MIGA stage of Trump political career: the art of betrayal of his election promises (April 2017 -- March 2019)
Will the neocon baggage, "Make Israel Great Again" (MIGA) policies, Venezuela color revolution, and complete betrayal of his voters
Trump looks like Republican Obama, another master of "bait and switch" maneuver. Obama won his reelection bid. Can
Trump repeat the trick ?
In 2016 Trump promised to drain the swamp. He drained a small patch of neocon swamp and put all those bottomfeeders from this
patch in his cabinet.
Trumps come and go, but the deluded, totally brainwashed electorate will stay. That's the real problem. Degradation of democracy
into oligarchy (the iron law of oligarchy) is an objective process. In 2016 we saw some kind revolt against status quo. That's
why Trump and Sanders get so many supporters. It ended with nothing.
Donald Trump probably broke the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history including previous
champion -- Obama.
The Imperial Presidency of the United States has evolved over the last century to the point that the executive holds certain powers
that can be considered dictatorial. Arguably, due to imperial transformation of the USA after 1991 (the collapse of the USSR) the area
in which the President is almost totally uncontrolled is in waging wars. The Constitution specifically reserves this right for Congress.
Trump betrayed everything and everybody, but he remain the sign of the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. The USA looks and
sounds like a person with dementia – as if a sick person behaving inappropriately, showing unprovoked aggression (like some Alzheimer
patients), using silly or senseless phrasing, and having the unreasonable demands and uncontrolled fits of rage like a spoiled child.
Add to this Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer Brennan.
Let me be clear: in the last 24 years the DC political class has gone almost entirely criminal, with the last 13 years dedicated
to serial war crimes. In this sort of situation the DoJ, AG, and FBI head, becomes corrupted, and turns away from the rule of law to
become a shield for the DC criminal despotism.
His greatest accomplishment may well be that he has caused Washington's Swamp Dwellers to rise from the ooze and expose themselves
for all the world to see.
Trump proved to be a sad joke of a anti-neoliberal, anti-war crusader. As for his anti-globalization stance, it looks like
he prefers the direct economic racket to treaties. but still wants to sustain and expand the US neoliberal empire, no matter what
are the costs for the US people. Venezuela is a good example here. US relations with Russia, which Trump
promised to improve, have chilled to Cold War status and policies toward Russia of Trump administration does not differ from the policies
of Obama administration. That increases chances of WWIII, which might mean that perishing of the human civilization, as we know
it (Khrushchev's bon mot about the US nuclear superiority still apples, He said something like that: "Yes, the USA is much stronger,
we just have the capability to destroy the USA one time, while they have the capability to destroy the USSR many times"). This
saying is fully applicable to the idiotism of Trump "supersized" military budget. And the U.S. national debt is now larger than
the US economy. This is imperial overstretch. It is unsustainable.
His "Draining the swamp" slogan in reality turned to be as phony as "change we can believe is. " he proved to be another Bush
II, uneducated, inarticulate, and incompetent President fully controlled by neocon lobby (which in its immense gratitude for services
he provided wants to depose him and organized Mueller witch hunt). Add to this his impulsivity and narcissistic desire to be in the
spotlight and you get a really toxic brew. The number of neocons in Trump administration is comparable with the number of neocons in
Bush II and Obama administrations.
Trump allowed to Washington foreign policy elite to conduct his foreign
policy. The latter is arrogant (just look at Pompeo and Bolton), out of touch with reality and still stuck in the 1990s. They believed
in American exceptionalism and that the U.S. had an almost divine right to run the world. American power supposedly rivaled imperial
Rome. Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump all shared similar foreign policy objectives. Fierst of all they wanted to to spread the
US-style neoliberalism. Even if this can be accomplished on the tips of bayonets. Any dissenters are branded as authoritarian
dictators, sanctioned and for non-nuclear players threatened with force. The Washington elite believes it is America’s destiny
to lead the world forever, despite their own level of degeneration. Government officials and media commentators who have promoted
disastrous wars suffer no consequences and are welcomed back into circles of power.The cost of imperial wars since dissolution of the
USSR runs at around 6 trillion. It is now clear that that large part of the defense budget would be better spent at home, upgrading
the country's infrastructure.
Trump proved to be completely different politician then he was pretending to be during 2016 election. In this sense he competes
with Obama for the title of Grandmaster of "bait and switch" game.
His main accomplishment was "Trump tax cut for the rich". Similar to Bush II cut. In this sense he performed a deft "bait and switch"
maneuver similar to one done by Obama and can be called "Republican Obama." Another classic turncoat US politician, who betrayed his
voters three months after the elections.
Despite his campaign rhetoric (“our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster”; “we’re rebuilding other countries while weakening
our own”), Trump used the playbook of the neocon foreign-policy. Even some members of establishment started to realise this (better
late, then never ;-). See for example Stephen Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions.Here
is one Amazon comment
This is a well written, well researched, and well reasoned criticism of Liberal Hegemony (“LH”). LH rests on the belief that the
United States is uniquely positioned to spread democracy and shape the international system to promote international peace and
prosperity. LH has led to the invasion of Iraq, military efforts in Afghanistan, and counterterrorism operations in Somalia, Yemen,
Libya and Syria. The results, according to Walt, are not favorable:
Our military operations have been costly in both dollars and lives but have had scant success;
The number of violent extremists and the number of places where they are active is greater now then when Al Qaeda first
emerged;
Our military efforts have created resentment because of civilian casualties;
Our foreign activities have taken time, attention and resources away from pressing domestic concerns; and
Efforts to promote democracy and human rights have gone into reverse with a decline in many countries of political rights
and civil liberties.
In spite of this, LH continues to be advocated almost universally in the media and by political and foreign policy commentators.
People who criticize its exercise are ostracized. Nevertheless, Walt names proponent’s names and few well known political and
military spokesmen are spared.
Walt reviews Trump’s foreign policy and military efforts and concludes he has made matters worse.
Walt presents a very persuasive alternative strategy that he calls Offshore Balancing. It would entail a continued strong military
but much less active military involvement in other countries and more use of diplomacy. This is truly a book well worth reading.
Trump as serial Betrayer not that different from Obama
Again, the essential of Trump is "serial betrayer" which is as bad as "serial killer": in 2018 Trump positioned himself as
anti-war, anti-establishment candidate and some of his points resonated strong with the the US population. He betrayed all of
them. This posture was fake, and now he can't repeat this trick. He is not the establishment. All those votes IMHO
are not going to Tulsi, not Trump, if Tulsi runs against him.
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. But they will fight furiously and will try to accomplish with Tulsi the same dirty trick as they
accomplished with Sanders in 2016.
Ironically, the entire contention that Trump pursued an appeasement policy toward Putin was
the opposite of reality. Washington's policy toward Moscow
actually hardened in multiple ways during the Trump years. Numerous measures, including
repeated U.S. arms sales to Ukraine, continued expansion of NATO's membership, an increase in
both the number and size of NATO war games near Russia's borders, U.S. withdrawal from the INF
treaty, and Washington's efforts to unseat Russian client regimes in Syria and Venezuela,
confirmed that point. Some would argue that he did this all under pressure from Congress,
nevertheless, the mythology that Trump spent four years cozying-up to a murderous aggressor now
has a tenacious hold on the collective American psyche.
Many nationalists plan to vote for Trump, not due to a positive assessment of his first
term, but for the same reason people line up for terrible movie sequels: warm and fuzzy
nostalgia, sometimes inexplicable. Once upon a time the prospect of electing this man made the
people we all hate but who rule us anyway visibly afraid.
Spite for the "coastal elites" in tortoiseshell glasses will likely save the day.
But don't expect the same flood of libtard tears this time around outside of maybe low level
MSNBC watchers. The real elite, the Jews, now realize that Trump's gun had an orange tip spray
painted black the whole time.
Trump began betraying his voters almost as soon as he was sworn into office. The only
figures in Trump's populist campaign who survived the 2016 election were Steve Bannon, who was
banished after Charlottesville and is now facing federal charges at the hands of Trump's own
Department of Justice, and Jeff Sessions, whose political career was destroyed by Trump's
calculated malice.
A victory in 2016 by any of the generic GOP hacks who lost during the primary would've been
indistinguishable from the last four years of Trump, policy-wise.
Draining the swamp and transforming the Republicans into a worker's party? No. Instead, his
cabinet positions
were staffed by the swamp scum at the Heritage Foundation.
Deportation force and a wall? He trots out Stephen Miller
before any big vote , but nothing was accomplished on this front. Barack Obama removed
50% more
illegal aliens in his first term than Trump has. In his first two years of holding the
Presidency and Congress, Trump made no effort to present legislation to combat illegal
immigration or even increase border security. There are more Asian and Central American illegal
aliens in the United States right now than before he took office.
Punishing "LIBERAL DONORS"? Heritage's appointments have helped enable a corporate crime
wave not seen in recent memory, with laughable cases of naked insider trading like the
"paused" loan to Kodak personally protected by Trump's inner circle. Every multi-national
and NGO has been scamming the PPP system, Trump's promise to crack down on this
will never materialized . White collar crime prosecutions have fallen to a
33-year low during this administration.
Is it any wonder these "donors" have so much money laying around they can use it to fund
Black Lives Matter?
This round of American populism has been defeated by the Swamp conservatives, many who were
originally Trump foes and but now gleefully wear MAGA hats and have shoved aside relatively
independent alt-light con artists and
the organic ethno-nationalist movement. The conservatives we thought we canceled, like the Jews
Ben Shapiro, Mark Levine, and Dennis Prager have come back from the dead thanks to Big Tech's
massive crackdown on independent media.
The problem for Trump is that conservatism is widely hated, especially by his voters.
Trump's tax cut for billionaires is one of his administration's only policy achievements, and
it is the
most unpopular thing he has ever done.
What will carry Trump over the finish line is the understandable desire to trigger the
libs just one last time, in a way that won't get you fired from your job or
antagonized by the FBI . The immense power the Judeo-left has amassed by uniting suburban
liberals, big capitalists, permanent bureaucrats and antifa under Trump has contributed to
white working people becoming atomized, thus demoralized, thus susceptible to Trump's campaign
year presentation as The Last White Man .
Seeing the conservative movement peering out from under the mountains of shit we shoveled on
them to dominate the Trump-era is testament to the flexibility and tenacity -- thanks to Jewish
"philanthropy" -- of the phony right. The time-sink, money-sink non-issues of abortion, the
supposed justification for confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, has re-emerged as
a supposedly important issue. Last year the abortion rate fell to the lowest
levels ever, largely due to low rates of sex between young people and the widespread
adoption of contraceptives.
But the Koch brothers know what we're really getting in ACB. The notorious "Americans for
Prosperity"
spent millions to push her through because she will be the most pro-big business justice on
the court (she sided with big business 85% of the time during her
judgeship), which explains the complete lack of a fight from the Democrats. 15 of the last 19
SCOTUS judges have been appointed by the Republican Party, yet the court has become more
pro-business and socially "liberal" anyway.
As Ted Cruz has recently stated, once the election is over and they're no longer under
pressure from voters, Trump and the GOP will be returning to
business as usual : imposing austerity during an unprecedented unemployment crisis,
ratcheting up military tensions with enemies of Israel, and as the
Heritage Foundation predicts in its conclusion of Trump v. Biden on immigration, a massive
amnesty bill that will introduce a new "merit-based immigration system" -- the H1-B program on
steroids.
While nobody thinks Trump's "platinum plan for black America" will ever come to be, the mere
suggestion will be opening up a debate we should not be having. Explicit
no-whites-need-apply social policies are another cultural artifact of the Trump era bound to
become acceptable in his second term.
For establishment Democrats, their second defeat at the hands of Trump will be enormously
discrediting, but they will profit in the short term from their comfortable position as the
opposition party. By running a candidate like Joe Biden, one can only assume they want to
lose.
But the Clinton-Biden-Obama-Pelosi nexus, who planned to fill "Sleepy Joe's" spayed cabinet
with people like John Kasich, Jeff
Flake , and various in-house neo-liberals, will be pressured by actual communists in their
party to step aside. The Republican Party will never be able to meet this challenge, instead
Trump and Charlie Kirk will be riding a helicopter to Botswana to cut the ribbon on a new
bathhouse and dance to the Village People when the next incident occurs and the nation is once
again on fire.
The New York Times has turned this election into a referendum on Woke + Wall
Street. The majority, even many non-whites, will be rejecting America's new official ideology
today.
From the beginning, one side of me has always thought Trump to be too good to be true. My
first doubts about him came when I learned his daughter was married to a powerful Jew and
she's adopted his religion. Trump has turned out to be the most pro-Zionist president ever
and has even moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem...
Best thing I have read on Trump. Here is my one reservation
"The real elite, the Jews, now realize that Trump's gun had an orange tip spray painted
black the whole time."
Forget "now realize". At least Trump's Jews – the ones anti Jewish Power Trump
supporters never report on – have ALWAYS realized that Trump is shabbos goy to the
bone. I am talking about Jews like:
Lew Eisenberg, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Mel Sembler, Ron Weiser, Steve Wynn, Elliott
Brody, Laurie Perlmutter, and Carl Icahn, not to mention Bernie Marcus. Then we have his many
Jewish personal and professional associates, who include, among others, Avi Berkowitz,
Michael Cohen, Gary Cohn, Reed Cordish, Boris Epshteyn, David Friedman, Jason Greenblatt,
Larry Kudlow, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, Jay Sekulow, David Shulkin, and Allen
Weisselberg. All those Trump-defenders out there in America should be dismayed at his vast
linkage to the people of Israel(See Thomas Dalton, True Q)
These are the big Business Republican Jews and their apparatchiks as opposed to the new
class professionals, academics, intellectuals, mediaist, journalists, and policy wonks who
comprise the neo liberal – liberal and neocon Jews of the Democrat Party. Unlike the
Democrat Jews who don't know Trump existentially – he's too vulgar and undereducated
– and really do think, or perhaps at least thought, that Trump could be the coming of a
new Hitler, the Business Jews have had long actual existential relations with Trump or know
Jews who have. Trump has been up to his ears in Jews of the Big Business type his whole life
and they know he is firmly in the Semophile bag. As Jews , Trump's Jews want Zionism and have
always known he is good for it. But they also want every break they can get for Big Business
because what could be better for Jews who prosper from neoliberalism right across their
higher class status? As Striker argues , Trump will give Jews another round of business
breaks like those he had already given in his first term. And there will go his populist
image but it will have served its purpose
All this could have been easily predicted if someone in our ethnic realism community had
taken a good look at Trump's Jews. Instead Trump was allowed to pose as "the last white
man"
Actually E Michael Jones sort of tried it but he didn't get any support. Why is that?
Well, I don't know who won yet and I doubt that anyone will ever know since everything is
rigged, but Old Joe has most of the alphabet agencies in his pocket, the MSM in his corner
and a whole lot of Obama, Clinton trotskyites lookin after him. That should mean that he
should win by a landslide, unless he lets the popular vote for Trump – into the
election process – which would be shrewd .. lol As far as America goes – SNAFU d
again.
I've been sitting here watching the election maps all night.
The counting stopped around 8:30 – 9:00 Pacific time. It hasn't moved since.
If you go into the counties on the particular states that have stalled, you can do the
math.
Clearly Trump was winning and if counts allowed, they should be able to call it.
Amazingly, they called Arizona when it was only something like 68% complete.
NV was going red but it shows it is swaying blue now it is the only state that has updated
in last 3 hours besides Arizona.
It looks like they might be trying to pull something (the Democrats/Deep state).
I've never seen this happen. There is no reason for it to have happened.
WI, MI, PA, NC and GA are all pending red, along with the 1 electoral vote in ME.
Go to bed. In morning we'll get up and Biden will be declared winner with most of the
above states declared blue (sometime during the night when most people are sleeping).
Superficial article. The author did write a few good sentences, but seems to have missed
that Trump is at most a potential catalyst for white awakening. If that does not happen, you
can't blame him. You can only blame yourself for a combination of spinelessness, stupidity,
cowardice & naivety.
If the central pillar of America, whites, are so immature or so divided, US cannot last.
No empire which was not a nation-state too, did survive in history. It disintegrated &
collapsed.
Too bad Trump is jewish and fully cooperated with his shitty ethnic group and their
endless treasonous schemes many times. The alt-right/Q/MAGA jewish psyop (the real
Russiagate), HARPA, Barr covering up many crimes of the tribe (Epstein, Trump's crimes, big
tech, fake BLM/ANTIFA protests, ), treasonous cooperation with Israel, the coronavirus flu
scam, close ties to illegal mass surveillance contractors and Chabad Lubavich, shady deals
with banks, handing money over to his fellows in "coronavirus aid packages", engaging in
trade wars that seemed to be stupid, but had the objective of imploding the US economy to
pave way for China (same for the flu scam and 2008 crisis)
Biden isn't that different either.
@Anon out civilization
and barbarism that Hudson quite matter-of-factly agreed with me that the book is, to the
extent that it will be understood, " earth-shattering" in both intent and effect .
The movement that Striker is referring to, has have a moral component, otherwise the agents
of Mammon win again. Our (((friends))) have been winning for centuries, because they have
redefined reality using their ill-gotten gains. Clown world is funded.
But whether we get Trump or Biden, we need to organize our own political movement or we
will be getting it anyway.
The point is that there's not a dimes worth of difference between the Democrats and
Republicans and their candidates and therefore voting is a waste of time.
It looks like they might be trying to pull something (the Democrats/Deep state).
Yes, they're trying to cheat, no doubt. Of course, nobody will care enough to do anything
about it. Had Trump actually done something for White people, the erstwhile alt-right might
have organized Charlottesville-style rallies in support of Trump, but he didn't, so they won't.
That's what he gets for being a cuck and throwing his most committed supporters under the
bus.
Trump is like the abusive alcoholic husband and American conservatives(mostly Whites)are
like the battered wife. Deep down we know the beatings will never stop, but we continue to give
our love and support to him. We know we should leave him, perhaps find a new man to share our
love with and help raise our kids. The problem is we are stuck in a neighborhood of crack heads
and heroine addicts, and the new husband would turn out worse than the last...
The old saw that Obama deported more illegals than did Trump in the first term is a lie
exposed many times over. At the border under Bush II, Mexicans caught coming across were simply
sent back on their own recognizance (ORed) and not counted as a deportation. There were
thousands and thousands treated this way by the Border Patrol and Immigration. To get the
deportation numbers up, Obama ordered that ORs be counted as deportations, so therein is the
lie.
I must agree with this article. Trump has largely betrayed his base, and is no more likely
to do better for the average working class American in his second term than he has in his
first. It's painful, I don't want to admit this either, but as they say, optimism is
cowardice.
I must however object to the notion that the Democrats are in any way "communist." Do
communists throw tens of trillions of dollars at Wall Street while starving the real economy of
investment? Do communists support "surprise medical billing?" Do communists allow all important
financial decisions to be made by private corporations? Oh sure, the Democrats will come up
with all sorts of confiscatory taxes and regulations on the middle class, no doubt, and they
will subsidize illegal immigrants – which is to say, they will subsidize cheap labor for
the elites. And yes they will be for transgender bathrooms. But communists? No way no how, the
Democrats are Neoliberal scum just like the Republicans.
Make a new political movement? It would be nice, but I can't see any way that such a thing
will not be suppressed or co-opted or the leadership bought out etc.etc. Look what happened to
"Golden Dawn" in Greece
Sadly I think the last white man is going to lose. The election has been stolen from him
with mass voting fraud, both in vote counting and mass voting by illegal voters. He has also
shot himself in the foot over the last four years with several major blunders, which did not
help, for e.g.:
1) Calling off the voting fraud investigation and disbanded the investigative team soon
after his inauguration in 2016.
2) Too thin skin and incendiary in his tweets, not very Presidential and made unnecessary
enemies.
3) Didn't do enough to reduce legal immigration incl. H1B and OPTs right from the get go,
which lost him a lot of enthusiasm from college educated voters. He only finally began to do
something about it last month, too little too late. Stephen Miller turned out to be a fake
patriot after all, who kept out true patriots like Kris Kobach from running the DHS.
4) Kept/promoted his enemies like Paul Ryan, John Kelly, Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, HR
McMaster, Gina Haspel, Christopher Wray et. al, which came back to haunt him very quickly.
5) Letting wormtongue (Jared Kushner) into the WH and giving him far too much power,
including freeing all the drug dealers.
6) At times it seemed like the only thing he cares about is the stock market, he made lots
of people way richer than they were in 2016, and these are all the people who are now voting
against him, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
7) Too many Jews and Ziocons in his cabinet. Pandered too much to Israel, making his real
slogan more like MIGA than MAGA.
Come to think of it, Trump is not the last white man. He is the last Ziocon Jew to become
president.
Trump did not win by a landslide as so many hoped. There is a reason for the red wave fail,
and it is Trump himself and his policies.
Trump's biggest enemy is himself, he spent the entire administration making threats and
filling his administration with swamp criminals, he is slavishly whored to Netanyahu and
Israel, he even murdered Soleimani. He didn't remove the troops from a single occupied nation.
Trump's failure as a good administrator is glaring obvious and of no surprise because he had no
previous governmental experience. He just winged it based on being the Donald. What a joke. A
nation ruled by one ego that thinks it is god.
He never went on the offensive with 911 truth, which would put the entire swamp under
investigation and in a fight to stay out of prison. With 911 investigation Israel would be put
on a leash, and the Neocons would ALL be indicted, along with the Jewish newspapers and
lobbies. Because Trump REFUSED to investigate the biggest crime in history because of his god
damned loyalty to Jews and Israel, it is Trump who spent his entire presidency in a defensive
mode.
When asked if he condemns white supremacy Trump did not condemn the interviewer or defend
white people. Pathetic. He's cucked to the Jewish media narrative. And why doesn't he take
legal or military action against the Jewish media? Because he is bed with Kushners and the
Adelsons.
As a result of his own actions Trump who could of won by a landslide is now in a stalemate
with creeper senile Biden, one of the most pathetic candidates ever. Trump failures all center
around his loyalties to Jews and Israel.
So this election is looking more and more like a stalemate and I would like to bring to
everyone's attention that there is a "prophecy" of how this ends:
"The presidents of the U.S., a supposedly free country, have been abusing their power to
an increasingly greater extent. During a time of social unrest even more so than the period
of Viet Nam and Watergate, the electoral college will be evenly split over the election of
the new president. The process will stalemate, with many people clamoring for whichever
candidate they voted for, causing enormous tension in the country. Internationally it will be
a sensitive situation.
Because of the split, and the extremely volatile and explosive social unrest, putting
either candidate in office instead of the other could start a civil war or a revolution.
After a long time of impassioned speeches invoking patriotism and the founding fathers, a
compromise solution of holding another election will be taken, and a candidate will be
installed without disaster."
PS I have no dog in the fight and I don't vote, I will never vote for a lesser of two evils,
if the two pedo candidates is the best the nation can do when we have 337 million people to
pick from then maybe the nation needs to fall.
persistence and evolution of the US two/uni party system is interesting.
It is due to the "winner take all" election rules rather than a proportional system. For the
most part, US voters vote straight party anyway, so I don't see why we can't just go to a
proportional system where you vote for a party, and based upon that party's percentage of vote,
they get to fill X seats. Perhaps that would not work with the Presidential or Senate
elections, but would at least work for the House.
It looks like Republicans will be keeping the Senate. They almost did win House also.
So Biden cannot do too much, except to make some wars, regulate the international trade and
give some money to freeloaders residing in the cities.
In the mean time the rate of debt will significantly increase.
I do not think there could be any negotiations with Russians because Biden is unreliable.
Trump began betraying his voters almost as soon as he was sworn into office. The only
figures in Trump's populist campaign who survived the 2016 election were Steve Bannon, who
was banished after Charlottesville and is now facing federal charges at the hands of Trump's
own Department of Justice, and Jeff Sessions, whose political career was destroyed by Trump's
calculated malice.
Remember Kris Kobach and how he was going to investigate widespread election fraud? that's
something that might have been useful. Whatever happened to him, anyway? Just kind of faded
away. No support from Drumpf. Last I heard, Kobach was held in contempt of court for failing to
adequately advise noncitizens of their "right" to vote:
And Steve King -- sure, he was initially a Cruz supporter, but backed Trump enthusiastically
later on. King's mild civic nationalism and strong support for common sense, patriotic
immigration reform are exactly the agenda that Trump claimed to support. But when the
corporate "news" media and the entire Uniparty attacked Steve King as "inadequately anti-White"
-- Trump did <a href+' https://www.timesofisrael.com/white-house-distances-itself-from-king-comments/"was
quick to disavow. King's longstanding
fanatical
Israel Firstism did nothing to save him. It's not enough to support semitic supremacism in
the current year; you have to be actively anti-White as well, goy.
Zemurray's original name was Schmuel Zmurri. He was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russia
(present-day Chişinău, Moldova) to a poor Jewish family that emigrated
to America when he was fourteen years old.
In early 20th century, he went to Honduras to take over the banana crop business. He hired
pe0ple to do a coup for his business interests in 1910.
@Rufus Clyde Too group
has been around for more than a decade. It was very clever to imply they were deeply involved
and have them seem to be the originators of the predator exposures and firings.
Also, think it a coincidence that so many Repubs in Congress either "retired",
decided to do something else or whose campaigns weren't going to be funded by the RNC in 2018?
NO. They were forced out because they were corrupt.
Think Guliani bothered to go spend weeks in Ukraine just for vacation? NO, he went to get
firsthand evidence of the Biden corruption. Etc, etc ..
@Zarathustra "Trump did
for the jew as much as he could."
How does the cliche go? Live by the jew, die by the jew? Parasites are not known for their
loyalty. The tribe squeezed all it could out of their useful idiot, Donnie the Dummy, and then
deftly jumped to a new host, Joey Depends, who will willingly advance the tribe's self-serving
agenda in ways yet undreamed of even by the political cognoscenti. Donnie appears to be a
vindictive old bitch and might just form a populist third party along the lines of Teddy
Roosevelt's moronic Bull Moose now that the tribe has discarded him like a wad of used stained
toilet paper.
@Zarathustra he Jews and
being vetted by them. He was a loose cannon and had to go.
I further believe that war with China is more likely under Biden than Trump. The U.S. dollar
has been the reserve currency since right after WWII. The rise of China threatens that so China
will eventually have to be dealt with militarily. The Jews must maintain the U.S. dollar as
reserve currency else much of their ill gotten gains tend to evaporate over time.
I am positive that local Jews have large investments in China.
That one I have no information on. It could well be true.
Multiculturalism has always been a stopgap, a temporary pause on the way to disintegration
for empires. The elites always put their hopes in it imagining they will satisfy angry
minorities with minor adjustments. It never works. Just look at the Black armed militias. Not
even systematic Black privilege n Supremacism is enough for them. They won't stop even for
Biden until they ethnically cleanse whites completely from large parts of the country dominate
the rest. We are past elections now. The war has begun.
The stage is set for another false flag with everyone distracted and caught up with the
plandemic and/or political unrest, and regardless of which puppet gets selected, the
Ziocorporate regime is certain to be rolling out more AI and tech to manipulate, control and
frame the masses. The "anti-semitic terrorism" angle of Islamism now colluding with neo-Nazi
white supremacism is as hilarious as it is scary, considering the US/EU Ziocorporate terrorist
regimes' recent interventions in Libya, Syria and Ukraine and the sudden rise in ISlamist
events in NATO/EU countries. This late stage fusion of imperial capitalism with communism in
the West is looking like a complete disaster for mankind.
@Katrinka in droves, but
there is massive fraud going on in GA, NC, NV, AZ, PA, WI and MI, as well as all the blue
states. Not only are votes miscounted, ballots conjured out of thin air for Biden, I suspect
many are also voting illegally since the DMV that registers voters in these states have no
capacity to check their citizenship status. The GOP needs to form an election integrity
committee and conduct a thorough audit of every state to verify their voters' eligibility. It
is a massive undertaking, but it must be done. There is no integrity left in our election
system.
The DNC should rename themselves the EJM, the End Justifies Means party. Democrats are a
bunch of shameless frauds.
It's so simple most don't even see it. American Jews are Trotskyites and Israeli Jews are
Stalinists. That's it Bolshevism 101, come to think of it there is no 102. It seems Mr. Trump
did not choose wisely.
"... Here context matters. The US, or those who control the US, are trying to maintain American hegemony, or near hegemony, over the world. America has 600-800 military bases around the globe depending on what you regard as a military base. While many tens of thousands of America sleep on the sidewalks, while infrastructure crumbles, while standards of living fall and medical care is pricey but poor, the Pentagon always gets its budget. At the level of the White House, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel, the arms industry, the important thing is to maintain the flow of money. And dominate the world. ..."
"... Trump is the embodiment of this looking-for-a-fight attitude. Not good. He has surrounded himself with over-age Cold Warriors, with generals, with the pathologically aggressive hangers-on from think-tank Washington: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Steve Bannon, and minor squibs of like outlook. He has pulled the US out of the arms-control treaties, START, INF, Open Skies. He has pushed NATO against Russian borders. In the Legion halls of Idaho, this may seem virile, the sort of thing that John Wayne would do. Back the commies down. Show them who is boss. No. It is just pointless and dangerous. ..."
"... Worse, there is a new kid on the block. China is growing. It behaves no worse than other countries, does not inflict on the world nearly the destruction and horror that the United States does, but it is growing. For Washington, this makes it not a competitor but an enemy. This is very much Trump's policy. Don't negotiate. Threaten. "Do as I say, or I will break you." ..."
"... Those favoring the continuance of Empire might note that, even at this, Trump has been a disaster. The First Rule of Empire is Don't let your enemies unite. Trump, having made Russia and China into enemies (why?) has forced ..."
"... Then there is Iran, a geopolitical linchpin, having eighty million people, a large and competent military, and lots and lots of oil. Under the JCPOA, the nuke deal, the Iranians were posed happily to integrate themselves into the Western economy -- buy hundreds of airliners from Boeing and Airbus, telecommunications gear, sell oil, have western companies develop its huge hydrocarbon reserves. ..."
"... Then Trump pulled out of the treaty and, led by the egregious Pompeo, tries to starve the Iranians into installing a puppet government. Iran, seeing that the West is not friendly, turns to the East, allies itself tightly with Russia and China. Tehran and Beijing are about to sign a twenty-five year, multimanymuchoslotsa billion dollar development deal. ..."
"... Then Trump had Soleimani, an Iranian hero, murdered. This doubtless played well with his partisans in Joe's Bar in Chicago, being manly and decisive and making America great again. It was also idiotic, making Iranians even less likely to cave to American pressure. ..."
"... With Trump the country elected an attitude, not a President. Truculence, bravado, and an in-your-face aggressiveness are no substitute for competence. ..."
Everybody and his goat has weighed in on the election, so I will too. This will make no
difference to Trump's core followers, for whom he is a cult figure, or to those who detest him.
The undecided may be interested.
Note how insubstantial Trump has been, pretending to be what he isn't and claiming to have
done what he hasn't. Does no one notice? He has heavy support from Evangelicals. Ask him to
name the books of the Pentateuch, or the second book, or what church he regularly attended, or
ever attended, in New York. He was going to end the wars, but what war has he ended? To reduce
the trade deficit, but it has grown . To get rid of
all illegal aliens withing two years, but have they gone? To bring back factories from China
and Mexico, but how many have returned? He is called a law-and-order President. Yet he hid,
besieged, in the White House during the greatest eruption of lawlessness the country has ever
seen, with a statue being pulled down across the street from his house. His handling of the
virus? America remains hardest hit in the world, and it worsens by the day.
Trump, like all Presidents, has fulfilled the two critical jobs expected of him, protecting
Wall Street and the military budget. What else has he done?
Almost nothing. All in good fun. But in the crucial field of international relations, he has
been a disaster. I suspect that few of his followers in Flint and Gary study things beyond the
borders. They should.
Here context matters. The US, or those who control the US, are trying to maintain
American hegemony, or near hegemony, over the world. America has 600-800 military bases around
the globe depending on what you regard as a military base. While many tens of thousands of
America sleep on the sidewalks, while infrastructure crumbles, while standards of living fall
and medical care is pricey but poor, the Pentagon always gets its budget. At the level of the
White House, the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel, the arms industry, the important thing is to maintain
the flow of money. And dominate the world.
Trump is the embodiment of this looking-for-a-fight attitude. Not good. He has
surrounded himself with over-age Cold Warriors, with generals, with the pathologically
aggressive hangers-on from think-tank Washington: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Steve
Bannon, and minor squibs of like outlook. He has pulled the US out of the arms-control
treaties, START, INF, Open Skies. He has pushed NATO against Russian borders. In the Legion
halls of Idaho, this may seem virile, the sort of thing that John Wayne would do. Back the
commies down. Show them who is boss. No. It is just pointless and dangerous.
Worse, there is a new kid on the block. China is growing. It behaves no worse than other
countries, does not inflict on the world nearly the destruction and horror that the United
States does, but it is growing. For Washington, this makes it not a competitor but an enemy.
This is very much Trump's policy. Don't negotiate. Threaten. "Do as I say, or I will break
you."
Those favoring the continuance of Empire might note that, even at this, Trump has been a
disaster. The First Rule of Empire is Don't let your enemies unite. Trump, having made Russia
and China into enemies (why?) has forced them to unite. This is -- how shall I
put it? -- stupid. Russia and China are not natural allies. China is a crowded country with 1.4
billion smart, industrious people, rapidly growing influence, and a very long indefensible
border with Russia. Russia has barely 146 million people, a comparatively static economy, vast
empty lands with rich resources. The Russians may have noticed this. The two have had
territorial disputes. This is not a marriage made, as we say, in heaven. Instead of playing
them against each other, allying with one against the other, or leaving them the hell alone,
Trump has forced them into close alliance.
This is Trump's policy, in the sense that if it happens during his presidency, it is his
baby, though it is fairly evident that Pompeo is Trumps brains and Trump is Pompeo's
enabler.
Then there is Iran, a geopolitical linchpin, having eighty million people, a large and
competent military, and lots and lots of oil. Under the JCPOA, the nuke deal, the Iranians were
posed happily to integrate themselves into the Western economy -- buy hundreds of airliners
from Boeing and Airbus, telecommunications gear, sell oil, have western companies develop its
huge hydrocarbon reserves.
Then Trump pulled out of the treaty and, led by the egregious Pompeo, tries to starve
the Iranians into installing a puppet government. Iran, seeing that the West is not friendly,
turns to the East, allies itself tightly with Russia and China. Tehran and Beijing are about to
sign a twenty-five year, multimanymuchoslotsa billion dollar development deal.
Three enemies, united, where none was before. Fucking brilliant, Mike. Just fucking
brilliant.
Then Trump had Soleimani, an Iranian hero, murdered. This doubtless played well with his
partisans in Joe's Bar in Chicago, being manly and decisive and making America great again. It
was also idiotic, making Iranians even less likely to cave to American pressure.
The same counterproductiveness appears in his "trade war" with China, in fact an attempt to
wreck China commercially and technologically. This is packaged by Trump as "standing up to
China," "deterring China," "containing China," but it might as accurately be called
"encouraging the genie to leave the bottle," or "asking for it."
A quick example: Huawei was contentedly using Google's Android operating system on its
smartphones. Android and iOS, both American, dominated the world market for operating systems.
Huawei, with the predictability of sunrise, responded by crash-developing its own OS,
Harmony . With equal predictability and suddenness it will improve it, further grow its app
store (HMS, Huawei Mobile Services) and, on a guess, encourage other companies to use it. It
will be said that a new OS won't work, can't compete, will take decades, and all the things
that are customarily said of things China does. Wait.
Trump's result: A new and, likely, serious competitor to Google. Good job, Don.
There is more to come. Precisely because of Trump's technology-denial policy, China has
launched a massive program to make itself tech-independent. It will take time, but it will
happen. Every time China develops a replacement for an American product, US companies will lose
the Chinese market for it -- and shortly face a competitor.
The root of the matter? With Trump the country elected an attitude, not a President.
Truculence, bravado, and an in-your-face aggressiveness are no substitute for competence.
Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he is blankly ignorant of history, geography,
technology, the military. In Hawaii, when taken to the USS Arizona memorial, he didn't know
what it was. He has opined that the Spanish flu of 1917 (his date)
influenced the end of WWII . It would be instructive for a reporter to ask him what
countries border Iran, where one finds the Strait of Malacca, and why it matters.
The more enthusiastic of his followers seem to be equally ignorant and, worse, have no idea
why a President should know such things. Is this how we choose Presidents, and the sort of
Presidents we choose?
Write Fred at [email protected] Put the letters pdq anywhere in the
subject line to avoid heartless autodeletion.
Check out Fred's splendid
books ! Sedition, outrage, distortion, treason and other amusements. Enjoy accounts of
America, not the disaster by the same name now peddled as the real thing. Cheap at the
price.
This chart is a good reminder why Trump should be re-elected.
Suck it, Fred.
Oh and Mexico's doing worse on Covid when you account for their criminal undercounting of
Covid deaths. When you have one of the lowest testing rates of any large country, then it's
easy to undercount.
This article would read fairly well if you would just replace all instances of "Trump"
with "the US Feral Government". You're gonna blame the continuing stupidity of this huge
Beast of a Government on the one man? Do you think he is King of America? He can hardly get
anything done, which IS, BTW, partly his problem – the one thing you are quite right
about is the stupidity in the President's hiring of swamp creatures to drain the swamp. I
don't understand this myself but chalk it up to a lack of confidence in his own
instincts.
Commenter Bragadocious has already brought up the very encouraging numbers of admitted
"refugees" that I have read on VDare, but there are other below-the-radar good efforts by the
President regarding immigration. Of course, most of us have been disappointed quite a bit,
but lately I've been more gung-ho – anyone interested, please read VDare's "NYT Delivers Unintentional Endorsement Of Trump's Immigration Triumph" . (Hey,
didn't you use to work there, Fred? You ought to at least keep up a bit.)
Peak Stupidity points out "The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly" regarding the President
and this election – see "The Bad" , "The Good" , and
"The
Ugly" .
I honestly don't understand why you're so concerned with what happens to America anyway,
Fred. You live in the great country of Mexico. Is it that everything disparaging you write
makes you feel better about your decision to high-tail it down there?
Presidentially and socially we face two alternatives: an easy anesthetized slide into
certain doom or a panicked descent kicking against the looming walls of our trap. Of course,
that is not what either pretends to be, nor what the masses think they are.
In the end I can't tell a nickel's worth of difference. If someone could guarantee that
one alternative was more likely than another to end in nuclear holocaust than the other I
would allow a difference, but I don't see it. Which ever we "choose" this time, the pendulum
will swing until a tipping point is reached.
It would be nice to have a serious realist in the White House, but I don't see the people
voting for one. Maybe one will ride in on a white horse.
An excellent and accurate article. However, it should note that Biden's history shows he
will probably be worse. Despite his tough talk, Trump never started a new war, which is why
the Deep State hates him. They teed up four excuses to attack Iran: the strange drone attack
on a Saudi oil facility, the strange mines placed on a tanker, flying a drone over Iran that
was shot down, and doing nothing when Iran fired missiles at American bases in Iraq.
Those favoring the continuance of Empire might note that, even at this, Trump has been a
disaster. The First Rule of Empire is Don't let your enemies unite. Trump, having made
Russia and China into enemies (why?) has forced them to unite. This is -- how shall I put
it? -- stupid.
This isn't accurate, letting Russia and China unite was a notable feature of the Obama
administration and probably goes back further than that. Remember the pivot to Asia? Remember
Victoria Nuland handing out cookies at the Maidan? But you are absolutely right about Trump
solely pushing Iran into the arms of Russia and China.
Fred is right, Trump is a hee-haw Jackass who takes the prize for the dumbest, most
delusional, most corrupt and most incompetent POTUS in all history.
He's run America into the ground with his failed trade war, his delusional (un)management
of Covid-19 and all his damn fool gross stupidity. Just like his 6 failed casinos, his Trump
University and his bankrupt listed company DJT.
Everything just fail, fail, and fail. Even an Orangutan taken from the zoo would have done
better as POTUS than him.
Sorry, but to rewrite your comment, Trump, just like all his predecessors, has fulfilled
the Three critical jobs expected of him: 1. Armed and expanded Jewish colonial fascism
in Palestine, 2. Continue to protect the 1% (Wall Street) and 3. Increased U.S. military
budget by continuing to sale arms to fascist regimes.
Yes, he is a blathering, bullshitting salesman who built hotels and had a reality TV show.
But he didn't start any wars. Bombed the odd airstrip, but that was about it. Who was the
last President you could say that about? If he loses, strap in for more wars, possibly even
the Big One. And as for China, before we get too awestruck about their economic 'miracle' --
which was remarkable -- note that their money supply (M2) is 2.5 times their GDP. $2.50 for
every $1 they need for their economy. Why? To prop up a banking system that is a total Ponzi
scheme. To say they have an internal debt problem doesn't begin to cover it. Sure, it allowed
them to build super fast trains and cities with no-one in them, but they can't get Chinese
people to consume because they are all desperately saving for health care. The public health
care is dreadful. It was a miracle, sure, but full of holes (which makes it no less
impressive).
Fred highlights lots of problems, but I don't see why the other two Presidents will be
better at solving them. They certainly won't be, because they don't see them as problems.
They will start more wars, they will ignore the trade deficit, they will bring in millions
of immigrants, they will keep selling off manufacturing to cheaper places indifferently, and
they will be indebted to their BLM fascists when in power, meaning violence will increase
either way.
They are for Empire, and they don't keep to the treaties anyways – at least Trump is
honest when he tears them up. It is, according to Al-Anfal 55-63 at least, up to those who
get betrayed to tear up the treaties, and they should have long done so anyways.
Killing Suleimani? Is there a bigger misstep that could have been done by the Empire, that
cost so little in terms of human life to the ME, and actually improved the reputation of
Trump with the crazies whilst making the wind down accelerate?!
They will be for NATO, which will stop being an NA and will become a World Treaty
Organisation.
He sure ain't perfect – he is a very weak or trusting manager, it seems – but
he tries to move in the right direction often, even if he is prevented from taking even more
than baby steps. The other two Presidents will march into the abyss whilst laughing at their
awesome brilliance!
Why was Trump elected in the first place, Fred? In a well-run country with real options,
Trump would have been laughed at. When your rulers actively sell you out, hate you, and are
in the process of replacing you, a Donald Trump is a realistic option. That is sad. What's
worse is that even after Trump's election, the PTBs are doubling down on the treason and
hatred of Americans. As bad as Trump is, what is the option? And what can one man really
do?
It's too easy to just blame the situation on stupid Trump supporters, as if their votes
created America's problems.
@Weston Waroda rm the Ukraine military. Ukies don't just take their kalashnikovs and send
them to the metal cutters – their corrupt generals sold all the rifles, motors, and
assorted other arms and kept the 35 million. This makes Neo Nazi's much more stronger at the
Maidan, which was delayed because of Yanukovych and his kleptocrazy regime. Thanks to the
African born Obama and Joe the War lover – Ukraine to day is totally CIA,Mossad, Nato
etc. We could dissect Libya and Syria but we would find the same Satanic World Order boys
– Barrack and Joe – doing their thing for the Cabal. Oh – I lived in
Ukraine 08 – 2014 and then had to switch residency – for obvious reasons. Spacibo
You have to give credit to Trump for stopping the anti white brainwashing AKA
as 'diversity training' which was based on the white hating manifesto AKA 'critical
race theory.' It turned out that under the radar big business and many parts of the
government were forcing whites to repent for their racist attitudes and write forced
confessions. President Trump gave the middle finger to that with much deconstructing
still to come.
I can't fathom how a descendant of the illustrious Tidewater Reeds can
turn his back on the accomplishments of his Anglo Saxon people.
America began as a Protestant project which is why we are fortunate to have
the most enlightened system of jurisprudence in the world. Say what you will about
Trump's brash New York City manner but at least he is a defender of Western
Civilization. I most look forward to cleaning house at the DOJ & CIA if he wins.
That and smashing Big Tech into a thousand pieces.
I'm not sure I want someone like you lecturing us on morality, Fred.
You're basically stating over and over, that the US should strive to maintain its 'Only
Empire in the World' approach (which it did since at least Clinton),
but Trump is just doing it wrong.
@Craig Nelsen f stupidity is Mr. Reed's part about Trump causing Russia and China to be
allied. WTH? Trump wanted to ignore the pretension by the Neocons (if they are serious it be
even stupider) that Russia is still the USSR, our arch enemy. The MIC and Neocons blocked his
rapprochement with Russia. President Trump's attempt to end the completely unfair trade deal
the sell-outs handed to China in the mid-1990s is one of his admirable efforts. Relations
have become bad mostly due to that the Chinese don't want a fair deal with trade. They are
used to taking advantage of us in every way possible – even the Great Chinese Visiting Scholar
Scam .
Trump is a symptom of the disease which the author mistakes for the disease itself. That's
why Trump won in 2016 because the white masses who elected him needed to vomit their own
existential angst against the System. The more petulant Trump became, the more love the white
masses have for him because that's how they feel against the System which has betrayed their
own white interests.
The author correctly points out that Trump does exactly what other US Presidents before
him have done which is to promote the economic interests of the US Capitalist Class and the
US Military-Industrial Complex, by cutting income taxes and increasing the defense budget,
respectively. He also mentions Trump's trade war and technology bans against China which has
served more as a "canary in a coal mine" than anything else, hastening the pace by which
Chinese companies have been diversifying away from the USA, since the GFC in 2008, including
developing their own indigenous technologies which have given rise to homegrown tech giants
like Huawei and TikTok. While Trump's anti-China moves were driven by political
self-aggrandizement, China's response was driven by its economic self-interest, which
explains its low-key approach to resolving its trade disputes with the USA.
But the author missed something else which is Trump's hostility to Globalist causes such
as unrestricted immigration, outsourcing of manufacturing and services jobs, foreign wars,
multilateral treaties such as the Paris Climate Accord, international institutions such as
the WHO, trade deals such as the TPP and NAFTA, among others. His most glaring omission is to
avoid any mention of Trump's decision to withdraw US troops out of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Germany as well as preventing another regime-change war against Iran.
While his economic policies range from the patently mediocre (promoting "fracking") to
outright stupid (imposing tariffs), Trump's biggest successes are in fact in the areas of US
foreign policy in which he DID carry out his "America First" strategy which has endeared him
to his white supporters but which has disheartened his enemies in the US Deep State.
Of course, that's exactly why his white supporters elected him in 2016 and why the US Deep
State is doing everything it can to defeat him in 2020 because a second term of Trump would
hasten the decline and fall of the US Empire.
"He has pushed NATO against Russian borders." No, after Reagan assured Gorbachev that NATO
would not move an inch closer to Russia with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Bill
Clinton moved NATO to Russia's borders as a provocation, along with slaughtering Slavs and
proving the inability of Russia to continue its traditional role as protector of the Slavs.
This was followed by BUSH's and OBAMA's continuation of Color Revolutions to establish US
puppets in former Soviets (and more NATO bases).
The Biden/ Nuland-led Maidan Revolution in Ukraine meant that the per capita GDP dropped
over half by deflecting the internal corruption into external Americans' and American
Ukrainians' pockets. For calling out that US corruption and briefly holding up more weapons,
money and provocation with Russia, Trump was impeached. Ukraine lost Crimea BEFORE Trump, and
he was stymied from removing troops by a Congress who refused to accept him as an Elected
President and Commander-in-Chief.
While Trump has lots of issues, calling him out for doing exactly what the last three
Presidents before him did, really undercuts the article's message. Scapegoating Trump doesn't
change reality.
Trump is the embodiment of this looking-for-a-fight attitude.
Wow, you have been asleep for the last four years? The antics of the Democrats and their
female goddess seem to have completely passed you by. Just to fill you in on some basic
detail, the Democrats (what an ironic name) have been waging battle after battle, you could
call it a war, against the President because they just couldn't accept the result of the last
election. They felt they were entitled to the presidency. You say Trump is looking for a
fight, the Democrats didn't just look, they launched the war and lost.
We all know that Trump is bellicose and a blowhard but he said all the right things in
2015-16. My issue with Trump is his betrayals. He threatened to end birthright citizenship
but never followed through. He was working with Tom Cotton to reduce legal immigration and
end chain migration but gave up after less than a year. He should have ended AFFH shortly
after taking office but didn't do so until just two months ago. The list goes on.
Another reason his administration wasn't as successful as we all hoped is that he didn't
know how to staff a government as PCR feared and predicted. He thought he could just ride in
to Washington and wing it and start barking orders it doesn't work that way.
Trump is not a visionary like Obama was. In order to qualify for Obama's administration
you had to think and see the world exactly like he did. Trump seems to get his jollies from
hiring people who disagree with him and work to undermine his agenda.
Now Trump is courting black nationalists like rapper Ice Cube while condemning white
nationalists. This would be like Obama courting David Duke on a plan to help poor and working
class white Americans.
Trump has given us three conservative SCOTUS's justices. He has also exposed the deep
state, the alphabet agencies, and the MSM for what they are. Evil anti American forces.
And all the while, staving off three bullshit coup attempts and constant personal and
political assault!
And what better would we get from proven corrupt and dementia laden career politician Joe
Biden Fred?
Fuck you!
I'm voting for the entertaining one. Politics is interactive theater. Was it George Carlin
who said that if voting mattered they wouldn't let us do it? No truer words. Plus I like the
Melania fashion watch on Breitbart....
BRICS began back in Obama days. More importantly its inception was due to crippling
Russian sanctions due to the bogus Magnitsky Act, which was passed during the W. Bush reign.
BTW do you know who sponsored the act in Congress? McCain, Biden, and Obama. All are/were
Zionists and Necon approved.
Hmm, as disappointing as Trump has been, and believe me, he has been a disappointment, he
is the best President in my lifetime of 59 years. Of course, given the list of empty suits
that we have been given as our leaders over the last 59 years, saying Trump is the best of
the lot is not saying much. Honestly has America elected a decent man to hold the office of
POTUS in the last 120 years?
At the very minimum Trump has exposed the FAKE MEDIA, hell, that is more than the others
ever did while in office because as we all know the American people have been lied to by the
Jew Media for over 100 years and counting. IF anyone can come up with reasons why anyone from
JFK to Obama were better for America than Trump, I am all ears. Personally, I give Trump an
overall D on his report card while the others I give a flat F. Do Whites really want a
Biden/Harris Presidency? I voted Trump, again. No REAL choice as usual.
All the potus have been under zionist control since they had JFK assassinated and then
came the zionist/Israeli and traitors in the ZUS government attack on the WTC on 911 and this
was blamed on the Arabs and gave the zionists the excuse to destroy the middle east for
Israels greater Israel agenda, using the ZUS military and AL CIADA and MOSSAD and MI6 created
mercenaries to to the destruction and the killing.
Trump is just another in a long line of zionist puppets and Biden is the same and the one
ie the libertarian Joanne Jorgensen who is against these wars, is ignored, and the beat goes
on.
Nobody gives a shit in Joe's Bar in Chicago about the killing of the Iranian general but
you may want to check the bars in Tel Aviv to see if they're rejoicing
Now enough about China there are plenty of other sycophants on unz.com without you joining in. Stick to defending wetbacks which
suits you naturally and it's more palatable.
As to Russia and China: first, you outline Chinese population treat to Russia and then
second, you breathlessly claim they're boon companions so, which is it?
Lastly, I noticed that the one group which has most benefited from the orange man
presidency while undercutting his nationalist credentials which would help traditional
Americans isn't even mentioned in the article no names or hints. What gives?
Not that foreign policy is high priority for most of the USA electorate, but still it looks
like some potential Trump voters do not approve this message.
That's why many of them probably will not vote for Trump in 2020, or will not vote at all
because there is no difference in this area between Trump and Biden: you can call the same
Zionist cutlet with two different names. but it is still the same cutlet.
People voted in Trump to be a protector of workers and lower middle class against financial
oligarchy. Instead, they got "Ziotrump", a marionette of Israel lobby who is first and foremost
the protector of Israel, MIC and the billionaire class.
The question is: Is Zionism an official ideology of the USA ruling elite? Zionism as any far right nationalism has it pluses
and minuses, but why this important decision is not discussed?
Notable quotes:
"... I like being energy independent, don't you? I'm sure that most of you noticed when you go to fill up your tank in your car, oftentimes it's below two dollars. You say how the hell did this happen? While I'm president, America will remain the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world. We will remain energy independent. It should be for many many years to come. The fact is, we don't have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We've been very good to Israel. Other than that, we don't have to be in the Middle East." ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
For many years the security framework in the Middle East has been described as a bilateral
arrangement whereby Washington gained access to sufficient Saudi Arabian oil to keep the energy
market stable while the United States provided an armed physical presence through its bases in
the region and its ability to project power if anyone should seek to threaten the Saudi
Kingdom. The agreement was reportedly worked out in a February 1945 meeting between
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, just as World War 2 was drawing
to a close. That role as protector of Saudi Arabia and guarantor of stable energy markets in
the region later served as part of the justification for the U.S. ouster of the Iraqi Army from
Kuwait in 1991.
After 9/11, the rationale became somewhat less focused. The United States invaded
Afghanistan, did not capture or kill Osama bin Laden due to its own incompetence, and, rather
than setting up a puppet regime and leaving, settled down to a nineteen-years long and still
running counter-insurgency plus training mission. Fake intelligence produced by the neocons in
the White House and Defense Department subsequently implicated Iraq in 9/11 and led to the
political and military disaster known as the Iraq War.
During the 75 years since the end of the Second World War the Middle East has experienced
dramatic change, to include the withdrawal of the imperial European powers from the region and
the creation of the State of Israel. And the growth and diversification of energy resources
mean that it is no longer as necessary to secure the petroleum that moves in tankers through
the Persian Gulf. Lest there be any confusion over why the United States continues to be
involved in Syria, Iraq, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump remarkably
provided some clarity relating to the issue when on September 8 th
he declared that the U.S. isn't any longer in the Middle East to secure oil supplies, but
rather because we "want to protect Israel."
The comment was made by Trump during a rally in Winston-Salem, N.C . as part of a
boast about his having reduced energy costs for consumers. He said " I like being energy
independent, don't you? I'm sure that most of you noticed when you go to fill up your tank in
your car, oftentimes it's below two dollars. You say how the hell did this happen? While I'm
president, America will remain the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world. We
will remain energy independent. It should be for many many years to come. The fact is, we don't
have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel. We've been very good to
Israel. Other than that, we don't have to be in the Middle East."
The reality is, of course, that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been all about
Israel for a very long time, at least since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who has been
sometimes dubbed the first Jewish president for his deference to Israeli interests. The Iraq
War is a prime example of how neoconservatives and Israel Firsters inside the United States
government conspired to go to war to protect the Jewish State. In key positions at the Pentagon
were Zionists Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Feith's Office of Special Plans developed the
"alternative intelligence" linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to a mythical nuclear
program that was used to justify war. Feith was so close to Israel that he partnered in a law
firm that had an office in Jerusalem. The fake intelligence was then stove-piped to the White
House by fellow neocon "Scooter" Libby who worked in the office of Vice President Dick
Cheney.
After the fact, former Secretary of State Colin Powell also had something to say about the
origins of the war, commenting that the United States had
gone into Iraq because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bought into the neoconservative
case made for doing so by "the JINSA crowd," by which he meant the Israel Lobby organization
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
And if any more confirmation about the origins of the Iraq War were needed, one might turn
to Philip Zelikow, who was involved in the planning process while working on the staff of
Condoleezza Rice. He said "The unstated threat. And
here I criticize the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over
and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States. And then everybody says:
'Show me an imminent threat from Iraq to America. Show me, why would Iraq attack America or use
nuclear weapons against us?' So I'll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has
been since 1990. It's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its
name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And
the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it's not a
popular sell."
So here is the point that resonates: even in 2002-3, when the Israel Lobby was not as
powerful as it is now, the fact that the U.S. was going to war on a lie and was actually acting
on behalf of the Jewish State was never presented in any way to the public, even though
America's children would be dying in the conflict and American taxpayers would be footing the
bill. The media, if it knew about the false intelligence, was reliably pro-Israel and helped
enable the deception.
And that same deception continued to this day until Trump spilled the beans earlier this
month. And now, with the special security arrangement that the U.S. has entered into with
Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, the ability to exit from a troublesome region
that does not actually threaten American interests has become very limited. As guarantor of the
agreement, Washington now has an obligation to intervene on the behalf of the parties involved.
Think about that, a no-win arrangement that will almost certainly lead to war with Iran,
possibly to include countries like Russia and China that will be selling it military equipment
contrary to U.S. "sanctions."
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected] .
Excellent synopsis of the situation. And if we look into the founding of Israel, we find
it was founded by war profiteers. This would explain why peace has been so "elusive". It has
been relentlessly dodged. "War Profiteers and the Roots of the 'War on Terror'" https://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com/p/war-profiteers-and-roots-of-war-on.html
This declaration is against the will of the American people. Hawkish policies of this
nature, that endanger the American lives should be confirmed by a referendum of the people.
Of course that would be logical step in a democracy but USA is not a democracy but a diktat
of backroom unellected ruling clique.
990. Jews are the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ whites just as whites are
the scapegoats for all the deficiencies of low-IQ non-whites. Let me explain how that
works.
Why do we observe Jews at the forefront of many cutting-edge industries? (for example the
media/arts and financial industries are indeed rife with them). The low-IQ answer is, of
course, a simplistic conspiracy theory: Jews form an evil cabal that created all these
industries from scratch to "destroy culture" (or at least what low-IQ people think is
culture, i.e. some previous, obsolete state of culture, i.e. older, lower culture, i.e.
non-culture). And, to be sure, there is a lot of decadence in these industries. But, in an
advanced civilization, there is a lot of decadence everywhere anyway! It's an essential
prerequisite even! So it makes perfect sense that the most capable people in such a
civilization will also be the most decadent! The stereotype of the degenerate
cocaine-sniffing whoremonging or homosexual Hollywood or Wall Street operative belongs here.
Well, buddy, if YOU were subjected to the stresses and temptations of the Hollywood or Wall
Street lifestyles, maybe you'd be a "degenerate" too! But you lack the IQ for that, so of
course you'll reduce the whole enterprise to a simplistic resentful fairy tale that seems
laughable even to children: a bunch of old bearded Jews gathered round a large table planning
the destruction of civilization! Well I say enough with this childish nonsense! The Jews are
simply some of the smartest and most industrious people around, ergo it makes sense that
they'll be encountered at or near all the peaks of the dominant culture, being
overrepresented everywhere in it, including therefore in its failings and excesses! This is
what it means to be the best! It doesn't mean that you are faultless little angels who can do
no wrong, you brainless corn-fed nitwits! There's a moving passage somewhere in Nietzsche
where he relates that Europe owes the Jews for the highest sage (Spinoza), and the highest
saint (Jesus), and he'd never even heard of Freud or Einstein! In view of all the
immeasurable gifts the Jewish spirit has lavished on humanity, anti-semitism in the coming
world order will be a capital offense, if I have anything to say on the matter. The slightest
word against the Jews, and you're a marked man: I would have not only you, but your entire
extended family wiped out, just to be sure. You think you know what the Devil is, but he's
just the lackey taking my orders. Entire cities razed to the ground (including the entire
Middle East), simply because one person there said something bad about "the Jews", that's how
I would have the future! Enough with this stupid meme! To hell with all of you brainless
subhumans! You've wasted enough of our nervous energy on this stupid shit! And the same goes
to low-IQ non-whites who blame all their troubles on whites! And it's all true: Jews and
whites upped the stakes for everybody by bringing into the world a whole torrent of new
possibilities which your IQ is too low to handle! So whatcha gonna do about it? Are you all
bark, or are you prepared to bite? Come on, let's see what you can do! Any of you fucking
pricks bark, and we'll execute every motherfucking last one of you!
Honestly, I like way better out in the open like this. Now there is no reason to worry
about all the other BS excuses, it's all on the table.
So now, as a public, we have been informed; so what are we going to do about it? Or are
they so confident about their position that they know they can announce it to he world openly
and be sure that there will be zero consequences?
Protector, personal armies, saboteurs, financiers, assassin's, propagandists, liars,
thieves, rapists, slavers, and that is just for starters – which includes inside and
outside of the former country called the USA.
No, you are wrong. The problem with the 'industriousness' is that it is characterized by
the principle of profit before all, no matter how immoral the activity. People who do that
don't care about a civilized society and should not be able to reap the benefits of one.
Also high IQ isn't exemplified by trickery, lying, subverting and eroding the morals of
the host society.
The US is not only the protector, but has been the enabler of the mafia from the
start.
Chaim.Weizman and Nathan Sokolow approach the British with a dirty deal. The Zionists
offer to use their international influence to bring the US into the war on Britain's
side, while undermining Germany from within. The price that Britain must pay for U.S.
entry is to steal Palestine from Ottoman Turkey (Germany's ally) and allow the Jews to
settle there. Zionist agitated anti-German propaganda was unleashed in the US while the
Zionists and Marxists of Germany begin to undermine Germany's war effort from within.
Wilson establishes the Committee on Public Information (CPI) for the purpose of
manipulating public opinion in support of the war.
-M.S. King, The Bad War, p 50.
Similar scenario for "WW2" which was little more than a continuation of the previous
biggie. They really ought to be known as the One World Wars since they were obviously part
of the plan for the world to be dominated by the International mafia through such creations
as the League of Subjects and the United Slave Nations with the capitol at Tel Aviv.
Yes, Dr. Giraldi, you hit the nail on the head again.
However, the problem is that most White Middle Class Americans, are satisfied and fully
compliant with this situation where the USA is a Megalethon Vassal and Servile State
for the poor little Israeli state .
Also, let us be honest with ourselves, Blacks and other minorities on more occasions do
dare to speak out on this issue, only to get trounced upon by the MSM and silence and
snickers by the stay safe White American Middle Class. Do you ever find a Main Line
White Politician speaking up for America's interests and placing them first vis a vis our
best little ally ??? Only when it comes to Afro or the Hispanic – Americans
sticking their heads up a little does Middle White Americana get all worked up and
emotionally charged.
The White Middle Class and most certainly the well moneyed Corporate Class of America,
does not mind giving away huge transfers of their tax dollars, national debt, high
technologies, military hardware, and even their uniformed sons and daughter, upon command
from the likes of Trump and their political opportunists managing the country (Rep and Dem
alike). Serving and making America serve the Greater Zio Agenda for their ME and Global
domination has become the norm and unquestionable. Try raising this issue at a dinner party
and see how many people role their eyes and turn their heads away.
I doubt that the RU followers here, who seem more bent on street brawling with the false
bogeymen like BLM and ANTIFA, are the ones that will stand up to the in your face
take over of WDC by AIPAC and the Israel First Crowd, including front man Trump for the
Kushner-Bibi WH.
Let us not forget the thieving and scamming Sunday preachers who tell them it is great
to be in full service of the Zio (Jewish Talmudic based) domination agenda– as it has
become a direct ticket to a Raptured Heaven . Jesus for them was been thrown under
the bus long ago or strangely converted into a gun machine toting Israeli nut case
extremist settler, clearing the land and villages of the indignies children and
all.
Let us be frank, some elements of the America First Jewish intelligentsia are more
likely to call out and the whorishness ( extremes only) of the Washington's ZOG policies
than Middle Americana, who dare not risk their creature comforts, Game Time or corporate
positions.
As the old adage goes, you get the Government That You Deserve .
Are you all bark, or are you prepared to bite? Come on, let's see what you can do! Any
of you fucking pricks bark, and we'll execute every motherfucking last one of you!
Well your tribe has been incredibly effective at genocide and mass murder on an
unprecedented scale of barbarism in the past, and I have no doubt you remain just as
capable of such barbarity and cruelty today. Your rant makes that very clear.
Too bad the high IQ does not seem to correlate in a positive way with morality.
But thanks for the warning! Trust me, many of us are quite aware of your
capabilities.
The only reason Trump "spilled the beans" about how we are in the Middle East to protect
Israel and not to keep oil flowing is to get himself reelected and nothing else. As to war
with China, Zuckerberg alone would be able to bribe the administration in particular, and
both the parties in general, with his extra billions to keep them out of the war being that
he has married a chink, er, Chan. All will be back to business as usual after the election
at least, for four more years.
It means Netanyahu is the de facto president of the US.
Not quite. He is much more powerful than that. The entire Congress of the United States
stands and applauds when he arrives to speak. They would never do that for Trump, or any
president. The fear of being unpersoned keeps them in line.
@Ugetit
endence and freedom but things actually became more messy. Also the "hated" Russian
Romanovs were got rid off, Russia pushed under Communist Jewish dictatorship. Also the
destruction of the Caliph, imagine a united Turko-Arab Empire, no way Israel would have
survived that. Even T.E. Lawrence who helped the Arabs fight the Turks was totally
disappointed with the behaviour of his own Zionist controlled government. He was going to
speak to the British people about the great betrayal to the Arabs and being a war hero they
would have listened to him. But before he could do so he met with an "accident" while
riding his motorcycle. Yeah, very convenient.
@sethster
re good at gathering Nobel Prizes, which is best arranged by jury-rigging and
string-pulling thanks to their talent for networking, but no so good as making real
inventions. In Israel proper the mean Jewish IQ, 94, is not only disappointing but a few
points below even the Palestinian one. Spiritually the Jews have no longer been a chosen
people for ages and most of the intellectual development they knew from about 1850 onwards
was due to their being emancipated en masse from rabbinical authority, not by conforming to
it : now that are falling back under an even worse collective authority with Zionism they
are reversing the intellectual gains they once made.
Back in the second half of the 80s the big war games were all IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ!!1! There
was a strong push from all the interagency pukes with their dotted-lines reports to Langley
– to aim at Iraq, and to suppress any practical considerations that might interfere
with this very lucrative debacle. We watched these moles countering evidence and analysis
with declamatory bullshit they made up. Way back then CIA had decided. April Glaspie's
headfake sprung a trap set in Kuwait by the NOCs infesting Bechtel. That
horizontal-drilling rhubarb was years in preparation.
Iraq was one big war with three phases: beating up on the Iraqi armed forces; ten years
of blowing shit up; the occupation.
It turned out great. CIA got money-laundering nirvana, a chaotic zone where they could
ship pallets of money around. They got an arms entrepot that lasted 20 years.They got a
great network of sites for the torture gulag, with secure impunity – when Iraq tried
to accede to the Rome Statute in 05, the CIA torturers were on the spot to nip it in the
bud. The tame jihadi boogeymen the torture camps produced were invaluable in creating
Rumsfeld's "terrorist corridor" in the Sahel and justifying the P2OG and the Pan-Sahel
Initiative. That put AFRICOM garrisons, US-trained warlords, and CIA torture sites in one
of the most diplomatically recalcitrant regions of the world:
So turn that frown upside down! Your old bosses got a lot out of that charlie
foxtrot.
@sethster
re all conceived and started by Gentiles Henry Ford is a great example and he knew Jews
quite well. The only industries , as you call them, that Jews are involved in are
leech enterprises financial corporations are excellent examples of leech enterprises. The
financial products they contrive are methods to extract value from productive
industries.
A large percent of Jews are devoted obsessed with gaining wealth and power from the efforts
of others which is the reason for their inordinate involvement in the Deep State and also
for the abject loathing by many Gentiles throughout the ages.
Whether the truth is hidden or now out in the open doesn't matter to a people so stupid
as to believe the Creator's offspring walked, eat and crapped on this little planet 2k
years ago.
Exhibit B of their stupidity: Electing Trump (and more than a few of his
predecessors).
The NWO won't come to America as Greta Thunberg marching ahead of the Democrats in Mao
suits under LGBTQ and GND banners and tumbrels of Christians headed for the guillotine, but
as one transnational compliance regime after the other enacted by treaty, such as mandatory
bi-annual vaccinations with largely inefficacious vaccines carrying not just behavior
modifying chemicals and sterilants as adjuvants, but DNA-altering horrors. Anyone want to
argue the threats posed by these DNA- or mRNA-modifying vaccines made from, among other
things, insect DNA?
Some think it's over the top to talk about the NWO that's on the horizon as a
Sino-Judaic, world-hegemonic NWO, but the United States government is itself already little
more than a collection of compliance regimes in service to International Jewry. The 29
standing ovations from a Congress afraid to be the first to stop clapping for a kitchen
cabinet salesman-turned-Caesar made that clear enough. The rest of the story, like the
nonsense that Congress and DJT are voluntarily protecting Israel, is eyewash for
fools when International Jewry owns them all like the trained seals who perform in the
Central Park Zoo.
The Holy Rollers were never going to bail from Trump after the embassy move to
Jerusalem. Jews on the other hand are likely not amused about such a revelation. So his
words were unlikely about the election.
@lavoisier
nd stern conversation, "For me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the
existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people." He's a brilliant intellectual
and a thoughtful politician, and we don't need to worry – he won't give up his
existential friendship so easily. And certainly not because of Bennett or his colleague
Orit Strock, the party whip.
A very symbolic photo posted by the Israel Defence Forces' Twitter account, in the tweet
linked to by user Talha
It is time to be more honest. A foreign war that the US loses may be the only way out of
the political, moral and social impasse that currently afflicts the US. The forces that
control the US government need to be removed and that seems increasingly unlikely to arise
from simply domestic opposition.
It took World War II to remove Adolf Hitler from power in Germany. Why should anyone
expect anything less to change the government of the United States? The US wants a war with
Russia and China. Perhaps it is best that it be granted one? Let's see some articles on this
proposition.
The odd thing is how so many Jews still support immigration despite the fact that a lot of
the immigrants are (from the Jewish/Zionist perspective) at best indifferent to Israel and at
worse outright hostile and want it gone.
Or perhaps they realise democracy is a sham and the Jewish elite have got their backs?
Hence their plans to mongrelise Europeans nations don't really conflict with their Zionist
ambitions.
One thing is for sure, when things start to get hairy in the West, all Jews will have a
nice First World ethnocracy to move to.
Trump's greatest contribution to the US/World might be exposing the naked ambition and
evilness of the Ziocons. Before Trump, Ziocons lurked in the background as puppet masters,
with their many plans obscured behind "diplomacy" and propaganda like "freedom" and "human
rights", now thanks to Trump they are showing their true colors. Trump has managed to expose
to the whole world including all our allies who is really running America and the extent they
will go to destroy their perceived "enemies" to achieve world domination -- the end justifies
the means. It is making our allies esp. Europe think twice about their alliance with
JU.S.A.
Trump's greatest contribution to the US/World might be exposing the naked ambition and
evilness of the Ziocons. Before Trump, Ziocons lurked in the background as puppet masters,
with their many plans obscured behind "diplomacy" and propaganda like "freedom" and "human
rights", now thanks to Trump they are showing their true colors. Trump has managed to expose
to the whole world including all our allies who is really running America and the extent they
will go to destroy their perceived "enemies" to achieve world domination -- the end justifies
the means. It is making our allies esp. Europe think twice about their alliance with
JU.S.A.
You must have been misinformed if you think that "Germany sold Israel submarines". Not
really as you can find out from the link bellow. The first two submarines were donated and
the third was "hawkered" for about half the production cost.
@anon
the empire starts WW3, e.g. the "big one" at Yellowstone, which will do so much damage as to
make it impossible for the evil empire to continue it's pursuit of world domination and
control.
I do think it is game over for quite a while in the West regarding opposition to Israel.
Israel may collapse or have to come to the table or something due to some game changer in the
Middle East, but I don't see it happening due to lack of support from the West anytime
soon.
It's been nearly four years since the myth of Trump-Russia collusion made its debut in
American politics, generating an endless stream of stories in the corporate press and hundreds
of allegations of conspiracy from pundits and officials. But despite netting scores of
embarrassing admissions, corrections, editor's notes and retractions in that time, the theory
refuses to die.
Over the years, the highly elaborate "Russiagate" narrative has fallen away piece-by-piece.
Claims about Donald Trump's various back channels to Moscow -- Carter Page ,
George Papadopoulos ,
Michael Flynn ,
Paul Manafort ,
Alfa Bank -- have each been thoroughly discredited. House Intelligence Committee
transcripts released in May have revealed that nobody who asserted a Russian hack on Democratic
computers, including the
DNC's own cyber security firm , is able to produce evidence that it happened. In fact, it
is now clear the entire investigation into the Trump campaign was
without basis .
It was alleged that Moscow manipulated the president with " kompromat " and black mail,
sold to the public in a " dossier " compiled by a former British
intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Working through a DC consulting firm , Steele was hired by
Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump, gathering a litany of accusations that Steele's own primary
source would later dismiss as "hearsay" and "rumor."
Though the FBI was
aware the dossier was little more than sloppy opposition research, the bureau nonetheless
used it to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Even the claim that Russia helped Trump from afar, without direct coordination, has fallen
flat on its face. The "
troll farm " allegedly tapped by the Kremlin to wage a pro-Trump meme war -- the Internet
Research Agency -- spent only $46,000 on Facebook ads, or around 0.05 percent
of the $81 million budget of the Trump and Clinton campaigns. The vast majority of the IRA's
ads had nothing to do with U.S. politics, and more than half of those that did were published
after the election, having no impact on voters. The Department of Justice, moreover,
has dropped its charges
against the IRA's parent company, abandoning a major case resulting from Robert Mueller's
special counsel probe.
Though few of its most diehard proponents would ever admit it, after four long years, the
foundation of the Trump-Russia narrative has finally given way and its edifice has crumbled.
The wreckage left behind will remain for some time to come, however, kicking off a new era of
mainstream McCarthyism and setting the stage for the next Cold War.
It Didn't Start With
Trump
The importance of Russiagate to U.S. foreign policy cannot be understated, but the road to
hostilities with Moscow stretches far beyond the current administration. For thirty years, the
United States has
exploited its de facto victory in the first Cold War, interfering in Russian elections in
the 1990s, aiding oligarchs as they looted the country into poverty, and orchestrating Color
Revolutions in former Soviet states. NATO, meanwhile, has been enlarged up to Russia's border,
despite American assurances the alliance wouldn't expand "
one inch " eastward after the collapse of the USSR.
Unquestionably, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the day Trump took office, the United
States maintained an aggressive policy toward Moscow. But with the USSR wiped off the map and
communism defeated for good, a sufficient pretext to rally the American public into another
Cold War has been missing in the post-Soviet era. In the same 30-year period, moreover,
Washington has pursued one disastrous
diversion after another in the Middle East, leaving little space or interest for another
round of brinkmanship with the Russians, who were relegated to little more than a talking
point. That, however, has changed.
The Crisis They Needed
The Washington foreign policy establishment -- memorably dubbed "
the Blob " by one Obama adviser -- was thrown into disarray by Trump's election win in the
fall of 2016. In some ways, Trump stood out as the dove during the race, deeming "endless wars"
in the Middle East a scam, calling for closer ties with Russia, and even questioning the
usefulness of NATO. Sincere or not, Trump's campaign vows shocked the Beltway think tankers,
journalists, and politicos whose worldviews (and salaries) rely on the maintenance of empire.
Something had to be done.
In the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks
published thousands of emails belonging to then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, her
campaign manager, and the Democratic National Committee. Though damaging to Clinton, the leak
became fodder for a powerful new attack on the president-to-be. Trump had worked in league with
Moscow to throw the election, the story went, and the embarrassing email trove was stolen in a
Russian hack, then passed to WikiLeaks to propel Trump's campaign.
By the time Trump took office, the narrative was in full swing. Pundits and politicians
rushed to outdo one another in hysterically denouncing the supposed election-meddling, which
was deemed the "political equivalent" of the 9/11
attacks , tantamount to
Pearl Harbor , and akin to the Nazis' 1938
Kristallnacht pogrom. In lock-step with the U.S. intelligence community -- which soon
issued a
pair of reports endorsing the Russian hacking
story -- the Blob quickly joined the cause, hoping to short-circuit any tinkering with NATO or
rapprochement with Moscow under Trump.
The allegations soon broadened well beyond hacking. Russia had now waged war on American
democracy itself, and "sowed discord" with misinformation online, all in direct collusion with
the Trump campaign. Talking heads on cable news and former intelligence officials -- some of
them playing both
roles at once -- weaved a dramatic plot of conspiracy out of countless news reports,
clinging to many of the "bombshell" stories long after their key claims were
blown up .
A
large segment of American society eagerly bought the fiction, refusing to believe that
Trump, the game show host, could have defeated Clinton without assistance from a foreign power.
For the first time since the fall of the USSR, rank-and-file Democrats and moderate
progressives were aligned with some of the most vocal Russia hawks across the aisle, creating
space for what many have called a " new Cold War. "
Stress Fractures
Under immense pressure and nonstop allegations, the candidate who shouted "America First"
and slammed NATO as "
obsolete " quickly adapted himself to the foreign policy consensus on the alliance, one of
the first signs the Trump-Russia story was bearing fruit.
Demonstrating the Blob in action, during debate on the Senate floor over Montenegro's bid to
join NATO in March 2017, the hawkish John McCain castigated Rand Paul for daring to oppose the
measure, riding on anti-Russian sentiments stoked during the election to accuse him of "working for Vladimir
Putin." With most lawmakers agreeing the expansion of NATO was needed to "push back" against
Russia, the Senate approved the request nearly
unanimously and Trump signed it without batting an eye -- perhaps seeing the attacks a veto
would bring, even from his own party.
Allowing Montenegro -- a country that illustrates everything wrong with
NATO -- to join the alliance may suggest Trump's criticisms were always empty talk, but the
establishment's drive to constrain his foreign policy was undoubtedly having an effect. Just a
few months later, the administration would put out its National
Security Strategy , stressing the need to refocus U.S. military engagements from
counter-terrorism in the Middle East to "great power competition" with Russia and China.
On another aspiring NATO member, Ukraine, the president was also hectored into reversing
course under pressure from the Blob. During the 2016 race, the corporate press savaged the
Trump campaign for working behind the scenes to " water down " the Republican Party platform after it opposed a
pledge to arm Ukraine's post-coup government. That stance did not last long.
Though even Obama decided against arming the new government -- which his administration
helped to install
-- Trump reversed that move in late 2017, handing Kiev hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles.
In an irony noticed by
few , some of the arms went to
open neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, who were integrated into the country's National
Guard after leading street battles with security forces in the Obama-backed coup of 2014. Some
of the very same Beltway critics slamming the president as a racist demanded he pass weapons to
out-and-out white supremacists.
Ukraine's
bid to join NATO has all but stalled under President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the country
has nonetheless played an outsized role in American politics both before and after Trump took
office. In the wake of Ukraine's 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup, "Russian aggression" became a
favorite slogan in the American press, laying the ground for future allegations of
election-meddling.
Weaponizing Ukraine
The drive for renewed hostilities with Moscow got underway well before Trump took the Oval
Office, nurtured in its early stages under the Obama administration. Using Ukraine's revolution
as a springboard, Obama launched a major rhetorical and policy offensive against Russia,
casting it in the role of an aggressive ,
expansionist power.
Protests erupted in Ukraine in late 2013, following President Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to
sign an association agreement with the European Union, preferring to keep closer ties with
Russia. Demanding a deal with the EU and an end to government corruption, demonstrators --
including the above-mentioned neo-Nazis -- were soon in the streets clashing with security
forces. Yanukovych was chased out of the country, and eventually out of power.
Through cut-out organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Obama
administration poured millions of
dollars into the Ukrainian opposition prior to the coup, training, organizing and funding
activists. Dubbed the "Euromaidan Revolution," Yanukovych's ouster mirrored similar US-backed
color coups before and since, with Uncle Sam riding on the back of legitimate grievances while
positioning the most
U.S.-friendly figures to take power afterward.
The coup set off serious unrest in Ukraine's Russian-speaking enclaves, the eastern Donbass
region and the Crimean Peninsula to the south. In the Donbass, secessionist forces attempted
their own revolution, prompting the new government in Kiev to launch a bloody "war on terror"
that continues to this day. Though the separatists received some level of support from Moscow,
Washington placed sole blame on the Russians for Ukraine's unrest, while the press breathlessly
predicted an all-out invasion that never materialized.
In Crimea -- where Moscow has kept its Black Sea Fleet since the late 1700s -- Russia took a
more forceful stance, seizing the territory to keep control of its long term naval base. The
annexation was accomplished without bloodshed, and a referendum was held weeks later affirming
that a large majority of Crimeans supported rejoining Russia, a sentiment
western polling firms have since
corroborated . Regardless, as in the Donbass, the move was labeled an invasion, eventually
triggering a raft of sanctions from the
U.S. and the EU (and more
recently, from
Trump himself ).
The media made no effort to see Russia's perspective on Crimea in the wake of the revolution
-- imagining the U.S. response if the roles were reversed, for example -- and all but ignored
the preferences of Crimeans. Instead, it spun a black-and-white story of "Russian aggression"
in Ukraine. For the Blob, Moscow's actions there put Vladimir Putin on par with Adolf Hitler,
driving a flood of frenzied press coverage not seen again until the 2016
election.
Succumbing to Hysteria
While Trump had already begun to cave to the onslaught of Russiagate in the early months of
his presidency, a July 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki presented an opportunity to reverse
course, offering a venue to hash out differences and plan for future cooperation. Trump's
previous sit-downs with his Russian counterpart were largely uneventful, but widely portrayed
as a meeting between master and puppet. At the Helsinki Summit, however, a meager gesture
toward improved relations was met with a new level of hysterics.
Trump's refusal to interrogate Putin on his supposed election-hacking during a summit press
conference was taken as irrefutable proof that the two were conspiring together. Former CIA
Director John Brennan declared it an
act of treason , while CNN gravely
contemplated whether Putin's gift to Trump during the meetings -- a World Cup soccer ball
-- was really a secret spying transmitter. By this point, Robert Mueller's special counsel
probe was in full effect, lending official credibility to the collusion story and further
emboldening the claims of conspiracy.
Though the summit did little to strengthen U.S.-Russia ties and Trump made no real effort to
do so -- beyond resisting the calls to directly confront Putin -- it brought on some of the
most extreme attacks yet, further ratcheting up the cost of rapprochement. The window of
opportunity presented in Helsinki, while only cracked to begin with, was now firmly shut, with
Trump as reluctant as ever to make good on his original policy platform.
Sanctions!
After taking a beating in Helsinki, the administration allowed tensions with Moscow to soar
to new heights, more or less embracing the Blob's favored policies and often even outdoing the
Obama government's hawkishness toward Russia in both rhetoric and action.
In March 2018, the poisoning of a former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom was blamed
on Moscow in a highly
elaborate storyline that ultimately fell
apart (sound familiar?), but nonetheless triggered a wave of retaliation from western
governments. In the largest diplomatic purge in US history, the Trump administration expelled
60 Russian officials in a period of two days, surpassing Obama's ejection of 35 diplomats in
response to the election-meddling allegations.
Though Trump had called to lift rather
than impose penalties on Russia before taking office, worn down by endless negative press
coverage and surrounded by a coterie of hawkish advisers, he was brought around on the merits
of sanctions before long, and has used them liberally ever since.
Goodbye INF, RIP
OST
By October 2018, Trump had largely abandoned any idea of improving the relationship with
Russia and, in addition to the barrage of sanctions, began shredding a series of major treaties
and arms control agreements. He started with the Cold War-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty (INF), which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons -- medium-range missiles
-- and removed Europe as a theater for nuclear war.
At this point in Trump's tenure, super-hawk John Bolton had assumed the position of national
security advisor, encouraging the president's worst instincts and using his newfound influence
to convince Trump to ditch the INF treaty. Bolton -- who helped to detonate a number of arms control
pacts in previous administrations -- argued that Russia's new short-range missile had
violated the treaty. While there remains some dispute over the missile's true range and whether
it actually breached the agreement, Washington failed to pursue available dispute mechanisms
and ignored Russian offers for talks to resolve the spat.
After the U.S. officially scrapped the agreement, it quickly began testing formerly-banned
munitions. Unlike the Russian missiles, which were only said to have a range overstepping the
treaty by a few miles, the U.S. began testing nuclear-capable land-based cruise
missiles expressly banned under the INF.
Next came the Open Skies Treaty (OST), an idea originally floated by President Eisenhower,
but which wouldn't take shape until 1992, when an agreement was struck between NATO and former
Warsaw Pact nations. The agreement now has over 30 members and allows each to arrange
surveillance flights over other members' territory, an important confidence-building measure in
the post-Soviet world.
Trump saw matters differently, however, and turned a minor dispute over Russia's
implementation of the pact into a reason to discard it altogether, again egged on by militant
advisers. In late May 2020, the president declared
his intent to withdraw from the nearly 30-year-old agreement, proposing nothing to replace
it.
Quid Pro Quo
With the DOJ's special counsel probe into Trump-Russia collusion
coming up short on both smoking-gun evidence and relevant indictments, the president's
enemies began searching for new angles of attack. Following a July 2019 phone call between
Trump and his newly elected Ukrainian counterpart, they soon found one.
During the call ,
Trump urged Zelensky to investigate a computer server he believed to be linked to Russiagate,
and to look into potential
corruption and nepotism on the part of former Vice President Joe Biden, who played an
active role in Ukraine following the Obama-backed coup.
Less than two months later, a " whistleblower
" -- a CIA officer detailed to the White House, Eric Ciaramella -- came forward with an "urgent
concern" that the president had abused his office on the July call. According to his
complaint , Trump threatened to withhold U.S. military aid, as well as a face-to-face
meeting with Zelensky, should Kiev fail to deliver the goods on Biden, who by that point was a
major contender in the 2020 race.
The same players who peddled Russiagate seized on Ciaramella's account to manufacture a
whole new scandal: "Ukrainegate." Failing to squeeze an impeachment out of the Mueller probe,
the Democrats did just that with the Ukraine call, insisting Trump had committed grave
offenses, again conspiring with a foreign leader to meddle in a U.S. election.
At a high point during the impeachment trial, an expert called to testify by the Democrats
revived George W.
Bush's "fight them over there" maxim to
argue for U.S. arms transfers to Ukraine, citing the Russian menace. The effort was doomed
from the start, however, with a GOP-controlled Senate never likely to convict and the evidence
weak for a "quid pro quo" with Zelensky. Ukrainegate, like Russiagate before it, was a failure
in its stated goal, yet both served to mark the administration with claims of foreign collusion
and press for more hawkish policies toward Moscow.
The End of New START?
The Obama administration scored a rare diplomatic achievement with Russia in 2010, signing
the New START Treaty, a continuation of the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty inked in
the waning days of the Soviet Union. Like its first iteration, the agreement places a cap on
the number of nuclear weapons and warheads deployed by each side. It featured a ten-year sunset
clause, but included provisions to continue beyond its initial end date.
With the treaty set to expire in early 2021, it has become an increasingly hot topic
throughout Trump's presidency. While Trump sold himself as an expert dealmaker on the campaign
trail -- an artist , even -- his negotiation
skills have shown lacking when it comes to working out a new deal with the Russians.
The administration has
demanded that China be incorporated into any extended version of the treaty, calling on
Russia to compel Beijing to the negotiating table and vastly complicating any prospect for a
deal. With a nuclear arsenal around one-tenth the size of that of Russia or the U.S., China has
refused to join the pact. Washington's intransigence on the issue has put the future of the
treaty in limbo and largely left Russia without a negotiating partner.
A second Trump term would spell serious trouble for New START, having already shown
willingness to shred the INF and Open Skies agreements. And with the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty (ABM) already killed under the Bush administration, New START is one of the few
remaining constraints on the planet's two largest nuclear arsenals.
Despite pursuing massive escalation with Moscow from 2018 onward, Trump-Russia conspiracy
allegations never stopped pouring from newspapers and TV screens. For the Blob -- heavily
invested in a narrative as fruitful as it was false -- Trump would forever be "Putin's puppet,"
regardless of the sanctions imposed, the landmark treaties incinerated or the deluge of warlike
rhetoric.
Running for an Arms Race
As the Trump administration leads the country into the next Cold War, a renewed arms race is
also in the making. The destruction of key arms control pacts by previous administrations has
fed a proliferation powder keg, and the demise of New START could be the spark to set it
off.
Following Bush Jr.'s termination of the ABM deal in 2002 -- wrecking a pact which placed
limits on Russian and American missile defense systems to maintain the balance of mutually
assured destruction -- Russia soon resumed funding for a number of strategic weapons projects,
including its hypersonic missile. In his announcement of the new technology in
2018, Putin deemed the move a response to Washington's unilateral withdrawal from ABM, which
also saw the U.S. develop new weapons .
Though he inked New START and campaigned on vows to pursue an end to the bomb, President
Obama also helped to advance the arms build-up, embarking on a 30-year
nuclear modernization project set to cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion. The Trump administration
has embraced the initiative with open arms, even
adding to it , as Moscow follows suit with upgrades to its own arsenal.
In May, Trump's top arms control envoy promised to spend Russia and China
into oblivion in the event of any future arms race, but one was already well underway.
After withdrawing from INF, the administration began churning
out previously banned nuclear-capable cruise missiles, while fielding an entire new class
of
low-yield nuclear weapons. Known as "tactical nukes," the smaller warheads lower the
threshold for use, making nuclear conflict more likely. Meanwhile, the White House has also
mulled a live bomb test -- America's first since 1992 -- though has apparently shelved
the idea for now.
A Runaway Freight Train
As Trump approaches the end of his first term, the two major U.S. political parties have
become locked in a permanent cycle of escalation, eternally compelled to prove who's the bigger
hawk. The president put up mild resistance during his first months in office, but the
relentless drumbeat of Russiagate successfully crushed any chances for improved ties with
Moscow.
The Democrats refuse to give up on "Russian aggression" and see virtually no pushback from
hawks across the aisle, while intelligence "leaks" continue to flow into the imperial press,
fueling a whole new round of election-meddling
allegations .
Likewise, Trump's campaign vows to revamp U.S.-Russian relations are long dead. His
presidency counts among its accomplishments a pile of new sanctions, dozens of expelled
diplomats and the demise of two major arms control treaties. For all his talk of getting along
with Putin, Trump has failed to ink a single deal, de-escalate any of the ongoing strife over
Syria, Ukraine or Libya, and been unable to arrange one state visit in Moscow or DC.
Nonetheless, Trump's every action is still interpreted through the lens of Russian
collusion. After announcing a troop drawdown in Germany on June 5, reducing the U.S. presence
by just one-third, the president was met with the now-typical swarm of baseless charges. MSNBC
regular and retired general Barry McCaffrey dubbed the move "a gift to
Russia," while GOP Rep. Liz Cheney said the meager troop movement
placed the "cause of freedom in peril." Top Democrats in the House and Senate
introduced bills to stop the withdrawal dead in its tracks, attributing the policy to
Trump's "absurd affection for Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator."
Starting as a dirty campaign trick to explain away the Democrats' election loss and jam up
the new president, Russiagate is now a key driving force in the U.S. political establishment
that will long outlive the age of Trump. After nearly four years, the bipartisan consensus on
the need for Cold War is stronger than ever, and will endure regardless of who takes the Oval
Office next.
CFR Members And Bilderberg Attendees Appointed By Donald Trump (Taken from the CFR membership and Bilderberg participant lists)
Published: Wednesday, May 31, 2017
CFR Members And Bilderberg Attendees Appointed By Donald Trump
John P. Abizaid, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (Individual CFR member)
Elliott Abrams, Special Envoy on Venezuela (Individual CFR member)
James H. Baker, Director of the Office of Net Assessment (Bilderberg attendee)
Barbara Barrett, Secretary of the Air Force (Individual CFR member, Bilderberg attendee)
David Bohigian, Executive Vice President of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Individual CFR member)
John Bolton, National Security Advisor (Individual CFR member)
Dan R. Brouillette, Secretary of Energy, Deputy Secretary of Energy (Individual CFR member)
Elaine Chao, United States Secretary of Transportation (CFR Individual member)
Richard Clarida, Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve (CFR Individual member)
Jay Clayton, Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (CFR corporate member)
Gary Cohn, Director of the National Economic Council (CFR corporate member)
Paul Dabbar, Under Secretary of Energy for Science, (Individual CFR member)
Jamie Dimon, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
Jim Donovan, Deputy Treasury Secretary (CFR corporate member)
Mark T. Esper, Acting Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army (Individual CFR member, CFR corporate member)
Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) (CFR fellow traveler
and frequent speaker)
Larry Fink, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
Christopher A. Ford, Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation (Individual CFR member)
James S. Gilmore III, United States Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (Individual CFR
member)
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, National Security Advisor (Individual CFR member, Bilderberg attendee)
Neil M. Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice (Individual CFR member)
Harry B. Harris Jr., Ambassador to South Korea (Individual CFR member)
Vice Admiral Robert S. Harward, National Security Advisor (declined appointment) (CFR corporate member)
Kevin Hassett, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CFR fellow traveler)
Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson IV, United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom (Individual CFR member)
Kenneth I. Juster, Ambassador to India (Individual CFR member)
Robert Kadlec, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (Preparedness and Response), (Individual CFR member)
Lawrence Kudlow, Director of the National Economic Council (Individual CFR member)
Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President (Bilderberg attendee)
Christopher Landau, Ambassador to Mexico (Individual CFR member)
Robert Lighthizer, United States Trade Representative (Individual CFR member)
David R. Malpass, World Bank (Individual CFR member)
James Mattis, Secretary of Defense (Bilderberg attendee)
K.T. McFarland, Deputy National Security Adviser (Individual CFR member)
Brent McIntosh, Undersecretary for international affairs, Department of the Treasury and General Counsel of the Department
of the Treasury (Individual CFR member)
Linda McMahon, Administrator of the Small Business Administration (CFR corporate member)
Army Lt. General Herbert Raymond "H. R." McMaster, National Security Advisor (Individual CFR member, Bilderberg attendee)
Jim McNerney, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury (CFR corporate member)
Justin G. Muzinich, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury (Individual CFR member)
Denise Natali, Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations (Individual CFR member)
Indra Nooyi, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member, Bilderberg attendee)
Rick Perry, Secretary of Energy (Bilderberg attendee)
Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State (Bilderberg attendee)
Matthew Pottinger, Senior Director of the National Security Council (Bilderberg attendee)
Dina Powell, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy (CFR corporate member)
Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Individual CFR member)
Mira R. Ricardel, Deputy National Security Advisor (Individual CFR member)
Ginni Rometty, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
William B. Roper Jr., Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, Logistics (Individual CFR member)
Jeffrey A. Rosen, Deputy Secretary of Transportation and Deputy Attorney General (Individual CFR member)
Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce (Bilderberg attendee)
Anthony Scaramucci, Director of Communications (Individual CFR member)
Nadia Schadlow, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy (Bilderberg attendee)
Stephen Schwarzman, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
Patrick Shanahan, Deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Defense (CFR corporate member)
Susan A. Thornton Assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs (Individual CFR member)
Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State (CFR corporate member)
Rick L. Waddell, National Security Advisor (Individual CFR member)
Elizabeth E. Walsh, Director General of the United States Commercial Service and Assistant Secretary of Commerce (Global Markets)
(Individual CFR member)
Ray Washburne, President and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Individual CFR member)
Jack Welch, Member of Strategic and Policy Forum (CFR corporate member)
Owen West, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (Individual CFR member)
Robert Wilkie, Secretary of Veterans Affairs (Individual CFR member)
Heather Ann Wilson, Secretary of the Air Force (Individual CFR member)
"... Instead of reining in the "globalist elites" he so vociferously ran against or those corporations "who have no loyalty to America," his one legislative achievement has been to award them a massive tax cut. Through it, he has maintained their favorite mix of low revenue intake and high deficits which gives Republicans a pretext to "starve the beast" and induce fiscal anorexia. ..."
"... Trump ran as a populist firebrand -- a fusion of Huey Long and Ross Perot -- and while he never abandoned that style, he has governed for the most part as a milquetoast free market Republican in perfect tandem with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, one whose solution to everything is more tax cuts and deregulation: a kind of turbo-charged "high-energy Jeb." ..."
"... With the outbreak of COVID-19, many on the reformist right are hoping for the emergence of the President Trump they thought they were promised, a leader just as ready to break out of the donor-enforced "small government" straitjacket while in power as he was during the campaign. ..."
"... The heightened rhetoric against China will continue -- the one thing Trump is good at -- but it is unlikely to be matched with the required policy ..."
"... If neoliberalism excused inequality at home by extolling the equalization of incomes across the globe (millions of Chinese raised from poverty, while millions of American workers fall back into it!), the new position must shift emphasis back to ensuring a more equitable domestic distribution of wealth and opportunity across all classes and communities in this country. ..."
"... It is worth pondering what might have happened if the administration had gone the other way and followed the last piece of policy advice given by Steve Bannon before his ouster in August 2017. Bannon suggested raising the top marginal income tax rate to 44 percent while "arguing that it would actually hit left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood." ..."
"... It might well have put Trump on the path to becoming what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once proposed as a model for Richard Nixon when he gifted the 37th president a biography of Disraeli, namely a Tory Republican who could outsmart the left by crafting broad popular coalitions based on a blending of patriotic cultural conservatism with class-conscious economic and social policy. ..."
"... Then and even more so now, the idea resonates: a Reuters/Ipsos poll from January found that 64 percent of Americans support a wealth tax, a majority of Republicans included. Poll after poll has reaffirmed this. It seems as if there is right-wing populist support for taxing the rich more. ..."
"... There is one more thing to be said about the significance of taxing the rich. Up until very recently, there has been a prevailing tendency among the reformist right (with some important exceptions) to couch criticism of the elites primarily or even exclusively in cultural terms. There seems to have been a polite hesitation at taking the cultural critique to its logical economic conclusions. It is easy to excoriate the excesses of elite identity politics, the "woke" part of woke capitalism; it's something all conservatives -- and indeed growing numbers of liberals and socialists -- agree on. Fish in a barrel. ..."
"... But to challenge the capitalism part, i.e. free market orthodoxy, not in a secondary or tertiary way, but head on and in specific policy terms as Lofgren and a few others have done, would involve confronting difficult truths, namely that the biggest beneficiaries of tax cuts and Reaganite economic policy in general, which most conservatives enthusiastically promoted for four decades, are the selfsame decadent coastal elites they claim to oppose. It is they who more than anyone else thrive on financialized globalization, arbitrage and offshoring. ..."
"... In other words, it amounts to an honest recognition of the complicity of conservatism in the mess we're in, which is perhaps a psychological bridge too far for too many on the right, reformist or not. (Trigger Warning!) This separation of culture and economics has led to the farce of a self-styled nationalist president lining the pockets of his nominal enemies, the globalist ruling class. ..."
"... A conservative call to tax the rich would signal that the right is ready to end this charade and chart a course toward a more patriotic, public-spirited and yes, proudly hyphenated capitalism. ..."
"... Michael Cuenco is a writer on politics and policy. He has also written for American Affairs. ..."
They also left worker wages stagnant and increased the deficit. Where is our more nationalist economic policy?
Much has been written about the disappointment of certain segments of the right in the apparent capitulation of Donald Trump to
the agenda of the conservative establishment.
Instead of reining in the "globalist elites" he so vociferously ran against or those corporations "who have no loyalty to America,"
his one legislative achievement has been to award them a massive tax cut. Through it, he has maintained their favorite mix of low
revenue intake and high deficits which gives Republicans a pretext to "starve the beast" and induce fiscal anorexia.
The president has granted them as well their ideal labor market through an ingenious formula: double down on mostly symbolic raids
(as opposed to systemic solutions like Mandatory E-Verify) and ramp up the rhetoric about "shithole countries" to distract the media,
but keep the supply of cheap, exploitable low-skill labor (legal and illegal) intact for the business lobby.
Trump ran as a populist firebrand -- a fusion of Huey Long and Ross Perot -- and while he never abandoned that style, he has governed
for the most part as a milquetoast free market Republican in perfect tandem with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, one whose solution
to everything is more tax cuts and deregulation: a kind of turbo-charged "high-energy Jeb."
With the outbreak of COVID-19, many on the reformist right are hoping for the emergence of the President Trump they thought they
were promised, a leader just as ready to break out of the donor-enforced "small government" straitjacket while in power as he was
during the campaign.
Despite signs of progress, what's more likely is a return to business as usual. Already the GOP's impulse for austerity and parsimony
is proving to be stronger than any willingness to think and act outside the box.
The heightened rhetoric against China will continue -- the one thing Trump is good at -- but it is unlikely to be matched with
the required policy, such as a long-term plan to reshore U.S. industry (that doesn't just rely on blindly giving corporations the
benefit of the doubt). At this point, we already know where the president's priorities lie when given a choice between the advancement
of America's workers or continued labor arbitrage and carte blanche corporate handouts.
Lest they be engulfed by it like everyone else, the reformist right should ask: is there any way to stand athwart the supply-side
swamp yelling Stop?
Many of these conservatives lament the Trump tax cut not just because it was a disaster that failed to spark reinvestment, left
wages stagnant, needlessly blew up the deficit and served as a slush fund for stock buybacks, but more fundamentally because it betrayed
the overwhelming intellectual inertia and lack of imagination that characterizes conservative policymaking.
More than in any other issue then, a distinct position on taxes would make the new conservatism truly worth distinguishing from
the old: tax cuts were after all the defining policy dogma of the neoliberal Reagan era.
If neoliberalism excused inequality at home by extolling the equalization of incomes across the globe (millions of Chinese raised
from poverty, while millions of American workers fall back into it!), the new position must shift emphasis back to ensuring a more
equitable domestic distribution of wealth and opportunity across all classes and communities in this country.
A reformulation of fiscal policy along populist economic nationalist lines can help with that.
It is worth pondering what might have happened if the administration had gone the other way and followed the last piece of policy
advice given by Steve Bannon before his ouster in August 2017. Bannon suggested raising the top marginal income tax rate to 44 percent
while "arguing that it would actually hit left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood."
Such a move would have been nothing short of revolutionary: it would have been a faithful and full-blown expression of the populist
economic nationalism Trump ran on; it would have presented a genuine material threat to the elite ruling class of both parties, and
likely would have pre-empted the shock value of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing a 70 percent top marginal rate.
It might well have put Trump on the path to becoming what Daniel Patrick Moynihan once proposed as a model for Richard Nixon when
he gifted the 37th president a biography of Disraeli, namely a Tory Republican who could outsmart the left by crafting broad popular
coalitions based on a blending of patriotic cultural conservatism with class-conscious economic and social policy.
Not that Trump would have needed to go back to Nixon or Disraeli for instruction on the matter. In 1999, long before Elizabeth
Warren came along on the national scene, a presidential candidate eyeing the Reform Party nomination contemplated the imposition
of a 14.25 percent wealth tax on America's richest citizens in order to pay off the national debt: his name was Donald Trump.
What ever happened to that guy? The Trump of 1999 was onto something. Maybe this could be a way to deal with our post-pandemic
deficits.
Then and even more so now, the idea resonates: a Reuters/Ipsos poll from January found that 64 percent of Americans support a
wealth tax, a majority of Republicans included. Poll after poll has reaffirmed this. It seems as if there is right-wing populist
support for taxing the rich more.
To the common refrain, "the rich are just going to find ways to shelter their income or relocate it offshore," I have written
elsewhere about the concrete policy measures countries can and have taken to clip the wings of mobile global capital and prevent
such an outcome.
I have written as well about how taxing the rich and tightening the screws on tax enforcement have implications that go beyond
the merely redistributive approach to fiscal policy conventionally favored by the left; about how it can be a form of leverage against
an unaccountable investor class used to shopping at home and abroad for the most opaque assets in which to hoard vast amounts of
essentially idle capital.
A deft administration would use aggressive fiscal policy as an inducement for this irresponsible class to make things right by
reinvesting in such priorities as the wages and well-being of workers, the vitality of communities, the strength of strategic industries
and the productivity of the real economy – or else Uncle Sam will tax their wealth and do it for them.
It would also be an assertion of national sovereignty against globalization's command for countries to stay "competitive" by immiserating
their citizens with ever-lower taxes on capital holders and ever more loose and "flexible" labor markets in a never-ending race to
the bottom.
Mike Lofgren has penned a marvelous essay in these pages about the virtual secession of the rich from the American nation, "with
their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility."
What better way to remind them that they are still citizens of a country and members of a society -- and not just floating streams
of deracinated capital -- than by making them perform that most basic of civic duties, paying one's fair share and contributing to
the commonweal? America need not revert to the 70-90 percent top marginal rates of the bolshevik administrations of Truman, Eisenhower
or Kennedy, but proposals for modest moves in that direction would be welcome.
There is one more thing to be said about the significance of taxing the rich. Up until very recently, there has been a prevailing
tendency among the reformist right (with some important exceptions) to couch criticism of the elites primarily or even exclusively
in cultural terms. There seems to have been a polite hesitation at taking the cultural critique to its logical economic conclusions.
It is easy to excoriate the excesses of elite identity politics, the "woke" part of woke capitalism; it's something all conservatives
-- and indeed growing numbers of liberals and socialists -- agree on. Fish in a barrel.
But to challenge the capitalism part, i.e. free market orthodoxy, not in a secondary or tertiary way, but head on and in specific
policy terms as Lofgren and a few others have done, would involve confronting difficult truths, namely that the biggest beneficiaries
of tax cuts and Reaganite economic policy in general, which most conservatives enthusiastically promoted for four decades, are the
selfsame decadent coastal elites they claim to oppose. It is they who more than anyone else thrive on financialized globalization,
arbitrage and offshoring.
In other words, it amounts to an honest recognition of the complicity of conservatism in the mess we're in, which is perhaps
a psychological bridge too far for too many on the right, reformist or not. (Trigger Warning!) This separation of culture and economics
has led to the farce of a self-styled nationalist president lining the pockets of his nominal enemies, the globalist ruling class.
Already, the White House is proposing yet another gigantic corporate tax cut. Using the exact same discredited logic as the last
one, senior economic advisor Larry Kudlow wants Americans to trust him when he says that halving the already lowered 2017 rate to
10.5 percent will encourage these eminently reasonable multinationals to reinvest. There he goes again.
A conservative call to tax the rich would signal that the right is ready to end this charade and chart a course toward a more
patriotic, public-spirited and yes, proudly hyphenated capitalism.
Michael Cuenco is a writer on politics and policy. He has also written for American Affairs.
"America need not revert to the 70-90 percent top marginal rates of the bolshevik administrations of Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy,
but proposals for modest moves in that direction would be welcome."
Those tax rates were offset by direct investment in the US economy. So if I invested in the stock market, I'd get a 90% tax
rate because that doesn't produce actual wealth. On the other hand, if I invested in building factories that created thousands
of jobs for American citizens, my tax rate may fall to 0%. And those policies created a fantastic economy that we oldsters remember
as the golden age. That wasn't bolshevism, it was competitive capitalism. What we have today is libertarianism. And as long as
conservatives are going to let the libertarian boogey-man's nose under the tent, we are going to have this ugly, bifurcated economy.
Your choice. Man up.
You ever tell hear of sarcasm, bud? I think that's what the author was going for. Don't think he was trying to say that Ike and
Truman were Bolsheviks but was rather making fun of libertarians who hyperbolically associate high tax rates with socialism and
Soviet Communism...
We absolutely do not have libertarianism operating in this country today. There is simply no evidence that there is any
sort of libertarian economic or political system in place. Oh sure, you'll whine "but globalism without actually defining
what globalism is, or what is wrong about precisely, but just that it's somehow wrong and that libertarians are to blame for it.
There's a good word for such an argument: bullshit.
We have an economy that is extraordinarily dominated by the state via mandates, regulations, and monetary interference that is
most decidedly not libertarian in any way whatsoever. The current system though does create and perpetuate a system of
rent-seeking cronies who conform rather nicely to the descriptions of said actors by Buchanan and Tullock. The problems of the
modern economy are the result of state interference, not its absence, and Cuenco's sorry policy prescriptions do nothing to minimize
the state but instead just create a different set of rent-seeking cronies for which the wealth and incomes of the nation are to
be expropriated.
If you can point to how the current situation is in any way "libertarian" without creating your own perfect little lazy straw
man definition then by all means do so. Until then your retort is without
substance (you see a no true Scotsman reply doesn't work if the facts are in the favor of the person supposedly making such an
argument. Here you fail to establish why what I said is such a case; saying it doesn't make it so). When Kent makes some throwaway
comment that we're somehow living in some sort of libertarian era he's full of it, you know it, and all you can do is provide
some weak "no true Scotsman" defense? Come on and man up, stop appealing to artificial complaints of fallacious argumentation,
and give me an actual solid argument with evidence beyond "this is so libertarian" that we're living in some libertarian golden
age that's driving the oppression of the masses.
Busted unions, contracting out and privatization, deregulation of vast swaths of the economy since the late 1970's (Jimmy Carter
has gotten kudos from libertarian writers for his de-regulatory efforts), lowered tax rates, especially on financial speculation
and concentrated wealth, a blind eye or shrugged shoulder to anti-trust law and corporate consolidation. Yeah, nothing to see
here, no partial victories for the libertarian wings of the ruling class or the GOP, at all. The Koch Brothers accomplished nothing,
absolutely nothing, since David was the Libertarian Party's nominee for Vice President in 1980; all that money gone to waste.
Sure.
So, now some sort of "partial victory" means we're living in some sort of libertarian era? And what exactly was so wonderful about
all the things you listed being perpetuated? So, union "busting" is terrible, but union corruption was a great part of our national
solidarity and should have been protected? Deregulation of vast swathes of the economy? You mean the elimination of government
controlled cartels in the form of trucking and airlines? You mean the sorts of things that have enabled the working class folks
you supposedly favor to travel to places that were previously out of reach for them and only accessible to the rich for their
vacations? Yes, that's truly terrible. Again, you're on the side of the little guy, right? Lowered taxes? Are you seriously going
to argue that the traditional conservative position has been for high tax rates? What are taxes placed upon? People and property.
What do conservatives want to protect? People and property. So... arguing for higher taxes or saying that low taxes are bad or
even especially, libertarian, is really going off the rails. That's just bad reasoning. And regarding financialization, those
weren't especially libertarian in their enacting, but rather flow directly out of the consequences of the modern Progressive implementation
of neo-Keynesian monetary and fiscal policy. Suffice it to say, I don't think you'll find too many arguments from libertarians
that the policies encouraging financialization were good or followed libertarian economic policy prescriptions. Moreover, they
led entirely to the repulsive "too big to fail" situation and if there's one thing that libertarians hold to is that there is
no such thing (or shouldn't be) as "too big to fail." The objection to anti-trust law is that it was regularly abused and actually
created government-protected firms that harmed consumers. If you think anti-trust laws are good things and should be supported
by conservatives then by all means encourage Joe Biden to have Elizabeth Warren as his vice-presidential running mate and go vote
Democrat this fall.
"The problems of the modern economy are the result of state interference, not its absence". That's because the "state interference"
is working as proxy for the interests of vulture capitalist.
What we have today is vulture capitalism as opposed to free enterprise capitalism.
Exactly. The existence of a vulture capitalist or crony capitalist economy, which we have in many sectors, is evidence that "libertarianism"
is nothing more than a convenient totem to invoke as a rationale for complaint against the outcomes of the existing crony capitalist
state of affairs. My contention is that Cuenco, et al are simply advocating for a replacement of the cronies and vultures.
A very similar article(but probably coming at it from a slightly different angle) wouldn't look out of place in a socialist publication.
The culture war really is a pointless waste of time that keeps working class people from working towards a common solution to
shared problems.
I used to think that conservatism was about protecting private property and not, like Cuenco, in coming up with ever more excuses
for expropriating it.
No, that's libertarianism (or more properly propertarianism). Conservatism is first and foremost about responsibility to God,
community, family and self. Property is only of value in its utility towards a means.
As I see it, here are examples of how "conservatives" have actually practiced their "responsibility to God, community, family
and self":
The genocide of Native Americans
The slavery and murder of blacks
Their opposition to child labor laws, to womens' suffrage, etc.
Their support of Jim Crow laws
Their opposition to ending slavery and opposition to desegregation
Opposition to Civil Liberties Laws
Willingness to block, or curtail, voting rights.
Hyping the "imminent threat" of an ever more powerful communist menace bearing
down on us from the late 40s to the "unanticipated" collapse of the
USSR in '91. All of which was little more than endless "threat inflation" used
by our defense industry-corporate kleptocrats to justify monstrous increases
in deficits that have been "invested" in our meddlesome, murderous militarism all around the world, with the torture and deaths
of millions from S. E. Asia, to Indonesia, to Latin America, to the Middle East, to Africa, etc.
Violations of privacy rights (conservative hero J. Edgar Hoover's illegal domestic surveillance and acts of domestic terrorism,
"justified" by
his loopy paranoia about commies on every corner and under every bed.)
Toppling of democracies to install totalitarian despots in Iran
("Ike" '53), Guatemala (Ike, again, '54), Chile (Nixon '73), Brazil (LBJ, '64) and many, many more countries.
Strong support of the Vietnam War, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, and the Iraq War, which, according to conservative W. Bush,
God had inspired.
The myriad "dirty wars" we've fought around the world, and not only in Latin America.
With a few, notable exceptions, conservatives have routinely been on the wrong side of these issues. For the most part, it
has been the left, particularly the "hard left," that has gotten it right.
So conservatism should be entirely about taking people's property "for the good of the country"? That the purpose of a country
is to loot the people? That the people exist for the government and not the government for the people? Seems Edmund Burke and
Russell Kirk would like to have a word with you Adm.
To quote Kirk as just one example of your fundamental error:
Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked . [Apparently, Adm. you dispute
Kirk's assertion and accuse him thereby of conflating libertarianism and conservatism. Yes, I know Kirk was a hater of the
idea of patriotism, but he was such a raging libertarian what else could he do?] Separate property from private possession,
and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread
is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling[this
is the outcome of Cuenco's policy prescriptions by the way] , conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting
and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth
is much to be desired.
So, either "Mr. Conservative" Russell Kirk wasn't really a conservative but a man who horribly conflated libertarianism and
conservatism, or we can say that Kirk was a conservative and that he recognized the protection of private property as crucial
in minimizing the control and reach of the Leviathan state. If the latter holds, then maybe what we've established is that AdmBenson
isn't particularly conservative.
"The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth." This status quo
has produced precisely the opposite of this. Wealth, assets, capital has been captured by the elite. The pitchforks are coming.
See this CBO chart:
View Hide
Conservatives accept taxes as a part of citizenship. Since taxes can't be avoided, a conservative insists on democratic representation
and has a general desire to get maximum bang for their taxpayer buck.
Libertarians, on the other hand, see everything through the lens of an individual's property rights. Taxes and regulation are
infringements on those rights, so a libertarian is always at war with their own government. They're not interested in bang for
their taxpayer buck, they just want the government to go away. I can't fault people for believing this way, but I can point out
that it is severely faulty as the operating philosophy beyond anything but a small community.
As for me not being particularly conservative, ya got me. It really depends on time of day and the level of sunspot activity.
I should have put the /s on my reply, but your response did give me a good chuckle. Besides, for that finger pointing at you,
there were three more pointing back at me.
And somehow people continually fall for the Trickle Down economic theory. George HW Bush was correct when he called this VooDoo
economics. Fiscal irresponsibility at it's finest.
Nah people don't fall for it, republicans do. The rest of us know this stuff doesn't work. We didn't need an additional datapoint
to realize that. The Tax Cuts and Jobs act was the single most unpopular piece of legislation to ever pass since polling began.
It never had support outside of the Republican Party which is why it's never had majority support.
John Kenneth Galbraith called Trickle Down "economics", "Oats and Horse Economics". If you feed the horse a lot of oats, eventually
some be left on the road...
Mitch is fully owned by Trump as is every republican that holds office except Romney. Mitch can't go to the bathroom with out
asking Trumps permission.
Mitch is owned by corporations and he likes it that way. He basically says as much whenever campaign finance reform pops up and
he defends the status quo.
Yep. The guy who declared war on the Tea Party. The guy who changed his tune entirely about China when he married into the family
of a shipping magnate.
I'm eagerly awaiting a GOP plan for economic restructuring. I've been waiting for decade(s). Surely there is someone in the entire
body of think tanks, congressional staffers, and political class that can propose a genuine and comprehensive plan for how to
rebalance production, education, and technology for the better of ALL Americans. Surely...
I honestly wonder if Jack Kemp might have had a "Road to Damascus" conversion away from his pseudo-libertarian and supply side
economic convictions if he had lived through the decade after the Great Recession. Probably not, given his political and economic
activity up until his death.
Trump pushed the tax cut because it saves him at least $20 million each year in taxes, probably closer to $50 million. That's
the only reason he does anything, because he benefits personally.
Thank you very much for posting the link to the wonderful essay by Mike Lofgren. Written 8 years ago it feels even more actual
than then. I have bookmarked it for future reference.
Looking at the US it always comes to my mind the way Rome and then Byzantium fell: a total erosion of the tax-base the rich
refused to pay anything to the imperial coffers, and then some of the rich had land bigger than some modern countries... And then
the barbarians came...
Lofgren: "What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby 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."
That was in 2012, but that was what struck me about my well-to-do classmates
when I transferred from Cal State Long Beach to Columbia University in 1977 . Suddenly I was among people who saw America,
American laws, and a shared sense of civic responsibility as quaint, bothersome, rather tangential to the project of promoting
oneself and/or one's special interest.
The only way that factories would come back is when Americans start buying made in America. We can't wait for ANY government to
bring those factories and jobs ( and technology) . Only people voting with their pocketbooks can do it.
Still waiting for the day the first American asks "What have WE done wrong?" Rather than just following in Trumps step
and playing the victim card every step of the way and wondering why nothing gets better.
@Al
Lipton He strikes me as just another leader out for his own self image, and legacy. I
took this opinion given his foreign policy – the shows for his isolationist base, and
his continuous almost wars for the MIC. I do say almost wars, and that says something. We're
I a US citizen, and one to vote for humans, I would vote for Trump this time, but he is
imperfect imo, and it's only a coincidence that on some issues what benefits him, aligns with
what benefits the nation.
The timing of ObamaGate for example – we all knew it, it would go from snail's pace
to a decent speed just as the election cycle was heating up. But this is playing politics and
electioneering with the most critical misdirection and criminality of US officials in a long
time. A real leader who worked for the nation and its Constitution only, would bugger all
that and start draining as soon as could be done.
Of course that could be coincidence, and they could have been building a strong case, but
as someone else said, I will take my conspiracy theory over some coincidence theory any
day.
I can't imagine that without ObamaGate, he would have even tried to drain the swamp. Made
showpieces of it sure, but no thing major. But now he can do what he promised and maybe even
wanted to do, without reputational damage, and he will do it.
But how he will be in his second term, through a depression that was on its way in 6
months before corona? Like FDR I'd guess – war war war.
"... former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell admitted in a TV interview he views that the US should be in the business of "killing Russians and Iranians covertly" ). ..."
"... Ironically, Jeffrey's official title has been Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIL, but apparently the mission is now to essentially "give the Russians hell". His comments were made Tuesday during a video conference hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute : ..."
"... He also emphasized that the Syrian state would continue to be squeezed into submission as part of long-term US efforts (going back to at least 2011) to legitimize a Syria government in exile of sorts. This after the Trump administration recently piled new sanctions on Damascus. As University of Oklahoma professor and expert on the region Joshua Landis summarized of Jeffrey's remarks: "He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria - international funding, reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of government." ..."
Washington now says it's all about defeating the Russians . While it's not the first time
this has been thrown around in policy circles (recall that a year after Russia's 2015 entry
into Syria at Assad's invitation, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell
admitted in a TV interview he views that the US should be in the business of "killing
Russians and Iranians covertly" ).
"My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians."
Ironically, Jeffrey's official title has been Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to
Defeat ISIL, but apparently the mission is now to essentially "give the Russians hell". His
comments were made Tuesday during a video conference hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute :
Asked why the American public should tolerate US involvement in Syria, Special Envoy James
Jeffrey points out the small US footprint in the fight against ISIS. "This isn't Afghanistan.
This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a quagmire. My job is to make it a quagmire for the
Russians."
He also emphasized that the Syrian state would continue to be squeezed into submission as
part of long-term US efforts (going back to at least 2011) to legitimize a Syria government in
exile of sorts. This after the Trump administration recently piled new sanctions on Damascus.
As University of Oklahoma professor and expert on the region Joshua Landis summarized of
Jeffrey's remarks: "He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria -
international funding, reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of
government."
"My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians."
