file a complaint.....try door FU2....closed at 5 PM...
Walking Turtle , 54 minutes ago
You should file a complaint.....try door FU2....closed at 5 PM...
Ah but even after hours, there is STILL the Secret Access Complaint Department.
That office is open 18/7/365\6, right there behind that selfsame door (FU2 iirc) with
generous seating and several magazines to share. Just buzz the buzzer for admittance.
But there is a secret, which shall herein be disclosed forthwith. To wit, the
Secret Password. Because without it one will never be admitted. Turns out, the Secret
Password is (and always was) the Office Manager's name. Know that name and you can
expect satisfaction in due full course!
Her name is Helen Waite. Those with After-Hours Complaints such as this one really should
go to Helen Waite, now shouldn't they? "Always there for YOU !" is the Standing Motto.
Servicing that nasty complaint and smiling while doing so...
Just stay seated and don't lose your Number. Remember Herself's Name. And that is all.
0{;-)o[
GoingBig , 20 minutes ago
LMAO!
Ranger7676 , 1 hour ago
Trump did not go to Princeton, Harvard or Yale and rape children and drink their blood
like Hillary, Obama and the Bush's, so you know the deep state is out to get him. Drain the
swamp and expose these assholes Mr. President.
Buck Shot , 1 hour ago
Worried about his reputation? Is he afraid the other cheerleaders will say he is a slut?
What a ******* *****. I bet he has never been in a fistfight in his life.
novictim , 1 hour ago
Wow. I may have reached a peak now. I don't think I could be anymore cynical about the FBI
and DOJ at this point.
GoingBig , 1 hour ago
lmao, I think most people would gasp in horror if they actually heard Trump go on one of
his famous Trumptantrums, which happens every 3-4 minutes. This is freaking hilarious.
NoPension , 1 hour ago
Haha!
You're right...you're hilarious.
Hass C. , 58 minutes ago
More wishful thinking from you.
1970SSNova396 , 57 minutes ago
The best part of you ran down your mothers leg
GoingBig , 19 minutes ago
That's a ******* new one! LMFO. What are you 100 years old! FLMAO
cheech_wizard , 41 minutes ago
Here, have another soy latte.
vintage512 , 1 hour ago
lmao... this is outrageous....this generation should be in the streets.. they get into the
streets to wait in line for the new iphone but not for their civil liberties...priorities...a
nation of pathetic eunuchs
DingleBarryObummer , 1 hour ago
like the liberty of having sound money... which we don't have?
Ranger7676 , 1 hour ago
I have several young 30's friends who went from liberal to Trump supporters. They see
whats going on with the Deep State and don't like it.
Is-Be , 56 minutes ago
iPhones and eunuchs go together like hookers and blow.
Keep them away from your gonads if you are worth breeding from.
Megaton Jim , 1 hour ago
Get rid of the ******* kikes in government, Wall St and the media. Jooz are Satanic
vermin!
DingleBarryObummer , 1 hour ago
Trump's going to be mighty lonely in his white house.
moman , 1 hour ago
'Get rid of the ******* kikes in government,' ....get rid of the DUMB-*** Goyim that alow
this ****!
GoingBig , 1 hour ago
somebody needs some milk and cookies....
Hass C. , 54 minutes ago
Actually, you have a point, moman. To hell with the whole pack. But who's going to send
them there?
Victory_Garden , 1 hour ago
Oh my, he said, ****!
So, has the ships Tyler lifted the chinese censorship?
Curious crew member wanna know and if indeed this be the truth, then let the good rants
roll!
Testing: ****! Holy...****!
So OK, back to the farkin grind.
All hands forward for leave.
Ding...ding...ding.
+
True Historian , 1 hour ago
Sessions and Trump are together, a team. Session's recusal will be rescinded after the
2018 election. Then the real "deep state" removal process will begin. Trump has played them
all; and is in the process of destroying them.
Sessions-Trump secret deal is that Sessions will take the verbal assaults until the
Mueller investigation goes down in flames.
Notice that Mueller has gone quiet. He knows he is through; he is cutting a deal with
Trump so that he doesn't go to jail over the "Uranium One" deal.
The Kav anaugh hearings with Feinstein are just to incite all anti-democrats to vote.
1970SSNova396 , 1 hour ago
If not for LBJ's great slacking society the dems would never win another election. Blacks
will do what they always do and vote for dems. They fuq up everything they touch.
Nunny , 55 minutes ago
I hate the LBJ ********, and we all see what he did there. I talk to mill working blacks
everyday that have got 'woke'....and not in the stupid snowflake way.
Hass C. , 48 minutes ago
A man on the cusp of winning such a chess game is not having tweet tantrums every morning.
Those pathetic tweets are a sign of powerlessness, not the opposite.
When this is said, i wish you were right.
JoeTurner , 1 hour ago
In diverse, multicultrual America competency will soon be a crime
Seems pretty clear by now that the reason Trump doesn't fire these 5th-columnists
is because he can't . The rot in the system is far more deeply entrenched than most
imagined: We are seeing a system openly and contemptuously ignore the wishes of the elected
Chief Executive, and he seems to have no power to do anything but launch a few acerbic tweets
at his tormenters.
So why isn't Hillary Clinton in jail? Because the Clinton cabal is still in control,
that's why. Which explains all sorts of things, including Rosenstein's display of arrogance
before the Congress: He knows well who runs things and it ain't Congress or the President. He
knows that it's a matter of time before Trump is either completely broken, or run out of
town, or both, and isn't a bit concerned about showing what he thinks of the "deplorables"
who dared question his divine right to do what the corporations goddamn please.
And I don't even have much hope for these grand jury hearings on worms like McCabe and
Comey, either. A prosecutor has pretty unlimited control over a grand jury in the real world,
and they almost always do what the prosecutor wants. I have not heard anything that tells me
that the government agents in charge of these grand jury investigations aren't just more
Clintonites. In which case, look for no-bills for the Clintonist criminals. It's the classic
way corrupt prosecutors get rid of cases without fading the heat: "We presented the cases,
but the grand jury no-billed, nothing we can do. Next case..."
Corrupt to the bone. Wish I were wrong, but sure doesn't look like it.
debtserf , 1 hour ago
Trump is the big dog. He looks for leverage. Why fire Slippery Rod if he has all the
leverage over him to secure his own insurance policy against impeachment - and crush the Dems
in the midterms. If Rod doesnt do this and pronto, then Bubba will be telling him to "get on
ma body".
Looks like Big T has this one covered.
Debt Slave , 12 minutes ago
Recall Strzok's behavior during his testimony. It couldn't be more obvious if they took
out a full page ad in the New York Times.
debtor of last resort , 1 hour ago
They have put the left on the altar to make the right start the war.
LaugherNYC , 1 hour ago
This is coming from McCabe.
Trying to get a deal. Remember what he screamed when he heard that he was under
investigation: "If they **** with my pension I will burn this place to the ground!!"
Well, he's got the gas and the matches. He doesn't want to go to prison where Hillary's
people can shank him. He's letting some tidbits out now to convince Huber he will do more
damage from outside than inside.
I say **** HIM. Let him burn it down. Sessions is recused - not his fault.
McCabe needs to do 3-5 in a FedPen for his lies and cover-ups. Tried to quash the Weiner
laptop and impede a Federal investigation. Repeatedly leaked information to misdirect and
interfere with a Federal investigation.
A top, trained intel officer. Lock him the hell up. This is the kind of "patriot" who
comes up through the Deep State system to run the alphabet agencies that work day and night
to protect America from the sunlight its intel community so desperately needs on those who
sell out the rank-and-file, hardworking true patriots for their own boundless ambition.
Strzok and Page come next.
Burn out the poison vipers' nests.
NoPension , 1 hour ago
All these ******* vipers are go to start eating other. As I think about it...Mr.Trump
should just stay out of their way...and poke the hornets nest every so often, get them all
stirred up!
McCabe...muh Pension. Haha! All those years...carrying scumbag water...and he gets to end
up in the graybar hotel, while they skate? I do not think sooooo......
Man, this is going to make a great movie some day.
debtserf , 1 hour ago
Sopranos meets Veep.
NoPension , 1 hour ago
House of Cards is going to look like Sesame Street when this thing winds up....
debtserf , 54 minutes ago
It's a perpetual Muppet Show.
Nunny , 50 minutes ago
I was thinking the same thing. Why watch 'fiction' when you can watch it in real time. I
told my husband, if Trump gets in, one thing I know, it will be ENTERTAINING. And BTW, hubby
had never registered to vote in all his 60+ years....but he did just to vote for Trump. THAT
is how much we hate the status quo of a government that hates it's own citizens.
And as a side bar....we also did it to throw a big fat middle finger to the press, the
'celebrities' the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
Cobra Commander , 1 hour ago
NYT and "anonymous sources;" sounds like the Left is trying to goad President Trump, or at
least sow more discord in the White House.
That said, how is it that President Obama gets a self-described "wingman" for an attorney
general (Holder), and President Trump gets bird feces for his?
Holy shite. I'm getting a feeling that this is ready to EXPLODE on the world stage. And
implicate Britain and Australia as in on the scam. I'm getting the sense, the Brits called
Trump and begged him not to let this come completely to light. Trump has ALL these
motherfuckers by the balls now. I just hope and pray that ******* arrogant poser Obama is
sweating bullets right now.
I cant even imagine how this all plays out. These arrogant ******* Nee World Order pieces
of ****,especially both Clinton's, Obama and most if not ALL of his senior administration
just felt entitled to do whatever the **** they wanted, the ends justify the means, the
Constitution and the people be damned. These people really to need to endure a special type
of hell. If this charade doesn't warrant it, what does? To Big To Fail comes to mind, though.
This might be SO big, Trump actually has to manage the shitshow...or the train goes off the
rails.
This guy quit the week before The Don took the keys to the white house.....Imagine that.
As you might recall Judge Nap at Fox stated that the Obama Cabal used the brits to spy on
Trump and then was place in timeout for 2 weeks. He returned and double downed on his
statement.
I for one am shocked that's a *** would try to subvert America's political system.
ObiterDictum , 2 hours ago
Watch how the media puts this story into its magic hat and poof!, it disappears. Meanwhile
those two investigative journalistic corpses known as Woodward and Bernstein, heroes of J
schools everywhere, will shake off their mothballs of irrelevance and swill cocktails with
their fellow elitist nitwits and talk about Watergate and Trump while this open corruption
accelerates. The truth does not matter anymore - just repeat a lie over and over again and
the moronic media reports it as a "competing fact." Or, just call up WaPo and say, "I will
speak to you as an anon. government official" and THEY PRINT IT with a line that they
asked you for a comment and you declined. The media becomes the publicist/lap dog of the
corrupted politicians. The majority of people reading the comment thinks, " hey, it must
be true if they are afraid to be named. I am sure the paper verified it." The lack of an
independent media has killed Truth. Truth is now a concept. And, then the media blame Trump
for the fact that 50% of the population does not trust them. A bit like the old story of the
person who kills his parent and says, ' oh, feel sorry for me, I am an orphan ."
Endgame Napoleon , 1 hour ago
Back in the Watergate days, the American people cared about the 4th Amendment, which is
why an audible gasp was heard in the congressional hearings, when it was revealed that Nixon
taped people in the WH.
Today, the American people have ceded their 4th Amendment rights in many ways, including
when agreeing to be taped and filmed in the maze of paperwork signed in any
$10-to-$12-per-hour office job that will not even cover the cost of rent for those with no
spousal income and no womb-productivity-based welfare and progressive tax-code welfare.
'We've come a long way, baby.'
High-ranking, highly paid people in the WH, too, are already being taped, hence the Flynn
incident.
There is a word for it when you try to wiretap a head of State... now what was that? Oh,
yes. Espionage , and pieces of **** like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg fried in the
electric chair for it. Why should this particular dual citizen be any
different? Fry his *** extra crispy -just like a chicken.
RictaviousPorkchop , 2 hours ago
Rosenberg...Rosenstein.....Hmmmmmm
Jackprong , 2 hours ago
Rosenstein orchestrated a COUP ATTEMPT! Rosenstein needs to pay for this Banana Republic
move on his part. Before he pays, he should spill his guts about his relationships with Obama
and Mrs. Bill Clinton.
blindfaith , 2 hours ago
Is the New York Times and ABC beginning to see the light? Are they awakening to the
deception? Will they become actual news reporters?
So many questions.....
RictaviousPorkchop , 2 hours ago
No. The media is merely cashing in on the chaos, AND in hopes that Trump will fire the
Jewish Lad.
That's a bold statement but cancerous growth is typical of any intelligence agency, especially CIA: all of them want more and more
budget money and try to influence both domestic and foreign policy. That's signs of cancel.
FBI actually has dual mandate: suppressing political dissent (STASI functions) and fight with criminals and organized crime.
The fact the President does not control his own administration, especially State Department isclearly visible now. He is more like
a ceremonial figura that is allowed to rant on Twitter, but can't change any thing of substance in forign policy. and Is a typucal Repiblican
in domenstic policy, betraying the electorate like Obama did
Notable quotes:
"... Sessions recused himself from the "Russia Collusion" investigation. Now that it is known to have been an extension of Democratic election rigging, and DC bureaucratic "Resistance," he could be initiate a broad sweep investigation into Washington, DC based bureaucratic bias and corruption. ..."
Shifting from Sessions to the much-maligned FBI, Trump said the agency was "a cancer" and that uncovering deep-seated corruption
in the FBI may be remembered as the "crowning achievement" of his administration, per
the Hill .
"What we've done is a great service to the country, really," Trump said in a 45-minute, wide-ranging interview in the Oval
Office.
"I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer
in our country."
Moreover, Trump insisted that he never trusted former FBI Director James Comey, and that he had initially planned to fire Comey
shortly after the inauguration, but had been talked out of it by his aides.
Trump also said he regretted not firing former FBI Director James Comey immediately instead of waiting until May 2017, confirming
an account his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gave Hill.TV earlier in the day that Trump was dismayed in 2016 by the way Comey handled
the Hillary Clinton email case and began discussing firing him well before he became president.
"If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,"
Trump said. "I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don't want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day
on the job. ... I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don't want him there when I get there."
The FISA Court judges who approved the initial requests allowing the FBI to surveil employees of the Trump Campaign also came
in for some criticism, with Trump claiming they used "poor Carter Page, who nobody even knew, and who I feel very badly for...as
a foil...to surveil a candidate or the presidency of the United States." Trump added that he felt the judges had been "misled" by
the FBI.
He criticizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court's approval of the warrant that authorized surveillance
of Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign aide, toward the end of the 2016 election, suggesting the FBI misled the court.
"They know this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country because basically what they did is, they used Carter
Page, who nobody even knew, who I feel very badly for, I think he's been treated very badly. They used Carter Page as a foil in
order to surveil a candidate for the presidency of the United States."
As for the judges on the secret intelligence court: "It looks to me just based on your reporting, that they have been misled,"
the president said, citing a series of columns in The Hill newspaper identifying shortcomings in the FBI investigation. "I mean
I don't think we have to go much further than to say that they've been misled."
"One of the things I'm disappointed in is that the judges in FISA didn't, don't seem to have done anything about it. I'm very
disappointed in that Now, I may be wrong because, maybe as we sit here and talk, maybe they're well into it. We just don't know
that because I purposely have not chosen to get involved," Trump said.
Trump continued the assault on Sessions during a brief conference with reporters Wednesday morning. When asked whether he was
planning to fire Sessions, Trump replied that "we're looking into lots of different things."
To be sure, Sessions has managed to hang on thus far. And if he can somehow manage to survive past Nov. 6, his fate will perversely
rest on the Democrats' success. Basically, if they wrest back control of the Senate (which, to be sure, is unlikely), Sessions chances
of staying on would rise dramatically. But then again, how much abuse can a man realistically endure before he decides that the costs
of staying outweigh the benefits of leaving?
DingleBarryObummer , 19 minutes ago
Sessions works for Trump, because Trump is running the uniparty russia-gate stormy-gate anti-trump show. Sessions was intentionally
placed there to stonewall and make sure the kabuki goes on. Rosenstein is a Trump appointee. This **** garners sympathy for him
as the persecuted underdog, rallies his base; and distracts from the obvious zio-bankster influence over his admin and his many
unfulfilled campaign promises. He's deceiving you. Why do you think Giuliani acts like such a buffoon? It's because that's what
he was hired for. All distractions and bullshit. He will not get impeached, Hillary is not going to jail, nothing will happen.
The zio-Banksters will continue to stay at the top of the pyramid, because that's who trump works for, NOT you and me.
"While Trump's fascination with the White House still burned within him [re: 2011], he also had The Apprentice to deal with--and
it wasn't as easy as you might think. He loved doing the show and was reluctant to give it up. At one point, he was actually thinking
of hosting it from the oval office if he made it all the way to the White House. He even discussed it with Stephen Burke, the
CEO at NBCUniversal, telling Burke he would reconsider running if the network was concerned about his candidacy." -Roger Stone
"To some people the notion of consciously playing power games-no matter how indirect-seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past.
They believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people,
for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power. They utilize strategies
that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation involved. These types, for example, will often display their weakness and
lack of power as a kind of moral virtue. But true powerlessness, without any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its
weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptive,
in the game of power." -Robert Greene
Sparkey , 31 minutes ago
This is why the 'little' people love President 'The Donald' Trump, he says the things they would like to say, but have no platform
to speak from, Mushroom man The Donald has no fear he has got Mushroom power, and he has my support in what ever he does!
Secret Weapon , 43 minutes ago
Is Sessions a Deep State firewall? Starting to look that way.
TrustbutVerify , 48 minutes ago
Sessions recused himself from the "Russia Collusion" investigation. Now that it is known to have been an extension of Democratic
election rigging, and DC bureaucratic "Resistance," he could be initiate a broad sweep investigation into Washington, DC based
bureaucratic bias and corruption.
I suspect Sessions will last until after the mid-term elections. Then Trump will fire him and bring someone like Gowdy in to
head the DOJ and to bring about investigations.
And, my gosh, there seems to be so much to investigate. And to my mind prosecute.
loop, 49 minutes ago
"I've never seen a President - I don't care who he is - stand up to them (Israel). It just boggles the mind. They always
get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down.
If the American people understood what a grip these people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms.
Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."
- U.S. Navy Admiral and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer
mendigo, 59 minutes ago
Cool stuff. But really the cancer goes much deeper. That is the scary part. Trump is now largely controlled by the Borg.
Government employees and elected officials have a choice: can either play along and become wealthy and powerful or have
their careers destroyed, or worse.
Haaretz via Antiwar.com:
Israel's defense chief calls for probe into identity of top official embroiled in Manafort
case
Special counsel Robert Mueller's office tells Haaretz that it cannot reveal more details
regarding individuals who were not accused in the case
Noa Landau, Amir Tibon | Sep. 17, 2018 | 2:45 AM
The document alleges that a senior Israeli government official conspired with Manafort
in 2012 to defame then-Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko by accusing her of
maintaining ties with anti-Semitic groups. Manafort said that, as a result, American Jews
would pressure the Obama administration not to support Yulia Tymoshenko, whose opponent was a
client of Manafort's, the indictment says .
"... A 75-year old insider that dropped out of the race in 2008, after capturing less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus, and who "occupies the sensible center of the Democratic Party." That just screams excitement, does it not? ..."
Even an inbred domesticated pet can learn simple tricks, but corporate Democrats...Let's just say that they are further down the
evolutionary ladder. Joe Biden
proved that today.
"Despite losing in the courts, and in the court of opinion, these forces of intolerance remain determined to undermine and roll
back the progress you all have made," he said. "This time they - not you - have an ally in the White House. This time they have
an ally. They're a small percentage of the American people - virulent people, some of them the dregs of society."
At least he didn't say "deplorables." Why do establishment Dems think that insulting a third of the electorate is a good idea?
And why are establishment Dems incapable of learning from 2016? Why do they think Biden is the
"solution"?
Amid discussion of resistance to Trump, he surprised me with talk of 2020, when he'll turn 78. "I'll run," the
vice president deadpanned, "if I can walk." Three days later, he informed the Washington press corps that he wasn't joking.
Biden isn't likely to run, but keeping the door ajar gives him a bigger voice in Democratic Party debates. The one that worries
him most is over repositioning to win back Trump voters. He has little patience with Democrats who want to move either left or
right. " 'We gotta move to the center,' 'We gotta move to those white guys,' 'We gotta move to those working-class
people' or 'We gotta double down on the social agenda.' " It's a false choice, he said: "They are totally compatible. I have never
said anything to the A.C.L.U. that I wouldn't say to the Chamber of Commerce."
A 75-year old insider that dropped out of the race in 2008, after capturing less than 1% of the vote in the Iowa caucus, and
who "occupies the sensible center of the Democratic
Party." That just screams excitement, does it not? /s And yet the establishment continues to try to force Joe Biden down
our throats, but their recent effort is
more laughable than most.
Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump by 7 percentage points in a head-to-head match-up, according to a
new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
A plurality of registered voters, 44 percent, said they'd choose Biden in the 2020 presidential election, while 37 percent
of voters said they would vote for Trump.
The percentage of Democrats who would choose Biden - 80 percent - was slightly higher than the 78 percent of Republicans who
would vote for the president's reelection. The former vice president, who ran for the White House in 1988 and 2008, has been floated
as a 2020 contender, and Biden himself has said he's not ruling out a third try.
OK. You following this so far? Creepy Joe is the overwhelming favorite, especially amoung Democrats, right?
span y The Voice In th... on Tue, 09/18/2018 - 10:19am
I hope they do run Biden and he falls flat on his face. This will hasten the demise of the Democratic Party and make room in
the political spectrum for a truly progressive Party.
Regarding retreads, I see that Bill Daley has thrown his hat into the ring for Boss of All Bosses Mayor of Chicago.
Another retread but possibly a baby step up from the odious Rahm Emanuel.
Good post gj. Biden is Mr. Establishement, the epitome of what is wrong with the Dem party. Like Clinton, Bush, Trump, Obama,
a master at pretending he is there for you. But not really. He's there for corporate America. You are right they haven't learned
a thing. Look at the Hillary Atlantic piece (have barf bag handy).
They are self-righteous at a level the precludes objective reflection or introspection. They are a psychopathic mix of ego,
greed, power and war monger. They are meeting Einstein's definition of insanity very well, doing the same thing and expecting
a different result. I guess a thousand seat loss is no cause for concern.
Its those low-info dregs, and Russia, and Jill Stein, and promises of ponies. Same people running the ship into the same ground.
The same 30% of blind followers will always follow their leaders, no matter what, be it Trumpsters or DemBots.
Haaretz via Antiwar.com:
Israel's defense chief calls for probe into identity of top official embroiled in Manafort
case
Special counsel Robert Mueller's office tells Haaretz that it cannot reveal more details
regarding individuals who were not accused in the case
Noa Landau, Amir Tibon | Sep. 17, 2018 | 2:45 AM
The document alleges that a senior Israeli government official conspired with Manafort
in 2012 to defame then-Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko by accusing her of
maintaining ties with anti-Semitic groups. Manafort said that, as a result, American Jews
would pressure the Obama administration not to support Yulia Tymoshenko, whose opponent was a
client of Manafort's, the indictment says .
"... Since when have these "Guardians of Our Republic" ever been against the release of more information from our government? Obviously, only when such release might put a dent in the Russia cloud that they have deliberately perpetuated regardless of the drip, drip, drip of evidence implicating high-ranking FBI, CIA and Justice officials in wrongdoing. ..."
"... The actions of former Secretary of State John Kerry in meeting with Iranian ministers -- a country with which we have no diplomatic relations -- are 100 times more troubling, as he is actively undermining the policy of the current administration. ..."
"... So, two years, a trail of ruined lives, shredded constitutional protections, an administration under a cloud, and no collusion. All that's really been uncovered is a single meeting with a Russian lawyer who actually dined the night before and after the Trump Tower meeting with Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, who testified he didn't speak to her about it, even though she was his client. ..."
"... It's time for the shroud of secrecy around this investigation to be lifted, for everything to be put in public view. The Justice Department -- and even Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has brazenly defied congressional subpoenas -- must comply with these very lawful and appropriate orders without delay. It also is time for the media to give full, fair coverage to any and all revelations that come out of these documents, regardless of who it hurts or helps. ..."
"... President Barack Obama once famously said that "elections have consequences," and he was right. But those consequences can't be the weaponization of our intelligence assets and the setting-off of investigations to bring down a newly elected government we don't like. Policy changes should be the consequence. ..."
"... Remember, the ends don't justify the means. It is the means that justify the ends. ..."
Democrats are squawking about President Trump's order to release the material used by the
FBI and the Justice Department to initiate the investigation of his campaign. These minority
committee chairs, soon likely to be in the majority, claim it's unfair, an abuse of power,
one-sided.
Since when have these "Guardians of Our Republic" ever been against the release of more
information from our government? Obviously, only when such release might put a dent in the
Russia cloud that they have deliberately perpetuated regardless of the drip, drip, drip of
evidence implicating high-ranking FBI, CIA and Justice officials in wrongdoing.
This investigation of the Trump campaign, his administration, family and associates has gone
on for more than two years without any serious evidence supporting the Russia-Trump collusion
theory. And, increasingly, it looks like there never was any real evidence to support the
launching of the largest investigation of an administration in history. It's the only known
investigation ever by an outgoing party of the incoming officials of the other party. It was
whipped up by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, former British spy Christopher Steele and
partisans in the Obama administration, creating a vast echo chamber with information that was
never substantiated in any material way and, on the face of it, was preposterous. (No one ever
offered Trump campaign adviser Carter Page $19 billion for anything.)
Now, before Americans go to vote, is precisely the time to unmask publicly this information;
if it favors the current administration, then the originators of the investigation will have
even more explaining to do. Information that was used to start an investigation can't possibly
be exculpatory unless, in the light of day, it appears forced, false or incomplete. After all,
it was used to convince judges that crimes were being committed by Trump and his
associates.
Based on what we see in the prosecutions, there appears to have been three tranches of
allegations behind the investigations -- the "tip" from Australian diplomat Alexander Downer
that George Papadopoulos had some generalized advance information about email hacking, the
Christopher Steele dossier, and the then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates investigation of
Gen. Michael Flynn for potential Logan Act violations. The Mueller probe systematically pursued
all of them to the prosecutorial limits, until every witness was bludgeoned into
cooperation.
The Papadopoulos case yielded tremendous speculation but no collusion -- just a rather
pointless prosecution against him, resolved with 14 days in jail. The best they got from the
former Trump campaign adviser was a nod at a meeting that maybe Trump should meet Vladimir
Putin. It remains unclear whether FBI plants were sent to entrap him, and others, but that may
come out in these documents.
The famous dossier pointed fingers at Page, Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen and
onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort as the collusion masterminds. Page was extensively
spied upon, apparently to no avail. Cohen did not take the fabled trips to Prague or anywhere
else and, yet, his financial life was investigated anyway and he became a victim of the Mueller
probe. He is now part of a Stormy Daniels insurance policy if the main investigation fails to
take down the president.
Manafort quite rightly sought a plea deal after losing part of the first trial, and he
admitted he did not pay taxes or file lobbying reports, but none of the charges against him
include collusion with Russians. I would not hold my breath for any bombshell revelations from
him. He could add more color to a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, but that meeting
was not a crime.
Gen. Flynn is set to be sentenced and it's unlikely he will get even 14 days, given his
record of service to the nation. He was deliberately targeted by Yates, an outgoing Obama
official, who intercepted legitimate transition calls with the Russian ambassador and
dispatched the FBI to question Flynn about those, even though she already had a transcript
showing they were benign. The actions of former Secretary of State John Kerry in meeting with
Iranian ministers -- a country with which we have no diplomatic relations -- are 100 times more
troubling, as he is actively undermining the policy of the current administration.
Then there is Roger Stone. He may have texted with one of the hackers of Clinton campaign
emails, but he rejected operatives' efforts to get him to pay for Hillary dirt. Here, Mueller
is having less luck trying the same playbook used on others, of finding something in his
personal or business life to deploy as leverage against him.
Investigating people in this manner is so completely un-American that Congress should pass
legislation to prohibit it in the future, especially when there are political considerations.
We investigate crimes, not people. Here, people were named and then investigated until crimes
of any kind were found.
So, two years, a trail of ruined lives, shredded constitutional protections, an
administration under a cloud, and no collusion. All that's really been uncovered is a single
meeting with a Russian lawyer who actually dined the night before and after the Trump Tower
meeting with Glen Simpson of Fusion GPS, who testified he didn't speak to her about it, even
though she was his client.
It's time for the shroud of secrecy around this investigation to be lifted, for everything
to be put in public view. The Justice Department -- and even Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein, who has brazenly defied congressional subpoenas -- must comply with these very
lawful and appropriate orders without delay. It also is time for the media to give full, fair
coverage to any and all revelations that come out of these documents, regardless of who it
hurts or helps.
President Barack Obama once famously said that "elections have consequences," and he was
right. But those consequences can't be the weaponization of our intelligence assets and the
setting-off of investigations to bring down a newly elected government we don't like. Policy
changes should be the consequence.
We have elections every two years, and that's the right route for Americans to express their
frustrations. Investigations, especially without probable cause, are most often the wrong way
-- and maybe this additional sunlight on what was done here will bring us together around
needed reforms to prevent this from ever happening again.
Remember, the ends don't justify the
means. It is the means that justify the ends.
Mark Penn is a managing partner of the Stagwell Group, a private equity firm
specializing in marketing services companies, as well as chairman of the Harris Poll and author
of "Microtrends Squared." He served as pollster and adviser to President Clinton from 1995 to
2000, including during Clinton's impeachment. You can follow him on Twitter
@Mark_Penn.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a
wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it
possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden
interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was. ..."
"... And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims. ..."
"... But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts. ..."
"... It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger. ..."
"... It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM. ..."
"... My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides. ..."
"... There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win. ..."
"... The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ. ..."
"... Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. ..."
"... Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. ..."
"... You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. ..."
"... Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ. ..."
"... In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo ..."
"... There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. ..."
"... At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom. ..."
"... I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time. ..."
"... I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop? ..."
"... I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers. ..."
"... I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class. ..."
"... I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing. ..."
"... In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. ..."
"... It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse. ..."
"... 'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.' ..."
"... And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities. ..."
"... So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin. ..."
"... All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko. ..."
"... All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele. ..."
"... Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017. ..."
"... That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins. ..."
"... To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ. ..."
"... I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue. ..."
"... The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice. ..."
"... No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes. ..."
"... In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.' ..."
"... Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .) ..."
"... Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' ..."
"... I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global. ..."
"... I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that. ..."
"... Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket? ..."
"... It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate? ..."
"... Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents. ..."
"... The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6. ..."
"... An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core. ..."
"... It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.' ..."
"... That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries. ..."
"... In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read. ..."
"... Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it. ..."
"... At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public. ..."
"... Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins. ..."
"... My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it. ..."
"... So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him. ..."
"... 'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.' ..."
"... This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.' ..."
"... In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia. ..."
"... Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified. ..."
"... Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky. ..."
"... But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption. ..."
"... The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.' ..."
"... One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy. ..."
"... I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined. ..."
"... Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election ..."
"... Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate. ..."
"... Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him ..."
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications. ..."
"... This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames. ..."
"... I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS. ..."
"... I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms. ..."
"... If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury. ..."
My strong impression is that nobody on the British side vetted the dossier for publication. A striking feature of the early news
coverage is that there appeared to be total confusion, with some of the reporting suggesting that the sources quoted wanted to hang
him out to dry, others that they wanted to defend him.
An interesting aspect is that not only were anonymous sources linked to MI6 quoted on both sides of the argument -- which could
have been explained by disagreements within the organisation: in different stories, not however far apart in date, its head, Sir
Alex Younger, was portrayed as holding radically different views.
When CNN publicised the existence of the dossier on 10 January 2017, the same day that it was published by 'BuzzFeed', it suggested
that the author was British. The following day, the WSJ named Steele.
On 13 January, Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter for 'Mail Online', published a report whose headlines seem worth quoting in
full:
'I introduced him to my wife as James Bond': Former spy Chris Steele's friends describe a "show-off" 007 figure but MI6 bosses
brand him "an idiot" for an "appalling lack of judgement" over the Trump "dirty dossier": Intelligence expert Nigel West says friend
is like Ian Fleming's famous character; He said: "He's James Bond. I actually introduced him to my wife as James Bond'; Mr West says
Steele dislikes Putin and Kremlin for ignoring rules of espionage; Angry spy source calls him 'idiot' and blasts decision to take
on the Trump work; Current MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger is said to be livid about reputation damage.'
On 15 January, however, Kim Sengupta, Defence Editor of the 'Independent', produced a report headlined: 'Head of MI6 used information
from Trump dossier in first public speech; Warnings on cyberattacks show ex-spy's work is respected.'
A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared
by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision
being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would
seem to me unlikely that Steele was.
This leads me on to another puzzle about the dossier to which I have been having a difficulty finding a solution. Long years
ago I was reasonably familiar with libel law in relation to journalism. Anyone who 'served indentures', as very many of us did in
those days, had to study it. Later, I got involved in a protracted libel suit -- successfully, I hasten to add -- in relation to
a programme I made, and had the sobering experience of having a top-class libel barrister requiring me to justify every assertion
I had made.
In the jargon then, a crucial question when an article, or programme, was being 'vetted' before publication was whether it represented
a 'fair business risk.' This involved both the technical legal issues, and also judgements as to whether people were likely to sue,
and how if they did the case would be likely to pan out.
On the face of things, one would not have expected that people at 'BuzzFeed' would have gone ahead and make the dossier public,
without having it 'vetted' by competent lawyers. And I have difficulty seeing how, if they did, the advice could have been to publish
what they published.
I have some difficulty seeing how the advice could have been to include the memorandum with the claims about the Alfa Group oligarchs,
unless either these could be seriously defended or it was assumed that contesting them effectively would involve revealing more 'dirty
linen' than these wanted to see aired in public.
And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction
of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely,
without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims.
Trying to make sense of why such an obvious precaution was not taken, I find myself wondering whether, in fact, the reason may
have been that the people responsible for the dossier may have actually believed this part of it at least.
If that is so, however, the most plausible explanation I can see is that while other claims in the dossier may well be total fabrication,
either by the people at Fusion and Steele or by some of their questionable contacts, this information at least did come from what
Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr et al thought were reliable Russian government sources.
But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would
not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts.
I think that the cases involving Karim Baratov and Dmitri Dokuchaev and his colleagues may be much more complex than is apparent
from what looks to me like patent disinformation put out both on the Western and Russian sides.
It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts
and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also
Christopher Steele and Alex Younger.
It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation',
while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM.
If you want to get a clear picture of quite how low-grade the latter figure is, incidentally, it is worth looking at the speech
to which Kim Sengupta refers.
A favourite line of mine comes in Younger's discussion of the -- actually largely mythical -- notion of 'hybrid warfare': 'In
this arena, our opponents are often states whose very survival owes to the strength of their security capabilities; the work is complex
and risky, often with the full weight of the State seeking to root us out.'
Leaving aside the fact that this is borderline illiterate, what it amazing is Younger's apparent blindness to clearly unintended
implications of what he writes. If indeed, the 'very survival' of the Russian state 'owes to the strength of [its] security capabilities',
the conclusions, seen from a Russian point of view, would seem rather obvious: vote Putin, and give medals to Patrushev and Bortnikov.
My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American
intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended
consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate
measures to cover their backsides.
There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One
of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency
planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of
a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win.
The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central
role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ.
Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous
communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. They even
have discussions about Deripaska and about his visa application to visit the US. Bruce is a conduit to Strzok at FBI. Glenn Simpson
also is part of these discussions with Steele and the Ohrs.
Simpson also arranges for Steele to brief "reporters" like David Corn and others at the NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, Politico and others.
Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. They are communicating with Carter Page and
Papadopolous, who in turn is drinking and yapping with Aussie ambassador Downer.
You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's
US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. There's Sen. Harry Reid passing on the Steele "dossier" to
Comey.
Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then
there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in
all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors
on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's
golf course in NJ.
Oh, there is also Nellie Ohr setting up ham radio to avoid detection in her communications with Steele. Then we have everyone
leaking and spinning to their "cohorts" in the premier media like the NY Times, CNN and WaPo.
Comey even has his buddy a professor and ostensibly his legal counsel on the payroll of the FBI as a contractor with access
to all the sensitive databases leaking to the media.
Andy McCabe has his legal counsel Lisa Page spin stories around his wife's huge campaign contributions from Clinton consigliere
McAuliffe.
In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media
personalities for a quid pro quo.
As if all this was not enough there's AG Loretta Lynch, meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac ostensibly to discuss their grandkids.
Not to forget there were these "unmaskings" of surveillance information by Susan Rice, Samantha Power.
There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele.
Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. Then there are the FISC judges who never believed
their mandate required them to verify the evidence before issuing sweeping surveillance warrants. Now all this is what I as an
old farmer and winemaker have read. Those more in tune would easily add to these convoluted machinations.
I don't know how to make sense of all this. All I see is the extent of effort to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and
after he won from governing. The most obvious observation is that the leadership in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies
are so busy politicking spinning and leaking they have neither the time or the inclination let alone competence to do their real
job for which they get paid a handsome wage and sterling benefits.
At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the
Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of
Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience
in spookdom.
If you have any speculative theories that connects some of the dots it would be my great pleasure to read.
I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time.
Confident that their horse is going to win the race and that the media will cover it all up and nobody will ever hear anything
about anything. Now that the unexpected happened, they're just spinning and denying faster hoping the Dems win in Nov and stop
all the investigations. And, they're getting nervous wondering who's going to sell out whom next. Up and down, around and around.
Gerbils -- there really isn't anything very consistent, planned or thought-out.
"I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time."
I believe your summary of what's happening is more accurate than Alastair Crooke's as set out in the article linked to.
But bright or not, what are these people in the IC doing being "highly politicised"? Does that not render them considerably
less efficient?
I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to
predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang
indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised"
mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop?
I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget
that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria
and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers.
Usually the incumbent party loses the mid-term election. The Democrats lost big in Obama's first mid-term. The Republicans
won the House and gained six senators. While the punditry claims a Blue Wave and Nate Silver is giving the Dems the odds. I'm
not so sure. I think the GOP will increase their majority in the Senate putting any conviction of Trump out of question.
I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media,
the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump.
Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class.
Yeah. My bet is that the Repubs hold onto both. 1) the economy is getting better 2) what do the Dems have to offer other than
this crazy Trump/Russia thing?
Economy will slow down sharply in 2019 but there should be enough momentum to help with the mid-terms. Trump needs to stop
with the endless sanction stuff. The House does look like a close one.
At a very general level, a 'speculative theory' which I have been mulling over for some time was rather well set out in a commentary
in 'The Hill' on 9 August by Sharyl Attkisson, which opens:
'Let's begin in the realm of the fanciful.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that
a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
And Attkisson goes on to outline precisely the developments that appear to have happened.
I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which
Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history'
crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing.
In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional
conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not
binding on the elect. And in turn, according to a familiar skeptical view, antinomianism can easily end up in in straightforward
rascality.
On the rascality – to which Attkisson is pointing – I am working on how parts of the picture can be fleshed out. A few preliminary
points raised by your remarks.
As you note, 'There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok
for Steele.' So, we know that Ohr and Steele were conspiring together to ensure that the latter could continue to be intimately
involved in the Mueller investigation, despite the FBI termination,
It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures
in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else
is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse.
If, as seems to me likely, although not certain, the second possibility is closer to the truth than the former, then before
Ohr testifies on 28 August before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees he will have to consider whether he is prepared
to 'take the rap' for his superiors, or 'sing sweetly.'
The fact that in a report in 'The Hill', I think on the same day as the Attkisson piece, John Solomon was quoting from Ohr's
handwritten notes of a meeting with Glenn Simpson in December 2016 makes me wonder whether he may not already have made a decision.
A key paragraph from the report:
'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher
Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes
from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.'
There is I think a need for caution here. There is no guarantee that Simpson was telling the literal truth to Ohr, or indeed
the latter reproducing with absolute accuracy with he was told (handwritten notes can be disposed of easily, but they can also
be rewritten.)
One is I think on firmer ground in relation to what it suggests was not the case – that there is any substance whatsoever in
the ludicrous story of someone running a private security company in London sending out hired employees who then gain access to
top Kremlin insiders, with these, of course, telling them precisely what they actually think.
And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which
could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain,
or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities.
So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources,
and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin.
All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved
in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko.
That said, I continue to think it possible that both the second and final memoranda may incorporate some 'glitter', as well
as 'chickenfeed' fed from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts, to hark back to George Smiley says to the Minister,
quite possibly included in the hope that the BS involved would be reproduced in contexts where it could provoke legal action.
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making
it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie
Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
It could then be that Steele has been, in effect, hoist with his own petard, in that he is having to sustain the fiction that
he had some kind of grounds for making the claims about Aleksej Gubarev and XBT. How far this matters, at least in relation to
the action bought against 'BuzzFeed' in Florida, remains moot at the moment.
Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent
any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish
that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017.
That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon
the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins.
Mr Habakkuk, you mention "ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin" - I am not sure if you meant Akhmetov.
I am surprised and curious about you mentioning him - if you meant Akhmetov - because that is one name among all the oligarchs
which has so far not been prominent. Thank you for your posts, these posts and the SST comments could and should serve as help
to the congressional investigations and hearings.
To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's
Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate
and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ.
I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner
will be very interesting to pursue.
The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice.
No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's
good friend Benjamin Wittes.
Younger isn't the brightest bulb in the box, is he?
"If you doubt the link between legitimacy and effective counter-terrorism, then – albeit negatively – the unfolding tragedy
in Syria will, I fear, provide proof. I believe the Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad's discredited regime,
will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist
anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to
be defeated. Meanwhile, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy
is heart-breaking"
Those were indeed some of the most inane comments in an inane piece.
But then, if you read an interview given to Jay Elwes of 'Prospect' magazine in May last year by Younger's predecessor Sir
Richard Dearlove, who looks to have been a significant background presence in what has been going on, you will find that, although
he is much more coherent than than his successor, it is almost as inane.
As it happens, Dearlove was one of the signatories of the 'Statement of Principles' of something called the 'Henry Jackson
Society.'
This was founded in 2005, in Cambridge, by a group in whom acolytes of an historian called Maurice Cowling were prominent –
Dearlove is himself a graduate in history from that university.
In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that
only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic
states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.'
Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest'
an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See
https://nationalinterest.or...
.)
Among other things, he harked back to the way that, in 1648, a century and a half of bloody ideological strife in Europe had
been ended with a recognition that the legitimacy of different state forms had to be accepted, if a kind of 'war of all against
all' was to be avoided.
And Lieven went on to reflect on the way that, at what was then widely seen as the end of the Cold War, the abandonment of
universalisitic pretensions by Russia and China was interpreted as justifying an embrace of these by the the West.
This, he went on to argue, had actually had the paradoxical effect of relegitimising 'régimes' which do not conform to Western
'democratic' models, concluding by noting what appears to our new, quasi-Soviet, preference for not letting experience interfere
with ideological dogma:
'Finally – even after the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya – there is almost no awareness among US policymakers of the fact that
US attempts to change the regimes of other countries are likely to be seen not only by the elites of those countries but also
by their populations as leading to – and intended to lead to – the destruction of the state itself, leading to disaster for its
society and population. When the Communist regime in the USSR collapsed (though only in part under Western pressure), it took
the Soviet state with it. The Russian state came close to following suit in the years that followed, Russia was reduced to impotence
on the world stage, and large parts of the Russian and other populations suffered economic and social disaster. Remembering their
own past experiences with state collapse, warlordism, famine and foreign invasion, Chinese people looked at this awful spectacle
and huddled closer to the Chinese state – one that they may dislike in many ways, but which they certainly trust more than anything
America has to offer – especially given the apparent decay of democracy throughout the West.'
I read with interest your piece back in June entitled 'Putin Once Dreamed the American Dream', reprinting Charles Heberle's
account of the 'Transforming Subjects Into Citizens' project, and the attitude of some people close to Putin to it.
One of the things which struck me was that the question why the American Revolution succeeded, and so many others failed, which
was concerning the intellectuals to whom Heberle talked, is one of the central questions of modern political thought, from Tocqueville
on.
(Indeed, the question of the preconditions for what might be called 'constitutional' government, has been central to 'republican'
thought, ever since it was revived by Italian thinkers, including prominently Machiavelli, when the 'Renaissance' made them reactivate
and rework debates from ancient Rome and Greece.)
However, to hark back to the anxieties expressed by Lieven, nothing in the analysis of the great French thinker necessary guarantees
that the success of 'Democracy in America' is stable and permanent, or indeed that the relatively civilised order of the post-war
'Pax Americana' is necessarily durable in Western Europe.
Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology
of Eastward Turn.' A paragraph that struck me:
'Russian society should by no means abdicate from its mostly European culture. But it should certainly stop being afraid,
let alone feel ashamed, of its Asianism. It should be remembered that from the standpoint of prevailing social mentality and
society's attitude to the authorities Russia, just as China and many other Asian states, are offspring of Chengiss Khan's Empire.
This is no reason for throwing up hands in despair or for beginning to despise one's own people, contrary to what many members
of intelligencia sometimes do. It should be accepted as a fact of life and used as a strength. The more so, since amid the
harsh competitive environment of the modern world the authoritarian type of government – in the context of a market economy
and equitable military potentials – is certainly far more effective than modern democracy. This is what our Western partners
find so worrisome. Of course, we should bear in mind that authoritarianism – just like democracy – may lead to stagnation and
degradation. Russia is certainly confronted with such a risk.'
Unlike you, I cannot claim serious expertise on Russia. But, as a reasonably alert generalist television current affairs producer,
I took note of the indications which were emerging in the course of 1987 that the Gorbachev 'new thinking' was underpinned by
a realisation that Soviet institutions and ideas had become fundamentally dysfunctional, to which you have referred repeatedly
over the years.
And, after long tedious months trying interest the powers that were in British broadcasting in what was happening, I ended
up producing a couple of programmes for BBC Radio in February/March 1989 in which we interviewed some of the leading 'new thinkers',
among them Karaganov's then immediate superior at the Institute of Europe, Vitaly Zhurkin.
At the Institute for the USA and Canada, by contrast, we did not interview its head, Georgiy Arbatov, but his deputy, Andrei
Kokoshin, and one of the latter's mentors on military matters and collaborators General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, who I later realised
had earlier been one of the foremost Soviet nuclear strategists. (At the Institute for World Economy and International Relations,
we interviewed Arbatov's son, Alexei.)
Talking to these people we got a sense, although it had to be fleshed out later, of the scale of the disillusion with Soviet
models, and indeed – which began to frighten me not long after – of the way many of them were romanticising the West.
What Karaganov now writes is I think a hardly very surprising reaction to the way that the Western powers responded to the
'new thinking.' Moreover, it seems to me that the disillusionment involved is in no sense particular Russian, but rather global.
If one regards 'democracy' as though it were quoted on the stock exchange, before 1914 there were very many buyers, including
among the Russian élite. By 1931, in very many places, including large sections of the 'intelligentsia' in Western countries,
it was a sellers' market, to put it mildly.
After 1945, a kind of long 'bull market' in 'democracy' started: for very good reasons.
The – largely but very far from entirely – peaceful retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to a very significant extent the
product of this. The subsequent behaviour of Western élites has generated a vicious 'bear market', a fact they appear unable to
understand.
I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me,
are global.
I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO
the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and
that was that.
PS, in light of the Henry Jackson society and all Younger's references to "values" this one rather stands out "A vital lesson
I take from the Chilcot Report is the danger of group think."
Yeah. Group think, the very opposite of what I mean by pluralism.
Sharyl Atkinson describes well the conspiracy. When one steps back and look at all the machinations we know now, it seems incredible.
Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically?
If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains?
What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their
racket?
It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the
Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole
Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then
there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller
appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated?
Was each element separate?
There's no doubt a political thriller movie could be made.
I guess the comedy part is that there actually exist people with medically functioning brains, who are somehow able to contort
such a worldview...Aleppo as peaceful 'desert' indeed...who knew that having bearded fanatics in charge is somehow 'better'...[and
not 'heart-breaking']...
Some here may find blogpost from March of this year interesting as it speaks to the production of the Steele dossier. I have
not seen it mentioned here before and a site search produced no results.
https://apelbaum.wordpress....
Some sections seem to have gotten David Cay Johnston's hackles up.
I had seen Yaacov Apelbaum's piece referred to by Clarice Feldman in a post on the 'American Thinker' site a few days back,
but not looked at it properly.
It is indeed fascinating, and clearly repays a closer study than I have so far had time to give it. I was however relieved
to find that what Apelbaum writes 'meshes' quite well with my own views of the likely authorship of the dossier.
A question I have is whether the monumental amount of labour involved in producing it can really be the work of a single IT
person – however wide-ranging his abilities and interests. My suspicion is that there may be input from Russian intelligence.
This is not said in order to discredit Apelbaum's work. In matters where I have had occasion critically to examine claims from
official Russian sources, I have found several unsurprising, but recurring, patterns. Sometimes, the information provided can
be shown to be essentially accurate, and it is reasonably clear how it has been obtained.
At other times, claims are made which information from other sources suggests either are, or may well be, true, but the 'sources
and methods' involved are deliberately obscured, making evaluation more difficult.
And then, there are many occasions when what one gets is quite patently a mixture of accurate information and disinformation.
Analysing these can be very productive, if one can both sift out the accurate information, and attempt to see what the disinformation
is designed to obscure.
One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the networks which are outlined by Apelbaum are precisely those which Russian
intelligence will have spent a great deal of time and ingenuity penetrating.
This will have been attempted by 'SIGINT' and surveillance methods, and also through infiltrating agents and turning people.
(There are often grounds to suspect that some of those most vociferously denouncing Putin are colluding with Russian intelligence.)
Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that
at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of
security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents.
Some of these were used back in April 2016 in a 'Vesti Nedeli' edition presented by Dmitry Kiselyov, who manages Russia's informational
programming resources, and an accompanying documentary on the 'Pervyi Kanal' station.
The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was
acting as an agent of MI6.
There is a good discussion of this, which highlights some of the problems with the documents, by Gilbert Doctorow, and Sokolov
appears to have been involved in some murky activities since.
But whatever the credibility or lack of it of the material, its appearance illustrates a general pattern, where the political
disintegration of the London-based opposition to Putin has meant that more and more people involved in it have been supplying
information to the Russians.
If, as I strongly suspect, there is fire beneath the smoke in those Russian television programmes, and if a great part of a
series of projects of a related kind orchestrated in conjunction by elements in American and British intelligence were actually
large run from this side, this will be creating headaches for people in Washington, as well as London.
An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries
on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core.
It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence
is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter
and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor
at Orbis and Hakluyt.'
That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove.
When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things
listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent
Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries.
If this is the case, then questions are raised about how much of the apparently compelling forensic evidence is forged – and
close examination suggests that key parts of it are.
In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele
and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly
killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was
read.
Likewise, also in January 2016, I sent the key relevant evidence on this crucial matter to Harding and senior figures at the
'Guardian', and have reason to believe it was read.
Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it.
At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others
have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British
counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public.
Given the central role which Steele has now assumed in what looks like one of the biggest political scandals in American history,
and the fact that in his book 'Collusion' Harding was again coming out in support of him, it would be of the greatest possible
interest if indeed the latter had combined being a senior 'Guardian' correspondent with being paid by both Orbis and – even more
important – Hakluyt.
And, particularly given the peculiar ambiguities of the role both of Fusion GPS and Baumgartner in the 'Trump Tower' meeting,
it would be of great interest if the latter could be tied not only to Fusion, but to Orbis and – again even more important – Hakluyt.
This in turn might be relevant in trying to make sense of whether the fact that he and Simpson appear to have been working
against Trump and Browder at the same time was or was not part of an elaborate ploy to give credibility to 'information operations'
against the former.
There are accordingly two possibilities. It may be that, while much else in the Apelbaum material can be shown to be accurate,
such accurate information is being used to give credibility to disinformation.
Alternatively, he is being used as a conduit for accurate and really explosive information about the British end of 'Russiagate',
which he is unlikely to have unearthed all by himself, and the actual sources of which are – for very understandable reasons –
being obscured.
Thank you for your reply. You have given me much to think about and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond in
such a comprehensive manner, and that you have provided me and others here with some really compelling information and notions.
In particular, the issue of sources and methods you note seems spot on. The author(s)'s information gathering methodologies
and expertise are certainly not those of the laiety. In fact in the comments below his post YA mentions intelligence work.
Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the
likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins.
One thing that did catch my eye was a response he made to David Cay Johnston's pissy request for a retraction about Jacoby
involvement. YA included a quote in Latin from Cicero's accusations against Cataline. Here is the English: What is there that
you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what
design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?
While this sort of riposte isn't exactly hyper-erudite, it ain't chopped liver either. What I mean to say is that exceptional
cyber skills, algorithm coding (I'm guessing crawlers) are not commonly coupled with that sort of classical formation. His recourse
to various biblical quotes suggests an unusual level of education as well. And no way is he younger than 38 or so.
At any rate, thank you for the article and your kind and informative reply.
Thanks. I have now read both a good few of Apelbaum's earlier posts, and also the comments on his discussion of the dossier.
Given the importance of his analysis of that document closer study is clearly needed of all this material, but I have some preliminary
reactions.
My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in
his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it.
In a July 2010 post, he explained that: 'In my previous life, I was a civil engineer. I worked for a large power marine construction
company doing structural design and field engineering.' According to the account he gave then, he subsequently shifted to software
development.
What he now tells us is that: 'As far as how I first started, I do have an intelligence background and have been developing
OSINT/cyber/intelligence platforms for many years.'
That makes sense in terms of the analysis, which – whatever other inputs there may or may not have been – looks to me like
the work of someone who has a serious background in these kinds of methodology, and moreover, is clearly not any kind of 'Fachidiot.'
So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed
by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him.
Even if he is not, questions would obviously rise about present connections arising from past work. This is in addition to
the possibility that the logic of events may have provoked him to collaborate with those who might earlier have been his adversaries.
Reading Apelbaum's work, I am reminded of another interesting intervention in an embittered argument relating to the Middle
East and the post-Soviet space, from what turned out to be an unexpected source.
In the period following the 'false flag' sarin attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 an incisive demolition of the conventional
wisdom was provided in the 'crowdsourced' investigation masterminded by one 'sasa wawa' on a site entitled 'Who Attacked Ghouta?'
And then, in December 2016, an Israeli high technology entrepreneur called Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200, that
country's equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ, who had subsequently made a great deal of money when he and his partner sold their company
to Paypal, co-founded a site called 'Rootclaim.'
The site, it was explained, was dedicated to applying Bayesian statistics to 'current affairs' problems. This is a methodology,
whose modern form owes much to work done at Bletchley Park in the war, which is invaluable in 'SIGINT' analysis and also combating
online fraud.
At the outset, 'Rootclaim' posted a recycled version of some of the key material from the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' investigation.
So, it seems likely, if not absolutely certain, that Saar Wilf and 'sasa wawa' are one and the same.
Following the Salisbury incident on 4 March, a blogger using the name 'sushi' produced a series of eleven posts under the title
'A Curious Incident' on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog.
Again, there are some very clear resemblances to 'sasa wawa' and Saar Wilf, which made me wonder whether the same person may
be reappearing under yet another 'moniker.'
While the 'flavour' of Apelbaum seems to be different, the combination of what looks like serious technical expertise in IT
techniques relating to intelligence with broad general intellectual interests looks to me similar.
I was amused by the combination of his quotation of the words from John 8:32 etched into the wall of the original CIA headquarters
– 'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' – and the following remarks:
'The June 2016 start date of Steele's contract with Fusion GPS is the start of the "billable" activity, not the beginning of
the research. Steele and Simpson/Jacoby have been collaborating on Trump/Russia going back to 2009.
'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and
federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he
has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ
and state.'
As it happens, I think that many of the collaborations involved may have started significantly earlier than this. In his response
to David Cay Johnston, Apelbaum links to an April 2007' WSJ' article by Simpon and Jacoby which, among other things, deals with
Semyon Mogilevich.
This is behind a paywall, but, fortunately, the fact that Ukrainian nationalists have had an obvious interest in treating it
as a source of reliable information has meant that it is easily accessible.
It should I think be clear from my January 2016 post why I find this particularly interesting, in that it has to be interpreted
in the context of a crucial 'key' to the mystery of the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler
Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying
to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.'
So, I then come back to the question of whether this notion of a 'large Haluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the
US', playing the role of Sauron with Brennan, perhaps, as the 'Witch-king of Angmar', does or does not have substance.
If it does, there would be very good reasons for a variety of people, with a range of different attitudes to events in the
post-Soviet space and the Middle East, to think that they had an interest in collaborating with Russian intelligence against a
common enemy.
If it does not, then there is a real possibility that Apelbaum may be involved in using accurate intelligence to disseminate
inaccurate. (It seems to me that he is much too intelligent to be a plausible candidate for the role of 'useful idiot.')
One further point that may, or may not, be relevant. Many of the most influential American and British Jews, for reasons which
I find somewhat hard to understand, seem to have decided that the heirs of the architects of the Lvov pogrom are nice and cuddly.
So, for example, Chrystia Freeland, the unrepentant granddaughter of the notorious Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak, has been
able to end up as Canadian Foreign Minister because made a successful journalistic career on the London 'Financial Times', a paper
with a strong Jewish presence.
That the editorial staff of such a paper thought it appropriate to have someone like Freeland as their Moscow correspondent
gives you a good insight into how moronic British élites have become. This may well be relevant, in trying to evaluate claims
about Hakluyt and other matters.
In relation to Apelbaum, it may be quite beside the point that other Jews from a Russian/East European background, both in
Russia, Israel, and the United States, have very different views on Ukraine, Russia, and the dangers posed – not least to Israel
– by jihadists. It is however a fact which needs to be born in mind, when one comes across people whose views cut across conventional
dividing lines in the United States and Britain.
Beside the point in relation to Apelbaum, I am confident, but also needing to be kept in mind, is the possibility that elements
in the United States 'intelligence community', seeing the 'writing on the wall', may think it appropriate to shift from trying
to pass the buck by blaming the Russians to doing so by blaming the Brits.
It seems apparent that Putin's reordering of the Russian economy after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Republic
Bank's difficulites and the death of Edmund Safra left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped to exercise rentier
rights over the Russian economy and resources. Why so much US resources and energy have been committed to recovering a contested
deed is a real conundrum.
I was unaware of Freeland's grandfather and his lamentable CV. Thank you. It's funny that you mentioned both the Ghouta post
and the Vineyard of the Saker. I recall reading those and thinking- this is not like common fare on the intertubes.
Your last points about failings in the quality of elite decision-making is extremely important. This dynamic of the dumb (US,
UK, EU) at the wheel is, for me, the most frightening feature of the current state of play. In the worst moments I fear we are
all on a bus driven by a drunk monkey, careening through the Andes. It's going to hurt all the way to the bottom.
Again, I am very grateful for your replies and all the great information and thought.
I think the question of why large elements in both American and British élites got so heavily invested, in essence, in supporting
the oligarchs who refused Putin's terms in what turned into a kind of 'bare knuckles' struggle they were always likely to lose
is a very interesting one.
It has long seemed to me that, even if one looked at matters from the most self-interested and cynical point of view, this
represented a quite spectacular error of judgement. And, viewing the way in which 'international relations' are rearranging themselves,
I am reasonably confident that this was one matter on which I got things right.
A central reason for this, I have come to think, is that Berezovsky and the 'information operations' people round him – Litvinenko
is important, but the pivotal figure, the 'mastermind', if you will, was clearly Alex Goldfarb, and Yuri Shvets and Yuri Felshtinsky
both played and still play important supporting roles – were telling people in the West what these wanted to hear.
It is a truth if not quite 'universally acknowledged', at least widely recognised by those who have acquired some 'worldly
wisdom', that intellectually arrogant people, with limited experience of the world and a narrow education, can commonly be 'led
by the nose' by figures who have more of the relevant kinds of intelligence and experience, and few scruples.
This rather basic fact is central to understanding the press conference on 31 May 2007 where the figure whom the Berezovsky
group and Christopher Steele had framed in relation to the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, responded to the Crown Prosecution
Service request for his extradition.
In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards',
to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version,
the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia.
Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations'
people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism
– makes clear it is justified.
What moreover became very evident, when Glenn Simpson testified to the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees,
was that he was once again recycling the Berezovsky's group's version of Putin 'sistema' as the 'return of Karla.'
Given what has been emerging on the ways in which Fusion GPS and Steele were both integrated into networks involving top-level
people in the FBI, DOJ, State Department and CIA, it seems clear that the 'retards'/'idiots' label is as applicable to people
on your side as to people on ours.
Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose
strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost
of Boris Berezovsky.
But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the
successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted
to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption.
As to what happened next, a recent item on 'Russian Insider', providing a link to and transcript of a more recent piece presented
by Dmitry Kiselyov on 'Vesti Nedeli is a good illustration of where accurate information and disinformation can be mixed in material
from Russian sources.
The piece, which appeared in July, discusses, and quotes from, an interview given the previous month to Dmitry Gordon, who
runs a Ukrainian nationalist site, by Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta. Among other things, this deals with Berezovsky's death.
(See
https://gordonua.com/public...
. A little manipulation will get you a reasonably serviceable English translation, although
it becomes comic because Berezovsky is referred to as 'pope'.)
The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by
British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.'
As it happens, this is a patently tendentious reading of what she says. However, interesting features of the actual text of
the interview are 1. that it does provide what to my mind is compelling evidence that her father was murdered, and 2. while she
clearly suggests that this was covered up by the British, she is not suggesting that they were responsible – but also not making
Putin 'prime suspect.'
Whether the suggestion by his daughter that her father might have been murdered by people who knew that by so doing they might
get control of assets he might otherwise recoup has any merit I cannot say: I doubt it but cannot simply rule the possibility
out.
What remains the case is that at that point there were very many people, including but in no way limited to elements in Western
intelligence agencies, who had strong interests in avoiding a return by Berezovsky to Russia.
And the same people had the strongest possible interest in avoiding his being treated at the Inquest into Litvinenko's death
by a competent barrister representing the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the way he had been treated by
Lord Sumption.
Ironically, it may have been partly because Lugovoi had made a dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing from the proceedings
less than a fortnight before Berezovsky's death that before this happened a lot of people were staring at an absolutely worst-case
scenario.
Time and again, in Owen's report, one finds matters where he recycles patent disinformation, which a well-briefed barrister
acting for the ICRF could have easily ripped to shreds. At the same time, in this situation, the Russians could most probably
have made a reasonable fist of coping with the multiple contradictions in claims made on their own side.
And, crucially, their patent weak suit – the need to obscure the actual role of Russian intelligence in the smuggling of the
polonium into London, which had nothing to do with any murder plot – could have been reasonably well 'covered.'
Precisely because of these facts, the one scenario which can very easily be completely ruled out is that which is basic to
the 'information operations' now coming out of London and Washington. In this, Berezovsky's death is portrayed as a key element
in a systematic attempt by the Putin 'sistema' to eradicate the supposedly heroic opposition, much of it located in London.
That sustaining this fable is critical to defending the credibility of Steele, and therefore of the whole 'Russiagate' narrative,
is quite evident from the 'From Russia With Blood' materials published by 'BuzzFeed' in July last year.
This, however, leads on to a paradox, which is highlighted by a piece posted by James George Jatras on the 'Strategic Culture
Foundation' site on 18 August, entitled 'Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?'
Among the points Jatras – who I think is an Orthodox Christian – makes is that the logic of contesting the 'Russiagate' narrative
has had some strange consequences. Among these, there is one on which the actual history of the activities of Berezovsky and his
'information operations' people bears directly:
'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative: Among the President's defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors,
Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) "interfered in our elections" in order to "undermine our democracy." Mitt Romney was
right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that's the variable.
The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher
Steele dossier is full of "Russian dirt" – though there's literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing
to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.'
For reasons I have already discussed, I think what while Jatras is substantially right, 'zero evidence' is only partially correct:
It seems to me that disinformation supplied by elements in Russian intelligence could quite possibly have found its way into the
second and final memoranda.
That said, Jatras has pointed to a fundamental feature of the current situation, which involves multiple ironies.
The total destruction of Steele's credibility could easily be achieved by anyone who was interested in looking at the evidence
about the life and death of the late Alexander Litvinenko seriously. However, because a central tactic of most of those who are
attacking the 'Russiagate' narrative has generally been 'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative', they are like people who ought
to be able to see Steele's 'Achilles' heel', but in practice, often end up attacking him where his armour is, without being, not
at its weakest.
Meanwhile, as I have already stressed, the ability of the Russian authorities to undermine the 'narrative' produced by the
'information operations' people around Berezovsky, of whom the most important are Alex Goldfarb and Yuri Shvets, is compromised
by their fear of having to 'own up to' their actual role in the smuggling of the polonium into London in October-November 2007.
The person who had a strong interest in blowing this structure of illusion to pieces was actually Lugovoi. But it seems to
me at least possible that there has been a kind of disguised covert conspiracy by elements in Western and Russian intelligence
to ensure there was no risk of him doing so.
One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content
and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not
match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report"
to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy.
I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association
with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm
seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion
was undermined.
Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting
in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough
to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before
the election
Saying he was reopening the HC email investigation.
Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track
on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate.
Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit
in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and
mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had
the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him
One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers
murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)
Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from
the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD
to know that report exists - and covered it up.
That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about
that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.
And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration
knew?
That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even
more people are likely to end up in jail.
You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what
he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot
of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.
I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape"
was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.
I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies
if I missed that response.
Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.
What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".
When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything
he said was true.
1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.
2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the
future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.
3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem
he already has had in the past.
4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target
of retaliation in some way.
If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for
his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he
said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.
Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility
that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked
him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.
I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks. But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
quote: 55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh
had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know
this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."
56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C.
police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were
unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer.
At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed
FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016],
[Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some
juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you
know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money." . . . "I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
. . . The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had
a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to
his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording
and his statement to NPR cannot both be true. endquote https://medium.com/@caityjo...
You may very well be right. There may be a large element of 'amateur night out' about this.
But then I come back to the question of who decided that the dossier be published, and who, if anyone, was consulted before
the decision was made. For the reasons I gave, I am reasonably confident that those on this side who had been in one way or another
complicit in its production and covert dissemination were taken aback by the publication.
It is not clear to me whether anything significant can be inferred from the publicly available evidence about whether those
on your side who had been complicit were involved in the decision to publish without taking even elementary precautions, or whether
the 'Buzzfeed' people just had a rush of blood to the head.
I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to
opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations
underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about
the legal ramifications.
This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant
or fan the media flames.
And now they are turning on one another. Hayden just slammed Clapper for making too much of losing the security clearance the
he abuse for political reasons.
Looks like both Clapper and Haydon made the same comment about Brennan. they said "his rhetoric was becoming a problem. Ah,
the USAF intel rats are swimming for the shore. Lets see how many others (not all USAF) decide to try to save themselves.
I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful
media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS.
I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms.
IMO, everyone on the list that Sarah Sanders noted, should not just lose their clearance but should be testifying to a grand
jury.
Not really incredulous. Just expected behavior from swamp creatures whose self-assumed importance and "rights" (that the rest
of us peasants don't have) are coming under threat.
It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this.
One question. It seems to me that if what seems likely to be true does prove true, a range of these people must have committed
very serious offences indeed.
However, I am too ignorant to know what precisely those offences might be. If you, or anyone else, had a clear understanding,
I would be interested.
"It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this."
That says it all. We got the more discreditable side of the affair outsourced to us. Ugh. Is that all we're fit for now in
the UK? White helmets and Khan Sheikhoun and Steele, all the scrubby stuff? Is that what the famous "Special Relationship" now
consists of? We get to do the scrubby stuff because it's what we're fit for and we can be relied upon to keep it quiet?
Because at least on the American side there are people concerned about the political/PR involvement of parts of their own Intelligence
Community, and seeking to have it looked into. Here - am I right? - it's dead silence.
I've been permitted to say before on SST that I don't think the Americans are going to resolve this affair satisfactorily until
more light is cast on the UK side. But I also think that, for our own sakes, we should be looking at what exactly our IC does,
and in particular, how much UK political involvement there was in what is now clear was a direct PR attack on an American President.
I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the federal criminal statutes. Having said that I suspect that the following could
be considered crimes:
intentionally misleading FISC
perjury
leaking classified information
launching investigations on the basis of known false information
surveillance of US citizens on the basis of false information
conspiracy to subvert the constitution
sedition/treason
There may also be certain professional agreements with the government that may have been violated. The only way any of these
people will face a grand jury is if Donald Trump chooses to take action. Left to the natural devices of the law enforcement institutions
nothing will happen and they will sweep everything under the rug. The intensity of Trump's tweets and the accusations therein
are rising. If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein
and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury.
Considering what has been uncovered by Congressional investigators and the DOJ IG, I am truly surprised that Sessions has resisted
the appointment of a special counsel. But of course that could go the way of the Owens inquiry in your country.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a
wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it
possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden
interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
Notable quotes:
"... A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was. ..."
"... And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims. ..."
"... But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts. ..."
"... It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger. ..."
"... It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM. ..."
"... My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides. ..."
"... There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win. ..."
"... The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ. ..."
"... Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. ..."
"... Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. ..."
"... You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. ..."
"... Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ. ..."
"... In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo ..."
"... There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. ..."
"... At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom. ..."
"... I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time. ..."
"... I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop? ..."
"... I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers. ..."
"... I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class. ..."
"... I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing. ..."
"... In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. ..."
"... It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse. ..."
"... 'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.' ..."
"... And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities. ..."
"... So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin. ..."
"... All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko. ..."
"... All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele. ..."
"... Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017. ..."
"... That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins. ..."
"... To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ. ..."
"... I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue. ..."
"... The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice. ..."
"... No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes. ..."
"... In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.' ..."
"... Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .) ..."
"... Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' ..."
"... I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global. ..."
"... I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that. ..."
"... Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket? ..."
"... It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate? ..."
"... Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents. ..."
"... The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6. ..."
"... An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core. ..."
"... It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.' ..."
"... That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries. ..."
"... In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read. ..."
"... Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it. ..."
"... At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public. ..."
"... Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins. ..."
"... My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it. ..."
"... So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him. ..."
"... 'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.' ..."
"... This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.' ..."
"... In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia. ..."
"... Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified. ..."
"... Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky. ..."
"... But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption. ..."
"... The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.' ..."
"... One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy. ..."
"... I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined. ..."
"... Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election ..."
"... Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate. ..."
"... Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him ..."
"... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
"... I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications. ..."
"... This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames. ..."
"... I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS. ..."
"... I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms. ..."
"... If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury. ..."
My strong impression is that nobody on the British side vetted the dossier for publication. A striking feature of the early news
coverage is that there appeared to be total confusion, with some of the reporting suggesting that the sources quoted wanted to hang
him out to dry, others that they wanted to defend him.
An interesting aspect is that not only were anonymous sources linked to MI6 quoted on both sides of the argument -- which could
have been explained by disagreements within the organisation: in different stories, not however far apart in date, its head, Sir
Alex Younger, was portrayed as holding radically different views.
When CNN publicised the existence of the dossier on 10 January 2017, the same day that it was published by 'BuzzFeed', it suggested
that the author was British. The following day, the WSJ named Steele.
On 13 January, Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter for 'Mail Online', published a report whose headlines seem worth quoting in
full:
'I introduced him to my wife as James Bond': Former spy Chris Steele's friends describe a "show-off" 007 figure but MI6 bosses
brand him "an idiot" for an "appalling lack of judgement" over the Trump "dirty dossier": Intelligence expert Nigel West says friend
is like Ian Fleming's famous character; He said: "He's James Bond. I actually introduced him to my wife as James Bond'; Mr West says
Steele dislikes Putin and Kremlin for ignoring rules of espionage; Angry spy source calls him 'idiot' and blasts decision to take
on the Trump work; Current MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger is said to be livid about reputation damage.'
On 15 January, however, Kim Sengupta, Defence Editor of the 'Independent', produced a report headlined: 'Head of MI6 used information
from Trump dossier in first public speech; Warnings on cyberattacks show ex-spy's work is respected.'
A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared
by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision
being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would
seem to me unlikely that Steele was.
This leads me on to another puzzle about the dossier to which I have been having a difficulty finding a solution. Long years
ago I was reasonably familiar with libel law in relation to journalism. Anyone who 'served indentures', as very many of us did in
those days, had to study it. Later, I got involved in a protracted libel suit -- successfully, I hasten to add -- in relation to
a programme I made, and had the sobering experience of having a top-class libel barrister requiring me to justify every assertion
I had made.
In the jargon then, a crucial question when an article, or programme, was being 'vetted' before publication was whether it represented
a 'fair business risk.' This involved both the technical legal issues, and also judgements as to whether people were likely to sue,
and how if they did the case would be likely to pan out.
On the face of things, one would not have expected that people at 'BuzzFeed' would have gone ahead and make the dossier public,
without having it 'vetted' by competent lawyers. And I have difficulty seeing how, if they did, the advice could have been to publish
what they published.
I have some difficulty seeing how the advice could have been to include the memorandum with the claims about the Alfa Group oligarchs,
unless either these could be seriously defended or it was assumed that contesting them effectively would involve revealing more 'dirty
linen' than these wanted to see aired in public.
And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction
of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely,
without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims.
Trying to make sense of why such an obvious precaution was not taken, I find myself wondering whether, in fact, the reason may
have been that the people responsible for the dossier may have actually believed this part of it at least.
If that is so, however, the most plausible explanation I can see is that while other claims in the dossier may well be total fabrication,
either by the people at Fusion and Steele or by some of their questionable contacts, this information at least did come from what
Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr et al thought were reliable Russian government sources.
But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would
not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts.
I think that the cases involving Karim Baratov and Dmitri Dokuchaev and his colleagues may be much more complex than is apparent
from what looks to me like patent disinformation put out both on the Western and Russian sides.
It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts
and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also
Christopher Steele and Alex Younger.
It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation',
while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM.
If you want to get a clear picture of quite how low-grade the latter figure is, incidentally, it is worth looking at the speech
to which Kim Sengupta refers.
A favourite line of mine comes in Younger's discussion of the -- actually largely mythical -- notion of 'hybrid warfare': 'In
this arena, our opponents are often states whose very survival owes to the strength of their security capabilities; the work is complex
and risky, often with the full weight of the State seeking to root us out.'
Leaving aside the fact that this is borderline illiterate, what it amazing is Younger's apparent blindness to clearly unintended
implications of what he writes. If indeed, the 'very survival' of the Russian state 'owes to the strength of [its] security capabilities',
the conclusions, seen from a Russian point of view, would seem rather obvious: vote Putin, and give medals to Patrushev and Bortnikov.
My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American
intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended
consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate
measures to cover their backsides.
There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One
of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency
planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of
a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win.
The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central
role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ.
Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous
communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. They even
have discussions about Deripaska and about his visa application to visit the US. Bruce is a conduit to Strzok at FBI. Glenn Simpson
also is part of these discussions with Steele and the Ohrs.
Simpson also arranges for Steele to brief "reporters" like David Corn and others at the NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, Politico and others.
Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. They are communicating with Carter Page and
Papadopolous, who in turn is drinking and yapping with Aussie ambassador Downer.
You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's
US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. There's Sen. Harry Reid passing on the Steele "dossier" to
Comey.
Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then
there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in
all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors
on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's
golf course in NJ.
Oh, there is also Nellie Ohr setting up ham radio to avoid detection in her communications with Steele. Then we have everyone
leaking and spinning to their "cohorts" in the premier media like the NY Times, CNN and WaPo.
Comey even has his buddy a professor and ostensibly his legal counsel on the payroll of the FBI as a contractor with access
to all the sensitive databases leaking to the media.
Andy McCabe has his legal counsel Lisa Page spin stories around his wife's huge campaign contributions from Clinton consigliere
McAuliffe.
In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media
personalities for a quid pro quo.
As if all this was not enough there's AG Loretta Lynch, meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac ostensibly to discuss their grandkids.
Not to forget there were these "unmaskings" of surveillance information by Susan Rice, Samantha Power.
There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele.
Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. Then there are the FISC judges who never believed
their mandate required them to verify the evidence before issuing sweeping surveillance warrants. Now all this is what I as an
old farmer and winemaker have read. Those more in tune would easily add to these convoluted machinations.
I don't know how to make sense of all this. All I see is the extent of effort to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and
after he won from governing. The most obvious observation is that the leadership in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies
are so busy politicking spinning and leaking they have neither the time or the inclination let alone competence to do their real
job for which they get paid a handsome wage and sterling benefits.
At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the
Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of
Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience
in spookdom.
If you have any speculative theories that connects some of the dots it would be my great pleasure to read.
I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time.
Confident that their horse is going to win the race and that the media will cover it all up and nobody will ever hear anything
about anything. Now that the unexpected happened, they're just spinning and denying faster hoping the Dems win in Nov and stop
all the investigations. And, they're getting nervous wondering who's going to sell out whom next. Up and down, around and around.
Gerbils -- there really isn't anything very consistent, planned or thought-out.
"I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised
not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time."
I believe your summary of what's happening is more accurate than Alastair Crooke's as set out in the article linked to.
But bright or not, what are these people in the IC doing being "highly politicised"? Does that not render them considerably
less efficient?
I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to
predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang
indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised"
mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop?
I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget
that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria
and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers.
Usually the incumbent party loses the mid-term election. The Democrats lost big in Obama's first mid-term. The Republicans
won the House and gained six senators. While the punditry claims a Blue Wave and Nate Silver is giving the Dems the odds. I'm
not so sure. I think the GOP will increase their majority in the Senate putting any conviction of Trump out of question.
I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media,
the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump.
Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class.
Yeah. My bet is that the Repubs hold onto both. 1) the economy is getting better 2) what do the Dems have to offer other than
this crazy Trump/Russia thing?
Economy will slow down sharply in 2019 but there should be enough momentum to help with the mid-terms. Trump needs to stop
with the endless sanction stuff. The House does look like a close one.
At a very general level, a 'speculative theory' which I have been mulling over for some time was rather well set out in a commentary
in 'The Hill' on 9 August by Sharyl Attkisson, which opens:
'Let's begin in the realm of the fanciful.
'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that
a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established
money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
And Attkisson goes on to outline precisely the developments that appear to have happened.
I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which
Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history'
crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing.
In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional
conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not
binding on the elect. And in turn, according to a familiar skeptical view, antinomianism can easily end up in in straightforward
rascality.
On the rascality – to which Attkisson is pointing – I am working on how parts of the picture can be fleshed out. A few preliminary
points raised by your remarks.
As you note, 'There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok
for Steele.' So, we know that Ohr and Steele were conspiring together to ensure that the latter could continue to be intimately
involved in the Mueller investigation, despite the FBI termination,
It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures
in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else
is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse.
If, as seems to me likely, although not certain, the second possibility is closer to the truth than the former, then before
Ohr testifies on 28 August before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees he will have to consider whether he is prepared
to 'take the rap' for his superiors, or 'sing sweetly.'
The fact that in a report in 'The Hill', I think on the same day as the Attkisson piece, John Solomon was quoting from Ohr's
handwritten notes of a meeting with Glenn Simpson in December 2016 makes me wonder whether he may not already have made a decision.
A key paragraph from the report:
'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher
Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes
from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.'
There is I think a need for caution here. There is no guarantee that Simpson was telling the literal truth to Ohr, or indeed
the latter reproducing with absolute accuracy with he was told (handwritten notes can be disposed of easily, but they can also
be rewritten.)
One is I think on firmer ground in relation to what it suggests was not the case – that there is any substance whatsoever in
the ludicrous story of someone running a private security company in London sending out hired employees who then gain access to
top Kremlin insiders, with these, of course, telling them precisely what they actually think.
And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which
could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain,
or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities.
So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources,
and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin.
All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved
in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko.
That said, I continue to think it possible that both the second and final memoranda may incorporate some 'glitter', as well
as 'chickenfeed' fed from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts, to hark back to George Smiley says to the Minister,
quite possibly included in the hope that the BS involved would be reproduced in contexts where it could provoke legal action.
All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making
it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie
Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
It could then be that Steele has been, in effect, hoist with his own petard, in that he is having to sustain the fiction that
he had some kind of grounds for making the claims about Aleksej Gubarev and XBT. How far this matters, at least in relation to
the action bought against 'BuzzFeed' in Florida, remains moot at the moment.
Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent
any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish
that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017.
That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon
the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins.
Mr Habakkuk, you mention "ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin" - I am not sure if you meant Akhmetov.
I am surprised and curious about you mentioning him - if you meant Akhmetov - because that is one name among all the oligarchs
which has so far not been prominent. Thank you for your posts, these posts and the SST comments could and should serve as help
to the congressional investigations and hearings.
To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's
Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate
and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ.
I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner
will be very interesting to pursue.
The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice.
No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's
good friend Benjamin Wittes.
Younger isn't the brightest bulb in the box, is he?
"If you doubt the link between legitimacy and effective counter-terrorism, then – albeit negatively – the unfolding tragedy
in Syria will, I fear, provide proof. I believe the Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad's discredited regime,
will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist
anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to
be defeated. Meanwhile, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy
is heart-breaking"
Those were indeed some of the most inane comments in an inane piece.
But then, if you read an interview given to Jay Elwes of 'Prospect' magazine in May last year by Younger's predecessor Sir
Richard Dearlove, who looks to have been a significant background presence in what has been going on, you will find that, although
he is much more coherent than than his successor, it is almost as inane.
As it happens, Dearlove was one of the signatories of the 'Statement of Principles' of something called the 'Henry Jackson
Society.'
This was founded in 2005, in Cambridge, by a group in whom acolytes of an historian called Maurice Cowling were prominent –
Dearlove is himself a graduate in history from that university.
In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that
only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic
states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.'
Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest'
an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See
https://nationalinterest.or...
.)
Among other things, he harked back to the way that, in 1648, a century and a half of bloody ideological strife in Europe had
been ended with a recognition that the legitimacy of different state forms had to be accepted, if a kind of 'war of all against
all' was to be avoided.
And Lieven went on to reflect on the way that, at what was then widely seen as the end of the Cold War, the abandonment of
universalisitic pretensions by Russia and China was interpreted as justifying an embrace of these by the the West.
This, he went on to argue, had actually had the paradoxical effect of relegitimising 'régimes' which do not conform to Western
'democratic' models, concluding by noting what appears to our new, quasi-Soviet, preference for not letting experience interfere
with ideological dogma:
'Finally – even after the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya – there is almost no awareness among US policymakers of the fact that
US attempts to change the regimes of other countries are likely to be seen not only by the elites of those countries but also
by their populations as leading to – and intended to lead to – the destruction of the state itself, leading to disaster for its
society and population. When the Communist regime in the USSR collapsed (though only in part under Western pressure), it took
the Soviet state with it. The Russian state came close to following suit in the years that followed, Russia was reduced to impotence
on the world stage, and large parts of the Russian and other populations suffered economic and social disaster. Remembering their
own past experiences with state collapse, warlordism, famine and foreign invasion, Chinese people looked at this awful spectacle
and huddled closer to the Chinese state – one that they may dislike in many ways, but which they certainly trust more than anything
America has to offer – especially given the apparent decay of democracy throughout the West.'
I read with interest your piece back in June entitled 'Putin Once Dreamed the American Dream', reprinting Charles Heberle's
account of the 'Transforming Subjects Into Citizens' project, and the attitude of some people close to Putin to it.
One of the things which struck me was that the question why the American Revolution succeeded, and so many others failed, which
was concerning the intellectuals to whom Heberle talked, is one of the central questions of modern political thought, from Tocqueville
on.
(Indeed, the question of the preconditions for what might be called 'constitutional' government, has been central to 'republican'
thought, ever since it was revived by Italian thinkers, including prominently Machiavelli, when the 'Renaissance' made them reactivate
and rework debates from ancient Rome and Greece.)
However, to hark back to the anxieties expressed by Lieven, nothing in the analysis of the great French thinker necessary guarantees
that the success of 'Democracy in America' is stable and permanent, or indeed that the relatively civilised order of the post-war
'Pax Americana' is necessarily durable in Western Europe.
Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology
of Eastward Turn.' A paragraph that struck me:
'Russian society should by no means abdicate from its mostly European culture. But it should certainly stop being afraid,
let alone feel ashamed, of its Asianism. It should be remembered that from the standpoint of prevailing social mentality and
society's attitude to the authorities Russia, just as China and many other Asian states, are offspring of Chengiss Khan's Empire.
This is no reason for throwing up hands in despair or for beginning to despise one's own people, contrary to what many members
of intelligencia sometimes do. It should be accepted as a fact of life and used as a strength. The more so, since amid the
harsh competitive environment of the modern world the authoritarian type of government – in the context of a market economy
and equitable military potentials – is certainly far more effective than modern democracy. This is what our Western partners
find so worrisome. Of course, we should bear in mind that authoritarianism – just like democracy – may lead to stagnation and
degradation. Russia is certainly confronted with such a risk.'
Unlike you, I cannot claim serious expertise on Russia. But, as a reasonably alert generalist television current affairs producer,
I took note of the indications which were emerging in the course of 1987 that the Gorbachev 'new thinking' was underpinned by
a realisation that Soviet institutions and ideas had become fundamentally dysfunctional, to which you have referred repeatedly
over the years.
And, after long tedious months trying interest the powers that were in British broadcasting in what was happening, I ended
up producing a couple of programmes for BBC Radio in February/March 1989 in which we interviewed some of the leading 'new thinkers',
among them Karaganov's then immediate superior at the Institute of Europe, Vitaly Zhurkin.
At the Institute for the USA and Canada, by contrast, we did not interview its head, Georgiy Arbatov, but his deputy, Andrei
Kokoshin, and one of the latter's mentors on military matters and collaborators General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, who I later realised
had earlier been one of the foremost Soviet nuclear strategists. (At the Institute for World Economy and International Relations,
we interviewed Arbatov's son, Alexei.)
Talking to these people we got a sense, although it had to be fleshed out later, of the scale of the disillusion with Soviet
models, and indeed – which began to frighten me not long after – of the way many of them were romanticising the West.
What Karaganov now writes is I think a hardly very surprising reaction to the way that the Western powers responded to the
'new thinking.' Moreover, it seems to me that the disillusionment involved is in no sense particular Russian, but rather global.
If one regards 'democracy' as though it were quoted on the stock exchange, before 1914 there were very many buyers, including
among the Russian élite. By 1931, in very many places, including large sections of the 'intelligentsia' in Western countries,
it was a sellers' market, to put it mildly.
After 1945, a kind of long 'bull market' in 'democracy' started: for very good reasons.
The – largely but very far from entirely – peaceful retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to a very significant extent the
product of this. The subsequent behaviour of Western élites has generated a vicious 'bear market', a fact they appear unable to
understand.
I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me,
are global.
I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO
the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and
that was that.
PS, in light of the Henry Jackson society and all Younger's references to "values" this one rather stands out "A vital lesson
I take from the Chilcot Report is the danger of group think."
Yeah. Group think, the very opposite of what I mean by pluralism.
Sharyl Atkinson describes well the conspiracy. When one steps back and look at all the machinations we know now, it seems incredible.
Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically?
If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains?
What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their
racket?
It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the
Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole
Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then
there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller
appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated?
Was each element separate?
There's no doubt a political thriller movie could be made.
I guess the comedy part is that there actually exist people with medically functioning brains, who are somehow able to contort
such a worldview...Aleppo as peaceful 'desert' indeed...who knew that having bearded fanatics in charge is somehow 'better'...[and
not 'heart-breaking']...
Some here may find blogpost from March of this year interesting as it speaks to the production of the Steele dossier. I have
not seen it mentioned here before and a site search produced no results.
https://apelbaum.wordpress....
Some sections seem to have gotten David Cay Johnston's hackles up.
I had seen Yaacov Apelbaum's piece referred to by Clarice Feldman in a post on the 'American Thinker' site a few days back,
but not looked at it properly.
It is indeed fascinating, and clearly repays a closer study than I have so far had time to give it. I was however relieved
to find that what Apelbaum writes 'meshes' quite well with my own views of the likely authorship of the dossier.
A question I have is whether the monumental amount of labour involved in producing it can really be the work of a single IT
person – however wide-ranging his abilities and interests. My suspicion is that there may be input from Russian intelligence.
This is not said in order to discredit Apelbaum's work. In matters where I have had occasion critically to examine claims from
official Russian sources, I have found several unsurprising, but recurring, patterns. Sometimes, the information provided can
be shown to be essentially accurate, and it is reasonably clear how it has been obtained.
At other times, claims are made which information from other sources suggests either are, or may well be, true, but the 'sources
and methods' involved are deliberately obscured, making evaluation more difficult.
And then, there are many occasions when what one gets is quite patently a mixture of accurate information and disinformation.
Analysing these can be very productive, if one can both sift out the accurate information, and attempt to see what the disinformation
is designed to obscure.
One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the networks which are outlined by Apelbaum are precisely those which Russian
intelligence will have spent a great deal of time and ingenuity penetrating.
This will have been attempted by 'SIGINT' and surveillance methods, and also through infiltrating agents and turning people.
(There are often grounds to suspect that some of those most vociferously denouncing Putin are colluding with Russian intelligence.)
Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that
at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of
security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents.
Some of these were used back in April 2016 in a 'Vesti Nedeli' edition presented by Dmitry Kiselyov, who manages Russia's informational
programming resources, and an accompanying documentary on the 'Pervyi Kanal' station.
The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was
acting as an agent of MI6.
There is a good discussion of this, which highlights some of the problems with the documents, by Gilbert Doctorow, and Sokolov
appears to have been involved in some murky activities since.
But whatever the credibility or lack of it of the material, its appearance illustrates a general pattern, where the political
disintegration of the London-based opposition to Putin has meant that more and more people involved in it have been supplying
information to the Russians.
If, as I strongly suspect, there is fire beneath the smoke in those Russian television programmes, and if a great part of a
series of projects of a related kind orchestrated in conjunction by elements in American and British intelligence were actually
large run from this side, this will be creating headaches for people in Washington, as well as London.
An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries
on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core.
It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence
is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter
and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor
at Orbis and Hakluyt.'
That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove.
When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things
listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent
Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries.
If this is the case, then questions are raised about how much of the apparently compelling forensic evidence is forged – and
close examination suggests that key parts of it are.
In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele
and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly
killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was
read.
Likewise, also in January 2016, I sent the key relevant evidence on this crucial matter to Harding and senior figures at the
'Guardian', and have reason to believe it was read.
Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the
course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it.
At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others
have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British
counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public.
Given the central role which Steele has now assumed in what looks like one of the biggest political scandals in American history,
and the fact that in his book 'Collusion' Harding was again coming out in support of him, it would be of the greatest possible
interest if indeed the latter had combined being a senior 'Guardian' correspondent with being paid by both Orbis and – even more
important – Hakluyt.
And, particularly given the peculiar ambiguities of the role both of Fusion GPS and Baumgartner in the 'Trump Tower' meeting,
it would be of great interest if the latter could be tied not only to Fusion, but to Orbis and – again even more important – Hakluyt.
This in turn might be relevant in trying to make sense of whether the fact that he and Simpson appear to have been working
against Trump and Browder at the same time was or was not part of an elaborate ploy to give credibility to 'information operations'
against the former.
There are accordingly two possibilities. It may be that, while much else in the Apelbaum material can be shown to be accurate,
such accurate information is being used to give credibility to disinformation.
Alternatively, he is being used as a conduit for accurate and really explosive information about the British end of 'Russiagate',
which he is unlikely to have unearthed all by himself, and the actual sources of which are – for very understandable reasons –
being obscured.
Thank you for your reply. You have given me much to think about and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond in
such a comprehensive manner, and that you have provided me and others here with some really compelling information and notions.
In particular, the issue of sources and methods you note seems spot on. The author(s)'s information gathering methodologies
and expertise are certainly not those of the laiety. In fact in the comments below his post YA mentions intelligence work.
Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the
likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins.
One thing that did catch my eye was a response he made to David Cay Johnston's pissy request for a retraction about Jacoby
involvement. YA included a quote in Latin from Cicero's accusations against Cataline. Here is the English: What is there that
you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what
design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?
While this sort of riposte isn't exactly hyper-erudite, it ain't chopped liver either. What I mean to say is that exceptional
cyber skills, algorithm coding (I'm guessing crawlers) are not commonly coupled with that sort of classical formation. His recourse
to various biblical quotes suggests an unusual level of education as well. And no way is he younger than 38 or so.
At any rate, thank you for the article and your kind and informative reply.
Thanks. I have now read both a good few of Apelbaum's earlier posts, and also the comments on his discussion of the dossier.
Given the importance of his analysis of that document closer study is clearly needed of all this material, but I have some preliminary
reactions.
My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in
his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it.
In a July 2010 post, he explained that: 'In my previous life, I was a civil engineer. I worked for a large power marine construction
company doing structural design and field engineering.' According to the account he gave then, he subsequently shifted to software
development.
What he now tells us is that: 'As far as how I first started, I do have an intelligence background and have been developing
OSINT/cyber/intelligence platforms for many years.'
That makes sense in terms of the analysis, which – whatever other inputs there may or may not have been – looks to me like
the work of someone who has a serious background in these kinds of methodology, and moreover, is clearly not any kind of 'Fachidiot.'
So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed
by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him.
Even if he is not, questions would obviously rise about present connections arising from past work. This is in addition to
the possibility that the logic of events may have provoked him to collaborate with those who might earlier have been his adversaries.
Reading Apelbaum's work, I am reminded of another interesting intervention in an embittered argument relating to the Middle
East and the post-Soviet space, from what turned out to be an unexpected source.
In the period following the 'false flag' sarin attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 an incisive demolition of the conventional
wisdom was provided in the 'crowdsourced' investigation masterminded by one 'sasa wawa' on a site entitled 'Who Attacked Ghouta?'
And then, in December 2016, an Israeli high technology entrepreneur called Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200, that
country's equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ, who had subsequently made a great deal of money when he and his partner sold their company
to Paypal, co-founded a site called 'Rootclaim.'
The site, it was explained, was dedicated to applying Bayesian statistics to 'current affairs' problems. This is a methodology,
whose modern form owes much to work done at Bletchley Park in the war, which is invaluable in 'SIGINT' analysis and also combating
online fraud.
At the outset, 'Rootclaim' posted a recycled version of some of the key material from the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' investigation.
So, it seems likely, if not absolutely certain, that Saar Wilf and 'sasa wawa' are one and the same.
Following the Salisbury incident on 4 March, a blogger using the name 'sushi' produced a series of eleven posts under the title
'A Curious Incident' on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog.
Again, there are some very clear resemblances to 'sasa wawa' and Saar Wilf, which made me wonder whether the same person may
be reappearing under yet another 'moniker.'
While the 'flavour' of Apelbaum seems to be different, the combination of what looks like serious technical expertise in IT
techniques relating to intelligence with broad general intellectual interests looks to me similar.
I was amused by the combination of his quotation of the words from John 8:32 etched into the wall of the original CIA headquarters
– 'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' – and the following remarks:
'The June 2016 start date of Steele's contract with Fusion GPS is the start of the "billable" activity, not the beginning of
the research. Steele and Simpson/Jacoby have been collaborating on Trump/Russia going back to 2009.
'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and
federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he
has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ
and state.'
As it happens, I think that many of the collaborations involved may have started significantly earlier than this. In his response
to David Cay Johnston, Apelbaum links to an April 2007' WSJ' article by Simpon and Jacoby which, among other things, deals with
Semyon Mogilevich.
This is behind a paywall, but, fortunately, the fact that Ukrainian nationalists have had an obvious interest in treating it
as a source of reliable information has meant that it is easily accessible.
It should I think be clear from my January 2016 post why I find this particularly interesting, in that it has to be interpreted
in the context of a crucial 'key' to the mystery of the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler
Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying
to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.'
So, I then come back to the question of whether this notion of a 'large Haluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the
US', playing the role of Sauron with Brennan, perhaps, as the 'Witch-king of Angmar', does or does not have substance.
If it does, there would be very good reasons for a variety of people, with a range of different attitudes to events in the
post-Soviet space and the Middle East, to think that they had an interest in collaborating with Russian intelligence against a
common enemy.
If it does not, then there is a real possibility that Apelbaum may be involved in using accurate intelligence to disseminate
inaccurate. (It seems to me that he is much too intelligent to be a plausible candidate for the role of 'useful idiot.')
One further point that may, or may not, be relevant. Many of the most influential American and British Jews, for reasons which
I find somewhat hard to understand, seem to have decided that the heirs of the architects of the Lvov pogrom are nice and cuddly.
So, for example, Chrystia Freeland, the unrepentant granddaughter of the notorious Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak, has been
able to end up as Canadian Foreign Minister because made a successful journalistic career on the London 'Financial Times', a paper
with a strong Jewish presence.
That the editorial staff of such a paper thought it appropriate to have someone like Freeland as their Moscow correspondent
gives you a good insight into how moronic British élites have become. This may well be relevant, in trying to evaluate claims
about Hakluyt and other matters.
In relation to Apelbaum, it may be quite beside the point that other Jews from a Russian/East European background, both in
Russia, Israel, and the United States, have very different views on Ukraine, Russia, and the dangers posed – not least to Israel
– by jihadists. It is however a fact which needs to be born in mind, when one comes across people whose views cut across conventional
dividing lines in the United States and Britain.
Beside the point in relation to Apelbaum, I am confident, but also needing to be kept in mind, is the possibility that elements
in the United States 'intelligence community', seeing the 'writing on the wall', may think it appropriate to shift from trying
to pass the buck by blaming the Russians to doing so by blaming the Brits.
It seems apparent that Putin's reordering of the Russian economy after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Republic
Bank's difficulites and the death of Edmund Safra left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped to exercise rentier
rights over the Russian economy and resources. Why so much US resources and energy have been committed to recovering a contested
deed is a real conundrum.
I was unaware of Freeland's grandfather and his lamentable CV. Thank you. It's funny that you mentioned both the Ghouta post
and the Vineyard of the Saker. I recall reading those and thinking- this is not like common fare on the intertubes.
Your last points about failings in the quality of elite decision-making is extremely important. This dynamic of the dumb (US,
UK, EU) at the wheel is, for me, the most frightening feature of the current state of play. In the worst moments I fear we are
all on a bus driven by a drunk monkey, careening through the Andes. It's going to hurt all the way to the bottom.
Again, I am very grateful for your replies and all the great information and thought.
I think the question of why large elements in both American and British élites got so heavily invested, in essence, in supporting
the oligarchs who refused Putin's terms in what turned into a kind of 'bare knuckles' struggle they were always likely to lose
is a very interesting one.
It has long seemed to me that, even if one looked at matters from the most self-interested and cynical point of view, this
represented a quite spectacular error of judgement. And, viewing the way in which 'international relations' are rearranging themselves,
I am reasonably confident that this was one matter on which I got things right.
A central reason for this, I have come to think, is that Berezovsky and the 'information operations' people round him – Litvinenko
is important, but the pivotal figure, the 'mastermind', if you will, was clearly Alex Goldfarb, and Yuri Shvets and Yuri Felshtinsky
both played and still play important supporting roles – were telling people in the West what these wanted to hear.
It is a truth if not quite 'universally acknowledged', at least widely recognised by those who have acquired some 'worldly
wisdom', that intellectually arrogant people, with limited experience of the world and a narrow education, can commonly be 'led
by the nose' by figures who have more of the relevant kinds of intelligence and experience, and few scruples.
This rather basic fact is central to understanding the press conference on 31 May 2007 where the figure whom the Berezovsky
group and Christopher Steele had framed in relation to the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, responded to the Crown Prosecution
Service request for his extradition.
In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards',
to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version,
the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia.
Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations'
people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism
– makes clear it is justified.
What moreover became very evident, when Glenn Simpson testified to the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees,
was that he was once again recycling the Berezovsky's group's version of Putin 'sistema' as the 'return of Karla.'
Given what has been emerging on the ways in which Fusion GPS and Steele were both integrated into networks involving top-level
people in the FBI, DOJ, State Department and CIA, it seems clear that the 'retards'/'idiots' label is as applicable to people
on your side as to people on ours.
Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose
strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost
of Boris Berezovsky.
But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the
successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted
to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption.
As to what happened next, a recent item on 'Russian Insider', providing a link to and transcript of a more recent piece presented
by Dmitry Kiselyov on 'Vesti Nedeli is a good illustration of where accurate information and disinformation can be mixed in material
from Russian sources.
The piece, which appeared in July, discusses, and quotes from, an interview given the previous month to Dmitry Gordon, who
runs a Ukrainian nationalist site, by Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta. Among other things, this deals with Berezovsky's death.
(See
https://gordonua.com/public...
. A little manipulation will get you a reasonably serviceable English translation, although
it becomes comic because Berezovsky is referred to as 'pope'.)
The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by
British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.'
As it happens, this is a patently tendentious reading of what she says. However, interesting features of the actual text of
the interview are 1. that it does provide what to my mind is compelling evidence that her father was murdered, and 2. while she
clearly suggests that this was covered up by the British, she is not suggesting that they were responsible – but also not making
Putin 'prime suspect.'
Whether the suggestion by his daughter that her father might have been murdered by people who knew that by so doing they might
get control of assets he might otherwise recoup has any merit I cannot say: I doubt it but cannot simply rule the possibility
out.
What remains the case is that at that point there were very many people, including but in no way limited to elements in Western
intelligence agencies, who had strong interests in avoiding a return by Berezovsky to Russia.
And the same people had the strongest possible interest in avoiding his being treated at the Inquest into Litvinenko's death
by a competent barrister representing the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the way he had been treated by
Lord Sumption.
Ironically, it may have been partly because Lugovoi had made a dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing from the proceedings
less than a fortnight before Berezovsky's death that before this happened a lot of people were staring at an absolutely worst-case
scenario.
Time and again, in Owen's report, one finds matters where he recycles patent disinformation, which a well-briefed barrister
acting for the ICRF could have easily ripped to shreds. At the same time, in this situation, the Russians could most probably
have made a reasonable fist of coping with the multiple contradictions in claims made on their own side.
And, crucially, their patent weak suit – the need to obscure the actual role of Russian intelligence in the smuggling of the
polonium into London, which had nothing to do with any murder plot – could have been reasonably well 'covered.'
Precisely because of these facts, the one scenario which can very easily be completely ruled out is that which is basic to
the 'information operations' now coming out of London and Washington. In this, Berezovsky's death is portrayed as a key element
in a systematic attempt by the Putin 'sistema' to eradicate the supposedly heroic opposition, much of it located in London.
That sustaining this fable is critical to defending the credibility of Steele, and therefore of the whole 'Russiagate' narrative,
is quite evident from the 'From Russia With Blood' materials published by 'BuzzFeed' in July last year.
This, however, leads on to a paradox, which is highlighted by a piece posted by James George Jatras on the 'Strategic Culture
Foundation' site on 18 August, entitled 'Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?'
Among the points Jatras – who I think is an Orthodox Christian – makes is that the logic of contesting the 'Russiagate' narrative
has had some strange consequences. Among these, there is one on which the actual history of the activities of Berezovsky and his
'information operations' people bears directly:
'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative: Among the President's defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors,
Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) "interfered in our elections" in order to "undermine our democracy." Mitt Romney was
right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that's the variable.
The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher
Steele dossier is full of "Russian dirt" – though there's literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing
to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.'
For reasons I have already discussed, I think what while Jatras is substantially right, 'zero evidence' is only partially correct:
It seems to me that disinformation supplied by elements in Russian intelligence could quite possibly have found its way into the
second and final memoranda.
That said, Jatras has pointed to a fundamental feature of the current situation, which involves multiple ironies.
The total destruction of Steele's credibility could easily be achieved by anyone who was interested in looking at the evidence
about the life and death of the late Alexander Litvinenko seriously. However, because a central tactic of most of those who are
attacking the 'Russiagate' narrative has generally been 'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative', they are like people who ought
to be able to see Steele's 'Achilles' heel', but in practice, often end up attacking him where his armour is, without being, not
at its weakest.
Meanwhile, as I have already stressed, the ability of the Russian authorities to undermine the 'narrative' produced by the
'information operations' people around Berezovsky, of whom the most important are Alex Goldfarb and Yuri Shvets, is compromised
by their fear of having to 'own up to' their actual role in the smuggling of the polonium into London in October-November 2007.
The person who had a strong interest in blowing this structure of illusion to pieces was actually Lugovoi. But it seems to
me at least possible that there has been a kind of disguised covert conspiracy by elements in Western and Russian intelligence
to ensure there was no risk of him doing so.
One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content
and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not
match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report"
to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy.
I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association
with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm
seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion
was undermined.
Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting
in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough
to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before
the election
Saying he was reopening the HC email investigation.
Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track
on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate.
Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit
in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and
mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had
the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him
One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers
murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)
Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from
the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD
to know that report exists - and covered it up.
That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about
that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.
And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration
knew?
That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even
more people are likely to end up in jail.
You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what
he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot
of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.
I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape"
was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.
I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies
if I missed that response.
Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.
What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".
When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything
he said was true.
1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.
2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the
future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.
3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem
he already has had in the past.
4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target
of retaliation in some way.
If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for
his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he
said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.
Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility
that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked
him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.
I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks. But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
quote: 55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh
had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know
this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."
56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C.
police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were
unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer.
At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed
FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016],
[Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some
juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you
know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money." . . . "I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
. . . The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had
a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to
his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording
and his statement to NPR cannot both be true. endquote https://medium.com/@caityjo...
You may very well be right. There may be a large element of 'amateur night out' about this.
But then I come back to the question of who decided that the dossier be published, and who, if anyone, was consulted before
the decision was made. For the reasons I gave, I am reasonably confident that those on this side who had been in one way or another
complicit in its production and covert dissemination were taken aback by the publication.
It is not clear to me whether anything significant can be inferred from the publicly available evidence about whether those
on your side who had been complicit were involved in the decision to publish without taking even elementary precautions, or whether
the 'Buzzfeed' people just had a rush of blood to the head.
I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to
opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations
underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about
the legal ramifications.
This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant
or fan the media flames.
And now they are turning on one another. Hayden just slammed Clapper for making too much of losing the security clearance the
he abuse for political reasons.
Looks like both Clapper and Haydon made the same comment about Brennan. they said "his rhetoric was becoming a problem. Ah,
the USAF intel rats are swimming for the shore. Lets see how many others (not all USAF) decide to try to save themselves.
I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful
media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS.
I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms.
IMO, everyone on the list that Sarah Sanders noted, should not just lose their clearance but should be testifying to a grand
jury.
Not really incredulous. Just expected behavior from swamp creatures whose self-assumed importance and "rights" (that the rest
of us peasants don't have) are coming under threat.
It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this.
One question. It seems to me that if what seems likely to be true does prove true, a range of these people must have committed
very serious offences indeed.
However, I am too ignorant to know what precisely those offences might be. If you, or anyone else, had a clear understanding,
I would be interested.
"It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central
role in all this."
That says it all. We got the more discreditable side of the affair outsourced to us. Ugh. Is that all we're fit for now in
the UK? White helmets and Khan Sheikhoun and Steele, all the scrubby stuff? Is that what the famous "Special Relationship" now
consists of? We get to do the scrubby stuff because it's what we're fit for and we can be relied upon to keep it quiet?
Because at least on the American side there are people concerned about the political/PR involvement of parts of their own Intelligence
Community, and seeking to have it looked into. Here - am I right? - it's dead silence.
I've been permitted to say before on SST that I don't think the Americans are going to resolve this affair satisfactorily until
more light is cast on the UK side. But I also think that, for our own sakes, we should be looking at what exactly our IC does,
and in particular, how much UK political involvement there was in what is now clear was a direct PR attack on an American President.
I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the federal criminal statutes. Having said that I suspect that the following could
be considered crimes:
intentionally misleading FISC
perjury
leaking classified information
launching investigations on the basis of known false information
surveillance of US citizens on the basis of false information
conspiracy to subvert the constitution
sedition/treason
There may also be certain professional agreements with the government that may have been violated. The only way any of these
people will face a grand jury is if Donald Trump chooses to take action. Left to the natural devices of the law enforcement institutions
nothing will happen and they will sweep everything under the rug. The intensity of Trump's tweets and the accusations therein
are rising. If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein
and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury.
Considering what has been uncovered by Congressional investigators and the DOJ IG, I am truly surprised that Sessions has resisted
the appointment of a special counsel. But of course that could go the way of the Owens inquiry in your country.
"... there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. ..."
"... His positions against illegal immigration and free trade also beat Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was a very experienced and savvy politician but she was tied to NAFTA thru her husband. And the Democratic party's defense of allowing ANY foreigner to walk across our borders without ANY sort of background check whatsoever, and remain in the country, was a losing proposition. ..."
"... Labor unions can claw back the "missing 10%" of overall income that a unionless labor market has squeezed out of the bottom 40% of earners; raising the bottom 40% back to 20% income share -- through higher consumer prices at Target, Walgreen's, etc. ..."
"... if fast food can pay $15/hr with 33% (!) labor costs, Target('s consumers) can easily pay $20/hr with 12% labor costs and Walmart('s consumers) can easily pay $25/hr with 7% labor costs. ..."
"... Your description of Republicans is spot on. However, other than their maniacal obsession with divisive identity politics, Democrats are hardly much better given the that they ALSO kowtow to the Wall Street and the wealthy. Neither major party represents working people–it just too bad that working people allow themselves to be forever divided by two corrupt political parties who view them with little but contempt. ..."
"... In other words Dems lost their legitimacy, identify politics did not work this time as well as in the past. I would say that the whole neoliberal elite lost its legitimacy. That's why Russiagate was launched, and Neo-McCarthyism hysteria was launched by Podesta and friends to cement those cracks that divide the USA. ..."
"... The Dem Party became a grab bag of identity groups. But this election the dominant was anti-globalization discourse, and Dems suffered a humiliating defeat. With Republican Party grabbing the the tool they created. The collies of small town America led to collapse of Dems. ..."
"... People do vote against their economic interest ("What the matter with Kansas" situation). But the level of alienation of working and lower middle class is really extreme. The opioid epidemic is just one sign of this. So Trump election was just a middle finger to the neoliberal elite. ..."
"... We actually do not have left in the USA. Because there is no real discussion about neoliberalism and alternatives. Bernie called himself "democratic socialist'. Which was at least in sense transformational. But that's it. Bernie is not anti-war and anti-American empire. ..."
As should already be clear from existing polls ( click and search for "fair" ), there is strong
support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy.
At Data For Progress, they chose
to emphasize the positive -- four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think it is just
as striking that opinion is almost equally split on a top marginal income tax rate of 90% (2%
more oppose than support) and universal basic income (2% more oppose than support).
In particular, a (very narrow) plurality of whites without a bachelors degree support a
universal basic income. One way to summarize the results is that pundits' guesses about public
opinion match the opinions of college educated whites (surprise surprise). That is the group
least enthusiastic about universal basic income (by far) (OK I admit I am white and have
university degrees so I should say "we are" but like hell i'm going to be classed with my
fellow White American College educated opponents of UBI).
JimH , August 2, 2018 9:59 am
"The key question for Democrats (and the USA) is why did most of a group of people more of
whom support than oppose UBI vote for Trump ? How can there be such a huge gap between bread
and butter big dollar issue polling (where the median US adult is to the left of the
mainstream of the Democratic Party) and voting ?"
During the Republican primaries, candidate Trump lost in the polls and won on the ballots.
In the run up to the Republican convention, mainstream Republicans were searching for any way
to deny the nomination to candidate Trump. (Without ruining the party.)
So candidate Trump was not a traditional mainstream Republican presidential candidate.
Candidate Trump espoused most of the mainstream Republican party position. But what separated
him from the pack were his positions on illegal immigration and free trade treaties. And
Republican voters chose him.
His positions against illegal immigration and free trade also beat Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was a very experienced and savvy politician but she was tied to NAFTA thru
her husband. And the Democratic party's defense of allowing ANY foreigner to walk across our
borders without ANY sort of background check whatsoever, and remain in the country, was a
losing proposition.
Candidate Clinton could have beaten any of the other Republican candidates.
Unbridled immigration into European countries has caused enough problems for the native
born citizens that it has become a huge political issue. Angela Merkel successfully oversaw
the uniting of east and west Germany. (A triumph!) But on immigration, her reach exceeded her
grasp, she completely misunderstood the magnitude of the problem. And she is splitting the
European Union.
Politicians in Europe and the United States speak of populism as if it was some sort of
new influence. That voters have never been seen to vote their own interests! European and
American voters have allowed their politicians almost a free rein for decades. They seemed to
assume that the political class knew best. But that period is coming to an end.
Democrats can beat Republican candidates, but first they have to accept that politics is
the art of the possible.
There is a practical, doable way to re-institute American labor unions (to German density
level) tomorrow.
Labor unions can claw back the "missing 10%" of overall income that a unionless labor
market has squeezed out of the bottom 40% of earners; raising the bottom 40% back to 20% income
share -- through higher consumer prices at Target, Walgreen's, etc.
No doubt about this: if
fast food can pay $15/hr with 33% (!) labor costs, Target('s consumers) can easily pay $20/hr
with 12% labor costs and Walmart('s consumers) can easily pay $25/hr with 7% labor costs.
Easy practical way to do this: amend the NLRA to mandate regularly scheduled cert
elections at every private workplace (I would suggest one, three or five year cycles; local
plurality rules).
Practical because no other way to rebuild American unions. Illegal (effective-penalty
free) union busting disease has so permeated our labor market that there is no normal
organizing going back. Even if we made union busting a felony, millions of businesspersons
across the country could just say: "What are you going to do, put us all in jail?"
Tear a page from the Rebublican's union busting playbook -- skip over organizing -- skip
right to elections on a regular basis:
Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule?
Andrew Strom -- November 1st, 2017
"Republicans in Congress have already proposed a bill [Repub amend] that would require a new
election in each unionized bargaining unit whenever, through turnover, expansion, or merger,
a unit experiences at least 50 percent turnover. While no union would be happy about
expending limited resources on regular retention elections, I think it would be hard to turn
down a trade that would allow the 93% of workers who are unrepresented to have a chance to
opt for unionization on a regular schedule."
Wheels within wheels of poetic justice: a Democratic proposed labor market-make-over would
corral a lot of blue collar voters (Obama voters, remember?) back into the Democratic win
column – so we could pass said amendment in the first place.
All said, all you have to realize is that there is no other way back -- do this or do
nothing forever.
Stealing a page from Scott Walker's playbook is "the" win-win-win issue.
Karl Kolchak , August 2, 2018 10:35 am
Your description of Republicans is spot on. However, other than their maniacal obsession
with divisive identity politics, Democrats are hardly much better given the that they ALSO
kowtow to the Wall Street and the wealthy. Neither major party represents working
people–it just too bad that working people allow themselves to be forever divided by
two corrupt political parties who view them with little but contempt.
EMichael, August 2, 2018 11:11 am
KK,
"To hold President Trump accountable, the Center for American Progress Action Fund's American Worker Project is
tracking every action the president takes to weaken job protections for Americans.
Our list includes legislation and orders signed by the president; procedural changes and regulations enacted or proposed
by his administration; and official statements of policy, such as the president's proposed budget. The list does not
include political nominations and appointments of individuals with records of enacting anti-worker policies, since these
actions happened outside their role in the administration."
"Neither major party represents working people–it just too bad that working people
allow themselves to be forever divided by two corrupt political parties who view them with
little but contempt."
That's the kind of bullshit that allowed Trump to sneak into office. The Democrats may not
be your idea of pro-worker or anti-Wall Street, but the difference in voting on
bread-and-butter issues between Republicans and Democrats is dramatic. On just one issue,
with a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress, there is no doubt we already would
have seen a minimum wage to at least $10 per hour. That's not sufficient, but it's almost 40%
better than what the Republicans are happy with. Tell a family with two minimum wage workers
that an extra $11,000 in their pockets is worthless!
We also would not have seen a Janus decision, because Gorsuch would not be on the
Court.
We probably would have already had a public option added to ACA -- at least for people
aged 50-64 without employer-provided insurance having the right to buy into Medicare.
Consideration of a broader public option for everyone in the exchanges would be on the table,
too, with very strong public support (and, therefore, likely passage).
That's just three issues. This pox-on-both-your houses is truly toxic. It's uninformed.
Yes, it's deplorable.
likbez , August 4, 2018 12:30 am
"Neither major party represents working people–it just too bad that working
people allow themselves to be forever divided by two corrupt political parties who view
them with little but contempt."
That's the kind of bullshit that allowed Trump to sneak into office. The Democrats may
not be your idea of pro-worker or anti-Wall Street, but the difference in voting on
bread-and-butter issues between Republicans and Democrats is dramatic
This line of thinking is well known as "What the matter with Kansas" line. It is true that
"That's allowed Trump to sneak into office."
But you ignored the fact that Democratic Party entered a profound crisis (aka "demexit"
similar to Brexit) from which they still are unable to escape. Clinton ideas that workers do
not have alternative and will vote for peanuts Dems are willing to give them stop working.
In other words Dems lost their legitimacy, identify politics did not work this time as
well as in the past. I would say that the whole neoliberal elite lost its legitimacy. That's
why Russiagate was launched, and Neo-McCarthyism hysteria was launched by Podesta and friends
to cement those cracks that divide the USA.
The Dem Party became a grab bag of identity groups. But this election the dominant was
anti-globalization discourse, and Dems suffered a humiliating defeat. With Republican Party
grabbing the the tool they created. The collies of small town America led to collapse of
Dems.
People do vote against their economic interest ("What the matter with Kansas"
situation). But the level of alienation of working and lower middle class is really extreme.
The opioid epidemic is just one sign of this. So Trump election was just a middle finger to
the neoliberal elite.
We actually do not have left in the USA. Because there is no real discussion about neoliberalism and
alternatives. Bernie called himself "democratic socialist'. Which was at least in sense
transformational. But that's it. Bernie is not anti-war and anti-American empire.
Hillary was a traditional neocon warmonger, defender of the empire in foreign policy and
corrupt to the core, greedy politician in domestic policy (in the pocket of Wall Street and
special interests).
As somebody noted here:
The term Progressive is now so mutilated that it's no longer effective as an identifier
of political affiliation. To be a real Progressive: one must be Anti-War, except in the
most dire of circumstances, which includes being Anti-Imperialist/Anti-Empire; 2nd, one
must be Pro-Justice as in promoting Rule of Law over all else; 3rd, one must be tolerant
and willing to listen to others; and 4th, work for Win-Win outcomes and denounce Zero-sum
as the smoke screen for increasing inequality.
This is a very weak article, but it raises several important questions such as the role or neoliberal MSM in color revolution
against Trump and which social group constituted the voting block that brought Trump to victory. The author answers incorrectly on
both those questions.
I think overall Tremblay analysis of Trump (and by extension of national neoliberalism he promotes) is incorrect. Probably the largest group
of voters which voted for Trump were voters who were against neoliberal globalization and who now feel real distrust and aversion to
the ruling neoliberal elite.
Trump is probably right to view neoliberal journalists as enemies: they are tools of intelligence agencies which as agents of
Wall Street promote globalization
At the same time Trump turned to be Obama II: he instantly betrayed his voters after the election. His
election slogan "make Ameraca great again" bacem that same joke as Obama "Change we can believe in". And he proved to be as
jingoistic as Obama (A Nobel Pease Price laureate who was militarists dream come true)
In discussion of groups who votes for Trump the author forgot to mention part of professional which skeptically view neoliberal
globalization and its destrction of jobs (for example programmer jobs in the USA) as well as blue color
workers decimated by offshoring of major industries.
Notable quotes:
"... "Just stick with us, don't believe the crap you see from these people [journalists], the fake news Just remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. " ..."
"... Donald Trump (1946- ), American President, (in remarks made during a campaign rally with Veterans of Foreign Wars, in Kansas City, July 24, 2018) ..."
"... "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." ..."
"... This is a White House where everybody lies ..."
"... I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power ..."
"... The second one can be found in Trump's artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and manipulate the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them into his own tools of propaganda. ..."
"... ad hominem' ..."
"... Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical showman diva , behaving in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than a reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians. ..."
"... He prefers to rely on one-directional so-called 'tweets' to express unfiltered personal ideas and emotions (as if he were a private person), and to use them as his main public relations channel of communication. ..."
"... checks and balance ..."
"... The centralization of power in the hands of one man is bound to have serious political consequences, both for the current administration and for future ones. ..."
"Just stick with us, don't believe the crap you see from these people [journalists], the fake news Just remember, what
you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening. "
Donald Trump (1946- ), American President, (in remarks made during a campaign rally with Veterans of Foreign Wars, in Kansas
City, July 24, 2018)
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and social critic, (in '1984', Ch. 7, 1949)
" This is a White House where everybody lies ." Omarosa Manigault Newman (1974- ), former White House aide to President
Donald Trump, (on Sunday August 12, 2018, while releasing tapes recording conversations with Donald Trump.)
" I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power ." Benjamin Franklin (
1706 –
1790 ), American inventor and US Founding Father, (in 'Words of
the Founding Fathers', 2012).
***
In this day and age, with instant information, how does a politician succeed in double-talking, in bragging, in scapegoating and
in shamefully distorting the truth, most of the time, without being unmasked as a charlatan and discredited? Why? That is the mysterious
and enigmatic question that one may ask about U. S. President Donald Trump, as a politician.
The most obvious answer is the fact that Trump's one-issue and cult-like followers do not care what he does or says and whether
or not he has declared a
war on truth and reality , provided he delivers the political and financial benefits they demand of him, based on their ideological
or pecuniary interests. These groups of voters live in their own reality and only their personal interests count.
1- Four groups of one-issue voters behind Trump
There are four groups of one-issue voters to
whom President Donald Trump has delivered the goodies:
Christian religious right voters, whose main political issue is to fill the U. S. Supreme Court with ultra conservative
judges. On that score, Donald Trump has been true to them by naming one such judge and in nominating a second one.
Super rich Zionists and the Pro-Israel Lobby, whose obsession is the state of Israel. Again, on that score, President
Donald Trump has fulfilled his promise to them and he has unilaterally moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in addition
to attacking the Palestinians and tearing up the 'Iran Deal'.
The one-percent Income earners and some corporate owners, whose main demand to Trump was substantial tax cuts and
deregulation. Once again, President Trump has fulfilled this group's wishes with huge tax cuts, mainly financed with future public
debt increases, which are going to be paid for by all taxpayers.
The NRA and the Pro-Gun Lobby, whose main obsession is to have the right to arm themselves to the teeth, including
with military assault weapons, with as few strings attached as possible. Here again President Donald Trump has sided with them
and against students who are increasingly in the line of fire in American schools.
With the strong support of these four monolithic lobbies -- his electoral base -- politician Donald Trump can count on the indefectible
support of between 35 percent and 40 percent of the American electorate. It is ironic that some of Trump's other policies, like reducing
health care coverage and the raising of import taxes, will hurt the poor and the middle class, even though some of Trump's victims
can be considered members of the above lobbies.
Moreover, some of Trump's supporters regularly rely on
hypocrisy and on excuses to exonerate their favorite
but flawed politician of choice. If any other politician from a different party were to say and do half of what Donald Trump does
and says, they would be asking for his impeachment.
There are three other reasons why Trump's rants, his
record-breaking lies , his untruths, his deceptions and his dictatorial-style attempts to
control information , in the eyes of his fanatical supporters, at least, are like water on the back of a duck. ( -- For the record,
according to the
Washington Post , as of early August, President Trump has made some 4,229 false claims, which amount to 7.6 a day, since his
inauguration.)
The first reason can be found in Trump's view that politics and even government business are first and foremost another form
of
entertainment , i.e. a sort of TV reality show, which must be scripted and acted upon. Trump thinks that is
OK to lie
and to ask his assistants to
lie
. In this new immoral world, the Trump phenomenon could be seen a sign of
post-democracy .
The second one can be found in Trump's artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and
manipulate the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them into his own tools of propaganda.
When Trump attacks the media, he is in fact coaxing them to give him free coverage to spread his
insults , his fake accusations, his provocations, his constant
threats , his denials or reversals, his convenient
changes of subject or his political spins. Indeed, with his outrageous statements, his gratuitous accusations and his attacks
' ad hominem' , and by constantly bullying and insulting adversaries at home and foreign heads of states abroad, and
by issuing threats in repetition, right and left, Trump has forced the media to talk and journalists to write about him constantly,
on a daily basis, 24/7.
That suits him perfectly well because he likes to be the center of attention. That is how he can change the political rhetoric
when any negative issue gets too close to him. In the coming weeks and months, as the Special prosecutor
Robert Mueller's report is likely to be released, Donald Trump is not above resorting to some sort of "
Wag the Dog " political trickery, to change the topic and to possibly push the damaging report off the headlines.
In such a circumstance, it is not impossible that launching an illegal war of choice, say against Iran (a
pet
project of Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton), could then look very convenient to a crafty politician like Donald
Trump and to his warmonger advisors. Therefore, observers should be on the lookout to spot any development of the sort in the
coming weeks.
That one man and his entourage could whimsically consider launching a
war of aggression is a throwback to ancient times
and is a sure indication of the level of depravity to which current politics has fallen. This should be a justified and clear
case for impeachment .
Finally, some far-right media outlets, such as
Fox News and
Sinclair Broadcasting , have taken it upon themselves to systematically present Trump's lies and misrepresentations as some
'alternative' truths and facts.
Indeed, ever since 1987, when the Reagan administration abolished the
Fairness Doctrine for licensing public radio
and TV waves, and since a Republican dominated Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for the
mass conglomeration of local broadcasting
in the United States, extreme conservative news outlets, such as the Fox and Sinclair networks, have sprung up. They are well
financed, and they have essentially become powerful
political propaganda machines , erasing the line between facts and fiction, and regularly presenting fictitious alternative
facts as the truth.
In so doing, they have pushed public debates in the United States away from facts, reason and logic, at least for those listeners
and viewers for whom such outlets are the only source of information. It is not surprising that such far-right media have also
made Donald Trump the champion of their cause, maliciously branding anything inconvenient as 'fake' news, as Trump has done in
his own anti-media campaign and his sustained assault on the free press.
2- Show Politics and public affairs as a form of entertainment
Donald Trump does not seem to take politics and public affairs very seriously, at least when his own personal interests are involved.
Therefore, when things go bad, he never volunteers to take personal responsibility, contrary to what a true leader would do, and
he conveniently
shifts the blame on somebody else. This is a sign of immaturity or cowardice. Paraphrasing President Harry Truman, "the buck
never stops at his desk."
Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical
showman diva , behaving
in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than
a reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians.
3- Trump VS the media and the journalists
Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who rarely holds scheduled press conferences. Why would he, since he considers journalists
to be his "enemies"! It doesn't seem to matter to him that freedom of the press is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution by the First
Amendment. He prefers to rely on one-directional so-called 'tweets' to express unfiltered personal ideas and emotions (as if
he were a private person), and to use them as his main public relations channel of communication.
The ABC News network
has calculated that, as of last July, Trump has tweeted more than 3,500 times, slightly more than seven tweets a day. How could he
have time left to do anything productive! Coincidently, Donald Trump's number of tweets is not far away from the number of outright
lies and misleading claims that he has told and made since his inauguration.
The Washington Post has counted no less than 3,251 lies or misleading claims of his, through the end of May of this year, --
an average of 6.5 such misstatements per day of his presidency. Fun fact: Trump seems to accelerate the pace of his lies. Last year,
he told 5.5 lies per day, on average. Is it possible to have a more cynical view of politics!
The media in general, (and
not only American ones), then serve more or less voluntarily as so many resonance boxes for his daily 'tweets', most of which
are often devoid of any thought and logic.
Such a practice has the consequence of demeaning the public discourse in the pursuit of the common good and the general welfare
of the people to the level of a frivolous private enterprise, where expertise, research and competence can easily be replaced by
improvisation, whimsical arbitrariness and charlatanry. In such a climate, only the short run counts, at the expense of planning
for the long run.
Conclusion
All this leads to this conclusion: Trump's approach is not the way to run an efficient government. Notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution
and what it says about the need to have " checks and balance s" among different government branches, President Donald Trump
has de facto pushed aside the U.S. Congress and the civil servants in important government Departments, even his own
Cabinet
, whose formal meetings under Trump have been little more than photo-up happenings, to grab the central political stage for himself.
If such a development does not represent an ominous threat to American democracy, what does?
The centralization of power in the hands of one man is bound to have serious political consequences, both for the current
administration and for future ones.
There might be criminal connection to Russian oligarchs, but it was for Trump organization which might play a role in Russian oligarchs
money laundering via real estate
Notable quotes:
"... The US and the UK, unlike most Western democracies, permit anonymous ownership of real estate which facilitates money laundering of roughly $300 billion per year in the United States alone, most of it from Russia. As a result, luxury real estate has provided a haven for Russian oligarchs ..."
"... According to a BuzzFeed investigation by Thomas Frank, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the US since the eighties, were sold "in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities." The BuzzFeed article added that the total value of these condo sales -- sales that match the US Treasury's criteria for possible money laundering -- was about $ 1.5 billion, a figure that actually may understate the amount of dirty money in play. ..."
"... Starting in 2006, Donald Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, made about half a dozen trips to Russia over the course of a year and a half. "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, ....We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." ..."
"... After a decade of litigation, multiple bankruptcies, and $4 billion in debt, Trump rose from the near-dead with the help of Bayrock and its alleged ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia. "They saved his bacon," said Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor ..."
"... Another Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal, oligarch Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship with Semyon Kislin, the Ukranian billionare commodities trader who was tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI, to Vyacheslav Ivankov's Russian mafias gang in Brighton Beach. ..."
"... Mueller has had over a year to investigate. No doubt he can call on vast resources of US govt too. For all that effort, Mueller has not shown direct Russian govt influence (yet). ..."
"... JR, ben was right on that point. I would put it this way: Trump is owned by Zionist Russian Oligarchs with dual citizenship. Haaretz has an article Know your oligarch: A guide to the Jewish billionaires in the Trump Russia probe. ..."
"... Let's just say there's a huge incentive to sell the Trump illusion and push the Trump juice around here. ..."
House of Trump, House of Putin has some interesting stuff.
The US and the UK, unlike most Western democracies, permit anonymous ownership of real estate which facilitates money laundering
of roughly $300 billion per year in the United States alone, most of it from Russia. As a result, luxury real estate has provided
a haven for Russian oligarchs
According to a BuzzFeed investigation by Thomas Frank, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold
in the US since the eighties, were sold "in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding
their finances and identities." The BuzzFeed article added that the total value of these condo sales -- sales that match the US
Treasury's criteria for possible money laundering -- was about $ 1.5 billion, a figure that actually may understate the amount
of dirty money in play.
Starting in 2006, Donald Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, made
about half a dozen trips to Russia over the course of a year and a half. "In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians
make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets, ....We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
After a decade of litigation, multiple bankruptcies, and $4 billion in debt, Trump rose from the near-dead with the help
of Bayrock and its alleged ties to Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia. "They saved his bacon," said Kenneth McCallion,
a former federal prosecutor
Another Bayrock partner, the Sapir Organization, had, through its principal, oligarch Tamir Sapir, a long business relationship
with Semyon Kislin, the Ukranian billionare commodities trader who was tied to the Chernoy brothers and, according to the FBI,
to Vyacheslav Ivankov's Russian mafias gang in Brighton Beach.
Trumps man Giuliani appointed Kislin to be a member of the New York City Economic Development Corporation
Kushner paid $295 million for some of the floors in the old New York Times building, purchased in 2015 from the US branch of
Israili-Russian oligarch Leviev's company, Africa Israel Investments (AFI), and partner, Five Mile Capital.
Kushner later borrowed $285 million from the German financial company Deutsche Bank, which has also been linked to Russian
money laundering,
The Trumps Taj Mahal had become a favorite destination for the Russian mob because Trump made a point of giving high rollers
"comps" for up to $100,000 a visit, an amenity that casinos often offered big-time gamblers. Later, two other Trump casinos, the
Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, agreed to pay fines for "willfully failing to report" currency
transactions over $10,000 and failing to comply with laws designed to prevent money laundering.
There is not a major Russian organized crime figure who we are tracking who does not also carry an Israeli passport," said
Jonathan Winer, the former money-laundering czar in the Clinton State Department.
Trump World Tower, one-third of the units on the tower's highest and priciest floors, floors seventy-six to eighty-three,*
had been snatched up, either by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to
Russia or countries that had been part of the Soviet Union. "We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan," sales
agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg Businessweek. Ukrainian billionaire Semyon "Sam" Kislin assisted the sales effort by issuing
mortgages to buyers of Trump's latest luxury condos.
Trump Tower in Toronto. When it came to financing the skyscraper, Shnaider, a billionaire of Russian extraction, turned to
Raiffeisen Bank International AG in Vienna, a bank whose affiliate has been called "a front to provide legitimacy to the gas company
[US-indicted Russian crime boss Semion Mogilevich] controls, RosUkrEnergo," according to Scott F. Kilner, deputy chief of mission
for the US embassy in Austria. So it followed that it was likely that funds from the Mogilevich-Firtash money pipeline were behind
the Trump project in Toronto.
Then there is the Chabad connection of the Kushners and Putin backed Russian oligarchs, but no time for that
Clarifying: it's good info about the suspicions of Trump-Russian connections. I appreciate you're being helpful in providing
that.
Mueller has had over a year to investigate. No doubt he can call on vast resources of US govt too. For all that effort,
Mueller has not shown direct Russian govt influence (yet).
JR, ben was right on that point. I would put it this way: Trump is owned by Zionist Russian Oligarchs with dual citizenship.
Haaretz has an article Know your oligarch: A guide to the Jewish billionaires in the Trump Russia probe.
It would be great if the Mueller probe exposes how minor Russia collusion is compared to Zionist collusion. Ergo the big prizes
for Israel and status quo for Russia under Trump.
I suspect that most still pushing the Trump illusion here are Zionists who care squat about party and American democracy but
are really pleased with what Trump is doing for Israel i.e. MIGA and the Zionist American collusion that is growing exponentially
with each successive American President.
Trump is their man and he's being well-supported by Zionists even here disguised as Russia lovers, populists and Hillary haters.
Let's not forget how many Russians are Zionists: over one million in Israel, not to mention Soviet Jews from former Soviet territory.
So the numbers are much greater. An army of hasbara on the web.
Let's just say there's a huge incentive to sell the Trump illusion and push the Trump juice around here. It's concealed
hasbara masquerading as Trumpism, plain and simple! Shameless pretense and very transparent.
"... Rather than being a revelatory, shocking look behind the curtain of an administration run by the single dumbest man to ever hold his office, the book just confirms the stories we've already heard, mixing in additional commentary from people in or close to the White House, mostly former employees who clearly still agree with Trump's agenda, even if they could no longer stand the man himself. ..."
"... Woodward presents anecdotes from these individuals--people like Sen. Lindsay Graham, a renown proponent of endless wars in the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, former Chief Strategist, an out-and-proud xenophobe and fascist--without commentary or context, which has the odd effect of presenting these people only in contrast and comparison to Trump himself. ..."
A frustratingly neutral collection of accounts from morally questionable people.
Trump is really, really bad at being President. This isn't news to anyone who has been
following the leaks, rumors, announcements, policies, and tweets coming out of the White
House for the last nineteen months.
Rather than being a revelatory, shocking look behind the
curtain of an administration run by the single dumbest man to ever hold his office, the book
just confirms the stories we've already heard, mixing in additional commentary from people in
or close to the White House, mostly former employees who clearly still agree with Trump's
agenda, even if they could no longer stand the man himself.
Woodward presents anecdotes from
these individuals--people like Sen. Lindsay Graham, a renown proponent of endless wars in
the Middle East, and Steve Bannon, former Chief Strategist, an out-and-proud xenophobe and
fascist--without commentary or context, which has the odd effect of presenting these people
only in contrast and comparison to Trump himself.
One unfamiliar with Bannon, for example,
could come away from the book thinking that he was a fairly reasonable person (rather than a
racist, white nationalist) because he is only ever shown as a foil to the ongoing circus of
incompetence that is the Trump administration.
This is Woodward's style, of course; he
presents himself as an almost entirely neutral presence, merely transcribing the things he
learned, but when discussing such dangerous and reprehensible people, a paragraph here and
there dedicated to reminding readers what, exactly, these people claim to believe would have
been appreciated additional context.
Essentially, this book is just Michael Wolfe or Omarosa's stories, only drier and with
more footnotes.
"... That said, many - including Yahoo News's Michael Isikoff (the guy whose article containing info fed to him by Christopher Steele was used by the FBI to obtain Carter Page's FISA warrant) - have pointed to potential targets on the left. ..."
"... Those people include former Manafort associates Tony Podesta, Vin Weber and Greg Craig - all of whom failed to register as foreign agents in connection with work outside the United States, as well as members of the Obama administration . Of course, the thought of Mueller going after "the untouchables" seems a bit far fetched. ..."
"... The FSB ambition: to choose the least competent Presidential candidate and, unbeknownst to him, smooth his way to the White House. Thus Robert Meuller's inconvenient truth: If Donald Trump were competent enough to be entrusted with collusion, then he would be too competent for the FSB to achieve its ambitions! I bet the FSB people in charge are gobsmacked that The Donald hasn't been impaled on the 25th Amendment yet! ..."
"... I don't understand Dershowitz here. What could Manafort say that Papadopoulos and Flynn haven't already told Mueller? He was Trump's campaign manager for what three months? ..."
"... If anyone had something juicy on Trump it'd be Michael Flynn since he was in the Trump administration if just for a short time. This is about keeping this farce of a charade going as long as humanly possible. ..."
"... My guess -- a guess -- is that Mueller is under a lot of pressure from the Clinton Family including Brennan, Clapper et al to find something, anything, on enough people to make the last 2 years look legit to the Americans who watch CNN. ..."
"... My guess is that the CF has gone from supporting Mueller to making him scared. ..."
"... That should work for continuing the Conspiracy theory... It is all the DOJ, FBI, Sessions and now newcomer Manafort trying to BRING Down the POTUS. All of this is happening to such a great guy like Trump... Sad huh... ..."
"... Jesus you Trumptards are delusional. The average American is no more likely to take up arms against his masters than the North Koreans are. ..."
Harvard Law professor and prominent liberal Alan Dershowitz - who has been shunned by the
liberal elite of late for defending President Trump - now says that the White House should be
alarmed over Paul Manafort's plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller.
" Well of course they should be ," replied Dershowitz - though he added the rather large
caveat that Mueller is "not a credible witness," and would be at best be a corroborating
witness against Trump.
"There's nothing he can testify to that would probably lend weight to impeachment because he
didn't have close contact with President Trump while he was president," said Dershowitz. " What
they are looking for is self-corroborating information that can be used against Trump if they
can make him sing and then there's the possibility of him composing, elaborating on the story
."
Dershowitz added that there is "no doubt" Mueller is trying to flip Manafort against
Trump.
" Once he agrees to cooperate, he has to cooperate about everything , said Dershowitz.
"There's no such thing as partial cooperation."
As for Trump pardoning Manafort? That's now "off the table," and that flipping on the
President "opens up a lot of doors that probably haven't been opened before."
It's a "big win" for Mueller, Dershowitz concludes.
That said, many - including Yahoo
News's Michael Isikoff (the guy whose article containing info fed to him by Christopher Steele
was used by the FBI to obtain Carter Page's FISA warrant) - have pointed to potential targets
on the left.
Those people include former Manafort associates Tony Podesta, Vin Weber and Greg Craig - all
of whom failed to register as foreign agents in connection with work outside the United States,
as well as members of the Obama administration . Of course, the thought of Mueller going after
"the untouchables" seems a bit far fetched.
quintus.sertorius , 19 minutes ago
The Tribe plays both sides: Dershowitz the plant in Trump team has the same real loyalty
as fellow tribesman Haim Saban or Sheldon Adelson. They want to blackmail Trump into fighting
Israel's war in Syria.
radbug , 55 minutes ago
The FSB ambition: to choose the least competent Presidential candidate and, unbeknownst to
him, smooth his way to the White House. Thus Robert Meuller's inconvenient truth: If Donald
Trump were competent enough to be entrusted with collusion, then he would be too competent
for the FSB to achieve its ambitions! I bet the FSB people in charge are gobsmacked that The
Donald hasn't been impaled on the 25th Amendment yet!
ZazzOne , 1 hour ago
"Big Win For Mueller"? Only if he plans on going after the founders of the Red Shoe "Pedo"
Club.....John and Tony Podesta! Though I highly doubt he'll ever go down that rabbit
hole!!!!!
Straddling-the-fence , 2 hours ago
Once he agrees to cooperate, he has to cooperate about everything , said Dershowitz.
"There's no such thing as partial cooperation.
That's asinine. There are terms to a plea agreement. Unless those terms encompass what is
claimed above, then that is simply false.
KekistanisUnite , 3 hours ago
I don't understand Dershowitz here. What could Manafort say that Papadopoulos and Flynn
haven't already told Mueller? He was Trump's campaign manager for what three months?
George
Papadopoulos I don't know how long he was there but if really has nothing of value to offer
then neither would Manafort.
If anyone had something juicy on Trump it'd be Michael Flynn
since he was in the Trump administration if just for a short time. This is about keeping this
farce of a charade going as long as humanly possible.
Econogeek , 3 hours ago
My guess -- a guess -- is that Mueller is under a lot of pressure from the Clinton Family
including Brennan, Clapper et al to find something, anything, on enough people to make the
last 2 years look legit to the Americans who watch CNN.
My guess is that the CF has gone from supporting Mueller to making him scared.
ThePhantom , 4 hours ago
i like to think Mueller is on the plate too, and this is his chance to save his own ass.
Greg Craig and Podesta's names are out in all the papers .... they worked with manafort first
and foremost....
no idea what dershowitz is talking about.. none.
Calvertsbio , 4 hours ago
Yea sure he is, the SPECIAL Counsel running the show to bring down corruption is "ON THE
PLATE" yea, ok...
That should work for continuing the Conspiracy theory... It is all the DOJ, FBI, Sessions
and now newcomer Manafort trying to BRING Down the POTUS. All of this is happening to such a
great guy like Trump... Sad huh...
Doesn't make much difference how much of this BS is posted, no one is buying it anymore...
Even FAUX news has basically given up on him... Everyone know that once it all comes out, it
will be labelled by HIS SHEEPLE that it is all made up BS to take him down...
Hillary did it... no ! Sessions did it, nope, it was RYAN ? McConnell... lets keep the
guessing game going... The Dossier did it...
BigJim, 4 hours ago
"The swamp critters better stop ignoring the Hillary/DNC side of this or the population is going to be marching in with
pitchforks and guillotines."
Jesus you Trumptards are delusional. The average American is no more likely to take up arms against his masters than
the North Koreans are.
"... Mueller is getting bad press for not going after Hillary and the democrats. If his findings are all against Trump it will be portrayed as a partisan hack job given all the dems on his team. ..."
Wait - where is the Special Counsel looking into FBI/DOJ misconduct with regard to falsely
exonerating Hillary ehile fabricating probable cause to spy on Trump??
Seriously, Mueller has been on a fishing expedition for 2 fucking years premised entirely
on what seems to be FBI/DOJ manufactured evidence and lies to the FISA court... steele memo,
the meetings with 'Russians' that were obvious set ups... Sally Yates making what should be a
CRIMINAL abuse of office call in justifying spying on Flynn because as part of an incoming
admin he was (gasp!) talking to Russian diplomats like incoming admins HAVE TO AND ALWAYS
do...
There are more than enough reasons for a special counsel to look into all that because the
Very fucking point Is the FBI and DOJ have been corrupted by political bias, despite the
'nothing to see here' bullshit of the IG Report.
All this while Hillary and Brennan and Comey and Clapper with his phony bullshit DNI
report all walk around free.. and I'll believe McCabe and Rosenstein are going to be indicted
when they are indicted.
Rosenstein tried to hide very relevant texts from Congress and lied about why.
Trump is getting shit advice. He should fire Sessions and Rosenstein right away, let the
media go nuts, and find a couple black or latino guys or women to replace them in 'acting'
status. See - they just need to be honest and teasonably good.
I Claudius, 4 hours ago
Completely disagree w/Dershowitz. Mueller is getting bad press for not going after Hillary and the democrats. If his
findings are all against Trump it will be portrayed as a partisan hack job given all the dems on his team.
My thoughts? Tony Podesta and that Skadden Arps attorney have been selected by the party leaders as the fall guys for the
dems. They are throwing them overboard so the Mueller BS probe can be portrayed as non-partisan. They can claim that Manafort
was not just a "get Trump's associates" hit job by now stating that Manafort got them these two clowns.
Manafort has zero on Trump and Mueller now has a huge dem jizz load on his face for getting nowhere. He now has to
preserve his reputation and going after these two f'wads for some minor issue (don't forget, the Repubs backed themselves
into a corner claiming this Foreign lobbyist thing is a minor infraction). So now they get these two guys on a BS charge . .
.
And they walk and Mueller saves face.
caconhma, 3 hours ago
It is all BS. The Trump affairs are just diversions from his primary assignments:
Utterly promote and advance interests of Zionist Mafia and Israel
Destabilize the US internal situation and use it as a pretext for transforming the USA into a totalitarian police
state
Protect and defend US$ as the only one viable reserve currency
Prevent by any means China from becoming a geopolitical superpower challenging the USA
IMHO, Trump's masters are doing their job very incompetent and their evil game will terribly backfire against them.
In a way Pence is a guarantee that Trump will not be impeached no matter what ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... The Republican elite (and the Democratic elite) have always wanted Pence for President, and they may yet get their wish. But not yet. ..."
"... In terms of the current situation, Manafort is simply irrelevant. Cohen is relevant, but paying a porn start off because you are worried your wife might find out that you are a philanderer: it seems a stretch to interpret that as 'trying to influence an election' although I can sort of see the logic (I suppose Bill Clinton's behaviour vis a vis Monica Lewinsky was ultimately political too). ..."
"... It also seems weird to conceptualise hush money to a porn star as 'campaign finance violations'. But what do I know. ..."
"... Cohen is a serious problem. He has implicated Trump in criminal conduct. ..."