Special US envoy to Syria - James Jeffery
He pledged that the United States will continue to deny Syria - international funding,
reconstruction, oil, banking, agriculture & recognition of government. https://t.co/MSAkQqAmdh
But no doubt both Putin and Assad have understood Washington's real proxy war interests all
along, which is why last year Russia delivered it's lethal S-300 into the hands of Assad (and
amid constant Israeli attacks). But no doubt both Putin and Assad have understood Washington's
real proxy war interests all along, which is why last year Russia delivered it's lethal S-300
into the hands of Assad (and amid constant Israeli attacks).
As for oil, currently Damascus is well supplied by the Iranians, eager to dump their stock
in fuel-starved Syria amid the global glut. Trump has previously voiced that part of US troops
"securing the oil fields" is to keep them out of the hands of Russia and Iran.
* * *
Recall the CIA's 2016 admission of what's really going on in terms of US action in
Syria:
R ussia and Saudi Arabia are engaged in an oil price war that has sent shockwaves around
the world, causing the price of oil to tumble and threatening the financial stability, and even
viability, of major international oil companies.
On the surface, this conflict appears to be a fight between two of the world's largest
producers of oil over market share. This may, in fact, be the motive driving Saudi Arabia,
which reacted to Russia's refusal to reduce its level of oil production by slashing the price
it charged per barrel of oil and threatening to increase its oil production, thereby flooding
the global market with cheap oil in an effort to attract customers away from competitors.
Russia's motives appear to be far different -- its target isn't Saudi Arabia, but rather
American shale oil. After absorbing American sanctions that targeted the Russian energy sector,
and working with global partners (including Saudi Arabia) to keep oil prices stable by reducing
oil production even as the United States increased the amount of shale oil it sold on the world
market, Russia had had enough. The advent of the Coronavirus global pandemic had significantly
reduced the demand for oil around the world, stressing the American shale producers.
Russia had been preparing for the eventuality of oil-based economic warfare with the United
States. With U.S. shale producers knocked back on their heels, Russia viewed the time as being
ripe to strike back. Russia's goal is simple: to make American shale oil producers "
share the pain ".
The United States has been slapping sanctions on Russia for more
than six years, ever since Russia took control (and later annexed) the Crimean Peninsula and
threw its weight behind Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. The first sanctions were issued
on March 6, 2014, through Executive
Order 13660 , targeting "persons who have asserted governmental authority in the Crimean
region without the authorization of the Government of Ukraine that undermine democratic
processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty,
and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets."
The most
recent round of sanctions was announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on February 18,
2020, by sanctioning Rosneft Trading S.A., a Swiss-incorporated, Russian-owned oil brokerage
firm, for operating in Venezuela's oil sector. The U.S. also recently targeted the Russian
Nord Stream 2
and
Turk Stream gas pipeline projects.
Russia had been signaling its displeasure over U.S. sanctions from the very beginning. In
July 2014, Russian President Vladimir
Putin warned that U.S. sanctions were "driving into a corner" relations between the two
countries, threatening the "the long-term national interests of the U.S. government and
people." Russia opted to ride out U.S. sanctions, in hopes that there might be a change of
administrations following the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections. Russian President Vladimir
Putin made it clear that he hoped the U.S. might elect someone whose policies would be more
friendly toward Russia, and that once the field of candidates narrowed down to a choice between
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Putin favored
Trump .
"Yes, I did," Putin remarked after the election, during a joint press conference with
President Trump following a summit in Helsinki in July 2018. "Yes, I did. Because he talked
about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal."
Putin's comments only reinforced the opinions of those who embraced allegations of Russian
interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as fact and concluded that Putin had some
sort of hold over Trump. Trump's continuous praise of Putin's leadership style only reinforced
these concerns.
Even before he was inaugurated, Trump singled out Putin's refusal to respond in kind to
President Obama's levying of sanctions based upon the assessment of the U.S. intelligence
community that Russia had interfered in the election. "Great move on delay (by V. Putin)
– I always knew he was very smart!"
Trump Tweeted . Trump viewed the Obama sanctions as an effort
to sabotage any chance of a Trump administration repairing relations with Russia, and
interpreted Putin's refusal to engage, despite being pressured to do so by the Russian
Parliament and Foreign Ministry, as a recognition of the same.
This sense of providing political space in the face of domestic pressure worked both ways.
In January 2018, Putin tried to shield his relationship with President Trump by calling the
release of a list containing some 200 names of persons close to the Russian government by the
U.S. Treasury Department as a hostile and "stupid"
move .
"Ordinary Russian citizens, employees and entire industries are behind each of those people
and companies," Putin remarked. "So all 146 million people have essentially been put on this
list. What is the point of this? I don't understand."
From the Russian perspective, the list highlighted the reality that the U.S. viewed the
entire Russian government as an enemy and is a byproduct of the "political paranoia" on the
part of U.S. lawmakers. The consequences of this, senior Russian officials warned, "will be
toxic and undermine prospects for cooperation for years ahead."
While President Trump entered office fully intending to "
get along with Russia ," including the possibility of
relaxing the Obama-era sanctions , the reality of U.S.-Russian relations, especially as
viewed from Congress, has been the strengthening of the Obama sanctions regime. These
sanctions, strengthened over time by new measures signed off by Trump, have had a negative
impact on the Russian economy,
slowing growth and
driving away foreign investment .
While Putin continued to show constraint in the face of these mounting sanctions, the recent
targeting of Russia's energy sector represented a bridge too far. When Saudi pressure to cut
oil production rates coincided with a global reduction in the demand for oil brought on by the
Coronavirus crisis, Russia struck.
The timing of the Russian action is curious, especially given the amount of speculation that
there was some sort of personal relationship between Trump and Putin that the Russian leader
sought to preserve and carry over into a potential second term. But Putin had, for some
time now, been signaling that his patience with Trump had run its course. When speaking to
the press in June 2019 about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, Putin noted that "They
(our relations) are going downhill, they are getting worse and worse," adding that "The current
[i.e., Trump] administration has approved, in my opinion, several dozen decisions on sanctions
against Russia in recent years."
By launching an oil price war on the eve of the American Presidential campaign season, Putin
has sent as strong a signal as possible that he no longer views Trump as an asset, if in fact
he ever did. Putin had hoped Trump could usher in positive change in the trajectory of
relations between the two nations; this clearly had not happened. Instead, in the words of
close Putin ally Igor Sechin , the chief executive of Russian oil giant Rosneft, the U.S.
was using its considerable energy resources as a political weapon, ushering in an era of "power
colonialism" that sought to expand U.S. oil production and market share at the expense of other
nations.
From Russia's perspective, the growth in U.S. oil production -- which doubled in output from
2011 until 2019 -- and the emergence of the U.S. as a net exporter of oil, was directly linked
to the suppression of oil export capability in nations such as Venezuela and Iran through the
imposition of sanctions. While this could be tolerated when the target was a third party, once
the U.S. set its sanctioning practices on Russian energy, the die was cast.
If the goal of the Russian-driven price war is to make U.S. shale companies "share the
pain," they have already succeeded. A similar price war, initiated by Saudi Arabia in 2014 for
the express purpose of suppressing U.S. shale oil production, failed, but only because
investors were willing to prop up the stricken shale producers with massive loans and infusion
of capital. For shale oil producers, who use an expensive methodology of extraction known as
"fracking," to be economically viable, the breakeven price of oil
per barrel needs to be between $40 and $60 dollars. This was the price range the Saudi's
were hoping to sustain when they proposed the cuts in oil production that Russia rejected.
The U.S. shale oil producers, saddled by massive debt and high operational expenses, will
suffer greatly in any sustained oil price war. Already, with the price of oil down to below $35
per barrel,
there is talk of bankruptcy and massive job layoffs -- none of which bode well for Trump in
the coming election.
It's clear that Russia has no intention of backing off anytime soon. According to
the Russian Finance Ministry , said on Russia could weather oil prices of $25-30 per barrel
for between six and ten years. One thing is for certain -- U.S. shale oil companies cannot.
In a sign that the Trump administration might be waking up to the reality of the predicament
it faces, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin quietly met with Russia's Ambassador to the U.S.,
Anatoly Antonov. According to a read out from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the two discussed economic sanctions, the Venezuelan economy, and the potential for "trade
and investment." Mnuchin, the Russians noted, emphasized the "importance of orderly energy
markets."
Russia is unlikely to fold anytime soon. As Admiral Josh Painter, a character in Tom
Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October," famously said , "Russians don't take a dump without
a plan."
Russia didn't enter its current course of action on a whim. Its goals are clearly stated --
to defeat U.S. shale oil -- and the costs of this effort, both economically and politically (up
to and including having Trump lose the 2020 Presidential election) have all been calculated and
considered in advance. The Russian Bear can only be toyed with for so long without generating a
response. We now know what that response is; when the Empire strikes back, it hits hard.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books,
including his forthcoming, Scorpion King:
America's Embrace of Nuclear Weapons From FDR to Trump (2020).
Looks like Trump is already lame duck President. And this will not change with the
elections
Notable quotes:
"... I'm not suggesting that President Trump deserves a second term. He didn't deserve a first one. He's a terrible person and an awful president. What I'm saying is that it is more likely than not that he has already done most of the damage that he can do. ..."
"... An achievement-filled second term would be a major reversal of recent historical precedent. Things may get worse under four more years of this idiot, but not much worse as the Democratic doomsday cult warns. ..."
"... I hope Obama enjoyed all those trips to Martha's Vineyard because that's pretty much all he has to show for term number two. ..."
"... George W. Bush screwed up one thing after another during his second four years in office, which was bookended by his hapless non-response to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and his role in the ineffective and wasteful bailout of Wall Street megabanks during the subprime mortgage financial crisis. What began as an illegal war of aggression against Iraq became, after reelection, a catastrophic quagmire that destroyed America's international reputation. ..."
"... Reagan was both senile and bogged down in Iran Contra. ..."
"... "If Trump wins a second term this November," James Pethokoukis writes in The Week, Trump "might propose more tax cuts, but they are more likely to be payroll tax cuts geared toward middle-class workers instead of income tax cuts for rich people and corporations. ..."
You've heard it so often that you may well believe it's true: Trump's second term would be a
disaster. For the Democratic Party. For the United States. For democracy itself. "The
reelection of Donald Trump," warns Nancy Pelosi, "would do irreparable damage to the United
States."
But would it really?
Exceptions are a normal part of history but the record suggests that Trump would not be one
of the few presidents who get much done during their second terms. There are three reasons for
the sophomore slump:
By definition, political honeymoons expire (well) before the end of a president's first
term. Elections have consequences in the form of policy changes that make good on campaign
promises. But turning a pledge into reality comes at a cost. Capital gets spent, promises are
broken, alliances shatter. Oftentimes, those changes prove disappointing. Recent example:
Obamacare. Voters often express their displeasure by punishing the party that controls the
White House with losses in Congress in midterm elections.
The permanent campaign fed by the 24-7 news cycle makes lame ducks gimpier than ever. Before
a president gets to take his or her second oath of office, news media and future hopefuls are
already looking four years ahead.
Scandals come usually home to roost during second terms. It's tough to push laws through a
Congress that is dragging your top officials through one investigation after another.
I'm not suggesting that President Trump deserves a second term. He didn't deserve a
first one. He's a terrible person and an awful president. What I'm saying is that it is more
likely than not that he has already done most of the damage that he can do.
Pundits and Democratic politicians have been pushing a self-serving narrative that implies
that everything Trump has done so far was merely a warm-up for the main event, that he would
want and be able to go even further if given the chance if November 2020 goes his way.
That doesn't make sense. Who in their right mind thinks Trump has been holding anything
back? Which president has failed to go big within a year or two?
An achievement-filled second term would be a major reversal of recent historical
precedent. Things may get worse under four more years of this idiot, but not much worse as the
Democratic doomsday cult warns.
President Obama didn't get much done during his second term, which began with the bungled
rollout of the federal and state "health exchanges." He signed the Paris climate accord,
renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba and negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran. But the ease
with which his successor canceled those achievements showcased both the ephemerality of
policies pushed through without thorough public propaganda and a general sense that second-term
laws and treaties are easy to annul. I hope Obama enjoyed all those trips to Martha's
Vineyard because that's pretty much all he has to show for term number two.
George W. Bush screwed up one thing after another during his second four years in
office, which was bookended by his hapless non-response to the destruction of New Orleans by
Hurricane Katrina and his role in the ineffective and wasteful bailout of Wall Street megabanks
during the subprime mortgage financial crisis. What began as an illegal war of aggression
against Iraq became, after reelection, a catastrophic quagmire that destroyed America's
international reputation.
Whatever the merits of Bill Clinton's legislative and policy agenda -- welfare reform, NAFTA
and bombing Kosovo would all have happened under a Republican president -- having anything
substantial or positive to point to was well in the rearview mirror by his second term, when he
found himself embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky affair and impeachment.
Reagan was both senile and bogged down in Iran Contra.
Even the most productive and prolific president of the 20th century had little to show for
his second term. FDR's legacy would be nearly as impressive today if he'd only served four
years.
Anything could happen. Donald Trump may use his second term to push dramatic changes. If
there were another terrorist attack, for example, he would probably try to exploit national
shock and fear to the political advantage of the right. Another Supreme Court justice could
pass away. On the other hand, Trump is old, clinically obese and out of shape. He might die.
It's doubtful that Mike Pence, a veep chosen for his lack of charisma, would be able to carry
on the Trump tradition as more than the head of a caretaker government.
Analysts differ on what Trump 2.0 might look like. Regardless of their perspective, however,
no one expects anything big.
"If Trump wins a second term this November," James Pethokoukis writes in The Week, Trump
"might propose more tax cuts, but they are more likely to be payroll tax cuts geared toward
middle-class workers instead of income tax cuts for rich people and corporations. He'll
look for a new Federal Reserve chair less worried about inflation than current boss Jerome
Powell, who deserves at least partial credit for the surging stock market and continuing
expansion. Trump will let the national debt soar rather than trimming projected Medicare and
Social Security benefits. And there will be more protectionism, although it may be called
'industrial policy.'"
"The early outlines of the [second-term] agenda are starting to emerge," Andrew Restuccia
reports in The Wall Street Journal. "Among the issues under consideration: continuing the
administration's efforts to lower prescription drug prices, pushing for a broad infrastructure
bill and taking another crack at reforming the country's immigration system, [White House]
officials said." They also want to reduce the deficit.
Under Trump, immigration reform is never a good thing. But it's hard to imagine anything
major happening without Democratic cooperation.
Internationally, many observers expect Trump to continue to nurture his isolationist
tendencies. But President Bernie Sanders would probably have similar impulses to focus on
America First.
By all means, vote against Trump. But don't freak out at the thought of a second term.
Mourn what happened under the first one instead -- and work to reverse it.
"... It seems to me, though, that running on little more than people's fond memories of the Obama administration won't be enough in de-industrialized, opioid-ravaged Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (Bernie outperforms Biden in all three, according to current polls). Trump won there by a combined margin of 77,744 votes precisely because of voters who, after eight years of Obama, had nearly lost hope and were hungry for change. ..."
Supporters who were expecting a more radical agenda may feel betrayed, and that could play into the hands of the Democrats.
In its ridiculous dual
endorsement of Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, the New York Times Editorial
Board divided the Democratic field into those candidates who "view President Trump as an
aberration and believe that a return to a more sensible America is possible" and those who
"believe that President Trump was the product of political and economic systems so rotten that
they must be replaced."
I've
already written about how arbitrarily the Board sorted candidates into one group or
another, but the dichotomy itself is useful. Recently, I've found that it helps to make a
parable of it.
Some Democratic candidates think Trump has flipped over the political table. They want to
set it back up, dab at the tablecloth, enforce better manners, reheat the entrées, and
put a second scoop of ice cream on the pie à la mode. Biden and Bloomberg are currently
the frontrunners in this category, but even the supposedly radical Elizabeth Warren, by virtue
of her moderating compromises and general palatability to the party elite, deserves (at least
in part) the label of table re-setter.
For others, though, Trump never actually flipped the table. Sure, he promised to, but as
soon as he sat down and dug into his well-done steak, something changed. Many of his signature
dishes never materialized. And although he continued to insist that the kitchen staff were
defiling the food, he seemed awfully chummy with the management. The management, for their
part, obligingly looked the other way while he belched, used the wrong knife, and generally
flouted the edicts of Emily Post. Those at the far end of the table where pickings were slim,
many of whom had played a part in elevating Trump to his lofty position, wondered what had gone
wrong. Was the table bolted invisibly to the floor? Or had Trump betrayed them? Meanwhile, the
food, rotten long before Trump had sat down, continued to attract flies.
Into this category, I would place Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and perhaps Tulsi Gabbard, of
whom only Bernie remains standing.
Biden thinks he can still salvage dinner; Bernie wants to go full Gordon Ramsay.
To be clear, neither of these is exactly my position. My question is how Trump will respond
to the latter. Sure, Biden's guy's-guy persona might be enough to take back the Rust Belt and
push him over 270. It seems to me, though, that running on little more than people's fond
memories of the Obama administration won't be enough in de-industrialized, opioid-ravaged
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (Bernie outperforms Biden in all three, according to
current polls). Trump won there by a
combined margin of 77,744 votes precisely because of voters who, after eight years of
Obama, had nearly lost hope and were hungry for change.
This feeling of being let down by Obama's messianic promises, what Sarah Palin eloquently
called his "hopey-changey thing," could cut both ways, though. Trump still hasn't built his
wall. Manufacturing jobs have not returned en masse; tariffs on China
have squeezed farmers and failed to produce the speedy victory he promised. The wars he
promised to end still rage, and we've gone to the brink with Iran. Yes, the economy is strong,
and conventional wisdom has it that the incumbent only loses if the economy tanks. But Bernie
makes a strong case that the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the economy are not the same
thing. Six out of 10 Americans feel they're
better off than they were three years ago, but I wonder whether the frustrated
Midwesterners who swung the election in 2016 have gotten what they wanted out of Trump. If not,
they might be willing to try something new . The
distance between left-populism and right-populism is, after all, far shorter than the distance
between the center-left and the center-right. If Obama let you down and Trump let you down, why
not vote Sanders? You've already switched parties once.
Trump shot to the top of the Republican primary polls because he had the energy of a
disruptor. The media showered l'enfant terrible with free advertising. Since the impeachment,
though, it seems like the press's white-hot Trump derangement has cooled at precisely the wrong
time. These days, it's Bernie drawing all the outrage, including accusations of Russian
stoogery and wild speculation about anarchic brokered conventions.
Slowly, a narrative is solidifying: if you're ready to say "the hell with it," vote
Sanders; if you want more of the same, vote Trump. This perception could prove fatal to the
incumbent.
Trump will give Bernie both barrels with "you're a communist" and "how are we supposed to
pay for that?" But those might actually work in Bernie's favor. On the campaign trail, Trump
proposed a number of fanciful policies, from punishing post-abortive women to deporting 12
million people to the possibility of nuking Europe, and all it got him was more free media. He
never explained how the hell he was going to get Mexico to pay for the wall, but nobody cared.
Trump was bold, brash, and unconcerned with breaking rules or offending people. Now Sanders,
less crass but equally brash, has usurped that brand positioning. This move could force Trump
into the role of a brake-pumping Deng Xiaoping, persecuting the authentic radicals while
hollowly insisting that he remains the true custodian of the populist revolution.
Badgering Bernie about his lavish Medicare-for-All plan and his lack of clarity about how
to fund it could induce sticker shock in the American electorate, but it could also solidify
voters' perception that Sanders is the dynamic visionary and Trump the static naysayer. Bernie
seems to actively cultivate this edgy persona. Why else would he call himself a "democratic
socialist" rather than a "social democrat," a term that more accurately describes his policies
and leaves out the scary S-word to boot?
On the debate stage, Bernie will almost certainly castigate Trump for exploiting the
anxieties of those coveted 77,744 and delivering on little of what he promised. If Trump
counters that he's been stymied by the Deep State, he loses again. His die-hard supporters will
buy it, but at least some voters at the end of their rope will think, "Well, if Trump couldn't
hit hard enough to shatter the ossified bureaucracy, maybe Sanders can. Or maybe he'll get it
rolling in the direction he wants, transforming that bureaucratic mass from an immovable object
into an unstoppable force."
I worry that our politics have entered a downward spiral. Hyperpartisan polarization has
ensured that everyone feels precarious all the time, and thanks to the ever-morphing values of
liquid modernity, moderate candidates can no longer run fast
enough to stay in place. If America is no longer great, it must be made great again by
whatever means necessary. If it was never great, it must be radically transformed. As checks,
balances, bureaucrats, and practicalities frustrate the sweeping aims of each successive
political messiah, they prepare the way for one even more extreme to follow. If this happens
enough times, the populists of whichever stripe, thwarted again and again, will finally turn
against the institutions of their own society. Enter Thomas Hobbes, stage right or left.
I recognize that, for all but the most milquetoast of centrists, the status quo has plenty
of problems. I even admit that my own sympathy to populism has grown since 2016. But the trend
I've described in American politics is enough to make me sympathize with C.S. Lewis, who
grew fed up with an electorate that demanded "such qualities as 'vision,' 'dynamism,' [and]
'creativity'" from candidates.
Lewis longed for a political leader "who will do a day's work for a day's pay, who will
refuse bribes, who will not make up his facts, and who has learned his job." He even
sardonically proposed founding "a Stagnation Party -- which at General
Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken
place."
It's enough to make me miss Jeb Bush.
Grayson Quay is a freelance writer and M.A. at Georgetown University.
US is an oligarchic republic, like the good old Venetian Republic of old. As an outsider of
the US polity, I just get the popcorn and beer during US elections. While the PoTUS has not
that much power in the US (albeit a savvy executive, controlling all the federal agencies and
appointments in various places, and having the appeal of executive power, which is direct
raw), it can be crushing for the outside world. The droned people can attest to that. The
starved people due to sanctions can attest to that, the sick and un-treatable people due to
sanctions can attest to that power of the PoTUS.
Building the wall is itself a lie. It would be simple to reduce immigration by a lot. use
e-verify
The wall is an expensive distraction, that would have zero impact on immigration.
It allows Trump and other elite (who want the low wage workers) to pander. They can tell
their base they are being so, so harsh on immigrants, while doing nothing.
...Make America Great is a revolt of the poor and middle class who want their share of the
economy instead of giving it away to foreign countries and foreign immigrants. That revolt is
not going to go away. However if you are blindly living off the largess of our nation and its
big government social welfare programs then you have no connection to education, to
employment and from your point of view the government provides your living and the living for
your children so as long as you get your check it doesn't matter whether there is 1 person
living off that social safety net or 1 thousand or 1 million or 1 billion.
It was never Trump's revolution to deliver. We the people delivered the revolution in
bringing in DJT to expose and (hopefully) weaken the entrenched Establishment. The former has
been accomplished exceedingly well. And there is more work toward that goal to be done. I'm
more than impressed with the progress that we've made. Captains can be changed quickly but
this ship does not turn easily.
This is a site for GOP establishment types. They suppressed us as deplorables and lied to us
with false promises. So we gave them Trump. May the never Trumper Romney types rot in hell
won't be enough in de-industrialized, opioid-ravaged Pennsylvania, Michigan, and
Wisconsin
Is this 'opioid epidemic' for real? I keep hearing about it. Or is it just like the Global
Warming Hoax and people are just exaggerating this 'epidemic', like the coronavirus
nonsense??
We are saving the world from socialism and communism.
We are energy independent, with innate exceptionalism and #MAGA# will usher in a new era
of American prosperity.
Any and all accusations of USSA imperialism, are made by the "woke" and those jealous of
the greatest Capitalist system in the world.
The swamp is being drained as I speak, and therefore will continue with unwavering
support for my 5x draft dodging, Zionist supporting, multiple times bankrupt, keeper of
broken promises POTUS.
Smedley Butler's book is not worthy of reading once you have the seminal work known as
"The Art Of The Deal"
"... IMHO, Sanders, accused of being a 'self-identified' socialist, should be emphasizing the U.S. is shoulder-deep in socialism for the 1% who have access to free Fed funds. ..."
it's not a lock that Trump will be re-elected. It's the great silent majority of moderates
[RINOs, DINOs] and independents who fear another 4 years of Trump -
The Autocratic President of the United States
a brutal assessment -
Donald Trump can be seen as some sort of a deadly "political virus", which was introduced
accidently into the American body politic in 2016.
Introduction
Wednesday, February 5, 2020 will come to be remembered as a date of historic
significance for the United States. Indeed, this is the date when a Senate majority of 52
Republican Senators (with the notable exception of Sen. Mitt Romney), voted against
convicting President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of justice, in the
impeachment trial of the latter. That is also the date when Donald Trump interpreted such
exoneration as a blank check to move towards a fully autocratic presidency.
Thus, in open defiance of the American Constitution and of America's checks-and-balances
system, Trump's Republican enablers have placed the American people before a fait accompli
and the only question now is to see if this dangerous drift toward autocracy will be
condoned or reversed in the next presidential election of November 3rd.[.]
IMHO, Sanders, accused of being a 'self-identified' socialist, should be emphasizing the
U.S. is shoulder-deep in socialism for the 1% who have access to free Fed funds. Free as in
ZERO interest (0%) while jim and joe mainstreet struggle to pay interest on debt.
@ RSH 66
[If] either are nominated - or any other of the current crop of losers - the Democrats will
lose against Trump, despite Trump making all kinds of incredibly stupid statements during the
campaign. Because, let's face it, Trump will do stupid stuff all during the election race -
and his supporters will no doubt ignore them or praise him for them. [;]
There is that Great Silent Majority made up of Independents, RINOs, DINOs, and Moderates
who are embarrassed by and are tired of Trump. Also, throw in those who will refuse to
participate in the rigged system. In 2020 this time it's different.
Another great Dave Lindorff item , "The Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is
Already Becoming Laughable," a topic we all knew was coming. Given his performances, Chris
Matthews would be better off with a lobotomy. Many others are just as bad in their display of
ignorance on the topic.
Meanwhile,
Mnuchin admits before the Senate's Finance Committee that Trump's budget does gut Social
Security and Medicare, proving Trump lied--again:
"Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, tweeted in
response to the exchange that 'Mnuchin admits Trump's budget cuts your earned benefits in
Social Security.'
"'Slowing the rate of increase' is Washington-speak for cutting benefits and breaking the
Social Security and Medicare guarantee,' Wyden added.
"The Trump admin claims there are no cuts to Social Security in the budget. So why
wouldn't Sec Mnuchin answer a simple yes or no question about whether there are billions in
cuts to Social Security, hurting seniors?
"Answer: because there are cuts to Social Security in the budget."
Yes, you can bet Sanders will milk that for all its worth just in time for all those
retirees living in Vegas to cast their primary votes.
"... Speaking of Trump's donors, we wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us. We voted for big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism." He has been a disappointment on all fronts. ..."
"... Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his "America First" foreign policy over Americans by a whopping 18-point margin? ..."
"... Trump's Chumps have demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and shill for the GOP no matter what it does. Donald Trump isn't under any pressure from these people to change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to participate in elections and to feel like they are "winning" that they will delude themselves like the rest of his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself. ..."
I spent months making the case for Trump on
this website. I will be the first to admit that I was wrong and that those who were skeptical of Trump in our
community were right in 2016. In that election, I drank the koolaid and was one of Trump's Chumps. Unlike
AmNats, I have tried to learn something from that experience.
I hate getting fooled by Republicans.
In 2020, we have a far better sense of
Donald Trump. The Trump administration has a record now. Donald Trump's first term is mostly history. We can
now look back with the benefit of hindsight and evaluate our standing after the last three years without being
drunk on Trump koolaid. No one drank the Trump koolaid in our community more deeply than the AmNats. Some of
them remained drunk on the Trump koolaid even after the 2018 midterms. A handful of his most faithful
cheerleaders have never given up faith in their GOD EMPEROR and succumbed to reality.
What is the reality of the Trump presidency?
1.) Those who feared that the Trump
administration would lull the conservative base into a false sense of complacency and put all the normies back
to sleep were right.
Donald Trump has told his base that they are "winning." They wear Q shirts and
"Trust The Plan" at his rallies. They are Making America Great Again simply by having a Republican in the White
House. They are content to go on believing that
even as illegal immigration DOUBLED in FY 2019
and became a far worse problem than it ever was under the
Obama administration. As we saw after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, they are also ready to swallow
Trump's war propaganda against Iran and believe anything their dear leader tells them. It was Julian Assange
and Roger Stone who went to prison under Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Normies are content to have conservatism
in power and
are less willing
to give us an audience with a Republican in the White House.
2.) Those who feared that the Trump
administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were right . In the final two years of
the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social media and was brimming with
energy. Four years later, the country has only gotten worse, but the brand has been destroyed and all the
energy it had back then as an online subculture has been sucked out of the room by Trump and channeled into
pushing the standard conservative policy agenda. The movement has been in disarray and has been divided and
demoralized ever since Trump won the 2016 election. The last few years have been terrible. As soon as Trump won
the 2016 election, conservatives shifted their attention back to policing their right flank. They are far more
successful at policing their right flank when they are in power.
3.) Those who rationalized voting
for Donald Trump on the basis of immigration and changing demographics were proven wrong about that too.
He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump
has built all of three new miles of fence
, which is actually less than W. and Obama. He didn't do anything
about sanctuary cities or pass E-Verify. He has
actually increased
guest worker programs
. There has been no cuts to legal immigration. Instead, Jared Kushner's legal
immigration plan
only proposes to reconfigure the composition of it for big business
so that more high skilled workers and
fewer peons are imported from the Third World. Illegal immigration has remained steady and has surged past the
worst highs of the Obama years. It has recently
fallen back to 2015 levels after peaking in FY 2019
. Trump has vowed to pass an amnesty to save DACA. The
Muslim ban
became an ineffective travel ban
. The only area where he has had any real success is refugee resettlement,
but overall the bottom line is that after four years of Trump there are millions of more illegal aliens and
legal immigrants here. Donald Trump hasn't even
deported as many illegal aliens as Obama
.
AmNats have been purged from Turning Point
USA, banned from its events and reduced to haranguing Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk from the sidewalk. They have
been banned from even attending CPAC. Those who thought that they could work within the system to reform
conservatism were grossly mistaken. Steve King was
condemned by Congress, stripped of his committee assignments and has been treated as a pariah within the
Republican Party
. Michelle Malkin
was deplatformed by Mar-a-Lago
and excommunicated from the synagogue of mainstream conservatism. Ann
Coulter was marginalized in the Trump administration. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were both fired. Donald
Trump hired conservatives and staffed his administration with his enemies. While I won't name any names, I will
just point to all the people who actually worked within the conservative movement who have all been purged and
fired in the Trump era by Conservatism, Inc. as proof that working within the system doesn't work and is a bad
idea and those people would have had more job security doing almost anything else.
5.) What about Antifa and Big Tech
censorship? Aren't those good reasons to vote for Donald Trump in 2020? Neither of these issues were on our
radar screen BEFORE Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
Both of those problems became dramatically
worse
as a result of electing the boogeyman as president
. Far from being a victory for the Dissident
Right, we became identified with Donald Trump and were caught in the backlash while he delivered Jeb Bush's
agenda (the boogeyman wasn't real). Before Trump was elected president, Antifa was a tiny nuisance that
protested Amren conferences and there was still a great deal of free speech on the internet. We could also hold
rallies all over the South without serial harassment from these people. Now, everything from harassment and
doxxing by "journalists" to chronic Antifa violence to police stand down orders to deplatforming to FBI
counterextremism witch hunts has became part of the scenery of life under the Trump administration which is
only interested in these new grievances insofar as they can be milked and exploited to elect more Republicans.
In hindsight, it would have been better NOT to have identified ourselves with the boogeyman in 2016.
6.) Isn't having Donald Trump in
the White House a huge victory for "identitarianism" and big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." President
Donald Trump's signature policy victories have been passing a huge corporate tax cut, criminal justice reform
and renegotiating and rebranding NAFTA.
Trump is a "populist" in the sense that he has DEEPENED
neoliberalism. When you look at his policies, he has continued and further extended the status quo of the last
forty years which has been tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts, free trade agreements and huge increases
in military spending. Trump's economic agenda has been no different from the last three Republican presidents.
He has been all bark and no bite.
Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a
nationalist, populist or identitarian. He carefully avoids ever mentioning the word "White." Instead, he talks
incessantly about the black, Hispanic, Asian-American, LGBTQ and female unemployment rate. He holds events at
the White House for blacks and Hispanics. He delivers policies for blacks and Hispanics too like criminal
justice reform. The "forgotten man" couldn't be further from Donald Trump's mind when he is schmoozing with the
likes of Steve Schwarzman and boasting about the stock market. Trump is a demagogue who recognized that
nationalist and populist sentiments were growing in the American electorate and he has harnessed and
manipulated and exploited those forces for his donors.
7.) Speaking of Trump's donors, we
wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us.
We
voted for big ideas like "nationalism" and "populism." The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were
immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas
of "nationalism" and "populism." He has been a disappointment on all fronts.
Those of us who were duped into believing
that Donald Trump had a team of Jews who were going to craft all of these policies which were going to
stabilize America's demographics should reflect on what has actually happened during the Trump presidency.
Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning
streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college
campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of
the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then
that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his "America First" foreign policy over Americans by a
whopping 18-point margin?
Trump's Chumps haven't been deterred by any
of this. They want us to write Donald Trump a second political blank check in 2020, which his Jewish donors
intend to cash at the White House,
only this time he won't be restrained by fear of losing his reelection
.
In light of everything he has delivered for them so far, what is Donald Trump going to do in his second term
for his Jewish donors who fund the GOP? Do we trust Trump not to start a war with Iran?
8.) In the last two elections,
Donald Trump has pulled a bait-and-switch and Trump's Chumps are gullible enough to fall for it a third time.
While I was wrong about the 2016 election, I was one of the first voices in our community to wise up to what
was going on. By the 2018 midterms, I saw the bait-and-switch coming and warned our readers about it.
As you might recall, the 2018 midterms were
about tax cuts and the roaring economy, deregulation and putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. It
was also full of dire warnings about scary Antifa groups, Big Tech censorship and caravans from Central America
to stir up the base. Trump vowed to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship. The GOP knows what
its base cares about and shamelessly manipulates its base during election season.
After the 2018 election was over, you
might recall how Trump banned bump stocks and passed criminal justice reform for Van Jones and the Koch
Brothers during the lame duck session of Congress. As we entered 2019, the Republican agenda changed to
overthrowing the government of Venezuela to install Juan Guaidó in power and passing anti-BDS legislation. The
GOP spent the whole year accusing the Democrats of anti-Semitism and promoting Jexodus. Virtually nothing else
was talked about for a whole year in Congress but anti-Semitism until Trump issued his executive order on
anti-Semitism on college campuses after the House and Senate had failed to reach agreement on anti-BDS
legislation. The White House
held its Social Media Summit in July and nothing came out of it
. Antifa disappeared from the agenda and was
replaced by a government crackdown on White Nationalists after El Paso. Ending birthright citizenship was
forgotten about. Illegal immigration soared to its highest level in over a decade last May.
Don't forget how Trump's Chumps told us how
"Chad" it was in 2018 to elect more Republicans to stop Antifa, the caravans and Big Tech censorship and how
those same Republicans once elected to office preferred to fight anti-Semitism for AIPAC.
10.) Trump's Chumps have
demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and
shill for the GOP no matter what it does.
Donald Trump isn't under any pressure from these people to
change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to
participate in elections and to feel like they are "winning" that they will delude themselves like the rest of
his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself.
Four years later, Trump's Chumps are still
sitting by the phone waiting for the Donald to call back while he huddles with Steve Schwarzman and Bibi
Netanyahu. They can't see what is front of their own eyes. By going ALL IN for Trump, they wrecked, divided and
demoralized their own movement in order to advance the standard conservative policy agenda. They have been
pushed off the internet and in some cases even to the dark web. In virtually every way, they are worse off than
they were four years ago and have nothing to show for it. Insofar as they are getting more web traffic, it is
because America has only continued to deteriorate under Trump, which would have happened anyway regardless who
won in 2016.
It's not too late for Trump's Chumps to
reclaim one thing that they have lost over the past four years. They can still reclaim their self respect. They
don't have to participate in this charade a second time and mislead people who are less informed because they
now know full well that Sheldon Adelson has bought Donald Trump and the lickspittle GOP Congress.
Note:
Imagine thinking a
New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what we wanted to hear and we
believed it.
My understanding is that net foreign immigration has gone down in the last few years. Hardly a triumph, I
agree.
There are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here. Even a president who was a combination of
Jesus and Superman would find it excrutiatingly difficult to eliminate immigration under these circumstances.
All this seemed painfully obvious to me in 2016. We all know who Trump had been the first 70 years of his life
– a braggart, a reprobate and a real estate developer who loved celebrities and organized crime figures. He is
married to a high class escort from Slovenia who speaks English worse than a Mexican immigrant. This man is
going to be the savior of Western Civilization? He has always been a fraud.
@MattinLA
Trump has not even made a sincere effort. Where is the effort to stop birth right citizenship? To punish
employers who hire illegals? He doesn't try to build a coalition to stop immigration, he is clearly using it as
political issue to keep his low info base revved up, but Trump doesn't actually want it resolved. It is the
same with abortion, where both Parties are perfectly happy with the status quo because it allows each to fund
raise by pointing at the threat coming from the other side. And at the end of the day it is all about find
raising.
Pretty much an accurate article, but what Democratic Presidential Contender would have been a better choice?
The answer is none. The modern day Democratic Party, and most everyone who identifies with it, is as morally
disgusting and filthy of a political party as has ever existed on this planet. Whatever grievances you have
with DT, wait until the next Democrat gets elected President. The trifecta of Diversity (aka hate and blame
Whitey for everything), LGBTQ insanity, and Climate Change hysteria will be shoved down the throats of this
country like never before. The Obama years were just a warm-up for the cultural destruction that will happen to
this country when the next Dem gets elected.
Actually, just bring the Civil War on. Whites will either get some self-respect and stand up for themselves
before it is too late, or surrender to living in a ghetto trash culture and being ruled over by Jews and their
white hating 'POC' puppets. It's an easy choice in my book.
I started college in 1982 with nothing but high hopes for the future, by 1990 I knew something was terribly
going wrong with this country, and now I know the destruction of this country is virtually guaranteed. No good
choices, indeed, as stated above. WTF happened?
I voted for this executive. I am not ashamed of my vote. However, as someone who voted on agendas and policies,
I disappointed with the results. I knew going in there wasn't much in store for me personally by supporting the
candidate. it was a diversion at the time from the standard fare. The problem with the standard fare is that
they offered more of what were the problems. candidate Trump, actually responded to the issues echoing the same
concerns, even if in a less than civil tenor. He gave as good as he got or better. I would that had been more
substantive, but it was what it was.
There are some things that need to be cleared up in your article, most prominant of which is the fairly
loose use of straw men positions. Just a few:
–the president did not run as a conservative despite comments he made about some conservative aspects of his
own views.
–he never ever abandoned his position on same sex relations and marriage -- both of which are neither
conservative or something he campaigned on, so it was clear from the get go, he had no intention of changing
that game. What he did contend is that religious people have the same protections and they should not be cowed
–the overton window that would permit any president to openly support a condition in which skin color is the
primary or a primary point of view would violate the principles and foundation of the country. but regardless
most of the country sees that as an anathema to the what they want to country to be -- even far right
conservatives are not arguing a white nationalist perspective -- trying to weigh him down with an overton window
position that was never in play, at least not as you suggest it. The president started with a definitive lean
in that direction of sorts, but it probably did not take him, long to figure out -- he was surrounded by whites
in control of the country -- whites are not being pushed around by non-whites, inspite of having elected a
non-white executive. But still he has knee jerk responses to dismantle the nonwhites policies. He remains as
prowhite as any candidate in office. his references to how he claims to have aided nonwhites as pushback
against accusations of being "racist" makes perfect sense. That does not make him "anti-white".
–your bait and switch assail is a tad convoluted. Antifa big tech and tax cuts . . . big tech and antifa
initially responded with the same shock and vitriol as all his opposition when he was elected -- but as time has
worn big tech has moved on seeing the current exec as a nonthreat -- tax cuts proceed unimpeded. The president's
position on Jews and Israel were clear from the start and remain as they were -- one can contend he is
overboard, but there was no bait and switch. The president did not say I was not for Israel and pro limiting
immigration, he made clear he opposed illegal immigration and was proIsrael they are not competing issues . He
has simply abided by one and dragged his feet on the other, if not abandoned it all together.
There are some other issues that need addressing, not the least of which is that many of us who supported
the current executive before and now, have done so calling him out on issues where he has failed or is failing
and have done so from the start -- -
@Priss Factor
the scary part about that is blumpf and the (((deep state))) would do that to you or me too
it was sickening
to see that he seemed to have regained his self confidence from the assassination of Soleimani and was
blathering on at the SOTU as though everything was just fine, better than ever
One good thing Trump did was save us from that shrieking Valkyrie warmongering Hildabeast. If she had been
elected she would have taken it as a mandate to start a war with Russia and/or Iran. Personally I was never
voting for Trump but against Hillary.
Now that the demoncrats no longer have someone like Hillary running it would be pretty safe to vote a third
party which I plan to do this election. Screw King Cyr-ass and his Zionist claque of losers.
@MattinLA
The US economy alone (not to mention the suckiness of the culture and people) has been bad enough going back to
a year or so before the crash that net immigration, I believe, has been outward. Stupid Orange Man yelling at
people "Get outta here! You're fired!" means less when they calmly retort, "I was leaving anyway".
Happened to be in the Emerald city on Wednesday and wandered through the Seattle Convention Center .there were
so many hindoos milling about thought it was some kind of curry cooking convention.
But no .it was something
called Microsoft Ready which is Microsoft's internal marketing, technical, and sales event bringing together
over 21,000 Microsoft staff.
Had to be at least 75% dotheads with a sprinkling of turbanized Sikhs, and maybe
25% whites and asians. Asked one of the dotheads if Paul Allen would be attending this year, but just drew a
quizzical stare.
Noted in the Mr. Softie handouts that these legions of imported cut rate code scribblers are
referred to as "scientists". Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it
claiming we need more of these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers,
you know.
Trump first got my attention when he made those initial comments against the illegal invasion. But later, when
he said that Mexico was going to pay for the wall and talked about putting a "big beautiful door" in it, I
figured he was probably full of it. When he attended AIPAC, I was done.
Congress has actually condemned White Nationalism at least two or three times since Donald Trump has been
president. Far more White Nationalists have gone to prison under Donald Trump than Barack Obama. Trump has
appointed "conservative judges" like Thomas Cullen who put RAM in prison.
After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi and the
traitorous schemes of deep state actors like Weismann, Vindman, Sondland and Yovanovitch I would still vote for
Trump in the hopes that some of these traitors and others in the DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA would be prosecuted.
Hopefully, Durham will do his job before the election and we will see some of the coup plotters going to jail.
Even if that doesn't happen, a final payback to the treacherous Democrats and their propagandists in the MSM
will be another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That
alone will be enough for me.
I agree with much of the analysis I've read here, but let me offer a somewhat different perspective. The author
notes that, "Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a nationalist, populist or identitarian." This is probably true, but
it's also not necessarily a bad thing at this point if you're a contrarian of this sort.
My read of the
situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite the confident
predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last vestiges of
Reagan conservatism down with him. Even if he doesn't, Trump will almost certainly be the last republican
president due to demographic change, so it doesn't matter either way. It would make sense in that light to let
Mr. Trump run and lose on a platform of standard fare conservatism than have him be closely associated with
populism and discredit that ideology on his way out.
People forget that Donald Trump was only made possible by Mitt Romney's failure in 2012. Romney ran a
standard conservative, milquetoast campaign and lost; he was nevertheless called all manner of vile names by
the left but responded like a gentlemen. His defeat came as quite a shock to many rank and file GOPers. Fox
News had convinced them leading up to election day that they were going to win. How could they not? Romney said
all the same things Ronald Regan did and he won; he talked up the military, he repeated economic platitudes and
denounced socialism, he self-immolated over racial issues and claimed democrats were the real racists. So,
obviously, Mitt Romney should – by all rights – win just as Reagan did. Lost on them was the demographic
situation, among other things. 2012 America was not 1980 America. When Reagan won California in 1980, Los
Angeles was majority white; California had two million more white Caucasians than it does now (Trump and Reagan
received almost exactly the same number of white votes in California but with different results); the economy
for blue collar voters was better, so there was less opposition to Reaganomics.
When Romney ran as a traditional, non-offensive republican and lost, he discredited that ideology and made a
louder, more combative alternative possible. That was Donald Trump. In the minds of many republicans,
conservatism could no longer win elections, so why not go all in with a contrarian radical? I expect that
mentality to return sometime after Trump loses this November. Radical sentiment has been quieted as of late
only because normies sheepishly think they are winning. That's probably why the establishment is freaking out:
they know that won't last. You occasionally see moderate democrats asking for peace and quiet, perhaps
realizing this, but it's unfortunately not a message well-received by the fringe left who control social media
and these divisive late night network shows.
My prediction: on election night 2020, there will be a lot of shell-shocked republican normies. Either the
despised socialist is elected or a man who stokes racial animus for personal gain – Pete Buttigieg – will
become president-elect. In the minds of conservative Boomers, that wasn't supposed to happen; it's as if
someone said they could see inside the event horizon of a black hole – total violation of established physical
reality.
Impossible
or so they thought. Republican operatives are already trying to help Bernie
Sanders in both Iowa and South Carolina. They foolishly think Sanders can't win, but that's not true. I've seen
the polls. On election night, Donald Trump will have to deliver a heart-wrenching speech to his deluded
followers conceding defeat to someone they thought couldn't win.
But the Trumpslide. Qanon said to trust the plan*. We're winning. The wall. MAGA.
All exposed as lies. The sort of lies a defeated people tell themselves. Cerebral comfort food for the
weak-minded.
In the process, Donald Trump will discredit Conservatism Inc. just like Mitt Romney did in 2012. Contrarians
will escape the judgment of history and live to fight another day. Most likely, there are yet more dissident
stars on the right to be made. Some older ones may also return in the aftermath.
Considering circumstances, the best path forward (speaking as devil's advocate) is to critique the man
without vocally supporting his defeat. Let him go down fair and square. Starting in November, there will many
republicans in Trump's former base looking for an alternative. They will seek out dissidents they heard about
but dismissed as blackpillers; MAGA supporters will be sidelined. Third Way Alternatives should consider laying
out a well-reasoned, practical and achievable alternative in the present with the anticipation they will be
called upon in the near future.
However, I wouldn't count on that considering the lack of organization and drive I see on the dissident
right. Mr. Griffith's essay, for example, is filled with a strange defeated tone. It sounds as if he just wants
to go back to business as usual before Trump: do his contrarian thing without being harassed. Certainly, life
would be easier. But you would be no closer to any kind of victory, either. As the author notes, dissidents
were tolerated before Trump. But why? I think laying the full blame on Trump is not warranted. Yes, he failed
to protect his followers – that's one big reason why dissent is now being crushed. There is another reason,
however: you were winning. You were only tolerated before because you were on the wrong side of history. The
establishment didn't fear you because you couldn't challenge them. With Trump's surprise victory, the situation
changed. With that in mind, what's the point of going back to business as usual while being on a certain path
to defeat? unless you want to lose (or don't care), unless you simply want the freedom to be a contrarian
without accomplishing anything. Sounds like a grift to me, pardon the rudeness.
If you want to ineffectually complain about the ruling class on Twitter while being free of harassment, then
supporting the democrat is probably your best bet. They'll tolerate you because you don't threaten them. I
think that's what a lot of guys on the right really want, which is why they went so heavily into Yang's UBI. It
was a sort of early retirement option for them, regardless of how they justified it – get free money and cash
out, let the world burn.
*Well, that and to drink bleach to ward off the wuhan coronavirus. Do NOT trust that plan.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a neutral third party who was never involved in any of this stuff.
Idiotic article. Yeah, Trump is a Trojan horse who is making. Israel great again. Yeah, he's a fragile,
narcissistic buffoon. The only unabashed positive I can really offer is that he is in 2020, as he was in 2016,
the least bad option.
The author doesn't seem to quite get numbers. God, as they say, tends to favor the side with the biggest
battalions. Perhaps he should take a look at a demographic plot of the map of the United States circa 2020. The
truth is that, if a hyper-competent, charismatic candidate had formed a consensus around Trump's 2016 platform
in maybe 1975, the demographic trajectory of the country could have been changed. It's way, way too late for
that.
If you were stupid enough to think in 2016 that demographic realities were going to be unwound, or even that
there could consensus to address the issue in a serious unapologetic way, I really don't know what to tell you.
You're probably too stupid to be operating heavy machinery, much less posting articles on Unz. Trump's election
is Prop 187, circa 1980's. Far too little, far too late. But still the least bad option.
All there really is at this point is a rearguard action, and maybe win a skirmish here and there. In terms
of the Long War, we don't have the numbers or the consensus. Grow the fuck up.
I'm often asked by people in the US who learn I've lived outside the US the better part of three decades when I
might return to the US, to which I lightly reply, "When the Republic is restored. I guess that means never."
At the end of the day, who better than Trump can you get behind? I guess it is game over. The only problem is
that the rest of the developed world is going in the same problemmatic direction, and places like Uruguay still
have their occasionally lurches into insanity.
2.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were
right.
This is very typical. In the waning days of G.W. Bush there was a very strong hard left anti-war movement in
place, and doing well on the internet, and also had a home on some cable stations. Once Obama was elected it
faded into obscurity with-in hours, and never resurrected even as Obama become more hawkish than Bush – both
expanding the War on Terror, and codifying the Bush Doctrine.
1. Trump was a con man as a businessman. How did anyone imagine he wouldn't be a con man as
president?
2. Trump knows which side his bread is buttered. How long do you imagine he would've lasted if he actually
did the things he promised, especially ending the Amerikastani Empire, before ending like Kennedy? Six weeks?
3. Whether the author of this article, with whom I sympathise, changes any minds with it is irrelevant.
Trump is the Wall Street/military industrial complex/zionist candidate for re election, and his return to power
is being arranged even as I write this. The shambolic Daymockratic Party impeachment circus and the bad jokes
posing as candidates in their primaries have one purpose alone: to ensure a second term for Donald Trump. What
any normal person votes for is irrelevant.
A common trope on the right is that the left gets what it wants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just
witness the shenanigans the DNC is pulling in the current primaries. When Pelosi theatrically ripped up Trump's
speech in the SOTU, she shortly thereafter voted to support the efforts to destabilise Venezuela and support
the CIA-handpicked Juan Guaido.
Pro-Israel PACs have flooded the primaries attacking Bernie. CIA puppet Pete Buttigieg is against medicare
for all. Democrats do not get what they want. The only thing they get is woke rhetoric but the neoliberal
economic system and the imperialist foreign policy remains the same.
Jimmy Dore's reference to the "uniparty" is apt here. So while Mr Griffin's catalogue of Trump's various
betrayals is useful, keep in mind that the disease is bipartisan. The US is in many ways a sham democracy where
the actors perform kabuki theater. You will never get an honest say on the core principles of the system.
Regardless if you're coming from the right or the left. And the media is in on the charade.
He is so duplicitous it's mind boggling. Nancy Pelosi is right when she calls him a liar,
although she's no angel herself.
The Jewish Power structure is in total control. Trump WILL BE the final nail in USA coffin, because he is
dictating for Israel, now. Israel will make even bigger moves after he is re-elected, for sure. No doubt to
further the Yinon plan along.
I voted for him too; but will not be voting at all this year. I refuse to play into their twisted game.
They purposely caused all this Chaos to keep people distracted while Big Tech companies consolidate their
power over the internet and the Military Industrial Complex plans the next false flag to kick off the next
invasion (Iran & Syria).
My guess is that Jewish Democrats like Schiff, Nader, and proxy Nancy have all been part of this horrible
PsyOp that has been going down the last 3 years.
It doesn't matter which "side" you are on anymore because there is really only ONE SIDE.
I wouldn't feel bad about being a "Trump Chump" – there are millions of you, after all.
As someone who would
be in the Bernie/Tulsi camp if I lived in the USA (but would also be furiously opposed to being swamped by
Somalis), here's a little advice, free of charge:
You will never get anywhere being attached to a Party of Capital. They will always want to bring cheap
labour into your country, and they don't care what those immigrants do to your family. Money rules. Forget the
GOP, and start your own party.
Imagine thinking a New York City billionaire is a "populist." LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what
we wanted to hear and we believed it.
Not just a NY billionaire, but one who profited from (a) mega-banks, and (b) the ZioNazi media.
His first two reality TV stunts were WWE, and then The Apprentice. The third is his crown achievement.
You call them Trump's Chumps, I've called them TrumpTARDs, because they are fucking useless, mindlessly
idiotic fools/rednecks/inbred losers.
Fact is the country doesn't stand a chance, the "resistance" is more pathetic than the globlalists. If the
last three years has taught the world anything, it's not just how mindlessly stupid TrumpTARDs are, but how
uncivil, rude, aggressive, and downright despicable.
Nobody has harmed the conservative cause more than the Orange Satan.
All, of course, by design. What still gets me is that conservatives are to utterly stupid to fall for it. At
least the Liberals caught on that Obama was a fake early on – the TrumpTARDs just can't get enough of sucking
that Orange ZioNazi's dick.
this who thing looks related to me.. .. the Cornoavirus, the pipeline, the bombings in Syria, the libya-turkey
GNA thing, the recent airliner crash in Turkey, I feel something is surfacing
Trump proved that the nation state system is disastrous for those humans governed by it. The nation state
system is great for those few who are the puppet governors of the few that rule the world.
The problem Mr. Griffin is that the article does not recognize that USA citizens who not part of the
electoral college cannot vote for either the President or the Vice President. Amendment 12 read it.
We should Trumpet Trump because if we don't we might be next..
There are quite literally hordes of foreigners living here.
Fact is none of the fake conservatives, from the Orange Satan to the Governor of Texas, is against illegal
immigration. It would be easy enough to prosecute employers who hire illegals, but neither the Orange Satan,
nor any State, be it Wyoming or Texas, so-called "Red" (Communist) states, does anything about it.
But yet the idiot TrumpTARDs wail on and on about how the Orange Satan is their savior and how Republicans
are better than Democrats.
It's amazing how unbelievably, astoundingly stupid Americans are.
You are either stupid or lying, I believe lying. I say this because in each of your substantive attacks, you
blatantly misstate facts, even obvious ones.
Personally I am honestly and eyes open clinging to the hope that
Trump is sincerely doing his best for us, because the alternative is civil war, and if it comes to that, it
will come to that. Trump is the last possible peaceful salvation for America.
Here are your lies, which tell me you are not genuine:
> He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump has built all of
three new miles of fence,
A blatant and obvious lie to anyone who is tracking the wall progress – "refurbished" means replaced
completely ineffective fence, including vehicle barriers which you can literally walk around, with 18-30ft high
steel fence. You may jerk off to the technicality that it isn't "new", but we all see through you. Over 100
miles so far with 350 more planned, and he has done it with congress kicking and screaming. He even diverted
defense spending for this purpose, against all of Washington's whining and complaining. These are the actions
of someone who is sincere.
>there have been no cuts to legal immigration
Bull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018 down
another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an entire
bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him. He didn't even get a law to sign and he still cut legal immigration by
almost HALF. I can hardly believe it myself it's too good to be true. Why lie?
>Donald Trump hasn't even deported as many illegal aliens as Obama.
You know as well as I do that Obama changed the reporting of deportations to include 'voluntary returns'.
Obama deported virtually no one from the interior. Regardless, more importantly, we both know how aggressively
both parties and the bureaucracy have fought to prevent Trump from taking action, and yet against all odds he
secured agreements with Honduras El Salvador and Guatemala to deport "Asylum seekers" there, making an end run
around the legal labyrinth that was keeping them here. That is HUGE and you completely omit it.
You also omitted –
Starting a trade war with China
Supporting the break up of the EU
Demanding funds from allies under our umbrella
Not starting a war in Syria or Iran, both of which they desperately tried to force him into
But most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the entire
establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
That is the main reason I still have hope. Your lies bald face lies are why I do not believe you are
sincere.
I love it that the jew and the fag won in Iowa. Of course, I don't love that Trump will probably win in Nov.
but the options to him are dismal to say the least. No matter what, once he's out of office the days of this
"republic"/empire are surely numbered.
I disagree that voting for Mr Trump was a mistake. American elections are always a choice of evils, but in this
case it was more a choice between rapid extinction of our species and run-of-the-mill evil, killing only the
odd million people now and then.
I personally take this cartoon very seriously indeed:
If Hillary Clinton had become President, I believe she would have found a way to start a war with Russia.
And that would have resulted in the death of all human beings, plus many other species.
Mr Trump is execrable, it is true. But he has one enormous virtue: for whatever reason, he is extremely open
and candid. Whereas US presidents going back to the 19th century did frightful things while smiling genially
and pretending to be kind, Mr Trump openly admits how frightful he and his deeds are.
That is hastening the demise of the US empire, which is in the interests of all human beings.
@MattinLA
There are certainly no easy choices. As a foreigner I am hardly in a position to criticize, let alone to
encourage US citizens. But perhaps I could remind you of an early President during whose 8 years in power not a
single American or foreigner was killed by the US government?
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years
without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be
discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such
misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. What country before ever
existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are
not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The
remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or
two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its
natural manure".
– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover's Jefferson On
Democracy
@MattinLA
IOW, you're going to vote again? For Mr. Trump?
"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will
hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our
ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex.
Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for
liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing
Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be
blamed on bipartisan politics."
Linh Dinh, "Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President," June 12, 2016, @ The Unz Review.
All the system needs is for you to pick Red or Blue, accepting the results until the next Most Important
Election Ever.
As a first time voter in 2016, Trump's relative inaction on all that he promised has made me more aware than
ever of the rot that has set in our political system. I was skeptical that political change could be
accomplished prior to 2016 but optimistic. Now I cannot be anymore pessimistic about the future.
@Chet Roman
" another conservative judge on the Supreme Court; a change that will impact the next 30+ years. That alone
will be enough for me."
Yeah, Right.
Like the impact of all the Republican appointees who issued the ruling in Roe v Wade?
Like the impact of Mr. Kennedy, a Republican choice who helped rewrite the legal definition of marriage?
Like the impact of Mr. Roberts, a Republican choice who nailed down Big Sickness for the pharmaceutical and
insurance industries?
What impact do you honestly expect from Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's choice who earned his first robe by
helping President Cheney with the Patriot Act?
Like the "federal" elections held every November in even-numbered years and the 5-4 decrees of the Court,
the partisan judicial nominations and nailbiting confirmation hearings are another part of the RedBlue puppet
show that keeps people like Chet Roman voting in the next Most Important Election Ever.
Your disappointment is the inverse of your expectations. Perhaps you should curb your enthusiasm? So what's
next? Join the Communists? Boycott the system? That will teach them! Trump is the best looking horse in the
glue factory. Do you see a candidate you like better?
The effort to remove Trump from office began before he was even sworn in. In terms of intensity the effort has
been unlike anything any of us have ever seen. And that effort has come relentlessly, from all sides. The
media, the late night comics, the intelligence services, the kritarchy, the bureaucracy they have been united
in thwarting Trump's every move, united in flogging an entirely bogus Russian collusion investigation from his
first day in office. And they IMPEACHED the man over nonsense, for crying out loud.
The most powerful elements in this country have thrown, and continue to throw, everything they've got at
him. They have brought this country to the brink of a cataclysm for their hatred of Donald Trump and their
overriding desire to see him removed from power and his voters punished. Their hatred alone is reason enough to
continue to support Trump.
It was a miracle Donald Trump won the presidency. It is a miracle he is still in office. And a miracle is
the only thing that can save us.
Do you not remember how utterly hopeless things seemed in 2015? How completely we'd been beaten? There was
zero chance the immigration tide could be stopped, for one thing. Do you not realize that it is a miracle that
things are slightly less hopeless now? A miracle that, in 2020, we aren't beaten quite so completely? That, by
some miracle, the chance of achieving an immigration time-out within the next four years is now greater than
zero?
Any Trump supporter who turns on Trump because he disapproves of the job Trump has done as president just
shows his own fractiousness, because, in truth, Trump has not yet had a chance to be president. And
politically, turning on Trump is particularly boneheaded given there is absolutely no alternative and we are
out of miracles.
@Divine Right
The GOP donors would never allow a fully-fledged White populist candidate to slip through the net, Trump was
never such a thing which is why he managed to win the primaries.
By the time the boomers die off, it will be too late and even a White Rights candidate would never won as
the demographics will have shifted so much, and this is assuming Whites start skewing towards GOP on the same
way Blacks skew towards Democrats. In reality the younger Whites still have the virus of individuality in their
minds, thinking that politics is about high-minded ideas instead of group interests.
Poor Brad. I spent all that same time trying desperately to show you how far off you were in the support of an
obvious jew water carrier. Twitter (until they dumped me) and then even signing up for your blog.
I left
comment after comment with valuable information, obvious and thorough.
You ignored it all, even in the face of its blatant OBVIOUSNESS. You were a Drumpfter and with Trump saying
just the right thing, you could probably go back.
It is why I left your site and won't go back. You spent years being totally WRONG.
Reading this is like reading the words of a guilty man who was too stupid to see what was truly right in
front of your face. Or one that knew all along but had a different agenda.
Either way, you have zero credibility or discernment when it comes to politics, so why don't you just keep
it to yourself.
Me, a dumb ole redneck, called it in Aug 2015 and didn't stop trying to warn the world of this OBVIOUSNESS.
You know it and I know it.
Some strong points here, not all of them, but a number.
"He has been a disappointment on all fronts."
No statement could be more accurate.
Trump is a failure, but one with a very loud mouth and a rather twisted psychology that magically converts
all failures into successes. Nothing factual ever fazes him.
And the ability to just keep going is a great asset in politics, even if it means you keep going to do
destructive things. You actions communicate strength and purpose and determination to ordinary people.
After all, much of the ordinary public literally has no idea what is going on, abroad or at home, so poorly
informed are they by the mainline press and the political establishment.
He does a daily war dance of self-praise, finding new phrases to whoop and chant, describing his almost
complete failure in the opposite terms.
But because he is doing overall the power establishment's work – against China, against Iran, against
Russia, for Israel, and in Latin America – they not only do not oppose him, they support him.
He does his work rudely and utterly without grace.
He is a man who wears his ignorance as though it were a finely-tailored suit.
But the power establishment is okay with the grotesque style, so long as they get the results they want. And
they do.
The desired results are mainly negative, not positive, achievements.
But that is the essence of imperial America today, to do harm to others in order to improve its own relative
standing. It does almost nothing positive anymore anywhere. It threatens friends and foes alike. It destroys
international organizations and order. It supports the creation of chaos, as in Syria or Libya or Yemen.
The contrast of America's now-constant threats and hostilities with China's great Belt and Rail Initiative
couldn't be starker. Or with Putin's pragmatic "live and let live" philosophy. We see destruction versus
creation. Coercion versus cooperation. Ignorance versus information. Darkness versus light.
So, Trump, with all of grotesqueries and lies, provides almost the perfect President.
Sorry, America, but that is a very great, if ugly, truth.
"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and
the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two
parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election
without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy .Then it should be possible to replace it, every
four years if necessary, by the other party which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new
vigor, approximately the same basic policies." Carroll Quigley
And so it goes ..at least until enough people
start to understand/believe that the government is their enemy, never their friend , and that a completely
unlimited government [i.e. what we currently endure], regardless of who is president, will continue to take
more of their money and freedom away on a daily basis because:
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting
[central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams
which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
Sadly, it doesn't matter who we vote for as the jewing will continue unabated.
Proof of this is to always
ask, "Who benefits?"
And the answer is ALWAYS the jews, and the answer is NEVER white people.
Once you understand what the jews want, what their interests are, and you see that everything that happens
seems to be good for the jews, you realize that this awful system is anti-white to the core and it's been
engineered by the nose for the nose. There is no other way to explain the fact that the interests of white
people are NEVER honored. In fact, the interests of white people are not even given a passing thought.
I knew it was going south in a hurry when he moved into the white house and turned it into something resembling
a synagogue.
As an outsider, watching media reporting on American politics, I find myself wondering if I'm
not actually viewing Israeli political news. How do Americans not notice this?
Trump's supposed conflict with congress to get funding for the border wall is just a kosher psyop designed to
give off the illusion that he is fighting to uphold his campaign promises, when in reality he's just carrying
out the jews white genocidal program. He's no different than Obama. Black or white, they take orders from the
same political class: the Jews who control the money, the policies, and the media.
But what's most sickening
about all this is that the same congress that unanimously votes to give untold billions to Israel in foreign
military aid is now telling the American people that there is just not enough money to fund a border wall !
Israel first, America last, that's how congress works.
Why don't the Jews want a strong US border wall built ? Because the JEWS want to genocide White Christian
Americans through mass illegal immigration. Why ? Because non-white third world people have lower-iq's and are
easier for the Jews to control and make slaves out of.
( Destabilizing society for political gains- Offering stupid people free everything will always get votes, and
they know this. )
Funding for the US border wall could be solved overnight by removing Jewish control over the monetary system
and cancelling all foreign aid to Israel, but don't except that to happen anytime soon. Nothing has changed
since Trump has become president and nothing will. Illegal immigration, poverty, unemployment and wars will
accelerate under Trump because those are the natural consequences of following the orders of America hating
Jews. Trump isn't playing some 4d chess strategy and all those who still say this are blind, deaf and dumb. The
Jews are still in full control of the Federal Reserve and by extension the media, government, courts, law
enforcement, education etc. Stop living in a fantasy land and face the facts.
As it was with Bush,Clinton and Obama, the United States is still a vassal state of Israel and controlled by
the Jews. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation. Democracy means Jewish control that breaks down to
which political candidate gets the most jewish money and jewish media coverage. The Jews pick our presidents,
it doesn't matter if a republican or democrat gets elected, each party is only concerned with advancing the
Jewish world government agenda.
@Priss Factor
Regarding Gen. Soleimani, a true martyr, you should have seen how insultingly the moronic ABC World News anchor
David Muir brought up the name of Gen. Soleimani at last night's DNC debate. And none of the candidates
bothered to correct Muir.
@Gleimhart Mantooso
Keep wallowing in hate and ignorance. Muslims are the only people outside of Christians who revere Jesus,
albeit not as god jr. but as as a mighty prophet.
For sure, Trump has been less than impressive on all fronts. At least he hasn't committed the US to an all-out
war with Iran, but I strongly suspect he will do so after he is re-elected.
As far as
actual
unemployment, January 2020 remains at a stable 21% and all the bs about 3.5% is the usual smoke-and-mirrors:
I think the establishment is once again giving the American voter no real alternatives (but isn't that the
point?). Do you want Trump or a Jewish communist, Trump or Indiana's little Peewee Buttfudge? Whatever. The
final result will always be "X" is president in a White House filled with zionists. Everything American
crumbles while the Israelis continue the dance they started on 9/11.
Machiavelli wrote that the best people to take power are not the best people to run the government. The
implication is precisely that: use the chumps and then discard them.
Despite all the technology, some things
haven't changed.
@Divine Right
" My read of the situation is that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the general election, despite
the confident predictions of an incoming Trumpslide by deluded supporters. In his defeat, he'll take the last
vestiges of Reagan conservatism down with him "
Your comment is very interesting. While I didn't like it
emotionally. Intellectually it was excellent.
I have all of the same complaints as Brad Griffin. I have to admit my perfidy as I have at times believed in
Q and other times I haven't. Right now I'm at the, we'll see, stage as I have no idea what is going to happen
and if he so wished Trump could fall on the deep State like a bear trap. If he is going to do this then the
delay til he can get in a more honest set of judges and push out some the worst of the actors makes sense. Even
his wishy washy staffing the place to the gills with Jews and inconsistent policies. He has several times
stated positions and done things that have put his enemies in very awkward positions that are difficult to
weasel out of. He could still take down portions of the deep State. We'll have to see but I admit it doesn't
look good.
Former CIA head William Casey once said, and it is verified, something like that when no one knows what the
truth is the CIA had done it's job. I think we are at that stage now.
If Trump does not reign in the deep State, meaning the Jews for all practical purposes, or even if he loses
the election I suspect strongly that a vast tsunami of Whites will instantly lose faith in government. I think
it likely that if Trump loses it will be a psychic shock.
If Trump has no plan to take on the deep State and Q is just a deep State actor to delay the day of
reckoning I hope Trump does lose.
There's a path, a very scary one, that may be what Q is all about if he is a deep State actor. Computer
power has continued to increase combined with neural nets computing. The time line for a $1,000 computer chip
with the computing power of a human is 2025. It may be off by a little but it will happen. If when this happens
and the Jews are still in control they could, combined with 5G, build what ever robot army they wished for
around 10 or 20 thousand dollars a piece and murder us all. Elon Musk global network in space would also allow
them global dominance. I've always been suspicious of Elon being a Jew while supporting what he is doing as
being good for the country. When he immigrated to Canada from South Africa he first had a job at a bank
supposedly with one of this relatives. He also has been extremely capable in raising vast sums of capital. Jews
are much more able to do this due to nepotism. He denies being a Jew.
Trump is very much a chump and a liar, as pretty much every president has been from the beginning. This will
include supposed great presidents like Lincoln, Wilson, Teddy and FD Roosevelt, Reagan, Obama, and yes, even
the vaunted JFK.
The problem is and always has been "Murkans" find themselves a political party and basically sign up for
life. They never seem to learn no matter who is put into office, the slow slide to a full blown Marxist type
Oligarchy marches on. I cannot fathom why people go to political rallies and wave and cheer for known liars and
charlatans, hanging on their every promise as if it came from God himself.
Nothing is ever going to change in this country until the corporate money is eliminated from politics, until
lobbying for political favors is made illegal, until BOTH corrupt political parties currently running America
are shown the ash heap of history, AND until people realize there is more politics than marking a ballot.
This country will only be made well when the citizens start attending city, county, and state government
meetings and demand the constitution be upheld. Without our involvement at every level of government, it is
easy for the shysters and crooks to grow fat through graft and corruption.
The choice is ours and ours alone, but if history is any indicator of what will be, I say we be in deep
shit.
Bull shit. Blatant lie. 2017 saw a 10% decrease in net migration from 1046 million to 930 million. 2018
down another 25% to 700 million, and 2019 15% to 600 million. That's God damn good work for a man with an
entire bureaucracy and 2 parties fighting him
Where's the link for this claim? At the 2019 SOTU Trump bragged that immigrants would be coming to the USA
in "the largest numbers ever" under his administration.
Candidate Trump vowed to end H1B visas but president Trump now supports expanding the program. Candidate
Trump vowed to deport Dreamers and all other illegal aliens. Candidate Trump says he'll work with Congress to
allow Dreamers to stay in the U.S. and avoid deportation.
But most of all, you ignored the fact that the entire intelligence apparatus, the entire media, the
entire establishment has sacrificed their credibility in the attack on Trump.
Outside of a few of exceptions like Comey, Strzok and McCabe there's been almost no consequences for any
crazy leftists or deep state operatives for attacking Trump. At most, some (((MSM))) talking heads have
suffered decreased viewership, but that hasn't slowed them down one iota while the FBI has viciously retaliated
against high profile Trump supporters like Mike Flynn and Roger Stone.
I thought Trump was going to go after Hillary if elected and "lock her up?" That was just one of his many
lies and dog whistles.
Yes, Trump is an idiot I know well. I spent a day with him.
The real problem has been, when we have a
candidate that would be good for America, the Jews and the Jewish controlled media destroy him, and the people
do not react appropriately.
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader all offered their talents for the job. See what happened?
Trump is not the problem. He's the symptom.
Go after the root.
Gerhard Menuhin understood this well enough he named his book accordingly.
Because life is relatively short, the people adapt a "go along to get along" mentality. They fear losing
their rice bowl (job) so they act like coolies (slaves).
People need to change the essential failing thinking only of themselves.
Better to be a martyr once than a slave 10,000 times.
Since both parties are hopelessly corrupt enemies of the people, I vote third party if I can, so I didn't vote
for Trump but I was glad he beat Hillary, because Hillary was a known evil, and Trump? I liked his campaign
promises, to make friends with Russia, to get out of NATO, to stop the "stupid" Mideast wars, to echo Lindbergh
by his motto "America First", which promised a kind of paleo-conservative "isolationism", i.e., stay home, mind
our own business, stop policing the world with regime-change wars. I wrote off his Border Fence as unworkable.
And he started off well. He called most TV news Fake News. He said Media was "the enemy of the people". Wow!
What other politician told such a truth? He met with Putin in Helsinki and believed Putin's word over his own
"Intelligence", and Wow!, again. But it didn't last. His enemies were after him (Russia! Russia! Russia!) from
Day One, and after the Putin meeting FBI and CIA and Media all called him a TRAITOR! Media bad-mouthed him 24/7
for months, and I believe Trump finally caved, joined our enemies in the Swamp he had promised to drain,
because he didn't have the balls to stand up to the constant, unrelenting pressure on him. His first choices
for Secty of State,of Defense, were okay, but then he hired the awful Bolton and then the noxious Pompeo, he
surrounded himself with the loyal-to-Israel Neocons, and now Netanyahu is our President, not Trump.
So he has
become just another enemy of the people. If Bernie is screwed out of the Dem nomination, as he was last time, I
hope he starts a Third Party, with Ron Paul as his Vice, and Tulsi Gabbard as Secty of State.
@Gizmo880
Add to that, who would champion any of these changes in either chamber of Congress? This article perfectly
reflects the adolescent whining that permeates the unz site that everything is not going exactly as I want.
You deserve to be drunk on the junk offered by the Drumpf a narcissistic hedonist from Manhattan in real
estate business (where 9 out of 10 largest real estate enterprises are owned by Jews), who was desperate at
times to hold on to that thing which is most dear to him, the title of unmitigated billionaire, and which could
not be hold on to without the blessings of the Central Park "rabbis" and one who had married non-native white
women of dubious origin (possibly Jewish), at least 2 out of 3 times and a man who wasn't known for his
christian (assuming he is one) piety or charity was suddenly the savior of the White nationalists.
You're
right about one thing: give a drowning (White nationalist) man enough rope and he will hang himself!
@nsa
Trumpstein actually did something about the H1B visa program .he increased it claiming we need more of
these half priced "brainiacs". Can't find enough discount American code scribblers, you know.
Bingo.
BTW, back in the mid 00s when I had certifications in C# programming and SQL, my phone was literally ringing
off the hook with job offers and I never went more than 1 week without a contract job. In the following years
working for a large company in the industry, I gained even more experience in other things in IT that
interested me such as machine learning, parallel programming and cloud computing.
When that company went south in 2016 I lost my job. Furiously searching for a job, it took NINE months
before I landed another. When I talked with all the local head-hunting contractor firms and IT placement
companies, they all told me the same story: all the local companies are pretty much only hiring H1B's now in
their IT departments.
Absolutely disgusting.
That along with many other things that I've seen since 2016 have convinced me that my children have no
future here in this shithole country.
In the final two years of the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social
media and was brimming with energy.
Yes, in service to Hillary and the Democrats. Not all who called themselves alt-right, but beyond question
it was a "movement" that was and still is wholly compromised. I know it's hard for you to hear, and despite
whatever else he peddled, Freud was on to something when it came to Projection.
It doesn't surprise me that this author has memory-holed his movement's high water mark -- Hillary's
alt-right speech. Throughout the 2016 campaign, while little went Hillary's way, she consistently drew royal
straight flushes, with David Duke, Richard Spencer and various other agents-provocateur, going on CNN and MSNBC
declaring their support for Trump.
Here's your buddy Richard Spencer days after Trump won the election:
A word to the wise, anyone who didn't know to whom this character belongs, and long before this moment,
should assiduously avoid the word 'chump.'
I won't paint with a broad brush. To the extent that anyone cares, it was and remains rather easy to figure
out which in the so-called alt-right can't be trusted. Whether because the FBI or someone else has them by the
short-hairs, or they're Leninist/Stalinist filth doing their part for the cause.
That includes those writing articles like this, lamenting that Trump betrayed you after you voted for him by
being a great president for African Americans too.
Timing is rarely coincidental. Thus this jibber jabber comes just after Trump defeated the latest coup
attempt and even Democrat allied-media is finally forced to begin to concede that he'll win reelection.
Trump will do so with historic support from blacks and Hispanics (for a Republican). Which is why Democrats
and their allied-media are again feverishly pushing their "white nationalist" button again.
Any day now the "GOD EMPEROR (!!!)" is going to "UNLEASH THE STORM!!!"
Oh, yeah, sure some Jews get beat up in midtown Manhattan and Trump swings into action quicker than whale
shit thru an ice floe passing EOs that end up practically paving the way to make it illegal to criticize Jews
Um, OK he sure was quick and decisive for them.
But surely he will get around to doing something for the goys too!!!
The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political
correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of "nationalism" and "populism."
Well then you
are
a chump. The only tactical reason to have voted for Trump was
to deny Hillary
Clinton executive power
. That was the sole reason any conservative or rightist had to participate in Our
National Sham. To believe that he was going to reintroduce "nigger" to the national lexicon by 2018 was
head-in-the-clouds foolishness.
Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the
other side have all come off. There is no longer any subterfuge about the Unholy Trinity of the Far Left,
meaning the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and the hostage institutions such as academia and
local/state government. The rabid doubling-down of the anti-white Deep State – unthinkable with a nabob like
McConnell or Romney in the Oval Office – is another plus to the Trump Administration: what the talking heads
all nervously refer to as the "deep divisions" in our country is one of the few signs of mental health and
vitality America has experienced in a half-century's worth of decline.
Nobody was going to reverse that half-century in three or four years – it was a physical impossibility; just
as no one was going to pry off Team Shmuel's death-grip without at least pretending not to. Ten
years
would be insufficient for such tasks. But it doesn't mean you petulantly vow to starve yourself because half a
loaf is an insult.
*= it's rarely brought up but his quietly appointing centrist/conservative judges to the bench, boring as it
may seem to tiki-torch revolutionaries, still represents an important step in the right direction and is
probably his
second
major contribution to the struggle,
Trump is the reincarnation of the Roman emperor Caligula and the present government of the ZUS is a
reincarnation of the later days of the Roman empire, in every way!
@MattinLA
America has faced problem like this in the past It will solve the problem in similar or identical terms . Thats
what it does It provides a ruse . Now the ruse is not covering the corners of the lying lips even before next
set of problems emerge straight from the solution.
Trump isn't a god and there's so much to criticize about his track record, all true. But at minimum, Trump did
delay the socialist takeover of the federal judiciary. As disgusting as his kowtowing has been of the neocons
that control the Deep State, the invasion of Iran has still yet to materialize. How would a Hillary presidency
have fared with Scalia's replacement and a no-fly zone over Syria? Good bye First and Second Amendment. The
alternative to Trump is grim.
@Tom Welsh
As bad as Trumpstein is, and make no mistake, the cuckold for Coco-Zionists is bad, Clinton and company would
have been even worse. In 2020 we have anti-White demsheviks like Butt-Plug, the first openly homosexual
candidate for Prez, Warren, Biden and flat out commie Jew, Sanders, and Jew Bloomberg. I guess the Jew is ready
to come out of the shadows and openly run for Prez just like homosexual Butt-Plug. Of course it could be said
that we have a Jew as POTUS right now, President Baby Nut&Yahoo and his VP Jared Kushner.
The biggest thing
Trumpstein has done as Prez is expose how fake the Jew media is, but lets not kid ourselves, with the exception
of Tucker Carlson ( even Tucker doesn't tell the total truth and he won't touch the JQ) even the neocons at FOX
and OAN don't tell the complete truth, and sometimes they do more harm by telling 90% truth and 10% lies than
commie anti-White networks like CNN, MSNBC and all the rest.
Trumpstein is a native New Yorker, what did you really expect?? The guy has been around criminal Jews all
his life, he has Jew lawyers, his daughter has converted to Judaism and she married an orthodox Jew. As bad as
our past Presidents were, some claim LBJ, FDR, and even Eisenhower might have been Jews or had Jewish blood
flowing through their shabbos goy veins, Trump might be the biggest cuckold yet when it comes to the biggest
shabbos goy Prez of all time.
Until a UNITED STATES PRESIDENT OR OFFICIAL GOES AFTER GEORGE SOROS AND THE LIKE AND SERIOUSLY SEEKS TO
IMPRISON HIM AND OTHERS FOR FLOODING OUR COUNTRY WITH ILLEGAL INVADERS, WE DON'T HAVE A LEGIT PRESIDENT.
Do you think Hitler would have stood by and allowed non-Germans or traitorous Germans to flood Germany with
Turks or Pakis and then went out and told throngs of people how he is keeping Germany first? Come on, man.
Trump is better than the alternative, BUT the new boss isn't much different than the old boss. Just another
cuckold influenced by his Jewish masters and Jewish money.
@Priss Factor
It's amusing to read the rabid Trump haters on the right. They have a better option?
Some of the Trump haters
say we should just let the whole thing burn down and that Trump is controlled opposition delaying the
inevitable and preferred civil war. These are people that won't give up their Netflix, won't give up whatever
outlet Game of Thrones is on and won't even put down their IPhone. It's absurd.
Trump is a fat-assed, baby boomer politician whore for the evil and immoral globalizer treasonites in the
JEW/WASP ruling class of the American Empire.
Trump has been screaming like a three dollar whore politician
about flooding the USA with mass legal immigration "in the largest numbers ever."
Trump has refused to deport the upwards of 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA.
Trump has kept the American Empire garrisons and bases forward deployed and stuck in muck hole regions of
the globe.
Trump has put the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the American Empire.
Trump is a bought and paid for three dollar whore politician for Jew billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul
Singer and Bernie Marcus and other billionaire bastards.
Trump has kept his fat mouth shut about the Fed-created and monetary policy induced asset bubbles in stocks,
bonds and real estate. In 2016, fat ass baby boomer bastard Trumpy was calling these same damn asset bubbles
nothing but "fat, ugly bubbles." In 2016 Trump said "we are in a big, fat, ugly bubble" and the asset bubbles
in stocks, bonds and real estate are only bigger and uglier and fatter now.
I hereby challenge baby boomer fat ass Trumpy -- and Teddy Cruz, Marco Rubio, Dan Crenshaw, Tom Cotton and
any other GOP puke who wants to show up -- to a debate on mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration,
tax policy, trade policy, foreign policy, monetary policy, American national identity, multicultural mayhem,
White Genocide and any other damn thing.
Vote for CHARLES PEWITT as a Write-In candidate for president in New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina
and every other state presidential primary.
Charles Pewitt Immigration Pledge:
IMMIGRATION MORATORIUM NOW!
DEPORT ALL ILLEGAL ALIEN INVADERS NOW!
REMOVE THE FOREIGNERS NOW!
REMOVE ALL WHITES OR OTHERS THAT ARE HOSTILE TO THE EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN ANCESTRAL CORE OF THE USA
Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president of the USA has called for the immediate implementation of
a BAT SOUP FEVER BAN which will quarantine the rest of the world, including Canada and Mexico. All foreigners
currently occupying US territory will be immediately removed and they will be put on barges with baloney
sandwiches for sustenance on their long voyage back to wherever the Hell they came from. Those who have
deliberately shredded their identification -- like Pelosi shredding Trumpy's speech -- shall be put in a baloney
sandwich camp in sub-Saharan Africa and kept there indefinitely.
The Charles Pewitt write-in campaign for president has stated numerous times that open borders mass legal
immigration and open borders mass illegal immigration brings infectious diseases to the USA and this new
fangled BAT SOUP FEVER is just EBOLA with more sniffles and the walking pneumonia and the boogie woogie bat
soup fever blues.
The Charles Pewitt ban on the Bat Soup Fever People, plus all the other foreigners for good measure, will
bring massive benefits to the American people.
The Charles Pewitt ban on all foreigners in combination with a massive removal of all foreigners in the USA
will boost wages, lower housing costs, reduce income inequality, lower class sizes, protect the environment,
restore cultural cohesion, give US workers more bargaining power, reduce belly fat, reduce commuting times,
provide relief for overwhelmed hospitals and be good for regular Americans and bad for globalizer banker
money-grubbing nasty people.
The Charles Pewitt presidency will extinguish all student loan debt and pay back all student loan debt ever
paid plus 6 percent interest accrued yearly.
The Pewitt Conjured Loot Portion will grant each American citizen with all blood ancestors born in colonial
America or in the USA before 1924 the sum of ten thousand dollars a month -- tax free.
The Pewitt Tax Pledge will abolish the payroll tax and reduce federal income taxes substantially for all
Americans making below 300, 000 dollars a year. Billionaires will be declared illegal and they will be
financially liquidated and the federal corporate tax rate shall be 80 percent and 100 percent for all
corporations that have gone offshore.
God Bless America And Ban The Bat Soup Fever People Now!
Write In CHARLES PEWITT For President On Your Ballot -- God Bless The USA!
@Divine Right
If the Democrats have Pete steal the nominatin, then you can be sure they want to give Trump the election. I
dont think they control Bliombverg, more likely, he controls them so I would call him a wild card. Sanders
would win the election, but as you can see in Iowa, the criminals running the DNC, aka Hillary, are a much
bigger threat to him then Trump.
@Charles Pewitt
And you actually think that guy has a legit shot at winning? And you actually think he will be able to keep all
of his promises? The more I learn about what Hitler had to overcome to become Chancellor of Germany, you
realize that men like Hitler are rare and only come along once every couple hundreds of years. And Germany
wasn't mixed with every kind of brown and yellow race under the Sun either, America is a different animal
altogether. I am not sure if even a man like Hitler could turn America around in 2020. It will take A LOT OF
WORK TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, odds are unless we do a 180% turn, America is going out with a whimper and
sooner rather than later.
@alex in San Jose AKA Digital
Detroit
Net immigration has definitely NOT been outward. Both legal and illegal migration into the USA are still
massive, larger than the outflow from all appearances. The net result, and this is without reference to the
race or color or religion of the wave of immigrants:
a more crowded, more polluted, more expensive, less
trusting society where tens of millions of people cannot communicate effectively with each other in English and
US citizens whose families have been here for generations or even a couple centuries have a harder and harder
time finding full-time jobs with decent pay, benefits, and HAHA a pension.
@Chet Roman
After the last 3 years of seditious behavior of lying politicians like
Schiff
,
Nadler
and
Pelosi and the traitorous schemes of deep state actors like
Weismann, Vindman, Sondland
and
Yovanovitch
While I agree with your main point, what are you going to do? Vote for lil' Mike Bloomberg? Mayor Pete? LOL.
These clowns are completely controlled. Yes this system has boxed us in but Trump at least gives the illusion
of revolt, and he still isn't 100% controlled, only 99%.(Grin) Others will have to pick up the mantle of revolt
against the 'Deep State' when he is gone.
For the time being thankfully Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul and other America First types will be pushing Trump to
follow his campaign promises, however little he actually does. Because the alternative, Biden, Bloomberg, the
mayor Pete & company, is considerably worse.
The main strikes against Trump are 1. His even more fawning than
anticipated towards the Zionist beast. But most of that was predictable however regrettable. 2. His
acquiescence to the Republi'tard tax cuts which has only benefited the rich. The Republicans lost big in the
mid terms because of those cuts but 'lo and behold' Trump was still there. 3. All the other shit-lib policies
that Trump ignored or even supported, like increases in 'legal' immigration. That's the fault of his dopey
daughter and her weird Zionist/Orthodox Jew husband. With the son-in-law's one sided
'Deal of the Century'
falling flat on its face, hopefully this will hasten the moving of said weird son-in-law and dopey daughter
back to NYC 'one'. Then hopefully Trump will turn to advice from the likes of Carlson and Paul who will appeal
to his inner America First soul.
@Ragno
Thwarting Soros/Hillary remains his major contribution* to American politics: under Trump, the masks on the
other side have all ""
How has he exactly ?
Soros and Hillary occupy certain positions . Now they are gone but taken over by some other guys and gals .
It's a job . New employees still haven't been awarded the best employee award yet . That will come at the
retirement for the next set of people to carry on with the same anonymity.
We all know PNAC. How many will bother to know what the new letter head organizations the same crazy bunch
are heading now with new faces ?
Whether it is the openly anti-White demshevik candidate who wins or Trump, it is a win-win for the Jew. And our
demshevik buddies have already hinted at locking up any White who might have the temerity to whine about his or
her countries being flooded with browns, yellows and other hues of hostile third world biological weapons of
mass destruction or God any White who blasphemes the self avowed "masters of the universe" who control
America's media, much of our judicial system, and apparently own all of our serious candidates for POTUS should
face imprisonment according to some of these certifiable cuckold nutjobs. As I commented earlier, Hitler wasn't
some mentally disturbed madman who munched on carpet when enraged, he was a brilliant and brave man, but even
Hitler didn't have to overcome the odds that anyone elected as the American President has to overcome. The
Jewish dream of making America a polyglot of every kind of race under the sun with more colors than a rainbow
has become true. Hitler only had the Jew to worry about for the most part, while the American President has to
tackle not only Jewish power and influence, he has a country full of Chinese, Arabs, East Indians, Africans,
Hispanics of all sorts, just your common everyday African American with a chip on his shoulder the size of a
boulder, and all other assorted groups of malcontents demanding handouts while at the same time cursing our
nation and thinking Whitey owes them something for nothing.
Jan 20, 2017 Here's how much debt the US government added under President Obama
Based on quarterly data released by the US Treasury, the debt at the end of 2008 – just before Obama took
office – stood at roughly $10,699,805,000,000. As of the third quarter of 2016, the most recent data available,
the debt as Obama is set to leave office stood at $19,573,445,000,000.
@Trinity
The USA will thrive like never before after doing two simple things:
3 measly little hikes to the federal
funds rate and remove all the foreigners and the spawn of the foreigners.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the privately-controlled Federal Reserve Bank to raise
the federal funds rate from the current level below 2 percent to 6 percent and then to 10 percent and then to
20 percent. This whole series of asset bubbles the last 40 years can be traced back to 1981 when the federal
funds rate was 20 percent. Deliberate asset bubble implosions now!
Implode the asset bubbles and financially liquidate the greedy White nation wreckers born before 1965.
Young White Core Americans must be free of the DEBT BOMB MILLSTONE destroying their future and their
country.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the Fed to begin contracting the Fed's balance sheet and
there will be a complete halt to dollar swaps and liquidity injections and all the other monetary extremism
crud that keeps the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate inflated.
The Pewitt presidential administration shall order the immediate implementation of an immigration moratorium
and will begin the immediate deportation of all 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA. All foreigners
and their spawn shall be immediately removed from the USA and the members of the Deportation Force that puts
this policy into action will get 1 million dollars a year for their patriotic efforts.
Politics in the USA Distilled For My Fellow Americans:
DEBT and DEMOGRAPHY
Monetary Policy
Immigration Policy
The USA must get back to a population of 220 million like it was in 1978.
After Iowa, i'm unclear why anyone still thinks the DNC is interested in making any sort of meaningful change
to our system towards socialism; rest assured they are not. They blatantly committed election fraud to support
the mayor from the CIA, Pete. If he fails, they will put their full support behind Bloomberg, the very
definition of a right wing candidate. The threat to our ruling class is not Trump, its Sanders.
Trump
supports Israel, billionaires, Big Corporations, wars for Oil, Wall Street and so will the DNC candidates Pete
and Bloomberg. The rest are just wedge issues to give the masses the illusion of choice.
Anyone who believes that Donald Trump was serious about reducing our military adventurism
is deluding themselves.
The theme of forcing other countries to support our aims is central to his foreign
policy, and he escalates all conflicts in hopes of forcing others to concede. None of that
was hidden during 2016. It's also consistent with how his businesses have treated small
vendors. The Trump you see is not some creation of the deep state, or a product of
aggressive investigations. It's the Trump that has always been there. He's a bully. He's
always been a bully, and he always will be a bully.
You might have missed the evidence in 2016, but you can't pretend in 2020 that Trump is
the guy who will minimize the use of force to accomplish his goals.
But how else will the US force the other countries to renounce their sovereign status and
relinquish their economies to the extractive, parasitic greed of Wall Street? Andrew
Mellon's brother, Richard, used to say that being in the business of steel making, one
needs a machine gun... When one seeks to be the Hegemon (ultimate monopolist), one needs
"full spectrum dominance"!
"We need to recognize that our hyper-militarized foreign policy achieves nothing except to
foment more conflict that kills and displaces innocent people in huge numbers."
That's called a "self-licking ice cream cone". The more you spend on something to fix
something else, it only causes an increase in the something else, which causes you to have
to spend more. It is the entire basis of the US defense, healthcare and legal markets.
The diehard Trump fans placed too much hope and faith in the miscreant's foreign policy. They
thought voting for the buffoon was a way of securing rapprochement with Russia and less
militarism. Let's face it, in 2016 the two nominees were reprehensible–there was NO
good choice. The electorate could choose the terrible warmonger Hillary, who would accelerate
Obama's imperialist policies against Russia, China, and the Middle East or they could vote
for the "phony" supposed non-interventionist.
The bottomline as always is that the "winner" is completely subjugated to the foreign
policy whims of the security/surveillance state. It's naive to think otherwise. During the
last three years there's been an internal conflict between various factions of the
military/security/ surveillance state, but generally speaking they've done quite well under
Trump. In fact, when it comes to foreign policy it's almost as if Hillary had been elected
..
I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm a little worried about Donald Trump. I'm
worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing
accident.
Food poisoning is another possibility. Or he could overdose on prescription medication. A
tanning bed mishap is not out of the question.
He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a
lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa. The Russians could spray him
with that Novichok perfume.
There are any number of ways he could snuff it.
I don't mean to sound alarmist, but the Resistance is running out of non-lethal options for
removing Donald Trump from office. Here they are, in no particular order
Cute, but seriously: Trump has been pretty much hammered into toeing the party line. The
oligarchy still doesn't like him, and it has taken a lot of effort to reign in him, but
rhetoric aside he's currently governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have. The borders are
still open to illegal immigrants and the rich have their cheap labor, we're still wasting
trillions on pointless winless foreign wars, our manufacturing base is pretty much hollowed
out, we're still shoveling trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to Wall
Street, big medicine is still busy with organized looting ('surprise medical billing',
anyone?), you get the idea.
Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. The 2020 election looks to be yet another heads
they win/tails we lose circus. Trump is in no danger, IMHO.
Unless Bernie gets the nomination. Now there's a politician that needs to worry about his
health
You're overlooking the obvious contingency plan for the Dems: Biden will recruit Terry Crews
or Tiny Lister for his VP candidate. Of course the Veep will have to dress transgender and
change their name to Cornpop, but that's a small price to pay. The future of the country is
at stake.
It has become clear to Bernie's supporters that they and the Deplorables have the same
enemies. The more the media demonize Bernie in the same way they demonize Trump the stronger
Bernie will become. Bernie doesn't need to be in Iowa. CNN and the NYT are working for him.
Fake news is also stupid news.
CJ Hopkins has to be one of the best political commentators alive today. His writing is
both hilarious and profound. No easy fete.
Yes, absolutely exquisite use of the language to ridicule the ridiculous "resistance."
Clearly, Andy Kaufmann (aka Latka Gravis) did not die: he slinked away to politics and
took on the mantle of Schifty the Popeyed Crackpot California Congressman.
Hopkins entertainingly finds the black humor in all of this -- but none of it is funny, even
darkly so -- the reason it isn't funny is that millions of decent, hard-working Americans are
chained to this amoral freak show via the coercive tax system.
Well nothing of value would be lost Trump hasn't drained the swamp, locked her up, or built
the wall. In fact the only people that have been arrested are Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
I was going to add a string of "lols" tied together, but this place is classier than that.
Honestly it might be a good thing, because then Pence would be president. Think about it,
then the Evangelicals who the GoP relies on their vote, but have also been strung along for
decades getting none of the social issues addressed while, and then also being blamed for
everything from war in the Middle East to every social problem. I think it would be good for
them to see the righteous avatar Pence ascend to the throne, and then completely shun and
ignore them. Maybe that will finally wake them up.
When/where did he ever talk about reducing the Federal government to its original
constitutional functions? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about re-enforcing the Bill of Rights on the Feds? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the income tax and the IRS? Never.
When/where did he ever talk about getting rid of the FBI, the CIA, the Federal Reserve,
the NSA, the FDA, the CDC, the EPA [all unconstitutional] etc.etc. etc. ad infinitum? Never,
that's when.
He's just another in a long line of big-mouthed, self-important scam artists –
always, was, and always will be.
I feel sorry for the naive individuals who were fooled, and those who continue to be
fooled. Maybe at least some of them have now learned a valuable lesson.
@TG I said over a
year ago, around the time this Orange Cuck Master gave that SOTU speech and reversed almost
every policy promise he made to his 63 million supporters on his #1 most important issue,
i.e., the border wall, deporting illegals, ending DACA on day one, drastically reducing legal
immigration – which is even more destructive to the future of the GOP to win any more
elections than is illegal immigration, the whole package that got people off their sofas and
down to the polls to vote for him – that it was obvious to me that the globalist deep
state had finally gotten their hands on some kind of leverage over him and had finally put
their dog collar around his Orange lying neck.
Was it related to Jeffrey Epstein? Who knows. I'm sure it is possible, with the way
degenerate behavior seems to now run amok within the super rich and elitist circles. Heck,
the morals of the entire country have pretty much descended into the sewer these days.
I think we are in the last days of this empire's history. I see no White knight waiting in
the wings who will ride to the rescue, and if one did emerge – only half of the country
would support them and the other half of totalitarian, sexual and moral degenerates would
want to kill him.
What we need is a collapse and breakup of America.
@Nancy O'Brien
Simpson Sept 24, 2019: "The future does not belong to the globalists." -Donald
Trump declares during his speech to UN General Assembly
Sept 24 later that day: "The President must be held accountable" -Nancy Pelosi
declares during her official launch of impeachment inquiry
Globalism is the ideological, economic and political platform thru which the 'Empire of
the 0.1%' best achieves the looting and subjugation of the rest.
So in spite of all his other offerings to them, the Elites still desperately want Trump
out. That's why.
The "Crush Bernie" movement is just getting started, but you can tell the Resistance
isn't screwing around. Hillary Clinton just officially launched her national "Nobody Likes
Bernie" campaign at the star-studded 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Influential Jewish
journalists like Bari Weiss and Jeffrey Goldberg, and Ronald Lauder's newly-founded
Anti-Semitism Accountability Project, have been Hitlerizing him, or, rather, Corbynizing
him. Obama has promised to "stop him," if necessary. MSNBC anchor Joy Reid brought on a
professional "body language expert" to phrenologize Sanders "live" on the air and, as I
said, they're just getting started.
Considering that nearly everything described happened to Trump in a similar manner. So two
ways of looking at this: Bernie should be able to easily get above this since Trump managed
to win despite a similar campaign, or accepting that Bernie is screwed and wonder if Trump
was initially treated fairly.
@Dutch Boy I like
some of Bernie's political stances, there are two of them, only two. But, they pale into
insignificance in comparison to the near hundred of other utterly inane and unworkable
political stances / policies which he advocates.
I'm a pretty run of the mill American. And, I'm an independent voter, although I lean
conservative. So, I don't believe my below expressed assessment and prediction is anything
but mainstream.
Bernie's toast and he's toast even without what appears to be a very concerted campaign by
the elites and the Democrats (hahaha, a distinction without a difference) to end any chance
that he'll be nominated.
As the author correctly points out, Trump will be re-elected if he survives the next 9
months to stand for re-election.
That said, Mr. Trump appears to be willing to betray his 2016 campaign position on
opposing America's endless wars as he appears to be willing to start a war with Iran. I feel
betrayed. If I'd have wanted more foreign wars and/or the deepening of already existing
foreign wars I'd have voted for Killary.
So, although I'll vote in the 2020 Federal elections, I'll leave the check boxes for
President on the ballot unchecked.
Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning:
"For a guy who couldn't get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn't get
approved for anything since, 'begged' me for a non Senate approved job, which I gave him
despite many saying 'Don't do it, sir,' takes the job, mistakenly says 'Libyan Model' on T.V.,
and ... many more mistakes of judgement [sic], gets fired because frankly, if I listened to
him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty &
untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?"
IMO, Trump is a fantastic POTUS for this day and age, but he wasn't on his A game when he
brought Bolton onboard. He should have known better and, was, apparently, warned. Maybe Trump
thought he could control him and use him as a threatening pit bull. Mistake. Bolton is greedy
as well as vindictive.
"... A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it." ..."
"... Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid . ..."
"... The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change. ..."
"... The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle. ..."
"... the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office. ..."
"... The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. ..."
"... But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day." ..."
"... Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement. ..."
"... And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth." ..."
"... One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000. ..."
"... Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world ..."
"... At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad. ..."
There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump's surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander
Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America's neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces
from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the
president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.
Indeed, this past summer, Trump's anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained
from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson
declared , "Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran." Carlson went on to condemn
the hawks in Trump's Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on -- familiar names to anyone who has followed
the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power
over the globe. "So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?"
he asked. "One of [the hawks'] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend
of Bill Kristol's. Together they helped plan the Iraq War."
By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was
on the outs. Carlson was on the president's North Korean junket, while Trump's national security adviser was in Mongolia. "John Bolton
is absolutely a hawk,"
Trump
told NBC in June. "If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK?" In September, Bolton was fired.
The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons' belligerent approach to global affairs,
much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump
for "bluffing" through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. "The
idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true,"
Bolton told Axios . Then Trump ordered the drone
strike on Soleimani, drastically escalating a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. All of a sudden the roles were
reversed, with Bolton praising the president and asserting that Soleimani's death was "
the first step to regime change in Tehran ." A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former
CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's
"decisive action." It was Carlson
who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades,"
Carlson said . "They
still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it."
Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the
national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet
another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals
in the region -- a central part of his
2020 reelection bid
.
The anti-interventionist right is freaking out. Writing in American Greatness, Matthew Boose
declared , "[T]he Trump movement, which was generated out of opposition to the foreign policy blob and its endless wars, was
revealed this week to have been co-opted to a great extent by neoconservatives seeking regime change." James Antle, the editor of
The American Conservative, a publication founded in 2002 to oppose the Iraq War,
asked , "Did
Trump betray the anti-war right?"
In the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation.
Their concerns are not unmerited. The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign
policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald
Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien,
Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian
Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators
Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked
up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with
Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In
June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian
opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? --
regime change.
The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind
Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of
war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by
causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle.
Donald Trump has not dragged us into war with Iran (yet). But the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual
complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its
hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in
the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even
if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant
of the Oval Office.
But there was a time when the neoconservative coalition was not so entrenched -- and what has turned out to be its provisional
state of exile lends some critical insight into how it managed to hang around respectable policymaking circles in recent years, and
how it may continue to shape American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. When the neoconservatives came on the scene in the
late 1960s, the Republican old guard viewed them as interlopers. The neocons, former Trotskyists turned liberals who broke with the
Democratic Party over its perceived weakness on the Cold War, stormed the citadel of Republican ideology by emphasizing the relationship
between ideas and political reality. Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives,
mused in 1985 that " what communists call the theoretical organs always end up through a filtering process influencing a lot
of people who don't even know they're being influenced. In the end, ideas rule the world because even interests are defined by ideas."
At pivotal moments in modern American foreign policy, the neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies
that might once have seemed outré. Jeane Kirkpatrick's seminal 1979 essay in Commentary, "Dictatorships and Double Standards,"
essentially set forth the lineaments of the Reagan doctrine. She assailed Jimmy Carter for attacking friendly authoritarian leaders
such as the shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. She contended that authoritarian regimes might molt into democracies,
while totalitarian regimes would remain impregnable to outside influence, American or otherwise. Ronald Reagan read the essay and
liked it. He named Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations, where she became the most influential neocon of the era for
her denunciations of Arab regimes and defenses of Israel. Her tenure was also defined by the notion that it was perfectly acceptable
for America to cozy up to noxious regimes, from apartheid South Africa to the shah's Iran, as part of the greater mission to oppose
the red menace.
The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré.
There was always tension between Reagan's affinity for authoritarian regimes and his hard-line opposition to Communist ones. His
sunny persona never quite gelled with Kirkpatrick's more gelid view that communism was an immutable force, and in 1982, in a major
speech to the British Parliament at Westminster emphasizing the power of democracy and free speech, he declared his intent to end
the Cold War on American terms. As Reagan's second term progressed and democracy and free speech actually took hold in the waning
days of the Soviet Union, many hawks declared that it was all a sham. Indeed, not a few neocons were livid, claiming that Reagan
was appeasing the Soviet Union. But after the USSR collapsed, they retroactively blessed him as the anti-Communist warrior par excellence
and the model for the future. The right was now a font of happy talk about the dawn of a new age of liberty based on free-market
economics and American firepower.
The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History
appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick's essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9,
1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it
as hopelessly utopian -- "I don't believe a word of it," he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons,
led by Irving's son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being
menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word
from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global
order with the U.S. at its head. The first Gulf War in 1991, precipitated by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, tested the neocons'
resolve and led to a break in the GOP -- one that would presage the rise of Donald Trump. For decades, Patrick Buchanan had been
regularly inveighing against what he came to call the neocon "
amen corner" in and around the
Washington centers of power, including A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom endorsed the '91 Gulf War. The neocons
were frustrated by the measured approach taken by George H.W. Bush. He refused to crow about the fall of the Berlin Wall and kicked
the Iraqis out of Kuwait but declined to invade Iraq and "finish the job," as his hawkish critics would later put it. Buchanan then
ran for the presidency in 1992 on an America First platform, reviving a paleoconservative tradition that would partly inform Trump's
dark horse run in 2016.
But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy
wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert
Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently
pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian
fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In
his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen
stated , "Creative destruction
is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day."
We all know the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction. In his second inaugural address, three
and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented
neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of
democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The neocons'
hubris had already turned into nemesis in Iraq, paving the way for an anti-war candidate in Barack Obama.
But it was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell. He announced
his Buchananesque policy of "America First" in a speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signaling that he would not adhere
to the long-standing Reaganite principles that had animated the party establishment.
The pooh-bahs of the GOP openly declared their disdain and revulsion for Trump, leading directly to the rise of the Never Trump
movement, which was dominated by neocons. The Never Trumpers ended up functioning as an informal blacklist for Trump once he became
president. Elliott Abrams, for example, who was being touted for deputy secretary of state in February 2017, was rejected when Steve
Bannon alerted Trump to his earlier heresies (though he later reemerged, in January 2019, as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela,
where he has pushed for regime change). Not a few other members of the Republican foreign policy establishment suffered similar fates.
Kristol's The Weekly Standard, which had held the neoconservative line through the Bush years and beyond , folded
in 2018. Even the office building that used to house the American Enterprise Institute and the Standard, on the corner of
17th and M streets in Washington, has been torn down, leaving an empty, boarded-up site whose symbolism speaks for itself.
Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued
to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers
in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have
done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the
movement.
It was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell.
But other neocons -- the ones who want to wield positions of influence and might -- have, more often than not, been able to hold
their noses. Stephen Wertheim, writing in The New York Review of Books, has perceptively dubbed this faction the anti-globalist
neocons. Led by John Bolton, they believe Trump performed a godsend by elevating the term globalism "from a marginal slur
to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics,"
Wertheim argued . The U.S. need not
bother with pesky multilateral institutions or international agreements or the entire postwar order, for that matter -- it's now
America's way or the highway.
And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian,
and Iraq War–era figures like
David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser,
the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't
care less if they negotiate,"
he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize
the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former
editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review ,
rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle
for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding
from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White
House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is
a myth."
In other words, whether the neocons themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant. The
ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard pressed to resist it -- if he even wants to.
How were the neocons able to influence another Republican presidency, one that was ostensibly dedicated to curbing their sway?
One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the
tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of
gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for
example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away"
from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. The event was hosted by Michael Doran, a
former senior director on George W. Bush's National Security Council and a senior fellow at the institute, who
wrote in
The New York Times on January 3, "The United States has no choice, if it seeks to stay in the Middle East, but to check
Iran's military power on the ground." Then there's Jamie M. Fly, a former staffer to Senator Marco Rubio who was appointed this past
August to head Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; he previously co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs contending that it isn't enough to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities: "If the United States seriously considers military action,
it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially
resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all."
Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has
popped up to warn Trump against
trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle
East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any
others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War
and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000.
But there are plenty of institutions in Washington, and neoconservatism's seemingly inescapable influence cannot be chalked up
to the swamp alone. Some etiolated form of what might be called Ledeenism lingered on before taking on new life at the outset of
the Trump administration. Trump's overt animus toward Muslims, for example, meant that figures such as Frank Gaffney, who opposed
arms-control treaties with Moscow as a member of the Reagan administration and resigned in protest of the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty, achieved a new prominence. During the Obama administration, Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy,
claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House and National Security Agency.
Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a
creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world: "We're in a world
war against a messianic mass movement of evil people." It was one of many signs that Trump was susceptible to ideas of a civilizational
battle against
"Islamo-fascism,"
which Norman Podhoretz and other neocons argued, in the wake of 9/11, would lead to World War III. In their millenarian ardor
and inflexible support for Israel, the neocons find themselves in a position precisely cognate to evangelical Christians -- both
groups of true believers trying to enact their vision through an apostate. But perhaps the neoconservatives' greatest strength lies
in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle,
not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default -- because there are so few genuinely alternative
ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani's killing -- which accelerated Iran's
nuclear weapons program, diminished America's influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran's theocratic regime -- has largely
occurred on a spectrum of the neocons' making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might
and hegemony -- Hobbes's "ill game" -- and naturally bends the universe toward more war.
At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the
two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which
is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that
his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly
is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad.
As Trump takes an extreme hard line against Iran, the neoconservatives may ultimately get their long-held wish of a war with the
ayatollahs. When it ends in a fresh disaster, they can always argue that it only failed because it wasn't prosecuted vigorously enough
-- and the shuffle will begin again.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.
@ JacobHeilbrunn
Trump doesn't have a thing to fear he's been a huge asset to the security state, whose
Russiagate theatrics provided mainstream media news with just enough bullshit to distract the
public, so that Trump could never be aggressively attacked from the Left. For the last three
years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia.
Meanwhile, this enabled Trump to successfully pass a slew of reactionary legislation and
fasttrack numerous lifetime appointments to the federal court without barely a whimper from
the phony Dems. In fact, the Democrats unanimously voted for Trump's military budget. The
same idiot they called unhinged was given the power to start WWIII.
No matter how much liberals complain–the wealthy are happy with the status quo and
the right-wing Evangelicals are as pleased as punch. However, there's quite a large number of
disaffected Trump voters looking at Tulsi, but could eventually come Bernie's way.
Especially, if Tulsi endorses Bernie. This discontented bunch includes the working-poor, the
indebted young, and all the folks who are not doing economically well under Trump's fabulous
stock market. It especially includes the military families who were promised an end to the
miserable foreign interventions. Bernie, has some appeal to these folks. His platform
certainly resonates with all those who can barely pay their health insurance
premiums, and whose salary is NOT nearly considered a living wage. But Bernie could win
hands-down and steal Trump's base, if he only had the courage to UNAPOLOGETICALLY speak out
against US imperialism and connect all the dots explaining how the security state plundered
the treasury for decades f–king over the working-class.
"... This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more years. ..."
"... besides much talk and showmastery, he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously change the course. ..."
"... So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his intentions. ..."
Thank you Colonel; I have been waiting for your take on this. And thank you for opening the
comments again. If there is a problem with my post, please point them out to me.
And i agree. This may well be a fatal mistake of his. And while i have thought Trump
to be the lesser evil compared to Clinton, i am now at a point where i seriously fear what
his ignorance and slavery to the neocon doctrine may bring the world in 4 more
years.
Still, immigration is another important issue, but besides much talk and showmastery,
he has not really changed anything substantial in this regard; Nothing that could seriously
change the course.
So he stripped himself of any true argument to vote for him, besides for ultra neocons
and ultra fundamental evangelical Christians. And even they don't seem to trust in his
intentions.
And China? He may have changed some small to medium problems for the better, but nothing
is changed in the overall trend of the US continuing to loose while China emerges as the next
global superpower.
It may have been slowed for some years; It may even have been accelerated, now that China
has been waken up to the extend of the threat posed by the US.
North Korea? They surely will never denuclearize. Even less after how Trump showed the
world how he treats international law and even allies.
With Trump its all photo ops and showmanship. And while he senses what issues are
important, it is worth a damn if he butchers the execution, or values photo ops more than
substantial progress.
Not that i would see a democratic alternative. No. But at least now everyone who wants to
know can see, that he is neither one.
4 years ago, democracy was corrupted, but at least there was someone who presented himself
as an alternative to that rotten establishment.
Now, even that small ray of light is as dark as it gets.
And that is the saddest thing. What worth is democracy, when one does not even have a true
alternative, besides Tulsi on endless wars, and Bernie for the socialist ;) ?
I just have watched again the Ken Burns documentary of the civil war. I know it is not
perfect (Though i love Shelby Foote's parts), but the sense of the divided 2 Americas there,
is still the same today. Today, America seems to break apart culturally, socially and
economically on the fault lines that have sucked it into the civil war over 150 years
ago.
And just like with seeing no real way out politically, i sadly can see no way to heal and
unite this country, as it never was truly united after the civil war, if not ever before. As
you Colonel said some weeks ago, the US were never a nation.
And looking at other countries, only a major national crisis may change this.
A most sad realization. But this hold true also for other western countries, including my
own.
But why are Trump and Pompeo continuing the policy of Obama and Clinton there? Remember
Trump said he would pay off the national debt in 8 years? How about stop spending our money
on the War Party's foreign interventions for a starter.
On January 20, Donald G. Trump completed his third year
in office. My one blog that received five-digit Facebook shares predicted Trump would lose in
2016. I was spectacularly wrong but not alone. Even the Las Vegas bookies thought Clinton was a
shoo-in with her unbeatable two-punch knockout of (1) I'm not Trump and (2) World War III with
the Russians would be peachy at least until the bombs start falling. What could possibly have
gone wrong?
More to the point, the unexpected victory of Trump was the historical reaction to the
bankruptcy of Clinton-Bush-Obama neoliberalism. Now after three years of Mr. Trump, what's
left?
During the George W. Bush years – he's now viewed
favorably by a majority of Democrats – Democrats could wring their tied hands to the
accolades of their base. My own Democrat Representative Lynn Woolsey stood up daily in the
House and denounced Bush's Iraq war. For a while there was a resurgent peace movement against
US military adventures in the Middle East, which was even backed by some left-leaning
liberals.
But the moment that Obama ascended to the Oval Office, the Iraq War became Obama's war,
Bush's secretary of war Gates was carried over to administer it, and Woolsey forgot she was for
peace. No matter, Obama, the peace candidate, would fix it. Just give him a chance. For eight
years, Obama was given a chance and the peace movement went quiescent.
Trump takes office
Surely a Republican president, I thought, would harken a rebirth of the peace movement given
the ever-inflated war budget and the proliferation of US wars. The US is
officially at war with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. To the
official list are any number of other states subject to drone attacks such as Iran, Pakistan,
and Mali. And then there are some 30 countries targeted with illegal
unilateral coercive measures as form of economic warfare. Yet a funny thing happened on the
way to the demonstration.
With Republicans in control of both Congress and the White House, my expectation was that
Democrats would safely take a giant step to the right in accordance with their Wall Street
funders, while safely keeping a baby step to the left of the Republicans appeasing their
liberal-leaning base. To certain extent, this is what happened with Trump's tax cut for the
wealthy. The Democrats could and did claim that their hands were once again tied wink, wink to
their Wall Street handlers.
Yet on many more fundamental issues, the Democrats did not take advantage of paying lip
service to their base's economic priorities by attacking the Republicans on their weak left
flank. No, the Democrats mounted an assault on the Republicans from the right with what
The Hill
called Pelosi's "fiscally hawkish pay-as-you-go rules," increasing the
war budget , and launching
Russiagate . Instead of appealing to working people on bread and butter issues, the
Democrats gave us turbo-charged identity politics.
Bernie Sanders had raised genuine issues regarding runaway income inequality and plutocratic
politics. However, Sanders was suppressed by a hostile corporate press and an antagonistic
Democratic Party establishment, which arguably preferred to risk a Republican victory in 2016
than support anyone who questioned neoliberal orthodoxy.
Sanders' issues got asphyxiated in the juggernaut of Russiagate. His legacy – so far
– has been to help contain a progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party, the
perennial graveyard of social movements. Had Mr. Sanders not come along, the Democrats –
now the full-throated party of neoliberal austerity at home and imperial war abroad –
would have needed to invent a leftish Pied Piper to keep their base in the fold.
So, after three years of Trump, the more than ever needed mass
movement against militarism has yet to resurrect in force, notwithstanding promising
demonstrations in immediate response to Trump's assassination of Iran's Major General
Soleimani on January 3 with more demonstrations to come.
Imperialism and neoliberalism
Dubya proved his imperialist mettle with the second Iraq war; Obama with the destruction of
Libya. But Trump has yet to start a war of his own. Though, in the case of Iran, it was not
from lack of trying. The last US president with a similar imperialist failing was the one-term
Carter. But Trump has 12 and possibly 60 more months to go.
In his short time in office, Trump has packed his administration with former war industry
executives, increased troops in Afghanistan, approved selling arms to the coup government of
Ukraine, made the largest arms sale in US history to Saudi Arabia, supported the Saudi's war
against Yemen, recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and killed more civilians in
drone strikes than "Obomber." In the empire's "backyard," Trump tightened the blockade on Cuba,
intensified Obama's sanctions on Venezuela to a blockade, oversaw the devastation of Puerto
Rico , and backed the right wing coup in Bolivia. The Venezuelan
Embassy Protectors are fighting the US government for a fair trial, while Julian Assange
faces extradition to the US.
Now that Trump has declared the
defeat of ISIS , the US National Defense Strategy is "interstate strategic competition"
with Russia and China. This official guiding document of the US imperial state explicitly calls
for "build[ing] a more lethal force" for world domination. Giving credit where it is due, back
in 2011, Hillary Clinton and Obama had presciently decreed a " pivot to Asia ," targeting
China.
Closer to home Trump has been busy deregulating environmental protections, dismantling the
National Park system, weaponizing
social media , and undoing net neutrality, while withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on
global warming. What's not to despise?
Russiagate and impeachment
Russiagate
– in case you have a real life and are not totally absorbed in mass media – is
about a conspiracy that the Russians and not the US Electoral College are responsible for
Hillary Clinton not getting her rightful turn to be President of the United States.
For the better part of the last three years under the shadow of Trump in the White House, a
spook emerged from the netherworld of the deep state and has toiled mightily to expose
wrongdoers. This man, former head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, we are told is only one miracle
short of being canonized in blue state heaven. Yet even he failed to indict a single American
for colluding with Russia, though he was able to hand out indictments to Americans for other
wrongdoings not related to Russia.
Undeterred by this investigation to nowhere, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi initiated
impeachment proceedings against the sitting president in the Democrat's first successful step
to promote Mike Pence as the next POTUS.
When an unelected and unaccountable CIA operative in secret collusion with opposition
politicians (e.g., Adam Schiff) and with backing from his agency seeks to take down a
constitutionally elected president, that is cause for concern. Operating under the cloak of
anonymity and with privileged access to information, national security operatives skilled in
the craft of espionage have the undemocratic means to manipulate and even depose elected
officials.
What has arisen is an emboldened national security state. The CIA, lest we forget, is the
clandestine agency whose mission is to use any means necessary to affect "regime change" in
countries that dare to buck the empire. Latin American leftists used to quip that the US has
never suffered a coup because there is no US embassy in Washington. There may not be a US
embassy there, but the CIA and the rest of the US security establishment are more than ever
present and pose a danger to democracy.
Now Obama's former Director of National Intelligence and serial
perjurer James Clapper holds the conflicted role of pundit on CNN while still retaining his
top
security clearance . Likewise, Obama's former CIA director, torture apologist, and fellow
perjurer John Brennan holds forth on NBC News and MSNBC with his security
clearance intact .
Class trumps partisan differences
The Democrats and Republicans mortally combat on the superficial, while remaining united in
their bedrock class loyalty to the rule of capital and US world hegemony. The first article of
the Democrat-backed impeachment is the president's "abuse of power." Yet, amidst the heat of
the House impeachment hearings, the Democrats, by an overwhelming majority, helped renew the
Patriot
Act , which gives the president war time authority to shred the constitution.
Contrary to the utterances of the Democratic presidential candidates
on the campaign trail about limiting US military spending, the latest $738 billion National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is $22 billion over the last. The Democratic Progressive
Caucus didn't even bother to whip members to oppose the bill. On December 11, in an orgy of
bi-partisan love, the NDAA bill passed by a landslide vote of 377-48.
President Trump tweeted "Wow!" Democratic Party leader and House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Adam Smith called the bill "the
most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades."
This bill gifts twelve more Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets than Trump had requested and
green-lights funding of Trump's border wall with Mexico. Stripped from the bipartisan NDAA
"compromise" bill were provisions to prohibit Trump from launching a war on Iran without
Congressional authorization. Similarly dropped were limits to US participation in the genocidal
war in Yemen.
A new Space Force is authorized to militarize the heavens. Meanwhile the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists has set the doomsday clock at 2 minutes before
midnight. Unfortunately, the Democrat's concern about Trump's abuse of power does not extend to
such existential matters as nuclear war.
Trump's renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (i.e., USMCA), an acknowledged
disaster , was renewed
with bipartisan support. On the domestic front, Trump cut food stamps, Medicaid, and
reproductive health services over the barely audible demurs of the supine Democrats.
Revolt of the dispossessed
Behind the façade of the impeachment spectacle – Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz
are now on Trump's legal team – is a ruling class consensus that trumps partisan
differences. As political economist Rob Urie perceptively observed
:
The American obsession with electoral politics is odd in that 'the people' have so little
say in electoral outcomes and that the outcomes only dance around the edges of most people's
lives. It isn't so much that the actions of elected leaders are inconsequential as that other
factors -- economic, historical, structural and institutional, do more to determine
'politics.'
In the highly contested 2016 presidential contest, nearly half the eligible US voters opted out, not
finding enough difference among the contenders to leave home. 2020 may be an opportunity; an
opening for an alternative to neoliberal austerity at home and imperial wars abroad lurching to
an increasingly oppressive national security state. The campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi
Gabbord and before them Occupy point to a popular insurgency. Mass protests of the dispossessed
are rocking
France , India ,
Colombia
, Chile , and
perhaps here soon.
I'm a former Trump voter who could vote for Warren or Sanders but not Biden. Trump has been
the biggest disappointment of my political life, and I'll never forgive him for the failures
on immigration, but Biden and bis family looks to be at least as personally sleazy and
corrupt as the Trumps, if not as outright sickening.
Well, I'm a non-Democrat leftist (except for conservative leanings on social issues and a
vehemently anti-war posture that is a minority view on both the left and right). I have voted
for third-party candidates for President most of my life (and I'm a septuagenarian). For
reasons of foreign policy and economics, I would probably vote for either Sanders or Warren,
at least if they don't get too bonkers on identity politics. But there is no way I would vote
for any of the other Democratic contenders, and there is no way I would vote for Trump.
For what it's worth, I think the whole frenzy to defeat Trump no matter what is overblown.
Except for the Twitter feed, I don't see how Trump has actually governed much differently
from any other contemporary Republican. The difference between Trump and, say Ted Cruz, or
Marco Rubio, is mostly style, not policy.
That last sentence is true. But it is style that really matters to many Democrats. Obama was
their ideal President almost entirely because of his style.
And Trump's style is what attracts his hard core supporters.
If that means Uncle Joe, then Trump may bloody well already uncork the champagne. Remember
that recent Iranian debacle of his, which is already starting being forgotten? That was the
*only* real chance for Democrats to look solid in the Senate when trying to impeach him. The
only way to make Republican senators look dishonest and partisan when defending him. An
unexpected and unprovoked electoral gift to them from Trump (a would-have-been-serious gift -
read Daniel Larison's articles as to how many American voters, no matter their partisan
leanings, are anti-war now). How did the DNC manage that gift? Exactly. By directly bringing
it to the trash bin without a moment of hesitation and keeping on desperately clinging to the
politically stillborn clownery around Ukraine which will allow the Republican senators to
laugh their Democratic colleagues out of the stage and seal Trump's victory the very moment
the said clownery is brought to the upper chamber of the parliament. Now Democrats look like
a poor feller in front of an insurmountable wall, who, having witnessed a door which
magically/quantumly appeared in that wall, screamed "To battle!/Arriva!/Kovfefe!", slammed
the said door shut, industriously broke the handle so that it could never be opened again in
the quantum dimension he exists and resumed his attempts to - how to put it mildly? - shatter
the reinforced concrete with his forehead.
Trump's increase in the military budget blows every claim about Trump rebelling against the
general out of the water. Also, firing generals from the second career civilian positions
they were never qualified for in the first place simply isn't "firing" them, especially not
in any sense Trump "Your'e fired!" would consider as firing. Trump can be as abusive as he
wants, just like he is with everyone apparently: Some officers will do anything but fight an
equal enemy for high rank, including eating Trump's shit, then smiling. In many respects the
entire US military is a mercenary army and mercenaries are not really good at serious
fighting with real opponents. (In other respects, the lower ranks of the military are turning
into a weird version of Mamelukes or Janissaries, a religiously defined service caste with
temptations to rule. But military rule in a giant country is quite difficult.)
Further, if there is a deep state, the generals who hated Clinton and the FBI who hated
Clinton are just as much a part of it as the CIA professionals who thought Trump was a moron
who'd wreck everything. All deep state theories are either crackpottery or duplicity. The
main supporters of Trump are rich people, not just as contributors to his campaign---after
all, some are billionaires who might want to play president themselves!---but the ones who
keep buying advertising from the mass media who give Trump billions in free publicity, cover
up his criminal career as much as possible and encourage identity politics to keep the loyal
opposition from uniting the mass of people against the billionaires.
Trump's real chances of winning are due partly to lack of opposition from the Democratic
Party, which sharply limits its attacks on Trump to attacks from the right, for the good
reason that in policy terms, there is a huge overlap between Trump and the mainstream
Democrats. (Hence the media's assistance in trashing the Democratic Party during the
primaries.) The intense campaign to keep blacks from turning out is proceeding on all fronts.
And most of all, the mass media are still normalizing Trump, who is actually labeling his
opponents traitors, and hinting at violence. Further, the Weinstein trial is meant to
intimidate Democratic Party Hollywood donors/PR. And the Epstein case may be used to tar the
Pedophile Party at a convenient time. They have already conceded that accusation=conviction,
so it's doubtful they could put up a fight.
US initiated wars have been going on for decades, but I see no indication that US
americans have any issues with it. The political parties are totally aligned on foreign wars,
there are no people protesting in US cities.
"The intense campaign to keep blacks from turning out is proceeding on all fronts."
That, to me (and hopefully for most people), is very disturbing. I have been loosely
following Greg Palast and his team for about 15 years, and it would appear that the rot in
the US electoral system has only escalated since the 2000 election farce.
In my mind it is a class-war, and it is being waged against the most marginalised,
especially if of a darker skin tone (by the 'Elites', and with the acquiescence of the
ever-dwindling middle-classes).
It is a horror-show.
I know it may be old hat to many here, but I would highly recommend to any who are
interested in some of the manouvres (c.2000-present) that have led the US electoral system to
the sewer it resides in to read:
I've joked before that Trump is the most peaceful president since Carter. There is some truth
to this insofar as Trump's narrow cost-benefit analysis (as opposed to incoherently broad,
even internally contradictory, cost-benefit outlook promoted by 'national security'
interests) means he doesn't want to commit to expensive long-term interventionist projects,
which is what unites the right-wing neocons and the liberal interventionists (Pelosi,
Schumer). Trump is happy to throw money at the military (like the recent 750 billion re-up
approved by Congress) but also wants to keep costs down. Like a real estate developer, he
spends the money to maintain the Trump brand (tough guy, not like Carter), while extorting
and cheating 'contractors' (client states like S. Korea) to keep costs down, hence his
wanting to pull back from Syria and Afghanistan, meeting with hysteria-level resistance from
the 'deep state.' It's no Carter, but certainly better than the Bushes, Clinton,
Obama/Hilary. Military still ballooning though.
The problem with the corporate/executive/military theory of elite power is that there are
factions within factions, so the theory has limited explanatory power. The 'corporate'
faction has largely turned against China (hence the push or approval of the trade war) but
there are also important elements like Google and Apple who abhor the trade war and want to
maintain the status-quo. And within the military/CIA/national security, there are vectors
working at cross purposes. In some ways, the complexity can be parsed by neocon versus
liberal interventionist, but these two have more commonalities than differences, while 'Full
Spectrum Dominance' has different interpretations and emphases that, as a whole, can look
incoherent. The rationale behind Afghanistan being one example.
karlof1: "The answer for Afghanistan is multifold: It provides a position that helps
encircle Iran; it prevents the construction of the most logical transportation corridors to
facilitate Eurasian integration; it allows for attacks by the Evil Outlaw US Empire's Foreign
Legions into the soft underbelly of Russia and China via Central Asia; and it allows the CIA
to control the international opium and heroin trade. You should also see why these truths
cannot be told to the public as those aims contradict genuine American Values."
karlof1, thank you for that summary, which is probably the most concise formulation of it
I've seen, and it reminds me of importance of the CIA and the opiate trade. While, taken
individually, those points look like they 'make sense', but as a whole -- especially the
support of proxy groups via opium funds and happily 'mispent' money like US aid -- the net
result is more chaos than actions with discrete goals. If there's anything that can be said
about US foreign policy, it's that the chaos is by design, not so much because it benefits
'national security interests' but because it benefits the MIC. Chaos is the biggest
subsidy.
@ 30 lysander.. "So no, Trump is not at all an anti-interventionist. He's just looking for a
way to make imperialism (even more) profitable and just wants to end the none performing wars
and start money making wars." i tend to think the usa - wall st and the military complex for
sure - make money off these money losing wars as well... why end them either, when it is
working for the top %? what i don't understand is any american thinking they are going to get
anything different with either repubs or dems... i guess that is where all the msm back and
forth bullshit works to keep people brainwashed and unable to see the bigger picture here..
that and americans for the most part seem totally obsessed with their own little exceptional
world with little thought about there foreign policy... to me it is all about fp, but to most
americans it is all about trump or sanders, or football and that is it! they seem quite happy
to stay in that small little loop.. i honestly think it will not be unable they are bombed on
their own soil will the collectively wake the fuck up and even then, i somehow doubt it as
the brainwashing has been so successful..
The 1950's triangle of power was superseded by the oligarch's counter revolution that
led to supranational trade institutions. Democracies were relegated to a secondary status and
run by technocrats for the benefit of oligarchs until Donald Trump. He is a nationalist
plutocrat; admittedly a lower level one, a NY casino owner who went bankrupt. Mike Bloomberg
represents the other side, a globalist billionaire. Elizabeth Warren is a top level
technocrat but no politician.
The endless wars are fought to make a profit for the plutocracy and destabilize nations
to make foreign corporate exploitation possible. That was why Hunter Biden was in Ukraine.
The conflicts are not meant to be won.
Donald Trump is way for over his head and getting old. His competent staff are in jail or
fired. Apparently no one told him about the thousands of ballistic missiles that can destroy
the Gulf States' oil facilities at will and make the buildup for the invasion of Iran
impossible. He makes stupid mistakes. Through the barrage of propaganda, reports of shell
shocked troops, destroyed buildings and 11 concussion causalities from Iran's missile attack
made it into the news. The military must be pissed. The aura of invincibility is gone.
Donald Trump should be removed by the 25th amendment before he mistakenly triggers the
Apocalypse. Except the 1% politician VP, Mike Pence, believes that the End of Time is God's
Will and necessary for his Ascension.
I completely disagree with this article. But to be honest, none of us knows anything for sure
outside our own direct experiences. We all rely on 3rd hand (even 10th hand) information and
pick among the various options beliefs which fit our own biases. So if thats what b chooses
to believe so be it.
All we can do is look at the present and compare it to a point in the past. So lets do
that.
With Trump we are still in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump committed an act of war
against Iran and violated a treaty with Iran. Has has supported MBS carnage in Yemen. He has
attempted regime change in Venezuela and implemented crippling sanctions against Venezuela
and Iran which causes harm to innocent people by denying access to some drugs and makes food
more expensive.
He started a trade war with China that resulted in billions of dollars in tariffs , paid
for by the American consumer, and the loss of income for farmers which he subsidized on the
tax payers dime. His agreement with China offers incentives for US companies to invest in
China and does nothing to bring manufacturing jobs back.
Manufacturing and industrial production is not much higher than when Trump took over. He
gave hundreds of billions in tax cuts to the rich and corporations promising it would trickle
down with more jobs and higher salaries. Its done neither and meanwhile the national debt has
skyrocketed.
Retail sales are plummeting as disposable income of the bottom 90% shrink as asset
inflation caused by the Fed QE make home ownership more expensive or unaffordable and causing
higher rents. Tuitions continue to rise paid by increased debt to students/households and
government paid tuitions for veterans. Drug prices continue to rise despite Trumps commitment
to reign in Big Pharma, as do overall medical costs and insurance premiums taking more out of
the bottom 90% budget.
Fifty percent of those working make less than 33k per year and 50% of households couldn't
come up with 400 dollars for an emergency w/o tapping into their credit (if any). Meanwhile,
while neocons in his administration plot to cut medicare, medicaid and social security,
something Trump promised not to do, while Trump keeps inflating the military budget each
year.
Infrastructure development which was big on his fake agenda is nowhere to be seen, aside
from a partially completed wall Mexico was supposed to pay for but didn't, but was rewarded
with Nafta 2 (Trump promised to scrap Nafta).
Meanwhile there seems to be as many illegal immigrants as before (after all, someone has
to work the farms and slaughter houses for Big Agra) .The great health care plan Trump
promised to replace Obamacare is nowhere to be seen. Relations with Russia don't seem much
better with more sanctions added under Trump.
Israel is pretty happy though, their new Cyrus moved the embassy to Jerusalem as promised
and signed an EO cutting of Federal funding to universities who allow criticism of
Israel.
The sad thing is nobody the Dems are running offer much of a positive change. Any promises
made will be broken and blamed on the other party. The DNC is beholden to the same masters as
the RNC. Presidents are just stage actors.
Trumps main mission besides enriching the elite at the middle class expense, feeding the
MIC beast, kissing Bibis feet is discrediting in the eyes of the rest of the world American
Democracy (an illusion at this point), Capitalism (actually taken over by neoliberalism) and
Christianity (his biggest supporters are Evangelical Christians). Imagine a bankrupted Casino
owner associated with the mafia with multiple divorces and multiple accusations of
inappropriate sexual conduct and convicted of racial discrimination not only becoming
President , but representing the party of the Christian Right?
So when they finally establish the consensus for a new multi-polar global NWO they will be
able to unite the world based on its anti-American sentiment , a feeling induced by the
neocons with Trump as the icing on the cake. Of course, the American elite who are actually
multi-national or globalist will remain unscathed, and the military will be
internationalized, but for those left behind life will be much like those in countries taken
over by the IMF/World Bank with reparations due instead of interest, paid via a Carbon
Tax
Donald Trump rode to victory in 2016 on a promise to end the useless wars in the Middle East, but he has now demonstrated
very clearly that he is a liar
He also promised a wall. Maybe he meant the Israeli wall?
Trump is betraying his voters and threatening millions of lives.
In a full-blown U.S. war
with Iran, up to a million people could die initially.
Hundreds of thousands more could die in the vacuum to follow. Millions would be made
refugees. That's the conclusion of experts surveyed
by Vox reporter Alex Ward . "The worst-case scenarios here are quite serious,"
Middle East scholar Michael Hanna warned.
With the brazen assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq,
President Trump has brought us leaps and bounds closer to that conflagration -- a decision
Trump appears to have made while
golfing at Mar-a-Lago .
Lawmakers need to move before it's too late.
The Iranians may
respond cautiously , perhaps forestalling a full-blown conflict. But there can be no doubt
the White House has been driving in that direction from day one.
In a few short years, Trump has blown up the Iran nuclear deal, put a horrific economic
stranglehold on the country, and sent a stunning
14,000 new troops to the Middle East since just last spring. Some
3,500 more are now on their way.
"Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran," John Bolton
tweeted about the assassination . Bolton may have left the White House, but clearly his
spirit lives on.
What next? Get ready to hear a lot about what a "
bad guy " Soleimani was, and how Iran is a "state sponsor" of terrorism.
No doubt, Soleimani had blood on his hands -- he was a general. Yet after two decades of
U.S. wars in the Middle East, that's the pot calling the kettle black. It was the U.S. who
invaded Iraq, started a civil war, and paved the way for a literal terrorist state, ISIS, to
occupy the country afterward (a force Soleimani himself was instrumental in dismantling).
That senseless war caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, exploded the terrorist threat,
and is destabilizing the region to this day. Yet somehow, war hawks like Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo can go on TV and -- with a straight face -- predict ordinary Iranians will
essentially thank the U.S. for murdering their general.
"People not only in Iraq but in Iran will view the American action last night as giving them
freedom,"
Pompeo said the morning after the assassination. You couldn't caricature a better callback
to Dick Cheney's infamous prediction that Iraqis would "greet us as liberators" if you
tried.
This war-mongering should be as toxic politically as
it is morally . Trump rode into office promising to end America's wars, winning him crucial
votes in swing states with large military and veteran populations. Huge bipartisan majorities,
including 58 percent of Republicans, say they want U.S. troops out of the Middle East.
Trump is betraying them spectacularly.
Yet too many Democrats are
merely objecting to Trump's failure to consult them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi complained the
strike "was taken without the consultation of the Congress." South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg
offered colorlessly that "there are serious questions about how this decision was made." Others
complained about the apparent lack of a "strategy."
It's illegal for a president to unilaterally launch a war -- that's important. But these
complaints make it sound like if you want to kill a million people for no reason, you just have
to go to the DMV first. As if Trump's base doesn't love it when he cuts the line in
Washington.
Senator Bernie Sanders, who warned that "Trump's dangerous escalation brings us closer to
another disastrous war in the Middle East that could cost countless lives and trillions more
dollars," came closer to communicating the real threat.
Millions of lives are at stake. Trump's aggression demands -- and voters will more likely
reward -- real opposition. Call him on it
before it's too late.
Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of
Foreign Policy In Focus.
A shadowy Silicon Valley group that, largely unnoticed, bankrolled Democrat candidates up and
down the country in the 2018 midterms, will spend up to $140 million to topple President Trump in 2020, according to
Recode.
The group, called "Mind the Gap," is led by Stanford law school professor Barbara Field, former Obama staffer
Graham Gottlieb, and former Hewlett Foundation president Paul Brest.
The group uses a data-driven approach to target funding to seats where donors' dollars will have the maximum
impact, funded 20 Democrat candidates in 2018, ten of whom won.
Via Recode:
In 2018, the group, which is led by Stanford law school professor
Barbara
Fried
,
raised
about $500,000 for 20 different Democratic congressional challengers
, many of whom were underdogs to win their
bids. Ten of them won. Mind the Gap became a hit in Silicon Valley in particular because it asked tech leaders to
fund races where it had calculated each dollar would have the greatest marginal impact on Democrats taking back
the House, which synced with the industry's data-driven thinking.
This time around, the group is asking its donors to fund three separate voter-registration
programs: the Voter Participation Center (VPC) and the Center for Voter Information (CVI), which in September
alone sent out 7.1 million voter registration applications by mail, according to Mind the Gap. The last endorsed
group is Everybody Votes (EV), which is training organizers to sign up voters in local communities and has used
some of the $35 million that Mind the Gap has already raised to register Democratic voters in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. (Future money from the group is going to do the same in Florida, Arizona, and
Nevada.)
In this cycle, the group aims to raise over $100 million to fund get-out-the-vote efforts and other political
activities:
Mind the Gap told prospective donors last fall that it had already raised at least $35 million in
political contributions for voter registration efforts, which is part of a fundraising goal that could stretch to
$100 million, according to a memo obtained by Recode.
Mind the Gap is also seeking another estimated $30 million for get-out-the-vote work along with
another estimated $10 million for "orphan races" -- which means primarily funding candidates for state legislatures
that the group sees as wrongly under-funded.
Are you an insider at Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit or any other tech company who wants to
confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email
address
[email protected].
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
When people thought in 2016 that they are winning against the National Security state, they
were deceived by the candidate who sounded rational during election campaign, but then became
Hillary II in three months after inauguration and brought Bush II neocons into his
Administration.
So voters were deceived with Clinton, deceived with Bush II, deceived with Obama, deceived
with Trump. You now see the tendency...
With all that is happening in the U.S right now I can't help but think that it's past time
for the people to reassert their power over the National security state, as unrealistic as
that might sound.
The Anti war movement is ideologically divided between progressives and
libertarian/paleoconservatives, so a political party would not likely be the answer.
Instead perhaps we should consider a grassroots movement to amend the constitution to
guarantee U.S neutrality in world affairs (banning both the arming or financing of foreign
belligerents) and to ban the Federal government from having a standing military force except
in times of actual war. I don't know what chance either would have of actually being passed,
but it might at least force a debate on these issues in a way that might resonate better with
the average American. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Peace and Solidarity
No Wall has been built in America BUT the U.S. Embassy is in Jerusalem.
No Immigration Solution. Record numbers of f-1's and b1's.
National Debt Level WORSE than in summer 2008 Right Before Financial Meltdown.
No End to the 'Endless' Wars (Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq)
Israel got the Golan Heights. Jews have gotten an E.O. recognizing them as a Nation. All the
big Jew Wall St. Firms have had easy money and tax credits from Trump.
What did America get? How can anyone believe anything other than: 'Israel first, last and
always' from Donald J. Trump? He endlessly blathers about the evils of antisemitism while 80%
of Jews continue to vote Democrat.
I can do nothing except conclude the man's soul has been completely and utterly drained from
him through his never ending fellating of Israel and the incessant pounding BoBo Satanyahoo
gives him.
At this point, it is just an embarrassment to watch Trump. I saw his press conference this
afternoon and I couldn't believe the difference between that monotone, babbling idiot I saw
today and the guy who used to fill Stadiums.
The America government has become the Great Satan.
Israel is it's helper.
Trump is the Great Betrayer.
Trump's legal team reportedly prepared their strategy to challenge articles of
impeachment by House Dems -- yet to be sent to the GOP-controlled Senate for trial.
According to Law Professor Jonathan Turley, "(b)y rushing the impeachment and forcing a vote
before Christmas, the House gave up control over an incomplete and insufficient case for
removal," adding:
"It gave up that control to a chamber controlled by the opposing party."
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi's attempt to game the system has not achieved any concession from
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell."
"Few of us believed it would. Now the House will proceed on the thinnest record ever
presented in a modern presidential impeachment trial."
Clearly it's going nowhere, likely to help Trump's reelection, not undermine it.
Articles of impeachment by House Dems against Trump with no legitimate standing seek
political advantage in November's presidential and congressional elections.
That's what this is all about, ignoring serious Trump wrongdoing, just cause for impeachment
and removal from office. More on this below.
Under the Constitution's Article II, Section 4, impeachment and conviction require proving
"treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."
No legitimacy exists to impeach Trump for abuse of power on grounds of seeking interference
from Ukraine to aid his 2020 presidential reelection and obstruction of Congress for defying
House subpoenas.
Clear just cause exists to impeach and remove him from office for crimes of war, against
humanity, and betraying the public trust by serving monied interests exclusively at the expense
of ordinary people he greatly harmed at home and abroad.
Breaching virtually every positive promise made to the American people proved he can never
be trusted and no longer has justification to serve.
Abroad, he escalated crimes of war and against humanity against Syria, Yemen,
Afghanistan, and Somalia. He supports aggression in Libya, Donbass, Ukraine, and Occupied
Palestine. He's waging economic terrorism on Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea,
Russia and other countries. He supports international terrorism while pretending to combat
it.
As US president and commander-in-chief, he's responsible for high crimes at home and abroad,
legitimate impeachable offenses.
He committed acts of war against Iraq and Iran by terror-bombing Iraqi territory, killing
deputy PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and others, along with assassinating IRGC Quds Force
commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
All of the above are high crimes, just cause to impeach and remove him from office, what
Dems and Republicans should support.
Clearly they won't because they share guilt. The vast majority of Washington's political
class is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors -- by supporting aggression, state terrorism,
and other hostile actions
In response to Trump's threat to target dozens of Iranian sites, including cultural ones,
President Rouhani warned him "never (to) threaten the Iranian nation."
In solidarity against imperial USA for assassinating General Soleimani, millions of Iranians
took to the streets over the weekend and Monday to honor him and symbolically stand against the
scourge America represents.
As a nation mourns the loss of its revered Quds Force commander, his assassination an act of
war by any standard, Iran's parliament discussed an appropriate response, the body's spokesman
Asadollah Abbasi saying:
"In reaction to the recent terrorist and cowardly assassination of Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani
and his companions by the US and as decided by the presiding board, the triple-urgency motion
will be put on the agenda of the parliament's open session," adding:
"The latest US action is viewed as 'state-sponsored terrorism' not only by the parliament's
presiding board but also by most world countries, and the ratification of the triple-urgency
motion lends legal credit to this issue."
On Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif denounced the US for its "blatant disregard for
the jus cogens in international law as well as for universally-recognized rights and
immunities," adding:
"This is the same schizophrenic approach that repugnantly threatens, in contravention of
international law, to strike Iran's cultural sites which are part of the shared human cultural
and civilizational heritage."
Killing Soleimani, a "voice of independence-seeking struggles" in the war-torn Middle East,
was a "cowardly" attack on him and the Iranian nation, "a strategic blunder."
The only way forward for restoration of regional peace and stability is "expulsion of the US
from West Asia."
Zarif stressed that Iran remains "the anchor of peace and security" in the Middle East,
along with its development.
Peace and stability defeat US imperial aims. Endless wars and other hostile actions serve it
-- what its imperial scourge is all about.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for
Hegemony Risks WW III."
Iran vs. US: The Murder of General Qassem Suleimani
by Peter Koenig / January 7th, 2020
Interestingly, after the US attack on Iraqi Militia
fighters on 31 December 2020, and the assassination of General Qassem Suleimani , on 2
January, the first thing President Trump could come up with was bragging that it was him who
gave the order to murder the popular military leader. General Qassem Suleimani was the
commander of the Iranian special Quds Force. The Quds Force was created during the
Iran –Iraq War as a special unit from the broader Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps ( IRGC ). It has the mission of liberating Muslim land, especially al-
Quds , from which it takes its name – "Jerusalem Force ", in English.
General Suleimani was killed by a US drone. He was not only the most popular and prominent
military officer in Iran, but he was also influential and respected throughout the Middle East.
He was chief in training Iraqi forces who eventually defeated ISIS in Iraq within less than a
year when the US and NATO estimated it would take at least 3 years. General Suleimani, along
with Russia, was also instrumental in training the Syrian armed forces with the objective of
defeating ISIS / IS / DEASH in Syria, and they succeeded. This US act of impunity, the General
Suleimani killing, was unmistakenly targeted with precision and as such a clear declaration of
war on Iran.
Trump expected applause from the public at large. Let's not forget he is entering the year
2020 of his re-election that's what he wants. So, he needs increased popularity and approval
ratings. To be reelected, he, like others before him, doesn't shy away from committing murder
or entering a new war, killing millions. That's what American Presidents do to win elections.
That's what Obama has done. He entered the Presidency with two ongoing US wars –
Afghanistan and Iraq – when he left office the US was engaged in seven wars around the
globe, in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Plus, numerous proxy-conflicts, meaning they are fought by mercenaries and / or US trained,
funded and armed terrorists; i.e., ISIS / DAESH, Islamic State (IS) and whatever other names
the empire gives its agents of terror to confuse the world. And let's not forget, the
algorithmically manipulated regime-change elections in Latin America and Europe, the steady
NATO advances with new military bases encircling Russia and China, including the stationing of
more than 50% of the US Naval force in the South China Sea.
Most of the US Presidents are elected on the basis of their aggression, planned or ongoing,
on how much they are willing to kill around the world and how well they are representing the
interests of the US War Industry -- and, of course, the Israeli AIPAC (American Israel Public
Affairs Committee). In other words, Americans who go to the polls are duped into believing they
are electing a president, when in reality their president had been pre-selected by a small
group of elitists, representing the key US interests, the War Industry, Big Finance, Big Oil,
Big Pharma – and who else, of course, the State of Israel.
The unarmed Iraqi protests and attack on 31 December on the US Embassy in Baghdad was a
response to a US assault on Militia Iraqi forces on 29 December – leaving at least 25
dead and more than 50 wounded.
The US has absolutely no business in Iraq. Not now, not ever – nor in Syria, nor
anywhere else in the Middle East – for that matter, outside the frontiers of the United
States of America. It's as simple as that.
And the world, the UN, the UN Security Council should act accordingly.
The boundless US aggression must be stopped.
The world has become used to it and, for the most part, is just silent. The ABNORMAL has
become normal. That must be reversed.
Yes, the Iranian Government warned of retaliation. Understandably. However, that is
precisely what Washington and the Pentagon wants; that's what they were provoking, with this
assassination of General Suleimani, and earlier with confiscated oil tankers and tanker attacks
in the Gulf. The US hawks are just waiting for Iran to retaliate, so they can attack in full
force – or ask Israel to attack in full force with US backing, of course.
Knowing how the US is acting around the world with impunity – and especially in the
countries they want to dominate – Iran has to count with the worst. So far, Iran has been
acting wisely with a lot of restraint, not to risk MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction, in
other words, a World War scenario.
A retaliation must be well-thought out – and foremost not be obvious. It must be
strategic with long-term impact not the short-term face-saving military act. In the long-term,
non-aggression, non-confrontation – the contrary of what Washington is seeking –
may prevail. Let the American war hawks continue shadow boxing.
What the Middle East and world is dealing with is a dying beast. That's what the US empire
has become. The beast, in its last breath, is lashing out round itself no matter how many other
countries it pulls with it into the abyss, no matter how many people are killed in the
process.
What will be the world's reaction to this open and flagrant murder? Do not expect much from
the US-submissive West, especially the Europeans.
However, Iran can certainly count on Russia and China and on a number of other allies. And
in the UN on the more than 120 non-aligned countries that also stand behind Venezuela and Cuba,
and now behind Evo Morales.
This is important. These unaligned countries are now in the majority of the UN body of
member states. They have to speak out in the Security Council, as well as in the General
Assembly. This case of US impunity should be elevated to world attention. Therefore, Iran may
want to call a special UN General Assembly Meeting to discuss the case. It would show
where the UN stands and would accordingly provide Iran with more leverage on their
reaction.
Iran cannot elevate this case high enough on the world stage. So that each and every nation
realizes that their own sovereignty is at risk – is every day at risk – of being
annihilated by the wannabe World Hegemon, the self-declared Exceptional Nation, US of A.
Only united can this monster be beaten.
Washington is weak, knows no long-term thinking, no long-term strategy – lives off
instant gratification. This works for a while, by sheer military force, but not forever.
Russia and China have now far advanced precision weaponry and are allies of Iran. Short-term
thinking may be a suicide mission.
Much as been made about Soleimani's alleged responsibility for the deaths of 600 American
servicemen but what people forget is that Iranian military personnel would be legitimate
targets if they invaded Mexico or Canada. That 600 figure is probably a drop in the bucket
compared to the number of people Trump has killed with his unprecedented number of drone
strikes since taking office.
Whatever the case Donald Trump is indeed a pathological liar and monumental fraud and it
seems that the vast majority of his deplorables (I'm an ex-deplorable) have tripled down on
their love and support of him despite his broken promise of ending "these stupid wars".
To some extent it is not relevant if Trump was lying during his campaign, or has been
corrupted/coopted/fooled/pressured/played for a chump by the establishment. He said one thing
and is doing another: that's the bottom line.
However: I note that after Barack Obama got elected, he immediately fired all of his
populist advisors and hired Wall Streeters even before being sworn in. Obama was clearly
lying up front.
Trump, however, initially did start moving in the direction he said he would, he kept his
populist/nationalist advisors, and really did make actual moves to carry out his campaign
promises. And the establishment went total nut job, he was a Russian agent, his populist
advisers were targeted for legal actions, they were replaced with establishment advisors who
hate him Trump was strong on stage berating a political opponent, but against establishment
pressure he has turned out to be weak, caving in to "the Blob" at every turn.
Had she been elected, Hillary would already have started the neocon wet dream of a war
with Iran.
While that may be true, I am tired of giving Trump a free pass, just because Hillary would
have been worse. Being relatively less evil, or a different incarnation of evil, is still
evil.
Frankly, impeachment was just a distraction to divert attention from the real play. The
dagger at his throat is from far more malevolent foes who can wield both blackmail or death
as the circumstances demand to get their way. The jewish mafia is far more dangerous than the
Sicilian boys could ever hope to be. The latter learned from the former.
>> On top of this Putin himself has made some critical mistakes due to his Naive
personality, especially his falling for Trumps phoney reset (Trumps policies towards Russia
have been harsher then any president since Pappi Bush) and in the aftermath of that flop,
running into the arms of "Red" China's fake belt and Road which will be used to get Russia
completely dependent on the biggest U$ satellite
I don't agree that China is pro-US, with tome China will grow and the US will diminish,
BRI will leads towards that, but I do agree that Trump has been the most anti-russian
president since the 80s. Be objective. Do not look at what they say, look at what they do,
the maxim says. Defacto, Trump has been far more aggressive and hostile to Russia than Obama.
And he made everything possible to increase military budgets.
She also failed to mention that Trump activated Second Fleet in the Atlantic (that Obama
actually disabled) for Russia containment.
Trump is just a military puppet seeking to prolong the US Empire on the cheap. That is -
no more nation building, and let others pay for propping up the US empire.
@ Posted by: lysias | Dec 16 2019 1:46 utc | 25 and Posted by: Passer by | Dec 16 2019 1:39
utc | 24 writing about who was instrumental in being negative towards Russia.
It was during Obama's term that Russia changed the trajectory of the war in Syria.
But lets get real, there is only one "Party" in America, the private finance/money party
and both Obama and Trump are/were puppets for it. And those folks have know for some time
about the integration of China/Russia geopolitical views so the policy has been "consistent"
for probably a decade or more.
Money quote: "Johnson will have to work superhard on this if he is to re-create not the
Thatcher coalition but the Disraeli nation. That's what he means when he talks about "One Nation
Conservatism." That was Disraeli's reformist conservatism of the 19th century, a somewhat
protectionist, supremely patriotic alliance between the conservative elites and the ordinary man
and woman. It will take a huge amount of charm and policy persistence to cement that coalition if
it is to last more than one election. But if Boris pulls that off, he will have found a new
formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup."
Notable quotes:
"... But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy ..."
Brexit is an eruption of English nationalism, and the Tories are now, under that shambling
parody of a drunk racist English aristo, Johnson, an English nationalist party.
IMHO this is highly questionable statement. Brexit is a form of protest against neoliberal
globalization. The fact that is colored with nationalism is the secondary effect/factor:
rejection of neoliberalism is almost always colored in either nationalist rhetoric, or Marxist
rhetoric.
Here are some quotes from paleoconservative analysis of the elections taken from two recent
articles:
While I do not share their enthusiasm about "Red Tories" rule in the UK, and the bright
future for "Trumpism without Trump" movement in the USA, they IMHO provide some interesting
insights into paleoconservatives view on the British elections results and elements of social
protest that led to them:
[AS] It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender,
and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they're talking about
and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can
have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural
left voters decided to listen to someone who
does actually speak their language , even if in an absurdly plummy accent.
[AS] But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on
public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the
far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy . ... This is
Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at
the heart of it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration
system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working
poor, not the decadent rich. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new
immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on
the working poor, not the decadent rich. It's very much the same movement of left-behind
people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump.
What we've seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to
stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it.
[AS] Trump has bollixed it up, of course. He ran on Johnson's platform but gave almost all
his tax cuts to the extremely wealthy, while Johnson will cut taxes on the poor. Trump talks
a big game on immigration but has been unable to get any real change in the system out of
Congress. Johnson now has a big majority to pass a new immigration bill, with Parliament in
his control, which makes the task much easier. Trump is flamingly incompetent and unable to
understand his constitutional role. Boris will assemble a competent team, with Michael Gove
as his CEO, and Dom Cummings as strategist.
[AS] If Johnson succeeds, he'll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no
apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public
spending on the poor and on those who are "just about managing"; increase taxes on the very
rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke;
and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support).
[RD] I have no idea why the Republicans are so damned silent on wokeness, including the
transgender madness. No doubt about it, the American people have accepted gay marriage and
gay rights, broadly. But the Left will not accept this victory in the culture war. They
cannot help bouncing the rubble, and driving people farther than they are willing to go, or
that they should have to go. It's the elites -- and not just academic elites. Every week I
get at least two e-mails from readers sending me examples of transgender wokeness taking over
their professions -- especially big business. People hate this pronoun crap, but nobody dares
to speak out against it, because they are afraid of being doxxed, cancelled, or at least
marginalized in the workplace.
[RD] My friend said (I paraphrase):
"Can you blame people for not answering pollsters' questions? Everybody is told all the
time that the things they believe, and the things they worry about, are backwards and
bigoted. They have learned to keep it to themselves. It's the same thing here. I hate
Donald Trump, but I'm probably going to end up voting for him, because at least he doesn't
hate my sons. I want a good future for every child -- black, Latino, white, all of them --
but the Left thinks my sons are what's wrong with the world
[RD] Boris (and Sully) style Toryism is better than nothing, isn't it? As a general rule,
in this emerging post-Christian social and political order, we conservative Christians had
better not let the unachievable perfect be the enemy of the common-sense good enough.
In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to announce
new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000 low-income folks.
The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that
beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to
Bloomberg sources.
Republicans have long attempted to abolish the welfare state, claiming that the
redistribution of wealth for poor people keeps them in a state of perpetual poverty. They also
claim the welfare state is a system of command and control and has been used by Democrats for
decades as a political weapon against conservatives, hence why most inner cities vote
Democrat.
House Republicans tried to cut parts of the federal food assistance program last year, but
it was quickly rejected in the Senate.
The new requirements by the Trump administration would only target "able-bodied" recipients
who aren't caring for children under six.
Sources said the measure would be one of three enacted by the Trump administration to wind
down the massive federal food assistance program.
The measures are expected to boot nearly 3.7 million recipients from the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Though it comes at a time when employment is in a
downturn, manufacturing has stumbled into a recession
, and the US economy could be entering a mild recession in the year ahead. As to why President
Trump wants hundreds of thousands of low-income folks off SNAP ahead of an election year while
the economy is rapidly decelerating could be an administrative error that may lead to social
instabilities in specific regions that will be affected the hardest. Then again, no turmoil
could come out of it, and it's hailed as a success during the election year.
The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1
billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five.
Nearly 36.4 million Americans in the "greatest economy ever" are on food stamps. At least
half of all Americans have low-wage jobs, barely enough to cover living expenses, nevertheless,
service their
credit cards with record-high interest rates . The economy as a whole is undergoing
profound structural changes with automation and artificial intelligence. Tens of millions of
jobs will be lost by 2030. It's likely the collision of these forces means the welfare state is
going nowhere and will only grow in size when the next recession strikes.
Cutting food stamps for low-income folks is the right move into creating a more leaner
government, but there are severe social implications that could be triggered if the new
measures are passed.
And while President Trump wants to slash the welfare state for poor people, his supply-side
policies and bailouts of corporate America have been record-setting in some respects.
Actions by the administration clearly show that corporate welfare for Wall Street elites is
more important than welfare for low-income folks. Perfect Storm: Trump Admin To Cut 750,000
From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession
this is one of the most shameful acts for any president, especially a billionaire. If he
wants to save a billion/year, cut it from military. Or increase staff at SNAP to check for
fraud, but this is really shameful. I think it would've been better to raise tariff on China
and use that money to increase SNAP not decrease it
What's the need in cutting foodstamps? You can take every able-bodied recipient and have
them work a reasonable number of hours per week in a fair exchange. Plenty of work to be had
and you could do it WPA style where those of certain skills could apply them.
And if you want to cut welfare, START WITH CORPORATE WELFARE
This is a positive development in terms of the nuclear family. Women can't just abscond
with the kids and her husband's alimony if she knows she will have to actually get a job to
pay for her own food. I'm sick of paying taxes to support whore women and their bastard
children.
"The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1
billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five."
Today's Repo operation by the Fed is $70.1 Billion. The $1.1 Billion in annual savings due
to this cut is about 1.5% of what the Fed pumped into the Repo market just today. I'm all for
cutting out the fraud. If you can work, then you should work. Don't work? Don't eat! But our
economy is a Service Sector for the most part now, and the wages suck for a big part in the
Service Sector. Wages overall have been nearly flat for about 30 years. How about we cut the
welfare **** to the banks, Wall Street? That would save trillions not just billions. Typical
DC. Fix problems while ******* over the little people, and continuing corporate welfare all
the while. This **** so needs to burn up!
great... outsource manufacturing, sign new trade deals to off shore more jobs, ramp up the
stock market for the rich, waste trillions on destabilizing other nations, give israel all
they want, print money to infinity, ask for zero interest rate.. and a billion per year to
feed poor people is too much.. Trump is in touch with the little guy
Trump will lose 2020... give the 750,000 guns and ammo and some food and water... and a
map to DC... Soros can provide the buses...
In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to
announce new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000
low-income folks
and yet Trump is crying for negative interest rates so the 0.1% can continue getting the
welfare they deserve ?
The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that
beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to
Bloomberg sources.
And... those are actually the OLD rules, which are still on the books, but which Obama
waived by EO. I'm glad 750,00 are being cut from the roles.
Trump Admin To Cut 750,000 From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession
OK, so I have to ask: What recession? Well, the coming one, obviously! So let's logic this
out. You wouldn't cut food stamps IN a recession (political suicide), so what's your
alternative? You're either in a recession or you're on your way to the next one which will
happen eventually, right? So, when would you be able to cut food stamps? I guess never by
that logic.
"... Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic growth without end/crisis. ..."
"... I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent, rigid class system ..."
"... If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive. Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners. ..."
"... The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things (despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly likely to be manipulated like Trump. ..."
"... I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral values against socialism, no matter what voters say. ..."
The headline will become operative in December, if as expected, the Trump Administration
maintains its refusal to nominate new judges
to the WTO appellate panel . That will render the WTO unable to take on new cases, and
bring about an effective return to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which
preceded the WTO .
An interesting sidelight is that Brexit No-Dealers have been keen on the merits of trading
"on WTO terms", but those terms will probably be unenforceable by the time No Deal happens (if
it does).
likbez 10.27.19 at 11:22 pm
That's another manifestation of the ascendance of "national neoliberalism," which now is
displacing "classic neoliberalism."
Attempts to remove Trump via color revolution mechanisms (Russiagate, Ukrainegate) are
essentially connected with the desire of adherents of classic neoliberalism to return to the
old paradigm and kick the can down the road until the cliff. I think it is impossible because
the neoliberal elite lost popular support (aka support of deplorables) and now is hanging in
the air. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to
be very destructive.
That's why probably previous attempts to remove Trump were unsuccessful. And if corrupt
classic neoliberal Biden wins Neoliberal Dem Party nomination, the USA probably will get the
second term of Trump. Warren might have a chance as "Better Trump then Trump" although she
proved so far to be pretty inept politician, and like "original" Trump probably can be easily
coerced by the establishment, if she wins.
All this weeping and gnashing of teeth by "neoliberal Intelligentsia" does not change the
fact that neoliberalism entered the period of structural crisis demonstrated by "secular
stagnation," and, as such, its survival is far from certain. We probably can argue only about
how long it will take for the "national neoliberalism" to dismantle it and what shape or form
the new social order will take.
That does not mean that replacing the classic neoliberalism the new social order will be
better, or more just. Neoliberalism was actually two steps back in comparison with the New
Deal Capitalism that it replaced. It clearly was a social regress.
John, I am legitimate curious what you find "exactly right" in the comment above. Other than
the obvious bit in the last line about new deal vs neoliberalism, I would say it is
completely wrong, band presenting an amazingly distorted view of both the last few years and
recent history.
Neo-liberalism is not a unified thing. Right wing parties are not following the original
(the value of choice) paradigm of Milton Friedman that won the argument during the 1970s
inflation panic, but have implemented a deceitful bait and switch strategy, followed by
continually shifting the goalposts – claiming – it would of worked but we weren't
pure enough.
But parts of what Milton Friedman said (for instance the danger of bad micro-economic
design of welfare systems creating poverty traps, and the inherent problems of high tariff
rates) had a kernel of truth. (Unfortunately, Friedman's macro-economics was almost all wrong
and has done great damage.)
"In that context it felt free to override national governments on any issue that
might affect international trade, most notably environmental policies."
Not entirely sure about that. The one case where I was informed enough to really know
detail was the China and rare earths WTO case. China claimed that restrictions on exports of
separated but otherwise unprocessed rare earths were being made on environmental grounds.
Rare earth mining is a messy business, especially the way they do it.
Well, OK. And if such exports were being limited on environmental grounds then that would
be WTO compliant. Which is why the claim presumably.
It was gently or not pointed out that exports of things made from those same rare earths
were not limited in any sense. Therefore that environmental justification might not be quite
the real one. Possibly, it was an attempt to suck RE using industry into China by making rare
earths outside in short supply, but the availability for local processing being unrestricted?
Certainly, one customer of mine at the time seriously considered packing up the US factory
and moving it.
China lost the WTO case. Not because environmental reasons aren't a justification for
restrictions on trade but because no one believed that was the reason, rather than the
justification.
I don't know about other cases – shrimp, tuna – but there is at least the
possibility that it's the argument, not the environment, which wasn't sufficient
justification?
Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every political and
institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of the free market.
In the EU, East Asia, and North America, some of what has taken place is the
rationalization of bureaucratic practices and the weakening of archaic localisms. Some of
these developments have been positive.
In this respect, neoliberalism in the blanket sense used by Likbez and many others is like
what the the ancien regime was, a mix of regressive and progressive tendencies. In the
aftermath of the on-going upheaval, it is likely that it will be reassessed and some of its
features will be valued if they manage to persist.
I'm thinking of international trade agreements, transnational scientific organizations,
and confederations like the European Union.
steven t johnson 10.29.19 at 12:29 am
If I may venture to translate @1?
Right-wing populism like Orban, Salvini, the Brexiteers are sweeping the globe and this is
more of the same.
Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing
Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional
quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face
of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular
stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't
collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic
growth without end/crisis.
I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading
system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent,
rigid class system .
If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to
hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or
nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good"
mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive.
Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but
self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social
cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners.
The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is
probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be
shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years
of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will
probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things
(despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly
likely to be manipulated like Trump.
Again, despite the fury the old internationalism is collapsing under stagnation and
weeping about it is irrelevant. Without any real ideas, we can only react to events as
nationalist predatory capitals fight for their new world.
I'm not saying the new right wing populism is better. The New Deal/Great Society did more
for America than its political successors since Nixon et al. The years since 1968 I think
have been a regression and I see no reason–alas–that it can't get even worse.
I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way
likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem
being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral
values against socialism, no matter what voters say.
It is a particular mutation of the original concept similar to mutation of socialism into
national socialism, when domestic policies are mostly preserved (including rampant
deregulation) and supplemented by repressive measures (total surveillance) , but in foreign
policy "might make right" and unilateralism with the stress on strictly bilateral regulations
of trade (no WTO) somewhat modifies "Washington consensus". In other words, the foreign
financial oligarchy has a demoted status under the "national neoliberalism" regime, while the
national financial oligarchy and manufactures are elevated.
And the slogan of "financial oligarchy of all countries, unite" which is sine qua
non of classic neoliberalism is effectively dead and is replaced by protection racket of
the most political powerful players (look at Biden and Ukrainian oligarchs behavior here
;-)
> I think every sentence in that comment is either completely wrong or at least
debatable. And is likbez actually John Hewson, because that comment reads like one of John
Hewson's commentaries
> Most obviously, to define Warren and Trump as both being neoliberals drains the
term of any meaning
You are way too fast even for a political football forward ;-).
Warren capitalizes on the same discontent and the feeling of the crisis of neoliberalism
that allowed Trump to win. Yes, she is a much better candidate than Trump, and her policy
proposals are better (unless she is coerced by the Deep State like Trump in the first three
months of her Presidency).
Still, unlike Sanders in domestic policy and Tulsi in foreign policy, she is a neoliberal
reformist at heart and a neoliberal warmonger in foreign policy. Most of her policy proposals
are quite shallow, and are just a band-aid.
> Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every
political and institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of
the free market.
This is a typical stance of neoliberal MSM, a popular line of attack on critics of
neoliberalism.
Yes, of course, not everything political and institutional development of the last 40
years comes down to the worship of the "free market." But how can it be otherwise? Notions of
human agency, a complex interaction of politics and economics in human affairs, technological
progress since 1970th, etc., all play a role. But a historian needs to be able to somehow
integrate the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story.
And IMHO this story for the last several decades is the ascendance and now decline of
"classic neoliberalism" with its stress on the neoliberal globalization and opening of the
foreign markets for transnational corporations (often via direct or indirect (financial)
pressure, or subversive actions including color revolutions and military intervention) and
replacement of it by "national neoliberalism" -- domestic neoliberalism without (or with a
different type of) neoliberal globalization.
Defining features of national neoliberalism along with the rejection of neoliberal
globalization and, in particular, multiparty treaties like WTO is massive, overwhelming
propaganda including politicized witch hunts (via neoliberal MSM), total surveillance of
citizens by the national security state institutions (three-letter agencies which now
acquired a political role), as well as elements of classic nationalism built-in.
The dominant ideology of the last 30 years was definitely connected with "worshiping of
free markets," a secular religion that displaced alternative views and, for several decades
(say 1976 -2007), dominated the discourse. So worshiping (or pretense of worshiping) of "free
market" (as if such market exists, and is not a theological construct -- a deity of some
sort) is really defining feature here.
This is too idealizing Trump coverage. Whel thestrggle with the Deep state is real, Trump
like Obama before him proved to be "betrayer of his election promises in chief" rather then the
fighter. Also the oligarchs who financed his election such as Adelson were most argent
Zionists, which exclude any real change from day one.
The New York Times on Thursday published a remarkable piece that essentially
acknowledged the existence of an American "deep state" and its implacable hostility to Donald
Trump. The Times writers (fully five on the byline: Peter Baker, Lara Jakes, Julian E.
Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, and Edward Wong) certainly don't decry the existence of this deep
state, as so many conservatives and Trump supporters do. Nor do they refrain from the kinds
of value-charged digs and asides against Trump that have illuminated the paper's consistent
bias against the president from the beginning.
But they do portray the current impeachment drama as the likely denouement of a struggle
between the outsider Trump and the insider administrative forces of government. In so doing,
they implicitly give support to those who have argued that American foreign policy has become
the almost exclusive domain of unelected bureaucrats impervious to the views of elected
officials -- even presidents -- who may harbor outlooks different from their own.
This is a big deal because, even in today's highly charged political environment, with a
sitting president under constant guerrilla attack, few have been willing to acknowledge any
such deep state phenomenon. When in the spring of 2018, The National Interest asked 12
presumed experts -- historians, writers, former government officials, and think tank mavens
-- to weigh in on whether there was in fact such a thing as a deep state, eight said no, two
waffled with a "sort of" response, and only two said yes. Former Colorado senator Gary Hart
made fun of the whole concept, warning of "sly devils meeting in the furnace room after
hours, passing out assignments for subverting the current administration."
But now the Times ' Baker et al weigh in with an analysis saying that, yes, Trump
has been battling something that some see as a deep state, and the deep state is winning. The
headline: "Trump's War on the 'Deep State' Turns Against Him." There's an explanatory subhed
that reads: "The impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the
president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged."
As the Times reporters put it in the story text, "The House impeachment inquiry into
Mr.Trump's efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Democrats is the climax of a 33-month
scorched-earth struggle between a president with no record of public service and the
government he inherited but never trusted." Leaving aside the requisite rapier thrust at the
president ("with no record of public service"), this is a pretty good summation of the Trump
presidency -- the story of entrenched government bureaucrats and a president who sought to
curb their power. Or, put another way, the story of a president who sought to rein in the
deep state and a deep state that sought to destroy his presidency.
Baker and his colleagues clearly think the president is on the ropes. They quote
Virginia's Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly as saying the nation is headed toward a
kind of "karmic justice," with the House impeachment inquiry now giving opportunity to
once-anonymous officials to "speak out, speak up, testify about and against."
Connolly and the Times reporters are probably right. The House seems headed
inexorably toward impeachment. The president's struggle against the deep state appears now to
be a lost cause. To prevail, he needed to marshal far more public support for his agenda --
including curtailment of the deep state -- than he proved capable of doing. He is a
beleaguered president and is likely to remain so throughout the remainder of his term.
The reporters note that Trump sought from the beginning to minimize the role of career
officials. He gave more ambassadorships to political appointees -- "the highest rate in
history," say the reporters (without noting that Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, and Ronald Reagan weren't far behind). The result, they write, has been "an exodus
from public service." They quote a "nonpartisan organization" saying the Trump
administration lost nearly 1,200 senior career service employees in its first 18 months --
roughly 40 percent more than during President Barack Obama's first year and a half in
office.
The reporters reveal a letter from 36 former foreign service officers to Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo complaining that he had "failed to protect civil servants from political
retaliation" and citing the removal of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Another
letter signed by more than 270 former employees of the U.S. Agency for International
Development expressed anger at the treatment of public servants and the president's "cavalier
(and quite possibly corrupt) approach to making foreign policy."
The tone of the Times piece seems to suggest these expressions and actions constitute a
kind of indictment of Trump. But a more objective appraisal would be that it is merely the
outward manifestation of that "33-month scorched-earth struggle" the Times was talking
about. Does a president have a right to fire an ambassador? How serious an offense is it
when he appoints political figures to ambassadorships at a rate slightly higher than some
previous presidents? If foreign policy careerists decide to leave the government because they
don't like the president's effort to rein in foreign policy careerists, is that a black mark
on the president -- or merely the natural result of a fundamental intragovernmental
struggle?
But the Times reporters give the game away more explicitly in cataloguing a list of
instances where those careerists sought to undermine the president because they found his
policy decisions contemptible. "While many career employees have left," writes the
Times , " some of those who stayed have resisted some of Mr. Trump's initiatives."
When the president canceled large war games with South Korea, the military held them anyway
-- only on a smaller scale and without fanfare. Diplomats negotiated an agreement before a
NATO summit to foreclose any Trump action based on a different outlook. When the White House
ordered foreign aid frozen this year, agency officials quietly worked with Congress to get it
restored. State Department officials enlisted congressional allies to hinder Trump's efforts
to initiate weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other nations.
Further, as the Times writes, "When transcripts of [Trump's] telephone calls with the
leaders of Mexico and Australia were leaked, it convinced him that he could not trust the
career staff and so records of subsequent call were stashed away in a classified
database." And that was very early in his presidency, about the time Trump also
learned there was a nasty dossier out there that was designed to provide grist for anyone
interested in undermining or destroying his presidency.
And of course, now governmental officials are lining up before the House impeachment panel
to slam the president over his effort to get Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rival Joe
Biden and Biden's son, Hunter, and his apparently related decision to hold up $391 million in
security aid to Ukraine. As I have written in this space previously, this outlandish
action by Trump constituted a profound lapse in judgment that was a kind of dare for
opposition Democrats to fire off the impeachment cannon. And fire it off they have. "Now,"
writes the Times , "[Trump] faces the counteroffensive."
But that doesn't take away from the central point of the Times story -- that Trump and the
deep state have been in mortal combat since the beginning of his administration. And the
stakes are huge.
Trump wanted to restore at least somewhat cordial relations with Russia,
whereas the deep state considered that the height of folly. Trump wanted to get out of
Afghanistan, whereas the deep state totally opposed such a move. Trump viewed America's role
in Syria as focused on defeating ISIS, whereas the deep state wanted to continue favoring the
overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Trump was wary of letting events in Ukraine
draw America into a direct confrontation with Russia, whereas the deep state wants to wrest
Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence even if it means opening tensions with the Bear.
Trump wanted to bring China to account for its widespread abuse of normal trading practices,
whereas the deep state clung to "free trade'' even in the face of such abuse.
These are big issues facing America. And the question hovering over the country as the
impeachment drama proceeds is: are these matters open to debate in America? Or will the deep
state suppress any such debate? And can a president -- any president -- pursue the Trump
policy options without being subjected to the powerful yet subtle machinations of a wily
bureaucracy bent on preserving its status and outlook?
Trump has been the boss for 33 months. He promised to "lock up corrupt Hillary and drain
the swamp". All he has done is play the victim as though he is a powerless outsider. That
is what Democrats do. Maybe, Trump is really a Democrat ?
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds
secure the oil for Israel. It's hard to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to
impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave Syria's Golan
Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they
want from him?
"... This "man" has never been anything else but a grifter and giant con. Virtually everything he has done, he's done to enrich himself and his family. That is, besides deconstruct the U$ govt. to enrich his class of people, (the malignantly rich) by dialing back regulations that protect everyday Americans from the greed of the mega-corporations. ..."
"... Trump had long announced that the U.S. military will leave Syria. He had made no promises to the Kurds. The State Department official did not do his job but contradicted Trump's policies. ..."
Commentator ben and others
critizised yesterday's post:
b, I've been a participant at this site for 14yrs, and I don't believe I've ever seen your
take on any subject more "off base", than your take on DJT.
This "man" has never been anything else but a grifter and giant con. Virtually everything
he has done, he's done to enrich himself and his family. That is, besides deconstruct the U$
govt. to enrich his class of people, (the malignantly rich) by dialing back regulations that
protect everyday Americans from the greed of the mega-corporations.
He's a sycophant for the corporate monsters who now own the U$A. Anything and everything
he's done, isn't because he is such an egalitarian, it's for his personal enrichment, and the
monsters he works for.
When they're done with him, they'll throw him under the bus, just like all the rest of
us...
I agree with ben's characterization of Trump. I dislike most of his policies. But
that does not change the fact that Donald Trump is the elected president of the United States
and that he is thereby entitled to direct its foreign policies as he sees fit.
Ben's and my opinion about Trump do not invalidate the point I made. Trump policies,
especially in international relations, are getting sabotaged or co-opted by the Borg ,
the unelected establishment in the various departments and think tanks. This is a dangerous
phenomenon that, more or less, hinders every elected president, especially those who want to
make peace. It should be resisted.
The people in leading positions of the executive work "at the pleasure of the president".
Their task is to execute his policies. When they refrain from doing so or implement their own
preferences they create a mess.
Consider two additional examples, both published yesterday, which describe how James
Jeffrey, the Special Representative for Syria Engagement, tried to
sabotage Trump's decision to leave Syria and, while doing that, misled the Kurds:
A State Department official told a senior Syrian Kurdish leader during a meeting in
Washington that the United States would not fully withdraw its forces from northeast Syria
and advised her administration not to engage with Bashar al-Assad's government or with
Russia.
According to two sources familiar with the Monday, October 22 meeting, a senior member of
Washington's diplomatic team is said to have become angry and told Ilham Ahmed, President of
the Executive Committee of the Syrian Democratic Council, that the U.S. will not allow the
SDC to arrange a deal with the Assad regime or Russia for protection against the Turkey-led
attack.
...
SDC officials told The Defense Post that American officials in the past have promised they
would not withdraw U.S. forces until a political settlement was in place to secure their
future in the Syrian political system.
Trump had long announced that the U.S. military will leave Syria. He had made no promises to
the Kurds. The State Department official did not do his job but contradicted Trump's
policies.
The National Interest has learned from multiple sources about tense meetings between
SDC diplomats and State Department officials who oversee the Trump administration's policy on
Syria. The State Department repeatedly pushed for the SDC to work with Turkish-backed
Islamist rebels while berating Syrian Kurdish officials and refusing to listen to their
concerns, according to multiple sources.
One source with firsthand knowledge of the screaming session told the National
Interest that Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joel Rayburn, who is a special envoy
for Syria, yelled at SDC officials and broke a pencil in a translator's face. Two sources
with secondhand knowledge confirmed this version of events.
"[Rayburn] loves the Syrian Islamist groups," one of the three sources said. "He thinks
they can counter Iran. He is dreaming."
"He is pushing [the SDC] to meet with jihadists," the source added.
To tell the anarcho-marxist YPG/PKK Kurds to unite with Erdogan's Jihadis is an absolutely
crazy idea. Neither the Kurds nor Erdogan would ever agree to a partnership. These were
impossible policies. They made no sense at all.
Jeffrey and his shop clearly worked against Trump's orders and against U.S. interests.
Jeffrey clearly favors Turkey where he once worked as U.S. ambassador and, above all,
Israel:
In addition to the uptick in tense verbal exchanges, the three different sources described to
the National Interest how State Department officials attempted to condemn the brutal
murder of Kurdish-Syrian politician Hevrin Khalaf only to have their efforts waylayed by
Ambassador James Jeffrey, who oversees anti-ISIS efforts. Jeffrey blocked the statement, they
said.
...
Now, even as U.S. troops are stepping aside to allow Turkey to attack U.S.-backed Syrian
Kurdish forces, Jeffrey's team is floating plans to peel off Arab components of the Syrian
Democratic Forces to build a counter-Iran force far from the Turkish border.
It is Jeffrey who is pressing for a continued U.S. occupation of Syria's oilfields. These
are not Trump's policies, but contradictions to them.
When [Trump in December 2018] told his advisers that he wanted to withdraw U.S. forces from
Syria, he meant it. The message should have been clear: devise an orderly withdrawal plan.
But that is not what happened. Instead, efforts and attention were geared towards U.S.
forces remaining indefinitely in Syria.
One can criticize Trump for not selecting advisors and envoys who follow his directions. But
Trump is a New Yorker businessman and not a politician with decades of experience in
Washington. He does not know who he can trust. He has to proceed by trial and error until he
finds people who are willing to go work with him against those permanent powers that usually
drive U.S. foreign policy.
In a congress hearing yesterday James Jeffrey
admitted (vid) that Trump did not consult him before his phone call with Erdogan.
Erdogan could show that he was fighting against the PKK terrorists and prevented their
attempts to become a proto-state. Trump could hold his campaign promise of removing U.S.
troops from useless foreign interventions. Syria regained its northeast and the important
economic resources of that area. Russia gained global prestige and additional influence in
the Middle East.
We will have to wait for Trump's (and Putin's) memoir to learn how much of this has been
coordinated behind the scenes.
I for one count this as a major foreign policy achievement for Trump and I am happy with
this
outcome .
With awareness and foresight, this incisive article on the US empire and the concurrent
demise of democracy in America was published on February 15, 2017 shortly after Trump's
presidential inauguration.
In the words of Julius Caesar , "you cannot build an Empire with a Republic."
" In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not
likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and
cruelty. Without exalting self and abasing others, without hypocrisy, lying, prisons,
fortresses, penalties, killing, no power can arise or hold its own." Leo Tolstoy
(1828-1910), (in 'The Kingdom of God is Within You' 1894.)
"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful
rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many
lunatics and most of the great men of history." Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), (in The
Conquest of Happiness, ch. 1, 1930.)
" Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him
power. " Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th President of the United States, 1861-65; (N. B.:
Originally found and attributed to Lincoln in a biography entitled " Abraham Lincoln, the
Backwoods Boy " by Horatio Alger Jr., pub. in 1883.)
"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged
against provisions against danger, real or pretended from abroad." James Madison
(1751-1836), Father of the US Constitution, 4th American President, (in a letter to Thomas
Jefferson, May 13, 1798.)
" When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the
cross." Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), (It Can't Happen Here, 1935, a novel about the election
of a fascist to the American presidency.)
When 46.1% of Americans who
voted , in November 2016, to elect a real estate magnate in the person of Donald Trump as
U.S. President, they did not know precisely what they were buying, because, as the quote above
says, we really know how a politician will behave only once he or she assumes power. Americans
surely did not expect that the promised "change" the Republican presidential candidate
envisioned and promised was going to be, in fact, "chaos" and "turmoil" in the U.S.
government.
President Donald Trump
(1946- ) has surrounded himself with three politically inexperienced Rasputin-like advisers,
i.e. his young pro-Israel Jewish son-in-law Jared
Kushner (1981- ), advising on foreign policy and acting as a speech writer, and his far
right media executive and chief political strategist Steve
Bannon (1953- ) with an apocalyptic worldview, who is, moreover, a voting permanent member
of the National Security Council (
NSC ).
Stephen Miller (1985- ), 31, also a young inexperienced senior White House adviser,
completes the trio. He is working with Jared Kushner for domestic affairs and is also a Trump
speechwriter.
Stephen Miller (1985- ) Jared Kushner (1981- )
Three weeks after his inauguration, President Trump has turned out to be a much more erratic
politician than could have been expected, even after all the inanities he uttered during the
U.S. Presidential campaign.
I, for one, thought that once elected president and installed in the White House, he would
abandon his tweeting eccentricities. -- I was wrong .
Stephen Bannon (1953- )
In fact, for a few weeks after inauguration day, on January 20, 2017, before the nominated
secretaries of various government departments were confirmed by the Senate, and anxious to "
get the show going ", the Trump White House behaved like an imperial junta, issuing a
string of executive
orders and memos . The objective, seemingly, was to force the hands of the responsible
departments and of the elected Congress, and to bend the entire U.S. bureaucracy to its agenda.
It may have gone too far.
Indeed, when the heads of important departments
like the Department of Defense ( James Mattis, right) and the State Department ( Rex Tillerson
) were confirmed and assumed their functions, President Trump changed his mind on many policies
about Israel ,
China ,
the Iran
Deal etc.
U.S. courts have also thrown a monkey wrench in the blanket executive order closing the
U.S. borders without recourse to the citizens of seven Muslim countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran,
Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen), for spurious " security reasons ".
Let us recall how the inexperienced Trump White House has created chaos during the first
weeks following inauguration day.
President Donald Trump has shown a propensity to govern by decree with a minimum input from
government departments and from the elected Congress
A dangerous and potentially disastrous approach to government, in a democracy, occurs when a
leader adopts the practice of
governing by decree , without constitutional constraints, thus forcing the hands of
responsible departments, of the elected Congress and submitting the entire U.S. bureaucracy to
his will by governing as an autocrat. If it were to continue on that road, the Trump
administration could turn out to be more like a would-be imperial presidency than a
responsible democratic government.
This term was first coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. in his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency , in
response to President Richard Nixon's attempt to extend the power of the U.S. president,
declaring " when the president does it, that means it is not illegal ". In my own 2003
book The New
American Empire , I dealt with the issue of American presidents having usurped over time
the power to adopt a policy of global intervention, and the power to launch wars of aggression
at will, with a minimum input from Congress.
President Trump seems to want to outdo President Nixon in considering the White House as the
primary center of political power within the American government, contrary to what the
U.S.
Constitution says about the separation of powers.
To be sure, other American presidents have issued executive orders and presidential memos
early in their administration, but this was mainly to re-establish procedures that a previous
administration had abandoned. They usually did not deal with fundamental and complex policies
without debate, although many did
.
In the case of President Trump, his executive orders and presidential memos have not only
been multiple, they also have dealt with fundamental policies, without consulting and
requesting the professional input of the Secretary and of the department responsible, be it on
healthcare, abortion, international trade, immigration, oil exploration, justice, etc., and
without producing policy papers to explain the rationale behind the policy changes and without
outlining the objectives being pursued.
When such a development of governing by decree has occurred in other countries, democracy
was the loser, and the consequences for the leader and his country turned out to be
disastrous.
President Donald Trump seems to be anxious to find pretexts to pick fights with other
countries: For him, it seems to be the U.S. against the world
In a March 2007 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, the future
presidential candidate Donald Trump said that President George W. Bush had been a disaster in
foreign relations and that he was " the worst American president in the history of the
United States ", adding that he " should have been impeached " because he lied his
way into a war of aggression against Iraq and sent thousands of people to their death. This is
an assessment that he has repeated on numerous occasions.
However, ironically, President Donald Trump seems to be on the same track as George W. Bush
regarding the country of Iran, using lies and
false
claims to pick a fight with that country, and in so doing, echoing the hysterical rhetoric
of Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu . He has also recklessly insulted the heads of a half dozen countries , even going so far as to
threaten the President of Mexico to invade his
country. As to his criticism of President George W. Bush, it seems that really, " it takes
one to know one "!
President Trump should be reminded of what he promised
as a presidential candidate. In a foreign policy speech delivered on Wednesday April 27, 2016,
he declared "Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my
first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands
that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength. Although not in government
service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly, saying for many years that it
would destabilize the Middle East."
President Donald Trump has been less than candid regarding the influence of the Wall Street
lobby on politicians, including himself
During the 2016 Presidential political campaign, candidate Donald Trump was very critical of
politicians who do the heavy lifting for Wall Street firms in Washington D.C. On many
occasions, Mr. Trump said that Wall Street is a symbol of a corrupt establishment that has been
robbing America's working class and enriching the elite. He also tweeted point blank, on July
28, 2016, that Secretary Hillary Clinton was " owned
by Wall Street " and that Wall Street banks had " total,
total control " over his rivals Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, implying that they were
unfit for the Office of the President. On October 19, 2016, Mr. Trump tweeted that " crooked
Hillary is nothing more than a Wall Street Puppet ", thus presenting himself as the
populist defender of the working class against the financial elite.
But guess what? One of Mr. Trump's first moves as President was to order the undoing of the
banking regulations known as the Dodd-Frank legislation , which was adopted in 2010, after the
2008 subprime financial crisis. President Trump thus quickly answered the main request made by
the very Wall Street mega banks that he had accused previously of corrupting Washington
politicians. He went even further when he named a former Goldman Sachs banker,
Steven Mnuchin ,(right) as his Treasury Secretary.
Also, Mr. Trump has reached to the mega-bank Goldman Sachs for help and support. He name Mr.
Gary Cohn (1960- ), president of
Goldman Sachs , head of the President's National Economic Council, thus making sure that
Wall Street bankers will have a big say in his administration's economic and financial
policies.
Was his lambasting of his opponents as Wall Street banks' puppets simply campaign rhetoric
without substance? That is certainly a question worth asking.
President Donald Trump's continuous attacks against the free press and against independent
judges who rule against his policies is an authoritarian approach to government and is a
violation of the separation of powers
On Monday February 6, President Trump launched a barrage of
off-the-cuff intimidating insults at the American news media, accusing them of "
refusing to report on terrorist attack s", without providing any evidence to back up
such serious accusations. He has also attempted to
intimidate judges who have to rule on the constitutionality of some of his decrees and
threatened their judiciary
independence .
Such behavior is a violation of, and contempt for the separation
of powers clause in the U.S. Constitution and is a frontal attack against the
free press .
This is not a trivial matter, because when an authoritarian regime wants to establish itself
and avoid accountability, it usually attacks the legislative and the judiciary branches of
government to pressure them to toe the line of the executive branch, and it tries to silence
the very institutions that can put the false statements of politicians to the test.
President Donald Trump has a mercantilist view of international trade, which is rejected by
nearly all economists
President Donald Trump seems to think that his country should have trade surpluses on goods
and services vis-à-vis other countries, the latter being saddled with trade deficits,
whatever the overall balance of payments of the United
States, especially its capital account, and whatever the domestic and foreign economic
circumstances. This is economically false. That is not the way adjustments in the balance of
payments of a country work, in a multilateral world.
When Donald Trump places all the emphasis on only one part of the balance of payments, the
trade balance, he misses the point. For example, if a country lives beyond its means and
borrows money from abroad, such foreign borrowing appears as an inflow of foreign capital in
the country. Such an inflow of foreign capital causes an excess of domestic spending over its
production, and that helps finance an excess of imports over exports of goods and services with
the rest of the world. The capital account of the country shows a surplus, while the trade
balance (more precisely the current account) indicates a deficit, thus balancing more or less
each other.
The main reason why the United States is registering trade deficits is because it borrows
too much from abroad.
This is partly due to the fact that the U.S. government runs huge fiscal deficits ,
spending more than its tax revenues, and borrowing money both from the private sector and from
foreigners, thus increasing the public debt. Such deficits often are the result of tax
reductions and of increased military expenditures. The fact that the world economy uses
the
U.S. dollar as a
reserve currency represents an interest-free loan that the rest of the world makes to the
United States, which allows the USA to have a chronic trade deficit. Mr. Trump and his advisers
would be wise to understand these truths of international finance.
If his administration wants to reduce the annual U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the
world, the U.S. government should balance its books and reduce its foreign borrowings.
Trade wars will not
improve the U.S. trade balance if the country keeps over-spending and keeps borrowing from
abroad. They would only make matters worse.
For many decades now, the U.S. government has piled up debt upon debt
while running continuous fiscal
deficits , mainly due to the fact that it has been waging costly wars abroad, while financing such
interventions with foreign money. This is a problem that American politicians must understand
if they don't want their country to go bankrupt. This has happened in the past to other
overextended empires ,
and there is no reason why it should not happen today when a country continuously spends more
than it produces. And wars do not produce anything, except death and destruction.
Hopes of putting an end to the Middle East chaos have greatly diminished
One of the positive results of the Trump election was the promise to end the deadly chaos in
the Middle East. During the presidential campaign and once in power, Mr. Trump threw some cold
water on that promise.
Firstly, in his March 21, 2016 speech to AIPAC , he
flattered his rich Zionist donors by announcing his intention to break with the half-century
policy of most western nations that considers the city of Jerusalem a United Nations protected
zone and an international city occupied by Arabs, Christians and Jews. He declared " we will
move the American embassy [from Tel Aviv] to the eternal capital of the Jewish people,
Jerusalem ."
Secondly, on Thursday December 15, 2016, to make sure that everybody understands that he is
one-sided in the more than half a century old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President-elect
Trump announced his choice of a hardliner pro-Israeli settlements on privately-owned
Palestinian lands for
U.S. ambassador to Israel (in fact, David Friedman , his
former bankruptcy lawyer). The new ambassador didn't waste any time in professing that he was
looking forward to doing his job " from the U.S. embassy in Israel's eternal capital,
Jerusalem ."
And, thirdly, seemingly forgetting that he had criticized Secretary Clinton for proposing a
similar dangerously reckless policy, President Trump announced, on January 25, that he "
will absolutely do safe
zones in Syria ", seemingly without considering if it was legal to do so without the
consent of the Syrian government, and without consulting with the three principal countries
(Russia, Turkey and Iran), which had just concluded a peace plan for Syria. He opted instead to
talk to leaders of Saudi Arabia and of the United Arab Emirates -- two countries known to be
sponsoring terrorism in Syria.
The world is afraid of President Donald Trump: Doomsday Clock scientists have concluded that
humanity is just two-and-a-half minutes from the apocalypse
Late in January, the scientists in charge of the
Doomsday Clock set the clock at just two-and-a-half minutes from the apocalypse, allegedly
because of Donald Trump. They said that the businessman turned politician, with his disturbing
and ill-considered pronouncements and policies, has the potential to drive the Planet to
oblivion.
This means that they consider that the Earth is now
closer to oblivion than it has ever been since 1953, at the height of the nuclear
confrontation between the USA and the Soviet Union.
The existential threats facing the Earth now come from the loose talk about using nuclear
weapons and the proliferation of such weapons, as well as the observed acceleration of climate
change.
Conclusion
All considered, the turn of events since the election of Donald Trump has raised a number of
fears that a lot of things could go wrong in the coming years. Many of the policies advanced by
the Trump administration are the wrong remedies for the problems facing the United States and
the world. In fact, many of these ill-conceived policies are more likely to make matters worse,
possibly much worse, than to improve them.
Things seem to have begun to change somewhat with the arrival of newly confirmed secretaries
in the decision-making process and new advisers. Let us hope that cooler heads will bring
experience, knowledge and competence to a Trump administration that cruelly needs it.
*
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It is true that hate of financial oligarchy fuels anti-Semitism but here Trump is just one
small step since 1980 to make this situation happen. The neoliberal elite achieves some success
by trying to substitute anti-Semitism with Russophobia, but the essence of Russophobia, as
displayed anti-Semitism is the same -- this is an attempt to deflect critique of neoliberal elite
and patch the cracks in the neoliberal facade of the US society.
The problem is not Trump but neoliberalism. Krugman who is neoliberal stooge would never
admit that. In essence he is a useful idiot for financial oligarchy in in Lenin's terminology.
And always was.
The real situation is that Wall Street banks and financial oligarchs despite
overrepresentation of a particular nationality in them are interested in imposing the neo-fascist
regime on the country and will finance the leader and the party which strive to do that because
they are afraid to lose the power and money as the result of the collapse of neoliberalism. So
this 1920 in the new colorful, gadget filled packaging. Few US citizens would name US business
moguls who help the rise of Hitler. They include some well known families.
Notable quotes:
"... It's true that Trump (breaking all his campaign promises) has indeed cut taxes on the wealthy, and will surely cut them further if re-elected. By contrast, whoever the Democrats nominate is likely to raise those taxes if she or he wins the general election, perhaps substantially. ..."
"... People who've studied the extremely rich argue that money, for them, is largely not about being able to buy things but is instead a way of keeping score; their satisfaction comes not from more consumption but from overtaking their perceived peers. ..."
"... And tax cuts don't help on that dimension, since your peers get the same tax breaks you do. ..."
It's true that Trump (breaking all his campaign promises) has indeed cut taxes on the
wealthy, and will surely cut them further if re-elected. By contrast, whoever the Democrats
nominate is likely to raise those taxes if she or he wins the general election, perhaps
substantially.
But let's get real. If you're a billionaire, you don't need the extra money. At that level,
purchasing power has nothing to do with the quality of life; having a 45,000-square-foot house
instead of just 40,000, or flying to one of your multiple other residences in a bigger private
jet, won't make you significantly happier.
People who've studied
the extremely rich argue that money, for them, is largely not about being able to buy
things but is instead a way of keeping score; their satisfaction comes not from more
consumption but from overtaking their perceived peers.
And tax cuts don't help on that dimension, since your peers get the same tax breaks you
do.
More to the point, Trumpism is about much more than tax cuts: It's an attempt to end the
rule of law and impose an authoritarian, white nationalist regime. And even billionaires should
be terrified about what their lives will be like if that attempt succeeds.
...Ross is
Jewish -- and anyone Jewish has to be completely ignorant of history not to know that when
bigotry runs free, we're always next in line for persecution.
In fact, the ingredients for an American pogrom are already in place. The El Paso shooting
suspect, like many right-wing terrorists, is a believer in " replacement
theory " -- the claim that immigration is part of a vast conspiracy to replace whites with
people of color. And who's behind that conspiracy? You know who: "Jews will not replace us,"
declared the torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville.
Is Trump a replacement theory guy? The replacement theorists think so.
... ... ...
By the way, the greed part is obvious. But it has also been clear since the Obama years that
a fair number of the superrich aren't satisfied with being immensely wealthy; they also want
adulation. They expect to be praised as heroic job creators and are enraged at any suggestion
that some of their number may have behaved badly, let alone that they may have benefited from a
rigged system.
Hence the hatred for even reasonable, pro-market progressives like, say, Elizabeth Warren.
It's not just that these progressives might make billionaires a bit poorer, but that they make
them feel small.
There is abundant academic research demonstrating that the rich are not nice people. People
driving luxury cars are more likely to cut off other cars and pedestrians instead of waiting
their turn at an intersection or crosswalk. The wealthiest 20% of Americans give
significantly less to charity as a fraction of income (1.4%) than the poorest 20 % do (3.5%),
according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Researchers have found that wealthier people
are more likely to believe that selfishness is a virtue. They are more likely to agree with
statements that say that being greedy is justified, even beneficial. The rich have a people
problem; they don't like people. Greed is a disease, but there is one good way to treat it:
with fair taxation. America's income tax, payroll tax and sales tax codes are giant Christmas
buffets for the rich that allow them to systematically dodge taxes while feigning
persecution. And the truly perverted part is that the 2017 Trump-GOP 0.1% Welfare Tax Cut Act
not only gave the 0.1% untold billions in gravy, but the 0.1% then proceeded to 're-invest'
part of that 0.1% welfare right back into the Trump-GOP corrupt campaign coffers, creating a
sickening loop of 0.1% Republican corruption of the tax code and campaign finance corruption.
In short, you can support the Grand Oligarch Party or you can support a decent American
civilization, but you can't do both. It's well past time to evict the Greed Over People party
from the American politiscape. 25 Replies
One of the most interesting things about the modern British Royal Family is how often its
members have served in the military. Another notable thing is how much they do for charity.
They needn't do anything but it seems that they take their responsibilities as the Royal
Family to heart. They do, for the most part, try to set an example to the nation they lead.
(Yes, it's a constitutional monarchy and most of the power resides in Parliament but the
family doesn't have to set any examples at all if it doesn't want to.) Here in America a
great many of our richest families do not serve the country in any way, shape or form except
one: they form PACS with innocuous names like Americans For Prosperity or Citizens for a
Sound Economy and use them to push an agenda that hurts 99% of us. We had a vice president,
Dick Cheney, who was quite happy to have a war in Iraq even though he avoided the draft
during the Vietnam War. In other words, he liked the sound of war but had no idea about what
was involved in running a war or anything else associated with a war. In America we confuse
riches with intelligence, being virtuous, and wisdom. In truth all being very rich does is to
insulate a person from the worst hardships of life. There is no reason to offer the rich
generous tax breaks. They do not spend the money; they invest it and it's not invested in us.
If they are true patriots they will pay their taxes. 8/12/2019 10:29pm
This "so called democracy" here in the U.S. has long ago been superseded by a monetized
democracy. Those making large monetary contributions to elected officials rule the day. Look
at the NRA, Big Pharma, Big Ag, etc. Stephen Ross is doing what many of the moneyed class in
the U.S.A does today in order to be heard. Time for a big change, bring back the voice of the
voting public.
"People who've studied the extremely rich argue that money, for them, is largely not about
being able to buy things but is instead a way of keeping score; their satisfaction comes not
from more consumption but from overtaking their perceived peers." Veblen would find that to
be an interesting observation. If the scoring can't be seen (like having one's tenth
Citation) does it generate the same impact on one's dopamine "wealth" receptors. The truth is
that extreme wealth turns just about everyone into somewhat of a sociopath, unable to have
any empathy for "the lower orders". Oh sure, they give a lot to charity but that too is
simply a variant of conspicuous consumption. When I was an executive in a health insurance
company back in the 90's, the compensation consultants would come in and say that if the
executive team did not get more money, they would all leave to go to higher paying companies.
While this was really not true by any objective measure, the board bought it an our salaries
and bonuses exploded even though we really didn't work all that much harder. It was just free
money. So the marginal utility of that added money did not result in actually harder work.
Now think of the poor person who IS working so much harder, often multiple jobs. They
actually deserve more money. But no, it goes to the enabled wealthy. What would Marx say? Oh,
and what would Jesus say?
Rich industrialists financed the Nazis for sure and I think the other fascist governments in
Italy and Spain as I recall. They are drawn to fascism like flies. Money does not equal
brains except in tech.
Story yesterday on Marketwatch that the Walton family's wealth increases by $100 million per
day. Meanwhile many of their workers have to apply for public assistance to stay alive. A
charming time, ours.
Employee rights advocates say this Labor Day's family barbecues and union solidarity picnics
will take place in the shadow of a Trump administration that has quietly stacked the National
Labor Relations Board with anti-labor members. The federal agency is far less well-known than
the IRS or EPA, but its five presidential appointees issue rulings with often far-reaching
consequences for America's working men and women. The NLRB was created in 1935 to oversee
collective bargaining and protect labor standards; the majority of its current board have
worked for years with pro-employer firms or
on behalf of industry.
Under the Trump administration, says Henry Willis , a veteran employment rights attorney at
Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers, "They are rolling back rights as fast as they
can."
Even before Trump was elected president, labor advocates had long lamented an NLRB process
weighted towards employers who have the power of the paycheck and an array of tactics to shut
down union organizing drives. A 2009 study , published by the liberal
Economic Policy Institute think tank, found that during 57 percent of union election processes,
employers threatened to shut down their workplaces; and during 34 percent of those organizing
drives, employers fired workers and used one-on-one meetings with employees to threaten
them.
Study author Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and a senior lecturer
at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, says those numbers have
remained steady since 2009.
Moreover, Bronfenbrenner adds, when an administration changes it's not uncommon for boards
to reverse some preceding labor decisions, but that "there's a different tone to this board in
that it is reversing long-held law. Not just changing rules but reversing decisions that had
been agreed upon for a long time."
In other words, the NLRB under Trump represents a tectonic shift in the way the agency has
traditionally operated.
Bronfenbrenner cites a recent decision that allows employers to
stop bargaining and call for a new union election each time a contract approaches
expiration -- in effect, inviting company employees to decertify their union. "[Employers] can
just say, 'I no longer believe the union has support, and then there will be an election," she
says. "Employers can do that every single time a contract expires."
Willis, who litigates on the front lines, ticks off a list illustrating a piece-by-piece
dismantling of employee rights.
"The current board has been attacking Obama board decisions on issues such as [establishing]
who's an independent contractor and who's an employee," he says, referring to a
January 2019 revision of the standard used to determine whether independent contractors are
covered by the National Labor Relations Act, which, the NLRB proclaims on its
website , was passed by Congress in 1935 "to protect the rights of employees and employers,
to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management
practices, and which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S.
economy."
The January decision makes it less likely that the contractors will be given the same rights
as employees.
"That's a big issue," Willis says. "Especially with the gig economy."
Another 2017 NLRB decision upended the
definition of bargaining units . An employer no longer has to recognize or bargain with
smaller units within a single work location, forcing a union to do large-scale organizing.
Organizing a shoe department, Willis notes, is less daunting than organizing an entire
department store.
The Obama NLRB strove to proactively extend protections to unorganized shops -- where
workers are less likely to know their rights. "The Trump board is taking a reactionary approach
-- pulling back wherever possible," Willis says.
* * *
Currently operating with a vacant seat , the five-member board consists of three Republicans
and Obama appointee Lauren McFerran, and it's set to term out in December. Conservative
interests have urged President Trump to wait until McFerran leaves and then to fill the two
empty seats to lock in a unanimous pro-employer majority.
Also in the works is a restructuring of the NLRB that would centralize decision-making in
Washington and bring decisions now investigated and adjudicated at the regional level under
scrutiny there.
Trump general counsel appointee Peter Robb issued a 2017 memo directing NLRB regional
offices to submit to his Division of Advice for review cases
involving "significant legal issues
.
" In
2018
Robb
announced an intention to reorganize the agency's 26 regional offices into a smaller number
of districts that report directly to Robb -- who could then present the issues to the NLRB in a
way to give cover to the board to reverse local decisions and create precedent.
"The current general counsel has been trying to shift decision-making power from the regions
to D.C. and creating a new layer of administration to give him more control over how the
regions handle unfair labor practice charges," says Willis. "It hasn't been carried out, but
the general counsel certainly has a big foot and brings it down much more frequently these
days."
It's not all bleak news for labor, however. Unions are now organizing and representing
contract workers, including hundreds of thousands of janitors, whether or not the NLRB
designates them as employees, says Bronfenbrenner.
She sees the most vibrant aspects today's labor movement in industries where the majority
are women and men and women of color -- and notes that those constituencies were largely
shunned by organized labor when it was at the height of its strength.
"Organized labor only started getting a move on when their density had gone down below down
to 12 percent and that's a little late. If they had done it when their density was 50 percent
or 45 percent, they could have used their bargaining power."
"... Almost four decades ago then-candidate George H.W. Bush used the phrase "voodoo economic policy" to describe Ronald Reagan's claim that cutting taxes for the rich would pay for itself. He was more prescient than he could have imagined. ..."
"... For voodoo economics isn't just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It's the ultimate policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can't be killed by evidence. It has failed every time its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along. In fact, at this point it has eaten the brains of every significant figure in the Republican Party. Even Susan Collins, the least right-wing G.O.P. senator (although that isn't saying much), insisted that the 2017 tax cut would actually reduce the deficit. ..."
"... During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump pretended to be different, claiming that he would actually raise taxes on the rich. Once in office, however, he immediately went full voodoo. In fact, he has taken magical thinking to a new level. ..."
"... My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush's tax-cutting presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? ..."
"... But Trump has gone one better. As it has become increasingly clear that the results of his tax cut were disappointing -- recent data revisions have marked down estimates of both G.D.P. and employment growth, to the point where it's hard to see more than a brief sugar high from $2 trillion in borrowing ..."
"... Officials have floated, then retracted, the idea of a cut in payroll taxes -- that is, a tax break for ordinary workers, rather than the corporations and wealthy individuals who mainly benefited from the 2017 tax cut. But such action seems unlikely, among other things because top administration officials denounced this policy idea when Obama proposed it. ..."
"... The truth is that Trump doesn't have a Plan B, and probably can't come up with one. On the other hand, he might not have to. Who needs competent policy when you're the chosen one and the king of Israel? ..."
From Voodoo Economics to Evil-Eye Economics
Are Democrats hexing the Trump boom with bad thoughts?
By Paul Krugman
Almost four decades ago then-candidate George H.W. Bush used the phrase "voodoo economic
policy" to describe Ronald Reagan's claim that cutting taxes for the rich would pay for
itself. He was more prescient than he could have imagined.
For voodoo economics isn't just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It's the ultimate
policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can't be killed by evidence. It has failed every time
its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along. In
fact, at this point it has eaten the brains of every significant figure in the Republican
Party. Even Susan Collins, the least right-wing G.O.P. senator (although that isn't saying
much), insisted that the 2017 tax cut would actually reduce the deficit.
During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump pretended to be different, claiming that he would
actually raise taxes on the rich. Once in office, however, he immediately went full voodoo.
In fact, he has taken magical thinking to a new level.
True, whenever tax cuts fail to produce the predicted miracle, their defenders come up
with bizarre explanations for their failure.
My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent
recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush's tax-cutting
presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression?
According to Laffer, blame rests with Barack Obama, even though the recession began more than
a year before Obama took office. You see, according to Laffer, everyone lost confidence upon
realizing that Obama might win the 2008 election.
But Trump has gone one better. As it has become increasingly clear that the results of his
tax cut were disappointing -- recent data revisions have marked down estimates of both G.D.P.
and employment growth, to the point where it's hard to see more than a brief sugar high from
$2 trillion in borrowing -- Trump has invented ever more creative ways to blame other people.
In particular, he's now claiming that the promised boom hasn't arrived because his opponents
are hexing the economy with bad thoughts: "The Democrats are trying to 'will' the Economy to
be bad for purposes of the 2020 Election."
Can opposition politicians really cause a recession with negative thinking? This goes
beyond voodoo economics; maybe we should call it evil-eye economics.
To be fair, the claim that Democrats are hexing his boom is a secondary theme in Trump's
ranting. Mostly he has been blaming the Federal Reserve for its "crazy" interest rate hikes.
And the truth is that last year's rate increases pretty clearly were a mistake.
But blaming the Fed for the tax cut's fizzle won't wash. For one thing, the Fed has
actually raised rates less than in previous economic recoveries. Even more to the point, the
Trump economic team was expecting Fed rate hikes when it made its extravagantly optimistic
forecasts. Administration projections from a year ago envisioned 2019 interest rates
substantially higher than what we're actually seeing.
Put it this way: The Trump tax cut was supposed to create a boom so powerful that it would
not only withstand modest Fed rate hikes, but actually require such hikes to prevent
inflationary overheating. You don't get to turn around and claim betrayal when the Fed does
exactly what you expected it to do.
Aside from blaming everyone but himself, however, how will Trump deal with the failure of
his economic promises? He has taken to demanding that the Fed roll the printing presses,
slashing interest rates and buying bonds -- the actions it normally takes in the face of a
serious recession -- even as he claims that the economy remains strong, and unemployment is
in fact near a historic low.
As many people have noted, these are exactly the actions Republicans, including Trump,
denounced as "currency debasement" when unemployment was far higher than it is today and the
economy desperately needed a boost.
Since the Fed is unlikely to oblige, what else might Trump do? Officials have floated,
then retracted, the idea of a cut in payroll taxes -- that is, a tax break for ordinary
workers, rather than the corporations and wealthy individuals who mainly benefited from the
2017 tax cut. But such action seems unlikely, among other things because top administration
officials denounced this policy idea when Obama proposed it.
Trump has also suggested using executive authority to reduce taxes on capital gains (which
are overwhelmingly paid by the wealthy). This move would have the distinction of being both
ineffectual and illegal.
What about calling off the trade war that has been depressing business investment? This
seems unlikely, because protectionism is right up there with racism as a core Trump value.
And merely postponing tariffs might not help, since it wouldn't resolve the uncertainty that
may be the trade war's biggest cost.
The truth is that Trump doesn't have a Plan B, and probably can't come up with one. On the
other hand, he might not have to. Who needs competent policy when you're the chosen one and
the king of Israel?
"But blaming the Fed for the tax cut's fizzle won't wash. For one thing, the Fed has actually
raised rates less than in previous economic recoveries. Even more to the point, the Trump
economic team was expecting Fed rate hikes when it made its extravagantly optimistic
forecasts. "
Yes the Trump economic team is insane and clueless. But the Fed has been tightening since
2013 when Bernanke began tapering QE.
So now all good liberals are crying recession (which would hurt Trump in the election) but
the Fed is blameless?
Monetary policy is ineffective. Then why don't we get rid of the Fed's vaunted
independence? Then why does it matter if Trump tweets at Powell?
This isn't directed at Anne but at the general comment reader and Krugman admirer.
Done nothing EVIL bar fire 100 cruise missiles into Syria and attempting to starve
millions in Venezuela & Iran, while sucking on Bibi's ****, emboldening him to continue
on a genocidal path in the ME among other twisted fuckery.
I think Trump administration will face several defeats on may fronts they have opened very
soon. Their major issue is that they have tried to tackle many things at once, which has
created a cohesive opposition: China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and many other countries that
don't like his unilateral decisions and moves. The major blow would be from dedollaraization
down in the road. If he had problem with China, he should have dealt with it at a different
time in a different manner. Pushing Iran at the same time was a major error. One wonders what
is he thinking. On the issue of Iran; if they would have got along with Iran, they would have
made major gains. Picking wrong partners always is the issue for these in the power.
I just got this email which I think appropriate to share with fellow MoA barflies
"
Since Day 1, this administration has been seeking out opportunity after opportunity to
benefit the powerful and the privileged -- the very wealthiest Americans and big
corporations. From the $1.7 trillion tax break for giant corporations and their wealthy
executives, to allowing more pollution by oil and gas companies, to allowing insurance
companies to once again discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, the
giveaways to billion dollar corporations have been endless, while working families pay the
price.
This week, the Trump administration added another critical item to the list of attacks on
working families: Gutting the Volcker Rule firewall, a critical safeguard that protects
Americans from the consequences of high-risk Wall Street gambling.
Make no mistake. This move is a brazen attempt by big banks and their Trump-appointed
allies to reopen the Wall Street casino that led us into the Great Recession, no matter the
cost to working Americans who will lose their homes, jobs and savings when the casino goes
belly-up. That's not just unethical, it's dangerous.
Working Americans should not have to foot the bill for the big banks' casino games. That's
why I co-authored the Volcker Rule and fought to include it in the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall
Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which Congress passed to prevent Wall
Street from repeating the causes of the Great Recession. The reality is, if we let big banks
go back to the days of making huge bets on things like future stock values, foreign exchange
rates, or interest rates, working families will ultimately be the ones to pay the price.
I believe that our economy is only as strong as the bottom lines of our working families,
and that big banks shouldn't be calling the shots. Please know that I'm going to keep
fighting for an economy that works for all of us -- not just the powerful and the
privileged.
All my best,
Jeff (Merkley - Oregon Senator)
"
Our government is now controlled by the elite but not entirely silenced.
"... The current neoliberal order failed to suppress China development enough to block her from becoming the competitor (and the second largest economy.) ..."
"... That's why a faction of the USA elite decided to adopt "might makes right" policies (essentially piracy instead of international law) in a hope that it will prolong the life of the US-centered neoliberal empire. ..."
"... As much as Trump proved to be inapt politician and personally and morally despicable individual (just his known behavior toward Melania tells a lot about him; we do not need possible Epstein revelations for that) he does represent a faction of the US elite what wants this change. ..."
"... All his pro working class and pro lower middle class rhetoric was a bluff -- he is representative of faction of the US elite that is hell bent on maintaining the imperial superiority achieved after the collapse of the USSR, whatever it takes. At the expense of common people as Pentagon budget can attest. ..."
"... That also explains the appointment of Bolton and Pompeo. That are birds of the feather, not some maniacs (although they are ;-) accidentally brought into Trump administration via major donors pressure. ..."
"... In this sense Russiagate was not only a color revolution launched to depose Trump by neoliberal wing of Democratic Party and rogue, Obama-installed elements within intelligence agencies (Brennan, Comey, McCabe, etc.) , but also part of the struggle between the faction of the US elite that wants "muscular" policy of preservation of the empire (Trump supporters faction so to speak) and the faction that still wants to kick the can down the road via "classic neoliberalism" path (Clinton supporters faction so to speak.) ..."
It is not about the strategy. It's about the agony. The agony of the US centered global
neoliberal empire.
Trump and forces behind him realized that current set of treaties does not favor the
preservation of the empire and allows new powerful players to emerge despite all
institutionalized looting via World Bank and IMF and the imposition of Washington Consensus.
The main danger here are Germany (and EU in general) and, especially, China.
The current neoliberal order failed to suppress China development enough to block her from
becoming the competitor (and the second largest economy.)
That's why a faction of the USA elite decided to adopt "might makes right" policies
(essentially piracy instead of international law) in a hope that it will prolong the life of
the US-centered neoliberal empire.
As much as Trump proved to be inapt politician and personally and morally despicable
individual (just his known behavior toward Melania tells a lot about him; we do not need
possible Epstein revelations for that) he does represent a faction of the US elite what wants
this change.
All his pro working class and pro lower middle class rhetoric was a bluff -- he is
representative of faction of the US elite that is hell bent on maintaining the imperial
superiority achieved after the collapse of the USSR, whatever it takes. At the expense of
common people as Pentagon budget can attest.
That also explains the appointment of Bolton and Pompeo. That are birds of the feather, not
some maniacs (although they are ;-) accidentally brought into Trump administration via major
donors pressure.
In this sense Russiagate was not only a color revolution launched to depose Trump by
neoliberal wing of Democratic Party and rogue, Obama-installed elements within intelligence
agencies (Brennan, Comey, McCabe, etc.) , but also part of the struggle between the faction of
the US elite that wants "muscular" policy of preservation of the empire (Trump supporters
faction so to speak) and the faction that still wants to kick the can down the road via
"classic neoliberalism" path (Clinton supporters faction so to speak.)
Donald Trump will win reelection, or not, based primarily on his performance in office. The voters will ask, in their
collective judgment, such questions as: has he scored at least one major accomplishment in domestic policy? Has he
maintained strong economic growth? Has he avoided major foreign policy failures? Has he presided over a major foreign
policy victory? Is he scarred by scandal? Are Americans better off than they were before his inauguration? Is the
country better positioned in the world?
Looking at the Trump presidency through the prism of such questions, it is
possible to produce a kind of preliminary report card. Recognizing that the voters won't render their own grades for
more than a year, we can still compile a general overview of the president's likely standing when the votes are counted.
This overview suggests that he resides upon a knife's edge of political fate. Events between now and November of next
year could easily push him into defeat, though he could also squeak through to victory. But defeat is more likely.
Before we get to the report card, two general points need to be made. First, irrespective of Trump's fate next year,
he is and will remain a significant figure in American political history. He transformed the national debate by exposing
the chasm in political sensibilities between the elites of the coasts and angry Americans in the heartland. In spite of
his crude and often distasteful ways (and sometimes because of them), he created a tight knot of political sentiment
that stands antagonistic toward the elite vision of globalism, diversity, open borders, overseas dominance, and free
trade -- most of it enforced with the cudgel of political correctness.
The heartland ethos, by contrast, includes an end to illegal immigration, a more restrictionist legal immigration
system to foster the absorption of those already here, a trade system attuned to industrial America, realism and
restraint in foreign policy, respect for the country's cultural heritage, and a hostility to the insidious impact of
identity politics.
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This is a huge chasm, yet when the 2016 campaign began, hardly a politician on the scene perceived it or understood
its ramifications. Trump did, and that got him (barely) elected. The result now is that we all now know about the chasm,
and it will be America's defining political pivot for years to come.
But if this political sagacity got Trump elected, it won't help him much in 2020. Challengers can win on talk if it
resonates sufficiently with the electorate; incumbents can only win on performance.
The second point is that, while the president enjoys the solid support of a highly loyal and unwavering contingent of
Americans, he has proven incapable of building a governing coalition. Throughout his presidency, his approval rating,
based on the aggregate numbers pulled together by the political web site FiveThirtyEight, has hovered between 39 percent
and 43 percent. This doesn't mean he can't get up to the 50 percent or so needed for reelection. Ronald Reagan's rating
was just 45 percent at this point in his presidency, and he went on to a landslide reelection win. But Trump's level of
approval has been so consistent that it is difficult to see how he might rise above it during his final months in
office.
Further, state-by-state poll numbers indicate that the president has lost considerable ground in key states needed
for reelection. According to surveys conducted by the online polling firm Civiqs, his approval rating is in negative
numbers in 10 states he carried in 2016, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Texas. None of the
states carried by Hillary Clinton seem poised to flip to the president.
This reflects Trump's general standing with the American people, and it means that he doesn't have sufficient
political juice to dominate the national debate on major issues and get Congress to take action. Trump supporters no
doubt will blame the Democrats, as presidential loyalists always do when their man can't get the job done. But in our
presidential system, chief executives don't get a pass by pointing fingers at the opposition.
Richard Nixon, a 43 percent victor in 1968, had to contend with a hostile Democratic majority in both houses of
Congress, and still amassed a record that buoyed him to a massive reelection victory in 1972. Reagan had a hostile House
Democratic majority and yet managed to galvanize the American people to such an extent that the House leadership lost
control of its own chamber, as frightened Democrats crossed over to Reagan's positions on major issues, particularly
fiscal ones.
How do presidents manage to overcome a hostile opposition? By shrewdly selecting issues to be pursued; by presenting
brilliant and coherent narrations on what those issues mean; and by deftly negotiating at the end to bring along just
enough of the opposition to carry the day. After his Democratic Party lost both houses of Congress in 1994, Bill Clinton
embarked on his brilliant "triangulation" strategy. Trump hasn't demonstrated any such capacity.
Which brings us to the report card:
Health care:
Trump failed all three of the tests for political success on this issue. He chose it
before it was ripe for serious legislative action (GOP lawmakers wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare but didn't have
anything approaching a viable replacement); he didn't explain it well because it wasn't well joined and because he
didn't seem to understand it; and he didn't seek any compromise with opposition members. Grade: D.
Immigration:
A massive Trump failure. He was the first president in decades who had enough
credibility with restrictionists to fashion a grand bargain that might have included legal status for the so-called
Dreamers (and perhaps their immediate families; not cousins and uncles). He might have also taken serious action on
other illegals in the country, on stemming the inward flow through every means possible, and on overhauling current
immigration policies, including ending family-based migration and the lottery, instituting a merit-based system, and
curbing the inflow enough to get the percentage of foreign-born people in America returned to more historical levels.
Was this even remotely possible? Perhaps not. But Trump campaigned as a man who would address the country's festering
immigration problem. That required that the issue be presented with sensitivity and clarity as to the harm that decades
of neglect have done to America. Nobody wants the United States to be a heartless country, but polls also indicate that
Democrats have come too close to open borders for the comfort of most. Therein was the opportunity.
But Trump didn't even talk to the American people about the issue; he communicated only to his base, thus ensuring
that the immigration chasm would continue with no end in sight. Grade: D.
Economic growth:
We can't issue a final grade here until the end of the semester, but prospects are
good for solid marks, even if an A doesn't appear likely. If growth continues through the third quarter of next year,
Trump will merit a solid B; if it slows, perhaps a B-; if it picks up, a B+. But an A would require the kind of growth
seen in Reagan's last six years in office (including annual percentages of 7.9, 5.6, 4.2, 4.5, and 3.8) or Clinton's
second term (4.4, 4.5, 4.9, 4.8). That isn't likely. Further, if the economy slips into recession, all bets are off.
This is a wait-and-see category. Grade: B, based on midterms, though the final exam will determine the outcome.
Trade:
Trump has taken a riverboat gamble on his trade dispute with China, which has been a commerce
thug for years -- stealing intellectual property, forcing U.S. companies in China to transfer technology, dumping goods
into U.S. markets, subsidizing state-owned companies, and manipulating its currency. White House aide Peter Navarro says
these "deadly sins" have destroyed some 70,000 factories in America and five million manufacturing jobs. China has been
bilking the United States in part to cadge vast sums of money to finance its geopolitical ambitions in Asia. There's a
strong argument that something had to be done, and only Trump among recent presidents had the fortitude to join the
issue.
In doing so, Trump has emphasized a central reality of American geopolitics, which his critics refuse to
accept -- namely that China, and not Russia, represents America's greatest long-term threat. But will the American people
and Congress accept the sacrifices that will likely be necessary to force China to change its ways? That may be
difficult for the president to pull off, given his less-than-robust standing with the American people. He's doing the
right thing in demanding reciprocal trade behavior from the Chinese, but his inability to forge a national consensus may
retard his prospects for success. Grade: Incomplete.
Foreign Policy:
Trump has not presided over any serious foreign policy failures, such as George W.
Bush's Iraq fiasco or Barack Obama's Libyan misadventure. Indeed, he has not led the country into any serious foreign
wars at all, which may be a significant accomplishment in comparison to his three predecessors. At the same time, he has
kept U.S. troops in Syria and Afghanistan beyond any worthwhile rationale. And he has not scored any significant foreign
policy successes -- nothing approaching Nixon's outreach to China or Jimmy Carter's Camp David Accords or Reagan's Cold War
breakthrough. The problem has been that he doesn't seem to possess any kind of coherent view of the world in our time.
He seems to have an instinctive understanding that the old global order is crumbling. But he doesn't have any idea of
what could or should replace this fading status quo or how America should operate in a changing world.
And Trump's decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement and seek to bring Iran to its knees economically
through "maximum pressure" could destabilize the entire Middle East even beyond George W. Bush's mindless Iraq invasion.
If so, the combustion likely won't occur until after Trump's current term, under whomever is president at the time. But
the burden of responsibility for any untoward developments emanating from that questionable policy will rest firmly upon
Trump. Grade: C-.
Scandal:
Any serious scandal that attaches to the upper reaches of an administration becomes a net
negative in the next election. It's difficult to assess the full political impact of the Russian scandal that has roiled
the nation since even before Trump was sworn in. On the one hand, the allegation of electoral "collusion" has been
exposed as a fraud. On the other, opponents have continued assaulting Trump for supposedly seeking to obstruct the
investigation. Their arguments are largely specious, but politics unfolds on the margin, and the marginal impact of all
this is likely to redound to Trump's detriment at reelection time. Besides, Trump doesn't seem to care much about how he
is perceived or about the old-style niceties of political discourse. That provides an opening for opposition arguments
about his loose ethics. Grade: C+.
General national welfare:
On those questions regarding whether Americans are better off today than
they were four years ago and whether America stands taller in the world, it's a bit of a mixed bag. The economic
statistics (growth, unemployment, job market participation, productivity, inflation, the stock market) are solid,
stemming largely from Trump's tax and regulatory policies. If they continue, the president will get general kudos from
the electorate on this crucial area of performance.
The voters' view of America's global standing is more difficult to assess. No doubt Trump's base is comfortable with
his performance on the world stage, but has he conducted himself in a way that will capture those swing voters who will
be crucial to his reelection prospects? It doesn't seem likely.
And that's reflective of the overall Trump presidency. This utterly unconventional politician who got elected in
utterly unconventional ways had an opportunity to fashion an unconventional brand of conservative politics -- wary of big
business and the nexus between government and big finance; hostile to coastal elites; protective of working class
Americans who have been abandoned and slandered by the Democratic Party; concerned about economic inequality; suspicious
of vehement libertarianism; opposed to promiscuous foreign policy adventurism; anti-globalist; nationalist; and
enthusiastic about the looming epic task of forging a new political order at home and a new geopolitical order in the
world.
Trump has demonstrated a vague sense of this opportunity, but he never seemed to grasp its complexities and nuances
or show any ability to forge a coherent strategy to make it a reality. The result: an overall grade of C. It would be a
gentleman's C if Trump were a gentleman. The question is whether the voters will grade on a curve.
"Trump has demonstrated a vague sense of this opportunity, but he never
seemed to grasp its complexities and nuances or show any ability to
forge a coherent strategy to make it a reality."
I don't think any national politician today, not Trump, not Bernie, not anyone,
really grasps just how seething with rage the public is right now.
Wanna know why
we have mass shootings? Think of those people that snap as a sort of warning sign of
the public mood. Expect to see a lot more of them, no matter who is in office.
For that matter, the election of Trump is a similar indicator. Think of Trump as
the "
Roll the dice, we've got nothing to lose!
" candidate, compared to the
establishment darling HRC.
Of course, long after Trump is gone from office, the forces that gave rise to
Trump will still be there. That said, the establishment will tar every populist for
years to come with Trump's weakness, stupidity, recklessness and incompetence. "
Remember
what happened the last time you didn't vote as instructed?
"
Already, Trump has proven the best campaign ad the European establishment could
ask for. He prevented the election of Le Pen in France, and prevented the German
establishment parties from complete meltdown. The campaign slogan goes something
like this: "
Vote for us, unless you want a buffoon like *him* in office!
"
I agree. For the first time in my life I am seriously concerned about the
future of this country. We are one serious financial or foreign policy
calamity away from serious social breakdown.
Robert: Thank you this very sober, very reasonable assessment. I hate Trump's stinking
rotten guts with the white hot fury of a thousand suns, and I disagree strongly with some
of the points you are making here, but this is a terrific piece.
He gets a "C" in foreign policy, but everything domestic is so bad that he may as well not
even call himself right wing at all. The illegal and legal immigration problems have
exacerbated under Trump (look up the numbers). Of course he has deported very few and now
advocates for increased legal immigration.That is not what anyone voted for. He
incessantly proclaims how much he has done for demographics that will never vote for him,
while even openly making fun of the struggles that working class white men (his base) face
in society. He has now come out in support of red flag laws as well because of one event
presumably. He even gave us a "criminal justice reform bill" to let out criminals to be
even more of a plague on society. Why?
"fashion a grand bargain that might have included
legal status for the so-called Dreamers (and perhaps their immediate families; not cousins
and uncles)." --> This is not acceptable. This is not reform, but merely a concession of
the inability of our country to have laws or moral legitimacy.
A solid F. Trump's weakness has failed to lead to any major policy successes, even when he
had majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump's incompetence has given the
establishment loads of ammunition and recruits that they didn't have a few years ago.
Hell, Trump has made even doofus Uncle Joe Biden look like a viable alternative. Sad!
One major problem with the author's analysis of the Trump Administration's scandals is
that it is limited entirely to the Russia scandal. Ignored are a host of acts of
corruption that have marked the Administration of the man who constantly bragged that he
would appoint "only the best people." So let's examine just a few of them. His National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn was convicted of felonies and sent to prison. His Secretary
of HHS Tom Price resigned in the wake of insider trading investigations. Interior
Secretary Ryan Zinke left the Trump administration amid mounting federal investigations
into his travel, political activity and potential conflicts of interest. EPA Administrator
Scott Pruitt was facing more than a dozen investigations into his taxpayer-funded travel,
questionable spending decisions, use of aides to conduct personal errands and other
matters when he resigned. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta resigned over his scandalous
granting of a sweetheart plea deal to Jeffrey Epstein. I could go on to the other members
of Trump's inner circle who are in prison or who have been forced to resign under a cloud
of scandal. I could point to New York State shutting down the Trump Foundation as a
fraudulent charity that scammed people out of their denotations. I could note the Trump
University scam whose victims received a $25 Million dollar payment from Trump after he
was elected. The author gives Trump a grade of C+ on scandals? An F would be more
accurate.
Healthcare: I actually don't blame Trump on this one. All he really did was trust his
party when they said they had plans and just needed the power to do them. It would've been
great if HE had a plan himself but in the end that's Congress' job more than anything. So
he gave them that power, said "DO IT!" and they failed him. He should've struck at
immigration first but as far as healthcare itself.
So I give him a B for effort.
Republicans get an F.
Immigration: "A massive Trump failure. He was the first president in decades who had
enough credibility with restrictionists to fashion a grand bargain that might have
included legal status for the so-called Dreamers (and perhaps their immediate families;
not cousins and uncles). He might have also taken serious action on other illegals in the
country, on stemming the inward flow through every means possible, and on overhauling
current immigration policies, including ending family-based migration and the lottery,
instituting a merit-based system, and curbing the inflow enough to get the percentage of
foreign-born people in America returned to more historical levels."
Remotely not possible? Legal Status for Dreamers, push for more efficient deportations,
merit based systems, and curbing the visa system?
That is VERY much possible to get all of most of that. The first is what the opposition
is wanting and most of his side wouldn't scream against. He didn't even provide it as a
bargaining chip (at best a "we'll revisit it later" delay).
Higher deportations would bring it to Obama levels. It just becomes hard to do when you
open the debate with blasting all latinos as criminals sparking off the PC bee hive.
Though that's moot since he could've, instead of a symbolic wall he could've asked for
more funding for more centers and more judges to speed up the deportation trials (since
isn't the point to actually DEPORT them, not lock them up for months under the pay of
taxpayers). he used up his capital to maintain a marketing gimmick. By the time we got
serious, he had moderates so pissed they tune the whole thing out and the left so angry
they'll contemplate decriminalizing the whole thing just to snub him.
A merit based system WOULD'VE been a decent sell before all that mess or simply done
when republicans had Congress. It also requires snubbing the "merit=europe" peanut
gallery. Now no one is even listening.
The visa issue would've been an easy sell to both sides. It brings in a mass of
non-citizens specifically to fill up job slots and then leaves them to be abused by their
employers under threat of deportation if they don't comply. I can throw that exact line up
in almost any forum and get a mob of support from the radical left to the far right.
There's insanely difficult topics about immigration. Most of your wish list was low
hanging fruit in 2015. Trump turned it into the third rail. He didn't spark debate or open
anything up. He got everyone so angry they aren't even discussing it properly anymore.
Lastly, if he wanted a wall that badly, he should've tried it in the first two years of
his election. Trying it RIGHT AFTER it became impossible reeks of wanting to LOOK like he
wanted it, sort of like if I waited until someone filled a box with cement then tried to
lift it and said "I'll try HARD to make this happen."
Pure F.
I agree with you on Economics. On Trade I'm not as "China BAD" as you but overall I'm
willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one, though I'm not a farmer.
Foreign Policy, There's no really any further places to GO to spark a war other than
Iran itself. And as you said he's not doing well there. That said it's probably close to
what you said, though I'd put him a D+ as we're not in war with Iran just yet (sadly that
is an accomplishment) but I can't see any way to really fix what we ruined at this point.
At BEST they'll go the way of North Korea.
Scandal: If this is on how he's handled scandal I'd give him a B-. He know how to
handle angry people and keep them barking with no bite. It would've been a B+ but I think
the current racial ones was a big overreach especially since it's causing his party to
throw their feet into their mouths 2008 style and further souring immigration issues.
Overall: Trump's big advantage is that he touched on an area that Americans desperately
needed but everyone wanted to ignore. Republicans wanted to go back to Bush. Democrats
forgot that they won on "Change" not on "more of the same".
His disadvantage is that he doesn't have much to actually offer to fix it. He touched
on immigration but sparks the fears of racism from the left and focuses on a symbolic, but
less effective, wall. He touches on poor workers but taxes rarely affect them and the
corporate elite is still tightening their grip just as effectively. He spoke of wars but
his biggest accomplishment is that we've run out of places to invade-except Iran which
we're 1 misfire from entering.
All he has is an economy that was rising before he joined in and is slowing down 1-2
years after his main policies have taken effect. Thankfully that's the most important. Not
thankfully, presidents have the least amount of control over it.
Which means he's mostly banking on a car that was built without a steering wheel and
hoping it doesn't slam into a tree.
Meanwhile I glance at the whiplash the size of a tornado that's to my left and wonder
just how insane things get when they grab the reigns again.
Very, very good analysis. I am a former Republican that now votes Democrat since the
lunatics are running the Republican asylum. I was the only one, of all my
progressive friends, that said maybe Trump can actually get something done. He owed
the Republicans nothing. Nada. Zip. He beat them all, without the help of the
Republican machine.
Trump could have formed a center right coalition. Starting
with infrastructure that wasn't a wall. Then he could have gone after Big Pharma and
the Medical Industrial Complex.
But no..... He immediately jumped as far right as possible. He went after every
right wing wet dream he could. He was like a drunken 4 year old that was thrilled to
break every toy of his sandbox rival (Obama). Now everything that he says that might
be somewhat reasonable is drowned out and eclipsed by his insanity, narcissism, and
general idiocy.
The Republicans are going to really, really hate 2020. Can't say it happened to a
more deserving bunch of folk though. Bless their little hearts.
This is a good point; the only Republican who could have actually broken the
consensus within the Republican Party and suggested that a) healthcare should
be improved for everyone b) the rich could be taxed more, and the poor less
and c) foreign wars of aggression are a bad thing got in to office and cut
taxes massively for the rich, tried to simply repeal the only step forward in
healthcare for decades, and antagonised everyone abroad (Israel and Saudi
excepted)
"The first [Dreamers] is what the opposition is wanting and most of his side
wouldn't scream against."
I cannot echo this loudly enough. I live right in the
middle of what has become red-meat hard-right Republican land -- but you can still
find support for the Dreamers here. They're not
desperate
for those kids
(illegal spouses of immigrants currently in military service dominate that
conversation), but they're absolutely willing to keep them -- at least as legal,
lifelong residents. And particularly if their families receive no similar benefit.
If you can swing that here, from people who're beginning to lean somewhat
xenophobic and feel strongly that illegal immigration is hurting them -- then man,
you have a powerful foundation from which to build.
Immigration is a massive Trump failure? Where was the GOP when he got elected? They have
said for years if they got the House, Senate, and White House they would build the wall
and fix immigration. They did nothing. Zero.
Obama/Hillary "misadventure" in Libya? Wow....talk about putting a sugar coating on a
disaster. They put 1 million plus "refugees" into Europe and created a thriving slave
market in Libya. Way to go!
No foreign policy success? How about calling out various NATO members for being dead
beats? Especially Germany. How about getting out of that fraud "Paris Accord?". Out of the
Iran Nuke Deal? Getting NK to Singapore? Taking on the failed NAFTA "deal?" Dumping TPP?
...And the big one...defeating ISIS!!!....Something the "glory boy", Obama could not
accomplish.
Russian scandal? No, Coup attempt by members of Deep State, i.e. Justice Dept.,
Intelligence agencies and the MSM. Trump failed in not having midnight SWAT team raids on
hundreds of coup plotters.
As far as I know, President Trump is the first person elected to the Presidency with
little to no support in any national political Party or organization.
Nor any experience in any form of government at all.
The only President that comes close is General Eisenhower.
Frankly, When I voted for him
in 2016.
I did not expect him to last this long. Two years max was my guess.
As Hillary Clinton was far, far worst than any alternative.
So I am surprised he is far better that what I was lead to believe.
I will be voting for President Trump in 2020.
Because he has no support in any of the current major political parties.
But has been relatively successful despite that political situation.
As both major political parties have proven themselves not to be working in the
interests of the American People. And have longstanding histories of working against the
American Middle-Class. And exploiting their political positions for their political and
monetary gain. At the public's expense.
Its Donald Trump or the Asteroid Strike as old the joke goes.