"... Presumably one of the key reasons that Clinton lied about the Lewinsky affair was because he thought it would make him look bad and therefore lose him votes in the 2000 elections. And in a sense it did (although others presumably voted for him 'cos they felt sorry for him). But that seems like a weird way to conceptualise his activities. ..."
"... To further clarify your statement, the issue is that the payment was transparently not to keep Ms. Trump from finding out about Ms. Cliffords or Ms. McDougal – the timing of the payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but immediately before the election, make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital affairs with adult entertainers from turning into October Surprises. ..."
"... It's intentionally vague . It should be noted that when Johnson was impeached , one of the eleven articles was "Bringing disgrace and ridicule to the presidency by his aforementioned words and actions." ..."
"... And I don't see impeachment as a very useful strategy for the Ds to pursue. Even if successful at removing Trump, that just gets you Pence -- just as public policy irrational, only less politically disorganized. ..."
"... Maybe impeachment comes up as a tactic, to facilitate some other plan of action, but I don't see conviction on impeachment as a useful means of even control of Trump behavior, much less removal. ..."
This is bad for Trump but not unexpected. Despite the fig leaf of 'Russian collusion' the
main brief of Mueller was 'find out bad stuff about Trump and his associates' and of course it
was almost inevitable that he would find such stuff because Trump and his cronies are scumbags
who exist to break the law. This is the reality of capitalism (as has been pointed out 'crony
capitalism' is the only kind of capitalism that has ever existed or ever will exist). Congress
might or might not accept it, but the Senate (even more viciously 'gerrymandered' albeit de
facto) won't yet. So Trump won't go down, not yet.
The only way that Trump will go down, IMHO is if and when the Republican establishment
decide that they have got everything out of him that they're going to get, which means after
the next Presidential election. Assuming he wins it, he may be ditched quickly. The
Republican elite (and the Democratic elite) have always wanted Pence for President, and they
may yet get their wish. But not yet.
In terms of the current situation, Manafort is simply irrelevant. Cohen is relevant, but
paying a porn start off because you are worried your wife might find out that you are a
philanderer: it seems a stretch to interpret that as 'trying to influence an election' although
I can sort of see the logic (I suppose Bill Clinton's behaviour vis a vis Monica Lewinsky was
ultimately political too).
It also seems weird to conceptualise hush money to a porn star as 'campaign finance
violations'. But what do I know.
Manaforte is a publicity problem, which will get worse with his second trial, and, if the
US Attorney decides to proceed on the hung counts, a third trial.
None of it ties to Trump; it suggests he hangs out with criminals and does not notice or
care about their conduct. That is a publicity issue. Cohen is a serious problem. He has
implicated Trump in criminal conduct.
As he is still facing a state investigations, there is high risk that he will exchange
information for leniency in that investigation. Which will result in more, at least
potentially, statements incriminating Trump. It is not clear to me what the status is
relative to the Mueller investigation -- only that his current deal does not require
cooperation with Mueller.
Having taken this step, I would expect him to work with Mueller as a way to further
leniency in sentencing and to insure no further prosecutions. (I can't tell from news
coverage whether the deal includes all federal investigations or not.) Cohen seems a credible
witness and too close to Trump on the direct political issues for any very successful effort
to wall him off.
His statement also is a big problem for the lawsuits by Daniels, and others, as it shreds
Trump's defenses to date. But none of it will mean that significant numbers of Republicans in
the Congress will back away from Trump. Nixon held most Republicans until he resigned. I
don't see a reason to think the team loyalty now will be less.
Watch what Lanny Davis, Cohen's attorney, says and does. He is not a Giuliani. He is
clearly telling prosecutors his client has valuable information and is willing to provide it
(if not already disclosed).
'The Republicans simply don't care, and nothing will make them care.'
To be fair, I don't care either, and nothing will make me care. Anyway, back in the real world .
'Michael Cohen, who spent a decade as a lawyer for Trump, told a judge Tuesday that he was
directed by Trump to coordinate payments to two women designed to prevent them from
disclosing alleged affairs with the real estate mogul before the presidential election, in
violation of campaign finance law.
Such an explosive assertion against anyone but the president would suggest that a criminal
case could be in the offing, but under long-standing legal interpretations by the Justice
Department, the president cannot be charged with a crime.
The department produced legal analyses in 1973 and 2000 concluding that the Constitution
does not allow for the criminal indictment of a sitting president.
In comments to reporters after Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony counts in federal
court in Manhattan, Deputy U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami said prosecutors were sending a
message that they are unafraid to file charges when campaign finance laws are broken. But he
did not mention Trump or offer any indication that his office planned to pursue action
against the president.'
(Washington Post)
'Despite impeachment talk, it's no easy task to remove a president in such a way. Both
Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were impeached, but both were acquitted by the Senate.
President Richard Nixon resigned before he could be removed from office.
There are three impeachable offenses: treason, bribery and the more opaque "high crimes
and misdemeanors," but the House of Representatives has the responsibility to accuse the
president of one of those things. If a majority in the House agrees, a president is then
impeached. The Senate then votes on impeachment, which under the U.S. Constitiution requires
a two-thirds majority.
In Trump's case, starting the impeachment process would currently require a mass revolt by
Republicans against him in the House of Representatives -- controlled by the GOP -- an event
even less likely than normal with midterm elections on the horizon.'
I am not sure that hush money being paid to the porn star the President was banging in
order that his pregnant wife not find out was precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind
by 'High crimes and misdemeanors,'
'I am no lawyer, but apparently if you spend that much money covering up your adultery to
avoid damage to your political campaign, that is a crime'.
I sort of see what you are saying, and of course, in a certain sense, what you say is not
only true but self-evidently and obviously true. Any politician engages in activities to gain
him or herself votes. All I am saying is that it doesn't seem like the most obvious way to
conceptualise these activities. CF Bill Clinton.
Presumably one of the key reasons that Clinton lied about the Lewinsky affair was because
he thought it would make him look bad and therefore lose him votes in the 2000 elections. And
in a sense it did (although others presumably voted for him 'cos they felt sorry for him).
But that seems like a weird way to conceptualise his activities.
Does it not seem more likely that Trump's main concern in paying the hush money was to
avoid his wife, who had just given birth, finding out? Obviously the effect on votes would be
of benefit to him, but I'm not sure that was his main concern.
I too agree with most of what Hidari said here (and there), except for their last
paragraph here.
To further clarify your statement, the issue is that the payment was
transparently not to keep Ms. Trump from finding out about Ms. Cliffords or Ms. McDougal
– the timing of the payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but
immediately before the election, make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital
affairs with adult entertainers from turning into October Surprises.
These functioned as
(unreported) in-kind donations, insofar as they were third-party resources expended to for
the explicit purpose of providing electoral support to the candidate.
I am not sure that hush money being paid to the porn star the President was banging in
order that his pregnant wife not find out was precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind
by 'High crimes and misdemeanors,'
It's intentionally
vague . It should be noted that when Johnson was impeached , one
of the eleven articles was "Bringing disgrace and ridicule to the presidency by his
aforementioned words and actions."
Again, though, the idea that the payoffs to Ms. Cliffords and Ms. McDougal were made to
prevent Ms. Trump from learning of the affairs defies all credibility when considering that
they occurred in the fall of 2016 rather than ten years earlier.
It would be a strange way to conceptualise the activity if it was based purely on
the fact that the hush money was politically helpful. But:
"He told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments to the
women were made "in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal
office," implicating the president in a federal crime.
"I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the
principal purpose of influencing the election" for president in 2016, Mr. Cohen said."
So I don't really know how you can keep insisting this is an issue of conceptual
analysis
I don't think that a Congressional majority, and certainly not the 2/3 Senate majority
needed for removal, is going to feel much ethical pressure to impeach based on the list of
wrongdoing we know about so far, or that are at all likely to emerge. Quite aside from the
lack of gravity of the crimes on that list, none of them are a clear betrayal of the
electorate that decided he should be president. That electorate already knew he was a
Russophile, had even invited Russians to hack D computers, they knew that he was a
pussy-grabber, and that his privately-owned business was ethically challenged -- yet an
electoral majority voted him in anyway. Removal on impeachment involves the legislature
asserting its will and its judgment over that of the people. Of course the legislature is
also elected by the people to accomplish duties that include holding the president to certain
standards. But I don't see even a 2/3 D Senate (which we would only get by the Rs losing
every race up this year, plus about 15 of them party-switching) having the cojones for such
an assertion, certainly not when the electorate already knew about the crimes when they voted
for the criminal. The Rs have cojones for such enterprises, and in spades, but not our
beloved Ds.
And I don't see impeachment as a very useful strategy for the Ds to pursue. Even if
successful at removing Trump, that just gets you Pence -- just as public policy irrational,
only less politically disorganized.
Maybe impeachment comes up as a tactic, to facilitate some other plan of action, but I
don't see conviction on impeachment as a useful means of even control of Trump behavior, much
less removal.
If the Ds do have control of either house after the election, of course the usual that we
can expect of them is not very much. Even if they control both chambers, they couldn't
possibly have the 2/3 in both needed to run the govt by overriding the vetoes that any actual
program of theirs would be sure to attract from the president. Even with 2/3, because this is
a D 2/3 we're talking about, we can most likely discount the possibility that they would even
try to exercise any oversight over what the govt does in opposition to the president's
control.
An actual political party in this situation of even controlling a bare majority of just
the House could do a whole lot to not only thwart Trump, but to at least make a credible
effort at asserting control over the govt. They could of course block any new legislation, or
the repeal of any existing law, and even the actual Ds are probably up to that. But to go
further, to control or limit how Trump runs the govt under existing law, this D majority of
the House would have to be willing to boldly set sail on the sea of political hardball and
take up a career of budgetary hostage-taking -- so right off we should say that this is
political fanfic, and not even canonic fanfic.
But a girl can dream, can't he, so let's pursue this alternate reality just a bit. Who
knows, if Trump's misrule makes things sufficiently dire, maybe even the Ds will be motivated
to find their inner pirate.
To take ICE as an example, it would go something like this. The House only agrees to pass
the annual appropriations on a 30-day continuing resolution basis, so that their assent is
needed every 30-days to the govt doing anything. They pass all the spending except for the
ICE funding (keeping the funding for whatever ICE spends on housing and otherwise caring for
people already apprehended -- that funding goes with the funding of the rest of the govt),
which they hold back until and unless Senate and president agree to ICE funding that includes
new law that keeps ICE from doing family separations, and whatever else the Ds find
objectionable. After success getting control of ICE abuses, next month when the CRs come due,
they do the same maneuver on their next target of Trump misrule.
The risk is that the Rs, Senate and president, just refuse to agree to the omnibus that
funds everything else the govt does until the Ds let loose the ICE funding. There is a govt
shutdown, and the Ds run the risk of being blamed. It turns into a game of legislative
chicken. Of course, this has to be anti-canon fanfic for such a game to end other than by the
Ds swerving first, so the real world Ds will never actually even start the game, because
whatever their faults, they know their limitations.
Hidari #13: " they 'all' want to get rid of him now?"
The Republican Senate would be happy to throw him overboard tomorrow. His voters are the
problem. They won't wait for his voters to turn on him however, if the Senate receives a
lengthy bill of impeachment from a Democratic House and Mueller has signed off on some of the
charges.
They'd rather have Pence do the sanctimonious messaging and go into 2020 trying to
reconstruct the party with an open primary.
After all, the GOP stands to lose Senate seats in 2020 anyway, just due to the map (the
same problem they have this year, with the House). If the election in 76 days puts the
Democrats in charge of the House, Trump won't make it to the end of his term.
'To further clarify your statement, the issue is that the payment was transparently not to
keep Ms. Trump from finding out about Ms. Cliffords or Ms. McDougal – the timing of the
payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but immediately before the election,
make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital affairs with adult entertainers from
turning into October Surprises. '
Oh ok, I didn't really understand that. I haven't to be honest, been following the Stormy
Daniels story too closely for the good reason that I don't care.
So one infers that the FL did in fact know about these things. Could we conceptualise it
thus, then: Trump paid the hush money to ensure that Melania was not publicly humiliated by
these things (I mean, humiliated even more than simply being married to Donald Trump)?
But obviously, in that case, Trump not wanting this to be a big story in the run up to the
election was obviously a 'thing'.
"... That said, many - including Yahoo News's Michael Isikoff (the guy whose article containing info fed to him by Christopher Steele was used by the FBI to obtain Carter Page's FISA warrant) - have pointed to potential targets on the left. ..."
"... Those people include former Manafort associates Tony Podesta, Vin Weber and Greg Craig - all of whom failed to register as foreign agents in connection with work outside the United States, as well as members of the Obama administration . Of course, the thought of Mueller going after "the untouchables" seems a bit far fetched. ..."
"... The FSB ambition: to choose the least competent Presidential candidate and, unbeknownst to him, smooth his way to the White House. Thus Robert Meuller's inconvenient truth: If Donald Trump were competent enough to be entrusted with collusion, then he would be too competent for the FSB to achieve its ambitions! I bet the FSB people in charge are gobsmacked that The Donald hasn't been impaled on the 25th Amendment yet! ..."
"... I don't understand Dershowitz here. What could Manafort say that Papadopoulos and Flynn haven't already told Mueller? He was Trump's campaign manager for what three months? ..."
"... If anyone had something juicy on Trump it'd be Michael Flynn since he was in the Trump administration if just for a short time. This is about keeping this farce of a charade going as long as humanly possible. ..."
"... My guess -- a guess -- is that Mueller is under a lot of pressure from the Clinton Family including Brennan, Clapper et al to find something, anything, on enough people to make the last 2 years look legit to the Americans who watch CNN. ..."
"... My guess is that the CF has gone from supporting Mueller to making him scared. ..."
"... That should work for continuing the Conspiracy theory... It is all the DOJ, FBI, Sessions and now newcomer Manafort trying to BRING Down the POTUS. All of this is happening to such a great guy like Trump... Sad huh... ..."
"... Jesus you Trumptards are delusional. The average American is no more likely to take up arms against his masters than the North Koreans are. ..."
Harvard Law professor and prominent liberal Alan Dershowitz - who has been shunned by the
liberal elite of late for defending President Trump - now says that the White House should be
alarmed over Paul Manafort's plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller.
" Well of course they should be ," replied Dershowitz - though he added the rather large
caveat that Mueller is "not a credible witness," and would be at best be a corroborating
witness against Trump.
"There's nothing he can testify to that would probably lend weight to impeachment because he
didn't have close contact with President Trump while he was president," said Dershowitz. " What
they are looking for is self-corroborating information that can be used against Trump if they
can make him sing and then there's the possibility of him composing, elaborating on the story
."
Dershowitz added that there is "no doubt" Mueller is trying to flip Manafort against
Trump.
" Once he agrees to cooperate, he has to cooperate about everything , said Dershowitz.
"There's no such thing as partial cooperation."
As for Trump pardoning Manafort? That's now "off the table," and that flipping on the
President "opens up a lot of doors that probably haven't been opened before."
It's a "big win" for Mueller, Dershowitz concludes.
That said, many - including Yahoo
News's Michael Isikoff (the guy whose article containing info fed to him by Christopher Steele
was used by the FBI to obtain Carter Page's FISA warrant) - have pointed to potential targets
on the left.
Those people include former Manafort associates Tony Podesta, Vin Weber and Greg Craig - all
of whom failed to register as foreign agents in connection with work outside the United States,
as well as members of the Obama administration . Of course, the thought of Mueller going after
"the untouchables" seems a bit far fetched.
quintus.sertorius , 19 minutes ago
The Tribe plays both sides: Dershowitz the plant in Trump team has the same real loyalty
as fellow tribesman Haim Saban or Sheldon Adelson. They want to blackmail Trump into fighting
Israel's war in Syria.
radbug , 55 minutes ago
The FSB ambition: to choose the least competent Presidential candidate and, unbeknownst to
him, smooth his way to the White House. Thus Robert Meuller's inconvenient truth: If Donald
Trump were competent enough to be entrusted with collusion, then he would be too competent
for the FSB to achieve its ambitions! I bet the FSB people in charge are gobsmacked that The
Donald hasn't been impaled on the 25th Amendment yet!
ZazzOne , 1 hour ago
"Big Win For Mueller"? Only if he plans on going after the founders of the Red Shoe "Pedo"
Club.....John and Tony Podesta! Though I highly doubt he'll ever go down that rabbit
hole!!!!!
Straddling-the-fence , 2 hours ago
Once he agrees to cooperate, he has to cooperate about everything , said Dershowitz.
"There's no such thing as partial cooperation.
That's asinine. There are terms to a plea agreement. Unless those terms encompass what is
claimed above, then that is simply false.
KekistanisUnite , 3 hours ago
I don't understand Dershowitz here. What could Manafort say that Papadopoulos and Flynn
haven't already told Mueller? He was Trump's campaign manager for what three months?
George
Papadopoulos I don't know how long he was there but if really has nothing of value to offer
then neither would Manafort.
If anyone had something juicy on Trump it'd be Michael Flynn
since he was in the Trump administration if just for a short time. This is about keeping this
farce of a charade going as long as humanly possible.
Econogeek , 3 hours ago
My guess -- a guess -- is that Mueller is under a lot of pressure from the Clinton Family
including Brennan, Clapper et al to find something, anything, on enough people to make the
last 2 years look legit to the Americans who watch CNN.
My guess is that the CF has gone from supporting Mueller to making him scared.
ThePhantom , 4 hours ago
i like to think Mueller is on the plate too, and this is his chance to save his own ass.
Greg Craig and Podesta's names are out in all the papers .... they worked with manafort first
and foremost....
no idea what dershowitz is talking about.. none.
Calvertsbio , 4 hours ago
Yea sure he is, the SPECIAL Counsel running the show to bring down corruption is "ON THE
PLATE" yea, ok...
That should work for continuing the Conspiracy theory... It is all the DOJ, FBI, Sessions
and now newcomer Manafort trying to BRING Down the POTUS. All of this is happening to such a
great guy like Trump... Sad huh...
Doesn't make much difference how much of this BS is posted, no one is buying it anymore...
Even FAUX news has basically given up on him... Everyone know that once it all comes out, it
will be labelled by HIS SHEEPLE that it is all made up BS to take him down...
Hillary did it... no ! Sessions did it, nope, it was RYAN ? McConnell... lets keep the
guessing game going... The Dossier did it...
BigJim, 4 hours ago
"The swamp critters better stop ignoring the Hillary/DNC side of this or the population is going to be marching in with
pitchforks and guillotines."
Jesus you Trumptards are delusional. The average American is no more likely to take up arms against his masters than
the North Koreans are.
Uncovered text messages reveal that FBI agent Peter Strzok wanted to use CNN's
"bombshell" report about the infamous "Steele Dossier" to interview witnesses in the
Trump-Russia probe
CNN used leaked knowledge that Comey briefed Trump on the dossier as a trigger to
publish
The FBI knew of CNN's plans to publish, confirming a dialogue between the FBI and
CNN
This is particularly damning in light of revelations of FBI-MSM collusion against the
Trump campaign
Newly revealed text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney
Lisa Page reveal that Strzok wanted to use CNN's report on the infamous "Steele Dossier" to
justify interviewing people in the Trump-Russia investigation, reports CNN
.
911bodysnatchers322 ,
So now CNN is complicit in illegal leaking, (dis)information laundering, citizen
targetting, conspiracy against rights, subversion, sedition and treason?
No wonder it's a nonstop Trump hate fest. They aren't just trying to get Trump impeached
in the court of public opinion, they're desperate to get rid of him before he 100% destroys
him
Well it's too late. Impeach away. But we'll still hold CNN for treason. The two things
aren't related. You can't steal from a store just because Trump set the one next to it on
fire
BGO ,
Fatigue is setting in with this charade. Soon the (((pundits))) will respond with the
obligatory ***yawn*** troll to all future allegations.
If Trump cannot or is unable to respond to this non-sense in the harshest terms possible,
he should not be president. It's amazing no one in this drama has met their maker Hitlery
style. If that cunt was in charge and dealing with this shit, bodies would have already hit
the floor.
J Mahoney ,
This whole situation has to piss off anyone that is even 10% objective. How could any
elected representative or senator still spew shit like "Leave Mueller Alone"
BOTTOM LINE -- If we do not get to work quickly to elect non establishment republicans in
the midterms NOTHING will EVER be done and Trump may be forced out if Dems make gains
apocalypticbrother ,
All old news. No one in jail except Manafort. It really seems like Trump is powerless
against agencys. He must hate being a powerless president.
squid ,
If, and I do mean IF, the GOP holds onto both houses of congress.....
Everyone of these fucks has to be indited with sedition, PERIOD.
its slam dunk. And, if the elected houses ever wants to get hold of the CIA, FBI and NSA
and gain some control over those rogue agencies 20-50 agents from each will have to go down
to spend the rest of their lives in Leavenworth.
These uncollected asshats have tried to change the government of the United States.
The only person on the left that appears to understand this is Glen Greenwald.
Squid
Save_America1st ,
the problem is that in my opinion the majority of the GOP is also so fucking corrupt that
I don't think most of them actually want to hold control of the House. They never even wanted
Trump to win in the first place. On top of that, I would say many of those treasonous
scumbags probably actually wanted Hitlery to win the fucking thing even if Trump wasn't going
to be her opponent!
Look at all the resignations. Never seen before in history. Why? Two reasons...Trump is
using the evidence to push many of them out or they end up in Guantanamo for life. And others
in the beginning were quitting in order to give up part of the majority in order to flip the
House to the even more evil, treasonous Demoscums so that it would restrict Trump's full
majority.
Just look how "No Name" McStain acted when voting down against repealing O-Fuck-You-Care,
right???
He was a traitor, plain and fucking simple. We all know it. Fuck their bullshit funeral.
That was a cathedral full of traitors to this country. Psychopaths and sociopaths. Except for
General Kelly and General Mattis keeping a close eye on that room full of demons.
The Mueller investigation has been going on for a very long time - if he had found
anything of any real value it would be out there already, trying to reduce Trump popularity
and hit the GOP mid-terms.
The Mid Terms are very important to Deep State. The Dems must at least get the House back
in order to stop Trump.
That Mueller and Co have virtually have found nothing to put out there to stop Trump and
the GOP means they have fuck all, and are now clutching at Straws.
They are going to have to go the Bullshit path....start inventing. OH and all sorts of
False Flags between now and Mid Terms are guaranteed. ALSO will the neocons dupe Trump into a
Syria mistake that causes the death of many US soldiers? We know Deep State don't care who or
how many they kill, so long as they get what they want.
One wonders if the Censoring of Conservative media, and Political Sites is because Deep
State are planning to Assassinate President Trump , as is stated on Alex Jone's site.
BANNED VIDEOS – PENTAGON INTEL SAYS GLOBALISTS WANT TRUMP DEAD BY MARCH 2019
Watch the clips censored by over one hundred websites
There have probably been several Trump assassination attempts since he was elected.
Knowing what happened to Lincoln when he vetoed the National Bank / Fed Reserve of his
time;
And what happened to JFK when he stated he would shut down the CIA;
Trump is fully aware he performs a death defying act daily. There may be others out there
willing to make the Trump-JFK-Lincoln sacrifice, to take back America, but not Pence, not
Sanders, not any current Democrat prez wanna be.
Thom Paine ,
It would be impossible, or an exercise in suicide by the GOP and or Democrats if they
actually impeached Trump.
Two thirds of the Senate is required for Impeachment, meaning the GOP would have to
vote with the Dems and that would mean total devastation of the GOP at the following
elections.
If the Dems tried impeachment, they would be only signaling to their hardcore base, but
there would be a significant voter backlash against them. It would be a self defeating
act.
If the GOP and Dems voted to impeach Trump in the Senate, Trump can appeal to the
Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court would deny the Impeachment - unless there was proper legal
cause.
There has to be a legally provable breach of Federal law outside the POTUS exercise of
powers. Extraordinary prosecution requires extraordinary evidence.
You cannot remove a President elected by 62 million people on flimsy hearsay, or 'he said
she said' evidence, or pure circumstantial evidence. It would also set a precedence where
Presidents could be impeached on the drop of a hat.
At the moment the Dems and Deep State want to impeach Trump because he beat Clinton and
fucked up the last step in their plan to own America.
If Trump beat Sanders not many would be whining right now, they wouldn't care.
StarGate ,
Your premise legally appears to be accurate, that the Supreme Court is a failsafe against
a retaliatory political impeachment, based primarily on fact Hillary lost.
However, that means the Supreme Court would have to been beyond corruption and Trump would
have to bring a case.
j0nx ,
No. All the Dems and deep state need to know is that a lot of the deplorable would riot
like mofos if they tried. No dem would be safe. You think they don't know that? Sociology
101.
Saying the deplorables wouldn't riot is like saying Obama's minions wouldn't have if the
shoe were reversed 7 years ago and there was an open coup against him like there is
Trump.
Withdrawn Sanction ,
Sorry to nit pick, but there are 2 steps here: the first is impeachment by the House. Akin
to an indictment. Then there is a trial in the Senate which is presided over by the Chief
Justice of the SC. THEN a 2/3s affirmative vote is required for conviction and removal from
office.
An impeachment just like an indictment is meaningless w/o a conviction. You see how much
"damage" an impeachment did to Slick Willy. Didn't skip a beat
"... What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most Trump haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he threatened to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a Russian puppet and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. ..."
"... Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece. The author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal -- he wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not escalate tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough Russian diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his neoconservative desires. ..."
"... Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least compatible with "Russiagate" -- Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against countries like Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and authoritarian leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative ideologues. In contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is that he wanted to have Assad killed -- something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly object. ..."
What I find interesting in the case of Bob Woodward's book is that many anti-Trumpers seem to
celebrate it without even taking into account that, if its contents were to be believed, it
would completely discredit the whole "Russiagate" story that has been the main line of attack
against Donald Trump.
As far as I can judge from the excerpts that have been published, most of the book deals
with issues of style -- it is certainly nothing new that many people in the establishment
strongly dislike Trump's style -- and about people in important positions in Trump's
surroundings have a negative opinion of him and sometimes try to work against him -- that is
hardly something new, either.
The only piece of information that could really make Trump look like someone unhinged and
dangerous is the claim that he demanded Assad to be killed. Of course, I don't know whether
that claim is true and if Trump said something like that, it was meant as an assignment or he
just wanted to know what others thought about the idea. But Trump certainly would not have
said anything like that if he was a Russian puppet. Although Russia hardly has absolutely
loyalty to Assad as a person, killing the president of a government with which Russia is
allied and thereby causing more instability is certainly not something Russia might want. So,
not only does Bob Woodward's book that claims to report things that happened behind the
scenes not show any hints that the Russiagate conspiracy theory might be true, but -- if it
is to be believed -, it shows quite strong evidence against that theory.
I don't know whether Bob Woodward spells this out anywhere in the book -- I doubt it
because the main target audience of the book is probably Trump haters who like to hate Trump
for any conceivable reason and might be upset if one such reason, which had been heavily
promoted, was taken away from them. But at least, Bob Woodward seems to be consistent on this
to some degree -- after the report by a few handpicked agents from three agencies and
Clapper's bureau in January 2017, Woodward criticized the politicization of the secret
services. Apart from a few excerpts, I have not read Bob Woodward's book, and I cannot judge
its merits, but I think that he is probably somewhat less dishonest than many of Trump haters
-- this strange coalition of pseudo-leftists with the deep state.
What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most
Trump haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he
threatened to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a
Russian puppet and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. I
think that once more demonstrates the irrationality of the base of that "Anti-Trump
Resistance" (not, of course, of people from the Clinton campaign, the FBI and CIA who
invented Russiagate, they just exploit the irrationality of large parts of the public).
Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece.
The author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal --
he wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not
escalate tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough
Russian diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his
neoconservative desires.
Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least compatible with
"Russiagate" -- Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against countries like
Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and authoritarian
leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative ideologues. In
contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is that he wanted
to have Assad killed -- something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly object.
@Adrian E. What I find interesting in the case of Bob Woodward's book is that many
anti-Trumpers seem to celebrate it without even taking into account that, if its contents
were to be believed, it would completely discredit the whole "Russiagate" story that has been
the main line of attack against Donald Trump.
As far as I can judge from the excerpts that have been published, most of the book deals
with issues of style - it is certainly nothing new that many people in the establishment
strongly dislike Trump's style - and about people in important positions in Trump's
surroundings have a negative opinion of him and sometimes try to work against him - that is
hardly something new, either.
The only piece of information that could really make Trump look like someone unhinged and
dangerous is the claim that he demanded Assad to be killed. Of course, I don't know whether
that claim is true and if Trump said something like that, it was meant as an assignment or he
just wanted to know what others thought about the idea. But Trump certainly would not have
said anything like that if he was a Russian puppet. Although Russia hardly has absolutely
loyalty to Assad as a person, killing the president of a government with which Russia is
allied and thereby causing more instability is certainly not something Russia might want. So,
not only does Bob Woodward's book that claims to report things that happened behind the
scenes not show any hints that the Russiagate conspiracy theory might be true, but - if it is
to be believed -, it shows quite strong evidence against that theory.
I don't know whether Bob Woodward spells this out anywhere in the book - I doubt it
because the main target audience of the book is probably Trump haters who like to hate Trump
for any conceiveable reason and might be upset if one such reason, which had been heavily
promoted, was taken away from them. But at least, Bob Woodward seems to be consistent on this
to some degree - after the report by a few handpicked agents from three agencies and
Clapper's bureau in January 2017, Woodward criticized the politicization of the secret
services. Apart from a few excerpts, I have not read Bob Woodward's book, and I cannot judge
its merits, but I think that he is probably somewhat less dishonest than many of his haters -
this strange coalition of pseudo-leftists with the deep state.
What I do find absurd is the reception of Bob Woodward's book. It seems that most Trump
haters don't seem to have any problems with thinking Trump is unhinged because he threatened
to kill the president of a country that is allied with Russia and that he is a Russian puppet
and that therefore the investigation about "collusion" is necessary. I think that once more
demonstrates the irrationality of the base of that "Anti-Trump Resistance" (not, of course,
of people from the Clinton campaign, the FBI and CIA who invented Russiagate, they just
exploit the irrationality of large parts of the public).
Bob Woodward's book also stands in a strange relationship to the anonymous NYT piece. The
author of that piece seems to be a hardcore neoconservative and free-trade neoliberal - he
wants deregulation, more money for the military, but he dislikes that Trump does not escalate
tensions against Russia enough and has to be pressured in order to expell enough Russian
diplomats, and also the tentative support of peace efforts for Korea go against his
neoconservative desires. Although it is not mentioned explicitly, the piece is at least
compatible with "Russiagate" - Trump's desire not to escalate international tensions against
countries like Russia and North Korea too much is seen as a "preference for dictators and
authoritarian leaders", which is an interpretation that is typical of neoconservative
ideologues. In contrast, Woodward's main point for accusing Donald Trump of being unhinged is
that he wanted to have Assad killed - something many of the hard-core neocons would hardly
object. Very good observations. Maybe the "kill Assad" ploy is not intended for domestic
consumption but rather to further undermine Trump's working relationship with Putin –
just as with the of the phoney Russian agent indictment which wast timed precisely to disrupt
the Helsinki summit.
History is very clear who runs the media for those who are in the know.
9/23/1975 Tom Charles Huston Church Committee Testimony
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance,
and opening of mail.
September 1, 2015 THE CIA AND THE MEDIA: 50 FACTS THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW
Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in
US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears
and reads on a regular basis.
President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the American government
has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt but the absolute
worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope for traitors.
Historians know that very few people understand great historical events when they happen.
My idea is that this now is the case.
Never before in history did the leader of an empire understand that that empire could not
survive, and act accordingly.
The British empire was already not sustainable, financially, before 1914. Britain had to
give up the two fleet standard, the situation where the British fleet was superior to the
next two biggest fleets. Obama had to give up the two war standard, the USA went to one and a
half war. What a half war accomplishes one can see in Syria.
The British empire fell apart through WWII, Churchill the undertaker. For this reason, I
suspect, are the peace proposals that Rudolf Hess brought to Scotland in May 1941 still
secret. France got a generous peace, logical to assume that Hitler would propose the same to
Great Britain, the empire he admired.
The British example makes two things clear: what should have been clear prior to 1914 was
not clear, or was ignored, and the price of unwilling, or not capable of understanding
history at the moment it happens becomes clear. Britain did not have a Deep State, one might
say, on the other hand, one can be of the opinion that the British Deep State did exist. A
conflict as now in the USA never existed in Great Britain.
What would have happened if say Chamberlain would have acted as Trump does know, anybody's
guess. Chamberlain did not want war, but he also did not want to end British imagined power,
he belonged to the Thirtyniners, those with the illusion that Great Britain was ready for war
in 1939.
As in 1917, the USA had to rescue Britain, but this time the price was high: opening the
empire to foreign competition, on top of that, FDR's lofty statements, the Atlantic Charter,
in fact the end of all colonial European empires.
@Buckwheat President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the
American government has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt
but the absolute worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope
for traitors.
President Trump's greatest legacy will be his exposing how corrupt the American
government has become. Almost every branch of Government has been exposed as corrupt but
the absolute worst is the FBI. This attempted coup should be met with the hangman's rope
for traitors.
The media controls the minds of the mob, and presents itself as vox populi .
Corruption has been exposed, and the media admits to it, endorses it, and encourages
more.
So, whaddya figure? 20 years to total economic collapse? Who's gonna feed the messicans?
Oh! The humanity! Oh, Rome, do not burn!
"Shining city on a hill" and all that bullshit. Turn out the lights.
@Deschutes I didn't like Clinton, but I think Trump is as bad, probably worse. Look at
the EPA under Trump, it's a fucking joke with fossil fuel shills like Pruitt gutting much
needed laws to protect environment and people. Look at Education secretary DeVoss: it does
NOT get any worse: a billionaire christian fundamentalist wacko billionaire who bought her
way into that post funding the GOP/Trump ticket!? She's the epitome of what the 'Trump
voters' ostensibly hate: a billionaire class aka 'Rome on the Potomac' as this author calls
it, the plutocracy who own and run the show while the proletariat slave away at their office
temp jobs, or worse yet amazon.com sweatshop, etc. DeVoss is privatizing education so that
christian fundies can have their kids taught 'gawd made the world in 7 days' instead of
Darwin's evolution. Look at Trumps Atty General Sessions: he's a reactionary fossil from the
1950s who wants to illegalize weed? Roll back sensible drug policy? He's a fucking disaster.
And look at what Trump is doing for Israel!? Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and
Kishner sucking up to Netanyahoo, doing his bidding like an Israel firster? This is all good?
This is what the disenfranchised Trump supporter voted for and had in mind??
Trump is a fucking awful trainwreck. ' Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, '
If this makes Netanyahu happy for some time, at negligible cost to the USA, smart move.
At the same time, Trump can claim 'see how I love Israel'.
For me the same as the fake attacks on Syria.
Show.
@Wizard of Oz You seem to be using language like Alice's Humpty Dumpty. "Zionism" is at
least a little bit constrained in meaning by its being a movement to restore the Jewish
people as currently understood to the land of Israel (Judea and Samaria principally which
creates special difficulties...) with Jerusalem as it's capital, and, I suppose to maintain
them there. You are absolutely correct.
But it also includes protection of Israel.
And what is the best protection of Israel?
..
To control the most powerful country in the world ergo USA
..
And what is even better protection of Israel?
To to rule the world.
..
What is wrong or evil in this plan?
Nothing! it is good plan.
..
So where is the snag?
..
Complications in executing this plan.
According to the Washington Post, Barbara K. Olson called her husband twice on September
11, 2001 in the final minutes of Flight 77. Her last words to him were, "What do I tell the
pilot to do?"
"She called from the plane while it was being hijacked," said Theodore Olson -- 42nd
Solicitor General of the United States. "I wish it wasn't so, but it is."
However, prosecution exhibit P200054 (attached) in United States v.
Zacarias Moussaoui -- http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/
exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html -- shows that Barbara Olson made only one phone
call -- it did not connect, and it lasted for 0 seconds!
Both accounts of Barbara Olson's phone calls -- the Solicitor General's and the
prosecution's in United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui -- cannot be correct.
Media lies and fabrications have been going on ever since there were "journalists" (I use
that term loosely). The difference today, is that "professional journalism" is now blatantly
showing its liberal communistic bias.
From "Remember the Maine" in the Spanish-American war (actually a powder magazine
explosion–not an attack) to walter duranty's extolling the "virtues" of communism while
one of the greatest artificially-engineered (by communists)famines in the Ukraine was taking
place, in order to force the "collectivization" of privately-held farms, to walter cronkite
outright lying about the American military's effectiveness during the 1968 Vietnam "Tet
offensive" (in which much enemy life was lost) journalism has always been a "nasty craft". In
cronkite's case, the North Vietnamese were ready to settle (and capitulate) until cronkite's
lies about the supposed American "defeat" were publicized. Cronkite's lies gave the North
Vietnamese new resolve, as they realized that they had the American "news media" on their
side. There has always been a certain sympathy for communism and totalitarianism in the
so-called "mainstream media". All one has to do is to look at the journalists fawning over
Cuba's Fidel Castro and how wonderful life is in that communist "paradise".
Journalists HATE the internet because it exposes their "profession" for what it really is
with the internet, anyone can be a true journalist. This is why the same "mainstream media"
is calling for the "licensing" of journalists–something that would have been unheard of
(and treasonous) in previous decades
Professional journalism is its own worst enemy
We're surprised the tools of the Oligarch Class remain loyal to their paymasters? Comey and
Müller both received very lucrative board-seat assignments for looking the other way
when appropriate, or digging a little deeper when asked.
"In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our
national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of
national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry -- in an
informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic
government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free
most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For, without an informed and
free press, there cannot be an enlightened people."
I have no choice. I must don the mantle of greatness and take the reins of the country.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I will run for the office of dictator, or
President in American parlance.
Readers may ask, "But Fred, what makes you think you are qualified to be President?" To
which I respond, "Nothing. But have you seen what we have now? You want a White House with
John Bolton in it?"
You see.
I append here a few of the enlightened policies which I will effect. Hold your applause
until the end. Interspersed for perusal are a few slogans that I may use to incite your
fervor.
One: I will end all policies hostile to Cuba. I will not make life difficult for
eleven million perfectly good people to please a ratpack of phony Cubans afflicting Miami. In
fact, I will offer Havana a twenty-billion-dollar loan if they will take the bastards back.
Cuba poses no danger to anyone. They have good cigars. They should be left alone to live as
they please and drink mojitos. If nutcake Republicans protest my policy, I will have them
stuffed into an abandoned oil well. Along with the pseudo-Cubans.
Two: Elizabeth Warren will be required to take a DNA test to see whether she is a
wild Indian. If she is, she will have to wear feathers. Otherwise, to see a psychiatrist.
We have nothing to be afred of but Fred hisself! Has a classic ring, don't you
think?
Three: I will end the Afghan war in an afternoon, relying on use the exit strategy
proposed by James P. Coyne, the Sun Tsu of our age:
"OK, on the plane. Now ."
If Lindsey Graham complains that we need to kill more puzzled goatherds, I will have him
inserted into the oil well on top of the Republicans and pseudo-Cubans, with Oprah tamped
down on top as a sort of cork. There is nothing in Afghanistan that Americans need or want,
except opium products, and private enterprise now provides these in abundance. Check the
nearest street corner, or ask your kids.
Four: I will make membership in AIPAC a felony, and remind its members that I could
have Oprah temporarily removed from the oil well to make more room. Aipackers can act as they
please in their own country–I will not meddle in foreign affairs–but leave ours
alone.
Fred! Ahhhhhh . This has a nicely orgasmic quality that will appeal to the younger
demographic. It represents the satisfaction that my rule will bring to the entire
country.
Five: I will end all sanctions against Iran. Then I will sell those Persian rascals
airplanes and cars and electronic stuff and towel softener and lock them into the American
economic system. This will make Boeing and AT&T and Intel love me with the deep sweet
love that never dies, at least as long as the money flows, and there will be lots of jobs in
Seattle.
Six: I will bring charges of treason against the contents of the Great Double Wide
on Pennsylvania Avenue. The evidence is incontrovertible. The first rule of empire is Don't
Let Your Enemies Unite. Everybody who has an empire knows this. Except us. Inside the White
House a bunch of apparently brain-damaged political mostly left-overs, suffering from Beltway
Bubble Syndrome, push China, Russia, and Iran together like some kind of international
spaghetti-grope LGTBQRSTUV threesome. Who are our dismal leaders really working for?
China?
A Fred in Every Pot This makes no sense, you may say. No, but we are doing
politics. It is almost iambic pentameter, like Shakespeare. It will lend class to my
campaign.
Seven: I will keep the F-35 program. It provides a lot of jobs. However, I will but get
rid of the airplane. Isn't this brilliant? Instead of building the thing, workers will dig
holes and fill them in, but keep their current salaries. It will improve their health, and
make America safer. The fewer dangerous things the children in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel
have, the less trouble it can cause.
Better Fred than Dead! Some readers will dispute this. What do they know?
Eight: I have been urged to end affirmative action on the grounds that things
should be done by people who can actually do them. This is racist. I will have nothing to do
with it. Instead I will make affirmative action democratic and inclusive. Everyone will
qualify for it. Special privilege should not be restricted to a minority. It isn't the
American way.
Fred! Good as Any, Better'n Some. Good thinking.
Nine: I will abolish NATO. America should find a cheaper way to control the
vassals. There is of course the bedtime story that NATO exists to confront the Russkies, and
only incidentally provides a compulsory market for American armament. Nuts. Russia cannot
seem dangerous to anyone who wasn't dropped on his head at some formative juncture in life.
Smallish population, low military budget.
Likewise South Korea, which has twice the population and forty times the economy of the
North. If it wants to defend itself, it has my blessing. If it doesn't, it isn't our
problem.
Tippecanoe and Frederick Too! This may require exhumation, but for this we have
backhoes.
Ten: I will make a modest reduction in the military budget, say seventy-five
percent. To keep the soldiers happy I will invest in high-throughput roller coasters, a
shooting range with BB guns, and really loud speaker systems that say Va roooom and
Bangbangbang and fzzzzzzzzboom. These will provide psychic emoluments of
martial life without the murder.
Eleven: The money thus saved I will use on pressing domestic problems. LA has
68,000 homeless people on the streets, San Francisco loses conventions because of so many
homeless defecating on the sidewalks, Portland has homeless riots,. The lower primates in
Antifa and BLM rend such social fabric as any longer exists. Dams are aging. Our trains are
out of of the Fifties. And we spend a trillion a year on goddam aircraft carriers?
Fred? Well, Got a Better Idea?
Twelve: As an educational reform, I will have the Department of Education filled
with linoleum cement, the occupants being left inside. This will raise the national IQ by at
least three points. I will pass an amendment to the fragments of the Constitution saying, "No
federal entity or person shall say, think, suggest, or do anything whatever regarding
schooling on pain of garroting." Part of the savings from lowering the military budget will
go to purchasing garrotes. The duration, content, and nature of the schools shall be left to
localities without exception.
Thirteen: The father of any girl subjected to genital mutilation will be awarded a
free gender reassignment operation, preferably with tin-snips. Genital mutilation should be
inclusive. The father will then be placed for two weeks in the bottom of a public latrine in
Uganda. If this doesn't suffice to deter the practice, I may be forced to adopt extreme
measures. A country that allows such treatment of daughters deserves to go to hell. And seems
to be.
Fourteen: I will impose a literacy test for voting. People too dim to find their
way home should not be permitted to influence policies they have never heard of and can't
spell. Yes, this might be called illiberal. If so, it will doubtless be the only example of
illiberalism in this meritorious list.
Fifteen: In higher education, I will prescribe horse whipping for anyone saying
microaggression, white privilege, whiteness, patriarchy, safe space, people of color, racism,
any kind of phobia, or "Resist" in a squalling voice with an exclamation point. No curriculum
containing the word "Studies" will be permitted.
Sixteen: Anyone prescribing Ritalin for children under twenty-one will be thrown from a
helicopter.
In conclusion, I say to my yearning public, There, you, see, there is hope. Together we can
do this. See you at the polls.
... ... ...
Fred Reed is a former news weasel and part-time sociopath living in central Mexico
with his wife and three useless but agreeable street dogs. He says it suits him.
"... Retired USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty revealed that the "Pentagon Papers" were a planned CIA leak to shift blame for the failed war in Vietnam from the CIA to the Pentagon. The documents were real, but only certain documents were released. ..."
"... Nixon was ousted with the help of covert CIA agent Bob Woodward, working undercover as a reporter at the CIA co-founded "Washington Post". Gerald Ford became President, who just happened to be a member of the discredited Warren Commission that engineered the cover-up of the JFK assassination! ..."
He graduated from the CIA university (aka Yale) then went to CIA basic training as a naval
intelligence officer for five years, then to the Washington Post. This is why he was allowed
White House access by the Trump Neocons, despite is record as a back stabber to those who
oppose the Neocon agenda. The Washington Post itself was co-founded by the CIA. Woodward was
a key player in the last CIA coup when Nixon was ousted, not too long after they disposed of
troublesome President Kennedy. I noted some of this in my 2010 blog:
Retired USAF Col. Fletcher Prouty revealed that the "Pentagon Papers" were a planned
CIA leak to shift blame for the failed war in Vietnam from the CIA to the Pentagon. The
documents were real, but only certain documents were released. Prouty wrote the other
reason for this "leak" was to upset the Nixon administration, which it was trying to
destabilize in hopes of ousting Nixon.
That President was upset that the CIA refused to provide him with requested documents
concerning the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination. Nixon also angered the "Power Elite" by
withdrawing American troops from their profitable business venture in Vietnam and improving
relations with Red China.
Nixon was ousted with the help of covert CIA agent Bob Woodward, working undercover as
a reporter at the CIA co-founded "Washington Post". Gerald Ford became President, who just
happened to be a member of the discredited Warren Commission that engineered the cover-up of
the JFK assassination!
This piece makes Trump look like a credible president – that is, if he is to be judged
by his campaign promises to the American electorate who voted him in. This is only partly
true. Recall that Trump did make unequivocal promises: "We will stop racing to topple foreign
regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with,". and "We will stop
racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved
with," Not long after such promises, he announced he would be sending more troops to
Afghanistan. His bombing of Syria and illegally keeping American boots in that country surely
flies in the face of such promises especially in light of statements that American troops
will not leave that country any time soon, in keeping with America's zeal for fighting
Israel's wars. This piece portrays Trump as intrepid and true to his word. Yet, like many of
his predecessors, the morbid fear of the pro-Israeli lobby remains a defining feature of US
foreign policy matters. Neither can Trump exonerate himself from the ongoing tragedy in Yemen
emboldening the Saudis and their Emirati allies with the sale of billions of dollars of arms
to these medieval monarchies, not to mention the logistical support given them by the US.
Prime Minister Teresa May took
to the floor of the Parliament today to report that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police
had issued warrants for two Russian GRU officials who, they claim, had carried out the Skripal
attacks last March. "We were right," she said with a stiff upper lip, "to say in March that the
Russian State was responsible." Mugshots were released of two people whose names, she declared,
were aliases (how they know they are GRU officials if they don't know their names was not
explained). "This chemical weapon attack on our soil was part of a wider pattern of Russian
behavior that persistently seeks to undermine our security and that of our allies around the
world," she intoned.
At the same time, dire warnings have been issued to Syria and Russia that there will be a
major military response if Syria uses chemical weapons in Idlib. This is despite the fact that
Russia has presented the proof to the OPCW and to the UN that the British intelligence-linked
Olive security outfit and the British-sponsored White Helmet terrorists have prepared a false
flag chlorine attack in Idlib, to be blamed on the Syrian government, to trigger such a
military atrocity by the US and the UK.
Also at the same time, in the US, Washington Post fraudster Bob Woodward released a book
claiming that numerous Trump cabinet officials made wildly slanderous statements about Trump --
all third hand from anonymous sources, of course. Chief of Staff John Kelly called the claims
"total BS," while Secretary of State Jim Mattis called it typical Washington DC fiction, adding
that "the idea that I would show contempt for the elected Commander-in-Chief, President Trump,
or tolerate disrespect to the office of the President from within our Department of Defense, is
a product of someone's rich imagination."
Worse, the New York Times, apparently for the first time, printed an "anonymous" op-ed by
someone claiming to be a "senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known
to us," under the title: "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration -- I work
for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and
his worst inclinations." Whether this person is or is not who they claim to be, it is clearly
part of the British coup attempt, as proven in the op-ed itself. After calling Trump amoral,
unhinged, and more, and claiming there is discussion within the Administration of using the
25th Amendment to remove him for mental incompetence, it then states: "Take foreign policy: In
public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as
President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little
genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations [read: the United
Kingdom - ed.]. Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is
operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and
punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than
ridiculed as rivals. On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of
Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He
complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further
confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to
impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew
better such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable."
And, while news about the British drive for war with Russia and their attempted coup against
the government of the United States fills the airwaves and the press, not a single word --
repeat, not a single word -- has been reported in the US or British media about the truly
historic conference which took place on Monday and Tuesday in Beijing, the Forum on
China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAP). Helga Zepp-LaRouche declared this week that this event will
be recognized in history as the end of the era of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Every
African nation except one was represented at the conference in Beijing (the "one" was
Swaziland, the last holdout on the African continent which still maintains diplomatic relations
with Taiwan rather than Beijing).
All but six were represented their head of state. They reviewed the transformation taking
place across Africa due to the Belt and Road Initiative since the last FOCAP meeting in 2015,
and laid out plans for the even more rapid development over the next three years, and on to
2063 -- the target year for full modernization over 50 years, adopted by the African Union in
2013. One after another the leaders of the African nations described the actual liberation
taking place, finally seeing in China the example that real development and the escape from
poverty is possible. The program launched at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung,
Indonesia, where the formerly colonized nations met for the first time without their colonial
masters, has finally been realized.
But no one reading the western press would even know that this transformative event had
taken place.
Rather, there is only the new McCarthyism, trying to demonize Russia and China, to revive
the "enemy image" which should have been eliminated with the fall of the Soviet Union and the
recognition of the People's Republic of China.
Trump threatens this new McCarthyism, insisting that America should be friends with Russia
and China. No longer will the U.S. accept Lord Palmerston's imperial dictate for the Empire,
that "nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests." The "special
relationship" is to be no more.
This is the cause of Theresa May's hysterical rant today in the Parliament. Better war, led
by the "dumb giant" America, than to see the Empire destroyed in a world united through a
shared vision of universal development.
Britain's drive for war must be exposed and stopped, along with their Russiagate coup
attempt in the US. A victory for the common aims of mankind is within our grasp, but the danger
is great, and the time is short.
All Trump has to do to get rid of the Op Ed guy is to fire all those who want to go to war
withRussia. That would leave him with no staff.
But Trump is not fooling me. You do not make a campaign promise to cooperate with Russia,
and then hire all these people who want to go to war with Russia.
It tells me that Trump was lying during his campaign.
He told us Iraq was the wrong decision, and now he has bombed Syria twice and is ready to
bomb them again; he told us that he wants out of the mid-east; he told us he wanted to
cooperate with Russia.
So I voted for him, but he was lying. I already found out he is a brazen liar. He took
those Clinton women to his debate to humiliate Hillary and Bill Clinton, when all the while
he was doing the same thing with women. That is what I call a brazen liar.
He is a pawn of the State of Israel, nothing more and nothing less. They probably told him
to hire Bolton and all the other war-mongers around him. He's not surrounded by the enemy. He
is surrounded by his friends.
The biggest mystery of this whole presidency is why the guy who went to battle against the
GOP foreign policy establishment turned over those policy positions to them, instead of
putting people into office who actually looked favorably on him and shared areas of agreement
with him (paleocons, realists, non-interventionists, etc.). The only foreign policy promise
he's kept is the one that happened to align with the neocon preferences: backing out of the
Iran deal.
I guess it must come down to Jared Kushner and his close ties with Israel and the Gulf
Arabs, but still find it bizarre that Trump never reached out to Pat Buchanan, Rand Paul,
Steve Bannon, etc., in selecting foreign policy officials.
@Admiral
Assbar The biggest mystery of this whole presidency is why the guy who went to battle
against the GOP foreign policy establishment turned over those policy positions to them,
instead of putting people into office who actually looked favorably on him and shared areas
of agreement with him (paleocons, realists, non-interventionists, etc.). The only foreign
policy promise he's kept is the one that happened to align with the neocon preferences:
backing out of the Iran deal.
I guess it must come down to Jared Kushner and his close ties with Israel and the Gulf
Arabs, but still find it bizarre that Trump never reached out to Pat Buchanan, Rand Paul,
Steve Bannon, etc., in selecting foreign policy officials. "The biggest mystery of this whole
presidency is why the guy who went to battle against the GOP foreign policy establishment
turned over those policy positions to them "
It seems fairly clear that, whenever a new President is sworn in, he immediately receives
a "pep talk" in which he is informed what he will and will not say and do, and what will
happen to him, his family, their pets, and everyone they have ever spoken to if he disobeys.
Probably this "offer that he can't refuse" is concluded by words along the lines of: " and if
you want to get what the Kennedys got, just try stepping out of line".
J. Edgar Hoover used to do something of the kind when he was head of the FBI, but that was
relatively benign – just a threat of blackmail accompanied by kindly advice never to
fight the FBI.
@AlbionRevisited I was
referring to the campaign, of course we're in a different situation now. It's amazing the way
in which they were able to co-oped his administration. AlbionRevisted wrote: "It's amazing
the way in which they (Neoconservatives) were able to co-oped his (Trump)
administration."
Greetings AlbionRevisited!
Many were disappointed with Trump and that might even include a percentage of the voting bloc
known as "Deplorables."
Nonetheless, after honing into candidate Donald Trump's awful 2017 homage to AIPAC, it
becomes dramatically less amazing how Neoconservatives crept into the White House.
Recall how rabid leftist Neoconservatives wanted Hillary, and how suddenly the naysayer,
Extra-Octane Neoconservative, John Bolton, stuck with the phoney populist, "America
First-After-Israeli-Interests," talkin' Donald J. Trump?
The essence of American presidential campaigns/elections boil down to powerful international
Jewry needs & timing, and disemboweled citizens must take-it or leave-it. Uh, support the
immoral wars and pay the bill!
Thanks, AlbionRevisted.
Herald says: September 12, 2018 at 10:53 am GMT • 100 Words
@Tom Welsh
I am not convinced that Trump started out with good intentions but quickly bowed to threats. Trump was never a principled
person and it seems much more likely that he was always a stooge for the Israel lobby and the MIC.
I used to think that things would have been worse under Hillary but these days I'm even beginning to have doubts on that
score.
jacques sheete, September 12, 2018 at 11:19 am GMT • 100 Words
@Admiral Assbar
The biggest mystery of this whole presidency is why the guy who went to battle against the GOP foreign policy establishment
turned over those policy positions to them
No mystery at all. It was all campaign rhetoric like the Shrub's promises of "a humble foreign policy" and "compassionate
conservatism," O-bomba-'s "hope and change"and Woody 'n Frankies promises to keep the US out of war.
KenH, September 12, 2018 at 12:20 pm GMT
Trump is now becoming more "patriotic" by the day with his willingness to get us into another no-win, forever war in Syria
for Israel. I say we air drop John Brennan into Idlib so he can fight and die like a real man.
"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you" – Chuck Schumer. maybe Schumer's protective scare-mongering
goes to a deeper matter; the matter of the most powerful intelligence agency operating in the
USA is MOSSAD, an entity which has penetrated every aspect of American governance.
AIPAC is one of MOSSAD's favorite playgrounds
Did Sanders' people challenge 'the Russians did it' propaganda line, demand the DNC
servers be examined by forensic specialists and investigate Crowdstrike? No.
no U.S. intelligence agency has performed its own forensic analysis on the [Clinton's] hacked
servers. Instead, the bureau and other agencies have relied on analysis done by the
third-party security firm CrowdStrike [Dm. Alperovitch, of the CrowdStrike fame, is a vicious
Russophobe and loyal zionist fed and cared for by the ziocon Atlantic Council.] In actuality
we know it was the assassinated Seth Rich took the DNC emails with a thumbdrive.
Vladimir Putin, the man standing in the way of Syria's breakup and working to keep the
Iran agreement intact and avert a war, must be demonized to realize Bibi Netanyahu's goals.
In fact, Israel's intelligence services focus has historically prioritized Russia, first, and
the USA second "
– The Jewish Bolsheviks are in arms against Russia and the US because this is what
the Jewish Bolsheviks are best for -- at the destruction of functioning human societies.
"... "Let us linger over the perversity," he writes in "Why Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump," one of the seventeen component essays in Rendezvous with Oblivion : "Let us linger over the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America -- one of our two monopoly parties -- chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a 'creative class' that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps ..."
"... And the real bad news is not that this Creative Class, this Expert Class, this Meritocratic Class, this Professional Class -- this Liberal Class, with all its techno-ecstasy and virtue-questing and unleashing of innovation -- is so deeply narcissistic and hypocritical, but rather that it is so self-interestedly parasitical and predatory. ..."
Thomas Frank's new collection of essays: Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a
Sinking Society (Metropolitan Books 2018) and Listen, Liberal; or,Whatever
Happened to the Party of the People? (ibid. 2016)
To hang out with Thomas Frank for a couple of hours is to be reminded that, going back to
1607, say, or to 1620, for a period of about three hundred and fifty years, the most archetypal
of American characters was, arguably, the hard-working, earnest, self-controlled, dependable
white Protestant guy, last presented without irony a generation or two -- or three -- ago in
the television personas of men like Ward Cleaver and Mister Rogers.
Thomas Frank, who grew up in Kansas and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, who
at age 53 has the vibe of a happy eager college nerd, not only glows with authentic Midwestern
Nice (and sometimes his face turns red when he laughs, which is often), he actually lives in
suburbia, just outside of D.C., in Bethesda, where, he told me, he takes pleasure in mowing the
lawn and doing some auto repair and fixing dinner for his wife and two children. (Until I met
him, I had always assumed it was impossible for a serious intellectual to live in suburbia and
stay sane, but Thomas Frank has proven me quite wrong on this.)
Frank is sincerely worried about the possibility of offending friends and acquaintances by
the topics he chooses to write about. He told me that he was a B oy Scout back in Kansas, but
didn't make Eagle. He told me that he was perhaps a little too harsh on Hillary Clinton in his
brilliantly perspicacious "Liberal Gilt [ sic ]" chapter at the end of Listen,
Liberal . His piercing insight into and fascination with the moral rot and the hypocrisy
that lies in the American soul brings, well, Nathaniel Hawthorne to mind, yet he refuses to say
anything (and I tried so hard to bait him!) mean about anyone, no matter how culpable he or she
is in the ongoing dissolving and crumbling and sinking -- all his
metaphors -- of our society. And with such metaphors Frank describes the "one essential story"
he is telling in Rendezvous with Oblivion : "This is what a society looks like when the
glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when
they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses
through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on
their power to accumulate" ( Thomas Frank in NYC on book tour https://youtu.be/DBNthCKtc1Y ).
And I believe that Frank's self-restraint, his refusal to indulge in bitter satire even as
he parses our every national lie, makes him unique as social critic. "You will notice," he
writes in the introduction to Rendezvous with Oblivion, "that I describe [these
disasters] with a certain amount of levity. I do that because that's the only way to confront
the issues of our time without sinking into debilitating gloom" (p. 8). And so rather than
succumbing to an existential nausea, Frank descends into the abyss with a dependable flashlight
and a ca. 1956 sitcom-dad chuckle.
"Let us linger over the perversity," he writes in "Why Millions of Ordinary Americans
Support Donald Trump," one of the seventeen component essays in Rendezvous with Oblivion
: "Let us linger over the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the
fortunes of working people. But our left party in America -- one of our two monopoly parties --
chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the
tribune of the enlightened professional class, a 'creative class' that makes innovative things
like derivative securities and smartphone apps " (p. 178).
And it is his analysis of this "Creative Class" -- he usually refers to it as the "Liberal
Class" and sometimes as the "Meritocratic Class" in Listen, Liberal (while Barbara
Ehrenreich uses the term " Professional Managerial Class ,"and Matthew Stewart recently
published an article entitled "The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy" in the
Atlantic ) -- that makes it clear that Frank's work is a continuation of the profound
sociological critique that goes back to Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899) and, more recently, to Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites (1994).
Unlike Veblen and Lasch, however, Frank is able to deliver the harshest news without any
hauteur or irascibility, but rather with a deftness and tranquillity of mind, for he is both in
and of the Creative Class; he abides among those afflicted by the epidemic which he diagnoses:
"Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care
providers, all of them out for themselves . Liberalism itself has changed to accommodate its
new constituents' technocratic views. Today, liberalism is the philosophy not of the sons of
toil but of the 'knowledge economy' and, specifically, of the knowledge economy's winners: the
Silicon Valley chieftains, the big university systems, and the Wall Street titans who gave so
much to Barack Obama's 2008 campaign . They are a 'learning class' that truly gets the power of
education. They are a 'creative class' that naturally rebels against fakeness and conformity.
They are an ' innovation class ' that just can't stop coming up with awesome new stuff" (
Listen, Liberal , pp. 27-29).
And the real bad news is not that this Creative Class, this Expert Class, this
Meritocratic Class, this Professional Class -- this Liberal Class, with all its
techno-ecstasy and virtue-questing and unleashing of innovation -- is so deeply narcissistic
and hypocritical, but rather that it is so self-interestedly parasitical and
predatory.
The class that now runs the so-called Party of the People is impoverishing the people; the
genius value-creators at Amazon and Google and Uber are Robber Barons, although, one must
grant, hipper, cooler, and oh so much more innovative than their historical predecessors. "In
reality," Frank writes in Listen, Liberal ,
.there is little new about this stuff except the software, the convenience, and the
spying. Each of the innovations I have mentioned merely updates or digitizes some business
strategy that Americans learned long ago to be wary of. Amazon updates the practices of
Wal-Mart, for example, while Google has dusted off corporate behavior from the days of the
Robber Barons. What Uber does has been compared to the every-man-for-himself hiring
procedures of the pre-union shipping docks . Together, as Robert Reich has written, all these
developments are 'the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when
corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors,
free-lancers, and consultants.' This is atavism, not innovation . And if we keep going in
this direction, it will one day reduce all of us to day laborers, standing around like the
guys outside the local hardware store, hoping for work. (p. 215).
And who gets this message? The YouTube patriot/comedian Jimmy Dore, Chicago-born,
ex-Catholic, son of a cop, does for one. "If you read this b ook, " Dore said while
interviewing Frank back in January of 2017, "it'll make y ou a radical" (Frank Interview Part 4
https://youtu.be/JONbGkQaq8Q ).
But to what extent, on the other hand, is Frank being actively excluded from our elite media
outlets? He's certainly not on TV or radio or in print as much as he used to be. So is he a
prophet without honor in his own country? Frank, of course, is too self-restrained to speculate
about the motives of these Creative Class decision-makers and influencers. "But it is ironic
and worth mentioning," he told me, "that most of my writing for the last few years has been in
a British publication, The Guardian and (in translation) in Le Monde Diplomatique
. The way to put it, I think, is to describe me as an ex-pundit."
Frank was, nevertheless, happy to tell me in vivid detail about how his most fundamental
observation about America, viz. that the Party of the People has become hostile to the
people , was for years effectively discredited in the Creative Class media -- among the
bien-pensants , that is -- and about what he learned from their denialism.
JS: Going all the way back to your 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? -- I
just looked at Larry Bartels's attack on it, "What's the Matter with What's the Matter with
Kansas?" -- and I saw that his first objection to your book was, Well, Thomas Frank says the
working class is alienated from the Democrats, but I have the math to show that that's false.
How out of touch does that sound now?
TCF: [laughs merrily] I know.
JS: I remember at the time that was considered a serious objection to your
thesis.
TCF: Yeah. Well, he was a professor at Princeton. And he had numbers. So it looked
real. And I actually wrote a response to
that in which I pointed out that there were other statistical ways of looking at it, and he
had chosen the one that makes his point.
JS: Well, what did Mark Twain say?
TCF: Mark Twain?
JS: There are lies, damned lies --
TCF: [laughs merrily] -- and statistics! Yeah. Well, anyhow, Bartels's take became
the common sense of the highly educated -- there needs to be a term for these people by the
way, in France they're called the bien-pensants -- the "right-thinking," the people who
read The Atlantic, The New York Times op-ed page, The Washington Post op-ed page,
and who all agree with each other on everything -- there's this tight little circle of
unanimity. And they all agreed that Bartels was right about that, and that was a costly
mistake. For example, Paul Krugman, a guy whom I admire in a lot of ways, he referenced this
four or five times.
He agreed with it . No, the Democrats are not losing the white working class outside the
South -- they were not going over to the Republicans. The suggestion was that there is
nothing to worry about. Yes. And there were people saying this right up to the 2016
election. But it was a mistake.
JS: I remember being perplexed at the time. I had thought you had written this brilliant
book, and you weren't being taken seriously -- because somebody at Princeton had run some
software -- as if that had proven you wrong.
TCF: Yeah, that's correct . That was a very widespread take on it. And Bartels was
incorrect, and I am right, and [laughs merrily] that's that.
JS: So do you think Russiagate is a way of saying, Oh no no no no, Hillary didn't really
lose?
TCF: Well, she did win the popular vote -- but there's a whole set of pathologies out
there right now that all stem from Hillary Denialism. And I don't want to say that Russiagate
is one of them, because we don't know the answer to that yet.
JS: Um, ok.
TCF: Well, there are all kinds of questionable reactions to 2016 out there, and what
they all have in common is the faith that Democrats did nothing wrong. For example, this same
circle of the bien-pensants have decided that the only acceptable explanation for
Trump's victory is the racism of his supporters. Racism can be the only explanation for the
behavior of Trump voters. But that just seems odd to me because, while it's true of course that
there's lots of racism in this country, and while Trump is clearly a bigot and clearly won the
bigot vote, racism is just one of several factors that went into what happened in 2016. Those
who focus on this as the only possible answer are implying that all Trump voters are
irredeemable, lost forever.
And it comes back to the same point that was made by all those people who denied what was
happening with the white working class, which is: The Democratic Party needs to do nothing
differently . All the post-election arguments come back to this same point. So a couple
years ago they were saying about the white working class -- we don't have to worry about them
-- they're not leaving the Democratic Party, they're totally loyal, especially in the northern
states, or whatever the hell it was. And now they say, well, Those people are racists, and
therefore they're lost to us forever. What is the common theme of these two arguments? It's
always that there's nothing the Democratic Party needs to do differently. First, you haven't
lost them; now you have lost them and they're irretrievable: Either way -- you see what I'm
getting at? -- you don't have to do anything differently to win them.
JS: Yes, I do.
TCF: The argument in What's the Matter with Kansas? was that this is a
long-term process, the movement of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. This
has been going on for a long time. It begins in the '60s, and the response of the Democrats by
and large has been to mock those people, deride those people, and to move away from organized
labor, to move away from class issues -- working class issues -- and so their response has been
to make this situation worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse, and it
gets worse! And there's really no excuse for them not seeing it. But they say, believe,
rationalize, you know, come up with anything that gets then off the hook for this, that allows
them to ignore this change. Anything. They will say or believe whatever it takes.
JS: Yes.
TCF: By the way, these are the smartest people! These are tenured professors at Ivy
League institutions, these are people with Nobel Prizes, people with foundation grants, people
with, you know, chairs at prestigious universities, people who work at our most prestigious
media outlets -- that's who's wrong about all this stuff.
JS: [quoting the title of David Halberstam's 1972 book, an excerpt from which Frank uses
as an epigraph for Listen, Liberal ] The best and the brightest!
TCF: [laughing merrily] Exactly. Isn't it fascinating?
JS: But this gets to the irony of the thing. [locates highlighted passage in book] I'm
going to ask you one of the questions you ask in Rendezvous with Oblivion: "Why are
worshippers of competence so often incompetent?" (p. 165). That's a huge question.
TCF: That's one of the big mysteries. Look. Take a step back. I had met Barack Obama.
He was a professor at the University of Chicago, and I'd been a student there. And he was super
smart. Anyhow, I met him and was really impressed by him. All the liberals in Hyde Park --
that's the neighborhood we lived in -- loved him, and I was one of them, and I loved him too.
And I was so happy when he got elected.
Anyhow, I knew one thing he would do for sure, and that is he would end the reign of
cronyism and incompetence that marked the Bush administration and before them the Reagan
administration. These were administrations that actively promoted incompetent people. And I
knew Obama wouldn't do that, and I knew Obama would bring in the smartest people, and he'd get
the best economists. Remember, when he got elected we were in the pit of the crisis -- we were
at this terrible moment -- and here comes exactly the right man to solve the problem. He did
exactly what I just described: He brought in [pause] Larry Summers, the former president of
Harvard, considered the greatest economist of his generation -- and, you know, go down the
list: He had Nobel Prize winners, he had people who'd won genius grants, he had The Best and
the Brightest . And they didn't really deal with the problem. They let the Wall Street
perpetrators off the hook -- in a catastrophic way, I would argue. They come up with a health
care system that was half-baked. Anyhow, the question becomes -- after watching the great
disappointments of the Obama years -- the question becomes: Why did government-by-expert
fail?
JS: So how did this happen? Why?
TCF: The answer is understanding experts not as individual geniuses but as members
of a class . This is the great missing link in all of our talk about expertise. Experts
aren't just experts: They are members of a class. And they act like a class. They have loyalty
to one another; they have a disdain for others, people who aren't like them, who they perceive
as being lower than them, and there's this whole hierarchy of status that they are at the
pinnacle of.
And once you understand this, then everything falls into place! So why did they let the Wall
Street bankers off the hook? Because these people were them. These people are their peers. Why
did they refuse to do what obviously needed to be done with the health care system? Because
they didn't want to do that to their friends in Big Pharma. Why didn't Obama get tough with
Google and Facebook? They obviously have this kind of scary monopoly power that we haven't seen
in a long time. Instead, he brought them into the White House, he identified with them. Again,
it's the same thing. Once you understand this, you say: Wait a minute -- so the Democratic
Party is a vehicle of this particular social class! It all makes sense. And all of a sudden all
of these screw-ups make sense. And, you know, all of their rhetoric makes sense. And the way
they treat working class people makes sense. And they way they treat so many other demographic
groups makes sense -- all of the old-time elements of the Democratic Party: unions, minorities,
et cetera. They all get to ride in back. It's the professionals -- you know, the professional
class -- that sits up front and has its hands on the steering wheel.
* * *
It is, given Frank's persona, not surprising that he is able to conclude Listen,
Liberal with a certain hopefulness, and so let me end by quoting some of his final
words:
What I saw in Kansas eleven years ago is now everywhere . It is time to face the obvious:
that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a
failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health . The Democrats posture as the
'party of the people' even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and
glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege
in a way that Americans find stomach-turning . The Democrats have no interest in reforming
themselves in a more egalitarian way . What we can do is strip away the Democrats' precious
sense of their own moral probity -- to make liberals live without the comforting knowledge
that righteousness is always on their side . Once that smooth, seamless sense of liberal
virtue has been cracked, anything becomes possible. (pp. 256-257).
What is interesting that the first eight reviews were all written by neocons.
The book looks like an implicit promotion of Pence. Which is probably not
what Dems want ;-).
Notable quotes:
"... I fell in love with Woodward's writing with "All the President's Men." It inspired me to work in journalism. But Woodward has lost his touch. His "reporting" feels second-hand and arm's length. Each Chapter in his Source Notes leads with this disclaimer: "The information in the chapter comes primarily from multiple deep background interviews and firsthand sources." We have no way of knowing what firsthand sources even means – an article he read in the New York Times whose author he's friends with? ..."
"... The review mentions biography of Mike Pence, "The Shadow President ..." by Michael D'Antonio and Peter Eisner . For former Harvard alumni this is an extremely naive review, that is completely devoid of understanding of political forces that are shaping the country and first of all the crisis of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Mike Pence, the "Shadow President" and Trump's hand picked successor, will from many indications become president in the months following the November 6 election. ..."
I went into this book thinking that it would confirm all of my deepest fears about Trump and give me more reasons to
dislike him. At the end of the book, I had the distinct impression that Trump's presidency is not as bad as it is often
portrayed.
Some of Trump's ideas are not so bad -- for example, the book spends a lot of time on Afghanistan. Trump has for a long
time believed the war was a mistake, that there is no way to "win," and that it is a perpetual loss of our country's
treasures.
The book spends a lot of time showing how Trump fought the "swamp" to come up with a strategy to get out -- and failed.
Of course, many other stories in the book confirmed my belief that he is a disaster for a president.
The book jumps around in time and topic a lot, making it difficult to follow. Kind of like Trump himself.
Melanie Gilbert, September 12, 2018
Deep Fear
My Kindle book loaded at 12:30 Tuesday morning , and I stayed up until 6:30 a.m. reading this fascinating and alarming
story. The scariest part of this massive tome is the sheer hubris of everyone in President Trump's orbit including the
author, famed Watergate reporter, Bob Woodward. They all think they are more presidential than the actual president, and that
sense of entitlement and arrogance drives this tell-all narrative.
Even though I agree that Trump is mentally unfit to be Commander-in-Chief – and Woodward cites many troubling incidents that
point to a memory-impaired leader – it feels as if Woodward operated under the theory of selection bias, finding sources who
would confirm his thesis. I don't know what's scarier, a president who is off the rails, or a staff that helps keep him there
while they are busy running the country the way they see fit (except when the crazy uncle escapes his handlers and spouts off
on Twitter.)
Woodward, a veteran reporter, and the man (with Carl Bernstein) who broke the Nixon-era Watergate crime with a source the
known only as "Deep Throat" falls for and magnifies their conceit. The real story isn't Trump, it's his unelected and
unconstitutional enablers (senior staff, family, media, lobbyists, rogue governments) who act like they are running a shadow
government (surreptitiously taking papers off his desk, screening his briefing materials.) Woodward's story will feed Trump's
main argument that there's a Deep State at work in this country.
I fell in love with Woodward's writing with "All the President's Men." It inspired me to work in journalism. But Woodward
has lost his touch. His "reporting" feels second-hand and arm's length. Each Chapter in his Source Notes leads with this
disclaimer: "The information in the chapter comes primarily from multiple deep background interviews and firsthand sources."
We have no way of knowing what firsthand sources even means – an article he read in the New York Times whose author he's
friends with?
This book is beneath Woodward's skill and reputation. You can basically retrieve the same message in "Unhinged" a much
briefer and far more readable format - though no less disturbing account - of working in the Trump White House.
NOTES: The review mentions biography of Mike Pence, "The Shadow President ..." by
Michael
D'Antonio and Peter Eisner
. For former Harvard alumni this is an extremely naive review, that is completely devoid of
understanding of political forces that are shaping the country and first of all the crisis of
neoliberalism.
Donald Trump's Demotion & Mike Pence's Promotion! When and How?
Bob Woodward has done it again. "Fear" is a remarkable and important book, especially
because it is so current and revealing and is vouched for by this very credible reporter.
Woodward's book confirms in much greater detail many earlier and less credible reports, plus
many others --- establishing clearly that Donald Trump is not fit to be the US president ---
politically, intellectually, psychologically or morally. Moreover, his erratic behavior is a
threat to US national security, as Woodward's book and recent TV interviews make very clear.
Of course, most of the media attention on this book has been and will continue to be on
Woodward's many shocking scoops. The most important question, however, that the book raises,
for me at least, is "When and how will Trump's reckless rule be retired?"
Mike Pence, the "Shadow President" and Trump's hand picked successor, will from many
indications become president in the months following the November 6 election. That seems
to be a high probability, even without Special Counsel Robert Mueller's likely devastating
report on the Russian conspiracy to influence illegally the 2016 presidential elections and
the related cover up obstructing Mueller's investigation of this conspiracy . The only
unknown now is when and how Trump goes--- by the impeachment process or by simple resignation
like Nixon did.
We can expect Pence will then give Trump a full pardon, after Trump fully pardons some
family members and close associates. Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort need not hold their
breath waiting for a pardon. Trump, some of his family members and close associates will, of
course, still be at risk of state law prosecutions, expecially in NY.
Trump has long used fear to exercise power over others. Fear, as Machiavelli strongly
recommended five centuries ago to a corrupt pope's nephew, is preferable to and more
effective than kindness. Paradoxically, Trump's own deep personal fear of failure still
drives him desperately--- any means are justified to reach Trump's top goals of personal
profit and glory forever. Any means is OK, including even orphaning innocent infants at the
Mexican border, while other immigrants are welcomed to work temporarily at Mar-a-Lago.
Woodward's book just reinforces these observations many have already made.
It is amazing to me that many of the so-called "adults in the room" cannot see that Trump
is misbehaving as he always did. He cannot be changed, certainly not now and not by the many
handlers selected seemingly because Trump can dominate them. That said, Trump still has more
than two years remaining on his term!
I have strong reactions to Woodward's many disturbing disclosures, as (1) a former Harvard
Law assistant to Archibald Cox (prior to his being the unforgettable Watergate Prosecutor and
nailing Nixon), (2) a former high school chum of Rudy Guiliani (now an unimpressive key Trump
advisor), (3) a former law firm colleague of Bob Khuzami (now the impressive head of NYC
federal investigations of Trump criminal matters) and (4) a father and grandfather.
... ... ...
At 75 years old, Woodward clearly had a purpose in this voluntary and prodigious effort to
research and write this book--- to flush out the true Donald Trump and show the danger he
poses for US national security. Woodward, a Navy veteran like John McCain before him, is also
a patriot. To paraphrase Trump, Woodward shows vividly that Trump's behavior is "very sad and
really disgusting".
The media will have a field day with some of the troubling Trump episodes Woodward
reports. Many persons cited in the book will challenge some of his reports. To be expected
and perhaps understandable, given Trump's fiery temper about those he thinks are in any way
disloyal to him. The facts will nevertheless prevail, as they have mostly for Woodward's
earlier books about the many presidents who immediately preceded Trump.
More important, however, than specific episodes, is what the confluence of these troubling
episodes clearly shows --- Trump is clearly unfit to be president! The longer he remains, the
greater the risk in our nuclear age for the US, and the world as well. It is well to recall
the near catastrophe last January when a Hawaiian technician pressed the wrong button
indicating a non-existent "imminent" North Korean missile attack, following Trump's reckless
rhetoric about the real North Korean threat. This must have sent a real chill down the spines
of the leaders of all nuclear nations, and many others as well.
Will Trump then finish his first term? Very doubtful, it appears.
If the Democrats win a House majority in less than two months, prompt impeachment
proceedings and numerous House investigations of Trump and his corrupt cronies appear to be
inevitable. That dooms Trump.
Even if the Democrats remain the minority, impeachment is still likely to occur in my view
as Mueller's efforts continue --- they cannot be stopped now. They will continue even if
Mueller is fired as they continued after Nixon fired Archibald Cox. Moreover, there is a
reasonable prospect that one or more of Trump's children and/or in-laws could soon be
indicted.
Trump will after November be an increasingly unnecessary liability for Republicans, the
GOP. Only 32% of voters currently polled even think Trump is honest. He has already done what
the GOP and its billionaire backers like the Kochs and Devoses most wanted --- a major tax
cut for the wealthiest, reckless deregulation, insuring a right wing judiciary majority,
reducing drastically Federal revenues needed to fund the social safety net, et al.
Moreover, it seems unlikely that Trump will be able to handle the steadily growing
pressure he faces. He may even elect to resign as Nixon did. Pence can finish up to the
cheers of the Kochs, Devoses, et al.
For a fuller picture of what to expect from Pence when Trump "retires", please see the new
comprehensive, readable and detailed biography of Mike Pence, "The Shadow President ..." by
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter, Michael D'Antonio, and by his co-author, Peter
Eisner. This book's findings dovetail nicely with the findings in "Fear".
Unlike Woodward, D'Antonio even got, for his recent excellent Trump biography, hours of
direct interviews of Trump before the 2016 elections, until Trump abruptly ended the
interviews apparently concerned that D'Antonio was writing a truthful book based on facts,
not on Trump's limitless lies and specious spin. We now know from this important book on
Pence why it is very unlikely that Pence will ever be able to clean up Donald Trump's mess.
We also can understand much better why Trump recently predicted that stock markets would
crash if he were to be impeached. Not too great an endorsement of his successor, Pence, by a
reckless and incompetent boss who has now witnessed up close for almost two years the
non-stop cheerleading of the "Shadow President", Mike Pence.
Pence successfully strived during the last two years behind the scenes, with Trump's
apparent blessings, to advance his repressive and regressive fundamentalist Christian
remaking of American society, including through administration and judicial right-wing
appointments and adoption of fundamentalist social policies, like curtailing legal abortions
and even limiting contraception access. Significantly, these policies mostly benefit in the
end the already "uberrich" top 0.01% of Americans at the expense of the 99.99 % less
fortunate--- how Christian is that?
Trump's and Pence's unfair tax cuts and excessive deregulation can readily be fixed by
Democrats when they regain power. But Trump and Pence have already changed the Federal
judiciary with their many right wing judges appointed for life. That is not so easily
fixed.
This is scary stuff for a religiously diverse nation with constitutional safeguards of
religious freedom that were extremely important for good reason to our Founding Fathers. They
rejected a theocracy as well as a monarchy !
By providing a brisk and insightful history of Pence's personal and political journey, we
are able with this book to see behind Pence's perpetual smile and smooth style. It is not a
very pretty picture.
All, even Trump supporters, should read this book to understand better the threat Pence
poses even for Trump. After the midterm elections, the "uberrich" will know they can fulfill
all their remaining political and economic dreams through Pence, without having to put up any
longer with Trump's erratic and at times almost bizarre policies and behavior. By
mid-November, Trump will need Pence more than Pence will need Trump.
It is not surprising the Omarosa recently observed on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" show that
she thinks one of Pence's staff was the author of the unprecedented and anonymous New York
times Op Ed column that further undercuts Trump and re-inforces some of Woodward's
revelations. As to be expected, Pence offers to swear under oath that HE did not write the Op
Ed column, which denial leaves room that one of his staffers wrote it, no?
"Fear" and "The Shadow Presidency" raise a very ironic possibility in my mind. If Special
Counsel Robert Mueller's report, after the midterm elections in November, indicates that
Trump and Pence were both implicated in Russian election conspiracy and/or in the subsequent
cover-up, both of them could be removed from office or worse by a Congress forced by public
outrage to act on Mueller's report. Even Nixon's base abandoned him once the true facts were
widely known.
Pence often played a key role in the 2016 campaign, as well as during the two years since.
Who knows what he said and did in secret? Who knows if Pence was recorded by Amarosa, an
evangelical pastor, or Michael Cohen, a "tell all" third rate lawyer or someone else at the
White House, including possibly Trump himself. I suspect that by now, Mueller knows!
If that happens, Nancy Pelosi could succeed after next January to the presidency as
Speaker of the House, third in line after the President and Vice President. So much then for
the great Trump/Pence strategy.
The Pence book makes very clear why Pence is to be feared, perhaps even more than Trump.
The "god" of Trump is Trump --- in that sense, he is obvious and usually predictable. Pence's
"god" is much darker and more dangerous, as well as unpredictable, as this book has confirmed
for me. It may be that a needy and greedy Trump is a safer bet than a surreptitious and
smiling religious zealot, Pence.
Pence legitimated Trump with the important and united fundamentalist voter base, who voted
by over 80% to elect Trump! Trump also won 52% of Catholics' votes, while only 46% of the
national vote. Who will legitimate Pence? This book suggests "good" fundamentalists should
now vote against Pence if they ever find their Christian moorings again!
Pence appears determined to advance a repressive and regressive fundamentalist evangelical
theocracy, even though most Americans, including most Christians, have no interest in a
theocracy, Christian or otherwise. Our Founding Fathers were well aware of the brutal
post-Reformation religious wars that some of their not too distant relatives had fled Europe
to avoid.
Interestingly, Pence was a Catholic altar boy and Trump attended for two years a Jesuit
college, Fordham. And the current four male Supreme Court conservative Catholic Justices and
the newly nominated likely to be Justice, Brett Kavanagh, were also raised Catholic. Four of
these five also went to Catholic schools --- Clarence Thomas to Jesuit Holy Cross College,
Neil Gorsuch and Kavanagh to Jesuit Georgetown Prep and John Roberts to La Lumiere School.
Samuel Alito was raised in a traditional Italian American Catholic family environment.
Looks like this "Iago" op-ed injected the poison of mutual suspicion into Trump administration: "Cabinet secretaries quickly
lined up to plead their innocence of any involvement, playing Bukharin to Trump's Stalin. Who wrote the op-ed? Someone by the name
of "Not Me." An internal administration manhunt (womanhunt?) has allegedly launched to unmask the
evildoer."
The op-ed itself was a jejune and mediocre example of
a time-honored American pastime, talking smack about one's boss behind his back. On its own
terms, it deserved at most a brief period of public mockery before fading away to something less
than an historical footnote.
But then Trump responded swiftly and decisively from his favorite bully pulpit, Twitter.
As for the alleged internal "resistance" the anonymous writer claims to belong to, it seems
to have fled the scene. Cabinet secretaries quickly lined up to plead their innocence of any
involvement, playing Bukharin to Trump's Stalin. Who wrote the op-ed? Someone by the name of
"Not Me." An internal administration manhunt (womanhunt?) has allegedly launched to unmask the
evildoer.
"... kind of psy-op. The problem I've had all along with this and the continued blaming of the "deep state" for preventing Trump from being the next coming of Jesus is that it creates sympathy for Trump, which is very dangerous. As I've said many times, none of them are on our side, Trump and his included. ..."
"... @Big Al ..."
"... "With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits, the big banks have made out like bandits during the post-crash period." ..."
"... "With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits, the big banks have made out like bandits during the post-crash period." ..."
"... @WoodsDweller ..."
"... @WoodsDweller ..."
"... to take criminal action, ..."
"... @Unabashed Liberal ..."
"... to take criminal action, ..."
"... Leaks to the media are equated with espionage. ..."
"... Leaks to the media are equated with espionage. ..."
This, according to author Paul Craig Roberts. In his urgent and compelling essay, he breaks the discovery down piece by piece.
You'll want to follow the link below and read it yourself for the full effect of the logic in action. Here are a few of his key
assertions:
The op-ed is a forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that no
senior official would express disagreement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it
undermines the character of the writer.
The New York Times' claim to have vetted the writer lacks credibility, as the New York Times has consistently printed
extreme accusations against Trump and against Vladimir Putin without supplying a bit of evidence. The New York Times
has consistently misrepresented unsubstantiated allegations as proven fact. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the
New York Times about anything.
Roberts is convinced that this obviously forged op-ed is an attempt to break up the Trump administration by creating suspicion
throughout the senior level. Unfortunately, Trump has fallen for the hoax and may not realize his mistake before significant damage
is done.
The New York Times motive for this deception, and the reason for the op-ed in the first place, is to serve the interests
of the military/security complex, which has long been the newspaper's primary objective. They desperately seek to compel a paranoid
nation to hold on to the enemies with whom Trump prefers to make peace.
For example, the alleged "senior official" misrepresents, as does the New York Times , President Trump's efforts
to reduce dangerous tensions with North Korea and Russia as President Trump's "preference for autocrats and dictators, such
as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un" over America's "allied, like-minded nations."
This is the same non-sequitur that the New York Times has expressed endlessly.
Why is resolving dangerous tensions a "preference for dictators" and not a preference for peace? The New York Times
has never explained, and neither does the "senior official."
How is it that Putin, elected three times by majorities that no US president has ever received, is a dictator? Putin stepped
down after serving the permitted two consecutive terms and was again elected after being out of office for a term. Do dictators
step down and sit out for 6 years?
The "senior official" also endorses as proven fact the alleged Skripal poisoning by a "deadly Russian nerve agent," an event
for which not one scrap of evidence exists. Neither has anyone explained why the "deadly nerve agent" wasn't deadly. The entire
Skripal event rests only on assertions. The purpose of the Skripal hoax was precisely what President Trump said it was: to
box him into further confrontation with Russia and prevent a reduction in tensions.
If the "senior official" is really so uninformed as to believe that Putin is a dictator who attacked the Skripals with a
deadly nerve agent and elected Trump president, the "senior official" is too dangerously ignorant and gullible to be a senior
official in any administration. These are the New York Times' beliefs or professed beliefs as the New York Times
does everything the organization can do to protect the military/security complex's budget from any reduction in the "enemy
threat."
Roberts points out another favorite attack on President Trump used by the New York Times, that he is unstable and
unfit for office. He notes that even the wording of the attack is reproduced in the fake op-ed:
"Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which
would start a complex process for removing the president," writes the invented and non-existent "senior official."
Americans are an insouciant people. But are any so insouciant that they really think that a senior official would write
that the members of President Trump's cabinet have considered removing him from office? What is this statement other than a
deliberate effort to produce a constitutional crisis -- the precise aim of John Brennan, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the DNC,
and the New York Times . A constitutional crisis is what the hoax of Russiagate is all about. The level
of mendacity and evil in this plot against Trump is unequaled in history.
This op-ed hoax puts people in grave danger, all for the financial gain of the war profiteers. There is not a politician left
in America that has the nerve to stand up against this atrocity. They are all owned and fearful; they know full well a factual
and moral criticism against these inhumane wars and designated enemies will instantly destroy their careers. They will be banished
from the Capitol. It is up to the people themselves to denounce the coup government that is waging these illegal wars and destabilizing
the world.
In America today, and in Europe, people are living in a situation in which the liberal-progressive-left's blind hatred of
Donald Trump, together with the self-interested power and profit of the military security complex and election hopes of the
Democratic Party, are recklessly and irresponsibly risking nuclear Armageddon for no other reason than to act out their hate
and further their own nest.
This plot against Trump is dangerous to life on earth and demands that the governments and peoples of the world act now
to expose this plot and to bring it to an end before it kills us all.
...in a democracy. But according to recent polls, more than 75 percent of Americans have no one to represent them in ending
the wars. No one to vote for in upcoming elections because no one in Congress will take a stand against the deep state Coup government
that is pushing military aggression and intervention around the world.
The headline findings show, among other things, that 86.4 percent of those surveyed feel the American military should be
used only as a last resort, while 57 percent feel that US military aid to foreign countries is counterproductive. The latter
sentiment "increases significantly" when involving countries like Saudi Arabia, with 63.9 percent saying military aid -- including
money and weapons -- should not be provided to such countries.
The poll shows strong, indeed overwhelming, support, for Congress to reassert itself in the oversight of US military interventions,
with 70.8 percent of those polled saying Congress should pass legislation that would restrain military action overseas
@Pluto's
Republic
When was the last time the US Congress declared war, as required by the Constitution ?
Many assume it was Dec.8, 1941 against Japan or maybe Dec.11, 1941 against Germany and Italy.
Actually, it was June 5, 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
I had to look that up: wikipedia
...in a democracy. But according to recent polls, more than 75 percent of Americans have no one to represent them in ending
the wars. No one to vote for in upcoming elections because no one in Congress will take a stand against the deep state Coup
government that is pushing military aggression and intervention around the world.
The headline findings show, among other things, that 86.4 percent of those surveyed feel the American military should
be used only as a last resort, while 57 percent feel that US military aid to foreign countries is counterproductive. The
latter sentiment "increases significantly" when involving countries like Saudi Arabia, with 63.9 percent saying military
aid -- including money and weapons -- should not be provided to such countries.
The poll shows strong, indeed overwhelming, support, for Congress to reassert itself in the oversight of US military
interventions, with 70.8 percent of those polled saying Congress should pass legislation that would restrain military action
overseas
I'm not as amazed as I might have been before I learned about the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921
for the sole purpose of forcing US involvement in wars around the world.
The people refused to do it, saw no point in it, so the bankers had to do it themselves.
#1
When was the last time the US Congress declared war, as required by the Constitution ?
Many assume it was Dec.8, 1941 against Japan or maybe Dec.11, 1941 against Germany and Italy.
Actually, it was June 5, 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
I had to look that up: wikipedia
Insouciant - showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent.
PCR overuses the word, but it is basically a dig at "the exceptional nation". He means we are so arrogant that we can't be
concerned to inform ourselves about the facts or their implications. I guess you could say it means ignorant, but its a kind of
willful, fingers in the ears ignorance.
Not out of ignorance, but because he's too damned polite.
but particularly after the NYT put out a response to over 23,000 reader inquiries. The answers to those inquires simply did
not ring credible.
I laid out two scenarios in a comment
on wendy davis' essay yesterday. In the beginning of the second scenario, I wrote of my belief that this op ed was not what it
was purported to be. It did not pass the smell test to me.
The more I am learning about this op ed and particularly as a result of the Times explanation of how it came to be, I am
beginning to think this op ed was concocted as a way of poisoning the well by those who wish Trump out of office. Two red flags
jumped out for me in the Times response to reader inquiries.
While this op ed may not have been written in house by Times staff, it was probably written by someone who has worked closely
with the Times in the past and may have even been written at the request of the Times editor in chief or publisher.
The op-ed is an obvious forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that
no senior official would express disagreement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor
of it undermines the character of the writer. A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position
to lend weight to his dissent.
This is exactly why I used William Ruckelhaus' resignation from the Nixon Administration as an example of an insider using
his reputation and honor to call attention to what Nixon wanted to do by firing Archibald Cox.
Another aspect of Roberts' essay is something that is very important to me personally and that is what would be the long term
damage done to the country by those calling for Trump's impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment. And that does not take
into consideration the frightening prospect of Pence becoming President.
The level of mendacity and evil in this plot against Trump is unequaled in history. Have any of these conspirators
given a moment's thought to the consequences of removing a president for his unwillingness to worsen the dangerously high tensions
between nuclear powers? The next president would have to adopt a Russophobic stance and do nothing to reduce the tensions
that can break out in nuclear war or himself be accused of "coddling the Russian dictator and putting America at risk."
but particularly after the NYT put out a response to over 23,000 reader inquiries. The answers to those inquires simply
did not ring credible.
I laid out two scenarios in a comment
on wendy davis' essay yesterday. In the beginning of the second scenario, I wrote of my belief that this op ed was not what
it was purported to be. It did not pass the smell test to me.
The more I am learning about this op ed and particularly as a result of the Times explanation of how it came to be, I
am beginning to think this op ed was concocted as a way of poisoning the well by those who wish Trump out of office. Two
red flags jumped out for me in the Times response to reader inquiries.
While this op ed may not have been written in house by Times staff, it was probably written by someone who has worked closely
with the Times in the past and may have even been written at the request of the Times editor in chief or publisher.
kind of psy-op. The problem I've had all along with this and the continued blaming of the "deep state" for preventing Trump
from being the next coming of Jesus is that it creates sympathy for Trump, which is very dangerous. As I've said many times, none
of them are on our side, Trump and his included.
"Personifying a serious and unfortunate division on the left, progressive-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald has focused
his ire on the individuals in the administration who seek to undermine Trump's presidency, and his anger at these alleged "deep
state" bureaucrats has been echoed by numerous leftists I've spoken with in recent days. While admitting that Trump "may be a
threat," Greenwald responds: "but so is this covert coup" within the White House, which represents "an unelected cabal that covertly
imposed their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency."
"Greenwald is an important figure for leftists considering his work with Edward Snowden to expose the federal government and
NSA's illegal spying in the "War on Terror." But his message here badly misses the mark. The claim that Trump "may be a threat"
to the country is perhaps the understatement of the century.And his willingness to focus on turmoil within the administration
as a major threat to democracy is strange. It's akin to complaining that your lawn is slowly turning brown when your house is
burning down in front of you. This is not a critique that's unique to Greenwald, as I've engaged with numerous individuals on
the left over the last week who see the White House op-ed as an example of the "deep state's" assault on civilian political rule.
I don't see it this way. The stakes are far higher than some monkey wrenchers in the White House undermining the president. If
we cannot separate the real threat to the nation – fascism in the White House – from the marginal "problem" of intra-administrative
discord within that fascist administration, then we are in serious trouble."
I'm not clear if, with your extensive quotations, you are endorsing the Counterpunch article. To me, that article is busy attacking
Greenwald for defending the Constitution and the political process. The author perverts defending the law into defending Trump.
Even murderers are supposed to be given a fair trial. The author, DiMaggio, does not seem to be in favor of that.
This article fits a pattern at Counterpunch. They print some leftwing stuff, but when the chips are down, they will publish
an article that supports the Deep State. I judge Counterpunch on an article by article basis. This article gets an F.
kind of psy-op. The problem I've had all along with this and the continued blaming of the "deep state" for preventing Trump
from being the next coming of Jesus is that it creates sympathy for Trump, which is very dangerous. As I've said many times,
none of them are on our side, Trump and his included.
"Personifying a serious and unfortunate division on the left, progressive-libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald has focused
his ire on the individuals in the administration who seek to undermine Trump's presidency, and his anger at these alleged "deep
state" bureaucrats has been echoed by numerous leftists I've spoken with in recent days. While admitting that Trump "may be
a threat," Greenwald responds: "but so is this covert coup" within the White House, which represents "an unelected cabal that
covertly imposed their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency."
"Greenwald is an important figure for leftists considering his work with Edward Snowden to expose the federal government
and NSA's illegal spying in the "War on Terror." But his message here badly misses the mark. The claim that Trump "may be a
threat" to the country is perhaps the understatement of the century.And his willingness to focus on turmoil within the administration
as a major threat to democracy is strange. It's akin to complaining that your lawn is slowly turning brown when your house
is burning down in front of you. This is not a critique that's unique to Greenwald, as I've engaged with numerous individuals
on the left over the last week who see the White House op-ed as an example of the "deep state's" assault on civilian political
rule. I don't see it this way. The stakes are far higher than some monkey wrenchers in the White House undermining the president.
If we cannot separate the real threat to the nation – fascism in the White House – from the marginal "problem" of intra-administrative
discord within that fascist administration, then we are in serious trouble."
internal or external? I really don't have an opinion on which, but I think both are a threat to our rapidly disappearing democracy.
Trump is a threat too and easy to hate. It makes him such a great foil for a coup.
@dkmich
target of a coup, doesn't it? The more I see of this stuff the more I cannot help but think that Trump WAS part of their plan
and not just Hers plan that she would win against him but maybe the perfect plan to dismantle what's left of our pathetically
termed "democracy."
Trump is dangerous as hell in his own right, what he and his idiots are doing to the climate is something we'll all live with,
or rather, die with, but he's doing what our owners want there and it is so easy to blame it all on him when I think we all know
our fossil fuel psychos are as much a part of the deep state as is the MIC.
This is a coup alright and what they want is nothing less than totalitarianism. By using Trump to get there it is the same
damned game of dupe, divide and conquer. Trump is no hero either, he's not going to "save America" but drive it into a ditch,
and really, I think that's been the plan all along.
internal or external? I really don't have an opinion on which, but I think both are a threat to our rapidly disappearing
democracy. Trump is a threat too and easy to hate. It makes him such a great foil for a coup.
Trump was the plan all along. He is doing much of the same things that Obama was doing but people weren't noticing because
of his so called 'charm'. It looks like Trump is rolling back a lot of Obama's policies where it comes to the environment, but
many of those policies were done just before Obama left office and wouldn't take affect for months or years. But it makes it look
like Obama was more progressive than he was and Trump is the one destroying the country.
Hillary wouldn't have been able to appoint the type of people Trump has in order to get to where we are now. And I see that
the only thing that has changed when it comes to our foreign interventions is that Trump has relaxed the rules of engagement and
isn't even bothering to protect the civilians who are in our way. Trump is still supporting ISIS and AQ who Obama and Hillary
armed and funded to do our dirty work.
Then there's the economic issues that the GOP are ramming through and the poor democrats are in no position to defend against
them. How convenient, eh?
People are going to pissed when Trump cuts the social programs, but lets not forget that they were cut during Obama's tenure
too and he even put SS on the table. Rumor is that McConnell stopped him, but why did he? SO that he could take credit for it?
Hmmm. Fishy that.
"With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits, the big banks have made out like bandits
during the post-crash period."
The 2008 financial meltdown inflicted devastating financial and psychological damage upon millions of ordinary Americans,
but a new report released by Public Citizen on Tuesday shows the Wall Street banks that caused the crash with their reckless
speculation and outright fraud have done phenomenally well in the ten years since the crisis.
Thanks to the Obama administration's decision to rescue collapsing Wall Street banks with taxpayer cash and the Trump administration's
massive tax cuts and deregulatory push, America's five largest banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo,
and Goldman Sachs -- have raked in more than $583 billion in combined profits over the past decade, Public Citizen found in
its analysis marking the ten-year anniversary of the crisis.
"With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits," said Robert Weissman, president of Public
Citizen, "the big banks have made out like bandits during the post-crash period. Like bandits."
What a surprise,
According to a Washington Post analysis published on Saturday, many of the lawmakers and congressional aides who helped
craft the Democratic Congress' regulatory response to the 2008 crisis have gone on to work for Wall Street in the hopes of
benefiting from big banks' booming profits.
Not
#5 target of a coup,
doesn't it? The more I see of this stuff the more I cannot help but think that Trump WAS part of their plan and not just Hers
plan that she would win against him but maybe the perfect plan to dismantle what's left of our pathetically termed "democracy."
Trump is dangerous as hell in his own right, what he and his idiots are doing to the climate is something we'll all live
with, or rather, die with, but he's doing what our owners want there and it is so easy to blame it all on him when I think
we all know our fossil fuel psychos are as much a part of the deep state as is the MIC.
This is a coup alright and what they want is nothing less than totalitarianism. By using Trump to get there it is the same
damned game of dupe, divide and conquer. Trump is no hero either, he's not going to "save America" but drive it into a ditch,
and really, I think that's been the plan all along.
@snoopydawg
You always put it so much better and in better detail than I do. I've felt from the beginning with Trump the more repulsive and
stupid the policy, they better for our owners. They're fine with all that, but they will not tolerate dissent on overall American
dominance of the entire world and Trump, for whatever greedy reasons, is bucking them there. And I do not believe Her could have
gotten away with his more egregious things and our owners were certainly aware of that. The mask is off, let the final gutting
commence openly.
And the more they "fight" Trump the more "credible" Trump looks. I find that personally terrifying.
Trump was the plan all along. He is doing much of the same things that Obama was doing but people weren't noticing because
of his so called 'charm'. It looks like Trump is rolling back a lot of Obama's policies where it comes to the environment,
but many of those policies were done just before Obama left office and wouldn't take affect for months or years. But it makes
it look like Obama was more progressive than he was and Trump is the one destroying the country.
Hillary wouldn't have been able to appoint the type of people Trump has in order to get to where we are now. And I see that
the only thing that has changed when it comes to our foreign interventions is that Trump has relaxed the rules of engagement
and isn't even bothering to protect the civilians who are in our way. Trump is still supporting ISIS and AQ who Obama and Hillary
armed and funded to do our dirty work.
Then there's the economic issues that the GOP are ramming through and the poor democrats are in no position to defend against
them. How convenient, eh?
People are going to pissed when Trump cuts the social programs, but lets not forget that they were cut during Obama's tenure
too and he even put SS on the table. Rumor is that McConnell stopped him, but why did he? SO that he could take credit for
it? Hmmm. Fishy that.
"With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits, the big banks have made out like bandits
during the post-crash period."
The 2008 financial meltdown inflicted devastating financial and psychological damage upon millions of ordinary Americans,
but a new report released by Public Citizen on Tuesday shows the Wall Street banks that caused the crash with their reckless
speculation and outright fraud have done phenomenally well in the ten years since the crisis.
Thanks to the Obama administration's decision to rescue collapsing Wall Street banks with taxpayer cash and the Trump
administration's massive tax cuts and deregulatory push, America's five largest banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America,
Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs -- have raked in more than $583 billion in combined profits over the past decade,
Public Citizen found in its analysis marking the ten-year anniversary of the crisis.
"With no jail time for executives and half a trillion in post-crisis profits," said Robert Weissman, president of Public
Citizen, "the big banks have made out like bandits during the post-crash period. Like bandits."
What a surprise,
According to a Washington Post analysis published on Saturday, many of the lawmakers and congressional aides who helped
craft the Democratic Congress' regulatory response to the 2008 crisis have gone on to work for Wall Street in the hopes
of benefiting from big banks' booming profits.
By that I'm saying that both major legacy Parties always managed to nominate Party candidates who were acceptable to the Deep
State and the One Percent--until DT came along, and won the Republican nomination in 2016.
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
#5 target of a coup,
doesn't it? The more I see of this stuff the more I cannot help but think that Trump WAS part of their plan and not just Hers
plan that she would win against him but maybe the perfect plan to dismantle what's left of our pathetically termed "democracy."
Trump is dangerous as hell in his own right, what he and his idiots are doing to the climate is something we'll all live
with, or rather, die with, but he's doing what our owners want there and it is so easy to blame it all on him when I think
we all know our fossil fuel psychos are as much a part of the deep state as is the MIC.
This is a coup alright and what they want is nothing less than totalitarianism. By using Trump to get there it is the same
damned game of dupe, divide and conquer. Trump is no hero either, he's not going to "save America" but drive it into a ditch,
and really, I think that's been the plan all along.
leading to a Pence administration. Trump's main qualification is that he's incompetent. What this op-ed (I also think it is
fake, perhaps written by someone at an intelligence agency) is supposed to do is to tie the Trump White House in knots and keep
them from functioning. A Democratic wave in November, even if it does no more than retake the House, will put a stop to Trump's
initiatives. If the Democrats take the Senate they will be able to hold up appointments, in particular of judges.
And how many Democratic candidates have an intelligence or military background? What voting block would be calling the shots?
Delay and befuddle for just a few months more, and the worst of the Trump threat will be disarmed. I don't think this is any more
complicated than that.
the biggest Dem Congressional voting block will be a military/intel/national security/State Dept cabal--or, a 'shadow Deep
State.' Probably, one reason that the DCCC and Dem Leadership recruited scores of these candidates to run in open seats.
On November 7, it will be a piece of cake to take out (figuratively) DT.
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
leading to a Pence administration. Trump's main qualification is that he's incompetent. What this op-ed (I also think it
is fake, perhaps written by someone at an intelligence agency) is supposed to do is to tie the Trump White House in knots and
keep them from functioning. A Democratic wave in November, even if it does no more than retake the House, will put a stop to
Trump's initiatives. If the Democrats take the Senate they will be able to hold up appointments, in particular of judges.
And how many Democratic candidates have an intelligence or military background? What voting block would be calling the shots?
Delay and befuddle for just a few months more, and the worst of the Trump threat will be disarmed. I don't think this is any
more complicated than that.
...on domestic issues, but don't expect improvements.
As for foreign policy, the Dems will vote with the Deep State every time.
The trajectories of the past 50 years are not going to change.
leading to a Pence administration. Trump's main qualification is that he's incompetent. What this op-ed (I also think it
is fake, perhaps written by someone at an intelligence agency) is supposed to do is to tie the Trump White House in knots and
keep them from functioning. A Democratic wave in November, even if it does no more than retake the House, will put a stop to
Trump's initiatives. If the Democrats take the Senate they will be able to hold up appointments, in particular of judges.
And how many Democratic candidates have an intelligence or military background? What voting block would be calling the shots?
Delay and befuddle for just a few months more, and the worst of the Trump threat will be disarmed. I don't think this is any
more complicated than that.
Greenwald. The CP piece is factually incorrect--the Admin is not asking for an investigation of the author to
take criminal action, per the NYT & LA Times. They're wanting assistance to "root out the source of the
Op-Ed." Not to prosecute, or jail him/her.
After all, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that OPM wouldn't have a Department that can suss out 'who' the author
is. So, in order to discipline the author, some other agency would have to identify him/her.
No doubt, we're witnessing an attempted coup d'état.
Now, if it's a 'single' official--my money's on Jon Huntsman. I've also wondered if the Op-Ed could be a collective effort
(by a cabal of officials ).
OTOH, it could very well be the Editorial Board of the NYT, considering the way the author(s) wove in so many verbal
expressions that could point to various 'officials.' IOW, it seemed very contrived.
(Pence uses 'lodestar' a lot. Read that a couple other terms/expressions were common to John Kelly, and one other person--whose
name I can't recall, right now.)
Anyhoo, who'd be better equipped to throw out 'BS' like that, than a bunch of newspaper editors. After all, they'd have a great
deal of familiarty with politicians'/officials' verbiage.
Guess I'll need to amend my comment in WD's essay, now!
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
have attributed this excellent essay to Pluto. My apologies!
(Nancy's comments were great, too. )
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
Greenwald. The CP piece is factually incorrect--the Admin is not asking for an investigation of the author
to take criminal action, per the NYT & LA Times. They're wanting assistance to "root out the source
of the Op-Ed." Not to prosecute, or jail him/her.
After all, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that OPM wouldn't have a Department that can suss out 'who' the
author is. So, in order to discipline the author, some other agency would have to identify him/her.
No doubt, we're witnessing an attempted coup d'état.
Now, if it's a 'single' official--my money's on Jon Huntsman. I've also wondered if the Op-Ed could be a collective effort
(by a cabal of officials ).
OTOH, it could very well be the Editorial Board of the NYT, considering the way the author(s) wove in so many verbal
expressions that could point to various 'officials.' IOW, it seemed very contrived.
(Pence uses 'lodestar' a lot. Read that a couple other terms/expressions were common to John Kelly, and one other person--whose
name I can't recall, right now.)
Anyhoo, who'd be better equipped to throw out 'BS' like that, than a bunch of newspaper editors. After all, they'd have
a great deal of familiarty with politicians'/officials' verbiage.
Guess I'll need to amend my comment in WD's essay, now!
Blue Onyx
"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong." ~~W. R. Purche
Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans' phone records, the Obama administration
was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers
and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.
President Barack Obama's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has
received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments
and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments.
It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of "insider threat" give agencies latitude to pursue and
penalize a range of other conduct.
Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures
of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch
for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to
report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.
"Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States," says a June 1, 2012, Defense
Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.
Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans' phone records, the Obama
administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer
tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.
President Barack Obama's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It
has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal
departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and
Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of "insider threat" give agencies
latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.
Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized
disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors
must watch for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for
failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.
"Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States," says a June 1, 2012,
Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.
I haven't seen Trump behave in any way but in a way consistent with this op-ed. I watched Omarosa on The View (on youtube)
yesterday, and she was completely convinced of the op-ed's truth and had her own theory about who in the administration wrote.
She also played a recording of Trump spewing terrible lies (I forgot the subject matter out a need for tranquility) and Sara Huckabee
was there backing up the lies, ready to spew them at her next press conference.
I mean, come on: Trump University? The President
was born in Kenya? Bankruptcies, inability to condemn a deadly nazi parade? etc etc et fucking cetera. This is real and it's Trump
and maybe Putin. The evidence is getting overwhelming.
We know Trump is a liar. The public knew that when they elected him. That's actually a better deal than the suckers who voted
for Obama the "peacemaker" but got Obama the war starter, drone bomber, and coup instigator. That's a better deal than the people
who voted for Obama to undo the Bush/Cheney damage, and got Obama the bailer-out of Wall St, Obama the prosecutor of whistleblowers.
Lying is not an impeachable offense. Politicians do it all the time.
The constant undermining of the office of the President by intelligence agencies who abuse their access to classified information
is a crime - although one that we have never been able to prosecute the CIA for since the day it was founded.
I haven't seen Trump behave in any way but in a way consistent with this op-ed. I watched Omarosa on The View (on youtube)
yesterday, and she was completely convinced of the op-ed's truth and had her own theory about who in the administration wrote.
She also played a recording of Trump spewing terrible lies (I forgot the subject matter out a need for tranquility) and Sara
Huckabee was there backing up the lies, ready to spew them at her next press conference. I mean, come on: Trump University?
The President was born in Kenya? Bankruptcies, inability to condemn a deadly nazi parade? etc etc et fucking cetera. This is
real and it's Trump and maybe Putin. The evidence is getting overwhelming.
@arendt
That was the point I was making, since this is an article that seems to imply the op-ed is part of a conspiracy. So you agree
with me about the character of Trump and that the op-ed could very well be real?
We know Trump is a liar. The public knew that when they elected him. That's actually a better deal than the suckers who
voted for Obama the "peacemaker" but got Obama the war starter, drone bomber, and coup instigator. That's a better deal than
the people who voted for Obama to undo the Bush/Cheney damage, and got Obama the bailer-out of Wall St, Obama the prosecutor
of whistleblowers.
Lying is not an impeachable offense. Politicians do it all the time.
The constant undermining of the office of the President by intelligence agencies who abuse their access to classified information
is a crime - although one that we have never been able to prosecute the CIA for since the day it was founded.
Of course I think the op-ed is part of the plot to overthrow a legitimately elected president.
Trump's a bum. But so was George W. Bush, and Nancy Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table". The Clintons are crooks who
TPTB refuse to prosecute. Maybe the NYT should start a smear campaign against Hillary.
You seem to not care about the process of government. You seem to think that all that matters is getting rid of Trump, not
how that is done, not how much of the Constitution we tear up to do it. You seem not to care that impeaching Trump brings us Mike
Pence, who may be even worse.
This is the same game as Jose Padilla and Habeus Corpus. You find some loathsome character and use him as a test case to get
rid of some basic rights from everyone, forever.
If you can't see the plot by this point, I can't help you.
#9.1
That was the point I was making, since this is an article that seems to imply the op-ed is part of a conspiracy. So you agree
with me about the character of Trump and that the op-ed could very well be real?
@arendt@arendt
Democracy requires:
1) A readiness to debate honestly, in a civil manner, with people who disagree.
2) An openess to facts and expert opinion about such things as climate change.
3) A respect for due process and fairness.
4) A respect for non-partisanship in reference, to say, what the attorney general can investigate.
There's a lot of other things a democracy requires but first and foremost Trump has no respect for honest debate. How the hell
are we going to solve climate change when Trump's only response is to insult scientists and the intelligence of every American?
You seem to not care about the process of government. You seem to think that all that matters is getting rid of Trump, not
how that is done, not how much of the Constitution we tear up to do it.
I never said the word "impeachment" until this reply. Quit putting words in my mouth. Everybody needs to vote against Trump
this November because it's critical as hell.
Of course I think the op-ed is part of the plot to overthrow a legitimately elected president.
Trump's a bum. But so was George W. Bush, and Nancy Pelosi said "impeachment is off the table". The Clintons are crooks
who TPTB refuse to prosecute. Maybe the NYT should start a smear campaign against Hillary.
You seem to not care about the process of government. You seem to think that all that matters is getting rid of Trump, not
how that is done, not how much of the Constitution we tear up to do it. You seem not to care that impeaching Trump brings us
Mike Pence, who may be even worse.
This is the same game as Jose Padilla and Habeus Corpus. You find some loathsome character and use him as a test case to
get rid of some basic rights from everyone, forever.
If you can't see the plot by this point, I can't help you.
You have to wait for 2020 when you will be able to vote for Biden if you can stop throwing up on your way to the polls.
#9.1.1.1#9.1.1.1
Democracy requires:
1) A readiness to debate honestly, in a civil manner, with people who disagree.
2) An openess to facts and expert opinion about such things as climate change.
3) A respect for due process and fairness.
4) A respect for non-partisanship in reference, to say, what the attorney general can investigate.
There's a lot of other things a democracy requires but first and foremost Trump has no respect for honest debate. How the
hell are we going to solve climate change when Trump's only response is to insult scientists and the intelligence of every
American?
You seem to not care about the process of government. You seem to think that all that matters is getting rid of Trump,
not how that is done, not how much of the Constitution we tear up to do it.
I never said the word "impeachment" until this reply. Quit putting words in my mouth. Everybody needs to vote against Trump
this November because it's critical as hell.
That was the point I was making, since this is an article that seems to imply the op-ed is part of a conspiracy.
In other words, you have difficulty acknowledging that PCR has been on record for months claiming there is a conspiracy. Are
you really that unwilling to acknowledge he thinks there is a conspiracy? What is your objection to acknowledging the man's stated
position?
In this second response, you jump on the word "impeachment" as if that is an unjustifiable stretch from the facts on the table.
I never said the word "impeachment" until this reply. Quit putting words in my mouth.
To many of us, including the OP writer, this op-ed is just the latest stirring of the pot in an ongoing campaign to get rid
of/impeach/remove Trump well before 2020. Such provocations have been occurring since before Trump was sworn in. To claim, as
you do, that this op-ed was done only to influence this election is a classic "broken clock is right twice a day" argument. Its
true it might influence the election, but its purpose is to further the coup attempt that is underway.
That you react so strongly ("I never said") to the word impeachment is part of a pattern. You want to wall off the issue of
the conspiracy (which you still only acknowledge with a "seems to imply") from the issue of Trump's behavior and only focus on
the latter. This is exactly the pattern of the corporate Dems.
I refuse to adhere to your compartmentalization. The op-ed and impeachment ARE related.
#9.1.1.1#9.1.1.1
Democracy requires:
1) A readiness to debate honestly, in a civil manner, with people who disagree.
2) An openess to facts and expert opinion about such things as climate change.
3) A respect for due process and fairness.
4) A respect for non-partisanship in reference, to say, what the attorney general can investigate.
There's a lot of other things a democracy requires but first and foremost Trump has no respect for honest debate. How the
hell are we going to solve climate change when Trump's only response is to insult scientists and the intelligence of every
American?
You seem to not care about the process of government. You seem to think that all that matters is getting rid of Trump,
not how that is done, not how much of the Constitution we tear up to do it.
I never said the word "impeachment" until this reply. Quit putting words in my mouth. Everybody needs to vote against Trump
this November because it's critical as hell.
"It's Time for the Press to Stop Complaining -- And to Start Fighting Back"
Chuck Todd SEP 3, 2018 in "The Atlantic"
Two days later the NYT article hit. That was my reaction to the piece, Chuck called for this.
What deep state conspiracy? There's your proof right there! So, Trump was right?
"It's a witch hunt!" Trumps seemingly paranoid ejaculations, do not seem so paranoid with every passing day of nothing but backfires.
"Fake News!" Strzok-Page's "media leak strategy" Not so crazy after all?
Trump is so unpredictable. The tweeting maniac is impossible to handle. Is that such a bad thing?
I think we can afford it, there is a benefit.
Some people just wanted Washington shook up, they are getting what they wanted.
I don't know that there's a better way to bring actual change.
The means are not conventional that's for sure, what are the results we want?
If he achieves them, will he be credited?
If all his fantastic assertions keep coming true, he'll be around for some time.
No? Why not, because of anonymous articles like this? Another deep state back fire; keep digging.
"... The op-ed, perhaps by no coincidence whatsoever, appeared one week before the release of the new book by Bob Woodward Fear: Trump in the White House , which has a similar tale to tell and came out on Amazon today. ..."
And there is always Iran just waiting to get kicked around, when all else fails. Haley,
always blissfully ignorant but never quiet,
commented while preparing to take over the presidency of the U.N. Security Council last
Friday, that Russia and Syria "want to bomb schools, hospitals, and homes" before launching
into a tirade about Iran, saying
that "President Trump is very adamant that we have to start making sure that Iran is
falling in line with international order. If you continue to look at the spread Iran has had in
supporting terrorism, if you continue to look at the ballistic missile testing that they are
doing, if you continue to look at the sales of weapons we see with the Huthis in Yemen -- these
are all violations of security council resolution. These are all threats to the region, and
these are all things that the international community needs to talk about."
And there is the usual hypocrisy over long term objectives. President Donald Trump said in
April that "it's time" to bring American troops home from Syria -- once the jihadists of
Islamic State have been definitively defeated. But now that that objective is in sight, there
has to be some question about who is actually determining the policies that come out of the
White House, which is reported to be in more than usual disarray due to the appearance last
week of the New York Timesanonymous
op-ed describing a "resistance" movement within the West Wing that has been deliberately
undermining and sometimes ignoring the president to further Establishment/Deep State friendly
policies. The op-ed, perhaps by no coincidence whatsoever, appeared one week before the
release of the new book by Bob Woodward Fear: Trump in the White House , which has a similar tale to tell and came out on
Amazon today.
The book and op-ed mesh nicely in describing how Donald Trump is a walking disaster who is
deliberately circumvented by his staff. One section of the op-ed is particularly telling and
suggestive of neocon foreign policy, describing how the White House staff has succeeded in
"[calling out] countries like Russia for meddling and [having them] punished accordingly" in
spite of the president's desire for détente. It then goes on to elaborate on Russia and
Trump, describing how " the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as
punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about
senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he
expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for
its malign behavior. But the national security team knew better – such actions had to be
taken to hold Moscow accountable."
If the op-ed and Woodward book are in any way accurate, one has to ask "Whose policy? An
elected president or a cabal of disgruntled staffers who might well identify as
neoconservatives?" Be that as it may, the White House is desperately pushing back while at the
same time searching for the traitor, which suggests to many in Washington that it will right
the sinking ship prior to November elections by the time honored and approved method used by
politicians worldwide, which means starting a war to rally the nation behind the
government.
As North Korea is nuclear armed, the obvious targets for a new or upgraded war would be Iran
and Syria. As Iran might actually fight back effectively and the Pentagon always prefers an
enemy that is easy to defeat, one suspects that some kind of expansion of the current effort in
Syria would be preferable. It would be desirable, one presumes, to avoid an open conflict with
Russia, which would be unpredictable, but an attack on Syrian government forces that would
produce a quick result which could plausibly be described as a victory would certainly be worth
considering.
By all appearances, the preparation of the public for an attack on Syria is already well
underway. The mainstream media has been deluged with descriptions of tyrant Bashar al-Assad,
who allegedly has killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. The rhetoric coming out of
the usual government sources is remarkable for its truculence, particularly when one considers
that Damascus is trying to regain control over what is indisputably its own sovereign territory
from groups that everyone agrees are at least in large part terrorists.
Last week, the Trump White House approved the
new U.S. plan for Syria, which, unlike the old plan of withdrawal, envisions something like
a permanent presence in the country. It includes a continued occupation of the country's
northeast, which is the Kurdish region; forcing Iran plus its proxies including Hezbollah to
leave the country completely; and continued pressure on Damascus to bring about regime
change.
Washington has also shifted its perception of who is trapped in Idlib, with
newly appointed U.S. Special Representative for Syria James Jeffrey arguing that
". . . they're not terrorists, but people fighting a civil war against a brutal
dictator." Jeffrey, it should be noted, was pulled out of retirement where he was a fellow with
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) spin off. On his recent trip to the Middle East he stopped off in Israel nine
days ago to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The change in policy, which is totally in
line with Israeli demands, would suggest that Jeffrey received his instructions during the
visit.
Israel is indeed upping its involvement in Syria. It has bombed the country 200
times in the past 18 months and is now threatening to extend the war by attacking Iranians in
neighboring Iraq. It has also been providing
arms to the terrorist groups operating inside Syria .
As Doug French
noted last July , this result would surprise no one familiar with F.A. Hayek's Road to
Serfdom. As Hayek wrote in his chapter dedicated to the question "Why the Worst Rise to the
Top:"
Advancement within a totalitarian group or party depends largely on a willingness to do
immoral things. The principle that the end justifies the means, which in individualist ethics
is regarded as the denial of all morals, in collectivist ethics becomes necessarily the
supreme rule. There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be
prepared to do if it serves 'the good of the whole', because that is to him the only
criterion of what ought to be done.
Donald Trump is a man that is guilty of a great many sins, but at the end of the day he's no
worse than your average – overpaid
– Federal senior staffer. The elites that make up the professional political class and
their cheerleaders in the mainstream media have no moral high ground here. Their aim is not to
restore "civility" or "decency" to American politics, after all their desire to expand the
reach of government power is precisely what undermines such values .
No, their goal is simply to reverse an election they didn't expect to lose. It's quite possible
they may end up succeeding.
Hopefully the takeaway for those who relished the idea of "draining the swamp" is the
realization that this can't be accomplished by simply changing the name of the person who
occupies the top office. The Federal government can't be fixed; it must have its powers taken
away.
Political decentralization is the only way to truly make America great again.
"... Trump's new saber rattling against Syria, Russia and Iran goes beyond pure irony and will certainly fuel rumors embraced by critics that he is becoming senile. When Trump was running for the Presidency, he sang a radically different tune: ..."
"... If Vladimir Putin wants to launch airstrikes inside Syria, that's no problem for Donald Trump, who said Wednesday that he believes Russia's military moves in Syria are targeting ISIS and that the United States shouldn't interfere. ( https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/30/politics/donald-trump-syria-don-lemon/index.html ) 1 October 2015 ..."
"... However, Trump did note the complexity of the situation on the ground in Syria, pointing out in reference to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that Putin "is an Assad person" and "the United States doesn't like Assad". He went on to condemn the Obama administration for "backing people who they don't know who they are", and to warn that rebels backed by the United States "could be Isis" ..."
"... President Donald Trump warned Syria and its allies Russia and Iran on Monday against attacking the last major rebel stronghold of Idlib province in the country's northwest. "President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must not recklessly attack Idlib Province," Trump wrote on Twitter. "The Russians and Iranians would be making a grave humanitarian mistake to take part in this potential human tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Don't let that happen!" ( https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/politics/trump-syria-tweet-assad-rebel-idlib/index.html ) 4 September 2018 ..."
"... In a recent discussion about Syria, people familiar with the exchange said, President Trump threatened to conduct a massive attack against Mr. Assad if he carries out a massacre in Idlib, the northwestern province that has become the last refuge for more than three million people and as many as 70,000 opposition fighters that the regime considers to be terrorists. ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-says-syria-plans-gas-attack-in-rebel-stronghold-1536535853?mod=mktw ) 9 September 2018 ..."
Trump's new saber rattling against Syria, Russia and Iran goes beyond pure irony and will certainly fuel rumors embraced by critics
that he is becoming senile. When Trump was running for the Presidency, he sang a radically different tune:
If Vladimir Putin wants to launch airstrikes inside Syria, that's no problem for Donald Trump, who said Wednesday that he believes
Russia's military moves in Syria are targeting ISIS and that the United States shouldn't interfere. (
https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/30/politics/donald-trump-syria-don-lemon/index.html
) 1 October 2015
Addressing Russia's intervention in the Syrian conflict, which has so far
disproportionately targeted rebel-held areas with no Isis presence, Trump expressed confidence that Vladimir Putin would eventually
target the Islamic State. "He's going to want to bomb Isis because he doesn't want Isis going into Russia and so he's going to want
to bomb Isis," Trump said of the Russian president. "Vladimir Putin is going to want to really go after Isis, and if he doesn't it'll
be a big shock to everybody."
However, Trump did note the complexity of the situation on the ground in Syria, pointing out in reference
to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that Putin "is an Assad person" and "the United States doesn't like Assad". He went on to condemn
the Obama administration for "backing people who they don't know who they are", and to warn that rebels backed by the United States
"could be Isis". (
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/donald-trump-foreign-policy-doctrine-nation-building
) 13 October 2015.
That was then. Now Trump is chest thumping and trash talking Syria and Russia like the recently deceased John McCain. He now appears
ready to lead the NeoCon Conga line into an escalation of the war in Syria:
President Donald Trump warned Syria and its allies Russia and Iran on Monday against attacking the last major rebel stronghold
of Idlib province in the country's northwest. "President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must not recklessly attack Idlib Province," Trump
wrote on Twitter. "The Russians and Iranians would be making a grave humanitarian mistake to take part in this potential human tragedy.
Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Don't let that happen!" (
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/politics/trump-syria-tweet-assad-rebel-idlib/index.html
) 4 September 2018
In a recent discussion about Syria, people familiar with the exchange said, President Trump threatened to conduct a massive attack
against Mr. Assad if he carries out a massacre in Idlib, the northwestern province that has become the last refuge for more than
three million people and as many as 70,000 opposition fighters that the regime considers to be terrorists. (
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-says-syria-plans-gas-attack-in-rebel-stronghold-1536535853?mod=mktw
) 9 September 2018
In an Op-Ed in WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/article...
"Moderate rebels played a key role in Turkey's fight against terrorists in Northern #Syria; their assistance and guidance will
be crucial in Idlib as well"
Yep wonder where all those moderate rebels aka foreign jihadis came through after landing in IST.
Putin told him off in Tehran and now he is back on the fence or on the FUKUS side.
Guess Qatar must be pushing him to play nice by flooding him with billions .
WSJ is really hoping to get the war going . This is a second article /op-ed two days in a row.
Fisk is an old school journalist who doesn't sport a parting in his tongue. I've found him to be very reliable in his reporting.
His latest report reveals that despite considerable searching over a 2 day period, he could find no massed Syrian troops around
Idlib ready for the looming ground battle.
It's not like you can miss 100,000 men and all the supporting equipment; armoured vehicles,, kitchens, field hospitals, tent
cities etc. No Hezbollah, no Russians.
Which raises the question: are we being played here?
The US has no more authority to interfere in Syria domestic affairs than Syria has to interfere in US domestic affairs.
>Syrian President Bashar Assad has authorized his forces to use chlorine gas in the assault on the last significant rebel redoubt
in the country, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Who can doubt the Wall Street Journal?
>The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods
of Warfare, usually called the Geneva Protocol, is a treaty prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in international
armed conflicts.
> The Protocol was Signed at Geneva June 17, 1925, and Entered into force February 8, 1928, and the convention were ratified by
President Ford on January 22, 1975.
>Chlorine itself is not a chemical weapon. It's a toxic industrial chemical that is very useful to purify water. It's really very
important to have clean water to avoid water borne diseases. But chlorine is a chemical agent that effects the eyes and the ability
to breath. When mixed with water it produces hydrochloride acid. It's not a very efficient chemical weapon because we can sense
it when it's not very toxic yet. So you can run away. Using chlorine gas is not prohibited as such, but using chlorine gas as
a weapon is prohibited in international armed conflicts.
We can be certain that the jihadi White Helmets will stage an "outrage" event, since Bolton and Nikki have already stated what
the US response would be. The media I'm sure have their playbook already figured out and ready to create the necessary media hysteria.
The last two times Trump fired a few missiles and called it a day. Woodward however claims that his "anonymous" sources say
that Trump wanted to assassinate Assad and Mattis walked it back to token missile strikes. Woodward also claims that the #Resistance
in the White House are doing whatever they want and Trump is for all intents and purposes rather clueless about what they're up
to. If this has any credence would it be possible that Bolton and Nikki and the other ziocons in the White House orchestrate a
provocation by the jihadis that will then be setup to "we need a muscular response to show who's boss". You know the all too familiar
argument that the US needs to act to retain credibility.
All this is coming just before the mid-terms which is a pivotal election for Trump. If he loses the House then he's up shit
creek with Dems running all kinds of investigations and Mueller emboldened. How does he calculate the political implications of
a deeper military engagement in Syria? IMO, many who supported him in the last election will not be very happy and their enthusiasm
may waver which could be the difference in close races. OTOH, there is a perception that his economic team and policies are making
a positive difference and that is benefiting the Deplorables.
Obama lost big time in his first mid-terms and did very poorly for the Democrats in both federal and state elections during
his term as president. Yet the Democrat establishment has continued to back him. That may not happen with Trump as the GOP establishment
will find the opportunity to go back to their traditional ways if Trump can't hold the House.
It is really becoming unlearn why the Deep State hates Trump so much and tries to depose him. He became a typical neocon,
Republican Obama, another "bait and switch" artist with slogan "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) as equivalent to Obama's fake
"Change we can believe in".
May be Deep State has so many skeletons in the closet (811 is one) that he can only allow CIA controlled puppets as
Presidents (looks like Clinton, Bush and Obama were such puppets).
Notable quotes:
"... If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed. ..."
"... Drain the Swamp? Trump and his sidekick Jared K inhabit the murkiest depths of that Swamp. But people will say Tubby's being forced into a corner and just has to appoint neoCON psychopaths like Bolton. Then explain Trump appointing Nutty Nikki to the UN, at the start of his presidency? Israeli PM wanted Nutty in that job and after watching her unhinged performances in the UNGA, I see why; she's a Shabbos Goy, more than willing to do anything Israel asks, and BTW, keep me in mind for that POTUS opening, OK guys? ..."
"... MAGA was Trump's 'Hope and Change' mantra that many bought. ..."
"... Trump made and lost four multi-billion dollar fortunes while using NYC as his home base. Then made another multi-billion dollar fortune. One doesn't do that in NYC unless you're in bed with the same gangsters that have been looting this nation for decades, those TBTF Wall Street banks that us peasants are forced to bail-out every 10 or so years. ..."
"... Trump was bought and paid for a long time ago, now he's paying off his helpers by doing their dirty work around the word while the 'marks,' us Americans, get our pockets picked. ..."
Another great
article by Mr. Giraldi. If Trump can't get the neocons out of the government, who possibly
can?
In liberals derangement over Trump, and willingness to support anything that challenges his
2016 America First (anti-interventionist) campaign, they're willing to support the old order
for fear of an "isolationist," or realist one, taking its place. If there's a large scale
intervention, it'll be interesting to see what kind of left-liberal/dissident-right anti-war
movement emerges, and if that furthers the deformation of the normative "liberal"
"conservative" divide.
Another great article by Mr. Giraldi. If Trump can't get the neocons out of the
government, who possibly can?
If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government, explain
Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed.
If you believe Trump is trying to remove neocons(Deep State) from the government,
explain Bolton and many other Deep State denizens Trump has appointed.
Agreed.
Drain the Swamp? Trump and his sidekick Jared K inhabit the murkiest depths of that
Swamp. But people will say Tubby's being forced into a corner and just has to appoint neoCON
psychopaths like Bolton. Then explain Trump appointing Nutty Nikki to the UN, at the start of
his presidency? Israeli PM wanted Nutty in that job and after watching her unhinged
performances in the UNGA, I see why; she's a Shabbos Goy, more than willing to do anything
Israel asks, and BTW, keep me in mind for that POTUS opening, OK guys?
MAGA was Trump's 'Hope and Change' mantra that many bought.
Trump made and lost four multi-billion dollar fortunes while using NYC as his home base. Then
made another multi-billion dollar fortune. One doesn't do that in NYC unless you're in bed
with the same gangsters that have been looting this nation for decades, those TBTF Wall
Street banks that us peasants are forced to bail-out every 10 or so years.
Trump was bought and paid for a long time ago, now he's paying off his helpers by doing
their dirty work around the word while the 'marks,' us Americans, get our pockets picked.
"... Top Trump aides like chief of staff John Kelly, national security advisor John Bolton, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met with Trump Thursday in an effort to convince him that none of them was the author of the op-ed and that he could still trust his inner circle. Some two dozen top officials issued formal denials that they were the anonymous writer. ..."
Every day last week brought new demonstrations of an unprecedented crisis within the Trump
White House and US state apparatus. The Trump administration is torn by internal divisions,
amidst palace coup conspiracies involving the corporate media and sections of the
military-intelligence apparatus, as well as the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, initial reports on the new book by Bob Woodward portrayed top Trump aides
deriding his intelligence and even sanity, working behind the scenes to derail his most
inflammatory orders -- such as a demand for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad. Trump administration officials were carrying out what Woodward characterized as "an
administrative coup d'état," i.e., disobeying his wishes and carrying out their own.
The next day, the New York Times made public an op-ed, written for its Thursday
print edition, in which an unnamed "senior administration official" presented himself as the
spokesman for a cabal of top officials working to keep Trump in check. "We are the real
resistance," the official claimed, making clear his support for the main elements of the
administration's right-wing program.
On Friday, Barack Obama weighed in with a campaign-style speech -- unusual for an
ex-president in the first election after leaving office -- in which he described the Trump
administration as "radical" and "not normal." He called on Republicans, conservatives and
Christian fundamentalists to vote for Democratic candidates in November, to "restore sanity" in
Washington and allow a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to provide an
institutional check on Trump.
President Trump responded in kind. On Monday, he attacked his own attorney-general, Jeff
Sessions, for not quashing Justice Department investigations into two Republican congressmen
indicted on criminal charges of stock market swindling and theft. On Tuesday he denounced the
Woodward book as a fabrication, and on Wednesday he called the New York Times op-ed an
act of treason. On Thursday, he told a campaign rally in Montana that they had to vote
Republican in November to prevent his impeachment. On Friday, he tweeted his demand that
Sessions have the Justice Department investigate the New York Times op-ed and identify
the anonymous writer.
Top Trump aides like chief of staff John Kelly, national security advisor John Bolton, press
secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly met with Trump
Thursday in an effort to convince him that none of them was the author of the op-ed and that he
could still trust his inner circle. Some two dozen top officials issued formal denials that
they were the anonymous writer.
There is simply no precedent in modern American history for such a level of political
conflict and dysfunction within the leading institutions of the capitalist state. How is this
to be explained? What direction will the crisis take?
It is entirely superficial to root such an explanation in the personality of Donald Trump.
Even Obama in his Illinois speech admitted that Trump is not the cause, but merely the symptom,
of more profound processes. But Obama, of course, covered up his own role, depicting his
presidency as eight years of heroic efforts to repair the damage caused by the 2008 financial
crash. At the end of those eight years, however, Wall Street and the financial oligarchy were
fully recovered, enjoying record wealth, while working people were poorer than before, a
widening social chasm that made possible the election of the billionaire con man and demagogue
in November 2016.
This social crisis underlies the political convulsions in Washington. There are, of course,
political differences within the two factions fighting it out within the ruling elite. They are
deeply divided over foreign policy, particularly over how to deal with the failure of US
intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly, and over whether to target Russia or
China first in the struggle to maintain the global dominance of American imperialism. The most
significant passage in Obama's speech was his criticism of the Republican Party for having
retreated from its Cold War, anti-Communist roots by tolerating Trump's supposed "softness"
toward Putin.
More fundamental, however, is the growing concern within all sections of the ruling elite
over the possibility of a renewed economic crisis under conditions of mounting social
opposition from below, following the initial stirrings of the American working class this year
-- the series of statewide teachers' strikes, the mounting resistance of industrial workers to
sellout contracts imposed by the unions, and the buildup of anger over super-exploitation by
giant employers like Amazon and Walmart.
Facing an impending eruption of the class struggle, there is little confidence in corporate
boardrooms, on Wall Street, or at the Pentagon and CIA that the current chief executive of the
American government can meet the test of great events.
One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report
on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another "great
liquidity crisis" was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by
Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, "in light of the potential impact of central bank
actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
The report went on to note that political explosions on the scale of 1968 could develop,
facilitated by the role of the internet as a means of dissemination for radical political views
and a means of political self-organization. "The next crisis is also likely to result in social
tensions similar to those witnessed 50 years ago in 1968," the bank report warned. "Similar to
1968, the internet today (social media, leaked documents, etc.) provides millennials with
unrestricted access to information In addition to information, the internet provides a platform
for various social groups to become more self-aware, polarized, and organized."
The ruling class response to this danger is to prepare domestic repression on a massive
scale. In that respect, there is no difference between Trump and his opponents, except the
ferocious disagreement over who should be in control of the forces of repression that will be
unleashed against the American working class. Trump, of course, is an authoritarian through and
through, organizing a fascistic attack on immigrant workers and developing tools that will be
used against the entire working class.
However, his opponents, utilizing of the methods of the palace coup -- intrigues, leaks,
media smears, special prosecutors and other provocations -- are no more wedded to democratic
forms than Trump. The essence of the drive to censor the internet, spearheaded by the
Democratic Party, is revealed by the JP Morgan report: it is the platform for "social groups,"
above all, the working class, "to become more self-aware."
As one of Trump's leading media critics, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum,
a frothing anti-communist, wrote Sunday, "Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which
our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the
21st."
Trump's political opponents seek to use the Democratic Party campaign in the November
elections both to further the preparations for repression and to disguise them from working
people. The disguise is provided by a handful of self-styled leftwing and even "socialist"
candidates for the House of Representatives, many aligned with Bernie Sanders, like Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley.
The substance is provided by the much larger number of Democratic candidates drawn directly
from the military-intelligence apparatus, nearly three dozen in all, who will hold the balance
of power if the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives. The policy the Democrats
will pursue if they win the election has already been demonstrated by the anti-Russia campaign
and the accompanying demands for internet censorship.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, it will not resolve the crisis in Washington nor
alter the basic trajectory of politics, which is bringing the working class into explosive
conflict with the ruling class, the entire state apparatus, and the capitalist system.
"... Serious border enforcement, demanding our wealthy allies do more for their own security, infrastructure investment, the (campaign's) refutation of Reaganomics, acknowledging the costs of globalism, calling BS on all of the dominant left PC pieties and lies, were themes of Trump's campaign that were of value. ..."
Serious border enforcement, demanding our wealthy allies do more for their own security,
infrastructure investment, the (campaign's) refutation of Reaganomics, acknowledging the
costs of globalism, calling BS on all of the dominant left PC pieties and lies, were themes
of Trump's campaign that were of value.
Trump was able to harness and give voice to some very important energies. But being Trump,
he's poisoned these issues for a couple of generations. No serious leader will be able to
touch these things.
Add this to all the institutional and political ruin he has created.
Responding to an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times detailing an active resistance within
the Trump White House, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told
Reuters that President Trump is facing a "coup" the likes of which haven't been seen since
the American Civil War.
... ... ...
" This is a crisis . The country has only ever had such a crisis in the
summer of 1862 when General McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the Union Army,
deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief ," said
Bannon - whose departure from the White House was in large part over a fallout with Trump's
"establishment" advisers. Bannon said at the time that the "Republican establishment" sought to
nullify the results of the 2016 election and effectively neuter Trump.
"There is a cabal of Republic establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to
be president of the United States. This is a crisis," Bannon said in Rome.
Anonymous IX ,
The naivete of so many astounds me. Do you really think that Trump cannot get the name of
the person who wrote the op-ed? In the old days, you sent your operatives to break into the
Watergate. With today's computers and backdoors everywhere into any computer system [open
your reading horizons... https://www.rt.com/op-ed/437895-privacy-five-eyes-encryption/
], anyone can obtain this information if they so desire. Why is Trump being portrayed as a
poor "rich guy" who only wants the best for the country while valiantly fighting a nefarious
coup...whose members, by the way, are so clever and clandestine that they write an op-ed in
the friggin' New York Times! Sorry...don't have much time to continue discussing op-eds in
the NYT, gotta go re-insert ourselves into an independent sovereign nation, called Syria,
where our 1%-ers have deemed we need to go!
I like Trump's bravado and I like his partner, Melania. Designers should definitely bring
back slits in skirts! Scroll down. Here's a lady with class and style. She doesn't have to
show you her entire bosom for you to get the idea that she's hot! https://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2018/09/03/melania-trump-labor-day-looks/
thebigunit ,
Silicon Valley comes full circle:
Apple's famous "1984" ad.
How ironic.
The guy on the TV screen is Tim Cook. He's saying "WE MUST SUPPRESS ALEX JONES!"
The anonymous leaker might not exist. Maybe the oped was written by someone at the new
york times. The reason for lying such might be to make Trump start hunting for his own
subordinates, that could turn some of his subordinates against him who then become an actual
leaker. I think this is their plan.
Moe Howard ,
Of course it is a coup in progress. So obvious it is beyond a question.
The fake op-ed was just the latest shot.
Seems to me that we need to break up and destroy these MSM and interweb monopolies.
No more dual national control over media outlets.
DEDA CVETKO ,
Yes, Steve Bannon. This is a coup. And it is a bad, bad, bad nazi-style,
beer-putsch kind of coup, the night of long knives and all.
But this is the coup you and your party (as well as your technical adversaries, but
friends in real life - the "democrats" - have been preparing for decades . This is the
coup you have been paving the way for with bombbombbomb Iran, with "export of
democracy" to Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and Russia (and pretty much
everywhere else); with weaponization of dollar and global finance and militarization of media
and the police, with colored and rosey and khaki revolutions, with vulture hedge funds as the
primary instrument of the foreign policy and with 1% distribution of the 99% of national
wealth.
Yes. Steve Bannon. These are all proud accomplishments of the Republican and
Democratic party.
This is the coup your party (as well as the other one) has been funding for almost
three decades by voting for $1 trillion-per-year war budgets and never-ending wars across the
globe and by vigorously bankrolling the nazi merchants of death a/k/a/
military-industrial-financial-academic-media complex. And now you are shocked to learn that
nazis have fondness for putcshes? No kiddin', Sherlock!
This is the coup your party ideologically, theologically and morally justified in
terms of divine national exceptionalism, messianic narcissism, arrogant group-think and
never-ending pursuit of national might-makes-right and peace-through-strength.
Yes, Steve Bannon, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was right when he said that the chickens are
coming home to roost, er...roast. But this time, they are not coming home as McDonalds'
Chikken McNuggets or Kentucky Fried Chicken Shit. This time they are returning as chicken
guts'n'bones for the gigantic globalist chicken soup called New World Order.
You and your party should be rejoicing, not bemoaning. For, after all, this is your
proudest achievement and your finest hour.
God is The Son ,
Bannon is a retard, Trump is a retard, both Zionists. The only hope is Mattias to a Order
Coup De Ta. Military General needs to recognize that how Israel, Jews, Rothschilds have taken
over Banking Politics and Media in US and have hijacked US and are looting it. He also needs
to realize that they run the Left and the Right of Politics's. Arrest Trump, Alex Jones,
Zionists, ABC, FOX, Re-Investigate 9/11 findings will probably come to that the CIA and
Zionists did it, and that JFK killing was also CIA and Zionists. The CIA gets destroyed into
Thousand pieces and Israeli influence is removed entirely from all parts of American Society.
Federal Reserve, gets taken and turned into Public Central Bank of America under eye of US
Military. Rothschilds then told to leave or Arrested.
Peter41 ,
Well, correct up to a point. The established world order elites "saved" the system in
2007-08, by propping up the moribund banks (Citibank, JP Morgan, and others) by massive
injections of liquidity. Rather than removing this liquidity after the debacle, the Fed kept
the accelerator to the floor with continued "quantitative easing." Now presiding over a
$4Trillion balance sheet, the Fed is in the famous "liquidity trap" which Lord Keynes avoided
describing a solution for, by opining, "in the long run we are all dead."
Well, the elites are now in the position of watching the whole shitteree come unglued as
the Fed's policies framed by the elites will soon come unwound. Then, the elites will be
exposed as powerless.
Griffin ,
The old world order was not so organised, and the main ideology the ruling elites had in
common was transfer of wealth and wealth control,.
Using ideas like privatisation to get control of strategic assets like natural resources,
energy etc.
Using scams like pump and dump to suck wealth out of economies and then investing outside
the economy or planting it in a tax haven.
In Iceland there was roughly a 5 year interval between crashes. I called it the bubble
crash machine.
The msm and bank analysts were a important tool for politicians to keep this scam running,
but its dead now.