President Trump will do if I can not get two Asteroids striking Washington DC and New York
City simultaneously.
Trump's presidency is a failure and you don't have to be a Democrat to see that. In many
ways, Trump was a man ahead of his time, but a major part of his failures is his inability
to personally invest any of his time into the issues. Take Afghanistan - he keeps saying
he wanted out from the moment he took office, yet here we are, over two years later, with
still no end in sight. The fact is, Trump's an empty vessel. I've never gotten the sense
he's a true believer and, even if he were, he's become more worried about re-election,
which means he's become just another politician.
I'd never vote for a Democrat, with the
possible exception of Andrew Yang, in 2020. But it's time to face the music - Trump's
going to lose re-election. And maybe that's a good thing, for it's not the establishment
that needs to be broken up yet, it's the American right. We need to replace the Mitch
McConnells and Lindsay Grahams with the Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawleys. The greatest thing
Trump will ever have done is kickstart this nationalist moment, but he won't be able to
sustain it. That's up to the people willing and able to do the work we expected him to do
as president.
Trump proved to be Hillary in disguses "very much a hawk." I would say reckless hawk. Stephen Cohen
characterization of Hillary is fully applicable to him now if you substitute Russia for China "Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, was
very much a hawk. When she said publicly that Vladimir Putin has no soul, you could not commit
or utter a more supreme statement of ant i-diplomacy, and particularly addressing the Russians,
who put a lot of stock in soul. "
Notable quotes:
"... Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, was very much a hawk. When she said publicly that Vladimir Putin has no soul, you could not commit or utter a more supreme statement of anti-diplomacy, and particularly addressing the Russians, who put a lot of stock in soul. ..."
PAUL JAY: Well, my question is, I think when you are saying positive things about
Trump diminishing tensions with Russia, which I think is correct, but I think you need to add
this guy does not have peaceful intentions, he's very dangerous.
STEPHEN COHEN: I live in a social realm–to the extent that I have any social
life at all anymore– where people get very angry if I say, or anybody says, anything
positive about Donald Trump. When Trump was campaigning in 2016, he said, "I think it would be
great to cooperate with Russia." All of my adult life, my advocacy in American foreign
policy–I've known presidents, the first George Bush invited me to Camp David to consult
with him before he went to the Malta Summit. I've known presidential candidates, Senators and
the rest, and I've always said the same thing. American national security runs through Moscow,
period. Nothing's changed.
In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever
more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons–Putin
announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they're real–that can elude any
missile defense. We spent trillions on missile defense to acquire a first strike capability
against Russia. We said it was against or Iran, but nobody believed it. Russia has now thwarted
us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to
missiles. And Putin has said, "It's time to negotiate an end to this new arms race," and he's
100 percent right. So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had
already become convinced–and I spell this out in my new book, War with Russia?–that
we were in a new cold war, but a new cold war more dangerous than the preceding one for reasons
I gave in the book, one of them being these new nuclear weapons.
So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment–that would have been
probably around the summer of 2016–just on this one point, because none of the other
candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia. And as I told you before, Paul, all my life
I've been a detente guy. Detente means cooperate with Russia. I saw in Trump the one candidate
who said this is necessary, in his own funny language. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, was
very much a hawk. When she said publicly that Vladimir Putin has no soul, you could not commit
or utter a more supreme statement of anti-diplomacy, and particularly addressing the Russians,
who put a lot of stock in soul. To say somebody has no soul and then go on to equate him with
Hitler, I found that so irresponsible. I didn't vote for Trump, but I did begin to write and
broadcast that this was of vital importance that we have this discussion, that we needed a new
detente because of the new and more dangerous Cold War.
Since he's been president, I think he's been ineffective in regard to pursuing detente with
Russia for a couple of reasons. I think that the people who invented Russiagate were the
enemies of detente, and they piled on. So they've now demonized Russia, they've crippled Trump.
Anything he does diplomatically with Putin is called collusion. No matter what Mueller says,
it's collusion. This is anti-democracy, and detente is pursued through democracy. So whatever
he really wants to do–it's hard to say–he's been thwarted. I think it's also one of
the reasons why he put anti-detente people around him.
"... The real concern is the US Senate. Currently, the GOP holds a six-seat majority (if you count the two Independent senators, who caucus with Democrats, as Democrats). Thirty-four seats are up in 2020. According to this analysis , at this point, 18 of them are in play, and four of those 18 are toss-ups ..."
"... An anti-Trump landslide at the top of the ticket could wash the GOP Senate majority away. We would then have a Democratic president and Congress -- and they would be in a score-settling mood. ..."
"... a recession, which is growing more likely by the day, would be something extremely hard for Trump to overcome. The new Fox poll has Trump at 56 percent unfavorable, with only 42 percent favorable -- and this is in good economic times. ..."
"... UPDATE: Douthat speculates today on what a recession would mean for the country , starting with the presidency: ..."
"... First, the easy part: Donald Trump loses re-election . It will be ugly and flailing and desperate and -- depending on recession-era geopolitics -- potentially quite dangerous, but there is no way a president so widely disliked survives the evaporation of his boom. ..."
"... But, as Douthat points out, getting rid of Trump doesn't do much to address the factors that led to his rise in the first place. ..."
"... The real truth is that the Republicans have a problem their rich globalist donors have abandoned them for Democrats blue Dog Dems as they are called, while their base will support them if they lead. Leading means angering their mega donors. ..."
"... Normally Republican Funder Hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman said Democrats need to regain control of Congress "for the good of the country". His money has had found its way to 56 Democrats running for House seats and 22 Democrats running for the U.S. Senate. This is millions. His reason was a tax cut he neither needed nor wanted, Huh? ..."
"... if it is business as usual they will lose the Senate and not gain the house. ..."
( PBS News Hour screenshot ) Anything could
happen between now and November 2020, but this new Fox News poll is not good news for the president. If the vote were held today,
Joe Biden would clobber him, which is no surprise. But also, a geriatric New England socialist would beat the stuffing out of Trump.
So would a preachy Harvard professor and a militantly progressive black woman from the San Francisco Bay Area:
Again, anything could happen, but you know what's probably going to happen between now and Election Day? A recession. That's hard
for any incumbent president to overcome, but this one will already be starting out in a deep hole, and I think most of us can agree
that in the event of an economic downturn, is unlikely to dazzle with his scintillating competence.
New from the AP:
The financial markets signaled the possibility
of a U.S. recession this week, sending a jolt of anxiety to investors, companies and consumers. That's on top of concerns
over Trump's plans to impose punishing tariffs on goods from China and word from the United Kingdom and Germany that their economies
are shrinking.
Though a pre-election recession here is far from certain, a downturn would be a devastating blow to the president, who has
made a strong economy his central argument for a second term. Trump advisers fear a weakened economy would hurt him with moderate
Republican and independent voters who have been willing to give him a pass on some his incendiary policies and rhetoric. And White
House economic advisers see few options for reversing course should the economy start to slip.
Trump has taken to blaming others for the recession fears, mostly the Federal Reserve, which he is pushing for further interest
rate cuts. Yet much of the uncertainty in the markets stems from his own escalation of a trade war with China, as well as weakened
economies in key countries around the world.
If the economy goes into recession, what's the compelling argument for voting Trump? I know what the argument is for social and
religious conservatives: judges. But only a minority of American voters care so strongly about judges.
The real concern is the US Senate. Currently, the GOP holds a six-seat majority (if you count the two Independent senators,
who caucus with Democrats, as Democrats). Thirty-four seats are up in 2020. According to
this analysis , at this point, 18 of them are in play,
and four of those 18 are toss-ups. Only one of those four toss-ups -- Doug Jones in Alabama -- is a Democrat. Jones will probably
lose no matter what -- Alabama went for Trump by 30 points, and Jones only won because his GOP opponent was creepy Roy Moore.
An anti-Trump landslide at the top of the ticket could wash the GOP Senate majority away. We would then have a Democratic
president and Congress -- and they would be in a score-settling mood.
One more time: anything could happen between now and Election Day 2020. But a recession, which is growing more likely by the
day, would be something extremely hard for Trump to overcome. The new Fox poll has Trump at 56 percent unfavorable, with only 42
percent favorable -- and this is in good economic times.
First, the easy part: Donald Trump loses re-election . It will be ugly and flailing and desperate and -- depending on recession-era
geopolitics -- potentially quite dangerous, but there is no way a president so widely disliked survives the evaporation of his
boom. The rules of politics have changed, but they haven't been suspended. Polarization will keep Trump from being defeated
in a landslide, but not from being beaten handily, and in a recession the Democrats can nominate any of their candidates and expect
to evict the president with ease.
Having guaranteed Trump's removal from office, in other words, the recession would also set the stage for Trumpism's eventual
return.
I see a number of pro-Trump commenters below are pointing out that the pundits didn't see Trump coming, so their forecasts of
Trump's defeat in 2020 shouldn't be taken seriously. Sure, that's true -- but Trump in 2016 was elected in a booming economy. Had
the economy not been in good shape, Trump might have been elected anyway, riding high on economic anxiety. Neither of these factors
will be present should Trump have to run for re-election in a recessionary economy. And, Trump was running against a candidate representing
the incumbent White House party. Now, he is a member of the incumbent White House party.
But, as Douthat points out, getting rid of Trump doesn't do much to address the factors that led to his rise in the first
place.
Let me point out for the hundred-eleventieth time: anything can happen between now and November 2020. Polls aren't worth much
now. But they do remind us that Trump is extremely unpopular, and will have trouble getting re-elected even if the economy is in
good shape next year. If it's not, what, exactly, will he run on?
Trump has had historically awful numbers since about a month after he was inaugurated. The Fox News poll is coming as a wake-up
call because for a long time, the liberal media were too busy hanging out in Rust Belt diners interviewing Trump voters -- the
alleged "Real Americans" -- to pay much mind to the fact that much of the actual country detests the guy. Not saying he can't
win in '20, but recessions aside, one thing he won't have going for him this time is the element of surprise: Everyone will know
that it's obviously possible for him to win, and that if your main goal is to prevent that then you simply have to vote
for the Democrat -- no staying home, no Jill Stein or Evan McMullin-type nonsense, at least not if you're in a state whose outcome
is remotely in doubt. Eight years of Obama had made too many voters complacent, and Trump has helpfully focused people's minds.
I will gladly vote for the Democratic nominee, regardless of who it is. (Unless he/she is worse than Trump, which is probably
impossible, since Genghis Khan is not available.) I would vote for the toad in my back garden if he/she gets the nomination. Everyone
reading this knows why. Some people are able to overlook the obvious, but I find that I can't.
Unhappily I am in California, so it really doesn't matter who I vote for.
Yea, I think part of the reason Trump won in 2016 was because he took everyone by surprise. Few people thought he could win (except
Nate Silver and the LA Times, I guess, and a few of the commenters here): even he didn't think he was going to win until the Michigan
results started coming in.
Another weak story board based on polls that already in question. Fox is not above the fold to skew polls to keep stories going.
The left and the media has made a pseudo state of fear of even wearing a MAGA hat in public. This pseudo state has armed low information
and low IQ Americans willing to attack Senators while they are mowing their lawn, or enabling professors swinging bike locks at
rallies against Trump supporters.
The Senate and the House will loose not on the coattails of Trump, but based on their own silence and failures, and business
as usual. Again and Again these articles throw up the importance of saving the Republican party, but before Trump the party was
over. The party knew that as they went after rigging of the polls rather than winning the votes through addressing problems.
The real truth is that the Republicans have a problem their rich globalist donors have abandoned them for Democrats blue
Dog Dems as they are called, while their base will support them if they lead. Leading means angering their mega donors. Trump
has 65 percent individual donors, far above any of the Dems, even combined. Tom Steyer is paying millions to get thousands that
are from individual donors.
Normally Republican Funder Hedge fund billionaire Seth Klarman said Democrats need to regain control of Congress "for the
good of the country". His money has had found its way to 56 Democrats running for House seats and 22 Democrats running for the
U.S. Senate. This is millions. His reason was a tax cut he neither needed nor wanted, Huh?
Uihlein gave $2.5 million to Ives in a single week this past January -- essentially bankrolling her campaign to defeat Rauner
in a Republican primary on Tuesday.
Koch Brothers also followed the same suit. I could go naming more and more that switch sides, but also tried to finance Trump
Inauguration where things were more laxed and flooded in, and tried to line up on his door step. Instead he closed the door.
Trump showed that Campaign funds don't really matter if you have heart and the desire to win, having a bad candidate to run
against doesn't hurt either, but the Dems have tons of bad candidates.
With Harvesting Vote laws California is lost, but the rest of the country is in play. If they lead and lead for the people
they will win, if it is business as usual they will lose the Senate and not gain the house.
At this point who cares? Tweets aside Trump has turned into the corporate/donor class
Republican he ran against in 2016 and in some cases even worse with his recent about face on
the second amendment which I've been predicting since he banned bump stocks. He's now bought
the lie that as long as the U.S. enjoys sustained economic growth the multiracial madhouse
that is contemporary murica won't ever derail.
Trump the candidate promised:
* A strong economy which he's partially delivered on
* A wall on our Southern border
* A drastic reduction in H1B and other work visas that allow American elites to displace
Americans from the work force
* Decreases in legal immigration
* Unwavering support for the 2nd amendment
* Law and order
Trump the president has given us:
* More moral, material and financial support to Israel than ever
* Moved the embassy to Jerusalem
* Forcing foreign nations to decriminalize homosexual sodomy
* Letting Antifa and other assorted left wing crazies run wild and attack people in the
streets while prosecuting his right of center supporters for fighting back
* Early prison release for violent black and other felons
* Potentially the largest influx of legal immigrants and illegal aliens in U.S. history
coupled with the lowest number of deportations
* No wall (yet)
* Formally condemned white nationalism and so called white supremacy but not black and brown
supremacy or left wing terrorism
* Potentially infringing upon the 2nd amendment even more than Bill Clinton and far more than
Barack Obama
At this rate Trump will probably give us the green new deal, black slave reparations, a
white privilege tax and deny "anti-semites" first and second amendment rights should he win a
second term. History has shown that the radical left makes some of its greatest political
gains under Republican presidents and Trump has done nothing to buck that trend.
America was and is looted by wealthy Americans looking for a quick buck. Globalization and
offshoring in the 19080's was all about greedy wealthy Westerners, especially Americans,
wanting to make more money. To blame the looting in others just demonstrates Buchanan's
stupidity.
@Hanrahan Notice the
continued exclusion of Representative Gabbard and her criticism of the destructive Empire --
despite focusing on Beltway politics, he hasn't typed her name since June 28. He wants the
"Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders-AOC Democrats" to go even kookier because this website's
"Mr. Paleoconservative" has become a Beltway fixture, cheerleading for Team Red in the next
Most Important Election Ever.
"the Great Arsenal of Democracy was looted by" the military-industrial complex Arsenal &
it's unending wars & nothing short of nuclear annihilation is going to change that. There
is no Democrat who is willing to bet their chance at the presidency on pulling it down. And
the American public, by and large, is put to sleep by lengthy discussions of the intricacies
of trade policy. The election will be waged, like the primaries, around race-baiting. Biden
will be the first victim. The other white candidates are running scared & becoming more
shrill in their denunciations of whites in general by the hour. There's no telling where it
all may lead but it's becoming clearer day by day that the hostility will outlast the
primaries & the general election will be a very ugly affair. There's no turning back to
the soothing center now, it will be an us-vs.-them type election & hopefully, Pat
Buchanan, still America's shrewdest pundit, will keep us fully apprised.
@Charles Pewitt
Basically I agree with Erebus's comment.
What you don't seem to get is that the China situation is of the US's own making. US Co's in
the 90's & naughtier literally salivated at getting there production into China (or
Mexico) Then -- they were happy to accept Chinese conditions, as was the US government.
So, your ridiculous, punitive tariffs are going to HURT the thousands of US companies who
happily moved production to China. Nor will US Co's move home (unless the government acts
aggressively) -- they'll move to Vietnam or where ever.
Of course such punitive tarrifs will justify the Chinese into further devaluing their
currency.
Would be interesting to see the affects on US inflation were your program followed.
Implied in your comment is the apparent fact that you do not understand this US/China
issue.(which is OK, because Trump & CO certainly don't understand the imperatives
here)
You seem to think it's about trade. Actually it about China's sovereignty. The US position is
that China NOT become a leading economy such as the US, Japan & Germany are. The US
demands China cease it's drive to lead in high tech'. The Chinese simply can not give-in. US
demands amount to China becoming a second rate power, essentially a US vassal.
How could any country, let alone China with its humiliating history of being a victim of
western imperialism, do anything else but fight?
President Donald Trump's reelection hopes hinge on two things: the state of the economy
in 2020 and the identity of the Democratic nominee.
That's the first sentence and that's where I should have stopped reading. This is the kind
of out of touch political insider horse trading irradiated bullshittery that no one should
waste their time on anymore.
Trump's is finished if he doesn't fulfil his US immigration promises from 2016. He's also
finished if he doesn't stop channelling his Jewish handlers with embarrassingly stupid
anti-white rhetoric. That's it. That's where "reelection hopes" should focus on.
Trump's most obvious failed promise is not putting the deep state under constitutional
control, after the Obama/Clinton escapades.
"Justice, FBI and ICE are turning into partisan organizations."
Wrong! The deep state is in the DNC's pocket. Barr is fixing the extent Obama attempted to
coup the 2016 election using the DNC' deep state.
BTW your Leninist DNC armed appendage aka antifa is now responsible for 4 attacks on IC
offices. The latest a gun shot through a window of an ICE office in San Antonio, Tx.
That the deep state has not closed them is deep state obeisance to the DNC.
President Donald Trump saw the same day that bombs must have been used on the WTC towers on
9/11/2001.
From his experience building steel sky scrapers, he knew they were built to be strong,
even against a jet. He stated to the reporter that bombs must also have been involved.
What I have yet to see satisfactorily explained is how a huge (or even yuuuge) skyscraper can
fall – within its footprint – when subjected to asymmetrical forces.
Put aside whether the jets had enough fuel, burned hot or long enough, etc. Taking the
footage at face value, the buildings were SLAMMED from one direction. There is no way that
could have caused symmetrical damage. Any structural component closer to impact received
orders of magnitude of force more than those on the opposite side, resulting in unequal
weakening. Yet what everyone saw was a symmetrical collapse within footprint, as though all
structural components were equally and simultaneously weakened.
Who you gonna believe, the gubmint, or your own lying eyes?
"... The establishment's "Democracy Works!" propaganda seeks to stifle such Movements, directing attention to establishment candidates voice those concerns. But those candidates invariably prove to be ineffective because they can never get enough support to win and their efforts largely end with the election. ..."
Well you don't trust any of them, but you vote for the ones pushing policy you want to see happen, and you vote for the
ones that try to make that happen, and you abandon them immediately if they renege.
Obama's election and betrayal proved that this strategy doesn't work.
Tulsi is not anti-war', she's anti- dumb wars . Just as Colin Powell was ('Powell Doctrine' LOL). Just as
Obama was ("don't do stupid stuff"). Just as Trump is (amid howls of "isolationist!" LOL).
The fact is, every candidate will salute the flag as soon as the requisite false flag outrage occurs.
Furthermore, even if you ardently support Tulsi because she voices something that appears to be anti-war, you have to contend
with passionate supporters of other candidates: those who want a candidate of color, those who want an older
more experienced candidate, those who want a women candidate; those who want a socialist candidate, etc. In this way the electorate
is played against each other and in the end the establishment's favored candidate emerges naturally as the "democratic choice"
(with the help of establishment money and media support) .
Relying on voting for change is not enough . There has to be independent Movements for each fundamental change:
Democracy, Anti-war; Economic fairness. Like the Yellow Vest Movement.
The establishment's "Democracy Works!" propaganda seeks to stifle such Movements, directing attention to establishment candidates
voice those concerns. But those candidates invariably prove to be ineffective because they can never get enough support to win
and their efforts largely end with the election.
Donald Trump: billionaire of the people. When he ran for office,
he said , "The American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and
fight for them."
And how's that working out for the American worker? Not very well, actually, not very well.
When it comes down to picking sides -- standing up for workers' rights or lining the pockets of
CEOs and shareholders -- Trump aligned himself and his policies with the fat cats. This cost
workers money and safety. The truth is that American corporations got a president who protected
them and fought for them
Presidential elections are a joke. It's best to vote for 3rd candidate to express your
opposition to the Status quo: I won't be voting Trump again and fall for that sting. Will
vote Tulsi whether she's on ballot or not.
She will never make it as she is too honest about foreign policy and the USA lies.
Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian Interference
Claims
Lavrov responded first to the question. He said that there is no evidence that shows any
Russian interference in the U.S. elections. He continued:
Speaking about the most recent US presidential campaign in particular, we have had in
place an information exchange channel about potential unintended risks arising in cyberspace
since 2013. From October 2016 (when the US Democratic Administration first raised this issue)
until January 2017 (before Donald Trump's inauguration), this channel was used to handle
requests and responses. Not so long ago, when the attacks on Russia in connection with the
alleged interference in the elections reached their high point, we proposed publishing this
exchange of messages between these two entities, which engage in staving off cyberspace
incidents. I reminded Mr Pompeo about this today. The administration, now led by President
Trump, refused to do so. I'm not sure who was behind this decision, but the idea to publish
this data was blocked by the United States. However, we believe that publishing it would
remove many currently circulating fabrications. Of course, we will not unilaterally make
these exchanges public, but I would still like to make this fact known.
The communication channel about cyber issues did indeed exist. In June 2013 the Presidents
of the United States and Russia issued a Joint Statement about "Information and
Communications Technologies (ICTs)". The parties agreed to establishing communication
channels between each other computer emergency response teams, to use the direct
communication link of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers for cyber issue exchanges, and to
have direct communication links between high-level officials in the White House and Kremlin
for such matter. A Fact Sheet published by the Obama White House detailed the implementation
of these three channels.
One inference from Lavrov's statement is that the "fundamental understanding on this
matter" between the two presidents that has "not been fully implemented" is the release of
the communications about cyberspace incidents. The Russians clearly think that a release of
the communications with the Obama administration would exculpate them. That would also
exculpate Trump from any further collusion allegations. Why then does the Trump
administration reject the release? Who is blocking it?
Cont. reading: Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian
Interference Claims
"... Railing against Trump only sets up the next smooth-talking stooge who will start a fresh new con. ..."
"... Dore traces the problem primarily to Democratic Party's turning to identity politics instead of representing the working class. They sold us out. Clinton and Obama are just "Republican light" aka "Centrist" "Third Way" Democrats. "Centrist" = establishment-serving con artists. ..."
"... "Managed democracy" or "guided democracy" : is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto autocracy. Such governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals. ..."
Dore makes the same point I have: "Trump is a Symptom of 40 years of NeoLiberalism and
the Corporate Capture of the U.S. government."Railing against Trump only sets up the
next smooth-talking stooge who will start a fresh new con.
Dore traces the problem primarily to Democratic Party's turning to identity politics
instead of representing the working class. They sold us out. Clinton and Obama are just
"Republican light" aka "Centrist" "Third Way" Democrats. "Centrist" = establishment-serving
con artists.
"Managed
democracy" or "guided democracy" : is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto autocracy. Such
governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the
state's policies, motives, and goals.
In other words, the government controls elections so that the people can exercise all
their rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic
principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed
democracy, the state's continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from
having a significant impact on policy.
The concept of a "guided democracy" was developed in the 20th century by Walter
Lippmann in his seminal work Public Opinion (1922) and by Edward Bernays in his work
Crystallizing Public Opinion.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
RT has a good video on Yellow Vest protestors (on rt.com homepage). It's kind long for the
info that it provides. I suggest skipping some parts.
"... The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with Iran. ..."
"... We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they are ready to pull out from the deal. ..."
"... He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition. ..."
It's hard to foresee how US efforts to bring Iranian oil exports to zero will play out in
future, Vladimir Putin admitted, saying OPEC members should live up to their obligation to keep
output as low as possible if it comes true. Russia has an agreement with the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut their output by 1.2 million barrels per day,
which remains in effect until July of this year, Putin said. But the US waivers – which
gave a host of countries an exemption from the existing anti-Iran sanctions – expire much
earlier, he reminded.
I don't imagine how the global energy market will react to that.
In November, the US re-imposed sanctions on Iran's energy, shipbuilding and banking sectors
in a bid to deprive Tehran of its main sources of revenue. But it simultaneously issued waivers
to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey – the main importers of Iranian crude
– so that they can find alternative vendors of oil.
The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions
beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American
restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with
Iran.
Commenting on the issue, Putin said he hopes the market will eventually avoid the deficit of
Iranian oil and that Iran will still be able to sell it. The comment came on the heels of
conflicting reports that Donald Trump persuaded Riyadh to ramp up oil output this lowering fuel
costs; these reports were denounced by OPEC officials.
Nevertheless, there is "no evidence" that any country is going to withdraw from the
OPEC+ agreement to drop oil outputs, Putin said.
We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they
are ready to pull out from the deal.
He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed
by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to
withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition.
It's a dog & pony show. Trump folded very quickly, in april 2017 or three moth after inauguration. He proved
to be no fighter, a weakling, a marionette. Appointment of Bolton and Pompeo just added insult to injury. this is classic bait and
switch similar to what was executed by Obama after then election. In a way Trump is a Republican version of Obama.
I wonder if he did not want to fight to the death and sacrifice himself for the course, why he entered the Presidential race at
all ? He is not stupid enough not to understand the he will be covered with dirt and all skeletons in his closet will be dug
out for display by the US intelligence agencies, which protect that interest of Wall Street and MIC (Israel is a part of the
US MIC -- its biggest lobbyist and beneficiary) , not the USA as a sovereign state.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. ..."
"... To help sabotage Trump's political agenda ..."
"... To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election ..."
"... And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia. ..."
"... These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. ..."
"... The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington. ..."
"... "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will." ..."
"... Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., ..."
"... Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her? ..."
"... War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!" ..."
"... Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face? ..."
"... Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"? ..."
"... There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized. ..."
"... Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose. ..."
Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely
hurt Trump's chances for reelection. But he didn't do that. Why?
Of course, we're assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed
Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the
Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers
at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did.
He also would have indicted senior-level agents
at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn't do that
either.
Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very
beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those
objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:
To help sabotage Trump's political agenda
To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election
And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.
These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power
to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage
or, even worse, a traitor.
The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller
played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment
over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.
My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?
I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:
"We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes
and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will
partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings
with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will."
Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime
change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising
to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions,
instead, we're going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight
terrorism together? Really?
At the same time Trump was promising this new era of "peace, understanding, and good will," Hillary Clinton was issuing her war
whoop at every opportunity. Here's candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:
"The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership
with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a
no-fly zone and safe zones."
Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria
would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the
switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?
"We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground," boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported
the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. "I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and
trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening."
War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything
more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish
comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after
it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!"
So, what changed? Trump changed.
Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of
withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels
on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger
to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing
up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?
The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then,
sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration
and he never reciprocated for Kim's cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to "build
a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula" or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit,
Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all
of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal
steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually
lift sanctions.
Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy
establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change
all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"?
Yes, that was Trump's campaign promise. So, what happened?
There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range
nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring
up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling
regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.
Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon,
he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife'
is on the loose.
Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: "You follow our foreign policy directives and we'll make
Mueller disappear?
It sure looks like it. play_arrow 2 Reply reply Report flag
the report was finished last august. hed got all the juice in that squeeze. but i also guess he got a call from somebodys in
the GOG mafia[continuity of .gov] deepstate after all is their little bitch
He had to stop before he implicated himself. For instance, still waiting on "the why" he never put Steele or McCabe or Hillary
or Perkins Coie or Rosenstein or Comey etc under oath when it was...THEY... who supplied false evidence to a FISA court
, "evidence gathered" (according to Steele) from...ta daaah!...Russians ;-)
You can drive yourself crazy wondering whether it was all theater from the start, or whether they put a gun to the head of
the guy who was going to expose it was theater until he started playing along. End result, theater.
exactly. Just like you can wonder why Justice John Roberts turned on Obamacare and **** on conservatives. Was he sincere or
did he get a 3:00 am phone call that if he didn't uphold it, his wife and kids would die in an unfortunate accident?
Oh, I dunno...maybe because even with a crack team of demoncraft operatives, Deep State Hillary deadenders and a limitless
supply of federal funding even they couldn't come up with "Russian collusion" because...none ever existed? ;-)
"... To be perfectly honest with you PL, when Trump was elected I thought to myself, WoW! for the first time since JFK or LBJ ..."
"... I thought he was going to be the first non-neoconservative president, possibly a crude 2016 resurgence of paleoconservatism, hence his intense focus on immigration, culture wars and identity politics mixed with authentic economic nationalism and non-interventionism (hence his lively attacks on the very ideology of neoconservatism) but obviously his admin is significantly more hawkish than the old Vulcans(!) back in the Bush days. ..."
"... One could even argue that from 2006 to 2008, Bush somewhat learned the ropes and distanced itself from the crazy Vulcans and more toward Realism, hence Condi Rice's handling of the 33-day war between Israel and Lebanon, as well dismissing the like of Perle, Wolfowitz, and others later on. But with Trump, given his knack for indifference to what is right and wrong and his method of shilling for whoever is willing to chip in the most, any progression toward common sense inside Donald Trump is highly unlikely to happen. ..."
To be perfectly honest with you PL, when Trump was elected I thought to myself, WoW! for
the first time since JFK or LBJ (possibly as far back as Truman) someone "new" has become
president of the U.S. who does not come from the Washington elite circle/Borg/Blob. I
remember watching the debates and the way he politically neutralized the likes of Bush,
Rubio, and Ted Cruz and on top of that, Hilary Clinton.
I thought he was going to be the first non-neoconservative president, possibly a crude
2016 resurgence of paleoconservatism, hence his intense focus on immigration, culture wars
and identity politics mixed with authentic economic nationalism and non-interventionism
(hence his lively attacks on the very ideology of neoconservatism) but obviously his admin is
significantly more hawkish than the old Vulcans(!) back in the Bush days.
One could even argue that from 2006 to 2008, Bush somewhat learned the ropes and
distanced itself from the crazy Vulcans and more toward Realism, hence Condi Rice's handling
of the 33-day war between Israel and Lebanon, as well dismissing the like of Perle,
Wolfowitz, and others later on. But with Trump, given his knack for indifference to what is
right and wrong and his method of shilling for whoever is willing to chip in the most, any
progression toward common sense inside Donald Trump is highly unlikely to happen.
In terms of the admin's policy in the ME, I think the immediate focus of the U.S-Israel
policy in the region is "Lebanon" and Trump's ME policies among other things is deeply
attached to Lebanon and that specific patch of land. Even Hassan Nasrallah has sounded the
alarm and in his recent TV speech during which he warned the Lebanese people of a possible
incoming war in the Summer with Israel that would be devastating to the people in the
region.
Regarding Russia, in the past 1+ years it has become clear that Russia is going to play a
stronger role in the ME, possibly even replacing the U.S. there, especially given the warm
relations between Putin and Netanyahu where the former has not raised any objection against
the latter's constant illegal bombings in Syria and Iraq among other things.
The false impression was that Putin is going to stand up to Netanyahu and form some sort
of diplomatic and even military resistance to its aggression in the ME, but that is clearly
not the case. Andrew Korybko of Eurasiafuture has written extensively on this interesting and
unfolding new dynamic between the two. All in all I hope a shred of common sense prevails
inside the head of these Hard Neocons and Trump himself and stop its belligerence against
Iran and other ME countries. Nobody wants war and nobody needs war
P.S. I am an avid reader of your valuable analyses and I would like to offer my deepest
thanks to you for this great website.
The new narrative is that of an embattled president trying against the odds to do the
right thing
the new narrative is they got him, Watergate 2.0
*if* that is correct the changes to expect are
– media going easier on him
– corporate dems going easier on him (while smirking a lot)
– more war
– more corporate donors as they might prefer a controlled Trump to a Sanders
– they might throw him a symbolic bone on immigration to help him win in 2020
– more corporate donors as they might prefer a controlled Trump to a Sanders
– they might throw him a symbolic bone on immigration to help him win in 2020
The Deep State will never allow an uncontrolled candidate to win.
I see that there are mainly two opposing explanations:
a) Donald Trump really wanted to break with the neocons, but he is under such enormous
pressure that he had to give in to them (at least temporarily, maybe, according to that
interpretation, there is still hope)
b) Donald Trump wanted to behave this way from the start, and if there is a conspiracy, he
is a part of it. He just said some things about not involving the US in conflicts that are
not in its interest because that was popular in order to get elected, but he never had any
intentions of going through with it.
I think there are problems with both explanations.
The main problem with a):
Even if Trump had to make concessions because he was under such enormous pressure, it is
hardly plausible that there really was a need to surround himself with neocons to such a
degree and go much further with neoconservative policies in some areas than many mainstream
Republicans would probably have gone.
The main problem with b):
If Trump really belongs to the inner circle, it does not seem very plausible that
intelligence services and establishment politicians would go to such lengths constructing a
conspiracy theory (setting up meetings of Papadopoulos with Mifsud and Downer, the Steele
dossier, campaign surveillance), which is not only a lot of effort, but also lays bare some
elements of the "deep state" they would normally prefer to keep hidden.
How one might attempt to save a):
While the neocons are generally very influential in the US, they normally operate in the
background. They don't have full control over lawmakers. However, some members of Congress
are very close to neocons, and many of them (in both parties) were among the strictest
anti-Trumpers. The most concrete danger of impeachment for Trump was that some Republicans
closely connected with neocons would unite with Democrats against him. Appointing lots of
neocons and increasing their influence might have been the best option of placating these
neoconservative Republican anti-Trumpers (or even to make these Republican neocons stop being
anti-Trumpers).
How one might attempt to save b):
While the whole Russiagate conspiracy theory is somewhat risky for the (overt and deep)
establishment, it is also a great distraction. Furthermore, I think Russiagate was not
primarily directed against Trump, but more against Russia and in favor of increasing military
spending from which many in the establishment profit. Generally, Democrats used to be
somewhat less hawkish than Republicans, and since they already hate Trump fervently (but
mostly didn't care much about Russia), Russiagate was a great opportunity for making
Democrats even more ardent supporters of the new cold war, the intelligence services, and the
security state. One could hardly invent such an efficient means for making Democrats hate
Russia and support the surveillance state except by associating their boogeyman with Russia.
Many Republicans would go along with the new cold war, anyway, winning over Democrats for the
CIA, anti-Russian hatred and military spending was particularly valuable.
So, I think both a) and b) are probably partially true.
I don't think Trump was really a part of an inner circle. As someone from the outside,
some of the bipartisan neoconservative dogmas were probably alien to him. There are some
leaks (e.g. in the book by Bob Woodward) that show that Trump questioned the large number of
expensive military bases around the world. He probably looked at it from a business
perspective, and it seems hard to justify such enormous expenses. Furthermore, he had some
ideas about the rivalry with China, and the idea of alienating and antagonizing Russia,
China, and some medium-sized countries (and to some degree even Western Europe, though it
mostly still follows the US) all at once, which pushes them into closer collaboration
probably seems odd to someone from the outside who has not been surrounded by people from
neoconservative think tanks for most of his life. On the other hand, I don't think there were
any deep convictions behind the things Trump said in his campaign. He just said things that
a) seemed to be popular and b) he probably mostly agreed with himself, but when it became
clear to him that it was more convenient for him to do something very different from what he
had said during the campaign, he hardly hesitated.
I think that for the (both overt and deep) establishment someone "naïve" from the
outside was seen as a threat. On the other hand, they probably also understood that Trump
hardly has strong convictions and therefore would give in relatively easily under pressure.
So, the Russiagate conspiracy theory was probably a good idea from the perspective of the
(overt and deep) establishment for bringing Trump into line.
Then, I would also distinguish some things. Trump probably was very pro-Israeli from the
start. But being pro-Israeli does not have to mean being anti-Russian, after all the Israeli
and Russian government have relatively good relations, even though their interests diverge in
many areas.
"Your analysis fails to account for the fact that Trump essentially ran as a third party
candidate."
Deep state sleeper agent Trump ran as an "outsider" opposed to everything that deep state
agent Hillary Clinton stood for. His candidacy was a carefully calculated bait and switch
fraud which leveraged his non-career-politician status.
"His original agenda of sealing up the border and ending Bush-Obama regime change ran
counter to both parties."
Since his campaign strategy was to present himself as an outsider, of course he had to
pretend to take positions that ran counter to both parties. It's now painfully obvious that
his "original agenda" was nothing but disingenuous BS.
"There's been no one more hostile to Trump since Jan. 2017 than Paul Ryan and Mitch
McConnell, both Republicans."
Talk is cheap.
"As Darren Beattie said, McConnell's tactic with Trump all along has been to block him
on everything except for federal judges. And McConnell's winning."
Everything, or just the things that Trump pretends to want but doesn't really want? Funny
that nobody's been able to deter him from his war crimes and his provocations and his
apparent drive to start WW3.
"Now you'll probably say, it's all theater, they're all in on it together, wake up &
smell the coffee."
How will smelling coffee change the fact that it is all political theater?
"I don't believe it."
LOL! You think Trump is honest? Seriously?
"Trump could have run as a Jeb Bush Republican and done just fine, but he didn't."
Or so you barely assert; and so you barely assert without explaining how Jeb Bush lost the
primary to Trump.
"He took a huge risk saying the stuff he did, and won."
He won because agent Obama, agent Clinton and their deep state handlers helped him win. Or
do you think it was just a coincidence that Obama attacked the Syrian army at Deir Ezzor in
Sept. 2016, for example, which greatly escalated tensions with Russia just as the election
was coming into the home stretch?
To understand what the Deep State will and will not tolerate answer these questions.
What do both parties agree on? If they appear to disagree, look to see if anything changes
when one party has the power to cause change or does the party in power make excuses to avoid
change? Those things that the populus is against but never change or get worse are what the
Deep State wants
The Deep State wants a constant state of tension with 'hostile' countries (Iran, Russia,
Venezuela, China, Syria and others). This scares the crap out of ignorant Americans and
allows unjustifiable spending on war matériel.
The Deep State wants a steady supply of cheap foreign labor to provide wealth to the
supporters of the Deep State.
The Deep State wants our financial institutions to never fail (FED 2009) even at the
expense of 90% of Americans. The Deep State wants financial institutions to provide financial
products to the wealthy which cripples the vast majority of Americans.
The silly internecine squabbles within the Deep State are a ruse to misdirect the public
from important issues like constant war, legal and illegal immigrants taking jobs from
Americans and the increased transfer of wealth for the 90% to the supper weathy.
There will never be a wall and illegal immigration will continue to be a problem.
All the investigations into Trump, the DNC, Hillary and all the rest will never come to
justice.
The wealth transfer will not stop
Until Americans realize these diversions for what they are and put an end to it through
what ever means necessary
it was successful as Trump was likely forced to turn his back on his better angels and
subsequently hired Pompeo, Bolton and Abrams.
Oh plezzze .you sound like you've been drugged.
Trump never had any better angels as any reporter and journalist whoever interviewed or
investigated him would tell you.
And come on! .You know damn well Adelson sent Bolton and you should also know damn well
why the Orange Boy staffed his adm with Zio Jews. .no one in NY except Jews would associate
with Trump.
i think some of the conspiracy was about controlling Trump's foreign policy going forward but
i also think some of it was people like Brennan worried CIA collusion with Saudi funded
jihadist groups since 9/11 (and possibly before) might come out.
Trump biggest regret is going to be that he ever ran for President. Impeached or not
impeached all his dirty laundry is going to be exposed. Even if he secured a second term
there is no statute of limitations on what he could be prosecuted for .so the minute he steps
down from the WH he's going to have to spend everything he's got on lawyers fighting the
charges the SDNY is going to bring against him.
David Cay Johnston: What Is Trump Hiding in His Tax Returns?
The Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter explains what's likely in Trump's
returns.
By Jon WienerTwitter
David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter who previously
worked at The New York Times. He's the founder and editor of DCReport.org.
Jon Wiener: The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee formally requested six years
of Trump's personal and business tax returns earlier this month. Trump, of course, refused to
comply, and said the law is "100 percent" on his side. Does the IRS have to hand over Trump's
tax returns to the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee?
David Cay Johnston: If they follow the law, they absolutely have to hand them over. Under
a 1924 anti-corruption law that was passed because of Teapot Dome, a Harding-administration
scandal, Congress can look at anybody's tax return at any time. In the 85-year history of
this law, the IRS has always responded appropriately to the request and turned over
everything that was requested.
[Hide MORE]
JW: What are the exceptions to this law?
DCJ: There aren't any. It says, "Congress shall provide upon written request." That's it.
Well, they have a written request, it's a specific request, and therefore they shall provide.
The statement by Donald Trump that the law is 100 percent on his side is just classic
Trumpian lying: Take something that is true, and state the exact opposite.
JW: Does the IRS commissioner have any alternative to handing over Trump's tax returns?
What happens if he doesn't comply?
DCJ: There's another section of the tax code which says that any federal employee dealing
with any aspects of the tax code who either does not comply, or who fails to act -- covering
both sins of omission and commission -- "shall be removed from office, and is subject to
prosecution and upon conviction, five years in prison and a $10,000 fine."
JW: Who enforces this law? It's not just up to Attorney General William Barr -- is that
right?
DCJ: That's correct. First of all, a US Attorney's office could enforce the action,
although that seems unlikely in this administration. But the next administration, if it
chooses, could go back, and even if the IRS commissioner has left, prosecute him for failure
to turn over the documents. Of course, Congress can hold the commissioner in contempt, and
Congress can also go to federal court to enforce its orders. It can. And has in the distant
past even tried people itself.
JW: The IRS commissioner is a man named Charles Rettig, and he's a Trump appointee. Tell
us a little about Charles Rettig.
DCJ: At DCReport we call him "Donald Trump's man at the IRS." Almost every IRS
commissioner has been a tax lawyer, but Charles Rettig is not like most of those other tax
lawyers. He isn't in the business of tax planning. He's in the business of representing tax
cheats who get caught, and his specialty is keeping them from being indicted. As we put it,
"He's one of the foxes who is not just in charge of the hen house. He's in a position to
redesign the hen house."
JW: Trump's personal lawyer last week urged the Treasury Department not to hand over
Trump's tax returns. He said that to comply with their request would turn the IRS into a
political weapon of the radical Democrats. Is that a good legal argument?
DCJ: No. It may be a good political argument with Trump's base, but as a legal matter, if
my students at Syracuse Law were to bring that up, I would have to work hard not to laugh at
them -- because it's a ridiculous argument. There is no limit in Section 6103 that says you
can only ask for a tax return if you're a Republican, or if you hew to certain political
views. It simply says, "Upon written request, the return shall be provided." It could not be
more clear.
JW: The boss of the IRS commissioner is the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin. He said
sort of the opposite of what Trump's personal lawyer said. He said, "Our intent is to follow
the law." How do you explain the difference between the legal positions of Trump's personal
lawyer and Trump's treasury secretary?
DCJ: This is exactly what got me onto this story. I noticed that Trump, his lawyers, and
the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, were making these wild, reckless,
lawless statements. But Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Rettig, the IRS commissioner,
both made nuanced statements, and carefully avoided refusing to comply, and instead said,
"We're trying to understand how to comply with law. It is our intent to comply with the law,
but we need more time to learn what the law says." It should take you literally about 10
seconds to learn what the law says. That's when I thought, "What's going on here?" It's what
got me on to the section of the tax code that says, in effect, that any federal employee who
interferes, obstructs, or fails to act, is subject to removal, prosecution, and fine. I think
what Mnuchin is trying to do here is thread a needle. He wants to continue to show his
loyalty to Trump. Not to our Constitution, as his oath of office requires, but to Trump. He's
trying to evade the law that says there must be compliance with the request, without going to
jail.
JW: The New York Times news story on this reported that "The fight over Mr. Trump's tax
returns is expected to turn into a protracted legal battle that will likely make its way to
the Supreme Court." Do you think that's right, and does the Republican majority on the court
have a way to rule in Trump's favor?
DCJ: It may lead to a protracted fight. It's also possible that this will get fast-tracked
and get right to our Supreme Court. As someone who reads Supreme Court decisions, I don't
particularly care for the jurisprudence of John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the United
States, but nothing in his opinions suggests that he would sell the soul and the integrity of
the court to favor Donald Trump. Every indication is that he would uphold the law. I would
not be surprised if you got a 7-2 or 9-0 decision from the Supreme Court that the IRS has to
turn over the documents.
JW: The really interesting question is, what do you think is in Trump's tax returns? Why
do you think he's trying so hard to keep them secret?
DCJ: There are at least three reasons here. Number one, Trump's tax returns will show that
he is not anywhere near as wealthy as he claimed. Remember during the campaign he kept saying
he was worth more than $10 billion. But after he became president, he signed under oath his
financial disclosure statement, and 90 percent of his wealth vanished. Even that statement,
which I've analyzed, overstates his wealth. There's never been a scintilla of verifiable
evidence that Trump is a billionaire. And I'm the guy who revealed, back in 1990 when he said
he was worth $3 billion, that he wasn't a billionaire. We eventually found that he had
negative net worth of about $295 million -- minus $295 million.
Secondly, Donald Trump is a tax cheat. He had two civil trials for income tax fraud, one
by the State of New York and the other by the City of New York. In both cases he lost. In one
of those trials, his own long-time tax attorney and accountant, Jack Mitnick, testified
against him. Mitnick was shown the filed tax return, which was a photocopy, and testified,
"That's my signature on the return, but neither I nor my firm prepared that tax return."
That's as good a badge of fraud as you're ever going to find. It indicates that Donald Trump
took the tax return that was prepared, changed it, and then with a photocopy machine put the
signature of Jack Mitnick on it. Donald Trump is also a confessed sales tax cheat. Mayor Ed
Koch of New York said he should have served 15 days in jail for his crime. Trump has a long
history of hiding records from auditors, cheating governments, using two sets of numbers. So
his tax returns are highly likely to show tax cheating.
Finally, the returns may well establish how much money he has been getting from Russians,
Saudis, people from the Emirates, and elsewhere. They may show whether he has been engaged in
money laundering for these people through real estate transactions and other actions that
make no business sense, but, when closely examined, show exactly what we see when there's
money laundering. I think the record is pretty clear that he has been doing that.
JW: A technical question: Where do you report payments from Russian oligarchs on your tax
return?
DCJ: Trump has over 500 business entities, and the tax return is the beginning point for
an audit. You then would examine the books and records that are behind it. Now, Trump has a
long history of destroying or claiming he destroyed business records to thwart auditors. This
happened particularly with the City of New York when he tried to cheat the city out of about
$2.9 million. But there may actually be transactions reported right in the tax return that
would tell you where money came from–because it may list entities to which he is
obligated, or is in partnership with, or received money from, or shared profits with. The
request by Chairman Neal of the House Ways and Means Committee was very targeted. It cited
six specific Trump businesses -- out of over 500 businesses. That suggests to me that they
know what they were looking for .
JW: What do you think the political effect would be if voters learned from Trump's tax
return that he has been a tax cheat? As I recall, this was a huge issue in the final downfall
of Richard Nixon.
DCJ: That's right. This was a big scandal in 1974. Nixon was pardoned, so nothing happened
to him, but his tax lawyer went to prison. By the way, the very law that exposed Nixon as a
tax cheat is the same law that the Trump people are now trying to resist. I frankly think
that among people who are strong Trump supporters, this will have little impact. The impact
that would matter is on people on the margin. People who have been with Trump but are uneasy
with him because of all of his other behavior. And if he has committed federal tax crimes,
then he has committed New York State tax crimes, because New York State tax law hews very
closely to federal law. ".
how do you explain his hiring so many Deep State denizens Bolton, Pompeo et al.?
I would suggest, they have "great guy" Epstein dirt on Trump. Seems so obvious to me, the
entire swamp is either bought or blackmailed with this kind of dirt.
If the masses would find out about this kind of dirt, there was probably a violent purge
taking place, a lynching of the entire swamp.
Btw, you are right, Us political circus works like WWE.
It's just an opinion, but mine is that boat has already sailed. Trump has been giving the
finger to his "base" from the outset, and his ego-driven government shutdown was probably the
last straw. There are always going to be a few knuckleheads who will love him forever, and my
estimate of that group would be on the order of 25%. Unless the Democrats put up a candidate
who is even worse, the man is a goner in political terms.
This means Pompeo has to move quickly. If the fat slug picked up anything at West
Point, he understands that to mobilize the US requires the other side to shoot first. In the
case of his nominal boss, you can put that in neon lights. Trump is a gullible old man, and
Pompeo needs to be able to point to something 'drastic' so as to galvanize Trump into
action.
The CIA torture woman found faked pictures of dead ducks (!) and sick children worked.
Pompeo would find a sizable number of US military men or women in body bags extremely
useful in his desperate efforts to suck up to the pissant apartheid state and hopefully pull
the ripcord of The Second Coming.
On the other side of this, Iran needs to avoid starting the shooting, no matter what! The
Confederates attacked a US fort to start the Civil War. It was about the most stupid thing
possible for them to have done. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor - again the dumbest thing
imaginable. I'd expect Iran has been consulting with India and China about its options. China
probably has every storage tank in the country topped off, and will be immune to an "oil
shock" for a long time.
In any event, it can afford to outbid everybody else is things came to that. Just off the
top of my head, Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz, then making a public announcement about it
looks like a workable plan. The US mine-sweeping capability is beyond-belief awful - and why
that is I don't understand. Any mines there which are found and destroyed can be easily and
quickly be replaced by small boats, submarines, or aircraft dropping them.
I think the real question is not whether Trump is successful or
not. That question is a red herring in American politics today. The real question is whether or
not the Democratic "leadership" can allow nomination of a candidate that the Democrat rank and
file want. Bernie Sanders should have won the nomination last time. But the superdelegate
system gives a literal handful of mandarins the ability to fake the primary process. (I say
that as someone who has significant issues with some of Sanders positions.)
Trump won because Hillary was a horrific candidate. Voters stayed home, disgusted. Trump won
because the Obama administration didn't deliver hope nor change. He delivered a government of
the corporate criminal bankers for them. Middle and working class America got screwed. Black
people got screwed worst. Trump won because the utter corruption at the heart of the DNC was
exposed for all to see in the emails. Trump win because of the Obama administration making a
trade deal top secret classified and trying to force a vote through congress. Not seeing any
point in voting, Democrats didnt.
All the evidence since shows the DNC leadership didn't learn anything. They are just as
contemptuous of voters, just as manipulative with their window dressing as ever. The Democratic
party is the party of endless war even more than the Republicans. It's a party that stopped
every effort by Trump to wind down or end war posture with Russia and North Korea. There's now
2 parties in Netanyahu's pocket implementing Likuds insane middle east ideas. Put some solar
energy and LGBTQ butter on it with a side of women's rights bullshit and it's "Democrat". But
the politicians are just as venal. The legislature just as wildly right wing war mongering.
The 1960's is long over. The Democratic party hasn't seen a new idea since and has converted
to govern to the right of Nixon. Way to Nixon's right. The Democratic party is the tool of the
Uber-ization of not just America, but the whole world. Flour and break the law to pauperize the
working class, and suck money to a few in the SF Bay Area. That's policy now.
You can see it already. Sanders is ahead. But Buttigieg is being anointed. He's the perfect
candidate. He's gay! He's out of the closet! And he's a corporate tool who can talk smoothly
without speaking a clear word. Best of all, he has ZERO foreign policy experience or positions.
So he'll be putty in the hands of the corporations that want endless war for profits. Wall
Street wants him. And the street owns the Democratic party. Will he give a flying f*@k about
the middle and working class? Will he be anything but another neo-liberal who can be
differentiated from a neo-conservative only by mild difference in racism? (Overt vs.covert)
At least Buttigieg isn't Beto O'Rourke, the most completely empty skin in Congress. There's
that.
All the evidence I see is no. The Democrat "leadership" don't understand. I predict a Trump
win, or else a squeaker election that barely scrapes by with a win.
No matter what, the idiot Democrats won't get it. Pelosi will do her best to cast the
Republicans anti-tax anti-government (federal) government culture war in concrete with balanced
budget horse manure. The Democrats will continue to force a new cold war on Russia. They will
keep backing companies that steal from the middle and working class. (Yes, Uber and Lyft are
massive theft operations. They implemented taxi service without licenses. Those licenses cost a
lot of money to those who bought them. They put the public at risk causing multiple deaths and
assaults from unlicensed taxi drivers.)
Trump's appeal is that he at least talks a game of "f*@k you". Domestically it's all lies on
all sides. He lies to everyone. But at least he doesn't lie smoothly like the "good Democrat"
candidates do.
Obviously everybody's motives are mixed. The same guys who are calculating the economic
advantages of supporting Trump are likely to be cultural nativists too. That said, I think a
lot of the traditional Republicans who have come around to heartfelt Trumpism supported him
once he got the nomination for rational (zweckrational) reasons. A moderate Democrat like
Clinton might not seem like much of a threat, but the era of triangulation is coming to an
end no matter who's in charge. The imperative problems of the times -- drastic inequality,
economic stagnation, a train wreck of a health care system, climate change -- will have to be
faced with measures deeply threatening to the existing order of things, especially since
sheer demography is undermining the white Christian base of right-wing politics. Under the
circumstances, the only way to defend privilege is to embrace some kind of craziness. The
incompetence of the administration and the decline of American power and prestige that goes
with it are a trade-off. In any case, though Trump may be worse than necessary, any
conservative government will necessarily oversee the debasement of the country in the name of
race and religion. As Molly Bloom once murmured, "as well him as another."
jim harrison #24: "Under the circumstances, the only way to defend privilege is to embrace
some kind of craziness. The incompetence of the administration and the decline of American
power and prestige that goes with it are a trade-off."
I think you've put it in a nutshell. But the recognition of this particular thought is
prevented in the minds of conservatives, both upper and lower class, by an opposing thought.
The conservative logic is that defending privilege is scientifically proper. It is to defend
the material hierarchy in which you, yourself, may ascend on your own merits as a productive
successful individual. Privilege is not simply "I got mine, so you get yours": it is
conservatives' presumed key to capitalism's overall success, thus to defend privilege is to
defend the US's status as the world's strongest, most vibrant economy.
There are several reasons why this law of the jungle may no longer remain operational in
the US, and they started before Trump 's hastening of US decline. If these reasons ever dawn
upon the lower-class conservatives, that awakening may not come yet for 10 or 20 years as the
unavoidable bills become due and global financial markets begin to divest from the US as if
it were a money-loser. In the meantime the upper class will have taken its money offshore, as
foreign economies grow and liberalize investment. Thus it is that neoliberals (in Quinn
Slobodian's particular description, of a free-floating globalized financial class that
manipulates local national policies) can cut themselves free of the US as it descends further
into stratified poverty and brutality. The elites, simply by following the financial markets,
will gut the US.
Your quote describes a trade-off that is a vicious circle. It looks impossible to break
unless there is a generally agreed-upon rewrite of political economy. I repeat "generally
agreed-upon", because the real need is to change a big social preference, and as economists
say,"preferences are exogenous", meaning they are prior to the application of the toolkit of
modern economics. The US was the first large advanced capitalist country, and it may become
the first large advanced democratic socialist country if it is to avoid fascism.
Uncle Jeffy 04.22.19 at 2:05 pm (no link)
Happy Charles Krauthammer Day!
In Memoriam, of course. But his brilliant insight (that there were WMDs in Iraq, and all
we needed was a little more time to find them) will live on forever ..
Jay 04.22.19 at 11:43 pm (no link)
or maybe they weren't eager for World War 3 with Russia over Syria or the Ukraine?
I voted for Trump after previously voting for Ralph Nader. And Obama proved beyond a doubt
that Nader was right. Meanwhile Trump has done exactly what I hoped he would do; he has shown
that our entire election system is rigged by the CIA (obviously not very thoroughly rigged).
Like or hate Trump, only a traitor would not be concerned that the CIA is giving marching
order to the media and colluding to derail candidates it does not approve of.
Unless a "democrat" stands up who is willing to talk about unconstitutional wars,
unconstitutional bailouts, unconstitutional surveillance and unconstitutional rigging of the
two major parties, Trump is far better because he is forcing the public to see how corrupt DC
is. We have been in a constitutional crisis since at least the 1990's. Of course if you are
too weak and stupid to handle any of that discussion, just bury your head and pretend that
"racism" is the only reason Trump won.
bruce wilder 04.23.19 at 12:21 am (no link)
Reading the post and comments, I can help but feel the entire agenda is about feeling good
about one's own political fecklessness. The abject moral and economic failures of
left-neoliberalism / lesser evilism Democratic Party politics are staring at you. And, you
are projecting that outward as if Trump is a failure of the Republican Party and its
politics!
Trump has done exactly what I hoped he would do; he has shown that our entire election
system is rigged by the CIA (obviously not very thoroughly rigged).
If you mean that (as a result of Trump's election) most people in the US now believe that
that your entire election system is rigged by the CIA, then you're wrong: most people in the
US do not believe that your entire election system is rigged by the CIA. On the other hand,
you can't mean that as a result of Trump's election you now believe that to be true, because
(on your own say-so) you already believed it to be true before Trump's election.
If you mean that as a result of Trump's election you feel justified in priding yourself on
having superior insight to the poor dupes who still believe in the system, then I would
believe that's how you feel; but perhaps that's not what you mean. I hope that's not what you
mean.
Trump is far better because he is forcing the public to see how corrupt DC is
No, the number of people who did not believe that DC was corrupt before Trump but who have
come to believe that it is corrupt because of Trump is so small as to be insignificant.
likbez 04.23.19 at 5:58 am (no link)
@Brian 04.21.19 at 2:43 pm ( 18)
First of all thank you for your post. You insights are much appreciated. Some
comments:
The real question is whether or not the Democratic "leadership" can allow nomination of
a candidate that the Democrat rank and file want.
In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination. And Democratic leadership mainly
consists of "CIA-democrats"
Trump won because Hillary was a horrific candidate. Voters stayed home, disgusted. Trump
won because the Obama administration didn't deliver hope nor change. He delivered a
government of the corporate criminal bankers for them. Middle and working class America got
screwed. Black people got screwed worst. Trump won because the utter corruption at the
heart of the DNC was exposed for all to see in the emails.
This is a very apt description of reasons for which Trump had won, but anti-war sentiments
played also important role and probably should be added to the list. People with neocon
foreign policy platform might face hard wing in 2020 as well too. That does not means that
voters will not be betrayed again like in case of Trump and Obama, but still
The Democratic party is the party of endless war even more than the Republicans. It's a
party that stopped every effort by Trump to wind down or end war posture with Russia and
North Korea. There's now 2 parties in Netanyahu's pocket implementing Likuds insane middle
east ideas. Put some solar energy and LGBTQ butter on it with a side of women's rights
bullshit and it's "Democrat". But the politicians are just as venal. The legislature just
as wildly right wing war mongering.
True. But in 2020 that might be their undoing. That's why this corrupt gang is more afraid
of Tulsi more then of Trump.
In general the level of crisis of neoliberalism will play important role in 2002
elections, especially if the economy slows down in 2020. Wheels might start coming off the
neoliberal cart in 2020; that's why Russiagate hysteria serves as an "insurance policy". It
helps to cement the cracks in the neoliberal façade, or at least to attribute them to
the chosen scapegoat.
One good thing that Trump has done (beside criminal justice reform) is that he helped to
discredit neoliberal media. That effort should be applauded. He really turned the Twitter
into a razor to slash neoliberal MSMs.
The Trump administration is poised to tell five nations, including allies Japan, South
Korea and Turkey, that they will no longer be exempt from U.S. sanctions if they continue to
import oil from Iran.
U.S. officials say Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to announce on Monday that the
administration will not renew sanctions waivers for the five countries when they expire on
May 2.
Refusing to offer new sanctions waivers is the latest sign that Trump is once again giving
in to the most extreme Iran hawks. When sanctions on Iran's oil sector went into effect last
November, the administration initially granted waivers to the top importers of Iranian oil to
avoid a spike in the price of oil, but that is now coming to an end. The economic war that the
U.S. has been waging against Iran over the last year is about to expand to include some of the
world's biggest economies and some of America's leading trading partners. It is certain to
inflict more hardship on the Iranian people, and it will damage relations between the U.S. and
other major economic powers, including China and India, but it will have no discernible effect
on the Iranian government's behavior and policies. India, China, and Turkey are practically
guaranteed to ignore U.S. demands that they eliminate all Iranian oil imports.
The decision to end waivers has implications for world oil markets, which have been
eagerly anticipating President Trump's decision on whether to extend waivers. The officials
said market disruption should be minimal for two reasons: supply is now greater than demand
and Pompeo is also set to announce offsets through commitments from other suppliers such as
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Trump spoke about the issue Thursday with the
UAE's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
Between the administration's Venezuela and Iran oil sanctions and increased instability in
Libya (also supported by the Trump administration), oil prices are nonetheless likely to rise.
Even if they don't, Trump's Iran obsession is causing significant economic dislocation for no
good reason as part of a regime change policy that can't and won't succeed. It cannot be
emphasized enough that the reimposition of sanctions on Iran is completely unwarranted and
represents a betrayal of previous U.S. commitments to Iran and our allies under the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action. The decision to refuse any new sanctions waivers is a clear sign
that the most fanatical members of the Trump administration have prevailed in internal debates
and U.S. Iran policy is held hostage to their whims.
Maybe Trump will reap the benefits of this if oil prices go up a lot and it torpedos his
reelection in 2020.
One thing I'm really not clear on how are these proposed sanctions against third parties
(e.g. Japan, etc etc) not a violation of trade agreements? Are there escape clauses in those
agreements that allow the US to do these things, or is it merely that these other countries
are (usually) not willing to rely on the trade agreements' protections because, at the end of
the day, it would mean a trade war with the US, which they're not willing to countenance?
Iran policy ??? What about foreign policy in general ?? Interventionism is NOT what Americans
want, or can afford! No more lives & limbs (and dollars) for foreign countries!!
"Between the administration's Venezuela and Iran oil sanctions and increased instability
in Libya (also supported by the Trump administration), oil prices are nonetheless likely to
rise. Even if they don't, Trump's Iran obsession is causing significant economic dislocation
for no good reason "
But there is a good reason. Forcing up oil prices is a shot in the arm for the Saudi
economy. Remember "Israel first, and Saudi Arabia second". That formula explains most of
Trump's foreign policy, the rest being a jumble of random impulses and the consequences of
infighting among his advisors.
Gas is already $3.20 in the Chicago suburbs, and we are not into the summer driving season
yet. Overseas – India is going to the poll. India imports most of its oil, and Iran is
a major supplier. Yes, the Saudis have been trying to get India to switch over to more Saudi
imports – but it would look like "strong" Modi is giving in to Trump and MBS.
We are going to sanction China for buying Iranian oil? Does anyone seriously think they are
going to submit to that gracefully? Japan and Korea might, they are much smaller and stuck
with us. But China?
And I seriously doubt that sanctioning India for buying Iranian oil will advance our
strategic alliance with them, either.
Here we need to look at the candidate political history, their actions before the election. "Trump scam" like "Obama
scam" was based on the fact that they do not have political history, they were what Romans called "Tabula
rasa". A "clean state" politician into which
voters can project their wishes about domestic and foreign policy. That was a dirty. but very effective trick.
But the most important factor in Trump win was the he was competing against despicable warmonger Hillary Clinton, the
establishment candidate who wanted to kick the neoliberal globalization can down the road. So the "lesser evilism" card was
also in play consciously or unconscionably as well. So with Hillary as the opposition candidate it was a kind of
implementation of the USSR style elections on a new level. but with the same with zero choice. Effectively the US
electorate was disenfranchised when FBI has thrown Sander under the bus by exonerating Hillary. In a way FBI was the
kingmaker in 2016 elections.
And please note that the Deep State launched a color revolution against Trump to keep him in check. Only later it became
evident that he from the very beginning was a pro-Israel neoconservative, probably fully controlled by pro-Israel forces. That Trump
electorate bought MIGA instead of MAGA from the day one.
Notable quotes:
"... The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? ..."
In a recent call from Trump requesting his opinion on China, Jimmy Carter noted that China
has not spent a dime on war since 1979, whereas we've spent trillions & continue to spend
even more.
China invested trillions in their infrastructure while ours crumbles. They've invested in
building the world's manufacturing capacity while we dismantled ours. We spend twice per
capita on healthcare compared to any other western country, yet chronic diseases like
diabetes keeps growing. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined yet
how superior is our weaponry compared to the Russians who spend one-tenth of what we spend?
We've financialized our economy and socialized speculative losses of Wall St mavens but when
some politicians talk about spending on the commons then socialism is labeled bad.
The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos,
would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our
endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding
ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even
with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?
STEPHEN COHEN: But the point here is that Russia has been torn between East and the West forever. Its best policy, in its
own best interest, is to straddle East and West, not to be of the East or the West, but it's impossible in this world today. And
U.S.-led Western policy since the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly since Putin came to power in 2000, has persuaded the
Russian ruling elite that Russia can not count any longer, economically, politically, militarily, on being part of the West. It has
to go elsewhere. So all this talk about wanting to win Russia to an American position that's anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese is conceived
in disaster and will end in disaster. They should think of some other foreign policy.
...Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be
happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:
Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
Stationed troops in Poland
Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland
Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic
Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:
And the neocon-ization of the Trump administration continues.
While The Donald is packing away Big Macs and Diet Cokes, his neocon secretary of state is
appointing likeminded warmongers.
Ortagus has been a fixture of the GOP foreign policy establishment for more than a decade.
She has served as a press officer at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a
financial intelligence officer at the Treasury Department and an intelligence officer in the
US Naval Reserve. She has also worked with several political campaigns, as well as a
political action committee, and has experience working on Wall Street and in foreign policy
consulting.
In addition to working with spooks and a federal agency that undermines elections
and foments coups in foreign lands, Ortagus "served on the boards" at the Institute for the
Study of War (ISW), a coven of warmongers run by Kimberly Kagan, wife of notorious neocon
Frederick Kagan.
ISW is funded by the death merchants -- Raytheon, General Dynamics, DynCorp, and others --
and it pushes the concept of the indispensable nation engaged in forever war around the world,
a conflict promoted in the name of "democracy," which is code for mass murder campaigns waged
by the financial elite in its quest for total domination and theft of everything valuable on
planet Earth.
Naturally, some folks over on the so-called "New Right" support the appointment of an ardent
neocon -- a former pretty face from Fox News -- at the State Department, thus demonstrating
they are little different than establishment Republicans, or for that matter Democrats.
I don't know about others on SST but while he may not have been a good DIA man or the best
NSA, Gen. Flynn was thrown under the bus by Trump and Pence and railroaded by Mueller.
Shameful!
Trump previously also voiced doubts about official narrative of 9/11. Now he emerged as an avid supporter of the official
narrative. Nice metamorphose.
No matter where you personally stand on 9/11 events Trump is double dealer.
Notable quotes:
"... Today, some of their names – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush – are prominently engraved on airports, federal offices, and library halls around the country. Others became the subject of rowdy bestsellers such as "Charlie Wilson's War," or saw their exploits dramatized in Cold War kitsch productions like "Rambo III." And then there were those who waged America's dirty wars from the shadows, and whose names will scarcely ever be known. ..."
"... Today, as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – the lone foreign policy dissenter within the Democratic presidential field – pointed out , they are doing it all over again through their protection of the world's largest Al Qaeda franchise in Syria's Idlib province, which came into being thanks in large part to U.S. intervention in the country. ..."
"... These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign Islamist fighters. ..."
"... These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the aisle in Congress. ..."
"... "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?" remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant." ..."
A s Donald Trump sharpens his re-election messaging, he has sought to make a foil out of
freshman Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar, homing in on her identity as a black Muslim immigrant and
her brazen defiance of what was once a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. Trump's most recent
attack was the most inflammatory to date, implying through a characteristically dishonest
Twitter video that Omar had played some role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Trump was referencing comments Omar made this month during a banquet of the Los Angeles
chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR): "CAIR was founded after 9/11,
because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose
access to our civil liberties," Omar said during a 20-minute-long denunciation of public
bullying and violent attacks against Muslims living in the West. (CAIR was founded in 1994,
contrary to Omar's claim).
As innocuous as Omar's comments might have seemed, they were easily spun by a right-wing
bigot-sphere seeking to portray her as not merely insensitive to the deep wound Americans
suffered on 9/11, but as a possible terror-sympathizer. As Bernard Kerik, the disgraced former
NYPD commissioner and convicted felon , said of Omar
on Fox News, "she's infatuated with Al Qaeda, with Hamas, with Hezbollah."
For Trump, the manufactured outrage offered yet another opportunity to advance his rebranded
version of the Southern Strategy, painting Omar as the face of a Democratic Party overrun by
socialists, Muslims, MS13 and trans radicals – as a clear and present danger to the
reactionary white exurbanites commonly referred to in mainstream media as "swing voters."
Amid an onslaught of menacing condemnations and online death threats triggered by Trump's
tweet, prominent Democrats mobilized to defend Omar. However, many were too timid to mention
her by name, apparently fearing that doing so would play into Trump's cynical strategy. Some
refused to defend her at all. And among those willing to speak up, most felt compelled to lead
their defense by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves
anti-Muslim narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion
of it must be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi.
In Washington, 9/11 is understood as an act of inexplicable evil that materialized out of a
clear blue sky. "They hate us because we're free," Americans are still told in a semi-official
drone, conveniently excising the attacks that took place on 9/11 from their historical context.
This ruthlessly enforced interpretation has had the effect of displacing blame from those who
bear direct or indirect responsibility for the attacks onto much more convenient scapegoats
like the Islamic faith and its diverse mass of adherents.
In my new book, " The Management of
Savagery ," I explain which people did what things to lay the groundwork for the worst
terror attack on U.S. soil. Not all of those people were Muslim, and few have faced the kind of
scrutiny Omar has for her seemingly benign comment about 9/11. As I illustrate, many of them
maintained lustrous reputations well after the ash was cleared from Ground Zero. Today, some of
their names – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush – are prominently
engraved on airports, federal offices, and library halls around the country. Others became the
subject of rowdy bestsellers such as "Charlie Wilson's War," or saw their exploits dramatized
in Cold War kitsch productions like "Rambo III." And then there were those who waged America's
dirty wars from the shadows, and whose names will scarcely ever be known.
While these figures lay claim to the mantle of "national security," their true legacy was
the callous abandonment of that concept in order to advance imperial objectives. During the
Cold War, they forged partnerships with theocratic monarchies and armed Islamist militants,
even distributing jihadist textbooks to children in the name of defeating the Soviet scourge.
Today, as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – the lone foreign policy dissenter within the Democratic
presidential field – pointed out , they are doing
it all over again through their protection of the world's largest Al Qaeda franchise in Syria's
Idlib province, which came into being thanks in large part to U.S. intervention in the
country.
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a
superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a critical history that has been
suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the attacks occurred, when "some
people did something." Many of those people served at the highest levels of U.S. government,
and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an international network
– and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the Red
Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy weapons
in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi clerics such
as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of dollars worth
of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them to commit acts
of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to wreak havoc on
the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause with
the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
Trump previously also voiced doubts about official narrative of 9/11. Now he emerged as an avid supporter of the official
narrative. Nice metamorphose.
No matter where you personally stand on 9/11 events Trump is double dealer.
Notable quotes:
"... Today, some of their names – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush – are prominently engraved on airports, federal offices, and library halls around the country. Others became the subject of rowdy bestsellers such as "Charlie Wilson's War," or saw their exploits dramatized in Cold War kitsch productions like "Rambo III." And then there were those who waged America's dirty wars from the shadows, and whose names will scarcely ever be known. ..."
"... Today, as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – the lone foreign policy dissenter within the Democratic presidential field – pointed out , they are doing it all over again through their protection of the world's largest Al Qaeda franchise in Syria's Idlib province, which came into being thanks in large part to U.S. intervention in the country. ..."
"... These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign Islamist fighters. ..."
"... These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the aisle in Congress. ..."
"... "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?" remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant." ..."
A s Donald Trump sharpens his re-election messaging, he has sought to make a foil out of
freshman Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar, homing in on her identity as a black Muslim immigrant and
her brazen defiance of what was once a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. Trump's most recent
attack was the most inflammatory to date, implying through a characteristically dishonest
Twitter video that Omar had played some role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Trump was referencing comments Omar made this month during a banquet of the Los Angeles
chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR): "CAIR was founded after 9/11,
because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose
access to our civil liberties," Omar said during a 20-minute-long denunciation of public
bullying and violent attacks against Muslims living in the West. (CAIR was founded in 1994,
contrary to Omar's claim).
As innocuous as Omar's comments might have seemed, they were easily spun by a right-wing
bigot-sphere seeking to portray her as not merely insensitive to the deep wound Americans
suffered on 9/11, but as a possible terror-sympathizer. As Bernard Kerik, the disgraced former
NYPD commissioner and convicted felon , said of Omar
on Fox News, "she's infatuated with Al Qaeda, with Hamas, with Hezbollah."
For Trump, the manufactured outrage offered yet another opportunity to advance his rebranded
version of the Southern Strategy, painting Omar as the face of a Democratic Party overrun by
socialists, Muslims, MS13 and trans radicals – as a clear and present danger to the
reactionary white exurbanites commonly referred to in mainstream media as "swing voters."
Amid an onslaught of menacing condemnations and online death threats triggered by Trump's
tweet, prominent Democrats mobilized to defend Omar. However, many were too timid to mention
her by name, apparently fearing that doing so would play into Trump's cynical strategy. Some
refused to defend her at all. And among those willing to speak up, most felt compelled to lead
their defense by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves
anti-Muslim narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion
of it must be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi.
In Washington, 9/11 is understood as an act of inexplicable evil that materialized out of a
clear blue sky. "They hate us because we're free," Americans are still told in a semi-official
drone, conveniently excising the attacks that took place on 9/11 from their historical context.
This ruthlessly enforced interpretation has had the effect of displacing blame from those who
bear direct or indirect responsibility for the attacks onto much more convenient scapegoats
like the Islamic faith and its diverse mass of adherents.
In my new book, " The Management of
Savagery ," I explain which people did what things to lay the groundwork for the worst
terror attack on U.S. soil. Not all of those people were Muslim, and few have faced the kind of
scrutiny Omar has for her seemingly benign comment about 9/11. As I illustrate, many of them
maintained lustrous reputations well after the ash was cleared from Ground Zero. Today, some of
their names – Zbigniew Brzezinski, Ronald Reagan, H.W. Bush – are prominently
engraved on airports, federal offices, and library halls around the country. Others became the
subject of rowdy bestsellers such as "Charlie Wilson's War," or saw their exploits dramatized
in Cold War kitsch productions like "Rambo III." And then there were those who waged America's
dirty wars from the shadows, and whose names will scarcely ever be known.
While these figures lay claim to the mantle of "national security," their true legacy was
the callous abandonment of that concept in order to advance imperial objectives. During the
Cold War, they forged partnerships with theocratic monarchies and armed Islamist militants,
even distributing jihadist textbooks to children in the name of defeating the Soviet scourge.
Today, as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – the lone foreign policy dissenter within the Democratic
presidential field – pointed out , they are doing
it all over again through their protection of the world's largest Al Qaeda franchise in Syria's
Idlib province, which came into being thanks in large part to U.S. intervention in the
country.
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a
superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a critical history that has been
suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the attacks occurred, when "some
people did something." Many of those people served at the highest levels of U.S. government,
and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an international network
– and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the Red
Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy weapons
in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi clerics such
as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of dollars worth
of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them to commit acts
of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to wreak havoc on
the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause with
the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
Trump essentially rules as Bush III with Bush II coterie of neocons in his administrations
and an unusual level of pandering to Isreal. All he election promises were fake.
People in other countries, meanwhile, will be looking on with awe and anxiety. For seventy
years, the United States has led a global order based on mutual interest, enhanced trade, and,
ultimately, America's role as the global hegemon (co-hegemon until 1989). Rhetorically, at
least, Trump's accession to power marks a break with this order. Describing himself as an
America Firster, he has talked scathingly about many of the institutions that have girded the
Pax Americana, including NATO , the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. He
has criticized American military interventions -- sometimes, it must be said, with good cause.
And he has pledged to renegotiate trade deals, and, if he deems it necessary, to slap heavy
tariffs on goods from Mexico, China, and other countries
Surveying Trump's victory and the
rise of xenophobic populism in many other Western countries, Martin Wolf, the Financial
Times' senior economics commentator, recently pronounced , "We are, in
short, at the end of both an economic period -- that of western-led globalisation -- and a
geopolitical one -- the post-cold war 'unipolar moment' of a US-led global order."
That judgment could still turn out to be premature. The world economy is so closely
integrated these days that it would take huge shocks, or policy changes, to turn the clock
back. American multinational companies, like Apple and Facebook and General Motors, are some of
globalization's biggest beneficiaries and supporters. To his Cabinet, Trump has appointed both
Rex Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, the world's biggest oil company, and Gary Cohn,
the former president of Goldman Sachs, the world's leading investment bank. Trump himself
claims to favor trade, but what he terms "fair trade."
In his Inaugural Address, however, Trump made clear that he will at least try to tilt
globalization in favor of American manufacturing workers. Reverting to the populist rhetoric
that had propelled his campaign, he said, "The wealth of the middle class has been ripped from
their homes and redistributed across the world," adding, "From this day forward, it's going to
be only America first, America first. Every decision will be made to protect American workers
and American families."
On the geopolitical front, it is far less clear what Trump will do, and that's the greatest
concern for many people, here and around the world. Despite his claims that America's armed
services have been run down, the United States remains by far the world's biggest military
power, the only country able to project its will anywhere on the globe. But how will Trump live
up to this responsibility? In his speech, he pledged to "reinforce old alliances and form new
ones" and to "eradicate" Islamic terrorism "completely from the face of the earth." But he also
sounded some of the neo-isolationist themes that he put forward during the campaign, saying
that America had "subsidized the armies of other countries" and "defended other nations'
borders while refusing to defend our own." His language and tone suggested that the days when
America viewed itself as the benevolent global leader, willing to make sacrifices to the mutual
benefit of all countries, were coming to an end.
IRT B's request not to waste effort on challenges likely not to make a difference. I
observe no Trumpy program yet, promises to improve America nor reverse the ever declining
quality of life Americans are experiencing (As wages double, costs triple as federal grants
increase, the corporations are getting wealthier). Make the USA Oligarchs Wealthier programs
all expose Americans to more risk and greater loss of wealth. Fracking, 5g energies, wars,
better internal surveillance tailored to capture the most minute behaviors of every American,
and foreign management of Americans via the USA as a conduct.
In a statement to the Senate released by the White House, Trump called the joint resolution
"unnecessary", warned it represents a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional
authorities" and argued it would negatively affect U.S. foreign policy. What he really meant is
that the US military-industrial complex stood to lose billions in potential revenue from the
biggest US weapons client. As a result countless innocent civilians will continue to die for an
unknown period of time but at least the stock price of Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon
will not be put in jeopardy.
... ... ...
As a reminder, last month the Senate voted 54-46 to pass a resolution requiring the
president to withdraw any troops in or "affecting" Yemen within 30 days unless they are
fighting al Qaeda. The House passed the measure earlier this month with a 248-177 vote. Neither
was enough to override Trump's veto.
If Trump pardoned Assange, I would consider that draining the swamp. But Orange Jewlius is
a Deep State **** socket, so the swamp has grown to a lagoon
Clearly the US government has zero respect for Australia, Australian Law or Australian
citizens. The case is shite, else they would allow Assange to be deported to Australia and
the extradition hearing to be heard there. They refuse because they know their case is shite
and they would have to prove it in Australia before they could get extradition.
The USA is not an ally of Australia because it does not respect Australian law, not in the
least. Prove US respect of Australians by deporting Assange to Australia and holding the
extradition hearings there, else look as guilty as shite and never ever to be trusted by
Australians.
The US Govt respects NOBODY but its own Interests. It's the Australian Govt that's
complicit in this travesty of Nil justice. The Gutless Australian Govt has NO interest in
helping Julian Assange because they were persuaded NOT to by their American masters. It hurts
that your own Govt are total A$$holes & follow USA into Crimes with out question. The
Australian Govt has a History of lip service only when assistance Overseas is required. ****
them !
Assange probably is a narcissist. So what? All the people criticizing him are, too. At
least he's an honest narcissist. In everything he's published, not a single item has even
been allegedly false. Can any of these other so-called "journalists" demonstrate that level
of accuracy?
Here is a good article on Assange. Explains the cat. Things were okay for him under the
real elected president of Ecuador, except no sunlight thanks to US spooks.
It is normal that others see weakness in the U.S. before we do. The notion in the United
States is that what we want to be true is true. Fantasy is a comforting mechanism but it sure
is painful when everything falls apart. Our reality gap has not slammed shut but it will.
Disappointing but not surprising. I do hope at some point his mind will be changed. Give
full credit to the 16 Republicans in the House and 7 Republican Senators for supporting this
resolution.
It is possible, now that Assange has been arrested, that the American charge against him is
relatively minor only in order to encourage the UK to extradite him. Once he is in American
custody those charges may well change.
btw Trump suddenly dropping any love for Wikileaks after enthusiastically stating his
approval of them over 100 times during the last election is going to cause a lot of damage to
his chances of being reelected.
Wikileaks is probably already putting him under the microscope, and there are all the
Wikileaks fans to contend with as well.
Bad move Donald, you just sacrificed a bishop to no advantage and placed yourself in
danger of checkmate. More people are starting to see your 'veracity' as the facade it is.
"... Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future. ..."
"... And there was a video of him bringing her to the microphone on the subject of 5G which amazed me: Trump Invites Ivanka To Talk About 5G Deployment In The U.S. I think Trump truly believes Ivanka is presidential material! ..."
"... Tinfoil-hat opinion time: if you have a credible threat against Ivanka, you control Trump. If you want to gain a different kind of leverage - like to talk him into quitting in 2020 - promise him you'll work hard to put her in the White House. ..."
"... Still tin-foiling, but I think a version of this happened in 1992. Iran Contra was closing in, and the Democrats had the goods on Bush Senior. I buy into the conspiracy notion Bush Sr. was offered a deal where the matter would be dropped if he left office, and with a "sweetener" that one of his boys would be advanced to the White House. This didn't hurt the Powers That Be, for the chosen democrat was a rare Pro-Choice Republican posing as a democrat. ..."
"... Bill Clinton was a warmongering neocon nut who governed domestically as a Republican. ..."
"... The problem lies with people in generation after generation being fooled by the same or similar ruses used before, which is why The Who exhorted people to not let themselves "get fooled again." ..."
"... The UK & EU both face crises caused by their adherence to Neoliberal economics, but Neoliberal governments hold sway in almost every EU nation and UK despite the damage they've caused. ..."
"... Here's a link for anyone who still doesn't believe Trump is on the dark side: Trump vetoes resolution ending U.S. involvement in Yemen ..."
"... Looks like Trump is only a compassionate humanitarian on behalf of Syrian kids. With 14 school children killed in Yemen a week ago, not so much. ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... The Brits were lying, Haspel was lying, and either Trump believed her or pretended to. ..."
By "meaningful intellectual activity", Craig Murray is referring to critical thinking skills, having an open mind and being
able to consider all options and possibilities. We can agree that Theresa May and the people who make up her Cabinet and government,
and a sizeable proportion of the Tories, may well be deficient in these activities.
I have read something of how David Cameron worked his way up to leadership of the British Conservatives years ago. Coming from
a wealthy family (his father was a stockbroker who enjoyed posthumous notoriety when his name surfaced in the Panama Papers),
Cameron went to the "right" schools (which count Prince Andrew and Prince Edward as former students, btw), Eton College and then
Oxford University where he enrolled in the politics / economics course that prepares students for careers in politics - it's popularly
called "PPE". After university he went to work for the Conservative Party.
You could say Cameron's path had already been mapped out for him and the decision was not his to deviate from it. Probably
the same can be said of some other people in Theresa May's Cabinet.
And what can be said of a UK Defence Secretary of whom the love of his life is a pet Mexican tarantula?
You are being sarcastic, tongue in cheek, correct? I also wonder who could have done such a thing?
But seriously, the value of Solzhenitsyn is not in the quality of his prose, which is very difficult to read, then in the relevance
of his topics. He did document how power over others and ultimately totalitarianism manifest themselves in the fallible human
nature. Humans cannot rule themselves properly, but usually psychopaths must rule (use & abuse) others. A whole system can be
created on top of psychopathy of a few individuals (does this ring a bell?). Of course, the claim that Solzhenitsyn was a critic
of Communism is equivalent to the claim that Animal Farm is a description of Communism. Both are good social critique turned into
yet another political/brainwashing tool. It is art because it describes human nature across artificial boundaries, especially
the ideological one: left versus right.
On another matter, I have started skipping comments where Trump is being bashed. In addition to being leftist TDS, this is
a perfect indication that the commenter has got no clue what is really going on, so how could he/she explain anything to others?
Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She
wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future.
If an idea like that ever gets into Trump's head, Haspel is a goner. Have you noticed how he said he considered Ivanka for
the World bank?
"Donald Trump reveals he considered making Ivanka head of World Bank because she's 'good with numbers'"
Tinfoil-hat opinion time: if you have a credible threat against Ivanka, you control Trump. If you want to gain a different
kind of leverage - like to talk him into quitting in 2020 - promise him you'll work hard to put her in the White House.
Still tin-foiling, but I think a version of this happened in 1992. Iran Contra was closing in, and the Democrats had the
goods on Bush Senior. I buy into the conspiracy notion Bush Sr. was offered a deal where the matter would be dropped if he left
office, and with a "sweetener" that one of his boys would be advanced to the White House. This didn't hurt the Powers That Be,
for the chosen democrat was a rare Pro-Choice Republican posing as a democrat.
Bill Clinton was a warmongering neocon nut who governed domestically as a Republican.
As it turns out, the "smart one" (Jeb) lost his first step by not immediately getting to be Governor of Florida. That left
the Codpiece Commander, and all his sins were airbrushed away, the Supreme Court intervened, and he entered the White House. Good
deal for Pappy Bush, BTW. Him and Reagan got to keep their gold shine, and President Dumbya did all which was expected of him.
Thanks Jen & Piotr for your comments regarding my take on Murray's missive.
The problem lies with people in generation after generation being fooled by the same or similar ruses used before, which
is why The Who exhorted people to not let themselves "get fooled again."
The UK & EU both face crises caused by their adherence to Neoliberal economics, but Neoliberal governments hold sway in
almost every EU nation and UK despite the damage they've caused.
It's certainly a muddle. Trump vetoing the legislation to cease supporting Saudi in Yemen will further help the turn to the
East. And tomorrow will bring something else.
400 children killed since January 2019 in Yemen and 85,000 have died from malnutrition in the past 3 and a half years and Trump
vetoes resolution to end U.S. involvement.
So far as I understand your question, the Neocon York Times link from above had this about the kids and the ducks:
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened
by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were
inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
The Brits were lying, Haspel was lying, and either Trump believed her or pretended to.
This will at least wake up those morons at places like Breitbart that Trump is nothing more
than a neocon swine. I mean how much more evidence do they need to see that he is invite the
world, invade the world. On top of that mass censorship being unleashed under Trump, how can
anyone still be conned into supporting him.
This is why Anglo-Saxon propaganda is so very effective. They have freedom of speech,
see? Though of course saying politically incorrect things might socially kill you, so it's
understood you won't do that. You will say PC (including anti-Russian, etc.) platitudes
always. So people will not even notice PC propaganda, like fish don't notice they're wet.
And when trying to convince a normie, you have to break a very long, almost infinite chain
of assumptions, which you won't know how to do.
Take a look at the career of Charles Austin Beard, for example.
He was one of the single most highly-regarded historians in America; his contributions to
the field were well-known and massively important. But even he could not break through the
pillars of propaganda when he published his book about the folly of Franklin Roosevelt's
foreign policy. The "court historians" like Samuel Eliot Morison and Schlesinger, et al,
blackballed his work and dismissed it with the most flippant arrogance and lack of care for
detail. The major newspapers and periodicals followed suit. Overnight he became all but a
pariah. Only a few regional newspapers were willing to treat his work with serious care. To
his credit, Beard had anticipated this reaction, but published his works anyway.
After World War 1, revisionism became par for the course in America – the vast
majority of historians, journalists, together with the public as a whole, came to agree that
America's entry into that conflict had been a selfish mistake. But during and after World War
Two, what you call "Anglo-Saxon propaganda" tightened up to a remarkably successful degree,
and to this day the pro-interventionist myth of the "great crusade" is all but unimpeachable
among the masses. In fact, the anti-revisionists, the "court historians," even managed to
defeat the old inter-war consensus about World War One, so that even it is now regarded as an
idealistic crusade for democracy! Very remarkable stuff, though sad!
I would probably do the same thing in Putin's situation. At a very basic level you simply
cannot trust people like Assange. Giving refuge to a spy is one thing; you're not going to
let him near any state secrets so it's not like he could betray you even if he wanted to (and
it's easy to keep an eye on him). For somebody like Assange there's the constant threat that
he could turn against you: acquire damaging information and use it as leverage, or simply
release it for the sake of his own ego or murky ideals. Too much potential for embarrassment.
Snowden was closer in spirit to a spy imo; Assange is more like bin Laden or a mafia boss,
the head of a shadowy international organization with significant reach and resources.
It's sort of like the French Foreign Legion: they take a dim view of British and American
recruits and generally won't let them join unless they speak French or have prior military
experience. The reason is psychological unsuitability: no sensible British or American person
interested in a military career would volunteer to be a mercenary for a foreign country over
serving in his own country's well-funded armed forces. Romantics and escapists are inherently
flaky and unreliable people. That's also why Brazilians are regarded as the best Legion
soldiers: they just do it to get EU citizenship
Ecuador rented a house opposite their main offices in Knightsbridge, and had three agents
in the house to permanently monitor Assange on cameras (for a cost of $1 million a year).
So they might be more intelligent than we think?
At the same time, Ecuador's politicians had problems justifying the costs of this to their
media.
Perhaps it seems more like this was perceived by Ecuador, as an intelligence operation, to
monitor Assange, and get intelligence information they could would use as leverage with the
Americans.
Today, the Ecuadorian interior minister is suddenly boasting about how they monitored and
have knowledge about two hackers who worked with Assange.
@reiner Tor Scotland yard
tried to play down their own costs of hanging outside the Ecuadorian embassy, which in 2015
was already estimated to be well over £10m over the prior three years, by saying that a
lot of that cost was money they would have spent on policing anyway: Tell that to the rapidly
increasing numbers of families of murder victims in the Capital. Oops, careful about saying
that in the UK, as the police there will pick you up for a thought-crime.
Elites around the globe protect each other more than they protect the interests of non-elites
in their own nations and any who side with non-elites in any non-trivial way, so it makes
sense that Latin American elites side with US elites who favor the mass immigration that has
driven down wages for 40 years and the mass exportation of US jobs to Latin American since it
1) boosts the profits of American elites and 2) relieves pressure on Latin American elites.
Ecuador seemed to get fed up with Assange – cutting him off from the world, badmouthing
him in MSM, etc – early 2018 when he was mostly tweeting about Catalonia. Spain is
supposedly Ecuador's closest partner in Europe. The timing could've been coincidental but
probably not.
@neutral He was always
scum but he was still the better choice than Hillary Clinton. He may still be better than his
opponent in 2020. That's how bad things are at the centre of the American empire.
Trump had the potential to be better than he is now but Washington has pushed his back
against the wall and his shitty character has thus shown itself in full. He could have been a
better President under different circumstances; even with these same character flaws.
@neutral Trump was and
still is the chaos candidate. When a better option than sabotage presents itself, then Trump
will become the second best choice.
Many, if not most, people knew he was the sabotage candidate when they supported him.
Hillary was understood to be worse because she'd maintain and even strengthen a bad system
while Trump would bugger it up.
@Thorfinnsson The Deep
State might already be beyond repair. So perhaps, come the Revolution, new, revolutionary
state organs will need to be set up in a clean break with the obscurantist blank slatist
regime. The state secrets of these new, revolutionary organs should be protected by any means
necessary. But then we'll have free countries for ourselves.
Until then, we don't need to protect the secrets of the oppressive obscurantist
regime.
Disagree here, he's energised the left to a degree that wouldn't have happened had he not
been elected and his policies are now no different to what Clinton's would have been. In
American politics, what you say appears to matter much more than what you do, so we've now
got the perfect storm of someone who talks like a right wing populist, and the resulting
backlash, but nothing to show for it. I remember ak mentioning that the only saving grace of
his administration being that it had alienated allies, but even that hasnt materialised. The
guy is a conman and a sellout, but he's very clearly noticed the fact that European
governments will unquestionably obey the US, so it's pointless to treat them with any respect
whatsoever: THATs the one and only positive thing I can say about him. Still not looking
forward to his successor.
@The
Alarmist Trump said he liked Wikileaks at that time, because they released some
embarrassing emails about Hilary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential election.
If they released embarrassing emails about Trump, he would have said the opposite.
Trump will not have any specific principles that would make him support asylum for
leakers, or generalized protection for dissidents, unless it might specifically be explained
that it would help him in some way (and unless there are emails to leak about his opponent in
2020, how will it help him?).
@reiner Tor But Trump
would say anything that would get him elected, and he would do many of these things. But, as
plutocrat surrounded by plutocrats, he'll never open the market for housing (allow easier
re-zoning), or transportation (dismantle the dealership racket), or hospitals / doctors.
Yeah, apparently he lacks the levers to reduce housing costs, but he can always fix, or
promise to fix, something about Assange, or about Christian-Obamacare conflicts –
despite them being equally remote from his mandate. Watch the idiotic boomers drooling all
over unz.com about Trump's "efforts" to fix immigration.
These being the highest expenses of an American, I can see who is the idiot here.
@simple_pseudonymic_handle
The most obvious parallel was the UK's refusal to extradite Gary McKinnon to the US.
McKinnon gained access to 97 US military and NASA networks between early 2001 and 2002. he
was also very very shit at covering his tracks.
The US sought extradition; McKinnon's lawyers challenged it on a bunch of grounds;
McKinnon won.
Part of the range of stuff that got him off was the refusal of the US to make guarantees
that he would not be housed in a SuperMax and that he would not be placed in solitary
confinement, That, plus McKinnon's "Asperger's" (diagnosed after he was arrested), was
enough for the system to tell the US government to pound sand.
I as among the people who warned JA not to go to the UK when he was leaving Sweden. (I've
known the guy as a nodding acquaintance since the 1980s and WANK; I'm in he & Suelette's
book, under a different pseudonym).
He was warned against one of the classic blunders.
The first two classic blunders are known to all –
① never start a land war in Asia , and
② never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line .
The third is less well-known:
③ when you've been honeypotted, DO NOT SEEK REFUGE ON A FUCKING ISLAND
.
When he ignored us, he was dropped from several DMSes.
For a very smart bloke, his judgement was always suspect: he allowed a fucking nappy like
Dumb Shitberg (Domscheit-Berg) inside his circle of confidants.
This whole damn country is a pile of lies. I don't know how you guys keep your sanity.
I think America may crack in the next ten years.
I live in a "minority-majority" area. It is all bullshit.
Hey, let's take all the worlds nations, races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, lifestyles,
sexual orientations, etc and stick them in one place!
On top of this we have a government that doesn't listen, ruled by special interest group.
My god, how long America?
I can't stand this place anymore.
It's going to be very interesting to see the next 10 years. The country is cracking up.
For my part, I'm learning a foreign language right now, it will come in handy when I have
enough money to bail.
Gentleman, there is nothing here worth left of preserving, only rot.
I miss a consideration, that wikileaks could be a Mossad/Unit8200 operation.
If I look at the wikileak's site, menu "partners", all is clear to me, "Der Spiegel" and
truth are mutually exclusive.
Wikileaks "revealed" an EU plan to use military against the poor human traffickers and
Israeli NGOs who bring in these Africans and "refugees". Fascinating, they have once in their
evil life a good plan in Brussels, and wikileaks shoots against it.
I think the question for Russian asylum is the same question why Russia did not spell the
beans on 911.
@Meimou The leader of
progressives, the dual-loyalty opportunist and CIA stooge Schumer:
Chuck Schumer
@SenSchumer
Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his
meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.
@Hyperborean Trumpstein
and his sleazy family keep delivering for the vile jooies and the JudenPresse, JudenTV, and
JudenNet will make sure he gets reelected especially if he attacks Iran. Where is Titus now
that we need him?
"... Trump has reneged on all these promises and in many cases done the exact opposite. I suspect that part of this was deliberate lying on Trump's part but a lot of it is due to his sheer, mind-boggling incompetence, coupled with modest intelligence, and some rather severe personality disorders that have manifested themselves more clearly over time. ..."
"... In his own words, Donald Trump reveals his hypocrisy about Iraq, immigration, health care, abortion, Libya, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and more. ..."
@WorkingClass
Alex Graham is right. I voted for Trump because he promised:
(1) to end the wars the US is fighting as a sock puppet of Israel and her domestic agents,
the so-called neocons and the traitorous Zionist fifth column in this country, exemplified by
Adelson, Saban, Kushner, et al.;
(2) to restore the rule of law regarding illegal aliens in this country by removing these
criminals post haste;
(3) to restore order at the border and end the massive stream of illegals and contraband
entering our country every day;
(4) to establish reasonable laws and policies regulating immigration and naturalization so
that new immigrants and citizens improve rather than diminish the quality of life for current
citizens; and
(5) to eliminate and/or restructure trade agreements so they are bilateral and not
destructive of the USA's industrial and economic base.
Trump has reneged on all these promises and in many cases done the exact opposite. I
suspect that part of this was deliberate lying on Trump's part but a lot of it is due to his
sheer, mind-boggling incompetence, coupled with modest intelligence, and some rather severe
personality disorders that have manifested themselves more clearly over time.
By all means, do not vote for Trump ever again. I don't intend to. But please don't
consider voting for a Democrat. They will just more efficiently screw us than Trump is doing
now.
Of course it's a Trump thing as well. The 'deep state' IS the state! TRump serves the
purpose of 'opening doors' for the rest of the gangsters, much the same way as successive
Labour govts, here in the UK, opened the door for even more reactionary Tory govts.
It's an issue of style versus substance. Ignore Trump's 'style', not that he has much, and
concentrate on events. They're seamless. The process continues as it has done for
decades.
"... Trump's failure here is his alone. Closing the border could be accomplished with a simple executive order. It has happened before: Reagan ordered the closing of the border when DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was murdered on assignment in Mexico in 1985, for instance. ..."
"... Trump's empty threats over the past two years have had real-world consequences, prompting waves of migrants trying to sneak into the country while they still have the chance. His recent move to cut all foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is another empty gesture that will probably have similar consequences. The funds directed to those countries were used for programs that provided citizens with incentives not to migrate elsewhere. (The situation was not ideal from an isolationist point of view, but a wiser man would have built the wall before cutting off the aid.) ..."
"... Trump's betrayal of American workers is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that one of the members of the advisory board of his National Council for the American Worker (which claims to "enhance employment opportunities for Americans of all ages") is the CEO of IBM, a company that has expressed a preference for F-1 and H-1B visa holders in its job postings. ..."
"... There are more former Goldman Sachs employees in the Trump White House than in the Obama and Bush administrations combined. ..."
"... It is hard to escape the conclusion that Trump is not actually interested in curbing immigration and reversing America's demographic decline. He is a con artist and a coward who is willing to betray millions of white Americans so that he can remain in the good graces of establishment neoconservatives ..."
"... As Ann Coulter has put it, "He's like a waiter who compliments us for ordering the hamburger, but keeps bringing us fish. The hamburger is our signature dish, juicy and grilled to perfection, you've made a brilliant choice . . . now here's your salmon. " ..."
"... Third, he put an end to American funding for Palestinians. This coincided with the passing of a bill that codified a $38 billion, ten-year foreign aid package for Israel. Trump also authorized an act allocating an additional $550 million toward US-Israel missile and tunnel defense cooperation. ..."
"... Trump's track record on Israel shows that he is capable of exercising agency and getting things done. But he has failed to address the most pressing issue that America currently faces: mass immigration and the displacement of white Americans. The most credible explanation for his incompetence is that he has no intention of delivering on his promises. There is no "Plan," no 4-D chess game. The sooner white Americans realize this, the better. ..."
"... We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more" ..."
"Unlike other presidents, I keep my promises," Trump boasted in a
speech delivered on Saturday to the Republican Jewish Congress
at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. Many in the audience wore red yarmulkes emblazoned with his name. In his speech, Trump condemned
Democrats for allowing "the terrible scourge of anti-Semitism to take root in their party" and emphasized his loyalty to Israel.
Trump has kept some of his promises. So far, he has kept every promise that he made to the Jewish community. Yet he has reneged
on his promises to white America – the promises that got him elected in the first place. It is a betrayal of the highest order: millions
of white Americans placed their hopes in Trump and wholeheartedly believed that he would be the one to make America great again.
They were willing to endure social ostracism and imperil their livelihoods by supporting him. In return, Trump has turned his back
on them and rendered his promises void.
The most recent example of this is Trump's failure to keep his promise to close the border. On March 29, Trump threatened to close
the border if Mexico did not stop all illegal immigration into the US. This would likely have been a highly effective measure given
Mexico's dependence on cross-border trade. Five days later, he suddenly retracted this threat and said that he would give Mexico
a " one-year warning
" before taking drastic action. He further claimed that closing the border would not be necessary and that he planned to establish
a twenty-five percent
tariff on cars
entering the US instead.
Trump's failure here is his alone. Closing the border could be accomplished with a simple executive order. It has happened
before: Reagan ordered the closing of the border when DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was murdered on assignment in Mexico in 1985,
for instance.
Trump's empty threats over the past two years have had real-world consequences, prompting waves of migrants trying to sneak
into the country while they still have the chance. His recent move to cut all foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
is another empty gesture that will probably have similar consequences. The funds directed to those countries were used for programs
that provided citizens with incentives not to migrate elsewhere. (The situation was not ideal from an isolationist point of view,
but a wiser man would have built the wall before cutting off the aid.)
The past two years have seen a surge in illegal immigration without precedent in the past decade. Since late December, the Department
of Homeland Security has released 125,565 illegal aliens into the country. In the past two weeks alone,
6,000 have been admitted. According to current projections, 2019 will witness around 500,000 to 775,000 border crossings. Additionally,
about 630,000 illegal aliens will be added to the population after having overstayed their visas. By the end of the year,
more than one million illegal aliens will have been added to the population:
These projections put the number of illegal aliens added to the U.S. population at around one to 1.5 million, on top of the
11 to
22 million illegal aliens who are already living across the country. This finding does not factor in the illegal aliens who
will be deported, die over the next year, or leave the U.S. of their own will. As DHS data has revealed, once border crossers
and illegal aliens are released into the country, the overwhelming majority are never deported.
In February, Trump signed a
bill allowing the DHS
secretary to add another 69,320 spots to the current H-2B cap of 66,000. On March 29, DHS began this process by announcing that it
would issue an additional
30,000 H-2B visas this year. The H-2B visa program allows foreign workers to come to the US and work in non-agricultural occupations.
Unlike the H-1B program, a Bachelor's degree is not required; most H-2B workers are employed in construction, maintenance, landscaping,
and so on. The demographic most affected by the expansion of the H-2B program will be unemployed working-class Americans. This flies
in the face of Trump's promise to protect American workers and stop importing foreigners.
Trump has indicated that he has plans to expand the H-1B visa program as well. "We want to encourage talented and highly skilled
people to pursue career options in the U.S.," he said in a
tweet in January.
Trump's betrayal of American workers is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that one of the members of the advisory board
of his National Council for the American Worker
(which claims to "enhance employment opportunities for Americans of all ages") is the CEO of IBM, a company that has
expressed a preference for F-1 and H-1B visa holders
in its job postings.
Trump has been working on legal immigration with Jared Kushner, who has quietly been crafting a
plan to grant
citizenship to more "low- and high-skilled workers, as well as permanent and temporary workers" (so, just about everyone). Kushner's
plan proves the folly of the typical Republican line that legal immigration is fine and that only illegal immigration should be opposed.
Under his plan, thousands of illegal aliens will become "legal" with the stroke of a pen.
There is a paucity of anti-immigration hardliners in Trump's inner circle (though Stephen Miller is a notable exception). Trump
has surrounded himself with moderates: the Kushners, Mick Mulvaney, Alex Acosta, and others. There are more former Goldman Sachs
employees in the Trump White House than in the Obama and Bush administrations combined.
The new DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenan, who was appointed yesterday following Kirstjen Nielsen's resignation, is a middle-of-the-road
law enforcement official who served under Obama and Bush and is responsible for the revival of the "
catch-and-release " policy, whereby
illegal aliens are released upon being apprehended. It was reported last week that Trump was thinking of appointing either Kris Kobach
or Ken Cuccinelli to a position of prominence (as an "
immigration czar "),
but this appears to have been another lie.
Trump's failure to deliver on his promises cannot be chalked up to congressional obstruction. Congress. As Kobach said in a recent
interview , "It's not like we're powerless and it's not like we have to wait for Congress to do something. . . . No, we can actually
solve the immediate crisis without Congress acting." Solving the border crisis would simply demand "leadership in the executive branch
willing to act decisively." Kobach recently outlined an intelligent
three-point plan that Trump could implement:
Publish the final version of the regulation that would supersede the Flores Settlement. The initial regulation was
published by the Department of Homeland
Security in September 2018. DHS could have published the final regulation in December. Inexplicably, DHS has dragged its feet. Finalizing
that regulation would allow the United States to detain entire families together, and it would stop illegal aliens from exploiting
children as get-out-of-jail free cards. Set up processing centers at the border to house the migrants and hold the hearings in one
place. The Department of Justice should deploy dozens of immigration judges to hear the asylum claims at the border without releasing
the migrants into the country. FEMA already owns
thousands of travel trailers and mobile homes that it has used to address past hurricane disasters. Instead of selling them (which
FEMA is currently doing), FEMA should ship them to the processing centers to provide comfortable housing for the migrants. In addition,
a fleet of passenger planes should deployed to the processing centers. Anyone who fails in his or her asylum claim, or who is not
seeking asylum and is inadmissible, should be flown home immediately. It would be possible to fly most migrants home within a few
weeks of their arrival. Word would get out quickly in their home countries that entry into the United States is not as easy as advertised.
The incentive to join future caravans would dissipate quickly. Publish a proposed Treasury regulation that prohibits the sending
home of remittances by people who cannot document lawful presence in the United States. This will hit Mexico in the pocketbook: Mexico
typically brings in well over $20 billion a year in
remittances , raking in
more than $26 billion in 2017. Then, tell the government of Mexico that we will finalize the Treasury regulation unless they do two
things to help us address the border crisis: (1) Mexico immediately signs a "safe third country agreement" similar to our agreement
with Canada. This would require asylum applicants to file their asylum application in the first safe country they set foot in (so
applicants in the caravans from Central America would have to seek asylum in Mexico, rather than Canada); and (2) Mexico chips in
$5 billion to help us build the wall. The threat of ending remittances from illegal aliens is a far more powerful one than threatening
to close the border. Ending such remittances doesn't hurt the U.S. economy; indeed, it helps the economy by making it more likely
that such capital will be spent and circulate in our own country. We can follow through easily if Mexico doesn't cooperate.
It would not be all that difficult for Trump to implement these proposals. Kobach still has faith in Trump, but his assessment
of him appears increasingly to be too generous. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Trump is not actually interested in
curbing immigration and reversing America's demographic decline. He is a con artist and a coward who is willing to betray millions
of white Americans so that he can remain in the good graces of establishment neoconservatives . At the same time, he wants to
maintain the illusion that he cares about his base.
As Ann Coulter has put it, "He's like a waiter who compliments us for ordering the hamburger, but keeps bringing us fish.
The hamburger is our signature dish, juicy and grilled to perfection, you've made a brilliant choice . . . now here's your salmon.
"
Nearly everything Trump has done in the name of restricting immigration has turned out to be an empty gesture and mere theatrics:
threatening to close the border, offering protections to "Dreamers" in exchange for funding for the ever-elusive wall, threatening
to end the "anchor baby" phenomenon with an executive order (which never came to pass), cutting off aid to Central American countries,
claiming that he will appoint an "immigration czar" (and then proceeding to appoint McAleenan instead of Kobach as DHS secretary),
and on and on.
While Trump has failed to keep the promises that got him elected, he has fulfilled a number of major promises that he made to
Israel and the Jewish community.
First, he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump claimed that the move would only cost $200,000, but in
reality it will end up being more than
$20 million . The construction
of the embassy also led to a series of bloody protests; it is located in East Jerusalem, which is generally acknowledged to be Palestinian
territory.
Second, he pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal. Netanyahu
claimed on Israeli TV that Israel was responsible for convincing him to exit the deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran. (Both Trump
and Netanyahu falsely alleged that Iran lied about the extent of its nuclear program; meanwhile, Israel's large arsenal of chemical
and biological weapons has escaped mention.) Third, he put an end to American funding for Palestinians. This coincided with the
passing of a
bill that codified a $38 billion, ten-year foreign aid package for Israel. Trump also authorized an act allocating an additional
$550 million toward US-Israel missile and tunnel defense cooperation.
Fourth, he recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights (in defiance of the rest of the world, which recognizes the
Golan Heights as Syrian territory under Israeli occupation). Trump's Golan Heights proclamation was issued on March 21 and was celebrated
by Israel. Trump's track record on Israel shows that he is capable of exercising agency and getting things done. But he has failed
to address the most pressing issue that America currently faces: mass immigration and the displacement of white Americans. The most
credible explanation for his incompetence is that he has no intention of delivering on his promises. There is no "Plan," no 4-D chess
game. The sooner white Americans realize this, the better.
If you haven't picked up a copy of Vicky Ward's book, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story
of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump , you really should.
I haven't read Mr. Graham's essay yet, but I thought those two links would fit in nicely. I stay in a low boil, like it is,
and having plodded through both those reviews, I can't stand reading too much on this topic at once.
Something's gotta give. Or are the brainless goy just going to let themselves be led off a cliff?
Oh, yes. There's an interview with Ward on
BookTV .
Yep. Trump's a lying POS pond scum like the rest of the DC swamp that he said he was going to drain, turns out he is one of them
all along. We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more. He needs to change his campaign slogan to MIGA, Make Israel
Great Again, that was the plan of his handlers all along.
What I want to know is, who are those idiots who still keep showing up at his rallies? Are they really that dumb?
Even Sanders came out and said we can't have open borders. I've also heard him said back in 2015 that the H1b visa program
is a replacement program for American workers. If he grows a pair and reverts back to that stance, teams up with Tulsi Gabbard,
I'll vote for them 2020. Fuck Trump! Time for him and his whole treasonous rat family to move to Israel where they belong.
His "implicitly white" supporters would have abandoned him in droves, not wanting to be associated with a racist, thus pointing
up the weakness of implicit whiteness as a survival strategy. And is it actually a survival strategy? A closer look at it makes
me think it's more of a racial self-extermination strategy. After all, what kind of a survival strategy is it that can't even
admit its goals to itself? And it's exactly this refusal of whites to explicitly state that they collectively want to continue
to exist as a race that is the greatest impediment to their doing so. It's an interesting problem with no easy solution. How
do you restore the will to live to a race that seems to have lost it? And not only lost its will to live, but actually prides
itself on doing so? Accordingly, this "betrayal" isn't a betrayal at all. It's what American whites voted for and want. Giving
their country away and accepting their own demographic demise is proof of their virtue; proof of their Christian love for all
mankind.
You are definitely onto something here.
Still, I feel it's not that deep and complicated. It could be that they simply don't believe that the danger is closing in.
Boils down to wrong judgment. People who haven't had the need to think hard about serious things tend to develop that weakness.
I guess that boils down to "good times make weak men."
Hard times are coming and they'll make hard men.
The catch is simple: will be enough of them in time ?
Switching to the Democrats is no solution. The DNC has proven itself to be a criminal organization through sabotaging Sander's
campaign and then being instrumental in creating Russophobia, in collusion with Obama, the CIA, the FBI, and the DoJ. The DNC
has rules in place stating that super delegates – elitists aligned with the DNC – can vote if one nominee does not win on the
first ballot at the National Convention.
Because we have a HUGE number of hats in the Democratic ring, the chances that the nomination
will not be decided on a first vote are extremely high, with the result being that the Democratic nominee is not going to be decided
by voters in the primaries but by super delegates, i.e., the elitists and plutocrats.
Democracy exists when we vote to support
candidates chosen by the elites for the elites; when we stop doing that, the elites turn on democracy. It is a sham; we will have
a choice in 2020: between Pepsi and Coke. You are free to choose which one you prefer, because you live in a democracy. For more
on the rigging of the democratic primaries for 2020, see
"... Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by the old-time professionals, they go back in despair to the latter, and are flayed and pillaged again." ..."
Reed was wrong here. The American voter, for the most part, still doesn't realize any of
this.
In June 1922 the Zionist halter was firmly reaffixed
round the neck of American State policy, and though American voter only slowly
realized this, it became immaterial to him which party prevailed at elections.
"First the poor taxpayers, robbed by the politicians of one great party and then by
those of the other, turn to a group of free-lance rogues in the middle ground --
non-partisan candidates, Liberals, reformers, or what not: the name is unimportant.
Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by the old-time
professionals, they go back in despair to the latter, and are flayed and pillaged
again."
Trump is attacked relentlessly by Israel firsters (both left and right) prior to, and after
his investiture as POTUS. How does he respond? How has he responded to relentless attacks on
his base? The man has no spine, and no sense of gratitude or morality.
'Not worth feeding' my late grandfather would have said. Although he has made a lot of
wealthy petulant people (who despise him and laugh behind his back) even wealthier.
What is needed is a billionaire who has genuine sense of noblesse oblige. Hopeless!
Of course Trump was a gamble. I clearly remember him saying he wanted to get out of Syria,
put an end to the endless wars, and he declared himself neutral on the Israel/Palestine
issue–those were the biggest reasons I voted for him. Turns out he lied big time.
Now what? Looking at the clown car of presidential candidates just induces political
nausea. No matter who gets elected it will be a government of, by, and for
Jewish/Israeli/Zionist interests.
In the meantime I see no real progress on putting the brakes on illegals flooding the
country. I see no economic miracles in spite of all the spin. Actual unemployment in the US
was at 21.2% in March, really not much better than it has been since the 2008 crash (
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
), and record numbers of people are behind on mortgages and car payments, suicide and drug
casualties have been skyrocketing.
Our political system is not going to bring any solutions, it has been far too corrupt for
far too long.
"... Brookfield Asset Management has agreed to lease the troubled office tower for 99 years and is paying for the lease up front, rather than in the typical yearly ground rent, the Wall Street Journal reports. The financial terms of the deal were not made public, but the New York Times reports that Brookfield is paying $1.1B. ..."
"... Thanks b and you are wise to be sceptical. The up front payment to the Kusher kleptocracy by Brookfield Partners (Asset Management) is not just unusual but more like extraordinary! One test will be how this deal compares to other deals. Was Kushner avoiding taxes by doing a lease? Is this a common practice? ..."
"... It is an old story. From February 12, Bess Levin, Vanity Fair: Qatar Shocked, Shocked to Learn It Accidentally Bailed Out Jared Kushner ..."
"... In 2015, Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Russian /Israeli real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, where $285M was borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the transaction, despite the 666 albatross hanging over Kushners head ..."
"... Qatar paid over a billion dollars to build and expand the US base in Qatar and charges no rent for that base. This allows Qatar to easily brush aside any question of loyalty that may be posed by USA and makes the US/US military reluctant to pressure Qatar. But Israel would have no qualms about apply pressure. The "Jared bailout" allows for a narrative of Qatari leadership as weak and corrupt - much like the ridiculous claims that Putin is pro-Israel. ..."
Kushner Extorted Qatar - Or Did He?DG , Mar 30, 2019 5:37:23 PM |
link
The Hillreporter just published a very juicy story about Jared Kushner, the son in law and senior advisor of President
Trump.
It says that Kushner, with the help of the Saudi clown prince Mohammad bin Salman, extorted Qatar for $1 billion to save his families
real estate business in New York.
While the story sounds plausible and fits the public known timeline of other events, there is so far no evidence that supports
it.
Ward first talked through the story on yesterday's KrassenCast
, a podcast by the anti-Trump and
somewhat shady Krassenstein
brothers who also run the Hillreporter .
In 2007, at the hight of the real estate bubble, the Kushner family bought the 666 5th Avenue building in New York City for $1.8
billion. Ten years later the Kushners were in real trouble. Plans to replace the building with a new one found no financing. The
property was losing lots of money and a huge mortgage payment was due in January 2019. The family had to look for a bail out.
In early 2017 the Kushner family had several meetings with Qatari officials to discuss a deal. The Intercept
reported :
Joshua Kushner, a venture capitalist and the younger brother of White House adviser Jared Kushner, met with Qatari Finance Minister
Ali Sharif Al Emadi the same week as his father, Charles Kushner, did in April 2017, in an independent effort to discuss potential
investments from the Qatari government. Both meetings took place at Al Emadi's St. Regis Hotel suite in Manhattan.
This revelation comes after Charles Kushner, in an interview with the Washington Post this week, confirmed for the first time
that his meeting with Al Emadi had indeed taken place on the subject of financing for the underwater Kushner property at 666 Fifth
Avenue.
"What I have learned is that in the ensuing month [May 2017] before the US visit to Riyadh, Jared Kushner got on a plane and flew
to Doha, the Qatari capital, and he reamed the Qatari ruling family, the al-Thanis, for not doing the deal with his father They
began to feel that he was indirectly threatening their sovereignty. The next thing they know, when they show up to the summit
in Riyadh, the Emir, the ruler of Qatar, arrives with an entourage, but his entourage is suddenly cut off from him, and not allowed
into the summit at the same time by the Saudis, which he felt was a move to deliberately make him look weak. You have to remember
during this summit, Jared and Ivanka go off for a cozy secret unmonitored dinner with [Saudi Crown Prince] MBS. Nobody knows what
they talked about."
Fifteen days later the Saudis and the UAE blockade Qatar and send troops to its border. Trump supports the Saudi blockade against
the advice of his Secretary of State Tillerson and his Defense Secretary Mattis and despite the fact the the biggest U.S. base in
the area is in Qatar.
Nine months later, a Canadian company, Brookfield Partners, who the Qatari Investment Authority owns a $1.8 billion or 9% stake
in, bailed out Kushner Properties, with a 99-year lease agreement for 666 5th Ave.
...
Around this same time, President Trump publicly shifts course, no longer supporting the blockade, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
tells Saudi Arabia to stop the embargo.
If the blockade of Qatar originates in a Kushner extortion scheme, as the story insinuates, it would have serious political consequences.
But is that true?
Charles Kushner, head of the Kushner Companies, is in advanced talks with Brookfield Asset Management over a partnership to take
control of the 41-story aluminum-clad tower in Midtown Manhattan, 666 Fifth Avenue, according to two real estate executives who
have been briefed on the pending deal but were not authorized to discuss it.
The deal only
closed in August 2018 on terms that had changed from the first report and were unusual:
Brookfield Asset Management has agreed to lease the troubled office tower for 99 years and is paying for the lease up front,
rather than in the typical yearly ground rent, the Wall Street Journal reports. The financial terms of the deal were not made
public, but the New York Times reports that Brookfield is paying $1.1B.
What was the real sequencing here? Was the property deal agreed upon before the Trump administration changed its stand on the
Qatar blockade or after that happened? Was it related to it or not? We don't know. There is no public record of the alleged Jared
Kushner flight to Qatar. There is so far no other evidence that would support the story. The tale fits the publicly known timeline,
but that is not enough to believe it. Its authors may have used the public timeline to then fit a story onto it.
It is possible that the Kushner property deal and the Qatar blockade are intimately intertwined but there is, so far, no proof
for it. That idea that Kushner played the Saudis is dubious. The other way around is more likely.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE had plenty of reason to blockade Qatar. Both countries fear the Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood.