The new world order was supposed to be far more advanced and more organised, a tool to
eliminate all kinds of problems for large corporations, like the sovereign rights of states
for instance.
This was supposed to be a fusion between the superstate in Europe, where Merkel was at the
helm, and the liberal globalist friendly USA where Hillary was supposed to lead.
If this would have materialised it would have enabled multinational corporations to sue
nation states for imposing inconvenient laws that could suppress hopes of future profits for
instance, giving the corporations a indirect control over state politics, overriding
democracy and constitutions.
Abraxas ,
Coup, my ass. These guys turn everything upside-down. What a bunch of hyaenas.
Just look, these are the people that will drag us all down to the depths of hell with
them, telling us how nice and prosperous ride we'll have getting there. Stop this train, I
want to get off!
shortonoil ,
Having worked around DC I can tell you that the place collects nutcases, screwballs, and
sociopaths like fresh dog fresh shit collects flies. The Deep State is not the problem, the
problem is the DC State! DC is the epicenter of power hungry, greedy, self centered, self
serving, backstabbing, backbiting lunatics, and every one of them is looking for a gimmick to
advance their own personal agenda. The welfare of the nation is number 101 on their list of
100. Too much money, in too small a place with too many people trying to climb the same
ladder at the same time leads to anarchy. Give the power to collect money, and regulate back
to the States where it belongs, and let DC sink back into the swamp it was built on. The
Federal Government is out of control. The States have the Constitutional power, and
responsibility to regulate, and control the Federal government, and they had better start
using it before this dog and pony show breaks down into a lynching party.
Herdee ,
U.S. under Trump interfering in the internal affairs of Venezuela. The CIA goes around the
world overthrowing governments. American hypocrisy is so phony, especially their Washington
NeoCon/NeoNazi politicians:
These uniparty hacks are the same who claim Trump has disemboweled the Obama agenda, which
he has. Some nutcase... doing what he ran on. The only things he can't get done are because
of the career uniparty hacks.The op-ed was nothing more then carryover from the McCain
funeral. It's all transparent and meaningless, but a useful tool for Trump now.
DingleBarryObummer ,
"To some people the notion of consciously playing power games-no matter how indirect-seems
evil, asocial, a relic of the past. They believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in
ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people, for while they
express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power. They
utilize strategies that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation involved. These
types, for example, will often display their weakness and lack of power as a kind of moral
virtue. But true powerlessness, without any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its
weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very
effective strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power" -Robert Greene '48 Laws of
Power'
chumbawamba ,
What results though? So far, the results are in and the swamp is still pretty full.
As Dinglebutt pondered: deception, but for what purpose? Have you considered that you
might be being lulled into a safe landing right into the heart of totalitarianism?
Don't think for one moment Trump isn't capable of selling you out for his own
interests.
-chumblez.
Dilluminati ,
correction demonic coup (re-posted) but the Pizza gate it seems to be real, all the fake
news for generatons and the one story the globalists couldn't get to uncovering ~~~ YOU MUST
DECIDE!!
Sweden tonight.. Europe tomorrow. The left lives in fantasy land. Where Kapernick is some
NFL hero and the guy sucked at QB, I mean looking at the record, he sucked, he didn't win
anything. He ran like Mike Vick and that is about that.. and like Mike he suddenly realized
that EVERYBODY runs fast in the NFL unlike college. Then there is IMMIGRATION notice how the
globalists love three things above all others: profits for the 1%, paying no taxes, and they
love them some open borders and immigrant cheap labor. Take for example the imaginary op-ed
fake news from the NYT, or the CNN fake news story with leftist Lanny Davis, or lets drag
that whore Stormy out on stage for another trailer park runway dollar bill, or how about the
hearings on SCOTUS and Spartacus? Pocahontas? Abolishing Ice to fight crime, getting rid of
the 2nd amendment to make us safer, Or more gun legislation in Chicago or Baltimore doubling
down on stupid.. And now the ghouls who run the Democratic party have to go and try and sell
the Obama myth, talk about fantasy.. what the fuck was Obamacare? Where was the $ saved and
could people keep their doctor if they wanted? Each and every idea the Democrats and left
have come up with is proof that what the left doesn't fuck up it shits upon instead, and
now.. after being globally discredited the GLOBALISTS cocksuckers are done. Name a single
promise that the Globalists kept to any but the 1% the cocksuckers!
But turn on any globalist media, the NFL, ESPN, CNN, and of the Globalist monopoly news or
media outlets, the same lies are told. These Globalist cocksuckers cannot stop telling these
lies so instead they need to be removed by ballot, laws, and if need be FORCE!
The rudeness and desperation of the 1% is astonishing, but their boldness is like that of
the Pedophile Catholic Church! They get up on stage and do their empty virtue signalling and
then rape their communities cynically and with methodical efficiency, yes they are the 1% and
they do not care, yes they are the 1% and there is now no laws to confront them. There is
only the ballot. They intend to run to New Zealand as they know their days are numbered, they
skip the hearings like Google when called to account by Congress, and still you turn on the
media and see:
I'm sure Madeline has brokered some deal to service some 1% benefactor somewhere. But
again the rudeness, they come into your home under the guise of sports, under the guise of a
legitimate news source, and then they spread their LIES and distortions.
Watch Brexit and Google pissing in the face of Congress.. they do not respect the ballot
though they clamor about democracy, they but care about the 1% like the Pedophile Catholic
Church and do not care about your laws, they want to abolish Ice, they want to disarm you so
that they can more efficiently abuse you. That is your globalists not some loser on a Nike
ad, who has less of a career than say Tim Tebow (who could run) but wasn't the apologist and
hate America first Cunt stooge of the globalists. Watch Brexit and Google as they piss in the
face of democracy and remember.
This brief comment became the biggest headline news to come out of the third debate, as
many saw it as Mr Trump threatening to shatter a 240-year-old electoral tradition, one of the
cornerstones of US democracy: the losing candidate must always concede defeat, regardless of
the result.
Presidential rival Hillary Clinton called his stance "horrifying", saying it "was not
the way our democracy works".
Barack Obama labelled Trump's comments as "dangerous", and damaging to
democracy.
You see how that works? The left is like the Pedophile Catholic Church all worked up about
the plastic in the ocean, one set of laws and democracy for you, and another for them..
The lies, the globalist lies.. vote for your freedom.. What does the NFL and the Pedophile
Catholic Church have in common? NEITHER PAYS TAXES! Them globalists them silly globalists:
love three things above all others: profits for the 1%, paying no taxes, and they love them
some open borders and immigrant cheap labor.
The real PIZZA GATE my friends is the Globalists. The 1% with their laws, unaccountable to
ours which they twist against us.
I'm watching Bob Woodward being pimped by the Globalists media this morning, and I have to
think that in this guy's lifetime the largest scandal in the Church, the global abuse and
coverup, never warranted an op-ed. Need I say more? When you look at the fabled globalist Bob
Woodward, remember that he missed the abuse, the cover-up, the complete and orchestrated
abuse of power globally, he missed that story!
It took the state of Pennsylvania and a Grand Jury to tell that story that the globalist
and Bob Woodward would not, instead he peddled rumors, similar to Stormy trotted out for a
dollar bill on the trailer park runway.
notfeelinthebern ,
Been nothing but a coup since before day one even.
iinthesky ,
Started right after the Trump stepped off the escalator
Jim in MN ,
If the globalist elite neolibcon blackmail files ever see the light of day a lot of folks
are going to swing from nooses...where have I heard that phrase before....
This is still our last peaceful chance for change.
iinthesky ,
I think most historically competent folks quickly come to the conclusion that ''Kompramat"
as the Russians call it is without a doubt how the government governs itself.. hence an
'outsider' is rarely ever seen and never allowed to govern
Regarding that mysterious New York Times op-ed: I don't claim to know the truth of the
matter, but I'm mildly surprised that so few people are thinking out of the box-- or should I
say "outside the frame"?-- in which this curious op-ed was presented.
These days, I shouldn't be surprised that any old sensational "bombshell" is taken at face
value, especially by extreme anti-Trumpers.
The largely unexamined assumption that the mysterious op-ed is legitimate has triggered a
rush of whodunit fantasising; it's reminiscent of a pack of racing dogs chasing after the
mechanical bunny used on the racetrack to give the critters a reason to run. (Or the endless,
churning amateur espionage screenplay-writers' discussions of the Skripal diversion.)
I don't want to get pulped in the stampede, so I've held off expressing the obvious
thought that this agitprop gem could've easily been fabricated right in the NYT newsroom.
Why not? Never mind the conventional pious blather asserting that the prestigious
Newspaper of Record would never stoop to such chicanery.
Actually, I realize that this is a little too cut-and-dried; it's probable that the
NYT poobahs would be more inclined to "let it happen" rather than "make it happen"-- they
need a measure of deniability.
OTOH, the NYT is a major Big Lie fulfillment center. It essentially demands that the
public trust its explanation of the circumstances under which the op-ed was published; once
the "bombshell" is detonated, and the whodunit controversy is off and running, only rigorous
skeptics (ahem) would even think to question whether the NYT itself launched this IED of
self-sealing infoganda.
This possibility is too mind-blowing for Normals, of course. But why assume that the NYT's
carefully-staged and veiled assertions about the op-ed's origins are credible? It certainly
pushes all of the right "Resistance" buttons; whether it's perceived as a righteous
"whistleblower" attempting to Save Us from the ongoing horror of a Trump presidency, or a
treacherous stab in the back from some insider, it doesn't reflect well on Trump.
If one accepts these sources as credible and reliable, one must perforce conclude that
Trump is either seriously deranged, or is so hamstrung by his own megalomania and narcissism
that he's intolerably incompetent and out of control. He is simply too mad, or bad, or both,
to be allowed to remain on the Oval Office Throne.
I just saw a column by a progressive-liberal columnist, Will Bunch, at philly.com with the
headline " President Trump is not well. Congress must curb his power to start a nuclear
war. ". It almost sounds sympathetic, but the message is that both the mysterious op-ed
and Woodward's book conclusively "prove" that Trump is either ethically or mentally unfit to
hold office, or both.
Hmmm... these days, no matter where one looks, it's all about the "bombshells"!
Pepe Escobar has a wonderful new article today in which he discusses the Resistance
warrior in the NYT op-ed, as well as the Resistance hit piece from Bob Woodward, and reprises
Nixon and Kissinger from the old days of the "golden age of journalism", as Seymour Hersch
calls it in his latest memoir, Reporter , and as Escobar details.
The spookiness of the age we live in today couldn't be more resonant with the spookiness
exposed back in the golden age. It's all one piece. The only questions are, which is the side
to be on? And how are we supposed to leak these secrets anyhow? It's a gripping thriller of
an article from Pepe:
I said something similar to your quote from the link a couple of days ago. Its part of the
show
Frankly the whole Trump show is psyops theater. While the show is going on in public, in
the the wrecking crew in the shadows is working to dismantle every aspect of government that
works for the benefit of the population, whats left of it anyways.
I remember the Watergate hearings. They dared to interrupt soap operas which allowed me to
grab the TV from my mother some summer afternoons and I found it more entertaining than the
50's shows in UHF stations. Pure entertainment. Maybe we see something similar soon to liven
up the show
Of course this time they might give us a civil war to have an excuse to declare martial
law.
Cant really predict these things though . Stay tuned.
Pft @57: Frankly the whole Trump show is psyops theater.
Yup.
Pepe reinforces the narrative that Trump is a nationalist who peace initiatives are
thwarted by the nasty deep state. But Trump proved his love for the establishment in the
years before he ran for President and no real populist can be elected in USA.
It should be noted that the NYT oped cruise missile happened to be exactly timed with the
big splash of the Bob Woodward 'book' that trumpets the same meme ie the Trump administration
is dysfunctional and in a state of mutiny
'There is credible evidence that the American Deep State of the military-intelligence
apparatus used the Watergate scandal as a way to get rid of Nixon whose febrile mental
state was becoming a concern to them. Woodward, who had a background in Navy intelligence
was suspiciously a prodigy journalist who rapidly rose to cover what became the scandal
that ended Nixon's presidency.'
I would disagree only about Nixon's 'febrile mental state' as the reason for the deep
state wanting him gone the real reason was in fact that Nixon moved against neoliberalism and
expelled Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago School' from the white house he in fact turned
toward socialism on the economy
'Nixon's purge of Friedman from his administration was not merely symbolic. Facing a
serious economic downturn, Nixon utilized huge amounts of government spending, spending
$25.2 billion to stimulate the economy in 1972.
Nixon went as far to openly propose a plan to provide a universal basic income of $1,600
(the equivalent of $10,000 present day) to every American family of four.'
This was a step too far for the Rockefellers and the plutocracy that runs the United
States
as Caleb Maupin explained presciently back in May in his superb historical parallel
between the war on Trump and the Nixon offing
Now we see that the deep state 'journalist' Woodward is here attempting to reprise his
Watergate role in bringing down a sitting POTUS the claims in the Woodward book about an
'administrative coup' in the Trump white house, and this 'oped' are so obviously part of the
same ploy that it is way beyond coincidence
Now it is interesting to note that we have on record THREE very astute commentators saying
the same thing about the provenance of the 'anonymous' hit piece that it is a creation of the
NYT itself PCR was first out of the blocks, yesterday Mr Cunningham, one of the few honest
and capable writers on the REAL left and now Ms Johnstone
And here's where things get curioser yet even the neoliberal standard bearer, the New
Yorker magazine ran a scathing piece by none other than Putin [and Trump] hater Masha Gessen
condemning the 'media corruption' embodied in the NYT oped
'But having this state of affairs described in print further establishes that an
unelected body, or bodies, are overruling and actively undermining the elected leader
An anonymous person or persons cannot govern for the people, because the people do not
know who is governing.'
Clearly there is a civil war going on behind the scenes inside the executive branch of the
United States government what the results will be nobody can know but we must realize that
when even one link in the chain of command is broken, the whole thing falls apart
I predicted right after the Singapore Trump-Kim summit and the fierce media backlash that
resulted that the media and their deep state partners in crime would overplay their hand and
shoot themselves in the foot
They have now done exactly that we will see how the people react, but I suspect that even
those who might not otherwise support Trump will in fact rally round the embattled president
by firing this cannonade now the treasonous media have nailed their on coffin tightly
shut
For the "Full Spectrum Dominance " crows even neutered and bitten down Trump is unacceptable. They want him out.
Notable quotes:
"... I have no idea how deep this amorality charge goes, but coming from people who actually support killing children in the womb, that men and women are the same and marriage is the same dynamic between two people of the same sex as it is for the traditional dynamic, that relations out of wedlock are the same, that illegal immigrants are in fact entitled, that criticizing a foreign state is a crime, that have cheerlead for no less than the four military interventions or destabilizing state actions of the same . . . ..."
"... They don't need him gone, they just need him weak enough to destroy his ability to govern, his agenda and or him personally -- I think they prefer all four. ..."
"... This NYT op ed is a classic forgery, from the scammer NYT posing as a "conservative" (another common scam) to attacking Trump. ..."
This comes as no news. The NYT has been after part of the "get the president" for anything
and everything camp since the nomination.
I have no idea how deep this amorality charge goes, but coming from people who actually
support killing children in the womb, that men and women are the same and marriage is the
same dynamic between two people of the same sex as it is for the traditional dynamic, that
relations out of wedlock are the same, that illegal immigrants are in fact entitled, that
criticizing a foreign state is a crime, that have cheerlead for no less than the four
military interventions or destabilizing state actions of the same . . .
just does not have the weight to make much headway with me. It's like the supposedly
wonderful kobe beef from Japan I had today -- spoiled and sour.
The NYT reputation was tainted long before the current president took office. I think that
the compromise made by the president to adopt in full the intel report has serious
repercussions. The issue here is not whether the Russians engage in espionage or influence, i
take it for granted that they do. But thus far the evidence has been mighty thin that they
actually have done so and did so to any effect.
Something rather nasty has been seeping out of US polity and if Trump is anything he
represents that polity with all its veneer of integrity swept aside.
Not all of the members he chose for his staff are self seeking aggrandizers, making the US
safe for democracy is but a disguise. Some are honorable men and women who simply should not
have been selected because they openly rejected the current executive for political, policy
and personal reasons. I think that was a managerial mistake.
They don't need him gone, they just need him weak enough to destroy his ability to govern,
his agenda and or him personally -- I think they prefer all four.
This article about who, wrote or said what is just a side show.
@Rational DEAR
JUDAISTS -- PLEASE STOP LYING AND SCAMMING, PLEASE. BECOME CIVILIZED PLEASE.
Thanks for the excellent article, Sir. Great points!
This NYT op ed is a classic forgery, from the scammer NYT posing as a "conservative"
(another common scam) to attacking Trump.
Anonymous sources -- fabricated conversations that cannot be verified, because the source
is non-existent. It is all fabricated.
... ... ... You're being Rational again: "please stop these childish scams. This is
juvenile." You're appealing to hardened criminals.
I commend you for moderation and compassion, but if these people were to be redeemed it
would have happened before the FED, the Great Depression (read Wayne Jett), the assassination
of JFK and RFK, Tonkin, 911, 2008 and God know what more.
The neocon crowd wants a revenge. Badly. "Full Spectrum Dominance" is a a religion for them. And they uses all dirty tricks
intelligence agencies are know for.
In a speech Friday at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, former President Barack Obama publicly joined the escalating
offensive against President Trump being mounted by sections of the ruling class and the state. The speech, directed at channeling
both popular and ruling class opposition to the Trump administration behind the Democrats in the fall midterm elections, marked Obama's
first direct attack on his successor.
Obama's speech came as the culmination of a series of extraordinary events over the past two weeks that have brought the acute
political crisis in the US to a new and explosive level of intensity.
First came the week-long spectacle of bipartisan hypocrisy and political reaction occasioned by the death of Republican Senator
John McCain, one of the most ferocious war-mongers in the US political establishment. Democrats sought to outdo the Republicans in
eulogizing McCain as an "American hero" and model statesman. Within two days of McCain's burial, the media was ablaze with revelations
from the forthcoming book on the Trump White House by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward. Woodward, citing anonymous interviews
with high-ranking Trump officials, paints a picture of turmoil and dysfunction in which figures such as Defense Secretary James Mattis
and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly call Trump an idiot. Woodward recounts incidents of Trump administration officials countermanding
orders from the president, a situation Woodward characterizes as an "administrative coup d'état."
This was followed by the New York Times ' publication of an op-ed piece by an anonymous "senior official" in the Trump
administration describing the activities of an internal "resistance" to Trump within the White House. The piece cited discussions
among Trump aides about seeking his removal on the grounds of mental incompetence, as stipulated in the 25th Amendment to the US
Constitution. It made clear that the "resistance," promoted by the Times and the Democrats, supports Trump's tax cuts for
the rich, removal of corporate regulations and increase in military spending. It attacks Trump for his "softness" toward Russia and
North Korea and his overall impulsiveness, unpredictability and recklessness.
Obama's speech was along similar lines. He presented an absurdly potted history of American progress on the basis of the "free
market," with, he acknowledged, some imperfections -- such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq (which killed millions of people). His
administration was supposedly part of this march of progress.
... ... ...
The reality, of course, is that Obama presided over the funneling of trillions of dollars to Wall Street to rescue the financial
oligarchy, carrying out the greatest redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top in history. This was paid for by wage cuts
and the destruction of decent-paying jobs, replaced by poverty-wage, part-time and temporary employment, the gutting of health benefits
for millions of workers under "Obamacare," pension cuts, the closure of thousands of public schools and layoff of tens of thousands
of teachers, and a general lowering of the living standards of the working class.
Trump's attacks on democratic rights were prepared by Obama's brutal policy of deportations, his continuation of indefinite detention
and the Guantanamo torture camp, his support for mass domestic spying and his program of drone assassinations, including of US citizens.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were continued and new wars were launched in Libya and Syria.
"... The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president by a special prosecutor's office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist press plays its traditional supporting role. ..."
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high
gear this week.
Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our
establishment came to pay homage to John McCain.
Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and
Barack Obama, Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton,
John Kerry and Henry Kissinger, the leaders of both houses of Congress, and too many generals
and admirals to list.
Striding into the pulpit, Obama delivered a searing indictment of the man undoing his
legacy:
"So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and
petty, trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured outrage. It's
a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear."
Speakers praised McCain's willingness to cross party lines, but Democrats took away a new
determination: From here on out, confrontation!
Tuesday morning, as Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's
nomination to the Supreme Court began, Democrats disrupted the proceedings and demanded
immediate adjournment, as scores of protesters shouted and screamed to halt the hearings.
Taking credit for orchestrating the disruption, Sen. Dick Durbin boasted, "What we've heard
is the noise of democracy."
But if mob action to shut down a Senate hearing is the noise of democracy, this may explain
why many countries are taking a new look at the authoritarian rulers who can at least deliver a
semblance of order.
Wednesday came leaks in The Washington Post from Bob Woodward's new book, attributing to
Chief of Staff John Kelly and Gen. James Mattis crude remarks on the president's intelligence,
character and maturity, and describing the Trump White House as a "crazytown" led by a fifth-
or sixth-grader.
Kelly and Mattis both denied making the comments.
Thursday came an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous "senior official" claiming to
be a member of the "resistance working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his
(Trump's) agenda."
A pedestrian piece of prose containing nothing about Trump one cannot read or hear daily in
the media, the op-ed caused a sensation, but only because Times editors decided to give the
disloyal and seditious Trump aide who wrote it immunity and cover to betray his or her
president.
The transaction served the political objectives of both parties.
While the Woodward book may debut at the top of The New York Times best-seller list, and
"Anonymous," once ferreted out and fired, will have his or her 15 minutes of fame, what this
portends is not good.
For what is afoot here is something America specializes in -- regime change. Only the regime
our establishment and media mean to change is the government of the United States. What is
afoot is the overthrow of America's democratically elected head of state.
The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president
by a special prosecutor's office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist
press plays its traditional supporting role.
Presidents are wounded, disabled or overthrown, and Pulitzers all around.
ORDER IT NOW
No one suggests Richard Nixon was without sin in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in.
But no one should delude himself into believing that the overthrow of that president, not two
years after he won the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was not an act of vengeance by a
hate-filled city that ran a sword through Nixon for offenses it had covered up or brushed under
the rug in the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years.
So, where are we headed?
If November's elections produce, as many predict, a Democratic House, there will be more
investigations of President Trump than any man charged with running the U.S. government may be
able to manage.
There is the Mueller investigation into "Russiagate" that began before Trump was
inaugurated. There is the investigation of his business and private life before he became
president in the Southern District of New York. There is the investigation into the Trump
Foundation by New York State.
There will be investigations by House committees into alleged violations of the Emoluments
Clause. And ever present will be platoons of journalists ready to report the leaks from all of
these investigations.
Then, if media coverage can drive Trump's polls low enough, will come the impeachment
investigation and the regurgitation of all that went before.
If Trump has the stamina to hold on, and the Senate remains Republican, he may survive, even
as Democrats divide between a rising militant socialist left and the Democrats' septuagenarian
caucus led by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi.
2019 looks to be the year of bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.
Entertaining, for sure, but how many more of these coups d'etat can the Republic sustain before
a new generation says enough of all this?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
Just for the record -- not that we're keeping one -- I strongly suspect that that NYT Op Ed
by an "insider" is almost entirely fraudulent. OK, there might be an assistant to the
assistant undersecretary in charge of cutting the grass at the White House who will be
willing to put her name at the bottom of this thing, thereby giving the Times an "out" in
terms of committing outright journalistic perjury.
But who's going to call these people on it? The Times themselves? CNN? The Washington
Post? The Huffington Post?
What consequences will they suffer? Will the rabid dog leftists who read the
aforementioned periodicals suddenly do an about-face and abandon their leftist religion
because of journalistic fraud?
Of course not.
They'll just move on to the next "scandal" (almost certainly based on anonymous sources or
triple hearsay).
I think Trump is his own worst enemy. It is his incompetence that is fueling all these calls
for impeachment. He should have fired Mueller long time ago. The screaming could not have
been any worse. I don't think he comprehends the seriousness of the current situation. He
doesn't realize that he is the president. He has fallen into the trap of anti-Russian
rhetoric while I know he does not believe any of it.
He should never have hired John Bolton or Pompeo. For God's sakes; he appointed all these
heads of Departments, CIA, FBI, DNI, etc. and none of them can control his own department. He
is letting others control his agenda and his foreign policy. If it weren't for Pence, I would
prefer impeachment at this time because he is making the US a laughing stalk of the world.
But Pence scares me even more.
Acts 3:25 "He said to Abraham, 'Through your offspring all peoples on earth will be
blessed.'"
By the way, God's covenant with Abraham included Ishmael, who was also his offspring. The
Jews have altered the bible to make the covenant with Isaac only, as they have done with the
sacrifice of the "only son."
So far the only 2 senior officials who have not come out to deny writing the op-ed are John
Kelly and Nikki Haley, both are highly suspect at this point. John Kelly gave all those
disparaging accounts of the president to Bob Woodward then tried to deny it. Nikki Haley's
been running her own dog and pony show at the UN for two years, clashing with Trump more than
once for wanting to take out Assad. She takes her orders directly from the Prime Minister of
Israel, Trump who?
This NYTimes hit piece shows clearly the existence of a Deep State that is actively
working to subvert and overthrow a democratically elected POTUS. The Deep State must be
defeated for America to survive, but the only way to defeat the Deep State is through a
functioning DOJ. Jeff Sessions must now be considered part of the Deep State, along with
Pence and all the people Pence brought into Trump's cabinet when he was in charged of setting
up the interim government, from John Kelly to Mattis, Haley, Bolton, Kirstjen Nielsen,
Christopher Wray, Mike Pompeo, and above all Rod Rosenstein -- all are neocon Deep State
stooges and big time swamp creatures.
"... Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of John Brennan. ..."
"... The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between the U.S. and Russia. ..."
"... By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just such domestic activity by the CIA. ..."
"... That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. ..."
The media posited that these two events, one by trial, one by plea, gave Robert Mueller new
found credibility and "momentum' at a point where both were dissipating extremely rapidly. This
claim, like the others we have examined here, has no relation to reality.
Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with
illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we
know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their
fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of
John Brennan.
The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he
was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for
which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between
the U.S. and Russia.
By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce
investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just
such domestic activity by the CIA.
That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent
who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending
informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including
George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The fake evidence suggested that Trump was using Russian
obtained "dirt" against Hillary Clinton. The evidence planting operations, mostly conducted on
British soil, were designed to back up the bogus and otherwise evidence free and indefensible
dossier authored by MI-6's Christopher Steele, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and promoted
by the Department of State, Department of Justice, the FBI, and select reporters. The dirty
British Steele dossier claimed that Trump had been compromised by Putin. Based on this, Trump
was targeted in a full-set counterintelligence investigation by the FBI including surveillance
of his campaign and anyone associated with it. The goal of this surveillance was to put those
who were around Trump under an investigative microscope stretching back years to find any crime
or misdeed for which they could be prosecuted. That is the illegal and unconstitutional
backdrop to everything Robert Mueller has produced thus far. Nothing produced by Mueller has
shown Trump to be a puppet of Putin as claimed by the British, the Clinton campaign, and the
national news media. Nonetheless, the entire episode has damaged relations between the U.S. and
Russia and between the U.S. and China, which was the British strategic goal in the first
instance, continuing the dive into a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump has fought this at every
step.
Paul Manafort was hired to handle delegate selection at the Republican National Convention
and then as campaign manager. He worked for Trump for six months total until his legal problems
became known and he resigned. He was charged by Mueller with tax, foreign agent registration
act, and bank fraud offenses for his lobbying activities on behalf of the deposed government of
Ukraine. That government was overthrown in coup in which John McCain played a critical role, a
coup which empowered outright neo-Nazis. Christopher Steele, British intelligence, and the U.S.
State Department also played major roles in the Ukraine regime change operation. Manafort was
targeted by both Ukrainian and British intelligence because he, in effect, backed the perceived
Russian side in the coup. For this, he was being investigated by the Obama Justice Department
well prior to any campaign association with Donald Trump. Mueller simply adjusted the focus of
this already political investigation, a focus aimed at turning Manafort into an asset against
Trump by means of the terror of potential prison sentences numbering in the hundreds of years
as the result of overcharged and duplicative indictments.
Michael Cohen, who worked with Trump as a lawyer, also had his share of prior legal
problems, primarily related to taxes concerning his taxi medallion business in New York City.
For months, the mainstream media has featured the claims of porn star Stormy Daniels claiming a
one night stand with the future President, ten years ago, as if the nation could draw some
lesson from Daniels about public virtue. Cohen apparently arranged to pay off Daniels and
another woman concerning their allegations about sex with the President. Among other suspicious
dealings, Cohen tape recorded conversations with his client, Donald Trump, during the campaign,
a complete and total violation of legal ethics which would independently cost him his law
license. For many months prior to his plea deal, Cohen has been a target of intense
investigative interest based on his tax problems. In recent months, Cohen has repeatedly
signaled that he was willing to betray the President and say whatever prosecutors in the
Southern District of New York wanted him to say about Donald Trump in order to avoid jail. The
problem is that prosecutors thought Cohen an obvious desperate liar and were not buying.
Ultimately, the deal which Cohen struck has him claiming that candidate Trump asked him to pay
hush money to the women, resulting in Federal Election Campaign Act violations. This is what
the Justice Department claimed against John Edwards in a widely ridiculed and failed
prosecution. It is exactly the type of claim by which the British and our Establishment
impeached Bill Clinton.
Cohen hired long-time Clinton operative Lanny Davis to represent him in recent months and to
make a deal. Following his plea, Davis claimed that Cohen had two made-up morsels to offer
Mueller, in return for a reduced sentence, a claim that Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump
Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and a claim that Cohen knew about Russian hacking of
Hillary Clinton's emails. Davis has since admitted that both these claims were totally false
and has had to walk them back publicly.
So, if you are tempted by the media t think that either of these "convictions" are germane
to the President's fitness for office, or Robert Mueller's credibility, please, seek medical
attention. The madness which now infects much of official Washington may have claimed you.
"... he has brought North Korea away from the edge of nuclear war and established at least tentative diplomatic relations with that nation, something no president has done before him. Against frenzied opposition from the American Establishment, he has somewhat softened U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... On domestic and environmental matters, Trump is pro-plutocrat, a climate change denier, and the installer of arch-reactionary Supreme Court justices. But this is more a function of the current national Republican party than of Trump himself. Any of Trump's opponents in the 2016 primaries would have followed the same policies. ..."
Trump is not crazy at all. He is the proponent of a particular philosophy, Trumpism, which
he follows very clearly and consistently.
As president, he has had significant successes. Notably, he has brought North Korea away
from the edge of nuclear war and established at least tentative diplomatic relations with
that nation, something no president has done before him. Against frenzied opposition from the
American Establishment, he has somewhat softened U.S. relations with Russia.
On domestic and environmental matters, Trump is pro-plutocrat, a climate change denier,
and the installer of arch-reactionary Supreme Court justices. But this is more a function of
the current national Republican party than of Trump himself. Any of Trump's opponents in the
2016 primaries would have followed the same policies.
Trumpism is undeniably a form of near-fascism. Trump has followed viciously anti-immigrant
tendencies, and this, along with his ties to out-and-out racists, is the worst part of his
presidency. But these horrible aspects do not at all show that he is crazy. He has used them
coldly and calculatedly to gain power.
And while his schtick and bluster are indeed bizarre, he has used them very consistently
to keep a 40%-plus approval rating in the face of an Establishment opposition the like of
which has used against a president at least in our lifetimes.
As I have commented here before, except for Trump's disgusting anti-immigration policies,
George W. Bush was on balance a far worse president.
U.S. President Donald Trump continued his
attacks Wednesday on an explosive book about his administration.
Trump said the book, written by U.S. veteran investigative journalist Bob
Woodward, "means nothing" and called it "a work of fiction" during a photo op with
visiting Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah at the White
House.
Woodward's book -- "Fear: Trump in the White House" -- is to be released next
week.
According to excerpts obtained by media outlets, Trump's aides describe him as a
"liar" and an "idiot" who is running a "crazytown."
"Isn't it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up
stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the
fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost," Trump tweeted earlier in
the day.
He also tweeted out written statements of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, both of whom denied uttering quoted
criticisms of the president in the book.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Woodward said, "I stand by my
reporting."
The book was based on hundreds of hours of conversations with direct players,
according to the author.
Woodward has been a reporter at the The Washington Post since 1971 and remains
an associate editor there.
He is most famous for breaking the story of the Watergate scandal, which
promoted the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency in 1974.
"... two more people tied to me would be dragged before the Grand Jury. ..."
"... Mueller and his smug band of thugs seek to browbeat before the Grand Jury is conservative author Dr. Corsi. ..."
"... It was Dr. Corsi who first alerted me to the lucrative business deals and Russian collusion of John and Tony Podesta but Corsi, a brilliant researcher, got this information from already published public sources! ..."
"... The other longtime contact Mueller seeks to interrogate this week is Trump hating left-wing radio host and deranged but job Randy Credico who merely confirmed for me that Wikileaks had, as it's publisher Julian Assange told CNN in June if 2016 a trove of devastating material on Hillary and would publish the material in October before the election. ..."
Robert Mueller the biased and partisan " Special Counsel "who has no interest whatsoever in
the multiple crimes of Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and his deeply corrupted FBI
and Justice Department but is on a relentless drive to remove President Donald Trump has done
it again!
This time Mueller and the partisan band of left-wing hitmen on the "Get Trump squad" leaked
to the media that two more people tied to me would be dragged before the Grand
Jury.
If you believe the fake news media Mueller seeks to prove that I had advance knowledge of an
alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee by "the Russians" and that this alleged
hack email material was then sent to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks who then passed it on to me to
pass in to my friend and client if 40 years Donald Trump. This is a damnable provable lie!
The other fairy tale Mueller is pushing is the false claim that I knew that Wikileaks had
obtained and would [publish] Clinton campaign chief John Podesta's incredibly incriminating
emails. This also categorically false!
One of my friends Mueller and his smug band of thugs seek to browbeat before the Grand
Jury is conservative author Dr. Corsi.
It was Dr. Corsi who first alerted me to the lucrative business deals and Russian
collusion of John and Tony Podesta but Corsi, a brilliant researcher, got this information from
already published public sources! Corsi also made me aware of an August 14, 2016 article
in Breitbart News by Peter Schweizer who reported that John Podesta's brother Tony had lobbied
for the same Ukrainian political party as Paul.
While Corsi did not memorialize his findings until Aug 31 I had heard enough to post my now
Iconic tweet predicting " the Podesta's time in the barrel (time under the same public scrutiny
as Paul Manafort) would come "on August 21. Remember the context- Manafort was taking a beating
in the press but I knew the Podesta's Russian ties were more extensive and that Tony was in the
same boat as Manafort.
Note in the original Tweet I said THE Podesta's time in the barrel while THE (which is
omitted in virtually every news report including ironically the final House Intelligence
Committee Report) clearly refers to TWO Podestas. There is much debate about the apostrophe s
in Podesta's- I say it is correct as it is a plural possessive (referring to BOTH their time in
the barrel) while others argue it should be "Podestas" if I was speaking of two people.
The other longtime contact Mueller seeks to interrogate this week is Trump hating
left-wing radio host and deranged but job Randy Credico who merely confirmed for me that
Wikileaks had, as it's publisher Julian Assange told CNN in June if 2016 a trove of devastating
material on Hillary and would publish the material in October before the election.
This I know- there is no evidence in my emails or texts or anywhere else or from any other
party that would demonstrate that I knew about the publication or content of John Podesta's
extraordinarily embarrassing and incriminating emails in advance or that I knew about the
source or content of the DNC material Wikileaks did publish .Mr. Mueller will find nothing of
the sort and any claim to the contrary by anyone would be composed perjury.
If Corsi and Credico testify truthfully their testimony would be exculpatory for me but
Mueller has a lifelong record of squeezing witnesses to get them to lie.
Some people should be very careful what they wish for.
UPDATE- the testimony of Dr. Jerome Corsi before the Grand Jury today was canceled.
"... Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of John Brennan. ..."
"... The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between the U.S. and Russia. ..."
"... By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just such domestic activity by the CIA. ..."
"... That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. ..."
The media posited that these two events, one by trial, one by plea, gave Robert Mueller new
found credibility and "momentum' at a point where both were dissipating extremely rapidly. This
claim, like the others we have examined here, has no relation to reality.
Mueller's problem is that his entire investigation has been revealed to be permeated with
illegality and dubious Constitutional premises. As the result of investigations by Congress, we
know that as of December, 2015 British intelligence agencies were frantically signaling their
fears about Donald Trump to Obama Administration intelligence officials, primarily the CIA of
John Brennan.
The British were demanding that Trump be taken out by whatever means because he
was "soft on Russia." They were demanding that Trump be taken out by criminalizing the idea for
which the American people ultimately voted, a rational relationship, rather than war, between
the U.S. and Russia.
By the early Spring, we now know Brennan was operating out of the CIA with a taskforce
investigating Trump based on British "leads," despite multiple legal prohibitions against just
such domestic activity by the CIA.
That task force included Peter Strzok, the fired FBI agent
who said he would do anything to prevent Trump's election. This operation included sending
informants to plant fabricated evidence on peripheral figures in the Trump campaign, including
George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The fake evidence suggested that Trump was using Russian
obtained "dirt" against Hillary Clinton. The evidence planting operations, mostly conducted on
British soil, were designed to back up the bogus and otherwise evidence free and indefensible
dossier authored by MI-6's Christopher Steele, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and promoted
by the Department of State, Department of Justice, the FBI, and select reporters. The dirty
British Steele dossier claimed that Trump had been compromised by Putin. Based on this, Trump
was targeted in a full-set counterintelligence investigation by the FBI including surveillance
of his campaign and anyone associated with it. The goal of this surveillance was to put those
who were around Trump under an investigative microscope stretching back years to find any crime
or misdeed for which they could be prosecuted. That is the illegal and unconstitutional
backdrop to everything Robert Mueller has produced thus far. Nothing produced by Mueller has
shown Trump to be a puppet of Putin as claimed by the British, the Clinton campaign, and the
national news media. Nonetheless, the entire episode has damaged relations between the U.S. and
Russia and between the U.S. and China, which was the British strategic goal in the first
instance, continuing the dive into a new and dangerous Cold War. Trump has fought this at every
step.
Paul Manafort was hired to handle delegate selection at the Republican National Convention
and then as campaign manager. He worked for Trump for six months total until his legal problems
became known and he resigned. He was charged by Mueller with tax, foreign agent registration
act, and bank fraud offenses for his lobbying activities on behalf of the deposed government of
Ukraine. That government was overthrown in coup in which John McCain played a critical role, a
coup which empowered outright neo-Nazis. Christopher Steele, British intelligence, and the U.S.
State Department also played major roles in the Ukraine regime change operation. Manafort was
targeted by both Ukrainian and British intelligence because he, in effect, backed the perceived
Russian side in the coup. For this, he was being investigated by the Obama Justice Department
well prior to any campaign association with Donald Trump. Mueller simply adjusted the focus of
this already political investigation, a focus aimed at turning Manafort into an asset against
Trump by means of the terror of potential prison sentences numbering in the hundreds of years
as the result of overcharged and duplicative indictments.
Michael Cohen, who worked with Trump as a lawyer, also had his share of prior legal
problems, primarily related to taxes concerning his taxi medallion business in New York City.
For months, the mainstream media has featured the claims of porn star Stormy Daniels claiming a
one night stand with the future President, ten years ago, as if the nation could draw some
lesson from Daniels about public virtue. Cohen apparently arranged to pay off Daniels and
another woman concerning their allegations about sex with the President. Among other suspicious
dealings, Cohen tape recorded conversations with his client, Donald Trump, during the campaign,
a complete and total violation of legal ethics which would independently cost him his law
license. For many months prior to his plea deal, Cohen has been a target of intense
investigative interest based on his tax problems. In recent months, Cohen has repeatedly
signaled that he was willing to betray the President and say whatever prosecutors in the
Southern District of New York wanted him to say about Donald Trump in order to avoid jail. The
problem is that prosecutors thought Cohen an obvious desperate liar and were not buying.
Ultimately, the deal which Cohen struck has him claiming that candidate Trump asked him to pay
hush money to the women, resulting in Federal Election Campaign Act violations. This is what
the Justice Department claimed against John Edwards in a widely ridiculed and failed
prosecution. It is exactly the type of claim by which the British and our Establishment
impeached Bill Clinton.
Cohen hired long-time Clinton operative Lanny Davis to represent him in recent months and to
make a deal. Following his plea, Davis claimed that Cohen had two made-up morsels to offer
Mueller, in return for a reduced sentence, a claim that Trump knew about the June 2016 Trump
Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and a claim that Cohen knew about Russian hacking of
Hillary Clinton's emails. Davis has since admitted that both these claims were totally false
and has had to walk them back publicly.
So, if you are tempted by the media t think that either of these "convictions" are germane
to the President's fitness for office, or Robert Mueller's credibility, please, seek medical
attention. The madness which now infects much of official Washington may have claimed you.
First of all as Diana
Johnstone noted this can be attempt to saw discord in Trump administration and anonymous
author iether does not exist or is a former official fired by Trump. See The New York Times as Iago, by Diana
Johnstone . She suggested that it was written by NYT staff " The letter by Mister or Ms
Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the
NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a
masterpiece of treacherous deception." ... "The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the
facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to
undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea." The letter amounts to an endorsement
of future President Pence. Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing
Republican as President.
She continues: " Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone
around him? Isn't that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and
which is fallback grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with
anything more serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?"
AS Daniel Larrison points out the dishonesty of anonymous author is evident: " They want
credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating the policies of the
government to their own liking. ". And they so far succeeded in manipulating Trump foreign
policy to the extent that he does not differ from Bush II.
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
"... They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating the policies of the government to their own liking. ..."
"... There are legitimate political and constitutional remedies for an unfit president, but the anonymous "resistance" official isn't interested in any of that. He prefers to keep the administration from completely imploding because it also happens to be advancing a mostly conventional Republican agenda that he likes. There is nothing particularly admirable about that, and he should not have been granted anonymity to write his self-congratulatory article. ..."
The
New York Timespublished
a strange op-ed purportedly written by a "senior official" in the Trump administration:
The dilemma -- which he does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in
his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda
and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular "resistance" of the left. We want the administration
to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more
prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a
manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
The author of the op-ed flatters himself by claiming to be acting in the best interests of
the country, but there is something very wrong with having self-appointed guardians assuming
that they have the right to sabotage certain policies of the elected president. For one, they
have no authority to do what they're doing, and no one voted for them. It is one thing to argue
that professionals should be willing to serve a bad president in the interests of public
service, and it is quite another to argue that the officials working for the president are
entitled to disregard and override the president's decisions because the president happens to
be an ignorant buffoon. The "two-track presidency" that the official boasts about is an affront
to our system of government. It is not reassuring that U.S. foreign policy continues as if on
autopilot no matter what the electorate votes for.
Perversely, the more that Trump administration officials "frustrate parts of his agenda,"
the more likely it is that Trump remains in power longer than he otherwise would. The official
says that the core of the problem is the president's "amorality." That raises the obvious
question: how can someone acknowledge that the president has no principles or scruples of any
kind and still in good conscience try to help him succeed? These officials are not only
enabling a president whose behavior they consider to be "detrimental to the health of our
republic," but they are helping to make sure that he stays in office instead of hastening his
defeat. They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to
manipulating the policies of the government to their own liking.
There are legitimate political and constitutional remedies for an unfit president, but
the anonymous "resistance" official isn't interested in any of that. He prefers to keep the
administration from completely imploding because it also happens to be advancing a mostly
conventional Republican agenda that he likes. There is nothing particularly admirable about
that, and he should not have been granted anonymity to write his self-congratulatory
article.
If this official feels so strongly that the president endangers the health and well-being of
the country, he should put his name on a statement to that effect when he announces his
resignation.
"... No doctor that has examined him says he is insane. All that's presented are third-party anonymous accusations of incompetence shot through with gossip. A book written by a Hollywood trash reporter is otherwise held up as critical evidence of the inner workings of the president's mind. ..."
"... We might instead look at the actual decisions Trump has made, and those of his predecessors. One president used nuclear weapons to decimate two cities' worth of innocents , and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of American lives washing Vietnam with blood. Ronald Reagan was famously caught on an open mic saying he was going to start bombing the Soviet Union in the next few minutes. Another president spread false information about WMDs to launch an invasion of Iraq and mocked North Korea's leader as a pygmy. Obama said he "will not hesitate to use our military might" against the North, knowing that meant Armageddon. Historical psychiatrists say half of our past presidents may have suffered from some sort of mental illness. If Trump is dangerous as president, he would seem to have company. ..."
"... In the minds of the "Trump is Insane" crowd what matters most is that never-used fourth subsection, the incapacitation clause. People claim because Trump is insane he is unable to carry out his duties, and so Mike Pence, et al, must step in and transfer power away from him. Trump would legally exist in the same status as Grandpa Simpson in the nursing home, and Pence would take over. Among other problems, this imagines that the 25th Amendment's legally specific term "unable" means the same thing as "unfit." An unconscious man is unable to drive. A man who forgot his glasses is unfit, but still able, to drive. The 25th Amendment only refers to the first case. ..."
The media chatterati seems to be of one mind: Donald Trump is mentally incompetent and may
have to be removed from office before he blows us all to hell.
The solution, to their minds, lies in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which creates
a mechanism outside of impeachment to remove an "incapacitated" president. Trump's mental
state, some believe, qualifies him. Is there a case?
Dr. Bandy Lee , one of the
editors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump ,
says yes. Her evidence includes tweets that Trump sent threatening Kim Jong-un. She really
has no other ammunition: no doctor who says Trump is insane, including Lee, has examined him.
No doctor that has examined him says he is insane. All that's presented are third-party
anonymous
accusations of incompetence shot through with gossip. A book written by a Hollywood trash
reporter is otherwise held up as critical
evidence of the inner workings of the president's mind.
So is there a case without the tweets? Not really. Lee
adds that while Trump has not committed violent acts against himself or others, his "verbal
aggressiveness, history of boasting about sexual assault, history of inciting violence at his
rallies, and history of endorsing violence in his key public speeches are the best predictors
of future violence," and thus concludes he will destroy the world. Lee also weakly
points to Trump "being drawn to violent videos." Oh my.
We might instead look at the actual decisions Trump has made, and those of his predecessors.
One president used nuclear weapons to decimate two
cities' worth of innocents , and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of
American lives washing Vietnam with blood. Ronald Reagan was famously caught on an open mic
saying he was going to start bombing the Soviet Union in the next few minutes. Another
president spread false information about WMDs to launch an invasion of Iraq and mocked North
Korea's leader as a pygmy. Obama said he
"will not hesitate to use our military might" against the North, knowing that meant Armageddon.
Historical psychiatrists say
half of our past presidents may have suffered from some sort of mental illness. If Trump is
dangerous as president, he would seem to have company.
But how can we know? Trump will never voluntarily undergo a mental competency exam, though
courts can order people to submit. But even Lee, who met with congressional representatives to
press the case that Trump is insane, admits this is unlikely to happen. "Many lawyer groups
have actually volunteered to file for a court paper to ensure that the security staff will
cooperate with us," Lee
said . "But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are
trying to prevent violence, we don't wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection."
Still, those arguing Trump is insane and must be removed from office will point to the 25th
Amendment as just what the doctor ordered.
The framers did not originally include rules for what happens if a president dies or becomes
incapacitated. It was just assumed the vice president would serve as "Acting President." The
25th Amendment, passed after the Kennedy
assassination , created the first set of protocols for this sort of situation.
The amendment has four short
subsections. If the presidency goes vacant (for example, after a fatal heart attack), the vice
president becomes president. If the vice presidency goes vacant, the president chooses a new
VP. If the president knows he'll be incapacitated (due to scheduled surgery, for example), he
can voluntarily and temporarily assign his duties to the vice president. If the president is
truly incapacitated (unconscious after an assassination attempt) and can't voluntarily assign
away his duties, the VP and cabinet can do it for him, with a two-thirds majority confirming
vote of the House and Senate.
In the minds of the "Trump is Insane" crowd what matters most is that never-used fourth
subsection, the incapacitation clause. People claim because Trump is insane he is unable to
carry out his duties, and so Mike Pence, et al, must step in and transfer power away from him.
Trump would legally exist in the same status as Grandpa Simpson in the nursing home,
and Pence would take over. Among other problems, this imagines that the 25th Amendment's
legally specific term "unable" means the same thing as "unfit." An unconscious man is unable to
drive. A man who forgot his glasses is unfit, but still able, to drive. The 25th Amendment only
refers to the first case.
The use of the 25th Amendment to dethrone Trump is the kind of thing non-experts with too
much Google time can convince themselves is true. But unlike much of the Constitution, where
understanding original intent requires the Supreme Court and a close reading of the Federalist
Papers, the 25th Amendment is modern legislation. We know the drafters' intent
was an administrative
procedure, not a political thunderbolt. The 25th Amendment premises that the president will
almost always invoke succession himself, either by dying in office or by anticipating that he
will be unable to discharge his duties, as in 2007 when George W. Bush went under anesthesia
for his annual colonoscopy and signed things over to his vice president for a few hours.
The reason the 25th Amendment is not intended to be used adversarially is the Constitution
already specifies impeachment as the way to force an unfit president out against his
will, his unfitness specifically a result of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The people who
wrote the 25th Amendment did not intend it to be an alternate method of impeachment or a
do-over for an election.
The Constitution at its core grants ultimate power to the people to decide, deliberately,
not in panic, every four years, who is president. Anything otherwise would mean the drafters of
the 25th Amendment wrote a backdoor into the Constitution that would allow a group of
government officials, many of whom in the Cabinet were elected by nobody, to overthrow an
elected president who they simply think has turned out to be bad at his job.
Accusations of mental illness are subjective, unprovable in this case, and alarmist --
perfect fodder to displace the grinding technicalities of Russiagate. Denouncing one's
political opponents as crazy was a tried-and-true Soviet and Maoist tactic, and a movie trope
where the youngsters try to get the patriarch shut away to grab his fortune. We fear the
mentally ill, and psychiatric name calling against Trump invokes that fear
. "The 25th Amendment would require, for mental incapacity, a major psychotic break,"
said one former Harvard Law School professor. "This is hope over reality. If we don't like
someone's politics we rail against him, we campaign against him, we don't use the psychiatric
system against him. That's just dangerous."
Trump's time in office is finite, but what happens around him will outlast his tenure. It is
dangerous to mess with the very fundamentals of our democracy, where the people choose the
president and then replace him with a cabal called into session by pop psychologists. This is
an attack on the process at its roots: you yokels voted for the wrong guy so somebody smarter
has to clean up.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the
Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter@WeMeantWell.
Judging by the fact that he's still the only president after the end of the Cold War who
hasn't yet dragged the country into any new costly and unnecessary war, it indeed must be
that either he's a genius or his predecessors are mentally challenged. Your choice.
" . . . and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of American lives washing
Vietnam with blood."
Total US losses in the Vietnam War/conflict: 58,300
It is sad that plans were made to remove the Pres. even before he was elected. It has been
the use of a special prosecutor has certainly been a factor
in damaging our republics democracy.
I remember hearing a reporter comment upon Obama and Bush meeting on inauguration day that
the "Peaceful transition of power is what makes our Democracy great." Now 8 years later those
same people are saying we need to oust the Democratically elected candidate. The danger here
is not against the offices of our government but against the press itself. As the media
continues down this path they paint themselves as lunatics, hypocrites and partisans. I think
our institutions will survive this and much worse. But I don't think the media as we know it
will. Trust is at an all time low in most all of the media outlets. The question that needs
to be asked is will our Democracy survive the death of the press and what if anything will
replace what used to be called investigative and informative journalism?
There's a NeverTrump and Resistance checklist that's being worked through, and this was the
next gambit if Russiagate failed, which was the gambit if the Electoral College revolt didn't
work The next in line will be something along the arc of a politicized MeToo They're making a
list, and they're checking it twice
There's a NeverTrump and Resistance checklist that's predictably being worked through, and
this was the next gambit if Russiagate failed, which was the gambit if the Electoral College
revolt didn't work The next in line will be something along the arc of a politicized MeToo
They're making a list, and they're checking it twice
Reading this only serves as a reminder that the ones whom we really need to fear are the
masses of the great Unwashed Elite (Vox, CNN, etc.), not Trump.
Slightly off topic, but "the youngsters try to get the patriarch shut away to grab his
fortune" is, sadly, no movie trope; my family is living it right now. Trying to right this
outrageous wrong on behalf of the forcibly shut-away patriarch is costing us non-grabby
siblings tens of thousands of dollars in legal and court fees. Justice has a crippling price
in modern America and those who can't pay don't get much justice.
In East Germany, Stasi leader Markus Wolfe took things a step further with the "zersetzung"
tactic.
The idea was to *induce* a "personal crisis" through clandestine harassment, including at
the hands of acquaintances secretly recruited by the Stasi.
In other words, while the Frankfort School was content to merely *label* their opponents
mentally ill ("Authoritarian Personality", "Paranoid Style", etc.), Markus Wolfe was actively
trying to cause *real* mental illness by relentlessly gaslighting selected individual
dissidents until they cracked.
How many centuries will it take for the reputation of the mental health profession to
recover from their association with various repressive left-wing regimes and
pseudo-scientists such as the Freudians and the Frankfurt School?
HRC warned us of all the dumb white male deplorable's , as being a major threat. Wonder where
the pop psychologist have these Americans slotted, possibly not allowed to vote ?
What's insane is that a married FBI agent and an FBI lawyer hooked up and conspired to bring
down a President, yet both still work for the FBI! That's really insane.
It's just silliness re. Mr Trump. He's perfectly sane.
We had a former governor- whom I actually admire- but his behavior was authentically erratic.
If Pres. Trump ever acts even half this way, then we should take a serious look at his mental
health 🙂 :
" Long spent ninety minutes ranting and lashing out against his opponents. Spotting
Rainach in the crowd, Long launched into the salacious details of the murder of Rainach's
uncle, killed by a black man who had caught him in bed with the man's wife. In one of Long's
most famous remarks, he told the crowd, "After all this is over [Rainach will] probably go up
there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at
the moon, and get close to God." Pointing and shouting at Rainach, he continued, "And when
you do, you got to recognize that n**gers is human beings!" When he concluded his tirade,
Earl was rushed to the governor's mansion and locked in a bedroom where he grew violent. At
one point, he stood in the smashed bedroom window shouting, "Murder!"
Concerned about his mental health, Long's family had him institutionalized in Texas before
transferring him to the Louisiana State Hospital in Mandeville. With the assistance of his
subordinates, however, Long won release from the asylum, firing the director in the process,
and proceeded on an interstate buying spree trailed by national press agents. Many have
speculated on the cause of Long's apparent breakdown, with at least one biographer convinced
the politician suffered from bipolar disorder. Others speculate that Long's all-night
escapades in New Orleans, including dalliances with dancer Blaze Starr, coupled with the
regular ingestion of large amounts of alcohol and the powerful stimulants Dexedrine
undermined Long's perception of reality. Regardless of the cause, it was clear to many,
including the national press, that Long needed an extended vacation."
If one day Trump wakes up and decides it's a good day to launch nuclear missiles at some
country because their leader said disparaging remarks against him, then the 25th should be
invoked. But not before then.
One of the hallmarks of mental illness is that a person's personality or behavior change and
people close to them that love them are most alarmed by it and want them to get treated. None
of this holds in Trump's case. His behavior is the same as it's always been, which is what
people voted on. And the ones trying to use it are his enemies which don't care about
treatment, but simply as a machination to depose him.
The author has made several errors. He assumes that discussing the possibility of a
psychiatric disorder making Trump unfit means proving insanity. In reality, the most likely
disorder does not meet the legal definition of insanity, but does make a person incapable of
competently or faithfully performing the duties of office.
The suggestion that this is some type of superficial soviet style political maneuver
ignores the fact that good diagnosis is done nowadays based to a large extent on observed
behavior, history, and the reports of third parties. This is especially important when the
individual shows signs of being a pathological liar. In these cases, information gained in a
face-to-face interview may be virtually useless.
The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder
with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and
symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
Dishonesty and fraudulence
Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
Lack of concern for one's limitations
Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
Disregard for -- and failure to honor–financial and other obligations or
commitments
No one imagined that someone with this possible disorder would ever make it to the White
House, however, the 25th Amendment provides an avenue for him to temporarily be removed from
power while he can undergo proper evaluation by military psychiatrists and neurologists. This
is all mental health professionals are requesting. These individuals can do tremendous damage
when give power over others.
"The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder
with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and
symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
Dishonesty and fraudulence
Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
Lack of concern for one's limitations
Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
Disregard for -- and failure to honor–financial and other obligations or
commitments "
An Orwellian comment like the above just proves the point of the article, and then some.
As if there isn't anyone in the world who couldn't be shoehorned to fit such a diagnoses,
with a crafty narrative reconfiguring of their actions.
If there are indeed any witch doctors (excuse me, "psychiatrists") pathologizing people on
the basis of a laughable list like the above, then I consider them to be far more undeserving
of the power they have, and far more toxic to society, than Trump in any of the actions or
utterances that he has made.
Susan Dawkins, who claims my article has mistakes, didn't read it. Her amateur diagnosis that
Trump has "Antisocial Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features" does not make him
UNABLE to be president, which is what the 25th Amendment is for.
She claims he is UNFIT. Fitness is judged primarily by the people, who elected him. If a
president somehow becomes unfit while in office it must be because of "high crimes and
misdemeanors." That's the only reason the Constitution provides for. And impeachment is the
only answer.
Sorry kiddies, the 25th is a not-over for an election Rachael Maddow doesn't like.
This is all mental health professionals are requesting."
"All"? That's rich.
Indeed, is that all that they're requesting? My goodness -- what a modest
request! -- a request merely to have complete veto power over America's entire citizenry, in
terms of who is allowed to be President; a request merely to be able to remove any President
who is not to their liking.
In short, a mere request to be able to legally perform a coup d'etat at will, to overturn
any election that does not yield their desired result.
How gratified we all should be that their request for power is such a small one. Imagine
if they asked for something just a bit more ambitious. "Omnipotence" comes to mind.
Trump is the one who messes with the very fundamentals of our democracy. Remember his voting
commission and the crap they wanted? Force states to provide all the 2016 voter information
to his CosaNostra buddies. And remember when they wanted all Americans to fill out a
registration form similar to the one used when purchasing a gun? They said they wanted to
make sure only those qualified were on the voter registration lists.
Trrump's as sane as any other 71 year old man-baby.
Obviously saner and infinitely more mature than a 70 year old woman-baby, who wrecked a
havoc all over the Middle East, was laughing like a bloodthirsty child when watching an old
man's violent death in the hands of a barbaric crowd as one of the results of that havoc and
then, out of a sheer infantile negligence, caused an American ambassadors similarly violent
death in the hands of likely the same crowd as another result of the same havoc.
***
Susan Dawkins,
So, you claim that something that something that doesn't meet the legal definition of
insanity is somehow a basis to invoke a legal mechanism that would require someone to be
legally defined as insane ? How pathetic. Do you know that this mere writing of yours
can be a sign of at least three mental disorders, assuming it was written in good faith and
not as an umpteenth attempt of a comically maladroit political hackery? Note that I have
certain knowledge in psychiatry and can highlight the signs of these disorders step by step,
not by hysterical shrilling "I'm an MD, you philistines", which can be a sign of yet another
mental disorder.
Though the most comical part of your hackery is that every point of your list meant to
"describe" Trump perfectly fits Hillary Clinton. You should try better. Seriously. You have
just shown that your knowledge of psychiatry is abysmal, no matter the degrees you
might have.
Ultimately to the leftists everybody is mentally ill because they don't understand the
necessities of history and they don't possess "secret" knowledge.
Susan Dawkins, that list of symptoms reminds me of most all of the people that run for
political office or spend a majority of their lives up on the hill. I immediately thought of
several people on both the left and the right. Let's see how HIllary does:
1&2: embellished/lied in saying she was personally shot at by a sniper in Bosnia?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1582795/Hillary-Clintons-Bosnia-sniper-story-exposed.html
. Might I add that she said this while other Americans were on battlefields half a world away
actually getting shot at.
3&4: Calling American Citizens deplorable 5&6&8: Voted for Iraq, pushed for
action in Libya.
Hmm, I guess there is a reason voters didn't pick her.
What matters in this narrative is not law, not ethics or sanity, not anything else but
power.
If those who want Trump removed will have the power to do so, they will do so. Whatever
law is invoked will merely be an excuse, a cover story, if you will.
"The suggestion that this is some type of superficial soviet style political maneuver ignores
the fact that good diagnosis is done nowadays based to a large extent on observed behavior,
history, and the reports of third parties. This is especially important when the individual
shows signs of being a pathological liar. In these cases, information gained in a
face-to-face interview may be virtually useless."
So what happens when the third parties or the psychiatrist in question are pathological
liars? Would a face-to-face interview help in that case?
"... I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us, Russians. ..."
"... The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections. But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ? ..."
"... Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values. ..."
"... But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? ..."
"... Looks like Daniel Coats think that the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve the role of world government you better be rich. ..."
"... why we Russians should interfere in already completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity. ..."
According to popular belief, the cold war ended with the victory of the United States of America. And, accordingly, the demice
of the Soviet Union. However, what exactly represent such a victory is not that easy to understand. Instead of one conservative,
and therefore predictable player, the United States received a half dozen countries, of which only three or four are loyal, with
other living by "the laws of jungles" (sorry free market). The number of aimed at American cities Intercontinental ballistic missiles
with nuclear warheads remained approximately the same as before the infamous "victory." And strategic atomic submarines remained,
and strategic bombers. There are less of them, for sure, but they are more modern and more dngerous with more sophisticated weaponry.
In any ccase remaining are still enough to make the winner to feel like a loser after b=neclear apolaipsys. And the idfea of victory
is that the victor is the master (in this case the master of the plant). Am I missing something ?
Of course, another inquisitive observer will tell us about the controlled chaos, about the growing influence and plans for the
establishing of the world neoliberal government. I was impressed by the recent revelation of Senator John Tester, who said that Putin
is promoting communism in America. As the idea that this senator is a complete idiot who does not understand the Russia rejected
communism as a dead-born system is pretty absurd. I would venture to assume that it might be that Russia did something that can with
some stretch be qualifies as an attempt to influence the USA election, but, alas, Putin has no strategic plan, not the intention.
First of all this would be pretty idiotic idea as two candidates were equally bad for Russia and it was completely unclear who is
worse.
But all those crazy US neocons still managed to imposed on Russia sanctions because of its "interference in the elections." That
tells us something about the US congress. I do not want to write about the lack of evidence and absurdity of the arguments again.
I've already written a lot about it. No, let's stop talking about the past and try to look into the future.
The US President's national security adviser John Bolton (who theoretically should be a sanest person in the administration) recently
said that the US is concerned about the potential for interference in the midterm elections to the Congress of four countries. Russia,
China, Iran and North Korea. "I will not go into details of what I saw or didn't see, but I tell you that in the 2018 elections,
these four countries raise the greatest fears," proclaim this highly placed Presidential adviser.
Theoretically it make some sense. Any man with a knife has a potential to kill. Any country with nuclear weapons has the potential
to strike at the US. Any country with developed IT has a potential opportunity to interfere in elections with the help of cyber attacks.
For example, Israel. But it is not a good idea to scare the American voter with Israel. No, he/she should be confused, and he/she
should be afraid of potential menace. And this external enemy should unite fragmented by neoliberal excesses country (for this purpose
those good-for nothing people grazing in State Department and Spaso House (The US embassy in Moscow) should constantly accuse the
Russian authorities of all sorts nefarious activities. So there is nothing new here: Great Britain uses similar dirty tricks against
Russia for centuries. I am interested in another, a very simple question: why? Why would Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea
interfere in the US midterm elections? What they want to achieve. All right, let's drop all the others, let's just talk about us,
Russians.
What do we want? Let's say we want the midterms to be won by the Republicans. Then explain to me why Republican John Bolton fears
this. If there's anything John Bolton should be afraid of, it's that Russia will intervene in the midterms in order to win the Democrats.
But The Washington Post writes that "the leaders of the Democratic party of the United States fear the potential interference of
Russia and start to increase its presence in anticipation of the interim election cycle on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter."
President Trump writes on Twitter that Russia will" make a lot of effort " to intervene in the midterm elections on the side of the
Democrats. Microsoft claims that Russian hackers created fake websites of Republican organizations in order to collect information
about Republicans. The same hackers who broke into the DNC and stole Hillary Clinton emails now will steal midterm elections.
But from whom? Do you understand anything? Personally, I don't understand anymore. Which Party we support? Who is the target of our
effort to interfere in the USA elections. Are we promoting Repubs or DemoRats ?
Perhaps the head of the US national intelligence Daniel Coates is right when he declared that "their goal is to divide and
undermine our democratic values." Well, let's suppose that we really are against those sacred values.
But the midterm elections will still be held, despite any interference. And one of candidates will win, while the other will
lose. If we see no difference in candidates why we should interfere? If the net result for us anyway will be the same: more
sanctions? Here we should go back to the idea of "controlled chaos" and world government. Looks like Daniel Coats think that
the world government is us. No, I'd certainly like the idea, even if this requires smoking something really strong (let's use Musk
as a lodestar ;-). But I'm afraid we're not capable to serve in this role. After economic rape of 1991 we are too poor. And to serve
the role of world government you better be rich.
Again the question arise, why we should interfere in he USA elections. Only if we are out for revenge, "eye for eye" principle
as they interfered in ours. There's no other reasonable answer. But even in this case, why we Russians should interfere in already
completely messed up US elections, which typically equal to a force choice between two equally unacceptable candidates, already chosen
and vetted by neoliberal elite. Like Trump vs. Hillary. why we should play this game of "the lesser evil." It's plain vanilla stupidity.
And before we get the answer to this fundamental question "Why?" there can be no further questions. None. Moreover, no other questions
are needed. So let them just explain to us why we should interfere and how we can benefit from such an interference, and we will
try our best. Before that, let's just watch.
And when they explain this to us, we can communicate the answer to China, Iran and North Korea free of charge.
President Trump and those close to him have challenged the narrative of Bob
Woodward's new book, which portrays him as "a 5th-grader" ready to make rash decisions, such as
ordering the assassination of Assad.
"The Woodward book has already been refuted and
discredited by General (Secretary of Defense) James Mattis and General (Chief of Staff) John
Kelly," Trump tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, after excerpts from the book were published by
the Washington Post and other publications. The manuscript, which is scheduled for release next
week, contains many quotes that were "made up frauds," Trump said, calling the book's
narrative "a con on the public."
The Woodward book has already been refuted and discredited by General (Secretary of
Defense) James Mattis and General (Chief of Staff) John Kelly. Their quotes were made up
frauds, a con on the public. Likewise other stories and quotes. Woodward is a Dem operative?
Notice timing?
Rejecting the claims that senior aides have been plucking sensitive documents off his desk
to prevent him from making rash decisions, Trump noted in an exclusive interview with
the Daily Caller that the bulk of the stories in the book were just a compilation of "nasty
stuff" totally "made up" by the famed Watergate Washington Post reporter.
Trump was not the only one to slam Woodward's claims, which present the US leader as an
impulsive decision-maker, who is sometimes called an "idiot" and a "liar"
even by those closest to him:
Trump ordered Mattis to 'f**king kill' Assad
One of the excerpts from the book claims the president ordered Secretary of Defense Jim
Mattis to assassinate the Syrian leader following the 2017 Idlib chemical incident. "Let's
f**king kill him! Let's go in. Let's kill the f**king lot of them," Trump allegedly told
Mattis. "We're not going to do any of that. We're going to be much more measured," the
defense secretary allegedly told one of his senior staffers after that.
Following the controversial claim, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley denied that Trump
ever planned to assassinate Assad. "I have not once ever heard the president talk about
assassinating Assad,"
she told reporters at UN headquarters.
"Mr. Woodward never discussed or verified the alleged quotes included in his book with
Secretary Mattis or anyone within the DOD," a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Rob Manning,
added.
Mattis compared Trump to '5th or 6th grader'
Woodward claims that Trump once asked Mattis why the US backs South Korea militarily and
financially, prompting the defense secretary to tell close associates afterward that Trump had
the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader. "Secretaries of defense don't always get to
choose the president they work for," Mattis allegedly said in another instance.
Mattis personally rejected the claim made in the book. "In serving in this
administration, the idea that I would show contempt for the elected Commander-in-Chief,
President Trump, or tolerate disrespect to the office of the President from within our
Department of Defense, is a product of someone's rich imagination," he said.
Chief
of Staff described Trump as an 'unhinged idiot'
"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the
rails. We're in crazytown," Woodward quotes White House Chief of Staff John Kelly as
saying at a staff meeting in his office. "I don't even know why any of us are here. This is
the worst job I've ever had."
Kelly, however, has firmly
denied the allegations, dismissing the chapter about him as "total
BS."
Staff snatched documents from Trump's desk fearing he might sign them
Former Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn, according to Woodward, once saw a draft letter on
the Oval Office desk that would have withdrawn the US from a trade agreement with South Korea.
"I stole it off his desk," Cohn told an associate, allegedly terrified Trump might
sign it. "I wouldn't let him see it. He's never going to see that document. Got to protect
the country." Former staff secretary Rob Porter, who handled the flow of presidential
papers, allegedly used similar tactics on several occasions.
However, according to White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, the entire book is nothing
more than a bunch of "fabricated stories" told by "disgruntled" former
employees to make the president "look bad."
Egypt's president wondered if Trump
was 'going to be around' for long
According to Woodward, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is one of the world leaders
who was worried the infamous Mueller probe might eventually result in impeachment. "Donald,
I'm worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?" al-Sisi allegedly said.
Trump supposedly later told his lawyer that the question was "like a kick in the
nuts."
Amid the barrage of firm denials by Trump and his team, Woodward
reiterated that he "stands by" his reporting and the book's contents.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... "This is very different from Watergate. This is gossip. Much of it is anonymous gossip, so it feeds this neverending reality television show political drama that cable news channels like CNN are making quite a bit of money off of," ..."
"... "It's always something, it's endless burlesque, and this feeds into this kind of narrative." ..."
"... "a little more likely to side with Woodward on this one," ..."
"... "At the same time, 70 percent of the people in this country are in pretty severe economic distress, and their voices are not being heard at all, and I think that that's why Trump's base remains firm, because these people have been rendered invisible by the press... that has just become a giant carnival act," ..."
"... "shady world of anonymous sources" ..."
"... "Institutions like the New York Times... use language about the president that would've been wholly unacceptable when I was there. Calling him a liar day in and day out – that doesn't mean he didn't lie, but presidents lie all the time, and every administration I covered lied, starting with the Reagan administration. This is really a war on the part of the establishment press, the Washington establishment, to take down Trump." ..."
The paradoxical era of anonymous anti-Trump reporting has turned once-solid journalism into
a carnival of unverifiable accusations. True or not, they distract from real issues, says
Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges. A new bombshell book about the horrors of
Trump's White House is about to hit the shelves. This time it's not penned by a disgruntled
former official, but the world-famous Bob Woodward – the investigative journalist who
uncovered the 1970s Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. Only this
time, instead of doing solid, verifiable journalism, he is peddling damning claims by anonymous
sources, says Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author.
"This is very different from Watergate. This is gossip. Much of it is anonymous gossip,
so it feeds this neverending reality television show political drama that cable news channels
like CNN are making quite a bit of money off of," – Mr. Hedges told RT. "It's
always something, it's endless burlesque, and this feeds into this kind of narrative."
This doesn't mean accusations against Trump are necessarily false – in fact, Mr.
Hedges says he's "a little more likely to side with Woodward on this one," – but
it does draw attention from America's real issues, and thus further entrenches Trump's voter
base.
"At the same time, 70 percent of the people in this country are in pretty severe
economic distress, and their voices are not being heard at all, and I think that that's why
Trump's base remains firm, because these people have been rendered invisible by the press...
that has just become a giant carnival act," Mr. Hedges says.
The "shady world of anonymous sources" has enabled phenomena like the recent New
York Times op-ed by a supposed anonymous White House insider, claiming there's a 'Resistance'
hotbed within the heart of the presidency. Chris Hedges, who has worked at the NYT for 15 years
himself, says the media's war on the president is like nothing he has seen before.
"Institutions like the New York Times... use language about the president that would've
been wholly unacceptable when I was there. Calling him a liar day in and day out – that
doesn't mean he didn't lie, but presidents lie all the time, and every administration I covered
lied, starting with the Reagan administration. This is really a war on the part of the
establishment press, the Washington establishment, to take down Trump."
More plausible theory is that it was written by NYT staff in Iago-style operation to saw discord in Trump administration
and promote Woodward's book
Notable quotes:
"... might be just what the NYT wants the Trump Whitehouse to waste time on. ..."
"... It could very well be a trap. In fact, the timing almost guarantees it. The other alternative is that the NYT is very desperate and the Deep State in dire straights. ..."
"... I don't think the op-ed piece came from anyone in the WH. It's fake but rest assured Trump can still use it to his advantage. ..."
"... The "op-ed" was likely either a set-up fabrication / amalgam from the CIA Toilet Paper of Record or some deluded over ambitious piece of shit like Nikki Haley. ..."
1) The NYT OpEd was actually written by one of the people who were fired during the very
EARLY days of the Trump administration because they turned out to not be so good (like
Bannon, Preibus, Walsh, Yates, Comey, Spicer, Gorka, Tillerson, McMaster, etc). This also
makes sense because they are describing (very exaggerated) the early days of the Trump admin
which were known to be somewhat chaotic before Trump got a good chief of staff (because
Preibus was useless)
2) The NYT has been holding onto the letter for almost two years as a weapon to use during
the mid-term elections
3) Looking for them inside the current administration is useless, because they are already
long gone
4) The NYT is probably stretching the truth about them being "senior" official which they
have a history of stretching the truth on for sources
5) It is also the exact same person as the (primary/only) source for all the accusations
in Woodward's book
Assuming this was written recently is a HUGE tactical oversight and might be just what the NYT wants the Trump
Whitehouse to waste time on.
Brazen Heist II ,
It could very well be a trap. In fact, the timing almost guarantees it. The other alternative is that the NYT is very desperate and the Deep State in dire
straights.
FreeEarCandy ,
"Issue Of National Security" and "looking into legal action".
If its a "REAL" issue of national security looking into legal action is non sequitur. You
raid the NYT and send all the usual suspects to Guantanamo Bay for a little water
boarding.
This whole stunt is pure political mind fuckery. Since when does the justice department
determine if we can legally defend our national security?
Kreditanstalt ,
Trump, like the rest of the Deep State elite, detests and is enraged more by "disloyalty"
among fellow elitists than by the opposition!
Dangerclose ,
I don't think the op-ed piece came from anyone in the WH. It's fake but rest assured Trump
can still use it to his advantage. I'll bet he gets EVERYONE to show a little more support
and less resistance. Hmmmmmm?
benb ,
The "op-ed" was likely either a set-up fabrication / amalgam from the CIA Toilet Paper of
Record or some deluded over ambitious piece of shit like Nikki Haley.
In any event it doesn't
matter. It's all about subversion. The Communist Party USA (Democrats) and Deep State know
they are about to get their asses handed to them in November.
They're are a bunch of desperate assholes at this point. Heads up. Be ready for anything
from here on out.
"... The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception. ..."
"... This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow. ..."
"... The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea. ..."
"... Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.) ..."
"... The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. ..."
"... This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray. ..."
"... The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on. ..."
"... Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined. ..."
"... The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources. ..."
"... When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States. ..."
The New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no
more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their
pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources
are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don't
know anything about Russia's plans to mess up our November elections because "informants close
to Putin and in the Kremlin" aren't saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for
which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.
A story like that is not designed to "inform the public" since there is no information in
it. It has other purposes: to keep the "Russia is undermining our democracy" story on front
pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage.
The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?
But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the "newpaper of record" on
September 5. (By the way, the "record" is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad
– bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined "I am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administration", signed by nobody.
The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas
Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite
obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.
The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump's
"amorality" – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the
trust of one's superior.
This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing
measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust
military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which
could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model
of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow.
The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which
White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with
Russian and North Korea.
Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and
dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations
with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.)
The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman
service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch
mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing
the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence.
Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as
President.
The Democrats may not like Pence, but they are so demented by hatred of Trump that they are
visibly ready to accept the Devil himself to get rid of the sinister clown who dared defeat
Hillary Clinton. Down with democracy; the votes of deplorables shouldn't count.
That is treacherous enough, but even more despicable is the insidious design to destabilize
the presidency by sowing distrust. Speaking of Trump, Mr and/or Ms Anonymous declare: "The
dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in
his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and
his worst inclinations" (meaning peace with Russia).
This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to
distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington,
Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and
betray.
The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded
by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people
systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick
might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is
much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on.
Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly
matters since they are so closely entwined.
No trick is too low for those who consider Trump an intolerable intruder on THEIR power
territory. The New York Times "news" that Trump is surrounded by traitors is taken up by other
media who indirectly confirm the story by speculating on "who is it?" The Boston Globe (among
others) eagerly rushed in, asking:
"So who's the author of the op-ed? It's a question that has many people poking through the
text, looking for clues. Meanwhile, the denials have come thick and fast. Here's a brief look
at some of the highest-level officials in the administration who might have a motive to write
the letter."
Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone around him? Isn't
that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and which is fallback
grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with nothing more
serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?
The White House insider (or insiders, or whatever) use terms like "erratic behavior" and
"instability" to contribute to the "Trump is insane" narrative. Insanity is the alternative
pretext to the Mueller wild goose chase for divesting Trump of the powers of the presidency. If
Trump responds by accusing the traitors of being traitors, that will be final proof of his
mental instability. The oped claims to provide evidence that Trump is being betrayed, but if he
says so, that will be taken as a sign of mental derangement. To save our exemplary democracy
from itself, the elected president must be thrown out.
The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to
breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on
teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to
blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten
the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States
pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former
Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural
resources.
And when this fails, as it has been failing, and will continue to fail, the United States
has all those brand new first strike nuclear weapons being stationed in European NATO
countries, aimed at the Kremlin. And the Russian military are not just sitting there with their
own nuclear weapons, waiting to be wiped out. When nobody, not even the President of the United
States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form
of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is
what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.
"... Taken together, the two are the equivalent of a stiff left jab followed by a roundhouse right. The president has been left reeling, staring into the political abyss. ..."
"... The president is betrayed, openly, in the pages of America's paper of record and, according to the activist, "the senior people in the [administration] do nothing about it." ..."
"... A report of mine in the National Interest last year relayed the hiring procedures, or lack thereof, of Trump appointees on the campaign and in the administration; prospective employees were rarely asked about their policy preferences. Said Scott McConnell , founding editor of TAC , on Wednesday: "Trump's biggest weakness is lacking knowledge of the policy people who might have helped him with a realist/populist agenda. But he never evinced any interest in finding smart realists to staff his administration." ..."
"... "We're Watching an Antidemocratic Coup Unfold," says David Graham in The Atlantic . "How the 'resistance' in the White House threatens American democracy . ..."
"... There's more than one path to authoritarianism," posits Damon Linker in The Week. ..."
"... But it's also true that Trump openly ran on detente . Should actual voters' preferences just be tossed aside in the name of, as the author suggests, the preservation of democracy? "So let's see: Trump ran on closer relations with Russia," Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on Wednesday night. "Voters agreed with that. And so they elected him president of the United States. And yet, the tiny and incompetent Washington foreign policy establishment -- the very same people who brought you Iraq and Libya -- do not agree with that. So they subvert his views, which are also the views of voters." ..."
The Coup Against TrumpOne of his advisors tells TAC a plot is afoot. How far will
the president go to ensure his political survival?
... ... ...
Donald Trump rose from pariah to president through politics, and now may be on the brink of
being returned by the same means, the result of Bob Woodward's searing testimonial in
Fear and a scathing New York Times op-ed from someone in his own ranks.
Taken together, the two are the equivalent of a stiff left jab followed by a roundhouse
right. The president has been left reeling, staring into the political abyss.
A former senior administration official tells me that Wednesday's
op-ed in the New York Times , by an anonymous senior administration official, is
nothing short of an attempt at a "coup" against Trump himself. A veteran conservative activist
who is close to the White House says the story here is one insiders have been identifying since
the early days of the Trump administration (and that I've reported on
ad nauseum ): personnel.
The president is betrayed, openly, in the pages of America's paper
of record and, according to the activist, "the senior people in the [administration] do nothing
about it."
Something tantamount to a national game of "Clue" is underway. It was Mike Pence, with an
email to the Times , in the Naval Observatory. It was Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr.,
with the phone, in the bathroom of his Moscow apartment. This reporter is loathe to delve into
conjecture, but the author of the op-ed seems clearly to be, first, interested in national
security, and second, a traditional conservative. A preponderance of my sources argue that the
simplest explanation is usually the correct one. "[National Security Advisor John] Bolton would
shock me," a State Department veteran says.
The op-ed author writes: "This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of
the steady state." He (or she) maligns the president as "amoral" and devoid of "first
principles." A veteran watcher of Secretary of Defense James Mattis tells me that "'steady' is
a favorite Mattis word. I think the McCain funeral hit Mattis hard." Yet even if the president
suspected his defense chief, he would be loathe to quickly dispatch him -- and anyway Mattis
may leave on his own after the midterms.
♦♦♦
A case of seismic duplicity -- or needed patriotism, depending on who you talk to -- is, of
course, only half the story.
The other half is one that has been recurrent throughout this administration: the president
and his apparatchiks expended little initial capital on staffing the White House with genuine
loyalists, or true believers. They appointed neither longtime personal friends of the president
nor policy hands faithful to anything resembling a populist-nationalist agenda. News reports
abound of the president's surprising and depressing paucity of genuine friends.
As I relayed last week
in TAC : "A former senior Department of Defense official [being considered] for top
administration positions recalls meeting Jeff Sessions after the election. After hitting it
off, the future AG asked the candidate: ' Where have you been? '"
A report of mine in
the National Interest last year relayed the hiring procedures, or lack thereof, of
Trump appointees on the campaign and in the administration; prospective employees were rarely
asked about their policy preferences. Said Scott McConnell ,
founding editor of TAC , on Wednesday: "Trump's biggest weakness is lacking knowledge of
the policy people who might have helped him with a realist/populist agenda. But he never
evinced any interest in finding smart realists to staff his administration."
The president suggested that the op-ed was perhaps "TREASON?" He routinely conflates
national interest and personal interest, and thus now demands that the Times betray its
source. In doing so, he denigrates a founding ideal of the republic, prepared to erode civic
support for the First Amendment to dull the pain of an atrocious but largely self-inflicted
news cycle.
The personal nature of the president's complaint convulses the persuasive authority of the
arguments against his opposition. Since the publishing of the op-ed, there has been a steady
trickle of concern, particularly among left-liberal writers, about the precedent being set.
"We're Watching an Antidemocratic Coup Unfold," says David Graham in The Atlantic .
"How the 'resistance' in the White House threatens American democracy .There's more
than one path to authoritarianism," posits Damon Linker in The Week.
And indeed there are parts of the op-ed that are cause for genuine concern:
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies
as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks
about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and
he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country
for its malign behavior.
Treating Russia as the adversarial power that it is and proportionately punishing its malign
behavior smacks of sound policy. But it's also true that Trump openly ran on detente
. Should actual voters' preferences just be tossed aside in the name of, as the author
suggests, the preservation of democracy? "So let's see: Trump ran on closer relations with
Russia," Fox News host Tucker Carlson opined on Wednesday night. "Voters agreed with that. And
so they elected him president of the United States. And yet, the tiny and incompetent
Washington foreign policy establishment -- the very same people who brought you Iraq and Libya
-- do not agree with that. So they subvert his views, which are also the views of
voters."
Beyond the substantive criticisms from both sides, of Trump and of his critics, is the
diagnostic nature of the conspiracy -- and it is a conspiracy -- against the president. First
and foremost, Trump, they say, is unwell or unfit. The case for invocation of the 25th
Amendment is being made plainly in the pages of the United States' most-read newspapers.
What's truly remarkable is that, to a certain extent, the U.S. is already functioning as
though the 25th Amendment has been invoked -- at least if the reporting of Bob Woodward, the
premier journalist of his generation, is to be believed. In spring of 2017, after Syrian despot
Bashar al-Assad reportedly murdered citizens in rebel-held territory with chemical weapons,
Trump, according to Woodward, told Defense Secretary Mattis: "Let's f**ing kill him! Let's go
in. Let's kill the f**king lot of them." Mattis replied, "We're not going to do any of that."
(Mattis denies Woodward's accounts.) As the author of the op-ed gloats, this is "is a two-track
presidency. Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is
operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and
punished accordingly."
The debate, then, isn't about policy. It isn't as though Trump is trying to decimate the
civil service, or staff the State Department with "realists" on Russia, or halve legal
immigration. If he leaves office, his legacy will be tax cuts and (likely) two conservative
Supreme Court justices; on policy, it's unlikely that a President Cruz or Rubio would have done
much differently. But the paranoid style that Trump has mainstreamed is, of course, a separate
matter and not a small one. Neither is the fealty, or at least feigned fidelity, to a
populist-nationalism that is now likely a prerequisite to becoming the Republican presidential
nominee for the foreseeable future. That's even though, at their core, the president's
protestations of "treason" and a "deep state" are about personal survival, not the
implementation of a nationalist revolution.
For his supporters, Trump's continued occupancy of the White House is more about cultural
grievance -- a middle finger to a failed establishment -- than about a knock-down, drag-out
fight over real political change.
As Steve Bannon told the Weekly Standard after his ouster last year: "The Trump
presidency that we fought for, and won, is over."
Curt Mills is the foreign affairs reporter at The National Interest, where he covers
the State Department, National Security Council, and the Trump presidency.
Striding to the pulpit, Obama delivered a searing indictment of the man undoing his legacy.
"So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse can seem small and mean and
petty," he said, "trafficking in bombast and insult and phony controversies and manufactured
outrage. It's a politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear."
Speakers praised McCain's willingness to cross party lines, but Democrats took away a new
determination: from here on out, confrontation!
Tuesday morning, as Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Brett Kavanaugh's
nomination to the Supreme Court began, Democrats disrupted the proceedings and demanded
immediate adjournment, as scores of protesters shouted and screamed.
Taking credit for orchestrating the disruption, Senator Dick Durbin boasted, "What we've
heard is the noise of democracy."
But if mob action to shut down a Senate hearing is the noise of democracy, this may explain
why many countries are taking a new look at the authoritarian rulers who can at least deliver a
semblance of order.
Wednesday came leaks in the Washington Post from Bob Woodward's new book,
attributing to Chief of Staff John Kelly and General James Mattis crude remarks on the
president's intelligence, character, and maturity, and describing the Trump White House as a
"crazytown" led by a fifth or sixth grader.
Kelly and Mattis both denied making the comments.
Thursday came an op-ed in the New York Times by an anonymous "senior official"
claiming to be a member of the "resistance working diligently from within to frustrate parts of
his [Trump's] agenda."
A pedestrian piece of prose that revealed nothing about Trump one cannot read or hear daily
in the media, the op-ed nonetheless caused a sensation, but only because Times editors
decided to give the disloyal and seditious Trump aide who wrote it immunity and cover to betray
his or her president.
The transaction served the political objectives of both parties.
While the Woodward book may debut at the top of the New York Times bestseller list,
and "Anonymous," once ferreted out and fired, will have his or her 15 minutes of fame, what
this portends is not good.
For what is afoot here is something America specializes in -- regime change. Only the regime
our establishment and media mean to change is the government of the United States. What is
afoot is the overthrow of America's democratically elected head of state.
The methodology is familiar. After a years-long assault on the White House and president by
a special prosecutor's office, the House takes up impeachment, while a collaborationist press
plays its traditional supporting role.
Presidents are wounded, disabled, or overthrown, and Pulitzers all around.
No one suggests Richard Nixon was without sin in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in.
But no one should delude himself into believing that the overthrow of that president, not two
years after he won the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was not an act of vengeance by a
hate-filled city for offenses it had covered up or brushed under the rug in the Roosevelt,
Kennedy, and Johnson years.
So where are we headed?
If November's elections produce, as many have predicted, a Democratic House, there will be
more investigations of President Trump than any man charged with running the U.S. government
may be able to manage.
There is the Mueller investigation into "Russiagate" that began before Trump was
inaugurated. There is the investigation into his business and private life before he became
president in the Southern District of New York. There is the investigation into the Trump
Foundation by New York State.
There will be investigations by House committees into alleged violations of the Emoluments
Clause. And ever present will be platoons of journalists ready to report on the leaks from all
of these investigations.
Then, if the media coverage can drive Trump's polls low enough, will come the impeachment
investigation and the regurgitation of all that went before.
If Trump has the stamina to hold on, and the Senate remains Republican, he may survive, even
as Democrats divide between a rising militant socialist left and a septuagenarian caucus led by
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Nancy Pelosi.
2019 looks to be the year of bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all.
Entertaining, for sure, but how many more of these coups d'etat can the Republic sustain before
a new generation says enough of all this?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That
Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more about Patrick
Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators
website at www.creators.com.
On NBC's Thursday morning broadcast of the "Today" show, former CIA director John Brennan
repeatedly praised the unknown author of the New York Times's recent anti-Trump op-ed as a
supreme example of "courageous" American patriotism. While admitting that the anonymous writer
was committing "active insubordination" with the piece, Brennan justified his or her actions by
claiming that because Trump is too "unfit" to be President, the writer is admirably trying to
"prevent disasters" in the future.
"I think there are two major takeaways," Brennan told "Today" co-host Savannah Guthrie in
relation to the op-ed. "One is, what the author wrote is wholly consistent with all the reports
that we have seen over the last year, the reports within Bob Woodward's book, and other things
about just how unfit, reckless, irresponsible Donald Trump is. But secondly, it shows the depth
of concern within the administration, within the senior ranks of the administration, about what
is happening and the extraordinary steps that individuals are willing to take, such as this
op-ed, to prevent disasters."
Sara h
Huckabee Sanders has a tiny request: Please stop asking her about that pesky little
New York Times op-ed written by an anonymous White House official.
... ... ...
On Thursday, Sanders tweeted a message addressed to all the people "asking for the identity
of the anonymous coward" (basically, everyone).
The media's wild obsession with the identity of the anonymous coward is recklessly
tarnishing the reputation of thousands of great Americans who
proudly serve our country and work for President Trump. Stop. If you want to know who this
gutless loser is, call the opinion desk of the failing NYT at 212-556-1234, and ask them.
They are the only ones complicit in this deceitful act.
We stand united together and fully support our President Donald J.Trump.
Whoever it was, this "gutless" person seems pretty craven, opportunistic neocon of McCain
flavor. Most neocons are chickenhawks. And there are plenty of neocons in Trump
administration.
It might well be that anonymous "resistance" op-ed in NYT is CIA operation to promote Woodward's book ( Woodward is definitely
connected to CIA from the time of Nixon impeachment)
Notable quotes:
"... You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions ..."
During an interview with Fox and Friends, conducted onstage prior to Trump's rally and set
to air on Friday, the president called the paper's decision to publish the column "very
unfair".
"When somebody writes and you can't discredit because you have no idea who they are,"
Trump said. "It may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state
person that's been there a long time.
It's a very unfair thing, but it's very unfair to our country and to the millions of
people that voted really for us."
Since the editorial was published, the highest-ranking officials in Trump's administration
have come forth to
publicly deny any involvement. Those distancing themselves from the column have included
the vice-president, Mike Pence, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, along with much of
Trump's cabinet. The first lady, Melania Trump, also condemned the author and called on the
individual to come forward.
"You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions," she
wrote.
The editorial was published as the White House was contending with yet another
firestorm.
A book authored by the famed journalist
Bob Woodward , poised for release next week, chronicles the chaos and dysfunction within
the Trump administration.
Excerpts released on Tuesday provided an unflattering portrait of the
president, who was described by aides in disparaging terms that included being likened to a
schoolchild.
Most probably this anonymous official does not exist and this is Iago style disinformation operation by the NYT to saw
discord in trump administration.
Notable quotes:
"... Does the so-called "Senior Administration Official" really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? ..."
Meanwhile, First Lady Melania Trump said: "If a person is bold enough to accuse people of negative actions, they have a responsibility
to publicly stand by their words."
Why does it matter?
The White House is already on the defensive amid questions over Mr Trump's suitability for office raised in a book by revered
political journalist Bob Woodward.
Fear: Trump in the White House also describes staff deliberately undermining the president, with some hiding sensitive documents
from him to prevent him signing them, and other aides calling him an "idiot" and a "liar". Mr Trump has called the book a "con".
Image deleted (copyright REUTERS) Image caption Bob Woodward is one of the most respected journalists in the US
One of the most explosive passages in the New York Times article says there were "early whispers within the cabinet of invoking
the 25th Amendment", which would allow Mr Trump to be forced out of office.
"What the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil," he wrote. "He or
she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president's willfulness."
So much puzzles me about Mr/Ms Anon in @ nytimes - if you really
think best interests of state are served working covertly inside to thwart president, why blurt out what you're doing? Aren't
you making @ realDonaldTrump case of a
# DeepState ? Surely resign or keep schtum?
Donald J. Trump✔ @realDonaldTrump
Does the so-called "Senior Administration Official" really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another
phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her
over to government at once! 2:54 AM
- Sep 6, 2018
End of Twitter post by @BBCJonSopel
A former CIA director, John Brennan, who has been strongly critical of Mr Trump, called the article "active insubordination" although
he said it was "born out of loyalty to the country".
"... When the center does fail to hold, it is usually in periods of political and perhaps also social upheaval. In those conditions, centrist parties, along with the constituencies they represent, often radicalize – generally merging into the side that wins the day. ..."
"... The jury is still out on how effective Trump's verbal assaults on the institutions that regulate global trade will be. No matter what Trump says, tweets, or thinks, those institutions were fashioned to work to America's advantage, and still generally do. Evidently, though, they do not conform well enough to his or his base's understanding of American "greatness"; thus they have become imperiled. ..."
"... It wasn't always so, but nowadays, almost without exception, Democrats occupy left or center positions on that spectrum; Republicans line up on its right. In a relational sense, the center is replete with Democrats; the left not so much. Centrist Republicans, long a vanishing breed, are, by now, as rare as snowstorms in July. ..."
"... In this respect, the United States is an exceptional case. There are few, if any, liberal democratic regimes in modern capitalist states in which notionally leftwing political forces have played such a negligible role. ..."
"... s was evident in the Clinton campaign's efforts to fight back the Sanders insurgency in 2016, it has forged robust political machines in the process. Their ability to mobilize voters on behalf of mainstream Democratic candidates has been disappointing however; what they have been mainly good at is tamping down radical dissent. ..."
"... Thus conditions are now in place for a revival of Left politics at the electoral level. This frightens the party's leaders. They and the pundits who serve them speak of unity. But is plain as can be that they are determined to quash whatever they cannot turn to their own advantage. Corporate media's role in this endeavor is crucial. They are already hard at work – pushing the all-too-familiar line that the way to win, especially in "red" states and districts, is to occupy the (relational) center. ..."
"... That center in today's Democratic Party is a dead center; it is where progressive impulses go to die. And, like a vampire on a mission, that dead center is gearing up for a fight – against those who would challenge the Democratic Party from the left. Witness the weeklong spectacle that accompanied the departure of John McCain from the land of the living. What a nauseating display of veneration for a man supremely unworthy, and of nostalgia for the good old (actually bad old) pre-Trump days! ..."
When the center does fail to hold, it is usually in periods of political and perhaps
also social upheaval. In those conditions, centrist parties, along with the constituencies they
represent, often radicalize – generally merging into the side that wins the day.
Thus it is mainly in situations in which the regime itself is undergoing fundamental
transformations that the center is depleted of its former occupants. In time, though, a new
mainstream is constituted, and its center again becomes the point on the left/right continuum
where the majority of positions and policies in play at the time cluster.
***
To everyone living through it, it feels as if the Trump presidency has turned the political
scene topsy-turvy. This is what happens when there is an imbecilic president whose governing
style is a low-grade imitation of a mob boss's.
The fact is, though, that the Trump presidency, destructive as it has been, has changed a
good deal less than meets the eye. The foundations of the regime remain the same as before;
fundamental neoliberal economic structures remain intact, and the perpetual war regime that
went into overdrive after 9/11 continues to flourish.
The jury is still out on how effective Trump's verbal assaults on the institutions that
regulate global trade will be. No matter what Trump says, tweets, or thinks, those institutions
were fashioned to work to America's advantage, and still generally do. Evidently, though, they
do not conform well enough to his or his base's understanding of American "greatness"; thus
they have become imperiled.
What is disturbingly clear is that for all but the filthy rich, and especially for anyone
not white as the driven snow, life in Trump's America has taken a turn for the worse.
Trump has been a godsend for "white nationalists," the current euphemism for nativists and
racists. He has legitimated them and their views to an extent that no one would have imagined
just a few years ago.
Also, to the detriment of the health and well being of the vast majority of Americans, Trump
and his minions have done serious harm to America's feeble welfare state institutions.
And even this is not the main reason why there will be hell to pay when the next economic
downturn happens, as it inevitably will, more likely sooner than later. By giving Wall Street
free rein again, and by cutting taxes for the rich, depleting the treasury of financial
resources that could be put to use in a crisis, Trump has all but guaranteed that most
Americans will soon find themselves in straits as bad or worse than ten years ago.
Worst of all, by watering down or setting aside the weak but nevertheless indispensible
environmental regulations in place before their arrival on the scene, Trump has hastened the
day when the world will be hit with, and perhaps be undone by, grave, possibly irreparable,
ecological catastrophes.
There are many other lesser harms for which, directly or indirectly, Trump is responsible.
This is all serious stuff, but while they make life worse for many people and shift the
political spectrum to the right, they do not shake the foundations of the regime in a way that
puts the center in jeopardy -- at least not yet.
In short, what we are living through is not a Trumpian "revolution," not even in the "Reagan
Revolution" sense, but a degeneration of much of what is worth preserving in the old regime.
Trump didn't start the process, but he has come to dominate it, and his mindless and mean
spirited antics accelerate it.
***
If "left," "right," and "center" are understood in relational terms, American politics
plainly does have a left, right, and center. These designations overlay the deeply entrenched,
semi-established duopoly party system that structures the American political scene.
It wasn't always so, but nowadays, almost without exception, Democrats occupy left or
center positions on that spectrum; Republicans line up on its right. In a relational sense, the
center is replete with Democrats; the left not so much. Centrist Republicans, long a vanishing
breed, are, by now, as rare as snowstorms in July.
Understood notionally, where "left," "right," and "center" designate positions on an
historically evolving, widely understood, ideal political spectrum, the situation is much the
same, but with a major difference: there is hardly any left at all.
There have always been plenty of (notional) leftists in the United States, but there has
never been much of an intersection between the left of the political spectrum, understood
relationally, and anything resembling a notional Left.
In this respect, the United States is an exceptional case. There are few, if any,
liberal democratic regimes in modern capitalist states in which notionally leftwing political
forces have played such a negligible role.
This unfortunate state of affairs has become worse in recent decades under the aegis of
(notionally) center-right Democrats like the Clintons and their co-thinkers. Thanks to them,
the Democratic Party today is a (notionally) centrist party through and through.
They succeeded as well as they did partly because our party system stifles progressive
politics more effectively than it is stifled in other ways in other liberal democracies.
The duopoly is still going strong, but, even so, times change. Largely thanks to Trump,
there are now inklings of a notional Left in formation that stands a chance of avoiding
marginalization.
Thus Democrats all along the (relational) spectrum now consider themselves embattled,
challenged from the Left by anti-Trump militants. Many of the challengers come from
under-represented, Democratic-leaning constituencies – the young, women, and "persons of
color" – with traditionally low levels of political participation. In view of the
abundant, well meaning but generally toothless "diversity" blather for which Democrats are
notorious, this is delightfully ironic.
The challengers include African Americans, of course, but also people drawn from sectors of
the population that Trump has targeted and demeaned with particular malice -- Hispanics and
Muslims especially.
The Democratic Party has been actively courting – and colonizing – African
American and other subaltern constituencies for a long time. A s was evident in the Clinton
campaign's efforts to fight back the Sanders insurgency in 2016, it has forged robust political
machines in the process. Their ability to mobilize voters on behalf of mainstream Democratic
candidates has been disappointing however; what they have been mainly good at is tamping down
radical dissent.
But because race and ethnicity intersect with age and gender – and because, in the
final analysis, "it's the politics, stupid" -- many of the African Americans, Hispanics,
Muslims and others now being drawn into the electoral fold will likely not be as amenable to
being coopted by Democratic Party grandees as persons who "look like them" have been in the
past. The danger of cooptation remains formidable, but it is almost certainly surmountable if
the will to resist the pressure is strong.
Thus conditions are now in place for a revival of Left politics at the electoral level.
This frightens the party's leaders. They and the pundits who serve them speak of unity. But is
plain as can be that they are determined to quash whatever they cannot turn to their own
advantage. Corporate media's role in this endeavor is crucial. They are already hard at work
– pushing the all-too-familiar line that the way to win, especially in "red" states and
districts, is to occupy the (relational) center.
In this context, "red," of course, doesn't mean red; it means almost the opposite,
Republican. Only in America!
... ... ...
What passes for a "resistance" in liberal or "democratic socialist" circles nowadays is a
pale approximation of the genuine article. This is not just because the spirit of rebellion has
been bred out of us or because of any failure of imagination; it is because in the
circumstances that currently obtain, resistance, like "revolution," even in the anodyne "Our
Revolution" sense, just isn't on the agenda.
But there is something now that can and should be resisted by any and all appropriate means
– the illusion that the way to defeat Trump and Trumpism and, more generally, to advance
progressive causes, is to tack to the relational center.
That center in today's Democratic Party is a dead center; it is where progressive
impulses go to die. And, like a vampire on a mission, that dead center is gearing up for a
fight – against those who would challenge the Democratic Party from the left. Witness the
weeklong spectacle that accompanied the departure of John McCain from the land of the living.
What a nauseating display of veneration for a man supremely unworthy, and of nostalgia for the
good old (actually bad old) pre-Trump days!
How pathetic! The whole country's, not just the Democratic Party's, left, right, and center
– minus Donald Trump, of course -- heaping praise on a Navy pilot who, heeding McCain
family traditions and the call of Lyndon Johnson, killed a lot of Vietnamese peasants for no
defensible reason, before becoming a "hero" after the Vietnamese shot his plane down, and who,
after repatriation, embarked on a legislative career in which, despite a few "maverick"
exceptions, he promoted every retrograde Republican cause that arose, war mongered vociferously
at every opportunity, and did all he could, even before Hillary Clinton took a notion, to get
the Cold War revved up again.
They were all there, every rotten one of them -- from Barack Obama and Joe Biden and, their
brother-in-arms, George W. Bush, the man who, but for Trump, could now boast of being the worst
president in modern times, all the way to the decrepit Henry Kissinger, the never to be
indicted war criminal whom liberals have learned to stop loathing and to call upon for advice
instead.
Even that malevolent airhead couple Jarvanka showed up, invited, it seems, by Senator
Lindsey Graham, McCain's hapless sidekick. This was no popular front. It was a festival of the
dead Center, a blight on the political landscape, and, with Trump sucking up all the air, a
harbinger of things to come.
(theverge.com)Sanders' Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act
(abbreviated "Stop BEZOS") -- along with Khanna's House of Representatives counterpart, the
Corporate Responsibility and Taxpayer Protection Act --
would institute a 100 percent tax on government benefits that are granted to workers at large
companies . The bill's text characterizes this as a "corporate welfare tax," and it would
apply to corporations with 500 or more employees. If
workers are receiving government aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), national school lunch and breakfast programs, Section 8
housing subsidies, or Medicaid, employers will be taxed for the total cost of those benefits.
The bill applies to full-time and part-time employees, as well as independent contractors that
are de facto company employees.
"... No doctor that has examined him says he is insane. All that's presented are third-party anonymous accusations of incompetence shot through with gossip. A book written by a Hollywood trash reporter is otherwise held up as critical evidence of the inner workings of the president's mind. ..."
"... We might instead look at the actual decisions Trump has made, and those of his predecessors. One president used nuclear weapons to decimate two cities' worth of innocents , and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of American lives washing Vietnam with blood. Ronald Reagan was famously caught on an open mic saying he was going to start bombing the Soviet Union in the next few minutes. Another president spread false information about WMDs to launch an invasion of Iraq and mocked North Korea's leader as a pygmy. Obama said he "will not hesitate to use our military might" against the North, knowing that meant Armageddon. Historical psychiatrists say half of our past presidents may have suffered from some sort of mental illness. If Trump is dangerous as president, he would seem to have company. ..."
"... In the minds of the "Trump is Insane" crowd what matters most is that never-used fourth subsection, the incapacitation clause. People claim because Trump is insane he is unable to carry out his duties, and so Mike Pence, et al, must step in and transfer power away from him. Trump would legally exist in the same status as Grandpa Simpson in the nursing home, and Pence would take over. Among other problems, this imagines that the 25th Amendment's legally specific term "unable" means the same thing as "unfit." An unconscious man is unable to drive. A man who forgot his glasses is unfit, but still able, to drive. The 25th Amendment only refers to the first case. ..."
The media chatterati seems to be of one mind: Donald Trump is mentally incompetent and may
have to be removed from office before he blows us all to hell.
The solution, to their minds, lies in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which creates
a mechanism outside of impeachment to remove an "incapacitated" president. Trump's mental
state, some believe, qualifies him. Is there a case?
Dr. Bandy Lee , one of the
editors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump ,
says yes. Her evidence includes tweets that Trump sent threatening Kim Jong-un. She really
has no other ammunition: no doctor who says Trump is insane, including Lee, has examined him.
No doctor that has examined him says he is insane. All that's presented are third-party
anonymous
accusations of incompetence shot through with gossip. A book written by a Hollywood trash
reporter is otherwise held up as critical
evidence of the inner workings of the president's mind.
So is there a case without the tweets? Not really. Lee
adds that while Trump has not committed violent acts against himself or others, his "verbal
aggressiveness, history of boasting about sexual assault, history of inciting violence at his
rallies, and history of endorsing violence in his key public speeches are the best predictors
of future violence," and thus concludes he will destroy the world. Lee also weakly
points to Trump "being drawn to violent videos." Oh my.
We might instead look at the actual decisions Trump has made, and those of his predecessors.
One president used nuclear weapons to decimate two
cities' worth of innocents , and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of
American lives washing Vietnam with blood. Ronald Reagan was famously caught on an open mic
saying he was going to start bombing the Soviet Union in the next few minutes. Another
president spread false information about WMDs to launch an invasion of Iraq and mocked North
Korea's leader as a pygmy. Obama said he
"will not hesitate to use our military might" against the North, knowing that meant Armageddon.
Historical psychiatrists say
half of our past presidents may have suffered from some sort of mental illness. If Trump is
dangerous as president, he would seem to have company.
But how can we know? Trump will never voluntarily undergo a mental competency exam, though
courts can order people to submit. But even Lee, who met with congressional representatives to
press the case that Trump is insane, admits this is unlikely to happen. "Many lawyer groups
have actually volunteered to file for a court paper to ensure that the security staff will
cooperate with us," Lee
said . "But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are
trying to prevent violence, we don't wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection."
Still, those arguing Trump is insane and must be removed from office will point to the 25th
Amendment as just what the doctor ordered.
The framers did not originally include rules for what happens if a president dies or becomes
incapacitated. It was just assumed the vice president would serve as "Acting President." The
25th Amendment, passed after the Kennedy
assassination , created the first set of protocols for this sort of situation.
The amendment has four short
subsections. If the presidency goes vacant (for example, after a fatal heart attack), the vice
president becomes president. If the vice presidency goes vacant, the president chooses a new
VP. If the president knows he'll be incapacitated (due to scheduled surgery, for example), he
can voluntarily and temporarily assign his duties to the vice president. If the president is
truly incapacitated (unconscious after an assassination attempt) and can't voluntarily assign
away his duties, the VP and cabinet can do it for him, with a two-thirds majority confirming
vote of the House and Senate.
In the minds of the "Trump is Insane" crowd what matters most is that never-used fourth
subsection, the incapacitation clause. People claim because Trump is insane he is unable to
carry out his duties, and so Mike Pence, et al, must step in and transfer power away from him.
Trump would legally exist in the same status as Grandpa Simpson in the nursing home,
and Pence would take over. Among other problems, this imagines that the 25th Amendment's
legally specific term "unable" means the same thing as "unfit." An unconscious man is unable to
drive. A man who forgot his glasses is unfit, but still able, to drive. The 25th Amendment only
refers to the first case.
The use of the 25th Amendment to dethrone Trump is the kind of thing non-experts with too
much Google time can convince themselves is true. But unlike much of the Constitution, where
understanding original intent requires the Supreme Court and a close reading of the Federalist
Papers, the 25th Amendment is modern legislation. We know the drafters' intent
was an administrative
procedure, not a political thunderbolt. The 25th Amendment premises that the president will
almost always invoke succession himself, either by dying in office or by anticipating that he
will be unable to discharge his duties, as in 2007 when George W. Bush went under anesthesia
for his annual colonoscopy and signed things over to his vice president for a few hours.
The reason the 25th Amendment is not intended to be used adversarially is the Constitution
already specifies impeachment as the way to force an unfit president out against his
will, his unfitness specifically a result of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The people who
wrote the 25th Amendment did not intend it to be an alternate method of impeachment or a
do-over for an election.
The Constitution at its core grants ultimate power to the people to decide, deliberately,
not in panic, every four years, who is president. Anything otherwise would mean the drafters of
the 25th Amendment wrote a backdoor into the Constitution that would allow a group of
government officials, many of whom in the Cabinet were elected by nobody, to overthrow an
elected president who they simply think has turned out to be bad at his job.
Accusations of mental illness are subjective, unprovable in this case, and alarmist --
perfect fodder to displace the grinding technicalities of Russiagate. Denouncing one's
political opponents as crazy was a tried-and-true Soviet and Maoist tactic, and a movie trope
where the youngsters try to get the patriarch shut away to grab his fortune. We fear the
mentally ill, and psychiatric name calling against Trump invokes that fear
. "The 25th Amendment would require, for mental incapacity, a major psychotic break,"
said one former Harvard Law School professor. "This is hope over reality. If we don't like
someone's politics we rail against him, we campaign against him, we don't use the psychiatric
system against him. That's just dangerous."
Trump's time in office is finite, but what happens around him will outlast his tenure. It is
dangerous to mess with the very fundamentals of our democracy, where the people choose the
president and then replace him with a cabal called into session by pop psychologists. This is
an attack on the process at its roots: you yokels voted for the wrong guy so somebody smarter
has to clean up.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the
Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. Follow him on Twitter@WeMeantWell.
Judging by the fact that he's still the only president after the end of the Cold War who
hasn't yet dragged the country into any new costly and unnecessary war, it indeed must be
that either he's a genius or his predecessors are mentally challenged. Your choice.
" . . . and a set of presidents squandered hundreds of thousands of American lives washing
Vietnam with blood."
Total US losses in the Vietnam War/conflict: 58,300
It is sad that plans were made to remove the Pres. even before he was elected. It has been
the use of a special prosecutor has certainly been a factor
in damaging our republics democracy.
I remember hearing a reporter comment upon Obama and Bush meeting on inauguration day that
the "Peaceful transition of power is what makes our Democracy great." Now 8 years later those
same people are saying we need to oust the Democratically elected candidate. The danger here
is not against the offices of our government but against the press itself. As the media
continues down this path they paint themselves as lunatics, hypocrites and partisans. I think
our institutions will survive this and much worse. But I don't think the media as we know it
will. Trust is at an all time low in most all of the media outlets. The question that needs
to be asked is will our Democracy survive the death of the press and what if anything will
replace what used to be called investigative and informative journalism?
There's a NeverTrump and Resistance checklist that's being worked through, and this was the
next gambit if Russiagate failed, which was the gambit if the Electoral College revolt didn't
work The next in line will be something along the arc of a politicized MeToo They're making a
list, and they're checking it twice
There's a NeverTrump and Resistance checklist that's predictably being worked through, and
this was the next gambit if Russiagate failed, which was the gambit if the Electoral College
revolt didn't work The next in line will be something along the arc of a politicized MeToo
They're making a list, and they're checking it twice
Reading this only serves as a reminder that the ones whom we really need to fear are the
masses of the great Unwashed Elite (Vox, CNN, etc.), not Trump.
Slightly off topic, but "the youngsters try to get the patriarch shut away to grab his
fortune" is, sadly, no movie trope; my family is living it right now. Trying to right this
outrageous wrong on behalf of the forcibly shut-away patriarch is costing us non-grabby
siblings tens of thousands of dollars in legal and court fees. Justice has a crippling price
in modern America and those who can't pay don't get much justice.
In East Germany, Stasi leader Markus Wolfe took things a step further with the "zersetzung"
tactic.
The idea was to *induce* a "personal crisis" through clandestine harassment, including at
the hands of acquaintances secretly recruited by the Stasi.
In other words, while the Frankfort School was content to merely *label* their opponents
mentally ill ("Authoritarian Personality", "Paranoid Style", etc.), Markus Wolfe was actively
trying to cause *real* mental illness by relentlessly gaslighting selected individual
dissidents until they cracked.
How many centuries will it take for the reputation of the mental health profession to
recover from their association with various repressive left-wing regimes and
pseudo-scientists such as the Freudians and the Frankfurt School?
HRC warned us of all the dumb white male deplorable's , as being a major threat. Wonder where
the pop psychologist have these Americans slotted, possibly not allowed to vote ?
What's insane is that a married FBI agent and an FBI lawyer hooked up and conspired to bring
down a President, yet both still work for the FBI! That's really insane.
It's just silliness re. Mr Trump. He's perfectly sane.
We had a former governor- whom I actually admire- but his behavior was authentically erratic.
If Pres. Trump ever acts even half this way, then we should take a serious look at his mental
health 🙂 :
" Long spent ninety minutes ranting and lashing out against his opponents. Spotting
Rainach in the crowd, Long launched into the salacious details of the murder of Rainach's
uncle, killed by a black man who had caught him in bed with the man's wife. In one of Long's
most famous remarks, he told the crowd, "After all this is over [Rainach will] probably go up
there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at
the moon, and get close to God." Pointing and shouting at Rainach, he continued, "And when
you do, you got to recognize that n**gers is human beings!" When he concluded his tirade,
Earl was rushed to the governor's mansion and locked in a bedroom where he grew violent. At
one point, he stood in the smashed bedroom window shouting, "Murder!"
Concerned about his mental health, Long's family had him institutionalized in Texas before
transferring him to the Louisiana State Hospital in Mandeville. With the assistance of his
subordinates, however, Long won release from the asylum, firing the director in the process,
and proceeded on an interstate buying spree trailed by national press agents. Many have
speculated on the cause of Long's apparent breakdown, with at least one biographer convinced
the politician suffered from bipolar disorder. Others speculate that Long's all-night
escapades in New Orleans, including dalliances with dancer Blaze Starr, coupled with the
regular ingestion of large amounts of alcohol and the powerful stimulants Dexedrine
undermined Long's perception of reality. Regardless of the cause, it was clear to many,
including the national press, that Long needed an extended vacation."
If one day Trump wakes up and decides it's a good day to launch nuclear missiles at some
country because their leader said disparaging remarks against him, then the 25th should be
invoked. But not before then.
One of the hallmarks of mental illness is that a person's personality or behavior change and
people close to them that love them are most alarmed by it and want them to get treated. None
of this holds in Trump's case. His behavior is the same as it's always been, which is what
people voted on. And the ones trying to use it are his enemies which don't care about
treatment, but simply as a machination to depose him.
The author has made several errors. He assumes that discussing the possibility of a
psychiatric disorder making Trump unfit means proving insanity. In reality, the most likely
disorder does not meet the legal definition of insanity, but does make a person incapable of
competently or faithfully performing the duties of office.
The suggestion that this is some type of superficial soviet style political maneuver
ignores the fact that good diagnosis is done nowadays based to a large extent on observed
behavior, history, and the reports of third parties. This is especially important when the
individual shows signs of being a pathological liar. In these cases, information gained in a
face-to-face interview may be virtually useless.
The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder
with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and
symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
Dishonesty and fraudulence
Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
Lack of concern for one's limitations
Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
Disregard for -- and failure to honor–financial and other obligations or
commitments
No one imagined that someone with this possible disorder would ever make it to the White
House, however, the 25th Amendment provides an avenue for him to temporarily be removed from
power while he can undergo proper evaluation by military psychiatrists and neurologists. This
is all mental health professionals are requesting. These individuals can do tremendous damage
when give power over others.
"The condition that Mr. Trump should be assessed for is Antisocial Personality Disorder
with Psychopathic Features. (Alternative PDOs in DSM-5, pg. 761-765 Some of the signs and
symptoms which make such a person unfit for office include-
Dishonesty and fraudulence
Embellishment or fabrication when relating events
Anger or irritability in response to minor slights and insults
Mean, nasty, or vengeful behavior
Boredom proneness and thoughtless initiation of activities to counter boredom
Lack of concern for one's limitations
Acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli
Acting on a momentary basis without a plan or consideration of outcomes
Disregard for -- and failure to honor–financial and other obligations or
commitments "
An Orwellian comment like the above just proves the point of the article, and then some.
As if there isn't anyone in the world who couldn't be shoehorned to fit such a diagnoses,
with a crafty narrative reconfiguring of their actions.
If there are indeed any witch doctors (excuse me, "psychiatrists") pathologizing people on
the basis of a laughable list like the above, then I consider them to be far more undeserving
of the power they have, and far more toxic to society, than Trump in any of the actions or
utterances that he has made.
Susan Dawkins, who claims my article has mistakes, didn't read it. Her amateur diagnosis that
Trump has "Antisocial Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features" does not make him
UNABLE to be president, which is what the 25th Amendment is for.
She claims he is UNFIT. Fitness is judged primarily by the people, who elected him. If a
president somehow becomes unfit while in office it must be because of "high crimes and
misdemeanors." That's the only reason the Constitution provides for. And impeachment is the
only answer.
Sorry kiddies, the 25th is a not-over for an election Rachael Maddow doesn't like.
This is all mental health professionals are requesting."
"All"? That's rich.
Indeed, is that all that they're requesting? My goodness -- what a modest
request! -- a request merely to have complete veto power over America's entire citizenry, in
terms of who is allowed to be President; a request merely to be able to remove any President
who is not to their liking.
In short, a mere request to be able to legally perform a coup d'etat at will, to overturn
any election that does not yield their desired result.
How gratified we all should be that their request for power is such a small one. Imagine
if they asked for something just a bit more ambitious. "Omnipotence" comes to mind.
Trump is the one who messes with the very fundamentals of our democracy. Remember his voting
commission and the crap they wanted? Force states to provide all the 2016 voter information
to his CosaNostra buddies. And remember when they wanted all Americans to fill out a
registration form similar to the one used when purchasing a gun? They said they wanted to
make sure only those qualified were on the voter registration lists.
Trrump's as sane as any other 71 year old man-baby.
Obviously saner and infinitely more mature than a 70 year old woman-baby, who wrecked a
havoc all over the Middle East, was laughing like a bloodthirsty child when watching an old
man's violent death in the hands of a barbaric crowd as one of the results of that havoc and
then, out of a sheer infantile negligence, caused an American ambassadors similarly violent
death in the hands of likely the same crowd as another result of the same havoc.
***
Susan Dawkins,
So, you claim that something that something that doesn't meet the legal definition of
insanity is somehow a basis to invoke a legal mechanism that would require someone to be
legally defined as insane ? How pathetic. Do you know that this mere writing of yours
can be a sign of at least three mental disorders, assuming it was written in good faith and
not as an umpteenth attempt of a comically maladroit political hackery? Note that I have
certain knowledge in psychiatry and can highlight the signs of these disorders step by step,
not by hysterical shrilling "I'm an MD, you philistines", which can be a sign of yet another
mental disorder.
Though the most comical part of your hackery is that every point of your list meant to
"describe" Trump perfectly fits Hillary Clinton. You should try better. Seriously. You have
just shown that your knowledge of psychiatry is abysmal, no matter the degrees you
might have.
Ultimately to the leftists everybody is mentally ill because they don't understand the
necessities of history and they don't possess "secret" knowledge.
Susan Dawkins, that list of symptoms reminds me of most all of the people that run for
political office or spend a majority of their lives up on the hill. I immediately thought of
several people on both the left and the right. Let's see how HIllary does:
1&2: embellished/lied in saying she was personally shot at by a sniper in Bosnia?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1582795/Hillary-Clintons-Bosnia-sniper-story-exposed.html
. Might I add that she said this while other Americans were on battlefields half a world away
actually getting shot at.
3&4: Calling American Citizens deplorable 5&6&8: Voted for Iraq, pushed for
action in Libya.
Hmm, I guess there is a reason voters didn't pick her.
What matters in this narrative is not law, not ethics or sanity, not anything else but
power.
If those who want Trump removed will have the power to do so, they will do so. Whatever
law is invoked will merely be an excuse, a cover story, if you will.
"The suggestion that this is some type of superficial soviet style political maneuver ignores
the fact that good diagnosis is done nowadays based to a large extent on observed behavior,
history, and the reports of third parties. This is especially important when the individual
shows signs of being a pathological liar. In these cases, information gained in a
face-to-face interview may be virtually useless."
So what happens when the third parties or the psychiatrist in question are pathological
liars? Would a face-to-face interview help in that case?
Looks like this Iago-style false flag operation by NYT: the anonymous author does not exists and the the plot is to saw
discord and mutual suspicion
Notable quotes:
"... The more I study US politics, the less useful I find it to think of it in political terms. The two-headed one party system exists to give Americans the illusion of choice while advancing the agendas of the plutocratic class which owns and operates both parties, yes, but even more importantly it's a mechanism of narrative control. ..."
"... If you belonged to a ruling class, obviously your goal would be to ensure your subjects' continued support for you. In a corporatist oligarchy, the rulers are secret and the subjects don't know they're ruled, and power is held in place with manipulation and with money. As such a ruler your goal would be to find a way to manipulate the masses into supporting your agendas, and, since people are different, you'd need to use different narratives to manipulate them. You'd have to divide them, tell them different stories, turn them against each other, play them off one another, suck them in to the tales you are spinning with the theater of enmity and heroism. ..."
"... As a result of the New York Times op-ed, if this administration engages in yet another of its many, many establishment capitulations (let's say by attacking the Syrian government again ), Trump's supporters won't see it as his fault; it will be blamed on the deep state insiders in his administration who have been working to thwart his agendas of peace and harmony. ..."
"... Would a billionaire WWE Hall of Famer and United States President understand the theater of staged conflict for the advancement of plutocratic interests, and willingly participate in it? I'm going to say probably. ..."
If any evidence existed to be found that Donald Trump had illegally colluded with the
Russian government to rig the 2016 presidential election, that evidence would have been picked
up by the sprawling surveillance networks of the US and its allies and leaked to the Washington
Post before Obama left office.
Russiagate is like a mirage. From a distance it looks like a solid, tangible thing, but when
you actually move in to examine it critically you find nothing but gaping plot holes,
insinuation, innuendo, conflicting narratives, bizarre mental contortions to avoid
acknowledging contradictory information, a few arrests for corruption and process crimes, and a
lot of hot air. The whole thing has been held together by nothing but the confident-sounding
assertions of pundits and politicians and sheer, mindless repetition. And, as we approach the
two year mark since this president's election, we have not seen one iota of movement toward
removing him from office. The whole thing's a lie, and the smart movers and shakers behind it
are aware that it is a lie.
And yet they keep beating on it. Day after day after day after day it's been Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia. Instead of attacking this president for his many, many real problems in a way
that will do actual damage, they attack this fake blow-up doll standing next to him in a way
that never goes anywhere and never will, like a pro wrestler theatrically stomping on the
canvass next to his downed foe.
What's up with that?
... ... ....
As you doubtless already know by now, the New York Times has made the wildly controversial
decision to publish an anonymous op-ed
reportedly authored by "a senior official in the Trump administration." The op-ed's author
claims to be part of a secret coalition of patriots who dislike Trump and are "working
diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." These
"worst inclinations" according to the author include trying to make peace with Moscow and
Pyongyang, being rude to longtime US allies, saying mean things about the media, being
"anti-trade", and being "erratic". The possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment is briefly
mentioned but dismissed. The final paragraphs are spent gushing about John McCain for no
apparent reason.
I strongly encourage you to read the piece in its entirety, because for all the talk and
drama it's generating, it doesn't actually make any sense. While you are reading it, I
encourage you to keep the following question in mind: what could anyone possibly gain by
authoring this and giving it to the New York Times ?
Seriously, what could be gained? The op-ed says essentially nothing, other than to tell
readers to relax and trust in anonymous administration insiders who are working against the bad
guys on behalf of the people (which is interestingly the exact same message of the right-wing
8chan conspiracy phenomenon QAnon, just with the white hats and black hats reversed). Why would
any senior official risk everything to publish something so utterly pointless? Why risk getting
fired (or risk losing all political currency in the party if NYTAnon is Mike Pence, as
has been
theorized ) just to communicate something to the public that doesn't change or accomplish
anything? Why publicly announce your undercover conspiracy to undermine the president in a
major news outlet at all?
What are the results of this viral op-ed everyone's talking about? So far it's a bunch of
Democratic partisans making a lot of excited whooping noises, and Trump loyalists feeling
completely vindicated in the belief that all of their conspiracy theories have been proven
correct. Many rank-and-file Trump haters are feeling a little more relaxed and complacent
knowing that there are a bunch of McCain-loving "adults in the room" taking care of everything,
and many rank-and-file Trump supporters are more convinced than ever that Donald Trump is a
brave populist hero leading a covert 4-D chess insurgency against the Deep State. In other
words, everyone's been herded into their respective partisan stables and trusting the
narratives that they are being fed there.
And, well, I just think that's odd.
Did you know that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame ? He was inducted
in 2013, and he's been enthusiastically involved in pro wrestling for many years, both as a fan
and as a performer .
He's made more of a study on how to draw a crowd in to the theatrics of a choreographed fight
scene than anyone this side of the McMahon family (a member of whom happens to be part of the Trump
administration currently).
You don't have to get into any deep conspiratorial rabbit hole to consider the possibility
that all this drama and conflict is staged from top to bottom. Commentators on all sides
routinely crack jokes about how the mainstream media pretends to attack Trump but secretly
loves him because he brings them amazing ratings. Anyone with their eyes even part way open
already knows that America's two mainstream parties feign intense hatred for one another while
working together to pace their respective bases into accepting more and more neoliberal
exploitation at home and more and more neoconservative bloodshed abroad. They spit and snarl
and shake their fists at each other, then cuddle up and share candy
when it's time for a public gathering. Why should this administration be any different?
I believe that a senior Trump administration official probably did write that anonymous
op-ed. I do not believe that they were moved to write it out of compassion for the poor
Americans who are feeling emotionally stressed about the president. I believe it was written
and published for the same reason many other things are written and published in mainstream
media: because we are all being played.
The more I study US politics, the less useful I find it to think of it in political terms.
The two-headed one party system exists to give Americans the illusion of choice while advancing
the agendas of the plutocratic class which owns and operates both parties, yes, but even more
importantly it's a mechanism of narrative control. If you can separate the masses into two
groups based on extremely broad ideological characteristics, you can then funnel streamlined
"us vs them" narratives into each of the two stables, with the white hats and black hats
reversed in each case. Now you've got Republicans cheering for the president and Democrats
cheering for the CIA, for the FBI, and now for a platoon of covert John McCains alleged to be
operating on the inside of Trump's own administration. Everyone's cheering for one aspect of
the US power establishment or another.
If you belonged to a ruling class, obviously your goal would be to ensure your subjects'
continued support for you. In a corporatist oligarchy, the rulers are secret and the subjects don't
know they're ruled, and power is held in place with manipulation and with money. As such a
ruler your goal would be to find a way to manipulate the masses into supporting your agendas,
and, since people are different, you'd need to use different narratives to manipulate them.
You'd have to divide them, tell them different stories, turn them against each other, play them
off one another, suck them in to the tales you are spinning with the theater of enmity and
heroism.
As a result of the New York Times op-ed, if this administration engages in yet another of
its many, many establishment capitulations (let's say by
attacking the Syrian government again ), Trump's supporters won't see it as his fault; it
will be blamed on the deep state insiders in his administration who have been working to thwart
his agendas of peace and harmony. Meanwhile those who see Trump as a heel won't experience any
cognitive dissonance if any of the establishment agendas they support are carried out, because
they can give the credit to the secret hero squad in the White House.
Would a billionaire WWE Hall of Famer and United States President understand the theater of
staged conflict for the advancement of plutocratic interests, and willingly participate in it?
I'm going to say probably.
* * *
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .
What is interesting is that Wolffe links the op-ed and publishing Bob Woodward's latest
book: "Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they
prevented
World War Three , or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers
off his desk."
Notable quotes:
"... Nothing proved, unnamed sources, claims about this, claims about that. Until someone is prepared to step forward and reveal themselves this is a non story. Still, it gives the Trump haters comfort. ..."
"... Personally, I am not surprised or impressed by this White House insider's account. Nothing he or she has said should be a real revelation to anyone who has cast a critical eye on the Trump presidency. And whoever it is, this person is so enamored with tax cuts, deregulation, ramping up military spending and the usual Republican horse shit that he or she does not seem prepared to risk further discrediting the administration by identifying him/herself and resigning publicly. ..."
If you really believe your boss is a threat to the constitution which you've
taken an oath to protect, perhaps you should consider quitting or going public. As in: going on
Capitol Hill to hold a press conference to urge impeachment.
In this regard, and only in this regard, our anonymous whistleblower has handed the crazy
boss a degree of righteous indignation.
"If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist," tweeted the madman in the
attic, "the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at
once!"
Donald, we feel your pain, albeit briefly. Your internal enemies are indeed gutless, and if
you feel better putting that in ALL CAPS, that's fine. Let it out.
But that bit about turning people over to you for national security reasons is kind of the
point here. If you'll allow us to summarize the GUTLESS person's arguments: you are
fundamentally a threat to democracy and national security yourself. You are indeed, as your
lawyers have pointed out repeatedly, your own worst witness.
This much we know from this week's other bombshell in the shape of Bob Woodward's latest
book. Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they
prevented
World War Three , or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers
off his desk.
... ... ...
Mr or Ms GUTLESS describes Trump's decisions as "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally
reckless", while chief of staff John Kelly says Trump is "an idiot" living in a place called
"Crazytown". This revelation led to the priceless statement from Kelly where he had to deny
calling the president an idiot.
Somewhere in Texas, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson is swirling a glass of bourbon
muttering that he lost his job for calling Trump a moron.
Second, Trump's staffers are enabling the very horrors they claim to hate, while grandiosely
pretending to be doing the opposite.
Mr or Ms GUTLESS says there were "early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th
amendment" in what he imagines is a clear sign they can distinguish reality from reality
TV.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Trump cabinet: please know that you will not be accepted into
the next edition of Profiles in Courage for your early whispers. If you truly believe the
president is incapacitated, you should perhaps consider raising your voice to at least
conversational level, if you're not inclined to bellow from the mountaintops. Library rules are
inoperative at this point.
Given the weight of evidence, even the most diehard Trump defenders are now conceding the
obvious, by signing up to the GUTLESS gang's self-promotion. Brit Hume, a Fox News veteran, let
the cat out of the bag when he tweeted that it was a "good
thing" they were restraining Trump "from his most reckless impulses".
This is how the pirate ship Trump eventually sinks to the ocean's floor. You can fool some
of Fox News's viewers all of the time, and you can fool all of them some of the time.
But no fool wants to drown with the captain we all know is plain crazy.
It's someone high up that makes policy decisions, brags about everything they have done to
help America despite Cheetos interfering. Why now? Pence wants it known that he is running
the government not useless trump whom has passed nothing. Pence will come out as the author
when Don is removed from office. Which could be nearing since this OPED is likely to expose
him. Maybe he planned it that way.
What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's
White House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each
other.
Clearly a massive conspiracy. And one which Trump is helpfully participating in by
constantly saying and doing stuff which accords with the pictures they're all painting.
What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's White
House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each other. All
these sources come together to display a rather coherent image of a chaotic White House led
by a man who's not bright enough to realize he's in over his head.
The New York Times attack piece was anonymous. It is therefore completely unverifiable and
could have been written by anyone, including any of the politically biased NYT editorial
team, or by Bob Woodward to publicize his new book. It's junk news.
I'm firmly convinced that when it's all said and done we'll be able to represent his
presidency as an MMO boss fight. This is the bit where everyone concentrates fire on the
glowy spot until the enrage mechanic kicks in. In fact it looks like the mad flailing has
started and now everyone will try not to stand in the AoE as they DPS him down.
Mussolini was in power for twenty years before his functionaries deposed him to keep the
regime intact while removing its newly-a-liability head. Mussolini was the legal (if
abhorrent) premier of a coalition government in a liberal-democratic (both words with a pinch
of salt) regime for his first two years, until winning a parliamentary majority of his own;
indeed, after the leader of the Socialist Party was killed by his supporters, his coalition
partners almost pulled out of government: that's not a totalitarian dictatorship, but what
was then called "pre-fascism", and today we'd call it an 'illiberal democracy'. The
dictatorship was informal (result of a supportive majority) until the constitional reform of
1928 - five years into his government.
Thinking that all will turn out fine because American democracy is under strain but
generally intact, is a dangerous complacency. All interwar autocrats went through a
transition of first governing under the old constitution, slowly undermining opposition, then
installing a new organic law. Perhaps all will turn out well in the US, and Trump will leave
office with the old 'rules of the game' untouched - but that can't be assumed, and we won't
know until after he is gone.
Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back
- we have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.
Truckloads of "anonymous bollocks" reported by credible, highly respected journalists with
excellent reasons to protect their sources.
"Anonymous" bollocks" which syncs perfectly with events and pronouncements by the
president himself - including numerous firings of so many of the "best people" he hired.
"Anonymous bollocks" confirmed in evidence/testimony presented publicly and under oath in
court.
Nothing proved, unnamed sources, claims about this, claims about that. Until someone is
prepared to step forward and reveal themselves this is a non story.
Still, it gives the Trump haters comfort.
There is a segment of this country that is willfully ignorant because a con man told them
to be. We really need to ignore this shrinking number of fuck-nuts and just out vote
them.
We live in a democracy. If you choose to use facebook as your only source of news about the
world, it is not because a con man told you to, it is because you are just too plain stupid
to go looking elsewhere.
I'm surprised that no one has compared the author of the anonymous article in the New York
Times with "Deep Throat", who anonymously met Bernstein and Woodward in an underground
parking garage in Washington to spill the beans about Watergate. Deep Throat turned out to be
Mark Felt, a high-ranking official in the FBI who kept working against Nixon under cover and
whose name was revealed only a few years ago.
Personally, I am not surprised or impressed by this White House insider's account. Nothing he
or she has said should be a real revelation to anyone who has cast a critical eye on the
Trump presidency. And whoever it is, this person is so enamored with tax cuts, deregulation,
ramping up military spending and the usual Republican horse shit that he or she does not seem
prepared to risk further discrediting the administration by identifying him/herself and
resigning publicly.
Screw whoever it is, they are obviously no hero to the American people.
So now we know what 'the resistance' really is. It's the establishment. It's the old
political order. It's that late 20th-century political set, those out-of-touch managerial
elites, who still cannot believe the electorate rejected them. That is the take-home message of
the bizarre political spectacle that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life
has been transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump movement
might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from those who resisted fascism in
Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is primarily about restoring the apparently cool,
expert-driven rule of the old elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump /
Brexit era.
The response to McCain's death has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been
the self-conscious rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment
figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential candidate and
enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power overseas, has been reimagined as a
plucky battler for all that is good against a wicked, overbearing political machine. 'John
McCain's funeral was the biggest resistance meeting yet', said a headline in the New
Yorker , alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and
soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is 'the
resistance' now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders of foreign nations,
the Washington establishment.
The New Yorker piece, like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the
anti-Trump theme of McCain's funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn't attend his funeral.
And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a liberal commentariat that now
views everything through the binary moral framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed,
occasionally fascistic) and anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against
Nazism). Even better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain's
daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam Trumpism, without
explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what came before Trumpism, which of
course was their rule, their politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media
set might seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker writer, but it is also 'more united' in
one important sense - 'in its hatred of Donald Trump'.
Hatred of Trump has become the moral glue of the bruised elites who have been either pushed
aside or at least dramatically called into question by the populist surge taking hold in the
West. And so motored are these people by the shallow moralism of Anti-Trumpism that they are
happy to marshal even a life as complex and interesting and flawed as McCain's to the service
of hurting Trump. A former Al Gore adviser, Carter Eskew, wrote in the Washington Post: 'In
death, John McCain is about to exact revenge on Donald Trump.' Unwittingly revealing the Old
Testament streak to the new elite religion of Hating Trump, Eskew said that as 'McCain ascends
to heaven on an updraft of praise, Trump's political hell on Earth will burn hotter'. On why it
suddenly started to rain when McCain's coffin was brought into the Capitol, a CNN journalist
said: 'The angels were crying.' What century is this?
The religious allusions, the talk of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain's
life so that it becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the
infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some of the madder
McCain commentary, says there is now a 'condition' that he calls 'Resistance Brain', where
people display an 'urge to grab and cling on to anything that seems, even a little bit, like it
might be the thing that Finally Defeats Donald Trump'. Even if the thing they're grabbing on to
is actually a bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected
presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of Anti-Trumpism has been
extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge of liberal activists a decade ago, yet
now its architects are praised because they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being
against Trump washes away all sins.
Some on the left have criticised the moral rehabilitation of McCain. 'Let's not forget that
he wanted war with Iran and lots of other places too!', they cry. Yet the truth is they paved
the way for his posthumous rebranding as one of the great Americans of the late 20th century.
Since 2016 they have talked about Trump as a uniquely wicked president, a shocking aberration,
the closest thing to Hitler since the 1930s. Their anti-Trump hyperbole, driven by their own
political disorientation and increasing sense of distance from the electorate, has allowed any
politician who is not Trump to mend their reputations and gloss over their own destructive
behaviour. The transformation of Trump into the bête noire of all right-minded
people, a pillar of unrivalled wickedness that we all have a duty to protest against in our
pussy hats and orange wigs, has been a boon to the wounded pre-Trump political class keen both
to whitewash its own crimes and to prepare for its return to the position of power it enjoyed
before the electorate was corrupted by 'post-truth' hysteria.
'The resistance' is the fightback of the establishment against the people. As it is in
Britain, too, where the rich and influential people fuelling the war on Brexit - the largest
act of democracy in British history - like to refer to themselves as 'insurgents'. It is the
height of Orwellianism for these acts of elitist reaction against democratic dissent to dress
themselves up as forms of resistance. But it is not surprising. From the get-go, the so-called
resistance has been more a pining for the old establishment, for Hillary's rule and for the
continued domination of Britain by the EU, than it has been any kind of daring strike for a new
politics. Look closely at the funereal elitism of McCain's burial and you will see one of the
saddest and most striking political developments of our time: how self-styled radicals
preferred to throw their lot in with the old establishment under the umbrella of 'the
resistance' rather than heed ordinary people who were saying: 'Let's tear up the old
order.'
Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked. Find him on Instagram: @burntoakboy
Nice post and well put.
I am currently sitting in an office where 30% are blaggers of the highest order. They talk
and kiss ass - but ultimately - deep down - know they cannot do they do not know the job. The
responsibiltiy they have will make you shudder. I have told friends and they are visibly
shaken that this can happen. But I think it is the way of the world at the moment. They dare
not argue with me for full knowledge they will be sent packing, they already have been but on
"minor" non work related items.
"Fake it til you make it" is the slogan they clutch tight to their heart the consequences
however are far far reaching. My only hope is that should any of them leave here - they will
get found out in a week.
Yes the likes of Trump are a reflection of just that.
The mad thing is - I now am of the belief that I could do that job ie President of the US.
That is madness.
to foil the wishes of the elected members of government.
No. Just one member. And that one member isn't a supreme leader. You need to look
elsewhere for those types of leaders - they're usually standing next to Trump while he fawns
over them.
Personally I'm grateful for a bureaucracy that frustrates bad ideas - wherever they
come
from. That's part of their role.
Everything, with the exception of Steve Bannon in Michael Wolf's book, has been anonymous.
These people write things, attribute them to, say, John Kelly, then Kelly says I NEVER SAID
THAT and we're left to believe whom?
If there is genuine resistance inside the White House to Trump- If it is at all like
anybody says- then I would imagine that a genuine top level appointee would go on camera,
throw themselves on their sword, and speak to the American people. Until such a time I
question what is Woodward's agenda? Do I trust Omarosa? Is Michael Wolf credible? What are
their goals? I'm not blind but I want to see more than anonymous. And until then... I don't
believe it.
I agree, I'd hate to defend him either, but you can't help thinking he has a point by
calling this person gutless. Either stand up in public and say it or, if s/he really is
working in the background to save us from Trump's excesses, then surely you're better off
(and the country as a whole) staying there and not alerting him?
It's the New York Times, and no, they certainly haven't been against Trump since his
election.
Their lead White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman, still writes extremely
understanding pieces of Trump. And she's been covering the man for almost 15 years, so one
would think she had the measure of the man long ago.
More importantly, the NYT threw the election for Trump by first exonerating Trump of any
Russian collusion - which was false - and by covering the last-minute Comey statements on the
Clinton emails in the worst negative light possible for the Democratic candidate. The NYT
turned out to be wrong, but the damage was done.
The NYT even tried to put new faces on their opinion staff with close connections to
actual American neo-Nazis (!) and only failed when old tweets came to light.
I'm not quite sure what the NYT is playing at - I guess it's easy to play the devil's
advocate in artsy-fartsy, liberal New York - but they most certainly have not been
against Trump from January 2017 at all.
Trump is not a freedom fighter, he is not your Great White Messiah, he's not an advocate
for blue collar American citizens. Trump is a stupid, vulgar, greedy old fat racist who
conned his way into the White House. There has been a lot of talk in all mediums about his
unsuitability for the office, and his obvious ties to the Kremlin, but there has been no
organized effort to remove him from office, no matter what you might have read on Qanon.
You think the entire population is incapable of thinking about serious issues because there's
some tittle-tattle on twitter? When did that happen? No-one would work because there's always
fluffy kittens on YouTube.
"... "When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make themselves bigger than the entire American system," ..."
"... "extremely self-indulgent." ..."
"... "You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," ..."
"... "If you are this person, you really should resign tonight." ..."
"... "just made things worse," ..."
"... "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have far more impact." ..."
"... "The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is 'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and daring Trump to get worse," ..."
"... "Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far harder," ..."
"... "What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?" ..."
"... "We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because they think that's true," ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Press Pundits are lining up to
weigh in on a salacious New York Times op-ed allegedly penned by an anonymous #Resister in the
Trump administration, with some experts on television calling the piece an all-out coup against
the president. The opinion piece in question, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump
Administration," has spawned a level of frenetic punditry not seen since George W. Bush was
spotted
sneaking Michelle Obama a cough drop. Only this time the stakes are allegedly much higher.
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said on Wednesday the stunning claims made in the anonymous op-ed
– for example, that there is a group of "adults" in the White House who believe
Trump is unfit to hold office and are trying
to shape policy behind the president's back – are akin to "a coup."
"In other countries... they sometimes call this a coup," Wallace said on MSNBC's
Deadline: White House, referring to the article's assertion that there is a
"resistance" made up of administration officials which aims to protect the republic
from Trump's "amorality."
Another MSNBC talking head, Howard Fineman, said that he was troubled by the fact that the
op-ed appears to describe how "unelected aides have staged a slo-mo coup." Impeachment
– not "frenzy, mutiny and rumors" – is the antidote to Trump's criminal
unfitness for public service, he added.
The @nytimes
essay is troubling. Why? 1. The dangerous, ignorant volatility of @realDonaldTrump . 2. The claim
by UNELECTED aides to have staged a slo-mo coup. 3. The NYT letting the accuser hide.
#Trump 's unfit, but
caution: impeachment -- not frenzy, mutiny and rumor -- is the answer.
But others were even less impressed by the anonymous scoop-provider. Fox News host Sean
Hannity called the author of the op-ed a "swamp sewer creature who can't stand that there
is a new sheriff in town."
Hannity calls the senior Trump administration official who wrote the NYT op-ed a "swamp
sewer creature."
Speaking with Hannity on his program, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said
that the anonymous author had "repudiated our whole constitutional process."
"When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make
themselves bigger than the entire American system," Gingrich
said .
Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, called the
mysterious author of the op-ed "extremely self-indulgent."
"You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no
doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," she
said .
"If you are this person, you really should resign tonight."
Almost all of the nation's sharpest political minds were in agreement on one point, however:
This mystery senior government official should reveal him/herself, in order to save America
from fascism, or hokey #Resistance claptrap, depending on whom you ask.
The op-ed "just made things worse," conservative commentator and National Review
senior fellow David French said. "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of
honor speaking openly would have far more impact."
1) The guy is real (no way the NYT puts forth a fake source);
2) His story is likely largely true (perhaps exaggerated at the margins);
3) He's just made things worse.
4) Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have
far more impact
"If you are the author of this and you truly want to effectuate change... you want to do
something in service to the nation, you have to come forward and sign your name to this..
Come forward. You could change the fate of the country..."- @DavidJollyFL w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/d9l7PMnzkj
"The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is
'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and
daring Trump to get worse," veteran journalist Dan Froomkin said. He added that he thought
it was wrong of the Times not to identify the piece's author.
The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is
"principled," as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and
daring Trump to get worse. They shouldna granted anonymity.
Much has also been discussed about Trump's reaction to the article.
"Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far
harder," predicted Washington Post contributor Carlos Lozada. "What is the point
of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?"
Gut reaction to NYT oped:
1) Feeds/confirms Trump's worst fears about the deep state plots
2) Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this "internal resistance" far harder
3) What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?
Not everyone is calling for the anonymous author to come forward, however: At least one
pundit claims to already know who penned the troubling opinion piece.
"We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official
because they think that's true," Ben Shapiro tweeted.
We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because
they think that's true.
"He's an idiot. It's pointless to try to convince him of anything. He's gone off the
rails. We're in crazytown," Kelly is quoted as saying at a staff meeting in his office. "I
don't even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I've ever had."
(CNN) WARNING: This story contains graphic language.
President Donald Trump 's
closest aides have taken extraordinary measures in the White House to try to stop what they saw
as his most dangerous impulses, going so far as to swipe and hide papers from his desk so he
wouldn't sign them, according to a new book from legendary journalist Bob Woodward.
Woodward's 448-page book, " Fear: Trump in the White
House, " provides an unprecedented inside-the-room look through the eyes of the President's
inner circle. From the Oval Office to the Situation Room to the White House residence, Woodward
uses confidential background interviews to illustrate how some of the President's top advisers
view him as a danger to national security and have sought to circumvent the commander in
chief.
Many of the feuds and daily clashes have been well documented, but the picture painted by
Trump's confidants, senior staff and Cabinet officials reveal that many of them see an even
more alarming situation -- worse than previously known or understood. Woodward offers a
devastating portrait of a dysfunctional Trump White House, detailing how senior aides -- both
current and former Trump administration officials -- grew exasperated with the President and
increasingly worried about his erratic behavior, ignorance and penchant for lying.
Chief of staff John Kelly describes Trump as an "idiot" and "unhinged," Woodward reports.
Defense Secretary James Mattis describes Trump as having the understanding of "a fifth or sixth
grader." And Trump's former personal lawyer John Dowd describes the President as "a fucking
liar," telling Trump he would end up in an "orange jump suit" if he testified to special
counsel Robert Mueller.
Sounds like a palace coup to me: first, news of the forthcoming Woodward book (and excepts);
then-coincidentally-today's "anonymous" and 'Gutless' article in the Times.
As far as I'm concerned, this entire hellish administration is sheer "madness" and a very
clear indication that this country is in its agonizing twilight.
Each and every senior official in this administration is an enabler of this "shithole"
human being and current president, so there is no such thing as bravery here, just covering
one's tail if a coup were to occur.
Not once, as has been mentioned here and elsewhere, has this 'Gutless' wonder decried the
immorality of family separation, employing white racists as policy makers, shredding the
social safety net for millions of this nation's most vulnerable; an outlandish Pentagon
budget and etcetera.
What is solidly on display in this unfolding miasma is a firmly entrenched kleptocracy,
enabled and supported by U.S. corporations and the death of democracy.
The Woodward book seems to me just more kiss and tell stories of the Michael Wolff ilk
(remember him?). The juiciest quotes - Trump being called an idiot by Kelly - is denied by
Kelly himself and most of the others are ex-employees.
A better - more objective - book would
get past the unconventional, apparent chaos of the Whitehouse and perhaps investigate whether
Trumps methods have or will bear fruit.
That perhaps, as David Lynch said, traditional
politicians can't take the country or the world forward - they can't get things done anymore
because they are afraid of political consequences or media backlash. Trump and his ego
doesn't seem to care about that - is that a good thing or a bad thing? Trump has turned
everything on it's head and liberals find themselves allying with establishment politicians
and business groups. It is a fascinating period of political change and time - and better
journalism - will eventually judge Trump more objectively.
'Pence... not a dangerous, mentally ill megalomaniac'
Pence is more dangerous – make that outright terrifying – than Trump. Yes.
Trump is a senile vulgarian oaf – but he doesn't really believe in anything and is
motivated only by his greed and pathological need for self-aggrandizement. He's mentally
incompetent in a very obvious way, which renders him laughably inept at trying to bring his
more odious policy objectives to fruition (in fact, inept at everything, pretty much).
Pence is far more sinister, because he's a dementedly fanatical believer in a
fundamentalist and authoritarian mutation of religion – a crazed zealot. While
sometimes able to imitate the superficial demeanour of a person of sound mind, he is in truth
utterly deranged.
While Trump lies and denies obvious specific facts almost as a reflex, he doesn't really
sustain his warped world view consistently or with conviction that lasts longer than it takes
to play his next round of golf.
Pence vehemently espouses a whole alternative reality based
upon his religious fantasies, and believes he has a mission to impose his delusional ideas in
a punitive and repressive manner on his country's entire population, permanently. He may have
the cunning to be chillingly effective at realising his most ghastly ambitions.
Trump represents a temporary aberration; a collective brain fart. Pence could be the
instigator of a new dark age for the USA
Having seen this type of character assassination visited on Bill and Hillary Clinton,
character assassination before any reported crimes have been proven against them or for that
matter any sexual misdemeanors as president are proven, what exactly is going on here?
I totally disagree with this type of thing even if the person is someone I don't
understand much. The world has come to a dangerous place where digital lynching without
reference to law seems to be the prevailing modus operandi.
A little word of warning. Be careful what you wish for. If Don can be removed prior to the
next election, (and I don't believe that would happen), then Mike Pence takes the reins. He
has just as many crazy notions as his current boss, but is an experienced politician who
knows the ins and outs of Congress. He may get more of the programme through than little Don
can. And that would not be good.
He's done it before. Lots of times.
Example: one of his posts back in April:
"Trump is a genius. Nobody can take him down, the man is a fighter, you punch him and he'll
punch you back 10 times harder. The FBI, Democrats and MSM have tried to take him down since
he decided to run for president, yet he's standing tall and with a 50% approval rating."
There's no point in engaging in discussion with folks like that ...
Welcome to postmodernist politics folks. It will continue to degenerate until, in despair,
people turn toward an orderly system of politics; the Chinese system, the Russian system or
even a coherent religious system. Counsellors will be on hand for those who feel hurt or
upset by the return to authoritarianism -- they will be able to get great treatment in
re-education centres. Just a matter of time before our current system just crumbles from
within.
Yeah they're sucking it direct from Ayn Rand's teat. Bunch of sociopaths. And I think most
political scientists are well aware that citizens united was the death of American democracy
as a representative political system. The illusion of functionality has collapsed under the
weight of corruption. Trump is really just a symptom of that. A giant orange enema of the
state.
LOL. The west is about to collapse. There is no more money to finance the Ponzy Scheme of the
everlasting growth you seem to think is natural. while everyone is distracted in this
dualistic BS, the planet is slowly shutting down her ressources.
The Russia after years of
sanctions have developed an economy that make them less dependant on other countries. So
They will probably less affected by what is coming.
Unless you live in you own bubble, maybe
you noticed that Occidental countries have become empty shells...gutted from their skills at
making stuff. It is all virtual production now...all banking stuff, numbers insurance...most
skilled stuff are either in Germany or in Asia...what is going on?
Trump is a megalomaniac I agree, but he is not dangerous and is not mentally ill.
Mental illness is a real thing and you shouldn't casually trivialize it in this way.
Finally anyone who runs for office as President of the USA is by very definition a pretty
extreme megalomaniac. So you have two points that are not real and/or could be considered erroneous
discrimination and one point that is a prerequisite for any POTUS candidate.
Looking for a reason to impeach him is a ridiculous back to front thing to do and is itself
proof that any impeachment will fail. To impeach someone you must first start with a very
obvious reason.
It's simply not possible to impeach a president because you don't like their politics or
their personality. This whole searching for a reason to impeach is itself evidence that any
impeachment is politically motivated and the very optics of this serve only to strengthen
Trump's own political support in direct opposition.
Trump is President because the DNC was captured by very stupid and deeply corrupt
people.
Many say Mike Pence could have been the one behind the op-ed, because the unidentified author
singled out the late John McCain as "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our
national dialogue." The word isn't that commonly used. But Pence has used the word with some
regularity. Yet the word could have been a ploy to divert attention from the real author, who
claimed to support many of the GOP policies – "effective deregulation, historic tax
reform, a more robust military and more."
No doubt the current crisis works for Pence: "Given the instability many witnessed, there
were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a
complex process for removing the president." Of course he and the GOP didn't want to
"precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration
in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over." But they don't want Trump
to finish his term and hope that he'll soon be gone.
Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back - we
have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.
This op-ed is going to absolutely confirm, in the eyes of Trump supporters, all his whines
about being thwarted by the Deep State. It's going to increase his support among the crazies,
and it's also useful for the Republicans who want to ditch him in favour of Mike Pence.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and for the Democrats or the 'resistance' to see it
as some kind of bonus is insane. Even if you take it at face value it's a disgusting piece of
authoritarian, we-know-best hypocrisy. If you look at its actual effects, the net result is
not likely to benefit the forces of sanity in any way.
The media's complacency about all of this, and their failure to actually report on the
Republican trajectory and the bigger picture, is criminal. Instead we get YET ANOTHER bit of
'oh look the wheels are just about to come off the bus!', and all the while the Republicans
are gerrymandering and purging voter rolls like crazt before the midterms, and of course
refusing to change their unaccountable electronic voting machines and - did you read THIS one
in the news? - blocking a bill which would have audited the election results.
Tl;dr: The US, and by extension the planet via environmental destruction and possibly war
on top, is utterly fucked.
"... Mr anonymous also concedes that the administration has done some good things .. like .. a robust military. Now call me old fashioned, but having a military with twice(three times .. four times) the capability of the rest of the world put together and spending enough yearly to run the whole of Africa .. probably India too, just on a means of killing .. and this even before the US military became .. robust?.. ..."
Mr anonymous also concedes that the administration has done some good things .. like .. a
robust military. Now call me old fashioned, but having a military with twice(three times ..
four times) the capability of the rest of the world put together and spending enough yearly
to run the whole of Africa .. probably India too, just on a means of killing .. and this even
before the US military became .. robust?..
What is wrong with you people .. national security?.. Laughable .. when is your security
ever, ever, ever threatened! And yet people starve, people don't have clean water to drink
..
Perhaps were the US to help lift the basic burdens of millions who have bugger all, then
there wouldn't be so many suposed 'enemies'. I do believe film maker Michael Moore has voiced
this very same thing .. but then, what purpose all those shiny new expensive killing
machines?..
Something is seriously wrong in America .. and it ain't just Trump!
This is a very poor op-ed piece. Simply calling the President "a crazy loon " isn't political
analysis, or at least not the sort of political analysis I would be willing to pay for. Nor
do I think the thesis that certain members of the administration are busy trying to shore up
their reputations in the face of a sinking presidency holds water. Firstly, unless the
current investigations provide incontrovertible evidence that the President was engaged in
criminal activity I don't think there is any change that he will be impeached. Secondly, if
you wanted to protect your reputation surely the thing to do would be to resign and maintain
a dignified silence while you are writing your memoirs. Or if you really were part of a
secret clique protecting the American constitution against a reckless President you would
keep quiet and get on with your important business. It seems to me that this anonymous piece
was either a clumsy attempt to further damage the President or a sophisticated attempt to
galvanise his support base by "proving" that the President is being undermined by unelected
traitors. Or something else completely might be going on. That's why I would like to read a
thoughtful opinion piece by an informed observer.
Sounds like there's a treasonous public servant there, doing their best to subvert the will
of the people. And of course loudly supported by the squealing hard left guardian mob.
Looking at the type of far left fascists crawling out of the woodwork, I would say
Trump is provoking utter derangement in all the right people.
"the corrupt metropolitan elites have swindled them again"
-Who appointed these 'corrupt metropolitan elites' if it was not Trump himself? Who are these
people-Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin- quite apart from Jeff Sessions and the now
disgraced Michael Flynn? Trump appointed them, they weren't forced on him by the "corrupt
metropolitan elites". Is Trump to be given a free pass for his own mistakes?
What many commentators here seem to fail to recognise, because of their political bias I
suppose, is that there is a ground swell of dissatisfaction with the political consensus that
has seen the working class and lower middle class disenfranchised or at least their perceived
interests ignored. As a result, populist ideologies, as espoused by Steven Bannon, and
others, and exemplified by leaders like Donald Trump have thrown away the rule book with all
its aims to support the extremely wealthy and have reached out to those that want jobs before
green policies, law and order before gender diversity programs and so on.
I doubt that many of the readers here will receive the message but we are witnessing a
revolution that I see as significant as the rise of the sans-culottes in the early part of
the French Revolution. That didn't end well for the sans-culottes or their aims but we can
hardly blame them for trying. Today the retrenched car worker in the US can hardly be blamed
for being unhappy that the CEO of a car company receives a huge pay rise and bail outs from
the government and similar stories in other areas.
Vive la revolution.
Some of this stuff is clearly nonsense. Example: the insider claimed Trump is an admirer of
dictators:
"In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators,
such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and
displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded
nations."
And yet the forthcoming Bob Woodward book claims Trump told his defence secretary he
wanted to kill Assad:
Donald Trump ordered his defence secretary to assassinate Syria's president Bashar
al-Assad and "kill the f****** lot of them" in the leader's regime, in the wake of a chemical
attack against civilians, according to a new book.
Defence secretary James Mattis is said to have told the president during a phone call he
would "get right on it" before hanging up the phone and instead telling an aide: "We're not
going to do any of that. We're going to be much more measured." In the wake of the chemical
attack in April 2017, the president's national security team developed options that included
the more conventional airstrike that Mr Trump eventually ordered.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The anti-Trump lot can't have it both ways. He can't be a fan of dictators but also want to
kill them! It's clear there is lying or exaggeration on both sides. The people out to impeach
Trump (or sell books!) will lie too.
This is plausible as McCain was involved in Steele dossier saga
Notable quotes:
"... In this sense, the author may well have felt the need to plant the red herring in question in this very part of the letter so as to create the 'Pence diversion' in the very place that one might otherwise being looking for someone associated with John McCain. ..."
"... The next logical question would then be: how did he do it? The answer to this is quite simple. Just as he meticulously arranged his own funeral prior to his death, apparently down to the seating arrangements for guests, McCain could have easily handed the letter to a highly trusted associate or family member who would then present the letter to an ideological ally at the infamously anti-Trump New York Times. ..."
"... It is therefore not beyond the realm of the possible to consider that the infamous letter was not actually drafted by a Trump White House official but instead was drafted by John McCain as the final salvo in his long war against Donald Trump. Stranger things have happened and this without a doubt is a strange era in American political life. ..."
Not only was John McCain never in the Trump administration but at
the time when the infamous anonymous New York Times op-ed from a reportedly disgruntled senior
Trump White House official was published, John McCain had been dead for eleven days. Therefore
to suggest that McCain wrote the letter isn't to suggest a belief in time travel or the
supernatural. Instead it is to suggest a calculated scheme from beyond the grave by a man who
famously choreographed every detail of his own funeral during his final weeks or possibly
months of life.
Whoever wrote the letter was clever enough to include in the text a red herring designed to
convince the public and possibly Donald Trump himself that the letter's author was none other
than Vice President Mike Pence. But as Andrew Kroybko
rightly illustrates in his piece on the subject in Eurasia Future, Pence would never be so
foolish as to include in the letter the word "lodestar" as the highly obscure word is
frequently used by Pence while not being a part of the daily vocabulary of most English
speakers anywhere in world. Such an obvious giveaway could have only been planted by design
considering that whoever did write the letter most likely penned the most important epistle in
his or her life.
Making matters more curious, the word "lodestar" appears in the ed-op in the paragraph where
the author negatively compares Trump with John McCain. This itself is an indication that McCain
and his much anticipated death were clear sources of inspiration for the content of the letter
and the timing of its publication. The paragraph in question reads as follows:
"We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example -- a lodestar
for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such
honorable men, but we should revere them".
In this sense, the author may well have felt the need to plant the red herring in question
in this very part of the letter so as to create the 'Pence diversion' in the very place that
one might otherwise being looking for someone associated with John
McCain.
While not casting judgment on the reality that John McCain was indeed a surviving prisoner
of war, it is factually true that unlike many prisoners of war, McCain tended to publicly revel
in his status as a survivor and even used the fame derived from his harrowing experience to
launch a long political career. Because of this, it is not by any means unreasonable to think
that the kind of egotism one associates with McCain might have led him to devise such a
'parting shot' at his powerful and more politically successful rival. This was after all the
man who flew to all corners of the earth even in old age to rally various armed rebellions of
one sort or another from Georgia and Ukraine to Syria and Iraq. It is also instructive to
realise that McCain is the man who without a second thought handed the hoax Steele dossier to
then FBI Director James Comey and later
said the following about his actions:
"I discharged that obligation, and I would do it again. Anyone who doesn't like it can go
to hell".
The next logical question would then be: how did he do it? The answer to this is quite
simple. Just as he meticulously arranged his own funeral prior to his death, apparently down to
the seating arrangements for guests, McCain could have easily handed the letter to a highly
trusted associate or family member who would then present the letter to an ideological ally at
the infamously anti-Trump New York Times.
While Donald Trump has suggested that he will use legal pressure to force the New York Times
to divulge the source of the letter, such a matter could take years of back and forth in the
courts, by which time the relevance of the letter would have been greatly reduced by the
passage of time. In any case, as the drafting of the letter may well be a seditious or
treasonous act, unlike an actual member of the Trump White House staff, McCain is currently in
a place where no judge, jury or executioner can reach him.
It is therefore not beyond the realm of the possible to consider that the infamous letter
was not actually drafted by a Trump White House official but instead was drafted by John McCain
as the final salvo in his long war against Donald Trump. Stranger things have happened and this
without a doubt is a strange era in American political life.
"... The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution. ..."
The Mainstream Media's latest reports that internet sleuths think that Vice President Pence
probably wrote yesterday's "Resistance" op-ed in the New York Times because of the anonymous
writer's use of the word "lodestar" is nothing more than a red herring by the "deep state" to
provoke a showdown between Trump & Pence ahead of this November's midterms and possibly
even push the President to trigger a constitutional crisis by trying to fire him.
Everyone in the world is wondering which high-level official in the Trump Administration
penned yesterday's
"Resistance" op-ed in the New York Times, but the Mainstream Media is running with the
story that internet sleuths think that it's Vice President Pence because of the anonymous
writer's use of the word "lodestar", which he's publicly used on
at least five separate occasions before. He probably wasn't behind the piece, however, but
his idiosyncratic use of a relatively uncommon word was likely picked up by the "deep state"
well in advance and deliberately inserted into the preplanned infowar provocation that was just
published in order to pin the blame on him as part of a larger scheme to sow discord in the
White House.
The "deep state" wants to provoke Trump to unleash one of his famously scathing and
unscripted tweets against Pence, which would irreparably ruin their professional relationship
but also throw the President into a constitutional conundrum because he can't
legally fire his Vice President no matter how much the two might come to hate each other as
a result of this devious psy-op. Running with this scenario for a moment, whether Trump tries
to fire a publicly insulted Pence or seethes with rage because he can't, the resultant turmoil
that would play out in the Mainstream Media would be enough to seemingly confirm all of the
accusations of chaos that Bob Woodward alleged in his upcoming book, therefore potentially
tipping the midterm electoral scales to the Democrats' favor.
Reviewing the fast-moving developments of the past couple of days, it's inarguable that The
Establishment planned for all of this to happen far in advance as part of their plot to
undermine Trump ahead of the midterms, with the phased escalation of their infowar campaign so
far moving from Woodward's book to the anonymous "Resistance" op-ed and finally to the claims
that Pence is somehow involved because the unknown author cleverly inserted a very uncommon
word that he's known to occasionally use. While Trump will probably display more common sense
that he's regularly given credit for and likely won't fall for the trap of jumping the gun and
publicly condemning Pence, he's in a dilemma when it comes to identifying who's behind the
scandalous op-ed.
Trump has no choice but to order an immediate investigation on national security
grounds after it was revealed that a high-ranking official in his administration is
supposedly conspiring with others to sabotage the policies of the democratically elected and
legitimate President of the United States, but this is predictably being framed by the
Mainstream Media as a "witch hunt" that they'll soon try to compare to a "Stalinist purge" (if
they haven't done so already). Actually, they seem to secretly hope that Trump becomes paranoid
to the point of overreacting and punishes or publicly embarrasses innocent members of his staff
in order to counterproductively create an internal "Resistance" where there might not have even
really been one to begin with.
Whatever ends up happening, and the latest "deep state" coup attempt against Trump has only
just begun, this much is certain, and it's that the inclusion of the word "lodestar" was a red
herring designed to manipulate the President's mind after he finds out that the Mainstream
Media is promoting internet sleuths who apparently "discovered" that Pence used this uncommon
word on several occasions. The whole point at this stage is to provoke Trump, who they
mistakenly believe to be an unhinged maniac incapable of controlling his actions and prone to
lashing out at whoever and whenever at the slightest hint of an affront, to publicly attack
Pence and then trigger a constitutional crisis by trying to fire him, all of which would be
taking place in front of the entire nation ahead of the upcoming
midterms.
Trump's much too clever to fall for this trap, and the fact that something so blatantly
obvious has been attempted speaks to just how much his opponents underestimate him, but he
nevertheless needs to be careful that he doesn't take action against any innocent members of
his administration who might get caught up in the current investigation to find the traitor and
their ilk, if they even exist. This means that he has to trust whoever it is that he's
dispatched to dig up evidence on this issue and won't doubt the findings that they present to
him, after which he'll have to determine whether they're also being set up just like Pence is
or if they're actually guilty as charged. Trump's toughest tests are therefore ahead of him and
could make or break his presidency in the coming days.
DISCLAIMER:The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which
is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing
written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions
of any other media outlet or institution.
he reversed the war in afghanistan? drones? did he prosecute bankers? does he favor
increasing offshore drilling? now it looks like he's renegotiating clinton's nafta and
pushing for some version of obama's trade treaties. trump is the invading python, and the
democrats and establishment republicans are the alligators; whichever wins, the small furry
animals get eaten. i just hope they don't start world war 3 while they're settling
things--trump looks to be doubling down on obama's syria policy too, and support of the
current ukrainian government.
'Fraid so. Every new generation of neocons regurgitates the same discredited lies from the
previous generation, and suckers believe them all over again. Even the title "neocon" or
"neoliberal" is a lie: there's nothing new about them.
Trump was not only openly attacked during the nomination process, the Republican Party
nominee who was selected to fight Obama in 2012 -Mitt Romney- delivered a savage attack in
which he described Trump as a con-man and a chronic liar -yet the same people who could,
there and then have told Trump to get lost backed him. Trump has been attacked from the start
and every time and all of the time said to his attackers: so what? I dare you to remove me
from the nomination, I dare you to remove me from the Office of President. This is a man who
is challenging the governance of the US in a manner no other President has done before, and
so far, he is still winning. That is the scary part.
Trump is threatening Deep State corruption by placing his own family members in positions of
power and profiting from charging the nation for his and his staff's repeated use of Trump
Tower and Mar-a-Lago? That's a bizarre way of draining the swamp.
The US political system has many flaws, not least that the President can be elected on an
apparent electoral college landslide while losing the popular vote. But then again no
country's political system is perfect, human nature being what it is.
However, Trump is clearly not up to the job. Not by intellect, understanding of world
affairs, honesty, temperament, respect for the law, nor constitution. The list goes on
frankly.
The system has gone bad. Trump hasn't "drained the swamp", he's made it far deeper. That
said, "the system" such as it is should work in the hands of honest men and women of
integrity. The trouble is they're few and far between in the GOP as it wilfully ignores
issues in which they would be clamouring for a Democrat president to be impeached.
I sincerely hope the GOP get a thrashing in the mid-terms which may, just may, give them
pause for thought. A Democrat Congress might also actually hold Trump to account. The only
danger there is that he lashes out with even less self control.
Dangerous times.
"... Dear Readers: Your website needs your support. It cannot exist without it. ..."
"... When you read my column below, you will read what you cannot find anywhere else–a clear, concise, correct explanation of who the author is of the New York Times op-ed falsely attributed to a "senior Trump official." ..."
"... Anonymous dissent has no credibility. ..."
"... A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position to lend weight to his dissent. ..."
"... thwart his and his fellow co-conspirators' plot by revealing it! ..."
"... This forgery is an attempt to break up the Trump administration by creating suspicion throughout the senior level. If Trump falls for the New York Times' deception, a house cleaning is likely to take place wherever suspicion falls. A government full of mutual suspicion cannot function. ..."
"... Why is resolving dangerous tensions a "preference for dictators" and not a preference for peace? ..."
"... removing a president for his unwillingness to worsen the dangerously high tensions between nuclear powers? ..."
Dear Readers: Your website needs your support. It cannot exist without it.
When you read my column below, you will read what you cannot find anywhere else–a
clear, concise, correct explanation of who the author is of the New York Times op-ed falsely
attributed to a "senior Trump official."
I know who wrote the anonymous "senior Trump official" op-ed in the New York Times. The New
York Times wrote it.
The op-ed ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50194.htm
) is an obvious forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can
state with certainty that no senior official would express disageeement anonymously.
Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it undermines the
character of the writer. A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his
high position to lend weight to his dissent.
The New York Times' claim to have vetted the writer also lacks credibility, as the New York
Times has consistently printed extreme accusations against Trump and against Vladimir Putin
without supplying a bit of evidence. The New York Times has consistently misrepresented
unsubstantiated allegations as proven fact. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the New
York Times about anything.
Consider also whether a member of a conspiracy working "diligently" inside the
administration with "many of the senior officials" to "preserve our democratic institutions
while thwarting" Trump's "worst inclinations" would thwart his and his fellow
co-conspirators' plot by revealing it!
This forgery is an attempt to break up the Trump administration by creating suspicion
throughout the senior level. If Trump falls for the New York Times' deception, a house cleaning
is likely to take place wherever suspicion falls. A government full of mutual suspicion cannot
function.
The fake op-ed serves to validate from within the Trump administration the false reporting
by the New York Times that serves the interests of the military/security complex to hold on to
enemies with whom Trump prefers to make peace. For example, the alleged "senior official"
misrepresents, as does the New York Times, President Trump's efforts to reduce dangerous
tensions with North Korea and Russia as President Trump's "preference for autocrats and
dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un"
over America's "allied, like-minded nations." This is the same non-sequitur that the New York
Times has expressed endlessly. Why is resolving dangerous tensions a "preference for
dictators" and not a preference for peace? The New York Times has never explained, and
neither does the "senior official."
How is it that Putin, elected three times by majorities that no US president has ever
received, is a dictator? Putin stepped down after serving the permitted two consecutive terms
and was again elected after being out of office for a term. Do dictators step down and sit out
for 6 years?
The "senior official" also endorses as proven fact the alleged Skripal poisoning by a
"deadly Russian nerve agent," an event for which not one scrap of evidence exists. Neither has
anyone explained why the "deadly nerve agent" wasn't deadly. The entire Skripal event rests
only on assertions. The purpose of the Skripal hoax was precisely what President Trump said it
was: to box him into further confrontation with Russia and prevent a reduction in tensions.
If the "senior official" is really so uninformed as to believe that Putin is a dictator who
attacked the Skripals with a deadly nerve agent and elected Trump president, the "senior
official" is too dangerously ignorant and gullible to be a senior official in any
administration. These are the New York Times' beliefs or professed beliefs as the New York
Times does everything the organization can do to protect the military/security complex's budget
from any reduction in the "enemy threat."
Do you remember when Condoleezza Rice prepared the way for the US illegal invasion of Iraq
with her imagery of "a mushroom cloud going up over an American city"? Iraq had no nuclear
weapons, and everyone in the government knew it. There was no prospect of such an event.
However, there is a very real prospect of mushroom clouds going up over many American and
European cities if the crazed Russiaphobia of the New York Times and the other presstitutes
along with the Democratic Party and the security elements of the deep state continue to pile
lie after lie, provocation after provocation on Russia's patience. At some point, the only
logical conclusion that the Russian government can reach is that Washington is preparing
Americans and Europeans for an attack on Russia. Propaganda vilifying and demonizing the enemy
precedes military attacks.
The New York Times' other attack on President Trump -- that he is unstable and unfit for
office -- is reproduced in the fake op-ed: "Given the instability many witnessed, there were
early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex
process for removing the president," writes the invented and non-existent "senior
official."
Americans are an insouciant people. But are any so insouciant that they really think that a
senior official would write that the members of President Trump's cabinet have considered
removing him from office? What is this statement other than a deliberate effort to produce a
constitutional crisis -- the precise aim of John Brennan, James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the DNC,
and the New York Times. A constitutional crisis is what the hoax of Russiagate is all
about.
The level of mendacity and evil in this plot against Trump is unequaled in history. Have any
of these conspirators given a moment's thought to the consequences of removing a president
for his unwillingness to worsen the dangerously high tensions between nuclear powers? The
next president would have to adopt a Russophobic stance and do nothing to reduce the tensions
that can break out in nuclear war or himself be accused of "coddling the Russian dictator and
putting America at risk."
The reason that America is at risk is that the CIA and the presstitute media have put
America -- and Europe -- at risk by frustrating President Trump's intention to reduce the
dangerous level of tensions between the two major nuclear powers. Professor Steven Cohen,
America's premier Russian expert, says that never during the Cold War were tensions as high as
they are at this present time. As a former member of The Committee on the Present Danger, I
myself am a former Cold Warrior, and I know for a fact that Professor Cohen is correct.
In America today, and in Europe, people are living in a situation in which the
liberal-progressive-left's blind hatred of Donald Trump, together with the self-interested
power and profit of the military security complex and election hopes of the Democratic Party,
are recklessly and irresponsibly risking nuclear Armageddon for no other reason than to act out
their hate and further their own nest.
This plot against Trump is dangerous to life on earth and demands that the governments and
peoples of the world act now to expose this plot and to bring it to an end before it kills us
all.
This is a classic color revolutions trick, usually called "Diplomats letter". Used many times
in many color revolutions worldwide. In EuroMaydan it preceded "sniper massacre".
Notable quotes:
"... I think he has to do it ASAP because the NYT editorial looks like an act of desperation and I expect Mueller to pile on soon, so beat them to the punch and put them on their heels for a change. No doubt, this is hardball. ..."
Now that ridiculously juvenile NYT's "op-ed" starts to make sense...they were given a
heads up on the GJ proceedings against this "stellar public servant" and wanted to knock it
off the front page.
What's in my head is declassifying a bunch of nasty shit.
Either way, if NYT made up fake news pretending to be a senior white house official, OR,
there really is somebody in his inner circle anonymously stabbing POTUS in the back, it is
very bad news and there should be serious hell to pay. I do not like nor trust a single one
of his appointees so I'm guessing it's somebody. It would be suicide for NYT getting caught
making this all up, that would be risky business IMO.
This isn't a complicated timeline of he said, she said over this piss dossier that glosses
people's eyes over. This is very simple stuff people can understand and Trump could make a
very rational case that the swamp is so damn deep he can't even put together a staff without
it being infiltrated and say "here look" and declassify shit that would encompass ALL the
recent scandals and ensnare the fake news experts colluding to make this happen.
That would light a big fire in DC that would be very hard to put out.
Well personally I don't believe for one second that the "op-ed" was anything other than
Fake Nuuuz.
As far as ordering the release/declassification of everything the DoJ & FBI has on the
Hillary Dossier I believe it's getting close but it's a hardball kind of swamp, it would be
before the midterms for maximum effect I would think.
I think he has to do it ASAP because the NYT editorial looks like an act of desperation
and I expect Mueller to pile on soon, so beat them to the punch and put them on their heels
for a change. No doubt, this is hardball.
As was no doubt their intent, the mainstream media has succeeded in overshadowing the Kavanaugh
confirmation hearing with a flurry of stories about a mutiny allegedly brewing inside the West Wing
that has set
more than a
few
tongues
wagging
about the
possibility of Trump's cabinet invoking the 25th amendment
(an eventuality that was once reportedly discussed by former White House Chief Strategist
Steve Bannon
). But while White House officials have already vehemently denied the quotes
gathered by Bob Woodward
in the strategically leaked (to his own newspaper) excerpts from the
Watergate reporter's upcoming book, speculation is shifting to
who might be the mystery author
of a scathing NYT op-ed reportedly penned by a "senior
administration official" that portrays Trump as unfit for office.
Fortunately for Trump, several voices of moderation have come forward to condemn the attacks
(amid speculation that the Times' "senior" source may not be so senior after all).
But this
incipient backlash didn't deter Axios (a media org that, like the Times, is notoriously critical of
Trump) from piling on with a story about President Trump's intensifying distrust of those in his
inner circle.
Trump, Axios claims, is "deeply suspicious of much of the government he
oversees" from federal agency grunts all the way up to those privileged few with unfettered access
to the Oval Office. The piece even goes so far as to quote yet another anonymous "senior
administration official" as saying that "a lot of us are wishing we'd been the writer."
"I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating - that people seem so shocked that there is
a resistance from the inside," one senior official said.
"A lot of us [were] wishing
we'd been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows - maybe he does? - that there are
dozens and dozens of us."
And in case you couldn't figure out why this is important, allow
Axios
to elaborate:
Why it matters:
Several senior White House officials have described their
roles to us as saving America and the world from this president.
A good number of current White House officials have privately admitted to us they consider
Trump unstable, and at times dangerously slow.
But the really deep concern and contempt, from our experience, has been at the agencies -- and
particularly in the foreign policy arena.
In what was perhaps the most bombastic claim included in the piece, Trump reportedly once
carried around with him a list of suspected leakers.
"The snakes are everywhere but we're
getting rid of them,"
he reportedly told
Axios.
For some time last year,
Trump even carried with him a handwritten list of people
suspected to be leakers undermining his agenda.
"He would basically be like, 'We've gotta get rid of them.
The snakes are everywhere
but we're getting rid of them,'"
said a source close to Trump.
Trump would often ask staff whom they thought could be trusted.
He often
asks the people who work for him what they think about their colleagues, which can be not only
be uncomfortable but confusing to Trump: Rival staffers shoot at each other and Trump is left
not knowing who to believe.
And just in case you haven't read enough about Trump's purported obsession with "snakes" -
here's some more.
"When he was super frustrated about the leaks, he would rail about the 'snakes' in
the White House,"
said a source who has discussed administration leakers with the
president.
"Especially early on, when we would be in Roosevelt Room meetings,
he would sit down
at the table, and get to talking, then turn around to see who was sitting along the walls behind
him."
"One day, after one of those meetings, he said, 'Everything that just happened is going to
leak. I don't know any of those people in the room.' ... He was very paranoid about this."
All of this reinforces the idea that Trump truly believes that there is an organized "deep
state" conspiracy to take him down.
Of course, what Axios neglects to say,
is that he's
not wrong.
"Trump flopped as an owner of a professional football
team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but
the league as a whole... He bankrupted his casinos five
times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous
airline existed for less than three years and ended up
almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has
slapped his surname on a practically never-ending
sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water,
Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks,
Trump
magazine, Trump
Mortgage, Trump University -- for which he settled a
class-action fraud lawsuit earlier this year for $25
million)."
And Kruse didn't even mention The Donald's sixth
bankruptcy, the one he filed for the debt-ridden Plaza Hotel
in 1992.
So, people, what do you think Trump, the
bankrupter-in-chief, is gonna do to the good old US of A?
That's one of my major hopes for this presidency. That
Trump can get us through the coming bankruptcy without
a large scale war/depression breaking out.
"one senior
official said"... oh really, why should I believe
that? When something is obvious BS, repeating it
just makes you look foolish, it doesn't make it
true, Hitlers propaganda play book is dated and no
longer functions in the age of the internet. At
least we know that Operation Mocking Bird is alive
and well.
This just shows us how they keep recycling
the same shit bureaucrat's over and over
again and they become an animal that lives
within and outside of whomever is POTUS.
Perhaps it's time to burn the whole thing
down and start over again.....
We the People are not so
schooled in the finer points.
We have rope and can see
treason with our own eyes, and
figure to do our part, be
civic minded for the greater
good and all.
If he has the power to do it, the time is
right to declassify some major bombs on the
swamp.
It sounds sensational but it's also
a step in the right direction to move the
capital out of DC. It really is the nerve
center of raunch, deceit, fraud and an
irredeemable shit hole.
Agreed, but moving won't help. The problem
is the concentration of money and power.
You could move the capitol every day and
the swamp would follow like remoras follow
a shark
The only way to deal with the Debt, is to grow the
economy and shrink it on a relative basis. So much
of the past debt was incurred on non-productive
expenditures that yield no returns.
Trump knows
that. Amazing what he gets done with all the
snipers outside and all the cockroaches inside. A
lesser man would have said fuck it a long time ago.
Its as if they think the people actually support
the Deep State Establishment and don't loath them.
Please tell me how I should really love John McCain
again now that he's dead.
"Trump, Axios claims, is
'deeply suspicious of much of the government
he oversees'
"
Again, if people believed the corporate
media Trump wouldn't be president right now,
HIllary would be, so that fight is pretty
much over.
Also, just because you are paranoid and
think they are all out to get you doesn't
mean it isn't true!. Of course the deep
state hates Trump. It's all just a circus
and a show until it's not. I really don't
know what Trump is waiting for. Call Bill
Binney in and get your heads together and
take down all the deep state.
PUT THEM ALL IN PRISON.
Yes, it will wipe out the whole government
as we know it.... but that is why Trump was
elected in the first place.
a very big part. rub is, i don't think he
knew. i think wray came in on a "if you
don't appoint him, the FIB is going to be
without a director" sort of threat. i think
sessions totally ass raped trump.
as for the remainder of his
administration, if you turn the white house
into goldman south, what exactly do you
expect for an economic plan.
as for the pre-election dumbfucks saying
trump is an executive, he will appoint good
people, and let them do their jobs. i
haven't seen one good appointment yet out of
trump. out of all of his appointments, scott
pruitt was the best and trump should have
backed him up, but didn't. he was sacrificed
to the environmentalists.
holee shit!!!!!
have i got an off topic comment to make.
i clicked on the globalintelhub link at
the top of the page about the possible source
of the op-ed.
what i found about one fourth of the way
into the article stopped me dead in my
tracks. this is the comment that did it:
But what is news in this disclosure
are the
newly
released emails
between Mark Mazzetti,
the New York Times's national security and
intelligence reporter, and CIA spokeswoman
Marie Harf.
you see it? do you see it? MARIE
HARF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
does that name ring a bell? it damn well
should. she was a long time spokeshole in
the HNIC state department. she is the one
who uttered the phrase:
We need in the medium to longer term
to go after the root causes that leads people
to join these groups, whether it's a lack of
opportunity for jobs,
jobs for jihadists!!!! and this whore
still has a job in gov't? as a CIA
spokeshole? RUFKM
my fucking gawd get rid of these fucking
people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So if they go 25th Amendment on him will
Trump supporters chimp out or wait for the
proof to be presented and evaluate if his
staff have a vaild point?
Edit: I mostly
agree with your post and thats why I have
been so critical. What I saw early on, and
since, has been one big clusterfuck of
"you keep making decisions that in no way
reflect a person who is as awesome as you
promised."
Figures. When you are blocked from pillaging foreign
nations, you of course turn to the idea of bankruptcy.
You people just don't seem to understand that you are
not kings and queens, but common folk and you should
pay your debts, and tighten your belts. It would be
relatively short term pain for long term gain.
That,
more than anything else, speaks to the absence of any
character in the American make up.
I'll not believe it until Woof Shitzer and/or
Rachel Madcow confirm these rumors.
Radical Left
Plagiarist Farheed Diarrhea has evidently been
preoccupied by being dumped by his wife after 21
years of hardship so we won't be hearing his inane
comments bashing Trump for awhile.
Zakaria was suspended for a week in August
2012 while Time and CNN investigated an allegation
of plagiarism
[46]
involving an August 20 column on gun control with
similarities to a New Yorker article by
Jill Lepore
. In a statement Zakaria apologized,
saying that he had made "a terrible mistake."
Go back to Chinese Tire and buy some "made in
Canada" crap. Tell me again how the "Canadians"
co-opted the British in 1812 . Watch some more
Franz Kafka on the CBC, the Chinese Broadcasting
Corporation and explain to the CAW in southern
Ontario how Justine Twinklesocks traded auto worker
jobs for the Quebec Milk Quota.
There are
Canadians with character, but you ain't one of
them.
The US went into receivership in 1933, so I guess
"make it bankruptier?"
I have no problem with this,
since it's going to be interesting to see how the
debtors (The US and its employees) are going to pay
the creditors (that would be the Citizens) back for
the $17 trillion they owe us.
Going to have to be one helluva bake sale.
But my guess is they will just throw another woar
and kill off another generation of Creditors like they
have done for the past century. (And collect the
insurance premiums, since Social Security Insurance
pays out to the primary beneficiary first..and that
would be...The US GOv).
What? You thought Social Security was for YOUR
benefit?! Hahah, silly wabbits.
The author clearly supports a neocon foreign policy. just look at his stance about Russia. Can this me MI6 false flag designed
to paralyze Trump administration by sowing suspicion among the top officials.? British clearly resent Trump attempt to shrink the US
led global neoliberal empire created by his predecessors.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for
ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these
ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the "enemy of
the people," President Trump's impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don't get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative
coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust
military and more.
But these successes have come despite -- not because of -- the president's
leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior
officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief's comments and actions. Most are
working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive
rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to
be walked back.
"There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to
the next," a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president
flip-flopped on a major policy decision he'd made only a week earlier.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren't for unsung heroes in
and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have
gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always
successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there
are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what's right even when
Donald Trump won't.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference
for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and
displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is
operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly,
and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant
to expel
so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He
complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and
he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign
behavior. But his national security team knew better -- such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of the steady
state.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet
of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted
to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right
direction until -- one way or another -- it's over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather
what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be
stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his
farewell letter
. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim
of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example -- a
lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but
we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put
country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across
the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.
I assumed it was an effort at creating some sort of record of resistance. Does anybody
really believe Paul Ryan is retiring from the 3rd most powerful position in the US Government
to "spend more time with family"? The rats are fleeing a sinking ship. Even if Trump serves
out a full four years, anybody too closely tied to this stupid shit-storm of an
Administration will be tarred in public eyes. But, American voters are notoriously forgetful,
and getting out before the ship goes down will probably work.
Funny shit. "the mole" wrote an Op/Ed piece, that contains no information of a sensitive
nature. S/he wrote of their own personal observations working in the White House. There is
nothing illegal in that.
I get that you might not have any functional understanding of
US law, but it is deeply disturbing that the President of the United States is calling for
the arrest of a citizen exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights.
The op-ed piece being anonymous makes me wonder if Mr Trump himself put someone up to do it.
What better way of stirring up the base ahead of the mid-terms than talk of undemocratic
factions within the administration and fifth columnists to be rooted out for the cause. It
also offers the president another cudgel against the press that will appeal to his core
constituencies.
Even if Mr Trump isn't capable of coming up with such a scheme, there are certainly those
around him who are.
The statements in the opinion piece are horribly anti-pluralist anti-democratic in
themselves. The writer's nationalist appeal to 'American' unity at the end is based on
everyone uniting around US Republican principles of neo-liberalism, inequality and
militarism. S/he would use a false unity against Trump to impose the worst kind of
conservative fundamentalism and eliminate anything more progressive from the political
spectrum.
Maybe this is mainstream neo-liberal thinking but it's the end of a plural, democratic
state. There would be no more room to discuss inequality, climate change, race or gender
discrimination or new welfare provisions. Just an offer of false unity around hard neoliberal
principles. I guess it's a very similar game to Brexit, which is a choice between
life-threatening asset striping of the UK or May's 'hard right soft Brexit' super
Thatcherism.
Is Vice President Mike Pence trying to pull off a "House of Cards"-style scheme to undermine Trump
and increase his own chances of assuming the presidency?
Apparently, more than a few journalists
believe that might be the case. According to the Huffington Post, some believe that
the use
of a single word - "lodestar" - is a crucial tell
pointing toward Pence as the op-ed's
author. During the op-ed's final paragraphs the mystery author refers to John McCain as "a lodestar
for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue."
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter.
All Americans should
heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our
shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example - a
lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue.
Mr. Trump may
fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put
country first.
But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above
politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one:
Americans.
Pence has, of course, categorically denied these allegations and affirmed his loyalty to the
president.
Still, one video circulating on twitter shows Pence using the word in eight different speeches
dating back to 2001, when he was a Congressman from Indiana.
At the very least, there's some evidence to suggest that the author is a man. As Bloomberg's
Jennifer Jacobs pointed out yesterday, the Times' official Twitter feed may have inadvertently
revealed their gender.
For those who aren't familiar with the word, Merriam-Webster defines "lodestar" as
"a
star that leads or guides"
or a person who
"serves as an inspiration, model, or
guide."
To be sure, the Pence theory isn't without its holes. Trump staffers have said previously that
they pay attention to the idioms employed by others as a defense mechanism when speaking to the
press under the guise of anonymity.
"To cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers' idioms and use that in
my background quotes.
That throws the scent off me," one White House official told
Axios
.
But online betting markets have put Pence at the top of the list of suspects, with MyBookie
currently
reflecting 2-to-3 odds
on Pence as the culprit, per the
New
York Post
. The favorite right now, at 1-3 odds, is "the field" - i.e. someone not listed among
the 18 most likely senior admin officials, according to the Costa-Rica-based betting operation.
Still, at first brush, the theory makes a degree of sense:
As first in line for the
throne, Pence undoubtedly has the most to gain from the collapse of the Trump presidency.
But it's equally likely that a more junior official could've intentionally included these cues to
sow discord in the ranks.
As the Trump administration has proved time and time again, anything is possible in the West
Wing.
not sure pence is entirely a team member ... he has been told
to wait for more ... being around the trump tower, you can see
why pence would believe it besides the fact that he must have
been talking to real players that he knows they are real
players ...
having said all that, 100% this is coordinated ... it is no
coincidence it comes out at the same time with Bob Woodwards
book, Theresa May verdict on assailant of the failed attempt to
kill in salisbury soil, big offensive in Idlib (where trimp is
doing a 180 degrees and being a team member again ... to name
just a few ... it is the end of the line ... that economist
magazine "prediction" from 1988 on 30 years later comes to mind
... time for the US to come down hard i suppose ...
No way is the op-ed writer VP Pence. It
doesn't have his boring Midwestern tone.
It seems much more likely that the
letterbomb was written by a group --
not
in
the administration.
Rather, a
group of Deep State crybabies who aren't
getting their way and have devised this
lame, transparent effort akin to
Valley girls passing notes in homeroom ...
"like, I mean, um, whatever" ... because
they're too dumb to do anything else. And
the NYTimes ate it up.
But he IS a moron. All the war mongering pharisees are
morons.
Pence is a pro war psychopath who is very much
disconnected from his tortured soul and is a simple
biological robot devoid of higher levels of thought.
Pence is literally a moron. Only humans have souls and
access to imagination, inspiration, intuition, empathy:
pharisees DO NOT. They are all robotic machines: morons.
There being so many convoluted theories floating around,
here's mine. Trump, Pence and friends arranged this whole
editorial/reaction incident. As you point out, many other
stories were suddenly demoted to by-the-way status. This
gives Trump another reason to urge his supporters to be
enraged. It also could provide courage for purges within the
administration, someqthing it has long needed. Diverse
elements of the MSM are even attacking each other.
Ultimately, ask yourselves: cui bono? Who benefits?
It is
all too confusing. I'm getting a headache. Back to munching
on dark chocolate and watching cat videos.
Millions were beginning to think that that Trump wasn't
really leading the charge against the NWO and that he was
really
part of the NWO himself
--just like the NYT and the
person who wrote the op-ed, but by attacking Trump, these
NWO stooges
proved
Trump is leading the charge
against the NWO, and
proved
(after the
Sarah Jeong scandal
) to just as many others that the
NYT really is the most trustworthy institution in America
... just when both the NYT and Trump needed some street
cred the most ... and there's no way we are getting
played ... and there's no way this could be just theater
... or a psyop ... oh wait ...
Wasn't there a ZH article a few weeks ago about an algorithm that
could predict the author of a text, to a very high 90's percentile,
based on speech patterns?
I say we try it out and root out this
"saboteur".
However, I think we'd find that they are a fake.
Something about it feels contrived, why would a deep spate
functionary expose the apparatus that controls power regardless of
who is elected? What is the first rule of Fight Club?
I have a suspicion it is a plant, in an effort to convince the
masses that the deep state does exist. They are preaching to the
choir here at ZH, but 98% of the country has absolutely no idea what
the fuck Deep State even means. This makes it real for the common
man, In that respect, I guess it's a good thing. It just feels fake
though.
This whole year is playing out like the script from "House of Cards."
Now the MSM is calling for Trump to be removed as "unfit to hold
office." Liberals have hated Donald Trump since he first appeared on the
scene oil the 1970s as a loudmouth trust fund developer. They fought
every project he undertook and mocked him. Famously, "Spy" Magazine
belittled him as a "short-fingered vulgarian and Queens-born casino
operator" every time they mentioned his name, which was often. The
magazine's editor, Graydon Carter, despised Trump. Trump predicted the
magazine would fail within a year. So Carter put a calendar in the back
of the magazine, tearing off the days to prove Trump wrong. Alas, Trump
was right, and Spy shuttered before the year was out. It was a shame,
because the magazine was terrific and funny, but it had that typical
liberal New York Ivy League snottiness and superiority.
As
embarrassing as Trump may be, and he is certainly that, he is not
insane, nor unable to do the job. You may hate the job he is doing, but
this country has laws. If Mueller proves Trump committed real crimes
that mandate his indictment and removal, then so be it. But until then,
just because he runs a chaotic ship doesn't mean he can simply be taken
out.
The op-ed represents a shocking critique of Trump and is without precedent in modern
American history. Former CIA Director
John Brennan , who has sparred fiercely with the president, called the op-ed "active
insubordination born out of loyalty to the country, not to Donald Trump".
"This is not sustainable to have an executive branch where individuals are not following the
orders of the chief executive," Brennan told NBC's "Today" show. "I do think things will get
worse before they get better. I don't know how Donald Trump is going to react to this. A
wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded."
In it, the anonymous author describes Trump as amoral, "anti-trade and anti-democratic" and
prone to making "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions".
The writer claims aides had explored the possibility of removing Trump from office via
the 25th amendment , a complex constitutional mechanism to allow for the replacement of a
president who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office", but had decided
against it.
An op-ed written in the New York Times by an anonymous "senior official in the Trump
administration" has drawn harsh rebuke from both sides of the aisle and beyond - after everyone
from President Trump to Glenn Greenwald to the
Los Angeles Times
chimed in with various
criticisms.
The author, who claims to be actively working against Trump in collusion with other
senior officials in what they call a "resistance inside the Trump administration," has now been
labeled everything from a coward, to treasonous, to nonexistent.
Trump, as expected,
lashed out
at the "failing" New York Times - before questioning whether the the mystery
official really exists, and that if they do, the New York Times should reveal the author's identity
as a matter of national security.
Trump supporters, also as expected, slammed the op-ed as either pure fiction or treason - a
suggestion Trump made earlier Wednesday.
What we don't imagine the anonymous author or the
Times
saw coming was the onslaught of
criticism coming from the center and left - those who stand to benefit the most from Trump's fall
from grace, or at least probably wouldn't mind it.
In an op-ed which appeared hours after the
NYT
piece, Jessica Roy of
the
Los
Angeles Times
writes: "
No, anonymous Trump official, you're not 'part of
the resistance.' You're a coward
" for not going
far enough
to stop Trump and in
fact enabling him.
If they really believe there's a need to subvert the president to protect the country,
they should be getting this person out of the White House. But they're too cowardly and
afraid of the possible implications
. They hand-wave the notion thusly:
"Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of
invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But
no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis."
How is it that utilizing the 25th Amendment of the Constitution would cause a crisis,
but admitting to subverting a democratically elected leader wouldn't?
...
If you're reading this, senior White House official, know this: You are not resisting
Donald Trump. You are enabling him for your own benefit. That doesn't make you an unsung hero.
It makes you a coward. -
LA
Times
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald - the Pulitzer Prize Winning co-founder of
The Intercept,
also
called the author of the op-ed
a "coward" whose ideological issues "voters didn't ratify."
Greenwald continues; "The irony in the op-ed from the NYT's anonymous WH coward is glaring and
massive:
s/he accuses Trump of being "anti-democratic" while boasting of membership in an
unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability,
mandate or transparency.
"
So who is the "coward" in the White House?
While the author remains anonymous, there are a couple of clues in the case. For starters,
Bloomberg
White
House reporter Jennifer Jacobs points out that the
New York Times
revealed that a man
wrote the op-ed, which rules out Kellyanne Conway, Nikki Haley, Ivanka and Melania (the latter two
being
CNN's
suggestions
).
A second clue comes from the language used in the op-ed, and in particular "
Lodestar
"
- a rare word used by Mike Pence in at least one speech. Then again, someone trying to make one
think it's pence would also use that word (which was oddly Merriam-Webster's
word of the day
last
Tuesday).
A pence-theory hashtag has already emerged to support this theory;
#VeepThroat
Given the Op-Ed's praise of the late Senator John McCain, never-Trumper and Iraq War
sabre-rattler Bill Kristol tweeted that it was Kevin Hassett, the Chairman of the Council of
Economic Advisers. Of course, Kristol and whoever wrote the op-ed are ideologically aligned, so one
might question why he would voluntarily work against this person.
So while we don't know who wrote the op-ed, it appears to be backfiring spectacularly on its
author(s) amid wild theories and harsh rebuke from all sides of the aisle.
We're sure Carlos Slim - the largest owner of the
New York Times
and once the richest
man on earth, is having a good laugh at Trump's expense either way... for now.
Perhaps Trump can push the "fabrication" angle longer than NYT can retain the moral high ground
- especially after they hired, then refused to fire,
Sarah Jeong
- a new addition to the NYT editorial board who was revealed in old tweets to be an
openly bigoted, with a particularly deep hatred of "old white men."
The
New York Times
stood by Jeong - claiming she was simply responding to people
harassing her for being an Asian lesbian - only to have their absurd theory shredded within hours
.
Jeong
in fact has a multi-year history of unprovoked and random comments expressing hatred towards white
men.
And now she's right on the front lines of perhaps the greatest attempt to smear Trump yet. Not
exactly a good look for the
Times
at a time when MSM credibility has already taken a hit.
How many
broke bread
with the Clinton campaign leading up to the 2016 election?
Vote up!
158
Vote down!
2
Coup d'etat, in every sense of the word.......Constitution? What's that?
Roaches aren't even scurrying when you turn the lights on anymore. Trying to overthrow an elected standing government is the very definition of
treason.
That is an interesting angle. . . Trump creating his
own narratives by using agents to leak to the
blatently bias NYT. Jeebus, but the trouble that
strategy could cause. Millions out there are wound
tight across Amerika. Wouldnt take much of a spark to
get a good fire going. .
These are all staged irrelevances designed to distract
people...the few remaining people who are not addicted to
their screens. Remember - all media, all members of both
parties, all white house employees and especially Trump
work for the same cabal. No one can step out of line and
stay alive. The cabal knows everything.
If people yell loud and often enough, many will
actually forget that they are now knee deep in
ice-cold saltwater.
#Titanic
Let's focus on the important things, like a
scripted reality show fight, versus, idk, the fact
that we are again on the precipice of yet another
meltdown, only this time the Fed is fucked cause
nobody can borrow anymore $$, interest rates are still
way too low, and we are on our way to a Maunder
Minimum.
I could go on and on with REAL issues, but it seems
we just don't talk about them anymore. No need to see
how medical is bankrupting us, pensions are fucked,
"students" are quickly on their way to being
skullfucked with no way out.
We are setup for a calamity that will be 10x worse
than 2008, and the only thing I hear is the ever
increasing volume of "Everything is Awesome."
My dear, you don't really quite realize what you have
given the Trump Administration.
What the Times have
done is assured their readers that there is a counter
coup currently underway to bring down this sitting
President.
Back up and let that reality marinate.
Understand that now any failings or short comings that
come out of this administration can be laid at the feet
of the saboteurs working to bring down the government.
So if the economy rolls over and dies, it's the
saboteur's fault. If gas prices spike, it's the
senator's fault. If a nuke goes off in an American city,
it's the saboteur's fault. If the President is
impeached, it is the saboteur's fault. Any opposition to
this President from this point on is the result of a
concerted effort on the part of a gang of saboteurs to
bring down the government.
Merry Christmas, you have
just added the raison d'eter for a purge of all Obama
appointees in every executive agency.
President Trump thought that he could 'go along
to get along'. He is a slow learner. Taking credit
for a ginormous stock market bubble created by
cheap credit and buybacks, no real effort to build
a wall, massive tax cuts to
millionaires/billionaires, kissing Israel's ass,
the list goes on and on. The man hasn't done much
of anything to really help the middle class. And,
he hasn't done enough to even protect himself. The
op-ed is a hit piece. So what. But, Trump better
get up to speed sooner rather than later.
Are you really this stupid? The Trump administration
is owned by the banksters, every bit as much as the
'saboteur'. You really don't understand the game at
all.
CIA hit piece to discredit Trump and
sow division in the cabinet shortly before midterms.
If Trump fires half of his cabinet, or locks everyone down
hunting for the mole - "Seee?! We told you he was tyrannical!"
If he doesn't react or address it, it hangs out there,
continuing to make everyone believe he's an unstable bumbling
moron. And as he's stated previously, he's a "very stable
genius".
Either way, what may have been a clever ploy is a ham-fisted
CIA plot that misjudged it's audience (like they've never done
THAT before) and will continue to backfire. People are so sick
of the virtue signalling horseshit (Nike and Kuntpaernik come
to mind) that it's almost a guaranteed backfire when you try to
do it.
Imagine for a moment that you win the lottery and are appointed the
director of the CIA. Do you have any idea what the CIA does? Do you have
any inkling beyond what you have read in the media and the alternate media
of what agendas are afoot? Do you have any idea of what's at stake? Do
you have a clue about who you can trust? Are the lower echelons for you or
against you? Who do you talk to just to find out what is going on? Once
you are informed can you trust the information? Are the options you are
offered real options or are the serving someone's private agenda?
Now
imagine that you are President of the United States and half the electorate
wants to remove you from office. Who do you tap on the shoulder to
initiate the purge? How do you know they won't purge you?
I never said I was smart but I worked for one of the most corrupt
bureaucracies in the world for about a decade, and I learned a few
things about political tools and how to manipulate the narrative. What
the Times has done is publicly assert that there are saboteurs working
in the Trump administration who are actively attempting to bring down
this President. The Resistance i.e. the Democratic Party through its
mouth piece has openly stated that they are participating in an ongoing
coup to bring down the government. Do you not realize what kind of club
that has just been handed to Trump to beat down his opposition? Any
opposition is now aiding and abetting the attempted coup.
As for
government, the banks lent the money to purchase it in 1913. The banks
running the show is old news.
CIA hit piece to discredit Trump and sow division
in the cabinet shortly before midterms.
If Trump fires half of his cabinet, or locks everyone down hunting for
the mole - "Seee?! We told you he was tyrannical!" If he doesn't react or
address it, it hangs out there, continuing to make everyone believe he's an
unstable bumbling moron. And as he's stated previously, he's a "very stable
genius".
Either way, what may have been a clever ploy is a ham-fisted CIA plot
that misjudged it's audience (like they've never done THAT before) and will
continue to backfire. People are so sick of the virtue signalling horseshit
(Nike and Kuntpaernik come to mind) that it's almost a guaranteed backfire
when you try to do it.
syria had a legitimately elected government too, and look what's gone on
for the last seven years there.
you think these fuckers at CIA see any
difference between what they are able to do there and here in the US?
over there they drop pallets of weapons from the sky. over here they
drop what passes for information from their mockingbird operations.
same difference.
most america haters here at ZH are laughing because they think this
is the US getting their comeuppance. the comeuppance we are getting is
for challenging those who have been doing this to others for all these
years. it's not other nations turning around and doing this to the US.
it is those who have done this to others, are now doing it to the
citizens of the US. those america haters better hope we citizens win,
if not, that hell trump said would be unleashed on iran, will be
unleashed on the world. and all the hyperweapons invented or dreamed of
will not be able to stop it.
Government , its representatives and its agencies are unscrupulous
and immoral beyond the imagination of a normal person.
Northwoods,
Iraq WMD, Vietnam chemical weapon campaign, The Lusitania, Grenada,
Tonkin, kennedy assassinations.
The amazing thing is how people swallow all that and trot off to
the polls and never ask for any murderous corrupt bastard to be held
to account.
Meanwhile we lost the free press so now no lone voice questions
the moves of the real powers. The waste their voice on partisan
bickering over people who are only puppets leaving real power to play
its global killing games un remarked.
"... "When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make themselves bigger than the entire American system," ..."
"... "extremely self-indulgent." ..."
"... "You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," ..."
"... "If you are this person, you really should resign tonight." ..."
"... "just made things worse," ..."
"... "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have far more impact." ..."
"... "The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is 'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and daring Trump to get worse," ..."
"... "Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far harder," ..."
"... "What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?" ..."
"... "We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because they think that's true," ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
Press Pundits are lining up to
weigh in on a salacious New York Times op-ed allegedly penned by an anonymous #Resister in the
Trump administration, with some experts on television calling the piece an all-out coup against
the president. The opinion piece in question, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump
Administration," has spawned a level of frenetic punditry not seen since George W. Bush was
spotted
sneaking Michelle Obama a cough drop. Only this time the stakes are allegedly much higher.
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said on Wednesday the stunning claims made in the anonymous op-ed
– for example, that there is a group of "adults" in the White House who believe
Trump is unfit to hold office and are trying
to shape policy behind the president's back – are akin to "a coup."
"In other countries... they sometimes call this a coup," Wallace said on MSNBC's
Deadline: White House, referring to the article's assertion that there is a
"resistance" made up of administration officials which aims to protect the republic
from Trump's "amorality."
Another MSNBC talking head, Howard Fineman, said that he was troubled by the fact that the
op-ed appears to describe how "unelected aides have staged a slo-mo coup." Impeachment
– not "frenzy, mutiny and rumors" – is the antidote to Trump's criminal
unfitness for public service, he added.
The @nytimes
essay is troubling. Why? 1. The dangerous, ignorant volatility of @realDonaldTrump . 2. The claim
by UNELECTED aides to have staged a slo-mo coup. 3. The NYT letting the accuser hide.
#Trump 's unfit, but
caution: impeachment -- not frenzy, mutiny and rumor -- is the answer.
But others were even less impressed by the anonymous scoop-provider. Fox News host Sean
Hannity called the author of the op-ed a "swamp sewer creature who can't stand that there
is a new sheriff in town."
Hannity calls the senior Trump administration official who wrote the NYT op-ed a "swamp
sewer creature."
Speaking with Hannity on his program, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich said
that the anonymous author had "repudiated our whole constitutional process."
"When you think about it it's an amazing statement of their willingness to make
themselves bigger than the entire American system," Gingrich
said .
Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush, called the
mysterious author of the op-ed "extremely self-indulgent."
"You should not be lapping up the benefits of being a senior administration official, no
doubt while scouting for lucrative opportunities for when you leave your post," she
said .
"If you are this person, you really should resign tonight."
Almost all of the nation's sharpest political minds were in agreement on one point, however:
This mystery senior government official should reveal him/herself, in order to save America
from fascism, or hokey #Resistance claptrap, depending on whom you ask.
The op-ed "just made things worse," conservative commentator and National Review
senior fellow David French said. "Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of
honor speaking openly would have far more impact."
1) The guy is real (no way the NYT puts forth a fake source);
2) His story is likely largely true (perhaps exaggerated at the margins);
3) He's just made things worse.
4) Anonymous leaking won't take down Trump. A person of honor speaking openly would have
far more impact
"If you are the author of this and you truly want to effectuate change... you want to do
something in service to the nation, you have to come forward and sign your name to this..
Come forward. You could change the fate of the country..."- @DavidJollyFL w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/d9l7PMnzkj
"The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is
'principled,' as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and
daring Trump to get worse," veteran journalist Dan Froomkin said. He added that he thought
it was wrong of the Times not to identify the piece's author.
The thing about the op-ed is that reading its text, you can think the writer is
"principled," as the NYT did. But in context, the author is a coward confessing to a coup and
daring Trump to get worse. They shouldna granted anonymity.
Much has also been discussed about Trump's reaction to the article.
"Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this 'internal resistance' far
harder," predicted Washington Post contributor Carlos Lozada. "What is the point
of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?"
Gut reaction to NYT oped:
1) Feeds/confirms Trump's worst fears about the deep state plots
2) Trump will go nuclear, making the efforts of this "internal resistance" far harder
3) What is the point of a secret cabal if you don't keep it secret?
Not everyone is calling for the anonymous author to come forward, however: At least one
pundit claims to already know who penned the troubling opinion piece.
"We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official
because they think that's true," Ben Shapiro tweeted.
We all know Putin wrote the op-ed and the NYT claimed it's a senior Trump official because
they think that's true.
This really smells with coup d'état. Trump may be a threat but so is this covert coup
to impose these policies. The op ed suggests the existence of anti-Trump 'sleeper cells' within
the government"
The author also claimed that the administration's achievements had included some "bright
spots" such as "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and
more".
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times ..."
"... is required by their own oath ..."
"... If Anonymous=Deep State, then Trump brought this Deep State with him. These are his appointees ..."
The New York Timespublished
a strange op-ed purportedly written by a "senior official" in the Trump administration:
The dilemma -- which he does not fully grasp -- is that many of the senior officials in
his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda
and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular "resistance" of the left. We want the administration
to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more
prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a
manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
The author of the op-ed flatters himself by claiming to be acting in the best interests of
the country, but there is something very wrong with having self-appointed guardians assuming
that they have the right to sabotage certain policies of the elected president. For one, they
have no authority to do what they're doing, and no one voted for them. It is one thing to argue
that professionals should be willing to serve a bad president in the interests of public
service, and it is quite another to argue that the officials working for the president are
entitled to disregard and override the president's decisions because the president happens to
be an ignorant buffoon. The "two-track presidency" that the official boasts about is an affront
to our system of government. It is not reassuring that U.S. foreign policy continues as if on
autopilot no matter what the electorate votes for.
Perversely, the more that Trump administration officials "frustrate parts of his agenda,"
the more likely it is that Trump remains in power longer than he otherwise would. The official
says that the core of the problem is the president's "amorality." That raises the obvious
question: how can someone acknowledge that the president has no principles or scruples of any
kind and still in good conscience try to help him succeed? These officials are not only
enabling a president whose behavior they consider to be "detrimental to the health of our
republic," but they are helping to make sure that he stays in office instead of hastening his
defeat. They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating
the policies of the government to their own liking.
There are legitimate political and constitutional remedies for an unfit president, but the
anonymous "resistance" official isn't interested in any of that. He prefers to keep the
administration from completely imploding because it also happens to be advancing a mostly
conventional Republican agenda that he likes. There is nothing particularly admirable about
that, and he should not have been granted anonymity to write his self-congratulatory article.
If this official feels so strongly that the president endangers the health and well-being of
the country, he should put his name on a statement to that effect when he announces his
resignation.
Who knew the Deep State (tm?) included Trump's political appointees? (see Times guidelines on
who that attribute as "senior administration officials" )
Donald: Yes, but that Deep State was brought in by Trump and is trying to keep their jobs. I
agree with Daniel's analysis, but I am not at all confident that our Constitution is equipped
to deal with a sociopath as President when you also have a legislative branch that knows it
but refuses to do it's constitutional duty.
It is my understanding from carefully listening to Trump Supporters (I am not one) that this
is exactly the reason why he was elected. There is a feeling (particularly strongly felt
among Trump supporters, but a lot of Bernie supporters felt a version of it too) that
although we continue to have elections in this country, that we are ceasing to be a democracy
because decision-making is increasingly being taken away from or being delegated away from
elected officials.
Supporters of a very powerful Executive Branch might argue "hey, it's not exactly the way
that our Founder Fathers envisioned our Federal System to work, but if the Executive takes
decision-making power away from unelected bureaucrats, lifetime-appointed judges, and a
deadlocked Congress, then at least we get to vote every 4 years on kicking the bum out of the
White House or not".
A White House that has decision-making taken power away from the person of the Executive,
thus devolving power back to unelected officials, is a true crisis for democracy. Impeachment
or the 25th Amendment are Constitutional remedies for a corrupt or incapacitated Executive
because they take power away from an elected official and invest them in a new official
subject to election. White House officials secretly undermining the President doesn't pass
Constitutional muster, no matter how bad the President is.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get
it good and hard." – H. L. Mencken
It's a remarkable editorial. It appears to be a confession of treason. Similar words, written
in response to a popular president, would hopefully trigger an investigation leading to
conviction and imprisonment of those involved.
Every indication is that the writer is correct: Trump is a disaster. But if the writer
wants to live up to his/her claim of putting country first, s/he and the other cafeteria
Republicans (i.e., selective co-conspirators) should stop trying to have it both ways,
keeping their salaries and their positions of power in the name of the Trump administration
while simultaneously reserving the right to undermine it. Instead, they should find the
courage to step forward en masse.
An independent investigator could help them to find that courage. The process of exploring
and publicizing what has gone on, in that White House, may help to push the nation toward a
serious discussion of an appropriate replacement for its present corrupted and dysfunctional
form of democracy.
I have some reservations about this so called 'Resistance' Op-Ed in the NYT. This whole
'resistance' affair sounds hollow and not very authentic to me. I also have reservation about
the new book 'Fear' by Bob Woodward. The book as such probably is needed, but naming who said
what is counterproductive, to put it mildly. I do not think B. Woodward got permission to
assign names to who said what because if he had permission the people to whom some statements
are assigned would not deny them. I suspect that B. Woodward in reality conscientiously works
for D. Trump. Why I do think so: because I can not imagine that he in his book could not
anticipate what D. Trump will do next with those named. The book by B. Woodward will only
help to purge the rest of the moderate people from trump administration and put in their
place his favorites so he will have free hand to do whatever he wants probably until 2024.
I suspect this op-ed is nothing more than someone trying to establish their own personal
defense for when the whole thing comes crashing down. "No no no – don't blame me! I
wasn't really part of it. In fact I was really trying to stop it the whole time." If what
this person is writing is true, then there is a constitutional remedy that he or she is
required by their own oath to implement. Failing to do that, and just trying to
undermine Trump secretly is making them just as guilty. I despise Trump as much as anyone,
but this is not the way to deal with him.
I agree up to a point. If Trump got up one morning and decided he was tired of arguing with
North Korea and ordered a first nuclear strike, I'd hope that there'd be people around him
who would stop him, as that would, no doubt, be in the best interest of the country. To
assume that they'd have time to go through the constitutional removal procedure in time to
stop the needless deaths of millions of people is absurd.
Now, I'm not saying what they are doing is preventing nuclear war. I'm just making the
point that there are limits to your principled position.
"They want credit for "resisting" Trump when their "resistance" amounts to manipulating
the policies of the government to their own liking. "
Yes. Creepy. Especially in light of Trump's about-turn on foreign policy, in which this
administration has used our money and military power to serve Israeli and Saudi Arabian
interests instead of America's.
Now we know where the "America First" policy of the campaign went. It went down the Deep
State rabbit hole. We're still mired in the Middle East, still doing favors for Israel and
Saudi Arabia. Things didn't get better. They got far worse.
Hiding behind anonymity I believe shows a lack of courage and conviction. I am surprised a
genuine "newspaper" would even publish the article. How can anyone be believed when they
don;t have the courage to sign their name?
This basically confirms what many have suspected and feared. Neocon Establishment types
worked their way into the White House and have been pursuing their own foreign policy agenda,
exploiting the President's ignorance, stupidity, and impulsiveness.
"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron" – H. L.
Mencken
Some at TAC have suggested for quite a while that Trump was "hijacked" by his staff at some
point. While most of what he's done is clearly down to Trump himself, those who have
suggested that he has been manipulated and controlled by advisors just got whopping
corroboration from the Woodward book and NYT op/ed.
Under the circumstances, there's obviously concern that foreign countries have been
exploiting the situation. FBI counterespionage agents, a small army of them, should be
checking and re-checking the foreign connections of his current staff, to the extent that
isn't already being done by Mueller.
And it isn't just Russia. China, Israel and Saudi Arabia are obvious suspects, if for no
other reason that they spy on and attempt to influence us with at least the same intensity as
Russia. The investigators should look where Trump has been spending his time in the foreign
policy arena. He has been threatening and pressuring some countries, but he is also doing
favors for others. For what countries has he been doing favors? And in threatening certain
countries is he doing the will of others?
Reminds me of the story of the last days of the Nixon White House, when the pressure was
driving him to drunken wanderings punctuated by near unhinged rants. Senior officials became
so worried that they contacted the pentagon and told them to ignore nuclear launch orders
unless confirmed by someone else.
In all seriousness though, this is less some kind of "deep state" and more of what you get
when you run the White House the way Trump apparently has. He's packed his administration
with people of dubious ability for the most part, with the highest qualification apparently
being how he perceives their loyalty to him. Then he sets them all at odds against each
other, fighting for the scraps of his attention to get their own agendas enacted.
In that kind of environment it's inevitable that someone will believe that One, the
emperor has no clothes, and Two, the agenda they are fighting so hard to shepherd through
this administration is more important than the administration itself. So why not just do an
end run around the moron and do whatever they want.
Ray Woodcock: " It appears to be a confession of treason. "
Only if you regard the US president as a monarch to whom his minions owe a duty of
personal allegiance. Because that is the way treason is typically defined in monarchies. (For
example, in the UK.) In the United States treason has a very different definition. You can
find it in section 3 of article 3 of the Constitution. There allegiance is not to any one
person but to the United States as a whole, and more specifically to the Constitution.
In other words, in the US it isn't treason to betray a president, although I will grant
you many Americans do treat treason as if that WERE the case. But then just how many of them
have even read their nation's Constitution?
Re treason : "There allegiance is not to any one person but to the United States as a whole,
and more specifically to the Constitution."
Yes. There may be treason if a foreign country has infiltrated Trump's staff with
operatives who persuaded Trump to do things against the national security interests of the
United States – actions on behalf of a foreign country that imperil American persons or
property, civilian or military.
The idea that the ethical problem at the White House is not Pr. Trump is pretty odd.
Pr. Trump says GOP legislators shouldn't be prosecuted by DOJ, voting is rigged, FBI is
corrupt, 3 million Mexicans voted, orders economic deal with S. Korea to end, apparently
forgets about it, and etc, and somehow Mr. Larison, David Frum, and David Graham think a
bureaucrat ratting on the President and other bureaucrats frustrating the President's desires
is a constitutional crisis?
When members of the President's own cabinet are taking the same actions as these
bureaucrats, because they think the President is immature, not stable, or immoral?
They work with the President. They would know.
Apparently no one wants to work for Pr. Trump. Why can't he find people who agree with him
and respect him?
Go after Pr. Trump's cabinet members for a deep state, not petty bureaucrats who could be
fired and replaced any time.
Ask yourself why the President can't find good people to work for him.
The answer is tweeting at you every day and the finger should be pointing back at him.
"It's a remarkable editorial. It appears to be a confession of treason. "
But Trump has been spectacularly disloyal to the people who work for him. Is there anyone
other than family members who he hasn't belittled and attacked? Hell, he's even betrayed
those who voted for him (see long list of broken promises).
Given his own treacherous nature, how much loyalty can he reasonably expect? He must have
already fired half of those he hired, so it's not too surprising that many are now writing
books or telling tales to the NYT or WaPo.
That said, there are probably some real traitors in there. I'd guess most of the real
traitors are spies working for foreign countries, taking advantage of the chaos to get things
done for their foreign masters. That's a real cause for concern.
Clearly this is an admission of a Deep State. Many of you might agree with the politics of
the Deep State operative below but keep in mind he is phrasing the issue in the most
political way possible but that's the point. We don't resolve political disagreements by
using the power if the bureaucracy to tie the President up in say, 'collusion investigations'
in combination with what entrenched agencies want. If we did so we would still be enemies of
Great Britain. Those rogues burned down the White House and armed the Confederates.
The Deep State is trying to get us into battle against the Russians in Syria to create
Iraq 2.0 and is cheering on his mania against Iran for Iraq 3.0.
"Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for
autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's
leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to
allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on
another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished
accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed
as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's
spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for
weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with
Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions
on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better -- such
actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable"
All of this is well and good as the expression goes. The anonymous author of the Op Ed piece
should come forward and cease serving in an administration which is at odds with his or her
sensibilities except for one thing that above all else must be considered in this respect:
The Chief Executive has his finger on the button.
The case made by Mr. Larison is correct except for this one major consideration. One
individual can launch a nuclear strike and that individual no matter who it has been and no
matter who it is today and will be tomorrow has that power. Perhaps the time is past due to
reconsider granting one individual with this capacity to act which with one directive sent
directly to our nuclear warhead tipped missile silos may bring the end to our species on this
planet.
Many of the complaints from the NYT's anonymous WH coward - not all, but
many - are ideological: that Trump deviates from GOP orthodoxy, an ideology he didn't
campaign on & that voters didn't ratify. Trump may be a threat but so is this covert
coup to impose these policies. pic.twitter.com/4Qf54JJHN9
Replying to @ggreenwald The irony in the op-ed from the
NYT's anonymous WH coward is glaring and massive: s/he accuses Trump of being
"anti-democratic" while boasting of membership in an unelected cabal that covertly imposes
their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency
Michael Cohen's guilty plea
directly implicating President Trump in the commission of a crime has stimulated new talk
about possible impeachment. Given how the case involves sexual liaisons, it also has
stimulated comparisons with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Most such comparisons focus on
the domestic politics of each episode, and on such questions as whether Democrats who
downplayed the significance of Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern would be
inconsistent if they now went after Trump -- although Clinton's behavior did not involve an
election and violation of campaign finance law -- whereas Cohen's allegation about Trump
does.
Those more interested in foreign and security policy might focus instead on another
dimension of how Clinton's caper with Monica Lewinsky was discussed at the time. When
Clinton, following al-Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam
twenty years ago this month, ordered cruise missile attacks against facilities associated
with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan, some of his political opponents accused him of using
the strikes to boost domestic support that was sagging amid the Lewinsky affair. The
accusation was stimulated partly by the timing of the missile strikes, which occurred just
three days after Clinton admitted in a televised address that he had misled the public about
his relationship with Lewinsky.
Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir
Putin, has gone on record with
The
Hill
's John Solomon - admitting to colluding with Americans
leading up to the 2016 US election, except it might not be what
you're thinking.
Deripaska, rumored to be Donald Trump's "
back
channel
" to Putin via the Russian's former association with Paul
Manafort, says he "colluded" with the
US
Government
between 2009 and 2016.
In 2009, when
Robert
Mueller was running the FBI
, the agency asked Deripaska to
spend $25 million of his own money to bankroll an FBI-supervised
operation to rescue a retired FBI agent - Robert Levinson, who was
kidnapped in 2007 while working on a 2007 CIA contract in Iran. This
in and of itself is more than a bit strange.
Deripaska agreed, however the Obama State Department, headed by
Hillary Clinton, scuttled a last-minute deal with Iran before
Levinson could be released. He hasn't been heard from since.
FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel
meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington
.
Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the
mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither
involve nor harm his homeland. -The Hill
In other words -
Trump's
alleged "back channel" to Putin was in fact an FBI asset
who
spent $25 million helping Obama's "scandal free" administration find
a kidnapped agent. Deripaska's admitted
Steele, Ohr and the 2016 US Election
Trending Articles
Earth's "Big Freeze" Looms As Sun Remains Devoid
Of
Scientists believe that Earth could experience a
"big freeze" as the sun goes through what's
known as "solar minimum."
As the
New
York Times
frames it, distancing Deripaska from the FBI (no
mention of the $25 million rescue effort, for example), the Russian
aluminum magnate was just one of several Putin-linked Oligarchs the
FBI tried to flip.
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader,
clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining
cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia's richest men,
nearly
all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V.
Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. -
NYT
Central to the recruiting effort were two central players in the
Trump-Russia investigation; twice-demoted DOJ #4 official
Bruce
Ohr and Christopher Steele
- the author of the largely
unverified "Steele Dossier."
Steele, a longtime associate of Ohr's, worked for Deripaska
beginning in 2012 researching a business rival - work which would
evolve to the point where the former British spy was interfacing
with the Obama administration on his behalf - resulting in Deripaska
regaining entry into the United States, where he visited numerous
times between 2009 and 2017.
The State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa
between 2006 and 2009 because they believed he had unspecified
connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated
power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those
allegations...
Whatever the case,
it
is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska
regained entry to the United States
. And he visited
numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show. -
The
Hill
Deripaska is now banned from the United States as one of
several
Russians sanctioned
in April in response to alleged 2016
election meddling.
In a September 2016 meeting,
Deripaska
told FBI agents that it was "preposterous" that Paul Manafort was
colluding with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 election
.
This, despite the fact that Deripaska and Manafort's business
relationship "ended in lawsuits, per
The
Hill
- and the Russian would have every reason to throw
Manafort under the bus if he wanted some revenge on his old
associate.
So the
FBI
and DOJ secretly collaborated with Trump's alleged backchannel over
a seven-year period
, starting with Levinson, then on
Deripaska's Visa, and finally regarding whether Paul Manafort was an
intermediary to Putin. Deripaska vehemently denies the assertion,
and even took out newspaper advertisements in the US last year
volunteering to testify to Congress, refuting an
AP
report
that he and Manafort secretly worked on a plan to
"greatly benefit the Putin government" a decade ago.
Soon after the advertisements ran, representatives for the House
and Senate Intelligence Committees called a Washington-based
lawyer for Mr. Deripaska, Adam Waldman, inquiring about taking
his client up on the offer to testify, Mr. Waldman said in an
interview.
What happened after that has been in dispute. Mr. Waldman, who
stopped working for Mr. Deripaska after the sanctions were
levied, said he told the committee staff that his client would
be willing to testify without any grant of immunity, but would
not testify about any Russian collusion with the Trump campaign
because "he doesn't know anything about that theory and actually
doesn't believe it occurred." -
NYT
In short, Deripaska wants it known that he worked with the FBI and
DOJ, and that he had nothing to do with the Steele dossier.
Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of
several Russians sanctioned in April by the Trump administration
as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he
wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement
provided by his team.
First,
he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily
assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as
Ohr between 2009 and 2016.
He also wants Americans to know
he
did not cooperate or assist with Steele's dossier, and he tried
to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign
colluded during the 2016 election
. -
The
Hill
Interestingly, Steele's dossier which was partially funded by the
Clinton campaign, relied on
senior
Kremlin officials
.
"... In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to become chairman of Mr. Trump's campaign, had served as a link between the campaign and the Kremlin. ..."
"... The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia's richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said. ..."
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg
Sept. 1, 2018
WASHINGTON -- In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska,
a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations
of extortion, bribery and even murder. They also thought he might make a
good source.
Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully
tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might
provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or
even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they
were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible
Russian aid to President Trump's 2016 campaign, according to current and
former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.
In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and
uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him
on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to
become chairman of Mr. Trump's campaign, had served as a link between the
campaign and the Kremlin.
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine
American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly
a half-dozen of Russia's richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska,
depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials
said.
___________________
As I and some others around here have been saying for a while, "Russiagate"
started years before Trump entered the scene. He stumbled face-first into a
CIA/MI-6 effort to use Russian oligarchs to regime change Putin. It's right
there, if you read between the lines and the usual NYT spin.
Look at the dates. Also be aware of the larger context here. As we know,
this obviously didn't start with Russian "meddling" in US elections – and it
isn't about law enforcement. The FBI is the junior partner in such matters of
Oligarchs, Big Politics and Big Money. For decades, the FBI and DOJ knew about
and did surprisingly little about international organized crime, and its movement
of capital into the United States -- most of it into the Eastern District of
New York -- even Russian organized crime has been largely hands off. That's
why they actively helped Mr. Deripaska with his visa problems so he could move
his Manhattan bank accounts around after he began cooperating with western intelligence
in 2009.
What we're finally seeing is the lid coming off is the dying vestiges of
an ongoing, covert program to promote regime change in Moscow. Because since
that has already failed, Plan B is to escalate the Cold War and wipe out any
chance of continued detente with Russia. That'll teach 'em, even if we have
to bring our own corrupt empire down around our ears. It'll be a miracle if
we not to blow up the world this time 'round. We've already been improbably
lucky too many times.
As the world shifts, this is also an opportunity for the CIA to settle some
old scores, using Robert Mueller's Star Chamber to punish Americans such as
Mike Flynn and Manafort who for various reasons -- good and bad -- tried to
push back during the last Administration against failed regime change programs
in Syria and Ukraine.
If you buy into Russiagate, better be aware of the backstory what goes along
with it. As the lid comes off, who knows what else might crawl out.
Really, publishing a story which doesn't actually accuse El Trumpo of
Russian collusion. Is the geomagnetic pole starting to shift--after all
both polar ice caps are melting, throwing the celestial orb off track.
The brilliance of the FBI! Boy, it is unmatched in the files of history.
Trying to "turn" a Russian billionaire who not only owes his wealth to V.V.
Putin, but also his life? Oleg must have laughed his head off after the
Feebs left his home.
"What kind of story, boys, do you want me to tell you? About the Chinese
masquerading as Russians? About the Awangate? About Difi's Chinese spy 'about
which she didn't know--nor did you'?"
From NYT:
Mr. Trump and his allies have cast Mr. Steele's research -- and the
serious consideration it was given by Mr. Ohr and the F.B.I. -- as part
of a plot by rogue officials and Mrs. Clinton's allies to undermine
Mr. Trump's campaign and his presidency.
I would change rogue officials to "all of the senior officials". Of course
NYT won't admit to this silent civil war between two factions of the Deep
State.
Did Mr. Oleg get to deduct his money paid to the Feebs to rescue Levinson
from the Imams? It definitely was a loss. Apparently, though--and this is
the good news, The FBI doesn't get much funding from drug running, at least
unlike the CIA, so they had to rely on a furriner to bail them out. And
then they try to use him again, gratis, to pin a big one on El Trumpo.
The tides are slowly turning and lying assholes like Rachel Madcow are
beginning to slowly pirouette away from Russia-Russia-Russia. She actually
gave Brennan some hardball questions in her interview with the Ringleader
on MSDNC. Now perhaps Mr. Slim will be deprived of his part ownership of
the Slimes under Trump's new SHAFTA.
a fairly frequent and close observer of Tim Russert. Part of what I observed
was his asking both Democrats and Republicans what he called "the hard questions.
However, he would allow Republicans to complete their answers in peace.
Sometimes, he even nodded as they spoke, looking for all the world like
he was agreeing with what they were saying. Then, he would go on to the
next question, or ask a softball follow up question. So, the "hard question"
merely gave Republicans the opportunity to give their side of a story on
national television.
When he questioned Democrats, however, he would cut them off while they
were speaking, talk over them and barrage them with follow up questions,
sometimes not even waiting for them to respond before asking his next question.
I saw one interview of Ted Kennedy that could not have been more disrespectful,
with cutting off Kennedy repeatedly while shouting at him.
The first time Obama was on MTP, Russert hammered him about, of all things,
something controversial that Harry Belafonte had recently said, spending
most of Obama's air time on that one comment that Obama had not even made!
(I suppose it only made sense to insist that one Democratic black man defend
the comment of another Democratic black man?/s)
But, Russert would brag that he asked "both" sides the hard questions
and show video to back up his claim. Problem was, the video showed only
the initial question and not what followed. And it was only in what followed
the initial "hard question" that Russert's bias showed.
We helped put the Oligarchs into business, Putin reigned them in so he
has to go
From before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been cultivating
a commercial and political elite abroad that we could "work with." As in
most of the developing world during the Cold War, that meant that post-communist
Russia was an oligarchy kept in money and power by IMF loans, graft, private
militias and death squads.
Such was the case during the Boris Yeltsin's government that presided
over the Russian Federation, a self-contained trading bloc shorn of half
of its richest territories. The result of loss of most military spending
and trade resulted in an average 50% loss in real living standards for the
typical Russian in the depths of the Depression during the early 1990s.
What grew out of the rubble was the New Russia controlled by the Oligarchs,
run by returning members of Russian ethnic organized crime families once
scattered around the world and remnants of the KGB, party bosses, and former
Soviet military who couldn't move enough their assets out of the country
while the door was still open. For Deripaska, that door closed the other
way in 2006, when he lost his US B-1 visa, which meant that he had to make
a deal with the FBI's McCabe and other US intelligence handlers to reenter
the U.S. to access his stash deposited in Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Is Oleg really Putin's "closest oligarch", as is again repeated here
in the Times?
The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos Oil Co., one of
the world's major oil suppliers on October fifth, 2003 was a signal that
things would never be the same for the oligarchs. By the time he took his
third term as Russian President in 2012, Putin had put highly concentrated
large industries increasingly under state supervision, curtailing the effective
power and range of operation of many oligarchs, restricting the movement
of private wealth out of the country, including that of Oleg Deripaska,
whom he publicly humiliated in 2009, as seen in this video.
1) You pay your taxes
2) You pay your employees
3) There will be no asset stripping
Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging
Russia. From 1995–2006 his company, Hermitage Capital Management, siphoned
untold billions of dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts while paying
no taxes and cheating workers of wages and pensions.
Putin put an end to US and UK backed shysters stealing Russia blind.
Is it any wonder the western oligarchs hate him with such a passion?
@Alligator Ed the oligarchs. This has been a common historical
issue for Russia over many centuries.
Successful Czars controlled the oligarchs.
If you were in favor you could attend court and keep your position and wealth
in Russian society. Otherwise not.
The US deep state figured that they had won the cold war with Russia. Reality
had a different tale to tell. They are a bunch of sore losers and revengeful
bastards. Thinking that they could find another wedge to neuter Russia by
working with Russian oligarchs was wishful thinking, and showed a fundamental
misunderstanding of modern Russia. Today the neocons can't work through
the oligarchs, or NGOs, can't find any serious "Liberal" opposition and
can't generate any dislike of President Putin through the media. It's amazing
to travel in Moscow and talk to Russians about their government. They love
Vladimir Putin. Their attitude is the exact opposite of Liberal America
today. No hatred, just love and appreciation. It's really nice. The hate
in this country is disgusting and dangerous. Right mow Democrats are seething
with hate for both Presidents. I sat at a meeting of local Democrats led
by our Rep, seething with hate for Russia-- how dare they hack our pristine
god-sent democratic process? Unfortunately they betray themselves for who
they really are, and it's pretty ugly.
...until Putin was elected in 1999 and began to rein in the robber barons.
By then, the Russian people had fallen into poverty from a decade of
asset stripping, and their life expectancy had taken a steep dive.
The next decade, from 2000 to 2010, saw a reversal of those fortunes
under Putin's guidance. The people's standards of living had improved significantly,
and medical services were made available to them. Year-over-year economic
improvements made Putin a popular figure in Russia. That's when the US sanctions
and fear mongering began in earnest, along with NATO'S push to the West
and myriad military provocations against Russia, including the overthrow
of Ukraine's democratically elected government.
But I would suggest that the unintended consequences of US aggression
against Russia, coupled with larger geopolitical developments created a
condition that took regime change off the table and replaced it with a mad
grab for global supremacy and empire.
Sensable analysts would have seen by 2015 that regime change in Russia
was impossible -- especially after the failed attempt to seize Russia's
only warm water Navy base in Crimea (which was the key strategic purpose
of the Ukraine overthrow). The Russians are more attached to their 200-year-old
navy base than the West can ever begin to understand. It was a catastrophic
move. As a consequence, the US pushed Russia and China together and triggered
the explosive rise of Eurasia. In the face of illegal sanctions, Russia
grew stronger and opened markets decades into the future. Trading alliances
formed throughout the Eastern Hemisphere favoring Russia and China. The
roles of currencies transformed and comprehensive new banking systems that
could replace US controlled banking and hegemony were successfully established.
Almost immediately, the US was facing the reality of multipolar world
powers -- which replaced their dream of a New American Century. Even with
regime changes, the die had been cast. One hundred nations are now Members
of the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank AIIB, which will stand at
the center of global trade. The US is no longer the largest trading partner
of anybody, outside of Canada and Mexico. The US Dollar is optional, not
mandatory.
I would suggest that the US provoking Iran, Russia, and China is a desperate
attempt to undo the terrible consequences of the neocon's Ukraine fiasco;
it is their last, insane push to secure the American Empire they thought
was theirs already. Hillary Clinton devoted her time as SoS putting the
Empire timeline in place. She ushered in the TPP, the TTIP, and the Pivot
to Asia to wrap it up. As President of the United States, she was going
to oversee the final execution of the plan.
But the Neocons spoiled everything with the Ukraine coup.
Thanks for this stimulating essay. Your very first sentence got me laughing.
Good one.
@Pluto's Republic Your exposition is so clear and logical that
it's a wonder the genii at HFA, DNC, NeoCon Central didn't get it. Oh, wait...they
didn't want to "get it". They never acknowledge their fiascos. It's what
narcissistic sociopaths do.
The author had put me in a funny mood and I found your rifts on the topic
both amusing and insightful, especially your view on the contortions of
the NYT and Maddow. Do you think many readers can see this embarrassing
clawback? It seems so obvious.... but we are dealing with an intellectually
tased readership, so it's hard to know.
and excellent comments too. This is why this blue blog rocks.
Russia Gate boils down to this.
We helped put the Oligarchs into business, Putin reigned them in so he
has to go.
As the world shifts, this is also an opportunity for the CIA to settle
some old scores, using Robert Mueller's Star Chamber to punish Americans
such as Mike Flynn and Manafort who for various reasons -- good and
bad -- tried to push back during the last Administration against failed
regime change programs in Syria and Ukraine.
Good point. Manafort was working with the Ukraine president before Obama,
Biden, McCain and Nuland threw him out of his country because he accepted
the loan from Russia instead of the IMF which would bankrupted the country
unless he allowed foreign corrupt to steal the resources. And just like
every other country we have "meddled" with Ukraine is full of violence and
being run by despots. But why did Podesta get immunity for doing the same
things that Manafort did? John Podesta worked with Manafort on many issues.
Could it be because he's a friend of the Clintons?
And when Oleg refused to play along with the FBI:
In April, Deripaska and his company were hit by sweeping US sanctions,
with Washington accusing him of links to crime, various abuses and even
of ordering a murder.
During the previous Russian election the streets were full of protesters
against Putin's presidency. Putin wanted a more peaceful one during the
last one so he kicked out a bunch of NGOs and that made all the difference.
I reference to the Alligator's comment Rachel pinned down Brennan on
his tweet accusing Trump of committing treason. I wonder if she had a flash
back to when she had a conscience and reported on the heinous acts that
the intelligence agencies committed? But Rachel isn't the only one kissing
Brennan's buttocks.
In their blind hatred for Trump, liberals have sunk to an all-time
low by unabashedly cheering a war criminal.
On August 24, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher had former CIA director
John Brennan on as an interview guest. Brennan has been in the news
lately because he accused Trump of treason or, more precisely, "nothing
short of treason," due to the president's weak-kneed, post-summit news
conference with Russia's Vladimir Putin.
...
On the episode of Real Time, the usually acerbic Maher, or as I am fond
of calling him due to his petulant demeanor and intellectual dwarfism,
Little Bill, immodestly degraded himself fawning over John Brennan before
the former CIA chief ever got on stage by gushing that he was a "
true American patriot. "
The nadir for the #Resistance occurred shortly thereafter as Brennan
rumbled on stage and was greeted by the eruption of a raucous standing
ovation by the liberal audience, with Little Bill calling it a " well-deserved
standing ovation. " Only in the bizarre universe where a silver-spooned,
multi-bankrupted, reality television star is president does a former
CIA director who has committed crimes and war crimes such as implementing
and covering up Bush's rendition and torture regime, spying on the US
Senate, and masterminding Obama's deadly drone program, get a delirious
ovation from those on the left.
Trump derangement syndrome has infected the country. Everyone who spoke
at McCain's funeral had to get a dig in about Trump. Great way to honor
the biggest war hero in the history of the country wasn't it?
And just like every other country we have "meddled" with Ukraine is
full of violence and being run by despots.
Since "we" have meddled plenty with this our own country, we are full
of violence and being run by despots, who in the U.S. are generally called
billionaires--large beasts, ravenous appetites, and very little brain in
the small cranii.
Number two:
Trump derangement syndrome has infected the country. Everyone who spoke
at McCain's funeral had to get a dig in about Trump. Great way to honor
the biggest war hero in the history of the country wasn't it?
I missed the /shark label--oooh, never could spell well, er, I meant
/snark label. Surely you thought the Quote would be recognized for what
it is.
"... For the first 15 months of his presidency, Donald Trump saw no need to appoint members to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of outside advisors who have historically served as watchdogs over the official intelligence community on behalf of the Chief Executive. ..."
"... There's a power struggle between trump and the IC which wants to vet US. presidents like a modern praetorian guard; I don't know who is going to win, but the IC is on the side of pushing policies that risk war with Russia, so I support Trump there. ..."
For the first 15 months of his presidency, Donald Trump saw no need to appoint members to
the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of outside advisors who have historically
served as watchdogs over the official intelligence community on behalf of the Chief
Executive. It fit Trump's profile and his skepticism about the USIC that he felt no need
to have more quasi-official advisors peering over his shoulder. And a year-and-a-half into the
first term, the Trump Administration is still suffering from scores of vacancies in important
posts in all the executive branch departments.
Now, lo and behold, some appointments have been made to PFIAB, and it don't look good. The
only two names I have been able to locate as appointees to the PFIAB are: Steve Feinberg, who
was named on May 11, 2018 as the PFIAB chairman, and Samantha Ravich was named more recently as
the Board's vice chairman. To date, there are no indications there are any other members. Back
in January, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who founded PayPal and was one of the
only Valley big wigs to back Trump for President, rejected the offer to head PFIAB. Thiel's
data mining firm Palantir has extensive contracts with the USIC and he may have felt he'd be
caught up in conflict of interest allegations. He has also expressed concerns to friends that
the Trump Presidency may be headed for oblivion.
So who are the new PFIAB chair and vice chair? Steve Feinberg is a vulture fund magnate,
whose Cerberus Capital Management has wrought havoc across the US economy. The firm, founded in
1992 and named after the mythical three-headed dog that guarded the gates of Hades, Apropos.
After looting GMAC, the financial arm of General Motors, Feinberg bought up a number of arms
manufacturers and defense contractors, including DynCorp. According to his bio on AllGov,
Feinberg was trained by ex-Army snipers and set up his own private "military base" outside of
Memphis, Tennessee.
Ever the hedger, Feinberg backed Jeb Bush for president, then switched to Donald Trump in
the final months of the 2016 campaign, while also bankrolling Chuck Schumer in his Senate
re-election campaign.
Samantha Ravich is pure neocon. She was a national security aide to Vice President Dick
Cheney and was one of the biggest promoters of the "Saddam WMD" hoax, leading to the Iraq
invasion of March 2003. She runs the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Transformative
Cyber Innovation Lab, is listed on the FDD site as "principal investigator on FDD's
Cyber-Enabled Economic Warfare project" and Board Advisor on FDD's Center on Sanctions and
Illicit Finance. She is an advisor to the Chertoff Group.
You can't get more neocon than Samantha Ravich.
Question: Has President Trump finally caved in to the neocon long march through the
institutions? Is PFIAB another romper room for son-in-law and Netanyahu captive and love slave
Jared Kushner? Will PFIAB actually have a role or simply be a window dressing that Trump
ignores as he relies on a handful of cabinet and White House advisors and his rolodex of
billionaire friends who he chats up most evenings from the East Wing?
What I don't understand is after Iraq, who in the world with any brains would listen to
the Neo-cons again? As a veteran of the NY real estate wars, Trump has run into tons of snake
oil salesmen in his life and survived because he did not listen to them. What arguments are
neo-cons now advancing that would overcome all our previous mistakes and cause Trump to not
boot them out of the room. In my previous job as interim CFO of Prudential I was involved
with the negotiations with Trump and his Japanese partner over selling the ground under the
Empire State Building in 1991. At least back then, Trump did not listen to anyone except what
his gut told him. His mannerisms and personality have not changed one iota from those days to
his Presidency so why would Trump be susceptible to the nwo-cons when it goes against the
grain of everything he has espoused in the past.
Sad, but Trump doesn't pay any attention to groups like that. For him anything like that
is just PR and shareholder relations. He is much more interested in what the true loudmouths
on the boob tube have to say.
It's amazing to me that somebody who has engaged in NYC business and politics for so long
is so oblivious of how and when the strings are pulled when something needs to get done. Is
it even humanly possible that the same person that got himself into the WH can be so
oblivious. It's really an enigma. But then again, you kindly like to point out that sometimes
the most obvious explanations are the ones staring you right in the face
Donald Trump doesn't have an ideology or think tanks backing him; only his family. He is
in his 70s. He will appoint GOP flacks who didn't diss him in the past notwithstanding if
they are neocons or not. What he has done is jump in front of the parade. The FBI ran a sting
on Mayor of Tallahassee who is now the Democrat's Florida candidate for governor. The power
class is trying to contain the parade and direct it in the direction that they want. If it
goes wild, they will jail it.
More on Stephen Feinberg and his military connections:
"Through DynCorp, Feinberg already controls one of the largest military
contractors in the U.S., one which trains Afghanistan's police force and
assists in their narcotics-trafficking countermeasures. According to the
Times, Feinberg proposed an expanded role for such contractors, and
also recommended transferring the command of paramilitary operations in
the country to the C.I.A., increasing their operating footprint while
decreasing both transparency and accountability. He reportedly discussed
Afghanistan with President Trump in person."
same bullshit from the MIC, promoting war in Syria, in the bottles of the democrats and
the republicans. both parties are supporting the Russia bullshit -- look at the politics
swirling around McCain's funeral for example.
Both parties interfere in the middle east, paying off different sides, fighting al Qaida
one place, supporting them in Syria.
Both parties promote people like Bolton, with Bolton's agenda. Trump's main value is as a
destabilizer, which is why the established republicans and the democrats hate him, but the
people he surrounds himself with are very telling.
There's a power struggle between trump and the IC which wants to vet US. presidents
like a modern praetorian guard; I don't know who is going to win, but the IC is on the side
of pushing policies that risk war with Russia, so I support Trump there.
Ok, no insights or insides to offer, Harper, but from my own reading of Trump's Foreign
Policy Speech, scripted it was, I seem to recall I was told then vs earlier ad lib
approaches, I somewhat assumed this more general road into the future under Trump.
Strictly I dislike it deeply to approach anything resembling the, I" told you so" pattern.
It could suggest I only search for bits and pieces that fit in.
Irony/sarcasm alert: How well did the respectively selected PFIAB experts conform under
Bush, Obama? And who but a master in business would fit into let's say Trump's larger
meme-strategy: we have been exploited as a nation by close to everyone for ages?
What a wonderful insightful comment. Other than missing that PFIAB helped sell the Iraq
WMD, just like they were paid to do; and this pair will do the same next time out.
"... "The Russia Hoax Theme Got Started As a Dirty Trick by Hillary's 2016 Campaign ..."
"... "The seed was planted and significant parts of the American voting public noticed, particularly those who believed that Hillary Clinton had the God-given right to take control of the Oval Office. One way or another, Team Hillary was going to cram the Russian narrative down our collective throats." ..."
"The Russia Hoax Theme Got Started As a Dirty Trick by Hillary's 2016 Campaign
"The seed was planted and significant parts of the American voting public noticed,
particularly those who believed that Hillary Clinton had the God-given right to take control of
the Oval Office. One way or another, Team Hillary was going to cram the Russian narrative down
our collective throats."
No question, the woman fits the description "evil," but that sure doesn't make Trump a saint
by comparison.
America's tragedy – one shared by the entire world – is that this is the kind of
choice American voters get, a Hillary Clinton or a Donald Trump.
No matter who wins or loses each American presidential election, the people in general lose
and the establishment wins.
And right now, the American establishment likes and embraces the Clinton nonsense about
Russia. It serves its current purposes. Actually, it wasn't truly Clinton's own nonsense. She
was definitely feeding off a pre-existing set of attitudes in her Washington set.
So, it is more threatening than just a residual from an election campaign.
"... They are simply dragged along for the ride when Washington is determined to do something. They have nowhere to turn with their votes even. Republican or Democrat, the results in terms of war and empire will be the same. ..."
"... Washington ignores the UN. It ignores international law. It ignores many traditions and norms. Oh, it will offer up some excuse, some flimsy excuse for what it is doing, but, in the end, it doesn't matter what the American public believes, any more than it matters what the other 95% of humanity represented by the UN believes ..."
"... John Bolton's ugly public threat about even more devastating bombing if chemical weapons are used again -- "again," entirely begging the question of whether such weapons had ever been used by the government, with virtually all indicators saying they had not -- serves as a public invitation to the paid mercenaries in al-Nusra and such affiliates as the phony humanitarians of the White Helmets, to get on with the job of generating a needed provocation. ..."
"... And what will it matter if the public supports it or not? They know absolutely nothing anyway about what goes on in Syria and America's big, long-term role in it on behalf of Israel and others, including Saudi Arabia, to work towards destroying a legitimate government and cripple a beautiful country ..."
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JUSTIN RAIMONDO IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"The New Cold War Flops, The American People Are Not Buying
"Poll shows anti-Russia campaign had little effect"
Justin Raimondo, as he has shown in other articles, often just does not "get it."
It simply does not matter whether the American public embraces the power establishment's
disinformation efforts.
There is almost no connection between what average Americans want and believe and what
Washington does.
And this has been true for a very long time. Did the public want the holocaust in Vietnam or
a list of other horrors?
They are simply dragged along for the ride when Washington is determined to do
something. They have nowhere to turn with their votes even. Republican or Democrat, the results
in terms of war and empire will be the same.
The United States' power establishment doesn't care what anyone thinks anymore when it wants
to do something. Oh, I'm sure they'd rather the public "bought in," but whether they do or not
simply is not a "deal breaker."
Washington ignores the UN. It ignores international law. It ignores many traditions and
norms. Oh, it will offer up some excuse, some flimsy excuse for what it is doing, but, in the
end, it doesn't matter what the American public believes, any more than it matters what the
other 95% of humanity represented by the UN believes .
The American public is virtually uninformed about what goes on abroad anyway. Their press
and government representatives work hard towards that end. And the truth is the American public
is largely uninterested. Bored with foreigners and even knee-jerk hostile to many. So many
people also are just trying to keep body and soul together in the changed economic realities of
contemporary America. They have no time to be concerned about what goes on "out there."
America's establishment actually counts on such realities in its imperial calculations.
The only time America's public ever gets really worked up over such matters is when
Americans die in considerable numbers. Foreigners, who cares? But America has arranged its
foreign dirty work so that numbers of Americans do not die.
The numbers at a certain point during Vietnam began to generate something like the national
divisions of the American Civil War. Through many mechanisms, that has never been allowed to
happen again.
Look at the dirty work in Syria. We know, right now, a new phony gas attack is being planned
around Idlib. There is significant intelligence on the matter. And it is only a set-up for a
new round of bombing Syria, a country with which America is not legally at war and a country
where it has no business having any forces without permission.
John Bolton's ugly public threat about even more devastating bombing if chemical weapons are
used again -- "again," entirely begging the question of whether such weapons had ever been used
by the government, with virtually all indicators saying they had not -- serves as a public
invitation to the paid mercenaries in al-Nusra and such affiliates as the phony humanitarians
of the White Helmets, to get on with the job of generating a needed provocation.
And will even one newspaper or network in America question the fraud? Or question the
excessive response?
And what will it matter if the public supports it or not? They know absolutely nothing
anyway about what goes on in Syria and America's big, long-term role in it on behalf of Israel
and others, including Saudi Arabia, to work towards destroying a legitimate government and
cripple a beautiful country .
This is incorrect: Russiagate first and foremost is a color revolution
against Trump
Notable quotes:
"... Of course, the Deep State has many other goals and priorities which align with Russiagate, and therefore support it fully, but the principals of Russiagate are the criminals trying to save their skin ..."
"... Of course, you can look at it at different levels with differing breadths, and at one level the Deep State role is included within the definition of "Russiagate" and therefore will include both Trump and Russia. But the view I expressed above is more fundamental (a) in terms of how and why Russiagate came into being, (b) in terms of the main principals involved, and (c) in terms of the causality of the the main processes. ..."
"... Once the "Russian election meddling" and "Putin puppet" memes were concocted as 1) a deflection from the Wikileaks DNC meddling scandal and 2) a smear to help assure that Trump couldn't be elected, the Dems painted themselves into a corner that they couldn't get out of once Trump was elected. ..."
"... They had made their scurrilous charges without anticipating that Trump would win. Throwing a smear during a campaign is one thing; conducting an investigation to shore up a smear is quite another. A campaign smear doesn't have to withstand scrutiny if it achieves its effect by dominating news cycles. But once they had thrown it and Trump was elected anyway, they were forced into a position where the smear needed to be shored up with bogus investigations. The alternative would have been an admission that the smear was just a smear. ..."
"... Russia derangement is a response to having to deal with an independent regional power acting on its own interests. The only thing that could have defused it would have been if the Russians folded over the Crimea and Donbas, and not shown their agency in Syria. And of course "progressives" have latched onto the new McCarthyism in their aspirations to regain power. Not that I love Trump or the Republicans, but if "progressives" wake up after election day with results showing that it backfired, it will be a great day ..."
"... IMO Russia gate is a cover for the Dems to make no change to their playbook. It also gives Trump an excuse to not deliver on some campaign promises he never intended to deliver on, much like Obama and many other Presidents. Its a great distraction keeping people from looking at the biggest foreign influence on government and elections, which is Israel ..."
"... Whether intended or not Russia gate also serves to strengthen Putin at home in the face of an external threat and keep them on their neoliberal path such as cutting pensions to support their MIC in the face of the US threat, and it will allow EU members to increase their own military spending to meet Trumps demands and many of those Euros will flow to the US ..."
"... IMO this is a carefully planned psyops and con game with each party playing their role and facilitating the execution of the ruling elites game plan. Sure, there are different factions and some infighting is allowed to maintain an illusion of Democracy for the proles, but the only Democracy is at the level of the ruling elite during their many private meetings of various elite groups that need not be named since they are so well known ..."
Russiagate has just one purpose: coverup for the crimes of operatives involved in the
election manipulation of 2016 and earlier crimes such as the Clinton email scandal
investigation.
Nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Russia. Anything else is purely peripheral.
(Of course, the Deep State has many other goals and priorities which align with
Russiagate, and therefore support it fully, but the principals of Russiagate are the
criminals trying to save their skin.)
"Nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Russia."
Of course, you can look at it at different levels with differing breadths, and at one
level the Deep State role is included within the definition of "Russiagate" and therefore
will include both Trump and Russia. But the view I expressed above is more fundamental (a) in
terms of how and why Russiagate came into being, (b) in terms of the main principals
involved, and (c) in terms of the causality of the the main processes.
Once the "Russian election meddling" and "Putin puppet" memes were concocted as 1) a
deflection from the Wikileaks DNC meddling scandal and 2) a smear to help assure that Trump
couldn't be elected, the Dems painted themselves into a corner that they couldn't get out of
once Trump was elected.
They had made their scurrilous charges without anticipating that
Trump would win. Throwing a smear during a campaign is one thing; conducting an investigation
to shore up a smear is quite another. A campaign smear doesn't have to withstand scrutiny if
it achieves its effect by dominating news cycles. But once they had thrown it and Trump was
elected anyway, they were forced into a position where the smear needed to be shored up with
bogus investigations. The alternative would have been an admission that the smear was just a
smear.
Russia derangement is a response to having to deal with an independent regional power
acting on its own interests. The only thing that could have defused it would have been if the
Russians folded over the Crimea and Donbas, and not shown their agency in Syria. And of
course "progressives" have latched onto the new McCarthyism in their aspirations to regain
power. Not that I love Trump or the Republicans, but if "progressives" wake up after election
day with results showing that it backfired, it will be a great day.
IMO Russia gate is a cover for the Dems to make no change to their playbook. It also gives
Trump an excuse to not deliver on some campaign promises he never intended to deliver on,
much like Obama and many other Presidents. Its a great distraction keeping people from
looking at the biggest foreign influence on government and elections, which is Israel
Whether intended or not Russia gate also serves to strengthen Putin at home in the face of
an external threat and keep them on their neoliberal path such as cutting pensions to support
their MIC in the face of the US threat, and it will allow EU members to increase their own
military spending to meet Trumps demands and many of those Euros will flow to the US
IMO this is a carefully planned psyops and con game with each party playing their role and
facilitating the execution of the ruling elites game plan. Sure, there are different factions
and some infighting is allowed to maintain an illusion of Democracy for the proles, but the
only Democracy is at the level of the ruling elite during their many private meetings of
various elite groups that need not be named since they are so well known
The sleaze around Donald Trump's NYC businesses has gotten a couple of convictions. This a
classic case of looking under the streetlight and finding it. The FBI/DOJ/CIA collaboration
is something else. The forwarding of Clinton's 30,000 e-mails to the Chinese that was posted
here has popped up, again. The e-mails reportedly went to a business front in Northern
Virginia. The Chinese said they have heard this before. The Washington Post says that the FBI
denies it. The truth is totally in the dark, but this can be investigated and be proven if
true or false.
Jeff Sessions has appointed John Huber, Utah US Attorney, to investigate the claims
against the FBI. He is not a special counsel. This likely is the source of friction between
the two. The President is starting to show the wounds from the media attacks. All he has is
his family. His staff is third string. He doesn't read briefings and gets his news
from Fox TV. He blows his top. He is being wrestled down by the Lilliputians until he slaps
the mat.
The last thing Globalists want is the incompetence and corruption in DC of the last
decades brought out into the daylight. If the Democrats gain control of the House
this year, the President will be hard pressed to make to 2021. John Kelly and Fox News won't
tell the President, but the only way he can get off the ropes is to appoint a Second Special
Counsel to investigate the Obama Administration FBI/DOJ and the Intelligence Coup against
him.
Sir;
How far back does the China/Clinton 'connection' go? I remember some minor scandal from back
in Bill Clinton's administration concerning Chinese purported 'agents of influence.' Money,
of course played a role.
From your experience "inside the beltway," how large an effect do you think venality has on
national governance?
What a cast of characters. Grifters, con-men and neo-con-men. It's a wonder there are any
honest men and women left in Washington.
"... As I have argued previously , such evidence that exists points to John Brennan and James Clapper, President Obama's head of the CIA and director of national intelligence respectively, even though attention has been focused on the FBI. ..."
"... Until Brennan, Clapper, and their closest collaborators are required to testify under oath about the real origins of Russiagate, these crises will grow ..."
For nearly two years, mostly vacuous (though malignant) Russiagate
allegations have drowned out truly significant news directly affecting
America's place in the world. In recent days, for example.
French
President Emmanuel Macron declared
"Europe can no longer rely on the
United States to provide its security," calling for instead a broader kind
of security "and particularly doing it in cooperation with Russia." About
the same time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President
Vladimir Putin met to expand and solidify an essential energy partnership by
agreeing to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, despite US
attempts to abort it. Earlier, on August 22, the Afghan Taliban announced it
would attend its first ever major peace conference -- in Moscow, without US
participation.
Thus does the world turn, and not to the wishes of Washington. Such news
would, one might think, elicit extensive reporting and analysis in the
American mainstream media. But amid all this, on August 25, the ever-eager
New
York Times
published yet another front-page Russiagate story -- one that
if true would be sensational, though hardly anyone seemed to notice.
According to the
Times
'
regular Intel leakers, US intelligence agencies, presumably the CIA, has had
multiple "informants close to Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial
details" about Russiagate for two years. Now, however, "the vital Kremlin
informants have largely gone silent." The
Times
laces
the story with misdeeds questionably attributed to Putin and equally
untrustworthy commentators, as well as a mistranslated Putin statement that
incorrectly has him saying all "traitors" should be killed. Standard US
media fare these days when fact-checkers seem not to be required for Russia
coverage. But the sensation of the article is that the US had moles in
Putin's office.
Skeptical or credulous readers will react to the
Times
story
as they might. Actually, an initial, lesser version of it first appeared in
The
Washington Post
, an equally hospitable Intel platform, on December 15,
2017.
I
found it implausible
for much the same reasons
I
had previously found Christopher Steele's "dossier,"
also purportedly
based on "Kremlin sources," implausible. But the
Times
'
new, expanded version of the mole story raises more and larger questions.
If US intelligence really had such a priceless asset in Putin's office -- the
Post
report
implied only one, the
Times
writes
of more than one -- imagine what they could reveal about Enemy No. 1 Putin's
intentions abroad and at home, perhaps daily -- why would any American Intel
official disclose this information to any media at the risk of being charged
with a treasonous capital offense? And now more than once? Or, since "the
Kremlin" closely monitors US media, at the risk of having the no less
treasonous Russian informants identified and severely punished? Presumably
this why the
Times
'
leakers insist that the "silent" moles are still alive, though how they know
we are not told. All of this is even more implausible. Certainly, the
Times
article
asks no critical questions.
But why leak the mole story again, and now? Stripped of extraneous financial
improprieties, failures to register as foreign lobbyists, tacky lifestyles,
and sex having nothing to do with Russia, the gravamen of the Russiagate
narrative remains what it has always been: Putin ordered Russian operatives
to "meddle" in the US 2016 presidential election in order to put Donald
Trump in the White House, and Putin is now plotting to "attack" the November
congressional elections in order to get a Congress he wants. The more Robert
Mueller and his supporting media investigates, the less evidence actually
turns up, and when it seemingly does, it has to be considerably massaged or
misrepresented.
Nor are "meddling" and "interfering" in the other's domestic policy new in
Russian-American relations. Tsar Aleksandr II intervened militarily on the
side of the Union in the American Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson sent
troops to fight the Reds in the Russian Civil War. The Communist
International, founded in Moscow in 1919, and its successor organizations
financed American activists, electoral candidates, ideological schools, and
pro-Soviet bookstores for decades in the United States. With the support of
the Clinton administration, American electoral advisers encamped in Moscow
to help rig Russian President Boris Yeltsin's reelection in 1996. And that's
the bigger "meddling" apart from the decades-long "propaganda and
disinformation" churned out by both sides, often via forbidden short-wave
radio. Unless some conclusive evidence appears, Russian social media and
other meddling in the 2016 presidential election was little more than old
habits in modern-day forms. (Not incidentally, the
Times
story
suggests that US Intel had been hacking the Kremlin, or trying to, for many
years. This too should not shock us.)
The real novelty of Russiagate is the allegation that a Kremlin leader,
Putin, personally gave orders to affect the outcome of an American
presidential election. In this regard, Russiagaters have produced even less
evidence, only suppositions without facts or much logic. With the Russiagate
narrative being frayed by time and fruitless investigations, the "mole in
the Kremlin" may have seemed a ploy needed to keep the conspiracy theory
moving forward, presumably toward Trump's removal from office by whatever
means. And hence the temptation to play the mole card again, now, as yet
more investigations generate smoke but no smoking gun.
The pretext of the
Times
story
is that Putin is preparing an attack on the upcoming November elections, but
the once-"vital," now-silent moles are not providing the "crucial details."
Even if the story is entirely bogus, consider the damage it is doing.
Russiagate allegations have already delegitimized a presidential election,
and a presidency, in the minds of many Americans. The
Times
'
updated, expanded version may do the same to congressional elections and the
next Congress. If so, there is an "attack on American democracy" -- not by
Putin or Trump but by whoever godfathered and repeatedly inflated
Russiagate.
As I have argued
previously
,
such evidence that exists points to John Brennan and James Clapper,
President Obama's head of the CIA and director of national intelligence
respectively, even though attention has been focused on the FBI.
Indeed,
the
Times
story
reminds us of how central "intelligence" actors have been in this saga.
Arguably, Russiagate has brought us to the worst American political crisis
since the Civil War and the most dangerous relations with Russia in history.
Until Brennan, Clapper, and their closest collaborators are required to
testify under oath about the real origins of Russiagate, these crises will
grow
Jeffrey Harrison
says:
August 30, 2018 at 1:06 am
I'd love to know, Mr. Cohen, why you think that Russiagate was
perpetrated by Messrs Brennan and Clapper. I've been under the
impression that it all started with Three Names whining about a hack
to the DNC done by the Russians (based on no evidence) and the theft
of e-mails which revealed Three Names and her henchmen as amoral
political con artists. It is so clearly unfair and borderline
illegal to expose her and her henchmen for what they are
in.their.own.words that something must be done! I would advise that
we apply Occam's Razor to this problem and see what kind of answers
we get.
David Gurarie
says:
August 30, 2018 at
7:00 pm
The whining trio is a sideshow on general background run by our
deep state (or fourth government branch) made of
Clapper-Brennan-McCain types.
Joel Herman
says:
August 29, 2018 at 4:18 pm
Wrong . All we have to do is look at the actions of Trump and all
those that surround him to know that you are wrong take a hike with
the BS.
We have a conspiracy in plain sight. We did not meet with any
Russians. We discussed adoptions. But so what if we did engage in a
criminal conspiracy to swing an election. Then we established or
attempted to establish backchannels. To cash in.
All quite normal. Stick your nonsense where the sun doesn't shine.
Clark Shanahan
says:
August 30, 2018 at
11:30 am
Joel,
Were you part of Hill's $9.5 million "Correct the Record" troll
op?
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks".
Jeffrey Harrison
says:
August 30, 2018 at
12:02 pm
It's amazing to me how easily duped people with suspicious
minds are. It's also amazing to me how often people think
that they can create dynasties out of thin air. Three Names
has largely been unable to get anything right; the invasion
of Libya being a prime example of her capabilities. It would
be best if she just went away and took her daughter with
her.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one and
simply being incompetent is much simpler than some
fantastical tale of Russian interference which was magically
able to flip 80,000 votes in three states so that she could
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with a 2.9 million
vote lead.
Most of US Russiagate charges are projection. Russiagate is a color
revolution of the block of neoliberals and neocons to depose Trump. They are
afraid of too many skeletons in the closet to allow Trump to finish his
term. And for a right reason. Trump is unpredictable and he at one moment
can turn on them and start revealing unpleasant truth about Bush II and
Obama.
But rumors about the demise of the US neoliberal empire are slightly
exaggerated ;-). Without providing an alternative model to neoliberalism and
without ethnological superiority China does not stand a chance.
Notable quotes:
"... Through endless repetition, allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia. ..."
"... Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia. ..."
"... Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures & keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance & hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth! ..."
"... Their claim to One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than 100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology development system (DARPA) ..."
"... other Nations may reach a saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the realization that this crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped, once & for all time! ..."
It was around 1898, when America first starting thinking it was the center of the universe.
In that year the U.S. intervened in Cuba's war for independence and proceeded to take over
parts of the decrepit Spanish Empire, from Latin America to the Philippines. Shortly before, in
1893, the U.S. overthrew the Queen of Hawaii on behalf of U.S.-backed sugar and pineapple
plantation owners.
That led to a long history of political interference in other countries, in the form of
destabilization, coups and invasions. Once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a narrative was
fostered to justify expanding NATO to Russia's borders.
In the last four years, anti-Russian propaganda has reached a fever pitch: lies about
Russia's "expansionism" in Ukraine; hype about Russia's "meddling" in the U.S. elections,
creating an existential "threat to democracy;" unproven allegations of Russia using chemical
weapons to poison the Skripals in London. Experts are trotted out on major media to further the
narrative without hard evidence. Together with think-tanks, the American and British media run
these stories daily with almost no counter news or opinions. Through endless repetition,
allegations are transformed into "facts." Sanctions are loaded upon sanctions, based on these
unsubstantiated charges in an economic war against Russia.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White
House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy
White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in his 2017 book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious
Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria, writes that the West's psycho-social pathology
about Russia dates back over 1,000 years to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox
and Roman churches. The U.S. is a relative newcomer to this, but seeks perhaps its biggest
role.
" More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history," Mettan
says.
Myth of Russian Expansionism
The astute University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer exposed how the West provoked
the Ukraine crisis in his 2014 Foreign Affairs article,
"Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin."
But the American foreign policy establishment and media remain committed to the suppression of
facts about the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev and the resulting escalating tensions with Russia.
Ignoring or fabricating evidence, the U.S. and NATO persist in
lying that Russia has expansionist goals in Ukraine, Crimea and Syria. Russia is helping
ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine who are resisting the coup, Crimea (which had been part
of Russia since 1783 and transferred by the Soviets to Ukraine in 1954) held a referendum in
2014 in which the public voted to rejoin Russia. The Syrian government invited Russia in to
help fight Western and Gulf-backed jihadists trying to violently overthrow the government, as
even then Secretary of State John Kerry admitted .
Another scholar, Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University
of Kent, writes in his latest book, Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order, that the
Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russia and the West, differences
that are not just a replay of the "Cold War."
Simply put, under the banner of the indispensable "liberal world order," neo-conservative
warriors and "democracy"-spreading-"humanitarian-interventionists"
are promoting the Russophobia "reality" to justify American hegemony.
Ditching Solzhenitsyn
Solzhenitsyn : Ditched when he turned on America. (Wikimedia Commons)
One of the greatest illustrations of the centuries-old Russophobia, says Mettan in his 2017
book, is the case of Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
" During the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn," Mettan wrote.
"For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch
of anti-Soviet dissidence," but only when he criticized his communist Russia. But after moving
to the U.S., when Solzhenitsyn showed a preference for privacy "rather than attending
anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves."
And when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and spoke out against Russian 'westernizers' and
liberals who denied Russian interests, he was labeled "an outdated, senile writer," though he
had not changed his fundamental views on freedom.
After the mid-July, Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, there were countless mass media delusions
and hysteria against U.S.-Russia ties, reminiscent of the Hearst newspaper empire's propaganda
that whipped up a frenzy to support the empire-building war against Spain in 1898. Professor
Stephen Kinzer vividly described the unsuccessful battle by prestigious anti-imperialists
against the power of the Hearst propaganda in his latest book, The True Flag:Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire."
Today's propaganda tool is named "RussiaGate," a campaign to bring down a deeply flawed
U.S. president for possibly trying to mend U.S. relations with Russia.
Do we have enough good sense left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau: "Let us
settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion,
and prejudice till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."
Or, as I thought when I visited Galileo's house that day in the Florentine hills: the world
does not revolve around America.
Jean Ranc is a retired psychologist/research associate at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Wonderful observations that challenge the complete and utter madness of our times here in
the U.S., and the West in general. The inquisitorial "accusations" leveled against Putin and
Russia by the West bear no more resemblance to "reality" than the lunatic accusations that
the Holy Inquisition leveled against "witches," "heretics" and "non-believers" for centuries
as it used terror to consolidate power. Given the ever more shrill and painfully persistent
nature of these ongoing nonsense anti-Russian accusations – it would appear more and
more of us in the West are falling into the category of – "non-believers."
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:45 pm
A very good post Gary. The West is decadent and corrupt.Whatever high moral grounds the
West once held, I am afraid they are either forgotten or totally gone.
Delightful piece to read, great comments as usual. I can only add that the neocolonialists
who don't want to give up leading the US over the edge, as mike says "into the abyss", will
be forced to change their ways, well stated by Babylon and others. The tragedy of what they
have done by their narcissistic, egoistic, delusional misleading, is that they have wrecked
the lives of millions worldwide. But of course, that is the story of deluded conquerors until
they meet their own end. I welcome the sun setting on the "American Century"; a sharp reset
awaits us all but we should welcome it.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:48 pm
Jessika: the saddest part in all this is that they still continue to wreck and decimate
lives worldwide. It is like a cancer eating and obliterating every thing in their path. A
very incisive post.
The cancer is psychopathy! These people have no conscience or empathy. They are liars and
manipulators. They treat people like objects to be used and abused. Until America admits that
we've had a substantial percentage of psychopathic leaders and mentality, from the Puritans
forward, we will never recover from the psychological, social, economic, political, legal,
religious destruction this ilk has forced upon the rest of us. It took me deep research and
therapy to discover that psychopaths project themselves onto the rest of us and then claim we
are somehow damaged, flawed or have sinful human nature. The problem has always been the
psychopaths among us (1%) who have created hierarchies and placed themselves atop them. They
have bamboozled most of us with their lies but as we wake up to their games, we can kick them
out of power and we can create a country of the 99% with conscience and empathy rather than a
country of slaveowners and deluded "Israelites" who believed they had the right to exploit,
enslave, kill
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:36 am
It's not sad, it's what's deathcult tyrants & dying Empires do, they take as many
victims as they can, once they realise the end is nigh! It's a mass shooter mentality &
it's disgraceful!
JR , August 28, 2018 at 9:14 pm
HI Jessika,
I tried to find you while I was still living in NH as I got the idea you live there as well.
I had lived in the Dartmouth area in the 70's but the brutal winters were too much! this time
around so I returned to my home base here in Chapel Hill. If you'd like to be in touch, you
can reach me at my old-but-still-good Santa Fe address: [email protected]
mike k , August 28, 2018 at 5:37 pm
American egotism is legendary. It is the defining mark of the breed. Ignorant know-it-alls
lead us confidently into the abyss.
jose , August 28, 2018 at 8:53 pm
Mike: If American leaders that are in control of the country have studied history of any
empire, they would come to the realization that empires do not last forever. The illogical
part is that empire's life expectancy has been more or less the same worldwide. And like an
opened book the end is closing in and they know it.
Realist , August 28, 2018 at 5:00 pm
Excellent bit of necessary truth-telling. Too bad it won't be read in most of America, not
because the people would reject its premise, but because their keepers just won't let them
see it in the highly manipulated mass media.
America has repeatedly become what it most professes to hate: first an onerous empire like
Spain, then a pack of fascists like Nazi Germany, and now totalitarian tyrants like the
Soviets. Welcome to the truth, the one NOT fabricated by Rove's inheritors of empire.
Babyl-on , August 28, 2018 at 4:32 pm
This thought is so important to understand if you are to make any sense of the new
multi-polar world which does not revolve around the failing Western empire.
China's Belt and Road is a catalyst but China will benefit only through the
interconnection of the entire Eurasian land mass – sooner than you think, high-speed
trains will cross the steppes. That is the new world the Enlightenment era is dead the
Eurasian era is opening. Eurasia will trade most naturally with Africa and it will prosper
because The US Empire is the last of the Enlightenment white European empires.
When you consider the integration of the great Eurasian land mass for the first time is
history (the ancient Silk Road writ large) it's easy to forget about a US over there
separated by all that water from the thriving markets.
Those oceans which protected the center of power from attack now are a big disadvantage in
trade.
We are witnessing the end of the Enlightenment and the end of Empire which it spawned.
China is not imperial, Russia is not imperial – no country today seeks empire but
the US and they are failing in every way. Western Liberal Democracy also died with the
Enlightenment, new forms of governance and culture will develop, the sky really is the limit,
now that the old dead Enlightenment is moving out of the way.
It would be a brighter future if not for that pesky climate.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 1:51 am
Nations, such as Russia, China & others just want to determine their own futures &
keep their National sovereignty's! It's America, with it's unbelievable arrogance &
hubris, that wants to dominate & impose its sovereignty on every Country on Earth!
Russia
& China are the future with the one belt, one road initiative & America is being left
in the rear view mirror & is on the path to total oblivion thanks to its warmongering
ways! The end of this corrupt American Empire can't come soon enough for people who want to
live in peace!
Egocentrism isn't just a Donald Trump thing, it's an American thing. America's
never-ending RussiaGate narrative is a classic example of psychological projection. It can't
be US who has the problem, it must be THEM who has the problem. Time to own it.
paraphrasing J. Pilger -- America should leave the rest of the world
alone -- leave it alone
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:15 am
Yes, I second what Mr Pilger stated & I will add a few more requests? "Leave the
World" alone! Stop your Warmongering interference in other Countries affairs! Immediately
stop all your murderous Wars, Coups & Financial & Economic terrorism such as
weaponising the dollar & Trade sanctions to illegally punish other Nations! Abide by
International Laws & the U.N. charter! Remove your 800 bases from around the World &
stick to your own backyard! Stop being the Worlds Policeman because no one asked you to
perform this role! Look after your own people first & stop wasting trillions of dollars
on the pointless & stupid Military Industrial Complex! Ban Campaign lobbyists & big
money from Politics! Jail all corrupt Corporates & thieving Bankers, Politicians &
seize their assets! These are a few things for a start! There are many more things you could
do more numerous to name here, but the main thing is LEAVE THE WORLD ALONE! We are sick to
death of this American Empire!
Sally Snyder , August 28, 2018 at 2:28 pm
Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from
Washington:
Less than half of Americans believe that Russia's interference in the 2016 election made a
difference to the final outcome and nearly six in ten Americans believe that it is important
that Washington continue to improve relations with Moscow.
Jeff Harrison , August 28, 2018 at 2:25 pm
When you get to the end of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, six volumes of dense,
erudite prose which details the failings of a decadent society, Gibbon lets you in on a
secret. The Roman Empire was militarily defeated. Not all at once, mind. But militarily
defeated nonetheless. Consider what that means for the US.
RnM , August 28, 2018 at 9:27 pm
Rome became a victim of its success, being overstretched beyond their war technology
(horses, shields, swords and siege machines.)
My inability and unwillingness to predict the end of the rise of The Empire of "We the
People" and its brand of War Technologies, is due to my close perspective and life-long
Bernaiseian (?sp) brainwashing by the mass media, which, thankfully, has, since 2016, been
dealt a blow to the mask on their (the corporate media's) Totalitarian nature.
Their claim to
One Truth (no alternate facts tolerated in NYT/WaPo Land) that they've enjoyed for more than
100 years has fallen victim to the Internet, a creation of the American war technology
development system (DARPA). So, in the American attempt to surpass the Romans, the Empire of
We the People (as a Totalitarian dystopia) may well be thwarted by the spread of open
information. I hope so. The alternative might be very difficult to defeat.
Jeff, if you enjoyed Gibbons, I think you would really enjoy Michael Parenti's, "The
Assassination of Julius Caesar". There are so many parallels between the late Roman Republic
and today's America. Michael got his PhD in political science and history from Yale and
writes "people's history". He argues convincingly that Caesar was assassinated -- - not for
being an egomaniac and dictator -- - but because he stood up against the most elite in the
senate by seeking reforms that would benefit the masses. He actually argues that Gibbons
wrote as a historian from the priviledged class and therefore never condemned the senate for
exploiting the masses.
KiwiAntz , August 29, 2018 at 2:34 am
Yes, what it means,& if History is anything to go by, that other Nations may reach a
saturation point when enough is enough & they finally come to the
realization that this
crooked American Empire is to dangerous to be allowed too continue & must be stopped,
once & for all time!
The Roman Empire never saw the Barbarian hordes such as the
Visigoth's, Huns & Vandals coming until it was to late! Will the American Empire see
there downfall coming? 9/11 proved the arrogant American Empire couldn't even see that event
coming, due to their own hubris & complacency!
Sorry Mike, what do you mean by saying the goal is to "create a center-right" Democratic
Party? The Clinton's accomplished this in the 1990s -- what we have here is a full scale
enfoldment of the Dems into the National Security State
Not that it matters much -- both Republicans and Democrats have been on the same page for
a few decades now (since the 1940s IMHO). Inter-party politics don't matter much, except
insofar as the voting public can be conned into supporting one or the other, because no
matter which party holds the Congress or Presidency the same Deep State agenda is their top
priority.
Why? It's simple really -- money. Big campaign donors expect "value" in return for their
"political contributions". And if value isn't had for their money, the Deep State's
intelligence community can usually dig up something "useful" in the offender's background to
"persuade" him or her to support the current bipartisan agenda
If it's really true that to find out who has power, just take note of whom is above
criticism, perhaps we ought to consider that Rockefeller and JPMorgan money founded the CFR
in 1921 and it took root and bloomed in government "service" during and after WWII.
If you doubt the CFR's power as the Deep State personified, I suggest reading historian
Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time and sociologist Tom
Dye's Who Is Running America series.
Paraphrasing Quigley, writing when Bill Clinton was his student at Georgetown, the two
parties should be as alike as two sides of a coin so that voters can "throw the rascals out"
in any election without significantly changing governmental priorities and policies because
the policies the US is and ought be pursuing are not subject to significant dispute (or
at the least not by the voting public).
Which begs the question -- who is (and has been since the 1940s) setting US policy? If we,
the voters, cannot alter or change our national policies, then democratic oversight of the
Republic is nothing but a sham. The US is, in this view, just another Banana Republic which
Tom Dye ably documents from Watergate to Shrub's administration.
The two party "uniparty" is alive and well. In fact, while the party's supporters still
may include self- described "leftists" the party itself has gone further right than the
traditionally rightwing GOP. The dual party structure relies on the "Democrats" to gut
"entitlements", that is Social Security or Medicare.
It was the "Democrats" who put in Obamacare, which mandated people to spend an arm and a
leg on crappy medical insurance the cost of which was massively inflated which they could
only use when they had spent way more than average on medical bills. Meanwhile it was the
democrats' harpy candidate who proposed a no-fly zone in Syria on behalf of raghead
mercenaries hired by the yankee imperium.
While Trump has largely caved in to the deep state, in part perhaps because of the
pressure applied by the phony deep state witch hunt taking over the "justice" department of
the yankee regime, we know what the democrats, exponents of the fraudulent "Russia-gate"
stories, now espouse: a new cold war far more dangerous than the old one.
Meanwhile, the commercial media in the US and satellite countries, has degenerated into a
Goebbels-like propaganda apparat. Trump's clumsiness actually may have the accidental
salutary effect of enabling the satellite countries to slip the yankee leash, at least to
some extent.
The situation brought about by this unprecedented two faction version of fascism is
profoundly depressing, in addition to being seriously dangerous.
Why is this article entitled: "Dems Put Finishing Touches on One-Party 'Surveillance
Superstate'"
This website seems to have articles that show their authors are awake and yet, this article
shows quite the opposite. Who today, with the slightest modicum of common sense, who has made
the effort in understanding how the system works, still plays the left-right paradigm,
Hegelian Dialectic, political game nonsense?
I mean, let's get real here; the Democrats and the Republicans, like their UK counterparts of
Labour and Conservative are merely wings on the same bird, ultimately flying to a
destination. Both parties are taking the USA towards a one-party, surveillance, super state.
You do not enter American politics unless you bow to Zionism and International Jewry. Unless
you show 100% support to Israel then forget a career in politics.
Incidentally, to many who may have heard of her; the new luvey of the conservatives is
none other than black, Candace Owens, who is better known as Red Pill Black. She has been
this new voice who has entered into the 'alternative right', itself nothing more than
controlled opposition, speaking out against feminism, white privilege, rape culture,
transgender culture etc etc and has gained a large following. Other than being a complete
fraud, as information has appeared that she tried to launch a 'doxing' website, targeting
youngsters, she has appeared at the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem:
Why on earth, would some nobody, who has had an incredibly fast rise on YouTube (most
certainly her subscriber base and video view has been doctored) and more so a black
conservative, be invited to attend the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem? Bottom
line? She's being groomed for a career in politics and I wouldn't be surprised if they wheel
her out, some time in the future, as a presidential hopeful to capture the black vote in the
USA.
Again, this is controlled opposition.
You never vote in a new party in politics. You vote out the old one. 326 million is the
population of the USA and there are only two political parties? Are you serious? It's bad
enough, here in the UK with three (liberal party along with Labour and Conservative), with a
66 million population but only two in the USA?
Both parties are heavily controlled.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been putting presidents into power now for over a
hundred years. The CFR is the sister organization of the Royal Institute for International
Affairs, which has been doing the same, here in the UK for the same time. All politicians are
groomed from an early age, taught how to avoid answering any question directly, how to lie
and of course who their masters are. By implementing their wishes, politicians are then
granted a seat on some board, within some multi conglomerate, a six figure salary, a fat
pension on top of their political one and of course umpteen houses spread across wherever.
Blair and Obama epitomize this.
Both political parties are left wing, hiding under the right wing and classic liberal
monikers.
"... Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil war. ..."
"... Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats. ..."
"... These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited Federal funds at their fingertips. ..."
Ron Unz has linked to WSWS.org several times in the past as WSWS was targeted by the Deep
State/Google etc. cabal to make it disappear into the "memory hole."
The only activism I've seen from progressives in the past two years has nothing to do
with economic concerns; their energy is entirely focused on race, gender, and sexuality.
The cultural-Marxist troika.
Just one of many good point you make. The only thing I'd add is in relation to:
Democrats are proceeding down a dark path: identity politics brings only conflict, civil
war.
As Reg mentions: conflict among the masses is very much the plan. Divide et
impera.
And my stupid [neo]liberal friends still think the democrats are going to save them, and then
on to super – duper – special stupid, they think their vote for a democrat is
going to have an impact. On to ludicrous stupid – it's all the republicans fault.
Identity politics at its finest.
Unfixable, and circling the drain.
The Alarmist, June 8, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT • 100 Words
"Center-right" and "business oriented?"
Try Oligarch-centric.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, from the fall of
Constantinople: Sultan Mehmed II rounded up the surviving oligarchs of
the Empire and asked them why they had withheld their riches and
resources from supporting the Empire's final defense against his
conquest, to which the oligarchs replied that they were saving their
riches for his most excellent majesty. He had them brutally executed.
Jake, June 8, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT
Anybody who trusts the Democrats to save us from the evil
machinations of the Neocons is as hopelessly stupid as anyone who trusts
the Neocons to save us from the evil machinations of the Democrats.
At the upper levels there is no difference between the Demonrats and the
Republicons as all are controlled by the Zionists and congress would by
more accurately called the lower house of the Knesset..
prusmc, June 8, 2018 at 1:18 pm GMT • 100 Words
@anon
These new Democrats will never vote for less spending. There
previous career was based on having abundant and in some cases unlimited
Federal funds at their fingertips.
It is a mistake to think they will be any different than Maxine
Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jerold Nadler or Luis Guitirez. Senator Joe
Manchin of West Virginia is about a unconventional as we can expect the
new congressional majority members to be.
jacques sheete, June 8, 2018 at 1:44 pm GMT
@Anon
The ultra rich use the poor to attack the middle so they can
distract everyone else from uniting
That, in fact, is the practical aim of government in general.
Parties, schmarties it's all one huge extortion racket.
"... In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges. ..."
"... "Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the evidence" of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016, said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation. ..."
"... Contradicting Comey's testimony, this included highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas. The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information and it was never analyzed for damage to national security. ..."
"... Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intelligence agencies to determine if national security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated "damage assessment" directive . ..."
"... "There was no real investigation and no real search," said Michael Biasello, a 27-year veteran of the FBI. "It was all just show -- eyewash -- to make it look like there was an investigation before the election." ..."
"... Many Clinton supporters believe Comey's 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand. At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence. ..."
"... However, conducting a broader and more thorough search of the Weiner laptop may still have prosecutorial justification. Other questions linger, including whether subpoenaed evidence was destroyed or false statements were made to congressional and FBI investigators from 2014 to 2016, a time frame that is within the statute of limitations. The laptop was not searched for evidence pertaining to such crimes. Investigators instead focused their search, limited as it was, on classified information. ..."
"... The headers indicated that the emails on the laptop included ones sent and/or received by Abedin at her clintonemail.com account, her personal Yahoo! email account as well as a host of Clinton-associated domains including state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, presidentclinton.com and hillaryclinton.com. ..."
"... (McCabe told Horowitz he didn't remember Sweeney briefing him about the Weiner laptop, but personal notes he took during the teleconference indicate he was briefed. Sweeney also updated McCabe in a direct call later that afternoon in which he noted there were potentially 347,000 relevant emails, and that the count was climbing. McCabe was fired earlier this year and referred to the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, D.C., for possible criminal investigation into allegations he made false statements to federal agents working for Horowitz.) ..."
"... FBI officials in New York assumed that the bureau's brass would jump on the discovery, particularly since it included the missing emails from the start of Clinton's time at State. In fact, the emails dated from the beginning of 2007 and covered the entire period of Clinton's tenure as secretary and thereafter. The team leading the Clinton investigation, codenamed "Midyear Exam," had never been able to find Clinton's emails from her first two months as secretary. ..."
"... Lynch -- who had admonished Comey to call the Clinton case a "matter" and not an investigation, aligning FBI rhetoric with the Clinton campaign, and who inappropriately agreed to meet with Bill Clinton aboard her government plane five days before the FBI interviewed Hillary Clinton -- sought to keep the Weiner laptop search quiet and was opposed to going to Congress with the discovery so close to the election. ..."
"... But this time, Comey made no public show of his announcement. On Oct. 28, 2016, Comey quietly sent a terse and private letter to the chairs and the ranking members of the oversight committees on the Hill, informing them, vaguely, that the FBI was taking additional steps in the Clinton email investigation. ..."
"... The unnamed agent, who is identified in the IG report only as "Agent 1," is now married to another Midyear investigator, who on Election Day IM'd her then-boyfriend to say Clinton "better win," while threatening to quit if she didn't. Known as "Agent 5," she also stated, "fuck trump," while calling his voters "retarded." ..."
"... Also excluded were Abedin's Yahoo emails, even though investigators had previously found classified information on her Yahoo account and would arguably have probable cause to look at those emails, as well. ..."
"... Also removed from the search were the BlackBerry data -- even though the FBI had previously described them as the "golden emails," because they covered the dark period early in Clinton's term. ..."
"... In addition to limiting the scope of their probe, the agents were also under pressure from both Justice Department prosecutors and FBI headquarters to complete the review of the remaining emails in a hurry. ..."
"... Lynch urged Comey to process the Weiner laptop "as fast as you can," according to notes from a high-level department meeting on Oct. 31, 2016, which were obtained by the IG. ..."
"... Advanced new "de-duplicating" technology would allow them to speed through the mountain of new emails automatically flagging copies of previously reviewed material. ..."
"... But according to the IG, FBI's technology division only "attempted" to de-duplicate the emails, but ultimately was unsuccessful. The IG cited a report prepared Nov. 15, 2016, by three officials from the FBI's Boston field office. Titled "Anthony Weiner Laptop Review for Communications Pertinent to Midyear Exam," it found that "[b]ecause metadata was largely absent, the emails could not be completely, automatically de-duplicated or evaluated against prior emails recovered during the investigation." ..."
"... Contrary to Comey's claim, the FBI could not sufficiently determine how many emails containing classified information were duplicative of previously reviewed classified emails. As a result, hundreds of thousands of emails were not actually processed for evidence, law enforcement sources say. ..."
"... Later that evening of Nov. 6, after he announced to Congress that Clinton was in the clear again, an exuberant Comey gathered his inner circle in his office to watch football. ..."
"... Page noted that "Trump is talking about [Clinton]" on Fox News, and how "she's protected by a rigged system." ..."
"... RCI has learned that these highly sensitive messages include a Nov. 25, 2011, email regarding talks with Egyptian leaders and Hamas, and a July 9, 2011, "call sheet" Abedin sent Clinton in advance of a phone conversation she had that month with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The document runs four pages. ..."