They hate Qatar's Al Jazeerah TV because it often publicly opposes their policies. The Saudis need money and annexing the very rich
Qatar would solve all their problems. Brookfield Properties denies that Qatar or the Qatari investment agency had any involvement
in 666 5th Ave. deal.
Even if Qatar, through Brookfield, made a deal with the Kushner family, it does not mean that it was extorted. The Qatari rulers
might simply have hoped that the deal would help them. It did not. The blockade still continues despite the real estate deal. Trump
had his own reasons to support the Saudis Qatar blockade. He wanted them to buy as many U.S. weapon system as possible, if only to
beat out Obama, who sold the Saudis all sorts of military trash for a record amount of money.
During the Mueller Russia investigation lots of smoke seemed to show that there was a 'collusion' fire burning somewhere under
the hundreds of facts and figures. There wasn't.
The story about the Kushner 'extortion of Qatar' might create a similar '
the walls are closing in ' (vid) farce only to end up with
nothing. It is interesting that the Vicky Ward story was published on March 29, a day after Jared Kushner
was interviewed
behind closed door by the Senate Intelligence Commission:
President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner returned to the Senate Intelligence Committee for a closed door interview Thursday
as part of the committee's Russia investigation.
...
The first time Kushner appeared before the panel in 2017, he was interviewed by committee staff. The committee has wanted to re-interview
witnesses central to the investigation. On Thursday, senators were sitting in on the interview.
Russiagate is really finished
. The Republican's rule the Senate. Why would they continue to interview Kushner and why would senators sit in on it? Might the 'Kushner
extorted Qatar' be a planned sequel to Russiagate or why else was it launched right now?
Posted by b on March 30, 2019 at 05:28 PM |
Permalink
One has to wonder whether Kushner's influence was involved in this deal which would have seen the geopolitical balance in the
Middle East tilt into Saudi Arabia's favour.
Thanks b and you are wise to be sceptical. The up front payment to the Kusher kleptocracy by Brookfield Partners (Asset Management)
is not just unusual but more like extraordinary! One test will be how this deal compares to other deals. Was Kushner avoiding
taxes by doing a lease? Is this a common practice?
I did like the reference to Trump outdoing Obummer in arms deals and had a good laugh at Trumps childish racism in that game.
He sure hates Obummer but he sure won't go after him in any way. Trump wont even go after $hillary and her global empire shakedown
Foundation. Sometimes I think he is now a sitting duck but then I am an optimist.
In addition to likely having had the chance to hear about the deal through Brookfield directly or read about it in the paper
of record, one would imagine the Qataris were keeping tabs on all things Kushner on account of Jared's father, Charles Kushner,
taking a meeting with Qatar's finance minister, Ali Sharif Al Emadi in April 2017. (Kushner the Elder later said he accepted
the invite purely "out of respect" for the Qataris to tell them there was no way "we could do business.")
Of course Trump throwing the full weight of the US behind Saudi Arabia and UAE was a de facto shake down of Qatar. And of course,
Saudi and UAE were actively lobbying for it.
thanks b.. it will be interesting to see how much traction vicky wards reporting gets and whether any of it gets substantiated..
i do believe the usa is crazy enough to do another witch hunt, so anything is possible here... she works for the huffpost..
that is grounds to discredit here right there in my books..
More theatrics as diversion, while the crooks in D.C. dismantle the agencies that keep the wealthy oligarchs at bay, as they rewrite
the rules to allow greed and avarice to become virtues.
"Rules and regulations never changed a man's heart, but they can restrain the heartless."
Meanwhile, propaganda organs in America won't publicize real Donald Trump scandals like the case of ''Maria'' a Waterbury 12-year
old alleged child rape victim of Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The crimes allegedly occurred at a midtown
Manhattan mansion owned by Epstein's friend Les Wexner.
Donald Trump recently named as his Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, former U.S. Attorney for South Florida, the federal official
directly overseeing sweetheart future immunity deal for Grifter in Chief acolytes like Jeffrey Epstein... As Labor Secretary,
Acosta is charged with overseeing federal laws designed to combat domestic and international sex trafficking.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York is currently deciding whether to unseal the documents from a 2017
lawsuit involving one of Epstein's sex trafficking victims and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's assistant.
Other possible corrupt practices involving stable genius center around China's decision to grant Ivanka Trump 38 new trademarks
in the middle of a trade war dispute... Part of current trade war negotiations are EB-5 investment visas. Jared Kushner and Trump
stand to benefit from EB-5 visas designed to attract Chinese investment in the United States in return for permanent residency.
Curiously an EB-5 visa scam was being run out of an office in Jupiter, Florida, located across the street from the Orchids
of Asia massage parlor raided by police where Trump billionaire friend Kraft was caught in a possible Chinese Honey Trap.
Russiagate may be done but thats because it was defined improperly. Sometimes it helps to look back to get a big picture perspective
Starting in 1999, Putin enlisted two oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad's biggest
patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar,
who would come to be known as "Putin's rabbi."
Roman Abramovich is the owner of the Chelsea Football Club of the English Premier League. He was a victor (along with Paul
Manafort's patron Oleg Deripaska) in the aluminum wars of the 1990s and reportedly the person who convinced Boris Yeltsin that
Putin would be a proper successor.
Ivanka Trump is very close friends with Abramovich's wife , Dasha Zhukova. Zhukova reportedly attended the inauguration as
Ivanka's personal guest. Leviev is the one with the closest links to the Trumps and Israel
It starts with Bayrock . This is the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three
main actors . One was convicted mob associate and FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was Tevfik Arif, a likely Russian intelligence
connection who was once was arrested by the Turks . The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence.
The late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia. Trump has called Sapir "a great friend." In December
2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir's daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch
of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev's holding company, and known as Leviev's right hand man.
As mentioned Leviev was one of two oligarch's who Putin had establish the "Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia" under
the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as 'Putin's rabbi.'" Sater, Sapier, Jared, Ivanka are all
Chabad members and/or donors
Trump had business discussions in Moscow in 2013 about Moscow real estate projects with Agalarovs, Alex Sapir (son of Tamir
Sapir, brother of Zina, and brother-in-law of Rotem Rosen.) and Rotem Rosen, a pair of New York-based Russian . This may also
have been discussed during the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that was attended by Kushner, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr and
a Russian lawyer associated with Fusion GPS (Steele dossier) and the Leviev linked Prevezon
Agalarov is a Moscow-based property developer who had won major contracts from Putin's government. He hosted Trump's 2013 Miss
Universe contest at his concert hall in Moscow. He orchestrated the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and formed a new American shell
company a month beforehand with the help of the Russian lawyer who attended the meeting.
In 2015, Kushner and his family business, Kushner Cos., bought a portion of the New York Times building on West 43rd Street
from Russian /Israeli real estate billionaire Lev Leviev for $295M, where $285M was borrowed from Deutsche Bank to complete the
transaction, despite the 666 albatross hanging over Kushners head
Deutsche Bank and two companies tied to Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and Prevezon, have all recently been the subject
of money laundering investigations. A laundering case against Prevezon was settled two months after Trump fired Bharara, with
a $6M slap on the wrist settlement that raised some eyebrows.
As for 666, Kushner gets bailed out by Brookfield who has Qatar as its 2nd largest investor. But consider that at the same
time they did this deal they also acquired Westinghouse Electric, a nuclear power company. Now members of the Trump administration
propose selling nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia. Interesting.
Can't seem to find a Putin/Russian oligarch connection although that's probably due to the fact you cant use anonymous shell
companies to buy property in NYC any longer due to new rules by FinCEN
But so many conflict of interests here, Israel, China, Saudis, Russian oligarchs, etc and virtually no oversight or transparency.
With twitter being used to manipulate markets one has to imagine rampant insider trading as well (hey guys, my tweets going out
at 3 pm, get your trades in and remember my 5%).
@7 savvy globalist somebody wants us to know that there's nothing to see here!
But the Vanity Fair article he links to, written by Bess L-evin, makes this unsubstantiated(!) point:
So why is Doha taking pains to insist it accidentally bailed out the First-in-Laws on their no good, very bad investment
now?
1) Actually, the Reuters article that she refers to explicitly states that Qatar has a minority position and no board representation
! It is a known in the financial world as a "passive investment".
2) L-evin's wording is extremely disingenuous: the Qataris never said they bailed out anyone, accidentally or otherwise!!
Interestingly, Vicky Ward used to work at Vanity Fair, and is currently an editor at HuffPost (a Democratic rag). And media that
broke/promoted this story (Leevin and Krasseenstein) could (naturally) rise some suspicions of a connection to Israel's conflict
with Iran. Qatar shares a huge gas field with Iran so Qatar has been reluctant to join KSA and Israel against Iran.
Qatar paid over a billion dollars to build and expand the US base in Qatar and charges no rent for that base. This allows
Qatar to easily brush aside any question of loyalty that may be posed by USA and makes the US/US military reluctant to pressure
Qatar. But Israel would have no qualms about apply pressure. The "Jared bailout" allows for a narrative of Qatari leadership as
weak and corrupt - much like the ridiculous claims that Putin is pro-Israel.
1) Documentation is scarce and the few that exist don't fit the journalist's story chronology (even though, in the concrete
case, you could argue for expediency/bureacratic delay, so this criterium alone doesn't bust the journalist's chronology)
2) The whole narrative simply doesn't have social cohesion. It simply doesn't make any sense for Trump to risk be impeached
in such polarized scenario just to rescue his son-in-law. It makes even less sense for the Arab royalties to submit to a much
weaker political player such as Kushner. And, as b mentions, Trump had many more powerful reasons to sanction Qatar.
@11 &12
Corruption abounds, but any of it that touches Zionists, the Clinton's, or the royal family (Epstein, Prince Andrew) is off limits.
They are untouchable to the MSM.
people like Brennan & Clapper are feeding the "trump really, really, no really hearts putin" narrative to the msdnc crowd, and
this of an administration being helmed by CIA men like Pompeo.
like the fbi's manufacture wholesale of "islamo-terrorist" non-events
in part to distract from the presence of the actual threat of rising fascism & racism (a la Nazism, as in NZ) from the usual suspects,
much beloved of the fibbies, it's convenient for all, incl trump, to be painted as bff's with Vlad.
if the goal was to stop or in any way impede the trump admin (not just trump himself, who is a know-nothing shit golem animated
by the glad-handing he receives from the people actually in charge, who just feed his narcissistic fantasies), there are other,
more practical & achievable ways to do it. in-fighting among the herd who have not yet jumped off the Gadarene cliffs is not the
same thing as opposition, not among the Legion possessed swine in D.C. they are just grunting & snorting at each other, occasionally,
very occasionally & deliberately, trampling one of their own, as they plummet over the edge.
it's pretty clear that funny things like such pigs' full-throated support of Zionism is more important to Pelosi & Schumer
than resisting the Trump admin *in any way,* no matter how much they personally despise trump. and mainly they despise him for
helping to reveal what some POTUS would have sooner or later: the pointlessness of Congress; that the "unitary executive", as
the titular head of the corporate security state, is already fully in charge; that "dyarchy," dual rule by legislative & executive,
is non-existent.
"... Booker is a close friend of the controversial "America's rabbi" Shmuley Boteach and has taught himself enough Hebrew to pop out sentences from Torah with Jewish audiences. ..."
"... Last week the Intercept published a secret recording of Booker meeting with a group of Jews from New Jersey at the recently concluded AIPAC summit in Washington, which Booker, unlike a number of other Democratic presidential hopefuls, attended enthusiastically. Booker pandered so assiduously that it is hard to believe that he actually knows what he is saying in an effort to be more Israeli than the Israelis. ..."
"... Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss sums up the high points of what Booker said and did not say in the meeting: "Donald Trump is endangering Israel's security in Syria; there is no 'greater moral vandalism' than dividing the U.S. and Israel; ..."
"... A progressive senator who invokes Martin Luther King Jr. over and over again has not one word to say about the Jim Crow status of Palestinians while describing Israel as a 'country that I love so deeply, that changed my life from the day I went there as a 24 year old.'" ..."
"... Booker elaborated in his own words: "Israel is not political to me. It's not political. I was a supporter of Israel well before I was a United State Senator. I was coming to AIPAC conferences well before I knew that one day I would be a federal officer. If I forget thee, o Israel, may I cut off my right hand." ..."
"... Normally progressive Booker, who has criticized the endless war in Afghanistan on the campaign trail, has hypocritically condemned Trump for not continuing war in Syria to protect Israel ..."
"... Do we need a man like Cory Booker as President of the United States? He is articulate enough to cite "moral vandalism" but not perceptive enough to take the concept one step further and appreciate that uncritical close ties to Israel's feckless and fascist government could easily lead to a nuclear war that would constitute something far worse. He further believes that Israel's hand deep in the U.S. Treasury is a desirable policy, that unlimited "all resources" support of Israel is a U.S. national imperative, that ending the continued American military presence in the Middle East "would endanger our ally" Israel, and that moves to nonviolently oppose Israel's oppression of the Palestinians must be made illegal. ..."
"... Frankly, we already have an American leader who puts Israel first in Donald Trump and we don't need another round of wag the dog in our next president. ..."
Israel works hard to influence the United States at all levels. Its tentacles dig deep, now extending to local and state government
levels where candidates for office can expect to be grilled by Jewish constituents regarding their views on the Middle East. The
constituents often insist that the responses be provided in writing. The candidates being grilled understand perfectly well that
their answers will determine what kind of press coverage and level of donations they will receive in return.
One of the most blatant propaganda programs is the sponsorship of free "educational" trips to Israel for all newly elected congressmen
and spouses. The trips are normally led by Israel boosters in Congress like Democratic House Speaker Steny Hoyer, who recently boasted
at an AIPAC gathering how he has done 15 trips to Israel and is now preparing to do another with 30 Democratic congressmen, including
nearly all of those who are newly elected. The congressional trips are carefully coordinated with the Israeli government and are
both organized and paid for by an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the
American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) . Other trips sponsored
by AIEF as well as by other Jewish organizations include politicians at state and even local levels as well as journalists who write
about foreign policy.
As noted above, all the trips to Israel are carefully choreographed to present a polished completely Israel-slanted point of view
on contentious issues. Visits to Palestinian areas are arranged selectively to avoid any contact with actual Arabs. Everyone is expected
to return and sing the praises of the wonderful little democracy in the Middle East, which is of course a completely false description
as Israel is a militarized ethno-theocratic kleptocracy headed by a group of corrupt right-wing fanatics who also happen to be racists.
Even progressive politicians who are aware that the Israeli message is bogus and also resent the heavy handedness of the Israelis
and their diaspora friends often decide that it is better to go along for the ride rather than resist. But some embrace it enthusiastically,
like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a liberal Democrat running for his party's nomination for president, who has, by his own
admission, visited Israel many times. Israel and its friends are, of course, both courting and promoting him assiduously.
Booker inevitably reminds one of ex-President Barack Obama because he is black but the similarity goes beyond that as he is also
presentable, well-spoken and slick in his policy pronouncements. One suspects that like Obama he would say one thing to get elected
while doing something else afterwards, but we Americans have become accustomed to that in our presidents. More to the point, Booker
was and is a complete sell-out to Israel and its Jewish supporters during his not completely successful career in New Jersey as mayor
of Newark as well as in his bid for the presidential nomination. Booker is
a close friend of the controversial
"America's rabbi" Shmuley Boteach and has taught himself enough Hebrew to pop out sentences from Torah with Jewish audiences.
Last week the Intercept published
a secret recording of Booker meeting with a group of Jews from New Jersey at the recently concluded AIPAC summit in Washington,
which Booker, unlike a number of other Democratic presidential hopefuls, attended enthusiastically. Booker pandered so assiduously
that it is hard to believe that he actually knows what he is saying in an effort to be more Israeli than the Israelis. He described
an Israel that deserves total commitment from Washington and stated clearly that he wants to create a "unified front" against the
nonviolent boycott movement (BDS). He said that there is "no greater moral vandalism than abandoning Israel."
Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss sums up
the high points of what Booker said and did not say in the meeting: "Donald Trump is endangering Israel's security in Syria; there
is no 'greater moral vandalism' than dividing the U.S. and Israel; Booker would cut off his right hand before abandoning Israel;
he lobbied black congresspeople not to boycott Netanyahu's 2015 speech because we need to show a 'united front' with Israel; AIPAC
is an 'incredible great' organization whose mission is urgent now because of rising anti-Semitism; he 'text messages back and forth
like teenagers' with AIPAC's president Mort Fridman; and he swears to uphold bipartisan support in the Congress for Israel and give
it even more money. And Booker says not one word about Palestinian human rights or Israel's persecution of Palestinians. That's right.
A progressive senator who invokes Martin Luther King Jr. over and over again has not one word to say about the Jim Crow status of
Palestinians while describing Israel as a 'country that I love so deeply, that changed my life from the day I went there as a 24
year old.'"
Booker elaborated in his own words: "Israel is not political to me. It's not political. I was a supporter of Israel well before
I was a United State Senator. I was coming to AIPAC conferences well before I knew that one day I would be a federal officer. If
I forget thee, o Israel, may I cut off my right hand."
Booker described how he is appalled by the rise of alleged anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and worldwide. Rather than using
that possible development as leverage to get Israel to behave more humanely, he instead prefers to punish all Americans with new
legislation intended to strip all everyone of their First Amendment rights. Per Booker "We must take acts on a local stage against
vicious acts that target Israel. That's why I'm cosponsor of Senate Bill 720. Israel anti-Boycott Act."
Normally progressive Booker, who has criticized the endless war in Afghanistan on the campaign trail, has hypocritically condemned
Trump for not continuing war in Syria to protect Israel, saying
"This administration's seeming willingness to pull away from Syria makes it more dangerous to us, makes it more dangerous to
Israel, and this is not sound policy . When you're tweeting about pulling out of Syria within days, when that would create a vacuum
that would not only endanger the United States of America but it would endanger our ally Israel as well. We need a comprehensive
strategy for that region because Israel's neighborhood is getting more dangerous than less. Syria is becoming a highway for Iran
to move more precision guided missiles to Hezbollah. There has got to be a strategy in this country to support Israel that is
bipartisan that is wise and that frankly calls upon all the resources of this country, not just military".
And because Israel always needs more money, Booker is ready to deliver: "Unequivocally 100 percent absolutely [yes] to the 3.3
billion [a year]. I have been on the front lines every time an MOU is up to make sure Israel gets the funding it needs. I even pushed
for more funding."
Do we need a man like Cory Booker as President of the United States? He is articulate enough to cite "moral vandalism" but not
perceptive enough to take the concept one step further and appreciate that uncritical close ties to Israel's feckless and fascist
government could easily lead to a nuclear war that would constitute something far worse. He further believes that Israel's hand deep
in the U.S. Treasury is a desirable policy, that unlimited "all resources" support of Israel is a U.S. national imperative, that
ending the continued American military presence in the Middle East "would endanger our ally" Israel, and that moves to nonviolently
oppose Israel's oppression of the Palestinians must be made illegal.
One does not see an actual American interest in any of that, but perhaps special spectacles made in Israel are needed, an environment
where Booker has clearly spent a great deal of time both physically and metaphorically. Or maybe it's the Benjamins. Booker will
need millions of dollars to mount his campaign and he knows where to go and what he needs to say to get it.
One struggles to see just a tiny bit of humanity in Booker vis-à-vis the Arabs who have lost their homes and livelihoods to Israeli
criminality, but none of that comes through in a session in which, admittedly, the Senator from New Jersey is speaking with his Jewish
donor/supporters. Booker is on record favoring an Israel-Palestine "two state solution," which is no longer viable, though he has
not objected to Israeli army snipers shooting dead children, journalists, medical personnel and unarmed protesters in Gaza.
Frankly,
we already have an American leader who puts Israel first in Donald Trump and we don't need another round of wag the dog in our next
president.
Cory Booker should work hard to maintain his perfect attendance record at AIPAC as he texts "like a teenager" with Mort
Fridman, but maybe someday he will actually grow up and learn to think for himself. As he is a U.S. Senator that certainly is something
we might all hope for.
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 councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
"... When Trump officials insisted that the 2017 tax cut would lead to a decade of miraculous growth, their claim made no sense in terms of the underlying economics, and it flew in the face of decades of evidence. But it was a prediction, not a statement of fact, and it's conceivable (barely) that Trump's people actually believed it. ..."
"... But when Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, went on TV Sunday to declare that "every single plan" Trump has put forward "covered pre-existing conditions," that was just a lie. ..."
Republican Health Care Lying Syndrome: Even Trump supporters don't believe the party's
promises.
By Paul Krugman
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and Republican claims about health
care.
O.K., it's not news that politicians make misleading claims, some more than others.
According to a running tally kept by Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star, as of Monday morning,
Donald Trump had said 4,682 false things as president.
But G.O.P. health care claims are special, in several ways. First, they're outright,
clearly intentional lies -- not dubious assertions or misstatements that could be attributed
to ignorance or misunderstanding. Second, they're repetitive: Rather than making a wide
variety of false claims, Republicans keep telling the same few lies, over and over. Third,
they keep doing this even though the public long ago stopped believing anything they say on
the subject.
This syndrome demands an explanation, and I'll get there eventually. Before I do, however,
let's document the things that make G.O.P. health care lies unique.
First, as I said, I'm not talking about mere dubious claims. When Trump officials insisted
that the 2017 tax cut would lead to a decade of miraculous growth, their claim made no sense
in terms of the underlying economics, and it flew in the face of decades of evidence. But it
was a prediction, not a statement of fact, and it's conceivable (barely) that Trump's people
actually believed it.
But when Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, went on TV Sunday to
declare that "every single plan" Trump has put forward "covered pre-existing conditions,"
that was just a lie.
Here's what the Congressional Budget Office said in its assessment of the Republicans'
American Health Care Act, which would have caused 23 million to lose coverage, and would have
passed if John McCain hadn't voted "No": "People who are less healthy (including those with
pre-existing or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase
comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if
they could purchase it at all."
But Mulvaney's pre-existing conditions lie, along with his lie about nobody losing
coverage if the lawsuit against Obamacare succeeds, was normal by G.O.P. standards. Which
brings me to the second reason this particular form of lying is exceptional: Republicans just
keep telling the same lies, over and over. Again and again they have promised to maintain
coverage and protect pre-existing conditions -- then offered plans that would cause tens of
millions to lose health insurance, with the worst impact on those already suffering from
health problems.
The funny thing -- which is my third point -- is that almost nobody seems to believe these
lies. On the eve of last year's midterm elections, the public trusted Democrats over
Republicans to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions by 58 percent to 26 percent. A
margin this big tells us that even Trump supporters knew their man was lying on this
issue.
So what's behind the persistence of R.H.L.S. -- Republican health care lying syndrome?
Well, public opinion here is clear: Americans want everyone to have access to health care.
There isn't even that much of a partisan divide: An overwhelming majority of Republicans
don't believe insurance companies should be allowed to deny coverage or charge more to those
with pre-existing conditions.
This public near-unanimity is one reason Medicare is so popular. Getting older -- and thus
joining a group with much higher average health costs than the rest of the population -- is,
after all, the ultimate pre-existing condition.
But there are only two ways to cover people with pre-existing conditions, and both are
anathema to conservative ideology.
One is to have taxpayers pay the bills directly, which is what Medicare does.
The other combines regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies must be prohibited from
discriminating based on medical history -- a prohibition that must include preventing them
from issuing bare-bones policies that will appeal only to those in good health -- but that
won't do the job by itself. Healthy people must also be induced to sign up, to provide a good
risk pool, which means subsidizing premiums for those with lower incomes and, preferably
although not totally necessary, imposing a penalty on those without insurance.
If the second option sounds familiar, it should. It's what countries like the Netherlands
and Switzerland do; it's also a description of, you guessed it, Obamacare.
But Republicans cannot admit that the only way to protect pre-existing conditions is to
emulate Democratic policies. The party of Eisenhower, or even the party of Nixon, might have
been able to do such a thing, but the party of Fox News cannot.
Nor, however, do Republicans dare admit that they have no interest in providing protection
that a vast majority of voters demands. So they just keep lying.
You may, by the way, have heard talk about G.O.P. members of Congress opposed to Trump's
new health care push. But they share his goals; they're just questioning his timing. The
whole party still wants to take away your health care. It just hopes to get through the next
election before you find out.
"If the second option sounds familiar, it should. It's what countries like the Netherlands
and Switzerland do; it's also a description of, you guessed it, Obamacare."
Not quite:
"Unlike insurers offering the basic coverage plan, private insurers can be for-profit.
Often an insurance company in Switzerland will have a non-profit branch offering mandatory
public insurance and a for-profit branch offering additional private medical insurance. ...
"
"Most hospitals and health insurers in the Netherlands are privately run, non-profit
foundations, whereas most healthcare insurers are non-profit companies."
Why do hide the big difference between the US and other countries; that US health
insurance and the majority of providers are "for profit", while most other countries that use
non government insurers deny them profit?
List the US' not for profit insurers and a link to a description of their "business model".
I have worked with a few of DoD's federally funded R&D corps, They have no profits but
their loaded rates are half again the customary and reasonable..........
Exploitation by extraction
of a share of the value created
by an organization's job force
can be conducted by non profits
No profits can be
profit producers
distributing the profits
by other means
Then share holder dividends
Trump's Kakistocracy Is Also a Hackistocracy: The invasion of hucksters has reached the
Federal Reserve.
By Paul Krugman
It's no secret that Donald Trump has appointed a lot of partisan, unqualified hacks to key
policy positions. A few months ago my colleague Gail Collins asked readers to help her select
Trump's worst cabinet member. It was a hard choice, because there were so many qualified
applicants.
The winner, by the way, was Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. That looks like an even
better call now: Ross's department has reportedly prepared a report declaring that imports of
European cars threaten U.S. national security. This is both ludicrous and dangerous. It gives
Trump the right to start a new phase in his trade war that would inflict severe economic
damage while alienating our allies -- and, as a result, undermine national security.
Until recently, however, one agency had seemed immune to the continuing hack invasion: the
Federal Reserve, the single institution most crucial to economic policymaking. Trump's Fed
nominees, have, by and large, been sensible, respected economists. But that all changed last
week, when Trump said he planned to nominate Stephen Moore for the Fed's Board of
Governors.
Moore is manifestly, flamboyantly unqualified for the position. But there's a story here
that goes deeper than Moore, or even Trump; it's about the whole G.O.P.'s preference for
hucksters over experts, even partisan experts.
About Moore: It goes almost without saying that he has been wrong about everything. I
don't mean the occasional bad call, which all of us make. I mean a track record that includes
predicting that George W. Bush's policies would produce a magnificent boom, Barack Obama's
policies would lead to runaway inflation, tax cuts in Kansas would produce a "near immediate"
boost to the state's economy, and much more. And, of course, never an acknowledgment of error
or reflection on why he got it wrong.
Beyond that, Moore has a problem with facts. After printing a Moore op-ed in which all the
key numbers were wrong, one editor vowed never to publish the man's work again. And a
blizzard of factual errors is standard practice in his writing and speaking. It's actually
hard to find cases where Moore got a fact right.
Yet Moore isn't some random guy who caught Trump's eye. He has long been a prominent
figure in the conservative movement: a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page,
chief economist of the Heritage Foundation, a fixture on the right-wing lecture circuit.
Why?
You might say that the G.O.P. values partisan loyalty above professional competence. But
that's only a partial explanation, because there are plenty of conservative economists with
solid professional credentials -- and some of them are pretty naked in their partisanship,
too. Thus, a who's who of well-known conservative economists rushed to endorse the Trump
administration's outlandish claims about the benefits from its tax cut, claims they knew full
well were unreasonable.
Nor has their partisanship been restrained and polite. Many of us are still mourning the
death of Alan Krueger, the Princeton economist best known for research -- since vindicated by
many other studies -- showing that increases in the minimum wage don't usually seem to reduce
employment. Well, the Nobel-winning conservative economist James Buchanan denounced those
pursuing that line of research as "a bevy of camp-following whores."
So conservatives could, if they wanted, turn for advice to highly partisan economists with
at least some idea of what they're doing. Yet these economists, despite what often seem like
pathetic attempts to curry favor with politicians, are routinely passed over for key
positions, which go to almost surreally unqualified figures like Moore or Larry Kudlow, the
Trump administration's chief economist.
Many people have described the Trump administration as a kakistocracy -- rule by the worst
-- which it is. But it's also a hackistocracy -- rule by the ignorant and incompetent. And in
this Trump is just following standard G.O.P. practice.
Why do hacks rule on the right? It may simply be that a party of apparatchiks feels
uncomfortable with people who have any real expertise or independent reputation, no matter
how loyal they may seem. After all, you never know when they might take a stand on
principle.
In any case, there will eventually be a price to pay. True, there is, wrote Adam Smith, "a
great deal of ruin in a nation." America isn't just an immensely powerful, wealthy,
technologically advanced, peaceful country. We're also a nation with a long tradition of
dedicated public service.
Even now -- as I can attest from personal interactions -- a great majority of those
working for the Treasury Department, the State Department and so on are competent,
hard-working people trying to do the best they can for their country.
But as top jobs systematically go to hacks, there is an inevitable process of corrosion.
We're already seeing a degradation of the way our government responds to things like natural
disasters. Well, there will be more and bigger disasters ahead. And the people in charge of
dealing with those disasters will be the worst of the worst.
But we need to understand the Mueller expedition was witch hunt form the beginning to the end, and the fact that Mueller
backed off means that some pressure was exerted on him to stay within civilized discourse, or...
I doubt that Mueller of his anthrax investigation fame would have any problems to implicate Trump in non-existent crimes. That
would means the false assumption that he has some integrity, which his 9/11 behavioud fully contradict of.
In this sense lawyers from Mueller team complain about Mueller betrayal: he carefully selected the most Trump hating lawyers
and brought them for a witch hunt, but at the end he backed off. Ma be under pressure from Israel lobby.
Notable quotes:
"... The legal system isn't supposed to "damage" people, it is supposed to find them innocent or guilty. Shame on Mueller for appointing such disgraceful and unprofessional people. ..."
Greenwald is a consistent voice of sanity from the political left. Need more such sane
voices to restart cultural debate. Because as we all know, politics is downstream from
culture.
He is right tribalism is wrong. What Covington and all the fake stories should teach us it
to make sure that we look at the facts. The hard part is finding the good journalists so you
can support them.
. Gee.....I wonder why the big media firms are having to layoff huge numbers of their
workforce? Could it be that they have destroyed their own credibility and the revenue is no
longer there to support the bloated staffs they once had, because people are going elsewhere
for their information?
The legal system isn't supposed to "damage" people, it is supposed to find them innocent
or guilty. Shame on Mueller for appointing such disgraceful and unprofessional people.
So Trump took Adelson money and completely lost his independence, became Bolton marionette. He betrayed all major point of
his election campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... The fact is, the neo conservative "Never Trumpers" began moving in on Trump almost as soon as he won the election in order to ensure that their policy perspective prevailed. Greased by Adelson's money, it appears that they have succeeded to a considerable degree, particularly on Iran, but also on other aspects of national security policy as well, including, it appears, on Venezuela. And if US relations with Russia don't improve now that Russia-gate is dead, it'll be because of this crowd as well. ..."
"... Adelson's only concern, by his own quoted words, is protecting Israel and, according to the reports below, has even advocated the nuclear bombing of Iran if it doesn't give up a nuclear weapons program that every reasonable intelligence assessment and the IAEA say it doesn't have. Adelson is also credited with facilitating the firing of both H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson and replacing them with Bolton and Mike Pompeo, another one of Adelson's boys. ..."
"... Goldberg, who came out of the neo-con Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is clearly part of Adelson's orbit. ..."
"... it turns out that Politico published a big piece , last Friday, basically attributing Trump's decertification decision to Haley, who is portrayed as a neo-con channel into the White House. ..."
"... According to Politico's sources, the line in Trump's speech where he said that the US could pull out of the JCPOA "at any time" was added after Bolton reached Trump on the phone on Thursday afternoon. Bolton was calling from Las Vegas where he "was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson." Adelson's possible role in this is not further explored in the Politico article but probably bears further investigation. ..."
"... After Trump's speech, Bolton gloated: "The Iran deal may not have died today, but it will die shortly." He supports full US withdrawal from the agreement, and has reportedly transmitted his view to the White House through Jared Kushner. ..."
"... The even more lunatic John Bolton is thrilled about Trump's policy, but complains, in an op-ed in The Hill, that so far at least, it doesn't go far enough. After blaming Obama for giving the Middle East to Iran and Russia, Bolton demands that Trump recognize Kurdish independence and give the peshmerga the weapons and support they need to face the American-made tanks of the Iraqi army. ..."
"... He identifies Jared Kushner as the main conduit for the Likudist outlook into the White House. Kushner is a friend and supporter of Netanyahu and his parents have been backers of Israeli settlements. ..."
"... Adelson is a long time friend of Netanyahu, has used his assets in Israel to give Netanyahu political support and gave the Trump campaign $100 million. ..."
"... It was Bolton, Porter reports, "who worked with Israeli officials to plan a campaign to convince the world that Iran was secretly working on nuclear weapons." But the real purpose, which continues, was not so much to scare the world about an Iranian bomb, but rather, to use it as an issue to be exploited to weaken the Islamic regime and ultimately achieve regime change. Porter concludes by saying that Trump is cooperating with this objective even more enthusiastically than GW Bush did. ..."
"... Neo-cons in the Congress and elsewhere in Washington are enthusiastically following Bolton's lead. "The Iranian people want freedom and an end to the ayatollahs' reign of terror," said Senator Ted Cruz. ..."
"... Bolton's protégé, Nikki Haley, is calling for an emergency UNSC session to discuss the crisis in Iran. "The Iranian dictatorship is trying to do what it always does, which is to say that the protests were designed by enemies. We all know that is complete nonsense," Haley said (is it, realy?), yesterday. "The U.N. must speak out," Haley added. "We must not be silent. The people of Iran are crying out for freedom." ..."
"... It also likely means that Sheldon Adelson has a direct line to the White House and Nikki Haley's position at the UN has been strengthened, since she and Bolton have been reported to have a close relationship. ..."
"... Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton, writing in Lobelog, yesterday, argue that Sheldon Adelson was responsible for Trump's turnaround from populist anti-war candidate to pro-Israel hawk. In 2016, they write, Trump was mocking those, like Marco Rubio, who were seeking Adelson's support, meaning they were seeking his money. By the time of his inauguration, however, Trump had adopted Adelson's militant pro-Israel stance, including Adelson's demands to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and pursue a confrontationist approach to Iran, and Adelson occupied a prominent seat at the inauguration ceremony. ..."
"... "Trump met Adelson in Las Vegas in early October 2017. One week later, Trump announced that he would no longer certify that Iran was complying with the Iran nuclear deal, even though the U.S. intelligence community and all of Washington's European allies, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had found no evidence that Tehran was cheating," Lobe and Clifton write. ..."
"... Adelson's big protégé, as I've reported previously, is John Bolton. According to Lobe and Clifton, it was Adelson who made the arrangements to get Bolton back into the White House, overcoming efforts by White House chief of staff John Kelly keep to keep him out. Adelson also reportedly orchestrating the firing of McMaster and of Tilleson and their replacements by Bolton and Pompeo. ..."
"... According to Shaul Mofaz, former Israeli defense minister, Bolton "tried to convince me that Israel needs to attack Iran," which Mofaz recently asserted was not "a smart move – not on the part of the Americans today or anyone else until the threat is real." ..."
"... "To those who claim that the nuclear deal isn't working, regime change remains the only solution," wrote Rezaian. "For the MEK, and Bolton, if his words are to be taken at face value, the only path to that could be war. The group has long been prepared to do whatever it takes to see that happen, including presenting fake intelligence about Iran's nuclear program." ..."
"... On the JCPOA Bolton denied that the US had violated the agreement. Instead, the US is withdrawing from it. But he wouldn't acknowledged that Iran is in compliance, as the IAEA has reported numerous times. ..."
"... Sheldon Adelson has only one issue, Israel, and he has paid the Republican Party handsomely to make sure his views are the views of the party. According to Mintpress News' Whitney Webb, Adelson has lavished some $90 million on the part since 2016, including $35 million to the Trump campaign, and another $55 million to two Republican SuperPACS, Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund. ..."
"... Bolton has marginalized Mattis in national security policy making, so Mattis is turning his energies towards preventing a US attack on Iran. At the core of Mattis' concerns is, number one, it's a lot easier to start a war with Iran than to end it, and secondly, the US military services are all in poor shape after decades of wars and other never-ending contingency operations. Mattis, like many of his colleagues in the senior military leadership, have a long standing animus towards Iran, but at the same time, they don't see any good way through a war against Iran. Bolton and his co-thinkers, on the other hand, see a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to change the regime in Tehran as almost a moral obligation. ..."
"... Ha'aretz's sources say, however, that Bolton is behind the scenes advancing the option of collapsing the Iranian regime. According to those sources, Bolton views the demonstrations that have broken out in Iran in recent months over the state of the country's economy as an indication of the regime's weakness. He has told Trump that increased U.S. pressure could lead to the regime's collapse. One person who recently spoke with senior White House officials on the subject summarized Bolton view in the words: "One little kick and they're done." ..."
"... If the US is really seeking to employ such groups to try to destablilize Iran along ethnic lines, this would be nothing new. Gareth Porter, in an article that appeared in Middle East Eye on May 18, reports that John Bolton, when he was in the GW Bush Administration pushed aggressively for regime change but that Bush himself wasn't interested ..."
"... Daniel Larison, writing in The American Conservative, characterized Goldberg this way: "Goldberg has been a leading opponent of the nuclear deal and a fanatical advocate for enforcing new sanctions on Iran and anyone that does business with them. Bringing Goldberg into the administration is a sign that the Iran obsession is getting worse, and by making him the 'Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction.'" One might say we've seen this playbook before, in Iraq in 2002-2003. ..."
"... This is one dangerous pack of rats. It's frightening how easily prone to manipulation Trump has proven. One would think he'd be more resistant to this sort of thing. ..."
A review of publicly available reporting that I have accumulated in my files over the past two years would suggest that John Bolton's
boss is really Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino king who has plied the Republican Party with tens of millions of dollars in
largesse in order to remake it in his image. This conclusion is irrespective of what you might think of Trump himself and whether
or not you believe he really meant it when he said there should be no more regime change wars. The fact is, the neo conservative
"Never Trumpers" began moving in on Trump almost as soon as he won the election in order to ensure that their policy perspective
prevailed. Greased by Adelson's money, it appears that they have succeeded to a considerable degree, particularly on Iran, but also
on other aspects of national security policy as well, including, it appears, on Venezuela. And if US relations with Russia don't
improve now that Russia-gate is dead, it'll be because of this crowd as well.
Bolton's history goes back to the Reagan Administration in the 1980's, and his perfidy during the runup to the Iraq invasion is
well known to this readership. What I focus on here is the period from January of 2017 through mid-2018, around the time of his appointment
to be Trump's national security advisor, plus a couple of months, during which period a number of interesting reports were posted
on Trump's lobbying of the White House to get an administration position and his sponsorship by Adelson. Adelson's only concern,
by his own quoted words, is protecting Israel and, according to the reports below, has even advocated the nuclear bombing of Iran
if it doesn't give up a nuclear weapons program that every reasonable intelligence assessment and the IAEA say it doesn't have. Adelson
is also credited with facilitating the firing of both H.R. McMaster and Rex Tillerson and replacing them with Bolton and Mike Pompeo,
another one of Adelson's boys.
What follows is a time line of summaries of news stories covering the period above in the form that I wrote them at the time with
the dates over each one of them. It's not meant to be comprehensive–there's undoubtedly a great deal of insight still to be gained
on how deeply these neo-con networks have actually penetrated the administration–and the news reports the summaries are based on
likely vary in their quality. I hope anyone with such deeper insights will post them in the comments section.
Appended at the end of the time line is a short report on Richard Goldberg, the Z-lobby activist who Bolton brought onto the NSC
in January to be his "Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction." Goldberg, who came out of the neo-con Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies, is clearly part of Adelson's orbit.
1) John Bolton: A Timeline for 2017-2018
Feb. 19, 2017
AP circulated a
wire , yesterday, reporting that Trump was interviewing candidates for the National Security Advisor position at his estate
in Florida. The names mention were Cheneyac John Bolton (who, if I remember correctly, was already rejected by the Trump administration
for a State Department job) and LTG H.R. McMaster, according to one unnamed White House official. Another had said that Trump
had been interested in David Petraeus but that Petraeus was not a finalist for the position. Picking Bolton would be shear lunacy,
but McMaster is highly interesting. McMaster wrote a famous book about the Vietnam war in which he documented that practically
everybody in the military leadership, and especially Maxwell Taylor lied about Vietnam and, like Mattis, he has a history of being
a harsh critic of the RMA. I'll have more to say about him if he gets the job.
May 10, 2017
Bloomberg's Eli Lake, in a
column posted on Monday, described what amounts to a factional war inside the White House, with Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus
on one side and H.R. McMaster on the other. Trump himself is said to have blasted McMaster for his phone conversation with his
South Korean counterpart during which he assured him that Trump didn't really mean it when he said that South Korea should pay
for the THAAD deployment. "McMaster's allies and adversaries inside the White House tell me that Trump is disillusioned with him,"
Lake writes. "This professional military officer has failed to read the president -- by not giving him a chance to ask questions
during briefings, at times even lecturing Trump."
According to Lake's sources (and I'm wondering if they might, in fact, be Bannon and Priebus, or people close to them), Trump
has complained in front of McMaster in intelligence briefings about "the general undermining my policy." They say Trump has privately
expressed regret for choosing McMaster and even called in neo-con John Bolton to talk being McMaster's deputy, an idea which was
ultimately dropped.
Oct. 17, 2017
Nikki Haley told NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday that it's the administration's hope that America stays with the Iran nuclear
deal if Congress takes action to keep it together. "I think right now you are going to see us stay in the deal," she said. "What
we hope is that we can improve the situation," she added. "And that's the goal. So I think right now, we're in the deal to see
how we can make it better. And that's the goal. It's not that we're getting out of the deal. We're just trying to make the situation
better so that the American people feel safer." The NBC
press report doesn't report whether or not she explained how the JCPOA is going to be made better when all of the other parties
agree that it's not up for renegotiation. They note, however, that Haley was one of the few voices in the Trump administration
to encourage the president to declare Iran in violation. It's well known that both Tillerson and Mattis opposed decertification,
with Mattis telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, two weeks ago, that it was in the US interest to stay in the agreement.
I didn't come across this until yesterday afternoon, but it turns out that Politico published a
big piece , last
Friday, basically attributing Trump's decertification decision to Haley, who is portrayed as a neo-con channel into the White
House. At the other end of the channel is John Bolton, who even is able to get Trump on the phone himself from time to time, despite
John Kelly's efforts to obstruct him.
According to Politico's sources, the line in Trump's speech where he said that the US could
pull out of the JCPOA "at any time" was added after Bolton reached Trump on the phone on Thursday afternoon. Bolton was calling
from Las Vegas where he "was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson." Adelson's possible role in this is not further
explored in the Politico article but probably bears further investigation.
The article otherwise goes into great depth on how Haley is at odds with most of the rest of the administration on Iran, particularly
Tillerson, her nominal boss and who is reported to have strenuously objected to her trip to Vienna in August to put pressure on
the IAEA to demand inspection of military sites in Iran. One White House official described the escalating tensions between Tillerson
and Haley as reaching "World War III" proportions. Two weeks after the Vienna trip, Haley appeared at the AEI in Washington where
she publicly floated what became the parameters of the policy that Trump announced on Friday. "The purpose of the AEI speech was
to figure out, 'Is this gonna work? Does this thread that needle?'" one official said. After Trump's speech, Bolton gloated: "The
Iran deal may not have died today, but it will die shortly." He supports full US withdrawal from the agreement, and has reportedly
transmitted his view to the White House through Jared Kushner.
Asked about the Politico report on Sunday, Haley said "That is just so much drama. I mean, it's really, it's all this palace
intrigue."
Anti-neocon activist and former US Air Force analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski
told Sputnik that
she believes that Trump was mislead by fake intelligence. "I suspect that Mr. Trump is being fed information regarding Iran as
a nation and as a government that is cherry-picked and creatively elaborated, largely outside of intelligence channels, by his
neoconservative advisers," she said. She noted despite Trump's 2016 promise to "drain the swamp" of discredited foreign policy
interventionists, many of them have managed to weasel their way back into government service. "This faction has always slated
the destruction of Iran as a regional power for several decades now, and if they have the ear of the President, there is never
a better time than the present to press their case," she said. She insisted, however, that neither Trump himself, nor the U.S.
military is determined on war against Iran.
Oct. 24, 2017
According to VOA (at any rate), there's a big fight in Washington over the future of U.S. adherence to the JCPOA. Lunatic Lindsey
Graham fully supports the policy that Trump announced on Oct 13 (no surprise there), while the French armed forces minister, Florence
Parly, who was in Washington, last week, supports the agreement. "We need the JCPOA," she
said during an appearance at
CSIS on Friday. "Scrapping it would be a gift to Iran's hardliners and a first step towards future wars." Tim Kaine, who has leading
an effort in the Senate to write a new war authorization, echoed her. "If you weaken diplomacy, you raise the risk of unnecessary
war, and that's what this president is doing. If we take a step back from the deal, Iran will take a step back. And what will
they ask for, that they get to now increase centrifuges or get some of their enriched uranium back? I do not want to give Iran
one thing back from this deal," said Kaine.
But, if you believe Graham, Iran will be let loose from the deal in 15 years (some people say 10 or even 8 years) to enrich
as much uranium as it wants. This ignores the fact that Iran will still be a member of the NPT and will be subject to its additional
protocol. Top Iranian officials have said that if the US sabotages the JCPOA, Iran will make appropriate decisions in response,
but they won't be building bombs.
The even more lunatic John Bolton is thrilled about Trump's policy, but complains, in an
op-ed in The Hill, that so far at least, it doesn't go far enough. After blaming Obama for giving the Middle East to Iran
and Russia, Bolton demands that Trump recognize Kurdish independence and give the peshmerga the weapons and support they need
to face the American-made tanks of the Iraqi army.
"Rapidly increased pressure against Iran's role as the world's central banker
of international terrorism, stressed in Trump's Oct. 13 speech, cannot come fast enough," he goes on. And, of course, European
commercial relations with Iran are not to be tolerated. Othewise, "Tehran will rightly conclude the United States is really not
serious about confronting their threat to us and our allies. That is the legacy of the Obama administration. It should not also
be the legacy of the Trump administration." Nobody wants to rush the country headlong into disastrous faster then the neo-cons.
Oct. 26, 2017
Gareth Porter, in an
article that was posted on Oct. 20 (but that I didn't come across until yesterday) on the American Conservative, reports that
the new policy that Trump announced on Oct. 13 not only "clearly represents a dangerous rejection of diplomacy in favor of confrontation"
but also marks "a major shift toward a much closer alignment of U.S. policy with that of the Israeli government of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu." "Whether explicitly or not, Trump's vow to work with Congress to renegotiate the Iran nuclear agreement,
and his explicit threat to withdraw from the deal if no renegotiation takes place, appear to be satisfying the hardline demands
Netanyahu has made of Washington's policy toward Tehran," Porter writes. Those demands being either US withdrawal from the JCPOA
altogether, or demanding changes in it that cannot be attained.
Porter goes deeper into the conduits for this policy into the White House than a Politico article I reported on earlier that
came out at about the same time. He identifies Jared Kushner as the main conduit for the Likudist outlook into the White House.
Kushner is a friend and supporter of Netanyahu and his parents have been backers of Israeli settlements.
He also delves deeper into the significance of Sheldon Adelson than the Politico report did, noting that Adelson is a long
time friend of Netanyahu, has used his assets in Israel to give Netanyahu political support and gave the Trump campaign $100 million.
"Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in Washington -- especially with regard to Iran," Porter notes,
adding that in 2013, Adelson openly called for the nuclear intimidation of Iran. In the next few paragraphs, Porter provides a
thumbnail sketch of the history of the neo-cons in order to highlight the role of John Bolton in all of this. It was Bolton,
Porter reports, "who worked with Israeli officials to plan a campaign to convince the world that Iran was secretly working on
nuclear weapons." But the real purpose, which continues, was not so much to scare the world about an Iranian bomb, but rather,
to use it as an issue to be exploited to weaken the Islamic regime and ultimately achieve regime change. Porter concludes by saying
that Trump is cooperating with this objective even more enthusiastically than GW Bush did.
Jan. 3, 2018
The protests in Iran may have started spontaneously in anger at economic conditions, and/or at the instigation of Rouhani's
rival Raisi and his father -in-law in Mashad, but the evidence that they're being, at the very least, encouraged from the outside
is growing. Unnamed Trump Administration officials
told
the Washington Free Beacon that both Trump and Pence are watching the protests very closely and the officials said they are working
to ensure that Trump does not miss an opportunity to incubate a possible revolution that could topple Iran's hardline ruling regime.
"With the world watching growing demonstrations across Iran, the Trump administration sees an opportunity to feed the growing
protests," the Free Beacon reports, something that they and the neo-cons say that Obama failed to do in 2009, when protests erupted
against Ahmedinijad's re-election. "The Trump administration's strong and vocal support for the demonstrators is a 180 from the
Obama administration's approach and it's signaling to Tehran that this will not be a repeat of the 2009 demonstrations," the administration
official said.
The regime change cheerleader from outside the administration is, not surprisingly, John Bolton. During an appearance on "Fox
and Friends" on Monday, Bolton
argued
that these protests are different than the post-election protests in Iran in 2009, which questioned the legitimacy of the election
of then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and who should lead the regime. "These protests are about whether the regime survives
or not, and that makes them much more threatening to the ayatollahs, much more dangerous, and raises the stakes considerably,"
Bolton said. He called on Trump to end the nuclear deal, re-impose previous sanctions and impose new ones that increase the economic
pressure on Iran and provide material support to opposition forces. "There's a lot we can do to, and we should do it," Bolton
said. "Our goal should be regime change in Iran."
Neo-cons in the Congress and elsewhere in Washington are enthusiastically following Bolton's lead. "The Iranian people want
freedom and an end to the ayatollahs' reign of terror,"
said Senator Ted Cruz.
"Iranians are looking toward America to support their struggle," Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of
the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, urging the White House to continue condemning the
regime, and follow up with "sanctions targeting corruption and human-rights abuses."
Bolton's protégé, Nikki Haley, is calling for an emergency UNSC session to discuss the crisis in Iran. "The Iranian dictatorship
is trying to do what it always does, which is to say that the protests were designed by enemies. We all know that is complete
nonsense," Haley
said (is it,
realy?), yesterday. "The U.N. must speak out," Haley added. "We must not be silent. The people of Iran are crying out for freedom."
March 10, 2018
John Bolton has been snooping around the White House. CNN
reported on Wednesday,
that Trump met with him at the White House, suggesting that he may be under consideration as an "outside expert" to help the State
Department manage the North Korea portfolio. CNN says that Bolton argues that a pre-emptive strike on North Korea would not only
be legal but also effective at curbing the threat.
On Tuesday, Bolton
told Fox News that "The only thing North Korea is serious about is getting deliverable nuclear weapons." Bolton said direct
and indirect talks with North Korea have occurred for the last 25 years and never end up successful. He said if a new round of
talks begins, North Korea will possess a deliverable nuclear weapon by the end of the year. So, Bolton obviously believes that
the past determines the future.
The Washington Post, in the above cited article, reports that Christopher Hill, who was on Capitol Hill this week to talk about
North Korea, said that he face "withing attacks" from conservative Republicans when he was engaged in the six-party talks in 2005.
"People like John Bolton said I was a traitor for talking to the North Koreans," Hill said in an interview. The Post then reports
that Bolton offered conditioned praise for Trump, saying Friday that he expected the president to deliver a warning about U.S.
willingness to use military force.
Daniel Davis, in an
op-ed in Fox News, argues that Trump goes ahead with announced plans to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, he would
open the door to potentially solving our nuclear dispute with the Communist nation short of war. This is a far better course that
listening to the calls from some to give up on diplomacy and use military force against the North. The "some" include Bolton who
has been making the case for a preventive military strike against North Korea. "If such a U.S. strike were ordered, it would have
catastrophic consequences for us. Far from ensuring our safety, it would impose egregious levels of casualties on U.S. forces
and American civilians [not to mention Koreans who would make up the bulk of casualties -cjo], and harm – not help – our security
and our prosperity," Davis writes.
March 23, 2018
You've all seen the headlines by now. I'm not going to say a lot about it. The punditry is that it means more aggressive US
policies towards both Iran and North Korea. It also likely means that Sheldon Adelson has a
direct line to
the White House and Nikki Haley's position at the UN has been strengthened, since she and Bolton have been reported to have a
close relationship. The
suggestion in the press coverage is that Bolton is more likely to tell Trump what he wants to hear, particularly on Iran,
but we probably shouldn't automatically assume that Trump wants to go to war as badly as Bolton does.
March 25, 2018
Jim Lobe and Eli Clifton,
writing in Lobelog, yesterday,
argue that Sheldon Adelson was responsible for Trump's turnaround from populist anti-war candidate to pro-Israel hawk. In 2016,
they write, Trump was mocking those, like Marco Rubio, who were seeking Adelson's support, meaning they were seeking his money.
By the time of his inauguration, however, Trump had adopted Adelson's militant pro-Israel stance, including Adelson's demands
to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and pursue a confrontationist approach to Iran, and Adelson occupied a prominent
seat at the inauguration ceremony.
"Trump met Adelson in Las Vegas in early October 2017. One week later, Trump announced that he would no longer certify that
Iran was complying with the Iran nuclear deal, even though the U.S. intelligence community and all of Washington's European allies,
as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had found no evidence that Tehran was cheating," Lobe and Clifton write.
"One month later, Adelson used his own newspaper, The Las Vegas Review Journal, to express his frustration with Trump's failure
to quickly redeem his promise to move the embassy. Two months after that, Trump reversed a half century of U.S. policy by formally
recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. According to Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, Steve Bannon credited Adelson for
Trump's decision."
Adelson's big protégé, as I've reported previously, is John Bolton. According to Lobe and Clifton, it was Adelson who made
the arrangements to get Bolton back into the White House, overcoming efforts by White House chief of staff John Kelly keep to
keep him out. Adelson also reportedly orchestrating the firing of McMaster and of Tilleson and their replacements by Bolton and
Pompeo. Ands Bolton, like Adelson, has long favored a "military solution" to the Iran nuclear problem. In 2013, Adelson posted
an op-ed in his newspaper, the Las Vegas Review Journal, calling for the nuclear bombing of Iran, first in some uninhabited area
of the country to send Iran's leaders "a message" and if that didn't work, a second bombing of Tehran itself (this of course,
would be a war crime in the first degree). Bolton, himself, in an op-ed two years later, held up the Israeli bombing of Iraq's
Osirak reactor as the model for what the US should (as was later documented by a Norwegian researcher who's name I don't recall,
the bombing of Osirak did not end Saddam's Hussein's nuclear bomb program. Rather, it forced it underground and out of sight,
as UN weapons inspectors discovered in the 1990's after Gulf War I).
March 31, 2018
Journalist Whitney Webb,
writing Mintpress News, finds Bolton's appointment as Trump's national security advisor, to be particularly dangerous. Webb
puts Bolton's appointment in the context of those of Pompeo to be secretary of state and Gina Haspell to run the CIA, but finds
Bolton the most dangerous of the three, "due to his bellicose rhetoric, unilateral decision-making, and his "kiss up, kick down"
style of interaction with superiors and colleagues, allowing him to be remarkably effective in getting his way."
Webb's purpose is to explore what Bolton's appointment means for US national security policy and he begins with Bolton's deep
ties to Israel–ties "so deep that some have posited that his commitment to extreme Zionism has led him to betray the national
interest of his own country on more than one occasion." Webb cites a number of examples of this, which add up to Bolton pursuing
his own warmongering policy against Iran even when the administration he was nominally working for had the opposite policy. Bolton
has pressured Israeli officials to attack Iran even when calling for such an attack was not the U.S. government's position.
According to Shaul Mofaz, former Israeli defense minister, Bolton "tried to convince me that Israel needs to attack Iran," which
Mofaz recently asserted was not "a smart move – not on the part of the Americans today or anyone else until the threat is real."
May 8, 2018
Trump tweeted yesterday that he would be announcing his decision on Iran today at 2 PM. The Washington Post, citing the usual
gaggle of unnamed officials, US and foreign,
reports that he is expected to say that he will not continue a waiver of sanctions against Iran. Exactly what this means is
not at all clear. Trump is not expected to renege on the nuclear deal altogether. Instead, the Post says, he will address a portion
of the wide range of sanctions that were waived when the deal was first implemented, while leaving in limbo other waivers that
are due in July. As for what comes next, Boris Johnson said that as far as he knows, the administration has no clear "Plan B"
for what's to follow. The affected sanctions, the Post notes, not only impose restrictions on US trade with Iran but also threaten
pther countries that buy Iranian oil. Officials, who spoke to the Post about the upcoming announcement on the condition of anonymity,
suggested that Trump will use the threat of further measures as leverage on both the Europeans and Iran itself.
As has been too often the case, we may be seeing Trump and his advisors expressing two different policies on Iran. Rudy Giuliani,
Trump's newest lawyer, delivered remarks to meeting of something called the Iran Freedom Convention for Democracy and Human Rights,
during which he advocated regime change in Tehran. "We have a president who is tough," Giuliani is reported to have said. "We
have a president who is as committed to regime change as we are." Confronting Iran, he added, is "more important than an Israeli-Palestinian
deal." He also
predicted
the end of the nuclear deal. "What do you think is going to happen to that agreement!" Giuliani said of the deal, before taking
a piece of paper in his hands and pretending to rip it apart.
The State Department immediately dismissed Giuliani's remarks. "He speaks for himself and not on behalf of the administration
on foreign policy," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told The Associated Press on Monday. The Hill further
noted that U.S. officials were alarmed by Giuliani's comments and said they weren't consistent with the White House's policy.
This is confirmed by another
report in the Washington Post. "But if regime change is on the agenda, Trump has been far more circumspect about how it would
happen," writes the Post's Ishaan Tharoor. "Dethroning the mullahs would likely involve waging war against Iran, a prospect at
odds with his own stated desire to withdraw from Syria and disentangle the United States from a generation of costly conflicts
in the Middle East." Tharoor goes on to tie the regime change crowd, including Giuliani and Bolton directly to the MeK. The MeK,
Tharoor writes, was behind the event at which Giuliani spoke this weekend, "marking yet another episode in his long, cozy relationship
with the organization." Tharoor cites Politico reporting that the MeK has paid Giuliani "handsomely," to include not only appearances
before the group but also for lobbying to have it removed from the State Department's terror list, which was done in 2012.
Tharoor also cites Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was detained in Iran for a year-and-a-half, reporting that
the MeK is held with contempt by ordinary Iranians, who view the organization as a craven, treacherous outfit. "In the seven years
I lived in Iran, many people expressed criticism of the ruling establishment -- at great potential risk to themselves," noted
Rezaian. "In all that time, though, I never met a person who thought the MEK should, or could, present a viable alternative."
"To those who claim that the nuclear deal isn't working, regime change remains the only solution," wrote Rezaian. "For
the MEK, and Bolton, if his words are to be taken at face value, the only path to that could be war. The group has long been prepared
to do whatever it takes to see that happen, including presenting fake intelligence about Iran's nuclear program."
May 9, 2018
Before I get into the reactions following Trump's
speech of yesterday, I'll cover a few other details from what Trump announced.
The
memorandum that he signed after concluding his remarks states that the policy of the U.S. is "that Iran be denied a nuclear
weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles; that Iran's network and campaign of regional aggression be neutralized; to disrupt,
degrade, or deny the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its surrogates access to the resources that sustain their destabilizing
activities; and to counter Iran's aggressive development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities."
In addition to directing the Secretaries of State and Treasury to begin the process of reimposing the economic sanctions that
were waived as a result of the nuclear deal, it also directs the Secretary of Defense to "prepare to meet, swiftly and decisively,
all possible modes of Iranian aggression against the United States, our allies, and our partners. The Department of Defense shall
ensure that the United States develops and retains the means to stop Iran from developing or acquiring a nuclear weapon and related
delivery systems."
Trump's speech was shortly followed by a
press briefing by John Bolton. One of the matters that came up repeatedly was the question of regime change. The first question
was whether or not the administration was hoping that regime change would be part of addressing Iran's supposed malign activities.
"No," Bolton said. What Trump has said, he went on, "is that one of the fundamental criticisms that the President and others have
made to the deal is that it sought to address only a limited aspect of Iran's unacceptable behavior -- certainly a critical aspect
-- but not taking into account the fact this is, and has been for many years, the central banker of international terrorism."
Secondly, he was asked if this was a precursor for the U.S. putting boots on the ground in Iran. Anybody who believes that
"would be badly mistaken if that's what they thought," Bolton said.
Thirdly, a reporter asked Bolton if the administration was in contact with the MeK or other exile groups about a government
in exile. 'I'm not aware of any of that, and that's just not something that's ever come up," he said.
Bolton was then asked if the administration would support a regime change in Syria as well. "I think the President made clear
in his address a couple weeks ago when he announced the response to the Syrian chemical weapons attack, that the use of military
force there and our diplomatic responses was limited to the question of the use of weapons of mass destruction," he siad. He then
added that the real concern was Iran extending its influence through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon."
On the JCPOA Bolton denied that the US had violated the agreement. Instead, the US is withdrawing from it. But he wouldn't
acknowledged that Iran is in compliance, as the IAEA has reported numerous times. "I think there are plenty of cases where
we're simply incapable of saying whether they're in compliance or not. There are others where I think they've clearly been in
violation," he said. "For example, their production of heavy water has repeatedly exceeded the limits permissible under the JCPOA.
They're almost in the heavy water production business. They sell excess to Oman. They've sold it to European countries. It's a
way of keeping the heavy water production facilities alive. They're warm. And that's part of the danger. And they have exceeded
the limits."
At the end of his speech, yesterday, Trump said that the future of Iran belongs to its people. At first, this sounded to me
like the preface to a call for regime change. What he said was this: "Iran's leaders will naturally say that they refuse to negotiate
a new deal; they refuse. And that's fine. I'd probably say the same thing if I was in their position. But the fact is they are
going to want to make a new and lasting deal, one that benefits all of Iran and the Iranian people. When they do, I am ready,
willing, and able." A reporter asked Bolton if this meant that the US was ready tot alk to the Iranians from a position of strength.
He replied that what the administration is prepared to do, along with the Europeans and others, is "to talk about a much broader
deal addressing all of the aspects of Iran's conduct that we find objectionable. We're prepared to do that beginning right now."
May 21, 2018
If the New York Times is to be believed, Bolton is
bringing
with him, the same coterie of old neo-con cronies to work for him in the NSC that he's been surrounded by since his days in the
Reagan Administration in the 1980's. This includes Charles M. Kupperman, a former Reagan administration official and defense contracting
executive, who has come in as a temporary advisor. The list of those under consideration for positions in the NSC includes Frederick
H. Fleitz, Sarah Tinsley and David Wurmser. "Mr. Bolton's relationships with most of the associates date back decades, to his
days working in positions related to foreign policy in the Reagan administration. But he continued working with them in the dozen
years since he has been out of government, serving as an adviser to Mr. Wurmser's company, according to its website, while relying
on Mr. Kupperman, Ms. Tinsley and several other associates to help run a constellation of conservative political organizations
that he founded to advance his foreign policy views and political prospects," the Times reports. "The activity brought Mr. Bolton
into regular contact with some of the biggest donors on the right, while giving him a platform to explore his own possible presidential
campaign in 2016 and to be an advocate for confrontational strategies in dealing with Iran, North Korea and Russia."
The Times report is a little weak on the ideology of these folks, preferring instead to focus on Bolton's ethical lapses, but
can't avoid the matter entirely. Matthew C. Freedman, a long time associate who Bolton appointed to interview prospective hires,
Kupperman, Tinsley and another associate, Garrett Marquis, the Times reports further, were affiliated with a Bolton-led nonprofit,
the Foundation for American Security and Freedom, which aired ads in 2015 opposing the Iran nuclear deal. The Times also notes
Bolton's close relationship with Sheldon Adelson, whom the Times describes as "an influential hawk and supporter of Israel from
whom Mr. Bolton has sought assistance for his political ventures."
May 22, 2018
Sheldon Adelson has only one issue, Israel, and he has paid the Republican Party handsomely to make sure his views are
the views of the party. According to Mintpress News' Whitney Webb, Adelson has
lavished some $90 million on the part since 2016, including $35 million to the Trump campaign, and another $55 million to
two Republican SuperPACS, Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund. "After investing so heavily in the
GOP in 2016, Adelson's decision to again donate tens of millions of dollars to Republican efforts to stay in power is a direct
consequence of how successfully Adelson has been able to influence U.S. policy since Trump and the GOP rode to victory in the
last election cycle," Webb writes. "Adelson's belief that Trump would be "good for Israel" was the main driver behind his decision
to spend more than $90 million on helping Trump and other Republicans win in the last election."
June 29, 2018
Mark Perry, in an article posted
in Foreign Policy, yesterday, posits that Mattis is waging a losing battle against Bolton over the question of war with Iran.
He reports that since his arrival at the White House, Bolton has marginalized Mattis in national security policy making, so
Mattis is turning his energies towards preventing a US attack on Iran. At the core of Mattis' concerns is, number one, it's a
lot easier to start a war with Iran than to end it, and secondly, the US military services are all in poor shape after decades
of wars and other never-ending contingency operations. Mattis, like many of his colleagues in the senior military leadership,
have a long standing animus towards Iran, but at the same time, they don't see any good way through a war against Iran. Bolton
and his co-thinkers, on the other hand, see a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to change the regime in Tehran
as almost a moral obligation.
Mattis' concerns are shared by the senior military leadership. "We've been in the air and in combat since 1993," a senior retired
Air Force officer said, "and the wear and tear on the force has been considerable. The tempo has been crushing." Perry says this
is actually an understatement, given that 30 percent of Air Force aircraft are not "mission capable," in part because of huge
pilot shortfalls and a deterioration of military capability. The story is the same for the other services.
Then there's the military campaign itself. An air campaign could easily destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and its conventional
military forces, but what happens afterwards? As noted by several experts that Perry consulted, the end of the air campaign would
be the beginning of the war, not the end of it. There's no reason to expect that the government in Tehran would surrender and
it would be able to fight on with its considerable unconventional military capabilities, not only in the IRGC but its proxy forces
as well, such as Hezbollah.
In truth, the unease over any future conflict goes much deeper than these concerns, Perry notes, "and is seeded by what one
senior and influential military officer called 'an underlying anxiety that after 17 years of sprinkling the Middle East with corpses,
the U.S. is not any closer to a victory over terrorism now than it was on September 12.' It is this anxiety that undergirds military
doubts about going to war with Iran -- that the United States would be adding bodies to the pile and not much more." In other
words, it would be another forever war, only one that asborbs many times mor resources than even the ones we're in right now have
done.
July 2, 2018
Ha'aretz ran a
story , yesterday, very similar to the Mark Perry article I reported on last week, on the policy fight within the administration
over what to do about Iran. Officially, the administration is committed to diplomatic and economic pressure to bring Iran to the
negotiating table, where a new agreement should be constructed that would replace the JCPOA. Ha'aretz's sources say, however,
that Bolton is behind the scenes advancing the option of collapsing the Iranian regime. According to those sources, Bolton views
the demonstrations that have broken out in Iran in recent months over the state of the country's economy as an indication of the
regime's weakness. He has told Trump that increased U.S. pressure could lead to the regime's collapse. One person who recently
spoke with senior White House officials on the subject summarized Bolton view in the words: "One little kick and they're done."
Mattis, on the other hand, despite is long held animus towards Iran is skeptical of regime change. Mattis, the sources stated,
supports increasing pressure on Iran, but with the clear objective of bringing the Iranians back to the table for a better agreement
– one that would roll back their regional aggression. Pompeo is said to lie in between but is moving towards Mattis.
Ha'aretz also points to the influence of outside advisors like Rudy Giuliani–who recently addressed the annual conference of
the National Council of Resistance in Iran in Paris as–as a further factor in the uncertainty around Trump's policy. What Ha'aretz
doesn't mention, though, is the Russia factor and that what Trump ultimately decides to do could be determined in Helsinki on
July 16.
July 26, 2018
Fazel Hawramy, an independent journalist working in Iraqi Kurdistan,
reports in an article in Al Monitor, that the State Department is replacing the outgoing counsel general in Erbil with an
Iran expert by the name of Steven Fagin, the director of the Office of Iranian Affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Near
Eastern Affairs. As director of the Office of Iranian Affairs, which has several outposts around the world, including in Istanbul
and Dubai, Fagin was responsible for developing, coordinating, recommending and executing US policy on Iran, Hawramy reports.
Fagin's presence in Iraqi Kurdistan is significant given that the armed Iranian Kurdish opposition groups fighting the Islamic
Republic are based in the region. Hawramy names the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), in particular, whose leader, Mustafa
Hijri, Fagin met with last month, when he was in Washington, by invitation from the Trump Administration, for a week long series
of meetings at various think tanks. Each side is said to be exploring the seriousness of the other.
The KDPI, it turns out, is a military organization that has a long history of staging attacks against the IRGC in Iran. The
KDPI has also stepped up efforts to establish an entity through which all the Kurdish parties can coordinate their efforts against
Tehran. Meanwhile, on July 21, the Kurdistan Free Life Party, affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, announced the killing
of 15 Iranian soldiers near the town of Marivan, close to the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. No mention is made of how much support
these groups might have among Iranian Kurds, however. They may not be any more viable than the MeK, except for making trouble
of course.
If the US is really seeking to employ such groups to try to destablilize Iran along ethnic lines, this would be nothing
new. Gareth Porter, in an
article
that appeared in Middle East Eye on May 18, reports that John Bolton, when he was in the GW Bush Administration pushed aggressively
for regime change but that Bush himself wasn't interested. Bolton may find history repeating itself, with Trump resisting
his plan for regime change, just as Bush did in 2003, Porter writes. In the week before Porter's article came out, Bolton denied
that the administration policy for Iran was regime change, despite the pullout from the JCPOA. "I've written and said a lot of
things when I was a complete free agent. I certainly stand by what I said at the time, but those were my opinions then. The circumstance
I'm in now is I'm the national security adviser to the president. I'm not the national security decision-maker," he told CNN's
Situation Room. The implication is clear. Number one, Bolton still believes in regime change. Number two, his view has not prevailed
with Trump. The recent comments by both Trump and Pompeo would seem to bear out that Trump's policy remains, as Pompeo said, to
change the regime's behavior, not to change the regime.
2) Who Is Richard Goldberg?
In early January of this year, Bolton brought onto the NSC, one Richard Goldberg, to be the NSC's "Director for Countering
Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction." Goldberg, Jewish Insider
reported on Jan. 7, was the
lead Congressional staff negotiator for sanctions on Iran prior to the nuclear deal in 2015 in his capacity as deputy chief of
staff and senior foreign policy adviser to former Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), and later served as chief of staff for former Illinois
Governor Bruce Rauner. After leaving government in 2017, Goldberg joined the neo-con Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The National Interest's Curt Mills
confirmed
Goldberg's neo-con credentials the same day. "Couldn't think of anyone better than my @FDD colleague @rich_goldberg to join NSC
to maximize the maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran." FDD president mark Dubowitz jubilantly tweeted.
Goldberg "takes a view of Iran similar to many of Washington's most committed Iran hawks. He views the regime in Tehran as akin
to the Soviet Union -- a hub of a global, anti-American counterculture and internally collapsible if Reagan-style pressure is
applied," Mills reports. "For FDD, which has functioned as the administration's go-to think-tank on Iran, it's another coup. The
Goldberg move to the White House comes as at a time when the organization had been publicly doubting the administration's course
for the first time," Mills reports later in the article.
Daniel Larison,
writing
in The American Conservative, characterized Goldberg this way: "Goldberg has been a leading opponent of the nuclear deal and a
fanatical advocate for enforcing new sanctions on Iran and anyone that does business with them. Bringing Goldberg into the administration
is a sign that the Iran obsession is getting worse, and by making him the 'Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction.'"
One might say we've seen this playbook before, in Iraq in 2002-2003.
As for Goldberg's history, we find that he's been a very militant advocate for Likudnik Israel going back to 2004 when he first
arrived on Capitol Hill as a staffer (Goldberg is a young punk and was probably in his early to mid-20's in 2004). According to
the FDD's biography of him, Goldberg was "A leader in
efforts to expand U.S. missile defense cooperation with Israel, Richard played a key role in U.S. funding for the Arrow-3 program,
Iron Dome and the deployment of an advanced missile defense radar to the Negev Desert." During his time working for Mark Kirk,
Goldberg "emerged as a leading architect of the toughest sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was the lead Republican
negotiator for three rounds of sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran, the SWIFT financial messaging service, and entire
sectors of the Iranian economy. Richard also drafted and negotiated legislation promoting human rights and democracy in Iran,
including sanctions targeting entities that provide the Iranian regime with the tools of repression."
In September 2017, Goldberg authored a memo that was circulated on Capitol Hill which advocated that the president should declare
to Congress next month that the deal is no longer in the national security interest of the United States, Foreign Policy
reported at the time. Then the president
would make clear his readiness to hit Iran with a "de-facto global economic embargo" if it failed to meet certain conditions over
a 90-day period, including opening military sites to international inspectors. "This would be a 21st century financial version
of [John F.] Kennedy's Cuba quarantine," according to a copy of the proposal obtained by Foreign Policy. The embargo would involve
reimposing sanctions lifted under the deal, as well as additional measures including restrictions on oil exports. This is clearly
recognizable, now, as the policy that the Trump Administration has imposed on Iran since Trump announced the US withdrawal from
the JCPOA in May 2018.
TTG • 3 hours ago
Willy B., thanks for pulling all this information together into a very readable piece. Well done. This is one dangerous
pack of rats. It's frightening how easily prone to manipulation Trump has proven. One would think he'd be more resistant to this
sort of thing.
"... Given that Guaidó was trained by a group funded by USAID's sister organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) -- and is known to take his marching orders from Washington, including his self-proclamation as "interim president" and his return to Venezuela following the "humanitarian aid" showdown -- it is worth considering that this USAID document may well serve as a roadmap to the upcoming and Guaidó-led "tactical actions" that will comprise "Operation Freedom." ..."
"... Titled "Rapid Expeditionary Development (RED) Teams: Demand and Feasibility Assessment," the 75-page document was produced for the U.S. Global Development Lab, a branch of USAID. It was written as part of an effort to the "widespread sentiment" among the many military, intelligence, and development officials the report's authors interviewed "that the USG [U.S. government] is woefully underperforming in non-permissive and denied environments," including Venezuela. Notably, some of the military, intelligence and development officials interviewed by the report's authors had experience working in a covert capacity in Venezuela. ..."
"... The report goes on to state that "RED Team members would be catalytic actors, performing development activities alongside local communities while coordinating with interagency partners." It further states that "[i]t is envisioned that the priority competency of proposed RED Team development officers would be social movement theory (SMT)" and that "RED Team members would be 'super enablers,' observing situations on the ground and responding immediately by designing, funding, and implementing small-scale activities." ..."
"... Also raising the specter of a Venezuela link is the fact that the document suggests Brazil as a potential location for a RED Team pilot study. Several of those interviewed for the report asserted that "South American countries were ripe for pilots" of the RED Team program, adding that "These [countries were] under-reported, low-profile, idiot-proof locations, where USG civilian access is fairly unrestrained by DS [Diplomatic Security] and where there is a positive American relationship with the host government." ..."
"... This January, Brazil inaugurated Jair Bolsonaro as president, a fascist who has made his intention to align the country close to Washington's interests no secret. During Bolsonaro's recent visit to Washington, he became the first president of that country to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. President Donald Trump said during his meeting with Bolsonaro that "We have a great alliance with Brazil -- better than we've ever had before" and spoke in favor of Brazil joining NATO. ..."
"... This is supported by the troubling correlation between a document produced by the NED-funded group CANVAS and the recent power outages that have taken place throughout Venezuela, which were described as U.S.-led "sabotage" by the country's government. A recent report by The Grayzone detailed how a September 2010 memo by CANVAS -- which trained Juan Guaidó -- described in detail how the potential collapse of the country's electrical infrastructure, like that recently seen in Venezuela, would be "a watershed event" that "would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate." ..."
"... The document specifically named the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri Dam, which failed earlier this month as a result of what the Venezuelan government asserted was "sabotage" conducted by the U.S. government. That claim was bolstered by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio's apparent foreknowledge of the power outage. Thus, there is a precedent of correlation between these types of documents and actions that occur in relation to the current U.S. regime-change effort in Venezuela. ..."
With its hands tied when it comes to military intervention, only covert actions - such as those described in the RED Team document
- are likely to be enacted by the U.S. government, at least at this stage of its ongoing "regime change" effort in Venezuela.
Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed "interim president of Venezuela" who is supported by the United States government, recently announced
coming "tactical actions" that will be taken by his supporters starting April 6 as part of "
Operation Freedom ," an alleged grassroots effort
to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
That operation, according to Guaidó, will be
led by "Freedom and Aid Committees" that in turn create "freedom cells" throughout the country -- "cells" that will spring to
action when Guaidó gives the signal on April 6 and launch large-scale community protests. Guaidó's stated plan involves the Venezuelan
military then taking his side, but his insistence that "all options are still on the table" (i.e., foreign military intervention)
reveals his impatience with the military, which has continued to stay loyal to Maduro throughout Guaidó's "interim presidency."
However, a document released by the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) in February, and highlighted last month in
a report
by Devex, details the creation of networks of small teams, or cells, that would operate in a way very similar to what Guaidó
describes in his plan for "Operation Freedom."
Given that Guaidó
was trained by a group funded by USAID's sister organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) -- and is known to take
his marching orders from Washington, including
his self-proclamation as "interim president" and his return to Venezuela following the "humanitarian aid" showdown -- it is worth
considering that this USAID document may well serve as a roadmap to the upcoming and Guaidó-led "tactical actions" that will comprise
"Operation Freedom."
RED Teams
Titled "Rapid Expeditionary Development (RED) Teams: Demand and Feasibility Assessment," the 75-page
document was produced for the U.S. Global Development Lab,
a branch of USAID. It was written as part of an effort to the "widespread sentiment" among the many military, intelligence, and development
officials the report's authors interviewed "that the USG [U.S. government] is woefully underperforming in non-permissive and denied
environments," including Venezuela. Notably, some of the military, intelligence and development officials interviewed by the report's
authors had experience working in a covert capacity in Venezuela.
The approach put forth in this report involves the creation of rapid expeditionary development (RED) teams, who would "be deployed
as two-person teams and placed with 'non-traditional' USAID partners executing a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations
in extremis conditions." The report notes later on that these "non-traditional" partners are U.S. Special Forces (SF) and the CIA.
The report goes on to state that "RED Team members would be catalytic actors, performing development activities alongside local
communities while coordinating with interagency partners." It further states that "[i]t is envisioned that the priority competency
of proposed RED Team development officers would be social movement theory (SMT)" and that "RED Team members would be 'super enablers,'
observing situations on the ground and responding immediately by designing, funding, and implementing small-scale activities."
In other words, these teams of combined intelligence, military and/or "democracy promoting" personnel would work as "super enablers"
of "small-scale activities" focused on "social movement theory" and community mobilizations, such as the mobilizations of protests.
The decentralized nature of RED teams and their focus on engineering "social movements" and "mobilizations" is very similar to
Guaidó's plan for "Operation
Freedom." Operation Freedom is set to begin through "Freedom and Aid committees" that cultivate decentralized "freedom cells" throughout
the country and that create mass mobilizations when Guaidó gives the go ahead on April 6. The ultimate goal of Operation Freedom
is to have those "freedom cell"-generated protests converge on Venezuela's presidential palace, where Nicolás Maduro resides. Given
Guaidó lack of momentum and popularity within Venezuela, it seems highly likely that U.S. government "catalytic actors" may be a
key part of his upcoming plan to topple Maduro in little over a week.
Furthermore, an appendix included in the report states that RED Team members, in addition to being trained in social movement
theory and community mobilization techniques, would also be trained in "weapons handling and use," suggesting that their role as
"catalytic actors" could also involve Maidan-esque behavior. This is a distinct possibility raised by the report's claim that RED
Team members be trained in the use of both "offensive" and "defensive" weaponry.
In addition, another appendix states that RED Team members would help "identify allies and mobilize small amounts of cash to establish
community buy-in/relationship" -- i.e., bribes -- and would particularly benefit the CIA by offering a way to "transition covert
action into community engagement activities."
Feeling Bolsonaro's breath on its neck
Also raising the specter of a Venezuela link is the fact that the document suggests Brazil as a potential location for a RED Team
pilot study. Several of those interviewed for the report asserted that "South American countries were ripe for pilots" of the RED
Team program, adding that "These [countries were] under-reported, low-profile, idiot-proof locations, where USG civilian access is
fairly unrestrained by DS [Diplomatic Security] and where there is a positive American relationship with the host government."
This January, Brazil inaugurated Jair Bolsonaro as president, a fascist who has made his intention to align the country close
to Washington's interests no secret. During Bolsonaro's
recent visit to Washington, he became the first president of that country to visit CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. President
Donald Trump said during his meeting with Bolsonaro that "We have a great alliance with Brazil -- better than we've ever had before"
and spoke in favor of Brazil joining NATO.
Though Bolsonaro's government
has claimed late in February that it would not allow the U.S. to launch a military intervention from its territory, Bolsonaro's
son, Eduardo Bolsonaro -- an adviser to his father and a Brazilian congressman --
said
last week that "use of force will be necessary" in Venezuela "at some point" and, echoing the Trump administration, added that
"all options are on the table." If Bolsonaro's government does allow the "use of force," but not a full-blown foreign military intervention
per se, its closeness to the Trump administration and the CIA suggests that covert actions, such as those carried out by the proposed
RED Teams, are a distinct possibility.
Frontier Design Group
The RED Team report was authored by members of Frontier Design Group (FDG) for USAID's Global Development Lab. FDG is a national
security contractor and its mission statement on its website is quite revealing:
Since our founding, Frontier has focused on the challenges and opportunities that concern the "3Ds" of Defense, Development
and Diplomacy and critical intersections with the intelligence community. Our work has focused on the wicked and sometimes overlapping
problem sets of fragility, violent extremism, terrorism, civil war, and insurgency. Our work on these complex issues has included
projects with the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, USAID, the National Counterterrorism Center and the U.S. Institute of
Peace."
FDG also states on is website that it also regularly does work for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Omidyar Group -- which
is controlled by Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire with deep ties to the U.S. national security establishment that were the subject of
a recent MintPress series. According to journalist Tim Shorrock, who mentions the document in
a recent investigation
focusing on Pierre Omidyar for Washington Babylon , FDG was the "sole contractor" hired by USAID to create a "new counterinsurgency
doctrine for the Trump administration" and the fruit of that effort is the "RED Team" document described above.
One of the co-authors of the document is
Alexa Courtney , FDG founder
and former USAID liaison officer with the Department of Defense; former manager of civilian counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan
for USAID; and former counterinsurgency specialist for U.S. intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
In addition, according to Shorrock, Courtney's name has also been found "on several Caerus [Associates] contracts with USAID and
US intelligence that were leaked to me on a thumb drive, including a $77 million USAID project to track 'licit and illicit networks'
in Honduras." Courtney, according to
her LinkedIn account, was also
recently honored by Chevron Corporation for her "demonstrated leadership and impact on development results." MintPress
recently reported
on the role of Chevron in the current U.S.-led effort to topple Maduro and replace him with Guaidó.
Send in the USAID
Though Devex was told last month that USAID was "still working on the details in formulating the Rapid Expeditionary Development
(RED) Teams initiative," Courtney
stated
that the report's contents had been "received really favorably" by "very senior" and "influential" former and current government
officials she had interviewed during the creation of the document.
For instance, one respondent asserted that the RED Team system would "restore the long-lost doing capacity of USAID." Another
USAID official with 15 years of experience, including in "extremely denied environments," stated that:
We have to be involved in national security or USAID will not be relevant. Anybody who doesn't think we need to be working
in combat elements or working with SF [special forces] groups is just naïve. We are either going to be up front or irrelevant
USAID is going through a lot right now, but this is an area where we can be of utility. It must happen."
Given that the document represents the efforts of the sole contractor tasked with developing the current administration's new
counterterrorism strategy, there is plenty of reason to believe that its contents -- published for over a year -- have been or are
set to be put to use in Venezuela, potentially as part of the upcoming "Operation Freedom," set to begin on April 6.
This is supported by the troubling correlation between a document produced by the NED-funded group CANVAS and the recent power
outages that have taken place throughout Venezuela, which were described as U.S.-led "sabotage" by the country's government. A
recent report by The Grayzone detailed how a September 2010 memo by CANVAS -- which trained Juan Guaidó -- described in detail
how the potential collapse of the country's electrical infrastructure, like that recently seen in Venezuela, would be "a watershed
event" that "would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate."
The document specifically named the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri Dam, which failed earlier this month as a result
of what the Venezuelan government asserted was "sabotage" conducted by the U.S. government. That claim was bolstered by U.S. Senator
Marco Rubio's apparent foreknowledge of the power outage. Thus, there is a precedent of correlation between these types of documents
and actions that occur in relation to the current U.S. regime-change effort in Venezuela.
Furthermore, it would make sense for the Trump administration to attempt to enact such an initiative as that described in the
document, given its apparent inability to launch a military intervention in Venezuela, despite its frequent claims that "all options
are on the table." Indeed, U.S. allies -- including those close to Venezuela, like Colombia --
have rejected military intervention, given the U.S.' past role in bloody coups and civil wars throughout the region.
Thus, with its hands tied when it comes to military intervention, only covert actions -- such as those described in the RED Team
document -- are likely to be enacted by the U.S. government, at least at this stage of its ongoing "regime change" effort in Venezuela.
"... By Thomas Ferguson, Director of Research for the Institute of New Economic Thinking; Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Originally published at the Institute of New Economic Thinking website ..."
"... Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them. ..."
"... We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues, state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing the financial system. ..."
"... In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk, in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion. Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions? ..."
Running in the background, though, was a new, darker theme: That the post-2008 reforms had gone too far in restricting policymakers'
discretion in crises. The trio most responsible for making the post-Lehman bailout revolution -- Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner,
and Henry Paulson --
expressed their
misgivings in a joint op-ed :
But in its post-crisis reforms, Congress also took away some of the most powerful tools used by the FDIC, the Fed and the Treasury
the FDIC can no longer issue blanket guarantees of bank debt as it did in the crisis, the Fed's emergency lending powers have
been constrained, and the Treasury would not be able to repeat its guarantee of the money market funds.
These powers were critical in stopping the 2008 panic The paradox of any financial crisis is that the policies necessary to
stop it are always politically unpopular. But if that unpopularity delays or prevents a strong response, the costs to the economy
become greater.
We need to make sure that future generations of financial firefighters have the emergency powers they need to prevent the next
fire from becoming a conflagration.
Sotto voce fears of this sort go back to the earliest reform discussions. But the question surfaced dramatically in Timothy Geithner's
2016 Per Jacobsson Lecture, " Are We Safer? The Case for Strengthening
the Bagehot Arsenal ." More recently, the Group of Thirty
has advanced similar suggestions -- not too surprisingly, since Geithner was co-project manager of the report, along with Guillermo
Ortiz, the former Governor of the Mexican Central Bank, who introduced the former Treasury Secretary at the Per Jacobson lecture.
Aside from the financial collapse itself, probably nothing has so shaken public confidence in democratic institutions as the wave
of bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse. The redistribution of wealth and opportunity that the bailouts wrought surely helped
fuel the populist surges that have swept over Europe and the United States in the last decade. The spectacle of policymakers rubber
stamping literally unlimited sums for financial institutions while preaching the importance of austerity for everyone else has been
unbearable to millions of people.
Especially in money-driven political systems, affording policymakers unlimited discretion also plainly courts serious risks. Put
simply, too big to fail banks enjoy a uniquely splendid situation of "heads I win, tails you lose" when they take risks. Scholars
whose research INET has supported, notably
Edward Kane , have shown how the certainty of government bailouts advantages large financial institutions, directly affecting
prices of their bonds and stocks.
For these reasons INET convened a panel at a G20 preparatory meeting in Berlin on "
Moral Hazard Issues in Extended Financial Safety Nets ."
The Power Point presentations of the three panelists are presented in the order in which they gave them, since the latter ones sometimes
comment on Edward Kane
's analysis of the European banks. Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American
savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them.
Peter Bofinger
, Professor of International and Monetary Economics at the University of Würzburg and an outgoing member of the German Economic Council,
followed with a discussion of how the system has changed since 2008.
Helene Schuberth
, Head of the Foreign Research Division of the Austrian National Bank, analyzed changes in the global financial governance system
since the collapse.
The panel took place as public discussion of a proposed merger between two giant German banks, the Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank,
reached fever pitch. The panelists explored issues directly relevant to such fusions, without necessarily agreeing among themselves
or with anyone at INET.
But the point Robert Johnson, INET's President, and I
made some years back , amid an earlier wave of talk about using public money to bail out European banks, remains on target:
We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues,
state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with
bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best
practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many
years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing
the financial system.
The simplest way to do that is to have the state take equity in the banks it rescues and write down the equity of bank shareholders
in proportion. This can be done in several ways -- direct equity as a condition for bailout, requiring warrants that can be exercised
later, etc. The key points are for the state to take over the banks, get the bad loans rapidly out of those and into a "bad bank,"
and hold the junk for a decent interval so the rest of the market does not crater. When the banks come back to profitability,
you can cash in the warrants and sell the stock if you don't like state ownership. That way the public gets its money back .at
times states have even made a profit.
In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk,
in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion.
Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge
piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions?
there needs to be an asset tax on/break up of the megas. End the hyper-agglomeration of deposits at the tail end.
not holding my breath though. (see NY state congressional delegation)
to be generous, tax starts at $300 billion. Even then it affects only a dozen or so US banks. But would be enough to clamp
down on the hyper-scale of the largest US/world banks.
The world would be better off with lot more mid-sized regional players.
Anyone who mentions Timmy Geithner without spitting did not pay attention during the Obama reign of terror. He and Obama crowed
about the Making Home Affordable Act, implying that it would save all homeowners in mortgage trouble, but conveniently neglected
to mention that less than 100 banks had signed up. The thousands of non-signatories simply continued to foreclose. Not to mention
Eric Holder's intentional non-prosecution of banksters. For these and many other reasons, especially his "Islamic State is only
the JV team" crack, Obama was one of our worst presidents.
Fergusons graph on DBK's default probabilities coincides with the ECB's ending its asset purchase programme and entering the
"reinvestment phase of the asset purchase programme". https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.html
The worst of the euro zombie banks appear to be getting tense and nervous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKpzCCuHDVY
Maybe that is why Jerome Powell did his volte-face last month on gradually raising interest rates. Note that the Fed also reduced
its automatic asset roll-off. I'm curious if the other euro-zombies in the "peers" return on equity chart are are experiencing
volatility also.
Apparently the worst fate you can suffer as long as you don't go Madoff is Fuld. According to wikipedia his company manages
a hundred million which must be humiliating. It's not as humiliating as locking the guy up in prison would be by a very long stretch.
Greenspan famously lamented that there isn't anything the regulators can really do except make empty threats. This is dishonest.
The regulations are not carved in stone like the ten commandments. In China they execute incorrigible financiers all the time.
Everybody forgets (or at least does not mention) that Greenspan was a member of the Class of '43, the (mostly Canadian) earliest
members of the Objectivist Cult with guru Ayn Rand. Expecting him to act rationally is foolish. It may happen accidentally (we
do not know why he chose to let the economy expand unhindered in 1999), but you cannot count on it. In a world with information
asymmetry expecting markets to be concerned about reputation is ridiculous. To expect them to police themselves for long term
benefit is even more ridiculous.
I think Finance is currently about 13% of the S&P 500, down from the peak of about 18% or so in 2007. I think we will have
a healthy economy and improved political climate when Finance is about 8-10% of the S&P 500 which is about where I think finance
plays a healthy, but not overwhelming rentier role in the economy.
And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation , another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his
book, "
War With Russia? " It's a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary
Cold War, and the opening essay ,
adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.
"Some people who privately share our concerns -- again, in Congress, the media,
universities and think tanks -- do not speak out at all. For whatever
reason -- concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal
disposition -- they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent
is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option," Cohen wrote, adding, "We
should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my
guidance, and I always advise, 'Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could
adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family
and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead'."
Well, what was my excuse?
Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there's not much
there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this -- exhorting
readers against succumbing to feeling "disappointed".
Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted , it would have
been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We
could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.
Right before the species-ending war with Russia.
In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently
reminded us that, Mueller aside, "it's not over!" The "focus of the investigation" will move
now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will
continue to dream up wild theories -- they'll be Scotch-taped on every vertical
surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.
The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the
more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential
elections -- and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who
have tried to bring down the president -- that skeptical journalists more than
ever will be bullied to keep silent?
Rootless Whataboutism
As a test case -- a first step on the road to journalistic recovery --
can I suggest we at least retire the insane, Orwellian term "whataboutism?"
Whataboutism really deserves consideration as a "Word of the Year", and not in a good way.
There have been multiple non-ironic media reports about this odious concept,
on NPR , in the
Huffington Post ,
in The Washington Post , you name it.
"His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow," The Washington Post
told us awhile back, "but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet
propaganda tactic 'whataboutism,' the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting
moral equivalency between two things that aren't necessarily comparable."
NPR's version also claims that whataboutism is a Soviet-tainted practice. "It's not exactly
a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the
'yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there' defense," NPR says. "But it came to be associated with the
USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and
afterward, as Russia."
Yet in my experience, it's not so much a Soviet tactic as an American one --
specifically, it's a way of demanding a loyalty oath to the anti-Trump resistance.
I have occasionally dared express skepticism about the entire overblown story that Russia
was involved in our 2016 elections at all. That's right. I don't buy it. I am not
entirely convinced that "Russian bots and trolls" infected anyone's mind by, say, taking
positions both for and against gun control after the Parkland high school mass shooting, or
by setting up
anti-masturbation hotlines , or by
giving bad reviews to "Star Wars: the Last Jedi."
I am also not entirely convinced that the Russians, having supposedly decided at the highest
levels of their government to try to sink Hilary Clinton's candidacy, couldn't think of
anything more clever than to spear-phish campaign manager John Podesta's G-mail.
Nor do I
share the concerns of The Times of London that the Russian animated cartoon "Masha
and the Bear" is part of a soft propaganda drive to weaken the minds of Estonian children ahead
of their eventual annexation by Red Army tanks.
Yet before I can even offer any subtler qualification of all this -- sure,
there is Russian-government, let's say, "illicit computer and social media activity" out there,
mixed with a lot of other noise signals (click-bait farms, which explains at least some of the
infamous Internet Research Agency's activities; ordinary Russians with pro-Kremlin positions
and personal Facebook accounts; and yes, people sitting on their beds who weigh 400 pounds),
but it has to be weighed against -- I'll be cut off.
"That's whataboutism ," I've been told flatly.
It's actually not -- that doesn't even meet the absurd quasi-official
definitions of this new Kafkaesque term -- but that's the whole point.
Disagreement is by its very nature whataboutist . Every skeptical question, after all,
could technically begin, "But what about ?"
Of course, it's far, far worse if I truly commit a whataboutism and -- God
forbid! God forbid! – I express curiosity about The New York Times
reporting about millions flowing to the Clintons and associated with the Russian purchase
of American uranium mines.
Whataboutism! It's so comparable to the old Soviet thought crimes --
Trotskyite, wrecker, cosmopolitan, rootless cosmopolitanism Every time I hear someone
flag a statement as guilty of whataboutism, I mentally add " rootless whataboutism."
People tell me Mueller missed the point. It's about Russian oligarch and Kremlin money,
invested in Trump real estate -- it's not over! All hail the Southern District
prosecutors! OK, let's see it, I'm open to that possibility. But if all Russian money is
tainted just because it's "oligarchical" -- good luck defining that
! -- then is it O.K. for the spouse of then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to
take $500,000 for a single hour's work, a speech in Moscow, for one of the most famous
"oligarch" banks?
"That's whataboutism! NPR and The Washington Post say that's a
Soviet-favored tactic! Your loyalty is thus suspect two-fold. Have you had contact with
any Russian nationals?"
Communists and Crickets
"EVIDENCE POINTS TO RUSSIA AS MAIN SUSPECT IN BRAIN INJURY ATTACKS ON DOZENS OF U.S.
DIPLOMATS" was the report by
MSNBC in September 2017, and they flogged that big scoop for months, and have never
really apologized for it.
Two dozen American diplomats in Cuba suffered headaches, dizziness and other vague symptoms
they blamed on strange sounds -- sounds some of them tape-recorded and supplied
to journalists, doctors and the government. "It sounds sort of like a mass of crickets," was
the opening line of the Associated Press report about the recordings (which you can
listen to yourself here ).
But no. Not crickets. As MSNBC reported, our intelligence services had intercepted
Russian communications (!) revealing the sounds were "some kind of microwave weapon,"
one so sophisticated that our top government minds were at a loss.
We might not know how it works, MSNBC reported, but we did know it was a weapon, and
"now Russia is the leading suspect."
"This is not an accident," reported anchorwoman Andrea Mitchell then. "This is not a
microwave listening device gone bad. This is an attack -- against American
diplomats and intelligence officers, and this was targeting."
What an amazing allegation. The Russian government was beaming a mysterious, high-tech
weapon at our citizens ; we had intercepted communications that made this
clear.
For more than a year, I and colleagues with Russia-reporting experience would be grilled
about this, and would just have to shrug apologetically. We just didn't know what to say. It
didn't make a lot of face-value sense -- why exactly would Russian agents, amid
all this rabid anti-Russia hysteria, beam a secret brain-frying weapon at two-dozen random
American diplomats and their family members in Cuba, for weeks apparently? What would be the
logic behind giving these random-seeming people headaches and making them dizzy and even
causing "brain injuries similar to concussions"?
As a physician, I also shared the s
kepticism of colleagues published about this in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Playing odds, I agreed with those critics that I would have assumed either a
mass psychogenic illness or a viral infection more likely etiologies than a secret Siberian
death ray. I also read "brain injuries similar to concussions" as, "brain injuries that don't
show up on objective testing." (Of course, I've not examined any of these patients or reviewed
their cases so it's not for me to say.)
But in our fevered Russophobic environment, no one wanted to entertain alternative
scenarios -- after all, we don't even understand this sophisticated
weapon, which our intelligence agencies assure us (anonymously) they have intercepted Russian
communications bragging about, so how dare we debate the logic behind its use? (Maybe
this is how they control the president!)
Then three months ago, American scientists published in a peer-review journal their analysis
of the dastardly recordings and
identified the sounds : Crickets. Caribbean crickets.
Specifically, the echoing call of the male, short-tailed indies. During mating season.
But did MSNBC apologize, or retract?
Crickets.
Instead, during a historically cold week this winter, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow used
the excuse of a government panel about energy security to go on a Jack D. Ripper about Russia
someday deciding to freeze middle America to death.
"It is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed
the power in Fargo today? What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux
Falls just 'poofed', on the coldest day in recent memories, and it wasn't in our power
whether or not to turn them back on?" Maddow asked. "What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely --
as the act of a foreign power! -- on the same day the temperature in
your front yard matched the temperature in Antarctica? I mean, what would you and your family
do?"
Gee, I don't know Rachel. What would my family and I do if Russia launched a nuclear weapon
at my front yard? I guess we'd all die. I guess I don't know who to trust anymore, I feel
exhausted by the news, sick of it all, I just want to stop caring, and you seem to feel the
same, and omigosh Rachel, we've been infected by the red virus!
'They Hate our Freedoms'
James Comey, the former FBI director, testified before the Senate after his firing that the
Russians are "coming after America," because, "They think that this great experiment of ours is
a threat to them, and so they're going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as
possible."
Right. It's because "they hate our freedoms."
Where have I heard that before?
People had been waiting breathlessly for Mueller's report, but in reality, everything we
needed to know was right there in the first report -- the January 6, 2017, grand
announcement, the big reveal by our Intelligence Community -- the consensus of
CIA, FBI and NSA -- "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S.
Elections."
I remember finishing that report at the time and thinking:
Holy Cow, they have nothing.
Nothing!
Of the 15 pages with any meat to them in that report, seven were a long, bizarre complaint
about the existence and activities of RT (formerly RussiaToday ), the
Kremlin-sponsored English-language news channel.
Our intelligence agencies reported that RT has become "the most-watched foreign news
channel in the UK," had more YouTube viewers than the BBC or CNN , and was
surpassing al-Jazeera in New York and Washington D.C. ( Voice of America , which
is the U.S. government version of RT , has no sense of humor or passion and so no
viewers anywhere outside of Foggy Bottom.)
RT's success was, per the intelligence report, thanks to a combination of lavish
Kremlin funding and an alluring editorial slant. The intelligence report quoted RT's
editor as saying her station got lots of new viewers after offering sympathetic coverage of the
Occupy Wall Street movement. The intelligence report continued:
In an effort to highlight the alleged "lack of democracy" in the United States, RT broadcast,
hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the
political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does
not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a "sham." 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 RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts
on public health
This was hilarious of course -- a public snit by our intel communities about
Russians racking up big numbers among American viewers in Washington and New York , just
by offering mildly critical takes on drone killings and fracking and "alleged Wall Street
greed" ("alleged"? Really ?). We were promised a major assessment of any improper
Russian influences on our 2016 electoral process and we got -- this? A formal
complaint that Russian TV gave Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein too much air time?
All this bitching and moaning about RT -- which, remember, is not some
secret plot, but just a public TV station you can go watch on YouTube or not watch
-- takes up well more than half of that grand intelligence community assessment.
It really speaks volumes about what was on their minds. And again, my conclusion reading it two
years ago was: So, they've got nothing.
The one caveat, though, was that there was a classified appendix. There's always a
classified appendix. So, who knew what was in that ? After all, immediately and in the
two years since, intelligence officials have occasionally been cited -- always
anonymously! --
in The Guardian ,
The New Yorker , and The
New York Times -- as claiming to have intercepted communications between the
Trump team and the Russian government.
Well, by now, we should realize the appendix is a myth.
First, we now know that
at least part of it -- and, I would guess, probably all of it --
was nothing more than the Steele report, the infamous document first posted on
BuzzFeed , that collection of anti-Trump opposition research paid for by the Hilary Clinton
campaign. (You know -- the pee tape stuff.)
And we now also know, courtesy of Robert Mueller's report, that there are no "intercepted
communications" between Russians and the Trump campaign teams. Just like there are no Russian
intercepts about secret Siberian brain-frying rays in Cuba, because that, again, was the mating
call of a short-tailed Caribbean cricket.
I don't know what's funnier about all of this -- and it is damned funny,
really -- the fact that all of this has actually happened , or the fact
that I feel the need to come out of journalistic retirement to help point it out.
A
President With a Traitor's Heart -- for Six More Years
And that's the way it is, and has been, all along for these past two years. There have been
non-stop media allegations that, one way or another, our narcissistic, loud-mouthed, overtly
racist U.S. president has a traitor's heart. Any errors or inaccuracies -- and
there have been a shocking number of retracted "scoops," as well as screwups like the Caribbean
crickets that have just been ignored -- are excused in service of this larger
truth: Our president has a traitor's heart.
But I already knew that! We all did!
We knew it the moment he said , "Russia, if you're listening, I
hope you'll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" -- referencing
some official e-mails of Hilary Clinton's that were improperly handled and got deleted. (Among
the onion layers of irony to this political season is that Trump pioneered the 21st century
witch hunt. There has never been any evidence that Clinton's deleted emails represent anything
at all -- yet Trump hammered away at this as if it mattered, until one day it
did. And he didn't even suggest investigations, he skipped straight to "lock her up!").
Being racist, or stupid, or sexist, or a bully, or a New York real estate developer
-- all of these are deep character flaws. They are not always crimes. (Sexually
assaulting someone is always a crime, however, even if you are a TV star and remember
your breath mints.)
And yet, again, we already knew all of this. Remember this transcript
from The New York Times ?
Trump : I did try and fuck her. She was married and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I
took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, "I'll show you
where they have some nice furniture." I took her out furniture -- I moved on
her like a bitch. But I couldn't get there.
Trump : Yeah, that's her [peeking out a trailer window at a different target, an
approaching actress] . I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You
know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them.
It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything.
Billy Bush [a fawning minor TV personality] : Whatever you want.
Trump : Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
I share your pain. And I have no doubt he'd trade his own son for majority ownership of a
moderately nice golf course. But I'm also, frankly, no longer very interested in him. I'm much
more interested in us -- the rest of us.
What happened to us?
Well, I'll amend that slightly. I am of course quite interested in seeing Donald Trump leave
office. I suspect, however, that these two-plus years of journalistic malpractice --
a politically-motivated Red Scare at a time when we don't even have any Reds anymore,
just Russians -- has locked in his second term. (What's that? Impeachment
you say? Oh please. He'd set up a government-in-exile in Mar-a-Lago and then he'd be around for
twenty more years instead of six. And he'd have half the nation with him the entire
time.) So thank you for that, MSNBC and NPR and New York Times.
"... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. ..."
"... Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
" Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent
political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure
to see it coming.
Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf
Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us
so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ."
As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or
(IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about
private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense
Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think
he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.
Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted.
Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have
been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in
the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people
with strong stomachs:
Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered,
hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been
proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis
on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump,
and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.
They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by unexpectedly allowing waivers on
Iranian oil in November.
The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't have access to enough heavy oil
to meet their own needs.
Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue its empire. Without Venezuelan oil,
the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will remain so.
Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria, now Venezuela, Russia exposes the
U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.
If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are finished. For this reason the U.S. will
continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier actions, until it succeeds or breaks.
In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the U.S. will eventually move to destroy
Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.
Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out. Will the world become a multi-polar
world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by
a brutal, erratic hegemon?
So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
Notable quotes:
"... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
"... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
"... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
"... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
"... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
"... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
"... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
"... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
But as I foresaw well before the summary
of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests
are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent
of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been
a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves
engaged in " a cover-up
."
Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's
exculpatory finding actually mean that "
Russiagate
is dead " and indeed that " it expired
in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's
toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and
again in one form or another.
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller
investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged
"Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book
War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.
§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack
of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even
suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our
elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate
declining confidence in the entire electoral process.
Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites,
which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?
§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but
hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent
of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able
to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager,
Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a "
next time ."
§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers
and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate
media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media
did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January
2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here
about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi
has given us a meticulously documented
account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is
a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."
Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times
published on its front page
an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he
explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the
past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably
factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway.
In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the
Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "
have no regrets ."
§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational
institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the
party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell
from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance."
With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional
damage being done by Russiagate allegations.
As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.
Rachel Maddow
continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it
did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other
Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous
absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)
§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political,
economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived,
as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's
necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts
with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle
has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be "
derisive and scornful
" toward our political life.
"... All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. ..."
"... Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions. ..."
"... But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. ..."
"... This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations. ..."
"... The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. ..."
"... In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well ..."
"... WashingtonBezos Post writers are moronic or
drunk."
What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.
One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I
hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there
remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to
come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the
level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't
like Trump? Bolton? Clinton?
All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are
entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking
cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is
quite real and extends to the entire population.
How did this happen to America?
Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid
information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the
western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and
supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept
informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good
decisions.
With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites
themselves relied upon to inform their decisions.
Things like the CIA World Factbook,
for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be
trusted back then to be relatively dependable.
But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the
desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory
then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could
be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America
(it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become
just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a
"truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.
This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality
in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop
of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly
indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation,
from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations.
As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some
sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the
newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their
gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to
believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who
suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.
The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to
help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these
information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the
"proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" ,
even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality.
To do otherwise would be to
aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation
at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much
conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as
information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality
bubbles).
In short, WashingtonBezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk.
They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the
entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well.
Some Americans have
broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small...
certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of
the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the
corporate elites.
I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is
going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to
participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this
regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and
feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies
of the regime. Resist!
As we noted previously, The Hill reports , Woolsey, who was a senior advisor to President-elect Donald Trump , said: "I don't think people ought to say they know for sure there's only one. I don't think they're likely to be proven correct. It
shouldn't be portrayed as one guilty party," "It's much more complicated than that. This is not an organized operation that is hacking into a target. It's more like a bunch
of jackals at the carcass of an antelope ."
Woolsey suggested China and Iran could be behind cyber breaches in the U.S. Is it Russian? Probably some," he said. "Is it Chinese and Iranian? Maybe. We may find out more from Mr. Trump coming up today." This follows Trump's comments on Sunday hinting he would reveal new information about alleged Russian hacking during a New Year's
Eve celebration at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.
"[I know] things that other people don't know," he said. "I just want them to be sure because it's a pretty serious charge. I
think it's unfair if they don't know."
To which Woolsey contentiously also commented:
"There's a possibility that he is [playing us] a little bit."
But as is clear, Woolsey's belief that the Russians "were in there" still goes further than what Trump has said about the hacks
... which may be why Woolsey has announced in a formal statement
"Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a Senior Adviser to President-elect Trump or the transition," Woolsey's
spokesman, Jonathan Franks, wrote in a statement that was first reported by CNN's Jeremy Diamond.
"He wishes the President-elect and his Administration great success in their time in office."
Furthermore, The Washington Post's Philip
Rucker reports, Woolsey resigned after being cut out of intelligence talks with Trump and his national security adviser, retired
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Here we go, this is from Buzzfeed so according to the NYT's and Washington Post this source would qualify as "fake news"...lol...but!...
"The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI's Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department
of Justice's National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney's Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation,
but the FBI never requested access to the DNC's computer servers," Eric Walker, the DNC's deputy communications director, told
BuzzFeed News in an email."
...but!...just looky here...we've got an actual non-anonymous, real life, people-type person who is not speaking from the shadows
in an underground parking garage its, Eric Walker, the DNC's deputy communications director.
I still think it is independent patriots assited by patriotic insiders who exposed the DNC's criminal activity.
Anyway, when do we get the criminal investigation into the contents of the leaks? That's where the meat is. Not that someone
exposed the crimes; they deserve a medal.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, was a vocal advocate of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq who promoted allegations that
Saddam Hussein harbored illegal weapons of mass destruction.
No he does not. The claim of Trump desire to cut Neocon Deep State sounds like humor now
But the idea of dual personalities of the US Deep State with "Neocon-Neoliberal Deep State" as the dominant personality
-- "We came, we saw, he died" personality is still valid.
Notable quotes:
"... I have long held that America's Deep State --the unelected National Security State often referred to as the Shadow Government-- is not a unified monolith but a deeply divided ecosystem in which the dominant Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchy is being challenged by elements which view the Neocon-Neoliberal agenda as a threat to national security and the interests of the United States. ..."
"... I call these anti-Neocon-Neoliberal elements the progressive Deep State ..."
"... If you want a working definition of the Neocon-Neoliberal Deep State, Hillary Clinton's quip-- we came, we saw, he died --is a good summary: a bullying, arrogance-soaked state-within-a-state pursuing an agenda of ceaseless intervention while operating a global Murder, Inc., supremely confident that no one in the elected government can touch them. ..."
I have long held that America's Deep State --the unelected National Security State often referred to as the Shadow Government--
is not a unified monolith but a deeply divided ecosystem in which the dominant Neocon-Neoliberal Oligarchy is being challenged by
elements which view the Neocon-Neoliberal agenda as a threat to national security and the interests of the United States.
I call these anti-Neocon-Neoliberal elements the progressive Deep State.
If you want a working definition of the Neocon-Neoliberal Deep State, Hillary Clinton's quip-- we came, we saw, he died --is
a good summary: a bullying, arrogance-soaked state-within-a-state pursuing an agenda of ceaseless intervention while operating a
global Murder, Inc., supremely confident that no one in the elected government can touch them.
Until Trump unexpectedly wrenched the presidency from the Neocon's candidate. The Neocon Deep State's response was to manufacture
a mass-media hysteria that Russia had wrongfully deprived the Neocon's candidate (Hillary Clinton) of what was rightfully hers: the
presidency. (The Neocons operate their own version of the divine right of Political Nobility .)
The Neocon-Neoliberals' strategy was to delegitimize Trump's victory by ascribing it to "Russian Hacking," a claim that remains
entirely unsubstantiated. Now that this grasping-at-straws Hail Mary coup attempt by a politicized CIA and its corporate media mouthpiece
has failed, the Neocon Deep State is about to find out the Progressive Deep State finally has a president who is willing and able
to cut the Neocon-Neoliberals off at the knees.
If you want documented evidence of this split in the Deep State--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Nobody in the higher echelons
of the Deep State is going to leak anything about the low-intensity war being waged because the one thing everyone agrees on is the
Deep State's dirty laundry must be kept private.
As a result, the split is visible only by carefully reading between the lines, by examining who is being placed in positions of
control in the Trump Administration, and reading the tea leaves of who is "retiring" (i.e. being fired) or quitting, which agencies
are suddenly being reorganized, and the appearance of dissenting views in journals that serve as public conduits for Deep State narratives.
I have also long held that Wall Street's political dominance is part and parcel of the Neocon-Neoliberal ideology , and the progressive
elements in the Deep State also want to (finally) limit the power of the big banks and the rest of the Wall Street crowd.
The split in the Deep State is a reflection of the profound political disunity that is occurring in the U.S. In other words, it
isn't just disunity in the masses or the political elites--it's a division in all levels of our society.
The cause is not difficult to discern: the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the few is generating levels
of inequality that threaten democracy, the social order and the vitality of the economy:
As someone who has studied the Deep State for 40 years, I find it ironic that so many self-identified "progressives" do not understand
that the U.S. military is now the Progressive element and it's the civilian leadership--the Neocon-Neoliberals-- who are responsible
for leading the nation into quagmires and handing the keys to the chicken coop to the wolves of Wall Street.
When military leaders such as Eric Shinseki questioned the Neocon's insane "strategy" in Iraq--essentially a civilian fantasy
of magical-thinking--the Neocons quickly cashiered him (Shinseki was a wounded combat veteran of Vietnam who rose through the ranks--the
exact opposite of the coddled never-get-my-hands-dirty Elites in the civilian Neocon-Neoliberal leadership.)
To the degree that the U.S. has become a Third World Oligarchy owned and controlled by a financial-political Elite, then the U.S.
military is one of the few national institutions that hasn't been corrupted by top-down politicization and worship of Wall Street.
Shinseki et al. did not amass a fortune from Wall Street like Bill and Hillary Clinton. The simple dictum-- follow the money --maps
the lay of the land rather neatly.
The Neocon-Neoliberals have run the nation into the ground. They must be fired and put out to pasture before they do any more
harm. That includes the Fake-"Progressives" and the fake-"Conservatives" alike who have enriched themselves within the Neocon-Neoliberal
Oligarchy.
If you are surprised that the Democratic Party, the CIA and Wall Street are all hugging each other in the same cozy Neocon-Neoliberal
Oligarchic embrace, you shouldn't be. Open your eyes.
The problem is that the deep state owns most if not all the wet workers.
They will do whatever the DS says since their paychecks depend upon it.
Best thing would be to ID the wet workers and give them X amount of time to come in from the cold, then give them the choice
of taking a payoff and staying out of trouble or getting their wings clipped for violating parole, or turning state's evidence
in exchange for a job or getting their spawn into good schools/jobs.
If they miss the deadline they default into "problems" and get dealt with accordingly.
If Trump can cut the neo-fascist deep-state off at the knees, America can be great again!
The Spanish-American Inquisition : Mexican propaganda was the reason that people voted for Hillary Clinton. NYT largest shareholder
is Carlos Slim who has lost 40% of his net worth in the last 2 years as a result of the peso. Trump would diminish his own personal
empire by further devaluation of the peso and by reducing Mexican manufacturing.
The Mexican propaganda was not merely limited to the NYT. Telemundo also played a large part in this. The infiltration of Mexican
spies and propagandists through telemundo owned by Comcast, the country's largest media organization has completely compromised
Comcast! All of their companies endorsed Hillary in order to benefit the Mexican economy!
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in order to spread Cuban propaganda. His adopted father was from Cuba. Since Jeff Bezos
purchased WaPo, Obama has restored relations with Cuba. Coincidence?! We think not!!!
CNN is Chilean propaganda -- What lengths will they go to in order to mislead the public as the Chilean president owns Chilevisian
which is a Time Warner subsidiary and Time Warner owns CNN?! Trump's plan of rewriting NAFTA would be less favorable to Chile
than it is in its current form! CNN is trying to get people to put the needs of the Chilean people above the needs of American
people!
Congress has the right to declare war, but the president is the commander in chief. Let congress declare war on Russia and
go and fight the Russians themselves. They can declare war, but there will be nobody to fight it, unless they do it themselves!
The Fed and the TBTF banks run Deep State, and according to the latest article in the WSJ, Trump is beyond indebted to the
TBTF banks. If true, this is scary and gives Trump a pretty serious reason for putting so many Goldmanites in positions of power
in his Administration.
(Wall Street Journal)
"More than 150 financial institutions hold debt from President-elect Donald Trump's businesses or businesses in which he is
at least a 30 percent stakeholder, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
That amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential conflicts of interest as Trump prepares to begin his presidency.
When Trump submitted a required financial disclosure form with the Federal Election Commission in May 2015, he listed 16 loans,
collectively worth $315 million in debt, that his businesses had received from 10 companies, according to the newspaper.
The Journal's analysis goes beyond those loans and includes debt held by companies in which Trump is at least a 30 percent
stakeholder, including, for example, the companies which control 1290 Avenue of the Americas.
That building, owned by a partnership of companies that is 30 percent owned by Trump, received $950 million in loans in 2012
from UBS Group AG, Bank of China, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank, according to the report.
Deutsche Bank, a German institution, is currently under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for its equity trading
with wealthy Russian clients.
In the case of Goldman Sachs, the bank now counts several its former employees among the highest levels of the incoming Trump
administration, including former bank president Gary Cohn, who was appointed director of Trump's National Economic Council."
"The Neocon-Neoliberals have run the nation into the ground. They must be fired and put out to pasture before they do any more
harm. That includes the Fake-"Progressives" and the fake-"Conservatives" alike who have enriched themselves within the Neocon-Neoliberal
Oligarchy."
My ass!!!!! Mr Trump is the right man at the right time to send these war criminals to hell where they belong! HW, W, Bozo,Their
globalists war cabinets,Their corrupt underlings, #MAGA #Drain the Swamp
Trump needs to distract them quickly. So I have given this a few quick moments of thought and came up with what should be Trump's
first executive order. Congress and all Federal employees are now required to use Obamacare as their health plan.
Standard Disclaimer: Aside from watching Congressional critter's heads explode, the disaster known as Obamacare would be either
repealed or fixed in a NY minute.
There were high hopes after Trump election. now they all dissipated. He betrayed his electorate and should be fired.
Notable quotes:
"... I was one of the millions of people that believed in you. Believed what you said. Heard you. You got "hired" by 60 MILLION people. WE are your boss. YOU BECAME THE EMPLOYEE. Something you are not used to. I myself convinced nearly 20 people to vote for you over these last two years. Know what I said? "He's NOT a politician. He's a business man. He's an outsider – something Washington, D.C. SORELY needs. He's NOT the same 'business as usual' guy. Mr. Trump will change things for the better in Washington. Clean it up. Make peace with Russia – not war. Trump is a BUILDER – not a destroyer. He'll negotiate FAIR deals with countries. Install sensible immigration policies. Reverse the stranglehold on health care policies that have bankrupted millions." I made them see how biased the media was against you. How they lied by omission – and sometimes outright lied about you. (To a person, they NO LONGER WATCH, TRUST, OR HEED the media anymore.) ..."