"... Another previously unseen classified email, dated Nov. 25, 2010, concerns confidential high-level State Department talks with United Arab Emirates leaders. The note, including a classified "readout" of a phone call with the UAE prime minister, was written by Abedin and sent to Clinton, and then forwarded by Abedin the next day from her [email protected] account to her then-husband's account identified under the rubric "Anthony Campaign." ..."
"... Comey and Strzok also decided to close the case for a second time without interviewing its three central figures: Abedin, Weiner and Clinton. ..."
"... In a statement, Strzok's attorney blamed the delays in processing the new emails on "bureaucratic snafus," and insisted they had nothing to do with Strzok's political views, which he said never "affected his work." ..."
"... "When informed that Weiner's laptop contained Clinton emails, Strzok immediately had the matter pursued by two of his most qualified and aggressive investigators," Goelman said. Still, contemporaneous messages by Strzok reveal he was not thrilled about re-investigating Clinton. On Nov. 5, for example, he texted Page: "I hate this case." ..."
"... A final mystery remains: Where is the Weiner laptop today? ..."
"... Wherever its location, somewhere out there is a treasure trove of evidence involving potentially serious federal crimes -- including espionage, foreign influence-peddling and obstruction of justice -- that has never been properly or fully examined by law enforcement authorities. ..."
When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email
investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress
that his agency had "reviewed all of the communications" discovered on a personal laptop used
by Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.
James Comey, above.
Top photo: His certification to Congress just before Election Day clearing Hillary Clinton a
second time. That certification is challenged by new reporting. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,
File Top: AP Photo/Jon Elswick
At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the
"hundreds of thousands" of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a
sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.
Comey later
told Congress that "thanks to the wizardry of our technology," the FBI was able to
eliminate the vast majority of messages as "duplicates" of emails they'd previously seen.
Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked "night after night after night" to scrutinize the
remaining material.
But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.
In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new
emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for
classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single
12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.
"Most of the emails were never examined, even though they made up potentially 10 times the
evidence" of what was reviewed in the original year-long case that Comey closed in July 2016,
said a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Yet even the "extremely narrow" search that was finally conducted, after more than a month
of delay, uncovered more classified material sent and/or received by Clinton through her
unauthorized basement server, the official said. Contradicting Comey's testimony, this included
highly sensitive information dealing with Israel and the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas.
The former secretary of state, however, was never confronted with the sensitive new information
and it was never analyzed for damage to national security.
Even though the unique classified material was improperly stored and transmitted on an
unsecured device, the FBI did not refer the matter to U.S. intelligence agencies to determine
if national security had been compromised, as required under a federally mandated "damage
assessment" directive
.
The newly discovered classified material "was never previously sent out to the relevant
original classification authorities for security review," the official, who spoke to
RealClearInvestigations on the condition of anonymity, said.
Other key parts of the investigation remained open when the embattled director announced to
Congress he was buttoning the case back up for good just ahead of Election Day.
One career FBI special agent involved in the case complained to New York colleagues that
officials in Washington tried to "bury" the new trove of evidence, which he believed contained
the full archive of Clinton's emails -- including long-sought missing messages from her first
months at the State Department.
RealClearInvestigations pieced together the FBI's handling of the massive new email
discovery from the "Weiner laptop." This months-long investigation included a review of federal
court records and affidavits, cellphone text messages, and emails sent by key FBI personnel,
along with internal bureau memos, reviews and meeting notes documented in government reports.
Information also was gleaned through interviews with FBI agents and supervisors, prosecutors
and other law enforcement officials, as well as congressional investigators and public-interest
lawyers.
If the FBI "soft-pedaled" the original investigation of Clinton's emails, as some critics
have said, it out-and-out suppressed the follow-up probe related to the laptop, sources for
this article said.
"There was no real investigation and no real search," said Michael Biasello, a 27-year
veteran of the FBI. "It was all just show -- eyewash -- to make it look like there was an
investigation before the election."
Although the FBI's New York office first pointed headquarters to the large new volume of
evidence on Sept. 28, 2016, supervising agent Peter Strzok, who was fired on Aug. 10 for
sending anti-Trump texts and other misconduct, did not try to obtain a warrant to search the
huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016. Violating department policy, he edited the warrant
affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government
business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the
search.
The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New
York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated
back to 2007. But the warrant to search the laptop excluded any messages exchanged before or
after Clinton's 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state, key early periods when Clinton
initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands
of emails sought by investigators.
Far from investigating and clearing Abedin and Weiner, the FBI did not interview them,
according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely. The machine was not
authorized for classified material, and Weiner did not have classified security clearance to
receive such information, which he did on at least two occasions through his Yahoo! email
account – which he also used to email snapshots of his penis.
Many Clinton supporters believe Comey's 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her
campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and
his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand.
At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather
than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence.
Comey later admitted in his memoir "A Higher Loyalty," that political calculations shaped
his decisions during this period. But, he wrote, they were calibrated to help Clinton:
"Assuming, as nearly everyone did, that Hillary Clinton would be elected president of the
United States in less than two weeks, what would happen to the FBI, the Justice Department or
her own presidency if it later was revealed, after the fact, that she still was the subject of
an FBI investigation?"
What does it matter now? Republicans are clamoring for a special counsel to reopen the
Clinton email case, though a five-year statute of limitations may be an issue concerning crimes
relating to her potential mishandling of classified information.
However, conducting a broader and more thorough search of the Weiner laptop may still have
prosecutorial justification. Other questions linger, including whether subpoenaed evidence was
destroyed or false statements were made to congressional and FBI investigators from 2014 to
2016, a time frame that is within the statute of limitations. The laptop was not searched for
evidence pertaining to such crimes. Investigators instead focused their search, limited as it
was, on classified information.
Also, the FBI is still actively investigating the Clinton Foundation for alleged
foreign-tied corruption. That probe, handled chiefly out of New York, may benefit from evidence
on the laptop.
The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
The Background
In March 2015, it was revealed that Hillary Clinton had used a private email server located
in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home to conduct State Department business during her
2009-2013 tenure as the nation's top diplomat. The emails on the unsecured server included
thousands of classified messages, including top-secret information. Federal law makes it a
felony for government employees to possess or handle classified material in an unprotected
manner.
By July, intelligence community authorities had referred the matter to the FBI.
That investigation centered on the 30,490 emails Clinton handed over after deeming them
work-related. She said she had deleted another 33,000 because she decided they were "personal."
Also missing were emails from the first two months of her tenure at State – from Jan. 21,
2009, through March 18, 2009 -- because investigators were unable to locate the BlackBerry
device she used during this period, when she set up and began using the basement server,
bypassing the government's system of archiving such public records as required by federal
statute.
Comey faces media on July 5, 2016. AP Photo/Cliff Owen
One year later, in a dramatic July 2016 press conference less than three weeks before
Clinton would accept her party's nomination for president, Comey unilaterally cleared Clinton
of criminal wrongdoing. While Clinton and her aides "were extremely careless in their handling
of very sensitive, highly classified information," he said, "no charges are appropriate in this
case."
Comey would later say he broke with normal procedures whereby the FBI collects evidence and
the Department of Justice decides whether to bring charges, because he believed Attorney
General Loretta Lynch had engaged in actions that raised doubts about her credibility,
including secretly meeting with Clinton's husband, the former president, just days before the
FBI interviewed her.
Fast-forward to September 2016.
FBI investigators in New York were analyzing a Dell laptop, shared by Abedin and Weiner, as
part of a separate sex-crimes investigation involving Weiner's contact with an underage girl. A
former Democratic congressman from New York, Weiner is serving a 21-month prison sentence after
pleading guilty to sending obscene material to a 15-year-old.
On Sept. 26, 2016, the lead New York agent assigned to the case found a large volume of
emails – "over 300,000" – on the laptop related to Abedin and Clinton, including a
large volume of messages from Clinton's old BlackBerry account.
The headers indicated that the emails on the laptop included ones sent and/or received by
Abedin at her clintonemail.com account, her personal Yahoo! email account as well as a host of
Clinton-associated domains including state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, presidentclinton.com and
hillaryclinton.com.
The agents had reason to believe that classified information resided on the laptop, since
investigators had already established that emails containing classified information were
transmitted through multiple email accounts used by Abedin, including her clintonemail.com and
Yahoo! accounts. Moreover, the preliminary count of Clinton-related emails found on the laptop
in late September 2016 -- three months after Comey closed his case -- dwarfed the total of some
60,000 originally reported by Clinton.
The agent described the discovery as an "oh-shit moment." "Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?" he asked another case agent. They agreed that the information needed "to get reported up the chain"
immediately.
The next day, Sept. 27, the official in charge of the FBI's New York office, Bill Sweeney,
was alerted to the trove and confirmed "it was clearly her stuff." Sweeney reported the find to
Comey deputy Andrew McCabe and other headquarters officials on Sept. 28, and told Justice
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that "everybody realized the significance of
this."
(McCabe told Horowitz he didn't remember Sweeney briefing him about the Weiner laptop, but
personal notes he took during the teleconference indicate he was briefed. Sweeney also updated
McCabe in a direct call later that afternoon in which he noted there were potentially 347,000
relevant emails, and that the count was climbing. McCabe was fired earlier this year and
referred to the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, D.C., for possible criminal investigation
into allegations he made false statements to federal agents working for Horowitz.)
McCabe, in turn, briefed Strzok - who had led the Clinton email probe - that afternoon, text
messages show.
Comey was not on the conference call, but phone records show he and McCabe met privately
that afternoon and spoke during a flurry of phone calls late that evening. McCabe said he could
not recall what they discussed, while Comey told investigators that he did not hear about the
emails until early October -- and then quickly forgot about them. ("I kind of just put it out
of my mind," he said, because he claimed it did not "index" with him that Abedin was closely
connected to Clinton. "I don't know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the
time.")
FBI officials in New York assumed that the bureau's brass would jump on the discovery,
particularly since it included the missing emails from the start of Clinton's time at State. In
fact, the emails dated from the beginning of 2007 and covered the entire period of Clinton's
tenure as secretary and thereafter. The team leading the Clinton investigation, codenamed
"Midyear Exam," had never been able to find Clinton's emails from her first two months as
secretary.
By Oct. 4, the Weiner case agent had finished processing the laptop, and reported that he
found at least 675,000 emails potentially relevant to the Midyear case (in fact, the final
count was 694,000). "Based on the number of emails, we could have every email that Huma and
Hillary ever sent each other," the agent remarked to colleagues. It appeared this was the
mother lode of missing Clinton emails. But Strzok remained uninterested. "This isn't a ticking
terrorist bomb," he was quoted as saying in the recently issued inspector general's report.
Besides, he had bigger concerns, such as, "You know, is the government of Russia trying to get
somebody elected here in the United States?"
Strzok and headquarters sat on the mountain of evidence for another 26 days. The career New
York agent said all he was hearing from Washington was "crickets," so he pushed the issue to
his immediate superiors, fearing he would be "scapegoated" for failing to search the pile of
digital evidence. They, in turn, went over Strzok's head, passing their concerns on to career
officials at the National Security Division of the Justice Department, who in turn set off
alarm bells at the seventh floor executive suites of the Hoover Building.
The New York agent has not been publicly identified, even in the recent IG report, which
only describes him as male. But federal court filings in the Weiner case
reviewed by RCI list two FBI agents present in court proceedings, only one of whom is male -
John Robertson. RCI has confirmed that Robertson at the time was an FBI special agent assigned
to the C-20 squad investigating "crimes against children" at the bureau's New York field office
at 26 Federal Plaza, which did not return messages.
The agent told the inspector general that he wasn't political and didn't understand all the
sensitive issues headquarters may have been weighing, but he feared Washington's inaction might
be seen as a cover-up that could wreak havoc on the bureau. "I don't care who wins this election," he said, "but this is going to make us look really,
really horrible."
Once George Toscas, the highest-ranking Justice Department official directly involved in the
Clinton email investigation, found out about the delay, he prodded headquarters to initiate a
search and to inform Congress about the discovery.
By Oct. 21, Strzok had gotten the word. "Toscas now aware NY has hrc-huma emails," he texted
McCabe's counsel, Lisa Page, who responded, "whatever."
Four days later, Page told Strzok - with whom she was having an affair - about the murmurs
she was hearing from brass about having to tell Congress about the new emails. "F them," Strzok
responded, apparently referring to oversight committee leaders on the Hill.
The next day, Oct. 26, the New York agent finally was able to brief Strzok's team directly
about what he had found on the laptop. On Oct. 27, Comey gave the green light to seek a search
warrant.
Michael Horowitz: Pressure from New York was key to
reopening email case.
"This decision resulted not from the discovery of dramatic new information about the Weiner
laptop, but rather as a result of inquiries from the Weiner case agent and prosecutors from the
U.S. Attorney's Office [in New York]," Horowitz said in his recently released report on
the Clinton investigation.
Former prosecutors say that politics is the only explanation for why FBI brass dragged their
feet for a month after the New York office alerted them about the Clinton emails.
"There's no rational explanation why, after they found over 300,000 Clinton emails on the
Wiener laptop in late September, the FBI did nothing for a month," former deputy Independent
Counsel Solomon "Sol" L. Wisenberg said in a recent interview with Fox News host Laura
Ingraham. "It's pretty clear there's a real possibility they did nothing because they thought
it would hurt Mrs. Clinton during the election."
Horowitz concurred. The IG cited suspicions that the inaction "was a politically motivated
attempt to bury information that could negatively impact the chances of Hillary Clinton in the
election."
He noted that on Nov. 3, after Comey notified Congress of the search, Strzok created a
suspiciously inaccurate "Weiner timeline" and circulated it among the FBI leadership.
The odd document, written after the fact, made it seem as if New York hadn't fully processed
the laptop until Oct. 19 and had neglected to fill headquarters in on details about what had
been found until Oct. 21. In fact, New York finished processing on Oct. 4 and first began
reporting back details to top FBI executives as early as Sept. 28.
Fearing Leaks
Fears of media leaks also played a role in the ultimate decision to reopen the case and
notify Congress.
FBI leadership worried that New York would go public with the fact it was sitting on the
Weiner emails, because the field office was leaking information on other sensitive matters at
the time, including Clinton-related conflicts dogging McCabe, which the Wall Street Journal had
exposed that October. At the same time, Trump surrogate and former New York Mayor Rudy
Giuliani, who was still in touch with FBI sources in the city, was chirping about an "October
surprise" on Fox News.
Loretta Lynch: Stop those leaks.
During the October time frame, McCabe called Sweeney in New York and chewed him out about
leaks coming out of his office. On Oct. 26, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch was so worried
about the leaks, she called McCabe and Sweeney and angrily warned them to fix them. Sweeney
confirmed in an interview with the inspector general that they got "ripped by the AG on leaks."
McCabe said he never heard the attorney general "use more forceful language."
Lynch -- who had admonished Comey to call the Clinton case a "matter" and not an
investigation, aligning FBI rhetoric with the Clinton campaign, and who inappropriately agreed
to meet with Bill Clinton aboard her government plane five days before the FBI interviewed
Hillary Clinton -- sought to keep the Weiner laptop search quiet and was opposed to going to
Congress with the discovery so close to the election.
"We were quite confident that somebody is going to leak this fact, that we have all these
emails. That, if we don't put out a letter [to Congress], somebody is going to leak it,"
then-FBI General Counsel James Baker said. "The discussion was somebody in New York will leak
this."
Baker advised Comey that he also was under obligation to update Congress about any new
developments in the case. Just a few months earlier, the director had testified before Hill
oversight committees about his decision to close the case. Baker said the front office
rationalized that since Clinton was ahead in the polls, the notification would not have a big
impact on the race. The Democratic nominee would likely win no matter what the FBI did.
But this time, Comey made no public show of his announcement. On Oct. 28, 2016, Comey
quietly sent a terse and private letter to the chairs and the ranking members of the oversight
committees on the Hill, informing them, vaguely, that the FBI was taking additional steps in
the Clinton email investigation.
Those steps, of course, started with finally searching the laptop for relevant
emails.
'Giant Nothing-Burger'
Prosecutors and investigators alike, however, approached the search as an exercise in
futility, even prejudging the results as a "giant nothing-burger."
That was an assessment that would emerge later from David Laufman, then a lead prosecutor in
the Justice Department's national security division assigned to the Clinton email probe. He had
"a very low expectation" that any evidence found on the laptop would alter the outcome of the
Midyear investigation. And he doubted a search would turn up "anything novel or consequential,"
according to the IG report.
Mary McCord: Discounted laptop trove, and she wasn't the only
one.
Hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder, Laufman complained it was "exceptionally
inappropriate" to restart the investigation so close to the election. (Records show Laufman,
who sat in on Clinton's July 2016 interview at FBI headquarters, gave money to both of Barack
Obama's presidential campaigns.)
His boss, Mary McCord, discounted the laptop trove as emails they'd already seen. "Hopefully
all duplicates," she wrote in notes she took from an October 2016 phone call she had with
McCabe, who shared her hope. McCord opposed publicly opening the case again "because it could be a big nothing."
In an Oct. 27 email to the lead Midyear analyst, Strzok suggested the search would not be
serious, that they would just need to go through the motions, while joking about "de-duping,"
or excluding emails as ones they'd already seen.
The reactivated Midyear investigators were not eager to dive into the new emails, either.
They also prejudged the batch as evidence they had already analyzed -- while at the same time
expressing pro-Hillary and anti-Trump sentiments in internal communications.
For example, the Midyear agent who had called Clinton the "future pres[ident]" after
interviewing her in July, pooh-poohed the idea they would find emails substantively different
than what the team had previously reviewed. Even though he expected they'd find some missing
emails, even new classified material, he discounted their significance.
"My best guess -- probably uniques, maybe classified uniques, with none being any different
tha[n] what we've already seen," the agent wrote in an Oct. 28 instant message to another FBI
employee on the bureau's computer system. (Back in May 2016, as Clinton was locking up the
Democratic primary, the agent had revealed in another IM that there was "political urgency" to
wrap up her email investigation.)
The unnamed agent, who is identified in the IG report only as "Agent 1," is now married to
another Midyear investigator, who on Election Day IM'd her then-boyfriend to say Clinton
"better win," while threatening to quit if she didn't. Known as "Agent 5," she also stated,
"fuck trump," while calling his voters "retarded."
At the same time, the lead FBI attorney on the Midyear case, Sally Moyer (whose lawyers
confirmed is the anonymous "FBI Attorney 1" cited in the IG report), was in no hurry to process
the laptop. Before examining them, she expressed the belief that the massive volume of emails
"may just be duplicative of what we already have," doubting there was a "smoking gun" in the
pile.
A Hurried, Constrained Search
Moyer, a registered Democrat, was responsible for obtaining legal authority to review the
laptop's contents. She severely limited the scope of the evidence that investigators could
search on the laptop by setting unusually tight parameters.
Working closely with her was Strzok, who forwarded a draft of the warrant to his personal
email account in violation of FBI policy, where he helped edit the language in the affidavit.
By processing the document at home, no record of his changes to the document were captured in
the FBI system.
(Strzok had also edited the language in the drafts of Comey's public statement about his
original decision on the Clinton email investigation. He changed the description of Clinton's
handling of classified information from "grossly negligent" -- which is proscribed in the
federal statute -- to "extremely careless," eliminating a key phrase that could have had legal
ramifications for Clinton.)
The next day, the search warrant application drafted by Strzok and Moyer was filed in New
York. It was inexplicably self-constraining. The FBI asked the federal magistrate judge, Kevin
N. Fox, to see only a small portion of the evidence the New York agent told headquarters it
would find on the laptop.
"The FBI only reviewed emails to or from Clinton during the period in which she was
Secretary of State, and not emails from Abedin or other parties or emails outside that period,"
Horowitz pointed out in a section of his report discussing concerns that the search
warrant request was "too narrow."
That put the emails the New York case agent found between 2007 and 2009, when Clinton's
private server was set up, as well as those observed after her tenure in 2013, outside
investigators' reach. The post-tenure emails were potentially important, Horowitz noted,
because they may have offered clues concerning the intent behind the later destruction of
emails.
Also excluded were Abedin's Yahoo emails, even though investigators had previously found
classified information on her Yahoo account and would arguably have probable cause to look at
those emails, as well.
Also removed from the search were the BlackBerry data -- even though the FBI had previously
described them as the "golden emails," because they covered the dark period early in Clinton's
term.
"Noticeably absent from the search warrant application prepared by the Midyear team is both
any mention that the NYO agent had seen Clinton's emails on the laptop and any mention of the
potential presence of BlackBerry emails from early in Clinton's tenure," Horowitz noted.
Even though the BlackBerry messages were "critical to [the] assessment of the potential
significance of the emails on the Weiner laptop, the information was not included in the search
warrant application," he stressed, adding that the application appeared to misrepresent the
information provided by the New York field agent. It also grossly underestimated the extent of
the material. The affidavit warrant mentioned "thousands of emails," while the New York agent
had told them that the laptop contained "hundreds of thousands" of relevant emails.
That meant that the Midyear team never got to look, even if it wanted to, at the majority of
the communications secreted on the laptop, further raising suspicions that headquarters wasn't
really interested in finding any evidence of wrongdoing – at least on the part of Clinton
and her team.
"I had very strict instructions that all I was allowed to do within the case was look for
Hillary Clinton emails, because that was the scope of our work," an FBI analyst said, even
though Horowitz said investigators had probable cause to look at Abedin's emails as well.
In addition to limiting the scope of their probe, the agents were also under pressure from
both Justice Department prosecutors and FBI headquarters to complete the review of the
remaining emails in a hurry.
One line prosecutor, identified in the IG report only as "Prosecutor 1," argued that they
should finish up "as quickly" as possible. Baker said there was a general concern about the new
process "being too prolonged and dragged [out]."
Lynch urged Comey to process the Weiner laptop "as fast as you can," according to notes from
a high-level department meeting on Oct. 31, 2016, which were obtained by the IG.
On Nov. 3, Strzok indicated in a text that
Justice demanded he update the department twice a day on the FBI's progress in clearing the
stack. "DOJ is hyperventilating," he told Page.
De-Duplicating 'Wizardry'
Before the search warrant was issued, the Midyear team argued that the project was too vast
to complete before the election. According to Comey's recently published memoir, they insisted
it would take "many weeks" and require the enlistment of "hundreds of FBI employees." And, they
contended, not just anybody could read them: "It had to be done by people who knew the
context," and there was only a handful of investigators and analysts who could do the job.
"The team told me there was no chance the survey of the emails could be completed before the
Nov. 8 election," Comey recalled, which was right around the corner.
But after Comey decided he'd have to move forward with the search regardless, Strzok and his
investigators suddenly claimed they could finish the work in the short time remaining prior to
national polls opening.
At the same time, they cut off communications with the New York field office. "We should
essentially have no reason for contact with NYO going forward on this," Strzok texted Page on
Nov. 2.
Strzok followed up with another text that same day, which seemed to echo earlier texts about
what they viewed as their patriotic duty to stop Trump and support Clinton.
"Your country needs you now," he said in an apparent attempt to buck up Page, who was "very
angry" they were having to reopen the Clinton case. "We are going to have to be very wise about
all of this."
"We're going to make sure the right thing is done," he added. "It's gonna be ok."
Responded Page: "I have complete confidence in the [Midyear] team."
"Our team," Strzok texted back. "I'm telling you to take comfort in that." Later, he
reminded Page that any conversations she had with McCabe "would be covered under atty
[attorney-client] privilege."
Suddenly, however, the impossible project suddenly became manageable thanks to what Comey
described as a "huge breakthrough." As the new cache of emails arrived, the bureau claimed it
had solved one of the most labor-intensive aspects of the previous Midyear investigation
– having to sort through the tens of thousands of Clinton emails on various servers and
electronic devices manually.
Advanced new "de-duplicating" technology would allow them to speed through the mountain of
new emails automatically flagging copies of previously reviewed material.
Strzok, who led the effort, echoed Comey's words, later telling the IG's investigators that
technicians were able "to do amazing things" to "rapidly de-duplicate" the emails on the
laptop, which significantly lowered the number of emails that he and other investigators had to
individually review manually.
But according to the IG, FBI's technology division only "attempted" to de-duplicate the
emails, but ultimately was unsuccessful. The IG cited a report prepared Nov. 15, 2016, by three
officials from the FBI's Boston field office. Titled "Anthony Weiner Laptop Review for
Communications Pertinent to Midyear Exam," it found that "[b]ecause metadata was largely
absent, the emails could not be completely, automatically de-duplicated or evaluated against
prior emails recovered during the investigation."
Trump at rally Nov. 7, 2016, in
Manchester, N.H. : "You can't review 650,000 emails in eight days."
The absence of this metadata -- basically electronic fingerprints that reveal identifying
characteristics such as To, CC, Date, From, Subject, attachments and other fields –
informed the IG's finding that "the FBI could not determine how many of the potentially
work-related emails were duplicative of emails previously obtained in the Midyear
investigation."
Contrary to Comey's claim, the FBI could not sufficiently determine how many emails
containing classified information were duplicative of previously reviewed classified emails. As
a result, hundreds of thousands of emails were not actually processed for evidence, law
enforcement sources say.
"All those communications weren't ruled out because they were copies, they were just ruled
out," the federal investigator with direct knowledge of the case said. The official, who wished
to remain anonymous, explained that hundreds of thousands of emails were simply overlooked.
Instead of processing them all, investigators took just a sample of the batch and looked at
those documents.
After Comey announced his investigators wrapped up the review in days – then-candidate
Donald Trump expressed skepticism. "You can't review 650,000 emails in eight days," he said
during a rally on Nov. 7. He was more correct than he knew.
Exoneration Before Investigation
At the urging of Lynch, Comey began drafting a new exoneration statement several days before
investigators finished reviewing the sample of emails they took from the Weiner laptop.
High-level meeting notes reveal they even discussed sending Congress "more-clarifying"
statements during the week to "correct misimpressions out there."
A scene from the
documentary "Weiner."
As the search was under way, one of the Midyear agents – Agent 1 -- confided to
another agent in a Nov. 1 instant message on the FBI's computer network that "no one is going
to pros[ecute Clinton] even if we find unique classified [material]."
On Nov. 4 – two days before they had completed the search – Strzok talked about
"drafting" a statement. "We might have this stmt out and be substantially done," Page texted
back about an hour later.
The pair seemed confident at that point that Clinton's campaign had weathered the new
controversy and would still pull off a victory.
"[O]n Inauguration Day," Page texted Strzok, "in addition to our kegger, we should also have
a screening of the Weiner documentary!" The film, "Weiner," documented the former Democratic
lawmaker's ill-fated run for New York mayor in 2013.
Filtering
Even after the vast reservoir of emails had been winnowed down by questionable methods, the
remaining ones still had to be reviewed by hand to determine if they were relevant to the
investigation and therefore legally searchable as evidence.
Moyer, the lead FBI attorney on the Midyear team who had initially discounted the trove of
new emails as "duplicates" and failed to act upon their discovery, was also head of the
"filtering" team. After various searches of the laptop, she and the Midyear team came up with
6,827 emails they classified as being tied directly to Clinton. Moyer then culled away from
that batch emails she deemed to be personal in nature and outside the scope of legal
agreements, cutting the stack in half. That left 3,077 which she deemed "work related."
On Nov. 5, Moyer, Strzok and a third investigator divided up the remaining pool of 3,077
emails -- roughly 1,000 emails each -- and rifled through them for classified information and
incriminating evidence in less than 12 hours, even though the identification of classified
material is a complicated and prolonged process that requires soliciting input from the
original classification authorities within the intelligence community.
"We're doing it ALL," Strzok told Page late that evening. The trio ordered pizza and worked into the next morning combing through the emails. "Finishing up," Strzok texted Page around 1 a.m. that Sunday.
By about 2 a.m. Sunday, he declared they were done with their search, noting that while they
had found new State Department messages, they had found "no new classified" emails. And
allegedly nothing from the missing period at the start of Clinton's term that might suggest a
criminal motive.
Later that evening of Nov. 6, after he announced to Congress that Clinton was in the clear
again, an exuberant Comey gathered his inner circle in his office to watch football.
As news of the case's swift re-closure hit the airwaves, Page and Strzok giddily exchanged
text messages and celebrated. "Out on CNN now And fox I WANT TO WATCH THIS WITH YOU!" Strzok
said to Page. "Going to pour myself a glass of wine ."
Page noted that "Trump is talking about [Clinton]" on Fox News, and how "she's protected by
a rigged system."
New Classified Information
Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, earlier prognostications that the results of the laptop
search would not be a game-changer turned out to be accurate. Yet investigators nonetheless
found 13 classified email chains on the unauthorized laptop just in the small sample of 3,077
emails that were individually inspected, and four of those were classified as Secret at the
time.
Contrary to the FBI's public claims, at least five classified emails recovered were not
duplicates but new to investigators.
RCI has learned that these highly sensitive messages include a Nov. 25, 2011, email
regarding talks with Egyptian leaders and Hamas, and a July 9, 2011, "call sheet" Abedin sent
Clinton in advance of a phone conversation she had that month with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. The document runs four pages.
Another previously unseen classified email, dated Nov. 25, 2010, concerns confidential
high-level State Department talks with United Arab Emirates leaders. The note, including a
classified "readout" of a phone call with the UAE prime minister, was written by Abedin and
sent to Clinton, and then forwarded by Abedin the next day from her [email protected]
account to her then-husband's account identified under the rubric "Anthony Campaign."
Tom
Fitton: "sham" investigation.
Judicial Watch, a Washington-based government watchdog group which has filed a lawsuit
against the State Department seeking a full production of Clinton records, confirmed the
existence of several more unique classified emails it has received among the rolling release of
the 3,077 "work-related" emails.
"These classified documents are not duplicates," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told
RCI. "They are not ones the FBI had already seen prior to their November review."
He accused the FBI of conducting a "sham" investigation and called on Attorney General Jeff
Sessions to order a new investigation of Clinton's email.
The unique classified emails call into question Comey's May 2017
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when he maintained that although
investigators found classified email chains on the laptop, "We'd seen them all
before."
No Damage Assessment
Comey, in subsequent interviews and public testimony, maintained that the FBI left no stone
unturned. This, too, skirted the truth.
Although Comey claimed that investigators had scoured the laptop for intrusions by foreign
hackers who may have stolen the state secrets, Strzok and his team never forensically examined
the laptop to see if classified information residing on it had been hacked or compromised by a
foreign power before Nov. 6, law enforcement sources say. A complete forensic analysis was
never performed by technicians at the FBI's lab at Quantico.
Nor did they farm out the classified information found on the unsecured laptop to other
intelligence agencies for review as part of a national security damage assessment -- even
though Horowitz confirmed that Clinton's illegal email activity, in a major security breach,
gave "foreign actors" access to unknowable quantities of classified material.
Without addressing the laptop specifically, late last year the FBI's own inspection division
determined that classified information kept on Clinton's email server "was compromised by
unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber
intrusion or other means."
Judicial Watch is suing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the State
Department to force them to conduct, as required by law, a full damage assessment, and prepare
a report on how Clinton's email practices as secretary harmed national security.
Comey and Strzok also decided to close the case for a second time without interviewing its
three central figures: Abedin, Weiner and Clinton.
Abedin was eventually interviewed, two months later, on Jan. 6, 2017. Although summaries of
her previous interviews have been made public, this one has not.
Investigators never interviewed Weiner, even though he had received at least two of the
confirmed classified emails on his Yahoo account without the appropriate security clearance to
receive them.
The IG concluded, "The FBI did not determine exactly how Abedin's emails came to reside on
Weiner's laptop."
Premature Re-Closure
In his May 2017 testimony, however, Comey maintained that both Abedin and Weiner had been
investigated.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana: Investigating investigators. AP
Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.): Is there an investigation with respect to the two of them?
Comey: There was, it is -- we completed it.
Pressed to answer why neither of them was charged with crimes, including mishandling
classified information, Comey explained:
"With respect to Ms. Abedin, we didn't have any indication that she had a sense that what
she was doing was in violation of the law. Couldn't prove any sort of criminal intent."
At the time, the Senate Judiciary Committee was unaware that the FBI had not interviewed
Abedin to make such a determination before the election. What about Weiner? Did he read the classified materials without proper authority? the
committee asked. "I don't think so," Comey answered, before adding, "I don't think we've been able to
interview him."
Pro-Clinton Bias
The IG report found that Strzok demonstrated intense bias for Clinton and against Trump
throughout the initial probe, followed by a stubborn reluctance to examine potentially critical
new evidence against Clinton. These included hundreds of messages exchanged with Page, embodied
by a Nov. 7 text referencing a pre-Election Day article headlined, "A victory by Mr. Trump
remains possible," about which Strzok stated, "OMG THIS IS F*CKING TERRIFYING."
Strzok is a central figure because he was a top agent on the two investigations with the
greatest bearing on the 2016 election – Clinton emails and the Trump campaign's ties to
Russia. These probes overlapped in October as the discovery of Abedin's laptop renewed Bureau
attention on Clinton's emails at the same time it was preparing to seek a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Some Republicans have charged that the month-long delay between the New York office's
discovery of the laptop and the FBI's investigation of it can be explained by Strzok's partisan
decision to prioritize the Trump investigation over the Clinton one.
Among the evidence they cite is an Oct. 14 email to Page in which Strzok discussed applying
"hurry the F up pressure" on Justice Department attorneys to secure the FISA surveillance
warrant on Page approved before Election Day. (This also happened to be the day the Obama
administration promoted his wife, Melissa Hodgman , a big Hillary booster,
to associate director of the SEC's enforcement division.) On Oct. 21, his team filed an
application for a wiretap to spy on Carter Page.
IG Horowitz would not rule out bias as a motivating factor in the aggressive investigation
of Trump and passive probe of Clinton. "We did not have confidence that Strzok's decision to
prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead
discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias," he said.
Asked to elaborate in recent Senate testimony, Horowitz reaffirmed, "We did not find no bias
in regards to the October events."
Throughout that month, the facts overwhelmingly demonstrate that instead of digging into the
cache of new Clinton evidence, Strzok aggressively investigated the Trump campaign's alleged
ties to Moscow, including wiretapping at least one Trump adviser based heavily on unverified
allegations of espionage reported in a dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign.
In a statement, Strzok's attorney blamed the delays in processing the new emails on
"bureaucratic snafus," and insisted they had nothing to do with Strzok's political views, which
he said never "affected his work."
The lawyer, Aitan D. Goelman, a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP in Washington, added that
his client moved on the new information as soon as he could.
"When informed that Weiner's laptop contained Clinton emails, Strzok immediately had the
matter pursued by two of his most qualified and aggressive investigators," Goelman said. Still,
contemporaneous messages by Strzok reveal he was not thrilled about re-investigating Clinton.
On Nov. 5, for example, he texted Page: "I hate this case."
Recovering the
Laptop
A final mystery remains: Where is the Weiner laptop today?
The whistleblower agent in New York said that he was "instructed" by superiors to delete the
image of the laptop hard drive he had copied onto his work station, and to "wipe" all of the
Clinton-related emails clean from his computer.
But he said he believes the FBI "retained" possession of the actual machine, and that the
evidence on the device was preserved.
The last reported whereabouts of the laptop was the Quantico lab. However, the unusually
restrictive search warrant Strzok and his team drafted appeared to remand the laptop back into
the custody of Abedin and Weiner upon the closing of the case.
"If the government determines that the subject laptop is no longer necessary to retrieve and
preserve the data on the device," the document states on its final page, "the government will
return the subject laptop."
Wherever its location, somewhere out there is a treasure trove of evidence involving
potentially serious federal crimes -- including espionage, foreign influence-peddling and
obstruction of justice -- that has never been properly or fully examined by law enforcement
authorities.
"... Duncan described herself as an avid supporter of President Trump, but said she was moved by four full boxes of exhibits provided by Mueller's team – though she was skeptical about prosecutors' motives in the financial crimes case. ..."
"... Though Duncan said the jury was not political in its conviction, she said she was skeptical of prosecutors' intentions, which she implied were political. ..."
A juror who sat on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's
case said on
Fox
News Wednesday night
that a
lone
juror prevented a ruling on all 18 counts against Manafort.
Juror
Paula Duncan said a lone juror could not come to a guilty verdict on
10 charges, forcing judge T.S. Ellis III to declare a mistrial on 10
of Manafort's 18 counts.
"It was one person who kept the verdict from being guilty on all 18
counts," Duncan, 52, said. She added that Mueller's team of
prosecutors often seemed bored, apparently catnapping during parts
of the trial.
In an exclusive interview on
@
foxnewsnight
,
Paul Manafort juror Paula Duncan said Special
Counsel Robert Mueller's team was one holdout
juror away from convicting Paul Manafort on all
18 counts of bank and tax fraud.
https://
fxn.ws/2Mrmrzb
While the identities of the jurors have been closely held, kept
under seal by Judge T.S. Ellis III at Tuesday's conclusion of the
high-profile trial, Duncan gave a behind-the-scenes account to Fox
News on Wednesday, after the jury returned a guilty verdict against
the former Trump campaign chairman on eight financial crime counts
and deadlocked on 10 others.
Duncan described herself as an avid supporter of President Trump,
but said she was moved by four full boxes of exhibits provided by
Mueller's team – though she was skeptical about prosecutors' motives
in the financial crimes case.
"Certainly Mr. Manafort got caught breaking the law, but he
wouldn't have gotten caught if they weren't after President
Trump," Duncan said of the special counsel's case, which she
separately described as a "witch hunt to try to find Russian
collusion," borrowing a phrase Trump has used in tweets more
than 100 times.
Though Duncan said the jury was not political in its conviction, she
said she was skeptical of prosecutors' intentions, which she implied
were political.
Following a lengthy jury deliberation, former
Trump
campaign
manager Paul Manafort was
convicted
on
eight counts, including tax fraud, failure to disclose
foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud –
even
though jurors were still hung on another ten counts
:
"If we cannot come to a consensus for a single count, how can we
fill in the verdict sheet?" the jurors asked in the note.
"It is your duty to agree upon a verdict if you can do so," said
Ellis, who encouraged each juror to make their own decisions on
each count. If some were in the minority on a decision, however,
they could think about the other jurors' conclusions.
Notably, the case has nothing
to
do
with "Trump, the Trump campaign or the 2016 US election" – it
has to do with work Manafort did with former Ukranian President
Victor Yanukovych from 2005-2014.
The
case was referred to the federal prosecutors in the Southern
District of New York (SDNY) by Special Investigator
Robert
Mueller
who also referred Democrat superlobbyist Tony Podesta
for prosecution as part of similar work he did for Yanukovych.
All of this begs the question – if Tony Podesta committed the same
crimes as Paul Manafort, why hasn't the SDNY brought charges against
him?
Last year, Tucker Carlson exposed just how close Tony Podesta and
the
Podesta
Group
were to the Ukranian and Russian governments...
...which was summed up in the below list originally complied by
iBankCoin
–
detailing Manafort's close ties with the Podesta Group regarding
Russian
/Ukranian
lobbying:
Lobbyist and temporary Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort
is at the center of the Russia probe – however the scope of
the investigation has broadened to include his activities
prior to the 2016 election.
Manafort worked with the Podesta Group since at least
2011 on behalf of Russian interests
, and was at the
Podesta Group offices "all the time, at least once a
month," peddling Russian influence through a shell group
called the
European
Centre for a Modern Ukraine
(ECMU).
Manafort brought a "parade" of Russian oligarchs to congress
for meetings with members and their staffs, however, the
Russia's
"central effort" was the Obama Administration.
In 2013,
John
Podesta recommended that Tony hire David Adams, Hillary
Clinton's chief adviser at the State Department, giving them
a "direct liaison" between the group's Russian clients and
Hillary Clinton's State Department.
In late 2013 or early 2014,
Tony
Podesta and a representative for the Clinton Foundation met
to discuss how to help Uranium One
– the Russian
owned company that controls 20 percent of American Uranium
Production – and whose board members gave over $100 million
to the Clinton Foundation.
"
Tony
Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation."
Believing she would win the 2016 election,
Russia
considered the Podesta Group's connection to Hillary highly
valuable
.
Podesta Group is a nebulous organization with no board
oversight and all financial decisions made by Tony Podesta.
Carlson's source said
payments
and kickbacks could be hard for investigators to trace,
describing it as a "highly secret treasure trove."
One
employee's only official job was to manage Tony Podesta's
art
collection
, which could be used to conceal
financial transactions.
Trending Articles
"Thank God This Is Happening" Russia Says Time
Has Come To
With the US unveiling a new set of sanctions
against Russia on Friday, Moscow said it would
definitely respond to
Additionally, Zerohedge
explained
why
this list is so significant:
emails obtained by the Associated Press showed that Gates
personally directed two Washington lobbying firms,
Mercury
LLC and the Podesta Group, between 2012 and 2014 to set up
meetings between a top Ukrainian official and senators and
congressmen on influential committees involving Ukrainian
interests
. Gates noted in the emails that the official,
Ukraine's foreign minister, did not want to use his own embassy
in the United States to help coordinate the visits.
And this is where the plot thickens,
because
while the bulk of the press has so far spun the entire Ukraine
lobbying scandal, which led to Manafort's resignation, as the
latest "proof" that pro-Moscow powers were influencing not only
Manafort but the Trump campaign in general (who some democrats
have even painted of being a Putin agent), the reality is that a
firm closely tied with the Democratic party, the Podesta Group,
is just as implicated.
As AP further adds, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, a
Brussels-linked nonprofit entity which allegely ran the lobbying
project,
paid
Mercury and the Podesta Group a combined $2.2 million over
roughly two years.
In papers filed in the U.S. Senate,
Mercury and the Podesta Group listed the European nonprofit as
an independent, nonpolitical client. The firms said the center
stated in writing that it was not aligned with any foreign
political entity.
In other words, the Podesta Group was likely
as
much or even more complicit in any wrongdoing than Manafort was
.
Of course, none of this stopped
Mueller
from
offering
Podesta immunity – in exchange for testimony against Manafort:
It is not as though Manafort is blameless or guilt-free in his
conduct – and according to Corey Lewandowski,
President
Trump
himself was not particularly fond of
some
of
his conduct on the campaign trail, at one point
lowering
his helicopter
to berate him via cell phone:
While were in the air, heading for Delaware, somebody -- I think it
was Ann Coulter -- tweeted out
a
quote from Manafort saying that Trump shouldn't be on television
anymore
, that he shouldn't do the Sunday shows. And
from now on Manafort would do all shows. Because he's the
fucking expert, right? Not Trump, who had already turned the
whole primary race on its head
"Yes, sir," Hope said, "Paul said he doesn't want you on TV."
Trump went fucking ballistic. We were still over the New York
metropolitan area, where you can get cell service if you fly at
a low altitude.
"Lower it!" Trump yelled to the pilot. "I have to make a call."
He got Manafort on the phone, "Did you say I shouldn't be on TV
on Sunday??" Manafort could barely hear him because of the
helicopter motor. But Trump said,
"I'll
go on TV anytime I goddamn fucking want and you won't say
another fucking word about me! Tone it down? I wanna turn it up!
I don't wanna tone anything down! I played along with your
delegate charts, but I have had enough."
He got Paul on the phone and completely decimated him again
verbally. Ripped his fucking head off. I wish I'd recorded it,
because it was one of the greatest takedowns in the history of
the world.
"You're a political pro? Let me tell you something. I'm a pro at
life. I've been around a time or two. I know guys like you, with
your hair and your skin "
and again, according to Lewandowski, Trump was unaware of
Manafort's connections when he took the job, but was seriously
unhappy about them after they were released to the press:
"It's all lies," Manafort said. "My lawyers are fighting it."
"But if it's in the paper someone has to give Trump a heads-up,
because if it's in the paper, it's reality."
Just as Steve had thought, the story ran the next day, August
15, on Page One, above the fold.
"I've got a crook running my campaign," Trump said when he read
it.
However, in spite of his apparent misgivings for Manafort, Trump has
decided to support him – ostensibly because he did not cave to the
outrageous demands of the Mueller "
investigation
":
I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his
wonderful family. "Justice" took a 12 year old
tax case, among other things, applied tremendous
pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he
refused to "break" - make up stories in order to
get a "deal." Such respect for a brave man!
....and why hasn't the Podesta brother been
charged and arrested, like others, after being
forced to close down his very large and
successful firm? Is it because he is a VERY well
connected Democrat working in the Swamp of
Washington, D.C.?
...the Podesta brothers are both well-connected swamp creatures, on
the same political team as the
uber-politicized
SDNY
assigned to levy charges against them.
"... First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." ..."
"... It would deeply undermine any notion that the political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook posts. ..."
But these crimes are tax fraud, money laundering, and credit app padding that have nothing
to do with Donald Trump, and campaign-finance violations related to what a critic of Trump
aptly describes
as "a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses." I question the level
of word play, if not fantasizing, necessary to claim that these crimes validate "
this investigation of foreign subversion." None of them has anything to do with that.
The perils of this, that, these, and those.
Do these results disprove that the Mueller probe is "a political investigation"? I think
they imply quite the opposite, and quite obviously so.
Why? Because these convictions would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected
president. There would be no convictions because there would have been no investigation.
If Hillary had been elected, all the crimes of Manafort and Cohen -- certainly those that
took place over many years before the election, but even, I think, those having to do with
campaign contributions and mistress cover-ups -- would never have been investigated, because
all would have been considered right with the political world.
The Manafort and Cohen crimes would have been ignored as the standard tactics of the elite
financial grifting -- as well as of parasitism on, and payoffs by, political campaigns -- that
they are. Indeed, there would have been no emergency,
save-our-democracy-from-Russian-collaboration, Special Counsel investigation, from which these
irrelevant charges were spun off, at all.
... ... ...
Have you heard of the Podestas? The Clinton Foundation? Besides, the economic purpose of
American electoral politics is to funnel millions to consultants and the media. Campaign
finance law violations? We'll see how the
lawsuit over $84 million worth of funds allegedly transferred illegally from state party
contributions to the Clinton campaign works out. Does the media report, does anybody know or
care, about it? Will anybody ever go to prison over it?
... ... ...
First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the
impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the
Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." If the Democrats insist these convictions
are not just matters of financial hijinx, irrelevant to Mueller's "Russia collusion"
investigation, and irrelevant in fact to anything of political substance; if they assert that
the payoffs to Stormy and Karen (the only acts directly involving Trump) disqualify Trump for
the presidency, then they will have no excuse but to call for Trump's impeachment, and act to
make it happen. Their base will demand that Democratic candidates run on that promise, and if
the Democrats re-take the House, that they begin impeachment proceedings immediately.
... ... ...
If they try to impeach and fail (which is likely), well, then, as happened to the
Republicans with Clinton, they will just look stupid, and will be punished for having wasted
the nation's political time and energy foolishly. And Trump will be strengthened.
If they were to impeach, convict, and remove Trump (even by forcing a resignation), a large
swath of the population would conclude, correctly, that a ginned-up litigation had been used to
overturn the result of the 2016 election, that the Democrats had gotten away with what the
Republicans couldn't in 1998-9. That swath of the population would likely withdraw completely
from electoral politics, leaving all their problems and resentments intact -- hidden for a
while, but sure to erupt in some other ways. It would deeply undermine any notion that the
political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and
the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook
posts.
. .. ... ...
...if they do move forward, that will initiate a political battle that will tear the country
apart and end up either with their defeat or the victory of Mike Pence.
... ... ...
By the way, for those who think that Manafort's conviction portends a smoking gun, based on
his work for "pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych," as the NYT and other liberals persistently call
him, I would suggest looking at this Twitter thread by Aaron
Maté. It's a brilliant shredding of Rachel Maddow's (and, to a lesser extent, Chris
Hayes's) version of the deceptive implication -- presented as an indisputable fact -- that
Manafort's work for Yanukovych is proof that he (and by extension, Trump) was working for
Putin. As Maté shows, that is actually indisputably false. Manafort was working hard to
turn Yanukovych away from Russia to the EU and the West, and the evidence of that is
abundant and easily available. It was given in the trial, though you'd never know that from
reading the NYT or listening to MSNBC. As a former Ukraine Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "If
it weren't for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier. He was the one dragging
Yanukovich to the West." And the Democrats know this.
And if you think Cohen is harboring secret knowledge of Trump-Russia collusion that he's
going to turn over to Mueller, take look at Maté's thread on that.
We are now entering a new period of intense political maneuvering that's the latest turning
point in the bizarre and flimsy "Russiagate" narrative. I've been asked to comment on that a
number of times over the past two years, and each time I or one of my fellow commentators would
say, "Why are we still talking about this?" It was originally conjured up as a Clinton campaign
attack on Trump, but, to my and many others' surprise and chagrin, it somehow morphed into the
central theme of political opposition to Trump's presidency.
... ... ...
Russiagate was a pretext to dig around everywhere in his closet. Trump was clueless about
the trap he was setting for himself, and has been relentlessly foolish in dealing with it. It
is a witch hunt, and he's riding around on his broom, skywriting self-incriminating
tweets.
There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump -- his racism, his stupidity, his
infantile narcissism, his full embrace of Zionist colonialism with its demand to attack Iran,
his enactment of Republican social and economic policies that are destroying working-class
lives, etc. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them. His election was a symptom of deep
pathologies of American political culture that we must address, including the failure of the
"liberal" party and of the two-party system itself. That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not
one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment,
starting with the clear constitutional crime of launching a military attack on another country
without congressional authorization. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party and its allied media do not want to center the fight on
these substantive political issues. Instead, they are centering on this barrage of Russiagate
litigation -- none of which yet proves, or even charges, Russian "collusion" -- which they are
using as a substitute for politics. And, in place of opposition, they're substituting
uncritical loyalty to the heroes of the military-intelligence complex and "our democracy" that
only a complete fantasist could stomach. I mean, when you get to the point that you're
suspecting John Bolton's "
ties to Russia " .
"... "I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again," Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect." Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts." With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown behind a Russian presidential candidate. ..."
"... Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear: Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it, Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner. Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances. ..."
"... Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits, but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact, it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate in the Russian presidency. ..."
"... American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret. On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won, Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined, "Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris." ..."
"... This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. ..."
"... It is a delightful irony that shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today. ..."
FOR ONE OF THE world's major powers to interfere systematically in the presidential
politics of another country is an act of brazen aggression. Yet it happened.
Sitting in a distant capital, political leaders set out to assure that their
favored candidate won an election against rivals who scared them. They succeeded.
Voters were maneuvered into electing a president who served the interest of
the intervening power. This was a well-coordinated, government-sponsored project
to subvert the will of voters in another country -- a supremely successful piece
of political vandalism on a global scale.
The year was 1996. Russia was electing a president to succeed Boris Yeltsin,
whose disastrous presidency, marked by the post-Soviet social collapse and a
savage war in Chechnya, had brought his approval rating down to the single digits.
President Bill Clinton decided that American interests would be best served
by finding a way to re-elect Yeltsin despite his deep unpopularity. Yeltsin
was ill, chronically alcoholic, and seen in Washington as easy to control. Clinton
bonded with him. He was our "Manchurian Candidate."
"I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again,"
Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and
I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for
the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect."
Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts."
With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown
behind a Russian presidential candidate.
Part of the American plan was public. Clinton began praising Yeltsin as a
world-class statesman . He defended Yeltsin's scorched-earth tactics in Chechnya,
comparing him to Abraham Lincoln for his dedication to keeping a nation together.
As for Yeltsin's bombardment of the Russian Parliament in 1993, which cost 187
lives, Clinton insisted that his friend had "bent over backwards" to avoid it.
He stopped mentioning his plan to extend NATO toward Russia's borders, and never
uttered a word about the ravaging of Russia's formerly state-owned economy by
kleptocrats connected to Yeltsin. Instead he gave them a spectacular gift.
Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International
Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used
some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared
into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear:
Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it,
Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner.
Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his
rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances.
Four American political consultants moved to Moscow to help direct Yeltsin's
campaign. The campaign paid them $250,000 per month for advice on "sophisticated
methods of polling, voter contact and campaign organization." They organized
focus groups and designed advertising messages aimed at stoking voters' fears
of civil unrest. When they saw a CNN report from Moscow saying that voters were
gravitating toward Yeltsin because they feared unrest, one of the consultants
shouted in triumph: "It worked! The whole strategy worked. They're scared to
death!"
Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The
count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits,
but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce
the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact,
it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate
in the Russian presidency.
American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret.
On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a
country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin
and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the
right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland
but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won,
Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined,
"Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin
Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris."
This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in
the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened
his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. He turned the Chechen
capital, Grozny, into a wasteland. Standards of living in Russia fell dramatically.
Then, at the end of 1999, plagued by health problems, he shocked his country
and the world by resigning. As his final act, he named his successor: a little-known
intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin. It is a delightful irony that
shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the
United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years
ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today.
"... "I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again," Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect." Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts." With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown behind a Russian presidential candidate. ..."
"... Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear: Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it, Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner. Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances. ..."
"... Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits, but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact, it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate in the Russian presidency. ..."
"... American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret. On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won, Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined, "Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris." ..."
"... This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. ..."
"... It is a delightful irony that shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today. ..."
FOR ONE OF THE world's major powers to interfere systematically in the presidential
politics of another country is an act of brazen aggression. Yet it happened.
Sitting in a distant capital, political leaders set out to assure that their
favored candidate won an election against rivals who scared them. They succeeded.
Voters were maneuvered into electing a president who served the interest of
the intervening power. This was a well-coordinated, government-sponsored project
to subvert the will of voters in another country -- a supremely successful piece
of political vandalism on a global scale.
The year was 1996. Russia was electing a president to succeed Boris Yeltsin,
whose disastrous presidency, marked by the post-Soviet social collapse and a
savage war in Chechnya, had brought his approval rating down to the single digits.
President Bill Clinton decided that American interests would be best served
by finding a way to re-elect Yeltsin despite his deep unpopularity. Yeltsin
was ill, chronically alcoholic, and seen in Washington as easy to control. Clinton
bonded with him. He was our "Manchurian Candidate."
"I guess we've just got to pull up our socks and back ol' Boris again,"
Clinton told an aide. "I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and
I know that means we've got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for
the guy. But we've got to go all the way in helping in every other respect."
Later Clinton was even more categorical: "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts."
With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown
behind a Russian presidential candidate.
Part of the American plan was public. Clinton began praising Yeltsin as a
world-class statesman . He defended Yeltsin's scorched-earth tactics in Chechnya,
comparing him to Abraham Lincoln for his dedication to keeping a nation together.
As for Yeltsin's bombardment of the Russian Parliament in 1993, which cost 187
lives, Clinton insisted that his friend had "bent over backwards" to avoid it.
He stopped mentioning his plan to extend NATO toward Russia's borders, and never
uttered a word about the ravaging of Russia's formerly state-owned economy by
kleptocrats connected to Yeltsin. Instead he gave them a spectacular gift.
Four months before the election, Clinton arranged for the International
Monetary Fund to give Russia a $10.2 billion injection of cash. Yeltsin used
some of it to pay for election-year raises and bonuses, but much quickly disappeared
into the foreign bank accounts of Russian oligarchs. The message was clear:
Yeltsin knows how to shake the Western money tree. In case anyone missed it,
Clinton came to Moscow a few weeks later to celebrate with his Russian partner.
Oligarchs flocked to Yeltsin's side. American diplomats persuaded one of his
rivals to drop out of the presidential race in order to improve his chances.
Four American political consultants moved to Moscow to help direct Yeltsin's
campaign. The campaign paid them $250,000 per month for advice on "sophisticated
methods of polling, voter contact and campaign organization." They organized
focus groups and designed advertising messages aimed at stoking voters' fears
of civil unrest. When they saw a CNN report from Moscow saying that voters were
gravitating toward Yeltsin because they feared unrest, one of the consultants
shouted in triumph: "It worked! The whole strategy worked. They're scared to
death!"
Yeltsin won the election with a reported 54 percent of the vote. The
count was suspicious and Yeltsin had wildly violated campaign spending limits,
but American groups, some funded in part by Washington, rushed to pronounce
the election fair. The New York Times called it "a victory for Russia." In fact,
it was the opposite: a victory by a foreign power that wanted to place its candidate
in the Russian presidency.
American interference in the 1996 Russian election was hardly secret.
On the contrary, the press reveled in our ability to shape the politics of a
country we once feared. When Clinton maneuvered the IMF into giving Yeltsin
and his cronies $10.2 billion, the Washington Post approved: "Now this is the
right way to serve Western interests. . . It's to use the politically bland
but powerful instrument of the International Monetary Fund." After Yeltsin won,
Time put him on the cover -- holding an American flag. Its story was headlined,
"Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisors Helped Yeltsin
Win." The story was later made into a movie called "Spinning Boris."
This was the first direct interference in a presidential election in
the history of US-Russia relations. It produced bad results. Yeltsin opened
his country's assets to looting on a mass scale. He turned the Chechen
capital, Grozny, into a wasteland. Standards of living in Russia fell dramatically.
Then, at the end of 1999, plagued by health problems, he shocked his country
and the world by resigning. As his final act, he named his successor: a little-known
intelligence officer named Vladimir Putin. It is a delightful irony that
shows how unwise it can be to interfere in another country's politics. If the
United States had not crashed into a presidential election in Russia 22 years
ago, we almost certainly would not be dealing with Putin today.
"... And now Davis, the Clinton fixer, is Michael Cohen's lawyer. The fixer defending a fixer. So who pays the bill? Well, ostensibly no-one, because Davis started a Go Fund Me campaign where people can donate so Cohen "can tell people the truth about Trump". The goal is $500,000. Which goes to .. Lanny Davis. ..."
"... On TV yesterday he apparently promoted a wrong URL , which was promptly picked up by someone else who had it redirect to the Trump campaign. Even fixers screw up, right? Still, there's already well over $100,000 donated for Cohen Davis. But why $500,000? One of the accusations against Cohen concerns lying to a bank for a $20 million loan. He bought an apartment not long ago for $6.7 million. He owned multiple apartments in Trump buildings. ..."
"... Did he lose everything when Robert Mueller et al raided his office, home and hotel room on April 9 2018? Were all his assets frozen? Possibly. What we do know is that he 'expected' the Trump campaign to pay for his legal fees. Which they declined. Or rather, as Fortune reported in June : "The Trump campaign has given some money to Cohen to help cover legal expenses for the Russia investigation. To date, though, it has not offered financial assistance in the investigation of his business practices." ..."
"... But anyway. So Lanny Davis, fixer of fixers and presidents, goes on a talk-show tour last night and what do you think happens? He walks back just about everything he's said the previous day. Aaron Maté made a list in this Twitter thread ..."
"... What do you think will happen when someone of the stature of Bob Mueller spends 18 months investigating the Clintons and their fixers? Perhaps the events of the past few days won't bring such a 2nd Special Counsel any closer, but by the same token they might do just that. Offense is the best defense. ..."
"... That is both dangerous in that the mandate of a Special Counsel should be limited lest it becomes endless and veers off the reasons it was initiated, as well as in the risk that it can easily turn into a party-political tool to hurt one's opponent while one's own dirt remains unscrutinized. ..."
"... In the end, I can draw only one conclusion: there are so many sharks and squids swimming in the swamp that either it should be expanded or the existing one should be cleaned up and depopulated. So bring it: investigate the FBI, the Clintons, and fixers like Lanny Davis and Michael Avenatti, the same way the Trump camp has been. ..."
If there's one thing that is exposed in the sorry not-so-fairy tale of former Trump aides Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, it's
that Washington is a city run by fixers. Who often make substantial amounts of money. Many though by no means all, start out as lawyers
and figure out that let's say 'the edges of what's legal' can be quite profitable.
And it helps to know when one steps across that edge, so having attended law school is a bonus. Not so much to stop when stepping
across the edge, but to raise one's fees. There's a lot of dough waiting at the edge of the law. None of this should surprise any
thinking person. Manafort and Cohen are people who think in millions, with an easy few hundred grand thrown in here and there.
But sometimes the fixers happen to come under scrutiny of the law, like when they get entangled in a Special Counsel investigation.
Both Manafort and Cohen now rue the day they became involved with Trump, or rather, the day he was elected president and solicited
much more severe scrutiny.
Would either ever have been accused of what they face today had Trump lost to Hillary? It's not too likely. They just gambled
and lost. But there are many more just like them who will never be charged with anything. Still, a new fixer name has popped up the
last few days who may, down the line, not be so lucky.
And that's not even because Lanny Davis is a registered foreign agent for Dmytro Firtash, a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch wanted
by the US government. After all, both Manafort and Cohen have their contacts in that part of the world. Manafort made tens of millions
advising then-president Yanukovich in the Ukraine before the US coup dethroned the latter. Cohen's wife is Ukrainian-American.
Lanny Davis is a lawyer, special counsel even, for the Clintons. Has been for years. Which makes it kind of curious that Michael
Cohen would pick him to become his legal representation. But that's not all Davis is involved in. Like any true fixer, he has his
hands in more cookie jars than fit in the average kitchen. Glenn Greenwald wrote this in August 2009 about the health care debate:
After Tom Daschle was selected to be Barack Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services and chief health care adviser, Matt
Taibbi wrote: "In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle." One could easily have added:
"And then there's Lanny Davis." Davis frequently injects himself into political disputes, masquerading as a "political analyst"
and Democratic media pundit, yet is unmoored from any discernible political beliefs other than: "I agree with whoever pays me."
It's genuinely difficult to recall any instance where he publicly defended someone who hadn't, at some point, hired and shuffled
money to him. Yesterday, he published a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico – solemnly warning that extremists on
the Far Left and Far Right are jointly destroying democracy with their conduct in the health care debate and urging "the vast
center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out equally" – that vividly illustrates the limitless whoring
behavior which shapes Washington generally and specifically drives virtually every word out of Lanny Davis' mouth.
Davis' history is as long and consistent as it is sleazy. He was recently hired by Honduran oligarchs opposed to that country's
democratically elected left-wing President and promptly became the chief advocate of the military coup which forcibly removed
the President from office. He became an emphatic defender of the Israeli war on Gaza after he was named by the right-wing The
Israel Project to be its "Senior Advisor and Spokesperson." He has been the chief public defender for Joe Lieberman, Jane Harman
and the Clintons, all of whom have engaged his paid services.
And as NYU History Professor Greg Grandin just documented: "Recently, Davis has been hired by corporations to derail the labor-backed
Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize, all the while touting himself as a "pro-labor liberal."
Davis was also the chief U.S. lobbyist of the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late 90s and played an important role in
strengthening relations between then President Bill Clinton and de facto president General Perez Musharraf."
Trending Articles Majority Of Young Americans Live In A Household Receiving
New analysis from CNS News finds that the majority of Americans under 18 live in households that take "means-tested
There's much more in that article, but you get the drift. And now Davis, the Clinton fixer, is Michael Cohen's lawyer. The fixer
defending a fixer. So who pays the bill? Well, ostensibly no-one, because Davis started a Go Fund Me campaign where people can donate
so Cohen "can tell people the truth about Trump". The goal is $500,000. Which goes to .. Lanny Davis.
On TV yesterday
he apparently promoted a wrong URL , which was promptly picked up by someone else who had it redirect to the Trump campaign.
Even fixers screw up, right? Still, there's already well over $100,000 donated for Cohen Davis. But why $500,000? One of the
accusations against Cohen concerns lying to a bank for a $20 million loan. He bought an apartment not long ago for $6.7 million.
He owned multiple apartments in Trump buildings.
Did he lose everything when Robert Mueller et al raided his office, home and hotel room on April 9 2018? Were all his assets frozen?
Possibly. What we do know is that he 'expected' the Trump campaign to pay for his legal fees. Which they declined. Or rather, as
Fortune reported in June : "The
Trump campaign has given some money to Cohen to help cover legal expenses for the Russia investigation. To date, though, it has not
offered financial assistance in the investigation of his business practices."
It seems safe to assume that's the point where Cohen turned, or was turned, to Lanny Davis. From a full decade of being Trump's
fixer to being fixed by the Clintons' fixer. That's a big move. It raises a number of questions :
First, why did Trump not pay Cohen's legal fees? This is 2 months after the raid on the man's office, home, hotel room, in
which huge amounts of files and disks etc. were seized.
Second question: if Lanny Davis only now sets up a Go Fund Me campaign, who's been paying him over the past 2 months? Did Cohen
sell assets, or is someone else involved?
Anyway, so Davis goes on TV with big words about how Cohen will tell all about Trump -provided people donate half a million- and
adding "I know that Mr. Cohen would never accept a pardon from a man that he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person
in the oval office. And [Cohen] has flatly authorized me to say under no circumstances would he accept a pardon from Mr. Trump."
Oh, and that "the turning point for his client's attitude toward Trump was the Helsinki summit in July 2018 which caused him to
doubt Trump's loyalty to the U.S." That, to my little brain, doesn't sound like something that would come from Cohen. That sounds
more like a political point the likes of which Cohen has never made. That's plain old Russiagate.
But anyway. So Lanny Davis, fixer of fixers and presidents, goes on a talk-show tour last night and what do you think happens?
He walks back just about everything he's said the previous day. Aaron Maté made a list in this Twitter thread:
1/ In a few minutes of airtime today, Michael Cohen attorney Lanny Davis has rejected a key Steele dossier claim, and, more
significantly I think, the basis for all of the ceaseless, frenzied speculation that Cohen has something to offer Mueller on Trump-Russia
collusion:
3/ Right after, Davis walks back his already heavily qualified innuendo to
@ Maddow -- which generated endless chatter -- about Cohen being useful
to Mueller's probe on collusion & knowing of hacking. Now Davis claims he was "tentative", that Cohen "may or may not be useful",
etc:
4/ Earlier in the day, Davis also asserted that Cohen was "never, ever" in Prague -- undermining a key claim in the Steele
dossier that he went there in August/September 2016 as part of the collusion scheme:
https:// twitter.com/ChuckRossDC/st atus/1032427395993624576
6/ So in short: Lanny Davis has not just denied what was explosively alleged about Cohen-Trump by Steele, CNN, and McClatchy,
but has also walked back the explosive speculation about Cohen-Trump that Lanny Davis himself generated.
Is Michael Cohen sure he wants this guy as his lawyer? Is he watching this stuff?
If Cohen and Manafort have broken laws, they should be punished for it. The same goes for all other Trump campers, including the
Donald. But it would be good if people realize that Cohen and Manafort are not some kind of stand-alone examples, that they are instead
the norm in Washington. And Moscow, and Brussels, London, everywhere there's a concentration of power. In all these places, and probably
more so in DC, there are these folks specializing in the edge of the law.
What do you think will happen when someone of the stature of Bob Mueller spends 18 months investigating the Clintons and their
fixers? Perhaps the events of the past few days won't bring such a 2nd Special Counsel any closer, but by the same token they might
do just that. Offense is the best defense.
I don't know, we don't know, what monsters Trump has swept under his luxurious carpets. But we do know that those are not the
only monsters in Washington. Meanwhile, the Steele dossier that was used to start the entire Mueller remains just about entirely
unverified. The Russian collusion meme he was tasked with investigating has so far come up empty.
That he would find something if he tried hard enough was obvious from the start. That is both dangerous in that the mandate of
a Special Counsel should be limited lest it becomes endless and veers off the reasons it was initiated, as well as in the risk that
it can easily turn into a party-political tool to hurt one's opponent while one's own dirt remains unscrutinized.
In the end, I can draw only one conclusion: there are so many sharks and squids swimming in the swamp that either it should be
expanded or the existing one should be cleaned up and depopulated. So bring it: investigate the FBI, the Clintons, and fixers like
Lanny Davis and Michael Avenatti, the same way the Trump camp has been.
Because if you don't do that, you can only possibly end up in an even bigger mess. You can't drain half a swamp.
This is Lavrentiy Beria style move from John "911 coverup" Mueller. It is clear that he can dig dirt on trump business dealings.
Notable quotes:
"... What's more, Mr Weisselberg has been at the beating heart of the Trump Organization since the 1970s. He handles the president's private trust, is the treasurer of the family's charitable foundation - currently under investigation by the state of New York - and has, at times, reviewed the Trump presidential campaign's accounting books ..."
The Trump Organization's finance boss, Allen Weisselberg, has reportedly been granted legal immunity in the probe into Michael
Cohen.
He was summoned to testify earlier this year in the investigation into Cohen, Donald Trump's longtime former lawyer, US media
report.
Cohen pleaded guilty on Tuesday to handling hush money for Mr Trump in violation of campaign finance laws.
Mr Weisselberg, Chief Financial Officer, is the latest to get immunity.
On Thursday, it emerged that David Pecker, head of the company that publishes the National Enquirer tabloid, was also given immunity.
Mr Weisselberg is reportedly mentioned on a tape secretly recorded by Cohen in 2016 in which a hush money payment to an alleged
lover of Mr Trump is discussed.
It is not yet clear what Mr Weisselberg has agreed to in return for getting legal immunity.
The Trump Organization has not commented on the reports, which first emerged in the Wall Street Journal.
Where does this fit in?
This is the latest twist in a saga continuing to dog the Trump administration.
In a serious blow, Cohen, Mr Trump's personal lawyer for more than a decade, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to eight criminal charges,
including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations.
He said he had paid hush money to two women who alleged they had affairs with Mr Trump, at the direction of "the candidate" -
a clear reference to Mr Trump.
Cohen said the payment was made for the "principal purpose of influencing [the 2016] election".
His plea deal with prosecutors could see his prison sentence reduced from 65 years to five years and three months.
Mr Weisselberg was one of those called to give evidence before a federal grand jury for the Cohen investigation earlier this year,
the Wall Street Journal reports.
Separately, the Manhattan district attorney has launched a preliminary investigation into whether the Trump Organization falsified
business records relating to payments made to Cohen, a source confirmed to CBS news.
The dominoes continue to fall
By Anthony Zurcher, Senior North America Reporter
Donald Trump's former personal lawyer has told a federal judge that the president knew about his illegal payments to women claiming
illicit affairs with the then-candidate. The publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, formerly a close ally of Mr Trump's, has
reportedly received immunity to discuss his role in the payments.
Now multiple US media outlets are reporting that Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization and the
only non-relative trusted by the president to run his business empire during his presidency, is co-operating with federal investigators.
While much of the political world has been focused on Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the situation in New York for the president
is increasingly threatening.
Mr Weisselberg reportedly oversaw the reimbursements Mr Cohen received from the Trump Organization for paying adult film star
Stormy Daniels. Depending on how the financial transfer was accounted for, it could run afoul of a number of campaign finance and
accounting laws.
What's more, Mr Weisselberg has been at the beating heart of the Trump Organization since the 1970s. He handles the president's
private trust, is the treasurer of the family's charitable foundation - currently under investigation by the state of New York -
and has, at times, reviewed the Trump presidential campaign's accounting books.
He's the man who knows things - and now he's talking.
What's the origin of all this?
It is the latest fallout from the wider inquiry launched by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017 into suspected collusion
between the Trump election campaign and Russia.
As part of that probe, Cohen's offices were raided and investigators looked into his finances. What they found was passed on to
New York judicial authorities.
Cohen's lawyer has said his client is "more than happy" to help the collusion inquiry.
Mr Trump has repeatedly denied collusion with Russia, and Russia denies involvement in the 2016 election.
Related Topics
Federal prosecutors have granted immunity to American Media Inc. CEO and longtime friend of
President Trump, David Pecker, reports the Wall Street
Journal .
The Democrats' progressive wing claimed victory on Saturday after 'Superdelegates' lost the
ability to vote on the first ballot of the party's nomination process
"... Duncan described herself as an avid supporter of President Trump, but said she was moved by four full boxes of exhibits provided by Mueller's team – though she was skeptical about prosecutors' motives in the financial crimes case. ..."
"... Though Duncan said the jury was not political in its conviction, she said she was skeptical of prosecutors' intentions, which she implied were political. ..."
A juror who sat on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's
case said on
Fox
News Wednesday night
that a
lone
juror prevented a ruling on all 18 counts against Manafort.
Juror
Paula Duncan said a lone juror could not come to a guilty verdict on
10 charges, forcing judge T.S. Ellis III to declare a mistrial on 10
of Manafort's 18 counts.
"It was one person who kept the verdict from being guilty on all 18
counts," Duncan, 52, said. She added that Mueller's team of
prosecutors often seemed bored, apparently catnapping during parts
of the trial.
In an exclusive interview on
@
foxnewsnight
,
Paul Manafort juror Paula Duncan said Special
Counsel Robert Mueller's team was one holdout
juror away from convicting Paul Manafort on all
18 counts of bank and tax fraud.
https://
fxn.ws/2Mrmrzb
While the identities of the jurors have been closely held, kept
under seal by Judge T.S. Ellis III at Tuesday's conclusion of the
high-profile trial, Duncan gave a behind-the-scenes account to Fox
News on Wednesday, after the jury returned a guilty verdict against
the former Trump campaign chairman on eight financial crime counts
and deadlocked on 10 others.
Duncan described herself as an avid supporter of President Trump,
but said she was moved by four full boxes of exhibits provided by
Mueller's team – though she was skeptical about prosecutors' motives
in the financial crimes case.
"Certainly Mr. Manafort got caught breaking the law, but he
wouldn't have gotten caught if they weren't after President
Trump," Duncan said of the special counsel's case, which she
separately described as a "witch hunt to try to find Russian
collusion," borrowing a phrase Trump has used in tweets more
than 100 times.
Though Duncan said the jury was not political in its conviction, she
said she was skeptical of prosecutors' intentions, which she implied
were political.
Following a lengthy jury deliberation, former
Trump
campaign
manager Paul Manafort was
convicted
on
eight counts, including tax fraud, failure to disclose
foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud –
even
though jurors were still hung on another ten counts
:
"If we cannot come to a consensus for a single count, how can we
fill in the verdict sheet?" the jurors asked in the note.
"It is your duty to agree upon a verdict if you can do so," said
Ellis, who encouraged each juror to make their own decisions on
each count. If some were in the minority on a decision, however,
they could think about the other jurors' conclusions.
Notably, the case has nothing
to
do
with "Trump, the Trump campaign or the 2016 US election" – it
has to do with work Manafort did with former Ukranian President
Victor Yanukovych from 2005-2014.
The
case was referred to the federal prosecutors in the Southern
District of New York (SDNY) by Special Investigator
Robert
Mueller
who also referred Democrat superlobbyist Tony Podesta
for prosecution as part of similar work he did for Yanukovych.
All of this begs the question – if Tony Podesta committed the same
crimes as Paul Manafort, why hasn't the SDNY brought charges against
him?
Last year, Tucker Carlson exposed just how close Tony Podesta and
the
Podesta
Group
were to the Ukranian and Russian governments...
...which was summed up in the below list originally complied by
iBankCoin
–
detailing Manafort's close ties with the Podesta Group regarding
Russian
/Ukranian
lobbying:
Lobbyist and temporary Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort
is at the center of the Russia probe – however the scope of
the investigation has broadened to include his activities
prior to the 2016 election.
Manafort worked with the Podesta Group since at least
2011 on behalf of Russian interests
, and was at the
Podesta Group offices "all the time, at least once a
month," peddling Russian influence through a shell group
called the
European
Centre for a Modern Ukraine
(ECMU).
Manafort brought a "parade" of Russian oligarchs to congress
for meetings with members and their staffs, however, the
Russia's
"central effort" was the Obama Administration.
In 2013,
John
Podesta recommended that Tony hire David Adams, Hillary
Clinton's chief adviser at the State Department, giving them
a "direct liaison" between the group's Russian clients and
Hillary Clinton's State Department.
In late 2013 or early 2014,
Tony
Podesta and a representative for the Clinton Foundation met
to discuss how to help Uranium One
– the Russian
owned company that controls 20 percent of American Uranium
Production – and whose board members gave over $100 million
to the Clinton Foundation.
"
Tony
Podesta was basically part of the Clinton Foundation."
Believing she would win the 2016 election,
Russia
considered the Podesta Group's connection to Hillary highly
valuable
.
Podesta Group is a nebulous organization with no board
oversight and all financial decisions made by Tony Podesta.
Carlson's source said
payments
and kickbacks could be hard for investigators to trace,
describing it as a "highly secret treasure trove."
One
employee's only official job was to manage Tony Podesta's
art
collection
, which could be used to conceal
financial transactions.
Trending Articles
"Thank God This Is Happening" Russia Says Time
Has Come To
With the US unveiling a new set of sanctions
against Russia on Friday, Moscow said it would
definitely respond to
Additionally, Zerohedge
explained
why
this list is so significant:
emails obtained by the Associated Press showed that Gates
personally directed two Washington lobbying firms,
Mercury
LLC and the Podesta Group, between 2012 and 2014 to set up
meetings between a top Ukrainian official and senators and
congressmen on influential committees involving Ukrainian
interests
. Gates noted in the emails that the official,
Ukraine's foreign minister, did not want to use his own embassy
in the United States to help coordinate the visits.
And this is where the plot thickens,
because
while the bulk of the press has so far spun the entire Ukraine
lobbying scandal, which led to Manafort's resignation, as the
latest "proof" that pro-Moscow powers were influencing not only
Manafort but the Trump campaign in general (who some democrats
have even painted of being a Putin agent), the reality is that a
firm closely tied with the Democratic party, the Podesta Group,
is just as implicated.
As AP further adds, the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, a
Brussels-linked nonprofit entity which allegely ran the lobbying
project,
paid
Mercury and the Podesta Group a combined $2.2 million over
roughly two years.
In papers filed in the U.S. Senate,
Mercury and the Podesta Group listed the European nonprofit as
an independent, nonpolitical client. The firms said the center
stated in writing that it was not aligned with any foreign
political entity.
In other words, the Podesta Group was likely
as
much or even more complicit in any wrongdoing than Manafort was
.
Of course, none of this stopped
Mueller
from
offering
Podesta immunity – in exchange for testimony against Manafort:
It is not as though Manafort is blameless or guilt-free in his
conduct – and according to Corey Lewandowski,
President
Trump
himself was not particularly fond of
some
of
his conduct on the campaign trail, at one point
lowering
his helicopter
to berate him via cell phone:
While were in the air, heading for Delaware, somebody -- I think it
was Ann Coulter -- tweeted out
a
quote from Manafort saying that Trump shouldn't be on television
anymore
, that he shouldn't do the Sunday shows. And
from now on Manafort would do all shows. Because he's the
fucking expert, right? Not Trump, who had already turned the
whole primary race on its head
"Yes, sir," Hope said, "Paul said he doesn't want you on TV."
Trump went fucking ballistic. We were still over the New York
metropolitan area, where you can get cell service if you fly at
a low altitude.
"Lower it!" Trump yelled to the pilot. "I have to make a call."
He got Manafort on the phone, "Did you say I shouldn't be on TV
on Sunday??" Manafort could barely hear him because of the
helicopter motor. But Trump said,
"I'll
go on TV anytime I goddamn fucking want and you won't say
another fucking word about me! Tone it down? I wanna turn it up!
I don't wanna tone anything down! I played along with your
delegate charts, but I have had enough."
He got Paul on the phone and completely decimated him again
verbally. Ripped his fucking head off. I wish I'd recorded it,
because it was one of the greatest takedowns in the history of
the world.
"You're a political pro? Let me tell you something. I'm a pro at
life. I've been around a time or two. I know guys like you, with
your hair and your skin "
and again, according to Lewandowski, Trump was unaware of
Manafort's connections when he took the job, but was seriously
unhappy about them after they were released to the press:
"It's all lies," Manafort said. "My lawyers are fighting it."
"But if it's in the paper someone has to give Trump a heads-up,
because if it's in the paper, it's reality."
Just as Steve had thought, the story ran the next day, August
15, on Page One, above the fold.
"I've got a crook running my campaign," Trump said when he read
it.
However, in spite of his apparent misgivings for Manafort, Trump has
decided to support him – ostensibly because he did not cave to the
outrageous demands of the Mueller "
investigation
":
I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his
wonderful family. "Justice" took a 12 year old
tax case, among other things, applied tremendous
pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he
refused to "break" - make up stories in order to
get a "deal." Such respect for a brave man!
....and why hasn't the Podesta brother been
charged and arrested, like others, after being
forced to close down his very large and
successful firm? Is it because he is a VERY well
connected Democrat working in the Swamp of
Washington, D.C.?
...the Podesta brothers are both well-connected swamp creatures, on
the same political team as the
uber-politicized
SDNY
assigned to levy charges against them.
"... First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." ..."
"... It would deeply undermine any notion that the political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook posts. ..."
But these crimes are tax fraud, money laundering, and credit app padding that have nothing
to do with Donald Trump, and campaign-finance violations related to what a critic of Trump
aptly describes
as "a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses." I question the level
of word play, if not fantasizing, necessary to claim that these crimes validate "
this investigation of foreign subversion." None of them has anything to do with that.
The perils of this, that, these, and those.
Do these results disprove that the Mueller probe is "a political investigation"? I think
they imply quite the opposite, and quite obviously so.
Why? Because these convictions would not have occurred if Hillary Clinton had been elected
president. There would be no convictions because there would have been no investigation.
If Hillary had been elected, all the crimes of Manafort and Cohen -- certainly those that
took place over many years before the election, but even, I think, those having to do with
campaign contributions and mistress cover-ups -- would never have been investigated, because
all would have been considered right with the political world.
The Manafort and Cohen crimes would have been ignored as the standard tactics of the elite
financial grifting -- as well as of parasitism on, and payoffs by, political campaigns -- that
they are. Indeed, there would have been no emergency,
save-our-democracy-from-Russian-collaboration, Special Counsel investigation, from which these
irrelevant charges were spun off, at all.
... ... ...
Have you heard of the Podestas? The Clinton Foundation? Besides, the economic purpose of
American electoral politics is to funnel millions to consultants and the media. Campaign
finance law violations? We'll see how the
lawsuit over $84 million worth of funds allegedly transferred illegally from state party
contributions to the Clinton campaign works out. Does the media report, does anybody know or
care, about it? Will anybody ever go to prison over it?
... ... ...
First of all, the Democrats will now face increasing demands for impeachment from the
impassioned members of their base whom they have riled up to see Trump as the epitome of the
Putin-Nazi evil that threatens "our democracy." If the Democrats insist these convictions
are not just matters of financial hijinx, irrelevant to Mueller's "Russia collusion"
investigation, and irrelevant in fact to anything of political substance; if they assert that
the payoffs to Stormy and Karen (the only acts directly involving Trump) disqualify Trump for
the presidency, then they will have no excuse but to call for Trump's impeachment, and act to
make it happen. Their base will demand that Democratic candidates run on that promise, and if
the Democrats re-take the House, that they begin impeachment proceedings immediately.
... ... ...
If they try to impeach and fail (which is likely), well, then, as happened to the
Republicans with Clinton, they will just look stupid, and will be punished for having wasted
the nation's political time and energy foolishly. And Trump will be strengthened.
If they were to impeach, convict, and remove Trump (even by forcing a resignation), a large
swath of the population would conclude, correctly, that a ginned-up litigation had been used to
overturn the result of the 2016 election, that the Democrats had gotten away with what the
Republicans couldn't in 1998-9. That swath of the population would likely withdraw completely
from electoral politics, leaving all their problems and resentments intact -- hidden for a
while, but sure to erupt in some other ways. It would deeply undermine any notion that the
political system holds the confidence of the people, and intensify division, disruption, and
the sense of incipient civil war in the country more than any number of Russian Facebook
posts.
. .. ... ...
...if they do move forward, that will initiate a political battle that will tear the country
apart and end up either with their defeat or the victory of Mike Pence.
... ... ...
By the way, for those who think that Manafort's conviction portends a smoking gun, based on
his work for "pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych," as the NYT and other liberals persistently call
him, I would suggest looking at this Twitter thread by Aaron
Maté. It's a brilliant shredding of Rachel Maddow's (and, to a lesser extent, Chris
Hayes's) version of the deceptive implication -- presented as an indisputable fact -- that
Manafort's work for Yanukovych is proof that he (and by extension, Trump) was working for
Putin. As Maté shows, that is actually indisputably false. Manafort was working hard to
turn Yanukovych away from Russia to the EU and the West, and the evidence of that is
abundant and easily available. It was given in the trial, though you'd never know that from
reading the NYT or listening to MSNBC. As a former Ukraine Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "If
it weren't for Paul, Ukraine would have gone under Russia much earlier. He was the one dragging
Yanukovich to the West." And the Democrats know this.
And if you think Cohen is harboring secret knowledge of Trump-Russia collusion that he's
going to turn over to Mueller, take look at Maté's thread on that.
We are now entering a new period of intense political maneuvering that's the latest turning
point in the bizarre and flimsy "Russiagate" narrative. I've been asked to comment on that a
number of times over the past two years, and each time I or one of my fellow commentators would
say, "Why are we still talking about this?" It was originally conjured up as a Clinton campaign
attack on Trump, but, to my and many others' surprise and chagrin, it somehow morphed into the
central theme of political opposition to Trump's presidency.
... ... ...
Russiagate was a pretext to dig around everywhere in his closet. Trump was clueless about
the trap he was setting for himself, and has been relentlessly foolish in dealing with it. It
is a witch hunt, and he's riding around on his broom, skywriting self-incriminating
tweets.
There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump -- his racism, his stupidity, his
infantile narcissism, his full embrace of Zionist colonialism with its demand to attack Iran,
his enactment of Republican social and economic policies that are destroying working-class
lives, etc. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them. His election was a symptom of deep
pathologies of American political culture that we must address, including the failure of the
"liberal" party and of the two-party system itself. That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not
one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment,
starting with the clear constitutional crime of launching a military attack on another country
without congressional authorization. That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party and its allied media do not want to center the fight on
these substantive political issues. Instead, they are centering on this barrage of Russiagate
litigation -- none of which yet proves, or even charges, Russian "collusion" -- which they are
using as a substitute for politics. And, in place of opposition, they're substituting
uncritical loyalty to the heroes of the military-intelligence complex and "our democracy" that
only a complete fantasist could stomach. I mean, when you get to the point that you're
suspecting John Bolton's "
ties to Russia " .
"... Brennan is hardly a model of credibility. But in that he is simply characteristic of the national security apparatus's leaders over the decades. The starting point with these guys has always been an obvious contempt for the legislative branch and the public it represents. ..."
"... In fact, it's probably a qualification for the job. ..."
"... Not so obvious is the reference to "documentary evidence" that allegedly demonstrates how national security officials "play[ed] fast and loose with the Constitution and the law". A number of them made it clear during the campaign that they believed only one of the candidates was even remotely suitable for the presidency. ..."
"... Why people opposed to Clinton are still on about Comey is a mystery. His Prince-of-Denmark obsession with his own virtue materially contributed to her losing the election. ..."
(1) An intellectual Rubicon is crossed when Giuliani is deemed a reliable source for
anything.
(2) Brennan is hardly a model of credibility. But in that he is simply characteristic of the
national security apparatus's leaders over the decades. The starting point with these guys has
always been an obvious contempt for the legislative branch and the public it represents.
It's
not a quality unique to Brennan. In fact, it's probably a qualification for the job.
(3) Am happy to hear that Brennan wants "all Americans [to] get the answers they so rightly
deserve" [NYT] from the Mueller investigation. But he'd be more persuasive if that desire
extended equally to the Senate's investigation into torture.
(4) Not so obvious is the reference to "documentary evidence" that allegedly demonstrates
how national security officials "play[ed] fast and loose with the Constitution and the law". A
number of them made it clear during the campaign that they believed only one of the candidates
was even remotely suitable for the presidency. Where does the law come in? If the claim --
hinted at but not made explicit -- is that Brennan was part of a conspiracy to produce the
Steele dossier, allegations of fact, not to mention citation to laws violated, would be
helpful. Based on information known to date, we can reasonably surmise that some, but not all,
of the material in the dossier was the product of Russian disinformation channelled to Steele.
If there's something more, it would be good to get details.
(5) Why people opposed to Clinton are still on about Comey is a mystery. His
Prince-of-Denmark obsession with his own virtue materially contributed to her losing the
election. And, more broadly, if there really was a conspiracy by the national security
apparatus, it was an endeavor that failed. One would think that the 63 million would be pleased
on both counts.
(6) If law breaking there was, what explains the silence from the DOJ under Sessions, whose
stellar career is littered with contrived prosecutions of political opponents? It doesn't take
much to draft an indictment. Yet, here we are, nearly two years into the new dawn, and Brennan
continues to walk free and even spout off publicly. What explains that?
"... Trump, like Obama, should be impeached on illegal, unconstitutional acts of military aggression, including his unconstitutional use of signing statements to reject even the most feeble attempts of Congress to pretend to assert War Powers. Both men should have been impeached for the atrocity that is Yemen, and their for-profit collusion in it. ..."
"... Sample quote from the book: "[Pence is] the most successful Christian supremacist in American history." ..."
"For some reason I never actually let myself think of a concept of Trump with a Democratic
congress. The frightening thing is, it might actually work out."
When Trump was first elected I proposed this to some progressive friends of mine that
Trump, without the traditional Republican baggage, might actually be able to accomplish real
things, like taming the Military and Medical industrial complexes, do a grand infrastructure
deal with Schumer and The Democrats, pull us out of the middle east, etc. Their response was
"Do you really think he will do that?". My response was "I doubt it, but maybe".
But instead, he was captured by the radical Freedom Party and neo-con wing of the
Republicans, so nothing got done except tax cuts for the elites and more middle east turmoil
and destruction benefitting our good buddies Israel and Saudi Arabia. That, along with his
contempt for everything Obama, got us to where we are today.
And, just breaking news, the Southern District of NY has just granted the Trump
Organization CFO immunity from prosecution. Trump is in serious trouble, and will probably
resign soon (I know MM, another prediction without any basis). The SDNY is also investigating
the Trump Foundation for what appears to be massive, long running financial crimes. Don Jr,
Eri, and Ivanka are in serious trouble too.
Trump is toast. Let's hope he just goes away and doesn't drag the US into a global
wag-the-dog conflict or economic collapse.
"Better to accuse Trump of foreign collusion and wage political war to bring him down"
The Republican Mueller, under direction of Republican Rosenstein, and all under direction
of the hard core right wing GOP Sessions, is doing a fine enough job. Most Dems are merely
eating popcorn and watching the spectacle unfold.
Impeachment doesn't really concern most Dems so much. For one, they know the Senate will
not convict. Secondly, Pence as POTUS would be a nightmare for Dems: many of his views are
similar to Trump, but he's actually competent enough to get stuff done.
"Call me simple minded, but if the Democrats really hate Trump, why don't they put all of
their efforts into putting their own candidate over the top in the next presidential
election?"
They will -- but it's still only the second year of Trump's term. You have noticed how
energized Dem voters seem to be this summer thus far, haven't you?
The question we should ask is do Republicans want an impeachment fight? Presidents have
enormous power and Trump has shown no ability to restrain himself when he feels threatened.
The damage an enraged and desperate President could do to the country and the Party is
literally incalculable. If the list of crimes gets long enough and the evidence inescapable
enough, Republicans will need to find an 'offramp' for Trump out of pure self-interest (never
mind the Country).
Trump, like Obama, should be impeached on illegal, unconstitutional acts of military
aggression, including his unconstitutional use of signing statements to reject even the most
feeble attempts of Congress to pretend to assert War Powers. Both men should have been
impeached for the atrocity that is Yemen, and their for-profit collusion in it.
Does Buchanan have any principles, or is everything determined by day-to-day
expediency?
Two articles of interest at links below.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
CIA Whistleblower: It Was A Failed Coup & MSM Covering Up Phony DOJ Dossier
By Mac Slavo
August 23, 2018 "Information Clearing House" http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50112.htm
In retrospect, the new Pence bio book ("The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence")
would be seen as the first shot across the bow in the 'impeach Pence' movement if Trump were
impeached and removed.
Sample quote from the book: "[Pence is] the most successful Christian supremacist in
American history."
If the vote counters cannot get to 2/3rds vote in the Senate, the Democrats have an excuse
not to impeach. Instead they should spend the next two years investigating Trump. This would
put the Republican Senators in a really awkward position. Either they commit to supporting
impeachment or they watch what two more years of Trump does to their party.
You are right about pressure to impeach. But the Democrats are resisting it right now and
hopefully will continue to resist it.
Why would democrats want to impeach Trump? There is no chance of removing him from office.
What they will do is start requesting those documents. They will get those Tax returns, they
will put Omarosa up there and have her tell her story. The Trump agenda is over after
November when Democrats get into full obstruction mode. Let's start looking under those rocks
and see what we can see. Trump is super helpful for revitalizing democrats long term as he
solidifies the democratic hold on people under 45.
The fact that this article is even being written is evidence that truth really is
penetrating that right wing bubble. Trump isn't going to have a single week of his presidency
with Majority support.
Trump should pardon Manafort and Cohen and fire Mueller immediately. Then let the chips
fall where they may. Americans hate sore losers and whiners and they are fed up with
political correctness. These factors may act to deny the Congress to the Democrats. Trump has
blundered badly in the Middle East and has pulled out of the Iran deal. He broke his promise
to withdraw. He is now a puppet of Sheldon Adelson and Israeli foreign policy. In these
areas, the Democrats are in full agreement with Trump. So the issue is not foreign policy as
here there is no difference between the parties. Tariffs and immigration are the only areas
of disagreement and I think these issues are the ones that will allow the Republicans to keep
control of both Houses. We shall soon see.
Manafort will be going to court again next month on various other charges, including
failure to register as a foreign agent. What will be discovered in that trial is what is
keeping Trump up at night, as it these charges, not Manafort's tax evasion, which are much
closer to the presidency and his personal financial crimes.
Trump is going to go out in abject disgrace, either by impeachment, resignation or more
likely, refusing to run in 2020 as polls show he'll be blown out. Instead, the punk will
retreat to Mar-A-Lago, whining about conspiracies and Crooked Hillary and witch hunts, and
trying to be a king maker, and never shutting his mouth as an ex-"president." He doesn't have
the character to simply lose an honest contest.
Indeed, he'll fight like a cornered animal. He's already proven, repeatedly, that he's in
this for himself, not the country. He'll abuse every privilege and every power he has until
America's Berlusconi is out of options.
"... The Republican elite (and the Democratic elite) have always wanted Pence for President, and they may yet get their wish. But not yet. ..."
"... It also seems weird to conceptualise hush money to a porn star as 'campaign finance violations'. But what do I know. ..."
"... There are three impeachable offenses: treason, bribery and the more opaque "high crimes and misdemeanors," but the House of Representatives has the responsibility to accuse the president of one of those things. If a majority in the House agrees, a president is then impeached. The Senate then votes on impeachment, which under the U.S. Constitiution requires a two-thirds majority. ..."
"... I am not sure that hush money being paid to the porn star the President was banging in order that his pregnant wife not find out was precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind by 'High crimes and misdemeanors ..."
"... the timing of the payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but immediately before the election, make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital affairs with adult entertainers from turning into October Surprises. ..."
This is bad for Trump but not unexpected. Despite the figleaf of 'Russian collusion' the
main brief of Mueller was 'find out bad stuff about Trump and his associates' and of course
it was almost inevitable that he would find such stuff because Trump and his cronies are
scumbags who exist to break the law. This is the reality of capitalism (as has been pointed
out 'crony capitalism' is the only kind of capitalism that has ever existed or ever will
exist). Congress might or might not accept it, but the Senate (even more viciously
'gerrymandered' albeit de facto) won't yet. So Trump won't go down, not yet.
The only way that Trump will go down, IMHO is if and when the Republican establishment
decide that they have got everything out of him that they're going to get, which means after
the next Presidential election. Assuming he wins it, he may be ditched quickly. The
Republican elite (and the Democratic elite) have always wanted Pence for President, and they
may yet get their wish. But not yet.
In terms of the current situation, Manafort is simply irrelevant. Cohen is relevant, but
paying a porn start off because you are worried your wife might find out that you are a
philanderer: it seems a stretch to interpret that as 'trying to influence an election'
although I can sort of see the logic (I suppose Bill Clinton's behaviour vis a vis Monica
Lewinsky was ultimately political too).
It also seems weird to conceptualise hush money to a porn star as 'campaign finance
violations'. But what do I know.
'The Republicans simply don't care, and nothing will make them care.'
To be fair, I don't care either, and nothing will make me care.
Anyway, back in the real world .
'Michael Cohen, who spent a decade as a lawyer for Trump, told a judge Tuesday that he was
directed by Trump to coordinate payments to two women designed to prevent them from
disclosing alleged affairs with the real estate mogul before the presidential election, in
violation of campaign finance law.
Such an explosive assertion against anyone but the president would suggest that a criminal
case could be in the offing, but under long-standing legal interpretations by the Justice
Department, the president cannot be charged with a crime.
The department produced legal analyses in 1973 and 2000 concluding that the Constitution
does not allow for the criminal indictment of a sitting president.
In comments to reporters after Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony counts in federal
court in Manhattan, Deputy U.S. Attorney Robert Khuzami said prosecutors were sending a
message that they are unafraid to file charges when campaign finance laws are broken. But he
did not mention Trump or offer any indication that his office planned to pursue action
against the president.'
(Washington Post)
'Despite impeachment talk, it's no easy task to remove a president in such a way. Both
Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were impeached, but both were acquitted by the Senate.
President Richard Nixon resigned before he could be removed from office.
There are three impeachable offenses: treason, bribery and the more opaque "high
crimes and misdemeanors," but the House of Representatives has the responsibility to accuse
the president of one of those things. If a majority in the House agrees, a president is then
impeached. The Senate then votes on impeachment, which under the U.S. Constitiution requires
a two-thirds majority.
In Trump's case, starting the impeachment process would currently require a mass revolt by
Republicans against him in the House of Representatives -- controlled by the GOP -- an event
even less likely than normal with midterm elections on the horizon.'
I am not sure that hush money being paid to the porn star the President was banging in
order that his pregnant wife not find out was precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind
by 'High crimes and misdemeanors ,'
'I am no lawyer, but apparently if you spend that much money covering up your adultery to
avoid damage to your political campaign, that is a crime'.
I sort of see what you are saying, and of course, in a certain sense, what you say is not
only true but self-evidently and obviously true. Any politician engages in activities to gain
him or herself votes. All I am saying is that it doesn't seem like the most obvious way to
conceptualise these activities. CF Bill Clinton.
Presumably one of the key reasons that Clinton lied about the Lewinsky affair was because
he thought it would make him look bad and therefore lose him votes in the 2000 elections. And
in a sense it did (although others presumably voted for him 'cos they felt sorry for him).
But that seems like a weird way to conceptualise his activities.
Does it not seem more likely that Trump's main concern in paying the hush money was to
avoid his wife, who had just given birth, finding out? Obviously the effect on votes would be
of benefit to him, but I'm not sure that was his main concern.
Very serious. Cohen is obviously going to cooperate (if he hasn't begun already) on topics
far afield from his own charges, and Manafort must be thinking hard about doing the same
thing, now.
Lawfare does not mention the politics: this also boosts the possibility that
Democrats will take control of the House. Then they may wait for Mueller's report do the
heavy lifting before impeaching Trump and in the meantime start various committee
investigations of emoluments and the corruption elsewhere in the Administration.
The next two
years will be unremitting television news of more crime and corruption. If and when they
impeach Trump, even a Republican-controlled Senate will convict; the Senate only needs
2/3rds. The Senators all want to get rid of him; he makes it harder for them to run for
President themselves.
For now, they will all be watching the disapproval rating at someplace
reputable like FiveThirtyEight's aggregator. Tuesday's news will cycle into these figures, in
about a week or ten days. If it starts to tick downwards 3-5%, back to the levels in the last
half of 2017, Trump is toast sooner rather than later.
I too agree with most of what Hidari said here (and there), except for their last
paragraph here. To further clarify your statement, the issue is that the payment was
transparently not to keep Ms. Trump from finding out about Ms. Cliffords or Ms. McDougal
– the timing of the payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but
immediately before the election, make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital
affairs with adult entertainers from turning into October Surprises.
These functioned as (unreported) in-kind donations, insofar as they were third-party
resources expended to for the explicit purpose of providing electoral support to the
candidate.
Hidari@ I am not sure that hush money being paid to the porn star the President was banging in
order that his pregnant wife not find out was precisely what the Founding Fathers had in mind
by 'High crimes and misdemeanors,'
It's intentionally
vague . It should be noted that when Johnson was impeached , one
of the eleven articles was "Bringing disgrace and ridicule to the presidency by his
aforementioned words and actions."
Again, though, the idea that the payoffs to Ms. Cliffords and Ms. McDougal were made to
prevent Ms. Trump from learning of the affairs defies all credibility when considering that
they occurred in the fall of 2016 rather than ten years earlier.
@Hidari it would be a strange way to conceptualise the activity if it was based purely on
the fact that the hush money was politically helpful. But:
"He told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments to the
women were made "in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal
office," implicating the president in a federal crime.
"I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the
principal purpose of influencing the election" for president in 2016, Mr. Cohen said."
So I don't really know how you can keep insisting this is an issue of conceptual
analysis
I don't think that a Congressional majority, and certainly not the 2/3 Senate majority
needed for removal, is going to feel much ethical pressure to impeach based on the list of
wrongdoing we know about so far, or that are at all likely to emerge.
Quite aside from the lack of gravity of the crimes on that list, none of them are a clear
betrayal of the electorate that decided he should be president. That electorate already knew
he was a Russophile, had even invited Russians to hack D computers, they knew that he was a
pussy-grabber, and that his privately-owned business was ethically challenged -- yet an
electoral majority voted him in anyway.
Removal on impeachment involves the legislature asserting its will and its judgment over
that of the people. Of course the legislature is also elected by the people to accomplish
duties that include holding the president to certain standards. But I don't see even a 2/3 D
Senate (which we would only get by the Rs losing every race up this year, plus about 15 of
them party-switching) having the cojones for such an assertion, certainly not when the
electorate already knew about the crimes when they voted for the criminal. The Rs have
cojones for such enterprises, and in spades, but not our beloved Ds.
And I don't see impeachment as a very useful strategy for the Ds to pursue. Even if
successful at removing Trump, that just gets you Pence -- just as public policy irrational,
only less politically disorganized.
Maybe impeachment comes up as a tactic, to facilitate some other plan of action, but I
don't see conviction on impeachment as a useful means of even control of Trump behavior, much
less removal.
If the Ds do have control of either house after the election, of course the usual that we
can expect of them is not very much. Even if they control both chambers, they couldn't
possibly have the 2/3 in both needed to run the govt by overriding the vetoes that any actual
program of theirs would be sure to attract from the president. Even with 2/3, because this is
a D 2/3 we're talking about, we can most likely discount the possibility that they would even
try to exercise any oversight over what the govt does in opposition to the president's
control.
An actual political party in this situation of even controlling a bare majority of just
the House could do a whole lot to not only thwart Trump, but to at least make a credible
effort at asserting control over the govt. They could of course block any new legislation, or
the repeal of any existing law, and even the actual Ds are probably up to that. But to go
further, to control or limit how Trump runs the govt under existing law, this D majority of
the House would have to be willing to boldly set sail on the sea of political hardball and
take up a career of budgetary hostage-taking -- so right off we should say that this is
political fanfic, and not even canonic fanfic.
But a girl can dream, can't he, so let's pursue this alternate reality just a bit. Who
knows, if Trump's misrule makes things sufficiently dire, maybe even the Ds will be motivated
to find their inner pirate.
To take ICE as an example, it would go something like this. The House only agrees to pass
the annual appropriations on a 30-day continuing resolution basis, so that their assent is
needed every 30-days to the govt doing anything. They pass all the spending except for the
ICE funding (keeping the funding for whatever ICE spends on housing and otherwise caring for
people already apprehended -- that funding goes with the funding of the rest of the govt),
which they hold back until and unless Senate and president agree to ICE funding that includes
new law that keeps ICE from doing family separations, and whatever else the Ds find
objectionable. After success getting control of ICE abuses, next month when the CRs come due,
they do the same maneuver on their next target of Trump misrule.
The risk is that the Rs, Senate and president, just refuse to agree to the omnibus that
funds everything else the govt does until the Ds let loose the ICE funding. There is a govt
shutdown, and the Ds run the risk of being blamed. It turns into a game of legislative
chicken. Of course, this has to be anti-canon fanfic for such a game to end other than by the
Ds swerving first, so the real world Ds will never actually even start the game, because
whatever their faults, they know their limitations.
Hidari #13: " they 'all' want to get rid of him now?"
The Republican Senate would be happy to throw him overboard tomorrow. His voters are the
problem. They won't wait for his voters to turn on him however, if the Senate receives a
lengthy bill of impeachment from a Democratic House and Mueller has signed off on some of the
charges.
They'd rather have Pence do the sanctimonious messaging and go into 2020 trying to
reconstruct the party with an open primary.
After all, the GOP stands to lose Senate seats in 2020 anyway, just due to the map (the
same problem they have this year, with the House). If the election in 76 days puts the
Democrats in charge of the House, Trump won't make it to the end of his term.
'To further clarify your statement, the issue is that the payment was transparently not
to keep Ms. Trump from finding out about Ms. Cliffords or Ms. McDougal – the timing
of the payment/catch-and-kill story, well after the incidents but immediately before the
election, make that clear: their purpose was to avoid extramarital affairs with adult
entertainers from turning into October Surprises. '
Oh ok, I didn't really understand that. I haven't to be honest, been following the Stormy
Daniels story too closely for the good reason that I don't care.
So one infers that the FL did in fact know about these things. Could we conceptualise it
thus, then: Trump paid the hush money to ensure that Melania was not publicly humiliated by
these things (I mean, humiliated even more than simply being married to Donald Trump)?
But obviously, in that case, Trump not wanting this to be a big story in the run up to the
election was obviously a 'thing'.
"... Mueller's team of partisan prosecutors seek to prove the unprovable -- that I received allegedly hacked e-mails from the Russians or Wikileaks and passed them on to Donald Trump. ..."
Mueller is running a criminally abusive, constitutionally unaccountable, professionally and
politically incestuous conspiracy of ethically conflicted cronies colluding to violate my
Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights and those of almost everyone who had any sort of
political or personal association with me in the last 10 years.
He has conducted a supposedly comprehensive investigation of a very narrow and limited issue
as an open-ended, totally limitless Grand Prosecution, with absolutely no articulable or even
identifiable criminal predicate to substantiate it as a lawful investigation, even under
ordinary circumstances.
Mueller's team of partisan prosecutors seek to prove the unprovable -- that I received
allegedly hacked e-mails from the Russians or Wikileaks and passed them on to Donald
Trump. This threadbare false narrative is harped on endlessly by the slugs at MSNBC and
other despicable "fake news" outlets.
Now, because of the accuracy of my tweets -- in which I merely followed the tweets of
Wikileaks and the many public interviews of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange -- Mueller and
his hit-men seek to frame some ludicrous charge of "defrauding the United States."
This is, of course, based on a false and unproven assumption that Assange is a Russian agent
and Wikileaks is a Russian front -- neither of which has been proven in a court of law.
Interestingly Assange himself has said, "Roger Stone has never said or tweeted anything we at
Wikileaks had not already said publicly."
A question for all the impeach Trump for colluding with Russia weenies:
How would Cohen know anything about Trump's collusion with Russia? Why would Trump need a
lawyer for this illegal activity? If you are going to claim that Trump just happened to share
this information with Cohen, then why not anyone else? Is Cohen some sort of consigliere or
confession booth priest for Trump?
This whole farce with Cohen is pathetic BS. Cohen will be told to say this and that my
Mueller and this will be deemed "evidence". Americans are really a few cards short of a full
deck to swallow this drivel.
BTW, the new consensus emerging amongst the "deplorables" who do not share the official
CNN fake news narrative, is that the dirty dossier produced by Steele was a Russian
machination. This is truly overwhelming in its retardation. Why the f*ck would Russia
undermine Trump by colluding with Hillary when Hillary was basically foaming at the mouth to
start a war over Russia's intervention in Syria. Hillary's Democratic Party has ignited the
current anti-Russian hysteria in America, so there is no way that Russia was colluding with
her or her party. Americans are apparently too brainwashed or dumb to distinguish between the
involvement of Russian nationals and the Russian state. You can find dozens of nationals from
any country to do anything with the right motivation.
"... "Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." ..."
"... The investigation is based on a lie. Therefore it is unconstitutional and nothing more than an attempt to cover up MASSIVE crimes committed by the pplayers now losing their security clearance and their puppet masters ..."
"Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby
Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case
that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack
containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and
the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was
the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the
election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure
investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which
in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.
And now you want to talk about trying to shoe horn reality into your fantasy outcome.
Anyone with with 2 brain cells to rub together is laughing at you and your ilk pushing this
complete horse chit.
The investigation is based on a lie. Therefore it is unconstitutional and nothing more
than an attempt to cover up MASSIVE crimes committed by the pplayers now losing their
security clearance and their puppet masters.
Do yourself a favor and turn off that freak Rachel Madcow!
Cohen / Manafort mess creates a whole other level of problems for the current
Administration. So Mueller got Trump in an old fashioned way by digging the
personal and business related dirt and going after people who were close to
Trump. This is how prosecutors approach mafia cases ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president. ..."
"... Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature. ..."
"... But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation. ..."
"... Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump. Then there is the Mueller probe itself. ..."
"... Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate. ..."
"... However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down. ..."
"... And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's report. ..."
"... Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas, federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his enemies. ..."
"... No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted. ..."
"... if Democrats capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media auxiliaries to pursue impeachment. ..."
"... Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time. ..."
"... What has he done that's actually useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating pace. ..."
"... All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office. ..."
"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer," said President Donald Trump ruefully, "I would
strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen." Michael Cohen is no Roy
Cohn.
Tuesday, Trump's ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign
violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen had fronted the cash, $130,000, to pay porn star
Stormy Daniels for keeping quiet about a decade-old tryst with Trump. He had also brokered a
deal whereby the National Enquirer bought the rights to a story about a Trump affair with a
Playboy model, to kill it.
Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law. But paying girlfriends
to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a campaign violation. And Trump could
legally contribute as much as he wished to his own campaign for president.
Would a Democratic House, assuming we get one, really impeach a president for paying hush
money to old girlfriends?
Hence the high-fives among never-Trumpers are premature.
But if Cohen's guilty plea and Tuesday's conviction of campaign manager Paul Manafort do
not imperil Trump today, what they portend is ominous. For Cohen handled Trump's dealings for
more than a decade and has pledged full cooperation with prosecutors from both the Southern
District of New York and the Robert Mueller investigation.
Nothing that comes of this collaboration will be helpful to Trump.
Also, Manafort, now a convicted felon facing life in prison, has the most compelling of
motives to "flip" and reveal anything that could be useful to Mueller and harmful to Trump.
Then there is the Mueller probe itself.
Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six
months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard
evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate.
However, having, for a year now, been marching White House aides and campaign associates
of Trump before a grand jury, Mueller has to be holding more cards than he is showing. And even
if they do not directly implicate the president, more indictments may be coming down.
Mueller may not have the power to haul the president before a grand jury or indict him.
After all, it is Parliament that deposes and beheads the king, not the sheriff of Nottingham.
But Mueller will file a report with the Department of Justice that will be sent to the
House.
And as this Congress has only weeks left before the 2018 elections, it will be the new
House that meets in January, which may well be Democratic, that will receive Mueller's
report.
Still, as of now, it is hard to see how two-thirds of a new Senate would convict this
president of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Thus we are in for a hellish year.
Trump is not going to resign. To do so would open him up to grand jury subpoenas,
federal charges and civil suits for the rest of his life. To resign would be to give up his
sword and shield, and all of his immunity. He would be crazy to leave himself naked to his
enemies.
No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an
illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the
presidency in his fight for survival. And as he has shown, these powers are considerable: the
power to rally his emotional following, to challenge courts, to fire Justice officials and FBI
executives, to pull security clearances, to pardon the convicted.
Democrats who have grown giddy about taking the House should consider what a campaign to
bring down a president, who is supported by a huge swath of the nation and has fighting allies
in the press, would be like.
Why do it? Especially if they knew in advance the Senate would not convict.
That America has no desire for a political struggle to the death over impeachment is
evident. Recognition of this reality is why the Democratic Party is assuring America that
impeachment is not what they have in mind.
Today, it is Republicans leaders who are under pressure to break with Trump, denounce him,
and call for new investigations into alleged collusion with the Russians. But if Democrats
capture the House, then they will be the ones under intolerable pressure from their own media
auxiliaries to pursue impeachment.
Taking the House would put newly elected Democrats under fire from the right for forming a
lynch mob, and from the mainstream media for not doing their duty and moving immediately to
impeach Trump.
Democrats have been laboring for two years to win back the House. But if they discover that
the first duty demanded of them
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. "
President Pence would do little to undo the political polarization that America has
experienced over the past two decades since his voting record suggests that he leans rather
heavily to the right side of the political spectrum.
Maybe this is payback for the other impeachment attempt 20 years ago. Perhaps some dems
have been waiting two decades for vengeance. Whatever Clinton's faults, the GOP should not
have opened that can of worms back then.
Either the Republicans come out ahead in which case the left will say it was because of
"Russian" interference and the election results are thus illegitimate. Or the Democrats will
and they will not only be under pressure to impeach Trump but also to punish the deplorables
who voted for him.
Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at
rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.
Well, this would constitute a real civil war. All because Obama and Hillary failed at
rigging an election and failed at launching a coup. Good Times. Keep your powder dry.
Meh. Who are you going to shoot at? Your neighbors? The local messican ghetto? Cops in
general?
IMO, just like always throughout history, the key is to nab "elected representatives" from
local, state and federal positions, and hang them. You don't have to hang very many --
they're smarter than they look; they're merely corrupt slimebags. Kill a few, and the rest
scatter, awaiting future opportunity.
Mr. Buchanan somehow manages to make it through the entire article without reminding us
that, in fact, the GOP did impeach a president over a blowjob–what goes around,
comes around. And while I doubt that Pat is among his fans, Bill Clinton at the time was a
good deal more popular than Trump is now.
Which brings us to something basic: Democrats and liberals in general have jumped the
shark for everyone to see, they're stark raving mad. Granted, the GOP is not exactly Trump's
party, but in an environment where Republicans face no substantial opposition, Trump could
potentially do something for his voters and there would be no possibility of a blue wave.
Instead, he's embarked on a massively ambitious nation-building project in northeast Syria
and is otherwise scouring the globe for new wars to start, while mostly catering to his rich
friends at home. And Israel, Israel, Israel all the time.
What has he done that's actually
useful? Ditching TTIP? OK let's grant him that one. Meeting Kim? Mayyybe, but at the same
time he chose to appoint Bolton and Pompeo who are predictably sabotaging the Singapore
understanding. Meanwhile, American finances are going off the cliff at an ever-accelerating
pace.
All of which is the perfect mirror image of an equally true statement: if Obama hadn't
been such a lousy president (which his supporters are in denial about), a known
charlatan like Trump would've never had a shot at the office.
For an outsider, the
sentimental attachment of this supposedly forward-looking country to its two officially
allowed parties which haven't served their stated purpose for decades already is a curious
thing to behold.
Although I lean conservative, I despair for my country. If Trump's election "unauthorized by the real powers that be" proves to be the match that
sets alight the country then we're all in for a form of Hell that few of us have seen.
Note that someone whose supposed level of intimacy with violence is someone who would not
know the first thing to do if war actually broke out. Exactly why you, the armchair warrior,
who waits with bated breath to jackboot your "enemies", will be staying at home rather than
being on the front lines, just like yourself, dear.
Now, onto Patrick's post.
"Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn."
Patrick is partially right. They are both Jewish, and they both engaged in illegal
activity, but one was a closet homosexual.
"But paying girlfriends to keep past indiscretions private is neither a crime nor a
campaign violation "
Obviously if that was the case, Cohen would not have pled guilty. And clearly Patrick has
not been keeping up with the Mueller investigation on this particular development.
"Cohen claims he and Trump thus conspired to violate federal law."
No, Cohen is offering to corroborate the evidence collected by prosecutors as to what
constitutes illegal activities.
"No, given his belief that he is under attack by people who hate him and believe he is an
illegitimate president, and seek to bring him down, he will use all the powers of the
presidency in his fight for survival."
Well, we know for a fact that if Shitlery or Obama was in the SAME SITUATION, Patrick
would NOT be advocating this course of action. Rather, he would call for either of them to
step aside.
"Twenty-six months after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had resigned. Twenty-six
months after the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta emails, Mueller has yet to deliver hard
evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Putin's Russia, though this was his mandate."
The Mueller investigation is a sore spot for Buchanan, who had to endure an eerily similar
experience with Nixon. So it is other than surprising that Buchanan is defending Trump.
Patrick ought to know better here, as Mueller is carefully gathering evidence from one of the
most complex cases in our nation's political history.
Justice in this instance has no time
table. Mueller is under no obligation to show his cards, that is not how prosecutions
work.
"... "Perhaps the greatest political damage came not from the felony charges, all of them related to various forms of financial chicanery, including five counts each for Cohen and Manafort of income tax evasion, but from Cohen's public statement in the courtroom of Judge Kimba Wood. In confessing his guilt to the eight counts, Cohen declared that in two instances, violating federal laws by using personal funds to suppress politically inconvenient statements by Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels, he was acting "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office." ..."
"... My point is that Cohen's admissions implicating Trump in carrying out either himself or in concert with others willful ongoing acts violative of Federal Campaign Finance laws are CLEARLY sufficient-if substantiated-to oust him from office. ..."
"... "Mueller's strategy of focusing on Cohen and Manafort's white-collar crimes is perfectly reasonable, even in a probe directed at Russian interference in the 2016 election. "It's not unusual for prosecutors to use charges -- Al Capone is the primary example -- to bring down a criminal conspiracy in any way they can," Waxman pointed out." ..."
"... Cohen's guilty plea effectively makes Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Current Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted -- but building a legitimate criminal case against Trump would make it harder for Republicans to stand united in opposition to impeaching the president ..."
"... Cohen would be a prosecutor's "dream cooperator: one who had special insider access to the leader of a powerful, closed, corrupt organization," former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig wrote last month. "We used to prosecute mafia cases. We both know that in the mob -- and perhaps in this White House -- the right cooperator can bring down the entire hierarchy." ..."
"Perhaps the greatest political damage came not from the felony charges, all of them
related to various forms of financial chicanery, including five counts each for Cohen and
Manafort of income tax evasion, but from Cohen's public statement in the courtroom of Judge
Kimba Wood. In confessing his guilt to the eight counts, Cohen declared that in two
instances, violating federal laws by using personal funds to suppress politically
inconvenient statements by Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy
Daniels, he was acting "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal
office."
My point is that Cohen's admissions implicating Trump in carrying out either himself
or in concert with others willful ongoing acts violative of Federal Campaign Finance laws are
CLEARLY sufficient-if substantiated-to oust him from office.
Don't think so??
If the following transgressions were sufficient to 'nail' their intended targets -which is
what happened - then Trump's acts in attempting to hush up Stormy (supra) COULD achieve the
same result. Whether or not some faction of TPTB has the WILL to impeach him is another
matter.
"Mueller's strategy of focusing on Cohen and Manafort's white-collar crimes is perfectly
reasonable, even in a probe directed at Russian interference in the 2016 election. "It's not
unusual for prosecutors to use charges -- Al Capone is the primary example -- to bring down a
criminal conspiracy in any way they can," Waxman pointed out."
Yup!!!
" Cohen's guilty plea effectively makes Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Current
Justice Department guidelines say a sitting president cannot be indicted -- but building a
legitimate criminal case against Trump would make it harder for Republicans to stand united
in opposition to impeaching the president .
When President Richard Nixon was named an unindicted co-conspirator by a grand jury, he
opted to resign instead of face impeachment proceedings. Trump seems unlikely to step down,
however. Any further efforts on his part to block the investigation into his campaign would
put the Justice Department in uncharted territory"
Cohen would be a prosecutor's "dream cooperator: one who had special insider access to
the leader of a powerful, closed, corrupt organization," former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and
Elie Honig wrote last month. "We used to prosecute mafia cases. We both know that in the mob
-- and perhaps in this White House -- the right cooperator can bring down the entire
hierarchy."
From links I've already posted , getting a USC Title 18 conviction of Trump is not
necessarily that required to charge him with "High Crimes and Misdemeanors". Although there
is some dispute in legal circles as to what exactly constitutes a sufficent basis of facts
upon which impeachment can be based.
But it will establish an unsavory precedent – that any sitting president can be taken
out merely by selecting one of his/her aides and then threatening them with crushing
penalties for some silly transgression or other or they can turn state's evidence. Anyone who
ever dreamed of ascending to the nation's highest office would have to know that, by
facilitating this process, they were handing the lawmakers the means to remove any future
president.
But, as I said, I don't care. Hillary can't win it now, Pence is a dink, The Donald would
dig in his heels and fight all the way out, probably causing great damage, but if he went, so
what? He's a dreadful president. And the USA would be in political chaos.
Trump should have fired Sessions for recusing himself from this Congress instituted
witch-hunt. The job of Sessions is to be over-seer of the Special Counsel investigation.
Mueller cannot have special rights, he must follow the rules. Shaking down people around
Trump for tax evasion or assorted other unrelated crimes is not following the rules. It is
pure Inquisition tactics.
I would not be so quick to write Trump off as dreadful. He basically sabotaged the two
hyped up cruise missile attacks on Syria. Even though his hands are tied and his mouth is
gagged by US corporate-run "freedom", he managed to make both those attacks totally
ineffective. If he was a loyal servant of the US elites, he would have kept sending more and
more missiles and actually ordered NATzO or "coalition" jets to bomb Syrian targets
seriously. The sporadic Israeli and coalition attacks have been basically irrelevant.
He is rocking the boat as much as he can. This creates are sorts of noise. This noise is
not a metric of his efforts and success.
We'll see. If the Democrats are successful at having him impeached, they will probably create
a special holiday recognizing Stormy Daniels, or give her the Presidential Medal of Freedom
or something. I frankly don't care – he beat Hillary, and that's something she can
never erase or cover up.
I imagine they sweated him with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison;
all the newspaper accounts of his testimony spoke of his shaky voice, and it's typically
pretty hard to scare a lawyer. They likely told him that he could just disappear into the
prison system and that there would be nothing at all he could do about it.
Degeneration os social democratic parties into soft neoliberals is a world wide tendency.
That spell troubles for them as they lost their key constituency. The level of corruption within
the party elite is staggering (exemplified by Clintons and Obama). The
"Democratic" Party is completely captured by FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real
Estate)
If this assessment has some connection to reality Dems will be unable to improve their
position during the US mid-term elections.
At the same time idea that "proletariat" is capable organizing
resistance and winning th election enforcing favorable for them changes
proved to be wrong. Most positive changes of the New Deal/fair Deal
were forced concessions in face of the possibility of open armed revolt. Now
with the dissolution of the USSR this possibility is discounted by the
ruling neoliberal elite.
Also we face the end of "cheap oil" and that means that standard of
living of working class will continue to deteriorate.
The future is really grim...
Notable quotes:
"... Most social-democratic parties in Europe have the same problem the U.S. Democrats have. The party establishments angle for the ever elusive 'liberal' center. ..."
"... This phenomenon is the micro version of a much larger trend. [neo]Liberal globalization, as promoted by the party 'elites', promises but does not deliver what the real people need and want. [neo]Liberal globalization turned out to be a class war in which only the rich can win. A revolt, locally on the level of voters, and globally on the level of nations, is underway to regain a different view. ..."
"... Wages rise when companies have to compete for workers. Immigration increases the available work force. A political program that supports both does not compute. ..."
"... Neither LGBTXYZ identity policies nor other aloof 'liberal values' will increase the income of the poor. To win back the necessary masses the Democrats and social-democrats in Europe will have to shun, or at least de-emphasize such parts of their program. It's a class war. The rich are winning. Fight. ..."
"... your last sentence is right on target. It's been a class war for many decades. Most of the Dems have been playing "good cop, bad cop" for many years now. They talk progressive, but in the end they opt for the rich man's money. ..."
"... At present, the oligarchs own everything in the U$A. Giant corporate interests own the Govt., the Media, & the voting systems. No matter the good intentions of a few, if the people don't hear it or see it, it never happened. ..."
"... "The progressive Democrats...." Uh-oh! No such thing. "Working people understand this and in 2016 many of them voted for Trump." God...German working people also understand this and voted for Hitler or, rather for the Nazis. ..."
"... I think Marx call it "Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" ..."
"... The western fiat faction requires perpetually increasing inputs of capital, commodities and labor - labor population must increase or the debt ponzi falls. Thus, as long as we have declining birthrates in the West, immigration will continue regardless of what the peasants want... ..."
"... I agree that it is a class war, but it is one we have already lost. We are at the end of the oil era, yet our financial economic system requires perpetual growth, how do you think this will work out? (It won't) ..."
"... The "Democratic" party is completely captured by its FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) funders on Wall Street and the corporate class. The DNC crowd will stick to their losing guns election after election while not offering any benefits to working people ..."
"... Were it not for the purposefully restricted structure of the two party systems where voters bounce between two awful parties before giving up altogether, the Democratic party would have fully collapsed long ago. ..."
"... Remember: the donors don't care if the Republicans or Democrats win, as long as their agenda prevails. And most Democrats and most Republican politicians don't care about their party either, as long as they can retire and get put on the boards of big corporations and cash in etc. ..."
"... Big Money and the Political Machines it built within the USA became prominent soon after its Civil War. Those plus the oligarchical controls built into the USA's governmental organization ensured that Commonfolk would have a very difficult time trying to govern themselves and promote their own interests. ..."
"... By WW2's end, the foundation for Keynesian Militarism and its in-built [monies get redistributed upward, not downward, automatically] Class War was laid along with the basis for Big Money's recapture of government. ..."
"... Essentially, tax dollars are spent on weapons and munitions and the manufacturer endowed with excess profits which are then plowed back into the political system through campaign contributions--politico buying--which in turn further corrupts the system. ..."
"... until we get beyond predatory finance, we are all essentially screwed.. ..."
"... US Health care, despised by everyone in the U.S: doctors, nurses, patients and pharmacists, is not the only thing that needs reform. How we select and elect those who allegedly represent us is unacceptable. Private money is more important than humanity and no one can guarantee that those elected actually won. ..."
"... What's happening now in the USA is no longer democracy or capitalism at all. It's military plutocracy. The elections and voting process are a sham and certainly have been since G.W. Bush "won" the election vs Al Gore. Strangely, last year's showdown between Killary and Trump was probably the first live election in a while where the establishment didn't get their (wo)man. Killary seemed to scare a few powerful people - she'd spent too much time in Washington, was too ruthless and had too many of her own people in institutions or available as ANTIFA brownshirts. She failed a few final interviews and some key establishment players switched sides, allowing Trump a last minute real shot at the ring. ..."
"... Only by setting us at each other's throats can the establishment maintain its place for another decade or two. It seems they are prepared to take this risk ..."
"... Marx and then the Soviet Union scared the capitalists at the start of the twentieth century. National Socialism scared them even more. The Western Establishment have built a system and a plan to put off the revolution. How long can they hold us under? This is the fascinating question which The Hunger Games set out to answer. ..."
"... the Democrats, and similar "liberal" movements in Europe, Canada, etc, know exactly what they're doing, which is simply what the donors want. It's not about the strategists, and it's not about winning elections either--at least not in the first place. ..."
"... In case anybody didn't hear it Warren Buffet some time back came out with: "There is a class war and we have won it." ..."
"... Psychohistorian's stress on the importance of private finance is of course correct but it is just part of an imperial equation where finance + military = empire or vice versa. ..."
"... For a century and a half, the primary purpose of the Democratic Party has been to crush leftist/socialist movements. Eugene Debs knew this a century ago. The SDS knew this 1/2 century ago. Bernie Sanders knew this until 2016. ..."
"... Hudson's first magnum opus was SuperImperialism , but please get the updated version as the first is somewhat dated. ..."
"... Clearly, the US military is used by this "loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires" to enforce their will on those who foolishly believe their governments should serve their own citizens. But it is not the US, or even primarily the 0.01% of the US who are calling the shots. The PTSB have no allegiance to any nation-state (with one glaring exception). But they use nationalism to divide the 99% of the world into bite-sized, easily edible pieces. ..."
"... Yes exactly, a class war. Basically elites vs the rest of us. Maybe 10% of non elites go along for the ride and puck up some crumbs. Another 20% do alright for a time until they get replaced by cheaper and younger and struggle to survive to reach social security without losing their home due to medical bankruptcy. ..."
"... So long as both parties go along with the neoliberal imperialistic agenda there will be rewards, even for the minority party. Best to be a minority party with plenty of funding than one without funding ..."
"... Real median incomes are much lower than the early 70's when adjusted with the pre-1980 CPI. CPI post 1980 has been adjusted to mask the impact of neoliberalism and enhance it by lowering COLA's and keeping money cheap to fuel asset inflation which does not impact the new CPI as much ..."
Staying out of the single-payer debate, party strategists say, could help Democrats in the
general election, when they'll have to appeal to moderates skeptical of government-run health
care. Earlier this year, the DCCC warned candidates about embracing single payer, hoping to
avoid Republican attacks on "socialized" medicine.
Why is "socialized" medicine supposed to be a bad thing? Why not defend it? It is what the
voters want :
The 'strategists' say the voters can not have the nice stuff they want. Their arguments lost
the elections. If the Democrats want to win again their must tell their
voters to demand more nice stuff. Some people get that
:
Progressive insurgents believe Clinton's defeat, on top of losing control of Congress and
most state governments, proved them right. They aspire to overthrow conventional wisdom that
Democrats must stay safely in the middle to compete.
" Democrats have been fixated for 20 years on this elusive, independent, mythical middle
of the road voter that did not exist ," said Crystal Rhoades, head of the Democratic Party in
Nebraska's Douglas County, where a progressive candidate, Kara Eastman, is trying to wrest a
competitive congressional district from a Republican.
"We're going to try bold ideas."
Most social-democratic parties in Europe have the same problem the U.S. Democrats have.
The party establishments angle for the ever elusive 'liberal' center. They move the
parties further to the right and lose their natural constituencies, the working class. This
gives rise to (sometimes fascist) 'populists' (see Trump) and to an ever growing share of
people who reject the established system and do not vote at all.
This phenomenon is the micro version of a much larger trend. [neo]Liberal globalization,
as promoted by the party 'elites', promises but does not deliver what the real people need and
want. [neo]Liberal globalization turned out to be a class war in which only the rich can win. A
revolt, locally on the level of voters, and globally on the level of nations, is underway to
regain a different view.
Alastair Crooke recently
outlined the larger trend within a global, 'metaphysical' perspective.
The progressive Democrats who are pushing for single payer healthcare still miss out on
other issues. They also support higher wages, but are, at the same time, against restrictions
on immigration. Wages rise when companies have to compete for workers. Immigration
increases the available work force. A political program that supports both does not
compute.
Working people understand this and in 2016 many of them voted for Trump. Neither LGBTXYZ
identity policies nor other aloof 'liberal values' will increase the income of the poor. To win
back the necessary masses the Democrats and social-democrats in Europe will have to shun, or at
least de-emphasize such parts of their program. It's a class war. The rich are winning.
Fight.
Corporations and their lobbyists pay big money to influence both parties to ignore the will
of the proletariat in favor of the one percent. If the candidate does not deliver the goods
to his rich benefactors, he will lose his funding.
Therefore, a candidate can talk a populist game, but if he tries to implement anything of
value to the proles, he will be ousted as quickly as possible.
In this way, For the money, the Democratic Party that championed the working man (to a
degree) helped the Republicans to sabotage Labor Unions.
Now the D party is a champion of LGTBQ.
Could be difficult to win back the blue collar working man.
Thanks b, your last sentence is right on target. It's been a class war for many decades. Most
of the Dems have been playing "good cop, bad cop" for many years now. They talk progressive,
but in the end they opt for the rich man's money.
At present, the oligarchs own everything in the U$A. Giant corporate interests own the
Govt., the Media, & the voting systems. No matter the good intentions of a few, if the
people don't hear it or see it, it never happened.
It'll take torches and pitchforks to make a change, and, I just don't see that happening
until we hit rock bottom.
"The progressive Democrats...."
Uh-oh! No such thing.
"Working people understand this and in 2016 many of them voted for Trump."
God...German working people also understand this and voted for Hitler or, rather for the
Nazis.
Without a true labor party all the narrative that you mentioned is taking place within
capitalist's class, i.e. State Ideological Apparatus.
I think Marx call it "Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"
P.S.--Even with massive voter turn-out this Nov., we have no way of knowing what the real
vote is, since our voting systems have never been vetted. The machines are privately owned by
corporations, and they refuse vetting on grounds that their systems are proprietary
information. No problem huh? Except for this..
The western fiat faction requires perpetually increasing inputs of capital, commodities and
labor - labor population must increase or the debt ponzi falls. Thus, as long as we have
declining birthrates in the West, immigration will continue regardless of what the peasants
want...
I agree that it is a class war, but it is one we have already lost. We are at the end of
the oil era, yet our financial economic system requires perpetual growth, how do you think
this will work out? (It won't)
People should be thinking of how they are going to keep their children from starving in a
couple of years, the rest is just noise...
The "Democratic" party is completely captured by its FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate)
funders on Wall Street and the corporate class. The DNC crowd will stick to their losing guns
election after election while not offering any benefits to working people.
Further, they
would rather continue to lose elections than adapting to the will of the people -- hence their
ridiculous focus on Russiagate and other phantoms rather than offering real programs of
substance that would attract voters.
Were it not for the purposefully restricted structure of the two party systems where
voters bounce between two awful parties before giving up altogether, the Democratic party
would have fully collapsed long ago.
The capitalist migration policy intentions are not just to have.. "Immigration increase
the available work force", but rather to saturate the labour market. That way they keep the
cost of labour down by having more people compete for the jobs than there are available thus
bringing the labour costs down. This leads to the kinds of ethnic ghetto's wherein rampant
unemployment for the vast majority is a way of life, which in turn fosters non integration
into the country's larger society and hence we get what you are referring to as some."living
off of freebies in their own 'no-go' Shari law enclaves"
Solution? STOP bombing other countries back into the stone age, creating millions of
destitute refugees and after that, simply regulate immigration according to the available
jobs and workforce a country can reasonably accommodate and thereby successfully integrate
any newcomers from other lands.
Q: Why did the Democrats lose the Senate, House and presidency as well as more than a
thousand state government positions?
A: They listened to their DONORS, not to their voters.
Remember: the donors don't care if the Republicans or Democrats win, as long as their
agenda prevails. And most Democrats and most Republican politicians don't care about their
party either, as long as they can retire and get put on the boards of big corporations and
cash in etc.
"The progressive Democrats who are pushing for single payer healthcare still miss out on
other issues. They also support higher wages, but are, at the same time, against restrictions
on immigration." Kudos to you for pointing out the obvious. Be careful though, this kind of
talk can easily get you labelled as a racist, a fascist, as "literally Hitler" and Vladimir
Putin's homosexual lover.
Bottom line: the Democrats give lip service to supporting higher
wages, but in reality they support low wages, hence their opposition to moderating the rate
of immigration.
My last reply on the previous thread serves well as a beginning comment here:
"IMO, too many assets that elevate/enhance one's life experiences need to be made into
publicly owned utilities, social media communication platforms being one as I explained
above. If the Outlaw US Empire's people can finally get universal healthcare for all enacted,
then other realms of the for-profit arena can be targeted as a tsunami-sized political wave
is building that will make such changes possible provided the insurrection's sustained for
decades to forestall the forces of Reaction. It's really the only political direction capable
of making America great for the first time in its history--Being a Great Nation contains a
moral aspect the USA has never attained and is nowhere near close to attaining anytime
soon."
The Class War's been raging for centuries--millennia actually. But as Michael Hudson
notes at the end of his autobiographical interview, something deliberate was done to
alter the course of political-economy:
"[Marx] showed that capitalism itself is revolutionary, capitalism itself is driving
forward, and of course he expected it to lead toward socialism, as indeed it seemed to be
doing in the nineteenth century.
But it's not working out that way. Everything changed in World War One."
( I highly suggest reading the rest of that passage .)
Elsewhere Hudson has shown Marx expected the contradictions within Capitalism to spawn its
antithesis--Socialism--in a natural, evolutionary manner; but, clearly, the forces of
Reaction stepped in to arrest that path as Kolko illustrated in his Triumph of
Conservatism .
However, popular ideas within societies forwarding the evolution to
socialism needed to be constrained and harnessed -- the populism of the late 19th Century
couldn't be allowed to resurface as it was the #1 threat to elite control. And so began The
Great Reaction as soon as WW1 ended.
Unfortunately, Capitalism's contradictions arose to temporarily derail the
Counter-Revolution as the Great Depression ushered in a return of dynamic Populism within
Europe and especially the USA. WW2 provided a golden opportunity to finally crush dynamic
Populism once and for all as the forces of Reaction emerged from their closets within FDR's
administration and tools were forged to enable societal control, which included the newly
emerging forms of mass communication and indoctrination.
Big Money and the Political Machines it built within the USA became prominent soon after
its Civil War. Those plus the oligarchical controls built into the USA's governmental
organization ensured that Commonfolk would have a very difficult time trying to govern
themselves and promote their own interests.
The changes made to the system after the very
nearly won success of the Progressive Populists greatly aided the forces of Reaction as did
the imposition of Prohibition and the Red Scare--Populist successes were a mixed bag during
the 1930s as very reactionary laws were also introduced--The House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1938 and The Smith Act in 1940.
By WW2's end, the foundation for Keynesian
Militarism and its in-built [monies get redistributed upward, not downward, automatically]
Class War was laid along with the basis for Big Money's recapture of government.
Essentially,
tax dollars are spent on weapons and munitions and the manufacturer endowed with excess
profits which are then plowed back into the political system through campaign
contributions--politico buying--which in turn further corrupts the system.
It's been ongoing
since 1938--80 years--and must be excised from the body politic if the Outlaw US Empire is
ever to go straight and become a law abiding global citizen amongst the community of
nations.
All the countries with single payer health systems have a small military. I live in Canada
and when military spending is broached the people always want the money to be spent on
health care. I personally doubt that the NATO countries will actually drastically increase
there defense budgets against the voters wishes. No western country outside the USA feels
threatened so why spend more on defense?
It is up to the American people to make similar choices when they vote.
thanks b.. the whole political system as it presently stands in the west is not working.. it
is one step up from the system in places like Saudi Arabia and etc... i go back to
psychohistorians main view that until we get beyond predatory finance, we are all essentially
screwed..
folks talk immigration but in the forest industry here on the westcoast of canada,
machines have replaced workers.. This is just one example.. robots and etc. etc. are working
towards the same end.. a corp that can get a robot or machine to do something will go that
way based on long term costs. None of the political parties i know of are addressing the
impact of technology on job opportunities.. In fact they are all cheer leaders for technology
while talking of growing the economy and etc. etc...
So we just keep ''growing the population'' while skipping over addressing the private
finances elephant in the room.. at some point the world is going to have to change or not
survive.. the political class here in Canada is abysmal.. it seems like it is much the same
everywhere in the land of democracy too, where corporations and private interests with money
are calling the shots.. plutocracy is what i think they call it..
I read
this article then discovered b had written a similar one based on the same polling
results. But is the long-denied desire within the Outlaw US Empire for universal healthcare
an actual revolt against what b describes as "liberal globalization"?
What I see is a global
revolt against the Outlaw US Empire's gross illegalities and immoral hegemony which also
contains an ideological battle with nations embracing Win-Winism while rejecting Zerosumism,
which can also be interpreted as rejection of the Millenia-long Class War.
Globalization
continues on, actually increasing its velocity through the twin Eurasian projects--BRI &
EAEU. IMO, the Eurasian projects have the potential to force Capitalism to finally evolve
into Socialism, which is what Winwinism embodies.
Today's middle is yesterday's right. Party strategists are reflecting the views of their pay
masters. Both parties dial for the same dollars. Those dollars come from billionaires who
what to protect their wealth and power. Both parties parties parties reflect this sad
reality.
US Health care, despised by everyone in the U.S: doctors, nurses, patients and pharmacists,
is not the only thing that needs reform. How we select and elect those who allegedly
represent us is unacceptable. Private money is more important than humanity and no one can
guarantee that those elected actually won.
The assertion that immigration (in the U.S., at least) is keeping wages low needs to be
questioned. The immigrants from south of the border by and large do the work that no one else
wants to do. Unemployment is low, and relatively good paying jobs in less popular
geographical areas are not getting filled.
Wages are low because the forces of regulation
making them higher have been weakened, and unionization has declined. It has to be questioned
whether the individual worker has ever had bargaining power over wages.
It's been the
collective power of governmental action and union action that has worked for the benefit of
higher wages.
Thank you for your comment, Karlof. Deep comments like your and those of Paveway and a few
others are what make the comment section an occasional joy to read.
What's happening now in the USA is no longer democracy or capitalism at all. It's military
plutocracy. The elections and voting process are a sham and certainly have been since G.W.
Bush "won" the election vs Al Gore. Strangely, last year's showdown between Killary and Trump
was probably the first live election in a while where the establishment didn't get their
(wo)man. Killary seemed to scare a few powerful people - she'd spent too much time in
Washington, was too ruthless and had too many of her own people in institutions or available
as ANTIFA brownshirts. She failed a few final interviews and some key establishment players
switched sides, allowing Trump a last minute real shot at the ring.
People all over the Western world have woken up to diminishing incomes, higher bills
(education/medicine/utilities - all of which you can't avoid if you have children) and much
worse employment opportunities even for the very motivated but only modestly capable (if you
have 110 IQ or lower and didn't grow up inside a business household, your chances
going into business for yourself are very low and you are
likely to just dig yourself or your family a deeper hole). This is not what the people were
promised during the last five elections (whether in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia or
France). The game is up.
Only by setting us at each other's throats can the establishment maintain its place for
another decade or two. It seems they are prepared to take this risk. The Hunger Games were a
surprise huge world wide hit (the films are rather boring and not particularly well made,
despite a good performance in the lead role).
The close similarity between that dystopia and
what we live now with NFL football (literally knocks the brains out of your skull, may cause
sane people to
commit suicide or
murder their wife and children ) or even Premier League Football or Tour de France where
the contestants even now are mad roiders, compromising both personal integrity and long term
health in pursuit of yellow vest.
Marx and then the Soviet Union scared the capitalists at the start of the twentieth
century. National Socialism scared them even more. The Western Establishment have built a
system and a plan to put off the revolution. How long can they hold us under? This is the
fascinating question which The Hunger Games set out to answer.
Hey, I worked In Canada For CN on the running trades for 37 years. I'm 65 plus so CCP and Old
Age pension both kick in on top of my CN pension which leaves me able to indulge in all my
bad habits.
I lease a new car every four years and my Buick Regal turbo goes back this January. I live in an upscale apartment with all the amenities I've been sick lately but have been receiving excellent healthcare. You don't get bills.
Nada.
I'm a senior and my meds have been costing $4.11 per prescription. So you'll have to excuse me if up I'm not up for a revolution right now.
How 'bout you james? You ready to take to the streets?
Even as one who opposes single-payer health care (all monopolies cause problems, be they
private or public) I have to agree with b in principle. The rich are doing to us now what
they did to Russia in the 1990's. We of the working class don't deserve to have our interests
protected because we're "deplorables."
Oh please; we've had EIGHT years of earnest-sounding, well-intentioned advice to Obama to do
the right, progressive thing. As if he ever needed it; the Democrats, and similar "liberal"
movements in Europe, Canada, etc, know exactly what they're doing, which is simply
what the donors want. It's not about the strategists, and it's not about winning elections
either--at least not in the first place.
Continuing to pay attention to this zombie party only supports it; when it's burned to the
ground, that's when you may be having an impact.
@12 karlof1... thanks for the link to the autobiography on Michael Hudson. i really enjoyed
reading about him and didn't realize all that he has done over the course of his life. it
motivates me to read one of his books.. thanks.
@13 mdroy... that also looks like a good book.. thanks..
@21 peter.. i think the question is this: when's it all going to come crashing down? i
think uncoy is right.. it is coming down sometime within mine or the younger generations
lifetime.. young folks view things very differently then you... the fall will force many to
alter their present day view and drop with the smug attitude that seems so pervasive with
those who think they have it all..
A fascinating topic tonight and so much to ponder on with so many thoughtful comments.
In case anybody didn't hear it Warren Buffet some time back came out with: "There is a class
war and we have won it."
b. references Crooke's article. The poor folks over at zerohedge were hopelessly lost when
the article was put up there; some of them got very angry when concepts such as the
enlightenment celestially orbited way beyond their limited spheres. Maybe it stank of culture
or gay paintings or something. Who knows. But maybe they had a point.
Rather than the enlightenment I see the creation of empires as the starting point - at which
the English excelled. What the English did was to literally sacrifice their pawns (pawns =
peons = peasants) for the greater game when they kicked their peasantry off the land in the
enclosure movement (they always think up a nice word for a disgusting deed). Scientific
methods began to be employed on the new larger farms sufficient to feed a burgeoning
industrial proletariat. But it was this one revolutionary act that kickstarted the British-US
empire that has ruled us for so long.
Psychohistorian's stress on the importance of private finance is of course correct but it
is just part of an imperial equation where finance + military = empire or vice versa.
I am inclined to agree with Spike @ 18 that immigration by itself does not keep wages low. In
Australia (where I live), unemployment is low in comparison with other countries.
There are
sectors where more workers are needed: more nurses are needed and more primary and secondary
school teachers are needed. English-speaking countries in particular are short of medical and
nursing staff to the extent that they are drawing (poaching?) such people away from Asian and
African countries that need these people.
At the same time young people who might consider careers in nursing and medicine are
dissuaded by the cost of pursuing degrees as universities increasingly rely more on charging
on students for university education as government funding dries up.
Yet registered nurses earn an average annual pay of about A$65,000. Lower level nurses
earn less. Average annual income in Australia (as of 2nd quarter of 2018) is about
$82,000.
In Australia, wages growth has not kept pace with the cost of living since the 1980s when
the unions struck an accord with the then Labor government under Bob Hawke. The result is
that households have turned to credit cards to finance spending. Most households as a result
carry large amounts of debt and have very little savings. At the same time, we have had
steady if not very large levels of immigration.
For a century and a half, the primary purpose of the Democratic Party has been to crush
leftist/socialist movements. Eugene Debs knew this a century ago. The SDS knew this 1/2
century ago. Bernie Sanders knew this until 2016.
Faux Newz's "Fox and Friends" did a survey after the Koch Brothers funded "study" of
Bernie's Medicare For All plan. Going on the misleading figure, they asked "Is Medicare For
All worth the $32 Trillion it will cost?"
73% said YES!