I was one of the millions of people that believed in you. Believed what you said. Heard you. You got "hired" by 60 MILLION people. WE are your boss. YOU BECAME THE EMPLOYEE. Something you are not used to. I myself convinced nearly 20 people to vote for you over these last two years. Know what I said? "He's NOT a politician. He's a business man. He's an outsider – something Washington, D.C. SORELY needs. He's NOT the same
'business as usual' guy. Mr. Trump will change things for the better in Washington. Clean it up. Make peace with Russia – not
war. Trump is a BUILDER – not a destroyer. He'll negotiate FAIR deals with countries. Install sensible immigration policies. Reverse
the stranglehold on health care policies that have bankrupted millions." I made them see how biased the media was against you.
How they lied by omission – and sometimes outright lied about you. (To a person, they NO LONGER WATCH, TRUST, OR HEED the media
anymore.)
He'll change the culture of Washington – because that's EXACTLY WHAT IT NEEDS. CHANGE."
Washington has become a den of vipers. Self-enriching criminals that have sucked the life blood out of US – YOUR EMPLOYERS
. The phrase; "You're FIRED" must be repeated often to MANY people over the next few years. People that have engorged themselves
because of the previous employees, who have mismanaged the nation, and lied to it's people.
Your very words from your speeches that convinced us to hire you. Your platform. Your slogans;
"Make America Great Again." "I'll take back this country for you".
You said that to 60 MILLION of us – and we hired you based on it.
We hired you because we're SICK AND TIRED OF CAREER POLITICIANS. We hired you because we are sick of the GREED, DUPLICITY,
THE CORRUPTION of Congress and the past administrations that have enriched the elite, while robbing from the American taxpayer.
Already, the public has noticed that you have had a LOT of the old-guard/same ol' same ol' Republican Washington "insiders"
advising you. We understand that you will need some guidance in the first few months. All "apprentices" do.
However, we, as your employers, will NOT TOLERATE THE SAME OL' SAME OL' ANYMORE.
We hired YOU to do the right THINGS. "Drain The Swamp" "Take Our Country BACK".
Commencing January 21, 2017, that's exactly what we demand of you – our new employee.
WE WILL WANT RESULTS. ACTIONS. CHANGE.
WE WILL WANT INVESTIGATIONS. ARRESTS. PROSECUTIONS OF THE PEOPLE THAT WRONGED THIS NATION. STOLE FROM IT. CORRUPTED IT. DAMAGED
IT.
Just like you monitored your "apprentices", and judged them on their performances, WE ARE JUDGING YOU. And we are NOT going
to be fooled, like the oppositions legions were and are; by a biased media that lies to them. No one is going to get a "pass"
anymore. Especially like your immediate predecessor.
That's over. On January 21, 2017, your official duties commence. We all wish you the best, and are with you. The last thing we want to do is tell you;
Concern that President-Elect Trump may not have foreseen what a Medusas' head of Snakes the .gov is. Think Ron Paul has forewarned him. It's a nasty and corrupt business.
What!? How does the last line jive with the rest above it?
You must have meant "If you don't perform and deliver as promised, then You're Fired! In the meantime, You're Hired! Welcome
Aboard."
Read it again.
"On January 21, 2017, your official duties commence. We all wish you the best, and are with you. The last thing we want to do is tell you;
You're Fired."
-----------------------------
IF Trump even reads it (doubtful), he'll get it. I get your point though Captain.
it was just yesterday that I had posted the following to a friend... very similar.
I know, well the Internet people that elected him may and can put tremendous pressure on him to do the right thing... And I
expect that to happen...I expect the people to demand through social media that they keep their promises and that they do what
they are told by the people that elected them.....can you imagine the damage that could happen if the trump supporters starting
to Diss him because he didn't do what he was told by the people that elected him.
I think in the very near future countries will be run by the people of the country via the Internet where everybody's voice
counts and the people that want to share their voice will be the actual leaders of the country and the people that want to watch
sports and stick their head in the sand will be sheeple.
I think referendums will be a much more common item
I wrote that in the hopes that someone on the "TTT" (Trump Transition Team) reads it, and maybe, maybe, shows Trump himself. We all know he trolls different sites - and I'll bet he trolls ZH.
I agree with you; the "internet people" elected him. The "alt-right" (which IS the new media) elected him. If we had no internet, and had to rely on the MSM, Clinton would have been elected.
Or worse. But they are now the "old guard ". It is funny....sickening...and sad to watch them flail away like they have relevancy -
THEY don't.
In a big way, this election was a wake up call to THEM (like the NYT piece on here shows), to clean up THEIR act.
NO MORE business as usual. CFR meets and Washington insider parties of poo.
I actually DID convince 18 people to switch from Clinton to Trump (really, it was 12 from Cruz/Bush/Sanders, and 6 outright
flip Clinton to Trump).. and ALL of them HAD been a daily staple of watching the MSM.
Getting them to stop was akin to getting a smoker off cigarettes. Some still do - but they NOW know how the MSM LIES.
(One way I showed them? A tape on YouTube of 60 Minutes "editing techniques", linked below, which REALLY opened some eyes)
The video embedded in this thread - when Ann Coulter was on Bill Maher and got mocked for her backing Trump - in several instances
- was me in 2014 and 2015. I got laughed at by many for coming out for Trump back then.
However, what I wrote is true. I literally changed 18 people into Trump supporters from then to now.
The reasons are many - but the MAIN one is;
I'm. PISSED. OFF.
I'm angry as to the mis-management, lies and over-regulation that has killed the little guy in businesses. I'm angry as to
the lies and deceit from the bought of main stream media. A whole LOT of other reasons as well.
I am giving free reign for anyone here to re-post this on ANY internet forum they want; Brietbart, Drudge, and ANY online newspaper
comment op-ed section they wish.
I only am a commenter here. I choose not to become one on any other forum.
Please copy and paste it anywhere you'd like.
I'm just a little guy. A "peon". However, I did work hard for Trump. I expect no compensation. No recognition.
I DO expect Trump however - to DO WHAT he said. As a political outsider.
I am concerned as to the vipers, old guard Washington insiders, and of course, the Deep State - along with Israel - getting
to Trump.
WE didn't elect them. We elected HIM.
So please - have at it. Post away.
I hope my post inspires others to do their own "Apprentice" type open letters to Trump.
He needs to hear from us (and I bet he does troll ZH and other finanical sites.)
Some people understood the situation in 2017, when most Trump voters were still full of illutions.
Notable quotes:
"... you like most losers are driven by your own projections. You projected your hopes and wishful thinking on Trump and it worked perfectly for him. He got elected. ..."
"... now after firing Bannon there is nothing left. He was the last and the only guarantor of your hopes. That's why MSM hated Bannon so much. ..."
"... torture, Guantanamo and stealing their oil ..."
This turn of events is the biggest challenge ever to my support of Trump. If he really goes the way he is indicating, he will
lose the support of people like me -- and there may be millions like me. We have no alternative candidate, but we will never
again be led down this road.
If Trump turns, that is the end of everything.
" we will never again be led down this road." You will, you will because you like most losers are driven by your own projections.
You projected your hopes and wishful thinking on Trump and it worked perfectly for him. He got elected.
But now after firing Bannon there is nothing left. He was the last and the only guarantor of your hopes. That's why MSM
hated Bannon so much.
The only pre-election promises that actually will be retained are torture, Guantanamo and stealing their oil. Did you vote
for these items? Anyway, that is all you are left with. Get used to it:
That never materialized... Also appointment of Pompeo show that Trump is a marionette
I was actually surprised by the amount of Trump hating comments to this article.... What is so criminal in trying to reorganize
two of 12 Us intelligence agencies. Which might become too bloated and deviate from their original purposes. Is not how restructuring
is used in business world ? And the number of commenters blaclmpousing Putin and Russia create great alarm. Looks like the US MSM managed
to brainwash the US population like in 50th during "Red Scare". Some comments looks like hate sessions from 1984.
Notable quotes:
"... Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 - Amends the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, including about its people, its history, and the federal government's policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers and instructors. ..."
"... This use of propaganda on the American public effectively nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. ..."
"... The NDAA in its current form allows the State Department and Pentagon to go beyond manipulating mainstream media outlets to directly disseminate campaigns of misinformation to the U.S. public. ..."
"... They refused to brief Congress. They were never allowed to release their findings publicly, because they still haven't. They leaked their conclusions. All to attempt to undermine the stability of their own country. And you don't see this. ..."
"... This is why Wikileaks exists. What the MSM can no longer deliver (the TRUTH and credible news), Wikileaks can deliver to the American people. ..."
"... Are you claiming the US hasn't done all it can to destabilize and destroy Russia? ..."
"... This blame Russia frenzy is a loser strategy. The sole purpose is to deligitimize Trump's victory. Can't wait for Trump to start firing a**es. ..."
"The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world [is] becoming completely politicized," an individual close to Trump's
transition operation said. "They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring agencies and how they interact."
Trump is targeting the CIA and the ODNI as he publicly wars with the U.S. intelligence community over its conclusion that Russia
interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump wants to shrink the ODNI, as he believes the agency established in 2004 as a response to the 9/11 terror attacks has become
bloated and politicized.
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 - Amends the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize
the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information
intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, including about its people, its history, and the federal government's
policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media,
and through information centers and instructors.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 passed Congress as part of the NDAA 2013 on December 28, 2012.
This use of propaganda on the American public effectively nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids
information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion.
The NDAA in its current form allows the State Department and Pentagon to go beyond manipulating mainstream media outlets
to directly disseminate campaigns of misinformation to the U.S. public.
But the US public learned quickly and they are not buying the misinformation anymore.
1) Renewables: "I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth." - April 2016
2) Social media: "I understand social media. I understand the power of Twitter. I understand the power of Facebook maybe better
than almost
anybody, based on my results, right?" - November 2015
3) Debt: "Nobody knows more about debt. I'm like the king. I love debt." - May 2016
4) Taxes, again : "I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world. Nobody knows more about
taxes." - May 2016. I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can
fix them. #failing@nytimes
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2016
They refused to brief Congress. They were never allowed to release their findings publicly, because they still haven't. They
leaked their conclusions. All to attempt to undermine the stability of their own country. And you don't see this.
No, we haven't, and we didn't. In fact, his former boss -- Yeltsin -- hired Republican political consultants to help his campaign.
Putin would like the world to believe that Russians fed up with bribery, extortion, the fall of the ruble, and the fact that their
votes don't count rising up and protesting was about outside meddling, but it was internal.
And he responded by making protests illegal, getting rid of the election of governors (he appoints them now), closing down
critical reporting outlets, and some journalists were murdered.
You moron, I served the US for 20 years in the military, but facts are facts and we need to butt the he!! out of other countries
business, and until we do, they will continue to come after us. How long were you in?
Trump has described his son-in-law as a "great guy". The president-elect has also reportedly taken the unprecedented step of requesting
security clearance for Kushner to attend top-secret presidential briefings, the first one of which was on Tuesday. It's unclear if
the request will be approved. It marks an astonishing departure and invites the accusation of nepotism.
Kushner's options for a White House job are limited given his family ties to the president, Richard Painter, who served as President
George W Bush's White House ethics lawyer, told the Associated Press. Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967 that prohibits
the president from appointing a family member – including a son-in-law – to work in the office or agency they oversee. The measure
was passed after President John F Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general.
But the law does not appear to prevent Kushner from serving as an unpaid adviser, and few doubt that Kushner will play a decisive
role in shaping the Trump presidency, acting as policy adviser and gate-keeper. As
Trump and Barack Obama met privately at the White House last week, Kushner strolled the mansion's South Lawn, deep in conversation
with Obama's chief of staff. As Kushner walked through the bustling West Wing during Trump's visit last week, he was heard asking
Obama aides: "How many of these people stay?", apparently blissfully unaware that the entire West Wing staff will leave at the end
of Obama's term.
His contacts already include Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch; he has received foreign ambassadors. Like Trump, Kushner has
never had a formal role in government, but he now appears set to be more important than many who do.
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
If if 2016 there were some hope not we know that Trump folded. Completely. He actually is not a President. he is a marionette.
Notable quotes:
"... Bankers & Trump: Bankers know you capture catch more flies with money honey. ..."
"... " former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has known Trump socially for decades and is currently advising the president-elect on foreign policy issues " - I really, really hope this is just Hammerin' Hank tooting his own horn, as he and his sycophants in the FP establishment and MSM are wont to do. ..."
"... "Trump dumps the TPP: conservatives rue strategic fillip to China" (Guardian) Another wedge angle for Trumps new-found RINO "friends" to play. Trump will have as many problems with Ayn Ryan Congress as Obama/Clinton on economic issues. ..."
"... And if Abe's Japan were really an independent country, they'd pick up the TPP baton and sell it to China. ..."
"The Trump campaign, meanwhile, delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning." - Oh, please,
this sounds like a stereotypical Google-centric view of things. They of course left out the most important part of the campaign,
the key to its inception, which could be described in terms like "The Trump campaign, meanwhile, actually noticed the widespread
misery and non-recovery in the parts of the US outside the elite coastal bubbles and DC beltway, and spotted a yuuuge political
opportunity." In other words, not sentiment manipulation – that was, after all, the Dem-establishment-MSM-wall-street-and-the-elite-technocrats'
"America is already great, and anyone who denies it is deplorable!" strategy of manufactured consent – so much as actual *reading*
of sentiment. Of course if one insisted on remaining inside a protective elite echo chamber and didn't listen to anything Trump
or the attendees actually said in those huge flyover-country rallies that wasn't captured in suitably outrageous evening-news
soundbites, it was all too easy to believe one's own hype.
" former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who has known Trump socially for decades and is currently advising the president-elect
on foreign policy issues " - I really, really hope this is just Hammerin' Hank tooting his own horn, as he and his sycophants
in the FP establishment and MSM are wont to do.
"Trump dumps the TPP: conservatives rue strategic fillip to China" (Guardian) Another wedge angle for Trumps new-found
RINO "friends" to play. Trump will have as many problems with Ayn Ryan Congress as Obama/Clinton on economic issues.
"The TPP excludes China, which declined to join, proposing its own rival version, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP), which excludes the US." You see, it is all China's fault. No info presented on why China "declined" to join.
And if Abe's Japan were really an independent country, they'd pick up the TPP baton and sell it to China.
One of the rare early realistic assessments of Trump foreign policy. most were wrong. Circe was right in major points. The
appointment of CIA director was the litmus test and Trump failed it by appointing neocon Pompeo.
Trump foreign policy is a typical neocon foreign policy. People just tried to overlook it in vain hopes that Trump will change the US
foreign policy
Notable quotes:
"... 95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time. ..."
"... And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for treason. ..."
"... Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,". ..."
"... Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon -unfriendly President was elected. ..."
"... Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The 'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to fund security agencies and buy arms. ..."
"... And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly. ..."
"... What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense. ..."
"... he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh? ..."
95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated
obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is
a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This
is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.
And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden
is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him
to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already
stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for
treason.
Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the
Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern
of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".
That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.
Many of you here are extremely naïve regarding Trump.
b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found
the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.
Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke
of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon-unfriendly
President was elected.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The
'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to
fund security agencies and buy arms.
And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder
until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad
as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military
(note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel
or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?
The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:
>> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?
>> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions?
An enormous cultural failure that has produced a brittle social fabric.
>> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?
Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction
or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.
Trump failed his electorate in this critical metric. And as such does not deserve a reelection
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's success of failure will be measured by one thing: number of factory jobs added or lost, series MANEMP at the St. Louis FRED website.* If he doesn't create at least about 100,000 a year, he's in trouble. ..."
"... Disruption of neoliberal status quo and sending Hillary and some other neocon warmongers packing is already an achievement, not matter how you slice it. ..."
"... And a hissy fit that some factions of CIA demonstrated just before inauguration (it should not be considered as a monolithic organization; more like feudal kingdom of competing and often hostile to each other and to Pentagon and FBI factions ) was a reaction to this setback to neoconservatives in Washington. ..."
"... If Trump does what he promised in foreign policy: to end the wars for the expansion of neoliberal empire and to end of Cold War II with Russia it will be a huge achievement, even if the US economics not recover from Obama's secular stagnation (oil prices probably will go higher this year, representing an important headwind) . ..."
"... While we are writing those posts nuclear forces of both the USA and Russia are on high alert, and if something happen (and proliferation of computers make this more rather then less likely), the leaders of both countries have less then 20 minutes to decide about launching a full scale nuclear war. Actually Russia now has less time because of forward movement of NATO forces. ..."
Trump's success of failure will be measured by one thing: number of factory jobs added or lost, series MANEMP at the St. Louis
FRED website.* If he doesn't create at least about 100,000 a year, he's in trouble.
*assuming the data continues to be reported if it goes south on him, or he doesn't insist that the method of measuring change.
Something that is a real fear.
Slightly OT, there is one well-known wonky government data site I am watching. I think there are better than 50/50 odds it
disappears within the next two weeks.
Disruption of neoliberal status quo and sending Hillary and some other neocon warmongers packing is already an achievement,
not matter how you slice it.
And a hissy fit that some factions of CIA demonstrated just before inauguration (it should not be considered as a monolithic
organization; more like feudal kingdom of competing and often hostile to each other and to Pentagon and FBI factions ) was a reaction
to this setback to neoconservatives in Washington.
If Trump does what he promised in foreign policy: to end the wars for the expansion of neoliberal empire and to end of
Cold War II with Russia it will be a huge achievement, even if the US economics not recover from Obama's secular stagnation (oil
prices probably will go higher this year, representing an important headwind) .
No further escalation in geopolitical conflicts represents an important tailwind and might help.
While we are writing those posts nuclear forces of both the USA and Russia are on high alert, and if something happen (and
proliferation of computers make this more rather then less likely), the leaders of both countries have less then 20 minutes to
decide about launching a full scale nuclear war. Actually Russia now has less time because of forward movement of NATO forces.
Professor Stephen Cohen thinks that this is worse then Cuban Missile Crisis and he is an expert in this area.
"... Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding? ..."
"... If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint. ..."
"... Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative destruction to government ..."
"... Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt. ..."
"... Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain. The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again ..."
"... One quibble: The destruction he applies will not be creative. It will be thorough but entirely unimaginative. ..."
"... Why do you think a war is brewing? What do you think is going to happen? They'll give him bad intel like they did with Bush? ..."
"... The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread. ..."
"... Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general I mean a state of mutual distrust. ..."
Just as an aside - not really economics, but I am really worrying about what the war between the future white house team and the
CIA that seems to be brewing. I don't see good solutions to this. It is sort of unprecedented in a major western country. Can
you think of a similar case (where the intelligence services - and perhaps the military as well regarded there own government
head as an enemy agent)?
Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up
countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding?
If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint.
Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative
destruction to government
Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt.
As with Obamacare, the idea is to destroy it and replace it with something better. Most revolutions find it easy to destroy
and very much harder to build Most sane leaders recognize this difficulty and modify the existing rather than destroy and never
getting around to replacement or find the replacement to be worse than the existing.
Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will
give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain.
The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again
I don't believe in "creative destruction", I believe in "destructive creation" which is something quite different. But that is
not the point. This is not about the government as such, it is about the security apparatus in itself. It could get very nasty
if that ends up either totally alienated or politicized.
If I were President, provoking an organization whose specialty is covert operations and which has track record of bringing about
the demise of insufficiently agreeable leaders would not be high on my to-do list.
The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would
have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread.
Trump is an isolationist who repeatedly said the Iraq war was a disaster, which it was. If the CIA is going after Trump they're
doing a bad job. The worst they could come up with is some unverified accounts that Trump likes pee-pee parties.
Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it
ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general
I mean a state of mutual distrust.
This commenter Libezkova was right: Trump folded. And probably he was a phony fighter with neoliberalism and globalization from
the very beginning. So voters were deceived exactly like they were with Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... It's hilarious that the progressive neoliberals like DeLong, Krugman, Drum, Yglesias etc have said exactly nothing about Trump's tweets at Congressional Republicans over the independent ethics committee. ..."
"... There is a propaganda technique where you describe straw-person characterizations then undermine them. When in fact the whole longwinded campaign depends on readers and listeners not bothering or too tired to focus and see the mischaracterizations in the straw. ..."
"... This whole thing is an apologia, for propaganda purposes, as I see it. We all need to take care. It takes a lot of money and effort to organize such propaganda exercises. Please take care in using and reusing these type things. ..."
"... Theoretically that might give Democrats a chance, but I think the Clintonized Party is too corrupt to take this chance. "An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought." ;-) ..."
"... In any case, 2018 elections will be very interesting as I think that the process of a slow collapse of neoliberal ideology and the rise of the US nationalist movements ("far right") will continue unabated. ..."
"At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did
in 2012 - by a wide margin. Mrs. Clinton was also not matching Mr. Obama's support among black voters."
"Mrs. Clinton's gains were concentrated among the most affluent and best-educated white voters, much as Mr. Trump's gains
were concentrated among the lowest-income and least-educated white voters."
Trump won the Republican primary and general election.
""Trump dominated - in the primary and general elections - those districts represented by Congress's most conservative members,"
Tim Alberta wrote in National Review (he is now at Politico):
They once believed they were elected to advance a narrowly ideological agenda, but Trump's success has given them reason to
question that belief.
Among these archconservatives, who in the past had been fanatical in their pursuit of ideological purity, the realization that
they can no longer depend on unfailing support from their constituents has provoked deep anxiety."
These archconservatives who say that Trump's flimsy mandate is just based on just 80,000 votes in the rustbelt are in for a
rude awakening. He won the primary. In Northern States. In Southern States. Everywhere.
It's hilarious that the progressive neoliberals like DeLong, Krugman, Drum, Yglesias etc have said exactly nothing about
Trump's tweets at Congressional Republicans over the independent ethics committee.
There is a propaganda technique where you describe straw-person characterizations then undermine them. When in fact the whole
longwinded campaign depends on readers and listeners not bothering or too tired to focus and see the mischaracterizations in the
straw.
This whole thing is an apologia, for propaganda purposes, as I see it. We all need to take care. It takes a lot of money
and effort to organize such propaganda exercises. Please take care in using and reusing these type things.
"Trump has converted the GOP into a populist, America First party" is an overstatement. He definitely made some efforts
in this direction, but it is premature to declare this "fait accompli".
If we consider two possibilities: "GOP establishment chew up Trump" and "Trump chew up GOP establishment" it is clear that
possibility is more probable.
Theoretically that might give Democrats a chance, but I think the Clintonized Party is too corrupt to take this chance.
"An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought." ;-)
In any case, 2018 elections will be very interesting as I think that the process of a slow collapse of neoliberal ideology
and the rise of the US nationalist movements ("far right") will continue unabated.
This is the same process that we see in full force in EU.
"... It was possible to say, before Warren G. Harding was elected, that he wasn't particularly well-qualified to be president. And he did turn out as president to have, as we say nowadays, some issues. But his administration was stocked with (mostly) well-qualified men who served with considerable distinction. ..."
"... To succeed in business, the brand only gets you so far. Quality matters. To succeed in the presidency, getting elected only gets you so far. Governing matters. ..."
"... But how Hegelian it would be if the thesis of the Bush and Clinton dynasties, followed by the antithesis of a Trump victory over first a Bush and then a Clinton in 2016, were to produce an unanticipated synthesis: a Trump administration marked by the reconstruction of republican normalcy in America. In its own way, that would be a genuine contribution to making America great again. ..."
"... Kristol is mad Trump lambasted the Iraq war. Was Putin against the Iraq war? I think the whole world was except for the "Coalition of the Willing." You'll never see the UK back another war like that. ..."
"... "Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone and others have denounced Clinton's uncritical praise of the "opportunity" and "freedom" of American capitalism vis-à-vis other developed nations. "With this bit of frankness," Featherstone explains, referring to the former Secretary of State's "Denmark" comments, "Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist-indeed, no non-millionaire-should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark-yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way." Indeed, Clinton's denunciation of the idea that the United States should look more like Denmark betrayed one of the glaring the fault lines within the Democratic Party, and between Clintonian liberalism and Sandersite leftism." ..."
"... Of course the progressive neoliberals in this forum regularly resort to ad hominem to any ideas or facts that don't line up with the agreed-upon party line. ..."
The Trump Administration http://tws.io/2iFd3rC
via @WeeklyStandard
Nov 28, 2016 - William Kristol
Who now gives much thought to the presidency of Warren G. Harding? Who ever did? Not us.
But let us briefly turn our thoughts to our 29th president (while stipulating that we're certainly no experts on his life or
times). Here's our summary notion: Warren G. Harding may have been a problematic president. But the Harding administration was
in some ways an impressive one, which served the country reasonably well.
It was possible to say, before Warren G. Harding was elected, that he wasn't particularly well-qualified to be president.
And he did turn out as president to have, as we say nowadays, some issues. But his administration was stocked with (mostly) well-qualified
men who served with considerable distinction.
Andrew Mellon was a successful Treasury secretary whose tax reforms and deregulatory efforts spurred years of economic growth.
Charles Dawes, the first director of the Bureau of the Budget, reduced government expenditures and, helped by Mellon's economic
policies, brought the budget into balance. Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state dealt responsibly with a very difficult
world situation his administration had inherited-though in light of what followed in the next decade, one wishes in retrospect
for bolder assertions of American leadership, though in those years just after World War I, they would have been contrary to the
national mood.
In addition, President Harding's first two Supreme Court appointments -- William Howard Taft and George Sutherland -- were
distinguished ones. And Harding personally did some admirable things: He made pronouncements, impressive in the context of that
era, in favor of racial equality; he commuted the wartime prison sentence of the Socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs. In these ways,
he contributed to an atmosphere of national healing and civility.
The brief Harding administration-and for that matter the eight years constituting his administration and that of his vice president
and successor, Calvin Coolidge-may not have been times of surpassing national greatness. But there were real achievements, especially
in the economic sphere; those years were not disastrous; they were not dark times.
President-elect Donald J. Trump probably doesn't intend to model his administration on that of President Warren G. Harding.
But he could do worse than reflect on that administration's successes-and also on its failures, particularly the scandals that
exploded into public view after Harding's sudden death. These were produced by cronies appointed by Harding to important positions,
where they betrayed his trust and tarnished his historical reputation.
Donald Trump manifestly cares about his reputation. He surely knows that reputation ultimately depends on performance. If a
Trump hotel and casino is successful, it's not because of the Trump brand-that may get people through the door the first time-but
because it provides a worthwhile experience thanks to a good management team, fine restaurants, deft croupiers, and fun shows.
If a Trump golf course succeeds, it's because it has been built and is run by people who know something about golf. The failed
Trump efforts-from the university to the steaks-seem to have in common the assumption that the Trump name by itself would be enough
to carry mediocre or worse enterprises across the finish line.
To succeed in business, the brand only gets you so far. Quality matters. To succeed in the presidency, getting elected only
gets you so far. Governing matters.
It would be ironic if Trump's very personal electoral achievement were followed by a mode of governance that restored greater
responsibility to the cabinet agencies formally entrusted with the duties of governance. It would be ironic if a Trump presidency
also featured a return of authority to Congress, the states, and to other civic institutions. It would be ironic if Trump's victory
led not to a kind of American Caesarism but to a strengthening of republican institutions and forms. It would be ironic if the
election of Donald J. Trump heralded a return to a kind of constitutional normalcy.
If we are not mistaken, it was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (though sadly unaware of the phenomena of either Warren G. Harding
or Donald J. Trump) who made much of the Irony of History.
But how Hegelian it would be if the thesis of the Bush and Clinton dynasties, followed by the antithesis of a Trump victory
over first a Bush and then a Clinton in 2016, were to produce an unanticipated synthesis: a Trump administration marked by the
reconstruction of republican normalcy in America. In its own way, that would be a genuine contribution to making America great
again.
(Harding-Coolidge-Hoover were a disastrous triumvirate that ascended to power after the Taft & Wilson administrations, as the
GOP - then the embodiment of progressivism - split apart due to the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt.)
Peter K. -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
Kristol is mad Trump lambasted the Iraq war. Was Putin against the Iraq war? I think the whole world was except for the
"Coalition of the Willing." You'll never see the UK back another war like that.
It is the neocon's taking a back seat! Kristol is co-founder of PNAC along with a Clinton mob long time foggy bottom associate's
husband.. Trump is somewhat less thrilled with tilting with Russia for the American empire which is as moral as Nero's Rome.
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
Prescient: dumping Kristol's PNAC will strengthen the republic.
"Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone and others have denounced Clinton's uncritical praise of the "opportunity" and "freedom"
of American capitalism vis-à-vis other developed nations. "With this bit of frankness," Featherstone explains, referring to the
former Secretary of State's "Denmark" comments, "Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist-indeed, no non-millionaire-should
support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity
than women in Denmark-yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way." Indeed, Clinton's denunciation of
the idea that the United States should look more like Denmark betrayed one of the glaring the fault lines within the Democratic
Party, and between Clintonian liberalism and Sandersite leftism."
Is it better to ignore this fault line and try to paper it over or is it better to debate the issues in a polite and congenial
manner?
Of course the progressive neoliberals in this forum regularly resort to ad hominem to any ideas or facts that don't line
up with the agreed-upon party line.
Kristof panic was premature and just shows that he is a really has no political analyst
talent whatsoever. Trump was quickly co-opted by neocons.
It is interesting that Kristof, even at such an early stages of Russiagate was already
"FullOfSchiff"
"... The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion. ..."
"... Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack
on the United States. ..."
"... Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship." ..."
In 1972, President Richard Nixon's White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party
offices. That Watergate burglary and related "dirty tricks," such as releasing mice at a
Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a
Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans - and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue
journalism.
Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering.
Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats' digital offices and tried to change the
election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by
Russia's president, saying, "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."
In Watergate, the break-in didn't affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don't know
for sure. There were other factors, but it's possible that Russia's theft and release of the
emails provided the margin for Donald Trump's victory.
The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion.
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and
Trump by denouncing the CIA and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to
subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America's intelligence
community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the
dictator.
Let's be clear: This was an attack on America, less lethal than a missile but still
profoundly damaging to our system. It's not that Trump and Putin were colluding to steal an
election. But if the CIA is right, Russia apparently was trying to elect a president who would
be not a puppet exactly but perhaps something of a lap dog - a Russian poodle.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely (and unfairly) mocked as President George
W. Bush's poodle, following him loyally into the Iraq war. The fear is that this time Putin may
have interfered to acquire an ally who likewise will roll over for him.
Frankly, it's mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he
excoriates everyone else, from CIA officials to a local union leader in Indiana.
Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its
attack on the United States.
Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship."
Whatever our personal politics, how can we possibly want to respond to Russia's interference
in our election by putting American foreign policy in the hands of a Putin friend?
Tillerson's closeness to Putin is especially troubling because of Trump's other Russia
links. The incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, accepted Russian money to attend
a dinner in Moscow and sat near Putin. A ledger shows $12.7 million in secret payments by a
pro-Russia party in Ukraine to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the Trump
family itself has business connections with Russia.
In two years neocons completely occupied Trump administration.
Notable quotes:
"... It's a cliche to say that the cushiest positions of influence in any US administration go to figures who were seen to have brought something to the table during the campaign. ..."
"... a lot of high-ranking neoconservatives are expecting the exact opposite, figuring that they can step right into positions of power and influence despite openly campaigning against Trump. ..."
"... There are more than a few people who would normally be in line for top positions in a Republican White House, but who were very publicly part of the "Never Trump" crowd, attacking him throughout the primary and the general election. These same people are now making public their "willingness" to work with Trump. ..."
"... In other words, they want the usual spoils of victory, but having positioned themselves as so firmly in opposition to Trump's worldview, and to Trump in general, it's not at all clear how willing Trump's transition team is to consider such candidates for important positions. ..."
"... For many of the neocons, this is likely less about getting cushy jobs or fancy titles and more about ensuring that the US remains aggressively interventionist abroad. Indeed, many of these people split with Trump in the first place over concerns he was insufficiently hawkish, and now want jobs that would put them in a position to shift his new administration in those same hawkish directions. ..."
There are more than a few people who would normally be in line for top positions in a Republican White House, but who were
very publicly part of the "Never Trump" crowd, attacking him throughout the primary and the general election. These same people are
now making public their "willingness" to work with Trump.
In other words, they want the usual spoils of victory, but having positioned themselves as so firmly in opposition to Trump's
worldview, and to Trump in general, it's not at all clear how willing Trump's transition team is to consider such candidates for
important positions.
The early indications are that a lot of the foreign policy-related positions are going to be led by high-ranking former military
officials who backed Trump's candidacy, with officials noting that long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left them with a lot of
such officials to choose from.
For many of the neocons, this is likely less about getting cushy jobs or fancy titles and more about ensuring that the US
remains aggressively interventionist abroad. Indeed, many of these people split with Trump in the first place over concerns he was
insufficiently hawkish, and now want jobs that would put them in a position to shift his new administration in those same hawkish
directions.
"... Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course. ..."
"... Thanks to George W. Bush – who dared show his face at the inauguration – and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy mess in Iraq and now Syria. ..."
"... This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what? No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.' ..."
"... If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases, acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it. ..."
What I found most impressive this time was the reaffirmation of America's dedication to the peaceful transfer of political power.
This was the 45th time this miracle has happened. Saying this is perhaps banal, but the handover of power never fails to make me
proud to be an American and thankful we had such brilliant founding fathers.
This peaceful transfer sets the United States apart from many of the world's nations, even Britain and Canada, where leaders under
the parliamentary system are chosen in a process resembling a knife fight in a dark room. The US has somehow managed to retain its
three branches of government in spite of the best efforts of self-serving politicians to wreck it.
Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will
be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted
attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course.
Thanks to George W. Bush – who dared show his face at the inauguration – and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits
America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy
mess in Iraq and now Syria.
This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what?
No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a
great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.'
Trump will struggle to find a face-saving retreat from these unnecessary conflicts and shut his ears to the siren songs of the
war party and deep state which just failed to stage a 'soft' coup to block his inauguration. Waging little wars against weak nations
is a multi-billion dollar national industry in the US. America has become as addicted to war as it has to debt.
If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the
hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a
Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump appears to have been gulled into believing the canard that Mideast-origin violence is caused by what he called in his inaugural
speech, radical Islamic terrorism. This is a favorite device promoted by the hard right and Israel to de-legitimize any resistance
to Israel's expansion and ethnic cleansing. The label of 'terrorism' serves the same purpose.
Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the
US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases,
acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it.
Unfortunately, President Trump is unlikely to get this useful advice from the men who now surround him, with the possibly exception
of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Let's hope that Tillerson and not Goldman Sachs bank ends up steering US foreign policy.
(Reprinted from EricMargolis.com by permission
of author or representative)
"... And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist. ..."
"... Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign. He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. ..."
"... On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right" media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naïve about the New World Order. I don't believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it. ..."
"... To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack. ..."
"... Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind (NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). ..."
"... You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration. ..."
"... Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. ..."
"... What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties. ..."
"... The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected. ..."
After my post-election column last week, a lady wrote to me and said, "I have confidence he [Trump] plans to do what is best for
the country." With all due respect, I don't! I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson. He said, "In questions of power, then,
let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
If Donald Trump is going to be anything more than just another say-anything-to-get-elected phony, he is going to have to put raw
elbow grease to his rhetoric. His talk got him elected, but it is going to be his walk that is going to prove his worth.
And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is
who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff
and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist.
Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign.
He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. If that doesn't tell you what he is, nothing will. Trump probably
picked him because he is in so tight with House Speaker Paul Ryan (a globalist neocon of the highest order) and the GOP establishment,
thinking Priebus will help him get his agenda through the GOP Congress. But ideologically, Priebus does NOT share Trump's anti-establishment
agenda. So, this appointment is a risk at best and a sell-out at worst.
On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right"
media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington,
D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naïve about the New World Order. I don't
believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it.
To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE
than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State
in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical
New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But
Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the globalist elite gave Newt Gingrich the assignment of cozying up to (and "supporting")
Trump during his campaign with the sole intention of being in a position for Trump to think he owes Gingrich something so as to appoint
him to a key cabinet post in the event that he won. Gingrich could then weave his evil magic during a Donald Trump presidential administration.
Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind
(NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). If Donald Trump does not see through this man, and if he
appoints him as a cabinet head in his administration, I will be forced to believe that Donald Trump is clueless about "draining the
swamp." You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump
would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration.
Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating
and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. Granted, he hasn't even been sworn in yet, and it's still way too early to make a true
judgment of his presidency. But for a fact, his cabinet appointments and his first one hundred days in office will tell us most of
what we need to know.
What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume
that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because
at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties.
There is a reason we have lost more liberties under Republican administrations than Democratic ones over the past few decades.
And that reason is the conservative, constitutionalist, Christian, pro-freedom people who should be resisting government's assaults
against our liberties are sound asleep because they trust a Republican President and Congress to do the right thing -- and they give
the GOP a pass as our liberties are expunged piece by piece. A pass they would NEVER give to a Democrat.
The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington
establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will
NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected.
I tell you again: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the course of a nation. Frankly, if this opportunity is squandered,
there likely will not be another one in most of our lifetimes.
"... "kicked India and Turkey out of a decades-old US program that allows developing countries to export thousands of goods to the United States without paying duties," in a scheme known as the Generalized System of Preferences or GSP. ..."
"... The reasons given by the US Trade Representative for Trump's orders were that India had failed "to provide the United States with assurances that it will provide equitable and reasonable access to its markets in numerous sectors" while "Turkey's termination from the GSP follows a finding that it is sufficiently economically developed and should no longer benefit from preferential market access to the United States market." ..."
"... In the case of India, Washington has been trying for years to wean India away from its defense and trade association with Russia, concurrent with encouraging it to join the Pentagon in confronting China. The US Defence Department stated in September 2018 that "A decade ago, US arms sales to India amounted to virtually nothing. Today, the United States is the second-largest arms supplier to India, and US officials say they hope to increase that business," and the US focus on China has resulted in stronger military ties, with a joint statement last December indicating the intention "to further strengthen bilateral defence cooperation as a key pillar of the strategic partnership between India and the US." ..."
"... There is a Russia factor in the US-Turkey relationship, because Ankara has placed an order for world-beating S-400 surface-to-air missiles, which has riled Washington, as has India's forthcoming acquisition of the same system. The Military-Industrial Establishment in Washington made its feelings known on March 8, when chief Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers told reporters that "If Turkey takes the S-400, there would be grave consequences in terms of our relationship, military relationship with them." But this doesn't seem to worry President Erdoğan, who had already made it clear that "The S-400 is a done deal, there can be no turning back. We have reached an agreement with the Russians. We will move toward a joint production. Perhaps after the S-400, we will go for the S-500." ..."
There is
a saying in the worlds of politics and business that most people who come to prominence are those who in defeat bear malice and in
victory seek revenge. It is therefore unsurprising that President Donald Trump displays both characteristics in international as
well as domestic affairs, although his targets vary erratically between friend and foe. His near-psychotic concentration on achieving
the destruction of Iran is understandably malicious and revengeful, given the nature of the man, but his latest exhibitions of would-be
superiority involve allies, which even for Trump is dramatically misguided.
The Trumpian United States has few friends, mainly because in his two years in the White House Trump has gone out of his way to
belittle, demean and insult long-standing partners and antagonise those who may have been considering seeking closer ties with Washington.
His announcement
last December that "America is respected again" was wide of the mark, because, unfortunately, America has become a global joke --
but a dangerous joke whose president may be a raving booby, but is still powerful and appears intent on upsetting what little tranquillity
remains in this turmoil-stricken world.
One recent diatribe
was unprecedented in length, vulgarity and volatility. When he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2 he
set a new low for absurdity in what the commentator Stephen Colbert described as being an "epically weird" harangue which The
Atlantic said was
the longest presidential oration in history . Moving on from this bizarre performance, Trump turned to international affairs
and, as Politicoreported
on March 5, "kicked India and Turkey out of a decades-old US program that allows developing countries to export thousands of goods
to the United States without paying duties," in a scheme known as the Generalized System of Preferences or GSP.
The reasons given by
the US Trade Representative for Trump's orders were that India had failed "to provide the United States with assurances that
it will provide equitable and reasonable access to its markets in numerous sectors" while "Turkey's termination from the GSP follows
a finding that it is sufficiently economically developed and should no longer benefit from preferential market access to the United
States market."
In the case of India, Washington has been trying for years to wean India away from its defense and trade association with Russia,
concurrent with encouraging it to join the Pentagon in confronting China. The US Defence Department
stated
in September 2018 that "A decade ago, US arms sales to India amounted to virtually nothing. Today, the United States is the second-largest
arms supplier to India, and US officials say they hope to increase that business," and the US focus on China has resulted in stronger
military ties, with a
joint statement last December indicating the intention "to further strengthen bilateral defence cooperation as a key pillar of
the strategic partnership between India and the US."
Washington has been intensifying its confrontation with China in the South China sea, where in addition to overflights by nuclear-capable
bombers it conducts what are absurdly
called "freedom of navigation patrols" in waters where there has never been a single case of interference with any of the vast
number of merchant ships that pass though every year. The rationale is given as support for the Convention on the Law of the Sea
which, most ironically, Washington
refuses to ratify . Nevertheless,
the US has been trying hard to persuade the Indian government that it should contribute warships to join US patrols in the South
China Sea, which, so far, India has
refused
to do . So it might be thought that the Trump Administration would do its best to encourage India to buy more US weapons and
to cooperate in its anti-China antics (however unwise that would be) by keeping their relationship friction-free. But this isn't
the way Trump works.
Washington's unfortunate timing of the announcement that it will penalise India in trade arrangements extends to India's domestic
circumstances, because there are national elections due in April, and the party of Prime Minister Modi (an arch-nationalist and no
mean war-drummer himself) was already having difficulties, and is looking shakier day-by-day. Indeed the whole bizarre affair was
well summed-up by Professor Harsh Pant of King's College London when he said "the discourse in this country has been that America
needs India to balance China, and the question will be: Why is America doing this to India?"
But there doesn't seem to be a sensible answer to that question.
The same holds for Washington's treatment of NATO ally Turkey, whose President
said on February 26 that Ankara might buy the US Patriot missile system "if you [the US] provide us good conditions." But it's
blindingly obvious that the US declaration that Turkey "should no longer benefit from preferential market access to the United States
market" is not going to make President Erdoğan keen on buying Patriot missiles -- or anything else stamped "made in the USA."
There is a Russia factor in the US-Turkey relationship, because Ankara has placed an order for world-beating S-400 surface-to-air
missiles, which has riled Washington, as has India's
forthcoming acquisition of the same system. The Military-Industrial Establishment in Washington made its feelings known on March
8, when chief Pentagon spokesman Charlie Summers
told reporters that "If Turkey takes the S-400, there would be grave consequences in terms of our relationship, military relationship
with them." But this doesn't seem to worry President Erdoğan, who had already
made it clear that "The S-400 is a done deal, there can be no turning back. We have reached an agreement with the Russians. We
will move toward a joint production. Perhaps after the S-400, we will go for the S-500."
The signals are that Turkey is moving further away from the US and is possibly considering leaving NATO. After all, the US has
torn up favourable trade arrangements, and NATO has done nothing for Turkey which is working with Russia in many spheres. The most
recent example of regional military cooperation was on March 6-8 when four Turkish and Russian vessels conducted a
minor
exercise in the Black Sea, aimed at demonstrating and sharing techniques involved in mine-avoidance.
Trust is fostered by cooperation based on preparedness to understand differing viewpoints. Even more importantly, it is stimulated
by adopting pragmatic policies aimed at establishing confidence, rather than by ceaselessly confronting and confounding others. For
so long as Trump considers that "Make America Great Again" depends on confrontation and malevolence then his country will achieve
neither trust nor cooperation world-wide. And when he casts allies aside with sneering condescension, taking revenge for what he
considers to be unwarranted favouritism in the past, he is destroying America's path to Greatness.
A version of this piece appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on March 12.
That's a devastating for Trump post by Ann Coilter. She was his supporter in previous election cucle.
Notable quotes:
"... NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF TIMES TRUMP HAS CLAIMED ON TWITTER HE'S ALREADY BUILDING THE WALL: 16 BY MY COUNT. ..."
"... NUMBER OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS ENDING THE ANCHOR BABY SCAM -- AS TRUMP PROMISES WHENEVER AN ELECTION IS COMING: ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED BY TRUMP RESCINDING OBAMA'S UNCONSTITUTIONAL AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIEN "DREAMERS": ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF EXTENSIONS OF THE E-VERIFY SYSTEM TO PREVENT ILLEGALS FROM BEING HIRED OVER AMERICANS: ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF H1-B FOREIGN WORKERS IN THIS COUNTRY WHEN TRUMP TOOK OFFICE: APPROXIMATELY 1 MILLION. ..."
"... NUMBER OF H1-B FOREIGN WORKERS IN THIS COUNTRY TODAY: APPROXIMATELY 1 MILLION. ..."
"... NUMBER OF ASYLUM LOOPHOLES CLOSED: ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF CARRIED INTEREST LOOPHOLES ELIMINATED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP: ZERO. ..."
"... NUMBER OF GOLDMAN SACHS EMPLOYEES PUT IN TOP ADMINISTRATION POSITIONS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP: 7 -- or "more than Presidents Bush and Obama combined." ..."
"... (For someone unable to fulfill the most basic of his immigration promises, Trump has been amazingly competent in accomplishing the things Wall Street wanted, but no one else did.) ..."
"... PERCENTAGE OF THE BASE THAT TRUMP CAN AFFORD TO LOSE IN 2020, AFTER MILLIONS OF OLDER, WHITER AMERICANS HAVE DIED OFF, AND MILLIONS OF IMMIGRANTS HAVE TURNED 18 AND BEGUN VOTING: ZERO. ..."
It is now clear that Trump isn't waiting for a better moment. This was not an anomaly. It's not an accident.
After he signed his third spending bill with no wall funding, which he claims to need, all sentient beings were forced
to conclude that the president has no intention of ever doing anything we wanted on immigration.
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty
advocates Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short and Mercedes Schlapp in the White House. For all his talk about immigration, did
he ever consider hiring people who share his MAGA vision?
A (diminishing) percentage of the base is annoyed when I point this out. They think that the moment something comes out of Trump's
mouth, IT HAS HAPPENED.
Yes, Trump talks a good game. He's like a waiter who compliments us for ordering the hamburger, but keeps bringing us fish.
The hamburger is our signature dish, juicy and grilled to perfection, you've made a brilliant choice ... now here's your salmon.
If he refuses to do what we hired him to do, he's not getting a good Yelp review.
I've decided to discuss the Trump presidency in purely mathematical terms. It's not his fault! He's trying! Never has a president
been under such attack! -- these are more in the nature of "excuses," not facts.
Under my new approach, I will provide a numerical evaluation of the Trump presidency, which I call:
TRUMP BY THE NUMBERS!
No editorializing, no invective, no opinion.
** ** **
NUMBER OF MILES OF WALL BUILT ON OUR SOUTHERN BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: ZERO.
** ** **
NUMBER OF MILES OF FENCE, BOLLARD OR GARDEN TRELLIS BUILT ALONG OUR 2,000-MILE BORDER SINCE TRUMP HAS BEEN PRESIDENT: 26.
** ** **
NUMBER OF TIMES TRUMP HAS CLAIMED ON TWITTER HE'S ALREADY BUILDING THE WALL: 16 BY MY COUNT.
** ** **
NUMBER OF TIMES TRUMP HAS COMPLAINED ON TWITTER THAT CONGRESS WON'T GIVE HIM FUNDS TO BUILD THE WALL THAT HE SAYS HE'S ALREADY
BUILDING: AT LEAST 30 BY MY COUNT.
** ** **
NUMBER OF WALL "PROTOTYPES" DESTROYED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT: ALL OF THEM.
** ** **
NUMBER OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS ENDING THE ANCHOR BABY SCAM -- AS TRUMP PROMISES WHENEVER AN ELECTION IS COMING: ZERO.
** ** **
NUMBER OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED BY TRUMP RESCINDING OBAMA'S UNCONSTITUTIONAL AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIEN "DREAMERS": ZERO.
** ** **
NUMBER OF ILLEGAL ALIENS WHOSE PRESENCE HAS BEEN EXCUSED BY TRUMP: 11 TO 50 MILLION (depending on whether you believe the propaganda
or the facts).
** ** **
NUMBER OF EXTENSIONS OF THE E-VERIFY SYSTEM TO PREVENT ILLEGALS FROM BEING HIRED OVER AMERICANS: ZERO.
** ** **
NUMBER OF H1-B FOREIGN WORKERS IN THIS COUNTRY WHEN TRUMP TOOK OFFICE: APPROXIMATELY 1 MILLION.
** ** **
NUMBER OF H1-B FOREIGN WORKERS IN THIS COUNTRY TODAY: APPROXIMATELY 1 MILLION.
** ** **
NUMBER OF ASYLUM LOOPHOLES CLOSED: ZERO.
... ... ...
Apart from immigration, probably the single most important campaign promise Trump made was to end the carried interest loophole.
Most Republicans would break out into a cold sweat if asked to raise taxes on George Soros. FINALLY, we had a Republican (or Democrat)
who wasn't beholden to Wall Street!
During the campaign, Trump said this tax scam allowed hedge fund managers to "get away with murder" and vowed to eliminate it.
Americans who hadn't voted for 30 years said: How do I register to vote?
Let's take out the slide rule!
** ** **
NUMBER OF CARRIED INTEREST LOOPHOLES ELIMINATED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP: ZERO.
** ** **
TOTAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS IN 2016 GIVEN BY GOLDMAN SACHS TO HILLARY CLINTON: $388,000.
** ** **
TOTAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS GIVEN BY GOLDMAN SACHS TO TRUMP: $5,607 (or 70 times less than Goldman gave to Hillary).
** ** **
NUMBER OF GOLDMAN SACHS EMPLOYEES PUT IN TOP ADMINISTRATION POSITIONS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP: 7 -- or "more than Presidents Bush
and Obama combined."
(For someone unable to fulfill the most basic of his immigration promises, Trump has been amazingly competent in accomplishing
the things Wall Street wanted, but no one else did.)
** ** **
NUMBER OF ACTIONS TAKEN TO DEFEND THE FREE SPEECH RIGHTS OF TRUMP'S BIGGEST SUPPORTERS BEING DEPLATFORMED AND CENSORED, SUCH AS
MILO YIANNOPOULOS, GAVIN MCINNES, LAURA LOOMER AND ALEX JONES:
ZERO.
** ** **
PERCENTAGE OF THE BASE THAT TRUMP CAN AFFORD TO LOSE IN 2020, AFTER MILLIONS OF OLDER, WHITER AMERICANS HAVE DIED OFF, AND
MILLIONS OF IMMIGRANTS HAVE TURNED 18 AND BEGUN VOTING: ZERO.
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
"... Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street mafia. ..."
"... The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the united billionaires under Trump administration. ..."
"... Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate, excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico ..."
"... Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs, he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury ..."
"... The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions, he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention. ..."
"... Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'. ..."
"... They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away. ..."
Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's
not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street
mafia.
Recently, Trump announced another big alliance with the vulture billionaire, Paul Singer, who, initially, was supposedly against
him. It looks like the Trump big show continues.
The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the
united billionaires under Trump administration.
As Greg Palast told to Thom Hartmann:
Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This
is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate,
excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico.
Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the
vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs,
he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury.
He is against what Obama created, which is a system under Dodd–Frank, called 'living wills', where if a bank starts going bankrupt,
they don't call the US treasury for bail-out. These banks go out of business and they are broken up so we don't have to pay for the
bail-out. Singer wants to restore the system of bailouts because that's where he makes his money.
The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money
and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically
investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions,
he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention.
Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a
special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'.
They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one
was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall
Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break
called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away.
His political activities include funding the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and he has written against raising taxes
for the 1% and aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act. Singer is active in Republican Party politics and collectively, Singer and others affiliated
with Elliott Management are "the top source of contributions" to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
A number of sources have branded him a "vulture capitalist", largely on account of his role at EMC, which has been called a vulture
fund. Elliott was termed by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going
after countries for unpaid debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near
default-such as Argentina, ]- through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. Singer's
business model of purchasing distressed debt from companies and sovereign states and pursuing full payment through the courts has
led to criticism, while Singer and EMC defend their model as "a fight against charlatans who refuse to play by the market's rules."
In 1996, Elliott bought defaulted Peruvian debt for $11.4 million. Elliott won a $58 million judgment when the ruling was overturned
in 2000, and Peru had to repay the sum in full under the pari passu rule. When former president of Peru Alberto Fujimori was attempting
to flee the country due to facing legal proceedings over human rights abuses and corruption, Singer ordered the confiscation of his
jet and offered to let him leave the country in exchange for the $58 million payment from the treasury, an offer which Fujimori accepted.
A subsequent 2002 investigation by the Government of Peru into the incident and subsequent congressional report, uncovered instances
of corruption since Elliott was not legally authorized to purchase the Peruvian debt from Swiss Bank Corporation without the prior
approval of the Peruvian government, and thus the purchase had occurred in breach of contract. At the same time, Elliott's representative,
Jaime Pinto, had been formerly employed by the Peruvian Ministry of Economy and Finance and had contact with senior officials. According
to the Wall Street Journal, the Peruvian government paid Elliott $56 million to settle the case.
After Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2002, the Elliott-owned company NML Capital Limited refused to accept the Argentine offer
to pay less than 30 cents per dollar of debt. With a face value of $630 million, the bonds were reportedly bought by NML for $48
million, with Elliott assessing the bonds as worth $2.3 billion with accrued interest. Elliott sued Argentina for the debt's value,
and the lower UK courts found that Argentina had state immunity. Elliott successfully appealed the case to the UK Supreme Court,
which ruled that Elliott had the right to attempt to seize Argentine property in the United Kingdom. Alternatively, before 2011,
US courts ruled against allowing creditors to seize Argentine state assets in the United States. On October 2, 2012 Singer arranged
for a Ghanaian Court order to detain the Argentine naval training vessel ARA Libertad in a Ghanaian port, with the vessel to be used
as collateral in an effort to force Argentina to pay the debt. Refusing to pay, Argentina shortly thereafter regained control of
the ship after its seizure was deemed illegal by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Alleging the incident lost Tema
Harbour $7.6 million in lost revenue and unpaid docking fees, Ghana in 2012 was reportedly considering legal action against NML for
the amount.
His firm... is so influential that fear of its tactics helped shape the current 2012 Greek debt restructuring." Elliott was termed
by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid
debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near default-such as Argentina,
Peru-through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. In 2004, then first deputy managing
director of the International Monetary Fund Anne Osborn Krueger denounced the strategy, alleging that it has "undermined the entire
structure of sovereign finance."
we wrote that " Trump's rhetoric is concentrated around a racist delirium. He avoids to take direct position
on social matters, issues about inequality, etc. Of course he does, he is a billionaire! Trump will follow the pro-establishment
agenda of protecting Wall Street and big businesses. And here is the fundamental difference with Bernie Sanders. Bernie says no more
war and he means it. He says more taxes for the super-rich and he means it. Free healthcare and education for all the Americans,
and he means it. In case that Bernie manage to beat Hillary, the establishment will definitely turn to Trump who will be supported
by all means until the US presidency. "
Yet, we would never expect that Trump would verify us, that fast.
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.
"... Until the Crash of the Great Recession, after which we entered a "Punitive" stage, blaming "Those Others" for buying into faulty housing deals, for wanting a safety net of health care insurance, for resurgent terrorism beyond our borders, and, as the article above indicates, for having an equal citizen's voice in the electoral process. ..."
"... What needs to be restored is the purpose that "the economy works for the PEOPLE of the nation", not the other way around, as we've witnessed for the last four decades. ..."
Just finished reading this excellent book on how corporatist NeoLiberalism and the Xristianists merged their ideologies to form
the Conservative Coalition in the 1970s, and to then hijack the RepubliCAN party of Abe, Teddy, Ike (and Poppy Bush).
The author describes three phases of the RepugliCONs' zero-sum game:
The "Combative" stage of Reagan sought to restore "family values" (aka patriarchal hierarchy) to the moral depravity of Sixties
youth and the uppity claims to equal rights by blacks and feminists.
In the "Normative" stage of Gingrich and W Bush, the NeoConservatives claimed victory over Godless Communism and the NeoLibs
took credit for an expanding economy (due mostly by technology, not to Fed policy). They were happy to say "Aren't you happy now?"
with sole ownership of the Free World and its markets, yet ignoring various Black Swan events and global trends they actually
had no control over.
Until the Crash of the Great Recession, after which we entered a "Punitive" stage, blaming "Those Others" for buying into
faulty housing deals, for wanting a safety net of health care insurance, for resurgent terrorism beyond our borders, and, as the
article above indicates, for having an equal citizen's voice in the electoral process.
What was unexpected was that the libertarian mutiny by the TeaParty would become so nasty and vicious, leading to the Pirate
Trump to scavenge what little was left of American Democracy for his own treasure.
What needs to be restored is the purpose that "the economy works for the PEOPLE of the nation", not the other way around,
as we've witnessed for the last four decades.
"... The Druze minority that lives in occupied Golan was critical of the move, saying that even with Israel, and now the US, considering the Golan Heights to be part of Israel, would still be considered to have "Syrian" blood under Israeli law. ..."
"... Jordan also opposed the move , saying they still consider Golan part of Syria. It's clear why in this case, as Israel occupied parts of Syria and Jordan in the same war, and the US recognition of the annexation of the Syrian part may open Israel to annexing the West Bank and getting US approval for that as well. ..."
The Druze minority that lives in occupied Golan was critical of the move, saying that even
with Israel, and now the US, considering the Golan Heights to be part of Israel, would still be
considered to have "Syrian" blood under Israeli law.
Jordan
also opposed the move , saying they still consider Golan part of Syria. It's clear why in
this case, as Israel occupied parts of Syria and Jordan in the same war, and the US recognition
of the annexation of the Syrian part may open Israel to annexing the West Bank and getting US
approval for that as well.
The most direct opposition was from Syria, who echoed Russia and Iran in saying it violates
several UN resolutions on Golan's status.
Syria also added that they intend to ultimately recover the territory from Israel, whether
the US recognizes it or not.
While many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like obeying the constitution and not letting
big corporations and the wealthy run everything.
Your 35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your "national emergency" to build your wall with
money Congress refused to appropriate.
When you passed your tax bill you promised our paychecks would rise by an average of $4,000 but we never got the raise.
Our employers used the tax savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.
Then you fooled us into thinking we were getting a cut by lowering the amounts withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know
that now because we're getting smaller tax refunds.
At the same time, many big corporations aren't paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet, they're getting refunds. For example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104m refund on $11.8bn of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming
a $129m refund on profits of $11.2bn. (This is after New York offered it $3bn to put its second headquarters there.) They aren't breaking any tax laws or regulations. That's because they made the tax laws and regulations. You gave them a
free hand.
You're supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they're doing better than ever, as are their top executives
and biggest investors. Yet nothing has trickled down. We're getting shafted.
Which is why more than 75% of us (including 45% who call ourselves Republicans) support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposed
70% tax on dollars earned in excess of $10m a year.
And over 60% of us support Elizabeth Warren's proposed 2% annual tax on households with a new worth of $50m or more.
You've also shown you don't have a clue about healthcare. You promised us something better than the Affordable Care Act
but all you've done is whittle it back.
A big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat to eliminate protection for people with
pre-existing conditions.
Are you even aware that 70% of us now favor Medicare for all?
Most of us don't pay much attention to national policy but we pay a lot of attention to home economics. You've made our
own home economics worse.
We'll give you official notice you're fired on 3 November 2020, if not before. Until then, you can keep the house and perks,
but you're toast.
Chickenhawks are usually more militaristic then people who served. This is kind of inferiority complex compensation. Trump
is a chichenhawk.
Notable quotes:
"... One set of moral priorities – a different one – would end our endless wars and use the vast wealth of this nation to end poverty and lead to true security for all of us. It would invest in healthcare, well-paying jobs, affordable higher education, safe drinking water and clean air for all of us. ..."
"... With this budget, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and disperses fully $750bn to the military. Out of every taxpayer dollar , in other words, 62 cents go to the military and our militarized Department of Homeland Security. (Veterans' benefits take another seven cents.) ..."
"... The budget falsely claims to adhere to strict spending limits set by Congress for the military. But it hides an extra $174bn for the Pentagon in plain sight by adding it to a war spending account – despite the fact that the president has said he wants to bring back thousands of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. This gimmick brings total military spending all the way up to $750bn, even while the administration claims it is cutting the base Pentagon budget ..."
Donald Trump recently unleashed his dark vision for our
nation and our world, in the form of his
budget request to Congress
.
A budget shows our values more clearly than any
tweet, campaign speech or political slogan. It's what
marries detailed, dollar-and-cents policy decisions to
deeper political – and moral – priorities.
One set of moral priorities – a different one – would
end our endless wars and use the vast wealth of this
nation to end poverty and lead to true security for all
of us. It would invest in healthcare, well-paying jobs,
affordable higher education, safe drinking water and
clean air for all of us.
The proposed Trump budget drops bombs on that vision
– almost literally.
With this budget, Trump takes more than $1tn in
taxpayer money and disperses fully $750bn to the
military. Out of
every taxpayer dollar
, in other words, 62 cents go
to the military and our militarized Department of
Homeland Security. (Veterans' benefits take another
seven cents.)
... ... ...
At every turn, the Trump budget finds vast billions for
militarization, while it cuts much smaller poverty and
other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.
It
includes $164bn in war funding, but it cuts $4.7bn in
economic development and food assistance to other
nations. It finds $14bn for a vanity project military
branch called the space force, while it cuts $1.2bn for
a program that's built and preserved more than 1m
affordable homes. It includes $11bn for contractor
Lockheed Martin to build more F-35 jet fighters, but it
cuts $3.7bn in heating and cooling assistance for 6m
poor households.
And it includes more than $12bn for a wall at our
border, while it cuts $1bn for Job Corps, the program
that provides yearly training and work experience to
50,000 poor (and mostly black) youths.
The budget falsely claims to adhere to strict
spending limits set by Congress for the military. But it
hides
an extra $174bn
for the Pentagon in plain sight by
adding it to a war spending account – despite the fact
that the president has said he wants to bring back
thousands of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. This
gimmick brings total military spending all the way up to
$750bn, even while the administration claims it is
cutting the base Pentagon budget
"... Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia (how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?) ..."
"... But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat. ..."
"... The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical statements, dramatic actions. ..."
"... Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure. ..."
There are two certainties we can rely upon as we await Mueller's final word, none a cause for relief.
The special counsel's office did not undertake a credible investigation of the two core charges related to the 2016 elections
-- that Russian intelligence hacked Democratic National Committee email servers while colluding with Donald Trump as he sought
the presidency. Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, and failed to pursue alternative theories, a duty of any investigator
in Mueller's position. These omissions are more or less fatal to the legitimacy of Mueller's work.
Among the mainstream Democrats who have incessantly hyped the "Russia-wrecked-our-elections" story, there is no remorse for
the damage it has done to our governing institutions, our foreign policy, and our national security. Russia-gate has consolidated
Cold War II. The chance to rebuild mutually beneficial relations with Moscow has been damaged.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist,
author, and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist.
His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist
.
" The chance to rebuild mutually
beneficial relations with Moscow has been damaged. "
Why else was this narrative initiated by the Corporate Democrats? Expecting
the person who lead the cover up of the crimes of 9/11 was great comedy, indeed.
Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually
possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia
(how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?)
How do any of the nay-sayers of investigating them feel about Trump's (seemly obvious) CORRUPTION of campaign & post-election
trolling for Putin's permission to build his decades long dream of a TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW? or Son-In-Law-In-Charge-of-Middle-East-Peace
Jared Kushner's attempts at "back channel" (NON-transparent) communications with Russian government? or Trump himself making sure
there's NO RECORD of any of his one-0on-one conversations with Putin?
At the very least, it appears thta Donald Trump has more interests in HIS MONEY than in U.S. foreign policy.
That any progresisve/leftist could see Trump as a "peace activist" is a joke! He's had TWO YEARS to bring the troops home from
Iraq & Afghanistan & the other 5 countries that President Obama started wars on & he hasn't done it. Trump has RAISED Pentagon
budget & put people with ECONOMIC CONFLICTS OF INTEREST into his Cabinet–like the BOEING executive now as Sec. of Defense.
I DISLIKE Hillary Clinton & did NOT vote for her–or Trump. I think there are MANY reasons she lost the election -- not the
least of which is her long terrible record when it comes to EVERYONE–except the 1%.
The rooted-in-PRESERVING-SLAVERY/Antiquated Electoral College was another reason. James Comey's announcements in both JULY
& OCT. 106 didn't help -- nor did, what looks like Russian targeting of specific white working class Midwest voters.
But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT
LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat.
nomad March 24, 2019 at 09:57 Lydia,
If you had disconnected yourself from the 2 party system, what do you see?
You will see one party, not two, that associates itself with the elites, not the regular voters.
The regular voters are just pawn pieces on the political chess board that is played with or removed.
I see a corrupt system that both parties belong to, and its members serve it for their own interests.
If both parties were good, where are the business, military, educational, political, financial, legal, and medical reforms that
apply to everyone?
Why are most government politicians above the law?
Why do executive-level government get executive healthcare while the majority of its citizens get
less than this?
Why is the U.S hated by some countries?
Why is the U.S. government so corrupt? If you look at the corruption index, the U.S. is negatively trending downwards over time. https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlvH8gvOa4QIVZBh9Ch0usQonEAAYASAAEgIfj_D_BwE
Why does the U.S. still have so much debt from the past, the present, and going towards the future? http://www.usdebtclock.org/
For our government system, it does not make a difference who is in charge after this president and its congress.
If you had watched the movie Matrix, don't be a battery.
William March 22, 2019 at 17:47
Mueller's failure to interview the absolutely vital witnesses is obvious to those who have kept up with related events and
information since the beginning. This, however, amounts to such an extremely small number that it is fairly obvious that the truth
about "Russia Gate" will be as quickly forgotten as the Bush administrations lying us into war with Iraq.
Dave churbuck March 22, 2019 at 13:10 The corrup people that are and will continue to do the
never ending investigations make a lot of money.
By do the investigations they protect the guilty which are the investigators themselves.
They also insure that the Clinton Cartel will never get caught . Think about that.
Reply
O
Society March 22, 2019 at 11:51 Did you see James Comey let the public down gently and try to quell the riots ahead of time
with the seal of his authenticity?
The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical
statements, dramatic actions.
O Society March 21, 2019
at 13:07 Truth is Donald Trump is a tool. Like a weedeater or a vacuum, except in reverse. His job is to make a mess like a chaos
snowmachine. Crap all over the Oval Office, the military, and any coherent notion of policy and government as being for good of
the people.
With Russia (and all other simmering wars), Trump does whatever the neoconservatives tell him to do because he has no foreign
policy or ideology of his own. Don't overthink it. There's no 4D chess going on here, just pissing on things, marking his territory.
In fact, Trump has no economic, domestic, or foreign ideology other than "Me." Therefore, any benefit to anyone not named "Me"
which may come from anything he does is coincidental. Collateral damage, so to speak. Inadvertent to the hoisting of the Great
Leader's social status.
Trump is against blacks because he is white. He is against women because he's a man. He's against the regular people because
he's an oligarch. Simple.
DH Fabian March 22, 2019 at 01:01 Agree, and take a look at what Trump did. He reinforced economic sanctions against
Russia, increased US "meddling" in Ukraine, increased US/NATO troops near the Russian border, and we've been subjected to
two years of anti-Russian propaganda. And yes, Trump is about Trump. Period.
Reply
Eddie March 24, 2019 at 12:05 Yes O'S, as I've
noted a number of times before, the 'Occam's razor' POV here (which I and some others subscribed to) is that Trump basically
ran for office as a PR event, to help his always shady/chronically financially troubled scam empire by getting name recognition
to help fool potential investors. His stated political views were by and large entirely opportunistic and irrelevant --
- for instance, he supposedly used to be a liberal Democratic supporter who reportedly supported abortion rights and advocated
for Hillary Clinton. Trump was more stunned than elated when he won on election night (you could almost see him thinking
'Oh crap, NOW I might actually have to do some WORK, and it'll be in the public eye, where I can't con people as easily
as I do investors'), and his wife reportedly cried, but not tears of joy. To impute any serious political policies to the
man is to vastly exaggerate his interest in politics. He never previously held any elected office, which tells us a lot.
Reply
Gary March 21, 2019 at 08:11 It is clear the author
& responders do not understand geo-politics. As US imperialism continues its hegemonic actions, like the expansion of NATO,
it is clear the Russians need to foil this aggression. How do they do it short of nuclear war? They need to disrupt bourgeois
democracy in order to maintain & spread real democracy, i.e., socialist democracy. It doesn't matter that the October Revolution
was destroyed which Putin said recently is the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. There is still a desire to reestablish
socialism. In addition the US doesn't want that nor will it tolerate a powerful capitalist Russia. Writers at Consortium don't
seem to understand this facet of geo-politics. Why? Because writers & readers here are of the bourgeoisie & are not Marxists
even though they seem to be defending Russia & speak about preventing a Cold War II.
O Society March 20, 2019 at 14:42 There's a clear pattern in Donald Trump's life, as well as the life of his father, and his
father before that.
They'll steal and lie and scam and defraud the public, and get away with it.
We all know that's how the American Fairytale ends: He shat all over the place and someone else cleaned it up. Again.
Eddie March 24, 2019 at 15:22 As per your link to the article by Nomi Prins, and other similar articles going back to the
80's, Trump is easily the most financially corrupt POTUS we've seen in our generation (I was born in '49), possibly the worst
ever, at least on a personal-business basis (things like the Teapot Dome scandal were more 'political-financial' corrupt, a
somewhat different category, though in the end it's obviously all CORRUPTION*). It's sad that the US has gotten to this point
politically -- - to have someone so ill-suited and corrupt as our POTUS -- - but maybe as some critics have said Trump IS an
appropriate symbol of the crass country we've become..? If that's true or not, maybe he'll serve as a 'bottoming-out' signal
to enough of the US electorate to examine our overall culture and start a correction to more humanistic policies.
* Side note: Zephyr Teachout (quoted in the link) wrote an excellent book "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's
Snuff Box to Citizens United", which is a very readable, informative book on that timely subject.
O Society March 19, 2019 at 23:55 You can't believe
the president. You can't believe anything anyone says about the president either.
Whomever had the bright idea to make sure no one believes anything coming out of Washington DC for the foreseeable future
Tom
March 20, 2019 at 04:02 "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is
false"
CIA Director William Casey
Tom March 19, 2019 at 16:18 The very fact that the servers were never
inspected by the FBI but a private company that has a history of being anti Russia completely ruined the investigation and chain
of evidence that breached their own laws and never sought any interview with Ambassador Craig Murray who said he knows who leaked
the evidence says it all.
Craig Murray is banned from the USA.
Why?
Anarcissie March 19, 2019 at 15:00 I was quite interested in the early reports of supposed foreign influences and hacks of
the 2016 election, because to some extent computer security has been part of my métier. I soon realized that very little actual
evidence was being presented in comparison with the wild stories being circulated. So I don't think it's surprising that Mueller
appears to be coming up with nothing substantial (unless there's a big surprise awaiting us all). Mueller did not call a number
of the obvious witnesses (as noted above) because he knew they could not offer anything.
The House investigation is motivated by two things: (1) Democrats promised that if they got control of the House they would
investigate and maybe impeach Trump; (2) CYA procedures. The main effort of the Democratic Party leadership is keeping the Left
down; Russiagate was supposed to distract people from concerns like climate change, health care, education costs, and so on; the
Democratic leadership's donor class wants this sort of thing to be stopped or diverted. Hence the constant focus on Trump and
the conspiracy fables associated by them with him. They have now made a number of gaffes, not just Russiagate, which have to be
covered up and put out of mind if possible.
Those who went along with all this, especially those who indulged in McCarthyism, should be reminded of it frequently.
Lisa March 19, 2019 at 14:13 Concerning the first charge, Russian intelligence hacking the DNC computers, there is one more
witness whom Mueller never contacted, although he sent a message to Mueller and volunteered to be interviewed:
Kim Dotcom / Twitter 8. Aug. 2018
"I certainly know that Wikileaks didn't get it from Russia. I know who was the Wikileaks DNC source. I was involved. The Mueller
indictment of 12 Russians will never be tested in Court, it's a scam, initiated by Hillary Clinton. Mueller is a political hitman
tasked to end Trump."
It seems that both sides are steering the discussion to another dimension, being frustrated in advance of the coming Mueller
report. The Democrats are starting new investigations on other issues on Trump, not pushing the impeachment project further, the
other side is worried that the Mueller report will leave the question open, undecided, so that everyone can stick to their original
suspicions, and the country is left in turmoil.
Reply
DH Fabian March 19, 2019 at 21:56 It was reported
some time ago that the DNC servers hadn't been hacked at all. It was determined that someone who had direct access to the computers
had simply downloaded a huge number of files onto ordinary thumb drives, and these were passed along, ultimately to Wikileaks.
Reply
Norumbega March 20, 2019 at 18:21 I hadn't been aware
of Kim Dotcom's 2018 Tweet, but he is one of several potential witnesses to the matter in whom Mueller has shown zero interest
in interviewing.
I discuss this matter in a long post under last week's VIPS memo. In combination this witness evidence further underscores
that what Mueller is doing cannot by any stretch be considered an honest investigation:
Gregory Kruse March 19, 2019 at 13:34 Paranoiac hyperbole,
is it?
Reply
Jeff Harrison March 19, 2019 at 13:32 Yes, it's pretty
clear that the Democrats want to do to the Republicans what the Republicans did to the Democrats under Clinton and Obama. Hobble
the president that they don't want to consider legitimate. The Democrats have a couple of problems. One is that when there was
no there there in Clinton's case special persecutor Starr was able to get salacious bits on Clinton and essentially trap him into
a formal form of perjury because Clinton didn't want to admit that he had had sex with "that woman". Trump doesn't give a sh*t.
God and the gang know who he's been sleeping with and he doesn't care so the prudish, hypocritical sanctimony of the evangelicals
won't get him. The other problem is essentially that impeachment isn't really the vehicle to remove presidents you don't like.
That's what elections are for. You can't impeach him for something he did five years ago.
It really is too bad that he didn't depose Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele gives new meaning to the line out of the
Charlie Daniels hit where Uneasy Rider says, "he may look dumb, but that's just a disguise. He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage".
So, not only aren't today's Democrats very competent, they can't hire competent help, either.
It's not clear to me what the country does when neither political party is competent.
O Society March 19, 2019 at 13:19 Donald Trump is nothing more than an aristocrat. He got his family millions from his dad,
Fred, whose own mother, Elizabeth, started him in real estate. It's a family of rich grifters.
Yet the Democratic party doesn't go after all the Trump's financial fraud and scams. It's all Spy vs. Spy Russia baloney instead.
Why?
O Society March 19, 2019 at 17:21 Oh, I think we all know Trump is as crooked as a stick in water. There's mountains of
corruption in his family, at least a century's worth of fraud and scams to hold up in the sunlight.
The so called "meritocracy" – aka aristocracy, oligarchy, elite, plutocrats, etc – don't want to turn over rocks looking
for Trumps financial corruption because they're all hiding fraud and scams of their own.
Meritocracy itself is a fraud. These aren't our best and brightest and most worthy running things, they're celebrities and
vampires, just like Trump is.
Are you ready to expose how the selfish bastards rig the game to keep the rest of us from getting any of their so called
"merit?"
The first rule of Rich Club is you don't talk about Rich Club!
Eric32 March 19, 2019 at 13:18 The US is a bizarrely corrupt dysfunctional country.
The two countries that (past and present) interfere the most in US politics and elections are Israel and Britain. The corrupt
FBI didn't include them in its politicized "investigation".
Due to Hillary's incompetent attempts to hide her emails from examination via FOIA requests by using her own insecure servers,
Russia and all other countries with competent computer intelligence capabilities likely have all her emails dealing with State
Dept. classified and unclassified info. They also likely have her emails dealing with the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation
dealings.
Despite the above, the evidence indicates Wikileaks got the DNC emails showing corrupt activities, not from Russia or any other
country, but from a DNC onsite data transfer to a USB thumb drive, which was later physically transferred to wiki (involving Craig
Murray) . Seth Rich, a DNC employee whose subsequent murder remains unsolved, has been all but named by Assange as the DNC source.
Big Russian money flowed to Bill Clinton for speeches. Big Russian money flowed to the obviously corrupt Clinton foundation
as "donations".
Bill Clinton said: "I left the White House [2001] $16 million in debt". A Forbes magazine analysis of Clinton tax returns had
them pulling in $240 million over the ensuing 15 years.
What do the Clintons have to offer in books and speeches that would pull in that kind of money?
And yet, all the legal and press attention goes to supposed Trump corruption.
So far at least, nobody has been able to point to any any dirt on Trump that could have been used as blackmail leverage, which
is somewhat amazing for an operator who was involved in New York real estate, casinos and hotels.
Glennn March 19, 2019 at 14:14 Russiagate has been a smashing success. It has turned the bulk of the liberal Democratic
voting bloc into Russiaphobic cold warriors who don't seem overly concerned with the almost certain dire consequences of such
insanity. They seem eager to see their freedoms set aside so the rebranded Democratic Neocons can protect them from boogeymen.
It's never been easier in all of human history to inform oneself, yet we find ourselves surrounded by astonishing ignorance
as sites like this see their traffic from search reduced by tricks done by the corporate providers of the search engines. I
foolishly thought that Trump would cause a leftward movement in the population, and to a limited degree it has. I'm just shocked
at how many of my friends and family are totally sucked in by Russiagate and surrounding manipulations. I see no sign that
they learned anything from the 2016 debacle.
Skip Scott March 20, 2019 at 08:58 Yes, there would be at least as much "meat" examining the Clintons' finances as there
is in examining Trump's.
By your wording I'm not sure if you realize that you are talking about two different sets of emails. Hillary's emails for
while she was SoS have no doubt been obtained by the Russians and the Chinese, and any country with an interest in monitoring
US foreign policy that has hacking capability. That she got away with that without being prosecuted is astounding. The DNC
emails could also have been hacked, but all evidence supports a leak being the source for Wikileaks. As Putin said, why would
they bother to try to influence the election, when US foreign policy never changes no matter who is president. If the DNC and
Podesta were hacked by foreign powers, it was likely just done for information.
(I just re-read your comment more carefully and see that you are likely aware that we're talking about separate sets of
emails.)
hetro March 19, 2019 at 12:48 Also not investigated is the role of the Clinton forces, including Obama, in perpetuating the
myth of collusion as cover action for a) a failed election b) problems with The Clinton Foundation. Further on the not emphasized
includes the ICA of January 2017 relying on Crowdstrike, a dubious intelligence service to begin with in the employ of Hillary
Clinton. The earmarks of a fantastic propaganda scheme, involving supposedly reliable agencies of the US government, are clear
and demonstrable under the noses of those who still clamor there must be something legitimate about Mueller and his investigation
fiasco. If we needed further indications of corruption in high places, following the Democratic Party's lead in fixing the 2016
presidential nomination for Clinton, it came speedily along thereafter, with an apparent, "Oh, gee, those nasty Russians are responsible!"
response from a heavily brainwashed public. It would seem we need an official investigation of the investigation to join the enquiries
of Mr. Lawrence, William Binney, et al.
As to Robert Reich, he was "paranoiacally hyperbolic" back in 2016 and has only added to the TDS hysteria.
DW Bartoo March 19, 2019 at 12:25 Of course, the Mueller investigation was never intended to definitively answer any serious
questions, including why the FBI never insisted upon taking charge of the DNC computers allowing, instead, the allegations of
a private firm to stand as "evidence".
As you say, the harm done by the "Russia did it!" claim is immense and will have increasingly dire consequences as time goes
on.
The point and purpose of the Mueller spectacle is to allow evidence-free speculation to entrance the political system, not
just to excuse Hillary and the financial class Democrats of any responsibility for their loss in the election of 2016, but also
to shift attention away from the dismal failure of perpetual warfare and neoliberal austerity, in the service of military empire
and global capitalist extraction, even as the capacity of the planet to support human existence is daily diminished.
As long as the many can be kept distracted, the existential issues of nuclear war and environmental collapse may be avoided
by the political class.
Even such ideas as genuine health care or a more sane, humane, and sustainable economic system can be kept from ever becoming
something that people ought think and talk about.
If all problems may be attributed to Trump and Russia, then getting back to the Clinton-Bush-Obama daze of "business as usual"
will drone on most happily and a new Cold War may be heated up as the next thrilling adventure.
Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient
fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul
and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure.
exiled off mainstreet March 19, 2019 at 11:53
This is certainly an accurate view of the problem. He mentions Robert Reich, who along with the rest of the 'mainstream" Democrats
jumped the shark long ago on this issue, which has destroyed the legitimacy of the democratic party. Reich lost any claim on rationality
by following the conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, Trump's defense against the false charges bolstered the neocon element in the
Republican party. I don't see how this ends well.
"... At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal to block the resolution). ..."
"... In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0. ..."
"... But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role. ..."
"... While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value. ..."
"... In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968. ..."
"... Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US. ..."
"... It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm. ..."
"... "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one. ..."
"... The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak). ..."
"... So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel. ..."
"... So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first. ..."
"... Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection. ..."
"... Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference. ..."
"... I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." ..."
"... The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy. ..."
"... FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story. ..."
"... God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact. ..."
"... I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war. ..."
"... Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence. ..."
The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate December 23, 2017
While unproven claims of Russian meddling in U.S. politics have whipped Official Washington
into a frenzy, much less attention has been paid to real evidence of Israeli interference in
U.S. politics, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.
In investigating Russia's alleged meddling in U.S. politics, special prosecutor Robert
Mueller uncovered evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured the Trump
transition team to undermine President Obama's plans to permit the United Nations to censure
Israel over its illegal settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank, a discovery
referenced in the plea deal with President Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn.
At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took
the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call
with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal
to block the resolution).
I spoke on Dec, 18 with independent journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, who writes
on national security and other issues for a number of blogs at Tikun Olam .
Dennis Bernstein: A part of Michael Flynn's plea had to do with some actions he took before
coming to power regarding Israel and the United Nations. Please explain.
Richard Silverstein:
The Obama administration was negotiating in the [UN] Security Council
just before he left office about a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements.
Obviously, the Israeli government did not want this resolution to be passed. Instead of going
directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to
Trump instead. They approached Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner became involved in this. While
they were in the transition and before having any official capacity, they negotiated with
various members of the Security Council to try to quash the settlement resolution.
One of the issues here which is little known is the Logan Act, which was passed at the
foundation of our republic and was designed to prevent private citizens from usurping the
foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. It criminalized any private citizen who attempted
to negotiate with an enemy country over any foreign policy issue.
In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign
policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because
that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on
the resolution and it passed 14-0.
But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the
Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to
derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and
disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role.
This speaks to the power of the Israel lobby and of Israel itself to disrupt our foreign
policy. Very few people have ever been charged with committing an illegal act by advocating on
behalf of Israel. That is one of the reasons why this is such an important development. Until
now, the lobby has really ruled supreme on the issue of Israel and Palestine in US foreign
policy. Now it is possible that a private citizen will actually be made to pay a price for
that.
This is an important development because the lobby till now has run roughshod over our
foreign policy in this area and this may act as a restraining order against blatant disruption
of US foreign policy by people like this.
Bernstein: So this information is a part of Michael Flynn's plea. Anyone studying this would
learn something about Michael Flynn and it would be part of the prosecution's
investigation.
Silverstein:
That's absolutely right. One thing to note here is that it is reporters who
have raised the issue of the Logan Act, not Mueller or Flynn's people or anyone in the Trump
administration. But I do think that Logan is a very important part of this plea deal, even if
it is not mentioned explicitly.
Bernstein: If the special prosecutor had smoking-gun information that the Trump
administration colluded with Russia, in the way they colluded with Israel before coming to
power, this would be a huge revelation. But it is definitely collusion when it comes to
Israel.
Silverstein: Absolutely. If this were Russia, it would be on the front page of every major
newspaper in the United States and the leading story on the TV news. Because this is Israel and
because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby and they have so much influence
on US policy concerning Israel, it has managed to stay on the back burner. Only two or three
media outlets besides mine have raised this issue of Logan and collusion. Kushner and Flynn may
be the first American citizens charged under the Logan Act for interfering on behalf of Israel
in our foreign policy. This is a huge issue and it has hardly been raised at all.
Bernstein: As you know, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has made a career out of investigating the
Russia-gate charges. She says that she has read all this material carefully, so she must have
read about Flynn and Israel, but I haven't heard her on this issue at all.
Silverstein:
Even progressive journalists, who you'd think would be going after this with a
vengeance, are frightened off by the fact the lobby really bites back. So, aside from outlets
like the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, there is a lot of hesitation about going after
the Israel lobby. People are afraid because they know that there is a high price to be paid. It
goes from being purely journalism to being a personal and political vendetta when they get you
in their sights. In fact, one of the reasons I feel my blog is so important is that what I do
is challenge Israeli policy and Israeli intervention in places where it doesn't belong.
Bernstein: Jared Kushner is the point man for the Trump administration on Israel. He has
talked about having a "vision for peace." Do you think it is a problem that this is someone
with a long, close relationship with the prime minister of Israel and, in fact, runs a
foundation that invests in the building of illegal Israeli settlements? Might this be
problematic?
Silverstein:
It is quite nefarious, actually. When Jared Kushner was a teenager, Netanyahu
used to stay at the Kushner family home when he visited the United States. This relationship
with one of the most extreme right political figures in Israel goes back decades. And it is not
just Kushner himself, but all the administration personnel dealing with these so-called peace
negotiations, including Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the ambassador. These are all
orthodox Jews who tend to have very nationalist views when it comes to Israel. They all support
settlements financially through foundations. These are not honest brokers.
We could talk at length about the history of US personnel who have been negotiators for
Middle East peace. All of them have been favorable to Israel and answerable to the Israel
lobby, including Dennis Ross and Makovsky, who served in the last administration. These people
are dyed-in-the-wool ultra-nationalist supporters of [Israeli] settlements. They have no
business playing any role in negotiating a peace deal.
My prediction all along has been that these peace negotiations will come to naught, even
though they seem to have bought the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, which is something new in the
process. The Palestinians can never accept a deal that has been negotiated by Kushner and
company because it will be far too favorable to Israel and it will totally neglect the
interests of the Palestinians.
Bernstein: It has been revealed that Kushner supports the building of settlements in the
West Bank. Most people don't understand the politics of what is going on there, but it appears
to be part of an ethnic cleansing.
Silverstein:
The settlements have always been a violation of international law, ever since
Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. The Geneva Conventions direct an occupying power to
withdraw from territory that was not its own. In 1967 Israel invaded Arab states and conquered
the West Bank and Gaza but this has never been recognized or accepted by any nation until
now.
The fact that Kushner and his family are intimately involved in supporting
settlements–as are David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt–is completely outrageous. No
member of any previous US administration would have been allowed to participate with these
kinds of financial investments in support of settlements. Of course, Trump doesn't understand
the concept of conflict of interest because he is heavily involved in such conflicts himself.
But no party in the Middle East except Israel is going to consider the US an honest broker and
acceptable as a mediator.
When they announce this deal next January, no one in the Arab World is going to accept it,
with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia because they have other fish to fry in terms of
Iran. The next three years are going to be interesting, supposing Trump lasts out his term. My
prediction is that the peace plan will fail and that it will lead to greater violence in the
Middle East. It will not simply lead to a vacuum, it will lead to a deterioration in conditions
there.
Bernstein: The Trump transition team was actually approached directly by the Israeli
government to try to intercede at the United Nations.
Silverstein:
I'm assuming it was Netanyahu who went directly to Kushner and Trump. Now, we
haven't yet found out that Trump directly knew about this but it is very hard to believe
that Trump didn't endorse this. Now that we know that Mueller has access to all of the emails
of the transition team, there is little doubt that they have been able to find their smoking
gun. Flynn's plea meant that they basically had him dead to rights. It remains to be seen what
will happen with Kushner but I would think that this would play some role in either the
prosecution of Kushner or some plea deal.
Bernstein: The other big story, of course, is the decision by the Trump administration to
move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Was there any pre-election collusion in that
regard and what are the implications?
Silverstein:
Well, it's a terrible decision which goes against forty to fifty years of US
foreign policy. It also breaches all international understanding. All of our allies in the
European Union and elsewhere are aghast at this development. There is now a campaign in the
United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the announcement, which we will
veto, but the next step will be to go to the General Assembly, where such a resolution will
pass easily.
The question is how much anger, violence and disruption this is going to cause around the
world, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a slow-burning fuse. It is not going to
explode right now. The issue of Jerusalem is so vital that this is not something that is simply
going to go away. This is going to be a festering sore in the Muslim world and among
Palestinians. We have already seen attacks on Israeli soldiers and citizens and there will be
many more.
As to collusion in all of this, since Trump always said during the campaign that this was
what he was going to do, it might be difficult to treat this in the same way as the UN
resolution. The UN resolution was never on anybody's radar and nobody knew the role that Trump
was playing behind the scenes with that–as opposed to Trump saying right from the get-go
that Jerusalem was going to be recognized as the capital of Jerusalem.
By doing that, they have completely abrogated any Palestinian interest in Jerusalem. This is
a catastrophic decision that really excludes the United States from being an honest broker here
and shows our true colors in terms of how pro-Israel we are.
As most regular readers of CN already know, some dynamite books on the inordinate amount
of influence pro-Israel zealots have on Washington:
1.) 'The Host and the Parasite' by Greg Felton
2.) 'Power of Israel in the United States' by James Petras
3.) 'They Dare to Speak Out' by Paul Findley
4.) 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt
5.) 'Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power' by James Petras
I suggest that anyone relatively knew to this neglected topic peruse a few of the
aforementioned titles. An inevitable backlash by the citizens of the United States is
eventually forthcoming against the Zionist Power Configuration. It's crucial that this
impending backlash remain democratic, non-violent, eschews anti-Semitism, and travels in a
progressive in direction.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 5:47 pm
Which one would you suggest? I already read "The Israel Lobby."
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:38 pm
Findley and Mearsheimer are certainly worthwhile. I will look for Petras.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm
If you haven't already read them, the end/footnotes in "The Israel Lobby" are more
illuminating.
That influence is also shown, of course, by the fact that Obama waited until the midnight
hours of his tenure and after the 2016 election to even start working on this resolution.
While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated,
probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value.
In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think
he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew
calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:41 pm
Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case
against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel
collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will
awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:32 am
It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention
from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind
the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm.
The leaked emails showed the corruption
plainly, and based on the ACTUAL evidence (recorded download time), most likely came from a
highly disgruntled insider. The picture was starting to spill into public view. I'd estimate
the real huge worry was that if this stuff came out, it could bring out other Israeli
secrets, like their involvement in 9/11. That would mean actual jail time. Might be hard to
buy your way out of that no matter how much money you have.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 10:48 pm
The Logan act states that anyone who negotiates with an enemy of the US, and Israel is not
defined as an enemy.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 6:59 pm
The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would. I don't think anyone has
been convicted based on this act, and they were part of a transition team not to mention the
Logan act clearly states a private citizen who attempts to negotiate with an enemy state, and
that certainly doesn't apply to Israel. In this administration their bias is so blatant that
they can install Kushner as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestine peace process while his
family has a close relationship with Netanyahu, and he runs a foundation that invests in the
building of illegal settlements which goes against the Geneva conventions. Hopefully Trump's
blatant siding with Israel will receive a lot of backlash as did his plan to make Jerusalem
the capital of Israel.
I also found that so called progressive internet sites don't cover this the way they
should.
Al Pinto , December 24, 2017 at 9:16 am
@Annie
"The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would."
You and me both .
From the point of starting to read this article, it has been in my mind that the Logan act
would not apply here. After reading most of the comments, it became clear that not many
people viewed this as such. Yes, Joe Tedesky did as well
The UN is the "clearing house" for international politics, where countries freely contact
each other's for getting support for their cause behind the scene. The support sought after
could be voting for or against the resolution on hand. At times, as Israel did, countries
reach out to perceived enemies as well, if they could not secure sufficient support for their
cause. This is the normal activity of the UN diplomacy.
Knowing that the outgoing administration would not support its cause, Israel reached out
to the incoming administration to delay the vote on the UN resolution. I fail to see anything
wrong with Israel's action even in this case; Israel is not an enemy state to the US. As
such, there has been no violation of any acts by the incoming administration, even if they
tried to secure veto vote for Israel. I do not like it, but no action by Mueller in this case
is correct.
People, just like the article in itself, implying that the Logan Act applies in this case
are just plain wrong. Not just wrong, but their anti-Israel bias is in plain view.
Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state. Even then, Russia contacting the incoming administration is not a violation of
the Logan Act. That is just normal diplomacy in the background between countries. What would
be a violation is that the contacted official acted on the behalf of Russia and tried to
influence the outgoing administration's decision. That is what the Mueller investigation
tries to prove hopelessly
"Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and
therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with
Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing
their best to provoke Russia into one.
Annie , December 24, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for your reply. When I read the article and it referenced the Logan Act, which I am
familiar with in that I've read about it before, I was surprised that Bernstein and
Silverstein even brought it up because it so obviously does not apply in this case, since
Israel is not considered an enemy state. Many have even referenced it as flimsy when it comes
to convictions against those in Trump's transition team who had contacts with Russia. No one
has ever been convicted under the Logan Act.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:41 pm
The Logan Act either should apply equally, or not apply at all. This "Russia-gate" hype
seems to apply it selectively.
mrtmbrnmn , December 23, 2017 at 7:36 pm
You guys are blinded by the light. The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer
hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak).
There is no doubt that Trump is Bibi's and the Saudi's ventriloquist dummy and Jared has
been an Israel agent of influence since he was 12.
But half the Dementedcrat Sore Loser Brigade will withdraw from the field of battle (not
to mention most of the GOP living dead too) if publically and noisily tying Israel to Trump's
tail becomes the only route to his removal. Which it would have to be, as there is no there
there regarding the yearlong trumped-up PutinPutinPutin waterboarding of Trump.
Immediately (if not sooner) the mighty (pro-Israel) Donor Bank of Singer (Paul), Saban
(Haim), Sachs (Goldman) & Adelson (Sheldon), would change their passwords and leave these
politicians/beggars with empty begging bowls. End of $ordid $tory.
alley cat , December 23, 2017 at 7:45 pm
So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What
of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are
orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator
bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel.
Mueller can use that evidence of sabotage and/or obstruction of justice to try to coerce
false confessions from Kushner and Flynn. But what are the chances of that, barring short
stayovers for them at some CIA black site?
So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem
witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and
Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's
flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first.
Leslie F. , December 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm
He used it, along with other info, to turn flip Flynn and possibly can use it the same way
again Kusher. Not all evidence has end up in court to be useful.
JWalters , December 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm
This is an extremely important story, excellently reported. All the main "facts" Americans
think they know about Israel are, amazingly, flat-out lies.
1. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a
defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor
shape and would not be able to resist the zionist army.
2. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews.
3. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are
under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis.
4. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of
equal human rights for all.
Maintaining such a blanket of major lies for decades requires immense power. And this
power would have to be exercised "under the radar" to be effective. That requires even more
power. Both Congress and the press have to be controlled. How much power does it take to turn
"Progressive Rachel" into "Tel Aviv Rachel"? To turn "It Takes a Village" Hillary into
"Slaughter a Village" Hillary? It takes immense power AND ruthlessness.
War profiteers have exactly this combination of immense war profits and the ruthlessness
to victimize millions of people. "War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Vast war profits easily afford to buy the mainstream media. And controlling campaign
contributions for members of Congress is amazingly cheap in the big picture. Such a squalid
sale of souls.
And when simple bribery is not enough, they ruin a person's life through blackmail or
false character assassination. And if those don't work they use death threats, including to
family members, and finally murder. Their ruthlessness is unrestrained. John Perkins has
described these tactics in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".
For readers who haven't seen it, here is an excellent riff on the absurdly overwhelming
evidence for Israel's influence compared to that of Russia, at a highly professional news and
analysis website run by Jewish anti-Zionists. "Let's talk about Russian influence" http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/about-russian-influence/
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:44 pm
Hitler and Mussolini, Trump and Netanyahoo – matches made in Hell. These characters
are so obviously, blatantly evil that it is deeply disturbing that people fail to see that,
and instead go to great lengths to find some complicated flaws in these monsters.
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:49 pm
Keep it simple folks. No need for complex analyses. Just remember that these characters as
simply as evil as it gets, and proceed from there. These asinine shows that portray mobsters
as complex human beings are dangerously deluding. If you want to be victimized by these
types, this kind of overthinking is just the way to go.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 9:00 pm
There is a modern theory of fiction that insists upon the portrayal of inconsistency in
characters, both among the good guys and the bad guys. It is useful to show how those who do
wrongs have made specific kinds of errors that make them abnormal, and that those who do
right are not perfect but nonetheless did the right thing. Instead it is used by commercial
writers to argue that the good are really bad, and the bad are really good, which is of
course the philosophy of oligarchy-controlled mass publishers.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:54 pm
A very important article by Dennis Bernstein, and it is very appropriate that non-zionist
Jews are active against the extreme zionist corruption of our federal government. I am sure
that they are reviled by the zionists for interfering with the false denunciations of racism
against the opponents of zionism. Indeed critics face a very nearly totalitarian power of
zionism, which in league with MIC/WallSt opportunism has displaced democracy altogether in
the US.
backwardsevolution , December 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm
A nice little set-up by the Obama administration. Perhaps it was entrapment? Who set it
up? Flynn and Kushner should have known better to fall for it. So at the end of his
Presidency, Obama suddenly gets balls and wants to slap down Israel? Yeah, right.
Nice to have leverage over people, though, isn't it? If you're lucky and play your cards
right, you might even be lucky enough to land an impeachment.
Of course, I'm just being cynical. No one would want to overturn democracy, would
they?
Certainly people like Comey, Brenner, Clinton, Clapper, Mueller, Rosenstein wouldn't want
that, would they?
Joe Tedesky , December 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm
I just can't see any special prosecutor investigating Israel-Gate. Between what the
Zionist donors donate to these creepy politicians, too what goods they have on these same
mischievous politicians, I just can't see any investigation into Israel's collusion with the
Trump Administration going anywhere. Netanyahu isn't Putin, and Russia isn't Israel. Plus,
Israel is considered a U.S. ally, while Russia is being marked as a Washington rival. Sorry,
this news regarding Israel isn't going to be ranted on about for the next 18 months, like the
MSM has done with Russia, because our dear old Israel is the only democracy in the Middle
East, or so they tell us. So, don't get your hopes up.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:33 am
It's true the Israelis have America's politicians by the ears and the balls. But as this
story gets better known, politicians will start getting questions at their town meetings.
Increasingly the politicians will gag on what Israel is force-feeding them, until finally
they reach a critical mass of vomit in Congress.
Joe Tedesky , December 24, 2017 at 11:12 am
I hope you are right JWalters. Although relying on a Zionist controlled MSM doesn't give
hope for the news getting out properly. Again I hope you are right JWalters. Joe
Actually, Netanyahu was so desperate to have the resolution pulled and not voted on that
he reached out to any country that might help him after the foreign minister of New Zealand,
one of its co-sponsors refused to pull the plug after a testy phone exchange with the Israeli
PM ending up threatening an Israeli boycott oturnef the KIwis.
He then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin, who owed him a favor for having Israel's UN
delegate absent himself for the UNGA vote on sanctioning Russia after its annexation of
Crimea.
Putin then called Russia's UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, since deceased, and asked him to
get the other UNSC ambassadors to postpone the vote until Trump took over the White House but
the other ambassadors weren't buying it. Given Russia's historic public position regarding
the settlements, Churkin had no choice to vote Yes with the others.
This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US which,
due to Zionist influence on the media, does not want the American public to know about the
close ties between Putin and Netanyahu which has led to the Israeli PM making five state
visits there in the last year and a half.
Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto. That
Netanyahu apparently knew in advance that the US planned to veto the resolution was, I
suspect, leaked to the Israelis by US delegate Samantha Power, who was clearly unhappy at
having to abstain.
Abe , December 24, 2017 at 12:39 am
The Israeli Prime Minister made five state visits to Russia in the last year and a half to
make sure the Russians don't accidentally on purpose blast Israeli warplanes from the sky
over Syria (like they oughtta). Putin tries not to snicker when Netanyahu bloviates ad
nauseum about the purported "threat" posed by Iran.
He thinks Putin is a RATS ASS like the yankee government
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:34 am
"This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the
US"
We've just had a whole cluster of big stories involving Israel that have all been
essentially blacked out in the US press. e.g. "Dionne and Shields ignore the Adelson in the room" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/jerusalem-israels-capital
This is not due to chance. There is no doubt that the US mainstream media is wholly
controlled by the Israelis.
alley cat , December 24, 2017 at 4:49 am
"He [Netanyahu] then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin "
Jeff, that characterization of Putin and Netanyahu's relationship makes no sense, since
the Russians have consistently opposed Zionism and Putin has been no exception, having
spoiled Zionist plans for the destruction of Syria.
"Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US
veto."
Not sure where you're going with that, since the US vote was up to Obama, who wanted to
get some payback for all of Bibi's efforts to sabotage Obama's treaty with Iran.
For the record, Zionism has had no more rabid supporter than the Dragon Lady. If we're
going to make assumptions, we could start by assuming that if she had won the White House
we'd all be dead by now, thanks to her obsession (at the instigation of her Zionist/neocon
sponsors) with declaring no-fly zones in Syria.
Brendan , December 24, 2017 at 6:18 am
Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves
their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will
simply ignore the Israeli connection.
Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as
evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone
call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of
this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference.
Skip Scott , December 24, 2017 at 7:59 am
I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would
never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy.
"Nothing to see here folks, move along."
The zionist will stop at nothing to control the middle east with American taxpayers
money/military equiptment its a win win for the zionist they control America lock stock and
barrel a pity though it is a great country to be led by a jewish entity.
What will Israel-Palestine look like twenty years from now? Will it remain an apartheid
regime, a regime without any Palestinians, or something different. The Trump decision, which
the world rejects, brings the issue of "final" settlement to the fore. In a way we can go
back to the thirties and the British Mandate. Jewish were fleeing Europe, many coming to
Palestine. The British, on behalf of the Zionists, were delaying declaring Palestine a state
with control of its own affairs. Seeing the mass immigration and chafing at British foot
dragging, the Arabs rebelled, What happened then was that the British, responding to numerous
pressures notably war with Germany, acted by granting independence and granting Palestine
control of its borders.
With American pressure and the mass exodus of Jews from Europe, Jews defied the British
resulting in Jewish resistance. What followed then was a UN plan to divide the land with a
Jerusalem an international city administered by the UN. The Arabs rebelled and lost much of
what the UN plan provided and Jerusalem as an international city was scrapped.
Will there be a second serious attempt to settle the issue of the land and the status of
Jerusalem? Will there be a serious move toward a single state? How will the matter of
Jerusalem be resolved. The two state solution has always been a fantasy and acquiescence of
Palestinians to engage in this charade exposes their leaders to charges of posturing for
perks. Imagined options could go on and on but will there be serious options placed before
the world community or will the boots on the ground Israeli policies continue?
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 1:34 pm
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with
the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to
both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Truly mind-boggling. Ahistorical, and as you say, fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:48 pm
FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy
(against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End
of story.
$50K of Facebook ads about puppies pales in comparison to that blatant, prima facia,
public manipulation. God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:11 pm
Just for the record, Richard Silverstein blocked me on Twitter because I pointed out that
he slammed someone who was suggesting that the Assad government was fighting for its
(Syria's) life by fighting terrorists. Actually, more specifically, because of that he read
my "Free Palestine" bio on Twitter and called me a Hamas supporter (no Hamas mentioned) and a
"moron" for some seeming contradiction.
I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy.
If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria
and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving
their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing
brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote,
arguably, perpetual war.
Silverstein is probably not a good (ie. consistent) arbiter of Israeli impact on US
politics. Just sayin'.
This may be a tad ot but it relates to the alleged hacking of the DNC, the role debbie
wasserman schultz plays in the spy ring (awan bros) in house of rep servers: I have long
suspected that mossad has their fingers in this entire mess. FWIW
Good site, BTW.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 7:35 pm
I can't recall why I removed the Tikun Olam site from my bookmarks – it happened
quite a while back. Generally I do that when I feel the blogger crossed some kind of personal
red line. Something Mr. Silverstein wrote put him over that line with me.
In the course of a search I found that at the neocon NYT. Mr. Silverstein claims several
things I find unbelievable, and from that alone I wonder about his ultimate motives. I may be
excessively touchy about this, but that's how it is.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 8:51 pm
Yeah Zachary, "wondering about ultimate motives" is probably a good way to put it/his
views. He's obviously conflicted, if not deferential in some aspects of Israeli policy. He
really was a hero of mine, but now I just don't get whether what he says is masking something
or a true belief. He says some good stuff, but, but, but .
P. Michael Garber , December 24, 2017 at 11:54 pm
Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than
reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel
lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible
relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was
manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's
influence.
And then Trump administration supplied weapons to Ukraine
Notable quotes:
"... This is not much of a dissent from the hawkish line on foreign policy, but it is a rejection of one of the more thoughtless and irresponsible foreign policy proposals out there. The report predictably puts the most negative spin possible on this move, perhaps because this is the first sign in months that Trump and his allies aren't just going to roll over for whatever the most hawkish Republicans want. Whatever their reasons for doing this, it happens to be the right call as a matter of policy. ..."
Daniel DePetris observes that most of the Republican platform on foreign policy and national
security shows that the hawks remain firmly in charge of the party's agenda, and I agree. It is
worth noting, though, that the Trump campaign has gone against the hawkish consensus on at least
one issue. Josh Rogin reports that Trump campaign operatives managed to work with pro-Trump
delegates to delete language that called for sending weapons to Ukraine:
The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican
platform won't call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces,
contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.
This is not much of a dissent from the hawkish line on foreign policy, but it is a
rejection of one of the more thoughtless and irresponsible foreign policy proposals out there.
The report predictably puts the most negative spin possible on this move, perhaps because this is
the first sign in months that Trump and his allies aren't just going to roll over for whatever
the most hawkish Republicans want. Whatever their reasons for doing this, it happens to be the
right call as a matter of policy.
It did not take long before we knew there was no hope of change from President Obama. But at least he went into his inauguration
with an unprecedented number of Americans on the Mall showing their support for the President of Change. Hope was abundant.
But with Trump, we are already losing faith, if not yet with him, at least with his choice of those who comprise his government
even before Trump is inaugurated.
Trump's choice for Secretary of State not only sounds like the neoconservatives in declaring Russia to be a threat to the United
States and all of Europe, but also sounds like Hillary Clinton in declaring the South China Sea to be an area of US dominance. One
would think that the chairman of Exxon was not an idiot, but I am no longer sure. In his confirmation hearing, Rex Tillerson said
that China's access to its own South China Sea is "not going to be allowed."
Here is Tillerson's statement: "We're going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second,
your access to those islands also not going to be allowed."
I mean, really, what is Tillerson going to do about it except get the world blown up. China's response was as pointed as a response
can be:
Tillerson "should not be misled into thinking that Beijing will be fearful of threats. If Trump's diplomatic team shapes future
Sino-US ties as it is doing now, the two sides had better prepare for a military clash. Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear power
strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories."
So Trump is not even inaugurated and his idiot nominee for Secretary of State has already created an animosity relationship with
two nuclear powers capable of completely destroying all of the West for eternity. And this makes the US Senate comfortable with Tillerson.
The imbeciles should be scared out of their wits, assuming they have any.
One of the reasons that Russia rescued Syria from Washington's overthrow is that Russia understood that Washington's next target
would be Iran and from a destroyed Iran terrorism would be exported into the Russian Federation. There is an axis of countries threatened
by US supported terrorism-Syria, Iran, Russia, China.
Trump says he wants to normalize relations with Russia and to open up business opportunities in the place of conflict. But to
normalize relations with Russia requires also normalizing relations with Iran and China.
Judging from their public statements, Trump's announced government has targeted Iran for destabilization. Trump's appointees as
National Security Advisor, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA all regard Iran incorrectly as a terrorist state that must
be overthrown.
But Russia cannot allow Washington to overthrow the stable government in Iran and will not allow it. China's investments in Iranian
oil imply that China also will not permit Washington's overthrow of Iran. China has already suffered from its lost investments in
Libyan oil as the result of the Obama regimes overthrow of the Libyan government.
Realistically speaking, it looks like the Trump Presidency is already defeated by his own appointees independently of the ridiculous
and completely unbelievable propaganda put out by the CIA and broadcast by the presstitute media in the US, UK, and Europe. The New
York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and BBC have lowered themselves below the National Enquirer.
If the Chairman of Exxon and a Lt. General are not capable of standing up to the imbecilic Congress, they are unfit for office.
That they did not stand up is an indication that they lack the strength that Trump needs if he is to bring change from the top.
If Trump is unable to change US foreign policy, thermonuclear war and the destruction of Earth are inevitable.
"... I like the use of "careerist" ; it should be used more often, as it describes the motivation of a rather large number of decision-makers I've met. ..."
"... I would hate to see it used more often. I have heard of its being applied to a grad student who–wait for it!–actually hoped to have an academic career and recognized the forms that had to be gone through to achieve that. There are places where it is an appropriate description, but it is one of those vogue words (like narcissistic) which become void of meaning through overuse. ..."
Team Trump is working on a plan "to restructure the Central
Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia
headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the
world,"
And the main reason Clinton Democrats are jumping on this bandwagon is
that they want to blame their gross electoral failure on "external forces",
not their own terrible record of sabotaging the middle class in favor of
elite Wall Street interests. Their current fear is progressive Sanders
Democrats kicking them out of the DNC and other party organization
leadership positions (which just happened in California); hence their
willingness to get behind bogus claims on DNC hacking and Russians running
Trump.
As far as the FBI's Comey, notably he acted to protect Clinton when the
great fear was that she'd be defeated by Sanders; notably the FBI didn't
access DNC servers to look for evidence of a hack (it was probably an
internal leak), and Comey's refusal to recommend criminal charges for
Clinton during the primary was a service to the Clinton Democrats.
And the DNC was just so sleazy, no wonder they alienated all the Sanders
supporters for the general election:
It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to
ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has
a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make
several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would
draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.- DNC CFO Brad
Marshall
I would hate to see it used more often. I have heard of its being applied
to a grad student who–wait for it!–actually hoped to have an academic career
and recognized the forms that had to be gone through to achieve that. There
are places where it is an appropriate description, but it is one of those
vogue words (like narcissistic) which become void of meaning through
overuse.
"... I gather our President lectured our President Elect on the necessity to stand up to Russia. (My first thought is that like that stupid charitable campaign to Stand Up to Cancer!, another place where the phrase was either meaningless or foolhardy.) ..."
"... IF Russia ever started actually interfering in our relations with our neighbors or attempted to get us thrown out of our legal bases in foreign nations, I would say that Barack Obama might have a point. Since we are the party guilty of such actions, he would do better to clean up his own administration's relations with Russia, apologize to Russia, and then STFU. ..."
"... 'Obama Urges Trump to Maintain Pointless, Hyper-Aggresive Encirclement of Russia Strategy, Acknowledge Nuclear Apocalypse "Inevitable"' ..."
"... In the best of circumstances, Obama in his post-presidency will be akin to Jimmy Carter and stay out of politics, less or less. (I think he has exhausted all trust and value.) If he goes the Jimmy Carter route; he is bound to do worse and will fade away. I don't think he'll go the Clinton route unless Michelle tries to run for office. ..."
"... The good people of the US are awaiting DHS' final report on Russia's attempts to hack our elections. We deserve as much. ..."
"... If there's any basis to the allegations it's about time someone provided it. Up till now it's been unfounded assertions. Highly suspect at that. ..."
"... My guess is the whole Russian boogeyman was a ploy to attract those "moderate Republicans" who liked Romney. ..."
"... "My hope is that the president-elect coming in takes a similarly constructive approach, finding areas where we can cooperate with Russia where our values and interests align, but that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia when they are deviating from our values and international norms," Obama said. "But I don't expect that the president-elect will follow exactly our approach." ..."
"... Yes, because "U.S. values" as defined by the actions of the last 16 years have been so enlightened and successful and because the U.S. is a sterling example of adhering to international norms ..."
"... Just how deluded, ignorant or sociopathic does a person need to be that they can say things like that without vomiting? ..."
I gather our President lectured our President Elect on the necessity to stand up to Russia.
(My first thought is that like that stupid charitable campaign to Stand Up to Cancer!, another
place where the phrase was either meaningless or foolhardy.)
IF Russia ever started actually interfering in our relations with our neighbors or attempted
to get us thrown out of our legal bases in foreign nations, I would say that Barack Obama might
have a point. Since we are the party guilty of such actions, he would do better to clean up his
own administration's relations with Russia, apologize to Russia, and then STFU.
Which I am sure he will do once everyone recognizes that that is the appropriate thing to do.
But as we well know everyone else will have to do the heavy lifting of figuring that out before
he will even acknowledge the possibility.
In the best of circumstances, Obama in his post-presidency will be akin to Jimmy Carter
and stay out of politics, less or less. (I think he has exhausted all trust and value.) If he
goes the Jimmy Carter route; he is bound to do worse and will fade away. I don't think he'll go
the Clinton route unless Michelle tries to run for office.
In this case, Obama is probably too vain and Michelle being the saner of the two might rein
him in? Best of any world would, as you say, STFU. (As the Ex Prez. Obamamometer, that is probably
not in the cards.)
Maybe he will end up like Geo Bush, sitting in the bathtub drooling while he paints childish
self-portraits
Or maybe he will end up like OJ, where he tries to go hang out with all his cool friends and they
tell him to get lost
Ppl still mention him as a master orator, etc. Lots of post presidency speaking engagements
I suppose. I'd prefer him not to but then again if he makes enough annually from it to beat the
Clintons we might get the satisfaction of annoying them
"My hope is that the president-elect coming in takes a similarly constructive approach,
finding areas where we can cooperate with Russia where our values and interests align, but that
the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia when they are deviating from our values
and international norms," Obama said. "But I don't expect that the president-elect will follow
exactly our approach." What Obama is saying is he wants Russia to join America in bombing
hospitals, schools, children, doctors, public facilities like water treatment plants, bridges,
weddings, homes, and civilians to list just few – while arming and supporting terrorists for regime
change. And if anyone points this out, Russia like the US is supposed to say "I know you are but
what am I?"
Yes, because "U.S. values" as defined by the actions of the last 16 years have been so
enlightened and successful and because the U.S. is a sterling example of adhering to international
norms
Just how deluded, ignorant or sociopathic does a person need to be that they can say things
like that without vomiting?
Is this the same Russia that just hacked our election and subverted our fine democracy? Why,
President Obama, I believe it behooves you to stand up to Russia yourself. Show President-Elect
Trump how it is done sir!
Cohen tried to describe his former boss to those gathered and watching in terms befitting
the unique political phenomenon that has captured American politics for almost four years. "Mr.
Trump is an enigma," said Cohen. "He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do
we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst
version of himself."
Cohen had said to start that if they expected him to dish out bombshell evidence of
'Russian collusion', he had none to give, and just like that, he let all the air out of
the room. Disappointed Democrats grasping for air used their last breaths as to not let
today's hearing go to waste, tried to put some value on Cohen's testimony against the
President. Cohen used the usual scripted buzzwords Hillary had used then repeated by the
mainstream media since the Presidential debates. What followed is hearing turned
spectacle and circus.
"For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives:
that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped
elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and
other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal
officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had
effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result
by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the
second narrative is the correct one.
The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government
are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because -- in
fired FBI Director James Comey's formulation -- a "higher duty" than the oath they swore to
uphold the Constitution compelled them.
Or -- in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's
words -- "the threat" was too great. Nevermind that the nature of "the threat" was that the
people might elect someone he and Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might
actually serve his term, as elected." Black
----------
Baron Black of Crossharbour, is an interesting fellow. In this piece he (or someone) makes
the case for the reality of the "soft coup" that the Borg (foreign policy establishment) and
the Deep State mandarins (SES ers) scattered across the Executive Branch undertook and for
which they only now are being driven back into their dens. Black reminds me of Lord
Beaverbrook, another Canadian who was a member of the War Cabinet in WW2?
The caste of US general and admirals are not I think part of the coup plot. They have their
own game as a group and it is not a neocon game except for a few outliers like Jack Keane, a
priest of the neocon cult.
Nevertheless, IMO Black is wrong when he thinks that the present situation is the worst
constitutional crisis since the outbreak of the WBS. No, IMO, this is far worse than that. It
is the worst ever. In 1860 the seceding states did not seek to overthrow Lincoln, the legally
elected president of the US, even though he had been elected by a plurality in the popular vote
and not a single electoral vote from the South. They simply wished to depart what they saw as a
voluntary union of the states.
In this case the forces arrayed against Trump wish to overthrow the constitutional order.
That is much worse. pl
Unfortunately nothing will happen to these people.
No one will be charged, much less tried..
The swamp is above the law - "laws are for little people."
We are not governed, we are ruled.
The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually,
we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York
Times' Friday evening bushwhack. ...
And for lots of his columns, see
his archive at antiwar.com . There you will find not only the titles of his articles, but
also short summaries.
Interesting (actually quite disappointing) how little he is quoted in the MSM. What an
echo chamber it is!
Tump can go back and keep his job pleasing the Zionist elite that installed him.
So far as I'm concerned Hillary was the dream candidate for the apartheid Jewish state.
That the Zionists have made a terrific rebound in capturing Trump seems to me to be another
story entirely. At a guess, I'd say the job was done with a combination of flattery, bribery,
and naked force.
I've tuned out the Mueller thing, but suspect it was part of the leverage used to get
control of Trump. Again a guess, but I'd say Trump was totally in bed with the Russians - and
everybody else with whom he thought he might run a scam. But this was "business", as in
making promises and squeezing money out of them. Things like Trump University. With proper
handling the cost of the failures would fall mostly on the "investors". And in the worst
case, there was always the fifth or sixth bankruptcy.
Trump didn't expect to be president - that was a humongous publicity campaign financed by
the Corporate Media. I don't think Pence was expecting anything besides getting some national
exposure which might lead him becoming Senator from Indiana in 2018.
I'm very glad Hillary isn't perched in the White House, but the price of avoiding that has
been higher than I expected. Speaking of the devil, I read some ugly stuff at the 2:00 news
part of Naked Capitalism.
Clinton (2): "EX-CLINTON POLLSTER: Hillary will run if Biden doesn't -- or field is 'too
far left'" [The American Mirror]. "After defending Clinton's credentials as 'one of the
most experienced politicians around,' [Mark] Penn went on to say of the reported recent
confabs between Hillary and declared candidates, "Those meetings are going to be somewhat
awkward because she hasn't declared that she's not definitely running, and she, in fact, at
the same time is looking over the field and I think will make a decision later in the year
whether or not to run herself. Penn said the chances of Hillary running depends on how the
field shapes up. 'If the party looks too far to the left and there's no front runner,
she'll get in,' he said. 'I think if Joe Biden gets in, that probably means she won't run
if he gets in. If he doesn't get in, I think the field will be open for her,' Penn said."
• She's tanned, rested, and ready!
That fits right in with my belief that the corporate Dems would prefer Trump's second term
or Pence's first term to any decent Democrat being elected. I'll be saying this over and over
- while Sander's foreign policy credentials stink to high heaven, the prospect of him being
"decent" in domestic matters isn't too awfully bad.
Mueller [investigation]... suspect it was part of the leverage used to get control
of Trump.
Well, the "Russia meddled" scare-mongering has worked well as a means of reviving
anti-Russian McCarthyism. It even ensnared Wikileaks and Michael Flynn (both of whom were
CIA/Deep State targets).
And, why would the Deep State allow an unvetted person to assume control of the
Presidency? They are too careful for that. In fact, all recent President's have some
connection to CIA: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama. Felix Slater, an FBI informant worked
for Trump for over a decade while informing on the Russian mob, and most of Trump dubious
Russian oligarch connections are actually more loyal to Israel than Russia.
Trump didn't expect to be president
That's funny, given the fact that he bragged that he would win and that he was the ONLY
populist running for the Republican nomination (out of 19 contenders!). And none of the other
candidates (many of whom are seasoned campaigners) sought to alter their strategy when the
saw Trump pulling ahead?!?!