All up and down, policies which we'd label "progressive" or even "socialist" are widely
popular with USAmericans. From ending these wars to cutting military spending to increasing
taxes on the rich and corporations to tuition free public education through college or trade
schools, and on and on.
Right now, Sanders is still the most popular politician in the US by a country mile. Were
he, Tulsi Gabbard, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nina Turner, and other well-respected
politicians with records of electoral success to join together and create a new party, it
would instantly be the most popular party in the country.
Then, all we'd have to do is establish legitimate election systems.
Hudson's first magnum opus was SuperImperialism , but please get
the updated version as the first is somewhat dated.
What I think is his crowning achievement--he seems to
think so too--is his newest, and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and
Redemption -- From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year , the culmination of almost 40
years of research. Funny how its only been reviewed by
Brits .
When you read the entire autobiographical interview, you'll see there're several
other joint books he's produced prior to debts I'd consider getting via a university
library--it's 5 volumes @$150 each new--although he says he's going to rewrite them with
debts being the first volume in the series. That I don't have any of those volumes or
even knew about them is rather embarrassing given my fields of study. Here's Hudson's
introducing the series via a lecture:
"The five colloquia volumes that we've published began in 1994. We decided we have to
re-write the history to free it from the modern ideological preconceptions that have
distorted much popular understanding."
Earlier in the thread, you mentioned immigration, population growth and automation. Are
you aware that China scrapped its family planning policy despite their goal of instituting a
high degree of robotics into their manufacturing system? CCP leaders seem to believe their
system can provide resilient support for 1.3-1.5 Billion people, whereas we see the USA
growing increasingly dysfunctional trying to keep 330 million content.
@30 karlof1.. yes - he talks of those books in the autobio interview, but i don't see them
listed on amazon for example.. nor is his latest book - and forgive them their debts' listed
either.. i suppose the reason for the last title is it is yet to be released.. release date
is in nov 2018.. http://michael-hudson.com/2018/08/and-forgive-them-their-debts/
i was unaware of that change in policy in china.. i wonder how they envision everything -
greater population and continued work opportunities, in the face of automation? for me -
people need greater resources in order to continue to survive.. as i understand it - eating
meat is making a much bigger carbon footprint then not.. the chinese with their new wealth
are very much into eating pork and meat... i can't see how it all works out for the planet,
while i do think china would have thought this thru... i suppose it will remain a mystery to
me how they envision the intersection of these diverse interests and developments.. thanks
again for your comments..
"it seems like it is much the same everywhere in the land of democracy too, where
corporations and private interests with money are calling the shots.. plutocracy is what i
think they call it.."
Exactly! And it is the very same supra-national banking cabal, trans-national corporations
and Zionist racial supremacists in each of these "democracies" that are calling the shots.
They are the loci of power, not the political facades of nation-states.
Clearly, the US military is used by this "loose affiliation of millionaires and
billionaires" to enforce their will on those who foolishly believe their governments should
serve their own citizens. But it is not the US, or even primarily the 0.01% of the US who are
calling the shots. The PTSB have no allegiance to any nation-state (with one glaring
exception). But they use nationalism to divide the 99% of the world into bite-sized, easily
edible pieces.
I provided this link in my above
comment to james, but I had yet to read the entire lecture. It's very important and quite
germane to this discussion as this excerpt shows:
"It's very funny: If you go into Congress – I was the economic advisor to Dennis
Kucinich – you go into Congress and there's a big mural with Moses in the center and
Hammurabi on his right. Well, you know what Moses did? He gave the law. Leviticus, right in
the center of Mosaic law, canceled the debt. What did Hammurabi do? Debt cancellation as
well. You're not going to see Congress canceling the debts like that. If you look at the
Liberty Bell, it is inscribed with a quotation from Leviticus 25: "Proclaim liberty
throughout all the land." Well now we have translation problems again. The word really isn't
liberty: The real word means Clean Slate. It means freeing society from debt, letting
everybody have their own basic housing and means of self-support. And by striking
coincidence, what does the Statue of Liberty do? She's holding aloft a flame. And in the
Babylonian historical records, when Hammurabi would cancel the debts they would say: "The
ruler raised the sacred torch." So here you have a wonderful parallelism. It's been written
out of history today, It's not what you're taught in Bible school, or in ancient studies, or
in economic history. So you have this almost revolution that's been occurring in Assyriology,
in Biblical studies and Hebrew studies, and it's all kept up among us specialists. It hasn't
become popular at all, because almost everything about the Bronze Age and about the origins
of Christianity is abhorrent to the vested interests today."
My reaction: Wow! I'm figuratively kicking myself for not diligently reading
all of Hudson's essays--this was from January 2017. Just imagine what might occur if
the global public decided to demand the genuine Old Time Religion!
Yes exactly, a class war. Basically elites vs the rest of us. Maybe 10% of non elites go
along for the ride and puck up some crumbs. Another 20% do alright for a time until they get
replaced by cheaper and younger and struggle to survive to reach social security without
losing their home due to medical bankruptcy.
The rest its basically a struggle to survive
from day 1 with these people living from paycheck to paycheck or just checking into one of
the Prison Industrial Complex Apartments
Anyways, with the Democratic Party behind even Trump in the latest popularity polls (31%
vs 38%) they stay the course and maintain their pro elitist policies. Both parties are
puppets of the elites, differing on only on social issues that divide and distract from the
major issues of importance to the elite class
So long as both parties go along with the neoliberal imperialistic agenda there will be
rewards, even for the minority party. Best to be a minority party with plenty of funding than
one without funding
Meanwhile life expectancy has been stagnating and now declining in US since 2010 (actually
declined in 2015 and 2016 and most likely 2017) while most developed countries except UK are
rising. Health care costs still the source of most individual bankruptcies although
bankruptcy laws have been changed to ensure most lose their home in going that route (unlike
owners of corporations like Trump)
Real median incomes are much lower than the early 70's when adjusted with the pre-1980
CPI. CPI post 1980 has been adjusted to mask the impact of neoliberalism and enhance it by
lowering COLA's and keeping money cheap to fuel asset inflation which does not impact the new
CPI as much
Its not just in the US, this is going on globally, some places faster than others
"The assertion that immigration (in the U.S., at least) is keeping wages low needs to be
questioned. The immigrants from south of the border by and large do the work that no one else
wants to do. "
There are plenty of countries that do not rely on large scale immigration and yet
"someone" is doing those jobs there.
"Were it not for the purposefully restricted structure of the two party systems where
voters bounce between two awful parties before giving up altogether, the Democratic party
would have fully collapsed long ago."
This is the essence of the problem. Whose problem to solve is it? The average American
citizen.
Anyone can use social media and crowdfunding to start a huge popular campaign for a
specific objective.
True representative democracy. What's not to love about that?
All the nonsense about 'revolution' blah blah then becomes redundant. Once there are
multiple parties representing multiple interests, deals have to be done. Government becomes
far more careful and conservative.
Problems don't disappear, but at least there is an intelligent airing of the issues.
Fiscal prudence becomes front and centre. Individual welfare is also elevated to a central
concern. Everyone then recognises that tax money requires healthy businesses that pay their
fair share.
Try it! In spite of the initial barrage of fear, uncertainty, doubt, you will come to a
much more engaged and civil society.
The psyops against the American people have been nothing short of astounding.
"Trickle down!"
"Multi-culturalism"
"Globalism"
"Efficient Markets"
"War on Drugs! War on Terror! Russian interference!"
Each of these may have been reasonable in moderation but were pushed to the extreme via
the oligarch-fed elite of BOTH political Parties. Starting with Bill Clinton, the Democrats
sold out the people they used to represent. They have done MORE than simply block
change, they have poisoned the well via divisive identity politics.
Obama is the poster child for the Democrats "Third Way" disaster. He proved to be a tool
of neolibs and neocons alike, masking their evil agendas with a big smile, slick slogans
("YES WE CAN!") and clever quips ("If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to
fear") . No bankers went to jail for the 2008 GFC, a trillion dollar fraud estimated
to total a YEAR of global GNP , instead his administration "foamed the runway" for Bank
home foreclosures (mostly of lower income people that couldn't fight back) .
Obama promised to include a public option as part of his 'signature' healthcare initiative
("Obamacare") but instead produced a boondoogle for insurance companies which has proven to
be the epic failure that progressive critics said it would be.
Mis-allocated resources of an oligarch-centered public policy has created a supreme
clusterf*ck, the magnitude of which has grown with every new can-kicking initiative.
IMO USA probably loses 30% of GDP to such things as:
- overpriced healthcare;
- a bloated military which is largely useless (who are we going to invade? who is going
to invade us?);
- a police state that imprisons more people than any other Western democracy largely due
to misguided social policies (why not regulate drugs and prostitution illegal? why not
provide good training/jobs and workplace childcare?) ;
- terribly inefficient transportation system where everyone strives for "the American
dream" of commuting dozens of miles from their suburban home via a big SUV;
- education costs that have skyrocketed due to failed govt educational policies;
- a pampered executive and "investor class" that siphons billions - inequality is at
record levels and CEOs make dozens of times more pay then the average worker;
- while the US govt recognizes that climate change is real, they have decided to address
it gradually and accept the cost of 'mitigation' (defensive measures like sea walls,
when necessary) .
No one trust the government to fix anything. And fixes that are contemplated or in the
works will take decades to effect any meaningful change.
The saddest part may be that most people can't see that they've been played.
Americans used to be free thinkers. Now most of them are in an unhealthy relationship with
one of the two parties. Like the jealous, emotionally abusive partner they are, each party
plays on the fears of their 'base'.
Societal Stockholm Syndrome. Is that a thing? It is now.
Immigration, in the grand scheme of things, don't bring wages down mainly for two reasons:
1) it doesn't actually change the total number of human beings in the face of the Earth,
it just reallocates them to one or another specific corner of it. Since modern capitalism is
already global, even Steven.
2) in capitalism, labor power moves according to a reverse osmosis pattern: it goes from
the corner of the Earth with less capital (in money form, therefore money-capital) to the
corner of the Earth with more money-capital. So, for example, if 1,000,000 Mexicans immigrate
-- legally or illegally, it doesn't matter to capitalism -- to the USA in one year, it is
already presupposed the USA already has a wealth differential vis-à-vis Mexico that
can accomodate 1,000,000 more people than it in one year. This movement is also known as "job
hunt": people go where jobs are.
The only case mass immigration really distorts wages is when movement of labor force is
not induced by capitalism, but by a black swan, natural, catastrophic event, e.g. if the
hotspot in Yellowstone burst tommorow, and the American population somewhat manages to
evacuate to, let's say, Mexico, then Mexico receives, in a matter of months, 400 million
people thanks to a process the capitalist society didn't forsee. Then we have a so-called
"humanitarian crisis", i.e. a crisis not induced from capitalism's inner metabolism.
As for the German case, it was a miscalculation by Merkel. She had just arrived from a
huge victory in Greece (her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, had just put the
socialist government of Syriza on its knees), and she was cocky. She decided to move fast
and, enjoying the favorable wind from the Aegean, called for 1 million Syrians to come to
Germany.
At that time, there was a rumor stating most of the Syrians that were fleeing the war were
middle class, affluent Syrians who could afford the trip to Europe -- those were doctors,
engineers, businessmen, etc. etc. It is a known fact the German bourgeoisie uses mass
immigration from the Middle East as a leverage against the German powerful unions since the
Turks offered themselves. So, if Merkel acted impulsively in the execution, the plan was old
and had their approval with good antecedence.
Problem was Merkel appeared to be badly advised by the BND (or the CIA?).First, immigrants
can only force wages down if they are willing to work. Those "affluent Syrians", if they
existed, either were intercepted and coopted by Turkey and Saudi Arabia (where they had to
stop first, before going to Europe via Greece or Italy), or were a very tiny minority. Most
of the refugees were either already indigents, bandits, housewives with little children or
even some terrorists. They were not capable, nor willing, to "assimilate", i.e. to work for
German capitalists under German Law. So, it backfired.
Is this a joke??
Has anybody read the article from this Crooke that B is referring to in his post? This is
really the worst crap. So enlightenments is just a " totalitarian " ideology made to help the
Europeans rule the world? And Russia is just an old regime nation promoting blood based
brotherhood fighting them ? In a word the eating-babies communists versus the Teutonic aryan
Knights??
And then, I find an approving reference to the old stinking theory of " workers vs immigrants
" to explain low wages ? Btw, where have you seen democrats elites being " against
restrictions on immigrations " ? Didn't know that US under Obama was open door...
I don't recognize this website anymore! Let's hope the CIA is just fooling with me !
quot;Most social-democratic parties in Europe have the same problem the U.S.
Democrats have."
It is plain wrong to mention social-democratic parties in connection with the u.s. Dems. They
are a Wall street party very much at the right of even the most rightist, neoliberal social
democrats in Europa.
And no. Immigration is definitely not the cause for the work place competition. Not in the usa
at least. Most of the Latinos coming from the south do jobs u.s. citizen do not want,
especially in agriculture. And; the immigrants are not only workers, they are consumers too and
as such they raise the GDP and indirectly create additional work places. The capitalist system
works best if the population is on a steady, not too pronounced rise. (It is different with
inner-EU immigration though.)
"Most social-democratic parties in Europe have the same problem the U.S. Democrats have."
It is plain wrong to mention social-democratic parties in connection with the u.s. Dems. They
are a Wall street party very much at the right of even the most rightist, neoliberal social
democrats in Europa.
And no. Immigration is definitely not the cause for the work place competition. Not in the
usa at least. Most of the Latinos coming from the south do jobs u.s. citizen do not want,
especially in agriculture. And; the immigrants are not only workers, they are consumers too
and as such they raise the GDP and indirectly create additional work places. The capitalist
system works best if the population is on a steady, not too pronounced rise. (It is different
with inner-EU immigration though.)
On the subject of immigration keeping wages low. This has some truth to it of course,
although it does not explain it in its entirety. The main reason of course is the US has
extremely high unemployment/unxerempoyment rates
On the subject of immigration keeping wages low. This has some truth to it of course,
although it does not explain it in its entirety.
One reason of course is the US has extremely high unemployment/underemployment rates, far
greater than official figures.
Then you have the destruction of unions in the private sector. The few remaining unions
are coopted from within by union leadership
A principal cause of the above reasons may be globalization which has led to the
outsourcing of jobs to countries with lower wages
And of course you have minimum wages which are much lower in real dollars than they were
40 years go as both parties became corrupted by the neoliberal elite.
As for immigration. Illegal immigrants
tend to work in jobs not very appealing and are low paying but may suppress technical
innovation to make up for a low labor supply in this area at the cost of some higher paying
jobs
Legal immigration tends bring in professional labor who are willing to work at lower wages
in the hope of getting a shot at the American dream (or European Dream).
I feel both forms of immigration are minor impacts. The main purpose for the elite is to
create divisions within the society. Divide and rule. Which is why neither party has sought
to stamp it out entirely. Its simple really, jail time for anyone hiring an undocumented
worker and enforcement. Go after the corporations who hire them and not the worker.
A: They listened to their 'strategists', not to their voters.
...
Why is "socialized" medicine supposed to be a bad thing? Why not defend it? It is what
the voters want:
B: I haven't agreed with a whole lot of your posts lately, but this one I think you
nailed. Wish you would say a little more about Green Energy and AGW.
I actually think that Obama's first election was for young people in this country at that
time the equivalent of the assassination of President Kennedy in my younger years. A blow
from which there shall have to be allowed the loss of an entire generation - in my time, that
was accomplished by the Vietnam War. And indeed the generation of so-called millenials in the
US has been living through an ongoing psychological nightmare of similar proportions.
All the comments do apply, in spades. Thank you, fellow Americans.
The equivalence of which I speak is the shocking about face Obama presented after his
inauguration. He could have been a new Kennedy inspiring the young - he chose not to be. For
many, that was an assassination of an ideal - some clung on desperately refusing to believe,
but most finally knew they had been betrayed.
All I can hope is that there is some decent, anonymous Putin-like figure out there ready
to grab hold of power and throw it back to the people where it belongs. It happened there;
maybe it will happen here, sometime.
Other than calling the Trump-phenom quasi or crypto fascist in your post and in the same
breath at the end provide justification for the Trump-vote regarding the effect of an illegal
work force, you are right, b. There are many things that hurt the left in the global scene.
Do they not notice this or are they willfully biding their time to reemerge in the same
putrid swamp so us dumbasses can fawn over her like the Lady of the Lake?
I think the libs in this country, at least, are the real cheerleaders of globalism and a
stupifying urbanism that is preaching a false future of free stuff and you don't even have to
work for it!
Why would I Joe-taxpayer want to fund a student- loan debt relief program where morons the
country over are relieved of any responsibility of their idiotic line of thinking where they
believed that an overpriced degree equated to instant playboy lifestyle and on demand oral
sex?
Lower forms of employment to be occupied by natural citizens is absolutely vital to a
country's economic culture.
People have said that these are jobs that only Mexicans will take. That is BS. The market
would natutally adjust to an actual shortage in labor and pay citizens appropriately for
their menial labor. Having an abundance of black market labor prohibits this natural function
of a healthy economy.
General Lee knew that slavery was anaethma and a tragedy to America. A correlation could
be made about alien labor.
This is partially incorrect view on Trump foreign policy. At the center of
which is careful retreat for enormous expenses of keeping the global neoliberal
empire, plus military Keyseanism to revive the us economy. Which means
tremendous pressure of arm sales as the only way to improve trade balance.
NATO was always an instrument of the USA hegemony,
so Trump behavior is perfectly compatible with this view -- he just downgraded vassals
refusing usual formal respect for them, as they do no represent independent nations.
That's why he addressed them with the contempt. He aptly remarked that German stance
of relying on Russia hydrocarbons and still claiming the it needs the USA defense
is pure hypocrisy. On the other side china, Russia and North Korea can't be considered
the USA vassals.
China is completely dependent on the USA for advanced technologies so their
dreams of becoming the world hegemon is such exist are premature.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington's dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. ..."
"... By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed "populist" Donald Trump to power. ..."
"... Determined to check his country's decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus. ..."
"... On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus -- military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine -- to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent. ..."
"... Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world -- exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation's interests. ..."
"... Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. ..."
"... As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced "an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats." ..."
"... Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump's overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington's global power since the 1950s ..."
"... Donald Trump acted more like Argentina's former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. ..."
"... Beijing's low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean's busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia -- home to a full 70% percent of the world's population and its resources -- into a unified market without peer on the planet. ..."
"... In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a "Polar Silk Road," a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent's northern coast to Europe. ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. ..."
"... In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, "every successful empire," observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, "had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse" to win support from the world's subordinate states and their leaders. ..."
"... China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. ..."
"... During Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture. ..."
"... A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China's claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea "are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect." ..."
...Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China
and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open
economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO)
in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established
rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community.
There was almost
no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world
system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.
By the time Xi Jinping became China's seventh president, a decade of rapid
economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward
an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid,
radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office,
Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a
genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow
in its status as the world's sole superpower after "winning" the Cold War, Washington
had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities
and was slow to react.
China's bid couldn't have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly
70 years as the globe's hegemon, Washington's dominance over the world economy
had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive
edge.
By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization
that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in
democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed
"populist" Donald Trump to power.
Determined to check his country's decline, he has adopted an aggressive
and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both
Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.
Within months of Trump's entry into the Oval Office, the world was already
witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi's advocacy of a new form of global collaboration
and Trump's version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems
to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global
circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature
of the world order.
Trump's Disruptive Foreign Policy
Despite their constant
criticism of Donald Trump's leadership, few among Washington's corps of
foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations
of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World
War II rested upon what I've
called a "delicate duality": an American imperium of raw military and economic
power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law
and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and
the World Trade Organization.
On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier
apparatus -- military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine -- to advance a
global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on
hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first
power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.
Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski
warned that Washington would remain the world's preeminent power only as
long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade
before Trump's election, there were, however, already signs that America's hegemony
was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from
50% in 1950 to just
15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now
project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world's number one economy
by 2030, if not before.
In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump's torrent
of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of
America's place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently
over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy,
Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly
troubled world -- exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal
trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by
self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation's interests.
Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed)
advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies
like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly
nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin
in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi
in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded
countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while
crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states
like Iran and North Korea.
His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest
statement in his administration's December 2017 National Security Strategy.
As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced "an extraordinarily dangerous
world, filled with a wide range of threats." But in less than a year of his
leadership, it insisted, "We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East
to help drive out terrorists and extremists America's allies are now contributing
more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances." Humankind
will benefit from the president's "beautiful vision" that "puts America First"
and promotes "a balance of power that favors the United States." The whole world
will, in short, be "lifted by America's renewal."
Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump's overseas trips
has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly
by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation
for Washington's global power since the 1950s. During the president's first
foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly
voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington's European
allies to pay their "fair share" of NATO's military costs, leaving the U.S.
stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused
even to endorse the alliance's core principle of collective defense. It was
a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century
that he was later forced to formally
back down . (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those
allies in an unforgettable fashion.)
During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that
Germany was "a captive of Russia" and pressed the allies to immediately
double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic
product (a
level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn't reached)
-- a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very
idea of a common defense,
remarking that if "tiny" NATO ally Montenegro decided to "get aggressive,"
then "congratulations, you're in World War III."
Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling
a British
tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country's Brexit withdrawal
from the European Union and "killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal."
He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly
abased himself before NATO's nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were
even brief, angry
protests
from leaders of his own party.
During Trump's major Asia tour in November 2017, he
addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering
an extended "tirade" against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the
WTO. To counter intolerable "trade abuses," such as "product dumping, subsidized
goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies," he swore that
he would always "put America first" and not let it "be taken advantage of anymore."
Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than
"economic aggression" against America, he
invited everyone there to share his "Indo-Pacific dream" of the world as
a "beautiful constellation" of "strong, sovereign, and independent nations,"
each working like the United States to build "wealth and freedom."
Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe's
leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman
and he took it,
calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is "more open, inclusive,
and balanced." He spoke of China's future economic plans as an historic bid
for "interconnected development to achieve common prosperity on the Asian, European,
and African continents."
As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a
few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged
a more equitable world order "to bring the benefits of development to countries
across the globe." For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready
to make "$2 trillion of outbound investment" -- much of it for the development
of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region
more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century
Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald
Trump
acted
more like Argentina's former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As
if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining
11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada,
announced major progress in finalizing that agreement -- without the United
States.
In addition to undermining NATO, America's Pacific alliances, long its historic
fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding,
too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan's
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office,
the president's America First trade policy has
placed a "major strain" on Washington's most crucial alliance in the region.
First, he ignored Abe's
pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as
if his message hadn't been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy
tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he's
denounced the Canadian prime minister as "dishonest" and
mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi's accent, even as he made chummy with
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then
claimed ,
inaccurately , that his country was "no longer a nuclear threat."
It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.
Beijing's Grand Strategy
While Washington's influence in Asia recedes, Beijing's grows ever stronger.
As China's currency reserves
climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014,
President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013,
speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia's ancient Silk Road caravan route,
he
proclaimed a "one belt, one road initiative" aimed at economically integrating
the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing's leadership. Through "unimpeded
trade" and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to
connect "the Pacific and the Baltic Sea" in a proposed "economic belt along
the Silk Road," a region "inhabited by close to 3 billion people." It could
become, he predicted, "the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential."
Within a year, Beijing had
established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank
with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching
its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for
private equity projects. When China convened what it called a "belt and
road summit" of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good
reason,
hail his initiative as the "project of the century."
Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved
in his "one belt, one road" project as
wasteful ,
sybaritic ,
exploitative , or even
neo-colonial , its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing
is expected to
put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest
investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall
Plan, the only comparable program, which
spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild
a ravaged Europe after World War II.
Beijing's low-cost infrastructure
loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding
construction of the Mediterranean's
busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England,
a $6 billion
railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport
corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments
could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia -- home to a full 70%
percent of the world's population and its resources -- into a unified market
without peer on the planet.
Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership
seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically
separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive
network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia
and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete,
there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia's extensive
network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the
North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe's
extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental
lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to
Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.
Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent's southern
rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than
30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across
the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along
Europe's extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters
opened by global warming, Beijing began
planning for a "Polar Silk Road," a scheme that fits well with ambitious
Russian and
Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent's
northern coast to Europe.
Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion
in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the
four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing
already had doubled its
annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United
States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion
dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction
that has already made the continent China's second largest source of crude oil.
Similarly, Beijing has
invested heavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over
90% of Ecuador's oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent
doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with
what once was known as its own "backyard."
A Conflict with Consequences
This contest between Xi's globalism and Trump's nationalism has not been
safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years,
the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat
commercial competition. Apart from a
shadowy struggle for
dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially
volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically
in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing
stated
that "it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force
structure commensurate with its national security." Backed by lethal land-based
missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just
such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first
aircraft carriers.
Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson
reported
that China's "growing and modernized fleet" was "shrinking" the traditional
American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that "we must shake off any vestiges
of comfort or complacency." Under Trump's latest $700-billion-plus defense budget,
Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46
new ships, which will
raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling
with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun
conducting assertive "freedom-of-navigation" patrols near many of those same
installations, heightening the potential for conflict.
It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition
has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his
belief that "trade wars are good and easy to win," President Trump
slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in
March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country's intellectual property
theft by
promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs
finally hit in July, China immediately
retaliated against what it called "typical trade bullying" with similar
tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times
warned that this "tit-for-tat" can escalate into a "full bore trade war
that will be very bad for the global economy." As Trump
threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and
issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing
could ever comply, observers became
concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New
York Times called the "mountain of debt" that sustains much of China's
economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued
an uncommon
warning that "trade tensions could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global
economy."
China as Global Hegemon?
Although a withering of Washington's global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated
by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world
order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with
the obvious requisites for becoming the planet's new hegemon. Its phenomenal
economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological
prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.
Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement
of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart
from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia,
has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing
legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.
In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, "every
successful empire,"
observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, "had to elaborate
a universalist and inclusive discourse" to win support from the world's subordinate
states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the
hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion
for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and
Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural
francophonie , and Britain an Anglophone culture.
Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain
was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing
cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the
Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention
of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly,
at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide
through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were
made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films,
civic organizations like
Rotary International , and popular sports like basketball and baseball.
China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters,
not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even
avowedly, particularistic. And you don't have to look far for another Asian
power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During
Japan's
occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being
hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed
to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.
As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor
Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order
that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the
Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of
the International Court of Justice under the U.N.'s 1945 charter, the world's
nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation
rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held
together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded
in law.
From its founding in 1949, the People's Republic of China gave primacy to
the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the
rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance
came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague
ruled unanimously that China's claims to sovereignty in the South China
Sea "are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful
effect." Beijing's Foreign Ministry simply
dismissed the adverse decision as "invalid" and without "binding force."
President Xi
insisted China's "territorial sovereignty and maritime rights" were unchanged,
while the state Xinhua news agency
called the ruling "naturally null and void."
If Donald Trump's vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future
and if Beijing's projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history's
largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa,
and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership
will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if
by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first
time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear
successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the "
new normal " of
climate change -- the heating of the atmosphere and the
oceans , the intensification of flood, drought, and
fire , the rising seas that will
devastate coastal cities, and the
cascading damage to a densely populated world -- could mean that the very
idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.
Alfred W. McCoy, a
TomDispatch regular , is the Harrington professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity
in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture
of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global
Power (Dispatch Books).
"... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
"... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
"... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
"... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
"... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
"... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
"... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
William Blum shares with us his correspondence with
Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes
across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.
When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee,
which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the
Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard
Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too
many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China.
Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union
and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and
decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in
far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the
Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA
used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon
inherited and did not want.
The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his
conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always
wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid
of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to
accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing
his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and
so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war
management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.
Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a
CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is
to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties
are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract."
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told
The Anti-Empire Report # 159 Willian Blum
The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post
foreign policy reporter: July 18, 2018
Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin
nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the
overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure.
Therefore ?
If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in
Mexico? William Blum
Dear Mr. Blum,
Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last
time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and
run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who
did it.
It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014,
according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern
Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts. Best, Michael Birnbaum
To MB,
I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high
State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to
encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who
were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next
president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch
Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a
while. William Blum
To WB,
I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months
and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a
credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to
the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.
And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she
clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with
potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for
overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to
shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat
the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych
in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible
falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't
stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the
Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will
find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US
foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific.
Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides. Best, Michael Birnbaum
======================= end of exchange =======================
Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments;
never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new
president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr
Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports
fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make
it easy to give some examples.
For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And,
yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem –
Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full
century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is
there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast?
Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that
when they do it can seem rather weird.
To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the
Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in
proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed
objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and
conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So
we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at
determining the winner.
The Russians did it (cont.)
Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm
looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something
logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from
influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK.
But I do not find such evidence.
Each day brings headlines like these:
"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England
forces White House to act"
"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"
"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"
These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article,
but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in
America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY.
Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing
sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump
over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any
of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were
a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.
There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this
story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many
are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've
read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which
earn money simply by attracting visitors.
As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians
look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would
Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely
proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal
time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.
However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day
believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact
that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at
all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is
alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.
But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?
For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more
than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That
was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the
wall.
After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to
register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to
require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new
Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America,
CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments
accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek
to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."
And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights
and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S.
government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that
Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski,
"apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would
interfere in the other's elections."
"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's
interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what
the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."
How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?
We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft
the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today
was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's
wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of
political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."
"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and
government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda
outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a
U.S. retreat from global leadership."
"Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they
can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in
anything abroad.
And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and
government-overthrows.
"... If convicted on all counts, Mr Manafort could face a sentence of up to 305 years in prison based on the maximum for each count, with the most serious charge carrying up to 30 years. However, if convicted, he likely would be given between seven and 12 years, according to a range of estimates from three sentencing experts interviewed by Reuters. ..."
"... Meanwhile Mr Mueller recommended in a court filing on Friday that a judge sentence former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos to up to six months in prison for lying to agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. ..."
Prosecutors accuse Mr Manafort of a complex effort to hide millions of dollars in income
from Ukrainian politicians.
Mr Ellies earlier refused to release the names of jurors, saying he has received threats and
fears for their safety as well.
The judge said he is currently under the protection of U.S. marshals. He declined to delve
into specifics, but said he's been taken aback by the level of interest in the trial.
President Trump earlier said the case was "sad" and described Mr Manafort as a "good
person."
If convicted on all counts, Mr Manafort could face a sentence of up to 305 years in
prison based on the maximum for each count, with the most serious charge carrying up to 30
years. However, if convicted, he likely would be given between seven and 12 years, according to
a range of estimates from three sentencing experts interviewed by Reuters.
Meanwhile Mr Mueller recommended in a court filing on Friday that a judge sentence
former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos to up to six months in prison for lying to
agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
"The government does not take a position with respect to a particular sentence to be
imposed, but respectfully submits that a sentence of incarceration, within the applicable
guidelines range of zero to six months imprisonment is appropriate and warranted," Mr Mueller
said in the filing.
Mr Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to FBI agents investigating possible
collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia. He is scheduled to be sentenced
on Sept. 7.
That might have been true .then. However, Bannon was never the puppet master (Trump is a
capitalist who has never listened to anyone else apart from his own messy ego in his life: the
idea that he would be a puppet for anyone, Bannon, Putin or whatever, is risible). Without
wanting to raise from the dead the 'Trump is teh Hitler' meme: there is a very very tiny grain
of truth in it, just as there is a very very tiny grain of truth in the right wing idea that
Hitler was a socialist because his party had the word 'socialist' in it. Hitler's initial
programme really did have a tiny element of 'socialism' in it, and some elements of the working
class (shamefully) swallowed the lies and gained him votes.
But it was never real and Hitler was never going to deliver. He dealt with the Brownshirts
(the most authentically 'working class' and 'socialist' part of the Nazi movement) in the Night
of the Long Knives, and from that point on, the 'socialist' parts of the Nazi programme were
steadily ditched, as the regime became more and more strongly right wing throughout the
'30s.
Same with Trump (in this respect only). It's true that in the run up to the election he
threw some scraps to the working class, and some of his protectionist rhetoric swung him some
states in the Rust Belt. Some union supporters, to their shame, trooped along to the White
House soon after.
But Trump, a right wing Republican who is, as I've said, far more orthodox a Republican than
the media would have you believe, was never going to deliver. Bannon was the most 'left wing'
of Trump's circle (and as his admiration for Thatcher makes clear, he was never very left wing)
and he was quickly cast out. Trump did not, in fact, 'drain the swamp' and nor did he try. His
major economic policy has turned out to be .tax cuts for the rich. And he has totally failed to
follow through on the (interesting) isolationist rhetoric he used in his election campaign
(despite the fact that some of us hoped otherwise). He has turned out to be as much of a
warmonger as Obama or even Bush jr (even towards Russia, again despite what the media would
have you believe).
And we haven't heard too much about that 'trillion dollar' investment in infrastructure
recently have we?
The problem is that the Democrats have concentrated on the (mainly trivial and
uninteresting) ways in which Trump differs from previous Republican Presidents (the lies, the
silly tweets, the dubious rhetoric) and have therefore persuaded themselves that this
'unorthodox' President will have to be removed by 'unorthodox means'. 'Tain't so. Trump will be
removed the only way any President (except Nixon) has ever been removed since the dawn of the
Republic: by the opposing party organising, developing a strong program that people can believe
in, and getting out the core vote. No election has ever been won any other way. In the case of
the Democrats this means using the might and money of organised labour and activists to get
candidates who can inspire and who have a genuinely progressive message that resonates with
people.
Democrats, #Russiagate will not save you. Getting your core vote out to vote for a genuinely
progressive candidate, will.
Likbez
@Hidari 08.18.18 at 6:41 pm
Powerful post and a veryclear thinking. Thank you !
Also an interesting analogy with NSDAP the 25-point Plan of 1928
Hitler's initial programme really did have a tiny element of 'socialism' in it, and some
elements of the working class (shamefully) swallowed the lies and gained him votes.
But it was never real, and Hitler was never going to deliver. He dealt with the Brownshirts
(the most authentically 'working class' and 'socialist' part of the Nazi movement) in the Night
of the Long Knives, and from that point on, the 'socialist' parts of the Nazi programme were
steadily ditched, as the regime became more and more strongly right wing throughout the
'30s.
Same with Trump (in this respect only). It's true that in the run-up to the election he
threw some scraps to the working class, and some of his protectionist rhetoric swung him some
states in the Rust Belt. Some union supporters, to their shame, trooped along to the White
House soon after.
Actually NSAP program of 1928 has some political demands which are to the left of Sanders
such as "Abolition of unearned (work and labor) incomes", ".We demand the nationalization of
all (previous) associated industries (trusts)." and "We demand a division of profits of all
heavy industries."
7.We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood
and way of life for the citizens... ... ...
... ... ...
9.All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
10.The first obligation of every citizen must be to productively work mentally or
physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality,
but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all.
Consequently, we demand:
11.Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
12.In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands
of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the
people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13.We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14.We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15.We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
16.We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate
communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the
utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or
municipality.
17.We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free
expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and
prevention of all speculation in land.
18.We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the
general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be
punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
... ... ...
21.The state is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and
child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the
legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all
organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
22.We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
23.We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press...
.... ... ...
24.We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as
they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race...
But I think Trump was de-facto impeached with the appointment of Mueller. And that was the
plan ( "insurance" as Strzok called it). Mueller task is just to formalize impeachment.
Pence already is calling the shots in foreign policy via members of his close circle (which
includes Pompeo). The recent "unilateral" actions of State Department are a slap in the face
and, simultaneously, a nasty trap for Trump (he can cancel those sanctions only at a huge
political cost to himself) and are a clear sign that Trump does not control even his
administration. Here is how <a
href="http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2018/august/17/america-the-punitive/">Philip
Giraldi</a> described this obvious slap in the face:
The most recent is the new sanctioning of Russia over the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury
England. For those not following developments, last week Washington abruptly and without any
new evidence being presented, imposed additional trade sanctions on Russia in the belief that
Moscow ordered and carried out the poisoning of Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March
4th. The report of the new sanctions was particularly surprising as Yulia Skripal has recently
announced that she intends to return to her home in Russia, leading to the conclusion that even
one of the alleged victims does not believe the narrative being promoted by the British and
American governments.
Though Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded with restraint, avoiding a
tit-for-tat, he is reported to be angry about the new move by the US government and now
believes it to be an unreliable negotiating partner. Considering the friendly recent exchanges
between Putin and Trump, the punishment of Russia has to be viewed as something of a surprise,
suggesting that the president of the United States may not be in control of his own foreign
policy.
From the very beginning, any anti-globalization initiative of Trump was sabotaged and often
reversed. Haley is one example here. She does not coordinate some of her actions with Trump or
the Secretary of State unliterary defining the US foreign policy.
Her ambitions worry Trump, but he can so very little: she is supported by Pence and Pence
faction in the administration. Rumors "Haley/Pence 2020" surfaced and probably somewhat poison
atmosphere in the WH.
Add to this that Trump has hostile to him Justice Department, CIA, and FBI. He also does not
control some critical appointments such as the recent appointment of CIA director (who in no
way can be called Trump loyalist).
Which means that in some ways Trump already is a hostage and more ceremonial President than
a real.
"... Why didn't Sanders complain about DNC-Hillary collusion (he knew about it well before she captured the nomination - MSM didn't publicize it until after she had won). ..."
"... Why didn't Sanders make a big deal of Hillary's winning 6 of 6 coin tosses during the Iowa primaries. Character was an issue from the start of the race. Trump would later lambast "crooked Hillary". ..."
There were only two populists in the race: Trump and Sanders. One on Hillary's left (sheep-dogging voters to Hillary)
and one on Hillary's right (Trump).
Why did any of the other 18 republicans turn populist? Why didn't they wait so long to complain about the coverage being
provided to Trump?
Why were Republicans so adamantly against Trump after he won the nomination? Many said that they prefered Hillary - whom they
had claimed to hate so much only months before? Answer: Trump had to be an outsider. That's what makes the populist so compelling.
He has to be seen as taking on the establishment.
After such a contentious race, why did Trump quickly say that there would be no prosecution of Hillary? He has proven to be
petty and vain yet he was so quick to forgive the Clintons?
Why did Trump wait so long to fire Comey? It's almost like it was timed for Comey to hand the baton to a special prosecutor.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Here's a few more questions (of many many other questions)
Why didn't Sanders complain about DNC-Hillary collusion (he knew about it well before she captured the nomination -
MSM didn't publicize it until after she had won).
Why didn't Sanders make a big deal of the well-documented time that Hillary changed her vote for a big donor? Hillary loudly
proclaimed that she NEVER changed her vote for money before and DURING the crucial New York debate.
Why didn't Sanders release his 2014 tax returns? He called his tax returns "boring" yet, despite Hillary having released
10 years of tax returns, Sanders only released his 2015 returns. When his 2015 returns were delayed, reporters
asked for the 2014 returns but Sanders refused to provide them.
Why didn't Sanders make a big deal of Hillary's winning 6 of 6 coin tosses during the Iowa primaries. Character was
an issue from the start of the race. Trump would later lambast "crooked Hillary".
Good questions. Asking them sequentially leads even a dumbass like me to conclude Sanders is a fraud.
Unfortunately, most Sanders supporters probably don't remember the issues long enough to reevaluate them collectively. Each
issue appears to them during "the news cycle" as some one-off foible -- considered as misdemeanors and then forgotten before
the next one occurs and thus never assembled mentally as evidence for a larger felony case.
At last – a paterfamiliar earful by none other than James Howard Kunstler, on the state
of the "Three Headed Monster" that is the Democratic Party.
This is an important tipping point, because the country is waiting for nobles of the left
to lead their children from the deep dark woods.
Every day, we ask, "Where are the adults? Who will call this madness for what it is?" I'll
provide the link to this masterful analysis of the "illness" – but first let me tempt
readers with a brief synopsis of the "first head".
" one infected with the toxic shock of losing the 2016 election. The illness took hold
during the campaign that year when the bureaucracy under President Obama sent its lymphocytes
and microphages in the "intel community" to attack the perceived disease that the election of
Donald Trump represented.
The "doctors" of this Deep State diagnosed the condition as "Russian collusion." An
overdue second opinion by doctors outside the Deep State adduced later that the malady was
actually an auto-immune disease.
The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community
itself . who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and the British intel
service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible.
With the disease now revealed by hard evidence, the chief surgeon called into the case,
Robert Mueller, is left looking ridiculous -- and perhaps subject to malpractice charges --
for trying to remove an appendix-like organ called the Manifort from the body politic instead
of attending to the cancerous mess all around him. Meanwhile, the Deep State can't stop
running its mouth -- "
This was published on his blog yesterday..... this is monumental, if only because the
masks are coming off.
Read his description of the other 2 heads.... it's wonderful.
But always remember, the FBI/DOJ is "honorable". Yeah, that's the term
they use to refer to the scumbags that "represent" us in congress. In
reality, "there is no honor amongst thieves", and government is full of
them because sociopaths gravitate to positions of power.
It's a unruly fuck show at the FBI and nobody is being held accountable. No
leadership, no standards, no neutrality, no accountability. Obama weaponized
the FBI. Fire everyone.
"... If convicted on all counts, Mr Manafort could face a sentence of up to 305 years in prison based on the maximum for each count, with the most serious charge carrying up to 30 years. However, if convicted, he likely would be given between seven and 12 years, according to a range of estimates from three sentencing experts interviewed by Reuters. ..."
"... Meanwhile Mr Mueller recommended in a court filing on Friday that a judge sentence former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos to up to six months in prison for lying to agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. ..."
Prosecutors accuse Mr Manafort of a complex effort to hide millions of dollars in income
from Ukrainian politicians.
Mr Ellies earlier refused to release the names of jurors, saying he has received threats and
fears for their safety as well.
The judge said he is currently under the protection of U.S. marshals. He declined to delve
into specifics, but said he's been taken aback by the level of interest in the trial.
President Trump earlier said the case was "sad" and described Mr Manafort as a "good
person."
If convicted on all counts, Mr Manafort could face a sentence of up to 305 years in
prison based on the maximum for each count, with the most serious charge carrying up to 30
years. However, if convicted, he likely would be given between seven and 12 years, according to
a range of estimates from three sentencing experts interviewed by Reuters.
Meanwhile Mr Mueller recommended in a court filing on Friday that a judge sentence
former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos to up to six months in prison for lying to
agents investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
"The government does not take a position with respect to a particular sentence to be
imposed, but respectfully submits that a sentence of incarceration, within the applicable
guidelines range of zero to six months imprisonment is appropriate and warranted," Mr Mueller
said in the filing.
Mr Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October to lying to FBI agents investigating possible
collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia. He is scheduled to be sentenced
on Sept. 7.
Thursday, the New York Times decried Trump's accusation that the media are "the enemy of the
people." "Insisting that truths you don't like are 'fake news' is dangerous to the lifeblood of
democracy. And calling journalists 'the enemy of the people' is dangerous, period," said the
Times .
"... The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr. Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign, and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible. ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Deep State can't stop running its mouth -- The New York Times , CNN, WashPo , et al -- in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness). ..."
"... The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support arms manufacturers, black box "security" companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn up the temperature with some nuclear fire. ..."
"... This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse them of "aggression." ..."
"... The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. It arises from a crypto-gnostic wish to change human nature to escape the woes and sorrows of the human condition -- for example, the terrible tensions of sexuality. Hence, the multiplication of new sexual categories as a work-around for the fundamental terrors of human reproduction as represented by the differences between men and women. ..."
"... "We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a foolish and hazardous endeavor. " ..."
"... And this shit has been going on since the Soviet Union broke up and the "Harvard Boys" helped turn Russia into a corrupt Oligarchy, something the Left was first to identify. ..."
"... The rising of the Populist parties in the UK, Germany, especially Italy and now Sweden, portends an interesting trend, not just nationally, but world wide... ..."
The faction that used to be the Democratic party can be described with some precision these days as a three-headed monster driving
the nation toward danger, darkness, and incoherence.
Anyone interested in defending what remains of the sane center of American politics take heed:
The first head is the one infected with the toxic shock of losing the 2016 election. The illness took hold during the campaign
that year when the bureaucracy under President Obama sent its lymphocytes and microphages in the "intel community" -- especially
the leadership of the FBI -- to attack the perceived disease that the election of Donald Trump represented. The "doctors" of this
Deep State diagnosed the condition as "Russian collusion." An overdue second opinion by doctors outside the Deep State adduced later
that the malady was actually an auto-immune disease.
The agents actually threatening the health of the state came from the intel community itself: Mr. Brennan, Mr. Clapper, Mr.
Comey, Mr. Strzok, Mr. McCabe, Mr. Ohr, Ms. Yates. Ms. Page, et. al. who colluded with pathogens in the DNC, the Hillary campaign,
and the British intel service to chew up and spit out Mr. Trump as expeditiously as possible.
With the disease now revealed by hard evidence, the chief surgeon called into the case, Robert Mueller, is left looking ridiculous
-- and perhaps subject to malpractice charges -- for trying to remove an appendix-like organ called the Manifort from the body politic
instead of attending to the cancerous mess all around him. Meanwhile, the Deep State can't stop running its mouth -- The New
York Times , CNN, WashPo , et al -- in an evermore hysterical reaction to the truth of the matter: the Deep State itself colluded
with Russia (and perhaps hates itself for it, a sure recipe for mental illness).
The second head of this monster is a matrix of sinister interests seeking to incite conflict with Russia in order to support
arms manufacturers, black box "security" companies, congressmen-on-the-take, and an army of obscenely-rewarded Washington lobbyists
in concert with the military and a rabid neocon intellectual think-tank camp wishing to replay the cold war and perhaps even turn
up the temperature with some nuclear fire. They are apparently in deep confab with the first head and its Russia collusion storyline.
Note all the current talk about Russia already meddling in the 2018 midterm election, a full-fledged pathogenic hallucination.
This second head functions by way of a displacement-projection dynamic. We hold war games on the Russian border and accuse
them of "aggression." We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression.
We bust up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest
failed state.We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international
currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a foolish
and hazardous endeavor. The sane center never would have stood for this arrant recklessness. The world community is not fooled, though.
More and more, they recognize the USA as a national borderline personality, capable of any monstrous act.
The third head of this monster is the one aflame with identity politics. It arises from a crypto-gnostic wish to change human
nature to escape the woes and sorrows of the human condition -- for example, the terrible tensions of sexuality. Hence, the multiplication
of new sexual categories as a work-around for the fundamental terrors of human reproduction as represented by the differences between
men and women. Those differences must be abolished, and replaced with chimeras that enable a childish game of pretend, men pretending
to be women and vice-versa in one way or another: LBGTQetc. Anything BUT the dreaded "cis-hetero" purgatory of men and women acting
like men and women. The horror .
Its companion is the race hustle and its multicultural operating system. The objective has become transparent over the past year,
with rising calls to punish white people for the supposed "privilege" of being Caucasian and pay "reparations" in one way or another
to underprivileged "people of color." This comes partly from the infantile refusal to understand that life is difficult for everybody,
and that the woes and sorrows of being in this world require fortitude and intelligence to get through -- with the final reward being
absolutely the same for everybody.
"We engineer and pay for a coup against the elected government of Ukraine, and accuse Russia of aggression. We bust
up one nation after another in Middle East and complain indignantly when Russia acts to keep Syria from becoming the latest
failed state. We disrupt the Russian economy with sanctions, and the Russian banking system with a cut-off of SWIFT international
currency clearing privileges, and accuse them of aggression. This mode of behavior used to be known as "poking the bear," a
foolish and hazardous endeavor. "
And this shit has been going on since the Soviet Union broke up and the
"Harvard Boys" helped turn Russia into
a corrupt Oligarchy, something the Left was first to identify.
I was talking to someone, who knows a lot about the 'inner workings' and we were discussing, not only the US, but Europe's
situation as well.
The rising of the Populist parties in the UK, Germany, especially Italy and now Sweden, portends an interesting trend,
not just nationally, but world wide...
Fifteen years ago, on February 5, 2003, against the backdrop of worldwide mass
demonstrations in opposition to the impending invasion of Iraq, then-US Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued before the United Nations that the government of Saddam Hussein was rapidly
stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," which Iraq, together with Al Qaeda, was planning to
use against the United States.
In what was the climax of the Bush administration's campaign to justify war, Powell held up
a model vial of anthrax, showed aerial photographs and presented detailed slides purporting to
show the layout of Iraq's "mobile production facilities."
There was only one problem with Powell's presentation: it was a lie from beginning to
end.
... ... ...
...War against Iraq, the WSWS wrote, was not about "weapons of mass destruction."
Rather, "it is a war of colonial conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political
aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global
hegemony."
The response of the American media, and particularly its liberal wing, was very different.
Powell's litany of lies was presented as the gospel truth, an unanswerable indictment of the
Iraqi government.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who rushed off a column before he could
have examined Powell's allegations, declared, "The evidence he presented to the United Nations
-- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove
to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a
doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude
otherwise."
The editorial board of the New York Times -- whose reporter Judith Miller was at
the center of the Bush administration's campaign of lies -- declared one week later that there
"is ample evidence that Iraq has produced highly toxic VX nerve gas and anthrax and has the
capacity to produce a lot more. It has concealed these materials, lied about them, and more
recently failed to account for them to the current inspectors."
Subsequent developments would prove who was lying. The Bush administration and its
media accomplices conspired to drag the US into a war that led to the deaths of more than one
million people -- a colossal crime for which no one has yet been held accountable.
Fifteen years later, the script has been pulled from the closet and dusted off. This time,
instead of "weapons of mass destruction," it is "Russian meddling in the US elections." Once
again, assertions by US intelligence agencies and operatives are treated as fact. Once again, the
media is braying for war. Once again, the cynicism and hypocrisy of the American government --
which intervenes in the domestic politics of every state on the planet and has been relentlessly
expanding its operations in Eastern Europe -- are ignored.
"... When I hear people talk about how vulnerable Trump is because of his allegedly dirty business deals, I wonder: if that's true, then why wasn't he charged long ago, since he's been active as a businessman for many years. ..."
"... My hunch is that seriously investigating these deals, if they do exist, would expose too many powerful people to scrutiny they don't want, so Trump gets a pass. ..."
"... I doubt it very much, Trump has any dirty deals in those Russian money laundering as some commentators write about, the money the corrupt Russian Oligarchs, mostly Jewish, who brought to London and other West's Financial Centers during the plundering of Russia in 1992 – 2004 period. And as you pointed out, if there is any, seriously investigating these deals will expose many powerful people, and the corruption and rot of London Financial Center along with many other West's Financial Centers. ..."
"... All the Oligarchs engage in some sort of corruption, Mitt Romney was no different with all his money stashed away in off shore financial safe heavens. Trump is singled out because he ran against that Swamp which he called it during his election campaign, and in their view, he is damaging the World Uni-polar System with U.S. as the Master and EU as vassal States. ..."
When I hear people talk about how vulnerable Trump is because of his allegedly dirty
business deals, I wonder: if that's true, then why wasn't he charged long ago, since he's
been active as a businessman for many years.
My hunch is that seriously investigating these deals, if they do exist, would expose too many
powerful people to scrutiny they don't want, so Trump gets a pass.
And yes, I agree, there is no public evidence of collusion, not surprising since it isn't a
federal crime to begin with, except, potentially, in an anti-trust context that doesn't apply
here.
Dave P. , August 15, 2018 at 2:56 pm
John Kirsch – Good comments. I agree.
I doubt it very much, Trump has any dirty deals in those Russian money laundering as some
commentators write about, the money the corrupt Russian Oligarchs, mostly Jewish, who brought
to London and other West's Financial Centers during the plundering of Russia in 1992 –
2004 period. And as you pointed out, if there is any, seriously investigating these deals
will expose many powerful people, and the corruption and rot of London Financial Center along
with many other West's Financial Centers.
All the Oligarchs engage in some sort of corruption, Mitt Romney was no different with all
his money stashed away in off shore financial safe heavens. Trump is singled out because he
ran against that Swamp which he called it during his election campaign, and in their view, he
is damaging the World Uni-polar System with U.S. as the Master and EU as vassal States.
Trump says he discovered the power of being shallow: "Whenever I am making a creative
choice, I think back and remember my first shallow reaction. The day I realized it can be
smart to be shallow, was for me, a deep experience.
I have no personal business dealings with Trump nor have I ever met the guy. Just reading
information as everyone else does. No special knowledge of specific anything.
The allegation floating around is one very common to real estate. Laundering money.
Trump's business model is his "brand," which basically means Trump lends his names to
building projects rather than actually owning said buildings himself. Sounds similar to
franchising.
Not surprisingly, Trump has been involved in such shady scandals in the past. As someone
else stated, "My hunch is that seriously investigating these deals, if they do exist, would
expose too many powerful people to scrutiny they don't want, so Trump gets a pass."
Whether or not Trump gets convicted of these sorts of crimes depends on a cost/ benefit
analysis the powers that be will have to make. Is nailing Trump worth enough to them to draw
unwanted attention to how these money laundering/ not paying taxes/ globalism foreign
investment/ corrupt crony capitalist scams work?
"... The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped. ..."
"... Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor, providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in establishment institutions. ..."
The people behind advancing the Russiagate fraud are not concerned about the widening
chaos it has engendered. On the contrary, it is playing out exactly as they hoped.
Fast growing censorship of dissent, isolation of a major geopolitical competitor,
providing an explanation for the rise of Trump and the precipitous decline in public faith in
establishment institutions.
Hell, it's even being leveraged to explain away racism. Win win win win. I'd say they are
right where they want to be at this juncture.
Dave P. , August 14, 2018 at 6:21 pm
GM – Excellent observations. Very true.
I would add that they – the Ruling Establishment – are accomplished in the art
of manipulating the public into believing whatever they want them to believe in. In fact,
they have world wide reach.
"... But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times ..."
Less than four days after the Parkland school shooting, the New York Times has
found a way to turn a national tragedy that claimed the lives of 17 high school students into
an opportunity to escalate its unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian propaganda, involving the
continuous bombardment of the public with reactionary lies and warmongering.
Against the backdrop of a major escalation of military tensions between the two countries,
the Times seized upon the Justice Department indictment of Russian nationals over the
weekend to claim that Russia is at "war" with the United States. Now, the Times has
widened this claim into an argument that Russia somehow bears responsibility for social
divisions over the latest mass shooting in America.
Its lead headline Tuesday morning blared: "SHOTS ARE FIRED, AND BOTS SWARM TO SOCIAL DIVIDES
- Florida School Shooting Draws an Army Ready to Spread Discord"
According to the Times , Russian "bots," or automated social media accounts, sought
"to widen the divide" on issues of gun control and mental illness, in order to "make compromise
even more difficult." Russia sought to exploit "the issue of mental illness in the gun control
debate," and "propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman" was "mentally
ill."
The absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the existence of social divisions in America
is belied by the shooting itself, which is a testament to the fact that American society is
riven by antagonisms that express themselves, in the absence of a progressive outlet, in
outpourings of mass violence.
The aim of this campaign is to target anyone who would criticize the underlying social
causes of the shooting -- the violence of American society, the nonexistence of mental health
services, or even the social psychology that gives rise to mass shootings -- as a "Russian
agent" seeking to "sow divisions" in American society. The Times lead is based
entirely on a "dashboard" called Hamilton 68 created by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy, whose lead spokesman is Clint Watts, the former US intelligence agent and
censorship advocate who declared in November that social media companies must "silence" sources
of "rebellion."
Without naming any of the accounts it follows, Hamilton 68 claims to track content tweeted
by "Russian bots and trolls." But most of the trends leading the dashboard are news stories,
many posted by Russia Today and Sputnik News , that are identical with the
trending topics followed by any other news agency. Thus, Hamilton 68 provides an instant
New York Times headline generator: Any major news story can be presented as the result
of "Russian bots."
The New York Times is making its claims about "Russian meddling" with what is known
in the law as "unclean hands." That is, the Times practices the very actions of which
it accuses others.
Here is not the place to deal with the long and bloody history of American destabilization
campaigns and their horrific consequences in Latin America and the Middle East, or to review
the fact that many American journalists serving abroad had dual functions -- as reporters and
as agents.
But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of
Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the
Times with the major operations of the US intelligence agencies.
This is
particularly true with regard to Russia, in regard to which the Times acts as an
instrument of US foreign policy misinformation, practicing exactly what it accuse the Kremlin
of.
Take, for example, the so-called political "dissident" Aleksei Navalny. This proponent of
extreme nationalism and xenophobia, with deep ties to Russia's fascistic right, and extensive
connections to US intelligence agencies, has been championed by the Times as the voice
of social dissent in Russia. Despite his miniscule support within Russia, Navalny's activities
generate front-page headlines in the Times , which has mentioned him in over 400
separate articles.
Another example is the Times ' promotion of the "feminist" rock band Pussy Riot,
which makes a habit of getting themselves arrested by taking their clothes off in Russian
Orthodox churches, and whose fate the Times holds up as a horrific example of Russian
oppression. The very name "Pussy Riot," which in typical usage is not even translated into
Russian, expresses the fact that this operation aims to influence American, and not Russian,
public opinion.
In 2014, the Times met with members of Pussy Riot at their editorial offices, and
have since extensively promoted the group, having mentioned it in over 400 articles. The term
"anti-Putin opposition" is mentioned in another 600 articles.
The logic of the Times ' campaign was expressed most clearly by its columnist
Thomas Friedman, the personification of the pundit as state intelligence mouthpiece whose
career was aptly summed up in a biography titled Imperial Messenger . In a column
published on February 18 ("Whatever Trump is Hiding is Hurting All of US Now"), Friedman
declares a "code red" threat to the integrity of American democracy.
"At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller -- leveraging several years of
intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. -- has brought indictments against 13
Russian nationals and three Russian groups -- all linked in some way to the Kremlin -- for
interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections," Friedman writes, "America needs a president who will
lead our nation's defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy."
This "defense," according to Friedman, would include "bring[ing] together our intelligence
and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin -- the best defense of all."
In other words, war.
The task of all war propaganda is to divert internal social tensions outwards, and the
Times ' campaign is no different. Its aim is to take the anger that millions of people
feel at a society riven by social inequality, mass alienation, police violence, and endless
war, and pin it on some shady foreign adversary.
The New York Times ' claims of Russian "meddling" in the Parkland shooting set the
tone for even more hysterical coverage in the broadcast evening news. NBC News cited Jonathan
Morgan, another collaborator on the Hamilton 68 project, who declared that Russia is "really
interested in sowing discord amongst Americans. That way we're not focused on putting a unified
front out to foreign adversaries."
The goal of the ruling class and its media accomplices is to put on "a unified front"
through the suppression of social opposition within the United States. Along these Lines, NBC
added, "Researchers tell us it's not just Russia deploying these attacks on social media,"
adding "many small independent groups are trying to divide Americans and create chaos."
Who are these "small independent groups" seeking to "create chaos"? By this, they no doubt
mean any news or political organization that dares question the official line that everything
is fine in America, and that argues that the horrendous levels of violence that pervade
American society are somehow related to social inequality and the wars supported and justified
by the entire US political establishment
In philosophy there is a concept called Teleology which means to view things "by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated
causes". If we are to look at Russiagate from a teleological perspective, and indeed we should, as the evidentiary and proportional
justification is severely lacking, we see a distinct organism with a broad purpose. So let's examine, what purposes are being
served by Russiagate, what agendas being driven, and interests being advanced?
Control of information by imperial, establishment and corporate interests
Control of discourse and dissent being stigmatized
Restriction of democracy by third parties and anti-establishment candidates being smeared as "Kremlin supported'
The enlargement of the military industrial complex
The ideological alignment of the nominal left and center with authoritarianism
The justification of imperialism and aggressive foreign policy
The deflection from widespread issues of discontent
The projection of issues in the 2016 election, particularly primary rigging, voting irregularities, voter suppression,
candidate funded troll operations like Correct the Record, widespread collusion between candidates and the mainstream media,
and outsized influence of Israeli, Saudi and Ukrainian lobbies
Considering how much of an impact Russiagate has had towards these ends, in comparison how meagerly it has tackled these phantom
Russian meddlers and "active measures", I think it's fair to say that Russiagate has NOTHING to do with it's stated cause. If
Russiagate can be described by what it does, and not what allegedly caused it, what it is is an authoritarian push to broadly
increase control of society by establishment elites, and to advance their imperialistic ambitions. In this way, it does not look
dissimilar to the way previous societies have succumbed to authoritarian and imperialist rule, nor do the flavors of propaganda,
censorship and nationalism differ greatly. The 2016 election represented the ruling Establishment losing control of the narrative,
and to a lesser degree, not getting their preferred candidate. And in response the velvet glove is slipping.
Reply
mike k , August 13, 2018 at 7:33 pm
Excellent analysis!
Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 9:12 pm
You nailed that one man, Kudos
Maxwell Quest , August 13, 2018 at 9:32 pm
9. The delegitimization of Trump's presidency, and a false justification for removing him from office, or in the very least
crippling his ability to function as the executive.
Indeed. The Shit Snowball keeps gaining size and momentum because so many groups get various benefits from propagating the
Russiagate narrative.
I xeroxed your list of 8 – as well as an excerpt from Patrick Lawrence's original article – then added references and artwork
to set it off in a classy way.
Please let me know what the two of you think of the results:
exiled off mainstreet , August 15, 2018 at 3:00 am
This analysis is spot on.
Kevin Huxford , August 13, 2018 at 7:18 pm
Duncan Campbell's article is embarrassing, especially in that it took him so long to even slightly correct his misrepresentation
of Binney's position on the matter.
Dunderhead , August 13, 2018 at 7:00 pm
This article touches on such a fundamental truth which is the new paradigm of US disunity, the fracturing of both US political
parties and a greater General dysfunction of the American body politic not to mention the US's Image of itself.
A truly excellent and very important post! Thank you.
"To doubt the hollowed-out myth of American innocence is a grave sin against the faith." – author
Absolutely! The current "Russiagate" lunacy renders anyone a "heretic" who might engage in such "doubt"
– or who engages in any independent critical thinking on this matter. I've never seen the political class, the deep state psychopaths,
and the MSM more irrational, nor more out of touch with and more contemptuous of – simple basic verifiable physical "reality"
– than at this historical moment. The current state of affairs suggests the American empire may not simply be in decline, but
is instead perhaps in free fall with the hard ground of reality rapidly approaching. The current level of absolute public lunacy
also suggests the landing will be neither graceful nor pleasant, and may actually come as a shock to the true believers.
Terrific article, Patrick Lawrence. Too Big Too Fail is exactly correct. Just as the banks in the 2008 mortgage crisis got
bailed out, so the Russiagate narrative is cultivated by the US government. Both are insults to the American people.
As you know, there has been some recent discussion of this leak vs. hack topic. To wit:
There is a response by William Binney in video form at the end of this article:
"... With the strong support of these four monolithic lobbies -- his electoral base -- politician Donald Trump can count on the indefectible support of between 35 percent and 40 percent of the American electorate. It is ironic that some of Trump's other policies, like reducing health care coverage and the raising of import taxes, will hurt the poor and the middle class, even though some of Trump's victims can be considered members of the above lobbies. ..."
"... Donald Trump does not seem to take politics and public affairs very seriously, at least when his own personal interests are involved. Therefore, when things go bad, he never volunteers to take personal responsibility, contrary to what a true leader would do, and he conveniently shifts the blame on somebody else. This is a sign of immaturity or cowardice. Paraphrasing President Harry Truman, "the buck never stops at his desk." ..."
"... Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical showman diva , behaving in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than a reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians. ..."
There are four groups of one-issue voters to whom President
Donald Trump has delivered the goodies:
Christian religious right voters, whose main political issue is to fill the U. S. Supreme
Court with ultra conservative judges. On that score, Donald Trump has been true to them by
naming one such judge and in nominating a second one.
Super rich Zionists and the Pro-Israel Lobby, whose obsession is the state of Israel.
Again, on that score, President Donald Trump has fulfilled his promise to them and he has
unilaterally moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in addition to attacking the
Palestinians and tearing up the 'Iran Deal'.
The one-percent Income earners and some corporate owners , whose main demand to Trump was
substantial tax cuts and deregulation. Once again, President Trump has fulfilled this group's
wishes with huge tax cuts, mainly financed with future public debt increases, which are going
to be paid for by all taxpayers.
The NRA and the Pro-Gun Lobby, whose main obsession is to have the right to arm
themselves to the teeth, including with military assault weapons, with as few strings
attached as possible. Here again President Donald Trump has sided with them and against
students who are increasingly in the line of fire in American schools.
With the strong support of these four monolithic lobbies -- his electoral base --
politician Donald Trump can count on the indefectible support of between 35 percent and 40
percent of the American electorate. It is ironic that some of Trump's other policies, like
reducing health care coverage and the raising of import taxes, will hurt the poor and the
middle class, even though some of Trump's victims can be considered members of the above
lobbies.
Moreover, some of Trump's supporters regularly rely on hypocrisy and on excuses to
exonerate their favorite but flawed politician of choice. If any other politician from a
different party were to say and do half of what Donald Trump does and says, they would be
asking for his impeachment.
There are three other reasons why Trump's rants, his
record-breaking lies , his untruths, his deceptions and his dictatorial-style attempts to
control information , in the eyes of his fanatical supporters, at least, are like water on
the back of a duck. ( -- For the record, according to the
Washington Post , as of early August, President Trump has made some 4,229 false claims,
which amount to 7.6 a day, since his inauguration.)
The first reason can be found in Trump's view that politics and even government
business are first and foremost another form of
entertainment , i.e. a sort of TV reality show, which must be scripted and acted upon.
Trump thinks that is
OK to lie and to ask his assistants to
lie . In this new immoral world, the Trump phenomenon could be seen a sign of
post-democracy .
The second one can be found in Trump's artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and
manipulate the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them
into his own tools of propaganda. When Trump attacks the media, he is in fact coaxing them to
give him free coverage to spread his
insults , his fake accusations, his provocations, his constant
threats , his denials or reversals, his convenient
changes of subject or his political spins. Indeed, with his outrageous statements, his
gratuitous accusations and his attacks ' ad hominem' , and by constantly bullying
and insulting adversaries at home and foreign heads of states abroad, and by issuing threats
in repetition, right and left, Trump has forced the media to talk and journalists to write
about him constantly, on a daily basis, 24/7.
That suits him perfectly well because he likes to be the center of attention. That is how he
can change the political rhetoric when any negative issue gets too close to him. In the coming
weeks and months, as the Special prosecutor
Robert Mueller's report is likely to be released, Donald Trump is not above resorting to
some sort of "
Wag the Dog " political trickery, to change the topic and to possibly push the damaging
report off the headlines.
In such a circumstance, it is not impossible that launching an illegal war of choice, say
against Iran (a
pet project of Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton), could then look very
convenient to a crafty politician like Donald Trump and to his warmonger advisors. Therefore,
observers should be on the lookout to spot any development of the sort in the coming weeks.
That one man and his entourage could whimsically consider launching a
war of aggression is a throwback
to ancient times and is a sure indication of the level of depravity to which current politics
has fallen. This should be a justified and clear
case for impeachment .
Finally, some far-right media outlets, such as
Fox News and
Sinclair Broadcasting, have taken it upon themselves to systematically present Trump's
lies and misrepresentations as some 'alternative' truths and facts.
Indeed, ever since 1987, when the Reagan administration abolished the Fairness Doctrine for licensing
public radio and TV waves, and since a Republican dominated Congress passed the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for the mass conglomeration of local
broadcasting in the United States, extreme conservative news outlets, such as the Fox and
Sinclair networks, have sprung up. They are well financed, and they have essentially become
powerful
political propaganda machines , erasing the line between facts and fiction, and regularly
presenting fictitious alternative facts as the truth.
In so doing, they have pushed public debates in the United States away from facts, reason
and logic, at least for those listeners and viewers for whom such outlets are the only source
of information. It is not surprising that such far-right media have also made Donald Trump the
champion of their cause, maliciously branding anything inconvenient as 'fake' news, as Trump
has done in his own anti-media campaign and his sustained assault on the free press.
2- Show Politics and public affairs as a form of entertainment
Donald Trump does not seem to take politics and public affairs very seriously, at least when
his own personal interests are involved. Therefore, when things go bad, he never volunteers to
take personal responsibility, contrary to what a true leader would do, and he conveniently
shifts the blame on somebody else. This is a sign of immaturity or cowardice. Paraphrasing
President Harry Truman, "the buck never stops at his desk."
Donald Trump essentially has the traits of a typical showman
diva , behaving in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV show. Indeed, if
one considers politics and public affairs as no more than a reality show, this means that they
are really entertainment, and politicians are first and foremost entertainers or comedians.
3- Trump VS the media and the journalists
Donald Trump is the first U.S. president who rarely holds scheduled press conferences. Why
would he, since he considers journalists to be his "enemies"! It doesn't seem to matter to him
that freedom of the press is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution by the First Amendment. He
prefers to rely on one-directional so-called 'tweets' to express unfiltered personal ideas and
emotions (as if he were a private person), and to use them as his main public relations channel
of communication.
The ABC News
network has calculated that, as of last July, Trump has tweeted more than 3,500 times,
slightly more than seven tweets a day. How could he have time left to do anything productive!
Coincidently, Donald Trump's number of tweets is not far away from the number of outright lies
and misleading claims that he has told and made since his inauguration.
The Washington Post has counted no less than 3,251 lies or misleading claims of his,
through the end of May of this year, -- an average of 6.5 such misstatements per day of his
presidency. Fun fact: Trump seems to accelerate the pace of his lies. Last year, he told 5.5
lies per day, on average. Is it possible to have a more cynical view of politics!
The media in general, (and
not only American ones), then serve more or less voluntarily as so many resonance boxes for
his daily 'tweets', most of which are often devoid of any thought and logic.
Such a practice has the consequence of demeaning the public discourse in the pursuit of the
common good and the general welfare of the people to the level of a frivolous private
enterprise, where expertise, research and competence can easily be replaced by improvisation,
whimsical arbitrariness and charlatanry. In such a climate, only the short run counts, at the
expense of planning for the long run.
Conclusion
All this leads to this conclusion: Trump's approach is not the way to run an efficient
government. Notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution and what it says about the need to have "
checks and balance s" among different government branches, President Donald Trump has
de facto pushed aside the U.S. Congress and the civil servants in important government
Departments, even his own Cabinet
, whose formal meetings under Trump have been little more than photo-up happenings, to grab the
central political stage for himself. If such a development does not represent an ominous threat
to American democracy, what does?
The centralization of power in the hands of one man is bound to have serious political
consequences, both for the current administration and for future ones.
In both cases CIA and neocons run the show. But there is new powerful factor: emergence of CIA democrats like Brennan and the conversion
of intelligence agencies into political tool, the Cerberus that safeguard the castle of neoliberalism in the USA. The USA people (bottom
90%) be damned.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's guilt in " Russiagate " is now assumed by much of the American left, and reaches greater levels of fervor with every passing day. ..."
"... Coulter was confident and she wasn't alone. Virtually the entire mainstream American right -- from pundits like Coulter and Sean Hannity to President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress -- was deeply invested in the notion that Hussein possessed WMDs and that the Iraq war was justified based on that unshakeable premise. This belief was so ingrained for so long that many excitedly rushed to pretend that chemical weapons discovered in Iraq as reported by the New York Times ..."
"... Now, "Russian collusion" could be becoming the new WMDs. ..."
declared liberal celebrity
activist Rosie O'Donnell at a protest in front of the White House last week. "We see it, he can't lie about it," she added. "He is
going down and so will all of his administration." "The charge is treason," O'Donnell declared. Protesters held held large letters
that spelled it out: " T-R-E-A-S-O-N ."
O'Donnell is by no means alone in her sentiments. Trump's guilt in "
Russiagate " is now
assumed by much of the American left, and reaches greater levels of fervor with every passing day.
This kind of partisan religiosity is not new.
In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, conservative pundit Ann Coulter accused war opponents of "
treason " and
insisted of Saddam Hussein, "We know he had weapons of mass destruction."
Coulter was confident and she wasn't alone. Virtually the entire mainstream American right -- from pundits like Coulter and
Sean Hannity to President George W. Bush and
the Republican Congress -- was deeply invested in the notion that Hussein possessed WMDs and that the Iraq war was justified based
on that unshakeable premise. This belief was so ingrained for so long that many
excitedly rushed to
pretend that
chemical weapons discovered in Iraq as
reported by the New York Times in 2014 were somehow the same thing as the "
mushroom cloud " the
Bush administration said Saddam was capable of.
Now, "Russian collusion" could be becoming the new WMDs.
The post-2016 left's most dominant narrative is arguably their deeply held belief -- with all the ferocity and piety of yesterday's
pro-war conservatives -- that Russia colluded with Trump's campaign to undermine the presidential election. Many believe that the
president and anyone who supports his diplomatic efforts like
Senator Rand Paul
are in the pocket of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It really was plausible that Iraq had WMDs in 2003 based on what our intelligence agencies knew, or purported to know. Today,
it is feasible that American democracy really has Putin's fingerprints on it based on things revealed by U.S. intelligence.
But isn't it also possible that the left is reading far too much into Russiagate?
The Nation 's Aaron Maté believes
liberals are overreaching, and that's putting it mildly:
From the outset, Russiagate proponents have exhibited a blind faith in the unverified claims of US government officials and
other sources, most of them unnamed. The reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller's recent indictment of 12 Russian military-intelligence
officers for hacking of Democratic party servers and voter databases is no exception. Mueller's indictment is certainly detailed.
Most significantly, it marks the first time anyone has been charged for offenses related to Russiagate's underlying crime.
But while it is a major step forward in the investigation, we have yet to see the basis for the allegations that Mueller has
lodged. As with any criminal case, from a petty offense to a cybercrime charge against a foreign government, a verdict cannot
be formed in the absence of this evidence.
Then the irony kicks in. Maté continues, "The record of US intelligence, replete with lies and errors, underscores the need for
caution. Mueller was a player in one of this century's most disastrous follies when, in congressional testimony, he endorsed claims
about Iraqi WMDs and warned that Saddam Hussein 'may supply' chemical and biological material to 'terrorists.'"
Noting Mueller's 2003 WMD testimony
is not an attempt to undermine him or his investigation, something Maté also makes clear. But it does serve as an important reminder
that "intelligence" can be flat-out wrong. It reminds us how these scenarios, which so much of Washington and the elite class fully
endorse, can be looked back on as lapses of reason years later.
Mass psychology is real. Political classes and parties are not immune.
"Suppose, however, that all of the claims about Russian meddling turn out to be true," Maté asks. "Hacking e-mails and voter databases
is certainly a crime, and seeking to influence another country's election can never be justified."
He continues, "But the procession of elite voices falling over themselves to declare that stealing e-mails and running juvenile
social-media ads amount to an 'attack,' even an 'act of war,' are escalating a panic when a sober assessment is what is most needed."
The U.S. could have certainly used less hyperbole and more sobriety in 2002 and 2003.
And there's good chance that when the history books are written about American politics circa 2018, much of Russiagate will be
dismissed as more Red Scare than
Red Dawn .
With Russia, as with WMDs, left and right have elevated slivers of legitimate security concerns to the level of existential threat
based mostly on their own partisanship. That kind of thinking has already proven to be dangerous.
We don't know what evidence of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia might yet come forth, but it's easy to see how, even
if this narrative eventually falls flat, 15 years from now some liberals will still be clinging to Russiagate not as a matter of
fact, but political identity. Russia-obsessed liberals, too, could end up on the wrong side of history.
No one can know the future. Republicans would be wise to prepare for new, potentially damaging information about Trump and Russia
that may yet emerge.
Democrats should consider that Russiagate may be just as imaginary as Republicans' Iraq fantasy.
All this may be as Hunter would have it. Yet there is the nagging doubt that Trump, who could only find major financing for his
enterprises following his last bankruptcy through Putin-controlled banks, could be free of any entangling ties or obligations.
And if those doubts prove true, what then?
From the Nation: "From the outset, Russiagate proponents have exhibited a blind faith in the unverified claims of U.S. government
officials and other sources, most of them unnamed."
This is a key point, because now Democrats and the most of the Left are ready to embrace a guy like Brennan a.k.a. Mr. Torture,
merely because they hate Trump.
I'll also admit to not knowing what's coming in the future, but as of now there's a strong circumstantial case to be made that
this reactions to Russian election meddling, which when all was said and done amounted to providing the voting public with the
truth about the DNC and its own election-fixing operation, that this reaction is only about losing the 2016 presidential election
to a guy who was only given a 1% chance of winning by almost everyone.
This is the most sensible commentary on "Russiagate" I have seen anywhere in a long time.
At present, there is some suggestive evidence in the public arena, but nothing conclusive.
What we probably need, actually, is a moratorium on commentary about this until the investigation reaches its conclusion. That
can take a long time. But until then, the endless partisanship-motivated speculation we hear daily is, frankly tiresome.
Thank you, Mr. Hunter, for your temperate perspective on this. I wish this would be the last word on the subject until the
investigation ends.
'"Russian collusion" could be becoming the new WMDs.'
I suspect I agree with the author's sentiment, but it is not easy to tell.
Who stands accused? Trump? Russia? Both?
The claim that Trump is colluding with Russia is not the same as the claim that Iraq War opponents were colluding with Saddam
Hussein.
The manufactured "Russia!" hysteria campaign orchestrated by the Obama/Clinton Democratic Party leadership, as deplorable and
dubious as it might be, has nothing in common with the "5th column" smears Sullivan et.al. were peddling in 2002-2003 and beyond.
The claim that Trump committed "treason" would be legally incorrect on the worst case. Without a formal Congressional declaration
of war, we are not at war with Russia, and Russia is not the enemy, no matter how much irresponsible mouthbreathing is broadcast
from the biparty Congress members. However corrupt and corrupted Trump may be, corruption does not qualify as treason. If corruption
were treason, Congress, in support of Israel and Saudi Arabia at the expense of the US (and certainly not in support of Russia)
would be a house of traitors.
In comparison, the claim that opponents of the Iraq war were traitors was not just idiotic, but morally inexcusable. If anybody
violated their oath, it was Bush himself, his appointees, and the ranking officers of the US military, for issuing illegal orders
and/or following them.
"Russian election meddling" is the new WMD only the extent it is used as a pretext for war against Russia. It is the new "stained
dress" in the attempt to challenge the ballot and paralyze an inconvenient President. I have no doubt that the Clintons are corrupt,
and the GOP has engaged in many a Congressional effort to "investigate". The Clinton campaign adopted this playbook, and the damage
to the Republic done by all is growing every day.
The real corruption here is the pretense that Congress is any better than Trump, that Russian oligarchs have more impact on
the eroding Republic than Israeli-American, Saudi and UAE oligarchs, and that the biggest threat to the integrity of our elections
and the franchise is Russia, and not the Roberts Court, Democrat apparatchiks like Sunstein, or Republican frauds like Kobach.
Both parties are actively conspiring and plotting to make sure our votes are meaningless and cannot harm incumbents and the war
profiteering classes, and where there used to be an opposition to illegal war and to oligarchs and plutocrats, there is now willing
participation in manufactured hysteria to extend the 2016 campaign indefinitely.
WMDs? The very concept is a scam -- there is nukes, and nothing else. Nuclear arsenals outsized to end us all, and trillion
dollar waste to expand them, are the tie that binds the US and Russia, and I suspect that Russia would be a lot more rational
about reducing those arsenals than the US. If the author wants to worry about ending up on the wrong side of history, he should
stop worrying about partisan points and focus. Politics is not a team sports, and anybody who picks a favorite is a failure as
a citizen. Nobody who wants power is suitable for it.
Ask yourself, if Saddam Hussein had had "WMD" -- say, some of those chemical and biological stocks Reagan envoy Rumsfeld helpfully
provided to Saddam Hussein -- would that have made the Iraq invasion legal, right just, necessary, successful? Or if Powell's
little phials and mobile weapons labs actually existed?
Heck, let's say Saddam managed to make actual nukes out of tubes that weren't and yellowcake that wasn't. North Korea has nukes.
Does that make invasion and aggressive war legal, right, just necessary, successful?
WMD or not was a lie wrapped within a deception inside a fraud. That's the one thing that it has in common with "Russiagate".
Every layer, every aspect of it is a lie, a distraction, and everybody -- Trump included -- is perpetuating the hysteria for their
own benefit. The stupidity of it is only barely rivaled by the mendacity.
Trump is proving to be the Republican Alger Hiss. The partisanship of 1948 quickly crystallized into pro- and anti-Hiss camps
in which the then limited evidence was trumped by ideology. It was not until the Verona tapes were released in the early 1990s
that Hiss was proven to be guilty. Had Nixon and his allies called for a special prosecutor in 1948 and the facts both open and
classified been examined intensely, Hiss would never have become the progressive Victim that he was to be for over thirty years.
Ditto with Trump. Absent Mueller's investigation, these accusations against Trump (and I believe them to have serious weight and
substance as well as potential for policy changes to prevent election fraud) would be mere ideological shrapnel to be argued over
for another thirty years. Let the investigations proceed unimpeded and a final accounting be published at the very least for the
sanity and integrity of the Republic. Don't let Trump become the Right's Alger Hiss.
In other words, let's imagine that Putin has really tried to change election results. Let's imagine that Trump really has been
bribed by Russian oligarchs.
Is that why we are at this juncture? Is that why Congress has not served the People and upheld the Constitution in decades?
Is that why citizens and voters lose trust in our institutions, and doubt election results?
Really?
We cannot even own up to our own mistakes, our own greed, our own malignancy. We have to blame it not on our "business partners"
and "allies" and their hundreds of billions of dollars of arms purchases, we will blame it on Russia.
How small we have become.
It is not just Trump, it is Congress. It is not just this administration and this Congress, it is the previous ones, and the
ones before it, and so on.
The point is not whether or not the "Russia!" hysteria and the allegations against Trump are accurate or not. The point is
that, in comparison to everything else, it would just be more of the same, and we brought it upon ourselves.
@Collin-
Isn't it extremely Orwellian to say that 'information isn't really information/should be censored or disregarded if it comes from
a subversive (Russia) source'?
Naturally, it allows for a very easy way to control and censor information.
Now, as far as pure security threats, aside from information that should've been public anyway, experts deem that the DNC information
came from on site:
Now this is also an appeal to authority, but VIPs has a better track record and I've seen them actually elaborate on their
claims, not just assert them.
"... Peskov made a statement about how unfriendly this action was after the two presidents met and got on – is this guy for real? The Americans are aiming to crush Russia and Peskov thinks it's unfriendly. This is what I mean by pandering ..."
"... What was the cost to Russia? Nada. What did it do to the US – more comical flailing, posturing and noise. Russia clearly understood what they were doing and the repercussions to the US political system – more dysfunction and misdirection. Score: Russia 1, USA 0. ..."
When I used the term pandering I mean the following
– Agreeing to meet in Helsinki with no agenda.
The meeting btw Lavrov and Pompeo was cancelled.
But Russia went along and has now escalated the Russophobia attacks against itself – this behaviour by Russia is
pandering – let's meet with America whatever the cost, since at least 2014 and the latest Ukrainian coup; USA has
proved untrustworthy yet Russia turns up when the USA asks. Putin was even going to Washington.
Is the Kremlin living in a bubble?
Putin lavrov Shoigu have been there for years and yet they seem to wear rose coloured glasses when it comes to
America
Now with the latest sanctions – there is a protest and vague threat to respond –
Peskov made a statement about how unfriendly this action was after the two presidents met and got on – is
this guy for real? The Americans are aiming to crush Russia and Peskov thinks it's unfriendly. This is what I mean
by pandering
I really think the government needs fresh people – doing what they have been doing is not working.
What was the cost to Russia? Nada. What did it do to
the US – more comical flailing, posturing and noise. Russia clearly understood what they were doing and the
repercussions to the US political system – more dysfunction and misdirection. Score: Russia 1, USA 0.
If the situation eventually resolves itself without a major war, and things go back to something more like
normal, when American manufacturers like Caterpillar and Ford are looking to expand into Russia, they will say
"Waaahhhhh!!! Why do they hate us?"
Media: "We would like to have better relations with the Russian government. And sanctions are one tool
from a whole set, through which we can try to set up some kind of government that shows an improvement in its
behavior", the head of the State Department press service has said.
What kind of tool-set is this, "through which governments are set up to improve their behaviour for the
betterment of their relations with the US":
?
And I should like a couple of examples of where and how this "set" has worked.
I daresay there are a few countries in the world which would like to use various tools against the United
States until those countries managed to set up a government in America which showed an improvement in its
behavior. Would that be regarded as just another avenue of diplomacy by America? Surely not, in the Shining
City On A Hill? Then what's all this talk of 'meddling' in America's democracy? Either the people of the
country get to pick its leader, or the international community decides who would be appropriate and then uses
the tools at its disposal to maneuver a satisfactory government into power. Make up your mind, but stop
babbling about 'democracy', what say?
Amazingly enough, some people believe this nonsense. There are a
handful of Russian liberals who allow that the country deserves to be sanctioned, and express hope that there
will be more until the government is cast down, and a new American-style – possibly even American-picked –
government takes power. This, to the US State Department, is the very distilled essence of democracy and
freedom. However, the electoral process in America is evidently flawless, as no tampering with it is either
required or permitted, and any result which does not meet with the approval of the corporate lobbyists is
obviously an engineered takeover attempt by Russia.
"See: I'm not biased against the POTUS and never have been, cos I'm investigating the
Dems, too. So I need to continue my impartial work forever" scam:
" anything he unearths about Russian election interference.." Future tense, as in not yet
accomplished as of this date. Mueller landed himself a good gig, but you can bet he has
discovered a great deal about 'foreign money flowing into Washington' which will never be
told, because it's not good politics, and has nothing to do with Russia. I daresay a
significant amount flows out of Washington as well, for intrigues and influence-peddling
abroad.
"... Thus ends another episode in the seemingly interminable serial, "Bernie Sanders Tries, and Fails, to Put a Progressive Coat of Paint on the Democratic Party." Since he rocketed to political prominence in 2016 in his challenge to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, Sanders has played this role again and again. ..."
"... First, he appeals to the idealism of young people and the economic grievances of working people, claiming to represent a genuine alternative to the domination of American politics by the oligarchy of "millionaires and billionaires." Then he diverts those who have responded to his campaign back into the existing political framework, endorsing whatever right-wing hack emerges from the Democratic wing of the corporate-controlled two-party system. ..."
"... In the 2018 campaign, where he is not a candidate except for reelection in Vermont, Sanders has endorsed and campaigned for a number of supposedly left-wing candidates in the Democratic primaries, always based on the same pretense, that the Democratic Party can be reformed and pushed to the left, that this party of corporate America can be transformed into an instrument of social reform and popular politics. ..."
"... The requirements for receiving Sanders' support and that of "Our Revolution," the political operation formed by many of his 2016 campaign staffers, are not very demanding. The self-proclaimed socialist does not demand that his favored candidates oppose capitalism or pay lip service to socialism -- and almost none of them do. ..."
"... In other words, Sanders uses the image of radicalism and opposition to the status quo that surrounded his 2016 campaign to lend support to very conventional, pro-capitalist candidates, whose policies are well within the mainstream of the Democratic Party -- a party whose leadership has embraced most of the measures cited above, secure in the knowledge that it will not keep a single one of these promises and can always blame the Republicans for blocking them. ..."
"... In Michigan, Sanders spoke at rallies for El-Sayed, and his supporters were quite active on college campuses and on social media, mobilizing support among young people. But as in 2016, there was little effort to reach the working class, particularly minority workers in Detroit, Flint, Saginaw and other devastated industrial cities. ..."
"... Sanders and the supposedly "left" Democrats he promotes all fervently support the trade union bureaucracy, which is working overtime this year to prevent strikes by angry and militant workers -- as at United Parcel Service -- and to isolate, terminate and betray them where they break out -- as with the state-wide teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona earlier this year. ..."
"... Under these conditions, the Democratic Party is not a party that can or will can carry out social reforms in order to save capitalism, as in Roosevelt's day. It is a party that will carry out the dictates of the ruling class for war and austerity while using the services of "left" politicians like Sanders to confuse and disorient working people and youth. ..."
Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed went down to a double-digit defeat Tuesday in the Democratic primary, overwhelmed
by the near-unanimous support of the Democratic Party establishment for former state senator Gretchen Whitmer. The daughter of
former Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO Richard Whitmer won every county in the state and will go on to face Republican State Attorney
General Bill Schuette in the November general election.
In a tweet to his supporters, El-Sayed declared: "The victory was not ours today, but the work continues. Congratulations to
@gretchenwhitmer on her primary win. Tomorrow we continue the path toward justice, equity and sustainability."
When tomorrow came, however, that "path" led to a unity luncheon at which El-Sayed and the third candidate in the race, self-funding
millionaire Shri Thanedar, pledged their full support to Whitmer. "Today we all retool and figure out how we make sure that Bill
Schuette does not become governor. I'm super committed to that," El-Sayed said. "Never has it been more important to have a Democrat
lead state government."
Thus ends another episode in the seemingly interminable serial, "Bernie Sanders Tries, and Fails, to Put a Progressive
Coat of Paint on the Democratic Party." Since he rocketed to political prominence in 2016 in his challenge to Hillary Clinton,
the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, Sanders has played this role again and again.
First, he appeals to the idealism of young people and the economic grievances of working people, claiming to represent
a genuine alternative to the domination of American politics by the oligarchy of "millionaires and billionaires." Then he diverts
those who have responded to his campaign back into the existing political framework, endorsing whatever right-wing hack emerges
from the Democratic wing of the corporate-controlled two-party system.
In 2016, this involved appealing to his supporters to back Hillary Clinton, the candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence
apparatus. The Clinton campaign refused to make the slightest appeal to the working class in order to preserve its support within
corporate America and, in the process, drove millions of desperate workers to stay home on Election Day or vote for Trump, allowing
the billionaire demagogue to eke out an Electoral College victory.
In the 2018 campaign, where he is not a candidate except for reelection in Vermont, Sanders has endorsed and campaigned
for a number of supposedly left-wing candidates in the Democratic primaries, always based on the same pretense, that the Democratic
Party can be reformed and pushed to the left, that this party of corporate America can be transformed into an instrument of social
reform and popular politics.
The requirements for receiving Sanders' support and that of "Our Revolution," the political operation formed by many of
his 2016 campaign staffers, are not very demanding. The self-proclaimed socialist does not demand that his favored candidates
oppose capitalism or pay lip service to socialism -- and almost none of them do.
Their platforms usually include such demands as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, implementing "Medicare for all," interpreted
in various fashions, establishing free public college education for families earning less than $150,000 a year, and enacting universal
pre-K education. They usually promise not to accept corporate money and to support campaign finance reform.
These Sanders-backed candidates, like Sanders himself in 2016, have very little to say about foreign policy and make no appeal
whatsoever to the deep anti-war sentiment among American youth and workers. There is no discussion of Trump's threats of nuclear
war. As for trade war, most, like Sanders himself, embrace the economic nationalism that is the foundation of Trump's trade policy.
In other words, Sanders uses the image of radicalism and opposition to the status quo that surrounded his 2016 campaign
to lend support to very conventional, pro-capitalist candidates, whose policies are well within the mainstream of the Democratic
Party -- a party whose leadership has embraced most of the measures cited above, secure in the knowledge that it will not keep
a single one of these promises and can always blame the Republicans for blocking them.
In Michigan, Sanders spoke at rallies for El-Sayed, and his supporters were quite active on college campuses and on social
media, mobilizing support among young people. But as in 2016, there was little effort to reach the working class, particularly
minority workers in Detroit, Flint, Saginaw and other devastated industrial cities.
Sanders and the supposedly "left" Democrats he promotes all fervently support the trade union bureaucracy, which is working
overtime this year to prevent strikes by angry and militant workers -- as at United Parcel Service -- and to isolate, terminate
and betray them where they break out -- as with the state-wide teachers' strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona earlier
this year.
The real attitude of Sanders and El-Sayed to genuine socialism was made clear when they sought to ban supporters of the Socialist
Equality Party and SEP candidate for Congress Niles Niemuth from distributing leaflets and holding discussions outside campaign
rallies for El-Sayed.
This year, Sanders has been campaigning with a sidekick, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of
America who won the Democratic congressional nomination in the 12th District of New York, defeating incumbent Representative Joseph
Crowley, the fourth-ranking member of the Democratic leadership in the House.
Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for El-Sayed in Michigan and also for several congressional candidates, including Brent Welder in
Kansas and Cori Bush in Missouri, who also went down to defeat on August 7. Like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez claims that the Democratic
Party can be transformed into a genuinely progressive "party of the people" that will implement social reforms.
But at age 28, Ocasio-Cortez has less practice in performing the song-and-dance of pretending to be independent of the Democratic
Party establishment while working to give it a left cover and prop it up. She was clumsier in her execution, attracting notice
as she walked back a campaign demand to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and sought to downplay her previous
criticism of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.
After her campaign swing through the Midwest, Ocasio-Cortez traveled to the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, an annual
assemblage of the left flank of the Democratic Party. She told her adoring audience that her policies were not radical at all,
but firmly in the Democratic mainstream. "It's time for us to remember that universal college education, trade school, a federal
jobs guarantee, a universal basic income were not all proposed in 2016," she said. "They were proposed in 1940, by the Democratic
president of the United States."
The reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt was inadvertently revealing. Roosevelt adopted reform policies, including many of those
suggested by the social democrats of his day such as Norman Thomas. He was no socialist, but rather a clever and conscious bourgeois
politician who enacted limited reforms in a deliberate effort to save the capitalist system.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez likewise seek to save the capitalist system, but under conditions where no such reforms are possible.
The American ruling class no longer dominates the world economy, but is beset by powerful rivals in both Europe and Asia. It is
pouring resources into the military to prepare for world war. And at home, even the most modest measures run up against the intransigent
opposition of the super-rich, who control both parties and demand even greater wealth for themselves at the expense of working
people.
Under these conditions, the Democratic Party is not a party that can or will can carry out social reforms in order to save
capitalism, as in Roosevelt's day. It is a party that will carry out the dictates of the ruling class for war and austerity while
using the services of "left" politicians like Sanders to confuse and disorient working people and youth.
Thus, at Netroots Nation, the assembled "left" Democrats gave a loud ovation to Ocasio-Cortez, but also to Gina Ortiz Jones,
the Democratic nominee in the 23rd Congressional District of Texas, also young, nonwhite and female. Ortiz Jones has another characteristic,
however. She is a career Air Force intelligence officer who was deployed to Iraq, South Sudan and Libya -- all the scenes of US-instigated
bloodbaths.
Ortiz Jones is one of nearly three dozen such candidates chosen to represent the Democratic Party in contested congressional
districts around the country. Another such candidate is Elissa Slotkin, who won the Democratic nomination Tuesday in Michigan's
Eighth Congressional District. Slotkin served three tours with the CIA in Baghdad before being promoted to high-level positions
in the Pentagon and the Obama-era National Security Council.
The fake leftism of Bernie Sanders in alliance with the CIA: That is the formula for the Democratic Party in 2018.
"... Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from criticism. ..."
By all means confront Israel if that is your thing, but don't pretend that there is any
possibility of besting them.
Israel – not Russia – is the one foreign country that can interfere with
impunity with the political processes in the United States yet it is immune from
criticism.
Yes. And that is why only Israel can tame American Jews.
We are in a very peculiar ideological and political place in which Democracy (oh sainted
Democracy) is a very good thing, unless the voters reject the technocrat class's leadership.
Then the velvet gloves come off. From the perspective of the elites and their technocrat
apparatchiks, elections have only one purpose: to rubberstamp their leadership.
As a general rule, this is easily managed by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on
advertising and bribes to the cartels and insider fiefdoms who pony up most of the cash.
This is why incumbents win the vast majority of elections. Once in power, they issue the
bribes and payoffs needed to guarantee funding next election cycle.
The occasional incumbent who is voted out of office made one of two mistakes:
1. He/she showed a very troubling bit of independence from the technocrat status quo, so a
more orthodox candidate is selected to eliminate him/her.
2. The incumbent forgot to put on a charade of "listening to my constituency" etc.
If restive voters can't be bamboozled into passively supporting the technocrat status quo
with the usual propaganda, divide and conquer is the preferred strategy. Only voting for the
technocrat class (of any party, it doesn't really matter) will save us from the evil Other :
Deplorables, socialists, commies, fascists, etc.
In extreme cases where the masses confound the status quo by voting against the technocrat
class (i.e. against globalization, financialization, Empire), then the elites/technocrats will
punish them with austerity or a managed recession. The technocrat's core ideology boils down to
this:
1. The masses are dangerously incapable of making wise decisions about anything, so we have
to persuade them to do our bidding. Any dissent will be punished, marginalized, censored or
shut down under some pretext of "protecting the public" or violation of some open-ended
statute.
2. To insure this happy outcome, we must use all the powers of propaganda, up to and
including rigged statistics, bogus "facts" (official fake news can't be fake news, etc.),
divide and conquer, fear-mongering, misdirection and so on.
3. We must relentlessly centralize all power, wealth and authority so the masses have no
escape or independence left to threaten us. We must control everything, for their own good of
course.
4. Globalization must be presented not as a gargantuan fraud that has stripmined the planet
and its inhabitants, but as the sole wellspring of endless, permanent prosperity.
5. If the masses refuse to rubberstamp our leadership, they will be punished and told the
source of their punishment is their rejection of globalization, financialization and
Empire.
Technocrats rule the world, East and West alike. My two favorite charts of the outcome of
technocrats running things to suit their elite masters are:
The state-cartel-crony-capitalist version: the top .1% skim the vast majority of the gains
in income and wealth. Globalization, financialization and Empire sure do rack up impressive
gains. Too bad they're concentrated in the top 1.%.
The state-crony-socialist version: the currency is destroyed, impoverishing everyone but the
top .1% who transferred their wealth to Miami, London and Zurich long ago. Hmm, do you discern
a pattern here in the elite-technocrat regime?
Ideology is just a cover you slip over the machine to mask what's really going on.
Throughout, Republicans in Congress were relentless in their pursuit. (If the recent Peter
Strzok hearing shocked you, you didn't watch any of the dozens of Whitewater hearings.) Starr's
office leaked like a sieve, making it clear that his mission had strayed far beyond normal law
enforcement into being a political operation intended to bring down the president. The media
ate it all up like little baby birds with their beaks open, eager to take whatever was fed to
them. The atmosphere was febrile and intense.
Starr had finally decided to close up shop after years and years of chasing his tail had
come up with no evidence of a crime. But that was when the Paula Jones civil suit opened the
door for Linda Tripp to stab her friend Monica Lewinsky in the back, and right-wing lawyers set
a perjury trap for the president. Clinton walked into it, lying under oath when asked if he'd
engaged in an extramarital affair with Lewinsky. The rest is history.
Of course this kind of devious machination is what Republicans see happening with Robert
Mueller's investigation into Trump's campaign dealings with Russians.
This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
Notable quotes:
"... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
"... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
"... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
"... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
"... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
"... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
"... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
"... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
"... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
"... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much
use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage,
but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they
prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you
look at things.
First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has
been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and
China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and
conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you
are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.
In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days
torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged
in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and
that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate
negotiating future spy swaps.
In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a
good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies,
sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US
intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.
Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr.
Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own
spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They
poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no
evidence.
There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working
in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly
super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't
work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).
There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it
needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the
prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An
alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be
following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.
A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is
acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and
the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper,
professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents.
In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to
recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for
injecting disinformation.
Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert
Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail
server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's
been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that
they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet.
Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from
Russia.
Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in
Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the
Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of
Russia or extradited to another state."
Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can
just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule
against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.
That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked
into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system
has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done
bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged
hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping
a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.
He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC
officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie
Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian
hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So,
where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?
Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal
investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to
have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who
may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to
begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious
amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.
In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US
officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed,
at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US
instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?
The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the
traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance --
which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best
ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such
quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US
"intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit
up."
The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the
stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make
unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical
weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor
while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual
objective is easily discernible.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its
allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom
aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and
overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they
are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and
so on.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag
operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta
chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is
perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were
harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly
forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure
confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a
conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A
light-hearted answer would have been:
"What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They
were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to
claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped
lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available,
is an impossible task."
A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:
"The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig
the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to
prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately
be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as
conspiracy theory, not as fact."
And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:
"The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to
which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to
me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their
dismissal."
But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake
answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake
intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and
ultimately futile conflicts.
Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of
religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the
Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American
efforts in Iraq and Syria.
The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593.
Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is
too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the
US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."
The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like
a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the
country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of
them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of
the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million
per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence
community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US
intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.
There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.
First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that
the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where
grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward
an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such
incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for
their mistakes.
Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has
been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic
and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile
conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How
that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable
definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at
it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better
than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be
perpetual liars."
"... Second, the U.S. government in April imposed sanctions on Deripaska, one of several prominent Russians targeted to punish Vladimir Putin -- using the same sort of allegations that State used from 2006 to 2009. Yet, between those two episodes, Deripaska seemed good enough for the FBI to ask him to fund that multimillion-dollar rescue mission. And to seek his help on a sensitive political investigation. And to allow him into the country eight times. ..."
"... "The real question becomes whether it was proper to leave [Deripaska] out of the Manafort indictment, and whether that omission was to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law," Dershowitz said. ..."
"... Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog, told me a "far more significant issue" is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal: "It's possible the bureau's arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services." ..."
But there's one episode even Mueller's former law enforcement comrades -- and independent ethicists -- acknowledge raises legitimate
legal issues and a possible conflict of interest in his overseeing the Russia election probe.
ADVERTISEMENT In 2009, when Mueller ran the FBI,
the bureau
asked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to spend millions of his own dollars funding an FBI-supervised operation to rescue a retired
FBI agent, Robert Levinson, captured in Iran while working for the CIA in 2007.
Yes, that's the same Deripaska who has surfaced in Mueller's current investigation and who was recently sanctioned by the Trump
administration.
The Levinson mission is confirmed by more than a dozen participants inside and outside the FBI, including Deripaska, his lawyer,
the Levinson family and a retired agent who supervised the case. Mueller was kept apprised of the operation, officials told me.
Some aspects of Deripaska's help were chronicled in
a 2016 book by reporter Barry
Meier , but sources provide extensive new information about his role.
They said FBI agents courted Deripaska in 2009 in a series of secret hotel meetings in Paris; Vienna; Budapest, Hungary, and Washington.
Agents persuaded the aluminum industry magnate to underwrite the mission. The Russian billionaire insisted the operation neither
involve nor harm his homeland.
"We knew he was paying for his team helping us, and that probably ran into the millions," a U.S. official involved in the operation
confirmed.
Deripaska's lawyer said the Russian ultimately spent $25 million assembling a private search and rescue team that worked with
Iranian contacts under the FBI's watchful eye. Photos and videos indicating Levinson was alive were uncovered.
Then in fall 2010, the operation secured an offer to free Levinson. The deal was scuttled, however, when the State Department
become uncomfortable with Iran's terms, according to Deripaska's lawyer and the Levinson family.
FBI officials confirmed State hampered their efforts.
"We tried to turn over every stone we could to rescue Bob, but every time we started to get close, the State Department seemed
to always get in the way," said Robyn Gritz, the retired agent who supervised the Levinson case in 2009, when Deripaska first cooperated,
but who left for another position in 2010 before the Iranian offer arrived. "I kept Director Mueller and Deputy Director [John] Pistole
informed of the various efforts and operations, and they offered to intervene with State, if necessary."
FBI officials ended the operation in 2011, concerned that Deripaska's Iranian contacts couldn't deliver with all the U.S. infighting.
Levinson was never found; his whereabouts remain a mystery, 11 years after he disappeared.
The State Department declined comment, and a spokesman for Clinton did not offer comment. Mueller's spokesman, Peter Carr, declined
to answer questions. As did McCabe.
The FBI had three reasons for choosing Deripaska for a mission worthy of a spy novel. First, his aluminum empire had business
in Iran. Second, the FBI wanted a foreigner to fund the operation because spending money in Iran might violate U.S. sanctions and
other laws. Third, agents knew Deripaska had been banished since 2006 from the United States by State over reports he had ties to
organized crime and other nefarious activities. He denies the allegations, and nothing was ever proven in court.
The FBI rewarded Deripaska for his help. In fall 2009, according to U.S. entry records, Deripaska visited Washington on a rare
law enforcement parole visa. And since 2011, he has been granted entry at least eight times on a diplomatic passport, even though
he doesn't work for the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Former FBI officials confirm they arranged the access.
Deripaska said in a statement through Adam Waldman, his American lawyer, that FBI agents told him State's reasons for blocking
his U.S. visa were "merely a pretext."
"The FBI said they had undertaken a careful background check, and if there was any validity to the State Department smears, they
would not have reached out to me for assistance," the Russian said.
Deripaska once hired Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska
sued Manafort, alleging he stole money.
Mueller's indictment of Manafort makes no mention of Deripaska, even though prosecutors have evidence that Manafort
contemplated inviting his old Russian client for a 2016 Trump campaign briefing. Deripaska said he never got the invite and investigators
have found no evidence it occurred. There's no public evidence Deripaska had anything to do with election meddling.
Deripaska also appears to be one of the first Russians the FBI asked for help when it began investigating the now-infamous Fusion
GPS "Steele Dossier." Waldman, his American lawyer until the sanctions hit, gave me a detailed account, some of which U.S. officials
confirm separately.
Two months before Trump was elected president, Deripaska was in New York as part of Russia's United Nations delegation when three
FBI agents awakened him in his home; at least one agent had worked with Deripaska on the aborted effort to rescue Levinson. During
an hour-long visit, the agents posited a theory that Trump's campaign was secretly colluding with Russia to hijack the U.S. election.
"Deripaska laughed but realized, despite the joviality, that they were serious," the lawyer said. "So he told them in his informed
opinion the idea they were proposing was false. 'You are trying to create something out of nothing,' he told them." The agents left
though the FBI sought more information in 2017 from the Russian, sources tell me. Waldman declined to say if Deripaska has been in
contact with the FBI since Sept, 2016.
So why care about some banished Russian oligarch's account now?
Two reasons.
First, as the FBI prepared to get authority to surveil figures on Trump's campaign team, did it disclose to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court that one of its past Russian sources waived them off the notion of Trump-Russia collusion?
Second, the U.S. government in April imposed sanctions on Deripaska, one of several prominent Russians targeted to punish
Vladimir Putin -- using the same sort of allegations that State used from 2006 to 2009. Yet, between those two episodes, Deripaska
seemed good enough for the FBI to ask him to fund that multimillion-dollar rescue mission. And to seek his help on a sensitive political
investigation. And to allow him into the country eight times.
I was alerted to Deripaska's past FBI relationship by U.S. officials who wondered whether the Russian's conspicuous absence from
Mueller's indictments might be related to his FBI work.
They aren't the only ones.
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told me he believes Mueller has a conflict of interest because his FBI previously accepted
financial help from a Russian that is, at the very least, a witness in the current probe.
"The real question becomes whether it was proper to leave [Deripaska] out of the Manafort indictment, and whether that omission
was to avoid the kind of transparency that is really required by the law," Dershowitz said.
Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department lawyer and longtime ethics watchdog, told me a "far more significant issue"
is whether the earlier FBI operation was even legal: "It's possible the bureau's arrangement with Mr. Deripaska violated the Antideficiency
Act, which prohibits the government from accepting voluntary services."
George Washington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley agreed: "If the operation with Deripaska contravened
federal law, this figure could be viewed as a potential embarrassment for Mueller. The question is whether he could implicate Mueller
in an impropriety."
Now that sources have unmasked the Deripaska story, time will tell whether the courts, Justice, Congress or a defendant formally
questions if Mueller is conflicted.
In the meantime, the episode highlights an oft-forgotten truism: The cat-and-mouse maneuvers between Moscow and Washington are
often portrayed in black-and-white terms. But the truth is, the relationship is enveloped in many shades of gray.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence
failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous
cases of political corruption. He is The Hill's executive vice president for video.
WASHINGTON -- Saying that their investigation indicated her involvement in election interference went deeper than
previously believed, the FBI revealed Thursday that Russian agent Maria Butina traded sex in exchange for all 62,984,828 votes Donald
Trump received for president in 2016. "Our inquiry into Ms. Butina
WASHINGTON -- Suffering yet another unexpected setback during his ongoing investigation into foreign collusion with the Trump
campaign, Special Counsel Robert Mueller scrambled Friday to contain the damage to his documents after spilling an entire Grape Crush
Big Gulp all over his Russia evidence. "No, no, no! No! Aw,
"... By Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
Grappling with the shock of Donald Trump's election victory, most analysts focus on his
appeal to those in the United States who feel left behind, wish to retrieve a lost social
order, and sought to rebuke establishment politicians who do not serve their interests. In this
respect, the recent American revolt echoes the shock of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom,
but it is of far greater significance because it promises to reshape the entire global order,
and the complaisant forms of thought that accompanied it.
Ideas played an important role in creating the conditions that produced Brexit and Trump.
The 'social sciences' -- especially economics -- legitimated a set of ideas about the economy
that were aggressively peddled and became the conventional wisdom in the policies of mainstream
political parties, to the extent that the central theme of the age came to be that there was no
alternative. The victory of these ideas in politics in turn strengthened the iron-handed
enforcers of the same ideas in academic orthodoxy.
It is never clear whether ideas or interests are the prime mover in shaping historical
events, but only ideas and interests together can sustain a ruling consensus for a lengthy
interval, such as the historic period of financialization and globalization running over the
last 35 years. The role of economics in furnishing the now-rebuked narratives that have reigned
for decades in mainstream political parties can be seen in three areas.
First, there is globalization as we knew it. Mainstream economics championed
corporate-friendly trade and investment agreements to increase prosperity, and provided the
intellectual framework for multilateral trade agreements. Economics made the case for such
agreements, generally rejecting concerns over labor and environmental standards and giving
short shrift to the effects of globalization in weakening the bargaining power of workers or
altogether displacing them; to the need for compensatory measures to aid those displaced; and
more generally to measures to ensure that the benefits of growth were shared. For the most
part, economists casually waved aside such concerns, both in their theories and in their policy
recommendations, treating these matters as either insignificant or as being in the jurisdiction
of politicians. Still less attention was paid to crafting an alternate form of globalization,
or to identifying bases for national economic policies taking a less passive view of
comparative advantage and instead aiming to create it.
Second, there is financialization, which led to increasing disconnection between stock
market performance and the real economy, with large rewards going to firms that undertook asset
stripping, outsourcing, and offshoring. The combination of globalization and financialization
produced a new plutocratic class of owners, managers and those who serviced them in global
cities, alongside gentrification of those cities, proleterianization and lumpenization of
suburbs, and growing insecurity and casualization of employment for the bulk of the middle and
working class.
Financialization also led to the near-abandonment of the 'national' industrial economy in
favor of global sourcing and sales, and a handsome financial rentier economy built on top of
it. Meanwhile, automation trends led to shedding of jobs everywhere, and threaten far more.
All of this was hardly noticed by the discipline charged with studying the economy. Indeed,
it actively provided rationales for financialization, in the form of the efficient-markets
hypothesis and related ideas; for concentration of capital through mergers and acquisitions in
the form of contestable-markets theory; for the gentrification of the city through attacks on
rent control and other urban policies; for remaking of labor markets through the idea that
unemployment was primarily a reflection of voluntary leisure preferences, etc. The mainstream
political parties, including those historically representing the working and middle classes, in
thrall to the 'scientific' sheen of market fetishism, gambled that they could redistribute a
share of the promised gains and thus embraced policies the effect of which was ultimately to
abandon and to antagonize a large section of their electorate.
Third, there is the push for austerity, a recurrent trope of the 'neoliberal' era which,
although not favored by all, has played an important role in creating conditions for the rise
of popular movements demanding a more expansionary fiscal stance (though they can paradoxically
simultaneously disdain taxation, as with Trumpism). The often faulty intellectual case made by
many mainstream economists for central bank independence, inflation targeting, debt
sustainability thresholds, the distortive character of taxation and the superiority of private
provision of services including for health, education and welfare, have helped to support
antagonism to governmental activity. Within this perspective, there is limited room for fiscal
or even monetary stimulus, or for any direct governmental role in service provision, even in
the form of productivity-enhancing investments. It is only the failure fully to overcome the
shipwreck of 2008 that has caused some cracks in the edifice.
The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization. The system depended not merely on actors having the specific interests
attributed to them, but in believing in the theory that said that they did. [This is one of the
reasons that Trumpism has generated confusion among economic actors, even as his victory
produced an early bout of stock-market euphoria. It does not rebuke neoliberalism so much as
replace it with its own heretical version, bastard neoliberalism, an orientation without a
theory, whose tale has yet to be written.]
Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it's the idea that a
package of immigration restrictions and corporate tax cuts[1] will make workers better off by
reducing competition from migrants and increasing labor demand from corporations. The second
part of this claim has been pretty thoroughly demolished, so I want to look mainly at the
first. However, as we will see, the corporate tax cuts remain central to the argument.
Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it's the idea that a
package of immigration restrictions and corporate tax cuts[1] will make workers better off
by reducing competition from migrants and increasing labor demand from corporations.
The emergence of Trumpism signifies deepening of the ideological crisis for the
neoliberalism. Neoclassical economics fell like a house of cards. IMHO Trumpism can be viewed
as a kind of "national neoliberalism" which presuppose rejection of three dogmas of "classic
neoliberalism":
1. Rejection of neoliberal globalization including, but not limited to, free movement
of labor. Attempt to protect domestic industries via tariff barriers.
2. Rejection of excessive financialization and primacy of financial oligarchy.
Restoration of the status of manufacturing, and "traditional capitalists" status in
comparison with financial oligarchy.
3. Rejection of austerity. An attempt to fight "secular stagnation" via Military
Keysianism.
Trumpism sent "Chicago school" line of thinking to the dustbin of history. It exposed
neoliberal economists as agents of financial oligarchy and "Enemy of the American People"
(famous Trump phase about neoliberal MSM).
It is never clear whether ideas or interests are the prime mover in shaping historical
events, but only ideas and interests together can sustain a ruling consensus for a lengthy
interval, such as the historic period of financialization and globalization running over
the last 35 years. The role of economics in furnishing the now-rebuked narratives that have
reigned for decades in mainstream political parties can be seen in three areas.
First, there is globalization as we knew it. Mainstream economics championed
corporate-friendly trade and investment agreements to increase prosperity, and provided the
intellectual framework for multilateral trade agreements. ...
Second, there is financialization, which led to increasing disconnection between stock
market performance and the real economy, with large rewards going to firms that undertook
asset stripping, outsourcing, and offshoring. The combination of globalization and
financialization produced a new plutocratic class of owners, managers and those who
serviced them in global cities, alongside gentrification of those cities,
proletarianization and lumpenization of suburbs, and growing insecurity and casualization
of employment for the bulk of the middle and working class.
Financialization also led to the near-abandonment of the 'national' industrial economy
in favor of global sourcing and sales, and a handsome financial rentier economy built on
top of it. Meanwhile, automation trends led to shedding of jobs everywhere, and threaten
far more.
All of this was hardly noticed by the discipline charged with studying the economy.
Indeed, it actively provided rationales for financialization, in the form of the
efficient-markets hypothesis and related ideas; for concentration of capital through
mergers and acquisitions in the form of contestable-markets theory; for the gentrification
of the city through attacks on rent control and other urban policies; for remaking of labor
markets through the idea that unemployment was primarily a reflection of voluntary leisure
preferences, etc. The mainstream political parties, including those historically
representing the working and middle classes, in thrall to the 'scientific' sheen of market
fetishism, gambled that they could redistribute a share of the promised gains and thus
embraced policies the effect of which was ultimately to abandon and to antagonize a large
section of their electorate.
Third, there is the push for austerity, a recurrent trope of the 'neoliberal' era which,
although not favored by all, has played an important role in creating conditions for the
rise of popular movements demanding a more expansionary fiscal stance (though they can
paradoxically simultaneously disdain taxation, as with Trumpism). The often faulty
intellectual case made by many mainstream economists for central bank independence,
inflation targeting, debt sustainability thresholds, the distortive character of taxation
and the superiority of private provision of services including for health, education and
welfare, have helped to support antagonism to governmental activity. Within this
perspective, there is limited room for fiscal or even monetary stimulus, or for any direct
governmental role in service provision, even in the form of productivity-enhancing
investments. It is only the failure fully to overcome the shipwreck of 2008 that has caused
some cracks in the edifice.
The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization. The system depended not merely on actors having the specific interests
attributed to them, but in believing in the theory that said that they did. [This is one of
the reasons that Trumpism has generated confusion among economic actors, even as his
victory produced an early bout of stock-market euphoria. It does not rebuke neoliberalism
so much as replace it with its own heretical version, bastard neoliberalism, an orientation
without a theory, whose tale has yet to be written.]
Finally, interpretations of politics were too restrictive, conceptualizing citizens'
political choices as based on instrumental and usually economic calculations, while
indulging in a wishful account of their actual conditions -- for instance, focusing on low
measured unemployment, but ignoring measures of distress and insecurity, or the indignity
of living in hollowed-out communities.
Mainstream accounts of politics recognized the role of identities in the form of wooden
theories of group mobilization or of demands for representation. However, the psychological
and charismatic elements, which can give rise to moments of 'phase transition' in politics,
were altogether neglected, and the role of social media and other new methods in politics
hardly registered. As new political movements (such as the Tea Party and Trumpism in the
U.S.) emerged across the world, these were deemed 'populist' -- both an admission of the
analysts' lack of explanation, and a token of disdain. The essential feature of such
movements -- the obscurantism that allows them to offer many things to many people,
inconsistently and unaccountably, while serving some interests more than others -- was
little explored. The failures can be piled one upon the other. No amount of quantitative
data provided by polling, 'big data', or other techniques comprehended what might be
captured through open-eyed experiential narratives. It is evident that there is a need for
forms of understanding that can comprehend the currents within the human person, and go
beyond shallow empiricism. Mainstream social science has offered few if any resources to
understand, let alone challenge, illiberal majoritarianism, now a world-remaking
phenomenon.
Trump attacked former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the man at the center of the Trump dossier scandal, who
had extensive contacts with the Department of Justice's former #4 ranked official, before and after the FBI opened its Trump-Russia
probe in the summer of 2016,
according to new emails
recently turned over to Congressional investigators.
That official, Bruce Ohr, was
demoted twice
after the DOJ's Inspector General discovered that he lied about his involvement with opposition research firm Fusion
GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson - who employed Steele. Ohr's CIA-linked wife, Nellie, was also
employed by Fusion
as part of the firm's anti-Trump efforts, and had ongoing communications with the ex-UK spy, Christopher Steele
as well, suggesting that Steele was much closer to the Obama administration than previously disclosed, and his DOJ contact Bruce
Ohr reported directly to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates - who approved at least one of the FISA warrants to surveil Trump campaign
aide Carter Page.
"The big story that the Fake News Media refuses to report is lowlife Christopher Steele's many meetings with Deputy A.G. Bruce
Ohr and his beautiful wife, Nelly. It was Fusion GPS that hired Steele to write the phony & discredited Dossier, paid for by Crooked
Hillary & the DNC.... " Trump tweeted.
"...Do you believe Nelly worked for Fusion and her husband STILL WORKS FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF "JUSTICE." I have never seen anything
so Rigged in my life. Our A.G. is scared stiff and Missing in Action. It is all starting to be revealed - not pretty. IG Report soon?
Witch Hunt!"
Trump's latest broadside on Steel and Ohr was likely prompted by speculation that the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee is preparping subpoenas for people connected to the controversial Steele dossier. As The Hill
reported earlier
this week
, Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is said to be preparing subpoenas for Bruce Ohr, his wife Nellie Ohr and Fusion GPS
co-founder Glenn Simpson.
By escalating his all too public demands on AG Sessions, Trump is risking further scrutiny by Robert Mueller, who is
already
poring over Trump's tweets
to solidify his Obstruction of justice case, while inviting a whole new set of contradictory statements
by his newest attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who most recently said that Trump would be willing to sit down with Mueller if two specifics
topics are not discussed:
Why Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
What Trump said to Comey about the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Of course, by continuing his periodic twitter attacks on Sessions, Trump makes it prohibitively difficult for Mueller to agree
to those terms. Tags
Multiline Utilities - NEC
It's hard to say what's really going on behind the scenes but you'd think at some point soon that a huge and undeniable truth-bomb
is revealed.
Here's a sick thought...is Session's position as Trump's AG the "insurance policy" (((they))) had in place?
If Session's isn't part of Trump's plan then he'll be gone soon enough. If Trump endlessly tolerates Session's inactivity and
merely berates him periodically (just for optics) then we'll know Sessions is clandestinely working behind the scenes (w/HUBER)
and this movie starts to finally get interesting.
Obama, Hillary & Co. will pay for their attempted/failed treason. But will Session's be the AG that see's it through?
He's just trying to mess with your head and make you confused. That's what he does.
"Hit it from every angle. Open multiple fronts on your enemy. He must be confused, and feel besieged on every side."- Roger
Stone's Rules (the guy who got trump elected.)
What you don't realize is WE the people are his "enemy" in that tactic above. It's gaslighting.
Here's another Stone rule
"Always praise 'em before you hit 'em."
"Politics isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake."
"Unless you can fake sincerity, you'll get nowhere in this business"
MetaMussolini Our golfing warthog president has picked a cabinet of semi-human dirty people who are intellectually corrupt gangsters. Trump makes worse the sorrows of the middle class.
This confirms what we've been hearing on the alt news. Sessions isn't doing his job and the criminals will get a pass. Mr.
Sessions, you may not agree with the President and may feel you're acting honorably but that's a problem. You were put there to
round up the criminals (your former esteemed colleagues) and didn't follow through on your duties. Step aside and let someone
step up who isn't timid and let's git 'er done. Of course, that's assuming any of this was real to begin with and I have serious
doubts.
I think it goes a lot deeper than Hillary, Obama, or any intel agencies. All the way up to the globalist western oligarchs who
are scared shitless of losing control and allowing a populist movement to fuck up their racketts.
Orders come down the pike from
the oligarchs through the politicans [ who's campaigns cannot be funded without the oligarchs, and who nod is needed to be accepted
by either of the two parties ] and their appointed intelligentce agents, down through the media, through the special interest groups
to the idiot at home watching CNN.
If Session's isn't part of Trump's plan then he'll be gone soon enough. If Trump endlessly tolerates Session's inactivity
and merely berates him periodically (just for optics) then we'll know Sessions is clandestinely working behind the scenes (w/HUBER)
and this movie starts to finally get interesting.
Do you think that there are a lot of public servants in Washington DC
who practice rule of law, hold themselves to higher ideals, are
interested in promoting and spreading liberty? Tell me about them.
Most Reps are just talking heads, that's all they do, appear before
cameras looking like they are accomplishing shit. Same with Sessions,
except now he's in a appointed position, where there's actual things
to be accomplished besides finding the next donor to sell out to. But
it's not called the swamp for nothing. These law abiding freedom
loving so called conservatives we've been voting for are a joke, no
significant gains, only slightly less aggressive rate of
deterioration into a bigger state. And Session fits into that club
nicely. The conservative club is the joke. I'm merely pointing it
out. I'd like to be wrong, but I see no evidence of it. We're way
past the tipping point, too many of us are in on the take, in one way
or another, to go back, and by design.
Amen! I heard a sound clip of Sessions giving a speech on XM 125 a few
days ago. The man can barely talk and when he does talk he sounds like a
moron. A real life Forest Gump. He sounds retarded. Bad choice on the
part of Trump.
ADF: Alliance Defending Freedom and is made of Christians. Because of
that it is a hate group. The fucking commies will never stop. This PC
crap that everything is hate speech and everything is racist is
nonsense. I'm sick of it, quite frankly. Want to be racist? Go ahead.
Want to say something hateful or stupid? Go ahead. Let the leftists
freak out. I have had enough of their caterwauling!
This is awesome: "lowlife Christopher Steele's many meetings with Deputy A.G.
Bruce Ohr and his beautiful wife, Nelly." If you have seen pics of Nelly,
well, she isn't beautiful. Her being married to Ohr is weird. Beyond weird.
These two things do not go together!
Thats interesting because waldman inserted himself with assange and did
nine visits..the purpuse of that was to establish a mythical Russian
bridge to Assange that would be used against him by Mueller who was
exposed workin on Oleg Matter with the FBI . Oleg powed 25 M of own
money..and never got his visa. Chris steele was working to Get Oleg his
visa..Walman represented steele assange and Oleg...
He completed his
mission..on assange then sold him down the river turning the immunity
deal over to Warner...
Knowing full well Warner Comey and deepstate would trash it.
Warner is King of the Snakes..Adam was just doing what was best for
his mafioso boss Olegs business. Oleg and FBI are joined at the hip.
Sessions was the insurance. He screened everyone during the transition
including halper, who was then pushed aggressively by Navarro... Its ironic
that when paige , the patsy, went to the Cambridge meeting paid by Halpers
connection.. Paige took it cuz no body wanted to go so he volunteered.. the
guest speakers were Madelinne Albright of the Atlantic Council and Vin Weber
disgraced congressman whose PR firm was scrutinized by Mueller.
Albright went to emphasize what a threat Trump and the populist movement
was and how important it was to get on the transition team. No telling how
many others Sessions let thru. Make no mistake.. he will be implicated in
this. Trump knows what a betrayal this really was.
"... By Sanjay Reddy, Associate Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website ..."
"... Finally, interpretations of politics were too restrictive, conceptualizing citizens' political choices as based on instrumental and usually economic calculations, while indulging in a wishful account of their actual conditions -- for instance, focusing on low measured unemployment, but ignoring measures of distress and insecurity, or the indignity of living in hollowed-out communities. ..."
"... Welcome to the "New World Economic Order;" which looks suspiciously like Dickensian Predatory Capitalism. ..."
"... Just one caveat: Neoliberalism is not really market-fetishism, unless fetishism is understood as fake devotion. Neoliberalism is a State ideology of the economy, its central tenet being that the State must directly help the rich, the poor will be better off as a by-product. ..."
"... The Academy are direct and indirect employees of the State. The Ivy League are direct and indirect employees of plutocrats (thru the university endowment). The State officials are plutocrats or more commonly indirect employees of the plutocrats. What is not to like? How can the Academy be reformed, when it has been oligarchic since Plato (an oligarch) invented it the first Rand Corporation ..."
"... Steve Keen said similarly in Forbes – that once you offshore an industry it is too expensive to reinstall, and that some old factory for making furnaces cannot be retooled to make textiles, etc. even tho' you might have a comparative advantage for doing textiles – sounds like corporate raiding and big time looting more and more because once you devastate an industry you really cannot do anything economically with those facilities and those workers. ..."
"... Another factor in maintaining manufacturing in the USA is what is referred to as furthering the "next bench syndrome". This is where one is made aware of a manufacturing problem to solve due to proximity to the factory floor, and the solution leads to new profitiable products that can be used both inside/outside the original factory. ..."
"... Financialization leads to asset bubbles and deindustrialization. It hollows out industries. When money/credit are created in ever increasing quantity, the makeup of how we "work" shifts from goods producing to "finance". ..."
"... Get ready for real kleptocracy. Breitbart obscurantism + Trump/Bannon misdirection = turkeys vote for thanksgiving. ..."
"... TINA was definitely an ideology – an idea backed by interest. They were making fun of Thatcherism last nite on France 24 because it had been so devastating and now one of the candidates in France is talking her old trash again. ..."
"... "The Anti-Corn Law League was a successful political movement in Great Britain aimed at the abolition of the unpopular Corn Laws, which protected landowners' interests by levying taxes on imported wheat, thus raising the price of bread at a time when factory-owners were trying to cut wages to be internationally competitive." ..."
Grappling with the shock of Donald Trump's election victory, most analysts focus on his
appeal to those in the United States who feel left behind, wish to retrieve a lost social
order, and sought to rebuke establishment politicians who do not serve their interests. In this
respect, the recent American revolt echoes the shock of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom,
but it is of far greater significance because it promises to reshape the entire global order,
and the complaisant forms of thought that accompanied it.
Ideas played an important role in creating the conditions that produced Brexit and Trump.
The 'social sciences' -- especially economics -- legitimated a set of ideas about the economy
that were aggressively peddled and became the conventional wisdom in the policies of mainstream
political parties, to the extent that the central theme of the age came to be that there was no
alternative. The victory of these ideas in politics in turn strengthened the iron-handed
enforcers of the same ideas in academic orthodoxy.
It is never clear whether ideas or interests are the prime mover in shaping historical
events, but only ideas and interests together can sustain a ruling consensus for a lengthy
interval, such as the historic period of financialization and globalization running over the
last 35 years. The role of economics in furnishing the now-rebuked narratives that have reigned
for decades in mainstream political parties can be seen in three areas.
First, there is globalization as we knew it. Mainstream economics championed
corporate-friendly trade and investment agreements to increase prosperity, and provided the
intellectual framework for multilateral trade agreements. Economics made the case for such
agreements, generally rejecting concerns over labor and environmental standards and giving
short shrift to the effects of globalization in weakening the bargaining power of workers or
altogether displacing them; to the need for compensatory measures to aid those displaced; and
more generally to measures to ensure that the benefits of growth were shared. For the most
part, economists casually waved aside such concerns, both in their theories and in their policy
recommendations, treating these matters as either insignificant or as being in the jurisdiction
of politicians. Still less attention was paid to crafting an alternate form of globalization,
or to identifying bases for national economic policies taking a less passive view of
comparative advantage and instead aiming to create it.
Second, there is financialization, which led to increasing disconnection between stock
market performance and the real economy, with large rewards going to firms that undertook asset
stripping, outsourcing, and offshoring. The combination of globalization and financialization
produced a new plutocratic class of owners, managers and those who serviced them in global
cities, alongside gentrification of those cities, proleterianization and lumpenization of
suburbs, and growing insecurity and casualization of employment for the bulk of the middle and
working class.
Financialization also led to the near-abandonment of the 'national' industrial economy in
favor of global sourcing and sales, and a handsome financial rentier economy built on top of
it. Meanwhile, automation trends led to shedding of jobs everywhere, and threaten far more.
All of this was hardly noticed by the discipline charged with studying the economy. Indeed,
it actively provided rationales for financialization, in the form of the efficient-markets
hypothesis and related ideas; for concentration of capital through mergers and acquisitions in
the form of contestable-markets theory; for the gentrification of the city through attacks on
rent control and other urban policies; for remaking of labor markets through the idea that
unemployment was primarily a reflection of voluntary leisure preferences, etc. The mainstream
political parties, including those historically representing the working and middle classes, in
thrall to the 'scientific' sheen of market fetishism, gambled that they could redistribute a
share of the promised gains and thus embraced policies the effect of which was ultimately to
abandon and to antagonize a large section of their electorate.
Third, there is the push for austerity, a recurrent trope of the 'neoliberal' era which,
although not favored by all, has played an important role in creating conditions for the rise
of popular movements demanding a more expansionary fiscal stance (though they can paradoxically
simultaneously disdain taxation, as with Trumpism). The often faulty intellectual case made by
many mainstream economists for central bank independence, inflation targeting, debt
sustainability thresholds, the distortive character of taxation and the superiority of private
provision of services including for health, education and welfare, have helped to support
antagonism to governmental activity. Within this perspective, there is limited room for fiscal
or even monetary stimulus, or for any direct governmental role in service provision, even in
the form of productivity-enhancing investments. It is only the failure fully to overcome the
shipwreck of 2008 that has caused some cracks in the edifice.
The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization. The system depended not merely on actors having the specific interests
attributed to them, but in believing in the theory that said that they did. [This is one of the
reasons that Trumpism has generated confusion among economic actors, even as his victory
produced an early bout of stock-market euphoria. It does not rebuke neoliberalism so much as
replace it with its own heretical version, bastard neoliberalism, an orientation without a
theory, whose tale has yet to be written.]
Finally, interpretations of politics were too restrictive, conceptualizing citizens'
political choices as based on instrumental and usually economic calculations, while indulging
in a wishful account of their actual conditions -- for instance, focusing on low measured
unemployment, but ignoring measures of distress and insecurity, or the indignity of living in
hollowed-out communities.
Mainstream accounts of politics recognized the role of identities in the form of wooden
theories of group mobilization or of demands for representation. However, the psychological and
charismatic elements, which can give rise to moments of 'phase transition' in politics, were
altogether neglected, and the role of social media and other new methods in politics hardly
registered. As new political movements (such as the Tea Party and Trumpism in the U.S.) emerged
across the world, these were deemed 'populist' -- both an admission of the analysts' lack of
explanation, and a token of disdain. The essential feature of such movements -- the
obscurantism that allows them to offer many things to many people, inconsistently and
unaccountably, while serving some interests more than others -- was little explored. The
failures can be piled one upon the other. No amount of quantitative data provided by polling,
'big data', or other techniques comprehended what might be captured through open-eyed
experiential narratives. It is evident that there is a need for forms of understanding that can
comprehend the currents within the human person, and go beyond shallow empiricism. Mainstream
social science has offered few if any resources to understand, let alone challenge, illiberal
majoritarianism, now a world-remaking phenomenon.
Trumpism is a crisis for the most prestigious methods of understanding economic and social
life, ennobled and enthroned by the metropolitan academy of the last third of a century. It has
caused mainstream 'social science' to fall like a house of cards. It can only save itself
through comprehensive reinvention, from the ground up.
You are onto something here. I always wondered if the suppression of wages would lead to a
decline in the population of people even willing to learn a task due to a perceived lack of
incentive to make the effort. This would work alongside a seldom mentioned fact; the limits
to the supply of appropriately skilled "foreigners" to perform a task.
The resultant mix must
be generating an industry of active recruiters in foreign lands for in demand, for less,
skill sets. I would lay money on the bet that eventually, things will reach the point where
criminal activities make more sense than the miserable jobs on offer.
"I always wondered if the suppression of wages would lead to a decline in the population
of people even willing to learn a task due to a perceived lack of incentive to make the
effort."
Just from what I've seen & heard I'm pretty sure that's already happened with CNC
machinists, and it's happening with CDLs, and starting to happen with CNAs.
"I'm pretty sure that's happened with CNC machinists."
One of my neighbours is a CNC machinist. He is presently working "free lance" because the
company he was associated with was bought by a Taiwanese concern and all the skilled labour,
previously in house, was out sourced. After a couple of years of near disasterous
"production," the company re-shored the more technical work, but as sub contract labour.
Now
Jack receives regularly spaced "jobs" from the company to do what was previously done in
house. Naturally, now Jack and his fellow "free tradesmen" have to supply all the incidental
work involved, such as quarterly taxes, insurance if any, self supplied "workers comp," of a
sort, and most importantly, the actual machinery to do the work. Even a used CNC machine is a
pretty big investment for an individual.
Jack's CNC machine is almost as big as a Volkswagen
Beetle. Jack was "lucky" insofar as he was already trained to do this work. Others needs rely
on the support of small businesses in this "Engineering Trade," or go into debt to learn the
process at a technical college. Then, as Jack has remarked, there is no set schedule nor
guaranteed contract. The ultimate "craps shoot."
Welcome to the "New World Economic Order;" which looks suspiciously like Dickensian Predatory
Capitalism.
Sounds like a classic supply/demand curve: the lower the price, the lower the supply and
the greater the demand. As many have noted – perhaps higher wages would increase the
number of job applicants.
However, skilled workers aren't widgets – they need to be trained. Companies don't
want to invest in training, and students don't want to take out all those student loans
without some assurance that there'll be a job which pays enough to pay off the loans and
still have enough left over to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. Thus,
it takes time to bring more skilled workers on-line, and by then, the demand may have
evaporated.
Public schools investing in training workers would help – but that would mean
raising taxes to pay for them – and Grover would get angry.
I think some states are seeing a shortage of teachers because of the way they've demonized
the teaching profession and cut wages for the last fifteen years.
That was front page on the Wall St Journal Europe a couple days ago – a jaw-drop
moment. The voice of business effectively calling for a larger pool of voiceless dirt-cheap
laborers to dismantle the social contract. Clearly the management class has no fear of
suffering consequences, like maybe even higher crime rates (their native victims not the
illegals the perps), dystopic civics, encapsulation, culture = branding. are those
undocumented roofers in code with that left over sealing? you bet! management has got them by
the cajones.
Important to note there's quite a lot of Europeans who stay illegally in the US by
entering on the visa waiver program as tourists and simply overstaying. Irish and Eastern
Europeans especially. If you're in the Northeast it's common to see Irishmen working
maintenance jobs at buildings here, or as bartenders or other cash jobs – 90% are going
to be out of status. But this issue gets almost zero media attention.
Citizen registration (cr) would effectively end illegal immigration in the US. Once you
get past the immigration control at the airport you are in. access to relevant services is
possible without having to prove citizenship/legality. It is insane and/or perversely clever
that illegals can get drivers licenses, ss#s, use dumps, open bank accounts, receive water
and electrical services, even pay taxes without having to out themselves.
The only barrier is
at the border and Trump is gonna make it really big! hahaha.
To receive any municipal service, including registering to vote, it should be necessary to be
registered at city hall, anytime you change address you have to renew your registration,
standard practice in eur social democracies.
The thing to do is try to push the actual numbers of people trying to immigrate here down,
by ceasing to ruin their home countries. No one's ever even tried that.
You are on the right path Tim.
Any of you notice this shift in economic possibilities from Russia?
Excerpt:
The Stolypin Group
The third group represented was the one most Western observers ridiculed and dismissed,
with the US Pentagon-linked Stratfor referring to them as a "strange collective." I have
personally met and talked with them and they are hardly strange to anyone with a clear moral
mind.
This is the group which after two months has emerged with the mandate from Vladimir Putin
to lay out their plans to boost growth again in Russia.
The group is in essence followers of what the great almost-forgotten 19th Century German
economist, Friedrich List, would call "national economy" strategies. List's national economy
historical-based approach was in direct counter-position to the then-dominant British Adam
Smith free trade school.
Can we find some common ground in this demographic driven trade problem?
De`tante (Steady State) trade, lack of traditional "growth" yet more abundance and sanity?
Can we defeat demographic trends with a better monetary system? There is plenty of need, is
that not unfulfilled demand?
We see massive malinvestment and over capacity right now, so some common sense like List
and George sounds good to me.
I thought it's not possible to get a driver's license without a green card or US
citizenship since they changed the laws after 9/11. If this is true, one cannot get a SS No.,
open a bank a/c etc. Mexicans and others who cross the border w/o papers are unable to open a
bank a/c and therefore pay big fees to Amex for money orders.
Not all states adopted the OpenID law which requires this, and the federal government cannot impose it since it imposes a
financial cost on the states without compensating benefit. There are federal punishments for not adopting it, but states are
fighting it.
In my state you need legal presence docs and proof of residence in the state, at least a
student visa for example, to get a drivers license. And then the info is checked against the
federal govt Save request.
I think the post office and drug stores sell money orders without id? Certainly without
perm res status.
I think bank accounts can be opened at least at some banks with a foreign passport and
maybe an itin number.
I'm told by my father that in Berkely Springs, West Virginia, men can get haircuts for as
little as $1.75. Perhaps these are eastern European barbers? More likely it is simply a
product of the crushing desperation we see in our broken economy. But hey, unemployment is
under 5% so everything's fine, right? The dismal science indeed.
Just one caveat: Neoliberalism is not really market-fetishism, unless fetishism is
understood as fake devotion. Neoliberalism is a State ideology of the economy, its central
tenet being that the State must directly help the rich, the poor will be better off as a
by-product.
So if the push of the populace is strong enough, a new State ideology of the economy (aka
mainstream economic dogma) would develop around the concepts of Self-suficiency (as opposed
to Globalization), Industrialism (as opposed to Financialization), and Stimulus (as opposed
to Austerity). Probably MMT has something to say about the latter, but what about
Self-sufficiency and Industrialism?
its central tenet being that the State must directly help the rich, the poor will be
better off as a by-product. Ruben
Yes, government-subsidized* private credit creation being a (the?) prime example of
this.
*e.g. forcing the poorer to lend (a deposit is legally a loan) to banks to lower the
borrowing costs of the more so-called creditworthy, the richer, or else be limited to dealing
with unsafe, inconvenient physical fiat, cash.
The Academy are direct and indirect employees of the State. The Ivy League are direct and
indirect employees of plutocrats (thru the university endowment). The State officials are
plutocrats or more commonly indirect employees of the plutocrats. What is not to like? How
can the Academy be reformed, when it has been oligarchic since Plato (an oligarch) invented
it the first Rand Corporation
Tell me where you want to go and I'll provide the selective facts and the subjective
interpretation of those facts to reach the desired conclusions = Economists
-- - or merely arbitrarily change the cell definitions in excel as Harvard economists
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
As early as 1967 Greenspan was well known as an academic whore and a Rockefeller Puppet
which now is a vast army of dial up opinions.
"Ideas played an important role in creating the conditions that produced Brexit and Trump.
The 'social sciences' -- especially economics -- legitimated a set of ideas about the economy
that were aggressively peddled and became the conventional wisdom in the policies of
mainstream political parties, to the extent that the central theme of the age came to be that
there was no alternative. The victory of these ideas in politics in turn strengthened the
iron-handed enforcers of the same ideas in academic orthodoxy."
Yesterday I posted a link from Krugman saying that manufacturing CANNOT be restored in the
US.
Not that laws, rules, trade agreements make it difficult, but that something akin to the
"arrow of time" or entropy prevents it – " that there was no alternative." Which is why
I so vehemently disagree with the man. 1st, economics is not a physical science. 2nd, the
loss of manufacturing in this country is due to man made conventions. Men made the rules, men
can unmake the rules.
Just like prohibition was thought to be a good idea, but with the passage of time, it was
revealed that whatever benefits arise of not drinking, it is more than offset by the
setbacks.
I used to believe in "free trade" – but a thing called reality whacked me upside the
head and disabused me of the notion. Whether GDP is going up fast enough or not, there is
overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of GDP is not distributed to the 90% of the
members of society.
Like a lot of things, we did the experiment – it doesn't work, but a few who gain
advantage by that state of affairs want it to continue. The emperor has been exposed as
having no clothes, and once you see the nakedness, you can't unsee it.
of course you could institute that all manufacturng used 1960s technology – or maybe
even 1860s, that would generate even more jobs.
short of doing that, todays higly automated factory will use about tenth of blue collar
workforce than in 1960s with the same productivity but creating much more complex
products.
I've seen reshoring happen (into compartively high labour cost country) and it created a
thousand jobs or so. the previus offshoring costed close to five or six thousands iirc.
I doubt that you'd wish for the US workers to have 10k or less annual salary –
because that is what the Chinese get (10k is about the average salary for a worker at one of
the plants making Apple gadgets, and that involves almost continuous overtime. IIRC, the
hourly rate is something like $1.80. Oh, and there's no health or social insurance).
I suggest you investigate why the UK was the birthplace of industrial revolution and the
Continent wasn't (hint – the UK labour costs were order(s) of magnitude higher than say
in France or Germany. It just didn't make sense to invest in up-front expensive capital goods
when you could get reams of very cheap labour instead).
And, in fact, the QE and ZIRP made it even worse, because before that you'd to cost the
capital at much more than labour, while now you can get money for literally nothing (assuming
you want to use it for something, like capital goods). At the same time, the companies run
locally optimal, but globally bad strategy of holding on the money, failing to recognise that
for people to spend, they have to earn first. The supply economic mantra "if you make it
cheap enough, someone will buy" fails to recognise that shopping basket of most people is
very much skewed towards food, energy and housing, leaving limited buffer for other goods
– so the "cheap enough" may have to be "free" or "near free" in the environment of
falling real wages.
But I'd be happy for you to provide examples of re-shored operations where the number of
jobs created were the same (assuming the same quality of jobs) or comparable to the number of
jobs lost by offshoring before.
I don't have US numbers, but I can give you UK ones. In 1970s, UK car manufacturing
industry employed about 500k people. That number has been steadily dropping and today it's
about 140k total between all manufacturers (you may see some sources use number as high as
750k – but that generally includes anyone who has anything to do with cars, like car
salesmen, garage staff etc. – not just car manufacturers. I don't have a reliable
comparable number for 1970, so use manufacturers only).
In 1970, UK manufactured about 2m cars, in 2014 it was about 1.6m. The loss of 400k is
almost entirely covered by the loss of commercial vehicles capacity – personal cars are
at the same level.
So, the UK car industry lost about 70% of its jobs, but only 20% of its output. And the
cars it manufactures today are mostly driveable unlike say Austin Allegro.
The situation is not that much different elsewhere. Yves run an article on Trump making US
coal "great again" – and the conclusion was the same – it will never employ the
same number of people at the same salaries.
I work in the electronics industry and had a minor observation point for some of the
outsourcing of electronics manufacturing from the USA to, primarily, Asia, starting in the
late 1980's. At first USA employees were told not to worry as only excess capacity would be built
overseas. But, that was proven to be an optimistic(?) statement, as even the managers making these
statements also disappeared.
If one looks at the value of raw electronic "ingredients" produced in Asia, for example,
Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), one can see how much capacity has been built up overseas.
Here are some numbers pulled from report I have access to:
For 2015, 26.5 billion dollars of PCB's were produced in China.
Taiwan and South Korea produce 7.8Billion and 7.3billion respectively.
Even high priced Japan produces 5.36 billion dollars of PCB's
The North American number is 2.846 billion.
China + Japan + Taiwan + South Korea +Other Asia = .51.94 billion vs 2.8 billion in North
America.
So Asia produces 18.55 x as much dollar volume of PCBs than North America (Canada +
USA)
In my simple minded labor model, when a country allows very free migration of capital
overseas, importation of foreign workers by migration or temporary visas and outsourcing of
labor by computer networks to overseas workers, it seems implausible one would argue that USA
wages would not tend lower in response.
But we have Obama and numerous economists, pushing the Free Trade mantra, via TPP, as good
for American workers.
And a further factor is the US military and State Department strive to make it safer for
American businesses to function anywhere in the world, lowering business risk while pitching
increased national security to the USA population (who bears the military cost).
It will be difficult to bring American manufacturing back, especially when the alleged
high paying white collar college jobs are pushed as the solution to USA wage stagnation.