Oh, and Hillary helped her friend Trump win when she alienated key constituencies
(Sanders progressives, Blacks) and energized Trump's base by calling them
"deploreables".
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Oh, sorry, these things are supposed to be memory-holed. Hope you and MoA readers don't
suffer from too much cognitive dissonance from such facts.
I honestly think that had the media and the deep state treated Trump fairly, they would have still have some credibility
now. But the blatant attempt to derail his candidacy only egged on his supporters. Then, the concerted attempts to nullify the
election results convinced people all over the political spectrum that our "democracy" is only a "simulation of democracy" as
Hopkins points out.
Don't the people pulling the strings behind the media understand what they have done? They have convinced a large part of the
nation that everything that they were taught from childhood is a fraud.
Civilizations are only held together by the "glue" of shared beliefs. The deep-state-media-complex has just applied a solvent
to the very glue that holds the entire culture together.
This is going to make the next couple of years very interesting.
The DNC takes Deep State to a whole new level. They have this thing called "Superdelegates",
which has veto power over the little people.
The SJWs and Bernie bots may be too dumb to know who their real daddies are, but the
Superdelegates know exactly whose ring they need to kiss to regain power: the same globalist
capitalist Davos scums who now have Trump exactly where they want him, between their legs
sucking up while busy implementing their agendas of endless wars and endless immigration.
The Superdelegates will never let things get too far with the socialists, they're good for
entertainment, to give off the pretense of a real race. I'm betting my money on Kirsten
Gillibrand -- Dems know if there's a woman who could beat Trump, she needs to be a blonde.
Uncle Joe has too many skeletons in his closet. It's just a matter of time before the
cockroaches come out of the woodwork and #MeToo him into the orbits.
I stopped by to thank you for the link to Greg Grandin you offered in the last thread. I
just finished reading it, and it's a gem of historical storytelling, weaving great themes of
law in a superbly easy read. The concept of national sovereignty originated for the world in
the Latin American colonies, and over time the US embraced it as international law, only to
discard it later, from about the Nixon era on.
So Bolton and the like are actually acting within a current Washington school of thought.
And how well the concept of interventionism has been captured by neoliberalism. The concept
of individual sovereignty was used to dissolve the borders of national sovereignty, but it
wasn't the individual who won. As Grandin states towards the end:
"Economic globalisation promised a prosperous, borderless world, even as its promoters
signed a raft of treaties that freed capital but effectively criminalised labour mobility."
This matter of the mobility of capital and the demise of the individual is something shown
clearly in that other excellent piece you linked a couple of weeks back:
I've wanted to come here to comment on it but the task seemed daunting. Foster's
magisterial article traces the history of neoliberalism - almost 100 years old - and shows
how the mobility of capital was always what it aimed towards. And this financially
borderless world is what we live in now - how ironic that the US can enforce imperial borders
through financial sanctions.
~~
So the stories told by Grandin and Foster seem to intertwine. The rich desire a borderless
world to move capital freely. This has killed the prosperity of the working classes because
of the ease of offshoring industry - the ultimate threat against the worker. And you can no
longer restore equity to a society simply by taxing wealth, because it's too easy for wealth
to flee to other havens. The only thing you can do is nationalize it, to force it to stay
in-country.
Indeed, Venezuela is the enemy of the US on both of these crucial fronts: it insists on
the national sovereignty of its resources and it insists on sharing that wealth with its
workers. It becomes ever more clear that the struggle for true national sovereignty can only
come with the empowerment of the sovereign people, through fair law and fair distribution of
national wealth.
But to do all this, in an era of borderless capitalism, takes socialism.
And this is the crucial aspect of the time we live in. Justice Holmes I think said that he
paid taxes as the price for civilization. But moving forward the only way we can pay for
civilization now is through socialism. This is the dynamic that all the roads lead to,
inexorably.
You see what trouble you stir up when you share links?
Interview is about forthcoming book "Peak
Trump" In "Peak Trump", Stockman goes after all the sacred cows: Military spending, entitlement spending, MAGA, Trump's tax cut,
the intelligence budget, and the Wall. Trump is a symptom of the problem. He wanted to drain the swamp but failed to do so. He never
really had a good chance of doing that, but he failed to make the most of the chance he had. We are where we are because of decades
of Congressional and monetary mismanagement
All in the name of empire... the Deep state in non-particular and Trump proved to be a "naked king"
At 15:49 min Ron Paul asks the question about Tulsi... She positioned herself as noninterventionists and has similar foreign policy
as Ron Paul used to have. Stockman answer was very interesting and informative.. MSM journalists are essentially federal contractor,
lobbyists of MIC.
He also mentioned that Trump falls from the bait. And the appointment of Elliot Abrams was real betrayal of his voters.
Notable quotes:
"... He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues to exceed the avarice of politicians, though. ..."
"... No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed to be accompanied by spending cuts. ..."
"... But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning . Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who "know better" what should be produced. ..."
"... And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap. ..."
"... The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases. ..."
David Stockman was one of my conservative heroes during the Reagan years. He was the one person in the Administration who seemed
to have an honest understanding of economics. It's nice to see that his experiences with the reality of the DC swamp have made
him go all the way to describing himself as a libertarian, rather than a conservative.
He could have sold out, given up any modicum of principle, and simply become a multi-millionaire Republican Party establishment
hack.
I would venture to say he and I have some policy differences, but it's always nice to see when someone embraces their best,
rather than their worst, instincts.
My recollection of Stockman's economics from those years (based on e.g. The Triumph of Politics) was that he was all-in on
"supply side" economics, which is twaddle. He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as
the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues
to exceed the avarice of politicians, though.
Yes, supply side is bogus, but my observations were that Stockman was quite critical of the spending increases that the Administration
put forth. He approved of the so called tax-cuts, but he did so with the understanding that there would be spending cuts along
with them.
My own recollections (I was alive back then, but not as politically conscious as I am now) were that Stockman was not endorsing
the supply side theory so much as his own idea that cuts in government spending were necessary, and that tax cuts would put pressure
on Congress and the administration to cut spending. The irony is that, for whatever reason, tax revenues overall increased by
60% in Reagan's two terms, yet spending increased almost 100%. This certainly disproves the idea that there was ever a revenue
problem, and that it has always been a spending problem.
In any event, Stockman was just about the only person with an official capacity in DC, who actually worked toward spending
cuts. Unless you are saying that his rhetoric was a lie, and he was just like all the others. If that is the case then, of course,
you could always be right.
No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely
because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed
to be accompanied by spending cuts.
But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning .
Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who
"know better" what should be produced.
True, the central planning class in question was, broadly and not very honestly defined, "entrepreneurs" rather than government
bureaucrats, but the principle was the same. And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses
who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap.
"But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy"
Perhaps the most damning thing about it was that the stated goal was to increase the federal government's revenue. What person
in their right mind would wish to give even more money and power to the federal government?
The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a
top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond
bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases.
CREATION OF CONTROL FILES TRANSFERRED FROM FBI TO NSA
"But by then, it was already too late. The FBI's surveillance was messy and involved too many agents who could potentially
blow the whistle. In the wake of 9/11, the internal surveillance program was shifted from the Bureau to the NSA, and it was not
long before those surveillance powers were being directed against politicians and officials in yet another attempt to gather dirt
and find blackmail-worthy material on these individuals.
As NSA whistleblower Russell Tice told The Corbett Report in 2013, he had first-hand knowledge of this surveillance, which
included politicians, judges, military personnel, and even the future President of the United States.
In short, this scandal is too deep, too dark, and covers too many people from both sides of the political aisle for it to ever
proceed in public. If it were to be exposed it would uncover a tale of surveillance, scandal, drug money, child prostitution and
blackmail that could blow up all over Washington and make Watergate look like a minor footnote in the history of political scandal."
"In 2002 Gilbert Graham, a Special Agent in the Washington Field Office of the FBI, blew the whistle on an illegal surveillance
program being conducted out of the Bureau's Washington headquarters. According to the unclassified version of his complaint, obtained
by the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in 2007, Graham alleged violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence
Act "in conducting electronic surveillance as a subterfuge to acquire evidence of criminal activity."
These allegations were backed up by a former FBI Counterintelligence Specialist in the Washington Field Office, who told the
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition: " you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to
top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved
has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure."
According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, revealing the details of this program for the first time in a series of podcasts
in the wake of the Hastert revelations, this illegal surveillance program -- dubbed COINTELPRO II by the agents who were asked
to implement it -- dates back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton White House was being rocked by a series of sex scandals."
That's a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI
director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump's firing of former
Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly
elected president out of office.
According to New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Matthew Haag, McCabe made the
statement in an NBC 60 Minutes interview to be aired on Sunday. He also reportedly said
that McCabe wanted the so-called Russia collusion investigation to go after Trump for
obstructing justice in firing Comey and for any instances they could turn up of his working in
behalf of Russia.
The idea of invoking the 25th Amendment was discussed, it seems, at two meetings on May
16, 2017. According to McCabe, top law enforcement officials pondered how they might recruit
Vice President Pence and a majority of cabinet members to declare in writing, to the Senate's
president pro tempore and the House speaker, that the president was "unable to discharge the
powers and duties of his office." That would be enough, under the 25th Amendment, to install
the vice president as acting president, pushing aside Trump.
But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it
would set, it's necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text
prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional
figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president
after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration
within those four days that the guy can't govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue.
It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have
to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the
vice president would govern. If Congress can't muster the two-thirds majority within the
prescribed time period, the president "shall resume the powers and duties of his office."
It's almost impossible to contemplate the political conflagration that would ensue under
this plan. Citizens would watch those in Washington struggle with the monumental question of
the fate of their elected leader under an initiative that had never before been invoked, or
even considered, in such circumstances. Debates would flare up over whether this comported with
the original intent of the amendment; whether it was crafted to deal with physical or mental
"incapacitation," as opposed to controversial actions or unsubstantiated allegations or even
erratic decision making; whether such an action, if established as precedent, would destabilize
the American republic for all time; and whether unelected bureaucrats should arrogate to
themselves the power to set in motion the downfall of a president, circumventing the
impeachment language of the Constitution.
For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing
narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.
One narrative -- let's call it Narrative A -- has it that honorable and dedicated federal
law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian
agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve
U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite
understandably, that Trump had "colluded" with Russian officials to cadge a victory that
otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by
Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the "Russia as Threat" preoccupation, and
by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post
, and The New York Times .
The other view -- Narrative B -- posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the
national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart
Trump's candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and
particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive
investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law
enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters,
conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably
columnist Kimberley Strassel.
The McCabe revelation won't affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and
outrageous as this "deep state" behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be
seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there
heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.
And those Narrative A folks won't have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was
fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to
the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators
on four occasions, including three times while under oath.
Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed
by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn't matter. Peter Strzok, head
of the FBI's counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails
to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele's dossier of dirt on Trump,
including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled
by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was "desperate that
Donald Trump not get elected and passionate about him not being president"? Not important. The
dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial.
Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?
Now we have a report from a participant of those meetings that top officials of the
country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting
president they didn't like. The Times even says that McCabe "confirmed" an earlier
report that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire in meetings with
Trump to incriminate him and make him more vulnerable to the plot.
There is no suggestion in McCabe's interview pronouncements or in the words of Scott Pelley,
who conducted the interview and spoke to CBS This Morning about it, that these federal
officials ever took action to further the aim of unseating the president. There doesn't seem to
be any evidence that they approached cabinet members or the vice president about it. "They were
speculating, 'This person would be with us, this person would not be,' and they were counting
noses in that effort," said Pelley. He added, apparently in response to Rosenstein's
insistence that his comments about wearing a wire were meant as a joke, "This was not perceived
to be a joke."
What are we to make of this? Around the time of the meetings to discuss the 25th Amendment
plot, senior FBI officials also discussed initiating a national security investigation of the
president as a stooge of the Russians or perhaps even a Russian agent. These talks were
revealed by The New YorkTimes and CNN in January, based on closed-door
congressional testimony by former FBI general counsel James Baker. You don't have to read very
carefully to see that the reporters on these stories brought to them a Narrative A sensibility.
The Times headline: "F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on
Behalf of Russia." CNN's: "Transcripts detail how FBI debated whether Trump was 'following
directions' of Russia." And of course, whoever leaked those hearing transcripts almost surely
did so to bolster the Narrative A version of events.
The independent journalist Gareth Porter, writing at Consortium News, offers a penetrating
exposition of the inconsistencies, fallacies, and fatuities of the Narrative A matrix, as
reflected in how the Times and CNN handled the stories that resulted from what were
clearly self-interested leaks.
Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director
John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever
since, particularly in the Times . Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence
indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was "colluding with Moscow," Brennan dodged the
question. He said his experience had taught him that "the Russians try to suborn individuals,
and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly."
Of course you can't collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan's fancy expression has the
effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious
and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or
injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, "The real purpose is to confer on national
security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the
basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration
with the Russian government."
That seems to be what's going on here. There's no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and
Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations
with Russia. They viewed him as a president "who needed to be reined in," as a CNN report
described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.
So they expanded the definition of collusion to include "unwitting" collaboration in order
to justify their machinations. It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would
take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body
politic.
Now we learn that they actually sat around and plotted how to distort the Constitution, just
as they distorted the rules of official behavior designed to hold them in check, in order to
destroy a presidential administration placed in power by the American people. It's getting more
and more difficult to dismiss Narrative B.
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the
author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. MORE FROM THIS
AUTHOR
You're right, it didn't change a thing in the full-throated support to depose an elected
President they disagree with. The bureaucratic cabal has long had a more informal absolute
veto over who can even run for President. This guy challenged that hegemony of insider power
brokers, and caused the revelation that we have morphed into a Potemkin-style, managed
democracy, in which we don't choose who gets to run, just which of their choices we are allowed
to approve.
Such is the decadent trajectory, of republics that transition into empires, where
democratic accountabilty to the governed, domestic and foreign, decays in favor of empire
administrators and their elite beneficiaries and their sinecures at the expense of the
majority.
People rail against Trump as some sort of would-be Caesar, but he is elected, while those
permanent unaccountable "national security" czars acting in secrecy they are willing to
transfer all power to, are not.
No form of popular government can survive when secret police recording everything and spying
on the population become the real power.
"It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude
toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic."
What we don't want to recognize is that people in such positions are, in fact, just that
dumb. It is unfortunately true. While not a Trump supporter, I would be out on the streets with
them if these jacka$$es had tried to pull this off. They should ALL be immediately terminated
and any benefits revoked.
Last night (Feb 14, 2019) Tucker Carlson interviewed retired Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz (1:04-3:36):
Carlson: "Professor, thanks very much for coming on. So now the suspicions of many are
confirmed by one of the players in it. The Department of Justice discussed trying to remove the
President using the 25 Amendment. What's your reaction to that?
Dershowitz: "Well, if that's true, it is clearly an attempt at a coup d'état.
Relating to what your former guest said, let's take the worst case scenario: Let's assume the
President of the United States was in bed with the Russians, committed treason, committed
obstruction of justice -- the 25 Amendment simply is irrelevant to that. That's why you have an
impeachment provision. The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It's about a
president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It's not about the most
fundamental disagreements. It's not about impeachable offenses. And any Justice Department
official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed
a grievous offense against the Constitution. The framers of the 25th amendment had in mind
something very specific. And trying to use the 25th amendment to circumvent the impeachment
provisions, or to circumvent an election is a despicable act of unconstitutional
power-grabbing. And you were right when you said it reminded me of what happens in third world
countries. Look, these people may have been well-intentioned. They may believe that they were
serving the interests of the United States. But you have to obey the law and the law is the
Constitution and the 25th Amendment is as clear as could be: incapacity, unable to perform
office. That's what you need. That's why you need 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate
agreeing. And it has to be on the basis of a medical or psychological incapacity. Not on the
basis of even the most extreme crimes -- which there is no evidence were committed -- but even
if they were, that would not be basis for invoking the 25th Amendment. And I challenge any
left-wing person to get on television and to defend the use of the 25th Amendment. I challenge
any of my colleagues who are in the "Get Trump At Any Cost" camp to come on television and
justify the use of the 25 Amendment other than for physical or psychiatric incapacity.
Carlson: I bet they're doing that right now. This is an attack on our system, I would say,
not just the President. Alan Dershowitz, thank you very much.
Dershowitz: It is an attack on our system. It's an attack on the constitution. Thank
you.
How many millions of dollars did Bill and Hill receive from Russians? How much of America's
uranium deposits did Hillary sell to Russians during her time in the Obama administration? The
New York Times informs us:
" . . . the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity
in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for
national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from
a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off
was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions
from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton
Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling
$2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an
agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.
Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
"And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in
Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank
with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
"At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease
concerns about ceding control of the company's assets to the Russians. Those promises have been
repeatedly broken, records show."
I wonder how much howling and how many allegations of "collusion" with Russia we'd be
hearing if the name Clinton were removed from the NY Times article and the name Trump were
inserted?
The article states: " top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around
and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like."
-- -- -- --
Which makes one wonder if "The rule of law" is becoming the rule of outlaws? When the
non-elected in the justice profession appear to have their own agenda.
Trump is an idiot, but his enemies in the lib-Dem-media Establishment are far worse: corrupt,
deceitful, arrogant, and lawless. Exhibit A is Andrew McCabe.
That's why I'll vote for the Idiot-in-Chief (again) in 2020. Because the alternative makes
me vomit.
"The pages of this publication drift further and further into utter insanity and
despicable defense of Trump. Stand up for the values of the Constitution, or something, but
not for this man who is no more than a self-enriching demagogue with no understanding of the
reactionary politics he uses to delude the rubes and attract asinine threadbare pieces like
this one."
Actually no. Consider me the inverse of Peter. I didn't vote for Trump due to the character
weaknesses Peter describes. However, what I see is a seriously flawed man who has served the
useful purpose of revealing an echo chamber of flawed and self-serving biases shared by the
media and political establishment of this country. I see CNN, the NY Times, the Washington
Post, and even some key leaders of our security services in a completely different light than I
did two years ago. I am thankful for the clarity. I consider Merry's article to be a
contribution in that direction.
"Peter" sez: "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they
knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency."
Weird but no one has shown any actual criminal behavior by said President. Two years later
still no charges. But Peter and these "career law enforcement officials" KNEW he was a
criminal. Then Peter appeals to the Constitution, apparently oblivious to the fact that the
Constitution doesn't make any provisions for plotting to remove the lawfully elected President
because you don't like just because you "know" he is a "criminal", in spite of any actual
evidence.
"After his election, they (the deep state) determined to undermine his political standing, and
particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive
investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law
enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters,
conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably
columnist Kimberley Strassel."
The trouble with that is it completely ignores the ton of evidence pointing to really
nefarious stuff.
Lots of times, when there's smoke, there's fire. And when the smoke is overwhelming there
probably is a fire. A big one.
Trump has been going after the Russians since his inauguration. Therefore, those trying to
remove him from office are likely the actual Russian agents. Of course they would need smoke
and mirrors to hide that fact and deflect attention from themselves. It just so happens that
Russian spies are trained by the FSB to accuse others of being a spy, for just this purpose.
I'm looking at you, John O. (Oleg?) Brennan
No matter who the President is, there is some group of people in Washington is ALWAYS trying to
bring him down. Who those people are, and how large and powerful the group is, depends on a
variety of factors. But a competent president manages to enact his agenda while staying one
step ahead of his intriguers. Obama and GWB accomplished both, more or less because they were
intelligent men of good character (though Obama was much smarter and better man than W)
While Bill Clinton's character was too low to avoid impeachment he was a smart and able
administrator. Trump has both low character and low intellect so it is not surprising A. that
many people want to bring him down and B. that they have been pretty effective.
Politics may be a blood sport in Washington but that's not the same as a "deep state". And
Trump can't compete and win with anyone in Washington who doesn't grovel before him like the
supine Senate Republicans. And that is no one's fault but his.
You wanting Trump to be a Russian agent does not make him one. It never
will. Get over it. , ,
February 16, 2019 at 12:08 am
"If it turns out that Trump IS a Russian asset, will you apologize, Robert Merry? Because he
certainly acts like one. And, as REAL Republicans used to say, if it looks like a duck, walks
like a duck, and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a duck."
@One Guy Yeah, because sending deadly aid to Ukraine is so pro-Russian. What an idiot you
are!
"Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a
criminal taking over the office of the presidency. Shame on them!"
They also "knew" Martin Luther King Jr. was a Soviet agent.
The issue with the 25th amendment, is that the President's character flaws or mental deficiency
were known and very visible before the election. Is it constitutionally proper for Congress to
suspend a President for a preexisting condition that was known to and unhidden from voters? If
Congress did that, it means Congress has a veto over who the public is allowed to vote in as
President.
Forget the Covington students, Andrew McCabe and his lady co-workers have some pretty punchable
faces. (Ok, I'm enough of a sexist to not punch a lady. I'd use eye-rolling and mocking
gestures instead.)
The problem is not the existence of the deep state. It's inevitable that there will be
unelected officials who will continue to shape policy regardless of who is elected President.
The problem is that the deep state is blatantly working to undermine its elected
leadership. If you can't in good conscience work with your President, the honorable thing
to do is resign as some undoubtedly have. It's not an excuse for insubordination.
They removed both Kennedy brothers. Why not to remove Trump?
Notable quotes:
"... This FBI/CIA (plus British intelligence etc.) attempt to destroy and remove an elected President will end the same way as the bank fraud that damaged the US economy 11 yrs ago. ..."
"... I think what the Intel Agencies were really concerned about was Trump's statement "wouldn't it be great to get along with Russia." They were worried about detente, not influence. Trump threatened to remove their number one bogeyman, which would put at risk trillions of dollars for the MIC. What if he dared to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction treaty? What if he dared to share intelligence regarding terrorists with Russia, as Obama attempted before he was brought to heel? Trump has been emasculated by RussiaGate, and Mueller's "Theater of the Absurd" continues to ensure that Trump toes the line. The intel agencies don't need to remove him from power because they are the ones with the REAL power. ..."
"... In such a world "voting" and "democracy" are simply fairy tales "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing." They exist only as meaningless abstractions used to help insure we the populace remain compliant and don't take to the streets like the Yellow Vests in France. Which of course is our only chance whatsoever to in any meaningfully way impact this completely corrupt uber-violent corporate-feudal paradise we find ourselves now inhabiting. ..."
Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, in an
explosive interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," said that in early 2017, in the
aftermath of President Donald Trump's firing of former FBI Director James Comey, he and other
FBI officials discussed the possibility of recruiting a cabinet secretary to help push the
president out of office by using the Constitution's 25 th Amendment
McCabe further contended that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offered to wear a wire
when he was around Trump in order to gather evidence against him. (Rosenstein
denies the allegation.) McCabe said that Justice Department officials believed at the time
that Trump may have obstructed justice by firing Comey, and they worried that Trump was somehow
under the influence of the Russian government. In the end, nothing came of the plan. Regardless
of one's feelings toward President Trump and his policies, what McCabe is describing is nothing
less than a coup attempt. It's something that happens in weak or nascent democracies, following
interference by the CIA perhaps. It should never happen here.
Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the FBI, the CIA and other elements of
the intelligence community. Indeed, in early 2017, when news of the FISA warrants and the
private intelligence Steele dossier began to leak out, Trump began to tweet his disgust at news
of impending investigations of him, his campaign, and his business dealings.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded almost immediately, saying "(The president)
is being really dumb to do this." "This" was to take on the intelligence agencies, the
so-called Deep State, in public. A few days later, Schumer went on MSNBC to sharpen his warning
to Trump, saying, "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community -- they have six
ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
But Trump was right. The intelligence community -- the FBI, CIA, the NSA and other
three-letter agencies -- are too powerful, too entrenched and two well-funded. And they have
far too little oversight. They're a threat to our democracy, not the saviors of it. That is why
it pains me to see Democrats lining up behind them to attack Trump.
Presidents Come and Go
I was a member of that "Deep State" throughout my 15 years at the CIA. I can tell you from
first-hand experience that the CIA doesn't care who the president is. Neither does the FBI.
Senior CIA and FBI officers are there for decades, while presidents come and go. They know that
they can outwait any president they don't like. At the very least, at the CIA, they could made
administrative decisions that would hamstring a president: Perhaps they don't carry out that
risky operation. Maybe they don't target that well-placed source. Maybe they ignore the
president's orders knowing that in four years or eight years he or she will just go away.
Even worse, these same organizations -- the FBI and the CIA -- are the ones that have sought
to undermine our democracy over the years. Don't forget programs like COINTELPRO , the FBI's operation to force
Martin Luther King Jr. to commit
suicide ; the infiltration of peace groups; the CIA's efforts to control the media with
Operation
Mockingbird ; the CIA's illegal spying on American
citizens ; the CIA
hacking into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee; and the Agency's
extrajudicial
assassination program ; to name a few.
McCabe's almost offhanded comments on "60 Minutes," that the FBI actively considered
deposing a sitting president should be cause for alarm. Set partisan politics aside for a
moment. We're talking about deposing a sitting president . We're talking about
wearing a wire to catch a sitting president saying something because you're angry that
he fired your boss. Even the idea of it is unprecedented in American history.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower
indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies.
He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's
torture program.
Hillary and the DNC stole the nomination from Sanders and gave Sanders voters a stiff
middle finger meanwhile Hillary via Bill Talked Trump into Running as a REPUBLICAN ..
Hillary was the neo con neo liberal candidate ..Trump was never supposed to win and even
he was shocked it happened ..Melania even cried .
its worse than you think
Why Did Bernie Abandon Tim Canova & Election Integrity
Also Integrity Initiative infiltrated the Sanders campaign and boosted anti-Jill Stein
messaging. The only good thing about all this investigations nonsense is that we see how
blatantly rigged and/or manipulated US elections are by intelligence agencies on top of the
pre-manipulation by the corporate giants.
Babyl-on , February 17, 2019 at 1:13 pm
Thomas Piketty in his typically tedious economic research, has shown that there is and has
been for centuries a core block of Western capital. This core capital has not in the past 500
years ever had a year of loss, they gained in profit ALWAYS no matter the empire or democracy
war or peace – that is EVERY SINGLE YEAR.
Institutions are instruments of power they are not power itself. These institutions are
given instructions by those who represent the core block of Western capital. The US
government and all its agencies serve ONLY the interests of core capital.
Today that block of core capital has grown to over 41 trillion dollars. It is the largest
block of capital anywhere in the world, it's influence is deeply saturated throughout Western
society and culture.
Peter Phillips has produced a tremendous book providing the evidence of this block of
capital and the structure which communicates its orders to the World Bank, Fed and the "deep
state" and the EU and its institutions. GIANTS: The Global Power Elite.
There are no secret societies running the world the power elites do it in plane sight. We
know their names from history and in the present. Metici, Borgas – parts of those
fortunes are in the 41 trillion. Rockefeller, Rothschild, Buffet are in the world today.
Robert Kagen and his forces which represent the 41 trillion ALWAYS get what they want and
they have for 500 years. Imagine, 500 years of taking more "profits" than any other faction
of the population. But it is not just business, there is also theft, the way England stole in
today's dollars 45 trillion dollars worth of goods from India – they simply set up a
shell game and took everything and paid nothing. This is why their fortunes grow so much
better than others – just outright theft. It is not a capitalist system, it is
Feudalism.
This basic block of Western capital is openly pro war because within the 41 trillion are
the arms corporations which they control just as one example.
The methods of this, possibly the most enduring power unit in human history, are clear
throughout the historical record. They are ruthless, ALWAYS advancing pushing probing looking
for opportunities. They never rest or give any quarter. Governments come and go, empires come
and go but the core capital under any and all conditions profits every year.
While the phrase was first written in the years after WWII "Global full spectrum
domination." has been the marching order for this capital for centuries.
This small group of elites will settle for nothing except everything. For them there is no
morality, no good guys or bad buys, just winners and losers and they have won every battle
for power and money for 500 years, even in years where things didn't go well they still made
more that the economic growth of the economy.
It is the power of that 41 trillion which is destroying the planet and making perpetual
war for their own pleasures and profit.
Talk of impeachment of a president or "The Constitution" changing the government are
useless acts unless you can come up with a plan to take the assets of these monsters and to
distribute them appropriately so that human institutions serve people instead of slaughtering
for profit elites.
It is going to be far more difficult to deal with entrenched elites with a 500 year
success record but until its power is finally dissipated.
Idimalink , February 17, 2019 at 12:08 pm
The FBI, CIA, the NSA and other three-letter agencies are the enemy. Their spooks must
exposed as perpetrators of crime; heinous crimes.
errorum propagationi , February 17, 2019 at 2:55 pm
"The FBI, CIA, the NSA and other three-letter agencies are the enemy. Their spooks must
exposed as perpetrators of crime; heinous crimes."
And yet despite the tough-talking, empty-rhetoric, Trump continues to bow to the same.
Their crimes continue. The NSA is STILL collecting all data from EVERY citizen of the U.S., yet Trump has ensured
even-greater secrecy of those actions by that agency. The CIA is STILL interfering in the politics of other countries, and STILL running
drugs.
The FBI continues to ignore crimes by the .001 percent (incluing pedophilia, child
trafficking, financial crimes, white collar crimes, etc.).
Trump continues to call for the draconian prosecution of those whom sought to expose the
actions of these agencies.
Propaganda only works when it isn't recognized as such.
Trump's actions are called the propaganda of diversion & distraction.
Both Trump and Hillary were HIGHLY unpopular, yet the mindless masses are forced into not
only accepting either, but ultimately defending the instilled "leader".
You are proof of the effectivness of that propaganda.
Trump is an Entertainer, first and foremost.
His job is to lead mere followers like you to believing the roles he plays, into accepting
the same wholly corrupted system. "Partisan" politics is increasingly being scripted like episodes of entertainment, like
the Jerry Springer show.
Have you ever bothered to consider that the largest "news" media are similarly owned by
the same corporations that own the largest entertainement media?
I used to work for a image & footage library ..the firms are using stock images, video
& sound for both their entertainment & "news". Have you ever bothered to examine the true underlying ownership of the highly consolidated
corporate media?
CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc are all largely owned by the same firms, via large stock
holdings.
Trump is an Entertainer serving each of these subsidiaries.
The viewership/ratings of each has climbed.
The more "contention" (mere diversion & distraction) Trump creates, the more the loyal
viewers of these media continue to indulge in the nonsense.
"Partisan" followers, the sheep, are doing the same of their respective parties, each of
which are controlled by the same elite.
Don't believe it, take a look at the campaign finance & investment portfolios of the
largest candidates of each party (including the "Dems", "GOP", "Progs" and
"Libertarians").
The true "Deep State" is much larger than Trump.
Those few Agents he has called-out & sought to damage, are just small cogs in the much
larger system.
Absolutely nothing has changed. The mindless masses are so easily herded. Instincts of the Herd in Peace & War – Wilfred Trotter
Propaganda – Edward Bernays
The deep state kills presidents. It why Trump has his own security ..smart move. Trump tried to take them on and was called a TRAITOR ..and criminals like Brenner and
clapper and Haden work for MSNBC and CNN now? The USSR wasnt so blatant .
Spot on. Trump is PT Barnum, not Martin Luther King. He's not fighting to "save America
from the Deep State." Trump's a clown riding a unicycle juggling chainsaws. He's a circus
charlatan, not some hero demolishing the FBI to save John Q Public from the spooks. Sheep
indeed.
Scott Hunter , February 17, 2019 at 11:49 am
Spot on!!! Accountability is the next step Integrity is the key and has always been the
key to walking a path that brings contentment.
Thank you for your service John Kiriakou!!!
Billy , February 17, 2019 at 11:47 am
The Emsils reveal Hillary cheated Bernie. She needed to distract. Brennan, Clapper and the
FBI assisted her. When she lost they switched over from distract to removal mode. The entire
MSM is also complicate in this illegal coup. They're not fake news they're propagandist.
MSM fired Ed Shultz for wanting to cover Sanders . MSM fired Jesse Ventura for being anti war . MSM fiired Phil Donahue for being against the Iraq wars .. Brennan and Clapper and Haden are proved Bush criminals who now work for the MSM and CNN
liars ,war mongers and torture enthusiasts .
I like John and the information he puts out for us. But I just don't buy this. I see this
just as I did the 2016 election cycle for the republican party. A circus of over 21
candidates and everyone and the media all against Trump. But who got all the free time in the
media and ended up being the president? I didn't buy the fake disdain from the republicans
towards Trump because I knew they were licking their chops wanting him in their. With Trump
they could take the country to the right as far as they wanted. And here we are looking at a
fascist state now. The US has leaped right into the fire of the fourth reich. All that in
2016 was us being duped into a false illusion of Trump can't possibly win while the plan was
make him win. I honestly believe the whole 2016 election cycle was one big illusion to take
over the country. A coup over the population.
Trump and these intelligence agencies are working just fine together. This is all just
another illusion as the country continues to move towards fascism with the rest of the world.
Still working together in Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Africa and a list of other countries, along
with right here among us is the FBI. After all, right there in the article it states as much.
These entities and Trump essentially have the same agenda. And what we;re getting is a dose
of perception management to duped us from the reality of it being the reality. And just like
the founder of this news site has taught us, the media is the tool to make it work for
them.
Anne Jaclard , February 17, 2019 at 9:19 pm
Agree that Trump is a corporate military-intelligence flunky like his predecessors but
that doesn't justify the FBI/CIA manipulation, as it was based merely on dovish (but ignored
in office, of course) campaign rhetoric. What if Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders, or somebody
better than either of them (neither are super great) get spied upon or ousted by a militarist
cabal for the same reasons?
Jeff Harrison , February 17, 2019 at 10:40 am
It can't happen here . I'm telling you my dear, it can't happen here. – Frank Zappa
in a tune of the same name.
But, John, it already has. Mark Felt, aka Deep Throat, pissed off that he wasn't made FBI
director at Hoover's death, brought down a President, Nixon, out of personal pique. He
revealed secrets that never should have been secrets to Woodward & Bernstein and brought
Nixon down. Our evil ways in the rest of the world have come home to roost. You spoke of the
Church committee's reforms. I doubt there's much left of Frank Church's reforms. The three
letter surveillance state is the new Praetorian Guard. There is naught to be done but disband
the whole lot of 'em if we want our democracy back. I know everybody will be screaming that
Oh NO! We can't do that! But, ah, yes we can (to steal someone else's bullshit line).
The Ticoes of Costa Rica, after they got their government back from the military after a 1948
coup simply disbanded the military. No more military to junta. Haven't had a coup since.
There's two trite but very true lines:
Bullshit walks and money talks,
What goes around comes around. (and it's starting to come around. We'd better do something
about it or we will regret it. But that would mean we'd have to give up our imperial
pretensions and we all know that's not going to happen.)
anon4d2 , February 17, 2019 at 9:43 pm
We could certainly re-purpose 80% of our military to building infrastructure in developing
nations, without any opposition from them or additional expense, and improve our security and
international standing. We could completely eliminate the unconstitutional spying upon
citizens without any opposition, and use the same employees for humanitarian purposes.
But of course oligarchy must first be deposed, which historically has required invasion or
revolution. Where oligarchy controls mass media and elections, education and activism won't
get us there. Invasion is no longer a likely path. So the revolution will be the bloodiest in
history, likely after the mass media are discredited, the economy ruined by foreign embargo,
and oligarchy no longer able to provide the bread and circus needed to quell the
peasants.
If that string of disasters does not happen, we may have a permanent tyranny, a society
that explicitly accepts and honors tyranny, a curse upon humanity until its destruction.
JOHN WHITE , February 17, 2019 at 10:29 am
THEY DID NOT COME CLOSE TO A COUP..
THE COUP IS STILL GOING ON ..
So now I know what the 25th amendment to the Constitution is about. Impeachment would be
messy incapacitation would be quick and half the public, feeling helpless, would soon
forget.
Discussion of this reminds me of the things we accused the Stalin regime of doing, which
they well may have. Here today, gone tomorrow.
We cannot be sure this is all true, but the mere fact that it is floating around is
chilling. Impeachment with its uncertain outcome would be messy, using the 25th amendment
would be relatively quick if all your ducks were lined up.
Can we describe the Trump syndrome as anything else than mass hysteria. It has gotten so
bad that no matter what Trump proposes, forces go to work to prevent it from happening lest
he get credit for it. The merit of what he proposes, be damned, it's his idea and we are not
going to let it happen.
Who and what is at risk. A besieged President, anxious to survive, can do crazy things
which his crazy enemies happen to believe are good ideas. Things like detente with Russia are
set aside as is an effort to achieve normal relations with North Korea. Things like creating
a crisis with Iran or pulling out of a nuclear treaty are either praised or accepted. It all started minus day one of this guys presidency and it just won't stop. Hard to say
how it could end, but the options are pretty
scary.
The authors point is that we have elections to decide who shall be president and the
intoxicated crew in Washington, New York and Hollywood need to accept that.
Eric32 , February 17, 2019 at 9:06 am
This FBI/CIA (plus British intelligence etc.) attempt to destroy and remove an elected
President will end the same way as the bank fraud that damaged the US economy 11 yrs ago.
Nothing real will be done, and the disease will just get deeper and more widespread.
MBeaver , February 17, 2019 at 9:51 pm
I often look at politics like I look at software.
If you have bugs, you fix them quickly before they can hurt your customers too much and they
decide to ditch your software or look for an alternative somewhere else.
Here they are being ignored for decades and decades and many people exploit them, because
they can flourish on them, like a criminal uses bugs in software to circumvent security. Like
parasites. But the vast majority and the system itself is getting damaged by them. People
adapt to them, and become as dishonest as the minority. It gets worse and worse until there
is no way back and ends in a disaster.
Dave , February 17, 2019 at 8:18 am
Are McCabe and others going to face any consequences for their actions? I have some
doubts.
Skip Scott , February 17, 2019 at 7:35 am
"McCabe said that Justice Department officials believed at the time that Trump may have
obstructed justice by firing Comey, and they worried that Trump was somehow under the
influence of the Russian government."
I think what the Intel Agencies were really concerned about was Trump's statement
"wouldn't it be great to get along with Russia." They were worried about detente, not
influence. Trump threatened to remove their number one bogeyman, which would put at risk
trillions of dollars for the MIC. What if he dared to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction
treaty? What if he dared to share intelligence regarding terrorists with Russia, as Obama
attempted before he was brought to heel? Trump has been emasculated by RussiaGate, and
Mueller's "Theater of the Absurd" continues to ensure that Trump toes the line. The intel
agencies don't need to remove him from power because they are the ones with the REAL
power.
("Trump has been emasculated by RussiaGate, and Mueller's "Theater of the Absurd"
continues to ensure that Trump toes the line.")
I quite agree, and with your comment in mind I'd say that one could quite rationally argue
that in fact a deep state coup "has actually taken place" and was in fact quite successful.
Trump will most certainly "not" be normalizing relations with Russia if he wants to remain
president. This is the power of the deep state carried out through relentless MSM propaganda,
evidence and "reality" be damned.
In such a world "voting" and "democracy" are simply fairy tales "told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury and signifying nothing." They exist only as meaningless abstractions used to
help insure we the populace remain compliant and don't take to the streets like the Yellow
Vests in France. Which of course is our only chance whatsoever to in any meaningfully way
impact this completely corrupt uber-violent corporate-feudal paradise we find ourselves now
inhabiting.
"The intel agencies don't need to remove him from power because they are the ones with the
REAL power." – spot on!
jadez , February 17, 2019 at 6:46 am
MAYBE MR John Kiriakou should familiarize himself with the Constitution..and the 25th
amendment which he acknowledges was to be used to "oust"..a sitting president.
i do not disagree or challenge his integrity regarding the actions of the agencies he
writes about yet at the same time to dismiss out of hand a constitutional avenue of removing
a president for say BEING an actual agent of a foreign government can not be dismissed based
strictly on the idea that presidents "come and go"!
Abby , February 18, 2019 at 12:29 am
I'm pretty sure that Kiriakou knows all about the constitution and the 25th amendment. The
problem that he's discussing here is that if a president is unfit to continue his presidency
then it's up to his cabinet and congress to remove him, not the intelligence agency's
job.
Where was the proof that Trump was being an actual agent of a foreign government? There
was none at the time of this attempted coup and so far Mueller hasn't shown any. Manafort is
guilty of breaking tax laws, not anything to do with collusion with people in Russia. Nor has
he shown that anyone else was or is either. And do you honestly think that if a president was
working with a foreign government that congress would just sit patiently by as Mueller
dragged his feet for two years looking into that? I think not.
Seby , February 17, 2019 at 5:02 am
Excellent in more detailed analysis of this power struggle in the US plutocracy at NEO
recently.
3 Major Divisions in the American Ruling Class by Caleb Maupin.
To precis
Division #1: Saudi Wahabbis vs. The Muslim Brotherhood
Division #2: The Pentagon vs. Intel Agencies
Division #3: The Rich vs. The Ultra-Rich
Weren't
superdelegates people who, in the era before cars, would represent groups who are unable to travel to the voting stations
(long distances).
The superdelegates have the "right" to change the vote because their candidate could die while the
superdelegate is traveling. or any major development.
When they return to cast the vote they have a choice.
In the 21st
century it is unacceptable to keep such traditions and policies.
"... Baker said McCabe was cool, calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time." ..."
"... According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time." ..."
Two Trump Cabinet officials were "ready to support" a DOJ scheme to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump , according
to
Bloomberg and
Fox News , citing closed-door testimony from the FBI's former top lawyer, James Baker - who said that the claim came from Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The testimony was delivered last fall to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Fox News has confirmed portions of the
transcript. It provides additional insight into discussions that have returned to the spotlight in Washington as fired FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe revisits the matter during interviews promoting his forthcoming book. -
Fox News
While Baker did not identify the two Cabinet officials, he says that McCabe and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page approached him to
relay their conversations with Rosenstein, including their discussions of the 25th Amendment scheme. "I was being told by some combination
of Andy McCabe and Lisa Page, that, in a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General, he had stated that he -- this was what was
related to me -- that he had at least two members of the president's Cabinet who were ready to support, I guess you would call it,
an action under the 25th Amendment," Baker told the Congressional committees.
The 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a sitting president from office through various mechanisms - including the majority
of a president's Cabinet agreeing that the commander-in-chief is incapable of performing his duties.
Rosenstein - who is slated to leave the Justice Department in the near future, has denied the claims. Baker said McCabe was cool,
calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably
confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time
because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So
I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time."
McCabe, meanwhile
told "60 Minutes" in an interview set to air Sunday night that Rosenstein was concerned about Trump's "capacity."
According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet
officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity
and about his intent at that point in time."
"Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president?"
asks CBS News anchor Scott Pelly, to which McCabe replied: " That's correct. Counting votes or possible votes. "
The New York Times
first reported
last year that McCabe alleged in memos that Rosenstein had talked about using the 25th Amendment to oust Trump -- or wearing a
wire to surreptitiously monitor the president -- in the hectic days in May 2017 after Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director.
At the time, Rosenstein disputed the reporting. -
WaPo
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the 25th Amendment scheme a "
bureaucratic coup " led by enemies of President Trump. On Sunday morning, Graham said he would subpoena McCabe and Rosenstein
"if that's what it takes" to get to the bottom of the 25th Amendment claim.
On Thursday, the DOJ issued a statement claiming that Rosenstein rejects McCabe's version of events "as inaccurate and factually
incorrect," and also denied that Rosenstein ever approved wearing a "wire" to record Trump.
"The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references," reads the DOJ statement. "As the deputy
attorney general previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment,
nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment."
McCabe, meanwhile, walked back some of his "60 Minutes" statements . On Friday a spokeswoman for the former Deputy Director said:
"Certain statements made by Mr. McCabe, in interviews associated with the release of his book, have been taken out of context and
misrepresented," adding "To clarify, at no time did Mr. McCabe participate in any extended discussions about the use of the 25th
Amendment, nor is he aware of any such discussions."
Baker acknowledged during his testimony that he was not directly involved in the May 2017 discussions, rather, McCabe and Page
approached him contemporaneously following a meeting with Rosenstein in the days following former FBI Director James Comey's firing.
"I had the impression that the deputy attorney general had already discussed this with two members in the president's Cabinet
and that they were onboard with this concept already," said Baker.
Question: "Do you know what direction that went? Was it Mr. Rosenstein seeking out members of the Cabinet looking to pursue
this 25th Amendment approach or was it the other way around?"
Baker: "What I recall being said was that the Deputy Attorney General had two members of the Cabinet. So he – how they came
to be had, I don't know, but "
Question: "So he had two members, almost like he was taking the initiative and getting the members?"
Baker: "That would be speculation on my part." -
Via Fox News
Baker also suggested that "Lisa and Andy" did not know the names of the Cabinet officials who were on board with the 25th Amendment
scheme.
Baker testified in October that the alleged discussions took place during an uncertain and anxious time at the FBI and DOJ
after Comey's termination, and that the mood was "pretty dark":
Question: "Did people tell you that the DAG (Deputy Attorney General) was upset?"
Baker: "Yes."
Question: "Did they tell you that he was making jokes?"
Baker: "No."
Question: "Did they tell you that..."
Baker: " This was not a joking sort of time. This was pretty dark. " -
Via Fox News
"Our choice now seems to be between a "new war" and a new world. As always, the forces of reaction and wealth are telling us
we have no choice but war, and no right or power to decide. They are calling for a secret investigation, a secret conviction,
a secret method of execution, and a totally secret war abroad.
"The American people as a whole are the only ones in the world who have the right to decide on a national response to this
tragedy, and it must be one that takes into account the rights of all the other peoples and nations of the world."
The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
In neoliberal MSM there is positive feedback loop for "Trump is a Russian agent" stories. So the meme feeds on itself.
Notable quotes:
"... And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies. ..."
"... the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience. ..."
"... Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years ..."
"... Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water ..."
"... Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community . ..."
"... The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. ..."
"... The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man. ..."
The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just
published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the
interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia's natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning
Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.
<picture deleted>
And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working
to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand
for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence
agencies.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less "Putin's puppet" talk and a lot more "Hey,
maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth" talk among news media consumers. But there isn't,
because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives
are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.
Like His Predecessors
Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors,
and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's
not that much different
from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump
hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years.
If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they
were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration's actual behavior, he's just as reliable an upholder of
the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.
Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating
government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't
even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water.
They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their
ninth consecutive week , a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions
and the official narratives which uphold them.
The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France
closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting
U.S. government institutions. Right now they've got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S.
intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that
Americans think about their rulers.
Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate
the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an
inverted totalitarianism
which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered
by the interests of the common man.
The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and
rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those
institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power
to the people in France, and media corporations
acting increasingly weird and insecure , that looks more and more likely by the day.
"... In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well. ..."
In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI
Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing
President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the
President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy
director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to
accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure
that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well.
Now, after its own two years of investigation and 200 interviews, Chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-NC) has said, "There is no factual evidence of collusion
between the Trump campaign and Russia." Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA) said he disagrees
with the way Burr characterized the evidence, but declined to give his own assessment.
Veteran criminal attorney John Dowd, a member of Trump's legal team from June 2017 to March
2018, said,
"I know exactly what he [Mueller] has. I know exactly what every witness said, what every
document said. I know exactly what he asked. And I know what the conclusion or the result
is."
What will be the result of the probe?
"It's been a terrible waste of time.... This is one of the greatest frauds the country has
ever seen. I'm just shocked that Bob Mueller didn't call it that way and say, 'I'm being
used.' I would've done that.
"I'd have gone to [then Attorney General] Sessions and Rosenstein and said, 'Look. This is
nonsense. We are being used by a cabal in the FBI to get even.' "
Asked about Mueller's final report, he responded, "I will be shocked if anything regarding
the President is made public, other than, 'We're done.' "
At the same time, former NSA Technical Director William Binney has published new evidence
which shows that the DNC documents posted by WikiLeaks in July 2016, were probably not hacked
over the internet, by Russians or anyone else -- rather, the only available forensic evidence
indicates that they were downloaded from within the DNC's network. His evidence is summarized
in an article he co-authored with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson on Col. Pat Lang's "Sic
Semper Tyrannis" blog yesterday.
"... This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them. ..."
"... More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media. ..."
"... CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people ..."
"... The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage. ..."
"... The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project . ..."
"... They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better. ..."
Following what the Washington Post
has described as "the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period
of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press," mass media representatives are now flailing
desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream
news outlets.
On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered
the latest "bombshell" Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a
pattern that is now so consistent that I've personally made a practice of declining to comment
on such stories until a day or two after their release. "BOOM!" tweets were issued by
#Resistance pundits on Twitter, "If true this means X, Y and Z" bloviations were made on mass
media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of
their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by
ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a
proposal which died within weeks
and the Kremlin never touched .
There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied
celebration, including the fact that the story's two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony
Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of
the information they'd based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen
the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and
Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a
Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016
election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election .
Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller's office took the extremely rare step
of issuing an
unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong , writing simply, "BuzzFeed's
description of specific statements to the special counsel's office, and characterization of
documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's congressional
testimony are not accurate."
According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered
the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller's
correction the next day was shoved back to page 11 .
This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT's Wajahat Ali had the gall
to tweet , "Unlike the Trump
administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed
story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people,
right?"
This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not
reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must
continue to trust them.
"Those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism but
protecting themselves," tweeted NBC's Chuck Todd.
"There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we
live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware."
More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your
advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid
exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass
media.
"Mueller didn't do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one,"
griped
the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. "Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I'm sure
you'll see with the president himself, this allows them to say 'You can't believe it! You can't
believe what you read, you can't believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the
Special Counsel says that the media doesn't get it right.'"
"The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the
news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they're
willing to lie to do it, and I don't think that's true" said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel , adding "I
just think this is a bad day for us."
"It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media," said Brian Stelter on the same CNN
panel.
"I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks
individually and judge brands individually. Don't fall for what these politicians out there
want you to do. They want you to think we're all crooked. We're not. But Buzzfeed now, now
the onus is on Buzzfeed. "
CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably
even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that
Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016
publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by
multiple people.
The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be
distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant
promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even
more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a
preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.
The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it
doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their
numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are
being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless
cultural engineering project .
They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties
never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the
wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse
narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.
Looks like all of them were Brennan men. CIA used FBI counterintelligence and counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.
Notable quotes:
"... We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. ..."
"... If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice ..."
"... A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." ..."
"... Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. ..."
"... It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency." ..."
"... Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017 ..."
"... "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ..."
"... I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling ..."
"... Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons ..."
"... Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too." ..."
"... Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. ..."
"... Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner." ..."
"... There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words ..."
In April last year, Disobedient Media broke coverage of the British involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, asking
why
All Russiagate Roads Lead To London , via the quasi-scholar Joseph Mifsud and others.
The issue was also raised by WikiLeaks's Julian Assange , just days before
the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter thread cited research by
Chris Blackburn , who spoke with
Disobedient Media on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and organizations, as well
as his links to
Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.
We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the
Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on
the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members
of Mueller's investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence
community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western
establishment-backed media had a spine.
In
Disobedient Media's previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:
"I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I used to work for
the
9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism , one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped build a profile
of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one that had been built by the
CIA's Alec Station , a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin
Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed.
It had failed to take into account Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead
for a couple of organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."
"I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11 Commission published
its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public outreach program. The US National Intelligence
Conference and Exposition (
Intelcon ) was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance from
former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such as Sir John Chilcot and
Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."
"The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering counter-terrorism efforts.
They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I had mainly concentrated on the Middle East,
but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."
Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe
In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged
the following:
"It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election
into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin... Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK's role in
the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain... One former top White House adviser
to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on
the Page wiretap application: "I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to
be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA. " [Emphasis Added]
The article cites George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence
apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response
to the Telegraph's coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via Twitter
:
"The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal...not
counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth
countries are going to be seriously pissed off."
Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:
" If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange
happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with
people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice.
A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA
using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations,
doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their
intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." [Emphasis Added]
Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media:
"Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings,
assassinations, poisonings, and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known
to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations. Counter-terrorism is
also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime scene investigations, and explosive specialists.
Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces
and civic organizations. There is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism
and insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law
Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that
employed
both Papadopoulos and Mifsud , had also been working in that area."
Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation,
saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look
like they were something else.
As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they
share the same skill sets - covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be
more precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI
with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."
Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud
Zainab Ahmad , a
member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed
out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event
in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter :
"Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event
in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George
Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."
Blackburn told this author:
"Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism
conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged
Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."
Zainab Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point
"Richard Barrett, the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud
to Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were also there. The
London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been established in 2014. The Global Center
on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of
International Law Practice."
"The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD).
Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of International Law Practice. Sources have told
me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went
to work in counter-terrorism after LAD folded."
"I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped
up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as
special counsel is also troubling."
Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional
testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic
and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill
writes:
"Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ's international
operations, and Zainab Ahmad , an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior
counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis
Added]
This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial pre-investigation
meeting.
Last year, Blackburn noted the connection
between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel,
works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy.
Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US
State too."
Sambei has been described elsewhere as a "Former
practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent
Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence." [British spelling has been retained]
Arvinder Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group
That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion
regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016 . She is also a direct link
between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.
Blackburn wrote via Twitter : "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's
counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were
seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured
at a London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.
Arvinder Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
As Chris Blackburn told this author:
" Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert
Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for
covert espionage and evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore
two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism
think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while
at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian
private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis
Added]
Lisa Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter
An Embarrassment For John Brennan?
Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share
'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that "
The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that
he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23
January 2017.
Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the
New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown
to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and
Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed
so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers
at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."
Blackburn told Disobedient Media:
"Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning
the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public,
it would " embarrass John Brennan ." I think that
is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that
statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official'
investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."
Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was working to investigate
the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice has been working with Majed Garoub, the former
Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes
to get paid twice for his investigations."
"Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the London Academy of Diplomacy
used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend
of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom
Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this
plum academic position for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of
assets to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."
At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left
with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude
that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited
and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert
a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.
What ********. Britain was part of the group pulling of 911 along with the American and Jewish establishment. Blackburn was
the inside guy, posing as an outsider, to deflect attention from the real perpetrators. These people always have agents on both
sides of every issue in the same way they fund two "opposing" political parties and fund two "opposing" sides in the media.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency , and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power .
It's called TREASON .
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies , giving them aid and
comfort within the United States or elsewhere , is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than
five years
SteeleGate---his mate Skripal, boss Pablo Miller----novichok---Porton Down---anything to blame Russia in the end. After 30
dys of shutdown personnel of CIA, FBI and DOJ can be changed legally: draining of the swamp and DECLAS can begin with proper Military
Tribunals in place. This according to Q who shared all of this, so it was not a conspiracy theory that the Q team exposed, but
just MSM and Deep State in their last panic mode. Justice will now be able to follow: maybe rel end of endless wars too!
There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring
too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words
So now we have an international conspiracy of care. Not one power grubber in the group. A syndicate of misunderstood do gooders.
But not having the consent of the people, but rather trying to undo, and foil the consent of the people.
This part of the Declaration applies
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
-- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish
it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal
to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power..."
Why do you not call it a coup d'etat? That is what it is, nothing less. If it were about something Trump did you would use
the harshest possible language. Why not tell the truth here. Let the American people know what happened.
"... Why does the USA care about internal Venezuelan politics? Because it cares about every country's politics and demands every country bow down and kneel to the USA. The voters, aka morons, support this, both liberal and right wing, and have for generations. ..."
"... The morons pay their taxes to meddle in other countries and for a giant military to slaughter people who do not obey. ..."
Venezuela invasion thing is double-faceted: a trap for Trump & a bluff. if the
invasion is, then bye-bye 2020 election, mission accomplished. if no invasion on sight then
the bluff of Pompeo-Bolton-Abrams is called & the 2020 reelection assured. Venezuela in
the role of bait.
The real issue lies in the voting class which cowers in fear all day long and
seeks saviors every four years via rigged circus. Trump = Obama = CIA meddling in every
country. Presidents never change, only the perception of the morons changes.
Why does the USA care about internal Venezuelan politics? Because it cares about every
country's politics and demands every country bow down and kneel to the USA. The voters, aka
morons, support this, both liberal and right wing, and have for generations.
The morons pay their taxes to meddle in other countries and for a giant military to
slaughter people who do not obey. Freedom at the point of a gun. Nothing quite says
democracy like having the US president tell the Venezuelans how to run their country.
"... They divide us with race, sex, and religion. If we came together all the working class people, from every race, you'd see the oligarchs true face. They'd innact martial law in a heartbeat, and run to their underground base in the Ozarks. That's the painful truth. ..."
"... That's why Richard Nixon replaced the draft with a lottery that has evolved into a volunteer armed forces. We were nearly the verge of another civil war in this country. ..."
"... So Jimmy, once again, hit it out of the ballpark with this podcast on why the war hawks fear Tulsi ..."
"... She really scares the war hawks and just as importantly she scares the huge profits these war hawks and allied corporations (the parent company of GE which owns MSNBC makes turbine engines for the military) have made off these unnecessary and tragic wars since the 9/11 attacks. ..."
They divide us with race, sex, and religion. If we came together all the working class
people, from every race, you'd see the oligarchs true face. They'd innact martial law in a
heartbeat, and run to their underground base in the Ozarks. That's the painful
truth.
I served in Vietnam (31 May 1967 - 31 May 1968), so I'm approximately around the same age
as Phil. I told everyone I knew that if we invaded Iraq - this was during the lead-up in 2002
to vote on GWB's Iraq War resolution - having just a volunteer armed forces in the strategic
sense, let alone the invasion of Iraq would violate international covenants against illegal
wars of aggression - we would eventually have down the road a military blunder and a foreign
policy debacle that would rival the one we had in the Vietnam War.
If GWB had somehow
convinced the American people and the Congress to bring back the draft after the 9/11
attacks, I assure you we would have withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq long, long ago. But
the war hawks in Congress and the Pentagon love their private, (essentially) quasi-mercenary
volunteer armed forces after how badly they got burnt during the anti-war protests against
the Vietnam War.
That's why Richard Nixon replaced the draft with a lottery that has evolved
into a volunteer armed forces. We were nearly the verge of another civil war in this country.
So Jimmy, once again, hit it out of the ballpark with this podcast on why the war hawks fear Tulsi. Remember they can't smear her based on the fact that she was an officer who did two
tours of duty in the war zone, so they try to smear her because she is supposedly a puppet of
Putin, that is, a fifth columnist or fellow traveler as they did during the Red Scare in the
McCarthy era. I would definitely vote for her as a fellow war veteran for president, but she
has a very hard road to travel to win the nomination.
She really scares the war hawks and
just as importantly she scares the huge profits these war hawks and allied corporations (the
parent company of GE which owns MSNBC makes turbine engines for the military) have made off
these unnecessary and tragic wars since the 9/11 attacks.
"... First, you starve people; then you bring them humanitarian aid. This was proposed by John McNaughton at Pentagon: bomb locks and dams, by shallow-flooding the rice, cause widespread starvation (more than a million dead?) "And then we shall deliver humanitarian aid to the starving Vietnamese". Or, rather, "we could offer to do [that] at the conference table." Planning a million dead by starvation, in writing: if such a note would be found on the ruins of the Third Reich, it would seal the story of genocide, it would be quoted daily. But the story of the genocide of the Vietnamese is rarely mentioned nowadays. ..."
"... They did it in Syria, too. At first, they brought weapons for every Muslim extremist, then they blockaded Damascus, and then they sent some humanitarian aid, but only to the areas under rebel control. ..."
"... The Israelis practice it in Gaza. They block all export or import from the Strip, interdict fishing in the Mediterranean and drip-feed the captive Palestinians by 'humanitarian aid'. Jews, being Jews, make it one better: they made the EU to pay for the humanitarian aid to Gaza AND to buy the aid stuff from Israel. This made Gaza an important source of profit for the Jewish state. ..."
You are so kind-hearted! I shed a tear thinking of American generosity. "So many delightful
goodies: sacks of rice, canned tuna and protein-rich biscuits, corn flour, lentils and pasta,
arrived at the border of troubled Venezuela – enough for one light meal each for five
thousand people", – reported the news in a sublime reference to five thousand fed by
Christ's fishes and loaves. True, Christ did not take over the bank accounts and did not seize
the gold of those he fed. But 21st century Venezuela is a good deal more-prosperous than 1st
century Galilee. Nowadays, you have to organise a blockade if you want people to be grateful
for your humanitarian aid.
This is not a problem. The US-UK duo did it in Iraq, as marvellous Arundhati Roy wrote in
April 2003 (in The Guardian of old, before it turned into an imperial tool): After
Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its
infrastructure severely damaged the blockade and war were followed by you guessed it!
Humanitarian relief. At first, they blocked food supplies worth billions of dollars, and then
they delivered 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid and celebrated their generosity for a few days of
live TV broadcasts. Iraq had had enough money to buy all the food it needed, but it was
blocked, and its people received only some peanuts.
And this was rather humane by American standards. In the 18th century, the British colonists
in North America used more drastic methods while dispensing aid to disobedient natives. The Red
Indians were expelled from their native places, and then they were provided humanitarian aid:
whiskey and blankets. The blankets had been previously used by smallpox
patients . The native population of North America was decimated by the ensuing epidemics
from this and similar measures. Probably you haven't heard of this chapter of your history: the
USA has many Holocaust museums but not a single memorial to the genocide near home. It is much
more fun to discuss faults of Germans and Turks than of your own forefathers.
First, you starve people; then you bring them humanitarian aid. This was proposed by John
McNaughton at Pentagon: bomb locks and dams, by shallow-flooding the rice, cause widespread
starvation (more than a million dead?) "And then we shall deliver humanitarian aid to the
starving Vietnamese". Or, rather, "we could offer to do [that] at the conference table."
Planning a million dead by starvation, in writing: if such a note would be found on the ruins
of the Third Reich, it would seal the story of genocide, it would be quoted daily. But the
story of the genocide of the Vietnamese is rarely mentioned nowadays.
They did it in Syria, too. At first, they brought weapons for every Muslim extremist,
then they blockaded Damascus, and then they sent some humanitarian aid, but only to the areas
under rebel control.
This cruel but efficient method of breaking nations' spirit has been developed by lion
tamers for years, perhaps for centuries. You have to starve the beast until it will take food
from your hands and lick your fingers. 'Starvation-taming', they call it.
The Israelis practice it in Gaza. They block all export or import from the Strip,
interdict fishing in the Mediterranean and drip-feed the captive Palestinians by 'humanitarian
aid'. Jews, being Jews, make it one better: they made the EU to pay for the humanitarian aid to
Gaza AND to buy the aid stuff from Israel. This made Gaza an important source of profit for the
Jewish state.
So in Venezuela they follow an old script. The US and its London poodle seized over 20
billion dollars from Venezuela and from Venezuelan national companies. They stole over a
billion in gold ingots Venezuela had trustingly deposited in the cellars of the Bank of
England.
Well, they said they will give this money to a Venezuelan Random Dude, rather. To the guy
who already promised to give the wealth of Venezuela to the US companies. And after this
daylight robbery, they bring a few containers of humanitarian aid to the border and wait for
the rush of bereft Venezuelans for food.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted : "The Venezuelan people
desperately need humanitarian aid. The U.S. & other countries are trying to help, but
Venezuela's military under Maduro's orders is blocking aid with trucks and shipping tankers.
The Maduro regime must LET THE AID REACH THE STARVING PEOPLE."
Venezuelans aren't starving, even though they are going through difficulties. The biggest
noise is made by the wealthy, as always. If Pompeo wants to help Venezuelans, he might lift the
sanctions, return the funds, lift the blockade. The biscuits he wants to provide are of but
little use.
President Maduro is right when he refuses to let this hypocrisy bribe the stomachs and
hearts of his people. It is not just that he remembers his Virgil and knows, Timeo danaos
et dona ferentes , "beware gift-bearing Greeks." There are too many American and Colombian
soldiers around the pending delivery place, and this place is suspiciously close to an airport
with an extra-long runway suitable for a an airlift.
The US is known for its propensity to invade its neighbours: Panama was invaded in 1989 to
keep the Panama Canal in American hands and to roll back the agreement signed by the
good-hearted President Jimmy Carter. President George Bush Sr sent his airborne troops in after
calling Panama president "a dictator and cocaine smuggler". This is exactly what President
Trump says about Venezuela's president.
They are likely to use this aid to invade and suborn Venezuela. Wisely, Maduro began large
military exercises to prepare the army in case of invasion. The situation of Venezuela is dire
enough even without invasion. Their money has been appropriated, their main oil company is as
good as confiscated; and there is a strong fifth column waiting for Yankees in Caracas.
ORDER IT NOW
This fifth column consists mainly of compradors , well-off young folk with a
smattering of Western education and upbringing, who see their future within the framework of
the American Empire. They are ready to betray the unwashed masses and invite the US troops in.
They are supported by the super-rich, by representatives of foreign companies, by Western
secret services. Such people exist everywhere; they tried to organise the Gucci Revolution in
Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran, the Maidan in the Ukraine. In Russia they had their
chance in the winter of 2011/2012 when their Mink-Coat Revolution was played at
Moscow's Bolotnaya Heath.
In Moscow they lost when their opponents, the Russia-First crowd, bettered them by fielding
a much-bigger demo
at Poklonnaya Hill. The Western news agencies tried to cover the defeat by broadcasting
pictures of the Putin-supporters demo and saying it was the pro-Western Heath. Other Western
agencies published pictures of 1991 rallies saying they were taken in 2012 on the Heath. In
Moscow, nobody was fooled: the mink-coat crowd knew they were licked.
In the Ukraine, they won, for President Yanukovich, a hesitant and pusillanimous man of two
minds, failed to gather massive support. It is a big question whether Maduro will be able to
mobilise Venezuela-First masses. If he is, he will win the confrontation with the US as
well.
Maduro is rather reticent; he hasn't disciplined unruly oligarchs; he does not control the
media; he tries to play a social-democrat game in a country that is not Sweden by long shot.
His subsidies have allowed ordinary people to escape dire poverty, but now they are used by
black marketeers to siphon off the wealth of the nation. Far from being a disaster zone,
Venezuela is a true Bonanza, a real Klondike: you can fill a tanker with petrol for pennies,
smuggle it to neighbouring Colombia and sell it for market price. Many supporters of the Random
Guy have made small fortunes this way, and they hope to make a large killing if and when the
Americans come.
A bigger problem is that Venezuela had become a monoculture economy: it exports oil and
imports everything else. It does not even produce food to feed its 35 million inhabitants.
Venezuela is a victim of neoliberal doctrine claiming that you can buy what you can't produce.
Now they can't buy and they do not produce. Imagine a democratic Saudi Arabia hit by
blockade.
In order to save the economy, Maduro should drain the swamp, end the black market and
profiteering, encourage agriculture, tax the rich, develop some industry for local consumption.
It can be done. Venezuela is not a socialist state like orderly Cuba, nor a social-democratic
one like Sweden and England in 1970s, but even its very modest model of allowing the masses to
rise out of misery, poverty and ignorance seems too much for the West.
It is often said there are two antagonists in the West, the Populists and the Globalists,
and President Trump is the Populist leader. The Venezuela crisis proved these two forces are
united if there is a chance to attack and rob an outsider country. Trump is condemned at home
when he calls his troops back from Afghanistan or Syria, but he gains support when he threatens
Venezuela or North Korea. He can be sure he will be cheered on by Macron and Merkel and even by
The Washington Post and The New York Times .
He has the real WMD, the Weapons of Mass Deception, to attack Venezuela, and these WMD had
been activated with the beginning of the creeping coup. When a rather unknown young politician,
the leader of a small neoliberal rabidly pro-American fraction in the Parliament, Random Dude,
claimed the title of president, he was immediately recognised by Trump, and the Western media
reported that the people of Venezuela went out in mass demos to greet the new president and
demand Maduro's removal.
They beamed videos of huge Caracas demos back to Venezuela. Not many viewers abroad noticed
that the video was old, filmed in 2016 demos, but the Venezuelans saw that at once. They
weren't fooled. They knew that there is no chance for a big protest demo on that day, the day
of a particularly important baseball game in the professional league between Leones of Caracas
and Cardenales de Lara from Barquisimeto.
But the WMD kept lying. Here is a report by
Moon of Alabama : the reports of large anti-government rallies are fake news or prophecies
hoping to become self-fulfilling ones:
Agence France-Press stated at 11:10 utc yesterday that "tens of thousands" would
join a rally.
Tens of thousands of protesters are set to pour onto the streets of Venezuela's capital
#Caracas Saturday to back opposition leader Juan Guaido's calls for early elections as
international pressure increased on President #Maduro to step down http://u.afp.com/Jouu
They lie that there are army deserters spoiling for a fight with the army. The young guys
CNN presented weren't deserters, and they didn't live in Venezuela. Even their military
insignia were of the kind discarded years ago, as our friend The Saker
noticed .
However, these lies won't avail -- my correspondents in Caracas report that there are demos
for and against government (for Maduro slightly bigger crowds), but the feelings aren't strong.
The crisis is manufactured in Washington, and the Venezuelans aren't keen to get involved.
That's why we can expect an American attempt to use force, preceded by some provocation.
Probably it won't be a full-blown war: the US never fought an enemy that wasn't exhausted prior
to the encounter. If the Maduro administration survives the blow, the crisis will take a low
profile, until sanctions do their work and further undermine the economy.
ORDER IT NOW
In this struggle, President Trump is his own bitter enemy. He seeks approval of the War
Party, and his own base will be disappointed by his actions. His sanctions will send more
refugees to the US, wall or no wall. He undermines the unique status of the US dollar by
weaponising it. In 2020, he will reap what he sow.
I am pretty sure that there won't be any military intervention by US in Venezuela. How do I
know this? Well, if it was any other nation, – for example a nation of people whose
brains have been turned into mush by decades long propaganda – then I would be worried.
Luckily, US have one of the best informed populations on earth – they have all those
bastions of truth like CNN, CBS, NYT and so on. That's why I am fairly certain that the US
wouldn't dare to attack Venezuela. Their peace-loving nation wouldn't let them.
The only way it can happen is if in the next few weeks a group of Venezuelan terrorists
hijacked few planes and flew them into some tall buildings in the US. That's the only way
that the public opinion in the peace loving nation can be swayed towards war.
Remember, every time the US has gone to war, they had to stage various versions of 9/11
– in order to convince the well informed and peace loving Americans that someone hates
their freedoms, so they have to go over there to fight for those freedoms, rather than wait
over here for someone to bring the fight to them.
I am pretty sure that there won't be any military intervention by US in Venezuela. How do I
know this? Well, if it was any other nation, – for example a nation of people whose
brains have been turned into mush by decades long propaganda – then I would be worried.
Luckily, US have one of the best informed populations on earth – they have all those
bastions of truth like CNN, CBS, NYT and so on. That's why I am fairly certain that the US
wouldn't dare to attack Venezuela. Their peace-loving nation wouldn't let them.
The only way it can happen is if in the next few weeks a group of Venezuelan terrorists
hijacked few planes and flew them into some tall buildings in the US. That's the only way
that the public opinion in the peace loving nation can be swayed towards war.
Remember, every time the US has gone to war, they had to stage various versions of 9/11
– in order to convince the well informed and peace loving Americans that someone hates
their freedoms, so they have to go over there to fight for those freedoms, rather than wait
over here for someone to bring the fight to them.
@Verymuchalive
According to numbers from Venezuela's Ministry of Agriculture, after relatively stagnant food
production throughout the 1990s, from 2003 to 2011 milk production increased by 230 percent,
beef production by 19 percent, chicken by 60 percent, rice by 25 percent, corn by 116
percent, and beans by 320 percent.
As can be seen, the claims among Chavez's critics of a decrease in food production are
simply false. And while it is true that there have been food shortages, the real reason is
quite different from what the media reports. An impressive increase in food production in
recent years has simply been outpaced by growing consumption that has increased even more
rapidly, creating supply problems in many basic items and the need to import increasing
amounts of food. Though often cited as a major failure of the Chavez government, it is
actually the result of millions of poor Venezuelans eating better and consuming more than
ever before. As one Venezuelan recently said to an opposition activist who insisted that
empty supermarket shelves were proof of the government's failures and demanded to know, "Then
where is the milk?": "The milk," he replied, "is in the bellies of Venezuela's poor." https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7513
As for the USSR, only now the Russians are coming to the levels of modest affluence circa
1985, after the disaster of anti-communist rule in 1990s.
Russian Communism is a secularised Russian Orthodox Christianity. Likewise, American system
is secularised Judaism.
BRAVO OMAR ..2 nd time in my life I have seen balls in congress.
Venezuela Envoy Elliott Abrams Lose His Cool During Tense Exchange With Rep. Ilhan
Omar
Watch the video at link
"Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from
Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later
pardoned by president George H.W. Bush," began Omar. "I fail to understand why members of
this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be
truthful."
"If I could respond to that " interjected Abrams.
"It was not a question," shot back Omar.
After a brief exchange in which Abrams protested "It was not right!" Omar cut Abrams off,
saying "Thank you for your participation."
@bluedog
Please present you proof your 'forced labor living in holes in the ground, women selling
themselves for bread'.
You cannot, or you would have.
We note your avoidance of the facts. Violent Stone Age 'Indians':
– kept slaves
– were in constant states of war with other tribes
– treated & traded women like cattle
– practiced genocide against other 'Indian' tribes
– used crude environmentally destructive slash & burn agricultural methods
– decimated the animal populations
– the first acts by them when they got horses from the Spaniards was to attack and
decimate other tribes
– engaged in cannibalism
– roasted people alive
– routinely butchered children
– engaged in human sacrifice
– constant rapes
– took scalps from their enemies
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kw/crichton.html "The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200
years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths"
@bluedog
I've read biographies of Custer and can only recall two villages attacked by him at the head
of his regiment, the 7th U.S. Cavalry. In November 1868 he led an attack on the Cheyenne
encampment on the Washita River, in Oklahoma. Reports differ on the casualties, but this was
decidedly not a friendly village. The second is his celebrated and perhaps precipitous attack
on the massive summer encampment of Lakota/Cheyenne/Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River.in
June of 1876. They had refused President Grant's order to return to their reservations the
previous January, and placed themselves subject to military action. He had been involved in
other skirmishes with hostile Indians, in Kansas in 1867 and on the Yellowstone Expedition of
1873, but I'm unaware of any other attacks on villages.
I'm hardly a communist myself, but not everything can be blamed on communism.
Venezuela is not a communist state by any stretch of the imagination, and Chavez and Maduro
can hardly be compared to Lenin and Stalin, that's just a bit too much .
I didn't claim that Chavez and Maduro were Communists. Only that they had had a disastrous
effect on Venezuelan agriculture as Lenin and Stalin had on Soviet agriculture – though
of course Bolshevism was many degrees worse. I said elsewhere that Chavez used money from oil
to import ever more food from abroad, rather than stimulate indigenous food production. I
said that this was a very odd form of Socialism. In fact, it's not Socialism at all.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s – if, like me, you are old enough to remember – there
were a number of pseudo-Communist 3rd World States, like North Yemen, Angola and Ethiopia.
Beneath the very thin veneer, they were kleptocracies run to benefit those in power.
Venezuela is a similar pseudo-Socialist kleptocracy. Before he obtained power, Chavez
presented himself as a Reformer, rather than a Socialist. Afterwards, he claimed he was "
Bolivarian Socialist ".
Oil is a very capital intensive industry. If you fail to invest sufficiently, then production
will tail off, particularly the heavy, sulphurous product Venezuela produces. Chavez took
this money and used it to bribe the masses in welfare payments. Talk about being bribed by
your own money ! As much money if not more was stolen by the kleptocracy for their own
benefit – over $200bn or more if Forbes is to believed.
Oil production has gone down from 3.5bbp day before Chavez to 2.4bbp day on his death. It is
now down to 1 bbp day. By the end of the year, it will be be 0.5bbp day or less, regardless
of what America does.
I totally agree with you. The US should stay out of this conflict. Whether it wishes to
embargo Venezuelan crude imports is up to the American government. Otherwise, keep out.
Regardless, the Venezuelan Government would collapse within 18 months. Venezuela will need a
great deal of aid, not only to reconstruct their country, but also to invest heavily in oil
production. If the Us supplies this, let them have the oil. It will be the most expensive oil
in the world
A bigger problem is that Venezuela had become a monoculture economy: it exports oil and
imports everything else. It does not even produce food to feed its 35 million inhabitants.
Venezuela is a victim of neoliberal doctrine claiming that you can buy what you can't
produce.
Under two decades of Chavismo, Venezuela became much more a monoculture economy than it
used to be. Oil exports as a percentage of Venezuelan exports increased from 71.7% in 1998,
the year Chávez was elected, to 97.8% by 2013. Which implies that Chávez was
following, to quote your words, a "neoliberal doctrine claiming that you can buy what you
can't produce."
Yet you say this about the current Chavismo opponent.
When a rather unknown young politician, the leader of a small neoliberal
rabidly pro-American fraction in the Parliament, Random Dude, claimed the title of
president,
You inform us the leader of the opposition is "neoliberal," which implies that Maduro and
Chavismo are NOT neoliberal, in fact are far from being neoliberal. Yet you also inform us
that Chavismo, in its two decades in power followed "neoliberal doctrine claiming that you
can buy what you can't produce."
You are not making sense.
Fuel exports (% of merchandise exports)
1998 71.7%
2013 97.8%
CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24
lbs) in body weight last year and almost 90 percent now live in poverty, according to a new
university study on the impact of a devastating economic crisis and food shortages.
Over 60 percent of Venezuelans surveyed said that during the previous three months they had
woken up hungry because they did not have enough money to buy food. About a quarter of the
population was eating two or less meals a day, the study showed.
Last year, the three universities found that Venezuelans said they had lost an average
of 8 kilograms during 2016. This time, the study's dozen investigators surveyed 6,168
Venezuelans between the ages of 20 and 65 across the country of 30 million people.
Most people would term "difficulties" a euphemism for that.
@israel
shamirAs can be seen, the claims among Chavez's critics of a decrease in food
production are simply false.
FAO Stats tell us otherwise. You could find no data beyond 2011? Probably because your
information source, the Venezuelan Ministry of Agriculture didn't want to release
embarrassing data.
Chávez was elected in 2016. FAO Stats inform us that from 1998 to 2016,
Venezuela's net per capita Crops (PIN) production has fallen 35.7%.
Venezuela's net per capita Cereals, Total production (here corn and rice) has fallen
46.9%.
Cereals production fell a further 17% in 2017. From 2014-2017, Cereals production in
Venezuela fell 59%.
"Claims among Chavez's critics of a decrease in food production are simply false ?" As
they say in Venezuela, "Dime otro de vaqueros." Tell me another cowboy story. Tell me
another fish tale.
"... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
"... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
"... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
"... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
"... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
"... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
"... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
"... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
"... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
"... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
"... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
"... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
"... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had
somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.
An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business
contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian
click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence
that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.
Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate
is finished :
After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016
election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats
and Republicans on the committee.
...
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would
unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice
Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.
Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies
were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the
dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced
to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:
"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to
influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...
No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.
Russiagate created a lot of damage.
The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to
install censorship on social media. It was used
to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia.
Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was
held in solitary confinement
(recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out
of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from
there.
Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM |
Permalink
Comments next
page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or
parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the
Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some
comments of its own .
I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing,
all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff
like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!
as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing
down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm
at this point...
Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist
to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.
= ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent
The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.
= ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn
Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw
them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond
was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.
You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in
the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy
theorists.
I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver
bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.
I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate
proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even
if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.
The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee
chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine
Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.
They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct
so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft"
impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand
innuendoes and guilt-by-association.
Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt
to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate
the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.
Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)
Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget
how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate
a new narrative.
So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted
coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.
Putin solicits public input for essential national
policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos
argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their
economy.
Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI,
and within the entire Democrat Party.
I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several
stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point
made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful
idiot
for a take on the alternative reality some are living in
emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section...
as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM |
link
Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands
of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint
Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal
at the Daily Beast.
Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this
to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity
Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western
world.
The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly
4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most
of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.
Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s
Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance
who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.
Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically
justified by its diabolical policies.
I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power.
Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.
somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their
noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been
made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.
So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000
emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at
war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.
Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's
the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which
means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the
EU bloc.
Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely
to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that
will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.
I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but
the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".
You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in
supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.
Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane
by a properly functioning court of law.
I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no
investigation of Hillary ...
Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President,
Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and
propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.
Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep
State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn
and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?
Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have
gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu
and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because
he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.
I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties,
when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.
Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM |
link
Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated
either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.
This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.
On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen
to explore the facts.
Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead
the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were
commissioned to produce a 'report.'
Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.
Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information
was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.
Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."
In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests,
not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something
because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.
Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded
in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in
the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"
What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence
there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.
Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged
one evening after work and killed.
The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they
die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely,
the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL
FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.
That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than
in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid
of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish
state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West
and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and
Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!
He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all
along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35.
German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have
in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're
after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft,
that would be worth a try.
Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2)
he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)
It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate
they could manipulate.
Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both
hands, it would surprise me.
That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.
Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting
peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their
Government Lackeys.
It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made
that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do
it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it
to be so
Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded
by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign
governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other
countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.
Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well,
not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades
would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he
was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"
If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO
Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation,
propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to
move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral
college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.
It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a
warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians
tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real'
crimes which were done without a Russian assist.
I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed
a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney,
former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow
the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich.
So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?
Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie
Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The
documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also
this primer on Mueller's MO.
reply to Les 42
"It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they
could manipulate."
Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know
she is insane.
They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately
once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.
They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command
doesn't fully support.
Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)
The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the
democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to
increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia
collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this
request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will
happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe
the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!
Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.
The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions,
purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign
governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine
danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
@76Hw
I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have
a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking
hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to
pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?
Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump
infatuation, you should too!
Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's
Trump professing his endless love for Zionism:
Trump Resign
Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the
lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.
Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information
to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The
armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so
stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.
When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be
supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back
you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is
say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat
vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide
to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,,
Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise
trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives,
its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and
masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the
governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class
of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and
when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.
1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear
weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.
2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement,
and everybody laughed,
3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has
been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could
be a target, but
4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and
5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.
Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner
get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is
in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken
out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..
Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?
I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate
is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.
At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on
decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already
brainwashed population?
The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away
from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called
US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia
can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state
of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding
them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.
Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures
naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic
decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.
Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?
Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?
If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To
do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National
Emergency for more money for the wall.
The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need
a president to be more "presidential."
My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.
The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour,
"Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian
defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British
woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special
correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others,
the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry
of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.
Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know.
A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is
to be had even by academics for the right results.
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.
"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain --
that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not
Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely
excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously
welcomed."
On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of
The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's
Future.
Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship
imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward
Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that
had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for
example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very
hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."
"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece
published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."
"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or
seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this
Cold War and the preceding Cold War."
"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two
exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say
they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were
rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say –
could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."
"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you
would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are
used to these newspapers."
"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these
things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been
de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."
"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington
Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's
just the way the news business works now."
"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate
these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in
these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have
been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the
parameters of the debate."
"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my
lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no.
It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."
"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident
voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes
they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."
"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate
by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for
newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television
networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."
"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some
other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like
keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though
they haven't been convicted of anything."
"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said
– I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are
doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."
Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person
in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia
can be "appropriated by the right."
"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to
hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people
who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the
man said.
Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a
racist or a nationalist."
"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are
different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have
always been a nationalistic country."
"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not
permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the
way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is
making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities
– and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."
"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my
mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation ,
which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I
had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"
B you check out the brief awaiting adjudication, whereby they state that they will appeal to
to SCOTUS. Mueller is unconstitutional and plausible criminal.
67 pages
ARGUMENT I.
Congress Has Not "By Law" Vested The Attorney General With Authority to Appoint the
Special Counsel as an Inferior Officer.
The principal question before this Court is whether there is any statute that clearly
conveys power to the Attorney General to appoint a private attorney as Special Counsel at the
level of an inferior officer. The Special Counsel claims that §§ 515 and 533(1) do
the job. But the Spe
cial Counsel's "plain-text" analysis redrafts both provisions in material ways.
He also places extensive reliance on historic practice and predecessor versions of §
515 to aid his redrafting.
None of this squares with controlling and settled law. Here, the plain text of
§§ 515 and 533(1) does not clearly confer authority to appoint any special counsel,
much less one as an inferior officer.
He not only acknowledged early on that his initial support for the Iraq war was wrong, but
spent the rest of his career fighting for a more restrained and peaceful foreign policy. Rep.
Jones was one of the original Republican co-sponsors of
the first House antiwar resolution to end
U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen . He co-authored an op-ed with
Reps. Khanna and Pocan in 2017 in support of their resolution:
We believe that the American people, if presented with the facts of this conflict, will
oppose the use of their tax dollars to bomb and starve civilians in order to further the
Saudi monarchy's regional goals. Our House resolution is a first step in expanding democracy
into an arena long insulated from public accountability. Too many lives hang in the balance
to allow this American war to continue without congressional consent. When our bill comes to
the floor for a vote, our colleagues should consider first the solution proposed by the
director of Unicef, Anthony Lake, for stopping the unimaginable suffering of millions of
Yemenis: "Stop the war."
It is unfortunate that Rep. Jones did not live to see the House pass that resolution to end
U.S. support for the war, but when a new version of that resolution passes later this month it
will be thanks in no small part to his leadership.
Jones became a reliable scourge of
unnecessary and unauthorized foreign wars wherever they happened to be
. He saw the continuation of open-ended and illegal wars as an attack on the Constitution and
an abuse of the men and women who volunteered to serve their country. His opposition to these
wars earned him the enmity
of Republican hawks , who repeatedly and
unsuccessfully sought to unseat him through primary challenges. Whatever their disagreements
with him may have been over the years, his constituents recognized and appreciated his
integrity and his dedication to the country.
The cause of peace and restraint has lost one of its great defenders, TAC has lost
one of our good friends, and America has lot one of its most honorable and decent public
servants. May his memory be eternal.
I hope that good and true Americans inspired by his example will pick up the colors he
carried so long and faithfully, carry them forward, renewing his dogged efforts to rein in
military intervention and preserve true freedom.
For all that, you may be certain that somewhere the vermin are jumping for joy, because
when it comes to their vile wars and meddling they brook no dissent, and Jones's voice was
strong and sure, grounded in truth and "the better angels of our nature".
Very sorry to have lost this good and valuable American. Hats off also to the people of
his district, many of them soldiers or families of soldiers, who kept sending him back to
Washington. May they find someone to replace who has the same gumption, character, and
commitment to basic Americanism.
If there were more people like him in Washington, we wouldn't be in the state we're in. I
wrote him a "fan" letter back in 2006 or thereabouts, about his regrets about the Iraq war
and writing to all the families of those KIA. Also appreciated him being one of the few in
Congress that actually tried to follow the Constitution and do something about our national
debt. He also was all about constituent service,especially for veterans and those in Eastern
North Carolina affected by the recent hurricanes. Eternal rest, grant him, Oh Lord, and let
perpetual light shine upon him.
"... Maté explains why he thinks this narrative ultimately aligns with the longstanding interests of U.S. establishment power. He calls it a "privilege protection racket" that thrives on distraction and misdirection, turning the public away from a real critique of the rise of Trumpism that would otherwise implicate the neoliberal policies of democrats and conservatives alike, foreign policy think tanks, and the media. ..."
Aaron is gong to break down "Russiagate," taking a sober look at the media frenzy of
"bombshell" stories asserting a Russian conspiracy behind the 2016 election.
Maté explains why he thinks this narrative ultimately aligns with the
longstanding interests of U.S. establishment power. He calls it a "privilege protection racket"
that thrives on distraction and misdirection, turning the public away from a real critique of
the rise of Trumpism that would otherwise implicate the neoliberal policies of democrats and
conservatives alike, foreign policy think tanks, and the media.
And in a prior NBC News article Tuesday morning, Dilanian
spelled out :
After two years and 200 interviews , the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the
end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a
conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia , according to both Democrats and
Republicans on the committee.
MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson and her guest panelists' faces looked visibly confused and
uncomfortable as they learned the Senate report is going in the opposite direction of
everything MSNBC and other mainstream outlets have been breathlessly reporting on a near 24/7
basis.
More importantly, if this is a precursor of what the Mueller report concludes in a few
weeks/months, the TV station that built its current reputation on the premise of Russian
collusion, may have no option but to go on indefinite hiatus.
Watch the segment below, with host Hallie Jackson appearing to grow exasperated by the
2:20 mark : "If and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these
conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found I am not guilty of
conspiracy... he would be correct in saying that? "
Dilanian noted that while the Republican chair of the committee made what he characterized
as "partisan" comments the week prior, it turned out be unanimous fact. "What I found," he
said, "is that Democrats don't dispute that characterization ."
But perhaps sensing how "contrary" to the network's own hysterical 'Russiagate' coverage his
reporting was, he tried to soften the blow, saying, "But, again, no direct proof of a
conspiracy. As one democratic aide said to me, 'we never thought we were going to find a
Democrat between Trump and Vladimir Putin saying let's collude, but the question is how do we
interpret all these various contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.'"
Hallie Jackson followed with further probing: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but I want
to make sure I'm understanding this..." and asked "If and when the president, as he may
inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee
found I'm not guilty of conspiracy... he would be correct in saying that? "
Her face looking rather incredulous at this point, Dilanian responded by invoking the
Mueller investigation, reassuring her his inquiry is not complete and likely could uncover more
information. But then the bottom line: "That said, Trump will claim vindication through this,
and he'll be partially right," he said. But Dilanian also noted the Senate intel committee has
access to classified material, which means "if there was an intercept between officers
suggesting they were conspiring with the Trump campaign, [the committee] would see that. And
that has not emerged."
"So that evidence does not exist, and Trump will claim vindication," he repeated.
Yet after all this, during the full segment Vice News guest panelist Shawna Thomas actually
invoked impeachment in what appeared a desperate attempt to grasp for anything . "There's two
things I question about [the report]," she began.
"Number one, if and when the report finally comes out from the Senate intelligence
committee, is there anything in there that will cause, especially some of these new House Dems,
to start to clamor, even if there isn't 'conspiracy' or 'collusion', for impeachment?" said
Thomas.
But then she tried to deflate the whole thing, upsetting as it was for purveyors of the
collusion narrative: "The other thing is, based on what Ken is saying, it's all stuff we knew
already," she said.
Right... cause in MSNBC's Russiagate-land "the walls are closing in" on Trump, constantly.
Except the network just woke up to the reality that it's not the case.
We only wonder what Rachel Maddow will be left with after this.
Matthew George Whitaker (born October 29, 1969) is an American lawyer, politician, and the
Acting United States Attorney General. He was appointed by President Donald Trump on November
7, 2018, after Jeff Sessions resigned at Trump's request.[1] Whitaker previously served as
Chief of Staff to Sessions from September 2017 to November 2018.[2] Trump announced his
nomination of William P. Barr for Attorney General on December 7, 2018, leaving Whitaker's
future at the Department of Justice in doubt.[3]
In 2002, Whitaker was the candidate of the Republican Party for Treasurer of Iowa. From 2004
to 2009 he served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. Whitaker ran
in the 2014 Iowa Republican primary for the United States Senate. He later wrote opinion pieces
and appeared on talk-radio shows and cable news as the director of the Foundation for
Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a conservative advocacy group. He was also involved with
World Patent Marketing, which was fined $26 million and shut down by the Federal Trade
Commission in 2017 for deceiving consumers.[4][5]
The legality of Whitaker's appointment as Acting U.S. Attorney General was unsuccessfully
challenged in multiple lawsuits.[6] Legal scholars, commentators, and politicians have
questioned the legality and constitutionality of his appointment, arguing that his selection
circumvented Senate confirmation.[7] Some also called for Whitaker to recuse himself from
overseeing the Special Counsel investigation because of potential conflicts of
interest.[8][9][10] The Supreme Court denied a petition challenging the appointment in January
2019.[11]
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
"... Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans' care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700 people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs." ..."
"... Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria. ..."
"... A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women ..."
"... Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population, under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate, and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. ..."
"... The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act. ..."
"... Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more. ..."
"... It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists do not care for the facts. ..."
"... That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused. Brzezinski said, "None". ..."
An editorial published by the New York Times on February 4 titled "End the War in Afghanistan" has provoked a backlash from prominent
supporters of the decades-long US "war on terrorism" and the fraud of "humanitarian intervention."
The Times editorial was a damning
self-indictment by the US political establishment's newspaper of record, which has supported every US act of military aggression,
from the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the US wars for regime change in Libya
and Syria beginning in 2011.
The editorial presents the "war on terror" as an unmitigated fiasco, dating it from September 14, 2001, when "Congress wrote what
would prove to be one of the largest blank checks in the country's history," i.e., the Authorization for Use of Military Force against
Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which is still invoked to legitimize US interventions from Syria to Somalia, Yemen and, of course, Afghanistan.
On the day that this "blank check" was written, the Times published a column titled "No Middle Ground," which stated "the Bush
administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism, deny safe havens to terrorists
or face the certain prospect of death and destruction. The marble halls of Washington resounded with talk of war."
It continued, "The nation is rallying around its young, largely untried leader-as his rising approval ratings and the proliferation
of flags across the country vividly demonstrate "
This war propaganda was sustained by the Times, which sold the invasion of Afghanistan as retribution for 9/11 and then promoted
the illegal and unprovoked war against Iraq by legitimizing and embellishing the lies about "weapons of mass destruction."
With the first deployment of US ground troops in Afghanistan, the Times editorialized on October 20, 2001: "Now the nation's soldiers
are going into battle in a distant and treacherous land, facing a determined and resourceful enemy. As they go, they should know
that the nation supports their cause and yearns for their success."
Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans'
care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly
all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have
fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700
people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who
served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs."
The massive loss of life, destruction of social infrastructure and vast human suffering inflicted by these wars on civilian populations
are at best an afterthought for the Times. Conservative estimates place the number killed by the US war in Afghanistan at 175,000.
With the number of indirect fatalities caused by the war, the toll likely rises to a million. In Iraq, the death toll was even higher.
What does the Times conclude from this bloody record? "The failure of American leaders-civilians and generals through three administrations,
from the Pentagon to the State Department to Congress and the White House-to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to
be studied for generations. Likewise, all Americans-the news media included-need to be prepared to examine the national credulity
or passivity that's led to the longest conflict in modern American history."
What a cowardly and cynical evasion! Three administrations, those of Bush, Obama and Trump, have committed war crimes over the
course of more than 17 years, including launching wars of aggression-the principal charge leveled against the Nazis at Nuremberg-the
slaughter of civilians and torture. These crimes should not be "studied for generations," but punished.
As for the attempt to lump the news media together with "all Americans" as being guilty of "credulity" and "passivity," this is
a slander against the American people and a deliberate cover-up of the crimes carried out by the corporate media, with the Times
at their head, in disseminating outright lies and war propaganda. The Times editors should be "prepared to examine" the fact that
journalistic agents of the Nazi regime who carried out a similar function in Germany were tried and punished at Nuremberg.
The Times editorial supporting a US withdrawal reflects the conclusions being drawn by increasing sections of the ruling establishment,
including the Trump administration, which has opened up negotiations with the Taliban. It is bound up with the shift in strategy
by US imperialism and the Pentagon toward the preparation for "great power" confrontations with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
The Times ' call for an Afghanistan withdrawal has provoked a heated rebuke by defenders of the "war on terrorism" and "humanitarian
intervention," who have denounced the newspaper for defeatism. Such a withdrawal, a letter published by the Times on February 8 argued,
would "accelerate and expand the war," "allow another extremist-terrorist phenomenon to emerge," and "result in the deaths and abuse
of thousands of women."
The signatories of the letter include Frederick Kagan, David Sedney and Eleanor Smeal.
Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals
who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every
US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
Likewise Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense responsible for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, now working
at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Married to a top lobbyist for Chevron who worked extensively
in Central Asia, he has his own interests in the continuation of US military operations in the region.
Smeal is the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMD) and a former president of the National Organization for Women
(NOW), who is widely described as one of "the major leaders of the modern-day American feminist movement."
A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women. In 2001, Smeal and her FMD circulated a petition thanking the Bush
administration for its commitment to promoting the rights of women in Afghanistan. After the bombing began on October 7, she declared,
"We have real momentum now in the drive to restore the rights of women." A few days later, she and representatives of other feminist
organizations showed up at the White House to solidarize themselves with the US war.
Urging on the conquest of Afghanistan, she wrote, "I should hope our government doesn't retreat. We'll help rip those burqas off,
I hope. This is a unique time in history. If you're going to end terrorism, you've got to end the ideology of gender apartheid."
Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population,
under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate,
and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16.
Recent reports suggest that the maternal death rate may be higher than it was before the war began, surpassed only by South Sudan.
While USAID has poured some $280 million into its Promote program, supposedly to advance the conditions of Afghan women, it has done
nothing but line the pockets of corrupt officials of the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul.
The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a
crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act.
On October 9, two days after Washington launched its now 17-year-long war on Afghanistan and amid a furor of jingoistic and militarist
propaganda from the US government and the corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site editorial board posted a column titled "Why
we oppose the war in Afghanistan." It rejected the claim that this was a "war for justice and the security of the American people
against terrorism" and insisted that "the present action by the United States is an imperialist war" in which Washington aimed to
"establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control" over not only Afghanistan, but over the broader
region of Central Asia, "home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world."
The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. At most, it is a passive acceptance that war is the only means to fight terrorism,
a mood that owes a great deal to the efforts of a thoroughly dishonest media which serves as an arm of the state. Beneath the reluctant
endorsement of military action is a profound sense of unease and skepticism. Tens of millions sense that nothing good can come of
this latest eruption of American militarism.
"The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration.
What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.
"The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind
at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than
ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for
socialism."
These warnings and this perspective have been borne out entirely by the criminal and tragic events of the last 17 years, even
as the likes of the New York Times find themselves compelled to admit the bankruptcy of their entire record on Afghanistan, and their
erstwhile "liberal" allies struggle to salvage some shred of the filthy banner of "human rights imperialism."
"The failure of American leaders -- civilians and generals through three administrations, from the Pentagon to the State Department
to Congress and the White House -- to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to be studied for generations. Likewise,
all Americans -- the news media included -- need to be prepared to examine the national credulity or passivity that's led to the
longest conflict in modern American history."
What the New York Times should propose is a Nuremberg-style trial for the war criminals responsible for the genocide of millions,
the devastation of of the Middle East and Africa, and the looting of the US Treasury by war profiteers and the political duopoly.
If these criminals are NOT held accountable for their actions NOTHING will be learned and the violence, death and destruction
will continue.
"The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law, acted as Head of State or responsible
government official, does not relieve him from responsibility under international law."
Gore Vidal rightly named America as the United States of Amnesia. They NEVER learn from their own history and they are never told
about what their terrorist government does in their name.
Eleanor Smeal's comment about "ripping off those burqas" in Afghanistan reminds me of Louisiana congressman John Cooksey's post-9/11
suggestion that police should pull over and question anyone with ''a diaper on his head''. Both use religious intolerance to increase
the power of the state.
"A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women."
wouldn't it be more correctly "Janey comes lately" ..as in "Johnny come lately"..?
The completely insane fraud of waging imperialist war for "women rights" has been , unfortunately, extensively documented..the
US occupation has strengthened not weakened the Taliban
"The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. "
Not really in agreement with this statement although, everything has changed in almost 20 years.....
There are always elements that are gung ho for war. And I'll agree that the number was abnormally high for Afghanistan. But I
do think the majority still reluctantly agreed to the war as a necessary measure to fight "terrorism" as the more-than-likely-to-be-a-false-flag
9/11 event was very fresh in everyone's mind.
Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still
hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the
crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more.
What's more interesting is that the liberal elites will probably do their best to continue on with the war. But either way,
the USA will likely lose. In fact, it's already lost the war. The Taliban have won this one. That the elitists can't see that
shows just how far gone they are.
It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists
do not care for the facts.
That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years
ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused.
Brzezinski said, "None".
It looks like a specialist on illegal transferee of weapons is needed to make the color revolution a success...
Notable quotes:
"... Elliott Abrams got a new high level job last month, Special Envoy on Venezuela. Within weeks, the United States recognized a new President of Venezuela while the elected Venezuelan President is still in office. Chatter and rumor from the White House suggests that military intervention is possible. The "new" recognized-by- the-US-President of Venezuela is a veteran of color revolution type regime change, groomed for service with the help of the snakelike National Endowment for Democracy (NED). ..."
It's a sad fact that the full and unconditional
pardon given by President George H.W. Bush to Elliott Abrams (a member of the second
generation neo-conservative royalty by way of marriage to the daughter of neo-con co-creator,
Midge Decter), protected him from disbarment and possible prison. Abrams, who pled guilty to
the crime of lying to Congress in the investigation of the Iran-Contra, embraced the plea
option reportedly in order to avoid heavier charges from the office of then independent
counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, prosecutor in the Iran-Contra cases. Bush is gone, Walsh is gone,
but Mr. Bush's Attorney General William Barr is – surprise – now Attorney General
of the United States.
What that portends for future regime change adventures remains to be seen, but the
historical record is ominous.
In 1992, when Bush issued the Iran-Contra pardons on the eve of his leaving office after
losing reelection to President Bill Clinton, William Barr fully supported the pardons.
Presidential pardons are, after all, Constitutional. But, Lawrence Walsh said at the time,
reported NPR, "It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious
crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences."
Now the Iran-Contra era neo-cons and the Dick Cheney/Iraq Invasion 2003 era neo-cons are
marching back into the institution of the Presidency.
Elliott Abrams got a new high level job last month, Special Envoy on Venezuela. Within
weeks, the United States recognized a new President of Venezuela while the elected Venezuelan
President is still in office. Chatter and rumor from the White House suggests that military
intervention is possible. The "new" recognized-by- the-US-President of Venezuela is a veteran
of color revolution type regime change, groomed for service with the help of the snakelike
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Regime change, putting in questionable, if not nefarious new leaders, seems to be Abrams'
delight: Nicaragua, Iraq while a government official. Many others in his dreams.
In 1986, even before the Iran-Contra debacle was revealed, as Assistant Secretary of State
for Inter-American Affairs, Elliott Abrams told Congress that Nicaraguan "Contras" involved in
drug running didn't have the okay from Contra leaders. It was just underlings. This, while
Abrams and company were busy doing end-runs around the Boland Amendment and other Congressional
actions that barred military supplies to the Contras. Even Khomeini's Iran was not off limits
in getting money for the Nicaraguan fight.
In another time and place, i.e., Saudi Arabia, present day, where regime change in Syria was
a high priority, we've heard excuses similar to those made by Elliott Abrams about the Contras,
about the responsibility for the killing and butchering of the corpse of Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, and about the financing and arming of ISIS and Al Nusra terrorists by Saudi Arabia
in Syria. Deja vu.
With more neo-cons in the Administration, the trajectory is more wasted blood and
treasure.
It is all moving same pieces of capitalistic BS around. Basic imperialistic struggle among
former hegemon who is going down due to stupidity and bad choices and newly rising hopefuls.
Once USA is safely put out and hopefully down, new great powers will suck lesser powers
dry probably by smarter and less aggressive means but nevertheless.
Souverenity is being used as a tool now, but truly sovereign can be only few great powers
in capitalistic world and Venezuela will never be sovereign.
Sacker as usually lacks imagination to go beyond his narrow views. He is also
contradictory.
Fighting the only successful socialist state in the world which was the only one capable
to put his anglozios in place yet defending this pathetic entity pretending to be
socialist.
If it is socialist how come all those oligarchs and their base is still around to keep
creating troubles? They should have gotten rid off long time ago and their all assets and
capitals nationalized for common good.
Regarding USA I have never had any illusions about this entity. Not even in 80s. All those
birth Mark's were there from the start. As with every old person they turned into marasm at
certain age.
"... Indeed, a year later, Trump built a pro-war team that includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish neocons. And then, he ordered a second airstrike against Syria, together with his neocolonial friends. ..."
"... Trump conducted the longest experiment on neoliberals' ultimate goal: abolishing the annoying presence of the state. And this was just a taste of what Trump is willing to do in order to satisfy all neoliberals' wet dreams. ..."
"... And perhaps the best proof for that is a statement by one of the most warmongering figures of the neocon/neoliberal cabal, hired by Trump . As John Bolton cynically and openly admitted recently, " It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. " ..."
"... Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance. ..."
Government shutdown, Venezuela: Donald Trump evolves into the best propagator of neoliberal fascism that tends to become a
normFebruary
07, 2019by system failure
Even before the 2016 US presidential election, this blog supported that Donald Trump is
apure sample of neoliberal barbarism . Many almost laughed at this perception because Trump was being already promoted,
more or less, as the 'terminator' of the neoliberal establishment. And many people, especially in the US, tired from the economic
disasters, the growing inequality and the endless wars, were anxious to believe that this was indeed his special mission.
Right after the elections, we supported that the
US establishment
gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in power, against the only candidate that the same
establishment identified as a real threat: Bernie Sanders.
In 2017 , Trump bombed Syria for the first time, resembling the lies that led us to the Iraq war disaster. Despite the fact that
the US Tomahawk missile attack had zero value in operational level (the United States allegedly warned Russia and Syria, while the
targeted airport was operating normally just hours after the attack), Trump sent a clear message to the US deep state that he is
prepared to meet all its demands - and especially the escalation of the confrontation with Russia.
Indeed, a year later, Trump built a pro-war team that includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish neocons. And then, he ordered
a second airstrike against Syria, together with his neocolonial friends.
In the middle of all this 'orgy' of pro-establishment moves, Trump offered a controversial withdrawal of US forces from Syria
and Afghanistan to save whatever was possible from his 'anti-interventionist' profile. And it was indeed a highly controversial action
with very little value, considering all these US military bases that are still fully operational in the broader Middle East and beyond.
Not to mention the various ways through which the US intervenes in the area (training proxies, equip them with heavy weapons, supporting
the Saudis and contribute to war crimes in Yemen, etc.)
And then , after this very short break, Trump returned to 'business as usual' to satisfy the neoliberal establishment with a 'glorious'
record. He achieved a 35-day government shutdown, which is the
"longest shutdown in US history"
.
Trump conducted the longest experiment on neoliberals' ultimate goal: abolishing the annoying presence of the state. And this
was just a taste of what Trump is willing to do in order to satisfy all neoliberals' wet dreams.
And now, we have the Venezuela issue. Since Hugo Chavez nationalized PDVSA, the central oil and natural gas company, the US empire
launched a fierce economic war against the country. Yet, while all previous US administrations were trying to replace legitimate
governments with their puppets as much silently as possible through slow-motion coup operations, Trump has no problem to do it in
plain sight.
And perhaps the best proof for that is a statement by one of the most warmongering figures of the neocon/neoliberal cabal,
hired by Trump . As John Bolton cynically and openly
admitted recently, " It will make
a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities
in Venezuela. "
Therefore, one should be very naive of course to believe that the Western imperialist gang seriously cares about the Venezuelan
people and especially the poor. Here are three basic reasons behind the open US intervention in Venezuela:
The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel, as well as the
great
untapped natural resources , particularly gold (mostly for the Canadian companies).
Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy, which is mainly funded
by the oil production. The imperialists know that they must interrupt the path of Venezuela to real Socialism by force if
necessary. Neoliberalism must prevail by all means for the benefit of the big banks and corporations.
Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country
the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war. The country may find an alternative to escape the Western sanctions in
order to fund its social programs for the benefit of the people. And, of course, the West will never accept the exploitation of
the Venezuelan resources by the Sino-Russian bloc.
So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of
the West rushed to follow the decision.
This is something we have never seen before. The 'liberal democracies' of the West - only by name - immediately, uncritically
and without hesitation jumped on the same boat with Trump towards this outrageously undemocratic action. They recognized Washington's
puppet as the legitimate president of a third country. A man that was never elected by the Venezuelan people and has very low popularity
in the country. Even worse, the EU parliament
approved this action
, killing any last remnants of democracy in the Union.
Yet, it seems that the US is finding increasingly difficult to force many countries to align with its agenda. Even some European
countries took some distance from the attempted constitutional coup, with Italy even
trying to
veto EU's decision to recognize Guaido.
Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes
the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism
with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and
ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance.
This unprecedented action by the Western neoliberal powers to recognize Guaido is a serious sign that neoliberalism returns
to its roots and slips towards fascism. It appears now that this is the only way to maintain some level of power.
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 02/06/2019 - 19:44 251 SHARES
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced New York financier who served 13 months in prison for
soliciting an underaged girl for prostitution, has served his time, and despite all of the
negative press surrounding his "Lolita Express" and the many celebrities and politicians -
including former
President Bill Clinton and disgraced actor Kevin Spacey - who have reportedly traveled to
his "orgy island", he will likely live out his life as a free man (unless new offenses are
committed).
But thanks to a series published by the Miami Herald last year that
delved into how prosecutors worked with powerful defense attorneys to ensure Epstein received
such a lenient sentence. The expose shed a light on the role played by Alex Acosta, who went on
to become Trump's Secretary of Labour, in handing down the light sentence. Acosta was the US
Attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time Epstein's sentence was handed
down.
Now, thanks to those stories, the DOJ has reportedly opened an investigation into the
conduct of DOJ attorneys in the case, and whether they committed "professional misconduct" in
their working relationship with Epstein's attorneys.
The probe was opened in response to a request lodged by Sen. Ben Sasse, a a Nebraska
Republican and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who raised questions about the case
after reading the Herald's stories about how Acosta and other DOJ attorneys worked with defense
attorneys to cut a lenient plea deal for Epstein back in 2008, per the Herald.
At the time, the FBI was run by Robert Mueller.
Though the reasons for the lenient deal could be rooted in the natural advantages of the
wealthy, one Twitter user who did a deep dive into a cache of redacted FBI Vault documents
released last year raised the possibility that Epstein could have been an informant for the
FBI, providing information on executives from failed investment bank Bear Stearns in exchange
for the lenient sentence (though there's nothing in his guilty plea that suggested he provided
information).
To be sure, records show that Epstein passed a polygraph test showing that he didn't know
any of the girls he solicited were under the age of 18 at the time. Also, the case has taken on
renewed importance since opposition research shops
tried to link President Trump to Epstein during the campaign.
While that hasn't been conclusively proven, it could have been part of a separate agreement
that has yet to be disclosed.
It is very sad that FBI has decided to just prosecute this EVIL MAN and Child Pedophilia
enabler, just because Muller is investigating Trump. They are all in on it. They are
sick.
If I was one of the victims or the mother, I would do anything to destroy this man. Yes, I
know that Catholic church is also as guilty. But this sick faced Epstein with his evil smile,
has ruined many lives for his famous clients.
Child pedophilia is a disease wired in the brain and the only way to get rid of them, is
to execute them. There is no other solution. Imagine about the father who walked into his
house and witnessed his son getting raped by his sitter (man).
From a personal experience, when a burglar came to rub our house "As a minor not even a
teenage, I woke up with this stranger molesting me.". I had no idea what he was doing, but
that event gave me insomnia for the rest of my life.
So did Epstein provide the FBI with information for prosecutions? Doesn't seem like it.
Epstein knows the Clintons, Prince Andrew, Trump, and many others and they pressured the govt
to back off. Without any facts, the FBI cooperation story is just spin. His connected friends
have a lot to lose if he talks. I doubt that Mr. Epstein will live a long life.
Remember all those people on Clinton team who were interviewed by the FBI and granted
immunity? I remember. The crowd here was excited - oh, they are going to indict her today,
oh, they are going to drag her off tomorrow first thing... Turned out, all those immunities
were granted to protect them from future prosecutions.
Nothing may come out of this. Nothing, perhaps, will ever come out of this. The victim of
all these witch hunting is sitting in the President's chair; and when he is not interested in
getting justice for himself, or to uphold justice for the people, why should I worry about
justice for this world?
Failed Bureau of Investigation. Once a political organization, always a political
organization. I feel for the rank and file who's lives are determined by a few!
If this happened, if they focused on just WHAT THE **** HAPPENED in the Epstein case, I
might be a believer in our justice system. Even if it was just a minute. It could sweep up
Trump. It could flush the Clintons straight to hell.
"... The 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman now lives in the United States. He trained as a military interpreter at university and changed his name when he entered the U.S., his father said ..."
"... And Millian - real name Sergei Kukut or, in Belarussian, Siarhei Kukuts - has hinted that he could be in danger, blaming shadowy forces in London. He said that thanked God he was 'alive and healthy' and is able to 'tell the truth' that he had no involvement in the allegations against Trump, with whom he has claimed to have a business relationship. Trump has angrily denied any sexual impropriety in Moscow, and also dismissed claims from Millian that the pair had a business link, while Putin has denied holding 'kompromat' on the new U.S. president. ..."
"... his father Milediy Kukut revealed: 'He has asked the US government for protection - but was told he had to sort it all himself.' ..."
EXCLUSIVE: Russian businessman named as source for spy's dossier of
filthy claims about Trump has asked for U.S. government protection - and was refused
Sergei Millian has been named as the ultimate source for discredited claims that Donald
Trump ordered prostitutes to commit degrading sex acts in Moscow
Milediy Kukut, the father of the 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman tells DailyMail.com
his son asked for protection over fears for his safety
In an interview with Russian television not reported in the West, Millian said he had no
information on Trump
'All that was presented was some doubtful statements of third parties,' he said - not
denying that he had engaged in gossip about Trump
Millian, who changed his name when he became a U.S. resident, revealed to have trained as
'military interpreter' as a student and is now doing business in China
He was brought up in one-party Belarus, whose strongman leader is ally of Vladamir Putin
and still visits his family in dilapidated Soviet-style town
Published: 15:49 EST, 31 January 2017 | Updated: 18:10 EST, 31 January 2017
The mysterious 'source' of explosive and unsubstantiated allegations that Donald Trump
cavorted with Russian prostitutes asked for 'protection' from the US government, but was turned
down, his father has disclosed.
Soviet-born businessman Sergei Millian, 38, who Dailymail.com can reveal was trained as a
military interpreter before moving to the U.S., allegedly boasted to third parties that Moscow
had compromising video of the US president engaging in lewd sexual acts that could be used to
blackmail him.
These dynamite assertions were then - it has been claimed - passed without his knowledge by
at least one intermediary to British ex-MI6 agent Christoper Steele.
Those allegations formed the purported basis of the former spy's 'dirty dossier' which
rocked Washington when its contents became public.
Now it can be disclosed that Millian has voiced fears for his own safety, at the same time
as denying that he was in any way the source for the dossier.
Protection: Sergei Millian asked for the U.S. government to protect him after he was named
as the source of the most salacious claims in the dirty dossier. He denies having information
on Trump, whom he is now thought to have first met in 2007
Defiant: The 38-year-old Soviet-born businessman now lives in the United States. He trained
as a military interpreter at university and changed his name when he entered the U.S., his
father said
Back home: Sergei Millian (right) remains a frequent visitor to his family in a dilapidated
village in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, his father Milediy Kukut (left) told
DailyMail.com
+17
Impoverished: One-party state Belarus is impoverished and Sharkaŭshchyna, a town 125
miles from the capital of Minsk, is among its most economically troubled areas
Upbringing: Millian's parents still live at the second-floor, Soviet-era apartment where he
was brought up. His father drives the red Lada car (left), another Soviet-era h
Location: Belarus is a key ally of Vladimir Putin's Russia and Millian's native town of
Sharkaŭshchyna is 125 miles from its capital, Minsk
His father told DailyMail.com that the businessman had requested protection in the U.S.,
where he has lived since 2001.
And Millian - real name Sergei Kukut or, in Belarussian, Siarhei Kukuts - has hinted that he
could be in danger, blaming shadowy forces in London. He said that thanked God he was 'alive and healthy' and is able to 'tell the truth' that he
had no involvement in the allegations against Trump, with whom he has claimed to have a
business relationship. Trump has angrily denied any sexual impropriety in Moscow, and also dismissed claims from
Millian that the pair had a business link, while Putin has denied holding 'kompromat' on the
new U.S. president.
With Steele in hiding, and Millian last seen in Atlanta, DailyMail.com went to his native
Belarus, an economic basket case labeled the last dictatorship in Europe under strongman
Alexander Lukashenko, a longstanding Putin ally.
At the dilapidated town where Milliam was brought up, his father Milediy Kukut revealed: 'He
has asked the US government for protection - but was told he had to sort it all himself.'
Kukut, 63, said he did not know if his son had approached the FBI or another US law
enforcement agency after he was 'besieged' in the wake of The Wall Street Journal linking him
to the dossier.
"... Who provided former British spy Christopher Steele with the salacious and unverified information in the dossier? That's one question I'd like clarity on ..."
"... And it would also be interesting to hear from Sergei Millian, who is widely reported to be an unwitting source of information contained in the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... There is a reason why Republicans did not do so when they controlled the house. Think Uniparty! The Dems and Reps are two faces of the same party! The Uniparty did not want this to happen! Now that the Reps are minority, they can act like Reps because majority Dems won't grant their request! See how that works!!!! ..."
"... Think Uniparty! Then everything will suddenly start to make sense to you! ..."
"... Democrat politicians are lying to the people who care about MUH RUSSIA. These politicians don't care about it. They never did. From the start it was nothing more than a way to keep a certain powerful faction of their party in line by dangling MUH RUSSIA keys in front of them. ..."
"... They can't stop because the mindless rage monsters they whipped up (aka the shrieking base of the ever-growing left wing of the Party that lives on Cuntbook and Twatter) will turn on them if they do ..."
Making matters more interesting, Republicans today also put forward a motion to subpoena
around a dozen witnesses. Those people, including officials involved in the FBI's Russia
investigation as well as people likely to be familiar with the compilation of the Steele
dossier. Of course, those people may not say what the Democrats want to hear so the Democrats
rejected the motion.
It's actually a brilliant idea – we need more interviews. I think the Republicans
should pounce on this opportunity to question these witnesses. Hopefully, they will ask some
poignant questions we still don't have answers to.
Who provided former British spy Christopher Steele with the salacious and unverified
information in the dossier? That's one question I'd like clarity on.
"Since the Democrats previously sought testimony from these individuals, such as James
Baker and Sergei Millian, we assume they still want to speak to them," said Jack Langer,
spokesman for committee Republican Rep. Devin Nunes.
"It's even possible some witnesses can help explain the 'more than circumstantial
evidence' of Trump-Russia collusion that the Democrats claimed to have found two years ago
but, inexplicably, never revealed to Committee Republicans or anyone else."
James Baker is the former FBI General Counsel who was close friends with former FBI
Director James Comey. Baker is now the subject of a leak investigation. He reportedly accepted
documents from Perkins Coie, the law firm used by the Democratic National Committee and the
Hillary Clinton campaign to pay for the unverified dossier.
And it would also be interesting to hear from
Sergei Millian, who is widely reported to be an unwitting source of information contained
in the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
These witnesses would surely have some interesting information to share if they were under
questioned by the committee. I'm not sure it's information that would benefit Schiff's claim
that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. But I'm certain it would shed
light on what really happened with the dossier and the internal machinations of the FBI's probe
into the campaign.
Read the press release below from the House Intelligence
Committee:
Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued the following
statement today on sending the transcripts of interviews from the committee's Russia
investigation to the Special Counsel's office.
Republicans are happy the Democrats are joining us in reiterating what the Republican-led
committee already voted to do in September 2018 -- make all the transcripts available to the
executive branch, including the Special Counsel's office, as part of the process of
publishing them for the American people to see.
In light of the unacceptable delay in the Director of National Intelligence's
declassification review, we hope the Democrats will now join us in further increasing
transparency by voting to immediately publish all the unclassified transcripts that we
previously sent to the executive branch.
Additionally, we call on our Democratic colleagues to grant our request to subpoena
numerous witnesses whose testimony the Democrats had previously sought in connection with the
committee's Russia investigation.
... Republicans today also put forward a motion to subpoena around a dozen witnesses.
Those people, including officials involved in the FBI's Russia investigation as well as
people likely to be familiar with the compilation of the Steele dossier. ...
It's a damn shame they didn't make that motion a month ago when they were in the majority
on the committee.