Steve Keen said similarly in Forbes – that once you offshore an industry it is too
expensive to reinstall, and that some old factory for making furnaces cannot be retooled to
make textiles, etc. even tho' you might have a comparative advantage for doing textiles
– sounds like corporate raiding and big time looting more and more because once you
devastate an industry you really cannot do anything economically with those facilities and
those workers.
Which explains why after clever men like Mitt Romney finish with your
corporation's takeover nobody dashes in to re-up something new. Like pulling a tree out by
its roots and then expecting it to grow into some kinda shrub.
Well I like Steve Keen but he and PK are finally on the same page, where neither knows not
what the f he is talking about.
A lot of "offshoring" of the steel industry happened as the US plants themselves were
passing the "invest or wind down" point in their life. Since the US labor force was
considered intractable and foreign governments had much newer facilities the TPTB in steel
just punted on US manufacturing.
I am going to try to find a link, but there was a lot of
debate between the union and US Steel (? one of them? ) about building a continuous caster
plant in the 70's. Foreign companies had them, we didn't. I think they didn't, but the point
is the, all other things being equal, any plants of any type of manufacturing go
thru the same technological vs ageing cycle, and the US is as likely to gain "back" -- quotes
because like continuous casting, it's steelmaking but not the same as before -- an industry
as it is to have lost it in the first place. Factories like to be located where they make
sense.
And what is all this about "well they don't need anybody in manufacturing, it's all gonna
be machines now". Yeah, right. Been on a manufacturing floor lately? People have yet to be
born that are going to be working in something called "manufacturing". And if the machines
cut the work need by 10x, we may well need 10x as much stuff as long as it is the
right stuff.
Well, if we had universal heathcare and Germanic trade education, but that would require
elections not between carrot-heads and Queen Wannabes.
Because they have a skilled trade education track, and manufacturing is a respected
occupation that one can raise a family doing. Because of the high-skill labor base, Germany
can make high-margin products that the rest of the world wants to import.
From very early, all German kids are encouraged to build things and take things apart, and
they are given this opportunity even in urban areas at special "building playgrounds" that
have hammers, nails, and wood. How is a poor American kid in a housing project going to do
this? He's not, and even if he does have a clue what to do with a tool someone hands him on
the job, he won't have the deep fundamental background to use it well without a long period
of training and screwups -- the kind of period he would have already gotten through while
growing up.
American small businesses that require skilled technicians are desperate for them. We
literally cannot grow our businesses because of labor constraints.
Since I am not an economist nor a historian probably I should restrain myself, but if you
look at the history of labor relations in Germany you might notice that Bismark, not exactly
a bleeding heart, believed that it was in the nation's interest to have a healthy, well-fed,
well-educated populace. They not only made better workers, they made better soldiers. Then
from the 1890s onward Socialism was much better regarded in Germany than it ever has been in
the U.S. I speculate that there is a desire for fairness that has deeper roots in German
culture than in American culture -- which is not particularly homogenous anyway.
Nobody wants to hear this, but manufacturing profit margins, according to Bruce Greenwald
of Columbia Business School, are plummeting around the world. Globalization has hit its peak
without our recognizing the fact and without our help. Fifty years from now, most of the
things we buy will be made within fifty miles of our homes. In twenty years, we won't be
admiring the German system.
I used to respect Krugman during Bush II presidency. His columns at this time looked like
on target for me. No more.
Now I view him as yet another despicable neoliberal shill. I stopped reading his columns
long ago and kind of always suspect his views as insincere and unscientific. In this
particular case the key question is about maintaining the standard of living which can be
done only if manufacturing even in robotic variant is onshored and profits from it
re-distributed in New Deal fashion. Technology is just a tool. There can be exception for it
but generally attempts to produce everything outside the US and then sell it in the USA lead
to proliferation of McJobs and lower standard of living. Creating robotic factories in the
USA might not completely reverse the damage, but might be a step in the right direction. The
nations can't exist by just flipping hamburgers for each other.
Actually there is a term that explains well behavior of people like Krugman and it has
certain predictive value as for the set of behaviors we observe from them. It is called
Lysenkoism and it is about political control of science.
Yves in her book also touched this theme of political control of science. It might be a
good time to reread it. The key ideas of "ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined
Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism " are still current.
Another factor in maintaining manufacturing in the USA is what is referred to as
furthering the "next bench syndrome". This is where one is made aware of a manufacturing problem to solve due to proximity to
the factory floor, and the solution leads to new profitiable products that can be used both
inside/outside the original factory.
This might be an improved process or an improvement in manufacturing tooling that had not
been anticipated before.
New products will be created with their profits/knowledge flowing to the country hosting
the manufacturing plants.
The USA seems to be on a path of "we can create dollars and buy anything we want from
people anywhere in the world".
Manufacturing dollars and credit rather than real goods might prove very short sighted if
dollars are no longer prized.
Perhaps the TPP, with its ISDS provisions, indicates that powerful people understand this
is coming and want additional wealth extraction methods from foreign countries.
The author mentions globalization and financialization. But what seems to be always left
out (and given a pass) in these discussions is the role of central banks and monetary
policy.
Central banking policy (always creating more money/credit) lies at the nexus of almost all
that is wrong with modern capitalism and is the lubricant and fuel that enables
financialization's endless growth.
Financialization leads to asset bubbles and deindustrialization. It hollows out
industries. When money/credit are created in ever increasing quantity, the makeup of how we
"work" shifts from goods producing to "finance".
Then through globalization, what we lack in goods, foreigners who accept our paper, seem
to provide. At least for now. In a closed system, financialization has its natural limits.
But enabled by cross-border trade, it metastasizes.
In the short run, it appears to be a virtuous circle. We print paper. They make real
stuff. They take our paper. We take their stuff. We feel very clever.
But over time, wealth inequality grows. Industries are hollowed out. The banking sector
dominates.
And then we get a populist uprising because people realize "something is wrong".
But mistakenly, they think it's globalization. Or free trade. Or capitalism. When all
along, it's just central banking. Central banks are the problem. Central bankers are the
culprits.
Yes, insofar as they create fiat for the private sector since that is obviously violation
of equal protection under the law in favor of the banks and the rich.
Otoh, all citizens, their businesses, etc. should be allowed to deal directly in their
nation's fiat in the form of account balances at the central bank or equivalent and not be
limited to unsafe, inconvenient physical fiat, a.k.a. cash.
Central banks are part of the problem, but not because any of the things you say. Abandon
monetarism, is just wrong, on everything.
CB's do not control the rates effectively during the upturns (they are just procyclical as
they add to savings though higher rates).
CB's "creating money" would mean loanable funds theory is right, but as it has been
demonstrated over and over it's horribly wrong. Banks suffice themselves to expand credit on
upturns, and CB'ers can do nothing about it. On downturns they cna try, and fail, because the
appetite for credit is just not there. Credit expansion and contraction is endogenous and
apart of of what CB's do, not to speak about all the forms of shadow money which are the real
outliers and trouble makers.
What CB's do, in practice, is to prevent capitalism from collapsing on crisis, making "bad
money" good, by stabilising asset prices. All their tools are reactive, not pro-active, so
they cannot create any condition, because they react to conditions. They neither set the
rates in reality, nor "create money" that enters the real economy in any meaningful way.
The religion of "central bankism" is part of the problem, but as it is the religion of
"monetarism" (which are the same) on which many of those ideas are based.
Banks suffice themselves to expand credit on upturns, and CB'ers can do nothing about
it IDG
Yes, "loans create deposits" but only largely virtual liabilities wrt to the non-bank
private sector. We should fix that by allowing the non-bank private sector to deal with
reserves too then it would be much more dangerous for banks to create liabilities since bank
runs would be as easy and convenient as writing a check to one's cb account or equivalent. Of
course, government provided deposit insurance could then be abolished too since accounts at
the cb or equivalent are inherently risk-free.
Our system is a dangerous mess because of privileges for depository institutions –
completely unnecessary privileges given modern computers and communications.
Get ready for real kleptocracy. Breitbart obscurantism + Trump/Bannon misdirection = turkeys vote for thanksgiving.
Sessions views on race at Justice = curtailed civil rights.
Wilbur Ross pension stripping = privatize Social Security.
DeVos at education = privatize the golden egg of public education.
85% tax credit for private infrastructure spending = fire sale of the public square (only
rich need apply).
3~4 Military generals in the cabinet = enforcement threat for crypto-fascist state.
McGahn at counsel + Pompeo at CIA = Koch Bros.
Ryan at speaker = privatize Medicare
Welcome to government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.
btw, if Giuliani is appointed to a cabinet post, he will have to explain his foreknowledge
of the NY FBI→Kallstrom→Comey connection→to Congress under oath (if they
aren't too afraid to ask).
I worry along with you, but again: When somebody Ms DeVos opens her mouth people just
naturally recoil. Trump doesn't seem to have grasped the only thing that mattered in his
election – you want your enemies to suck. His appointees are people that suck. Hillary
would have appointed smooth-talkers who could effortlessly move between "private and public"
positions.
PS: Paul Ryan is a good counterexample – people fall for his BS because he isn't
quite a stupid as, say Guiliani. Of course he was elected, not picked by Trump.
mr reddy solves the riddle of the Great Refusal but doesn't far enough: certainly
mainstream economists were wrong to act as cheerleaders for the kleptocracy, yet they were
also complicit in a material sense by furnishing all the necessary algorithms to boost the
derivatives industry into the realm of corporate cyber-theft. that genie isn't going back
into bottle. what's in store for us then? economic apartheid. just read what the new team has
been saying about walls, guns, police, military and terrorism. the bannon plan is for heavily
policed gated communities monopolizing vital resources; high surveillance, rights abatement
zones for the proletariat; and a free-fire wilderness of lumpen gangsters, gun-toting
vigilantes, survivalist cults, etc. competing for subsistence. mad max, only run by people
worse than mel gibson. close to what we already have but once legislated into existence
impossible to reverse without a violent revolution. once again mr. reddy is correct: hobbes'
leviathan is the negation of social science.
hmmmm .. Trump said quite a few contradictory things during his campaign and it would seem
an error to believe anything a candidate says on either side of an issue. Have the Koch
brothers (who are involved w/Trump) been particularly unhappy with the numerous billions
they've accumulated under Obama? I expect this regime to be more along the 'different
globalization' side (more a shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic). Manufacturing will
be back in relation to the degree – penalties are eliminated on 'repatriated' funds,
land is eminent domained on behalf of oligarchs, private profit is granted primacy over
pollution, then build their factories with public money and abolish the minimum wage.
Austerity will continue but the new con will be private/public partnerships. Don't you want
to buy you friend/family member/neighbor a job? Don't you?
The elite, including the Trump's, are going to continue their actions until they've taken
it all.
Since you mention land you might be interested in the idea of land value taxation a way to
take the land back from the oligarchs an idea that has been around for a long time
assiduously ignored by folks like Naked Capitalism.
Mr. Fitzgerald, if you search in NC for "land value taxation" you will see many articles,
especially from Mr. Hudson. NC has thoroughly covered a lot of territory regarding this
topic.
Yes you could probably catch us restlessly muttering "Henry George" in our sleep half the
time.
The problem is it's a really, really hard sell. It just sounds funny. Pittsburgh actually
had it until a few years ago when it was "discovered" and before there was even a discussion
the Democratic mayor and City Council who should have known better had rescinded it before
anybody got a chance to say anything.
" during 2001 after years of underassessment, and the system was abandoned in favor of the
traditional single-rate property tax. The tax on land in Pittsburgh was about 5.77 times the
tax on improvements."
To be good Russian plants, we do actually need to know things about Amerika
Anyway, here's the problem: people just voted for a billionaire how you gonna get this
type of taxation approved given the Pittsburgh example?
It seems to be forgotten that this was a vote against Clinton and not a vote for Trump. If
Trump goes back on his progressive platform, jobs jobs jobs there will be a backlash so fast
that it will give everyone, especially the billionaires whiplash. Let them touch one hair on
Social Security's head or privatize Medicare, there will be another big surprise in the
mid-term elections. When the good people of the rust belt find out about the plans to put
rentier tolls on all that public infrastructure, trust me the pitchforks will come out from
their corners quick as you blink The best laid plans of billionaires and their lackeys often
go awry. The curtain has been lifted. If Trump thinks he can satisfy the working class by
giving another huge tax break to the .01%, he better think again. They do not have enough
rubber bullets nor pepper spray.
Nah, as long as Trump keeps blaming folks of color, he's got a good six years. You
overestimate the people of Flyover. Yes, they got hosed by Obama, but they've been electing
Republicans to flog them for 30 years.
It's a hard sell for good reason. Many Americans are land rich and cash poor. The idea
that they'd have to sell property to pay such a tax offends even the simplest conception of
sound land planning. If a lot more property came on the market at once, as it would have to
under the land tax scheme, we'd be Japan all over again.
Taxes should be unavoidable to avoid violating equal protection under the law and land
taxes are certainly unavoidable in that land can't be hidden as income, for example, can
be.
Another unavoidable tax, except for the existence of physical fiat* (notes and coins),
would be a tax on fiat, i.e. negative interest.
*Yet these can be taxed when bought and sold to the central bank with/for "reserves"**
**Just another name for fiat account balances at the central bank when the account owners are
depository institutions.
The goal should be to reduce injustice – preferably at its source. And the source of
much injustice is surely government privileges for private credit creation and other welfare
for the rich such as positive interest paying sovereign debt.
Still, there's previous injustice to deal with so asset redistribution should be on the
table too and that could include taxing the rich to give to the poor – certainly not to
run a surplus (or even a balanced budget) as you say.
Mainstream analysts don't want to recognize the real problem. They failed the people have
lost their legitimacy to govern.
Not saying Trump is the solution (I'm hoping for a solution from the left and think that
Trump could enable his cronies, but nothing else), but the Establishment is unworthy to
govern.
A solution that most people would consider being from the left but which is the radical
center (taking valid ideas from both left and right) is land value taxation the wedge issue
to tax the various sources of unearned income (estimated at 40+% of GNP however you determine
it) thus allowing for the elimination of taxation of earned income from wages and profit from
the investment of real capital in the real economy. Taxing community created land value and
making the distinction between earned and unearned income has been assiduously ignored and
avoided by mainstream economists, most of our vaunted/sainted public intellectuals and
sources like naked capitalism but since all of that has failed there is nothing to lose by
considering what this author, Sanjay Reddy, says is necessary: "It [social science] can only
save itself through comprehensive reinvention, from the ground up." I suggest that the this
has already been done literally from the ground up by the analysis that has been around for a
very long time that takes land, how its value is created, who owns it and what happen when
you tax its value into account. Happy day.
We finally made it to the post-modern wasteland. It is pretty weird to see the post-modern
methods used by social scientists for decades to dissect culture actually manifest in
practiced culture.
TINA was definitely an ideology – an idea backed by interest. They were making fun
of Thatcherism last nite on France 24 because it had been so devastating and now one of the
candidates in France is talking her old trash again. Humor is effective against ideology when
all else fails but it takes a while. But as defined above, we actually do have an alternative
– our current alternative is "illiberal majoritarianism". Sounds a tad negative. We
should just use the word "democracy".
"The Anti-Corn Law League was a successful political movement in Great Britain aimed
at the abolition of the unpopular Corn Laws, which protected landowners' interests by levying
taxes on imported wheat, thus raising the price of bread at a time when factory-owners were
trying to cut wages to be internationally competitive."
The landowners wanted to increase their profit by charging a higher price for corn, but
this posed a barrier to international free trade in making UK wage labour uncompetitive by
raising the cost of living for workers.
In a free trade world the cost of living needs to be the same in West and East as this
sets the wage levels.
The US has probably been the most successful in making its labour force internationally
uncompetitive with soaring costs of housing, healthcare and student loan repayments.
These costs all have to be covered by wages and US businesses are now squealing about the
high minimum wage.
US labour can never compete with Eastern labour and will have to be protected by
tariffs.
Free trade has requirements and you must meet them before you can engage in free
trade.
The cost of living needs to be the same in West and East.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that all assets in the West were equally owned by its
citizens? Then wouldn't free trade with the East be a universal blessing for the citizens of
the West and not a curse for some (actually many) of them?
So the problem is unjust asset distribution? But how could that occur if our economic
system is just? Except it isn't just since government subsidies for private credit creation
are obviously unjust in that the poor are forced to lend (a deposit is legally a loan) to
banks for the benefit of the rich.
A technical note, to avoid possible confusion: "corn" in British means wheat and other
small grains – a "corn" is a kernel. Maize was not a big factor in Britain; too far
north.
There are two certainties in life – death and taxes.
There are two certainties about new versions of capitalism; they work well for a couple of
decades before failing miserably.
Capitalism mark 1 – Unfettered Capitalism
Crashed and burned in 1929 with a global recession in the 1930s.
The New Deal and Keynesian ideas promised a bright new world.
Capitalism mark 2 – Keynesian Capitalism
Ended with stagflation in the 1970s.
Market led Capitalism ideas promised a bright new world.
Capitalism mark 3 – Unfettered Capitalism – Part 2 (Market led Capitalism)
Crashed and burned in 2008 with a global recession in the 2010s.
We are missing the vital ingredient.
When the first version of capitalism failed, Keynes was ready with a new version.
When the second version of capitalism failed, Milton Freidman was waiting in the wings
with his new version of capitalism.
Elites will always flounder around trying to stick with what they know, it takes someone
with creativity and imagination to show the new way when the old way has failed.
Today we are missing that person with creativity and imagination to lead us out of the
wilderness and
stagnation we have been experiencing since 2008.
1) The work of the Classical Economists and the distinction between "earned" and
"unearned" income, also "land" and "capital" need to be separated again (conflated in
neoclassical economics)
Reading Michael Hudson's "Killing the Host" is a very good start
2) How money and debt really work. Money's creation and destruction on bank balance
sheets.
3) The work of Irving Fisher, Hyman Minsky and Steve Keen on debt inflated asset
bubbles
>The Euro was designed with today's defective economics.
Man I didn't think of that. What comically lousy timing. I do like this post because it
similar to sigh, ok it asserts my belief but still don't think I'm in an echo chamber here, I
actually want people to know what I think so they can reinforce the good and whittle out the
bad anyway, asserts my belief that "economics" isn't a science but when used in the best way
is a toolkit, here we need an hammer (austerity), here we need a screwdriver (some tweaking).
It isn't one tool for all jobs for all time.
American's are brainwashed from birth about capitalism and Milton Freidman may have been
as susceptible as the next man.
He may not have realised he was building on a base that had already been corrupted, the
core of neoclassical economics.
The neoclassical economists of the late 19th century buried the difference between
"earned" and "unearned" income.
These economists also conflated "land" and "capital" to cause further problems that were
clear to the Classical Economists looking out on a world of small state, raw capitalism.
Thorstein Veblen wrote an essay in 1898 "Why is economics not an evolutionary
science?".
Real sciences are evolutionary and old theory is replaced as new theory comes along and
proves the old ideas wrong.
Economics needs a scientific, evolutionary rebuild from the work of the classical
economists.
Most of the UK now dreams of giving up work and living off the "unearned" income from a
BTL portfolio, extracting the "earned" income of generation rent.
The UK dream is to be like the idle rich, rentier, living off "unearned" income and doing
nothing productive.
This is what happens when stuff goes missing from economics.
Keynes realised wage income was just as important as profit.
Wage income looks after the demand side of the equation and profit the supply side.
I think we will find he was right, this knowledge has just gone missing at the moment.
Keynes studied the Great Depression and noted monetary stimulus lead to a "liquidity
trap".
Businesses and investors will not invest without the demand there to ensure their investment
will be worthwhile.
The money gets horded by investors and on company balance sheets as they won't invest.
Cutting wages to increase profit just makes the demand side of the equation worse and leads
you into debt deflation.
Central Banks today talk about the "savings glut" not realising this is probably Keynes's
"liquidity trap".
It's more missing stuff.
When Keynes was involved in Bretton Woods after the Second World War they put in
mechanisms for recycling the surplus, to keep the whole thing running.
The assumption today is that capitalism will just reach stable equilibriums by itself.
The Euro is based on this idea, but Greece has just reached max. debt and collapsed, it
never did reach that stable equilibrium.
Recycling the surplus would probably have worked better.
I disagree that we don't have a ready to go replacement. MMT. We just have TPTB throwing
$$$ around to make sure no one hears about it, much less does anything.
I believe that our way out of this morass is to start by buying locally. There are always
people who make things and they need to be supported. We may not get the cheap products, but
we can build our communities up gradually over time. Our standard of living will be different
but we will have our dignity and the means for creating prosperous communities.
I have been a member of a localist group here in AZ. Said group does a great job of
appealing to people from across the political spectrum. And that is a good example to
follow.
"I believe that our way out of this morass is to start by buying locally."
I very much like the localist movement, and I try very hard to support it in upstate NY,
among other places. The problem with this approach is that there are simply way too many
people for us to painlessly revert back to an artisanal, agrarian 18th c. lifestyle.
To put this in Empire State terms: we might just be able to accommodate hundreds of
thousands of people who used to work for Kodak, I.B.M, or Xerox upstate– in new jobs
making craft beer or high-quality string instruments, etc. Yet what do we do with the many
millions of people, who live downstate, who currently work in jobs very dependent on a
globalized economy?
We've seen a few economists posting lately to say that all social sciences got it wrong,
and especially economics. What's curious to me is that non of the examples given apply to any
social science except economics.
Is this the same discipline that refuses to acknowledge the value of other disciplines and
cross-discipline research, ducking for cover behind the very disciplines it's been
snobbing?
'All social sciences' indeed.
The election was less about trump gaining voters in the rust belt than Clinton losing
hers. Romney lost with exactly as many votes as trump got because 6 million that voted for
black Obama preferred to stay home rather than vote for white Clinton.
All the dems need to do is to run a candidate willing to spend quality time in the swing
states, somebody not totally corrupt and not verbally advocating confrontation with Russia
would also be a big help, though this already rules out most dem elites.
Of course if trump manages to get a lot of infra built, and gets a lot of decent jobs, his
support in 2020 will grow, maybe to the point only a strong progressive could beat him.
But today's dem elites will fight tooth and nail to keep real progressives from controlling
the party, as instructed by their corp overlords remember, bankers might go to jail if the
wrong person gets AG. First indication is Keith on dec 1 can/will big o keep him out?
I liked this 'take' by Prof. Reddy a lot in terms of looking at what happened to bring us
to a Trump Presidency (with an observation that Orange Duce hasn't YET been sworn in).
But if he thinks that a Tea Party shaped Republican House and Senate and soon to be skewed
Supreme Court aren't about to launch a season of Rent Taking and Austerity to levels
previously only attained in Arthur Laffer's wet dreams he needs his otherwise rational head
examined.
Don't go so excited the "Trump Revolution" like the "Obama Revolution" will likely end up
as "hopeless" for ordinary folk. So for starters Trump's tax breaks will save the 1% fifteen
percent and the rest of us 2 percent! Already the msm including my local paper are already
grinding out the counter-propaganda against raising tariff barriers for China. The majority
of the electorate are too ignorant to figure much of it out and come 2024 will be voting
Ivanka Trump in as president!
If Trump raises MORE(notice that word son) tariffs against China, he will get a nice
uppercut across the forehead when China cancels contracts one after another and jobs start
being lost in the next NBER recession. His ego can't take that.
He was the Mercers introduction to the elite, nothing more or less. If anything, the
Republicans are more Jewy than ever.
"The dominant economic ideas taken together created a framework in which deviation from
declared orthodoxy would be punished by dynamics unleashed by globalization and
financialization."
IOW, it isn't science; it's political ideology.
The environmental economist Herman Daley traces that back to the very beginning of the
field; he says the earliest economists essentially chose sides in the contest then raging
between landowners (resource based) and merchants (trade based). That made them
propagandists, not referees. And it's the reason economics, from the beginning, suppressed
the distinction between natural resources, like land, water, and minerals, and human-created
capital. It recognized only two "production factors," when in reality there are at least
three. Marx picked up the same self-serving :"error."
" illiberal majoritarianism"
That's an unfortunate word choice, considering that Trump lost the election by nearly 2
million votes. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the defective Electoral College
system. Maybe now we'll get some action on the Popular Vote initiative.
It's important to remember that the rebellion is "illiberal" mainly because the "liberal"
parties refuse to offer a "liberal" populism, aka the New Deal. You could call it an old,
proven idea. Some of us see that as weak tea, but even that isn't on offer outside the
marginalized Left. (This is the essential point of Thomas Franks' "What's the Matter with
Kansas.")
Of course, that's just a further illustration of the author's point.
One of the most insightful chapters in Karl Polanyi's THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION is about
something Karl calls "the discovery of society." It is the story of how those who wrestled
with the fundamental falsehoods of the "self-regulating market" [our Libertarian friends'
dreamworld] had to begin thinking about how people in their everyday lives actually, really,
incompletely, made a life for themselves in a world defined by trickle-down economics. It was
never a pretty sight, but the lesson was that the "self-regulating market" was going to be
regulated somehow by non-economic actors with non-economic considerations foremost in mind,
like it or not, or face destruction by human beings whose lives were distorted beyond what
would be tolerated by ordinary people. Most people put up with neoliberal BS for a generation
because that's what most people do, most of the time, even when they know they're being sold
a bunch of horsecr*p. But the limit of what people will tolerate in a society defined by the
false gods of market capitalism is reached periodically. Trump's victory tells us that one of
these limits has been reached. The question now is, "What are we going to "discover" about
ourselves and about the society we want to live in–and will we find a way to create it,
assuming it's something good?" (Or flee from, if it turns sour.)
TINA folks will repeat, over and over, that "there is no alternative," but that bugaboo
has just been smashed. Clinton, Summers, Obama, Rubin, Schumer, and the many, many lesser
lights of Neo-Liberalism have become "old hat" almost overnight. Let's hope our discovery of
society includes a stronger dose of Reason and Solidarity than would seem to exist in
Trumpworld.
ergo: Less work (at all levels) + increasing population (which includes some explosive
variables, like a large increase of older persons who will require economic support from
fewer younger workers) = a massive increase in tension re: the struggle for available
necessities.
Technology innovation will help with some of this, but the great, looming problem is: how
are billions of idle people with nothing to do going to be motivated to remain
non-disruptive? I can see a massive surveillance state controlling the "idles"; perhaps new
technologies that permit people to jack their brains into the network for diversion (but how
long before people become desensitized to that?). Will there be a "spiritual" revolution that
is not attached to current dogmatic religions, that values having less, sharing more,
cooperating with others, etc.? Hard to say.
Anyway, it's coming, yet very few policy makers are talking about it. I'll bet the
Pentagon is planning for this scenario, among others.
In twenty years – maybe a few more – we should be able to begin to migrate
away from earth. It will probably be a LONG time before extra-earth settlements are feasible
and sustainable. That said, we here on earth are going to have our hands full.
Can humanity somehow find ways to overcome its wired propensity for status reflected by
material wealth, and somehow change that status-seeking to a sharing model that is not
top-down?
I've been pondering this for a while. People much smarter than I will hopefully lead the
way. We have our work cut out for us.
This segment is interesting theatre, especially considering that Mr. Giuliani is acting as
President Trump's attorney on the Russiagate matter, and that he is going public about anything
at all having to do with the investigation and its case, in full knowledge that anything he
says publicly will be noted. Nevertheless, "America's Mayor" made several very strong
assertions:
Mueller doesn't need to ask a single question on obstruction; he has all the answers
already and those answers are not going to change in a direct interview with President
Trump.
Mueller is trying to trap the President into perjury.
The reason Mueller is trying to trap the President is simply because he does not have a
case.
According to Mr. Giuliani, the case will not fizzle; it is going to blow up on
them
This is because there is a lot more that they (meaning the Democrats) did, that no one
knows yet.
It will wind up with Mr. Mueller himself having a lot to answer for.
These and other points are included in Mr. Giuliani's responses in his discussion with Sean
Hannity.
The question that would logically arise with such a set of claims is "why would this
investigation even be happening in the first place, if it is only guaranteed to lose?"
And this question is what gives lie to the massive conspiracy of the Deep State and various
powerful figures
such as Bill Browder , the neo-con establishment, and secular humanist liberals, all banded
together to stop President Trump atany cost from changing America's headlong
plunge into the darkness of the soft tyranny of modern-day liberalism. Russia stands as the one
great power in the world that declares with great strength that this group of people is wrong,
and therefore, Russia, and anyone who wishes to grant her legitimacy – must be
stopped.
A speculative question that next arises is this:
What happens when President Trump gets vindicated?
There is a massive power play in motion here, and the stakes are much higher than anyone
cares to admit.
"... Coalition attacks on Yemeni markets are unfortunately all too common. The Saudis and their allies know they can strike civilian targets with impunity because the Western governments that arm and support them never call them out for what they do. ..."
There was another Saudi coalition airstrike on a
crowded market in northern Yemen today. Dozens of civilians have been killed and dozens more
injured. Many of the dead and injured were children whose school bus was hit in the attack:
Coalition attacks on Yemeni
markets are unfortunately all too common. The Saudis and their allies know they can strike
civilian targets with impunity because the Western governments that arm and support them never
call them out for what they do. The U.S. continues to arm and refuel coalition planes
despite ample evidence that the coalition has been deliberately attacking civilian targets. At
the very least, the coalition hits civilian targets with such regularity that they are
ignoring whatever
procedures they are supposed to be following to prevent that. The weapons that the U.S.,
Britain, and other arms suppliers provide them are being used to slaughter wedding-goers,
hospital patients, and schoolchildren, and U.S. refueling of coalition planes allows them to
carry out more of these attacks than they otherwise could. Today's attack ranks as one of the
worst.
Saada has come under some of the most intense attacks from the coalition bombing campaign.
The coalition illegally
declared the entire area a military target three years ago, and ever since they have been
blowing up
homes ,
markets ,
schools ,
water treatment systems, and
hospitals without any regard for the innocent civilians that are killed and injured.
The official U.S. line on support for the war is that even more civilians would be killed if
the U.S. weren't supporting the coalition. Our government has never provided any evidence to
support this, and the record shows that civilian casualties from Saudi coalition airstrikes
have
increased over the last year. The Saudis and their allies either don't listen to any of the
advice they're receiving, or they know they won't pay any price for ignoring it. As long as the
U.S. arms and refuels coalition planes while they slaughter Yemeni civilians in attacks like
this one, our government is implicated in the war crimes enabled by our unstinting military
assistance. Congress can and must halt that assistance immediately.
Update: CNN reports on the
aftermath of the airstrike:
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) said that a hospital it supports in
Saada had received 29 dead bodies of "mainly children" under 15 years of age, and 40 injured,
including 30 children.
"(The hospital) is very busy. They've been receiving wounded and dead since the morning
and it is non-stop ," ICRC head of communications and spokesperson Mirella Hodeib told
CNN.
Second Update: The Associated Press
reports that the death toll stands at 43 with another 63 injured.
Third Update: The death toll has reportedly risen to 50 . 77 were
injured.
Of course I have no right to surprise or shock. They've already targeted hospitals,
foreign doctors and nurses, first responders, wedding parties, and funerals.
School buses.
We used to make movies about killing people who do things like this. Now we help them do
it.
The repetitive frequency and intensity of these attacks on hospitals, schools, markets and
other civilian gatherings, coupled with the indifference of the guilty national governments
and their international enablers, signals that the world and human species is passing through
a mass psychosis. This psychosis is playing itself out at all levels. Fascism, which is very
current as a national psychology, is generally speaking, a coping strategy for dealing with
nasty chaos. This coping strategy is designed around generating even more chaos, since that
is a familiar and therefore more comfortable pattern of behavior; and that does provide a
delusion of stability. A good example would be the sanctions just declared by the Trump
Administration on Iranian commerce. In an intrinsically connected global market, these
sanctions are so thorough that they qualify as a blockade, within a contingency plan for
greater global conflict. But those who destroy hospitals, schools, school buses and public
celebrations are not, otherwise, forward looking nice people. We are descending into a nasty
fascist war psychosis. Just shake it. Live. Long and well.
"even more civilians would be killed if the U.S. weren't supporting the coalition"
If we did not hand them satellite images, did not service, repair and refuel their planes,
and did not sell them the bombs, then they would . kill more civilians how? They could not
even reach their targets, let alone drop explosives they do not have.
What Would Mohammad Do? Buy bombs from the Russians? Who have better quality control and
fewer duds, hence more victims?
What Would Mohammad Do? Get the UAE to hire Blackwater to poison the wells across
Yemen?
How exactly do the profiteers in our country, that get counted out blood money for every
single Yemeni killed, propose that the Saudis and Emiratis would make this worse?
But, good to know that our "smart" and "precise" munitions can still hit a school bus.
Made In America!
The coverage in the media has been predictably cowardly and contemptible in the aftermath of
this story. I read articles from CNN and MSNBC and they were variations on "school bus
bombed", in the passive tense – with no mention of who did it or who is supporting them
in the headline, ad if the bombings were natural disasters.
Fox, predictably, was even worse and led with "Biblical relics endangered by war", which
speaks volumes about the presumed priorities of their viewership.
This, and not anything to do with red meat domestic politics, is the worst media
malpractice of our time. "Stop directly helping the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks drop
bombs on school children" should be the absolute easiest possible moral issue for our media
to take a stand on and yet they treat it like it's radioactive.
Speaking as someone who considers themselves a liberal I am infuriated by the Democrats
response. How can the party leadership not see that if they keep flogging the horse of
Russian trolls and shrugging their shoulders over American given (not sold – *given*)
bombs being dropped on schools and hospitals, no one is ever going to take the supposed
Democratic anti-war platform seriously again. The Republicans can afford to be tarde by
association with these atrocities. The Democrats can't.
I wonder how many Democrats are in the same boat as me right now: I may not like Trump or
the Christian conservatives but fights over the Supreme Court or coal plants or a healthcare
law look terribly petty compared to the apparent decision by Saudi Arabia to kill literally
millions. For the first time in my life I'm seriously wishing there was a third-party
candidate I could support and the congressional elections just so I could send a message on
this.
@Hunter C
Vote Libertarian Party. You won't agree with a lot of their domestic agenda, but they're not
going to win, so it doesn't matter. The noninterventionist foreign policy is your message.
Chittum's work makes more sense than either of the books reviewed here. The two books
discussed above are good for the Harry Potter set but in no way conform to 2018 reality.
I frequently reread Chittum's work and am amazed at how he correctly analyzed the future into
what is contemporary USSA.
LOOK NO further, than the incipient election of a reparation Democrat governor in Georgia and
a like minded legislature,come November, for validation of Chittum's hypotheses. The one
weakness in his predictions is the belief that there will be a patriotic core in the local
police and national military that could be relied on to protect the lives and property of
traditional Americans. This just won't happen. The FBI, CIA, ATFE, Homeland Security Police
and like activities set the pace, call the shots and control the funds and the locals provide
a conditioned response.
Chittum writing 20 years back could not see the rise of the mass surveillance and correct
thought propagation that we increasingly welcome or endure today.
My bet is Unz Review will totally access denied after the massive Democrat election gains in
November.
"... During his election campaign, Donald Trump reportedly received a $20 million donation from the American-Israeli casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Adelson has Israeli citizenship. Is that not foreign help, according to definition of US laws? ..."
"... Russiagate is a cover to conceal the really disturbing scandal which was, and continues to be, the attempt to subvert American democracy by US intelligence agencies working in cahoots with the Obama administration and Clinton's election campaign. To cover up those crimes, Russia is being maligned for "attacking American democracy". ..."
So the US news
media are in uproar over President Trump's latest admission that a meeting between his son and
a Russian lawyer more than two years ago was about "getting dirt" on Hillary Clinton.
With self-righteous probity, Trump's political and media enemies are declaring him a felon
for accepting foreign interference in the US presidential election.
Admittedly, President Trump appears to have been telling lies about the past meeting, which
took place at Trump Tower in New York City in the summer of 2016. Or maybe it's just this
American president shooting himself in the foot -- again -- with his inimical
gibberish-style.
However, the burning issue of "foreign interference" is being stoked out of all proportion
by Trump's enemies who want him ousted from the White House.
US constitutional law forbids candidates from receiving help from foreign governments or
foreign nationals.
Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?
Thus, by appearing to accept a meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 -- during the
presidential campaign -- the Trump election team are accused of breaking US law.
The alleged transgression fits in with the wider narrative of "Russiagate" which posits that
Republican candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin to win the race to the White House
against Democrat rival Hillary
Clinton .
Russia has always denied any involvement in the US elections, saying the allegations are
preposterous. Moscow also points out that in spite of indictments leveled by American
prosecutors, there is no evidence to support claims that Russian hackers meddled in the
presidential campaign, or that the Kremlin somehow assisted Trump.
The Russian lawyer, Natalia
Veselnitskaya , who met with the Trump campaign team in early June 2016 is described in US
media as "Kremlin-linked". But that seems to be just more innuendo in place of facts. She
denies any such connection. The Kremlin also says it had no relation with the attorney on
her business of approaching Team Trump.
In any case, what is being totally missed in the latest brouhaha is the staggering hypocrisy
in the US media circus over Trump. Let's take Trump at his word -- not a reliable source
admittedly -- that his campaign team were trying to "get dirt" on Clinton. That would appear to
be a violation of US law.
If Trump is going to be nailed for improper conduct with regard to alleged foreign
assistance, then where does that leave Hillary Clinton and US intelligence agencies?
During the presidential campaign, Clinton's team contracted a British spy, Christopher
Steele, to dig up dirt on Trump in the form of the so-called "Russian dossier". That was the
pile of absurd claims alleging that the Kremlin had blackmailing leverage over Donald Trump. It
was Steele's fantasies that largely turned into the whole Russiagate affair which has dominated
US media and politics for the past two years.
Not only that, but now it transpires that the Federal Bureau of Investigation also paid the
same British spy to act as a source for the FBI's wiretapping of Trump's associates, according to
declassified documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a US citizens' rights group.
In other
words, the foreign interference that the FBI engaged in under the Barack Obama administration,
as well as by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, is on a far greater and more scandalous scale
that Trump seems to have clumsily endeavored to do with a Russian lawyer.
The real, shocking interference in US democracy was not by Russia or Trump, but by American
secret services working in collusion with the Clinton Democrats to distort the presidential
elections. This scandal which Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen has labeled "Intelgate" is far
more grievous than the Watergate crisis which resulted in President Richard Nixon's ignominious
resignation back in the mid-1970s.
The Obama administration's intelligence agencies and the Democrats attempted to sabotage the
2016 presidential election in order to keep Trump out of the White House. They failed. And they
have never gotten over that defeat to their illegal scheming.
The Russiagate claims are just a sideshow. As American writer Paul Craig Roberts, among
others, has
commented , the media-driven "witch hunt" against Trump and Russia is blown out of all
proportion in order to distract from the real scandal which is Intelgate -- and how millions of
American voters were potentially disenfranchised by the US intelligence apparatus for a
political power grab.
Another staggering hypocrisy in the US media kerfuffle over Trump and alleged Russian
interference is that all the fastidious hyperbole completely ignores actual foreign
interference in American democracy -- foreign interference that is on an absolutely colossal
scale.
As American critical thinker Noam Chomsky points out , "Israeli intervention in
US elections overwhelms anything Russia may have done".
Israel's interference includes the multi-million-dollar lobbying by such groups as the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its financial sponsorship of hundreds of
lawmakers in both houses of Congress. Many critics maintain
that the entire Congress is in effect "bought" by AIPAC.
Chomsky referred specifically to the occasion in 2015 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu snubbed then President Obama by addressing the US Congress with a speech openly
calling for lawmakers to reject the internationally-backed nuclear deal with Iran.
During his election campaign, Donald Trump
reportedly received a $20 million donation from the American-Israeli casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson. Adelson has Israeli citizenship. Is that not foreign help, according to definition of
US laws?
Trump has since shown himself to do Adelson's and Israel's bidding by walking away from the
Iran deal and in pushing stridently pro-Israeli interests in the conflict with
Palestinians.
Another foreign benefactor in US politics is the so-called Saudi lobby and other oil-rich
Gulf Arab states. Millions of dollars are funneled into Congress by these dubious regimes to
shape US government foreign policy in the Middle East. For several decades, Saudi oil money is
also documented to be
a major contributor to the CIA and its off-the-books covert operations around the world.
Foreign interference in US politics -- in which often nefarious foreign interests are
promoted over those of ordinary American citizens -- is conducted on a gargantuan and
systematic scale. But this massively illegal interference in flagrant violation of US laws is
stupendously ignored by the American media.
Trump is being assailed over an alleged scandal regarding Russia which is, by any objective
measure, negligible.
The whole Russiagate narrative is sheer hysteria driven by anti-Trump forces who do not want
to accept the result of the 2016 election. It is, in effect, a coup attempt by unelected
political forces.
Russiagate is a cover to conceal the really disturbing scandal which was,
and continues to be, the attempt to subvert American democracy by US intelligence agencies
working in cahoots with the Obama administration and Clinton's election campaign. To cover up
those crimes, Russia is being maligned for "attacking American democracy".
Such lies are an odious distortion of the truth by America's real enemies who are its own
domestic political and media operators trying to cover up their anti-constitutional crimes.
What's even more despicable is that these people are willing to inflame US-Russia relations to
the point of starting a war between two nuclear powers.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published
in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
This article was originally published by " Sputnik "
-
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
The by product of small minds and limited options. The collapse of the Democratic Party
also represented a failure to create a bench. AOC is a person who should have been identified
and pushed to run for local or even state government by a healthy political party.
In many ways, the Democratic elite are small "c"onservatives. New ideas and such are
frightening to them.
Donna Brazille knocked the Clinton Headquarters staff for not having sex, but the pictures
of the Clinton staffers looked like a particularly boring group of College Republicans. Wow,
the President listens to Jay-Z. He's really popular with kids from the suburbs!
This morning I was reminded that Sam Power apologized for calling Hillary a monster in
2013 probably because it seemed inevitable HRC would be President, but now I see it as a lack
of creative thinking where these boring people (they are boring) couldn't envision an
alternative.
As far as the options, the energy of the political left is not with the Democrats
hence why they have to pimp Biden every few months.
HRC use to pay DavidHow much went to MSNBC to be in ads for the choir? What good was an
HRC ad during a network dedicated to "Her"?
As far as her staff, she use to pay Mark Penn. Its reasonable to expect the Clinton
campaign would simply light money on fire, but I was always puzzled by the ads on MSNBC. What
good were they beyond preaching Hillary was running for President?
We know from the DNC emails Podesta said he needed to talk to HRC about promising the VP
to everyone after she had picked Kaine long before the announcement. I'm wondering what kinds
of ad buys she promised. When Obama got to the end, he just randomly ran an infomercial and
gave the field staff a fairly decent bonus. With all her money in a slam dunk election, I
think the story is more than a campaign of would be Mark Penns.
Thank you, Lambert, for going beyond the facile "horserace" and "blue wave" tropes and
assembling enough data for us non-insiders to be able to gain some understanding of the game
the insiders are playing.
These are people who speak of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally,
and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns "Anything that brings the
process closer to the people is all to the good," George Bush declared in his 1987
autobiography, Looking Forward, accepting as given this relatively recent notion that the
people and the process need not automatically be on convergent tracks.
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about "the
democratic process," or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in
its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is
correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report
on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who
answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to
the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who
attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of
public life.
I have a simple question: Why vote? Both parties are largely control by the same donors.
It strikes me as a waste of energy. When someone such a Sanders comes around who actually
slightly challenges the status quo, the powers to be actively collude to disenfranchise the
movement.
Simple answer: It's the only thing we have that scares them. Why else would they spend so
much effort trying to suppress the vote, or not fighting voter suppression? And who knows,
some candidates you vote for might win.
I don't think it actually scares them. It's more important for them to keep the showing
going. By voting, we are actively buying into the political theatre. It's a sham. Really
democracy simply can't coexist in a Capitalistic system.
Hard question, but how much is an Obama or Clinton endorsement really worth?
They are not going to be very appealing to swing voters, independents, etc. They have
limited to appeal to getting young people and supporters of Bernie Sanders to vote.
Seems like they are most useful for just motivating Establishment Democratic voters.
Second, the Democrat Party really is split. As you can see, Obama, Clinton, and the
DCCC's endorsements overlap in only a single case (again, CA-50) with "insurgent" backers
like Justice Democrats (JD) and Our Revolution (OR). Negative confirmation: Obama did not
endorse Ocasio-Cortez ("Party Unity is for Rubes"). Her district is a safe Democrat seat
(unless Crowley, running as a straw on the Working Families line, somehow takes it away
from her), so perhaps that doesn't matter: Positive confirmation: Obama and Clinton didn't
endorse Bryce in WI-01, although -- because? -- Sanders did, even though the DCCC did, and
the seat used to be Paul Ryan's![1]
It has been split between those who got rich by neoliberalism (the 10%er base) and the
rest of us.
My sense is the importance of the Oprah endorsement of Obama wasn't the endorsement as
much as the spectacle and crowds. 10,000 people at a campaign event in New Hampshire is huge.
At that point, Obama didn't have to face the usual primary audience much like HRC where
candidates do get fairly difficult questions in comparison to the msm garbage questions
cookie recipes.
Yellow dog types who might vote for AOC over say Crowley on their own might be swayed, but
I suspect "DNC" letter head would have the same effect.
Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy
Hersh's new book, Reporter , as well as
interviews he's given since publication...
1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle
East
(Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007
speech , the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this
highly classified memo has been quoted . Hersh's account appears to corroborate now retired
Gen. Clark's assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime
change in "7 countries in
5 years" was being circulated among intelligence officials.)
From Reporter: A Memoir
pg. 306 -- A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general
who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican
neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but
one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to
me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be
rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin "with the
assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this... is that the war will start making the U.S.
the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones,
as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination." Victory in Iraq would lead
to an ultimatum to Damascus, the "defanging" of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat's Palestine
Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America's enemies must understand that
"they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their
annihilation." I and the foreign general agreed that America's neocons were a menace to
civilization.
From Reporter: A Memoir
pages 306-307 -- Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to
permit America's Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the
division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq
until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld
had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for
monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an
invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning
applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I
knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to
9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country's most sensitive intelligence files on the
Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out... Rumsfeld
eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told...
3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11
From Reporter: A Memoir
pages 305-306 -- I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political
outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States
-- with ease . It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual
leaders of that group -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle -- had not hidden their
ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with
a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism . I had spent many hours
after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was
coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off
relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of
Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a
multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia . Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue
me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.
Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he
could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his
primacy in the White House , but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of
betraying my sources...
I came to understand that Cheney's goal was to run his most important military and
intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible.
I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney's constant accumulation of
power and authority as vice president , but it was impossible to even begin to verify the
information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good
idea from whom I was getting the information.
4) On Russian meddling in the US election
From the recent
Independent interview based on his autobiography -- Hersh has vociferously strong opinions
on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is "a great deal of animosity towards
Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous." He has
been researching the subject but is not ready to go public yet.
Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence,
it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian
hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence
estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. "When the intel
community wants to say something they say it High confidence effectively means that they don't
know."
5) On the Novichok poisoning
From the recent
Independent interview -- Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version
of the
Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: "The story of novichok
poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British
intelligence services about Russian organised crime." The unfortunate turn of events with the
contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements
rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government's
position.
Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing
on Obama –
"a trimmer articulate [but] far from a radical a middleman". During his Goldsmiths talk, he
remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.
He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the
wake of 9/11 . He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his
CIA sources fires back: "Sy you still don't get it after all these years – the FBI
catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks." It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.
* * *
6) On the Bush-era 'Redirection' policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which
in a 2007 New Yorker article
Hersh accurately predicted
would set off war in Syria
From the
Independent interview : [Hersh] tells me it is "amazing how many times that story has been
reprinted" . I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere
extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot
boundaries for the 21st century.
He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney "had it in for Iran", although he denies the idea
that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: "They were providing intel, collecting intel The US did
many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran"...
He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I'm sure though
that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory...
I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul
Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq . Hersh
ruefully states that: "The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing
that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far."
* * *
7) On the official 9/11 narrative
From the
Independent interview : We end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another
narrative ripe for deconstruction by sceptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of
the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by
the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year
undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the
attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis
potentially involved.
Hersh tells me: "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.
We really don't have an ending to the story. I've known people in the [intelligence] community.
We don't know anything empirical about who did what" . He continues: "The guy was living in a
cave. He really didn't know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for
the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later How's it going guys?"
8) On the media and the morality of the powerful
From a recent
The Intercept interview and book review -- If
Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages
after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive
slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the
Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, "a reminder of the
Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime." It
was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: "I had learned a domestic version of that rule
decades earlier" in Chicago. "Reporter" demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:
The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.
New McCarthyism allows
corporate media to tighten grip, Democrats to ignore their own failings Alan MacLeod
The election of Donald Trump came as a shock to many ( Independent ,
11/5/16 ).
To the shock of many, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential elections, becoming the 45th
president of the United States. Not least shocked were corporate media, and the political
establishment more generally; the Princeton Election Consortium
confidently predicted an over 99 percent chance of a Clinton victory, while MSNBC 's
Rachel Maddow ( 10/17/16 ) said
it could be a "Goldwater-style landslide."
Indeed, Hillary Clinton and her team actively
attempted to secure a Trump primary victory, assured that he would be the easiest candidate
to beat. The Podesta emails show that her team considered even
before the primaries that associating Trump with Vladimir Putin and Russia would be a winning
strategy and employed the tactic throughout 2016 and beyond.
With Clinton claiming , "Putin would rather have a puppet
as president," Russia was by far the most discussed topic during the presidential debates (
FAIR.org ,
10/13/16 ), easily eclipsing healthcare, terrorism, poverty and inequality. Media seized
upon the theme, with Paul Krugman ( New York Times , 7/22/16
) asserting Trump would be a " Siberian
candidate," while ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden ( Washington Post ,
5/16/16 ) claimed Trump would be Russia's "useful fool."
The day after the election, Jonathan Allen's book Shattered detailed, Clinton's team
decided that the proliferation of Russian-sponsored "fake news" online was the primary reason
for their loss.
Within weeks, the Washington Post (
11/24/16 ) was publicizing the website PropOrNot.com , which purports to help users
differentiate sources as fake or genuine, as an invaluable tool in the battle against fake news
( FAIR.org , 12/1/16
, 12/8/16 ).
The website soberly informs its readers that you see news sources critiquing the "mainstream
media," the EU, NATO, Obama, Clinton, Angela Merkel or other centrists are a telltale sign of
Russian propaganda. It also claims that when news sources argue against foreign intervention
and war with Russia, that's evidence that you are reading Kremlin-penned fake
news.
The Washington Post (
11/24/16 ) was one of the first media outlets to blame the election results on Russian
"fake news."
PropOrNot claims it has identified over 200 popular websites that "routinely peddle Russian
propaganda." Included in the list were Wikileaks , Trump-supporting right-wing websites
like InfoWars and the Drudge Report , libertarian outlets like the Ron Paul
Institute and Antiwar.com , and award-winning anti-Trump (but also Clinton-critical)
left-wing sites like TruthDig and Naked Capitalism . Thus it was uniquely news
sources that did not lie in the fairway between Clinton Democrats and moderate Republicans that
were tarred as propaganda.
PropOrNot calls for an FBI investigation into the news sources listed. Even its creators see
the resemblance to a new McCarthyism, as it appears as a frequently asked question on
their website. (They say it is not McCarthyism, because "we are not accusing anyone of
lawbreaking, treason, or 'being a member of the Communist Party.'") However, this new
McCarthyism does not stem from the conservative right like before, but from the establishment
center.
That the list is so evidently flawed and its creators refuse to reveal their identities or
funding did not stop the issue becoming one of the most discussed in mainstream circles. Media
talk of fake news sparked organizations like Google , Facebook , Bing and
YouTube to change their algorithms, ostensibly to combat it.
However, one major effect of the change has been to hammer progressive outlets that
challenge the status quo. The Interceptreported a 19 percent reduction
in Google search traffic, AlterNet63 percent and Democracy
Now!36 percent. Reddit and
Twitter deleted thousands of accounts, while in what came to be called the
"AdPocalypse," YouTube began demonetizing videos from independent creators like
Majority Report and the Jimmy Dore Show on controversial political topics like
environmental protests, war and mass shootings. (In contrast, corporate outlets like CNN
did not have their content on those subjects demonetized.) Journalists that questioned aspects
of the Russia narrative, like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté, were accused of being
agents of the Kremlin ( Shadowproof ,
7/9/18 ).
The effect has been to pull away the financial underpinnings of alternative media that
question the corporate state and capitalism in general, and to reassert corporate control over
communication, something that had been loosened during the election in particular. It also
impels liberal journalists to prove their loyalty by employing sufficiently bellicose and
anti-Russian rhetoric, lest they also be tarred as Kremlin agents.
Thomas Friedman ( Morning Joe ,
2/14/18 ) pointedly compared email hacking to events that the US responded to with major
wars.
When it was reported in February that 13 Russian trolls had been indicted by a US grand jury
for sharing and promoting pro-Trump and anti-Clinton memes on Facebook , the response
was a general uproar. Multiple senior political figures declared it an "act of war." Clinton
herself described Russian interference as a "
cyber 9/11 ," while Thomas Friedman said that it was a "
Pearl Harbor–scale event ." Morgan Freeman's viral video, produced by Rob Reiner's
Committee to Investigate Russia, summed up the outrage: "We have been attacked," the actor
declared ; "We are at war with Russia." Liberals declared Trump's refusal to react in a
sufficiently aggressive manner further proof he was Putin's puppet.
The McCarthyist wave swept over other politicians that challenged the liberal center. Green
Party presidential candidate Jill Stein refused to endorse the Russia narrative, leading
mainstream figures like Rachel Maddow to
insinuate she was a Kremlin stooge as well. After news broke that Stein's connection to
Russia was being officially investigated, top Clinton staffer Zac Petkanas announced :
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
Jill Stein is a Russian agent.
"Commentary" that succinctly summed up the political atmosphere.
In contrast, Bernie Sanders has consistently and explicitly endorsed the RussiaGate theory,
claiming it is "clear
to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and
intends to be involved in 2018." Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented
as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (
11/12/17 ) asking its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of
Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals respond?" The message is clear: The
progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
Outlets like Slate (
5/11/18 ) warned of a sinister connection between Black Lives Matter and Russia.
It is not just politicians who have been smeared as Russian agents, witting or unwitting;
virtually every major progressive movement challenging the system is increasingly dismissed in
the same way. Multiple media outlets, including CNN (
6/29/18 ), Slate (
5/11/18 ), Vox ( 4/11/18
) and the New York Times (
2/16/18 ), have produced articles linking Black Lives Matter to the Kremlin, insinuating
the outrage over racist police brutality is another Russian psyop.
Others claimed Russia funded the riots in Ferguson and that Russian trolls promoted
the Standing Rock environmental protests.
Meanwhile, Democratic insider Neera Tanden retweeted a
description of Chelsea Manning as a "Russian stooge," writing off her campaign for the Senate
as "the Kremlin paying the extreme left to swing elections. Remember that." Thus corporate
media are promoting the idea that any challenge to the establishment is likely a Kremlin-funded
astroturf effort.
The tactic has spread to Europe as well. After the poisoning of Russian double agent Sergei
Skripal, the UK government immediately blamed Russia and imposed sanctions (without publicly
presenting evidence). Jeremy Corbyn, the pacifist, leftist leader of the Labour Party, was
uncharacteristically bellicose, asserting , "The Russian
authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both
decisive and proportionate."
The British press was outraged -- at Corbyn's insufficient jingoism. The Sun 's front
page ( 3/15/18 )
attacked him as "Putin's Puppet," while the Daily Mail (
3/15/18 ) went with "Corbyn the Kremlin Stooge." As with Sanders, the fact that Corbyn
endorsed the official narrative didn't keep him from being attacked, showing that the
conspiratorial mindset seeing Russia behind everything has little to do with evidence-based
reality, and is increasingly a tool to demonize the establishment's political enemies.
The Atlantic Council
published a report claiming Greek political parties Syriza and Golden Dawn were not
expressions of popular frustration and disillusionment, but "the Kremlin's Trojan horses,"
undermining democracy in its birthplace. Providing scant evidence, the report went on to link
virtually every major European political party challenging the center, from right or left, to
Putin. From Britian's UKIP to Spain's Podemos to Italy's Five Star Movement, all are charged
with being under one man's control. It is this council that Facebookannounced
it was partnering with to help promote "trustworthy" news and weed out "untrustworthy" sources
( FAIR.org ,
5/21/18 ), as its CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with representatives from some of the largest
corporate outlets, like the New York Times , CNN and News Corp , to help
develop a system to control what content we see on the website.
"We are at war," Morgan Freeman
assures us on behalf of the Committee to Investigate Russia.
The utility of this wave of suspicion is captured in Freeman's aforementioned
video . After asserting that "for 241 years, our democracy has been a shining example to
the world of what we can all aspire to" -- a tally that would count nearly a century of chattel
slavery and almost another hundred years of de jure racial disenfranchisement -- the actor
explains that "Putin uses social media to spread propaganda and false information, he convinces
people in democratic societies to distrust their media, their political process."
The obvious implication is that the political process and media ought to be trusted, and
would be trusted were it not for Putin's propaganda. It was not the failures of capitalism and
the deep inequalities it created that led to widespread popular resentment and movements on
both left and right pressing for radical change across Europe and America, but Vladimir Putin
himself. In other words, "America is already great."
For the Democrats, Russiagate allows them to ignore calls for change and not scrutinize why
they lost to the most unpopular presidential candidate in history. Since Russia hacked the
election, there is no need for introspection, and certainly no need to accommodate the Sanders
wing or to engage with progressive challenges from activists on the left, who are Putin's
puppets anyway. The party can continue on the same course, painting over the deep cracks in
American society. Similarly, for centrists in Europe, under threat from both left and right,
the Russia narrative allows them to sow distrust among the public for any movement challenging
the dominant order.
For the state, Russiagate has encouraged liberals to forego their faculties and develop a
state-worshiping, conspiratorial mindset in the face of a common, manufactured enemy. Liberal
trust in institutions like the FBI has
markedly increased since 2016, while liberals also now espouse a neocon foreign policy in
Syria, Ukraine and other regions, with many supporting the vast increases in the US military
budget and attacking Trump from the right.
For corporate media, too, the disciplining effect of the Russia narrative is highly useful,
allowing them to reassert control over the means of communication under the guise of preventing
a Russian "fake news" infiltration. News sources that challenge the establishment are censored,
defunded or deranked, as corporate sources stoke mistrust of them. Meanwhile, it allows them to
portray themselves as arbiters of truth. This strategy has had some success, with
Democrats' trust in media increasing since the election.
None of this is to say that Russia does not strive to influence other countries' elections,
a tactic that the United States has employed even more frequently ( NPR ,
12/22/16 ). Yet the extent to which the story has dominated the US media to the detriment
of other issues is a remarkable testament to its utility for those in power.
In the wake of President Trump's Helsinki press conference, National Review declared
itself "Against
Moral Equivalence." The magazine claimed that there could be no equating American
meddling in foreign elections with Russian interference in our election because the goal of
the U.S. is to "promote democracy and political liberty and human rights." Though while
America's actions might be noble and have the sanction of heaven, National Review did
concede that its efforts to promote democracy have often been "messy" -- an adjective that the
people of Iraq might find understated.
Like many of Trump's critics, National Review 's embrace of American exceptionalism,
of exempting the United States from the moral laws of the universe because of its commitment to
democracy, is of a type the West has seen before. Swept up in their revolutionary enthusiasm,
the French Jacobins made similar claims. In late 1791, a member of the Assembly, while
agitating for war with Austria, declared that France "had become the foremost people of the
universe, so their conduct must now correspond to their new destiny. As slaves they were bold
and great; are they to be timid and feeble now that they are free?"
Robespierre himself was taken aback by the turn of a domestic revolution into a call for
military adventurism. Of plans to invade Austria and to overthrow "enemies" of liberty in other
nations, he famously remarked, "No one loves armed missionaries." (Robespierre's advice might
have also benefited the American occupiers of Iraq.) The Jacobins' moral preening led France to
declare war on Austria in 1792 and set in motion years of French military adventurism that
devastated much of central Europe. Military imperialism abroad and guillotines at home became
the legacy of self-declared French exceptionalism.
Hubristic nations that claim a unique place for themselves high atop the moral universe tend
to be imperialistic. This is because claims of national exceptionalism, whether of the French
or American variety, are antinomian, even nihilistic. The "exceptional" ones carve out for
themselves an exemption from the moral law. And prideful claims of moral purity are the
inevitable predicate to imposing one's will upon another. Once leaders assert that their
national soul is of a special kind -- indispensable and not subject to the same rules -- the
road to hell has been paved.
While supporters of American exceptionalism are careful to claim the mantle of Western
civilization, their philosophical orientation in fact amounts to a repudiation of the central
principles of the West and the Constitution.
Arguably, the tradition of the Judeo-Christian West has been special because it has asserted
that human nature is not particularly special. And the Constitution has been exceptional
because it's warned Americans that we are not particularly exceptional.
For example, the legacy of Pauline Christianity, Irving Babbitt tells us, is "the haunting
sense of sin and the stress it lays upon the struggle between the higher and lower self,
between the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit." No person or nation is above this
moral challenge. The uniquely American repudiation of exceptionalism shines brightly in The
Federalist , where no angels can be found among men, and, because no one's behavior enjoys
the sanction of heaven, extensive checks are placed upon people's ability to impose their wills
upon others. The foreign policy that flowed out of the worldview of the Framers was that of
George Washington, a strong recommendation against hubris and foreign meddling.
These historical and cultural warnings about human nature have since been swept away by
acolytes of American exceptionalism. Our moral superiority, they claim, makes us Masters of the
Universe, not careful and mindful custodians of our own fallen nature. We have been put on
earth to judge other nations, not to be judged. Tossing the legacy of the Framers onto the ash
heap of history, George W. Bush declared in his Second Inaugural Address
that our exceptionalism creates an obligation to promote democracy "in every nation and
culture." In this endeavor, Bush pronounced, the United States enjoys the sanction of heaven,
as "history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty." Bush's
Second Inaugural was probably better in the original French.
Now, the puffed-up American establishment, many of whom supported the bloody Iraq war, drip
with moral condescension as they brand Vladimir Putin an existential outlaw and the enemy of
democracy, foreclosing the possibility of common ground with Russia on nuclear weapons, China,
terrorism, and other issues that matter to the national security of the United States. That
Washington has meddled in countless nations' affairs from Iraq to Russia -- and caused untold
damage -- is of no account to the establishment. Rules do not apply to democracy promoters.
After the Iraq war, we should have reconsidered our hubristic American exceptionalism. One
can take pride in the American tradition without laying claim to a uniquely beautiful national
soul that is exempt from the laws of nature and of nature's God. The hysterical reaction to
Trump's truthful admission that the United States too has made mistakes in its relationship
with Russia is a sign that American exceptionalism is still in full flower among elites.
Without the return of a certain humility, there will be more military adventures abroad and
political strife at home.
William S. Smith is research fellow and managing director at the Center for the Study
of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America.11 Responses to America the
Unexceptional
I agree with the sentiment but the facts show we've always been this way. Historically
speaking our hubris didn't start with George W. Bush. We had quite the exceptionalist spirt
with "Manifest Destiny" back in the 19th century. And indeed it took a bit of hubris to
declare independence from Britain.
Dr. Smith wrote his PhD dissertation in political philosophy on a critique of romanticism in
political thinking. However, in the above article he somehow believes America is unexceptional
for having exempted itself from God's laws and natural law. But what if American policy makers
acted out of political necessity and realism, not "hubris" or un-humility? I might agree with
Smith about using "democracy building" as a pretense for military intervention. But does Smith
take what US presidents and congressmen say at face value? What if US intervention in Iraq had
to do with trying to balance power between Iraq and Iran, or stop Islamic expansionism from
pushing into Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states? Moralism can be just as dangerous as democracy
building in foreign affairs.
We did renounce exceptionalism and imperialism after WW1. Wilson's pet agencies faded out and
we focused internally. We remained non-interventionist until 1946 when the Wilsonians snatched
power again.
We should figure out why and how the bureaucracy and media gave up Empire in the early '20s.
Obviously the people were tired, just as they are now, but the people are irrelevant.
Something changed in the power structure. What was it? Can we help it to happen again?
The writer in question of the referenced piece at National Review, Jimmy Quinn, is a
20something college intern, proving they aren't even interested in hiring newer young
conservatives at NRO who don't just mindlessly repeat the neoconservative line on "American
exceptionalism". They are long past their days as a serious magazine. If not by ideology, just
by having a more interesting collection of writers, I'd say even the Weekly Standard is now a
better magazine than National Review. It's become like the boring Pravda rulebook for Official
Conservatism™ in America.
Well done, Mr. Smith. Our hubris blinds this nation to the pain it inflicts in other lands. I
reflect again and again on these words from the hymn (tune Finlandia):
This is my song, oh God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, thou God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine.
When nations rage, and fears erupt coercive,
The drumbeats sound, invoking pious cause.
My neighbors rise, their stalwart hearts they offer,
The gavels drop, suspending rights and laws.
While others wield their swords with blind devotion;
For peace I'll stand, my true and steadfast cause.
We would be one as now we join in singing,
Our hymn of love, to pledge ourselves anew.
To that high cause of greater understanding
Of who we are, and what in us is true.
We would be one in loving and forgiving,
with hopes and dreams as true and high as thine.
C'mon people, it's right to separate yourselves from the bombast and violent meddling we've
done all over the world, but let's not get carried away with this ridiculous "we're just like
any other bully" mentality.
The exceptionalism is in the elevation of individual human freedom as a foundational
principle. We declared it, the French declared it, and it remains a beacon for many others, no
matter how poorly we've observed it from time to time.
"Military imperialism abroad and guillotines at home became the legacy of self-declared
French exceptionalism." No, that was the paroxysm of revolution, one that the U,S. fortunately
avoided.
The real legacy was the sweeping away of monarchy across the continent, despite the irony of
Napoleon making himself emperor.
For all our imperialism, did we treat western Europe the same as Stalin treated eastern
Europe?
Is it just an accident of history that the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, former
British colonies all, lead the world in the protection of individual human rights? You can draw
a line, crooked though it may be, from those countries right back to the Magna Carta.
Yes, we had slavery, a legacy of our status as an agricultural colony, but the British,
French, and Americans all abolished it because it couldn't square with our declared
principles.
We may forget why we are exceptional but our immigration pressure shows that the the rest of
the world hasn't.
Re: The Jacobins' moral preening led France to declare war on Austria in 1792
It wasn't just the Jacobins: pretty much everyone wanted war. The royalists hoped that
foreign intervention would restore Louis XVI as an absolute monarch. The moderates wanted to
consolidate the gains of the Revolution and deflect public anger at its economic failings. The
radicals, as noted, looked to evangelize Europe with the Rights of Man. And the foreign powers
wanted to crush the Revolution lest its ideals take root in their own country -- and help
themselves to this or that bit of France's empire.
Why, then, would a coalition of leftish and right-wing patriots not join in
denouncing a leader who seemed to put Russia's interests ahead of those of his own country?
Sorry to say, things are not so simple. Look a bit more closely at what holds the anti-Trump
foreign policy coalition together, and you will discover a missing reality that virtually no
one will acknowledge directly: the existence of a beleaguered but still potent American Empire
whose junior partner is Europe. What motivates a broad range of the President's opponents,
then, is not so much the fear that he is anti-American as the suspicion that he is
anti-Empire.
Of course, neither liberals nor conservatives dare to utter the "E-word." Rather, they argue
in virtually identical terms that Trump's foreign and trade policies are threatening the
pillars of world order: NATO, the Group of Seven, the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, the OSCE, and so forth. These institutions, they claim, along with
American military power and a willingness to use it when necessary, are primarily responsible
for the peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic world that we have all been privileged to
inhabit since the Axis powers surrendered to the victorious Allies in 1945.
The fear expressed plainly by The New York Times 's David Leonhardt, a
self-described "left-liberal," is that "Trump wants to destroy the Atlantic Alliance." Seven
months earlier, this same fear motivated the arch-conservative National Review to
editorialize that, "Under Trump, America has retreated from its global and moral leadership
roles, alienated its democratic allies, and abandoned the bipartisan defense of liberal ideals
that led to more than 70 years of security and prosperity." All the critics would agree with
Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, who recently stated, "Let's face
it. Mr. Trump's core beliefs conflict with the foundations of Western grand strategy since the
mid-1940's."
"Western grand strategy," of course, is a euphemism for U.S. global hegemony – world
domination, to put it plainly. In addition to peace and prosperity (mainly for privileged
groups in privileged nations), this is the same strategy which since 1945 has given the world
the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear holocaust, and proxy wars consuming between 10 and 20
million lives in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen. Its direct effects include the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Iran,
Lebanon, Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Granada, Ukraine, et al.;
the bribery of public officials and impoverishment and injury of workers and farmers world-wide
as a result of exploitation and predatory "development" by Western governments and
mega-corporations; the destruction of natural environments and exacerbation of global climate
change by these same governments and corporations; and the increasing likelihood of new
imperialist wars caused by the determination of elites to maintain America's global supremacy
at all costs.
It is interesting that most defenders of the Western Alliance (and its Pacific equivalent:
the more loosely organized anti-Chinese alliance of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand,
and South Korea) virtually never talk about American hegemony or the gigantic military
apparatus (with more than 800 U.S. bases in 60 or so nations and a military-industrial complex
worth trillions) that supports it. Nor is the subject of empire high on Mr. Trump's list of
approved twitter topics, even when he desecrates NATO and other sacred cows of the Alliance.
There are several reasons for this silence, but the most important, perhaps, is the need to
maintain the pretense of American moral superiority: the so-called "exceptionalist" position
that inspires McCain to attack Trump for "false equivalency" (the President's statement in
Helsinki that both Russia and the U.S. have made mistakes), and that leads pundits left and
right to argue that America is not an old-style empire seeking to dominate, but a new-style
democracy seeking to liberate.
The narrative you will hear repeated ad nauseum at both ends of the liberal/conservative
spectrum tells how the Yanks, who won WW II with a little help from the Russians and other
allies, and who then thoroughly dominated the world both economically and militarily,
could have behaved like vengeful conquerors, but instead devoted their resources and
energies to spreading democracy, freedom, and the blessings of capitalism around the world. Gag
me with a Tomahawk cruise missile! What is weird about this narrative is that it "disappears"
not only the millions of victims of America's wars but the very military forces that
nationalists like Trump claim deserve to be worshipfully honored. Eight hundred bases? A
million and a half troops on active duty? Total air and sea domination? I'm shocked . . .
shocked!
In fact, there are two sorts of blindness operative in the current U.S. political
environment. The Democratic Party Establishment, now swollen to include a wide variety of
Russia-haters, globalizing capitalists, and militarists, is blind (or pretends to be) to the
connection between the "Western Alliance" and the American Empire. The Trump Party (which I
expect, one of these days, to shed the outworn Republican label in favor of something more
Berlusconi-like, say, the American Greatness Party) is blind – or pretends to be –
to the contradiction between its professed
"Fortress America" nationalism and the reality of a global U.S. imperium.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In a recent article in The Nation , Michael
Klare, a writer I generally admire, claims to have discovered that there is really a method to
Trump's foreign policy madness, i.e., the President favors the sort of "multi-polar" world,
with Russia and China occupying the two other poles, that Putin and Xi Jinping have long
advocated. Two factors make this article odd as well as interesting. First, the author argues
that multi-polarity is a bad idea, because "smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples
everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive
jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies)." Wha? Even shorter
shrift than under unipolarity? I think not, especially considering that adding new poles (why
just three, BTW? What about India and Brazil?) gives smaller states and minority peoples many
more bargaining options in the power game.
More important, however, Trump's multi-polar/nationalist ideals are clearly contradicted by
his determination to make American world domination even more overwhelming by vastly increasing
the size of the U.S. military establishment. Klare notes, correctly, that the President has
denounced the Iraq War, criticized American "overextension" abroad, talked about ending the
Afghan War, and declared that the U.S. should not be "the world's policeman." But if he wants
America to become a mere Great Power in a world of Great Powers, Trump will clearly have to do
more than talk about it. He will have to cut the military budget, abandon military bases,
negotiate arms control agreements, convert military-industrial spending to peaceful uses, and
do all sorts of other things he clearly has no intention of doing. Ever.
No – if the Western Alliance, democratic values, and WTO trade rules provide
ideological cover and junior partners for American global hegemony, "go-it-alone" nationalism,
multi-polarity, and Nobel Peace Prize diplomatic efforts provide ideological cover for . . .
American global hegemony! This can be seen most clearly in the case of Iran, against whom Trump
has virtually declared war. He would like to avoid direct military involvement there, of
course, but he is banking on threats of irresistible "fire and fury" to bring the Iranians to
heel. And if these threats are unavailing? Then – count on it! – the Empire will
act like an empire, and we will have open war.
In fact, Trump and his most vociferous critics and supporters are unknowingly playing the
same game. John Brennan, meet Steve Bannon! You preach very different sermons, but you're
working for the same god. That deity's name changes over the centuries, but we worship him
every time we venerate symbols of military might at sports events, pay taxes to support U.S.
military supremacy, or pledge allegiance to a flag. The name unutterable by both Trump and his
enemies is Empire.
What do we do with the knowledge that both the Tweeter King and the treason-baiting
coalition opposing him are imperialists under the skin? Two positions, I think, have to be
rejected. One is the Lyndon Johnson rationale: since Johnson was progressive on domestic
issues, including civil rights and poverty, that made him preferable to the Republicans, even
though he gave us the quasi-genocidal war in Indochina. The other position is the diametric
opposite: since Trump is less blatantly imperialistic than most Democratic Party leaders, we
ought to favor him, despite his billionaire-loving, immigrant-hating, racist and misogynist
domestic policies. Merely to say this is to refute it.
My own view is that anti-imperialists ought to decline to choose between these alternatives.
We ought to name the imperial god that both Trump and his critics worship and demand
that the party that we work and vote for renounce the pursuit of U.S. global hegemony.
Immediately, this means letting self-proclaimed progressives or libertarians in both major
parties know that avoiding new hot and cold wars, eliminating nuclear weapons and other WMD,
slashing military spending, and converting war production to peaceful uses are top priorities
that must be honored if they are to get our support. No political party can deliver peace and
social justice and maintain the Empire at the same time. If neither Republicans nor Democrats
are capable of facing this reality, we will have to create a new party that can.
Notes.
[1]
The author is University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason
University. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts : How Violent
Systems Can Be Transformed (2017).
"... STEPHANOPOULOS: And I gave you a chance to explain all the irregularities you thought you saw in the investigation. I asked you about that. You said no collusion. At first the White House said that there were no contacts with Russians. We now know there were at least 80 contacts. If the White House or anyone connected to the Trump campaign accepted information from the Russians, that could potentially be collusion. That would be -- that could be considered collusion, could be considered participating with a conspiracy. ..."
STEPHANOPOULOS: And I gave you a chance to explain all the irregularities you thought
you saw in the investigation. I asked you about that. You said no collusion. At first the White
House said that there were no contacts with Russians. We now know there were at least 80
contacts. If the White House or anyone connected to the Trump campaign accepted information
from the Russians, that could potentially be collusion. That would be -- that could be
considered collusion, could be considered participating with a conspiracy.
So that's also -- that's also the possibility of a legal violation there as well. But I do
want to ask you about --
(CROSSTALK)
SEKULOW: -- in that allegation, though, you'd have to -- the -- the so-called collusion,
which by the way is not a legal term, that's now what results in a -- a-- a issue of
criminality. I mean, that's just one theory (ph). And by the way, you know, the phrasing here,
especially at this late date is very important. So everyone is still talking about this
collusion concept. And when Rudy Giuliani said collusion's not a crime, that was again rather
unremarkable.
What was the fact? I mean what was the fact? Well the facts that we know is what is the
violation or what violation has anybody put forward of an actual federal statute that's been
violated by the – by the president of the United States?
And we've yet to seen (ph) it, and as I said, we've seen an awful lot of it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well that's one of the things that Robert Mueller's investigating. I agree
with you on that.
Once the Democratic Party has burned the people who fall under the marketing term
"Millennials" enough times, they'll move on to the new "hope" of Gen Z who won't have
multiple memories of lie after lie.
Some people have told me they could think better when hungry.
After the initial pangs go away, and one can think clearly, one is incentivized to really
find solutions, but thinking as in learning? They have different brains then me, let's just
say.
Marketing and advertising thrive on the same concept.
Exalting youth to exploit it.
When that doesn't work, use fear (of not being wealthy enough, attractive enough, etc,). That
base emotion gets played on throughout people's lives.
That is why those marketing terms found a comfy fit with political narratives and polling
(which is done to fit a narrative).
"... There are too many lucrative salaries on the line that depend on that trillion dollars a year military budget to allow Russia to end up being bogeyman number one. ..."
"... They are fighting for their own lifestyles. And I think that speaks to a broader point that the Russiagate narrative is one that sustains privilege because, really, who does it threaten? ..."
"... And of course, Russia has no huge, powerful lobby in Washington. Russia has no major economic power in the U.S. So attacking Russia really hurts nobody domestically in a position of privilege and influence. And meanwhile, attacking Russia serves a double benefit of allowing people to deflect from other interests much more powerful than Russia that are doing real damage here at home, as Paul has been talking about. ..."
"... While the importance of the existential threat of Russia, the importance of that narrative to the military-industrial complex, is I think that's only one piece of why the American state and large sections of the American oligarchy see Russia so much as a threat. They keep using the word 'adversary.' ..."
"... The United States wants what they call in some of their documents Full Spectrum Dominance. They want global hegemony. Global hegemony means hegemony in every region of the world. They do not like it when any power emerges. The challenges for regional hegemonic because that's obviously part of global hegemony. So they don't like the fact that Russia has a major economy; and not one of the biggest economies, by any means, but a major economy. A big army. Of course, nuclear weapons. So they don't like that it has, kind of, independent will in this region. It's not a global competitor. ..."
"... In the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a free-for-all plundering of all the natural resources and state resources, privatization mania. And the U.S., the Americans thought they'd get a much bigger piece of this. I don't think they thought, after all these years of trying, they thought, bringing down the Soviet Union, in truth the Soviet Union fell mostly for internal reasons. And bureaucrats within the party and the state became the oligarchs, became the billionaires. They seized a lot of these assets, not the West and the Americans. ..."
"... And the out of the chaos emerges a Russian state, led by Putin, to create some sense of normalcy, turn it into a kind of a normal capitalist country, with laws, to some extent, so you can do business and commerce. And one of the things that state did is it didn't allow the West to just hocus pocus, I forget the term, they didn't just allow the West to come in and pick up all these resources and privatization directly themselves. ..."
"... So different parts of the U.S. state have different agendas connected to different sections of capital that have their other agendas, but none of this justifies this McCarthyite level of Cold War rhetoric. ..."
"... And Kissinger observed to Nixon, he says: In 20 years your successor, if he's as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. And then he went on to say: Right now we need the Chinese to correct the Russians, and to discipline the Russians. ..."
"... The, the metaphysical vision of the world- and don't forget, Hitler had quite a metaphysical vision of the world. The, the role of, the mission of the aryan nation to take over the world and march into a new era of civilization and all this was all intertwined with, with a metaphysical, quasi-fanatical religious view of the world. ..."
"... Putin is very close to the Russian Orthodox Church. He's been promoting this kind of nationalism intertwined with religious messaging through the church. He promotes this kind of stuff in Western Europe. Putin has been nurturing the far right in Western Europe. So this jives, the agenda of the people around Trump and Putin have similar views of the world. ..."
"... So yeah, the idea of some kind of accommodation with Russia because of the coming trade war, and who knows what kind of war, with China, yeah, this is definitely, I think, part of the equation. The shorter-term play is Iran. They are, this group, this cabal in Washington, is fixated on regime change in Iran. I actually am not sure how they, why they see that fits the China strategy, but I don't know that it matters, because that's their play. And they've been talking about it for years, since the late night 1990s. And this document, Project for a New American Century. Undoing the Iranian revolution has been absolutely at the core of these people's foreign policy. ..."
Watch Part 2 of Paul Jay and Aaron Mate's interactive discussion with viewers about the
controversy over Trump's visit to Helsinki – From a live recording on July 18th, 2018
AARON MATE: I want to read a comment from a viewer, Kristen Lee, who writes: There
are too many lucrative salaries on the line that depend on that trillion dollars a year
military budget to allow Russia to end up being bogeyman number one. To not end up-. To have
Russia not end up being boogeymen number one, I believe. They are fighting for their own
lifestyles. And I think that speaks to a broader point that the Russiagate narrative is one
that sustains privilege because, really, who does it threaten? I mean, yes, it threatens Trump.
But we already know that there's a huge cross-section of the elite that despises Trump,
including many Republicans who campaigned against him during the campaign.
And of course, Russia has no huge, powerful lobby in Washington. Russia has no major
economic power in the U.S. So attacking Russia really hurts nobody domestically in a position
of privilege and influence. And meanwhile, attacking Russia serves a double benefit of allowing
people to deflect from other interests much more powerful than Russia that are doing real
damage here at home, as Paul has been talking about.
PAUL JAY: Could I just, could I just then-.
AARON MATE: Let me ask you about China, first. Because we're-.
PAUL JAY: Before we do China, before we do China, let me just add one thing to this,
which I think-. While the importance of the existential threat of Russia, the importance of
that narrative to the military-industrial complex, is I think that's only one piece of why the
American state and large sections of the American oligarchy see Russia so much as a threat.
They keep using the word 'adversary.' .
And the reason why I think there's a several pieces to it, and I said this in the interview
the other day, one, the United States does not like regional powers that are not under the
American thumb. They don't want anyone, they-. The United States wants what they call in
some of their documents Full Spectrum Dominance. They want global hegemony. Global hegemony
means hegemony in every region of the world. They do not like it when any power emerges. The
challenges for regional hegemonic because that's obviously part of global hegemony. So they
don't like the fact that Russia has a major economy; and not one of the biggest economies, by
any means, but a major economy. A big army. Of course, nuclear weapons. So they don't like that
it has, kind of, independent will in this region. It's not a global competitor.
But there's another piece to this. Russia has oil. They don't like an oil state, a country
that has such massive oil supply, not being under the U.S. umbrella, U.S. hegemony. That's,
that's number two. Number three, they don't like the way Putin and that state emerged. You
know, if people are watching the series that I'm doing of interviews with Alexander Buzgalin,
we're telling the whole story of the emergence of Putin out of the collapsed Soviet state,
Soviet system. In the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a
free-for-all plundering of all the natural resources and state resources, privatization mania.
And the U.S., the Americans thought they'd get a much bigger piece of this. I don't think they
thought, after all these years of trying, they thought, bringing down the Soviet Union, in
truth the Soviet Union fell mostly for internal reasons. And bureaucrats within the party and
the state became the oligarchs, became the billionaires. They seized a lot of these assets, not
the West and the Americans.
And the out of the chaos emerges a Russian state, led by Putin, to create some sense of
normalcy, turn it into a kind of a normal capitalist country, with laws, to some extent, so you
can do business and commerce. And one of the things that state did is it didn't allow the West
to just hocus pocus, I forget the term, they didn't just allow the West to come in and pick up
all these resources and privatization directly themselves.
So this Putin's state's been to some extent blocking the U.S. from turning this Russia, as
they have with most most other areas of the world- of course the other big exception is China
and Iran- under, into the American global capitalist system, where the Americans are the
dominant power. And they even had ways to do that. But these things jive, don't always jive, I
should say, which is the economic incorporation of Russia into, into global capitalism, into,
even into the EU, for example, or something, some structure like that, does not jive with the
narrative of an existential threat that serves this massive military expenditure.
So different parts of the U.S. state have different agendas connected to different
sections of capital that have their other agendas, but none of this justifies this McCarthyite
level of Cold War rhetoric.
AARON MATE: Right. So in terms of China, as we're talking about other possible
explanation for Trump's desire to work with Russia that go beyond him being a potential
intelligence asset, or that Putin has kompromat on Trump, which really is right now the
dominant corporate media narrative and question. You've been laying out some- I want to focus
on China for a second, and actually read to you, Paul, a quote. This is John Pomfret. He's a
historian. And he writes about Kissinger talking to Nixon after Kissinger returned from China
as part of the Nixon administration's overture to China in the early '70s. And Kissinger
observed to Nixon, he says: In 20 years your successor, if he's as wise as you, will wind up
leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. And then he went on to say: Right now we need
the Chinese to correct the Russians, and to discipline the Russians.
So I find that interesting, because it's a way to help understand what might have motivated
Nixon's overtures to China back then. But also I think that might help us understand what might
motivate Trump's overtures to Russia. Now, obviously China has been a huge obsession of Trump.
He talks about it constantly. He's launching a trade war right now. And it's quite likely, I
think, he recognizes that if he really wants to confront China, a far bigger world power than
Russia is, especially, obviously, economically, that he might need to enlist Russia for that
task.
PAUL JAY: I certainly think there's part of it. How conscious Trump himself is of
these kind of geostrategic assessments and plans, I don't know. Trump's a very smart con man. I
don't know that he has a big geopolitical brain. But that being said, he's got people around
him, including John Bolton, who are actually quite smart and have real geopolitical brains, and
are fanatics.
The, my guess is the short-term play, and I don't see this- I think it's ridiculous that
Trump is Putin's stooge, and all of this. The agenda of this group that's in power and that
Trump represents the interests of, this isn't just a one man band, even if he flies off the
handle in a one-man way. But this agenda of Iran and China, this was very well articulated by
Steve Bannon before and after the victory of Trump in the election. This has economic interests
which they, of course, China is the real economic competitor in the world that's a threat to
American dominance. But it also has an ideological framing for it. And that's the defense of
Western Christian civilization. And I think they believe in this stuff. Bannon himself is
connected to Opus Dei in the Catholic Church. He's connected to Cardinal Burke. They're waging
a war against Pope Francis. They want to overthrow the Pope. And it's really as open as that.
They don't like, they're shocked that they've got a pope that's a social democrat. The, the
metaphysical vision of the world- and don't forget, Hitler had quite a metaphysical vision of
the world. The, the role of, the mission of the aryan nation to take over the world and march
into a new era of civilization and all this was all intertwined with, with a metaphysical,
quasi-fanatical religious view of the world.
Well I think they have this. So China does not fit the plan of saving Western civilization.
But Russia does. And Putin is very close to the Russian Orthodox Church. He's been
promoting this kind of nationalism intertwined with religious messaging through the church. He
promotes this kind of stuff in Western Europe. Putin has been nurturing the far right in
Western Europe. So this jives, the agenda of the people around Trump and Putin have similar
views of the world. And it is a far right, far right view of the world.
So yeah, the idea of some kind of accommodation with Russia because of the coming trade
war, and who knows what kind of war, with China, yeah, this is definitely, I think, part of the
equation. The shorter-term play is Iran. They are, this group, this cabal in Washington, is
fixated on regime change in Iran. I actually am not sure how they, why they see that fits the
China strategy, but I don't know that it matters, because that's their play. And they've been
talking about it for years, since the late night 1990s. And this document, Project for a New
American Century. Undoing the Iranian revolution has been absolutely at the core of these
people's foreign policy.
So there are, all these things are interconnected. And you know, dividing Russia from China,
and having clearly some kind of alliance there, it's also in the interests of Putin, and it's
very much in the interest of this, of this cabal. I think we should even stop talking and being
so focused on Trump. Because if they bring down Trump the individual, they'll find some other,
some other individual to come play a similar role. And he won't, this, whoever he or she is
won't be such a clown.
"... Graph: The Democrats' choice to blame external forces, e.g. Russian meddling, for their electoral loss in 2016 ignores evidence of that none-of-the-above is the people's choice. The largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who chose not to vote. In contrast to the received wisdom in political consultant circles, choosing not to vote is a political act. The U.S. has the lowest voter turnout in the 'developed' world for a reason. Source: ..."
Prior to the 2016 presidential election, if one were to ask what single act could seal a
new Cold War with Russia, align liberals and progressives with the operational core of the
American military-industrial-surveillance complex, expose the preponderance of left-activism as
an offshoot of Democratic Party operations and consign most of what remained to personal
invective against an empirically dangerous leader, consensus would likely have it that doing so
wouldn't be easy.
The decision to blame Russian meddling for Hillary Clinton's electoral loss was
made in the immediate aftermath of the election by her senior campaign staff. Within days
the
received wisdom amongst Clinton supporters was that the election had been stolen and that
Donald Trump was set to enter the White House as a pawn of the Russian political leadership.
Left out was the history of U.S. – Russian relations; that the largest voting bloc in the
2016 election was eligible voters who didn't vote and that domestic business interests
substantially control the American electoral process.
Graph: The Democrats' choice to blame external forces, e.g. Russian meddling, for their
electoral loss in 2016 ignores evidence of that none-of-the-above is the people's choice. The
largest voting bloc in the 2016 election was eligible voters who chose not to vote. In contrast
to the received wisdom in political consultant circles, choosing not to vote is a political
act. The U.S. has the lowest voter turnout in the 'developed' world for a reason. Source:electproject.org.
More than a year later, no credible evidence has been put forward to establish that
any votes were changed due to 'external' meddling. As the Intercept has reported
, since the election progressive candidates seeking public office have been systematically
subverted by establishment Democrats in favor of those with connections to big-money donors.
And
the Democratic Party leadership in congress just voted to give Mr. Trump expanded spying
powers with fewer restraints. Congressional Democrats are certainly behaving as if they believe
Mr. Trump was duly elected. And more to the point, they are supporting his program.
The choice of Russia would seem bizarre if not for the history. Residual propaganda from the
first Cold War -- itself largely a business enterprise that provided
ideological cover for American imperial incursions , had it that substantive grievances
against the American government, in the form of protests, were universally the product of
'external' enemies intent on sowing discord to promote their own interests. This slander was
used against the Civil Rights movement, organized labor, anti-war protesters and the
counterculture of the 1960s.
Therefore, the choice by the Clintonites to invoke a new Cold War by bringing Russia into
the American electoral mix is not without a past. Students of history may recall that in the
early 1990s Mikhail Gorbachev was
given assurances by senior members of George H.W. Bush's administration that NATO would not
be expanded to Russia's border in exchange for Russia's help re-integrating East and West
Germany. It was Bill
Clinton who unilaterally abrogated these assurances and moved nuclear-armed NATO to
Russia's border.
In 2013 the Obama administration ' brokered ' (Mr. Obama's term) a coup in the
former Soviet state of Ukraine that ousted the democratically elected President to install
persons favorable to the
interests of Western oligarchs . At the time Hillary Clinton had just vacated her post as
Mr. Obama's Secretary of State to prepare for her 2016 run for president, but her lieutenants,
including Victoria
Nuland , were active in coordinating the coup and deciding who the new 'leadership' of
Ukraine would be.
An analogy would be if Russia moved troops and weaponry to the Mexican border with the U.S.
after giving assurances that it wouldn't do so and then engineered a coup (in Mexico) to
install a government friendly to the interests of the Russian political leadership. One needn't
be sympathetic to Russian interests to understand that these are provocations. Given U.S. and
Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, the provocations seem more reckless than 'tough.' Then
consider Mr. Obama's, later Trump's, move to 'upgrade' the U.S. nuclear arsenal toward
'tactical' use.
This is to suggest that it certainly makes sense that the Russian political leadership would
want to keep American militarists, a/k/a the Clintons and their neocon ' crazies
,' out of White House. But as of now, the evidence is that the Russians changed no votes in the
2016 election. As far as inciting dissent -- the charge that protests were organized by Russian
'interests,' not only does this reek of prior misdirection by the FBI and CIA, but there is no
evidence that any such protests had an impact on the outcome of the 2016 election.
Given Mr. Trump's belligerent (unhinged) rhetoric toward North Korea, if enhancing
geopolitical stability was the Russians' goal, Mr. Trump must be a disappointment.
Unfortunately for Mr. Trump's critics (among whom I count myself), there is a lot of 'theory'
from American think tanks that supports crazy as a strategy . And it was
after Mr. Trump's provocative posture toward North Korea became widely known that
senior Democrats voted to give him additional NSA powers with fewer restrictions.
The most cynically brilliant outcome of the 'blame Russia' campaign has been to neuter left
activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As
evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump's administration approximates
that in Mr. Obama's and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton's. If the problem is Donald Trump,
then the solution is 'not Trump.' However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political
outcomes, how would electing 'not Trump' bring about resolution?
As it is, within days of the 2016 election Mr. Trump, his supporters plus the political
opponents of Mrs. Clinton were recast as stooges of the Kremlin. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
had required loyalty oaths
from their stalwarts. But even a loyalty oath wouldn't prove that one isn't a stooge of the
Kremlin. And the larger problem with the theory (of Russian meddling) is that the U.S.
electoral system was already thoroughly corrupted by
economic power.
As students of the scientific method know, you can't 'prove' a negative. Condoleezza Rice
used this knowledge in 2003 to sell the
George W. Bush administration's calamitous war against Iraq through the charge that the proof
that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing WMD program is that he hadn't handed over his WMDs. As
history has it, Mr. Hussein couldn't hand over his WMDs because he didn't have any to hand
over. How then would critics of Mrs. Clinton 'prove' they weren't / aren't acting on behalf of
foreign interests?
The answer lies with Democratic Party loyalists. Much as Bush – Cheney supporters were
impervious to logical and evidentiary challenges to the rationales given for the war against
Iraq, Clintonites believe what they believe because they believe it. For those with an interest
and some knowledge of empirical research, read the myriad articles touting 'proof' of Russian
meddling and find a single instance where such proof is provided. Or with an eye toward not
being the half of
Republicans who still believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, bring the proof forward if it
exists.
Here is the disclaimer taken from the National Intelligence Estimate (link here ).
The National
Intelligence Estimate , initially claimed to be based on input from 17 intelligence
agencies, later reduced to selected representatives from three of the agencies (NSA, CIA and
FBI), provides no proof for claims of Russian meddling and states quite openly that it is
conjecture. Amongst these agencies, one (NSA) is known for illegally spying on Americans and
lying about it to congress, the second (CIA) provided fraudulent 'evidence' to drag the U.S.
into a calamitous war against Iraq where it ran illegal torture camps and the third (FBI) has
such a checkered history that is was called 'Gestapo'
by former U.S. president Harry Truman.
Here is James
Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, lying to congress about NSA spying.
Here is Trevor Timm in the
Columbia (University) Journalism Review explaining the many ways former head of the NSA and CIA
Michael Hayden has lied to congress and the American people. Here is a brief history of
COINTELPRO and FBI attempts to disrupt and discredit the Civil Rights movement. At the time
that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was accusing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist
(link above), the term approximated being an agent of Russia.
(Here is a compendium of links related to claims made in this piece:
Promise by U.S. that NATO wouldn't expand to surround Russia. Bill Clinton expands NATO
to Eastern Bloc to surround Russia. Barack Obama admits U.S. role in Ukraine coup. James
Clapper
committing perjury. Victoria Nuland discusses overthrowing the democratically
elected government of Ukraine and installing U.S. puppets. Backstory of CIA and Robert Sheer that
supports argument Propornot is government operation with ties to Ukrainian fascists.)
There is circumstantial
evidence that the first list of 'Russian-linked' websites published by the 'credible'
media, that of Propornot
published in the Washington Post (in their 'Business' section) to which a
disclaimer was subsequently added, was the work of Ukrainians with links to the CIA. The
Propornot website (link above) is worth visiting to get a sense of how implausible the whole
enterprise is. On it former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts , is listed
prominently as a puppet of the Kremlin. And deep-research political website Washington's Blog made the honor roll as well.
More recently, the New York Times
cited the German Marshall Fund as an authority on Russian meddling. The German Marshall
fund (U.S.) is headed by Karen Donfried , a former Obama
Administration official and operative for the National Intelligence Council. The National
Intelligence Council supports the Director of National Intelligence.Here (again) is James Clapper,
the former Director of National Intelligence, lying to congress about NSA spying. Derek Chollet , Executive Vice
President of the fund, is the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Obama
administration and a senior member of Hillary Clinton's Policy Planning Staff.
The question for the Left is why liberals and progressives would align themselves with
Hayden, Clapper, the FBI, CIA and NSA, and suspect organizations like Propornot and the German
Marshall Fund when most have spent their entire existences trying to undermine and shut down
the Left? The (near-term) cynical brilliance of the Democrats' strategy is through revival of
the Cold War frame of national interests that was always a cover for imperial business schemes.
As the Intercept articles (links above) have well- uncovered, this is all just business for the
Democrats anyway. Can you say class warfare?
Assuming for a moment that not everyone is playing the Democrats' one-dimensional checkers,
if the Russian political leadership really intended to 'undermine the U.S.-led liberal
democratic order,' as the NIE puts it, it is doing Mrs. Clinton
a disservice to suggest that she wasn't up to the job. From the Clintons' 1994 Crime Bill to
deregulating Wall Street to support for George W. Bush's calamitous war against Iraq to the
U.S. / NATO destruction of Libya, Mrs. Clinton has 'undermine(d) the U.S.-led liberal
democratic order' just fine.
Likely not considered when the Russian meddling hypothesis was originally put forward is
what happens next? The initial charge that America's 'sacred democratic tradition' was soiled
when the Russian political leadership hacked the election has run up against the apparent fact
that no votes have been found to have been changed. The charge that AstroTurf protests
organized by the Russians led to dissent smells a lot like the last half-century of FBI / CIA
lies against / about the Left. And the charge that narcissistic plutocrat Trump has been
'compromised' misses that he was already compromised by the circumstances of his birth and
upbringing. This is the problem.
The Democrats, in their wisdom, have given a gift to the U.S. intelligence 'community' that
provides political cover for closing down inconvenient commentary and disrupting inconvenient
political organizations. A political Left with a brain would be busy thinking through strategy
for when the internet becomes completely unusable for organizing and communication. The
unifying factor in the initial 'fake news' purge was criticism of Hillary Clinton. Print media,
a once viable alternative, has been all but destroyed by the move to the internet. This
capability needs to be rebuilt.
Bourgeois incredulity that Donald Trump still has supporters could be seen by an inquisitive
Left through a lens of class struggle. Yes, his effective supporters are rich, just as the
national Democrats' are -- the term for this is plutocracy. But back in the realm of human
beings, rising deaths of despair tie in theory and fact to the wholesale abandonment of the
American people by the political class. An inquisitive Left would be talking to these people,
not at them. The Russian meddling story is a sideshow with a political purpose. But class
struggle remains the relevant story. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Rob Urie
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is
published by CounterPunch Books.
"... Chart: Demonization of Russia centers on competition for oil and gas revenues. Pipelines to deliver oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe run through North Africa (Libya) and Syria and / or Turkey. These pipelines are substantially controlled by Western interests with imperial / colonial ties to the U.S., Britain and 'developed' Europe. Russian oil and gas did run through Ukraine, which is now negotiating to join NATO, or otherwise hits a NATO wall before entering Europe. ..."
The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given in
mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller's indictment is understood to charge the
exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for yourself), the FBI, which Mr.
Mueller directed from 2001 – 2013, is precisely the wrong entity to be rendering
judgment. The FBI has been America's political police since its founding in 1908. Early on
former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious mass
arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the slander of conflating
legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the institutional backdrop from which Mr.
Mueller proceeds.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI's targets included the civil rights movement, the
antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther Party and any other
political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program COINTELPRO was intended to
subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and with no regard for the lives of its
targets . Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless
to maintain an unjust social order.
Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September 11, 2001. One
of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons without any evidence of criminal
wrongdoing. None of those arrested were ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame
in which the FBI acted -- to maintain political stability threatened by 'external' forces, was
ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its aggressive war against
Iraq.
It is the FBI's legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr.
Mueller's indictment most insidiously perpetuates. Russians are 'sowing discord,' and they are
using Americans to do so, goes the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed
in the indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to the
presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and
evidence of being a foreign agent.
The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment -- that it isn't the FBI's fault
that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the electoral process, runs against the
history of the FBI's political role, the tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put
forward versus those put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that
the FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of a larger
story.
In the aftermath of the indictments it's easy to forget that the Pentagon created the internet ,
that the NSA
has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, that the CIA has been heavily
involved in funding and 'using' social media toward its own ends and that the FBI is only
reputable in the present because of Americans' near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that
the Russian operation was sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered
by the fact that it was, by the various agencies' own claims, ineffectual in changing the
outcome of the election.
I Have a List
While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past crimes, Dan
Coats, the Director of National Intelligence,
declared that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of the
2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that has its tentacles in
all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been heavily involved in funding and 'using'
social media toward its own ends and the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good
over evil would be quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question
that needs to be asked.
The political frame being put forward is that only these agencies know if particular
elections and candidates have been tainted by meddling, therefore we need to trust them to tell
us which candidates were legitimately elected and which weren't. As generous as this offer
seems, wouldn't the creation of free and fair elections be a more direct route to achieving
this end? Put differently, who among those making the offer, whether personally or as
functionaries of their respective agencies, has a demonstrated history of supporting democratic
institutions?
The 2016 election was apparently a test case for posing these agencies as the meddling
police. By getting the bourgeois electocracy -- liberal Democrats, to agree that the loathsome
Trump is illegitimate, future candidates will be vetted by the CIA, NSA and FBI with impunity.
It's apparently only the pre-'discord, ' the social angst that the decade of the Great
Recession left as its residual, that shifts this generous offer from the deterministic to the
realm of the probable. The social conditions that led to the Great Recession and its aftermath
are entirely home grown.
More broadly, how do the government agencies and people that spent the better part of the
last century undermining democracy at home and abroad intend to stop 'Russian meddling?' If the
FBI couldn't disentangle home grown 'discord' from that allegedly exploited and exacerbated by
the Russians, isn't the likely intention to edit out all discord? And if fake news is a problem
in need of addressing, wouldn't the
New York Times and the Washington Post have
been shut down years ago?
The Great Satin (sic)
While Russia is the villain of the day, week and year due to alleged election 'meddling,'
the process of demonization that Russia has undergone has shown little variation from (alleged)
villain to villain. It is thanks to cable news and the 'newspaper of record' that the true
villainy of Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicolas Maduro and the political
leadership of Iran has been revealed. In the face of such monsters, questions of motivation are
moot. Why wouldn't Mr. Putin 'sow discord?'
The question as yet unasked, and therefore unanswered is: is there something besides base
villainy that brought these national leaders, and the nations they lead, into the crosshairs of
America's fair and wise leadership? This question might forever go unanswered were it not for
the secret list from which their names were apparently drawn. No, not that secret list. This one is publicly available -- hiding in plain sight, as it
were. It is the list of proven oil reserves by country (below). This is no doubt unduly
reductive -- evil is as evil does, but read on.
The question of how such a list could divide so evenly between heroes and villains I leave
to the philosophers. On second thought, no I won't. The heroes are allies of a small cadre of
America's political and economic elite who have made themselves fabulously rich through the
alliances. The villains have oil, gas, pipelines and other resources that this elite wants.
Reductive, yes. But this simple list certainly appears to explain American foreign policy over
the last half-century quite well.
Source: gulfbusiness.com
It's almost as if America's love for humanity, as demonstrated through humanitarian
interventions, is determined by imperial competition for natural resources -- in this case oil
and gas. Amongst these countries, only one (Canada) is 'democratic' in the American sense of
being run by a small cadre of plutocrats who use the state to further their own interests. Two
-- Iraq and Libya, were recently reduced to rubble (for the sake of humanity) by the U.S.
Nigeria is being 'brought' under the control of AFRICOM. What remains are various and sundry
petro-states plus Venezuela and Russia.
Following the untimely death of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the horrible tyrant kept in office
via free
and fair elections , who used Venezuela's petro-dollars to feed, clothe and educate his
people and was in the process of creating a regional Left alliance to counter American abuse of
power, the CIA joined with local
plutocrats to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro. The goal: to 'liberate' Venezuela's oil
revenues in their own pockets. At the moment Mr. Maduro is down the list of villains, not
nearly the stature of a 'new Hitler' like Vladimir Putin. But where he ends up will depend on
how successfully the CIA (with Robert Mueller's help) can drum up a war against nuclear armed
Russia.
What separates Russia from the other heroes and villains on the list is its history as a
competing empire as well as the manner in which Russian oil and gas is distributed. Geography
placed it closer to the population centers of Europe than to Southeastern China where Chinese
economic development has been concentrated. This makes Europe a 'natural' market for Russian
oil and gas.
The former Soviet state of Ukraine did stand between, or rather under, Russian pipelines and
Europe until Hillary Clinton had her lieutenants engineer a coup there in 2014. In contrast to
the 'new Hitler' of Mr. Putin (or was that Trump?) Mrs. Clinton and her comrades demonstrated a
preference for the old Hitler in the form of Ukrainian fascists who were the ideological
descendants of 'authentic' WWII Nazis. But rest assured, not all of the U.S.'s allies in this
affair
were ideological Nazis .
Chart: Demonization of Russia centers on competition for oil and gas revenues. Pipelines
to deliver oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe run through North Africa (Libya) and
Syria and / or Turkey. These pipelines are substantially controlled by Western interests with
imperial / colonial ties to the U.S., Britain and 'developed' Europe. Russian oil and gas did
run through Ukraine, which is now negotiating to join NATO, or otherwise hits a NATO wall
before entering Europe.
In contrast to the alternative hypotheses given
in the American press, NATO, the geopolitical extension of the U.S. military in Europe,
admits that the U.S.
engineered coup in Ukraine was 'about' oil geopolitics with Russia. The American storyline
that Crimea was seized by Russia ignores that the Russian navy has had a Black Sea port in Crimea for decades. How
amenable, precisely, might Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his friends be if
Russia seized a major U.S. naval port given their generous offer to take over the U.S.
electoral system because of a few Russian trolls?
Although Russia is toward the bottom of the top ten countries in terms of oil reserves, it
faces a problem of distribution that the others don't. Imperial ties and recent military
incursions have left the distribution of oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe largely
under Western control. Syria, Turkey and North Africa are necessary to moving this oil and gas
through pipelines to Europe. That Syria, Libya and Turkey are now, or recently have been,
militarily contested adds credence to the contention that the 'international community's'
heroes and villains are largely determined by whose hands their oil and gas resources are
currently in.
Democratic Party loyalists who see Putin, Maduro et al as the problem first need to
answer for the candidate they put forward in 2016. Hillary Clinton led the carnage in Libya
that murdered
30,000 – 50,000 innocents for Western oil and gas interests. Russia didn't force the
U.S. into its calamitous invasion of Iraq. Russia didn't take Americans' jobs, houses and
pensions in the Great Recession. Russia didn't reward Wall Street for causing it. Democrats
need to take responsibility for their failed candidates and their failed Party.
Part of the point in relating oil reserves to American foreign entanglements is that the
countries and leaders involved are incidental. Vladimir Putin certainly seems smarter than the
American leadership. But this has no bearing on whether or not his leadership of Russia is
broadly socially beneficial. The only possible resolution of climate crisis requires both
Russia and the U.S. to greatly reduce their use of fossil fuels. Reports have it that Mr. Putin
has no interest in doing so. And once the marketing chatter is set to the side, neither do the
Americans.
By placing themselves as arbiters of the electoral process, the Director of National
Intelligence and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI can effectively control it. Is it accidental
that the candidate of liberal Democrats in the 2016 election was the insiders' -- the
intelligence agencies' and military contractors,' candidate as well? Implied is that these
agencies and contractors are now 'liberal.' Good luck with that program if you value peace and
prosperity.
There are lots of ways to create free and fair elections if that is the goal. Use
paper ballots that are counted in public, automatically register all eligible voters, make
election days national holidays and eliminate 'private' funding of electoral campaigns. But why
make elections free and fair when fanciful nonsense about 'meddling' will convince the liberal
class to deliver power to grey corpses in the CIA, NSA and FBI for the benefit of a tiny cabal
of stupendously rich plutocrats. Who says America isn't already great?
"... Akhilesh "Akhi" Pillalamarri is a fellow at Defense Priorities. An international relations analyst, editor, and writer, he studied international security at Georgetown University. Find him on Twitter ..."
Iranians: Not Pining for American InterventionSome seem to think they can't wait
for us to overthrow their government. Nothing could be further from the truth. By
Akhilesh Pillalamarri
•
August 6, 2018
Ryan
Rodrick Beiler/Shutterstock Defense hawks in Washington think the people of Iran are
waiting with bated breath for the regime in Tehran to collapse and wouldn't mind a little
American help along the way -- whether through direct military intervention, or "naturally" as
the result of grassroots
protests , "with Washington backing," of course.
There is no greater fallacy. While the people of Iran are undoubtedly frustrated with their
government, they are not on the
cusp of changing it, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems to believe . In fact, any attempt
by outside actors to change the regime would cause the people of Iran to unify around the
clerics. We would end up deflating the reformist party and enabling the hardliners who have
consistently warned their people that we can't be trusted.
This ongoing mind reading of the Iranian people is pure Washington hokum with no basis in
reality.
After witnessing the debacles of our interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, who can
blame the people of Iran for not wanting direct American military aid? As Damon Linker
points out in
The Week , our attitude towards unsavory regimes in other nations is all too often
informed by "an incorrigible optimism about the benefits of change and consequent refusal to
entertain the possibility that a bad situation might be made even worse by overturning it."
Almost nobody in Iran supports the main group pushing for Western-backed regime change, the
National Council for the Resistance of Iran (NCRI). That organization is widely seen as a
front for
the despised Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), an Iranian Marxist group that fought against the late
Shah, was virulently anti-American, and worked with Saddam Hussein to
invade Iran during the Iran-Iraq War before rebranding itself as a democratic opposition
group.
Despite this being common knowledge among unbiased observers, figures like National Security
Advisor John Bolton
continue to promote it as an alternative for Iran.
In actuality, despite the desire among a sizable segment of Iranians -- especially young
people in Tehran and other large cities -- for a pro-Western government, there is no
well-organized, secular, democratic alternative waiting to take charge. Any organization that
bills itself as such is following in the deceitful footsteps of Ahmed
Chalabi , the Iraqi leader-in-exile who sold himself in the United States as the Iraqi
George Washington, but failed to garner any political support after the fall of Saddam
Hussein.
History shows us that there is no quicker way for a leader or group to lose legitimacy than
by seeking the aid of a foreign power. King Louis XVI of France managed to hold on to his
throne for a few years after the storming of the Bastille, but was deposed after fleeing Paris
and seeking the aid of France's enemies. Iranians, like Americans, value liberty in the sense
of national self-determination: they would rather be under-served by their own leaders than by
well-meaning foreigners or those perceived to be puppets.
After wasting almost two decades of blood and treasure trying to rebuild countries with
weaker national identities than Iran -- like Iraq -- U.S. policymakers would have to be
detached from reality to believe that anything good could come of intervention in Iranian
affairs.
The people of Iran have a long historical memory: those who sold out their nation to foreign
powers, even in opposition to tyranny, have garnered not thanks but the collective hatred of
the Iranian people. From the actions
of the satrap Bessus who killed the last Achaemenid Persian king Darius III to curry favor with
Alexander the Great, to the slaying of the last pre-Islamic Persian ruler Yazdegerd III by a
local ruler to appease the invading Arabs, Iranians have long looked askance at collaboration
with foreigners. Numerous 19th-century Qajar rulers failed to implement their policies because
they were thought to be too close to the goals of the imperial powers of Russia or Britain. And
the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, never escaped the perception that his ascent to power in
1953 was enabled by British and American intelligence agencies, regardless of his own
self-portrayal as a nationalist.
Most Iranians, no matter how much they oppose their current government and politics, would
not support an invasion of their own country, let alone the peaceful ascendancy of groups
believed to serve interests other than theirs: it is a matter
of pride and honor.
It is true that Iran has been racked by protests throughout the past year, such as January's
multi-city demonstrations and the closure of the Grand Bazaar in Tehran in June. But those were
spontaneous actions resulting from blue-collar frustrations with the economy and are unlikely
to lead to an outcome favorable to American interests.
If our pressure on Iran leads to regime change, the most likely alternative is
probably a military junta led by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a
shift away from the semi-civilian government that Iran now enjoys. The IRGC has been infringing
on our geopolitical interests throughout the Middle East for decades and could take an even
harder anti-American line than the current government. When confronted with invaders and
foreign pressure, Iranians have always rallied around military strongmen, such as Nader Shah in
the early 18th century, who threw out the invading Afghans, and Reza Shah in the early 20th
century, who saved
Iran from disintegration after World War I.
Washington should be careful what it wishes for. We should not delude ourselves into
thinking that the people of Iran are waiting for our support and intervention. The truth is
much darker.
Akhilesh "Akhi" Pillalamarri is a fellow at Defense Priorities. An international
relations analyst, editor, and writer, he studied international security at Georgetown
University. Find him on Twitter@akhipill.
The people of Iran instinctively love America because everyone in the world loves America.
This is true regardless of the fact that we have never done anything whatsoever to merit
their love. We have never given them assistance when they had an earthquake, we won't let
them get spare parts for passenger airlines causing air travel to be unsafe. We hinder
civilian projects but since we are narcissists, we simply believe that everyone loves us
because of our intrinsically great qualities.
Really, what if the shoe were on the other foot? Trump is very unpopular as our own
President. But if a foreign power were to attempt to depose him and install a new government,
there would be massive popular resistance to that here. Why the neocons think it would be
different in any other country eludes me.
Nothing can unite even a fractiously divided nation more readily than foreign
interference.
US policy since Libya and Syria has been "regime destruction", with not even token
commitments to pretend "nation building". The miscalculation continues: if the US manages to
turn Iran into a "failed to comply" state without effective governance, there will be several
factions with professional military capabilities – especially given the IRGC
"deterrent" of connections and alliances throughout the Middle East – that can continue
where our pathological US "maglinity" plans to stop.
There are no "wars of choice". The only choice the US gets is whether to start an
unnecessary war, from then on our victims get a say, eventually. We are still trapped in
Eisenhower's grandstanding "meddling" in Iranian elections, after all .
Everyone knows that Iranians are not begging for "liberation", just as everyone with the
brains God gave my youngest cat knew damn well that American boots would not transform Iraq
into a western democracy, that American bombs would ruin Libya and American bombs are used
for genocide in Yemen.
The Trump Administration is looking for an excuse to attack. Just as the Bush
Administration shed crocodile tears over the poor Iraqis, and Obama cynically exploited the
fate of Libyans.
"... If, on average, just seven Republicans are moderates, and Democrats need 15 additional votes, Democrats will obviously fall short. Where else then could and should Democrats look? The more promising pools of people are actually Democratic voters -- many of whom face greater economic obstacles in finding the time and transportation to get to the polls. ..."
"... In the quest for those necessary 15 votes, the number-one place Democrats should look is among the 19 percent of Democrats who voted in 2016, but are unlikely to cast ballots this year. ..."
"... In fact, the largest pool of people Democrats should be trying to tap is actually nonvoters -- the 200,000 people per district who were eligible but didn't cast ballots in 2016. It is in these sectors of society where Democrats will find the source of success and the path to winning back the House and taking back our country and winning elections for years to come. ..."
Democratic leaders have gone to great lengths, for example, to
encourage
military veterans to run for Congress
this year. Veterans can be great progressive leaders (my father and
uncle served in the military, and I was born on a military base), but if the strategic objective is to appeal to
swing voters drawn to Trump's posture and positions, the math doesn't add up. The painful truth is that there just
aren't that many swing voters.
Doing a deep data dive on the districts reveals that the number of swing voters is
far smaller than many people realize, especially when you factor in the drop-off in voter turnout in midterm
elections. In the most competitive Republican-held congressional districts, Clinton won by an average of 17,000
votes, but the incumbent GOP congressperson beat his or her Democratic foe by an average of 34,000 votes.
This reality is particularly problematic when you factor in the smaller electorate during midterms, when fewer
turn out to vote than in a presidential year. This diagram shows the total voter pool in an average competitive
district, how many people voted, and how many voted for Clinton, Trump, and the Republican member of the House. For
illustration purposes, if 100 people voted in one of these Clinton-Republican representative-won districts in 2016,
the incumbent House Republican received 54 votes, and his or her Democratic opponent received 43 votes. Of those 54
people who voted for the incumbent Republican, seven (out of 100 votes) voted for Clinton. That's seven moderate
Republicans out of 100 voters. Historically, in midterm elections, Republicans are more likely to come back out and
vote than are Democrats, and as a result, that 54-43 Republican advantage from the higher-turnout presidential year
will be about 39-25 this midterm year (based on historical turnout data). This means Democrats need to find 15 votes
in every 100 in order to flip those 23 seats. Looking at the possible sources of an additional 15 percent highlights
how few moderate Republicans there are.
If, on average, just seven Republicans are moderates, and Democrats need 15 additional votes, Democrats will
obviously fall short. Where else then could and should Democrats look? The more promising pools of people are
actually Democratic voters -- many of whom face greater economic obstacles in finding the time and transportation to get
to the polls.
In the quest for those necessary 15 votes, the number-one place Democrats should look is among the 19 percent of
Democrats who voted in 2016, but are unlikely to cast ballots this year.
In races that may well be decided by a few thousand votes (for example, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb won his
special US House election earlier this year by a mere
627 votes
), it makes sense to also target the 20,000 young people in each congressional district who were not old
enough to vote in 2016, but are now eligible.
In fact, the largest pool of people Democrats should be trying to tap is actually nonvoters -- the 200,000 people per
district who were eligible but didn't cast ballots in 2016. It is in these sectors of society where Democrats will
find the source of success and the path to winning back the House and taking back our country and winning elections
for years to come.
It is hard work to get all of these voters out, but that is the work that will determine success or failure this
fall.
August 06, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - So the US news
media are in uproar over President Trump's latest admission that a meeting between his son and
a Russian lawyer more than two years ago was about "getting dirt" on Hillary Clinton.
With self-righteous probity, Trump's political and media enemies are declaring him a felon
for accepting foreign interference in the US presidential election.
Admittedly, President Trump appears to have been telling lies about the past meeting, which
took place at Trump Tower in New York City in the summer of 2016. Or maybe it's just this
American president shooting himself in the foot -- again -- with his inimical
gibberish-style.
However, the burning issue of "foreign interference" is being stoked out of all proportion
by Trump's enemies who want him ousted from the White House.
US constitutional law forbids candidates from receiving help from foreign governments or
foreign nationals.
Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda?
Thus, by appearing to accept a meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 -- during the
presidential campaign -- the Trump election team are accused of breaking US law.
The alleged transgression fits in with the wider narrative of "Russiagate" which posits that
Republican candidate Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin to win the race to the White House
against Democrat rival Hillary
Clinton .
Russia has always denied any involvement in the US elections, saying the allegations are
preposterous. Moscow also points out that in spite of indictments leveled by American
prosecutors, there is no evidence to support claims that Russian hackers meddled in the
presidential campaign, or that the Kremlin somehow assisted Trump.
The Russian lawyer, Natalia
Veselnitskaya , who met with the Trump campaign team in early June 2016 is described in US
media as "Kremlin-linked". But that seems to be just more innuendo in place of facts. She
denies any such connection. The Kremlin also says it had no relation with the attorney on
her business of approaching Team Trump.
In any case, what is being totally missed in the latest brouhaha is the staggering hypocrisy
in the US media circus over Trump. Let's take Trump at his word -- not a reliable source
admittedly -- that his campaign team were trying to "get dirt" on Clinton. That would appear to
be a violation of US law.
If Trump is going to be nailed for improper conduct with regard to alleged foreign
assistance, then where does that leave Hillary Clinton and US intelligence agencies?
During the presidential campaign, Clinton's team contracted a British spy, Christopher
Steele, to dig up dirt on Trump in the form of the so-called "Russian dossier". That was the
pile of absurd claims alleging that the Kremlin had blackmailing leverage over Donald Trump. It
was Steele's fantasies that largely turned into the whole Russiagate affair which has dominated
US media and politics for the past two years.
Not only that, but now it transpires that the Federal Bureau of Investigation also paid the
same British spy to act as a source for the FBI's wiretapping of Trump's associates, according to
declassified documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a US citizens' rights group.
In other
words, the foreign interference that the FBI engaged in under the Barack Obama administration,
as well as by Hillary Clinton's campaign team, is on a far greater and more scandalous scale
that Trump seems to have clumsily endeavored to do with a Russian lawyer.
The real, shocking interference in US democracy was not by Russia or Trump, but by American
secret services working in collusion with the Clinton Democrats to distort the presidential
elections. This scandal which Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen has labeled "Intelgate" is far
more grievous than the Watergate crisis which resulted in President Richard Nixon's ignominious
resignation back in the mid-1970s.
The Obama administration's intelligence agencies and the Democrats attempted to sabotage the
2016 presidential election in order to keep Trump out of the White House. They failed. And they
have never gotten over that defeat to their illegal scheming.
The Russiagate claims are just a sideshow. As American writer Paul Craig Roberts, among
others, has
commented , the media-driven "witch hunt" against Trump and Russia is blown out of all
proportion in order to distract from the real scandal which is Intelgate -- and how millions of
American voters were potentially disenfranchised by the US intelligence apparatus for a
political power grab.
Another staggering hypocrisy in the US media kerfuffle over Trump and alleged Russian
interference is that all the fastidious hyperbole completely ignores actual foreign
interference in American democracy -- foreign interference that is on an absolutely colossal
scale.
As American critical thinker Noam Chomsky points out , "Israeli intervention in
US elections overwhelms anything Russia may have done".
Israel's interference includes the multi-million-dollar lobbying by such groups as the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its financial sponsorship of hundreds of
lawmakers in both houses of Congress. Many critics maintain
that the entire Congress is in effect "bought" by AIPAC.
Chomsky referred specifically to the occasion in 2015 when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu snubbed then President Obama by addressing the US Congress with a speech openly
calling for lawmakers to reject the internationally-backed nuclear deal with Iran.
During his election campaign, Donald Trump
reportedly received a $20 million donation from the American-Israeli casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson. Adelson has Israeli citizenship. Is that not foreign help, according to definition of
US laws?
Trump has since shown himself to do Adelson's and Israel's bidding by walking away from the
Iran deal and in pushing stridently pro-Israeli interests in the conflict with
Palestinians.
Another foreign benefactor in US politics is the so-called Saudi lobby and other oil-rich
Gulf Arab states. Millions of dollars are funneled into Congress by these dubious regimes to
shape US government foreign policy in the Middle East. For several decades, Saudi oil money is
also documented to be
a major contributor to the CIA and its off-the-books covert operations around the world.
Foreign interference in US politics -- in which often nefarious foreign interests are
promoted over those of ordinary American citizens -- is conducted on a gargantuan and
systematic scale. But this massively illegal interference in flagrant violation of US laws is
stupendously ignored by the American media.
Trump is being assailed over an alleged scandal regarding Russia which is, by any objective
measure, negligible.
The whole Russiagate narrative is sheer hysteria driven by anti-Trump forces who do not want
to accept the result of the 2016 election. It is, in effect, a coup attempt by unelected
political forces.
Russiagate is a cover to conceal the really disturbing scandal which was,
and continues to be, the attempt to subvert American democracy by US intelligence agencies
working in cahoots with the Obama administration and Clinton's election campaign. To cover up
those crimes, Russia is being maligned for "attacking American democracy".
Such lies are an odious distortion of the truth by America's real enemies who are its own
domestic political and media operators trying to cover up their anti-constitutional crimes.
What's even more despicable is that these people are willing to inflame US-Russia relations to
the point of starting a war between two nuclear powers.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published
in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a
scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a
career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he
worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish
Times and Independent.
This article was originally published by " Sputnik "
-
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the
analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking
because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".
If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering
on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're
believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock
you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."
Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say.
The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.
I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling
Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.
I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists,
especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news"
and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.
\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists
into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content
are not made by them.
What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!
Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners
who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed
with accurate information.
Why, then, would a coalition of leftish and right-wing patriots not join in
denouncing a leader who seemed to put Russia's interests ahead of those of his own country?
Sorry to say, things are not so simple. Look a bit more closely at what holds the anti-Trump
foreign policy coalition together, and you will discover a missing reality that virtually no
one will acknowledge directly: the existence of a beleaguered but still potent American Empire
whose junior partner is Europe. What motivates a broad range of the President's opponents,
then, is not so much the fear that he is anti-American as the suspicion that he is
anti-Empire.
Of course, neither liberals nor conservatives dare to utter the "E-word." Rather, they argue
in virtually identical terms that Trump's foreign and trade policies are threatening the
pillars of world order: NATO, the Group of Seven, the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund, the OSCE, and so forth. These institutions, they claim, along with
American military power and a willingness to use it when necessary, are primarily responsible
for the peaceful, prosperous, free, and democratic world that we have all been privileged to
inhabit since the Axis powers surrendered to the victorious Allies in 1945.
The fear expressed plainly by The New York Times 's David Leonhardt, a
self-described "left-liberal," is that "Trump wants to destroy the Atlantic Alliance." Seven
months earlier, this same fear motivated the arch-conservative National Review to
editorialize that, "Under Trump, America has retreated from its global and moral leadership
roles, alienated its democratic allies, and abandoned the bipartisan defense of liberal ideals
that led to more than 70 years of security and prosperity." All the critics would agree with
Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, who recently stated, "Let's face
it. Mr. Trump's core beliefs conflict with the foundations of Western grand strategy since the
mid-1940's."
"Western grand strategy," of course, is a euphemism for U.S. global hegemony – world
domination, to put it plainly. In addition to peace and prosperity (mainly for privileged
groups in privileged nations), this is the same strategy which since 1945 has given the world
the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear holocaust, and proxy wars consuming between 10 and 20
million lives in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,
and Yemen. Its direct effects include the overthrow of elected governments in Guatemala, Iran,
Lebanon, Congo, Nigeria, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Granada, Ukraine, et al.;
the bribery of public officials and impoverishment and injury of workers and farmers world-wide
as a result of exploitation and predatory "development" by Western governments and
mega-corporations; the destruction of natural environments and exacerbation of global climate
change by these same governments and corporations; and the increasing likelihood of new
imperialist wars caused by the determination of elites to maintain America's global supremacy
at all costs.
It is interesting that most defenders of the Western Alliance (and its Pacific equivalent:
the more loosely organized anti-Chinese alliance of Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand,
and South Korea) virtually never talk about American hegemony or the gigantic military
apparatus (with more than 800 U.S. bases in 60 or so nations and a military-industrial complex
worth trillions) that supports it. Nor is the subject of empire high on Mr. Trump's list of
approved twitter topics, even when he desecrates NATO and other sacred cows of the Alliance.
There are several reasons for this silence, but the most important, perhaps, is the need to
maintain the pretense of American moral superiority: the so-called "exceptionalist" position
that inspires McCain to attack Trump for "false equivalency" (the President's statement in
Helsinki that both Russia and the U.S. have made mistakes), and that leads pundits left and
right to argue that America is not an old-style empire seeking to dominate, but a new-style
democracy seeking to liberate.
The narrative you will hear repeated ad nauseum at both ends of the liberal/conservative
spectrum tells how the Yanks, who won WW II with a little help from the Russians and other
allies, and who then thoroughly dominated the world both economically and militarily,
could have behaved like vengeful conquerors, but instead devoted their resources and
energies to spreading democracy, freedom, and the blessings of capitalism around the world. Gag
me with a Tomahawk cruise missile! What is weird about this narrative is that it "disappears"
not only the millions of victims of America's wars but the very military forces that
nationalists like Trump claim deserve to be worshipfully honored. Eight hundred bases? A
million and a half troops on active duty? Total air and sea domination? I'm shocked . . .
shocked!
In fact, there are two sorts of blindness operative in the current U.S. political
environment. The Democratic Party Establishment, now swollen to include a wide variety of
Russia-haters, globalizing capitalists, and militarists, is blind (or pretends to be) to the
connection between the "Western Alliance" and the American Empire. The Trump Party (which I
expect, one of these days, to shed the outworn Republican label in favor of something more
Berlusconi-like, say, the American Greatness Party) is blind – or pretends to be –
to the contradiction between its professed
"Fortress America" nationalism and the reality of a global U.S. imperium.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In a recent article in The Nation , Michael
Klare, a writer I generally admire, claims to have discovered that there is really a method to
Trump's foreign policy madness, i.e., the President favors the sort of "multi-polar" world,
with Russia and China occupying the two other poles, that Putin and Xi Jinping have long
advocated. Two factors make this article odd as well as interesting. First, the author argues
that multi-polarity is a bad idea, because "smaller, weaker states, and minority peoples
everywhere will be given even shorter shrift than at present when caught in any competitive
jousting for influence among the three main competitors (and their proxies)." Wha? Even shorter
shrift than under unipolarity? I think not, especially considering that adding new poles (why
just three, BTW? What about India and Brazil?) gives smaller states and minority peoples many
more bargaining options in the power game.
More important, however, Trump's multi-polar/nationalist ideals are clearly contradicted by
his determination to make American world domination even more overwhelming by vastly increasing
the size of the U.S. military establishment. Klare notes, correctly, that the President has
denounced the Iraq War, criticized American "overextension" abroad, talked about ending the
Afghan War, and declared that the U.S. should not be "the world's policeman." But if he wants
America to become a mere Great Power in a world of Great Powers, Trump will clearly have to do
more than talk about it. He will have to cut the military budget, abandon military bases,
negotiate arms control agreements, convert military-industrial spending to peaceful uses, and
do all sorts of other things he clearly has no intention of doing. Ever.
No – if the Western Alliance, democratic values, and WTO trade rules provide
ideological cover and junior partners for American global hegemony, "go-it-alone" nationalism,
multi-polarity, and Nobel Peace Prize diplomatic efforts provide ideological cover for . . .
American global hegemony! This can be seen most clearly in the case of Iran, against whom Trump
has virtually declared war. He would like to avoid direct military involvement there, of
course, but he is banking on threats of irresistible "fire and fury" to bring the Iranians to
heel. And if these threats are unavailing? Then – count on it! – the Empire will
act like an empire, and we will have open war.
In fact, Trump and his most vociferous critics and supporters are unknowingly playing the
same game. John Brennan, meet Steve Bannon! You preach very different sermons, but you're
working for the same god. That deity's name changes over the centuries, but we worship him
every time we venerate symbols of military might at sports events, pay taxes to support U.S.
military supremacy, or pledge allegiance to a flag. The name unutterable by both Trump and his
enemies is Empire.
What do we do with the knowledge that both the Tweeter King and the treason-baiting
coalition opposing him are imperialists under the skin? Two positions, I think, have to be
rejected. One is the Lyndon Johnson rationale: since Johnson was progressive on domestic
issues, including civil rights and poverty, that made him preferable to the Republicans, even
though he gave us the quasi-genocidal war in Indochina. The other position is the diametric
opposite: since Trump is less blatantly imperialistic than most Democratic Party leaders, we
ought to favor him, despite his billionaire-loving, immigrant-hating, racist and misogynist
domestic policies. Merely to say this is to refute it.
My own view is that anti-imperialists ought to decline to choose between these alternatives.
We ought to name the imperial god that both Trump and his critics worship and demand
that the party that we work and vote for renounce the pursuit of U.S. global hegemony.
Immediately, this means letting self-proclaimed progressives or libertarians in both major
parties know that avoiding new hot and cold wars, eliminating nuclear weapons and other WMD,
slashing military spending, and converting war production to peaceful uses are top priorities
that must be honored if they are to get our support. No political party can deliver peace and
social justice and maintain the Empire at the same time. If neither Republicans nor Democrats
are capable of facing this reality, we will have to create a new party that can.
Notes.
[1]
The author is University Professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason
University. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts : How Violent
Systems Can Be Transformed (2017).
"... As widely loathed as the Democratic establishment is, it has been remarkably adept at engineering a reactionary response in favor of establishment forces. Its demonization of Russia! has been approximately as effective at fomenting reactionary nationalism as Mr. Trump's racialized version. Lest this be overlooked, the strategy common to both is the use of oppositional logic through demonization of carefully selected 'others.' ..."
"... What preceded Donald Trump was the Great Recession, the most severe capitalist crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Recession followed approximately three decades of neoliberal de-industrialization, of policies intended to reduce the power of organized labor, reduce working class wages and raise economic insecurity under the antique capitalist theory that destitution motivates workers to produce more for less in return. ..."
"... The illusion / delusion that these problems -- lost livelihoods, homes, social roles, relationships, sense of purpose and basic human dignity -- were solved, or even addressed, by national Democrats, illustrates the class divide at work. The economy that was revived made the rich fabulously rich, the professional / managerial class comfortable and left the other 90% in various stages of economic decline. ..."
"... Asserting this isn't to embrace economic nationalism, support policies until they are clearly stated or trust Mr. Trump's motives. But the move ties analytically to his critique of neoliberal economic policies. As such, it is a potential monkey wrench thrown into the neoliberal world order. ..."
"... Democrats could have confronted the failures of neoliberalism without resorting to economic nationalism (as Mr. Trump did). And they could have confronted unhinged militarism without Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism. But this would have meant confronting their own history. And it would have meant publicly declaring themselves against the interests of their donor base. ..."
"... Mr. Trump's use of racialized nationalism is the primary basis of analyses arguing that he is fascist. Left unaddressed is the fact the the corporate-state form that is the basis of neoliberalism was also the basis of European fascism. Recent Left analysis proceeds from the premise that Trump control of the corporate-state form is fascism, while capitalist class control -- neoliberalism, is something else. ..."
"... Lest this not have occurred, FDR's New Deal was state capitalism approach within the framework of the corporatism (merge of corporations and a state) social formation. The only widely known effort to stage a fascist coup in the U.S. was carried out by Wall Street titans in the 1930s to wrest control from FDR before the New Deal was fully implemented. Put differently, the people who caused the Great Depression wanted to control its aftermath. And they were fascists. ..."
"... As political scientist Thomas Ferguson has been arguing for decades and Gilens and Page have recently chimed in, neither elections nor the public interest hold sway in the corridors of American power. The levers of control are structural -- congressional committee appointments go to the people with lots of money. Capitalist distribution controls the politics. ..."
"... The best-case scenario looking forward is that Donald Trump is successful with rapprochement toward North Korea and Russia and that he throws a monkey wrench into the architecture of neoliberalism so that a new path forward can be built when he's gone. If he pulls it off, this isn't reactionary nationalism and it isn't nothing. ..."
"... Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book ..."
The election of Donald Trump fractured the American Left. The abandonment of class analysis
in response to Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism left identity politics to fill the void. This
has facilitated the rise of neoliberal nationalism, an embrace of the national security state
combined with neoliberal economic analysis put forward as a liberal / Left response to Mr.
Trump's program. The result has been profoundly reactionary.
What had been unfocused consensus around issues of economic justice and ending militarism
has been sharpened into a political program. A nascent, self-styled socialist movement is
pushing domestic issues like single payer health care, strengthening the social safety net and
reversing wildly unbalanced income and wealth distribution, forward. Left unaddressed is how
this program will move forward without a revolutionary movement to act against countervailing
forces.
As widely loathed as the Democratic establishment is, it has been remarkably adept at
engineering a reactionary response in favor of establishment forces. Its demonization of
Russia! has been approximately as effective at fomenting reactionary nationalism as Mr. Trump's
racialized version. Lest this be overlooked, the strategy common to both is the use of
oppositional logic through demonization of carefully selected 'others.'
This points to the most potent fracture on the Left, the question of which is the more
effective reactionary force, the Democrats' neoliberal nationalism or Mr. Trump's racialized
version? As self-evident as the answer apparently is to the liberal / Left, it is only so
through abandonment of class analysis. Race, gender and immigration status are either subsets
of class or the concept loses meaning.
By way of the reform Democrat's analysis , it was the shift of
working class voters from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 that swung the election
in Mr. Trump's favor. To the extent that race was a factor, the finger points up the class
structure, not down. This difference is crucial when it comes to the much-abused 'white
working-class' explanation of Mr. Trump's victory.
What preceded Donald Trump was the Great Recession, the most severe capitalist crisis
since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Recession followed approximately three
decades of neoliberal de-industrialization, of policies intended to reduce the power of
organized labor, reduce working class wages and raise economic insecurity under the antique
capitalist theory that destitution motivates workers to produce more for less in
return.
The illusion / delusion that these problems -- lost livelihoods, homes, social roles,
relationships, sense of purpose and basic human dignity -- were solved, or even addressed, by
national Democrats, illustrates the class divide at work. The economy that was revived made the
rich fabulously rich, the professional / managerial class comfortable and left the other 90% in
various stages of economic decline.
Left apparently unrecognized in bourgeois attacks on working class voters is that the
analytical frames at work -- classist identity politics and liberal economics, are ruling class
ideology in the crudest Marxian / Gramscian senses. The illusion / delusion that they are
factually descriptive is a function of ideology, not lived outcomes.
Here's the rub: Mr. Trump's critique of neoliberalism can ] accommodate class analysis
whereas the Democrats' neoliberal nationalism explicitly excludes any notion of economic power,
and with it the possibility of class analysis. To date, Mr. Trump hasn't left this critique
behind -- neoliberal trade agreements are currently being renegotiated.
Asserting this isn't to embrace economic nationalism, support policies until they are
clearly stated or trust Mr. Trump's motives. But the move ties analytically to his critique of
neoliberal economic policies. As such, it is a potential monkey wrench thrown into the
neoliberal world order. Watching the bourgeois Left put forward neoliberal trade theory to
counter it would seem inexplicable without the benefit of class analysis.
Within the frame of identity politics rich and bourgeois blacks, women and immigrants have
the same travails as their poor and working-class compatriots. Ben Carson (black), Melania
Trump (female) and Melania Trump (immigrant) fit this taxonomy. For them racism, misogyny and
xenophobia are forms of social violence. But they aren't fundamental determinants of how they
live. The same can't be said for those brutalized by four decades of neoliberalism
The common bond here is a class war launched from above that has uprooted, displaced and
immiserated a large and growing proportion of the peoples of the West. This experience cuts
across race, gender and nationality making them a subset of class. If these problems are
rectified at the level of class, they will be rectified within the categories of race, gender
and nationality. Otherwise, they won't be rectified.
Democrats could have confronted the failures of neoliberalism without resorting to
economic nationalism (as Mr. Trump did). And they could have confronted unhinged militarism
without Mr. Trump's racialized nationalism. But this would have meant confronting their own
history. And it would have meant publicly declaring themselves against the interests of their
donor base.
Mr. Trump's use of racialized nationalism is the primary basis of analyses arguing that
he is fascist. Left unaddressed is the fact the the corporate-state form that is the basis of
neoliberalism was also the basis of European fascism. Recent Left analysis proceeds from the
premise that Trump control of the corporate-state form is fascism, while capitalist class
control -- neoliberalism, is something else.
Lest this not have occurred, FDR's New Deal was state capitalism approach within the
framework of the corporatism (merge of corporations and a state) social formation. The only
widely known effort to stage a fascist coup in the U.S. was carried out by Wall Street titans
in the 1930s to wrest control from FDR before the New Deal was fully implemented. Put
differently, the people who caused the Great Depression wanted to control its aftermath. And
they were fascists.
More recently, the effort to secure capitalist control has been led by [neo]liberal
Democrats using Investor-State Dispute Resolution (ISDS) clauses in trade agreements. So that
identity warriors might understand the implications, this control limits the ability of
governments to rectify race and gender bias because supranational adjudication can overrule
them.
So, is race and / or gender repression any less repressive because capitalists control the
levers? Colonial slave-masters certainly thought so. The people who own sweatshops probably
think so. Most slumlords probably think so. Employers who steal wages probably think so. The
people who own for-profit prisons probably think so. But these aren't 'real' repression, are
they? Where's the animosity?
As political scientist Thomas Ferguson
has been arguing for decades and
Gilens and Page have recently chimed in, neither elections nor the public interest hold
sway in the corridors of American power. The levers of control are structural -- congressional
committee appointments go to the people with lots of money. Capitalist distribution controls
the politics.
The liberal explanation for this is 'political culture.' The liberal solution is to change
the political culture without changing the economic relations that drive the culture. This is
also the frame of identity politics. The presence of a desperate and destitute underclass
lowers working class wages (raising profits), but ending racism is a matter of changing
minds?
This history holds an important lesson for today's nascent socialists. The domestic programs
recently put forward, as reasonable and potentially useful as they are, resemble FDR's effort
to save capitalism, not end it. The time to implement these programs was when Wall Street was
flat on its back, when it could have been more. This is the tragedy of betrayal by Barack Obama
his voters.
Despite the capitalist rhetoric at the time, the New Deal wasn't 'socialism' because it
never changed control over the means of production, over American political economy. Internal
class differences were reduced through redistribution, but brutal and ruthless imperialism
proceeded apace overseas.
The best-case scenario looking forward is that Donald Trump is successful with
rapprochement toward North Korea and Russia and that he throws a monkey wrench into the
architecture of neoliberalism so that a new path forward can be built when he's gone. If he
pulls it off, this isn't reactionary nationalism and it isn't nothing.
Otherwise, the rich have assigned the opining classes the task of defending their realm.
Step 1: divide the bourgeois into competing factions. Step 2: posit great differences between
them that are tightly circumscribed to prevent history from inconveniently intruding. Step 3:
turn these great differences into moral absolutes so that they can't be reconciled within the
terms given. Step 4: pose a rigged electoral process as the only pathway to political
resolution. Step 5: collect profits and repeat. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Rob Urie
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His bookZen Economicsis
published by CounterPunch Books.
"... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a
few comments. First, I disagree with the analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in
the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking because
Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".
If you pay attention to the questions and
statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering on
the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles
off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail
that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock you, but I
believe Vladimir Putin on several things."
Cooper continues to insist that the content of
the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say. The sheer
hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.
I do admit that Cooper shuts
up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake
of calling Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.
I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and
answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media
are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and
the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management
and ownership of the media.
\This would accomplish two important things, both necessary,
in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists into their correct place,
telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real
decisions on content are not made by them.
What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem
that would be!
Second, it would give the American people more information on how their
consent is engineered, how the media has owners who have an agenda, and that agenda is
not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed
with accurate information.
"... While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than " a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
"... So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours. ..."
"... You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was "deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated by DNC! Everybody knows... ..."
"... Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB ..."
"... Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate by the democrats. ..."
It has been clear to everyone (except Donald Trump) that Russia was deeply involved in the 2016 election and intends to be
involved in 2018. It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the
Russian oligarchs.
However, Sanders had already committed the unforgivable
sin of criticizing the Democratic establishment candidate from the left. There is simply no way of coming back from that treason.
Despite his stance, Sanders has also been constantly presented as another Russian agent, with the Washington Post (11/12/17) asking
its readers, "When Russia interferes with the 2020 election on behalf of Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders, how will liberals
respond?" The message is clear: The progressive wave rising across America is and will be a consequence of Russia, not of the
failures of the system, nor of the Democrats.
It isn't just progressive politicians that are all traitors. Movements like Black Lives Matter are also traitors for Russia.
It is the American people who should be deciding the political future of our country, not Mr. Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
Hey, Bernie. The American people were the ones who should have decided who won the primary, not Hillary, the DNC and the delegates.
That you are blaming Her loss on Russia instead of admitting that the American people rejected her makes you nothing more than
a democratic puppet. How embarrassing for you.
Every Black voter should abandon the DP until they apologize for their disrespect for the BLM and saying that they only started
protesting cops killing Blacks because Russia manipulated them into doing so.
Eichenwald thinks that our intelligence agencies are patriots who have spent their lives working on keeping us safe does he?
I agree with Dmitry Orlov's take on them.
The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as
possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on
ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially
organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.
....
the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial,
economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest
single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your
own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself.
While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than
" a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. "
And let's not forget how many
coups
and false flag events they had a hand in creating that have cost so much misery and death.
One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false
flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story
is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting
this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips.
It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy
theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.
The real puppets are the ones who believe in this silly story that Russia is pulling Trump's strings and that the GOP are also
Russian puppets. Good grief!
The others show that there are others out there that have seen through this propaganda crap. I'd like to see the breakdown
of Hillary supporters that believe Russia Gate and the Bernie supporters that don't. Most of the Trump supporters think it's phony
so what made Hillary's believe in something that everyone should be laughing at?
You deserve a lot of credit. Russia interfered in your favor, yet you are man enough to admit that they interfered. Thank
you Bernie!
So you plan to continue this McCarthy Russian BS? You didn't speak out when you got cheated in the primaries, and you
didn't seem to care that Hillary was using her own paid troll army. Integrity matters Bernie and you are losing yours.
You stopped speaking for me and millions of others when you caved to crooked HRC. No it was NOT clear that Russia was
"deeply involved in the election. What is CLEAR is your betrayal of your followers and cover up of the election fraud perpetrated
by DNC! Everybody knows...
Bernie, that's MIC propaganda. Stop helping it. There are millions of reasons Trump should not be president. We don't
need a hyped up corporate fairytale to make that point https://t.co/7FAwb47LtB
Democratic party jingoism in 2020 will be extra-ordinary with candidates each trying to out do each other how they will
fuck over Putin and the Russian nation. There will be a shit load of public loyalty testing against any third party candidate
by the democrats.
The democrats (and media cohorts) have become an apocolyptic death cult. The language that comes from them is infused with
the language of conspiracies, violence, treason, aggression and demonization.
And here is the thing, Bernie to survive electorally will have to become a cult member. Effectively he will have to be pro-war
with Russia. He will be giving from the the Left supposed support for aggressive action andmilitarism toward Russia.
I fear that if a democrat becomes president in 2020 (it won't be Bernie), is elected president that in the year of the midterms
in 2022, the US will start a real war with Russia which has a highly likehood of going nuclear.
So the US neoliberal establishment tried to sabotage Trump-Putin summit in doer to pursue "business as usual". In other words military-industrial
complex is in control of the USA government...
Notable quotes:
"... It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran. ..."
"... At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueï Skripal and his daughter, who, inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas. ..."
"... The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful. ..."
"... In opposition to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "), but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war. ..."
"... Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex? ..."
While the International Press distorted the content of the NATO Summit, the US establishment perfectly understood the unique
issue – the end of enmity with Russia. Thus disturbing the bilateral summit in Helsinki between the USA and Russia became its priority.
By all means possible, it had to prevent any rapprochement with Moscow.
We need to talk about everything, from commerce to the military, missiles, nuclear, and China " - this was how President Trump
began at the Helsinki Summit. " The time has come to talk in detail about our bilateral relationship and the international flashpoints
", emphasised Putin.
But it will not only be the two Presidents who will decide the future relationships between the United States and Russia.
It's no coincidence that, at the very moment when the President of the United States was about to meet with the President
of Russia, special prosecutor Robert Mueller III charged twelve Russians with having manipulated the US presidential elections by
hacking into the data networks of the Democratic party in order to hinder candidate Hillary Clinton. The twelve Russians, accused
of being agents of the military secret services (GRU), were officially defined as " conspirators ", and found guilty of " conspiracy
to the detriment of the United States ". Simultaneously, Daniel Coats, National Director of Intelligence and principal advisor to
the President in these matters, accused Russia of working to " undermine our basic values and our democracy ". He then sounded the
alarm about the " threat of cyber-attacks which have arrived at a critical point " similar to that which preceded 9/11, on behalf
not only of Russia, " the most aggressive foreign agent ", but also China and Iran.
At the same time, in London, British " investigators " declared that the Russian military secret service GRU, which had sabotaged
the Presidential elections in the USA, is the same service which poisoned ex-Russian agent, Sergueï Skripal and his daughter, who,
inexplicably, survived contact with an extremely lethal gas.
The political objective of these " enquiries " is clear – to maintain that at the head of all these " conspirators " is Russian
President Vladimir Putin, with whom President Donald Trump sat down at the negotiating table, despite vast bi-partisan opposition
in the USA. After the " conspirators " had been charged, the Democrats asked Trump to cancel the meeting with Putin. Even though
they failed, their pressure on the negotiations remains powerful.
What Putin tried to obtain from Trump is both simple and complex – to ease the tension between the two countries. To that purpose,
he proposed to Trump, who accepted, to implement a joint enquiry into the " conspiracy ". We do not know how the discussions on the
key questions will go – the status of Crimea, the condition of Syria, nuclear weapons and others. And we do not know what Trump will
ask in return. However, it is certain that any concession will be used to accuse him of connivance with the enemy. In opposition
to the easing of tension with Russia are not only the Democrats (who, with a reversal of formal roles, are playing the " hawks "),
but also many Republicans, among whom are several highly-important representatives of the Trump administration itself. It is the
establishment, not only of the US, but also of Europe, whose powers and profits are directly linked to tension and war.
It will not be the words, but the facts, which will reveal whether the climate of détente of the Helsinki Summit will become reality
- first of all with a de-escalation of NATO in Europe, in other words with the withdrawal of forces (including nuclear forces) of
the USA and NATO presently deployed against Russia, and the blockage of NATO's expansion to the East.
Even if an agreement on these questions were reached between Putin and Trump, would the latter be able to implement it? Or
will the real deciders be the powerful circles of the military-industrial complex?
One thing is certain – we in Italy and Europe can not remain the simple spectators of dealings which will define our future.
Manlio Dinucci
The conflict between transnational financial capitalism and productive national capitalism has entered into a paroxystic
phase. On one side, Presidents Trump and Putin are negotiating the joint defence of their national interests. On the other, the major
daily newspaper for the US and the world is accusing the US President of high treason, while the armed forces of the US and NATO
are preparing for war with Russia and China.
You have attacked our democracy. Your well-worn gamblers' denials do not interest us. If you continue with this attitude, we will
consider it an act of war." This is what Trump should have said to Putin at the Helsinki Summit, in the opinion of famous New
York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman, published in La Repubblica . He went on to accuse the Russian President of having
"attacked NATO, a fundamental pillar of international security, destabilised Europe, and bombed thousands of Syrian refugees, causing
them to seek refuge in Europe."
He then accused the President of the United States of having " repudiated his oath on the Constitution " and of being an " asset
of Russian Intelligence " or at least playing at being one.
What Friedman expressed in these provocative terms corresponds to the position of a powerful internal and international front
(of which the New York Times is an important mouthpiece) opposed to USA-Russia negotiations, which should continue with the
invitation of Putin to the White House. But there is a substantial difference.
While the negotiations have not yet borne fruit, opposition to the negotiations has been expressed not only in words, but especially
in facts.
Cancelling out the climate of détente at the Helsinki Summit, the planetary warmongering system of the United States is in the
process of intensifying the preparations for a war reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific:
After the landing of an US armoured brigade in Anvers, totalling a hundred tanks and a thousand military vehicles, a US aerial
brigade landed in Rotterdam with sixty attack helicopters. These forces and others, all of them USA/NATO, are deployed along the
borders of Russian territory, in the framework of operation Atlantic Resolve , launched in 2014 against " Russian aggression.
" In its anti-Russian function, Poland asked for the permanent presence of an armoured US unit on its own territory, offering
to pay between 1.5 - 2 billion dollars per year.
At the same time, NATO is intensifying the training and armament of troops in Georgia and Ukraine, candidates for entry into
membership of the Alliance on the frontiers with Russia.
Meanwhile, the US Congress received with all honours Adriy Parubiy, founder of the National-Social Party (on the model of
Adolf Hitler's National-Socialist Party), head of the neo-Nazi paramilitary formations employed by NATO in the Maïdan Square putsch.
NATO command in Lago Patria (JFC Naples) – under the orders of US Admiral James Foggo, who also commands the US naval forces
in Europe and those in Africa – is working busily to organise the grand-scale exercise Trident Juncture 18 , in which will
participate 40,000 military personnel, 130 aircraft and 70 ships from more than 30 countries including Sweden and Finland, which
are NATO partners. The exercise, which will take place in October in Norway and the adjacent seas, will simulate a scenario of
" collective defence " - naturally enough, against " Russian aggression. "
In the Pacific, the major naval exercise RIMPAC 2018 (27 June to 2 August) is in full swing - organised and directed
by USINDOPACOM, the US Command which covers the Indian and Pacific oceans – with the participation of 25,000 sailors and marines,
more than 50 ships and 200 war-planes.The exercise – in which France, Germany and the United Kingdom are also participating –
is clearly directed against China, which Admiral Phil Davidson, commander of USINDOPACOM, defines as a "major rival power which
is eroding the international order in order to reduce the access of the USA to the region and thus become hegemonic."
When Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, Friedman will no doubt accuse him of connivance not only with the Russian enemy,
but also with the Chinese enemy. Manlio Dinucci
Princeton, Harvard Law, Oxford law studies, six years in the navy, appointed by Reagan. This
is a hard fellow to talk your way around in a courtroom.
Sayings from TS Ellis:
"Don't roll your eyes at me." (to Mueller's crew in court.
"My wife thinks your statement that you might not call Rick Gates as a witness is funny.
Without him you do not have a case." (to the Muelleristas)
paraphrasing "You don't want Manafort. You are here to impeach the president."
"We do not try people for being rich, or throwing their money around." (in response to
Muellerite fascination with Manafort's lack of taste in throwing money around.)
"Sometimes prosecutors seek to make a witness sing. In others they seek to make them
compose."
Ellis' federal courthouse (Eastern District of Virginia) is about half a mile from my house.
I spent a lot of time there as a consultant and expert witness. I hope to never see the inside
of the place again.
IMO Ellis is going to do something dramatic with the Manafort case that is now in his court.
If he tosses the whole thing that will gut Mueller as a factor in The Resistance. pl
Sir,
I've been following this. Seeing the same things you are. Fascinating that this case has gone
to trial so quickly. If Ellis tosses the case or Manafort is found not guilty, then IMO,
Mueller is finished. This could happen well before the mid-terms. Ellis will provide some
quote worthy statements in throwing the case out that will be used to help justify getting
rid of Mueller; will help it stick and help Trump with the fallout of the s__t canning. Part
of me can't believe that Mueller would be so foolish as to put his part of the coup, and his
reputation, at such risk, but another part says that the coup has always been built on shaky
methods by sketchy incompetent people. If Mueller goes, then other dominoes begin to fall.
I hope so, I have always thought the US more corrupt than most suppose, recent events have
proven this, but I have always thought America one of the few places the rule of law
prevails, where a man can get a fair trial, this needs to be proven. Ellis sounds an
impressive character, a throw back to the Virginia gentry that has produced many notable
historical figures, let us hope he doesn't disappoint.
We are in the point when capitalist system (which presented itself as asocial system that created a large middle class)
converted into it opposite: it is social system that could not deliver that it promised and now want to distract people from this
sad fact.
The Trump adopted tax code is a huge excess: we have 40 year when corporation paid less taxes. This is last moment when they
need another gift. To give them tax is crazy excess that reminding
Louis XV of France. Those gains are going in buying of socks. And real growth is happening elsewhere in the world.
After WW2 there were a couple of decades of "golden age" of US capitalism when in the USA middle class increased considerably.
That was result of pressure of working class devastated by Great Depression. Roosevelt decided that risk is too great and he
introduced social security net. But capitalist class was so enraged that they started fighting it almost immediately after the
New Deal was introduced. Business class was enrages with the level of taxes and counterattacked. Tarp act and McCarthyism were
two successful counterattacks. McCarthyism converting communists and socialists into agents of foreign power.
The quality of jobs are going down. That's why Trump was elected... Which is sad. Giving your finger to the
neoliberal elite does not solve their problem
Notable quotes:
"... Finally, if everybody tries to save themselves (protection), we have a historical example: after the Great Depression that happened in Europe. And most people believe that it was a large part of what led to WWII after WWI, rather than a much saner collective effort. But capitalism doesn't go for collective efforts, it tends to destroy itself by its own mechanisms. There has to be a movement from below. Otherwise, there is no counter force that can take us in another direction. ..."
"... When Trump announced his big tariffs on China, we saw the stock market dropped 700 points in a day. That's a sign of the anxiety, the danger, even in the minds of capitalists, about where this is going. ..."
"... Everything is done to avoid asking the question to what degree the system we have in place - capitalism is its name - is the problem. It's the Russians, it's the immigrants, it's the tariffs, it's anything else, even the pornstar, to distract us from the debate we need to have had that we haven't had for a half a century, which puts us in a very bad place. We've given a free pass to a capitalist system because we've been afraid to debate it. And when you give a free pass to any institution you create the conditions for it to rot, right behind the facade. ..."
"... The Trump presidency is the last gasp, it's letting it all hang out. A [neoliberal] system that's gonna do whatever it can, take advantage of this moment, grab it all before it disappears. ..."
In another interesting interview with Chris Hedges, Richard Wolff explains why the Trump presidency is the last resort of a system
that is about to collapse:
Finally, if everybody tries to save themselves (protection), we have a historical example: after the Great Depression that happened
in Europe. And most people believe that it was a large part of what led to WWII after WWI, rather than a much saner collective effort.
But capitalism doesn't go for collective efforts, it tends to destroy itself by its own mechanisms. There has to be a movement from
below. Otherwise, there is no counter force that can take us in another direction.
So, absent that counter force we are going to see this system spinning out of control and destroying itself in the very way its
critics have for so long foreseen it well might.
When Trump announced his big tariffs on China, we saw the stock market dropped 700 points in a day. That's a sign of the anxiety,
the danger, even in the minds of capitalists, about where this is going. If we hadn't been a country with two or three decades of
a middle class - working class paid really well - maybe we could have gotten away with this. But in a society that has celebrated
its capacity to do what it now fails to do, you have an explosive situation.
Everything is done to avoid asking the question to what degree the system we have in place - capitalism is its name - is the problem.
It's the Russians, it's the immigrants, it's the tariffs, it's anything else, even the pornstar, to distract us from the debate we
need to have had that we haven't had for a half a century, which puts us in a very bad place. We've given a free pass to a capitalist
system because we've been afraid to debate it. And when you give a free pass to any institution you create the conditions for it
to rot, right behind the facade.
The Trump presidency is the last gasp, it's letting it all hang out. A [neoliberal] system that's gonna do whatever it can, take advantage
of this moment, grab it all before it disappears.
In France, it was said
'Après moi, le déluge' (after me the
catastrophe). The storm will break.
Princeton, Harvard Law, Oxford law studies, six years in the navy, appointed by Reagan. This
is a hard fellow to talk your way around in a courtroom.
Sayings from TS Ellis:
"Don't roll your eyes at me." (to Mueller's crew in court.
"My wife thinks your statement that you might not call Rick Gates as a witness is funny.
Without him you do not have a case." (to the Muelleristas)
paraphrasing "You don't want Manafort. You are here to impeach the president."
"We do not try people for being rich, or throwing their money around." (in response to
Muellerite fascination with Manafort's lack of taste in throwing money around.)
"Sometimes prosecutors seek to make a witness sing. In others they seek to make them
compose."
Ellis' federal courthouse (Eastern District of Virginia) is about half a mile from my house.
I spent a lot of time there as a consultant and expert witness. I hope to never see the inside
of the place again.
IMO Ellis is going to do something dramatic with the Manafort case that is now in his court.
If he tosses the whole thing that will gut Mueller as a factor in The Resistance. pl
Sir,
I've been following this. Seeing the same things you are. Fascinating that this case has gone
to trial so quickly. If Ellis tosses the case or Manafort is found not guilty, then IMO,
Mueller is finished. This could happen well before the mid-terms. Ellis will provide some
quote worthy statements in throwing the case out that will be used to help justify getting
rid of Mueller; will help it stick and help Trump with the fallout of the s__t canning. Part
of me can't believe that Mueller would be so foolish as to put his part of the coup, and his
reputation, at such risk, but another part says that the coup has always been built on shaky
methods by sketchy incompetent people. If Mueller goes, then other dominoes begin to fall.
I hope so, I have always thought the US more corrupt than most suppose, recent events have
proven this, but I have always thought America one of the few places the rule of law
prevails, where a man can get a fair trial, this needs to be proven. Ellis sounds an
impressive character, a throw back to the Virginia gentry that has produced many notable
historical figures, let us hope he doesn't disappoint.
In February, the Pentagon announced
a $950 million no-bid contract to REAN Cloud, LLC for the migration of legacy systems to the
cloud. As an Amazon Web Services consulting partner and reseller, REAN Cloud was likely favored
due to Amazon's recent $600 million cloud project for the Central Intelligence Agency. Creating
an unusually large contract with little oversight or competition led to ample criticism of the
Pentagon, as lawmakers demanded an explanation from DoD. In response to the brouhaha, the
Pentagon announced in early March that the maximum value of the contract would be
reduced from $950 million to $65 million.
As it turned out, though, even the Pentagon wasn't exactly sure how to apply the murky
requirements of OTA. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled in May that the REAN contract did not
accord with federal law, in that REAN was granted an award without even really considering
going through a competitive bidding process. "Vague and attenuated" statements from the
Pentagon to potential bidders in the beginning of the process ensured that the process would
not be an open one. After the cancellation of the REAN deal, the Pentagon finally seems open to
competitive bidding for cloud migration.
Unfortunately, OTA is still alive and well across the DoD procurement process. In June, the
Defense Information Systems Agency
joined the growing list of agencies dabbling in OTA, noting that "many of the companies
we're dealing with are small start-ups." But as the REAN Cloud case shows, many companies
appear "small" but have far larger partners. According to statistics in the
Federal News Radio report , "Only $7.4 billion of the nearly $21 billion went to
nontraditional companies." The problem is created in part by the use of consortiums, which are
comprised of multiple companies, which vary in size. The consortium can decide how money is
allocated for an award, allowing larger businesses to benefit disproportionately out of sight
of the DoD and taxpayers.
Congress has finally started to demand more accountability for OTAs. The 2019 National
Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress requires more data
reporting and analysis by acquisition officials. But far more work remains.
Lawmakers should set stricter limits on when it's okay to eschew competitive bidding, and
lower the threshold for requiring congressional notification (currently set at $500 million).
Allowing tens of billions of dollars to be spent behind the backs of taxpayers without a
bidding process cannot continue.
Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
We have lost some of our democratic habits -- indeed, in many ways we are losing
our very cohesion as a society. But I frame the question very differently.
I know a bunch of Trump supporters. Some of them are intellectuals who write for places like
TAC . But most are not. Neither are any of them raving bigots or knuckle-dragging
neanderthals, and all of them read the news, though with vastly less obsessiveness than people
who work in the business.
None of them "like" things like "unremitting chaos, lies, ignorance, trash-talking
vulgarity, legislative failure" or collusion with foreign governments. Some of them minimize
some of these things at least some of the time -- and I myself have been known to derive a kind
of pleasure from the absurdity of a figure like Mooch. But this isn't what the people who I
know who voted Trump voted for , nor is it why they continue to be happy with their
vote -- which, however unhappy they are with how the administration is conducting itself, most
of them still are.
Rather, the commonality among those who voted for Trump is their conviction that the
Democratic party's leadership is utterly bankrupt, and, to one degree or another, so is the
Republican leadership. And that assessment hasn't changed one iota since the
election.
"They are, however, people who have lost trust in the individuals and institutions who are
most alarmed about Trump: the political establishment, the press, etc. And so, on a relative
basis, they'd rather continue to put their trust in Trump."
That last line does not follow .We have lost trust in all of the others; so would rather
see what Trump does; not that we have any trust in him to do the right thing
THAT would be ridiculous; especially after the last six months.
Hmmm. Populism can not govern or build institutions by its very nature? I can't help but read
that as saying the plebeians are so incompetent and stupid that only the elites are capable
of governing. As for the American people taking a turn to authoritarianism. This is possible,
after all, our Federal government has spent most of the last century increasing their control
over many of the aspects of our lives and stretching the limits of the Constitution beyond
any recognition. We have been prepared to accept authoritarianism. Increasingly we have had
an authoritarian presidency that surveils its own people and has usurped regulatory and
warmaking authority from the Congress. The Federal government has created, out of whole
cloth, a role for itself in public education. Do not blame the populace for being what the
elite has spent a century shaping them to be.
I am convinced that the saber rattling and fear-mongering concerning Korea, Iran, and Russia
are not happening because we have any reason to be particularly concerned about these
countries or because they threaten our interests. No, this is the way a corrupt and
ineffective regime distracts its citizens from its own failings. Lets be clear, this would be
happening even if She-who-shall-not-be-named had one the Presidency.
Whatever happened to "trust but verify"?
OK, a bunch of people did the political equivalent of a Hail Mary play in voting for Trump.
But now that the ball has not only fallen short but gone way out of bounds and beaned some
spectators in the stands shouldn't they be revoking that trust and casting around for someone
else to represent them? Why stick with a sinking ship?
There is strong evidence to suggest that one factor in Trump's victory was distrust of US
foreign policy. The link above is to an article about exit polls showing Trump won the
veteran's vote 2:1 over Hillary Clinton.
People don't regret their votes for Trump because if they had voted for Clinton, they or
their loved ones would be coming home in body bags–or minus body parts.
As bad as Trump is, his foreign policy instincts are less hawkish than
Clinton's–witness his decision to end the CIA funding of Syrian insurgents.
Trump's behavior is certainly "unpresidential" and chaotic. It is also less horrible than
war by many orders of magnitude.
"The politically relevant, and profoundly disturbing, fact is precisely the opposite of the
conventional wisdom: After six months of unremitting chaos, lies, ignorance, trash-talking
vulgarity, legislative failure, and credible evidence of a desire to collude with a hostile
foreign government to subvert an American election, President Trump's approval rating is
astonishingly high -- with something between one-third and two-fifths of the American people
apparently liking what they see and hear from the White House"
But George W Bush at his nadir averaged 26% approval, and that's seven years in, during an
epic economic collapse, a catastrophic war, and a host of other disasters. Trump is not THAT
far away from that average.
There is simply a line beyond which a president can't decline unless he murders and eats a
puppy in public, and I see no reason to presume that we can judge that Trump hit his bottom
six months in, when the economy is decent and no non-self inflicted crisis looming.
I'd also add that while all your friends have different reasons to stay aboard the Trump
train, all of them sound like high information, fairly ideological voters. This is probably
not the profile of Trump voters set to vote for The Rock in 2020
Well, when a building is rotten to the core, the only thing you can do is raze it to the
ground to start rebuilding. Our government has long passed its sell-by date. Really,
expecting a political solution to arise from a government controlled system such as ours does
not border on insanity – it completely crosses that border in leaves it miles in the
dust. Witness our insane Congress voting by a 98% margin to inflict sanctions based upon
absolute crock. But then the US has never let reality get in the way of statesmenshowmanship.
We get what we deserve, good and hard.
You're OK until the last line. "And populism by its very nature cannot build institutions,
cannot govern "
You're still using the Deepstate definition of populism. In fact populists want only one
thing: We think the government of THIS country should serve the interests of the people of
THIS country.
It's perfectly possible to govern by this rule. FDR did it magnificently.
Why did it work for FDR? Because he was determined to BREAK the monopolies and forces that
acted contrary to the interests of the people, and because governments BELOW the Federal
level were still strong. When he closed the banks for several months, cities and Chambers of
Commerce jumped in immediately to develop scrip systems.
Thanks to an unbroken series of evil judges and presidents after WW2, local governments
and institutions are dead or dying. Even if a competent and determined populist tried to
close down banks or Amazon or the "health" insurance system, there would be no organized way
to replace them.
What exactly did these people think a Clinton administration would do? What nightmarish
dystopia did they see coming around the bend? And what do you think -- were their perceptions
of America's future under a Clinton administration accurate, or at least close to the mark?
And if so, why?
Also, I get that people have lost trust in mainstream institutions. What makes them think
that Trump is trustworthy in comparison? Why do they have more trust in Trump than in the
institutions? And does that seem reasonable?
I didn't vote for Trump: His rhetorical style turns me cold; I don't like his position on
many issues, or his general governing philosophy, to the extent he can be said to have one.
But, BUT, I sure as Hell did not vote for Hilary Clinton(I voted for Johnson and Weld, who
were obvious non-starters from the word Go. I might possibly have voted for Trump if it had
looked like the election might be close in Illinois, but since the Chicago Machine had
already stolen it for HRC, I could salve my conscience and vote for Johnson.
Clinton was the status quo candidate, and since I did not desire "more of the same",
governmentally, Trump and his circus are preferable to Clinton and whatever cabal she would
have assembled to run the country.
You claim that the elite "inevitably" run the machinery of government, but it's worth
noting that once upon a time in America, most of the people in government were political
appointees who could be sent packing(along with their bosses) by the voters. Nowadays, the
'elite' which runs government is dug in pretty much permanently, and the same people will be,
in practice, running the government no matter who wins the next election, or the one after
that
Hilary Clinton was forthrightly the candidate of the permanent, un-elected bureaucracy,
and Trump, well, didn't seem to be. The choice was between Trump, whose actual position on
the size of government was not clear, and Hilary Clinton who was actually promising to make
government bigger, more centralized, more expensive and less responsive. I'm not sorry Trump
won however distasteful he and his henchmen are to me.
I too had a friend who was a huge Ron Paul supporter who not only backed Trump, but became a
major apologist for him ever since. The man ran two back to back campaigns in Georgia for US
Senate, the Ron Paul mold. Now, no on his original team will give him the time of day. Those
who tried to get some sense into him, have been closed off.
As a libertarian, I am no more afraid of the left or the right. In fact, listening to the
right rant about the left yields a lot of ignorance, disinformation and paranoia: stock in
trade for right wing propaganda. But I am disturbed when people spend years fighting for
liberty suddenly joined Cult 45 that has no sense of liberty Ron Paul or his followers would
recognize.
But Trump fit the bankrupt GOP. Lest we forget, those 49 GOP Senators who voted for
"skinny repeal" (even the name is joke!) never gave a moment's consideration to the bill
written by Rand Paul that covers the conservative attributes of free markets and
self-determination. Lest we also forget that Rand is not only one of the few legit
conservatives, but a doctor and the son of doctor or former Congressman. Those credentials
alone would have been enough if GOP was actually interested being conservative. Apparently,
Trumpism is what the GOP is about and 49 of them proved it.
I think that you have identified a problem that transcends Trump and his opponents. Vitriolic
partisanship is one thing. At various points in our history, we have had some nasty spells of
polarization. The deeper problem that the institutions of public life are now losing their
very legitimacy.
Legitimacy is something deeper than mere approval. It relies upon the unspoken acceptance
of political and institutional norms.
We are clearly in the process of publicly reevaluating and even rejecting these norms. The
birthers questioning Obama's background and "not my president" folks do not view their
oppponents as legitimate, if mistaken. In the case of Trump and the radical left, they
contest the legitimacy of the other side even participating in the process, a process by the
way to which they owe no fealty.
Nothing wrong with America that couldn't be fixed, one, by making voting mandatory, and two,
by having top two vote getters in primary face each other in the general.
We'd have a moderate politics with elected officials clustering slightly right and left of
the center.
Speaking as a Commie Pinko Red, I still prefer Trump as President over Clinton, precisely
because he is doing so much to undermine America's "leadership" in world affairs. He's still
a murderous imperialist, maybe even just as much as she would have been, but there's just so
much more damage that she could have done making bi-partisan deals with the GOP for the
benefit of Wall Street and the insurance industry.
The movement against GOPcare – Trumpcare wasn't really a fair name for the wet
dreams of Paul Ryan and Conservative, Inc. – probably couldn't have been so effective
or flew under the radar of the establishment tools running the Democratic Party and its media
mouthpieces if a Democrat was in the White House and the various beltway "movement" honchos
had had their precious seat at the table where they could have rolled over for the Democratic
president of the moment.
The biggest problem is what comes after Trump for the GOP?
He's kicked off a process for the GOP that will be very difficult to manage going forward.
He showed that outright racism, sexism, continuous lying, even treasonous collusion with
Russia to subvert our election is just fine with the Republican Party. How does the GOP sell
family values to their 'base' after they all lined up with Donald j Trump, serial
wife-cheater and money-launderer?
It will be hard for anyone to forget that any of this happened.
Consider this: 8 years of W Bush yielded the first black President – It really could
not have happened if W hadn't burned the house down. What comes after Trump?
I'm a very middle-class worker in the IT sector where most of my coworkers have been
sensible, but my weekend hobby of playing music has put me in contact (largely via Facebook)
with many Trump supporters who do happen to be knuckle-dragging neanderthals. They generally
don't read; their "news" comes from partisan demagogues on the radio or TV. If I give one the
benefit of the doubt and share an article from, say, The American Conservative -- "The
Madness of King Donald" was a favorite -- it's been all too common to receive a
childish/hate-filled meme in response. Bigots are legion: I've unfriended the raving variety,
and unfollowed the milder dog-whistlers. These deplorables have in fact been emboldened by
the current POTUS.
But I get your point. I abhor the current duopoly, but it could be fixed if thinking
citizens wanted to put in some effort. So, it's depressing in a different kind of way that so
many thoughtful and well-read Americans are so cynical about state of US politics that they
are fine with Trump wrecking it.
"Rather, the commonality among those who voted for Trump is their conviction that the
Democratic party's leadership is utterly bankrupt, and, to one degree or another, so is the
Republican leadership. And that assessment hasn't changed one iota since the election."
They are people who were full of it beforehand, and as the evidence rolls in, they just
sink deeper into lies.
Linker's quote "a desire to collude" you reference later as "collusion". The first instance
is an attempt to broaden the charge from collusion, the second instance is a (sloppy?) change
in language.
@Will Harrington, "Populism can not govern or build institutions by its very nature? I can't
help but read that as saying the plebeians are so incompetent and stupid that only the elites
are capable of governing."
I read that statement as "Once you are governing, once you are the one(s) in a position of
power, then by definition you have become 'the elite' and are no longer 'a plebeian'".
Populists, by definition, are the people who call for the tearing down of institutions that
make up the status-quo, and elites, by definition, are the people who build and maintain
status-quo institutions. At least in my eyes, "being a populist" and "governing institutions"
are mutually exclusive.
Since the conservative party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower was invaded by the right
wingers and became the party of Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth, the goal has been to
tarnish all concept of a functioning a democracy and a government is built to work for the
people, of the people, and by the people. The right wing main tactic is lies and just get
people riled up so that they don't realize and oblivious to the fact that America has slipped
from capitalism to corporatism; from a capitalist democracy to a caste based plutocracy run
for the sole benefit of the oligarchs who bought this country.
Don Trump is the embodiment and distillation of the right winger and their economic and
social cultural policies. He is not an alternative or antidote to the Republicans or
Democrats.
" Is he happy with Trump? No -- he's especially unhappy with the number of Goldman bankers
Trump appointed to senior economic posts, but more generally he acknowledges that the
government is in chaos and that Trump is not bringing the change he hoped for. But he doesn't
regret his vote, and he prefers the chaos of Trump to business-as-usual under either the
Democrats or the Republicans. And if Trump winds up discrediting the Federal government
generally, that's fine with him."
I didn't vote this election because I didn't like either candidate. I had been promoting
'America First' as a rallying cry for a candidate for years but Trump wasnt exactly the kind
of leader I had in mind for it.
But I'm with the guy above -- if chaos will bust up the musical chair dual monarchies of the
dems and repubs and the corrupt status quo government bring it on.
A somewhat related question, Noah: If you had been a young man living in China on August 1,
1927, do you think you would have joined the People's Liberation Army?
Originally I wanted to sit out this past election but gave in to peer pressure. And I regret
this. Trump? Clinton? Johnson? Stein? All were mediocre. Clinton/Trump were the two worst
candidates that the "major" parties have ever produced in my lifetime. It was with fear and
trepidation that I voted for Trump, notwithstanding that I fundamentally agreed with him on
the issues of immigration and the need for a reduced American role in global affairs. In the
end, I rationalized this (wasted) vote based upon the notion that not only had his opponent
committed a felony (detouring government emails) but also because (as others have pointed
out) she was the candidate of the status quo, the "permanent bureaucracy", Big Finance etc.
etc. The fact that Trump actually won surprised me, but only moderately, because as terrible
a candidate as he was, his opponent was even worse.
What has transpired since his election comes as no surprise. Had Clinton been elected
conditions would have only been mirror imaged, such being the state of things in this
once-great republic. I continue to maintain that the two-party system is archaic and has to
go. Whether a multi-party system would be better, I don't know. Perhaps we have reached a
point where the country is simply ungovernable. Perhaps more responsibility should be
returned to state and local government (Jefferson would have approved). Again, I don't
know.
What I do know is that the current system is dysfunctional.
And that, my friends, is why we have a real estate/TV personality as President.
i am neither an establishment voter, or a member of the media/press. i am deeply worried
where the man (trump) is taking this nation. the gop is complicit in this chaos as they see
trump as a rubber stamp for their plutocratic agenda. i don't know what it will take to right
the ship of state
I don't regret my vote. And I ave had issues with my choice before and after the election.
The sky is not even close to falling as predicted. And the democracy you claim is at threat
may very well be, but it's from the current executive. And nothing thus far suggests that it
will.
I m not going to dismiss the caterwauling liberals have been making since the campaign or
the election as major distraction to governance.
And by the way there remain not a twiddle's evidence that the WH prior to the election
colluded to undermine the US in any manner. It's time to cease throwing that out as sauce for
the goose.
I think I agree with all four of your "freinds". I am very fond of the establishment, they
have their place. What they provide in cohesion, stability and continuity is valuable to the
state. But they appear to be want for any level of substance, depth thereof or moral
consistency (if any at all). The double standards they hold themselves, their donors and
connections on issues and accountability is unsustainable in a democracy as I think you
understand it.
When I was laid out in the ER, I found myself wrestling with my own position on
healthcare. The temptations are great to bend the guide as to my own conditions -- but I
don't think I could so with a clear conscience. I am nor sot sure that what we haven't lost
is a sense of conscience -- that sense that truth overrides immediate gain. I don't think the
US can survive as the US if the leadership is bent on holding themselves to a standard not
available to the country's citizens.
"Is he happy with Trump? No -- he's especially unhappy with the number of Goldman bankers
Trump appointed to senior economic posts, but more generally he acknowledges that the
government . . ."
And the discredited notions that
1. the rich know how to run an economy effectively and
2. that a rise in the market is a sign of economic health.
Pear Conference captures perfectly the 'thinking' i have heard from more than one Trump
voter. This is 'reasoning'?
If there is one system in America that needs blowing up to start over it might be our
education system. I am generally supportive of public ed, and i am impressed by some of the
commitment and inventiveness i see among the proposers of various alternatives to public ed.
So, some folks are trying, even sometimes succeeding, but we have managed to arrive at a
point in our culture where we have elected a President whose election success depended more
than anything else on a public who have lost the ability to think critically. (if they ever
had it, of course)
Yes I know the other one got more votes, by a lot. And i know that this other candidate was
oddly not at all an attractive alternative. I know all that, but still, a huge fraction of
the voting population–a fraction large enough to make themselves now THE base the
government is playing to–is a group who could not/would not see this con-job coming?
There was every opportunity to use actual logic and facts to reach a voting decision, but
these millions of voters chose instead to go with various variations on the theme of 'they
all stink, so i'm using my vote to poke a stick in their eyes." Or, as Pear satirized, "I
hate/mistrust the elites and they like almost anybody else other than my guy, so I'm gonna
turn my country over to the most vulgar non-elite pig the system can come up with."
There is talk now about the damage he can do to American politics and sense of community, but
I think he may be more symptom than cause. We don't value the things we thought were a
standard part of the American process: truthfulness, kindness, authenticity, devotion to the
common good. We value, it turns out, showmanship, machismo, crass shows of wealth and power,
and ..I can't go on.
I'm not sure how we got here, but I know the institutions held in high regard on this site,
such as church, and some factors we all put our faith in such as increasing levels of
education, turn out not to matter so much as we had thought. It is going to take some hard
work and more than a little time to recover from this sickness in the country's soul.
"Trump supporters are just like people who are outraged by something and show it by rioting
and burning down their own neighborhoods." – Greg in PDX
The antifas rioting and destroying in Portland also got very violent when some old folks
held a peaceful rally for Trump there.
Oh, sorry. I forgot that when "progressives" disagree with someone, they consider that
merely disagreeing with them constitutes "violence" against their "safe space" and they are
compelled to go out and punch or shoot people.
No reason why populism couldn't govern. Huey Long was a damn effective governor of Louisiana.
Send the whole Acela Corridor élite to Saddam's woodchipper and the country would
noodle along just fine. I'm not for state violence, and yet the fantasy gives me a
frisson. Forgive me, a sinner.
On Monday, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North interviewed Chris Hedges,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, lecturer and former New York Times
correspondent. Among Hedges' best-known books are War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, The
Death of the Liberal Class , Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph
of Spectacle, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt , which he co-wrote with the cartoonist
Joe Sacco, and Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt .
In an article published in Truthdig September 17 , titled "The Silencing
of Dissent," Hedges referenced the WSWS coverage of Google's censorship of left-wing sites and
warned about the growth of "blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign
agents for Russia and purveyors of 'fake news.'"
Hedges wrote that "the Department of Justice called on RT America and its 'associates' --
which may mean people like me -- to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. No
doubt, the corporate state knows that most of us will not register as foreign agents, meaning
we will be banished from the airwaves. This, I expect, is the intent."
North's interview with Hedges began with a discussion of the significance of the anti-Russia
campaign in the media.
David North: How do you interpret the fixation on Russia and the entire interpretation of
the election within the framework of Putin's manipulation?
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is an
absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation --
critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
I have no doubt that the Russians invested time, energy and money into attempting to
influence events in the United States in ways that would serve their interests, in the same way
that we have done and do in Russia and all sorts of other countries throughout the world. So
I'm not saying there was no influence, or an attempt to influence events.
But the whole idea that the Russians swung the election to Trump is absurd. It's really
premised on the unproven claim that Russia gave the Podesta emails to WikiLeaks, and the
release of these emails turned tens, or hundreds of thousands, of Clinton supporters towards
Trump. This doesn't make any sense. Either that, or, according to the director of national
intelligence, RT America, where I have a show, got everyone to vote for the Green Party.
This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the
Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the
outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women
and poor people of color. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA that
abolished good-paying union jobs and shipped them to places like Mexico, where workers without
benefits are paid $3.00 an hour. It is the result of the explosion of a system of mass
incarceration, begun by Bill Clinton with the 1994 omnibus crime bill, and the tripling and
quadrupling of prison sentences. It is the result of the slashing of basic government services,
including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure,
including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the
transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the
aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to
the country.
Police forces have been turned into quasi-military entities that terrorize marginal
communities, where people have been stripped of all of their rights and can be shot with
impunity; in fact over three are killed a day. The state shoots and locks up poor people of
color as a form of social control. They are quite willing to employ the same form of social
control on any other segment of the population that becomes restive.
The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face
its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties -- and remember, Barack Obama's
assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush -- and the
destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions.
Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why
they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
Without Wall Street money, they would not hold political power. The Democratic Party doesn't
actually function as a political party. It's about perpetual mass mobilization and a
hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party
has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his
followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater.
These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the
political process. They're not going to let it go, even if it all implodes.
DN: Chris, you worked for the New York Times . When was that, exactly?
CH: From 1990 to 2005.
DN: Since you have some experience with that institution, what changes do you see? We've
stressed that it has cultivated a constituency among the affluent upper-middle class.
CH: The New York Times consciously targets 30 million upper-middle class and
affluent Americans. It is a national newspaper; only about 11 percent of its readership is in
New York. It is very easy to see who the Times seeks to reach by looking at its
special sections on Home, Style, Business or Travel. Here, articles explain the difficulty of
maintaining, for example, a second house in the Hamptons. It can do good investigative work,
although not often. It covers foreign affairs. But it reflects the thinking of the elites. I
read the Times every day, maybe to balance it out with your web site.
DN: Well, I hope more than balance it.
CH: Yes, more than balance it. The Times was always an elitist publication, but it
wholly embraced the ideology of neo-conservatism and neoliberalism at a time of financial
distress, when Abe Rosenthal was editor. He was the one who instituted the special sections
that catered to the elite. And he imposed a de facto censorship to shut out critics of
unfettered capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. He hounded out
reporters like Sydney Schanberg, who challenged the real estate developers in New York, or
Raymond Bonner, who reported the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador.
He had lunch every week, along with his publisher, with William F. Buckley. This pivot into
the arms of the most retrograde forces of corporate capitalism and proponents of American
imperialism, for a time, made the paper very profitable. Eventually, of course, the rise of the
internet, the loss of classified ads, which accounted for about 40 percent of all newspaper
revenue, crippled the Times as it has crippled all newspapers. Newsprint has lost the
monopoly that once connected sellers with buyers. Newspapers are trapped in an old system of
information they call "objectivity" and "balance," formulae designed to cater to the powerful
and the wealthy and obscure the truth. But like all Byzantine courts, the Times will
go down clinging to its holy grail.
The intellectual gravitas of the paper -- in particular the Book Review and the Week in
Review -- was obliterated by Bill Keller, himself a neocon, who, as a columnist, had been a
cheerleader for the war in Iraq. He brought in figures like Sam Tanenhaus. At that point the
paper embraced, without any dissent, the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of
corporate power as an inevitable form of human progress. The Times , along with
business schools, economics departments at universities, and the pundits promoted by the
corporate state, propagated the absurd idea that we would all be better off if we prostrated
every sector of society before the dictates of the marketplace. It takes a unique kind of
stupidity to believe this. You had students at Harvard Business School doing case studies of
Enron and its brilliant business model, that is, until Enron collapsed and was exposed as a
gigantic scam. This was never, really, in the end, about ideas. It was about unadulterated
greed. It was pushed by the supposedly best educated among us, like Larry Summers, which
exposes the lie that somehow our decline is due to deficient levels of education. It was due to
a bankrupt and amoral elite, and the criminal financial institutions that make them rich.
Critical thinking on the op-ed page, the Week in Review or the Book Review, never very
strong to begin with, evaporated under Keller. Globalization was beyond questioning. Since the
Times , like all elite institutions, is a hermetically sealed echo chamber, they do
not realize how irrelevant they are becoming, or how ridiculous they look. Thomas Friedman and
David Brooks might as well write for the Onion .
I worked overseas. I wasn't in the newsroom very much, but the paper is a very
anxiety-ridden place. The rules aren't written on the walls, but everyone knows, even if they
do not articulate it, the paper's unofficial motto: Do not significantly alienate those
upon whom we depend for money and access! You can push against them some of the time. But
if you are a serious reporter, like Charlie Leduff, or Sydney Schanberg, who wants to give a
voice to people who don't have a voice, to address issues of race, class, capitalist
exploitation or the crimes of empire, you very swiftly become a management problem and get
pushed out. Those who rise in the organization and hold power are consummate careerists. Their
loyalty is to their advancement and the stature and profitability of the institution, which is
why the hierarchy of the paper is filled with such mediocrities. Careerism is the paper's
biggest Achilles heel. It does not lack for talent. But it does lack for intellectual
independence and moral courage. It reminds me of Harvard.
DN: Let's come back to this question of the Russian hacking news story. You raised the
ability to generate a story, which has absolutely no factual foundation, nothing but assertions
by various intelligence agencies, presented as an assessment that is beyond question. What is
your evaluation of this?
CH: The commercial broadcast networks, and that includes CNN and MSNBC, are not in the
business of journalism. They hardly do any. Their celebrity correspondents are courtiers to the
elite. They speculate about and amplify court gossip, which is all the accusations about
Russia, and they repeat what they are told to repeat. They sacrifice journalism and truth for
ratings and profit. These cable news shows are one of many revenue streams in a corporate
structure. They compete against other revenue streams. The head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who helped
create the fictional persona of Donald Trump on "Celebrity Apprentice," has turned politics on
CNN into a 24-hour reality show. All nuance, ambiguity, meaning and depth, along with
verifiable fact, are sacrificed for salacious entertainment. Lying, racism, bigotry and
conspiracy theories are given platforms and considered newsworthy, often espoused by people
whose sole quality is that they are unhinged. It is news as burlesque.
I was on the investigative team at the New York Times during the lead-up to the
Iraq War. I was based in Paris and covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East. Lewis
Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and maybe somebody in an intelligence agency, would
confirm whatever story the administration was attempting to pitch. Journalistic rules at the
Times say you can't go with a one-source story. But if you have three or four
supposedly independent sources confirming the same narrative, then you can go with it, which is
how they did it. The paper did not break any rules taught at Columbia journalism school, but
everything they wrote was a lie.
The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller
or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, 'as the Times reported .' It gave
these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive
institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced.
DN: The CIA pitches the story, and then the Times gets the verification from those
who pitch it to them.
CH: It's not always pitched. And not much of this came from the CIA. The CIA wasn't buying
the "weapons of mass destruction" hysteria.
DN: It goes the other way too?
CH: Sure. Because if you're trying to have access to a senior official, you'll constantly be
putting in requests, and those officials will decide when they want to see you. And when they
want to see you, it's usually because they have something to sell you.
DN: The media's anti-Russia narrative has been embraced by large portions of what presents
itself as the "left."
CH: Well, don't get me started on the American left. First of all, there is no American left
-- not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary
theories, that's steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work,
especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of
personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central
problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the
disease.
If you attempt to debate most of those on the supposedly left, they reduce discussion to
this cartoonish vision of politics.
The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical
movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually
destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s.
For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace -- so
that Cold War "liberals" equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and
liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in
Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from
scratch.
I've battled continuously with Antifa and the Black Bloc. I think they're kind of poster
children for what I would consider phenomenal political immaturity. Resistance is not a form of
personal catharsis. We are not fighting the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The corporate elites
we have to overthrow already hold power. And unless we build a broad, popular resistance
movement, which takes a lot of patient organizing among working men and women, we are going to
be steadily ground down.
So Trump's not the problem. But just that sentence alone is going to kill most discussions
with people who consider themselves part of the left.
The corporate state has made it very hard to make a living if you hold fast to this radical
critique. You will never get tenure. You probably won't get academic appointments. You won't
win prizes. You won't get grants. The New York Times , if they review your book, will
turn it over to a dutiful mandarin like George Packer to trash it -- as he did with my last
book. The elite schools, and I have taught as a visiting professor at a few of them, such as
Princeton and Columbia, replicate the structure and goals of corporations. If you want to even
get through a doctoral committee, much less a tenure committee, you must play it really, really
safe. You must not challenge the corporate-friendly stance that permeates the institution and
is imposed through corporate donations and the dictates of wealthy alumni. Half of the members
of most of these trustee boards should be in prison!
Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today
they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the
intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy. There is a
word for these people: traitors.
DN: What about the impact that you've seen of identity politics in America?
CH: Well, identity politics defines the immaturity of the left. The corporate state embraced
identity politics. We saw where identity politics got us with Barack Obama, which is worse than
nowhere. He was, as Cornel West said, a black mascot for Wall Street, and now he is going
around to collect his fees for selling us out.
My favorite kind of anecdotal story about identity politics: Cornel West and I, along with
others, led a march of homeless people on the Democratic National Convention session in
Philadelphia. There was an event that night. It was packed with hundreds of people, mostly
angry Bernie Sanders supporters. I had been asked to come speak. And in the back room, there
was a group of younger activists, one who said, "We're not letting the white guy go first."
Then he got up and gave a speech about how everybody now had to vote for Hillary Clinton.
That's kind of where identity politics gets you. There is a big difference between shills for
corporate capitalism and imperialism, like Corey Booker and Van Jones, and true radicals like
Glen Ford and Ajamu Baraka. The corporate state carefully selects and promotes women, or people
of color, to be masks for its cruelty and exploitation.
It is extremely important, obviously, that those voices are heard, but not those voices that
have sold out to the power elite. The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The old
feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering oppressed
women. This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew that it
is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new form of
feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO or woman
president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits that
prostitution is about choice. What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose to
be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics.
DN: I believe you spoke at a Socialist Convergence conference where you criticized Obama and
Sanders, and you were shouted down.
CH: Yes, I don't even remember. I've been shouted down criticizing Obama in many places,
including Berkeley. I have had to endure this for a long time as a supporter and speech writer
for Ralph Nader. People don't want the illusion of their manufactured personalities, their
political saviors, shattered; personalities created by public relations industries. They don't
want to do the hard work of truly understanding how power works and organizing to bring it
down.
DN: You mentioned that you have been reading the World Socialist Web Site for some
time. You know we are quite outside of that framework.
CH: I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a Trotskyist. But I like the site. You report on important
issues seriously and in a way a lot of other sites don't. You care about things that are
important to me -- mass incarceration, the rights and struggles of the working class and the
crimes of empire. I have read the site for a long time.
DN: Much of what claims to be left -- that is, the pseudo-left -- reflects the interests of
the affluent middle class.
CH: Precisely. When everybody was, you know, pushing for multiculturalism in lead
institutions, it really meant filtering a few people of color or women into university
departments or newsrooms, while carrying out this savage economic assault against the working
poor and, in particular, poor people of color in deindustrialized pockets of the United States.
Very few of these multiculturalists even noticed. I am all for diversity, but not when it is
devoid of economic justice. Cornel West has been one of the great champions, not only of the
black prophetic tradition, the most important intellectual tradition in our history, but the
clarion call for justice in all its forms. There is no racial justice without economic justice.
And while these elite institutions sprinkled a few token faces into their hierarchy, they
savaged the working class and the poor, especially poor people of color.
Much of the left was fooled by the identity politics trick. It was a boutique activism. It
kept the corporate system, the one we must destroy, intact. It gave it a friendly face.
DN: The World Socialist Web Site has made the issue of inequality a central focus
of its coverage.
CH: That's why I read it and like it.
DN: Returning to the Russia issue, where do you see this going? How seriously do you see
this assault on democratic rights? We call this the new McCarthyism. Is that, in your view, a
legitimate analogy?
CH: Yes, of course it's the new McCarthyism. But let's acknowledge how almost irrelevant our
voices are.
DN: I don't agree with you on that.
CH: Well, irrelevant in the sense that we're not heard within the mainstream. When I go to
Canada I am on the CBC on prime time. The same is true in France. That never happens here. PBS
and NPR are never going to do that. Nor are they going to do that for any other serious critic
of capitalism or imperialism.
If there is a debate about attacking Syria, for example, it comes down to bombing Syria or
bombing Syria and sending in troops, as if these are the only two options. Same with health
care. Do we have Obamacare, a creation of the Heritage Foundation and the pharmaceutical and
insurance industries, or no care? Universal health care for all is not discussed. So we are on
the margins. But that does not mean we are not dangerous. Neoliberalism and globalization are
zombie ideologies. They have no credibility left. The scam has been found out. The global
oligarchs are hated and reviled. The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they
can't afford to have us around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they're going to
use harsher forms of control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence.
DN: I think it can be a big mistake to be focused on the sense of isolation or
marginalization. I'll make a prediction. You will have, probably sooner than you think, more
requests for interviews and television time. We are in a period of colossal political
breakdown. We are going to see, more and more, the emergence of the working class as a powerful
political force.
CH: That's why we are a target. With the bankruptcy of the ruling ideology, and the
bankruptcy of the American liberal class and the American left, those who hold fast to
intellectual depth and an examination of systems of power, including economics, culture and
politics, have to be silenced. (Republished from World Socialist Web Site by
permission of author or representative)
I'm a moderate admirer of Chris Hedges, but he is really cooking in this interview. Too much
to praise here, but his thinking that corporations, the mainstream media, and the academy can
and do successfully "game" dissent by suppression, divide and conquer, co-optation, and so
on, is spot on.
Good but not great interview with Chris Hodges: he manages to talk about an amorphous elite
without identifying any of them and not a word about Israel. So pseudo-good roally
I think this was an excellent discussion, and I would like to thank you both for having it,
and sharing it.
Among the crises effecting the United States, the one effecting us most profoundly is the
absence of any accountability for the crimes committed by our oligarchic class.
Addressing this issue is ground zero for any meaningful change.
If there is no accountability for their crimes , there will be no change.
Certainly the greatest among these crimes was(is) defrauding the nation into " a war of
aggression". which, being the supreme international crime, should be met with harsh prison
sentences for all who promoted it.
It is important for everyone to recognize just how much damage these policies have done to
the country, not just in terms of our collective morale or our constitutional mandates,not
just in terms of our international standing on universal principles of legality and justice,
but our long term economic solvency as a nation.
The "exceptionalism" of our "war of aggression" elites has completely devastated our
nation's balance sheet.
Since 9-11, our national debt has grown by a mind numbing "fourteen and a half trillion
dollars".. nearly quadrupling since 1999.
This unconscionable level of "overspending" is unprecedented in human history.
Not one lawmaker, not one primetime pundit, nor one editorialist (of any major newspaper),
has a CLUE how to deal with it.
Aside from the root atrocity in visiting mass murder on millions of innocents who never
attacked us (and never intended to) which is a horrible crime in and of itself,
There is the profound crisis , in situ , of potentially demanding that 320 million
Americans PAY FOR THE WARS OUR ELITES LIED US INTO .
This is where the rubber meets the road for our "war of aggression-ists ", gentlemen.
This is the "unanimous space" of our entire country's population on the issue of "no
taxation without representation".
WHOSE assets should be made forfeit to pay for these wars .The DECEIVERS or the DECEIVED
?
Ask "The People" ..and you will find your answer .very fast.
No wonder our "elites" are terrified to discuss this .
I agree with the general tenor of this article and would further state that in addition to
the Iraq thing which was a war crime and eliminated any shreds of legitimacy retained by the
yankee regime that the Libya overthrow and destruction, a war crime of historic proportions,
and the use of that overthrow to provide major support to the barbaric element in Syria
expose the yankee regime as an enemy of civilization with all that entails, including
questions of whether, absent any legitimacy, the regime's continued existence itself does not
constitute a major threat.
The elements in the article discussing and exposing the New York Times and its role as an
integral part of the power structure should be read and remembered by all.
How do you interpret the fixation on Russia and the entire interpretation of the
election within the framework of Putin's manipulation?
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is
an absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation
-- critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
With all due respect for Chris Hedges, who is doubtless a courageous journalist and an
intelligent commentator, I would suggest that what is also and most ridiculous is the thought
that it is only agents of Israel that have suborned the neocon faction within USA's
government and 'Deep State' (controllers of MSM). Or is this OT? I don't think so, because if
we are to discuss the anti-Russia campaign realistically, as baseless in fact, and as
contrived for an effect and to further/protect some particular interests, we can hardly avoid
the question: Who or what interest is served by the anti-Russia campaign?
Who or what interest is served by anti-Russia propaganda other than, or in addition to,
just the usual MIC suspects, profiteering corporations who want to keep a supposed need for
nuclear weapons front and center in the minds of Congress? Cui bono?
To be clear: I suggest that neocon office-holders within USA's government or within the
Deep State (controllers of MSM) are foreign agents for at least three nations: the People's
Republic of China,the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel.
(I would compare USA now with Imperial China in its declining years when it was being sold
piecemeal to all the great powers of Europe.)
Who benefits from this situation and how do they benefit? All three of these countries are
deeply involved in suborning members of Congress and others within the government of the USA,
yet none of the three is mentioned in such a connection by the MSM or by officials of the
Executive. Thus, it is beneficial to them to have suspicion thrown onto Russia and thus
investigative attention deflected from themselves. A few public figures (e.g., Philip
Giraldi) have made such allegations respecting Israel, more public figures have made such
suggestions respecting Saudi Arabia, but very few have made the allegations in the case of
the PRC.
Let's think about this in the context of history, beginning with the Vietnam War. When USA
got involved in Vietnam -- which involvement began during the days of Eisenhower/Dulles --
probably the primary interest groups that swayed USA global/foreign policy were the Vatican
and the China Lobby. The interests of these two lobbies converged in Vietnam. From the RC
side, consider an historical event that is unknown practically to any Americans under the age
of 60 or 70, namely, Operation Passage to Freedom, 1954-55.
"The period was marked by a CIA-backed propaganda campaign on behalf of South Vietnam's
Roman Catholic Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem. The campaign exhorted Catholics to flee
impending religious persecution under communism, and around 60% of the north's 1 million
Catholics obliged." (Wikipedia: Operation Passage to Freedom )
From the side of the China Lobby – avoiding the matter of JFK's planning to dump USA
involvement in Vietnam after the 1964 election – what we saw in the early years of
USA's involvement, 1965-1969, was a period in which the China Lobby could push an agenda that
included widening the Vietnam campaign into southern China, particularly to include the
tungsten mining operations supposedly owned by K.C. Wu. Tungsten at that time was considered
as having tremendous strategic value, centering on, but not limited to, its essential use in
the filaments of incandescent light-bulbs. It became clear after the Tet Offensive that the
entire strategy of reopening the Chinese civil war, capturing the tungsten, etc, could make
sense only if Chang Kai Shek's KMT would commit its troops in huge numbers, virtually all of
its troops, on the ground in Vietnam (which would have brought in huge numbers of PRC troops
on the other side) -- it became, to borrow one of Nixon's favorite phrases, "perfectly clear"
that expansion into southern China and capture of the tungsten operations there were not in
the cards. When Kissinger talked up his 'realpolitik', what he really meant was the politics
of surrendering to Beijing. So, Nixon in July 1969, recognizing that there was nothing to be
gained by the loss of life and expenditure of every form of capital, ordered first of many
troop withdrawals from Vietnam. It was all a done deal as of Kissinger taking over as
National Security Adviser, January 1969 -- everything but the tears.
Now, patience, dear reader, this is all leading up to a certain crucial event that took
place in 1971 -- namely, Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing in July (1971) to arrange for
everything regarding what amounted to a surrender to the PRC, except the end of the Vietnam
War. The documents are still unavailable as classified Top Secret or whatever, but clearly,
China had no interest in seeing an end to the Vietnam War, because both parties –
Vietnam and USA – were adversaries of China. (Let them knock each other out!) Most
likely, Zhou talked Henry into doing what he could to prolong USA's involvement in the
Vietnam War, not to shorten it. See, including between the lines, National Security
Archives:
As noted, this stuff is mostly unavailable to us, the public, but it is clear that USA's
'leaders' (Nixon and Kissinger) wanted to make kissy-kissy with Zhou Enlai, and it was all
arranged including George H. W. Bush's appointment as USA's first 'Ambassador' (in all but
name) to Beijing, and including giving China's permanent seat on the UNSC to Beijing and
otherwise selling out the old China Lobby. I call it the 'old China Lobby' because part of
what was arranged was that the old China Lobby would be taken over by the New China lobby,
complete with all the payola channels into Congress and the Deep State.
Now, I think, we arrive at today, 2017, and the failure of Trump to act on his campaign
promises to oppose China in any way. Maybe he thought about it for a minute, but he was
surrounded by neocons, who were already on the payroll of the PRC -- if not taking direct
orders from the Standing Committee of the CCP, then at least promised to avoid offending the
interests of the PRC -- on pain of losing regular paychecks from Beijing into their secret
Grand Cayman accounts.
What I would like to say to Hedges. and others like him, is just this:
THEY say that you are foreign agents for Russia? Time to use a little judo on them: time
for YOU to speak truth that THEY are foreign agents for the People's Republic of China.
And don't forget this potent phrase: YET NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON!
"The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they can't afford to have us
around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they're going to use harsher forms of
control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence."
Precisely! What makes it even worse, they will be pushing this new pretexts for control
sloppy (as in Vegas) and in a hurry. Which will make them look even more ridiculous and due
to the lack of time will force to act even more stupid, resulting in an exponential curve of
censorship, oppression and insanity. And that's there the maniacal dreams of certain forces
to start a really big war in the Middle East (with or without attacking North Korea first)
may come true.
"avoiding the matter of JFK's planning to dump USA involvement in Vietnam after the 1964
election – "
Now that's a lie. This part is a lie. Or it is carefully crafted ex post hoc mythology a
la Camelot, the Kennedy Mystique.
FACT: JFK was a Cold War Hawk and during his administration increased nuclear arms higher
than Ike and until Reagan.
JFK during his administration increased the number of "advisers" to a higher number than
Ike.
William F. Buckley pointedly asked Senator Robert Kennedy in the mid. '60′s "So, was
there any thought of the White House pulling out [of Vietnam]?
RFK: No. There never was.
If anything, had he lived to see a second term, most likely US involvement in Vietnam
would have escalated as much as under LBJ, perhaps with the same disastrous results, perhaps
not. But JFK was no peacenik dove.
Mr. Hedges comes across as a total whackjob, and makes Bill Moyers appear to be a gentle
moderate in comparison. That he thinks so highly of race man BLM supporter Cornell West
speaks volumes of naivety to the nth degree. A total cuck without even knowing it, nay,
totally appreciative of being a cuck and it appears to be his hope that one day his cardinal
sin of being white will be purged by peoples of color, who are his true moral and
intellectual betters in every step of the way.
I agree that the Russia fixation is garbage, but explaining the populist revolt without
touching on the major issue of forced demographic and cultural change through legal and
illegal immigration is dishonest. Almost everyone who isn't an immigrant or the descendant or
relative of a post-65 immigrant is pissed off beyond words about this! How did you miss the
popular response to Trump's promises to "deport them all," end birthright citizenship and
chain migration, build a wall etc.? Without those promises, he wouldn't have made it to the
debates.
I'm also not sure how welfare has been stripped. What programs aren't available?
I'm not sure how to lower black incarceration rates. Having taught in inner-city schools
and worked in the same environment in other jobs, I know that crime and dysfunction are
through the roof. I can only imagine what those communities would be like if the predators
and crooks that are incarcerated were allowed to roam free.
Chris Hedges: It's as ridiculous as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is
an absolutely unproven allegation that is used to perpetuate a very frightening accusation
-- critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism are foreign agents for Russia.
Is this the same Chris Hedges that wrote those articles in November 2001 that Saddam and
al Qaeda were in cahoots, which led to the illegal 2003 invasion?
Tell me Chris, did you know about the CIA pollution then or just find out lately? And
correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you also write NYT articles in the Fall of 2002 saying
that Saddam had WMD's?
Again, getting your tips from the CIA? Ever hear of 'Operation Mockingbird?"
It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy.
That's cringe-worthy.
Transformation into an oligarchy? Transformation ??? I like Hedges' work,
but such fundamental errors really taint what he sez.
The country was never transformed into an oligarchy; it began as one.
In fact, it was organized and functioned as a pluto-oligarchy right out of the box. In
case anyone has the dimness to argue with me about it, all that shows is that you don't know
JS about how the cornstitution was foisted on the rest of us by the plutoligarchs.
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for "
-Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIII, 1782 . ME 2:163
The Elites "Have No Credibility Left"
Guess what, boys and girls Why did they have any to begin with?
Where do people get their faith? WakeTF up, already!! (Yes, I'm losing it. Because even a
duumbshit goy like myself can see it. Where are all you bright bulb know-it-alls with all the
flippin answers???)
Newspapers are trapped in an old system of information they call "objectivity" and
"balance," formulae designed to cater to the powerful and the wealthy and obscure the
truth.
It's amazing that here we are, self-anointed geniuses and dumbos alike, puttering around
in the 21st century, and someone feels the necessity to point that out. And he's right; it
needs to be pointed out. Drummed into our skulls in fact.
Arrrgggghhhh!!! Jefferson again.:
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes
suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of
misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within
their knowledge with the lies of the day.
More deja vu all over again and again. Note the date.:
"This is a story of a powerful and wealthy newspaper having enormous influence And never
a day out of more than ten thousand days that this newspaper has not subtly and
cunningly distort the news of the world in the interest of special privilege.
"
Upton Sinclair, "The crimes of the "Times" : a test of newspaper decency," pamphlet,
1921
"The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical
movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the "Red Scares" in the 1920s, when they virtually
destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s.
For good measure, they purged the liberal class -- look at what they did to Henry Wallace."
Look what they did to Henry Wallace -- Are you kidding me? Wallace was a Stalinist stooge,
too treasonous even for his boss, FDR, although the bird brain Eleanor loved him. The guy was
so out of touch with reality that after the Potemkin tour of the Gulag that Stalin gave him
during WWII he came back raving about how swell it was for the lunch-bucket gang in Siberia.
He also encouraged FDR to sell out the Poles to Stalin
I find it most fascinating that none of what Hedges says is news, but even UR readers
probably think it is. Here's an antidote to that idea.
The following quote is from Eugene Kelly who's excoriating government press releases but
the criticism applies as well to the resulting press reports. I found the whole article
striking.:
Any boob can deduce, a priori, what type of "news" is contained in this
rubbish.
-Eugene A. Kelly, Distorting the News, The American Mercury, March 1935 , pp.
307-318
Hedges doesn't seem to understand that the "Resistance" is openly and obviously working FOR
Deepstate. They do not resist wars and globalism and monopolistic corporations. They resist
everyone who questions the war. They resist nationalism and localism.
Nothing mysterious or hidden about this, no ulterior motive or bankshot. It's explicitly
stated in every poster and shout and beating.
"... The vilification of alternative, dissenting views or linking those views to a foreign power -- in many people's views, an implacably hostile foreign power -- is the degradation of our political media culture. When Rand Paul, who is interesting on foreign policy, reminds, as The New York Times has over the last -- you know, that America has meddled in other countries' elections, has interfered, has overthrown countries' governments, and MSNBC contributors tweet "traitor"? ..."
"... - it's dangerous when you have a suffocating consensus instead of a full, robust debate. ..."
"... But I think what -- the tweeting, to call someone a traitor because they have a point of you don't agree with, we're in a dangerous territory. ..."
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL : I think what Trump did on this trip, between Europe and the Helsinki
summit, is he played to his base. He's reconfiguring the Republican Party so that it becomes
more consistent with its isolationist roots, its roots as going it alone, not tethered by
international institutions, and also sympathetic to strongmen. I mean, I think Trump is more a
con man than a strongman, but he certainly has an affinity. I don't have much use for those who
say, "Look, he's guilty, because he never says a bad word about Putin." Problem is, he never
says a bad word about Bibi Netanyahu, doesn't say a bad word about the Saudi leaders, nor does
he say a bad word about the murderous Duterte in the Philippines. So he does have an affinity
for those strongmen, which I think does lead him and guide a kind of foreign policy. So we
need, as small-D democrats, to counter and not accept -- what I talked to Amy about last week
-- the failed bipartisan foreign policy establishment as our default. We should not go back to
policing the world, indispensable nation, but instead have a demilitarized foreign policy that
truly deals with the challenges of our time, which most of are not going to be met with a
military solution.
... ... ...
KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL : The vilification of alternative, dissenting views or
linking those views to a foreign power -- in many people's views, an implacably hostile foreign
power -- is the degradation of our political media culture. When Rand Paul, who is interesting
on foreign policy, reminds, as The New York Times has over the last -- you know, that
America has meddled in other countries' elections, has interfered, has overthrown countries'
governments, and MSNBC contributors tweet "traitor"?
And I would also mention Glenn Greenwald.
We talked of him earlier. Malcolm Nance, a very ubiquitous commentator on MSNBC on intelligence
and other issues, said Glenn was -- I'm going to read it, because it's so outrageous -- "an
agent of Trump & Moscow deep in the Kremlin's pocket." This is -- we've seen this in our
history before. And I think it is -- it's dangerous when you have a suffocating consensus
instead of a full, robust debate.
And it should be about issues. Juan is right. When we fix so much on personalities, we're
feeding the beast, we've seen, of media malpractice, this obliteration of the line between news
and entertainment, the conglomeratization, the decimation of local news.
These are issues which
collide with an administration which does want to delegitimize public accountability, if they
know public accountability journalism, delegitimize any check on abuses. And we, as
representatives of a media which seek to speak to the issues, seek debate, to foster, not
police, debate, need to stand up and continue to do our work despite these fake news and --
people are despairing about the issue of news, about facts, about -- anyway.
But I think what
-- the tweeting, to call someone a traitor because they have a point of you don't agree with,
we're in a dangerous territory.
NOAM CHOMSKY : So, take, say, the huge issue of interference in our pristine elections. Did
the Russians interfere in our elections? An issue of overwhelming concern in the media. I mean,
in most of the world, that's almost a joke. First of all, if you're interested in foreign
interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in
the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous
support. Israeli intervention in U.S. elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may
have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes
directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama
and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress
trying to -- calling on them to reverse U.S. policy, without even informing the president? And
that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So if you happen to be interested in
influence of -- foreign influence on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a
joke.
I mean, one of the most elementary principles of a functioning democracy is that elected
representatives should be responsive to those who elected them. There's nothing more elementary
than that. But we know very well that that is simply not the case in the United States. There's
ample literature in mainstream academic political science simply comparing voters' attitudes
with the policies pursued by their representatives, and it shows that for a large majority of
the population, they're basically disenfranchised. Their own representatives pay no attention
to their voices. They listen to the voices of the famous 1 percent -- the rich and the
powerful, the corporate sector. The elections -- Tom Ferguson's stellar work has demonstrated,
very conclusively, that for a long period, way back, U.S. elections have been pretty much
bought. You can predict the outcome of a presidential or congressional election with remarkable
precision by simply looking at campaign spending. That's only one part of it. Lobbyists
practically write legislation in congressional offices. In massive ways, the concentrated
private capital, corporate sector, super wealth, intervene in our elections, massively,
overwhelmingly, to the extent that the most elementary principles of democracy are undermined.
Now, of course, all that is technically legal, but that tells you something about the way the
society functions. So, if you're concerned with our elections and how they operate and how they
relate to what would happen in a democratic society, taking a look at Russian hacking is
absolutely the wrong place to look. Well, you see occasionally some attention to these matters
in the media, but very minor as compared with the extremely marginal question of Russian
hacking.
And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for
whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he's perfectly right when he says we should have
better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes --
Russia shouldn't refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst
crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But
they shouldn't refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn't refuse to deal with
them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just
absurd. We have to move towards better -- right at the Russian border, there are very extreme
tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war,
terminal for the species and life on Earth. We're very close to that. Now, we could ask why.
First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it's
because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises
to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded
right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The U.S. has offered to bring
Ukraine into NATO . That's the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes,
there's tensions at the Russian border -- and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those
are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of -- the fate of organized human
society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to
these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem
to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.
... ... ...
And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for
whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he's perfectly right when he says we should have better
relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes -- Russia
shouldn't refuse to deal with the United States because the U.S. carried out the worst crime of
the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn't
refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn't refuse to deal with them for whatever
infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to
move towards better -- right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could
blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the
species and life on Earth. We're very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we
should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it's because NATO expanded
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev,
mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border,
expanded further under Obama. The U.S. has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO . That's the kind
of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there's tensions at the Russian border
-- and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary
concern. The fate of -- the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species,
depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether
Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.
Manafort situation now is difficult. But the crimes he is accused of were committed
outside the election campaign period. He has some chances to fight them with a good
lawyers team claiming the Mueller exceeded his mandate and engaged in the witch hunt
against Trump.
If we assume that Mueller is a hired gun of Clinton wing of Democratic Party, and his
appointment was a gambit to impeach Trump, then he is also in a difficult position.
1. Now a lot of people started raising unpleasant questions about his role in 911
cover-up. So he is investigated too.
2. After spending taxpayers money for more than a year, the results were questionable.
He suffered greatly from Strzokgate and Steele dossier saga,
3. As Hillary aptly said" If that bastard wins, we all hang from nooses!" so I would
assume that Trump digs out some skeletons too.
4. If Rosenstein falls, Mueller is cooked. There are some people who would like to
take revenge, and without "Lord-protector" in the Justice Department, he is very
vulnerable.
5. The direct interference of the intelligence agencies in the election and derailing
Sanders now make all Russiagate saga a double-edged sword. There is also "the Sword of
Damocles" over Dems due to Avan brothers scandal. Those can be played strategically.
So this catfight between two factions of the US neoliberal elite might be very
interesting to watch.
In any case, Russiagate is just a smoke screen to cover the huge crack in the
neoliberal state façade.
robert Waldmann , August 1, 2018 10:13 am
@Likbez, what Joel said (with compliments for the topical reference to Virginian
congressional campaigns). Mueller is a lifetime Republican appointed bt lifetime Republican Rod
Rozenstrein who was appointed by sometimes Democrat Donald Trump.
The probability that "is a hired gun of Clinton wing of Democratic Party" is, like the
probability that you are a butterfly, one of those cases which help us decide if we can believe
that a probability can really be exactly exactly zero.
For that reason only, your comment is not off topic.
likbez , August 1, 2018 3:18 pm
@Robert Waldmann August 1, 2018 10:13 am
@Likbez, Mueller is a lifetime Republican appointed bt lifetime Republican Rod Rosenstein
who was appointed by sometimes Democrat Donald Trump.
This is just a deflection. Nobody can deny that we observe a fight between two factions of
the US elite. Which is about the direction of the country. Russiagate is just a smoke
screen.
And Mueller actions talk louder than words, or this superficial detail of his resume
(Democratic Party after Bill Clinton can well be renamed into Moderate Republican Party).
Look at the composition of Mueller team and try to find people who might be sympathetic to
Trump platform (not that he lasted long; he betrayed it in three month in office). All the team
consists exclusively of rabid Clinton supporters. Who knows what is their main task without the
necessity of Mueller telling them anything. And as we all know "Personnel is policy."
Now tell me again that he is a lifelong Republican ;-)
Also being a Republican (and moreover, being the head of FBI after 911, and one of the
architects of transition of the USA into national security state) does not exclude actions
against detractors from neoliberal globalization and neoliberalism even if they are fellow
Republicans.
His loyalty is not to the Republican party, but to neoliberalism and Neoconservatism
including neoliberal globalization, which is assaulted by Trump. Looks how smoothly neocons
aligned with the Democratic Party during and after the elections.
"... Authorities are investigating whether Mr. Cohen engaged in unregistered lobbying in connection with his consulting work for corporate clients after Mr. Trump went to the White House, according to people familiar with the probe ..."
"... Investigators are also examining potential campaign-finance violations and bank fraud surrounding, among other deals, Mr. Cohen's October 2016 payment to Stephanie Clifford , the former adult-film star called Stormy Daniels, to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the probe. Mr. Trump denies any encounter took place. - WSJ ..."
Authorities are investigating whether Mr. Cohen
engaged in unregistered lobbying in connection with his consulting work for corporate
clients after Mr. Trump went to the White House, according to people familiar with the
probe .
Investigators are also examining potential campaign-finance violations and bank fraud
surrounding, among other deals,
Mr. Cohen's October 2016 payment to Stephanie Clifford , the former adult-film star called
Stormy Daniels, to keep her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump,
according to people familiar with the probe. Mr. Trump denies any encounter took place. -
WSJ
Is David Brooks openly flirting with the state-worship
of this vexing 19th Century philosopher?Conservatism has gone from a rigid waltz between
libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks to a limb-flailing rave. Writers
are reaching towards the bookshelf for thinkers that will refine and define first principles
during this time of flux. While it's all been great fun, an esteemed but concerning guest has
now entered the party. Increasingly, the right is dancing with G.W. Hegel.
David Brooks' recent column
is a clear example of a Hegel flirtation. In it, Brooks defines conservatism as an internal
critique of the Enlightenment. Explaining opposition to the idea that individuals randomly
choose to start society, he writes: "There never was such a thing as an autonomous, free
individual who could gather with others to create order. Rather, individuals emerge out of
families, communities, faiths, neighborhoods and nations. The order comes first. Individual
freedom is an artifact of that order."
Family and community are the basic building blocks of society and social contract theory has
plenty of flaws. Yet note how Brooks lists the nation state as prior to individual freedom.
It's dropped so casually that its radicalism is almost obscured. What type of freedom is
dependent on the nation state? Hegelian.
Hegel argued that freedom was the origin of self-consciousness, and defined his work as
tracing "the stages in the evolution of the idea of the will free in and for itself." In
Philosophy of Right , he critiqued how Enlightenment liberals see freedom, arguing
that liberal freedom could be divided into three stages.
First comes freedom defined negatively: "Nothing can determine where I'll eat dinner!" In
the second stage of freedom, we want to choose specific states of mind or to concern ourselves
with a particular. "I'm going to eat at Waffle House." But if we choose to eat at Waffle House,
we've restricted that first stage of freedom. We can no longer say "nothing can determine where
I'll eat dinner" because we've selected a particular place to eat. So the third stage of
freedom is the ability to change one's mind, to keep options open, regardless of prior
commitments. "I will eat at Waffle House, unless I decide to just drink mini-wines in the
Applebee's parking lot." This reveals how our conception of freedom is dependent upon the
options available to us.
Liberal freedom is thus our capacity to enter and exit choices, which are determined by
factors other than ourselves. I did not choose for Waffle House to exist. I did not choose to
get hungry at dinner time. We do not choose what we choose between. Therefore, the order of
society creates freedom.
So Brooks is clearly doing the robot with Hegel. But so what? Maybe Hegel's ideas are both
conservative and correct. Maybe conservatives ought to embrace Hegel openly. There have always
been right-wing Hegelians. These are defensible positions. Yet we should remember that
conservative bouncers have restricted Hegel from their canon before and for good reason.
Hegel has always been associated with state worship, and Marxism largely sprang from his
thought. In History of the Idea of Progress , conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet
wrote that, while many try to disguise Hegel as some sort of liberal, "There is simply no way
of separating him from ideas and expressions which were in themselves acts of obeisance to the
national state and which on the ineffacable record, led others to ever-higher levels of
intensity in the glorification of the state."
Some may disagree with Nisbet's reading. Some
may say that Marxists misread Hegel . Yet the link to state worship and Marxism must be
contended with, and anyone who slips in Hegel without acknowledging it -- like Brooks -- is
masking the potentially radical nature of his statement.
Strip the Brooks column of the usual sentimental odes to "beautiful communities" and his
strange statement stands bare and a little menacing. There is a world of difference between
saying that freedom is dependent upon the family and saying that it's dependent on the nation
state. Brooks sounds an awful lot like former President Barack Obama: "Somebody helped to
create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody
invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that."
Yet apparently, as Brooks tells us, big government is no longer a threat to the "sacred
space." Community focused conservatives often use Nisbet's Quest for Community to
criticize hyper-individualism, yet they should also remember Nisbet's criticism of Hegelian
freedom: "Hegel clothes the absolute state, just as Rousseau had, in the garments of freedom;
but there cannot be the slightest doubt of Hegel's dedicated belief in the absolutism, the
sanctity, even the divinity of the national state's power."
Perhaps I'm reading too much into a throwaway line. After all, Aristotle offered ideas
similar to those of Hegel and Brooks without the taint of state worship -- maybe that's where
Brooks is drawing his inspiration from. Yet the connection between Brooks and Hegel is still
inescapable because the former is basing his definition of conservatism from British
philosopher Roger Scruton.
Scruton is one of two modern philosophers currently disseminating Hegelian ideas into
mainstream punditry. He reads Hegel in a positive light, and in his book The Soul of the
World , he writes: "Freedom is fully realized only in the world of persons, bound together
by rights and duties that are mutually recognized." Yet Scruton does not say "in the world of
nations," and elsewhere warns that Hegel is like a "beautiful oasis around a treacherous pool
of nonsense." Brooks doesn't offer any such qualifications.
Alasdair MacIntyre is the other philosopher who has helped popularize Hegel in conservative
circles, and in fact Brooks referenced him
just a few days ago . Conservatives who discuss "liquid modernity" as read through
MacIntyre describe something almost identical to Hegel's Absolute Negativity. And McIntyre's
idea of waiting for Benedict is similar to waiting for the Absolute Spirit, which is similar to
waiting for the revolution.
What would a more Hegelian conservatism look like? It's hard to tell. Perhaps we'd see books
declaring an end to one form of consciousness. Perhaps Hegel's ideas on corporations would be
directly referenced by those concerned with working-class alienation. Or perhaps we would see
more fishy ideas about the nation state being a prerequisite for individual freedom.
This isn't about pointing at Brooks and pulling an " Invasion of the Body Snatchers ," or just
beating up on him for the sake of it. He's merely the most obvious example of a conservative
who's done a waltz with the German philosopher. And even then it's always difficult to tell.
Hegel wrote on such a wide range of topics in such confusing prose, that, like a crazed ex, we
might mistakenly spot him everywhere.
Hegel's work is important, and both Scruton and MacIntyre are geniuses. Yet we should always
remember Russell Kirk's warnings that "Marx could draw upon Hegel's magazine; he could find
nothing to suit him in Burke" and that Hegel was "a conservative only from chance and
expediency." Hegel is already at the party; whether we want him to stay is another question
entirely.
James McElroy is a New York City-based novelist and essayist, who also works in
finance.
"... It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and no preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein (The Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth. ..."
Today on ABC Martha Raddatz hosted "This Week" which featured James Lankford a Republican
from Oklahoma describing how Russia and Putin were actively trying to ruin our democracy and
also were trying to influence elections at every possible turn. The Russian Bear and Putin
according to Lankford were also trying to rewrite the Constitution, trying to upend every
election and were seeking to disrupt our national electrical grid not to be confused with our
national election grid which they were also trying to destroy as well as to control the most
local elections by a means of electronic control that was beyond any means to control.
Of course no mention was made about possible solutions to thwart the Russians was
mentioned and it is doubtful that there are any serious efforts to counteract the alleged
Russian hacking of US elections since not one single preventive action to stop the Orwellian
monster of Russia, like Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty Four" was put
forth.
Apparently ABC and the other media are trying to convince Americans that there is an
overwhelming force in Russia that is somehow able to infiltrate and control all our national
elections. Apparently the Russians are unstoppable.
It is a sham.
It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and
no preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein
(The Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth.
Instead the publishers of "This Week" on ABC were content to provide evidence-free
incriminations of Russia and attribute all manner of influence in our elections to the
incredibly sneaky and unstoppable Russian-Putin election Influencing machine which is
unstoppable by our intelligence agencies.
What is missing from Martha Radditz's show? There will never be any admission that they
have jobs because of Citizens United, their corporate benefactors (Koch Industries),
Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Media Bias which ensures that the Iron Triangle of corporate
election dark money flows to hand picked political candidates that will support conservative
causes or that these are the real election influencing mechanisms which have the most power
in our country to influence elections.
As long as ABC, NBC, CBS and other cable news shows fail to correctly identify the real
reasons of election corruption which is our very near and dear corporate money funded
political organizations we will continue to be duped by the free press to believe that Russia
has control over our national elections and not believe that US Corporations hold all the
power.
Thanks to Norman for reminding us of the continued waste of time and effort on the
'russiagate' stories based on allegations and indictments, NOT evidence or possible reasons
for such behavior. The USA is fully capable of unfair election practices, helped by the
undemocratic system of electoral college, partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, lack of
response to voter desires .plus of course Israel being the very large external factor.
Trump's influence on workers, environment, USA's reputation are negative, but blaming Russia
when this is in nobody's real interest is hardly the way forward for the Democratic
Party.
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 9:26 pm
All those loons you mentioned are effectively practicing a religion, in which there is a
dogma everyone must believe to be virtuous and a set of commandments every believer must live
by to gain salvation. Don't toe the line on every bit of it and you are rejected as an
apostate.
I'm surprised that some of those folks, notably Thom Hartmann, choose not to practice what
they preach -- you know, the platitudes about studying the facts and coming to your own
conclusions rather than following the herd. They rightly condemn acting on prejudice, out of
pure self-interest, without verifiable facts (indeed at odds with empirical fact) and using
group intimidation, as per McCarthyist tactics, and then they go ahead and embrace those
vices to their own ends.
It is my process on everything in this life to learn as much as I can on my own, without
being brainwashed by any group or movement, and only backing a cause if it is congruent with
my own conclusions. Unfortunately, most people do the opposite: they are joiners first and
analysts only if their biases are not threatened.
I feel entirely justified in agreeing with movements on some things and not others. I
doubt that human beings have arrived at definitive answers about most phenomena in the real
world or that any single organised group of us has it all down accurate and pat on
everything. Listen to any casual debate on the questions big and small in science: the give
and take, back and forth, can go on as long as the participants have the interest and energy.
I never give my interlocutors any respite, because there is always one more thing to be
considered or one more way of looking at a problem. I'm sure I would have been burned at the
stake in many previous lives and so would a lot of the readers here.
Eddie , July 27, 2018 at 11:26 pm
Yes, good points Drew. I view Maddow as a liberal Rush Limbaugh, trying to win a Leni
Riefenstahl award from the DNC, and having to be satisfied with her purported $9M/yr salary
(which definitely DOES buy a LOT of co-opting).
In support of your argument, I would add that ultimately we should be voting for a
candidate based on his/her POLICIES, as evidenced by their prior political voting record and
whatever political actions they've taken, NOT based on what they SAY they believe -- that's
1st period high school civics as I recall. It's too easy for candidates to say this or that
during a campaign. Trump's policy of detente w/Russia, is -- like the proverbial 'blind
squirrel who occasionally finds a nut' -- probably random chance or perhaps a way to
penetrate a relatively untapped market with his hucksterism. But so what?? For something as
IMPORTANT as NOT having a nuclear war, I'm all for any honest, significant efforts in that
direction. Even Nixon, whose presidency I disliked greatly, did a good thing by 'going to
China' -- I don't recall anybody on the liberal side at that time saying he was Mao's dupe or
foolishness like that. Did Nixon do it as a cynical ploy to draw attention away from other
political problems, and did he previously help aggravate/perpetuate a lot of the conflict
w/China? Sure, but the act of rapprochement w/China was in-and-of-itself desirable and
laudable in that it moved the world a major step AWAY from possible nuclear war. And
full-scale nuclear war trumps (no pun intended) virtually all other problems, with the
possible exception of climate change, so a POTUS should devote extra energy to that task.
Ideally, they should be ramping down the militarism and nationalism, but unfortunately those
are campaign tactics that are too easy for either major party to set aside (with 1/2 the
fault lying in the electorate who too often endorses those 'isms).
Re-reading this today for some reason really popped a few things up for me. The first one
right in my face was: "Now, after a remarkable 46-minute news conference on foreign soil
where Trump stood side by side with a former KGB agent to praise his 'strong' denials of
election interference and criticize the FBI, those strategists believe the ground may have
shifted."
Can someone explain to me what the hell "foreign soil" has to do with the price of tea in
China? Trump has given plenty of pressers "on foreign soil" but that phrase nor anything like
it is ever mentioned. Trump stood side by side with a former KGB agent.
Talk about a lack of respect and blatant bias. He stood side by side with the
democratically elected President of the Russian Federation who, by the way, won his election
by a clear majority of the vote unlike Mr. Trump who would have lost the election had it been
held in Russia. One wonders what would have happened had WaPo and the NYT said something like
Russian President Gorbachev stood side by side with the former head of the KGB I mean CIA
without ever saying President Bush?
It's also blindingly obvious how screwed we are. We really only have one political party
in the US -- the US Corporate Party. There is, indeed, very little reason to vote as a recent
survey pointed out Congressional votes correspond to the people's preferences as determined
by polling only about 5% of the time.
Gregory Herr , July 27, 2018 at 12:08 pm
Progressives, particularly those few taken tokens the Democrats allow for, should have
realised long ago that MSNBC is all in on the corporatist controlled economy and leans
heavily forward in the quest for War and Profits.
FAIR is correct to point to the "traditional centers of power" that MSNBC services, but
the farcical "coverage" of Russiagate inanity certainly doesn't "preserve" a "progressive
image" and is not "elegant" in any way.
The war on Yemen and the weapons contracting with the Saudi terrorist regime was already
"steroidal" during Obama's Administration. In October 2016, warplanes bombed a community hall
in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, where mourners had gathered for a funeral, killing at least 140
people and wounding hundreds. We should note that the U.S. provided intelligence assistance
in identifying targets and mid-air refueling for Saudi aircraft and helped blockade the ports
of Yemen during Obama's tenure.
Manafort situation now is difficult. But the crimes he is accused of were committed
outside the election campaign period. He has some chances to fight them with a good
lawyers team claiming the Mueller exceeded his mandate and engaged in the witch hunt
against Trump.
If we assume that Mueller is a hired gun of Clinton wing of Democratic Party, and his
appointment was a gambit to impeach Trump, then he is also in a difficult position.
1. Now a lot of people started raising unpleasant questions about his role in 911
cover-up. So he is investigated too.
2. After spending taxpayers money for more than a year, the results were questionable.
He suffered greatly from Strzokgate and Steele dossier saga,
3. As Hillary aptly said" If that bastard wins, we all hang from nooses!" so I would
assume that Trump digs out some skeletons too.
4. If Rosenstein falls, Mueller is cooked. There are some people who would like to
take revenge, and without "Lord-protector" in the Justice Department, he is very
vulnerable.
5. The direct interference of the intelligence agencies in the election and derailing
Sanders now make all Russiagate saga a double-edged sword. There is also "the Sword of
Damocles" over Dems due to Avan brothers scandal. Those can be played strategically.
So this catfight between two factions of the US neoliberal elite might be very
interesting to watch.
In any case, Russiagate is just a smoke screen to cover the huge crack in the
neoliberal state façade.
robert Waldmann , August 1, 2018 10:13 am
@Likbez, what Joel said (with compliments for the topical reference to Virginian
congressional campaigns). Mueller is a lifetime Republican appointed bt lifetime Republican Rod
Rozenstrein who was appointed by sometimes Democrat Donald Trump.
The probability that "is a hired gun of Clinton wing of Democratic Party" is, like the
probability that you are a butterfly, one of those cases which help us decide if we can believe
that a probability can really be exactly exactly zero.
For that reason only, your comment is not off topic.
likbez , August 1, 2018 3:18 pm
@Robert Waldmann August 1, 2018 10:13 am
@Likbez, Mueller is a lifetime Republican appointed bt lifetime Republican Rod Rosenstein
who was appointed by sometimes Democrat Donald Trump.
This is just a deflection. Nobody can deny that we observe a fight between two factions of
the US elite. Which is about the direction of the country. Russiagate is just a smoke
screen.
And Mueller actions talk louder than words, or this superficial detail of his resume
(Democratic Party after Bill Clinton can well be renamed into Moderate Republican Party).
Look at the composition of Mueller team and try to find people who might be sympathetic to
Trump platform (not that he lasted long; he betrayed it in three month in office). All the team
consists exclusively of rabid Clinton supporters. Who knows what is their main task without the
necessity of Mueller telling them anything. And as we all know "Personnel is policy."
Now tell me again that he is a lifelong Republican ;-)
Also being a Republican (and moreover, being the head of FBI after 911, and one of the
architects of transition of the USA into national security state) does not exclude actions
against detractors from neoliberal globalization and neoliberalism even if they are fellow
Republicans.
His loyalty is not to the Republican party, but to neoliberalism and Neoconservatism
including neoliberal globalization, which is assaulted by Trump. Looks how smoothly neocons
aligned with the Democratic Party during and after the elections.
To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply by accusing them of being Russian
sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league
with Russia was enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy
fired his first shot on February 9, 1950,
proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing
but assertions .
Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making
accusations of treason without sufficient evidence. Other
definitionsinclude a ggressively
questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or discredit
an opponent, and subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security.
Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed thousands of lives over the next four years
simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist." Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy
answered that this was "the most positive
proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used by others as well: the
Lavender Scare , which
concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their
perversions, was an offshoot of McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals" charges.
State legislatures and school boards
mimicked McCarthy. Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded.
The FBI embarked on campaigns of political
repression (they would later claim Martin Luther
King Jr. had communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political thinking to exclude communism.
Hegel: The Uninvited Guest at the Conservative Party
Is David Brooks openly flirting with the state-worship of this vexing 19th Century philosopher?
By
James McElroy
•
August 1, 2018
Columnist David Brooks and German Philosopher G.W. Hagel (public domain)
Conservatism has gone from a rigid waltz between libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks to a
limb-flailing rave. Writers are reaching towards the bookshelf for thinkers that will refine and define first principles
during this time of flux. While it's all been great fun, an esteemed but concerning guest has now entered the party.
Increasingly, the right is dancing with G.W. Hegel.
David Brooks' recent
column
is a clear example of a Hegel flirtation. In it, Brooks defines conservatism as an internal critique of the
Enlightenment. Explaining opposition to the idea that individuals randomly choose to start society, he writes: "There
never was such a thing as an autonomous, free individual who could gather with others to create order. Rather,
individuals emerge out of families, communities, faiths, neighborhoods and nations. The order comes first. Individual
freedom is an artifact of that order."
Family and community are the basic building blocks of society and social contract theory has plenty of flaws. Yet
note how Brooks lists the nation state as prior to individual freedom. It's dropped so casually that its radicalism is
almost obscured. What type of freedom is dependent on the nation state? Hegelian.
Hegel argued that freedom was the origin of self-consciousness, and defined his work as tracing "the stages in the
evolution of the idea of the will free in and for itself." In
Philosophy of Right
, he critiqued how
Enlightenment liberals see freedom, arguing that liberal freedom could be divided into three stages.
First comes freedom defined negatively: "Nothing can determine where I'll eat dinner!" In the second stage of
freedom, we want to choose specific states of mind or to concern ourselves with a particular. "I'm going to eat at
Waffle House." But if we choose to eat at Waffle House, we've restricted that first stage of freedom. We can no longer
say "nothing can determine where I'll eat dinner" because we've selected a particular place to eat. So the third stage
of freedom is the ability to change one's mind, to keep options open, regardless of prior commitments. "I will eat at
Waffle House, unless I decide to just drink mini-wines in the Applebee's parking lot." This reveals how our conception
of freedom is dependent upon the options available to us.
Liberal freedom is thus our capacity to enter and exit choices, which are determined by factors other than ourselves.
I did not choose for Waffle House to exist. I did not choose to get hungry at dinner time. We do not choose what we
choose between. Therefore, the order of society creates freedom.
So Brooks is clearly doing the robot with Hegel. But so what? Maybe Hegel's ideas are both conservative and correct.
Maybe conservatives ought to embrace Hegel openly. There have always been right-wing Hegelians. These are defensible
positions. Yet we should remember that conservative bouncers have restricted Hegel from their canon before and for good
reason.
Hegel has always been associated with state worship, and Marxism largely sprang from his thought. In
History of
the Idea of Progress
, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote that, while many try to disguise Hegel as some
sort of liberal, "There is simply no way of separating him from ideas and expressions which were in themselves acts of
obeisance to the national state and which on the ineffacable record, led others to ever-higher levels of intensity in
the glorification of the state."
Some may disagree with Nisbet's reading.
Some may say that
Marxists misread Hegel
. Yet the link to state worship and Marxism must be contended with, and anyone who slips in
Hegel without acknowledging it -- like Brooks -- is masking the potentially radical nature of his statement.
Strip the Brooks column of the usual sentimental odes to "beautiful communities" and his strange statement stands
bare and a little menacing. There is a world of difference between saying that freedom is dependent upon the family and
saying that it's dependent on the nation state. Brooks sounds an awful lot like former President Barack Obama: "Somebody
helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads
and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that."
Yet apparently, as Brooks tells us, big government is no longer a threat to the "sacred space." Community focused
conservatives often use Nisbet's
Quest for Community
to criticize hyper-individualism, yet they should also
remember Nisbet's criticism of Hegelian freedom: "Hegel clothes the absolute state, just as Rousseau had, in the
garments of freedom; but there cannot be the slightest doubt of Hegel's dedicated belief in the absolutism, the
sanctity, even the divinity of the national state's power."
Perhaps I'm reading too much into a throwaway line. After all, Aristotle offered ideas similar to those of Hegel and
Brooks without the taint of state worship -- maybe that's where Brooks is drawing his inspiration from. Yet the connection
between Brooks and Hegel is still inescapable because the former is basing his definition of conservatism from British
philosopher Roger Scruton.
Scruton is one of two modern philosophers currently disseminating Hegelian ideas into mainstream punditry. He reads
Hegel in a positive light, and in his book
The Soul of the World
, he writes: "Freedom is fully realized only in
the world of persons, bound together by rights and duties that are mutually recognized." Yet Scruton does not say "in
the world of nations," and elsewhere warns that Hegel is like a "beautiful oasis around a treacherous pool of nonsense."
Brooks doesn't offer any such qualifications.
Alasdair MacIntyre is the other philosopher who has helped popularize Hegel in conservative circles, and in fact
Brooks referenced him
just a few days
ago
. Conservatives who discuss "liquid modernity" as read through MacIntyre describe something almost identical to
Hegel's Absolute Negativity. And McIntyre's idea of waiting for Benedict is similar to waiting for the Absolute Spirit,
which is similar to waiting for the revolution.
What would a more Hegelian conservatism look like? It's hard to tell. Perhaps we'd see books declaring an end to one
form of consciousness. Perhaps Hegel's ideas on corporations would be directly referenced by those concerned with
working-class alienation. Or perhaps we would see more fishy ideas about the nation state being a prerequisite for
individual freedom.
This isn't about pointing at Brooks and pulling an "
Invasion of
the Body Snatchers
," or just beating up on him for the sake of it. He's merely the most obvious example of a
conservative who's done a waltz with the German philosopher. And even then it's always difficult to tell. Hegel wrote on
such a wide range of topics in such confusing prose, that, like a crazed ex, we might mistakenly spot him everywhere.
Hegel's work is important, and both Scruton and MacIntyre are geniuses. Yet we should always remember Russell Kirk's
warnings that "Marx could draw upon Hegel's magazine; he could find nothing to suit him in Burke" and that Hegel was "a
conservative only from chance and expediency." Hegel is already at the party; whether we want him to stay is another
question entirely.
James McElroy is a New York City-based novelist and essayist, who also works in finance.
"... This week, under the headline " It's Been Over a Year Since MSNBC Has Mentioned U.S. War in Yemen ," journalist Adam Johnson reported for the media watchdog group FAIR about the collapse of journalistic decency at MSNBC, under the weight of the network's Russia Russia Russia obsession. Johnson's article asks a big-type question: "Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely ignoring his most devastating war?" ..."
"... It would be easy for news watchers to see that the Democratic Party is much more committed to a hard line against Russia than a hard line against the corporate forces imposing extreme economic inequality here at home. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Amplifying the anti-Russia din helps to drown out the left's core messages for economic fairness, equal rights, environmental protection, diplomacy and so much more." That, of course, is the purpose and intent. Just like hobbling the 'left' with absurd identity politics. ..."
"... It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and no preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein (The Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth. ..."
"... I'm surprised that some of those folks, notably Thom Hartmann, choose not to practice what they preach -- you know, the platitudes about studying the facts and coming to your own conclusions rather than following the herd. They rightly condemn acting on prejudice, out of pure self-interest, without verifiable facts (indeed at odds with empirical fact) and using group intimidation, as per McCarthyist tactics, and then they go ahead and embrace those vices to their own ends. ..."
Hammering on Russia is a losing strategy for progressives as most Americans care about
economic issues and it is the Republicans and corporate Democrats who stand to gain, argues
Norman Solomon.
Progressives should figure it out. Amplifying the
anti-Russia din helps to drown out the left's core messages for economic fairness, equal
rights, environmental protection, diplomacy and so much more. Echoing the racket of blaming
Russia for the USA's severe shortages of democracy plays into the hands of Republicans and
corporate Democrats eager to block progressive momentum.
When riding on the "Russiagate" bandwagon, progressives unwittingly aid political forces
that are eager to sideline progressive messages. And with the midterm elections now scarcely
100 days away, the torrents of
hyperbolic and
hypocritical claims about Russia keep diverting attention from why it's so important to
defeat Republicans.
As a practical matter, devoting massive amounts of time and resources to focusing on Russia
has reduced capacities to effectively challenge the domestic forces that are assaulting
democratic possibilities at home -- with such tactics as state voter ID laws, purging of voter
rolls, and numerous barriers to suppress turnout by people of color.
Instead of keeping eyes on the prize, some of the Democratic base has been watching and
trusting media outlets like MSNBC. An extreme Russia obsession at the network has left precious
little airtime to expose and challenge the vast quantity of terrible domestic-policy measures
being advanced by the Trump administration every day.
Likewise with the U.S. government's militarism. While some Democrats and Republicans in
Congress have put forward legislation to end the active U.S. role in Saudi Arabia's
mass-murderous war on Yemen, those efforts face a steeper uphill climb because of MSNBC.
This week, under the headline "
It's Been Over a Year Since MSNBC Has Mentioned U.S. War in Yemen ," journalist Adam
Johnson reported for the media watchdog group FAIR about the collapse of journalistic decency
at MSNBC, under the weight of the network's Russia Russia Russia obsession. Johnson's article
asks a big-type question: "Why is the No. 1 outlet of alleged anti-Trump #resistance completely
ignoring his most devastating war?"
Maddow: Most Americans don't care for her obsession.
The FAIR report says: "What seems most likely is MSNBC has found that attacking Russia from
the right on matters of foreign policy is the most elegant way to preserve its 'progressive'
image while still serving traditional centers of power -- namely, the Democratic Party
establishment, corporate sponsors, and their own revolving door of ex-spook and military
contractor-funded talking heads."
Russia Doesn't Concern Americans
Corporate media have been exerting enormous pressure on Democratic officeholders and
candidates to follow a thin blue party line on Russia. Yet polling shows that few Americans see
Russia as a threat to their well-being; they're far more concerned about such matters as
healthcare, education, housing and overall economic security.
The gap between most Americans and media elites is clear in a
nationwide poll taken after the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, which was fiercely
condemned by the punditocracy. As The Hill newspaper reported this week under the
headline "Most Americans Back Trump's Call for Follow-Up Summit With Putin," 54 percent of
respondents favored plans for a second summit. "The survey also found that 61 percent of
Americans say better relations with Russia are in the best interest of the United States."
Yet most Democratic Party leaders have very different priorities. After investing so much
political capital in portraying Putin's government as an implacable enemy of the United States,
top Democrats on Capitol Hill are hardly inclined to help thaw relations between the world's
two nuclear superpowers.
It would be easy for news watchers to see that the Democratic Party is much more committed to a hard line against Russia
than a hard line against the corporate forces imposing extreme economic inequality here at home.
National polling underscores just how out of whack and out of touch the party's top dogs are. Last month, the Gallup
organization asked: "What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?" The results were telling. "Situation with Russia" came in at
below one-half of 1 percent.
The day after the Helsinki summit, TheWashington Post reported: "Citing
polls and focus groups that have put Trump and Russia far down the list of voter priorities,
Democratic strategists have counseled candidates and party leaders for months to discuss
'kitchen table' issues. Now, after a remarkable 46-minute news conference on foreign soil where
Trump stood side by side with a former KGB agent to praise his 'strong' denials of election
interference and criticize the FBI, those strategists believe the ground may have shifted."
Prominent corporate Democrats who want to beat back the current progressive groundswell
inside their party are leading the charge. Jim Kessler, a senior vice president at the
"centrist" Third Way organization, was quick to
proclaim after the summit: "It got simple real fast. I've talked to a lot of Democrats that
are running in purple and red states and districts who have said that Russia rarely comes up
back home, and I think that has now changed."
The Democratic National Committee and other official arms of the party keep sending out
Russia-bashing emails to millions of people on a nearly daily basis. At times the goals seem to
involve generating and exploiting manic panic.
At the end of last week, as soon as the White House announced plans (later postponed) for
Vladimir Putin to meet with President Trump in Washington this fall, the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee fired off a mass email -- from "RUSSIA ALERT (via DCCC)" --
declaring that the Russian president "must NOT be allowed to set foot in our country." The
email strained to conflate a summit with Russian interference in U.S. elections. "We cannot
overstate how dangerous this is," the DCCC gravely warned. And: "We need to stop him at all
costs."
For Democrats who move in elite circles, running against Putin might seem like a smart
election move. But for voters worried about economic insecurity and many other social ills, a
political party obsessed with Russia is likely to seem aloof and irrelevant to their lives.
Norman Solomon is the national coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and
the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books
including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."
Nop , July 31, 2018 at 10:38 am
"Amplifying the anti-Russia din helps to drown out the left's core messages for economic
fairness, equal rights, environmental protection, diplomacy and so much more." That, of course, is the purpose and intent. Just like hobbling the 'left' with absurd
identity politics.
Bill Goldman , July 30, 2018 at 6:44 pm
If the Democrats don't turn primaries into housecleaning out establishment Dems, they will
gain no seats in the midterm election and Trump will retain his Republican majority in both
chambers. Putin is an heroic figure to the global electorates. They admire and respect him
and even wish he were running on their tickets. Most Americans want nothing to do with
mainstream media be it the NYT, WSJ, Fox, Financial Times, Guardian, MSNBC, or CNN. They are
mostly viewed as extreme liars and propagandists of the Goebbels variety. The real action is
in the alternative media who realize capitalist wars are military-industrial rackets. The
play is at RT, Sputnik International, Consortium, The Saker, New Eastern Outlook, and
Greenville Post, among others.
Taras77 , July 30, 2018 at 11:42 am
Not sure where this link would fit but here it is:
It was ok when Hillary said we need a "strong" Russia:
"We want very much to have a strong Russia because a strong, competent, prosperous, stable
Russia is , we think, in the interests of the world," Clinton said as Obama's secretary of
state in her 2010 interview with the partially Russian government-owned First Channel
Television.
Russia is not the USSR, although PMSNBC wants the ignorant to "stay ignorant, my
friend.."
Thedems are their own worst enemy.
Lois Gagnon , July 29, 2018 at 11:41 pm
Rachel Maddow is unfortunately a cult hero in my neck of the Western Mass woods as she
makes her permanent home here. It's impossible to penetrate the total brainwashing she has
managed to accomplish among the pink hat wearing crowd. It's very dispiriting.
It's sad when someone like Rachel Maddow uses their social gifts to advance tribalism. In
this case, one could say the Russia bashing amounts to racism.
H Beazley , July 29, 2018 at 9:55 pm
I have a foolproof method for proving which journalists are controlled by the C.I.A. The
agency always advocates for war and always claims that JFK was killed by a "lone nut." Rachel
Maddow always goes along with war propaganda and supports the Warren Commission every
November 22. Therefore, she is a tool for the C.I.A. and cannot be trusted.
Reference for above statement. Jim DiEugenio is a real source for the truth of the JFK
assassination, not Phil Shenon.
glitch , July 31, 2018 at 7:23 am
JFK is their most blatant "tell". Some can't even say his name without spitting it
out.
CitizenOne , July 29, 2018 at 9:26 pm
Today on ABC Martha Raddatz hosted "This Week" which featured James Lankford a Republican
from Oklahoma describing how Russia and Putin were actively trying to ruin our democracy and
also were trying to influence elections at every possible turn. The Russian Bear and Putin
according to Lankford were also trying to rewrite the Constitution, trying to upend every
election and were seeking to disrupt our national electrical grid not to be confused with our
national election grid which they were also trying to destroy as well as to control the most
local elections by a means of electronic control that was beyond any means to control.
Of course no mention was made about possible solutions to thwart the Russians was
mentioned and it is doubtful that there are any serious efforts to counteract the alleged
Russian hacking of US elections since not one single preventive action to stop the Orwellian
monster of Russia, like Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty Four" was put
forth.
Apparently ABC and the other media are trying to convince Americans that there is an
overwhelming force in Russia that is somehow able to infiltrate and control all our national
elections. Apparently the Russians are unstoppable.
It is a sham.
It is a sham since no evidence of election influence by the Russians was provided and no
preventive or corrective measures our government is taking to prevent Emmanuel Goldstein (The
Russians) from further attacking and usurping our elections was put forth.
Instead the publishers of "This Week" on ABC were content to provide evidence-free
incriminations of Russia and attribute all manner of influence in our elections to the
incredibly sneaky and unstoppable Russian-Putin election Influencing machine which is
unstoppable by our intelligence agencies.
What is missing from Martha Radditz's show? There will never be any admission that they
have jobs because of Citizens United, their corporate benefactors (Koch Industries),
Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Media Bias which ensures that the Iron Triangle of corporate
election dark money flows to hand picked political candidates that will support conservative
causes or that these are the real election influencing mechanisms which have the most power
in our country to influence elections.
As long as ABC, NBC, CBS and other cable news shows fail to correctly identify the real
reasons of election corruption which is our very near and dear corporate money funded
political organizations we will continue to be duped by the free press to believe that Russia
has control over our national elections and not believe that US Corporations hold all the
power.
Cassandra , July 29, 2018 at 8:43 pm
Hell hath no fury like a Clinton scorned. The Goldwater Girl just can't over her loss to
El Chumpo. It had to be the Russians, not the thoroughly disgusted American people who voted
with their feet by not going to the polls at all.
Thanks to Norman for reminding us of the continued waste of time and effort on the
'russiagate' stories based on allegations and indictments, NOT evidence or possible reasons
for such behavior. The USA is fully capable of unfair election practices, helped by the
undemocratic system of electoral college, partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, lack of
response to voter desires .plus of course Israel being the very large external factor.
Trump's influence on workers, environment, USA's reputation are negative, but blaming Russia
when this is in nobody's real interest is hardly the way forward for the Democratic
Party.
SteveK9 , July 28, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Incredible as it seems, the re-election of Donald Trump (assuming he is not deposed or
killed before then) is not essential to preserve our democracy. If they bring him down
(whatever you may think of him), then we might just as well have a 'Star Chamber' of the
Military/Industrial/Intelligence complex choose the President, not that it would matter who
that might be.
It really is peculiar what's happened to these dimwit Dems. I used to listen to Thom
Hartmann and Rachel Maddow when they were on Air America, and their main political positions
were for working people. Now, all they do is partisan politics which they don't seem to
understand benefits only the Deep State war party.
Incidentally, State of the Nation website, http://www.sott.net , has an article by Alex Krainer, who wrote
the book about Bill Browder's crooked dealings in Russia. His book, which was suppressed by
Browder first, i think is "Grand Deception", now available from Red Pill Press for $25 (and
must be selling well because it's being reprinted). I wrote this hastily but you'll see it on
sott.net. Russia's resurgence under Putin is nothing short of astounding.
Also, there is a video on Youtube, "The Rise of Putin and the Fall of the Russian Jewish
Oligarchs", 2 parts. I only saw the beginning showing how the Russian people were given state
vouchers that led to the oligarchs buying them up for their own profit and plunging Russians
into shock therapy disaster instigated by IMF and other US led monetary agencies including
Harvard. This is why it is so incredible how Americans receive political "perception control"
when the truth is exactly opposite of what they are being told. At least more people are
realizing the lies being told about Russia and Putin.
Drew Hunkins , July 27, 2018 at 3:51 pm
Maddow, Corn and the rest of them are playing a dangerous game. This weekend there's a guy
over at Counterpunch ("The curious case of pro-Trump leftism") who's essentially saying that
any progressives or liberal minded folks who concede that Trump's on the righteous path in
pursuing a detente of sorts with the Kremlin is a naive fool and isn't to be taken seriously
(Thom Hartmann also had a recent piece saying similar things). He sets up a Manichean world
in which you either see Trump as the sole embodiment of evil or you're a dupe playing into
rightwing hands. I for one, and most others at CN, have been highly critical of 90% of
Trump's platform and policies but we're also not dunderheaded dolts, we know when to give the
man a modicum of credit for going against the military industrial media complex on at least
this one particular issue.
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 9:26 pm
All those loons you mentioned are effectively practicing a religion, in which there is a
dogma everyone must believe to be virtuous and a set of commandments every believer must live
by to gain salvation. Don't toe the line on every bit of it and you are rejected as an
apostate.
I'm surprised that some of those folks, notably Thom Hartmann, choose not to practice what
they preach -- you know, the platitudes about studying the facts and coming to your own
conclusions rather than following the herd. They rightly condemn acting on prejudice, out of
pure self-interest, without verifiable facts (indeed at odds with empirical fact) and using
group intimidation, as per McCarthyist tactics, and then they go ahead and embrace those
vices to their own ends.
It is my process on everything in this life to learn as much as I can on my own, without
being brainwashed by any group or movement, and only backing a cause if it is congruent with
my own conclusions. Unfortunately, most people do the opposite: they are joiners first and
analysts only if their biases are not threatened.
I feel entirely justified in agreeing with movements on some things and not others. I
doubt that human beings have arrived at definitive answers about most phenomena in the real
world or that any single organised group of us has it all down accurate and pat on
everything. Listen to any casual debate on the questions big and small in science: the give
and take, back and forth, can go on as long as the participants have the interest and energy.
I never give my interlocutors any respite, because there is always one more thing to be
considered or one more way of looking at a problem. I'm sure I would have been burned at the
stake in many previous lives and so would a lot of the readers here.
Dogmatic party-line Democrats, Republicans, Communists, Islamists, Rastafarians,
Bokononites and all the rest suffer from the same malady of checking their minds at the door
when it comes to movement politics. They will never do the unthinkable and cooperate with the
opposition even if they happen to agree on an issue. This is a manifestation of the Manichean
approach you mentioned, Drew. Admit that the opposition is right about anything and you open
the door to the possibility that they are right about more, AND that you may (heaven forbid!)
be wrong more often than absolutely never. The main exception, at least in America, seems to
be warfare, which both main factions and a lot of the marginal ones agree enthusiastically
upon and engage with relish.
"... The whole corrupt, crazy political process is a distraction from our real problems, and an endless maze of futility. The illusion of democracy is collapsing all around us, and safety lies in abandoning it. ..."
"... Agreed. Our entire national political debate is a theater of smoke and mirrors. The facts most obvious and degrading to the national interest are ignored at all costs, e.g., an out of control military-industrial-intelligence complex that now swallows up an obscene $1 trillion annually (including "defense related expenditures"). ..."
"... My plans for the upcoming Democratic primary in Florida: I will write "none of these clowns" at the top of the ballot. ..."
"... I tend to think that the Cold War bankrupted us as well as the Soviets, but we just haven't figured it that out yet. ..."
"... Most of the human race has been speeding towards the cliff at 100 mph like Thelma and Louise. Certainly America has been. It's getting ever closer. We will get there. Don't expect Zeno's paradox to save us. ..."
"... I share your setiment about the Democrats but voting for Republicans just because is equally foolish. Why support banning labor unions, corporate very expensive health care, greatly reducing and eventually eliminating social security and Medicare, privitzing all public infrastructure and bailing out wall Street at all cost. I could go on but you get the idea. Vote for candidates that stand for the American people and have the guts to stand up to the elites. If no such candidates exist in a particular election don't vote simple as that. ..."
"... tealing a "none of the above" write-in requires the ballot be destroyed, so it can provide a paper trail and/or a potential theft exposure point. ..."
"... I am a registered Democrat; I will NOT be voting for them this fall. They no longer have any credibility with me. Rachel helped them shoot themselves in the foot as far as I'm concerned. How are they any different from neocons??? I'm grateful WikiLeaks pulled off their mask. I'm a historian and know a lot of both CIA and Russian history and am not buying Russiagate or Democrats. ..."
"... I like that, the "Demented-crats"! They are so completely clueless, in their overpaid bubbles, nothing to say about the Race-to-the-Bottom, Hunger Games society they have helped create. ..."
"... The loyal shrills to Clinton? Those aren't progressives. ..."
"... As Jimmy Dore keeps telling us: the Democratic leadership, which is totally corporatist and neocon, would rather lose to the GOP candidate than to see a progressive or liberal Democrat win the office. The Dems have no independent policies of their own and are merely enablers to make sure that the hard right agenda always prevails. ..."
"... And I see Bernie Sanders was spewing this neo-McCarthyite crap on a Sunday morning talk show earlier this week. He really should know better. ..."
"... Isaac Christiansen observes that "As Democrats seek to shift blame away from the discontent with our economic system, their party and their chosen Neoliberal candidate, we are told that Trump came to power almost solely due to Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election." ..."
"... Remember how the entire anti-Russian theme began? The Clinton team used Russia as their excuse for losing 2016. It didn't get much attention at first because the party/candidate that loses inevitably blames someone or something other than the candidate/party. But the Democrats ran with it from there, using much of the media marketed to liberals to build the Russian Tale. The most insane thing about the claims that Russia hacked voting machines for Trump, etc.: In spite of much Dem voter opposition to the Clinton right wing, H. Clinton got the most votes. (Did Russia do that, and if so, why?) Trump is president because of our antiquated electoral college process. Meanwhile, while Dems ramble on about a Putin/Trump bromance, the sane world has watched as Trump set the stage for our final war, US vs. Russia and China. ..."
"... Everything gets conspicuously twisted by a biased media, yet no one (of consequence) says anything about that. Even as Trump gets bashed, he gets cheered whenever he does something dangerous and stupid, such as launching missiles in the aftermath of an obvious false flag incident. We see the matrix being blatantly and clumsily spun right before our eyes and nobody says a word about the emperor's nakedness. ..."
"... It is time for the progressives to flee the Democratic party en masse and go their own way. ..."
"... "One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House districts have military-intelligence, State Department or NSC backgrounds. This is by far the largest subcategory of Democratic candidates." ..."
"... We haven't seen any progressives in years. Progressive politics isn't a new invention. In the US, it goes back at least to the early 1900s. It's about building a better nation from the bottom up -- legit aid for the poor at one end, firm restraints in the rich at the other end.We have nothing like that today. This isn't about "political purity," but about not calling an apple an armadillo. ..."
The whole corrupt, crazy political process is a distraction from our real problems,
and an endless maze of futility. The illusion of democracy is collapsing all around us, and
safety lies in abandoning it. We need a new way of thinking and acting that clearly and
directly sees our problems and deals with them. Politics as now understood is a dead end.
Agreed. Our entire national political debate is a theater of smoke and mirrors. The
facts most obvious and degrading to the national interest are ignored at all costs, e.g., an
out of control military-industrial-intelligence complex that now swallows up an obscene $1
trillion annually (including "defense related expenditures"). Even the fact that we no
longer live in a democracy but an oligarchy, according to objective studies and noted
commentators, including former president Carter, is never commented upon by the miscreant
pundits posing as reporters (Hayes, Maddow, Anderson, Cuomo, et al).
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 6:33 am
My plans for the upcoming Democratic primary in Florida: I will write "none of these
clowns" at the top of the ballot. Under that I will write "Stop the warmongering and
phony Russia-bashing. Stop the obstructionism just to damage Trump and exonerate Hillary for
losing a poorly-run campaign. I cannot vote for my party this November, and never again until
you stop trying to run to the right of the Republicans." Maybe someone reading the ballot
will pass the message on to the party leadership and adjustments will at least be
considered.
If not, eff 'em. We will be better off sweeping corrupt corporatist cronies of Hillary,
like Wasserman-Schultz, out of congress. Then there will be no doubt that the GOP needs to go
too, after they use their mandate to totally wreck all before them, and maybe, after a few
election cycles, some third party representing the interests of the people rather than Wall
Street and the MIC can emerge. Maybe the Greens and the Libertarians can become at least
equal players with the corporatist Dems and GOPers.
Somebody new is going to have to preside over the coming economic and societal collapse,
and do we want that to be the military, the police and the spooks? That is who will seize
power (not just covertly but overtly) if the usually mercenary politicians cannot effect some
workable changes.
Broompilot , July 27, 2018 at 7:01 pm
Like the Eastern Roman Empire, we could wax and wane for 1000 years with the power we
possess. Or, like the Soviet Union, we could suffer an economic collapse over a decade
throwing a large percentage of us into poverty.
I tend to think that the Cold War bankrupted us as well as the Soviets, but we just
haven't figured it that out yet.
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 9:48 pm
"I tend to think that the Cold War bankrupted us as well as the soviets, but we just
haven't figured that out yet."
Because we prefer to blow off science and empirically-supported concepts like the first
law of thermodynamics which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just
transferred or changed in form.
We choose to believe that we can endlessly create money, which is a token representing
access to available stored energy, out of nothing by issuing debt. Even if the tokens are
infinite, on a finite planet the available energy is certainly not.
Most of the human race has been speeding towards the cliff at 100 mph like Thelma and
Louise. Certainly America has been. It's getting ever closer. We will get there. Don't expect
Zeno's paradox to save us.
Ma Laoshi , July 27, 2018 at 5:37 am
We are long past the point that this extreme Russophobia has revealed itself to be plain
old race hatred. These bouts of hysteria have always been part of the American DNA, and it
has been most instructive how fast and seamless the switch has been from Muslims to Russians
as the hated. Other. Progressives have solemnly declared themselves to be the good guys
without much introspection, so one would expect them to be more susceptible to this bigotry,
not less; a more astute observer might have asked "When will the machine turn on me next?",
as is of course already happening to Sanders and others.
Yes RussiaGating is a losing strategy, but most of the evidence is that progressives ARE
losers. So there's no surprise that they're falling for it, and little to indicate that they
deserve any better.
Mike , July 26, 2018 at 11:43 pm
Never voted for Republican congressmen in the past. Never. This time I will. Democrats are
the party of open borders and war. Now they want conflict with Russia over this ginned up
fake investigation. They don't represent working people any more. I don't even think they put
AMERICANS over illegal immigrants. Why is it wrong that people should be forced to obey
immigration law? The laws for citizens are enforced. Never thought I'd vote Republican.
I can't think of any reason to vote for 99.9% of the Democrats. The more everyone
including the media lies about Russia, the more I empathize with them.
I'd guess the business owners that rely on illegals vote for Republicans because they're
business owners. We need to eat and they need to make more money than they deserve so neither
party is going to stand in the way of it as long as they bribe their politicians and anybody
else that feels entitled to free stuff. Democrats won't get rid of ICE soon, if ever.
Nearly all people coming from the South are escaping conditions we've created and are
granted asylum when allowed to make their case in court.
I think treating defenseless people terribly to show how mean we can be is wrong.
I share your setiment about the Democrats but voting for Republicans just because is
equally foolish. Why support banning labor unions, corporate very expensive health care,
greatly reducing and eventually eliminating social security and Medicare, privitzing all
public infrastructure and bailing out wall Street at all cost. I could go on but you get the
idea. Vote for candidates that stand for the American people and have the guts to stand up to
the elites. If no such candidates exist in a particular election don't vote simple as
that.
glitch , July 28, 2018 at 11:28 am
If you can't vote third party write in none of the above on a paper ballot. If those
aren't options spoil your ballot but turn it in. Not voting doesn't register your disdain,
it's easier for them to ignore as apathy. And non votes can be spoofed (stolen). S
tealing a "none of the above" write-in requires the ballot be destroyed, so it can
provide a paper trail and/or a potential theft exposure point.
I am a registered Democrat; I will NOT be voting for them this fall. They no longer
have any credibility with me. Rachel helped them shoot themselves in the foot as far as I'm
concerned. How are they any different from neocons??? I'm grateful WikiLeaks pulled off their
mask. I'm a historian and know a lot of both CIA and Russian history and am not buying
Russiagate or Democrats.
I like that, the "Demented-crats"! They are so completely clueless, in their overpaid
bubbles, nothing to say about the Race-to-the-Bottom, Hunger Games society they have helped
create.
Meanwhile, over in Russia, the government with leadership of Vladimir Putin has increased
the Russians' standard of living, much as was done for Americans under FDR and the New Deal.
(Never a word about the 80+ governments the USA/CIA has destabilized or directly overthrown,
including Russia's -- oh no! We're exceptional, didn't you know?)
Yea, I don't get it. Who the hell do you consider to be the progressives!?! Most people I
know who consider themselves to be progressives aren't all wrapped up in the Russian
narrative. The loyal shrills to Clinton? Those aren't progressives. Clinton herself
pretty much backed away from that stamp during the election cycle. Pelosi has quite obviously
made it clear she can't even see that side of the fence. Or will she allow it the light of
day. In case you missed it, there's a war on progressives going on. And we aren't allowed in
that club over there. I follow a hand full of Green Party sites on face hack, and they aren't
having the Russia did it by any means. Only those loyal to the liberal democrats have the
ignorance to bellow out the talking points and support for Sanders. Yea, those people that
wouldn't give him the light of day during that same election cycle when we thought he was a
progressive. Easy Bob! Just a hic cup. I hope! Rest peacefully!
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 6:46 am
As Jimmy Dore keeps telling us: the Democratic leadership, which is totally
corporatist and neocon, would rather lose to the GOP candidate than to see a progressive or
liberal Democrat win the office. The Dems have no independent policies of their own and are
merely enablers to make sure that the hard right agenda always prevails. They are a sham
party. Enough "blue dogs" and GOP-light types always win as Democrats to ensure that no
progressive legislation will ever be enacted even when "the party" has 60% majorities in both
houses -- as they did in Obama's first term. This is by design. Even the putative Democratic
presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama functioned as center-right Republicans. Obama said
as much. Clinton didn't have to as his policies were all reactionary and brought us to the
impending economic collapse.
Zim , July 26, 2018 at 5:39 pm
Looks like the Inauthentic Opposition Party is gearing up for another ass whooping at the
polls. The hypocrisy, the cluelessness is astounding.
JMG , July 26, 2018 at 5:33 pm
From this excellent Norman Solomon's article:
"As The Hill newspaper reported this week under the headline "Most Americans Back Trump's
Call for Follow-Up Summit With Putin," 54 percent of respondents favored plans for a second
summit. "The survey also found that 61 percent of Americans say better relations with Russia
are in the best interest of the United States.""
And I see Bernie Sanders was spewing this neo-McCarthyite crap on a Sunday morning
talk show earlier this week. He really should know better.
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 7:01 am
He's been co-opted. He's been told that the blame will be his when the Democratic Party
collapses unless he works like hell to keep his sheep in the fold. He's following orders from
the DNC which believes that the party's last best hope for a comeback, indeed to stave off
annihilation, is to keep bashing Putin and Trump because they have no policies, no
credibility and no candidates that the people eagerly want to get behind. They think that
lies and war are the winning combination. How did that work out for LBJ, Bushdaddy, and
Dubya's organisation?
mrtmbrnmn , July 26, 2018 at 5:15 pm
Ever since the Bonnie & Clyde Clinton years, the sclerotic Establishment Dementedcrats
have essentially despised their base. They only speak AT them. Never FOR them. Or else they
SCOLD them or simply IGNORE them. I hope now they are beginning to FEAR them.
jose , July 26, 2018 at 4:22 pm
Personally speaking, I am yet to see any serious evidence against allege Russia meddling
in US elections. And I am not alone in this regard; For instance, according to counterpunch
news, " The decision to blame Russian meddling for Hillary Clinton's electoral loss was made
in the immediate aftermath of the election by her senior campaign staff." According to Mike
Whitney, "So far, no single piece of evidence has been made public proving that the Trump
campaign joined with Russia to steal the US presidency."
Isaac Christiansen observes that "As Democrats seek to shift blame away from the
discontent with our economic system, their party and their chosen Neoliberal candidate, we
are told that Trump came to power almost solely due to Russian interference in the U.S. 2016
election." I reckon that any rational person should believe any Russian interference in
US electoral system only when presented with real iron-clad prove. Otherwise, it would be
foolhardy to accept at face value speculations and innuendo of a foreign interference that
purportedly put Trump in the White House.
DH Fabian , July 26, 2018 at 3:28 pm
Well, a couple of issues here. Liberals have not been about economic justice, but about
protecting the advantages of the middle class (with an occasional pat on the head to min.
wage workers). They've forgotten that we're over 20 years into one hell of a war on the poor.
Not everyone can work, and there aren't jobs for all. The US began shipping out jobs in the
'80s, ended actual welfare aid in the '90s -- lost over 6 million manufacturing jobs alone
since 2000. What is" justice" for today's jobless poor?
Remember how the entire anti-Russian theme began? The Clinton team used Russia as
their excuse for losing 2016. It didn't get much attention at first because the
party/candidate that loses inevitably blames someone or something other than the
candidate/party. But the Democrats ran with it from there, using much of the media marketed
to liberals to build the Russian Tale. The most insane thing about the claims that Russia
hacked voting machines for Trump, etc.: In spite of much Dem voter opposition to the Clinton
right wing, H. Clinton got the most votes. (Did Russia do that, and if so, why?) Trump is
president because of our antiquated electoral college process. Meanwhile, while Dems ramble
on about a Putin/Trump bromance, the sane world has watched as Trump set the stage for our
final war, US vs. Russia and China.
Realist , July 27, 2018 at 7:09 am
"Meanwhile, while Dems ramble on about a Putin/Trump bromance, the sane world has
watched as Trump set the stage for our final war, US vs. Russia and China."
So very right. Everything gets conspicuously twisted by a biased media, yet no one (of
consequence) says anything about that. Even as Trump gets bashed, he gets cheered whenever he
does something dangerous and stupid, such as launching missiles in the aftermath of an
obvious false flag incident. We see the matrix being blatantly and clumsily spun right before
our eyes and nobody says a word about the emperor's nakedness.
Skip Scott , July 26, 2018 at 2:27 pm
It is time for the progressives to flee the Democratic party en masse and go their own
way. If they haven't learned anything from the 2016 election, they are doomed. The DNC
has a stranglehold on the Progressive movement, and sheep dog Bernie will once again herd
them over to the corporate sponsored candidate in the end. For the midterms, this is what the
Democrats have planned:
"One quarter of all the Democratic challengers in competitive House districts have
military-intelligence, State Department or NSC backgrounds. This is by far the largest
subcategory of Democratic candidates."
The Green Party has a truly Progressive platform on Domestic and Foreign policy, and are
our only hope at this point. They just need the right standard bearers to break through the
MSM censorship. If they could get a charismatic candidate for President in 2020 and break the
15% threshold for the debates, the American people would finally see that they really do have
a choice for a better future.
DH Fabian , July 26, 2018 at 3:36 pm
We haven't seen any progressives in years. Progressive politics isn't a new invention.
In the US, it goes back at least to the early 1900s. It's about building a better nation from
the bottom up -- legit aid for the poor at one end, firm restraints in the rich at the other
end.We have nothing like that today. This isn't about "political purity," but about not
calling an apple an armadillo.
It's true that the Green Party platform does include legitimatrely addressing poverty, but
perhaps understandably, this fact was swept under the carpet during their 2016 campaign.
will , July 26, 2018 at 8:32 pm
"We haven't seen any progressives in years" Apparently you don't get out much.
hetro , July 26, 2018 at 4:14 pm
Skip, let's hope we don't have the "hold your nose and vote Democrat" arguments again,
with Greens as a vote for Trump (or Putin?). Interestingly, the following poll from FOX news
indicates the strum und feces hysteria of the current Democratic machine may not be working
out all that well, as 7 in 10 respondents here indicate the political atmosphere in the US at
this time is "overheated."
Well, a good deal of that overheat is coming from the "them Russians them Russians" meme
continually pushed -- and way over the top for most American people trying to "have a great
day!" This poll does indicate Dems are ahead at this point, and in the past several election
cycles there has been a regular switch every two years in congressional domination.
"The Green Party has a truly Progressive platform on Domestic and Foreign policy, and
are our only hope at this point."
The Green Party is a Capitalist party, just the kindest and gentlest Capitalism of any of
the Capitalist parties with the most stringent leash on the mad killer dog that is Capitalism
and the best safety net for those chased off the cliff by that mad killer dog.
For those of us who see that Capitalism is the problem, that makes voting Green actually a
lesser evil choice. If we're going to vote lesser evil, we might as well vote for the most
progressive Democrats, or even centrist ones when they're running against fire breathing
Randian Republicans who combine that with a Fundamentalist Christian Theocratic agenda (a
combination that makes no sense, but who said the GOP makes sense?)
There are few viable Socialist parties in the US anymore. The biggest jettisoned Socialism
nearly 50 years ago when it also jettisoned actually being a political party and decided to
just be a lobby group within the Democratic Party. The only political heir of Eugene V. Debs,
the Socialist Party USA, is now a fringe group whose national conventions are more like a
picnic gathering of a few friends. The other organizations that seem more viable are actually
Trotskyite groups, and Trotsky was not non-violent at all, which I am.
I am really at a lost what to do as far as the less important task of voting (which is
less important than ongoing activism.) I just did my primary ballot. We've got this terrible
top two primary, a system that basically kills movement building.
I could have voted for Gigi Ferguson, the independent, who was endorsed by the Green
Party, running for senate against NeoLiberal phony environmentalist Maria Cantwell and not
the poser, who said he was Green, (parties have no say in candidates' statements of which
party they prefer,) but is for privatizing Social Security. But I instead voted for Steve
Hoffman, the only avowed Socialist on the ballot in any race, even though his Freedom
Socialist Party is Troskyite.
I voted for Stoney Bird, a real Green, running against TPP loving and indefinite detention
loving and NeoLiberal anti-Single Payer Rick Larsen for Congress.
My state legislation had two positions. In one I voted for Alex Ramel, an ecological
activist, over the preferred establishment choice of Identity Politics candidate (tribal,)
Debra Lekanoff. In the other the incumbent, Jeff Morris, another establishment Democrat, ran
unopposed. I wrote in "None." (Morris having the same family name as my mother's maiden name
didn't affect me at all.)
But it was all an exercise in futility, voting for my conscience as much as possible. I
have little doubt that none of my choices, except maybe Ramel, will make it to the top two.
Cantwell and Larsen are shoo-ins and they'll surely face the establishment GOP candidate.
Thus cutting out all other options in the Fall.
I'll have to write in my choices then. Oh well.
maryam , July 27, 2018 at 4:54 am
Over here in Europe (not UK) and faced with the similar problem of inapt candidates, we
sometimes need to vote creatively: so we vote, of course, but choose to make the ballot sheet
invalid. this way our voice is noted and we show that we care about the electoral process,
while it also makes clear that we do not care much about the cabdidate(s). "we" will vote,
but "they" are not very trustworthy.
MBeaver , July 27, 2018 at 8:12 am
Yep. We in Germany had that lesson already. The Green party was one of the most corrupt
one when they finally got elected into the government. They also harmed the social systems
massively and supported the first offensive war with German support since WW2. Even as
opposition they show all the time how much they lie about their true intentions.
They are not an option, because they are hypocrites.
ronnie mitchell , July 27, 2018 at 4:09 pm
Interesting comment with some good information that I appreciate.\ I live in Bellingham
and have filled out my vote for Stony Bird over Rick Larsen whom I truly despise. In fact in
previous election cycles I voted for Mike Lapointe instead but he quit running more than a
few years ago so the last time I just left it blank and the same goes for the general
election vote for Congress.
With the TPP issue Rick Larsen had a townhall meeting at City hall building which was packed
and he starts off by saying he hasn't read any of the text of the TPP yet so he was free from
answering most questions however he would be checking it out BUT no there would be no further
meeting before the voting. In other words he was giving us NOTHING.
I had been part of the protesters outside his fundraising gathering (private and by
invitation only) and have been to his local office many times (it's two blocks from where I
live) and when myself and a small group were in opposition to building the largest coal
terminal in north America at Cherry Point. He would never say he was against it or for it but
his fundraisers were backers of the terminal and as each of our group stepped forward to give
a statement to his office workers on the issue (Rick was in DC,aka District of Corruption at
the time) they just politely listened but neither recorded nor wrote down ANYTHING we
said.
The list is long regarding issues on which he is on the opposite side of his constituents
wishes and at one gathering was smugly dismissive of requests to represent the votes of the
people and not use his super delegate status(not Democratic) to endorse Hillary Clinton
because votes in Caucuses were overwhelmingly for Sen. Sanders.
I could go on but it would be too long of a comment but you've given me some good ideas for
other choices on the ballot which I needed in particular with Maria Cantwell whom (like
fellow neoliberal Patty Murray) I have refused to support in the last two elections.For one
of many examples of why, one big one was their stand against importing cheaper medicines from
Canada which was word for word straight out of the Big PHarma handbook of talking points, but
they DID get quite a lot of flak for it.
I'll look into some of your other suggestions as well before I turn in this ballot, thanks
for your comment.
TS , July 27, 2018 at 4:06 am
> Skip Scott
> If they could get a charismatic candidate for President in 2020 and break the 15%
threshold for the debates,
And what makes you think the people who decide wouldn't simply shift the goalposts?
Skip Scott , July 27, 2018 at 2:48 pm
I'm sure that would be attempted, but with a strong candidate hopefully there'd be enough
of a fuss made to get them to back off. I'd also like to dream that some of the more
progressive Democrats in congress would see the writing on the wall, and declare themselves
Greens. That'd give us a toehold in two branches of government. I know I'm being overly
optimistic, but it keeps me away from the whiskey bottle.
Piotr Berman , July 28, 2018 at 3:06 pm
I have some misgivings to "eco politics", I am not sure to what extend they apply to
Greens, and I am sorry to say, liberals have a knack to pick the worst parts of any
progressive idea.
Any goal has to consider trade-off. If we think that emitting carbon to the atmosphere is
a major problem, solutions must follow economic calculus. Instead, there was two much stress
on "aesthetic solutions" and sometimes scientifically unsound solutions. For example,
aesthetic solution is electric vehicles, but hybrid vehicles offer a much smaller cost per
amount of carbon that is saved, only when majority of vehicles already gain from regenerative
braking and having engines work only in fuel optimal conditions (battery absorbing surplus or
augmenting the engine power when the amount of needed power is outside parameters optimal for
the internal combustion engine) you may get better cost from electric engines.
Or excluding nuclear power from the "approved solutions". One of my many objections on
"Republicans on energy" that they promised a few times to be "rational" but they never
delivered.
Philosophically, there should be a fat carbon tax and social policies and subsidies to
avoid poor people to loose.
"Hyperrational" progressive approach would be to make a balance: as a society, where do we
waste, and where do we spent too little.
1. Military/foreign policy. In aggregate, spendings are huge and nobody is overly proud
from the results. An open question if this category of spending should be decreased by 50% or
75%, if we proceed in stages we can reach satisfactory point. Mind you, the largest ticket
items are improving nuclear weapons or conventional weapon systems that are needed against
very few most sophisticated adversaries who also waste resources. USA, Russia, China, the
rest of NATO etc. could agree to some disarmament, Russia and China actually accelerated
weapon development in response to "Let America dominate forever" policies, bad news are they
they do it for less money.
2. Medical robbery complex. Private insurance and lack of costs control leads to spending
on medical care around 18% of GDP rather than 10%. This waste is actually larger than all
spending on defense.
3. Infrastructure (large public role) and other capital investments (small public role but
essential fiscal policies and "thoughtful protectionism"), we spent too little, can be
covered by a part of 1 and 2.
I could continue with "hyperrational progressive manifesto" but I will give one example.
Enforcing labor standards may eliminate 90% of illegal employment without walls,
concentration camps for aliens etc. Some industries cannot make it without cheap illegal
aliens, if they REALLY cannot, workers should work legally in their home countries and
resulting imports should be encouraged. If picking carrots is too expensive in USA, we may
get them from other countries in Western Hemisphere. On that note, lately there are enough
jobs in USA, but native born citizens do not flock to carrot picking, they would rather have
jobs that required large capital investments and there are too few of those.
Hyperrational rhetoric can borrow from libertarians: if our allies do not feel secure when
they spend X times more than their regional adversaries (especially if we add our own
regional expenditures), that says that money alone cannot cure their "secure feeling" deficit
and we and they are already spending too much. We do not need to hate or demean anyone to
reach such conclusions.
Skip Scott , July 29, 2018 at 1:09 pm
Piotr-
I am all in favor of rational solutions to our environmental problems. The problem is the
entrenched power of the existing exploitive industries. An incredible amount of progress
could be made through on-site power generation and energy efficient building design.
I'm am not in favor of current nuclear power plants, but I am not opposed to research, and
I've heard good things about recent designs, especially thorium nukes. I am no engineer, but
if we had safe nukes, we could go with hydrogen fuel cells for automobiles. There are plenty
of other creative ideas as well for things such as localized food production.
If we find common purpose with the Libertarians to stop the war machine, the amount of
energy and resources and creative potential to bring humanity forward would be tremendous.
First we have to stop the war machine, and then we can argue about the extent of the role of
government in a free society.
For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has
been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.
Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of
droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie
and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. ..."
Philippics are good, but at some point they faile to exite. The key question that Phipip forgot to ander is: Dore Izreal acts
a alobbist of the US MIC or it hasits own l(local agnda) that conflicts the MIC interests in the region.
So President Donald Trump reckoned on Monday that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) just might be wrong in its assessment
that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election but then decided on Tuesday that he misspoke and had the greatest confidence
in the IC and now agrees that they were correct in their judgment. But Donald Trump, interestingly, added something about there being
"others" that also had been involved in the election in an attempt to subvert it, though he was not specific and the national media
has chosen not to pursue the admittedly cryptic comment. He was almost certainly referring to China both due to possible motive and
the possession of the necessary resources to carry out such an operation. Indeed, there are
reports that China hacked the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that are apparently still missing.
Just how one interferes in an election in a large country with diverse sources of information and numerous polling stations located
in different states using different systems is, of course, problematical. The United States has interfered in elections everywhere,
including in Russia under Boris Yeltsin. It engaged in regime change in Iran, Chile, and Guatemala by supporting conservative elements
in the military which obligingly staged coups. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces invaded and overthrew the governments while in
Libya the change in regime was largely brought about by encouraging rebels while bombing government forces. The same model has been
applied in Syria, though without much success because Damascus actually was bold enough to resist.
So how do the Chinese "others" bring about "change" short of a full-scale invasion by the People's Liberation Army? I do not know
anything about actual Chinese plans to interfere in future American elections and gain influence over the resulting newly elected
government but would like to speculate on just how they might go about that onerous task.
First, I would build up an infrastructure in the United States that would have access to the media and be able to lobby and corrupt
the political class. That would be kind of tricky as it would require getting around the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA),
which requires representatives of foreign governments operating in the United States to register and have their finances subject
to review by the Department of the Treasury. Most recently, several Russian news agencies that are funded by the Putin government
have been required to do so, including RT International and Sputnik radio and television.
The way to avoid the FARA registration requirement is to have all funding come through Chinese-American sources that are not directly
connected with the government in Beijing. Further, the foundations and other organizations should be set up as having an educational
purpose rather than a political agenda. You might want to call your principal lobbying group something like the American Chinese
Political Action Committee or ACPAC as an acronym when one is referring to it shorthand.
Once established, ACPAC will hire and send hundreds of Chinese-American lobbyists to Capitol Hill when Congress is in session.
They will be carefully selected to come from as many states and congressional districts as possible to maximize access to legislative
offices. They will have with them position papers prepared by the ACPAC central office that explain why a close and uncritical relationship
with Beijing is not only the right thing to do, it is also a good thing for the United States.
As part of the process, new Congressmen will benefit from free trips to China paid for by an educational foundation set up for
that purpose. They will be able to walk on the Great Wall and speak to genuine representative Chinese who will tell them how wonderful
everything is in the People's Republic.
Congressmen who nevertheless appear to be resistant to the lobbying and the emoluments will be confronted with a whole battery
of alternative reasons why they should be filo-Chinese, including the thinly veiled threat that to behave otherwise could be construed
as politically damaging anti-Orientalist racism. For those who persist in their obduracy, the ultimate weapon will be citation of
the horrors of the Second World War Rape of Nanking. No one wants to be accused of being a Rape of Nanking denier.
The second phase of converting Congress is to set up a bunch of Political Action Committees (PACs). They will have innocuous names
like Rocky Mountain Sheep Herders Association, but they will all really be about China. When the money begins to flow into the campaign
coffers of legislators any concerns about what China is doing in the world will cease. The same PACs can be use to fund billboards
and voter outreach in some districts, allowing China to have a say in the elections without actually having to surface or be explicit
about whom it supports. Other PACs can work hard at inserting material into social websites, similar to what the Russians have been
accused of doing.
And then there is the mass media. Using the same Chinese-American conduit, you would simply buy up controlling interests in newspapers
and other media outlets. And you would begin staffing those outlets with earnest young Chinese-Americans who will be highly protective
of Chinese interests and never write a story critical of the government in Beijing or the Chinese people. That way the American public
will eventually become so heavily propagandized by the prevailing narrative that they will never question anything that China does,
ideally beginning to refer to it as the "only democracy in Asia" and "America's best friend in the whole wide world." Once the indoctrination
process is completed, the Chinese leadership might even crush demonstrators with tanks in Tiananmen Square or line up snipers to
pick off protest leaders and no congressman or newspaper would dare say nay.
When the political classes and media are sufficiently under control, it would then be time to move to the final objective: the
dismantling of the United States Constitution. In particularly, there is that pesky Bill of Rights and the First Amendment guaranteeing
Free Speech. That would definitely have to go, so you round up your tame Congress critters and you elect a president who is also
in your pocket, putting everything in place for the "slam-dunk." You pass a battery of laws making any criticism of China both racist
and felonious, with punitive fines and prison sentences attached. After that success, you can begin to dismantle the rest of the
Bill of Rights and no one will be able to say a word against what you are doing because the First Amendment will by then be a dead
duck. When the Constitution is in shreds and Chinese lobbyists are firmly in control of corrupted legislators, Beijing will have
won a bloodless victory against the United States and it all began with just a little interference in America's politics alluded
to by Donald Trump.
Of course, dear reader, all of the above might be true but for the fact that I am not talking about China at all and am only using
that country as a metaphor. Beijing may have spied on the U.S. elections but it otherwise has evidenced little interest in manipulating
elections or controlling any aspect of the U.S. government. And even though I am sure that Donald Trump was not referring to Israel
when he made his offhand comment about "others," the shoe perfectly fits that country's subjugation of many of the foreign and national
security policy mechanisms in the United States over the past fifty years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently
boasted
about how he controls Trump and convinced him to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement.
The real mystery, if there is one, is why no American politician has either the guts or the integrity or perhaps the necessary
intelligence to substitute Tel Aviv for Moscow and to call Israel out like we are currently calling out Russia for actions that pale
in comparison to what Netanyahu has been up to.
To be specific, there is no evidence that Russia ever asked for favors from Trump's campaign staff and transition team but
Israel did so over a vote on its illegal
settlements at the United Nations. Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Congress interested? No. Is the media interested? No.
Israel, relying on Jewish power and money to do the heavy lifting, has completely corrupted many aspects of American government
and, in particular, its foreign policy by aggressive lobbying and buying politicians. All new members of Congress and spouses are
taken to Israel on generously funded "fact finding"
tours after being elected to make sure they get their bearings straight right from the git-go. Israel's nearly total control over
the message on the Middle East coming out of the U.S. mainstream is aided and abetted by the numerous Jewish editors and journalists
who are prepared to pump the party line. The money to do all this comes from Jewish billionaires like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson,
who have their hooks deep into both political parties. Meanwhile, the ability of America's most powerful foreign policy lobby AIPAC
to avoid registration as a foreign agent is completely due to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States which means in practice
that Israel and its advocates will never be sanctioned in any way.
Israel is eager to have the United States fight Iran on its behalf, even though Washington has no real interest in doing so, and
all indications are that it will be successful. Though it is a rich country, it receives a multi-billion-dollar handout from the
U.S. Treasury every year. When its war criminal prime minister comes to town he receives
26 standing ovations from a completely sycophantic congress and now the United States has even stationed soldiers in Israel who
are
"prepared to die" for Israel even though there is no treaty of any kind between the two countries and the potential victims have
likely never been consulted regarding dying for a foreign country. All of this takes place without the public ever voting on or even
discussing the relationship, a tribute to the fact that both major parties and the media have been completely co-opted.
And now there is the assault on the First Amendment, with legislation currently in Congress
making
it a crime either to criticize Israel or support a boycott of it in support of Palestinian rights. When those bills become law,
which they will, we are finished as a country where fundamental rights are respected.
And what has Russia done in comparison to all this? Hardly anything even if all the claims about its alleged interference are
true. So when will Mueller and all the Republican and Democratic baying dogs say a single word about Israel's interference in our
elections and political processes? If past behavior is anything to go by, it will never happen.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O.
Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Thanks for the great article, Sir. You are so right.
The New York Times should change its name to Tel Aviv Times. Everyday, it interferes in virtually every US election, on behalf
of Israel, attacking candidates who do not support Israel or those who are patriotic and want to ban immigration.
Same with CNN, WaPo, the Economist (a Rothschild publication), etc.
Our Congressmen are Gazans. They are forced to sign pledges supporting Israel, and forced to destroy their country through
3rd world immigration, or risk destruction of their careers, mockery or defamation by the Zionist controlled media, loss of campaign
contributions from their biggest donors, or even risk being framed.
When Cynthia McKinney refused to sign the pledge, she was forced out. When another freshman Congressman simply wanted to delay
a vote in favor of Israel, he was attacked, taken to Israel where he was softened up and now is totally under the Jewish Lobby's
control.
"... With impeachment itself on the table, Mueller has done little more than issue the equivalent of parking tickets to foreigners he has no jurisdiction over. Intelligence summaries claim the Russians meddled, but don't show that Trump was involved. Indictments against Russians are cheered as evidence, when they are just Mueller's uncontested assertions. ..."
An answer was needed, so one was created: the Russians. As World War II ended with the U.S.
the planet's predominant power, dark forces saw advantage in arousing new
fears . The Soviet Union morphed from a decimated ally in the fight against fascism into a
competitor locked in a titanic struggle with America. How did they get so powerful so quickly?
Nothing could explain it except traitors. Cold War-era America? Or 2018 Trump America? Yes, on
both counts.
To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool -- one could defeat political enemies simply
by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate
were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was
enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February
9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for
the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions .
Indeed, the very word " McCarthyism " came to mean making accusations
of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitionsinclude a ggressively
questioning a person's patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to
adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political
rights in the name of national security.
Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed
thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying "communist."
Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was "the
most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist." The power of accusation was used
by others as well: the Lavender
Scare , which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who
were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of
McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free "morals"
charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy.
Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded. The FBI embarked on campaigns of political
repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had
communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political
thinking to exclude communism.
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