There is a reason why Republicans did not do so when they controlled the house. Think
Uniparty! The Dems and Reps are two faces of the same party! The Uniparty did not want this
to happen! Now that the Reps are minority, they can act like Reps because majority Dems won't grant
their request! See how that works!!!!
This is how deep state protects it crime family members Rep and Dems! Think Uniparty! Then everything will suddenly start to make sense to you!
freedommusic
Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security Submit Joint Report on Impact of Foreign Interference on Election and
Political/Campaign Infrastructure in 2018 Elections
Although the specific conclusions within the joint report must remain classified, the Departments have concluded there is
no evidence to date that any identified activities of a foreign government or foreign agent had a material impact on the
integrity or security of election infrastructure or political/campaign infrastructure used in the 2018 midterm elections for
the United States Congress.
So no Russian interference in the 2018 election. What about any domestic interference? I don't see that mentioned...
deepelemblues
MUH RUSSIA has been a never-ending chain of diminishing returns for two and three quarter years
Democrat politicians are lying to the people who care about MUH RUSSIA. These politicians don't care about it. They
never did. From the start it was nothing more than a way to keep a certain powerful faction of their party in line by
dangling MUH RUSSIA keys in front of them. Jingle-jangle, jingle-jangle...
They can't stop because the mindless rage monsters they whipped up (aka the shrieking base of the ever-growing left
wing of the Party that lives on Cuntbook and Twatter) will turn on them if they do with a tantrum of historic
proportions
Your average black Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Your average hispanic Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Your average white Democrat voter don't care about this MUH RUSSIA ********
Only the hyperpoliticized REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE machines whose entire lives are wrapped up in DUH STRUGGLE care about
this MUH RUSSIA ********
TeraByte
I can only refer to history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscription
In the Roman Empire enemies of the state were blacklisted and they simply vanished.
Muller investigation is at least 50% about the masking cracks in neoliberal facade with
Russia interference smoke screen (and, especially Hillary fiasco as War Party candidate) , as it
is about deposing of Trump. It also puts pressure of Trump to behave as War Party expect him,
or...
Looks like the "United War Party" (which encompass most Republicans and Democrats) felt the
threat to the money flows and acted accordingly. Add to this interest of Deep State (especially
CIA) are completely opposite to the end of foreign wars that Trump professed.
Notable quotes:
"... What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e., reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies represents. ..."
"... When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world. ..."
"... Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find those who connived against it begins. ..."
"... Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43 administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading Iraq. ..."
"... Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled "Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite ..."
"... With cultures clashing, nationalism on the march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety of their Gulfstream jets. ..."
"... And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals? ..."
"... But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal. ..."
"... The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only be described as frightening. ..."
"... With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy, though! Two thumbs up! ..."
"... You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade out. ..."
"... Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense, the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots of loot? ..."
"... At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll". ..."
"... If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump survives the deep state. ..."
"... Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong. ..."
"... And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger. ..."
"... Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections, and found none. ..."
The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald recently compiled a list of the
top 10 "most embarrassing media failures on the Trump-Russia story." All of them exhibit a
common theme: Russian conspiracies are undermining American interests everywhere. Greenwald's
piece was followed by a bizarre New York Timesstory from
January 16 with the headline: "Trump and Putin: Five Meetings Infused With Mystery." The story
implied something sinister in undisclosed conversations between the two leaders while offering
no evidence whatsoever.
What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A
common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow
the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e.,
reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both
fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies
represents.
In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a
democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its
luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that
causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is.
When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to
falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated
plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the
beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of
humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles
who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world.
Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When
the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find
those who connived against it begins.
Like the Jacobins, the foreign policy establishment in the United States has for decades
hitched its wagons to idealistic dreaming. The Romantic ideas of Hegel and Rousseau permeate
their thinking. Consider the establishment's obsequious reaction to Francis Fukuyama's "
end of
history " thesis. Fukuyama presented himself as the all-seeing gnostic who had divined the
direction of all human history. One does not need the acumen of an Aristotle to know
that this was far from an original thesis. Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and
unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43
administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading
Iraq.
Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled
"Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world
fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by
secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite .
The reality of a borderless world is global migration that threatens to extinguish much of
Western civilization in a generation or two. With cultures clashing, nationalism on the
march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety
of their Gulfstream jets.
And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How
else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open
borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question
the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history
by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals?
For those in a dream world, the only possible explanation for Trump is a conspiracy. His
presidency was hatched by Vladimir Putin, the world leader with the strongest reasons for
slowing the progressive march of history. Trump won the election because Putin has the powers
of a Rasputin. He can thwart history by crossing his eyes, pulling secret levers, and deploying
hackers.
But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their
conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be
created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents
must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared
to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal.
The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind
us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which
the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people
within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only
be described as frightening.
William S. Smith is research fellow at and managing director of the Center for the
Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America.
"In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a
democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its
luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that
causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is."
And yet, idealism or not, republican ideals DID spread around the world and WERE taken up
to oppose, undercut, reign in or overthrow monarchies from Latin America through the Middle
East, and from Europe (e.g., the bourgeois members of the Duma singing "La Marseillaise"
after the abdication of the Tsar) to Asia and Africa.
"When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter,
the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot
could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the
beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights
of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and
nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world."
I don't doubt the pernicious influence of conspiracy theories, I really don't – I'm
a Trotskyist, for Heaven's sake! – but the author might also acknowledge the reality of
the threats that the Jacobins faced. The armies of the united crowned heads of Europe that
had been sent against France, for instance. That the church and aristocracy WERE parts of the
old order (official estates, remember?), some of whose members WERE actually fighting to
restore the old regime and then drown, as they always drowned past peasant and popular
rebellions, in blood.
With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy,
though! Two thumbs up!
You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but
much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have
just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade
out.
Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense,
the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the
world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots
of loot?
At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was
automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the
conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's
establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't
like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the
conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll".
Are we supposed to take this seriously? Your entire "argument" against the so-called Russia
Conspiracy is itself nothing more than a conspiracy theory: an overwrought, paranoid, absurd
conspiracy theory involving The Establishment, Davos Elites, Neo Liberals, et al.
There isn't enough publicly-disclosed evidence to support the claim that Russian
interference tilted the 2016 election decisively in Trump's favor or that Trump has conspired
with or been compromised by Russia. But only a child would believe that Russia didn't
actively interfere in the election, or that various Trump associates didn't have
inappropriate contacts and dealings with Russian entities, which they then lied about and
continue to lie about.
If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and
Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump
survives the deep state.
CLW produces an argument from ignorance. "Just because we have no publicly available evidence
to prove that Trump is in fact Mickey Mouse just means we need to look harder! In the
meantime, we can safely assume that Trump has round black ears and a tail.".
In the meantime, I suggest you learn about the burden of proof – the burden of proof
is on those asserting the existence of a conspiracy (and you in particular are mighty short
on details!) and not on those debunking it.
Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that
liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but
you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy
theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong.
And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to
keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger.
CLW says "But only a child would believe that Russia didn't actively interfere in the
election, or that various Trump associates didn't have inappropriate contacts and dealings
with Russian entities, which they then lied about and continue to lie about." It took a child
to point out that the emperor had no clothes on, while the adults pretended that a falsehood
was tru. Perhaps more children are needed today to point out the truth and ignore blatant
propaganda.
Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no
evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the
Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a
commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded
to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany,
Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections,
and found none.
@Bill Instead of looking at this issue using a microscope, reading history about how
Empires fall lends wisdom and insight. Arrighi's book, (I believe) is called "The Long
Twentieth Century." He details how empires and huge trading giants rise and fall.
He details the rise of Italy's banking system during the Middle Ages as well as Spain's
Empire, the Dutch trading hegemonies and most enlightening how the British Empire rose and
fell.
We are seeing tell-tale symptoms of a US that's in trouble with a slow erosion of the US
$$ hegemony. The financial growth of China has begun degrading the US market with hi-tech and
other products. Thusly, you see Tim Cook of Apple apoplectic over China's Huwaii (sp?)
flooding the European market with less expensive computers, cellulars, notebooks, etc.
We see the practical nature of Exxon Mobile that views the short geographic distance
between the US (its military) to Venezuela's oil and mineral-rich soil. An easy pick, rather
than becoming further embroiled in the Middle East.
Targeting Venezuela suggests a geopolitical shift away from the Middle East (and Israel)
to countries that are less expensive to plunder yet with vast resources to be stolen. A
telling sign in the slow deteriorating US Hegemony.
When Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
announced her candidacy for the presidency on CNN last month, I had a feeling I'd be
writing about her a fair bit. Not because I particularly want her to be president, but because
I knew her candidacy would cause the narrative control mechanizations of the political/media
class to overextend themselves , leaving them open to attack, exposure, and the weakening of
their control of the narrative.
Mere
hours before her campaign officially launched, NBC News published an astonishingly blatant smear piece titled "Russia's
propaganda machine discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard," subtitled "Experts who
track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of
support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard." One of the article's authors shared it on Twitter with the
caption, "The Kremlin already has a crush on Tulsi Gabbard."
The article reported that media outlets tied to the Russian government had been talking a
lot about Gabbard's candidacy, ironically citing as an example an RT article which
documented the attempts by the US mainstream media to paint Gabbard as a Kremlin agent. The
article's authors cited the existence of such articles combined with the existence of "chatter"
about Gabbard on the anonymous message board 8chan (relevant for God knows what reason) as
evidence to substantiate its blaring headline. Even more hilariously, the source for its weird
8chan claim is named as none other than Renee DiResta of the narrative control firm New
Knowledge, which was
recently embroiled in a scandal for staging a "false flag operation" in an Alabama Senate
race which gave one of the candidates the false appearance of being amplified by Russian
bots.
This pathetic, juvenile language from one of the authors of that astronomically awful NBC
News article gives you a sense of what they're trying to accomplish here. Smear campaign
fully underway https://t.co/jvl5pFRr0P
This article is of course absurd. As we
discussed recently , you will always see Russia on the same US foreign policy page as
anti-interventionists like Tulsi Gabbard, because Russia, like so many other nations, opposes
US interventionism. To treat this as some sort of shocking conspiracy instead of obvious and
mundane is journalistic malpractice. There are many, many very good reasons to oppose the war
agendas of the US-centralized empire, none of which have anything to do with having any loyalty
to or sympathies for the Russian government.
But we will continue to see this tactic used again and again and again against any and all
opposition to US-led interventionism for as long as the Russiagate psyop maintains its grip
upon western consciousness. And make no mistake, these smears have everything to do with
anti-interventionism and nothing to do with Russia. There will never, ever be an antiwar voice
who the political/media class and their centrist followers espouse as good and valid; they'll
never say "Ahh, finally, someone who hates war and also isn't aligned with Russia! We can get
behind this one!" That will never, ever happen, because it is the opposition to war and
interventionism itself which is being rejected, and in the McCarthyite environment of Russia
hysteria, tarring it as "Russian" simply makes a practical excuse for that rejection.
All the biggest conflicts in the world can be described as unipolarism vs multipolarism: the
unipolarists who support the global hegemony of the US-centralized empire at any cost, versus
the multipolarists who oppose that dominance and support the existence of multiple power
structures in the world. The governments of Russia, China, Iran and their allies are
predominantly multipolarist in their geopolitical outlook, and they tend to be more in favor of
non-interventionism, since unipolarity can only be held in place by brute force and aggression.
Unipolarists, therefore, can always paint western anti-interventionists as Russian assets,
since the Russian government is multipolarist and opposed to the interventionism of the
unipolarists.
The nonstop propaganda campaign to keep the coals of Russia hysteria burning white hot at
all times can therefore be looked at first and foremost as a psychological operation to kill
support for multipolarism around the world. It can of course be used to manufacture consent for
escalations against Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, Iran etc as needed, but it can also be
used to attack the ideology of anti-interventionism itself by smearing anyone who opposes
unipolar oppression and aggression as an agent of a nefarious oppositional government.
The social engineers have succeeded in constructing a narrative control device which
encapsulates the entire agenda of the unipolar world order in a single bumper sticker-sized
talking point: "Russia opposes Big Brother, therefore anyone who opposes Big Brother is
Russian." This device didn't take an amazing intellectual feat to create; all they had to do
was recreate the paranoid insanity of the original cold war, and they already had a blueprint
for that. It was simply a matter of shepherding us back there.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, there emerged a popular notion of a " peace dividend " in which defense
spending could be reduced in the absence of America's sole rival and the abundant excess funds
used to take care of the American people instead. The only problem was that a lot of people had
gotten very rich and powerful as a result of that cold war defense spending, and it wasn't long
before they started circulating the idea of using America's newly uncontested might for a very
expensive campaign to hammer down a liberal world order led by the beneficent guidance of the
United States government. Soon the neoconservatives were pushing their unipolarist narratives in high levels
of influence with great effect, and shortly thereafter they got their " new Pearl
Harbor " in the form of the 9/11 attacks which justified an explosion in defense spending,
interventionism and expansionism, just as the neoconservative Project for a New American
Century had called
for . And the rest is history.
And now our collective consciousness is planted right back in the center of that paranoid,
hawkish political environment of the first cold war. The main difference now is of course that
Russia is nothing remotely like a superpower today, and that the establishment Russia narrative
is made entirely out of narrative, but the most important difference is that this time the
establishment narratives are not taking place within the hermetically sealed bubbles of major
news media corporations. People are able to communicate with each other and share information
far more easily than they were prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, and westerners are able to
easily access Russian media and anti-interventionist narratives if they want to.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, as I never tire of saying. This
difficulty in replicating the hermetically sealed media environment of the original cold war
poses a severe challenge for narrative control, and it is for this reason reason that there is
now so much skepticism of the establishment Russia narrative. It is also the reason for the
establishment's aggressive maneuvers to censor the internet, to demonize Russian media, and to
smear anti-interventionist perspectives.
But we can't keep living this way. We all know this, deep down. The people at the helm of
the unipolar world order are advancing an ecocidal world economy which is stripping the earth
bare and filling the air with poison while at the same time pushing more and more aggressively
against the multipolarist powers, one of which happens to have thousands of nuclear warheads at
its disposal. The unipolarity so enthusiastically promoted by the neoconservatives and their
fellow travelers has reached the end of the line after just a few short years, and now it's
time to dispense with it and try something else. They will necessarily smear us with everything
but the kitchen sink for saying so, but we are right and they are wrong. The state of the world
today proves this beyond a doubt.
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"... Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, making any withdrawal seem anything but "precipitous." Syria hasn't even been authorized by Congress. In both cases, our men and women in the armed forces have already achieved the goals that are militarily attainable. "It doesn't get much more pathetic," Congressman Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, said of the Senate vote. ..."
"... taken at face value, it inverts Congress's constitutional war powers by allowing lawmakers to shirk their power to declare war while frustrating presidential efforts to pursue peace. ..."
"... When Trump twice bombed Syria without congressional approval, the Beltway applaude ..."
"... The one bright spot in the Senate vote was that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar were all on the side of withdrawal. ..."
"... Trump has heeded the hawks in his party -- and inside his own administration -- on Yemen, Iran, and perhaps soon Venezuela. Breaking free of their stranglehold could help put his presidency back on track. Otherwise he will end up ceding foreign policy to the progressives who want to usher him out of office either by impeachment or electoral defeat. ..."
"... Trump's call to bring the troops home has left him isolated in Washington. If he makes withdrawal a priority in the State of the Union, he may find that he has more company throughout the country than he thinks. ..."
"... Seriously, he's got too many warmongers in his administration to go after Congress. If he's serious about ending these wars he needs to clean house in his administration of the perpetual warmongers. Once he's done that then go after Congress. To do anything less is Trump talking it one way, while his administration does something completely different. ..."
"... I believe the above quote shows that there are lawbreakers and warmongers in both political parties. None of the above countries "Afghanistan and Syria" invaded or attacked America. Therefore I believe they are in violation of international law. ..."
Who says Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything? Washington closed ranks Thursday
behind two wars President Donald Trump has proposed winding down as the Senate voted 68-23 to
advance a resolution warning against "precipitous withdrawal" from Afghanistan and Syria.
Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, making any withdrawal seem anything
but "precipitous." Syria hasn't even been authorized by Congress. In both cases, our men and
women in the armed forces have already achieved the goals that are militarily attainable. "It
doesn't get much more pathetic," Congressman Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, said of the
Senate vote.
The resolution is non-binding, like the Democrats' toothless measures to stop George W.
Bush's Iraq "surge" over a decade ago. Still, taken at face value, it inverts Congress's
constitutional war powers by allowing lawmakers to shirk their power to declare war while
frustrating presidential efforts to pursue peace.
When Trump twice bombed Syria without congressional approval, the Beltway applaude
d. Veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward's book repeats the president's probing questions
about how long we must stay in Afghanistan with an air of disbelief better suited to "fake
news" shared on Facebook. Trump's call late last year to bring troops home from both war-torn
countries elicited bipartisan criticism and the abrupt resignation of Pentagon chief James
Mattis.
To make matters worse, only three Republican senators -- Ted Cruz of Texas, John Kennedy of
Louisiana, and Mike Lee of Utah -- voted to stand with their president against these endless
nation-building exercises. Kentucky's Rand Paul, who was not present for the vote, would surely
have been a fourth. Even Chuck Schumer, the third straight Senate Democratic leader to have
voted for the Iraq war, opposed this anti-withdrawal amendment.
During the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump should call Congress's bluff.
He should dare legislators to do their jobs and vote to authorize continuing these wars -- or
he will end them. Put the onus on the House and Senate to fulfill their constitutional
duties.
Trump may find that he has unlikely allies in his would-be 2020 Democratic presidential
foes. The one bright spot in the Senate vote was that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar were all on the side of
withdrawal. How many ambitious Democrats will vote to give a Republican president a blank
check for war as an election year approaches?
GOP lawmakers will have to decide whether they stand with their president -- who wants to
cut America's multi-trillion dollar losses in the Middle East -- and
rank-and-file Republican voters in ending these wars. Those who want to stay in Syria and
Afghanistan quite likely cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton.
Up until now, Trump's big fight with the establishment has been over immigration and the
border wall. Amid his belated turn towards the more populist parts of his program, he should
not forget to spend political capital on America's wars as well. Trump
now says Republican congressional leaders misled him on the wall. It has been even worse on
foreign policy.
Partisans are dug in on the border. But on war, Trump has some opportunities to win over
converts. Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit stone-faced behind him as he agrees with the
Progressive Caucus on foreign policy?
Much is riding on whether a course correction is possible in Afghanistan and Syria.
Trump has heeded the hawks in his party -- and inside his own administration -- on Yemen,
Iran, and perhaps soon Venezuela. Breaking free of their stranglehold could help put his
presidency back on track. Otherwise he will end up ceding foreign policy to the progressives
who want to usher him out of office either by impeachment or electoral defeat.
Trump's call to bring the troops home has left him isolated in Washington. If he makes
withdrawal a priority in the State of the Union, he may find that he has more company
throughout the country than he thinks.
Mearsheimer has some main tenets of realist foreign policy include:
The lobby and its fellow travelers are not used to being told no. Time for them to create
and fund volunteer corps and do their own dirty work on their dime and at their own risk.
Trump should demand Congress debate and authorize the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It
would be good policy and good politics. And good for the Constitution.
Wouldn't hold my breath on Trump doing any such thing on ending of the Middle Eastern Wars.
Seriously, he's got too many warmongers in his administration to go after Congress. If he's
serious about ending these wars he needs to clean house in his administration of the perpetual
warmongers. Once he's done that then go after Congress. To do anything less is Trump talking it
one way, while his administration does something completely different.
The article states: "Who says Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything? Washington
closed ranks Thursday behind two wars President Donald Trump has proposed winding down as the
Senate voted 68-23 to advance a resolution warning against "precipitous withdrawal" from
Afghanistan and Syria."
-- -- -- -
I believe the above quote shows that there are lawbreakers and warmongers in both
political parties. None of the above countries "Afghanistan and Syria" invaded or attacked
America. Therefore I believe they are in violation of international law. More info at link
below.
I am extremely disappointed that both of my State's Democratic Senators voted to keep the wars
going.
However, I'm sure they did so only to spite Trump.
They don't either of them support more Long War. Of course, they don't want to be blamed
either in the case of another terrorist attack for not being tough enough. But this vote was
not one of principle.
That means they would not fight for it. They just did it. I suspect much of the vote in the
Senate was like that, and that the rather large number of non-votes is because of that.
During the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump should call Congress's bluff.
He should dare legislators to do their jobs and vote to authorize continuing these wars -- or
he will end them. Put the onus on the House and Senate to fulfill their constitutional
duties.
Would that he would but he won't.
Mr. Trump shan't read this good advice because it seems he only reads what the Kushners put
in front of him and (for the most part) hires only people who despise him–people who are
married to the pro-war Blob in DC.
There was no crime until the investigations started...
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone may be the most
peculiar document to emerge from the Trump–Russia "collusion" saga. It is an instant
classic in the Mueller genre: lots of heavy breathing, then sputtering anti-climax.
After a 20-page narrative about Russian cyber-ops, WikiLeaks' role as a witting
anti-American accomplice, and Trump supporters enthralled by thousands of hacked Democratic
emails and visions of the Clinton campaign's implosion, Stone, a comically inept hanger-on,
ends up charged with seven process crimes. No espionage, no conspiracy, no commission of any
crime until the investigations started.
This is not to say that obstruction of congressional investigations is trifling. Nor is it
to say the accused has a good chance of beating the case. Some of Stone's alleged lies were
mind-bogglingly stupid. Why deny written communications with people you've texted a zillion
times? Why deny conversations with interlocutors (such as Trump-campaign CEO Steve Bannon) who
have no reason to risk a perjury charge to protect you? And don't even get me started on the
witness-tampering count, which, if I were Mueller, I'd have hesitated to include for fear of
suggesting an insanity defense. ( Do it for Nixon? Pull a "Frank Pentangeli"? )
That said, the case is overcharged. The tampering count carries a 20-year penalty. Adding an
obstruction or false-statements count (five years each) would have given Stone (who is 66 years
old) prison exposure of up to 25 years. The most central "colluder" in the Mueller firmament to
be bagged so far, George Papadopoulos, was sentenced to a grand total of two weeks'
imprisonment. Surely a quarter-century of "potential" incarceration would have sufficed to give
prosecutors the "this is serious stuff" headline they crave while allowing for the more
representative sentence Stone will eventually receive -- who knows, maybe three weeks? But true
to form, Mueller instead included six of these five-year counts -- so the press can report that
Stone faces up to 50 years in the slammer.
This inflated portrait of Stone as a major criminal was further bloated by the scene of his
arrest : a well-armed battalion of FBI agents sent to apprehend him as the media, conveniently
on hand at 6 a.m., took it all in. But Stone is just a cameo. The big picture is the
overarching Trump–Russia investigation. It's still being inflated, too.
Prosecutors ordinarily do not write an elaborate narrative about crimes they cannot prove.
Here, though, Mueller uses Stone as the pretext to spell out the Big Collusion Scheme:
Candidate Donald Trump instructs Stone to coordinate with WikiLeaks on the dissemination of
Clinton dirt stolen by Russia; Stone directs his associate, Jerome Corsi, to have Corsi's man
in London, Ted Malloch, make contact with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, who is holed up at
the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Malloch must have succeeded, because next thing you know,
Corsi is reporting back to Stone: Our friends the Russian hackers have given WikiLeaks all this
damaging information on Hillary, including the Podesta emails; it will all be rolled out in
October, right before the election.
It's a sensational story. Only . . . it's just a story.
Mueller doesn't even pretend he can prove it. No shame in that: During a long investigation,
prosecutors always develop a theory of the case. Often, the hypothesis doesn't pan out. No
problem. You narrow your indictment down to what you can prove and call it a day. In Stone's
case, that would dictate omitting the ambitious collusion narrative and stripping down to a
two-page obstruction-of-Congress indictment. Instead, Mueller gives us the fever dream: Stone
as a key cog in the collusion wheel. Where reality intrudes, the prosecutors float suggestions
they cannot prove or leave out key details that blow up the narrative.
The special counsel could have contented himself with easy-to-prove false-statements charges
against Stone: lying about whether his WikiLeaks communications were documented in writing;
lying about whether he asked his friend Randy Credico to pass a request for specific Hillary
Clinton information to Assange; lying about whether he ever told the Trump campaign about his
WikiLeaks conversations with Credico.
But no, Mueller strains to accuse Stone of falsely denying that he had a second WikiLeaks
"intermediary" -- whom the indictment indicates was Jerome Corsi , Stone's Infowars associate.
Depending on how charitable you want to be, this claim is either risibly weak, flatly wrong, or
dependent on a distortion of the word "intermediary." To repeat, the "intermediary" thread adds
nothing to the case against Stone. It is a pretext for weaving the collusion narrative without
having to prove it.
To amplify the indictment a bit with reporting by the Daily
Caller 's Chuck Ross , Credico -- a left-wing comedian and radio host -- got access to
Assange through a radical lawyer, Margaret Ratner Kunstler , who has
done work for WikiLeaks. That apparently did not happen until shortly before August 25, 2016,
when Assange appeared as a guest on Credico's radio show. According to the indictment, Credico
first texted Stone about Assange's imminent appearance on August 19.
Prosecutors, however, suggest that Stone had a line into Assange and WikiLeaks starting at
least two months earlier. "By in or around June and July 2016," goes the slippery allegation,
Stone was telling Trump officials he had information that WikiLeaks possessed damaging Hillary
Clinton documents. In Mueller's telling, this makes Stone seem like a potentially valuable
WikiLeaks insider when, on July 22, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of DNC emails.
Immediately, a "senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any
additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton
campaign."
If not from Credico, from whom, pray tell, did Stone learn what WikiLeaks was up to? Who is
the other intermediary?
In truth, he didn't need one. He had two sources of information about WikiLeaks -- neither
of them Corsi, neither of them sensibly thought of as an "intermediary." These sources go
unmentioned in the indictment. Worse, while the prosecutors finger Corsi as Stone's hidden
"intermediary," their evidence does not support this claim -- and they know it, so they fudge
it.
Let's start with the two sources Mueller omits.
Turns out it is not just Stone who was alerted long before the Democratic convention that
WikiLeaks might have damaging information on Clinton. Everyone on the planet who cared to be
informed about such things knew. On June 12, 2016, in an
interview that was widely
reported , Assange said that WikiLeaks planned to expose documents relating to Hillary
Clinton that could affect the 2016 election. Was Stone, the self-styled dark-politics devotee,
pressing sources for an entrée into WikiLeaks? Sure he was. But that doesn't mean he had
one. And he didn't need one in order to direct the Trump campaign's attention to WikiLeaks;
Assange was calling the world's attention to himself.
The second omitted source? It was James Rosen, then a top reporter at Fox News -- though
Rosen seems to have had no idea he was playing that role. To understand what happened, we need
to consider the July 25 Stone–Corsi email that the indictment treats like a smoking gun
-- but consider it in the context of an earlier July 25 email that the indictment fails to
include.
As noted above, on July 22, someone very high up in the Trump campaign -- perhaps the
candidate himself, though we are not told -- ordered a top campaign official to reach out to
Stone. Just three days later, Stone sent Corsi an email with the subject line "Get to
[Assange]." Stone exhorted Corsi to try to reach the WikiLeaks leader "at Ecuadorian Embassy in
London and get the pending emails . . . they deal with the [Clinton] Foundation allegedly "
(emphasis added).
So why did Stone believe WikiLeaks had Clinton Foundation documents? Well, Stone is
acquainted with Charles Ortel , an
investor who dabbles in investigative journalism and has focused intently on the Clinton
Foundation. Ortel has occasional correspondence with James Rosen. In an email exchange on July
25, Rosen told Ortel, "Am told WikiLeaks will be doing a massive dump of HRC emails related to
the CF [i.e., the Clinton Foundation] in September." Ortel proceeded to forward this email to
Stone. Only after seeing Rosen's email did Stone contact Corsi to say that Assange "allegedly"
had Clinton Foundation emails that Corsi should try to acquire.
Obviously, Stone did not need a WikiLeaks intermediary to give him a heads-up about a
possible Clinton Foundation dump. He happened upon that information indirectly from a member of
the press (Rosen), through an acquaintance (Ortel). And he did not need Corsi as an
intermediary -- Stone is the one who alerted Corsi, not the other way around.
The indictment says that, shortly after receiving Stone's July 25 email imploring him to
make contact with Assange, Corsi forwarded it to a "supporter of the Trump campaign" in the
United Kingdom -- reported by Chuck Ross to be Ted Malloch, a London-based American who used to
be a business professor at
Oxford and has ties to British populists. Subsequently, on Sunday July 31, Stone emailed
Corsi to "call me MON," stressing that Corsi's associate should "see [Assange]."
Well, did that happen? Did Corsi's man Malloch make contact with WikiLeaks?
If you read nothing but Mueller's indictment, you assume he must have. After all, the next
thing we are told about is Corsi's email report to Stone on Tuesday, August 2. Corsi (then
vacationing in Italy) wrote: "Word is friend in embassy [i.e., Assange] plans 2 more dumps, one
shortly after I'm back [which was to be in mid August]. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very
damaging." Corsi added:
Time to let more than [Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to
drop HRC [Clinton]. That appears to be game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start
suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke -- neither he nor she well. I expect that much of
next dump focus, setting stage for foundation debacle.
The implication is clear: Malloch must have reached Assange, gotten the critical
information, and passed it along to Corsi so it could be communicated to Stone and the Trump
campaign. Corsi is the intermediary! Coordination! Collusion!
But Mueller is hiding the ball again. The indictment makes no mention of the facts that
Malloch
denies knowing anything about WikiLeaks , that Corsi denies having any sources with inside
knowledge about WikiLeaks, and that prosecutors appear to accept these denials.
So how did Corsi get the "2 more dumps" of information (or gossip) that he dished to Stone?
He made it up -- or, more benignly, he claims to have figured it out on his own. Reportedly , Mueller's prosecutors were as
frustrated as they were incredulous over Corsi's unlikely claim. But they don't have a better
explanation. In the negotiations over a plea offer (on a charge of lying to investigators),
which Corsi has resisted, Mueller's prosecutors drafted an agreed-upon "
Statement of the Offense ." In it, Corsi was to admit that "his representations to [Stone],
beginning in August 2016, that he had a way of obtaining confidential information from
[WikiLeaks] were false."
Corsi is another strange character in this drama. He is a notorious bomb-thrower, and his
memory is spotty. But one can understand why the special counsel seems to accept his story
about not having a WikiLeaks source: His information was spectacularly wrong. He surmised that
Assange would release information that Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former president Bill
Clinton, had serious medical problems; this would be a prelude to devastating disclosures about
the Clinton Foundation. Corsi's fever dream never came true, either.
But how can Corsi have been Stone's intermediary to WikiLeaks if he had no way of obtaining
confidential information from WikiLeaks?
Stone, meantime, points out that neither he nor Corsi made reference to Podesta's emails. He
denies any awareness that Assange had them, and plausibly contends that the reference to
Podesta in his conversation with Corsi (and in his later tweet on August 21 that "the Podesta's
[ sic ] in the barrel" was coming) related to a lobbying company started by John Podesta and
his brother Tony. That company had done work for the same Kremlin-backed Ukrainian political
party served by Paul Manafort -- Trump's campaign manager, and Stone's former business partner.
It was at the very time when Stone and Corsi were discussing WikiLeaks and Podesta that a July
31 New
York Times exposé appeared, outlining Manafort's lobbying entanglements with these
Ukrainians. Tellingly, Mueller does not contend that Stone's denial of foreknowledge about
WikiLeaks' Podesta dump is false.
Again, understand: It is not just that Mueller can't prove Corsi was Stone's intermediary.
Mueller has no need to try to prove it. He has an overwhelming obstruction and
witness-tampering case against Stone without it. The indictment's "intermediary" plot line is
just a device for prosecutors to spin the Trump–Russia–WikiLeaks collusion yarn.
They are careful not to plead it in a conspiracy count; just an "introductory" narrative -- no
formal charge, no burden to prove it, and no need to reveal stubborn facts that undermine it.
Since it is superfluous to the process charges against Stone, he may not even challenge it.
Maybe he will plead guilty, and the narrative will stand as the government's unrebutted version
of events.
And this is just the indictment of a bit player. Makes you look forward to the special
counsel's final report, no?
Mueller is famous for charging crimes that do not exist. The plurality of this cases are
overturned on appeal. For those of you who wonder that is 75% plus.
That alone begs the question of why he has not been disbarred.
Huge external debt plus high unemployment represents two vital preconditions of rise far right nationalism and fascism in all
its multiple incarnations. In this sence Ulrain, Argentina and Brasil are different links of the common chain of
events.
In a way fascism is a way of reaction of nation deeply in crisis. In essence this is introduction of war time
restrictions on political speech and freedoms of the population. The Catch 22 is that often this is done not so much to
fight external threat, but top preserve the power of existing financial oligarchy. Which fascist after coming to power quickly
include in government and and desire of which are disproportionally obeyed by fascist state.
What in new in XXI century is the huge growth of power on intelligence agencies which is way represent crippling fascism or
neofascism. In a way, then intelligence agencies became political kingmakers (as was the case with the assassination of JFK,
impeachment of Nixon, elections of Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, as well as establishing Mueller commission after Trump
victory), we can speak about sliding the county of the county toward fascism.
Notable quotes:
"... In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that followed. ..."
"... The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015 ..."
"... Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it forward. ..."
"... The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise. Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power. ..."
"... Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a program called Operation Paperclip . Many were dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist. ..."
"... A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason. Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism. ..."
"... The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism ..."
Missing from explanations of the rise of Mr. Bolsonaro is that for the last decade Brazil
has experienced the worst economic
recession in the country's history (graph below). Fourteen million formerly employed,
working age Brazilians are now unemployed. As was true in the U.S. and peripheral Europe from
2008 forward, the liberal response has been austerity as the Brazilian ruling class was made
richer and more politically powerful.
Since 2014, Brazil's public debt/GDP ratio has climbed from 20% to 75%
proclaims a worried IMF. That some fair portion of that climb came from falling GDP due to
economic austerity mandated by the IMF and Wall Street is left unmentioned. A decade of
austerity got liberal President Dilma Rousseff removed from office in 2016 in what can only be
called a Wall Street putsch. Perhaps Bolsonaro will tell Wall Street where to stick its loans
(not).
Back in the U.S., everyone knows that the liberalization of finance and trade in the 1990s
was the result of political calculations. That this liberalization was/is bipartisan suggests
that maybe the political calculations served certain economic interests. Never mind that these
interests were given what they asked for and crashed the economy with it. If economic problems
result from political calculations, the solution is political -- elect better leaders. If they
are driven by economic interests, the solution is to change the way that economic relationships
are organized.
Between 1928 and 1932 German industrial production fell by 58%. By 1933, six million
formerly employed German workers were begging in the streets and digging through garbage
looking for items to sell. The liberal (Socialist Party) response was half-measures and
austerity. Within the liberal frame, the Depression was a political problem to be addressed in
the realm of the political. Centrist accommodation defined the existing realm. Adolf Hitler was
appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression.
In Brazil in the early-mid 2000s, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula,
implemented a Left program that pulled twenty million Brazilians out of poverty. The Brazilian
economy briefly recovered after Wall Street crashed it in 2008 before Brazilian public debt was
used to force the implementation of austerity. Dilma Rousseff capitulated and Brazil re-entered
recession. Rousseff was removed from power in 2016. Hemmed in by Wall Street and
IMF mandated austerity , any liberal government that might be elected would meet the same
fate as Rousseff.
In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that
preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations
and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to
the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial
economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that
followed.
Since 2008, the fiscal structure of the EU (European Union) combined with wildly unbalanced
trade relationships led to a decade of austerity, recession and depression for the European
periphery. In the U.S., by 2009 Wall Street was pushing austerity and cuts to Social Security
and Medicare as necessary to fiscal stability. The consequences of four decades of
financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external
class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely
distributed busts.
With the presumed shared goal of ending the threat of fascism:
The ideological premises behind the logic that claims fascists as the explanation of fascism
emerge from liberalism. The term here is meant as description. Liberalism proceeds from
specific ontological assumptions. Within this temporal frame, a bit of social logic: If
fascists already existed, why didn't fascism? The question of whether to fight fascists or
fascism depends on the answer. The essentialist view is that characteristics intrinsic to
fascists make them fascists. This is the basis of scientific racism. And it underlies fascist
race theory.
The theory of a strongman who exploits people who have a predisposition towards fascism is
essentialist as well if receptivity is intrinsic, e.g. due to psychology, genetics, etc.
Liberal-Left commentary in recent years has tended toward the essentialist view -- that
fascists are born or otherwise predisposed toward fascism. Unconsidered is that non-fascists
are equally determined in this frame. If 'deplorables' were born that way, four decades of
neoliberalism is absolved.
The problem of analogy, the question of what fascism is and how European fascism of the
twentieth century bears relation to the present, can't be answered in the liberal frame. The
rise and fall of a global radical right have been episodic. It has tied in history to the
development of global capitalism in a center-and-periphery model of asymmetrical economic
power. Finance from the center facilitates economic expansion until financial crisis interrupts
the process. Peripheral governments are left to manage debt repayment with collapsed
economies.
Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing
ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would suggest
the opposite. In 2015, self-identified Marxists in Greece's SYRIZA party capitulated to the
austerity and privatization demands from EU creditors led by Germany. Even Lenin negotiated
with Wall Street creditors (on behalf of Russia) in the months after the October Revolution. In
a political frame, the solution from below is to elect leaders and parties who will act on
their rhetoric.
The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate
their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in
payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist
expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't
serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to
repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable
loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015.
Fascist racialization has analog in existing capitalist class relations. Immigration status,
race and gender define a social taxonomy of economic exploitation. Race was invented decades into the
Anglo-American manifestation of slavery to naturalize exploitation of Blacks. Gender difference
represents the evolution of unpaid to paid labor for women in the capitalist West. Claiming
these as causing exploitation gets the temporal sequence wrong. These were / are exploitable
classes before explanations of their special status were created.
This isn't to suggest that capitalist class relations form a complete explanation of fascist
racialization. But the ontological premise that 'freezes,' and thereby reifies racialization,
is fundamental to capitalism. This relates to the point argued below that the educated German
bourgeois, in the form of the Nazi scientists and engineers brought to the U.S. following WWII,
found Nazi racialization plausible through what has long been put forward as an antithetical
mode of understanding. Put differently, it wasn't just the rabble that found grotesque racial
caricatures plausible. The question is why?
Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson
administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and
in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and
images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it
forward.
The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had
no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise.
Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by
the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power.
Since WWI, commercial propaganda has become ubiquitous in the U.S. Advertising firms hire
psychologists to craft advertising campaigns with no regard for the concern that psychological
coercion removes free choice from capitalism. The distinction between political and commercial
propaganda is based on intent, not method. Its use by Woodrow Wilson (above) is instructive: a
large and vocal anti-war movement had legitimate reasons for opposing the U.S. entry into WWI.
The goal of Bernays and Wilson was to stifle political opposition.
Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their
families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a
program called Operation Paperclip . Many were
dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In
contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi
scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent
contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist.
The problem isn't just that many committed Nazis were scientists. Science and technology
created the Nazi war machine. Science and technology were fully integrated into the creation
and running of the Nazi concentration camps. American race 'science,' eugenics, formed the
basis of Nazi race theory. Science and technology formed the functional core of Nazism. And the
Nazi scientists and engineers of Operation Paperclip were major contributors to American
post-war military dominance.
A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious
past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of
liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason.
Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois
basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project
within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism.
This is no doubt disconcerting to theorists of great difference. If Bolsonaro can impose
austerity while maintaining an unjust peace, Wall Street and the IMF will smile and ask for
more. American business interests are already
circling Brazil, knowing that captive consumers combined with enforceable property rights
and a pliable workforce means profits. Where were liberals when the Wall Street that Barack
Obama saved was squeezing the people of Brazil, Spain, Greece and Portugal to repay debts
incurred by the oligarchs? Liberalism is the link between capitalism and fascism, not its
antithesis.
Having long ago abandoned Marx, the American Left is lost in the temporal logic of
liberalism. The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on
Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is
published by CounterPunch Books.
Just one more to a long list of Trump appointments. I believe Trump is some kind of pervert, like the ones that like
to get whipped, only Trump likes to get stabbed in the back. XXX , 34 minutes ago
He does what Sheldon and Bibi tell him.
You think you're so ******* smart, but this some how eludes you?
YYY, 3 hours ago (Edited)
Donald Trump's House of Cons, Clowns, Crappolas, Criminals, and Conspirators:
Jason Raimondo's hopes that the tide slowly was turning against the War
Party with Trump's appointment of Tillerson are dashed for good with the appointments of
Abrams, Bolton and Pompeo. The thugs for Wall Street have taken DC. Trump might as well go
home. Raimondo wrote of Abrams in 2017 in "The End of Globalism":
Excerpt:
Oh yes, the times they are a changin', as Bob Dylan once put it, and
here's the evidence :
"Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered his department to redefine its mission and
issue a new statement of purpose to the world. The draft statements under review right now are
similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing – any mention of promoting
democracy is being eliminated."
All the usual suspects are in a tizzy .
Elliott Abrams , he of
Contra-gate fame , and one of the purest of
the neoconservative ideologues , is cited in the
Washington Post piece as being quite unhappy: "The only significant difference is the
deletion of justice and democracy. We used to want a just and democratic word, and now
apparently we don't."
Abrams' contribution to a just and democratic world is
well-known : supporting a
military dictatorship in El Salvador during the 1980s that slaughtered thousand s, and then
testifying before Congress that massive human rights violations by the US-supported regime were
Communist "propaganda." US policy, of which he was one of the principal architects, led to the
lawlessness that now plagues that country, which has a higher murder rate than Iraq: in Abrams'
view, the Reagan policy of supporting a military dictatorship was "a fabulous achievement." The
same murderous policy was pursued in
Nicaragua while Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian
Affairs, as the US tried to overthrow a democratically elected government and provoked a civil
war that led to the death of many thousands . In
Honduras
and Guatemala
, Abrams was instrumental in covering up heinous atrocities committed by US-supported
regimes.
And, now, Venezuela. The economic hit man has arrived.
" 'I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I
spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of
half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that
Standard Oil went on its way unmolested." --
Smedley Butler
Brazen Heist II, 4 hours ago (Edited)
...The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in some
cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that.
napper, 4 hours ago (Edited)
He will, if he gets a second term!!!
Abrams' appointment is no accident or mistake. By now even the most casual (but intelligent) observer should have seen
through Donald Trump's contemptuous disregard for legal institutions and a criminal propensity for lawlessness.
Brazen Heist II, 4 hours ago(Edited)
And most American sheeple are dumb as a pile of rocks. The few good people left are largely powerless and have to deal
with so much BS in all directions. I hope they will get through the coming implosion with their sanity intact.
Glad I left that shithole. I saw it coming. What's coming won't be pretty.
CananTheConrearian1, 3 hours ago
OK, Great Mind, name a populace that is as smart as Americans. Europeans? Chinese? We're glad you left, ********.
"... War with Russia will be the agenda just as the left wanted to begin with. The " pick sides" is the warring cry of the old Bush regime of " either you're with us or against us" theme. ..."
"... Radical capitalism on the left and conservative traditional capitalism on right.... Both fighting for the same select few who run the show generation after generation. ..."
"... He's not really attacked by anyone. Its a bipartisan play to distract the gullible from the sick and subhuman policy they enact while you are distracted with the wall or fantasizing bout his tiny mushroom. ..."
"... So Trump jerks a couple of gators from the swamp, but only to make room for the T-Rex. Amazing. And why the hell is Bolton still involved in our government? He penned an article during the bush admin explaining why the posse comitatus doesn't really mean what it really says. Scary sob ..."
"... Trump is Zahpod Beeblebrox. Anyone remember the Hitchhiker's Guide? The role of the galactic president was not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was remarkably good at his job. ..."
"... When he bombed Syria in the first weeks of his presidency, giving the MIC, a $100 million of bomb sales ( to a company he had shares in, raytheon) was enough for me that tRump is what he always has been, a bankrupt, loud mouth yankee puppet who the plutocrats chose to continue the usual US empire evil ****. ..."
"... I had my suspicions prior with his choice of vp, mad eyes pence, a protege and smoker of **** cheney. Then pompous pompeo, 150% arsehole bolton and now this official pos. Only a trumptard or patriotard would accept this ****. ..."
"... it's just too much to keep track of it all. My scorecard booklet was all used up about the 1st week in after all the neocons and bankster slime who galloped into the WH on Trump's coattails. ..."
"... After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly elected President George W. Bush appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief. ..."
Abrams is obviously a Bush plant from left over CIA Bushys.
Abrams lied to Congress twice about his role with the Contras. He pleaded guilty to both counts in 1991 but was pardoned
by George H.W. Bush just before the latter left office.
A decade later, while working as special Middle East adviser to President George Ws Bush, Abrams was an enthusiastic advocate
of the disastrous Iraq invasion.
Abrams was also in the Bush White House at the time of the abortive coup in 2002 against the late Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez.
Abrams helped lead the U.S. effort to stage a coup to overturn the results of the 2006 Palestinian elections, complete
with murder and torture.
War with Russia will be the agenda just as the left wanted to begin with. The " pick sides" is the warring cry of the old
Bush regime of " either you're with us or against us" theme.
This is the precise crap people were hoping to avoid with Trump, but the left has put Trump administration in a vice by having
constant fires to put out and disyractions with FALE RUSSIAN COLLUSION
... It's a psychological ploy to wear down the President and search for legitimate excuse to gain public opinion to go against
Russia and they found it. Venezuela is a **** hole from socialism which AOL and dems are embracing now. Of course having sorry
liberal advisors like Kushner doesn't help... That is a huge mistake to have the opposition ( democrate Kushner and wife) in the
hen house with great pursasive power over an overwhelm Trump... Strategy working.
But politics as it is run mostly out of " The City of London" and old lynn Rothschild wanted puppet Hillary in ( Rothschild's
play dirty to get what they want and hold a full house of cards with the financial tools to " persuade people to their way of
thinking"... A battle us penny picker uppers must live with.... It's the only change we get.
Radical capitalism on the left and conservative traditional capitalism on right.... Both fighting for the same select few
who run the show generation after generation.
He's not really attacked by anyone. Its a bipartisan play to distract the gullible from the sick and subhuman policy they
enact while you are distracted with the wall or fantasizing bout his tiny mushroom.
So Trump jerks a couple of gators from the swamp, but only to make room for the T-Rex. Amazing. And why the hell is Bolton
still involved in our government? He penned an article during the bush admin explaining why the posse comitatus doesn't really
mean what it really says. Scary sob
Abrams was convicted of lying to congress meanwhile congress lies to us all day everyday and what happens to those bastards?
They vote themselves raises and sit on their *** all day taking bribes from their paymasters and writing laws and regulations
to control their chattel. Yes I hate politicians because they're ******* criminals and all of them and the useless bureaucrats
that infest that cesspool in D.C should be out of work permanently.
Trump is Zahpod Beeblebrox. Anyone remember the Hitchhiker's Guide? The role of the galactic president was not to wield
power, but to distract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was remarkably good at his job.
When he bombed Syria in the first weeks of his presidency, giving the MIC, a $100 million of bomb sales ( to a company
he had shares in, raytheon) was enough for me that tRump is what he always has been, a bankrupt, loud mouth yankee puppet who
the plutocrats chose to continue the usual US empire evil ****.
I had my suspicions prior with his choice of vp, mad eyes pence, a protege and smoker of **** cheney. Then pompous pompeo,
150% arsehole bolton and now this official pos. Only a trumptard or patriotard would accept this ****.
You're excused...it's just too much to keep track of it all. My scorecard booklet was all used up about the 1st week in
after all the neocons and bankster slime who galloped into the WH on Trump's coattails.
Seriously though, it's interesting that ZH has said nothing about the big corruption scandal going on now in Brasil. The guy
who won on platform of anti-corruption has been exposed within a month of taking office, surprise...surprise, as part of one of
the worst. Talk is vp taking over with the backing of the military. "soft-hard" coup you could say.
I too, got very angry about the exact things you mention. However, I perspective is something that keeps me grounded. Remember
what was happening in 2016, and what the options were. Remember BLM, march's in like every city, and Cops getting ambushed every
few weeks?
Remember, "We came, We saw, he died", from Queen Hillary? Or how about Queen Hillary calling Putin a Thug, and saying we had
to stand up to him in Ukraine, and Syria?
dude, we all know she is part of the same ****. The ******** election is over, the plutocracy chose their puppet. Think of
it, sure Killary would have done the same, but she wouldn't have been able to get away with it and the schizoid msm would have
had a breakdown trying to sell the same ol, same ol us empire games. People don't like surprises. Repubelicans as aggressive warmongers
doesnt surprise. Sadly they think they cant do anything about it. But they can, and not by talking **** on ZH.
See Ralph Nader's, How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress for tips.
It's 10 dimensional to the fifth power chess right? Just kidding. It's a big club and you ain't in it. Trump is not going to
save you. Did you really think one guy defied the odds and overcame the voter fraud and beat Hillary? Puhleez. All by design.
You're watching a movie...
After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly elected President George W. Bush
appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief.
Didn't W run on a 'bring the troops home and world leave us alone' platform in 2000?
when i think about what Trump did so far I think about that mandatory Obama care tax that I had to pay if I* didn't get Obama
care Well it's gone and that was a big deal for me cause I've got four kids that would have to pay it and that would be six thousand
out of pocket every year that's for starters with out Trump running interference in the FL house and senate elections we'd have
Obama lite new and antique Bill still that makes a huge difference in things like taxes and EPA enforcement in this state I really
think he has made the general public more aware of the Mexican invasion cause I see less and less Latinos on the jobs sites around
here He has really caused the Dems to lose it Trump did that not any other politician he has exposed election fraud he has exposed
the deep state like never before
Yes I'm a Trump supporter a thoughtful one I consider the options and will go with this till it impacts me negatively on an
economic personal level not an emotional one brought on by pundits and MSM never Trump ilk
why don't you ask me if I think he is perfect I think his wife is pretty much ok however I hate that he is from NYC and acts
like it his friends are not much to be proud of and his social skills are lacking but I think he showers regularly and has good
hygiene and moral habits except for golf but that's just me He's a bossy kind of guy and I might not get along with him He doesn't
do things country folks do and wouldn't fit in around here his hair sucks and is a narcissistic affectation for sure but i like
his foreign policy so far how am i doing think I'm being killed slowly I liked Ike but he was weak and I liked Buchanan bur preferred
Goldwater and on and on they are politicians and deserve the loyalty they give and " that's all I have to say about that"
Trump is a psychopath and he loves to hire even bigger psychopaths. Your whole admin is a swamp of sociopaths, psychopaths
and other sick deranged people.
Who is next? Paul
Wolfowitz now would be the most logical choice. Id the invasion of Venezuela decided already,
like Iraq war under Bush II.
That means that Rump can say goodbye to independents who votes for him because of his
anti-foreign wars noises during previous election campaign
Notable quotes:
"... Abrams, who had served in the Reagan State Department, faced multiple felony charges for lying to Congress and defying U.S. law in his role as a mastermind of the Iran-Contra debacle. Abrams' dishonesty almost destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency and put Reagan in jeopardy of impeachment. Abrams was allowed to plead guilty to two reduced charges and later was pardoned by George H.W. Bush, who feared impeachment because of his own role in Iran-Contra. ..."
"... Abrams was even more consequential as nation-wrecker. He was one of the principal architects of the invasion of Iraq. He is an inveterate advocate of "regime change" against countries whose policies he doesn't like. He has a track record in attempting to overthrow foreign governments both by covert action and outright military invasion. ..."
"... At the beginning of the Trump administration, foreign policy establishment types lobbied clueless Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to accept the convicted criminal Abrams as deputy head of the department - the person running all day-to-day affairs at State. ..."
"... Abrams suddenly appeared deus ex machina at the side of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said in a news conference that Abrams was appointed, "effective immediately" as special envoy to deal with resolution of the situation in Venezuela in a way that supposedly would advance U.S. interests. ..."
"... Abrams' special envoy post will be far more powerful than that of an ordinary ambassador or assistant secretary of state -- offices that require Senate confirmation. Should the Senate acquiesce in letting Abrams work without Senate confirmation? ..."
"... Abrams is a close friend and constant collaborator of Bill Kristol and Max Boot, both of whom are waging campaigns to impeach Trump or deny him re-election. There are no -- repeat, no -- policy differences between Abrams, Kristol, and Boot. ..."
"... If the appointment is supposed to be a sharp move to "hug your friends close and your enemies closer," then the test of its efficacy would be that Kristol, Boot, Jonah Goldberg, David French et. al., would halt their anti-Trump campaigns. One would think that if the Abrams appointment is one side of a shrewdly calculated transaction, then silencing Team Kristol would be a necessary condition. ..."
"... The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in some cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that. ..."
On Friday, following the dramatic arrest of a prominent Trump supporter on charges of lying
to Congress, President Trump gave one of the nation's most sensitive national security and
diplomatic posts to another controversial figure who already had been convicted of lying to
Congress.
Has the NeverTrump Republican echo chamber gone berserk over this irresponsible
appointment?
Have Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio taken to the Senate floor to speak out against the
president's defiance of honesty in government? Have they demanded hearings and a confirmation
vote?
Has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that Trump's action is so egregious it might call for
an article of impeachment?
Not at all. Turns out, the appointee is one of the president's worst enemies, a man
forcefully opposed to almost all of Trump's policies and campaign promises, a man who
repeatedly has said Trump is morally unfit for his office. He is Elliott Abrams, the
71-year-old éminence grise of the NeverTrump movement.
Abrams is the pre-eminent prophet and practitioner of hyper-interventionist approaches to
destabilize or overthrow governments - of foes and friends alike - that do not pass his
democracy-is-the-end-all-and-be-all litmus test. His closest friends and associates, from whom
his political positions are indistinguishable, include some of President Trump's most rabid
enemies, false-flag "conservatives" Bill Kristol and Max Boot.
Abrams, who had served in the Reagan State Department, faced multiple felony charges for
lying to Congress and defying U.S. law in his role as a mastermind of the Iran-Contra debacle.
Abrams' dishonesty almost destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency and put Reagan in jeopardy of
impeachment. Abrams was allowed to plead guilty to two reduced charges and later was pardoned
by George H.W. Bush, who feared impeachment because of his own role in Iran-Contra.
After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly
elected President George W. Bush appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where
Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief. Abrams was even more consequential as nation-wrecker. He was one of the principal architects
of the invasion of Iraq. He is an inveterate advocate of "regime change" against countries
whose policies he doesn't like. He has a track record in attempting to overthrow foreign
governments both by covert action and outright military invasion.
At the beginning of the Trump administration, foreign policy establishment types lobbied
clueless Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to accept the convicted criminal Abrams as deputy
head of the department - the person running all day-to-day affairs at State. Trump, who would
have had to sign off on the nomination, rejected Abrams when he learned of Abrams' background.
The truth about Abrams, while not by any means a secret,
came to Trump's attention from Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul, who held a deciding vote in
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would block Abrams if he were nominated.
Abrams already knew then what Trump took nearly a year to discover, that Tillerson was
hopelessly unprepared to serve as the nation's chief diplomat and indeed was, as Trump
colorfully put it, "dumb as a rock." Nothing about Abrams, the NeverTrumper who believes Trump cannot govern effectively without
him, has changed since then.
Following his rejection by Trump, Abrams wrote a sour-grapes article for
Politico , disparaging the president, along with Vice President Pence and Abrams' erstwhile
patron Tillerson, for not having international human rights policies identical to Abrams' own
views.
Abrams has been outspoken against sensitive Trump international policies right up to the
moment of his surprise appointment. He is unapologetic about his role in masterminding the Iraq
war. He has opposed Trump concerning American troops in Syria and America's relationship with
Saudi Arabia. As recently as January 14, 2019, he published a withering
attack on Trump's Middle East policies and diplomacy.
As events in Venezuela last week reached a crisis with rival claimants to the nation's
presidency, Abrams suddenly appeared deus ex machina at the side of Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, who said in a news conference that Abrams was appointed, "effective immediately" as
special envoy to deal with resolution of the situation in Venezuela in a way that supposedly
would advance U.S. interests.
Immediately? An appointee to a sensitive post needs a background investigation and security
clearance. These investigations can take months. If he indeed has a valid clearance, that means
his appointment was decided long ago.
Abrams' special envoy post will be far more powerful than that of an ordinary ambassador or
assistant secretary of state -- offices that require Senate confirmation. Should the Senate
acquiesce in letting Abrams work without Senate confirmation?
What is Pompeo thinking? Has Pompeo read Abrams' anti-Trump articles? In particular, has he
read Abrams' January 14 anti-Trump article that mocks Pompeo with a hugely unflattering photo
of the secretary of state?
What is going on?
Abrams is a close friend and constant collaborator of Bill Kristol and Max Boot, both of
whom are waging campaigns to impeach Trump or deny him re-election. There are no -- repeat, no
-- policy differences between Abrams, Kristol, and Boot.
If the appointment is supposed to be a sharp move to "hug your friends close and your
enemies closer," then the test of its efficacy would be that Kristol, Boot, Jonah Goldberg,
David French et. al., would halt their anti-Trump campaigns. One would think that if the Abrams
appointment is one side of a shrewdly calculated transaction, then silencing Team Kristol would
be a necessary condition.
So far there are no signs of this.
What did Trump know about the new Abrams appointment, and when did he know it?
It's amazing seeing the holdout Trump supporters continually writhe in mental contortions
to support his every move..as I've said all along..TDS affects the sheep on both right and
left equally.
Brazen Heist II 4 minutes ago (Edited)
... The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in
some cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that.
uhland62, 5 minutes ago
This guy is just picking up a couple more paychecks. He may think he can whip up Trump for more wars, Trump may think he
can control this guy because 'I am President and you are not'. The main thing is that the military can make more wars and
destroy more countries.
The-Post, 15 minutes ago
Trump loves those Bush criminals.
readerandthinker
Venezuelan army defectors appeal to Trump for weapons
Caracas, Venezuela (CNN)Venezuelan army defectors are calling on the Trump administration to arm them, in what they call
their quest for "freedom."
Former soldiers Carlos Guillen Martinez and Josue Hidalgo Azuaje, who live outside the country, told CNN they want US
military assistance to equip others inside the beleaguered nation. They claim to be in contact with hundreds of willing
defectors and have called on enlisted Venezuelan soldiers to revolt against the Maduro regime, through television broadcasts.
"As Venezuelan soldiers, we are making a request to the US to support us, in logistical terms, with communication,
with weapons, so we can realize Venezuelan freedom," Guillen Martinez told CNN.
Re: "The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised
segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world
wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures
such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).
Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy.
The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated
positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through.
If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign
positions, such as the border wall, for example.
But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the
former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further
Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy."
Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who came up through intelligence positions
in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create
the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.
"It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.
"As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar
Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History
will not be and should not be kind with that decision."
When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without
the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."
Flynn, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, also said that the American military response following 9/11 was
not well thought-out at all and based on significant misunderstandings.
Interesting, very interesting. As noted in the Flynn sentencing memo last night there were some curiously framed explanations
of events surrounding his FBI inquisition.
Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn;
and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview:
from the comments:
Curt says:
December 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm
This could be big news! Judge Emmet Sullivan was the same judge that had prosecutors investigated for criminal actions they took
in the Sen. Ted Stevens FALSE prosecution. Some on Mueller's team, including Weinstein, were held in contempt. One prosecutor
committed suicide. Others threatened with disbarment and some were suspended. "A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction
of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate
whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case (2008) should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing. Mueller
was also involved in that horrible attempt by prosecutors to frame Sen. Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan has absolutely no use for
this group of prosecutors. He smells a rat here and is asking for all investigative materials, including 302s. This judge will
not hesitate to take action against these crooked prosecutors if he finds evidence of ANY wrong doing.
On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury
before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. "In nearly 25 years on the bench," he said, "I've
never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case.
. . .
For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury
convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former
Alaska senator be dismissed.
On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.
In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors' handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted
that the misconduct allegations were "too serious and too numerous" to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation.
He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial
team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.
12-13-18 Following the allegations, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday ordered that both the Mueller investigation and
the Flynn team turn over all documents [the "302s"] relating to the fateful interview, including all contemporaneous notes, before
3pm Friday.
"... Capitalism has at different times or in different places offered concessions to mobilisations of the working class. It offers the fiction of political choice and representation. It provides a fig-leaf of regulation to impinge on the very worst excesses of the free market and private accumulation ..."
An anti-Trotskyist rationale for supporting imperialist war The war for regime change waged in Syria by the NATO powers, in
alliance with Al Qaeda, behind the backs of the peoples of America and Europe, is the outcome of three decades of US-led wars across
the Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.
These crimes of US and European imperialism have not only claimed millions
of lives and turned more than 60 million people into refugees. They have exposed the fact that the basic contradictions of capitalism,
which led to world war and the October Revolution in the 20th century, remain unresolved.
Despite the deep unpopularity of these bloody wars, which have cost trillions of dollars amid the deepest economic crisis of capitalism
since the 1930s, attempts by voters to end or limit them, by voting governments out of office in America and Europe, have failed.
Successive governments of all political colorations have, on the contrary, stepped them up, and it is clear that this has become
a policy endorsed by an entrenched ruling class. When the Syrian regime invited Moscow to help it fight the NATO-backed opposition
militias in 2015, for example, NATO escalated the war into a military standoff with Russia, a nuclear power. A century after the
outbreak of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the capitalist system is teetering on the brink of a nuclear conflagration.
The paragraphs quoted from Hensman in which she extols Western capitalist states providing democratic mechanisms through which
the working class can "fight back" - notwithstanding the 4 decades of unbroken counterrevolution that bring us into the present
- don't just embody the political dead end reached by those who broke from international revolutionary solidarity and Trotskyist
struggles against both Stalinism and imperialism.
They do something much worse and, in my view, more fundamental. They highlight how the thinkers that cluster around groups
like the ISO have completely lost - if they ever had it - the ability to think dialectically. Their political conclusions lead
me to conclude in turn that they actually don't comprehend the most essential principles of Marxist critical analysis of capitalism
or how dialectical materialism builds a complete picture of the totality that is our socio-economic environment.
Capitalism has at different times or in different places offered concessions to mobilisations of the working class. It
offers the fiction of political choice and representation. It provides a fig-leaf of regulation to impinge on the very worst excesses
of the free market and private accumulation.
But - and this is the key thing! - it is in its essence, in the most primitive, unchanging logic of its momentum and inexorable
development, always but always a system in which the privileges and power of capital will be elevated above those of workers.
It is constitutionally organised around that core function. If you don't understand that, every analysis that follows will be
useless.
By proceeding in his analysis from revolutionary concepts of class struggle, exploitation, alienation, and the material basis
for historical development, Marx was able to build - brick by brick - a critique of capitalism itself. Pseudo-left groups like
the ISO or the DSA do the exact opposite - they start from false principles and work towards over-elaborated false conclusions.
It isn't in other words just the case that they err on this or that detail. The whole premise and therefore all the conclusions
are useless - and must be rejected wholesale!
"... Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!! ..."
"... How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? ..."
"... Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation. ..."
"... Bill Barr clean out the DOJ? I wouldn't count on it. He is a member in good standing of the swamp ..."
Remember when Dan Rather self-immolated his credibility in a desperate attempt to take out George W. Bush? The Killian documents
controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six purported documents critical of U.S. President George W. Bush's
service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73.
Four of these documents[1] were presented as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than
two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate the documents.[2][3][4]
Subsequently, several typewriter and typography experts concluded the documents were forgeries.[5][6]
Well, looks like Buzzfeed did not learn from history. Buzzfeed set the media world on fire on Friday with a story that appeared
well sourced that claimed Donald Trump had directed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal
that never came to fruition. The mainstream media went into hyper impeachment drive.
This was the nail in the Trump coffin as far as they were concerned. Trump was as good as dead.
Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure,
unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!!
The Trump is dead meme quickly evaporated. Why did Mueller do this? The answer is simple. Bill Barr.
The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit. Mueller,
as an old friend of Barr, knew that he had to do something dramatic to distance himself and his staff from this toxic story.
Once Barr is installed in office, stand by. The Department of Justice and the FBI will received the equivalent of a high powered
enema. Both are sick institutions and need to have the feces flushed out.
"...Bill Barr. The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit."
Mr. Barr seems as swampy as they get. He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans and is the classic beltway
sophist who has done much to reinterpret the constitution eviscerating the Bill of Rights. His past actions don't make him a man
of integrity unless of course being in service to the national security state is considered virtuous.
I believe Mr. Johnson's optimism of Barr's nomination leading to a "high powered enema" at the DOJ & FBI is unfounded. IMO,
none of the seditionists will be held to account. In any case POTUS Trump seems quite content with tweeting witch hunt rather
than declassifying and ordering a prosecutor convene a grand jury and have Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and all the other putschists
testify.
"He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans"
He served under H.W. Bush who lost to Clinton. Obama did just what, beside get great protection from Brennan, Clapper, Comey
and a list of others you haven't named yet. How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration
have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? What kind of support do you think the Trump administration
was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past two years?
"What kind of support do you think the Trump administration was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past
two years?"
Well, it is the Trump administration that nominated Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray and now Barr. How many of those fired have
testified to a grand jury? They're nicely ensconced with their lucrative sinecures until the next Borg administration. Mueller
has spent tens of millions in going after Trump campaign minions. Where is the witch hunt against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch,
et al? Of course its not that POTUS has no agency here. He can order declassification and the appointment of a prosecutor with
a stroke of pen. Tweeting however is more like his pace.
Rather interviewed me in the library of the Army and Navy Club in DC at the height of the excitement over the obviously approaching
US invasion of Iraq in 2002. At one point he asked me if the Bushies were going to invade Iraq. I told himthat should not even
be a question. He did not believe me.
The only difference is that Rather had some small degree of credibility before the incident in question. I don't believe that
Buzzfeed has ever had a shred of credibility to anyone with the slightest ability to think.
Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough
for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation.
This is a tragedy for past good /honest fbi agents but the fbi currently
is a pestilence on this country which claims to be a nation of laws.
Was it conspiracy or idiocy that led to the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect
and prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon headquarters?
That's one of the questions at the heart of "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the
Crimes of the War on Terror," by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. In their careful and thorough
investigation of the events leading up to the attacks, the authors uncover a story about the
Central Intelligence Agency's neglect, possible criminal activities and a cover-up that may
have allowed al-Qaida to carry out its plans uninhibited by government officials.
In the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence," the journalists tell Truthdig Editor in
Chief Robert Scheer how an interview with Richard Clarke, the counterterror adviser to
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, led them to a jaw-dropping revelation regarding two
hijackers involved in the infamous attacks. As it turns out, Khalid Muhammad Abdallah
al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two men linked to al-Qaida, were staying at an FBI informant's
home in San Diego in 2000, and they were being tracked by the National Security Agency. Despite
knowledge of the men's ties to the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, neither was
investigated by the FBI. Clarke and others believe that this may have had to do with a CIA
attempt to turn the two men into agency informants.
"When we sat down with Clarke he told us he couldn't see any other explanation but that
there was an op [and] that it never made it to the White House because it would have had to
go through him," says Nowosielski.
"And his friend [then CIA Director] George Tenet was responsible for malfeasance and
misfeasance in the runup to 9/11."
Once the plans for the 9/11 attack must have become clear to the CIA, why didn't the agency
prevent it from taking place? Duffy and Nowosielski come to the simple, shocking conclusion
that because the CIA is prohibited from operating on U.S. soil, those involved in the operation
chose to avoid prosecution rather than come clean.
In a well-documented case study that touches senior government officials, including current
special counsel Robert Mueller and other high-level individuals, crucial questions arise about
who is responsible for allowing "a plot that resulted in 3,000 murders" and led to ongoing U.S.
military entanglements in the Middle East to move forward.
However, our country's recent crimes and the people behind them, including President Bush,
are currently being "whitewashed" by our national obsession with Donald Trump, the authors
warn.
"All the crimes of the war on terror, the torture, Abu Ghraib, it's all just gone -- the
unnecessary invasion of the war in Iraq, it's all just sort of under the rug now because of
Trump," Duffy says.
Listen to their discussion to learn more about the stunning investigation into the tragedy
that changed the course of our nation's history and the Americans who could have thwarted the
attacks but decided to cover their own backs instead. You can also read a transcript of the
interview below the media player .
RS : Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of "Scheer Intelligence," where the
intelligence comes from my guests. And the title is really appropriate for the book we're going
to talk about today, "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on
Terror." And the authors are John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. And they are investigative
reporters, and the watchdogs here are the people in our intelligence agencies that are supposed
to be protecting the nation. And this book cuts very deeply into the unsolved mystery of how
9/11 happened. Why weren't we better prepared to prevent it? It's one of the most important
events in American history; it certainly has shaped our lives in terms of a surveillance state,
our rights and everything else, up to the present. And this book, I think, represents the most
exhaustive and well-documented effort to get to the bottom of the whole thing. You're very
careful in what you do and do not assert about 9/11, what we don't know about it, and
particularly the role of George Tenet, who was then head of the CIA, and the role of the CIA in
-- what is the right word? -- obscuring the story, even keeping information from the White
House, from the FBI. So give me the gist of the book.
RN : This is Ray. The book is largely about looking at this case study of the failure
leading up to 9/11, the people who were involved in that failure, how that came about, and how
they were successful, to the present day, in managing to obscure the public from really fully
understanding that this was, in the words of one of our sources, really just a handful of
people. And the most jarring thing is that they're still, in some cases, working today in I
guess Trump's CIA. And we sort of document through the second half of the book what damage was
done to America because they remained in their positions.
JD: This is John. And intelligence was gathered around the time of the millennium that led
people in the Bin Laden unit at the CIA to monitor a meeting in Malaysia that was a gathering
of these al-Qaida figures. In monitoring this --
RS : That was in the year 2000, right?
JD : Yes. Right at the outset of the year. In monitoring this meeting, they became aware of
the fact that one of the attendees had a multiple-entry visa to the United States. That man's
name was Khalid al-Mihdhar. He would eventually be on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon;
he was one of the hijackers. So this starts the whole thing there, the fact that the CIA
becomes aware of this information; the Bin Laden unit, counterterror center, and then all the
way up to George Tenet are aware of this information. There's a lot of ins, outs, and
what-have-yous about where that information goes, but it ultimately does not go over to the
FBI's counterterror division in New York, much to the protest of the FBI agents who were
detailed to the CIA's Bin Laden unit. And it did not make it to the White House counterterror
czar, Richard Clarke, who very much finds this to be, like, the crux of the whole story -- the
fact that this information was kept from his office for basically a year and eight months, up
until the success of the attacks. The crux is there, that they had this information, these guys
were coming into the country, they had just left the terror planning summit, and this
information was being held close by the Bin Laden unit, by the counterterror center, and by
George Tenet. The reason for that is unknown; the speculation that Richard Clarke has was that
George Tenet and these people in the Bin Laden unit and counterterror center thought having
these al-Qaida people in the United States, they could possibly go through Allied proxies in
the Saudi intelligence to try to get close to these guys, monitor them, potentially find out
information from them or even try to flip them. That's Richard Clarke's speculation as to why
this was kept from him for so long. Ultimately, the attack was successful; that they all just
did their best to bury all this and, you know, hope no one noticed.
RS : Let me just start off with something that was confusing to me in reading your book.
Because the FBI generally comes off looking pretty good in your book, and the real problem is
with the CIA, and to a lesser degree, with the NSA. And in the San Diego story, and this is
covered in the 9/11 Commission Report and others, the two San Diego guys -- they are staying at
the home of an FBI informant at first. So when you say the FBI was not informed, weren't some
of these calls actually made from the home of an FBI asset?
RN : It's interesting when you know, A, that according to our NSA sources they were able to
be pinged every time that Mihdhar and Hazmi, the two hijackers, called from that house that you
mentioned in San Diego, back to Yemen. That somebody in the NSA was getting an alert as that
was happening each time, and was aware of those connections. But that the house that was being
used for the phone call was that of an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh. And Abdussattar was
somebody the FBI recruited who was inside a popular mosque in San Diego, and who they thought
might be able to feed them warnings of anybody who might be a radical Muslim terrorist. And
Abdussattar claims that he simply missed the warning signs of the two tenants that he had in
his home. I mean, it's kind of interesting. He's also, he's not just an FBI informant, he's
also a Saudi, which kind of points to Richard Clarke's conjecture, which he first laid out to
us when we sat down in his office in 2009. And that was that once the CIA monitored the meeting
in Malaysia, knew that these two guys were connected to Bin Laden and were of interest, and saw
that they were heading to the United States, in Clarke's words, they might well have thought
that the best way to try to recruit these guys to feed information was not to send a blue-eyed,
blonde-haired, American CIA agent to go to meet them. But, instead, to use our partners in
Saudi Arabia and Saudi intelligence -- which George Tenet, the head of the CIA, happened to be
very close with -- to try to recruit them. So I actually focus more on the fact that this guy
was introduced to this house by a gentleman who's been determined to be a Saudi agent, a guy
named Omar al-Bayoumi, and that this guy then was perhaps working dually for Saudi intel and as
an FBI asset. And everyone sort of focuses on, oh, Abdussattar Shaikh was an FBI asset, so that
seems to put blame at the feet of the FBI. Could be; could be, but I would also focus on that
Saudi angle, because it recurs so often.
RS : Well, it also goes to the question of the efficiency of the surveillance society.
Because after all, these phone calls could be intercepted. You know, they did; they could
follow this trail. And phone calls are being made back to a suspect residence in Yemen and so
forth, from the home of an FBI recruit. And I'm just wondering, there's been a lot of
discussion, some of the people that you quote in your book have made this point -- you collect
this haystack of information that doesn't lead you to the needle in the haystack. And so here
these phone calls were, clearly could be intercepted. They didn't require any special act of
Congress or anything else. This was not a case of their arms being tied, the intelligence
agencies. But they're not even looking at their own data. Isn't that the takeaway from the
first part of this story? These guys are acting suspiciously in San Diego, they have a
suspicious background, they've participated in a suspicious conference, they're staying at the
home of an FBI informant, and they're making calls that would basically outline what was going
to happen in this disastrous attack -- and no one noticed. Or the ones who noticed didn't tell
other people.
JD : I think what is likely to have happened there is, so those calls were going back, and I
think it was about seven or eight calls. And Khalid al-Mihdhar's wife still lived at that
house, and he was calling her from San Diego. So I don't think any deep operational details
were being discussed in those calls, but that doesn't really matter; the fact that they're
calling that home from America is a big deal. And how that would work at the NSA is there's
someone who is tasked all day with basically monitoring the electronic signals going into and
out of this house in Yemen, and when they see this coming in from the United States, that
should ring a really big alarm bell. Now, that person working that desk would have to seek
approval from the chop chain, which are these NSA managers. In order for anything to happen
with that information, it has to get passed up and then brought to a FISA court, brought to the
FBI. And if these managers within the NSA basically say, don't worry about it, sit on it, just
collect it, sit on it -- and if they don't allow any action, then there will be no action. And
it's just going to stay housed right there, in that particular data stovepipe at the NSA. If
Richard Clarke's speculation is true, that there was this attempt to recruit these guys in the
U.S. with Saudi proxies, part of that plan would have been George Tenet speaking to someone at
the NSA, or one of George Tenet's people speaking to someone at the NSA. Basically saying, hey,
before you go out getting any FISA warrants or chasing anything down regarding this specific
house, come to us first. So if there is some operation going on, it would stand to reason that
part of that operation would be not allowing these pings at this particular desk to turn into
any action.
RS : For people listening, let me make clear, this is an incredibly detailed, researched
book, which relies very heavily on intelligence veterans. No one less so than Richard Clarke,
who's come up so far; another is former colonel Larry Wilkerson, obviously a key person. And
what is very dramatic in your book is, where your story really comes to life for you guys as
journalists, is when Richard Clarke -- you say you go in there to interview him, and you tell
your crew, put the sound on as we go in. And you go in, and you think you're going to have to
ask a lot of questions to get -- and for people who don't know, Richard Clarke ever since the
early '70s was a major figure in the intelligence community. And at this point, when you're
talking to him, he's been around the block, he's seen everything. And he was a close friend of
George Tenet, who was head of the CIA; they considered themselves allies. And you're going in
to get this interview, and you think you're going to have to weasel information out of him. And
he just hits you over the head with an assertion that, really, is the thrust of this book. So
why don't you take us to that moment?
RN : What we discovered on the day that we walked into Richard Clarke's conference room was
that he'd been ready for probably about a year to talk about this, and no major journalists had
called him up to ask him about this subject. Nobody had ever asked him. So going back, you
know, he started in the Reagan State Department; he worked under George H.W.; Clinton, when
these Al Qaeda terrorist attacks began in the early nineties, recognized that there needed to
be a new position within his Cabinet, and he called it the counterterror czar, the
counterterror adviser. And he created that position for Richard Clarke. As you mentioned,
Clarke was close friends with George Tenet, who also was sort of on the National Security
Council under Clinton early on, and then got named the head of the CIA in the midst of
Clinton's first term. George W. Bush and company come in, early 2001; as it turned out, nine
months ahead of this ticking clock towards 9/11. And Richard Clarke is told that he's
essentially being demoted. He's still going to be the counterterror advisor, but it's not a
Cabinet-level position. And so now he's kind of essentially going through the extra layer of
Condoleezza Rice. But George Tenet still very much has Bush's ear. And that's kind of the back
story there; then after, you know, on 9/11 Richard Clarke by nearly all accounts was running
the response that morning, on that critical day; he was the top man for counterterror. Over
time, he starts to get rubbed the wrong way by the fact that the Bush administration
inexplicably is not really terribly still concerned about Al Qaeda after 9/11. But then Clarke
leaves, and he writes a bestselling book. And he testifies before the 9/11 commission and
becomes the only person to apologize to the families, to admit that there was a failure at all.
But cut to a few years down the line, and he releases another book in 2008 that doesn't become
a bestseller. And it's called "Your Government Failed You." And it includes a section on
Mihdhar and Hazmi that he calls "Straining Credulity," in which he says that he does not
believe in conspiracy theories, but in this one particular case, he's weighed it every which
way and he can't see another way to explain it but by. But he sort of saved us speculation, and
so we saw that part in his book and we thought, well, we've been itching -- we'd collected
enough info by that time, and talked with enough people, that we thought: something happened
here with these two hijackers that flew over to the U.S. Something happened when they arrived.
And the big question was, if this was an operation by the CIA, did they let Clinton know? Did
they then let Bush know when he came in? What was the deal there? And Richard Clarke would be
the man in a position to answer that. And so you're right, that's where our journey really --
that's where we launched. Because we'd been looking into it for a few years, but when we sat
down with Clarke, that was when he told us he couldn't see any other explanation but that there
was an op, that it never made it to the White House because it would have had to go through
him. And his friend George Tenet was responsible for malfeasance and misfeasance in the runup
to 9/11.
JD : And he also, in part of that description, said that a lot of the CIA reports that would
have, any other day, come directly to his computer -- when he flicked it on in the morning, it
would be right there waiting for him -- just on this specific case with these two individuals,
he was removed from the chain of information. And so he felt that he was getting minutiae
concerning terrorism from around the world in, like, tiny micro-detail on everything except
this, and that must have meant he was intentionally pulled out of the chain by someone. And
that that would have taken high-level order. And when asked, you know, how high level, he said
that it must have come from the director, referring to George Tenet.
RS : So let's cut to the chase here. There's an old caution, don't attribute to conspiracy
what can be explained by ordinary stupidity. Or laziness, or incompetence. Is this a case where
George Tenet, the admired at that time head of the CIA, was just incompetent, stupid,
indifferent? Is there something more at work? Did the CIA welcome such an attack as a boon for
the military-industrial complex, as some people allege? What's going on here? How could this
major tragedy event be visited upon the United States, the head of our intelligence agency
knows that there are these suspect characters there, and he doesn't bother to tip off the FBI,
let alone the White House? And after all, the FBI is in charge of domestic surveillance;
they're the ones that have to go arrest these guys, you know, at least confront them, see what
they're doing. I have to tell people listening to this, this is a very careful, indeed
conservative, in the best sense of the word, book. This is not a book you can just dismiss by
saying it's got some wild, interesting theory. No -- you err, I would say, on the side of
caution, in a way.
JD : We err on the side of caution all the time, and we're not going to try to say something
that we can't really, really defend. If we start from a position that there's some level of
merit to what Clarke is suggesting, that there is this operation going on to try to monitor
these hijackers domestically by the CIA, as opposed to handing it off to the FBI -- presuming
he's right on that, there is this --
RS : Can I just add a little note that Wilkerson actually goes further.
JD : Wilkerson later suggests that he heard it mentioned after the fact, in about 2003 or
2004, when he is at the CIA. The invasion of Iraq has begun, and they're waiting for updated
satellite information, everyone's kind of standing around just kind of BS'ing. And he basically
overhears a conversation about how, oh man, Tenet tried to flip these guys in the U.S. and then
had to hide it because it all went wrong, and it would have come back to bite him. And yeah,
Wilkerson basically claims to have overheard high-level people speaking about that, just sort
of in a B.S. session.
RN : Well, and not really, not overheard; it's more like, he claimed multiple, very
high-level under Tenet sources, that he was close with at that time, who were in these "yak-yak
sessions," that he calls them. And they each claimed to be aware of the reality of this,
supposedly.
JD : You're asking, like, how nefarious it is. In the first period of all this, presuming
that it's true, presuming that there's this operation going on to try to flip these guys or
follow them or whatever, gather information on them domestically, you can imagine that, OK,
they're going to have some sort of setup in which to monitor these guys, or they're using Saudi
proxies perhaps, or other proxies, and they're following them. Then we get to this point where,
well, the attack succeeds on September 11, so how the heck does that happen? If you have this,
if you're monitoring these guys and then they do this, where does the ball get dropped? And our
book does go into that a bit, and we definitely say, like, there's this moment where they must
have said: OK. This isn't working, it's not happening, there has got to be a point where they
say, abandon ship. But what do they do? How do they abandon ship? They need to somehow turn
this over to the FBI to wrap it up for them. And the way they seem to do this is not by being
honest and saying, hey, we were trying to do this and it didn't work, but here's the
information -- go get 'em. They definitely don't do that.
RS : The "trying to do this" -- you mean to turn these terrorists into agents for
themselves? --
JD : So what I'm saying is, if at some point when it's not working, when the flip hasn't
happened, when whatever goal they set for themselves, when they haven't achieved it, a time
must come for them to wrap up this operation. A time must -- you can't just let them go all the
way and succeed in their attack, you would think.
RN : But I think what you're asking is the intention of the operation, which would seem --
well, the CIA was created in order to prevent future Pearl Harbors. So I guess, giving them the
benefit of the doubt, the intention of the operation would theoretically have been to monitor
these guys so as to figure out what they're doing here in the U.S.
JD : Yes, yes. We're giving them the benefit of the doubt there. And then we look at the
emails and cable traffic we can find in that summer, and we watch as -- there's no search for
these guys, there's no FBI search for these guys until August 23rd of 2001. And that's the
point where, surreptitiously, someone stationed at Alec Station, the Bin Laden unit, CIA, who's
going through old cable traffic, goes: Oh my gosh! I found a cable that these guys came to the
United States. And she alerts the FBI, and the FBI begins their domestic search. I guess what
I'm suggesting is, a time would have come when they, when whoever is running this operation at
the CIA, whatever the architecture of that operation looks like, they would have seen these
things happening. They would have seen the connections they were making with these other guys
coming to the United States. And a time would have come for them to say: OK. We have to pass
this off to the FBI to shut it down. And it does --
RS : But wait a minute. When you say OK, and they've seen things -- they see people who are
identified as terrorists, part of this terrorist network, traces back to Al Qaeda. And they are
learning about airplanes and how to fly them, and flight paths, and everything. And you're
telling me that they say, well, you know, maybe we're not going to actually recruit them, maybe
we're -- we better do something. Why aren't they saying, holy cow, these guys can do great
damage to this country! We got to call, what, the local San Diego police, at least, to get them
to check them out! No?
RN : OK, so these guys arrive in early 2000. What happens in October 2000? The U.S.S. Cole
is attacked in Yemen. FBI agents working that from top levels of the New York office of the FBI
find a very direct connection not only to Al Qaeda, but to that same planning meeting that the
CIA monitored. The same one where Mihdhar and Hazmi were at that planning meeting. So not only
do you have an inclination -- oh, these guys are Al Qaeda, they're probably not here to, in the
words of one person, go to f'ing Disneyland. They're here for something nefarious -- but now,
after October 2000, for the entire year up to 9/11, the CIA has the knowledge that these two
individuals that were at this meeting, that the meeting spawned the U.S.S. Cole attack, which
killed 17 dead servicemen. So I think at that point, yeah, calling the local San Diego police
would probably make a lot of sense.
RS : OK, and what about the FBI informant who was their link in San Diego? Why isn't he
telling anyone, or why doesn't the FBI know?
JD : You have to be careful to separate what's going on at different agencies. An FBI
informant's not necessarily reporting to the CIA, and the CIA informant's not reporting to the
FBI. And then you also have to understand that the FBI has national headquarters and then a
bunch of different field offices throughout the country. And you have field office reports
coming in, like the Phoenix memo from Ken Williams mentioning that there's these, all these
Muslim guys trying to learn to fly. You've got what Coleen Rowley exposes out of Minnesota,
when they bust Zacarias Moussaoui, and how they're trying to get into his laptop, and they're
being hampered by FBI headquarters. So I mean, you don't know what came from Abdussattar. But I
don't want to move too far into the weeds and off the general thrust of your original question.
And I think what you come down to is a fork in the road. At some point, either the CIA running
this operation has to wrap it up, or this major attack is going to succeed. If you ask
yourself, well, why didn't they wrap it up -- because obviously they didn't, and the attack did
succeed–so if you ask yourself why didn't they, there's one potential answer, which is
that they were afraid of being prosecuted. Because they had been running an illegal operation
in the United States. So their own fear for their own lives, freedom, careers, all that
stuff–
RS : For people who don't understand the law, you have to explain, the CIA was prevented
from running this kind of operation domestically. This is supposed to be up to the FBI.
JD : It is a crime for them to operate within the United States.
RN : And what Richard Clarke told us, we don't know how much of the information, like the
Phoenix memo and these other things that Duffy just mentioned, got to George Tenet. But what we
do know, the existence of Mihdhar and Hazmi in this country should have made it to him by that
point. Because his own CIA counterterror office had informed the FBI in August, and a search
had begun. So that information should have been in Tenet's head. We know that he was briefed
about Zacarias Moussaoui acting weird at a flight school in Minnesota. And he comes to the --
oh, man --
JD : September 4th principals meeting.
RN : -- September 4th principals meeting in the White House. Clarke has been pushing the
entire Bush administration, the entire eight, nine months, to be able to brief them on Al Qaeda
and make the case for why the administration should take this seriously. And he's finally got
that meeting, and George Tenet is sitting there, and he doesn't say a word. And he was later
asked by investigators why not, and he gave this really bizarre non-answer, which was just
like: it just wasn't the right time, right place, I just can't take you any further than that.
And they let him get away with leaving it at that, but Richard Clarke says the reason he
doesn't tell us at that point, he believes, is because Clarke would have had him brought up on
charges that day for malfeasance and misfeasance in withholding that information. Because
remember, that would also make his people culpable for the Cole, because they would have known
about the planning session for the Cole nine months before that one happened, too. So it looks
like --
JD : And then they would have been guilty of obstruction of justice for all of the hiding of
these figures once the FBI investigation into the Cole happened. So they have a long list of
things they become guilty of should they just turn this over and say, like: Ah, hey guys,
there's these guys, you should probably go do something about it. Now, that's one explanation.
Other people have other explanations. But as I said, we don't make accusations that we cannot
really, firmly back up. So this time, that's pretty much the one we typically go with.
RS : Two people in your book who take it further are Richard Clarke and Larry Wilkerson. Two
of the most highly experienced, knowledgeable individuals to come out of our whole military
intelligence complex. And they, put it in human terms, they say they don't know how these
people sleep at night. Wilkerson, even more than Clarke, suggests that these people could have
prevented 9/11, and knew about it. Now, I just want to ask you about one other person. Again,
the book is devastating; it's called "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes
of the War on Terror," John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. But let me push it one step further to
the contemporary moment. The book is kind of easy on the FBI. But the fact is the FBI was
really the agency that should have been following these terrorists when they're in the United
States. But one guy who comes up in current making of history, and who was head of the FBI at a
critical point, is Mueller, who's now running the Russian, interference in our election
investigation. What was his role? I'd like to conclude on that, because he's a major figure
right now, the head of this special investigation. What was his role in this?
RN : I mean, it is important to remember that the guy came in, I think it was maybe 10 days
before 9/11, and took over the FBI. So he was, among the CIA, NSA, and FBI, he was able to be
the only one at the leadership helm in the post-9/11 days and months who you couldn't really
lay any culpability at his door for any kind of failure. Remember, the CIA director George
Tenet, he's right at the table with the President; he's a Cabinet-level guy. The FBI director,
it's not the same way. The FBI director reports to the Attorney General in the Department of
Justice, and the Attorney General gets the direct seat. We make the case in the book that when
George Tenet, in the week after 9/11, made the big play, the big power grab for the CIA, what
we call the wish list of every CIA director accumulated over the whole history of the agency,
and essentially puts it out there to Bush and says, these are the powers we need now to make
sure this kind of thing doesn't happen -- he gets his green light. Mueller, on the other hand
-- well, a couple things happen. For one thing, the stories–the CIA is better at keeping
their skeletons hidden, for a while. So the first stories that come out that start to paint a
picture of blame regarding 9/11, they're all pointing towards the FBI. Coleen Rowley comes out,
and she points a finger at Mueller in May of 2002, and that sort of gets the ball rolling on
the "it was the FBI's fault" story, which really didn't get corrected for quite a number of
years. So our sources tell us Mueller was playing defense, he was willing to kind of go along
as the Bush administration pushed that–we kind of know what happened here, so we don't
need to investigate this much further; you should be putting your FBI resources towards
preventing future attacks. And I can certainly understand why a man like Robert Mueller in that
position would say, would not want to be the guy that missed the next one. So from what we can
tell, and from what our sources told us, it does seem that he sort of wrapped up the 9/11
investigation, or just ended it midway. But what was happening was, we talked with Pat DeMoro
-- he was one of our sources -- and he took us inside, he ran the 9/11 criminal investigation;
remember, this was a crime, right. At least 19 guys, probably a lot more, were involved in a
plot that resulted in 3,000 murders. So he was investigating that, and he was finding over
about a two-year period, there would be leads that would point towards Saudi facilitators to
the hijackers, Saudi helpers, Saudi royal money coming over. And every time he found these, he
had to report them up to Bob Mueller. Bob Mueller would theoretically report them to the
Attorney General, who would theoretically report them to Bush. And yet the end result of this
was that Bush invades Iraq, and the U.S. public never heard about these Saudi connections
until, officially, until just a couple of years ago, really.
JD : And you have said that our book comes off pretty light on the FBI, and I think the
crucial difference to make clear is that most of the people we're talking about within the FBI
are from particularly one field office. We're talking about John O'Neill's people out of New
York, who are counterterror investigators. That's most of the people we're dealing -- we're
not, we mention a few other people from FBI headquarters, but we don't necessarily mention them
in the best light. And one of the big failures of the FBI is the search to find al-Mihdhar and
al-Hazmi, once they are made aware that they're in the country a couple weeks before 9/11. And
that is a huge story there, and we could only write so much book. So we don't want to just sit
here and say, like, oh, the FBI is great and did everything right; we focus specifically on a
handful of people who did do their damnedest to unearth the conspirators behind the Cole
attack, and to pass information about the presence of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi over to FBI
investigators in New York in the runup to 9/11. So we don't want to necessarily sit here and
say the FBI was perfect and did everything right; we're talking about a handful of
individuals.
RS : And as you've just indicated, your style and the character of this book is quite
scholarly. It's very thoughtful, it's incredibly well documented. And you got people really on
the inside, in the know, to trust you and to talk honestly about it. You've done the gumshoe
journalism, you took 10 years, you checked every record. What has been the critical
response?
RN : Well, we should have put Trump's picture on the cover. [Laughs] I think that would have
helped.
RS : That's a pretty profound observation, in a way. Because there's a whole bunch of people
now who think all of our troubles in this country started and will end with Trump. And it
really whitewashes everybody else.
JD : It's whitewashing a lot of people. There's, all of a sudden people who a few years ago
we were like, this is the worst person on earth! -- like George W. Bush, is now just being
embraced by Democrats as some, like, affable guy. All the crimes of the war on terror, the
torture, Abu-Ghraib, it's all just gone -- the unnecessary invasion of the war in Iraq, it's
all just sort of under the rug now because of Trump.
RS : Yeah, those were the adults watching the store. Everybody is angry that Trump doesn't
have adults watching the store, and now he just got in trouble with his Secretary of Defense,
pushing him out, and now that guy is whitewashed, right? He was considered a mad dog at one
point. So you're right; your book has run into a head storm of indifference to anything that
happened before Trump. But I'm asking a very pointed question. What happens? You guys spent
over 10 years on this, right?
RN : Yeah. And you know, our goal was not to get famous. [Laughs] We really did want
accountability for this small group of people that we thought, these people cannot stay in the
CIA, right? We're not going to keep letting them run the War on Terror, are we? And maybe if
people just know about this, or if we can just prove it–if we talk with enough insiders,
if we get enough documents together, if we write a book. It turns out, no. There's going to be
no accountability, and they're going to, the few that remain now at high levels of the CIA are
going to continue to do what they do, and no one's going to know about it except for folks that
listen to your show, so thank you.
RS : Well, they're going to write the history. I mean, the amazing thing–you think of
a movie like "Zero Dark Thirty," you know; and you quote John Kiriakou in your book, and he was
in the CIA; he was actually very successful in being involved with the capture of the highest
person connected with al-Qaida, and so forth. And they spun a myth that the torture worked, and
you needed torture, and blah blah blah. And it basically went unchallenged. So these people who
either lied, or just lied by not talking, even to the FBI or the White House -- they get to
control the narrative. And then a book like yours comes out, and -- I'm asking a very serious
question. What has been the response of The New York Times, The Washington Post?
JD : [Laughing] We're still waiting to hear what The Washington Post and The New York Times
think. We've gotten a lot of praise from people who have read it, but we're not getting any
really major national or international reviews. Well, one thing we like to do, you mentioned
"Zero Dark Thirty." And the main character, played by Jessica Chastain, is sort of an
amalgamation of a handful of people who did work at the CIA, most prominently a woman by the
name of Alfreda Bikowsky, who is mentioned very prominently in our book. We want people to know
her name, Alfreda Bikowsky, because it's a name that was sort of an open secret in the media
in, you know, New York, Washington, for many, many years. Her involvement goes from the
pre-9/11 period there at Alec Station through torture and drone killings, and we want to make
sure that her name gets out there so she can't hide in the shadows.
RN : Her name was never mentioned in any media until it came out on our website. It was 11
years, 10 months from the first alleged crime she'd committed that we documented, until her
name came out on our website.
JD : We just like to throw her name out there every once in a while, and make sure more and
more people hear it.
RS : Ah, that should be enough to inspire people to get a copy of "The Watchdogs Didn't
Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror." It's written by John Duffy and Ray
Nowosielski. It's a very, very important book. This is the yeoman journalistic work on the
story, and it's informed by people on the inside who really witnessed it, and were shocked by
what they saw, high-level people. So I recommend the book. I want to thank you guys for coming
on. OK, that's it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore
and Mario Diaz. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. I'm Robert Scheer, and
we're doing this broadcast from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism, where Sebastian Grubaugh, as he often does, has made the show
work, and I want to thank him.
From comments: "Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document
breaks down once you focus on individual claims. " What?!?
Notable quotes:
"... FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier ..."
"... The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross. ..."
"... Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. ..."
"... Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison with the TRUMP team." ..."
FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the
"Steele Dossier," the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.
The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump
attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats,
reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross.
"We've talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere -- they don't believe that ever happened," said Miller during the
October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.
We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down... there's an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to
settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place
trying to - just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty . -Greg Miller
Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information
in his recent book, "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy."
Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down
once you focus on individual claims.
Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet
with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison
with the TRUMP team."
Cohen's alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also
because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele's 35-page report to validate or invalidate.
Debate over the salacious document was reignited when
McClatchy reported April 15 that
special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen
denied it at the time.
Cohen last denied the dossier's allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors
against President Donald Trump . Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel's
office. - Daily Caller
Cohen's attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his
New York case - that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg " Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier,
but he has never been to Prague in his life ."
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.
monkeyshine
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.
brewing_it
So here is a WaPo reporter saying they sent reporters to every hotel in Prague to find out if Cohen had been there, they spent
weeks and weeks researching, interviewing, and nothing. What they are not saying is that they also spent shitloads of Bezo's money
exploring all the other fake dossier claims.
And nothing.....all you hillarytards have been completely scammed by, your pulses sent aflutter with clickbait and page views
and thats it. So sorry you losers.
Demologos
Yeah, like rubles are worth anything outside of Russia. Gold on the other hand ...
But seriously, you two should get a room. If you can't see the conspiracy in the Strzok/Page texts, the setup of Papadapoulous
by the Brits, the phony FISA warrant using the FBI informant, the setup of General Flynn, and the seedy cast of characters in
the DOJ breaking laws right and left, you should be checked for brain wave activity. You probably think the Russians paid for
all of the above too. Go suck a bag of Russian dicks.
Now more than ever, it is obvious that the federal criminal
justice system (with help from within the intelligence community) is being corruptly used to
try to remove the president of the United States, who was nominated through the Republican
Party to be on the general election ballot, and who after the election and confirmation by the
Electoral College, was sworn into office. Roger Stone, a long-time acquaintance of Donald
Trump, was arrested on criminal charges filed by "special counsel" Robert Mueller.
What matters in the 24-page indictment are pages 21-23 (page 24 has yesterday's date). The
Mueller group bootstrapped Stone's appearance on 26 September 2017 before the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) into seven charges: five for making false statements
under the proverbial Title 18, U.S. Code, section 1001; one charge for obstructing a
"proceeding", which was the HPSCI event; and one for attempting to persuade and persuading
"Person 2" (probably Randy Credico) from testifying in the HPSCI event.
The charge of obstructing the HPSCI (count 1) is alleged to be: testifying falsely and
misleadingly at a HPSCI hearing in or around September 2017; failing to turn over and lying
about the existence of responsive records to HPSCI's requests about documents; submitting a
letter to HPSCI falsely and misleadingly describing communications with Person 2; and
attempting to have Person 2 testify falsely before HPSCI or prevent him from testifying. The
sections of Title 18 of the U.S. Code used in the indictment are in the notes below [1].
It would be interesting to know when and under what circumstances the transcript of Stone's
testimony to the HPSCI was given to the Mueller group. The whole thing involves who may or may
not have talked to whom at Wikileaks, called "Organization 1" in the indictment--
The e-mails released by Wikileaks revealed shenanigans at and by the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Stone was arrested at his Florida residence at 6:00 a.m. today by gun-toting FBI agents,
with the whole thing being filmed by -- surprise, surprise! -- the CNN television network,
which perhaps knew to be there after consulting a Ouija Board [2].
After appearing before a federal magistrate in Florida, Stone was released on his own
recognizance by a signature bond, so he did not have to deposit any bail money or get a bail
bond.
The case is filed in a federal district court in Washington D.C., and the presiding judge is
Amy Berman Jackson, who is the judge in Paul Manafort's case that is in the D.C. federal
courthouse. Cases are normally assigned to a court randomly when they are filed, and it is not
known if that procedure was followed in this instance.
Looks like the color revolution against Trump continues. What is interesting is that while
Trump position becomes more and more shaky he does not want to fight. And he suppounded himself
with people, which will sell him at the first opportunity. I means first of all this neocon
warmonger Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... It really does tell a story that exonerates Trump of the Russian collusion narrative but also exposes the desperation of Mueller to create a crime where none exists. ..."
"... Where is President Trump in all this? These are all actions taken by his DOJ and FBI appointees. Does he believe that his responsibility ends with a tweet? Why hasn't he hauled Whitaker, Rosenstein and Wray into his office and demanded equal application of the law with respect to Hillary, Clapper, Brennan and Comey lying to Congress? Why hasn't he declassified all the information around the role of Fusion GPS, Clinton campaign, FBI, DOJ, CIA with respect to interference in the presidential campaign? ..."
"... Is he not POTUS? Or is he just a character in a VR game? ..."
"... I think, for what's it worth, that the whole point to Mueller and all the legal harassment and arrests of people associated, even to a small extent with the Trump campaign, is to scare people away from working with Trump on the 2020 campaign and leave the Donald high and dry. That and create an illusion of criminality around Trump. Again, that's an uninformed opinion; just an opinion derived from what I see. Curious to know if you think there's any truth to it. Thx ..."
"... Eric, it's called "file stuffing " a bureaucratic name for assembling a mountainous pile of allegations - 99.9% of which are either trivial or false, that is too big and convoluted for any team of humans to refute in detail at one sitting. ..."
"... Mueller is following the Department of Injustice practice of throwing multiple charges at people, even though they know many of them won't stick, so as to drive up the costs of discovery. Thus looms the prospect financial ruin for all but the wealthiest of defendants. This induces them to plead guilty to lesser charges in order to preserve their retirement savings and possibly long prison sentences. ..."
"... DoJ career prosecutors are evaluated on their out-of-court settlement rates and this is how they achieve high ones. ..."
"... So much for the de facto right of a fair trial. IIRC, when the press got to stone after the court appearance he stated that he'll take this to trial. He may have second thoughts as the legal bills pile up. ..."
I have had to shut off all of the media. The media/establishment hatred of Trump and their
desire to force him from office is palpable and on near continuous display on every cable
channel, including Fox. These pundits remind me of the drowning passengers from the Titanic,
flailing frantically while immersed in freezing water but going no where but down. They are
keen on avoiding facts. Let's be clear what the facts are about Roger Stone.
FACT ONE
Roger Stone had an extremely short tenure with the Trump campaign. He served in an
undefined position as a "campaign advisor" and either quit or was fired on 8 August 2015.
Politico's account of the incident attributed Stone's departure to Trump's comments
regarding former Fox star, Megyn Kelly:
Regardless of who resigned or was fired first, the campaign shakeup was the first sign that
Trump's election effort was seriously damaged from within after his Thursday night debate
performance and his subsequent comments in which he attacked one of the Fox debate moderators,
Megyn Kelly.
Stone was never a critical component or the Trump campaign. He was not an insider and he was
not a "go to guy" for Trump's inner circle. The indictment smears Stone by an unsupported claim
that Stone had regular, continuing contact with unnamed persons affiliated with the Trump
campaign even after his August 2015 departure. Having conversations is not illegal. Moreover,
Stone was never a go to guy for the campaign.
FACT TWO
Roger Stone does have a history with Paul Manafort, who served a brief tenure as
Trump's campaign manager. They formed a political consulting firm in 1980--
Black, Manafort, Stone
and Kelly --and became known as bare knuckle brawlers in the world of electoral politics.
They worked for Reagan and for George H.W. Bush. Worth noting that Manafort's time with the
Trump campaign started off in March 2016--seven months after Stone's departure--as an advisor
on going after delegates. He was promoted to campaign manager on May 19, 2016 and resigned from
the campaign on August 19, 2016 under the cloud of
being cozy with
Putin :
The Trump campaign provided no reason for Manafort's resignation. But in the days
immediately leading up to the announcement, the
New
York Times reported investigators were looking into $12.7 million in undisclosed
cash payments to Manafort from former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, and the Associated
Press
reported he helped a pro-Russian party in Ukraine funnel money to lobbying firms in
Washington, D.C.
There is a lot of speculation about who Stone was talking to.
Person 1 in the
indictment is Jerome Corsi. Person 2 is Randy Credico. None were involved in any
substantive way with the Trump campaign. I would not be surprised if it was Manafort (or
someone acting at his behest) that reached out to Stone to see if he could get any additional
info about Wikileaks plans.
FACT THREE
Roger Stone is a bullshitter and grand raconteur. He can tell you things that
sound spot on but are not true. I have first hand experience with him on this point. I first
met Roger in the spring of 1980. I was teaching in the Washington Semester Program at American
University and he spoke to my class. I did not see Roger in person again until March of
2018--we were on the same flight from Fort Lauderdale enroute to Washington. I introduced
myself and we got reacquainted. Subsequent to that meeting I watched the documentary on Roger
Stone and was amused to see him "credited" (or blamed) for starting the Whitey rumor--i.e., the
claim that there was a video tape of Michelle Obama using the phrase Whitey in a speech before
a group linked to Louis Farrakhan. Why amused? I started that rumor at the direction of Sidney
Blumenthal (I did not believe it was a rumor but I was gamed--but that is a story for another
day).
I ran into Roger last August, again at the airport. This time it was Washington Reagan
National. I walked up to him and told him that he was being blamed for something I did. I
proceeded to tell the story and he laughed when he learned that this smear of Michelle came
from the Clinton Campaign. Roger is a connoisseur of dirty tricks.
With this background, I want you to take a fresh look at Mueller's indictment of Stone.
It really does tell a story that exonerates Trump of the Russian collusion narrative but
also exposes the desperation of Mueller to create a crime where none exists. (BTW, kudos
to Robert Willman for his excellent piece at Sic Semper).
During the summer of 2016, STONE spoke to senior Trump Campaign officials (NOT FURTHER
IDENTIFIED) about WIKILEAKS and information it might have had that would be damaging to the
Clinton Campaign. STONE was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to inquire about
future releases by Organization 1.
By in or around early August 2016, STONE was claiming both publicly and privately to have
communicated with WIKILEAKS. By in or around mid-August 2016, WIKILEAKS made a public statement
denying direct communication with STONE. Thereafter, STONE said that his communication with
WIKILEAKS had occurred through a person STONE described as a "mutual friend," "go-between," and
"intermediary." STONE also continued to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign about
WIKILEAKS and its intended future releases.
Here is what this really demonstrates. First, Stone was talking out of his ass. He was
portraying himself to people in the Trump campaign (probably Manafort) as a guy with inside
knowledge. Based on what I know about Stone, I am sure he was playing this angle in hopes of
getting back into the good graces of the Trump campaign. Second, if the Trump organization was
actively colluding with the Russians and Wikileaks, why were they asking Stone to find out what
Wikileaks had and what it intended to do with such material.
This is the most critical revelation, in my view, from this indictment--the Trump campaign
did not know what Wikileaks had or what it intended to do. They were reaching out to an
outsider--a third party--who claimed to have contacts with Wikileaks. But Stone did not. In
typical Roger Stone fashion, his story kept changing. Initially he insisted he was in direct
contact with someone there. Not true. He then admitted that he was relying on the word of Randy
Credico. That probably was the truth. But Credico's information was second hand. Randy Credico
knew the wife of Julian Assange's deceased attorney--Margaret Ratner Kunstler, widow of
William Kunstler.
She did have contacts at Wikileaks and was in a position to tell Credico that more dirt on
Clinton was coming. But Stone was parlaying third hand information to present himself as a guy
with inside knowledge. That's not criminal. That is typical of Washington and the world of
journalism.
What is being done to Roger Stone is wrong. He was playing politics and playing according to
Washington rules. It may not be pretty and may not be ethical. But it is not criminal and
certainly does not justify sending out a ninja clad SWAT team to take him into custody. I hope
some wealthy benefactors step up and help fund Stone's defense fund. He will win this case.
Mueller and his team are the ones who have crossed an ethical and moral line.
Thank you for that vital point that this indictment contradicts the Official Story that the
Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians in regards to the Wikileaks DNC info.
After Thursday's news that Trump had decided to recognize the coup government in
Venezuela, I chose to subject myself to the Rachel Maddow Show to see the official reaction
of the Resistance™. She spent the entire first section of the show rehashing a story
about security clearances from a year ago. Obviously, the MSM is confused whether to be
against it, because TRUMP BAD, or to be for it, because ST. OBAMA imposed sanctions on
Venezuela.
Mueller relieved them of the need to make those hard decisions by sending a heavily armed
swat team on a predawn raid of an extremely dangerous loudmouth old braggart. They could even
ignore the news that Elliot Abrams had been dragged back out of obscurity to oversee the rest
of the coup in Venezuela. How long before Secord and North are shipping weapons from Israel
to the noble freedom fighters of Venezuela?
RE: Roger Stone and his Pinocchio problems. To f***ing bad. As long as he has been around, if
he isn't smart enough to know that he can get his ass in a jam by lying to Congress or the
FBI, the dude isn't thinking too straight. This administration seems to have a problem with
truth telling, all the way from Trump to the numerous administration/campaign officials
indicted or plead guilty to lying to the FBI or Congress. Blaming Mueller for their dishonest
utterances is putting the shoe on the wrong foot.
Where is President Trump in all this? These are all actions taken by his DOJ and FBI
appointees. Does he believe that his responsibility ends with a tweet? Why hasn't he hauled
Whitaker, Rosenstein and Wray into his office and demanded equal application of the law with
respect to Hillary, Clapper, Brennan and Comey lying to Congress? Why hasn't he declassified
all the information around the role of Fusion GPS, Clinton campaign, FBI, DOJ, CIA with
respect to interference in the presidential campaign?
Is he not POTUS? Or is he just a character in a VR game?
Eric Newhill's comment is spot on. Why would anyone want to work for Trump's campaign and
be ruined financially and face legal jeopardy when all he does is tweet? His actions show
weakness and his opponents know it.
Jack, I'm assuming he is not doing those things because he is completely surrounded by the
Deep State who is already going after him one every front. Every time he has tried to cut
back on forever war he gets sabotaged by the Borg. The gov't is yuuuuge and Trump and his
small crew are peanuts compared to that. It's very difficult to make progress on his agenda
given the level of internal opposition he faces and how outnumbered he is.
From what I have
learned over the years the POTUS does not have much freedom. Obama talked about this too.
Why should they care when the FBI & DOJ are going after their opponent Trump's minions?
He is the one that should care that his guys are the ones being being targeted and not his
opponents.
What you say sounds right enough to me - though I kind of have to take it on faith because
I've never been anywhere near the world you describe.
However, I think, for what's it worth,
that the whole point to Mueller and all the legal harassment and arrests of people
associated, even to a small extent with the Trump campaign, is to scare people away from
working with Trump on the 2020 campaign and leave the Donald high and dry. That and create an
illusion of criminality around Trump. Again, that's an uninformed opinion; just an opinion
derived from what I see. Curious to know if you think there's any truth to it. Thx
Eric, it's called "file stuffing " a bureaucratic name for assembling a mountainous pile of
allegations - 99.9% of which are either trivial or false, that is too big and convoluted for
any team of humans to refute in detail at one sitting.
This file is then served up to a judge (or the Republican National Convention) with the
offered assumption that because the file is so voluminous, the allegations contained must be
substantially true.
I would expect to hear Trump labelled as a "troubled President" because, you know, he and
his campaign did all these illegal things, so he must be guilty of stuff, so he needs to be
impeached and can't stand in 2020, meh or whatever..........
Mueller is following the Department of Injustice practice of throwing multiple charges at
people, even though they know many of them won't stick, so as to drive up the costs of
discovery. Thus looms the prospect financial ruin for all but the wealthiest of defendants.
This induces them to plead guilty to lesser charges in order to preserve their retirement
savings and possibly long prison sentences.
DoJ career prosecutors are evaluated on their
out-of-court settlement rates and this is how they achieve high ones.
So much for the de
facto right of a fair trial. IIRC, when the press got to stone after the court appearance he
stated that he'll take this to trial. He may have second thoughts as the legal bills pile up.
Essentially they are trying to control the US foreign policy. That's a sign of the slide to neofascism as under
neofascism intelligence agencies have a political role and are instrumental in crashing the dissent.
Notable quotes:
"... The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy establishment. ..."
"... By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist NKVD. ..."
"... The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder, Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." ..."
"... Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television news. ..."
"... But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials." ..."
The Times claims that Trump "had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when
he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack the emails of his
opponent, Hillary Clinton." Given that this was a sarcastic campaign remark directed against
Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and delivered at a
public news conference, Trump's sally can hardly be construed as evidence of a conspiracy.
The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at
the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the
Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to
benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions
adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy
establishment.
By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or
the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and
conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist
NKVD.
The agency also investigated four of Trump's campaign aides over possible ties to Russia,
and even made use of the notorious Steele dossier, consisting of anti-Trump gossip collated
from Russian sources by a former British intelligence agent on the payroll of the Democratic
Party.
After Trump fired Comey, according to the Times , "law enforcement officials became so
concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working
on behalf of Russia against American interests Counterintelligence investigators had to
consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national
security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or
had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence."
The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid
rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder,
Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II
commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist
conspiracy."
Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American
politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of
the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television
news.
But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at
age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a
billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the
Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence
has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian
government officials."
While there is no evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and Moscow, the Times report itself
is evidence of a conspiracy involving the intelligence agencies and the corporate media to
overturn the 2016 presidential election - which Trump won, albeit within the undemocratic
framework of the Electoral College - and install a government that would differ from Trump's
chiefly in being more committed to military confrontation with Russia in Syria, Ukraine and
elsewhere.
A secret security investigation by a powerful police agency directed against an elected
president or prime minister can be described as nothing other than the antechamber to a coup by
the military or intelligence services.
Historically, the FBI has been at the center of such dangers in the United States. Its
founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, was notorious for his unchecked power, particularly during
the period of the McCarthy anticommunist witch hunt, when he accumulated dossiers on virtually
every Democratic and Republican politician and authorized widespread spying on civil rights and
antiwar groups.
President John F. Kennedy was so concerned that he installed his brother Robert as attorney
general - and nominal superior to Hoover - to keep watch over the bureau. That did not save
Kennedy from assassination in 1963 , an event linked in still undisclosed ways to ultra-right
circles, including Cuban exiles embittered by the Bay of Pigs disaster, Southern
segregationists, and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus up in arms over Kennedy's
signing of a nuclear test ban treaty with Moscow.
The New York Times report - and a companion piece published Sunday in the Washington Post
claiming that Trump has kept secret key details of his private conversations with Putin - serve
to legitimize antidemocratic and unconstitutional conduct by the military-intelligence
apparatus .
These reports shed light on the striking complacency in the "mainstream" media over Trump's
threats to declare a national emergency, using the pretext of his conflict with congressional
Democrats over funding of a border wall, which has led to a three-week-long partial shutdown of
the federal government.
If one takes for good coin the main contention of the reports by the two newspapers, their
acquiescence in a potential Trump declaration of emergency rule is inexplicable. After all, if
Trump is Putin's agent, then a Trump declaration of a state of emergency, giving him sweeping,
near-absolute authority, would put the United States under the control of Moscow.
The explanation is that the Times and the Post welcome the discussion of emergency rule, to
prepare the forces of the state for coming conflicts with the working class. Their only
disagreement with Trump is over which faction of the ruling elite, Trump or his opponents in
the Democratic Party, should direct the repression.
One thing is certain: if Trump declares a national emergency, or if, as the Post suggested
in an editorial, his opponents in the ruling elite declare a national emergency over alleged
Russian "meddling" as part an effort to remove him, it will represent an irrevocable break with
democracy.
It is impossible to determine which side in this sordid conflict is more reactionary. The
working class is confronted with two alternatives :
either the present political crisis will be resolved by one faction of the ruling elite
moving against the other, using the methods of palace coup and dictatorship, whose essential
target is the working class,
or workers will move en masse against the political establishment as a whole and the
capitalist system that it defends.
while we are waiting for the final FINAL report of the endless interminable Mueller
investigation, perhaps best to review the Mueller report of Feb. 16 2018, and the conclusions
it drew: it identified 13 Russian nationals who were part of an organized effort based in the
Internet Research Agency. Those 13 Russians were named and indicted; if they step foot in any
Western space, they will be arrested and charged.
Oh, and the Americans? none named, none charged, none involved, concludes the Mueller
team. This likely presages the wet firecracker of the Mueller final report, and its look into
the media echo chamber's bottomless rumour mill.
just as good as you , 1 week ago
You seem to have forgotten the 33 indictments of 'Americans'. You seem to have forgotten
the 4 guilty pleas, and the 7 jail terms.
Yada yada yada.
Moseby1 , 1 week ago
Who do you think you're kidding?
Paul Manafort
Rick Gates
George Papadopoulos
Michael Flynn
Michael Cohen
Richard Pinedo
Alex Van Der Zwaan
Konstantin Killmnik
Kudos. I was just getting tired of typing the list, hence the "Yada yada yada".
Thanks.
Andy_Waxman1 , 1 week ago
Some of it happened pre-campaign, some of it is seriously dumb (Manafort not reporting
that he had a contract with the Ukraine), but much is Crimes of the Investigation - that is,
a crime caused by investigation. 'You told us you met with him Tuesday, but you met with him
Friday, you lied to the FBI, federal crime!' Like John Kelly. The actual meeting wasn't a
crime, though. Someone else tried to dangle a poll, "most of which was public," said the NYT.
Double dumb.
At this point the Collusion Narrative is like the Pee Tape, waaaaay more Liberal
Wishful Fantasy than proof. So far, there's no there there. Just endless breathless NYT CNN
and Globe headlines. 'Nuclear war this weekend with NK!' Remember that one? Right wing
Birthers were fringe. Left wing Haters are MSM. Big hat, no cattle. Waiting for Bob M.
BuzzFeed Throws Hail Mary: Publishes New Trump Tower Moscow Docs
After last week's embarrassing debacle in which special counsel Robert Mueller issued a rare statement
calling bullshit on BuzzFeed over their Trump Tower Moscow report that Trump ordered his attorney Michael Cohen to lie about
the timeline, the beleaguered news outlet has taken a
second bite at the
apple with a new report (oddly written by a completely different journalist) refuting comments by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani
that "no plans were ever made" for the project.
Not so fast Rudy ...
In their new report, BuzzFeed claims that the Trump Tower Moscow idea was "led by Trump's then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his
associate Felix Sater" despite
writing in November that Sater both thought of and spearheaded the idea , turning to Cohen to "get it off the ground" while overpromising
that he could seal the deal through his Russian connections that never panned out.
Sater, a brash real estate promoter who pleaded guilty to racketeering in 1998 and became a
longtime
asset to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, had worked with the Trump Organization on deals in the past and said
he came up with the idea. Cohen, Sater recalled, said, "Great idea." -
BuzzFeed
Today's "gotcha," however is that the project had progressed much further than Giuliani claimed on Monday when he told the New
Yorker "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."
Not true , writes BuzzFeed' s Azeen Ghorayshi.
The president and his representatives have dismissed the project as little more than a notion -- a rough plan led by Trump's
then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his associate Felix Sater, of which Trump and his family said they were only loosely aware as
the election campaign gathered pace.
On Monday, his lawyer,
Rudy Giuliani ,
said "the proposal was in the earliest stage," and he went on to tell the
New Yorker that "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."
However, hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans, obtained by BuzzFeed News
over a year of reporting, tell a very different story. Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on
the banks of the Moscow River. -
BuzzFeed
Trump Tower Moscow hasn't exactly been a secret, admits BuzzFeed , noting that Donald Trump tweeted about it following the 2013
Miss Universe pageant, and writing in his book The Art of the Deal that he had been trying to expand his business empire into Russia
for over 30 years.
Over the last week, Giuliani admitted to the New York Times that the Trump Tower Moscow discussions were "going on from the day
I announced to the day I won," Giuliani quoted Trump as saying. He then
walked back those comments , claiming in a statement: "My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between
Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow 'project' were hypothetical and not based on conversations
I had with the President."
In other words, Giuliani is a walking gaffe machine - which we already knew.
That said, the Trump Tower moscow project appears to have been much more developed than anyone in the Trump camp has acknowledged.
According to a finalized letter of intent signed by Donald Trump on Oct. 28, 2015, the tower would have "approximately 250
first class, luxury residential condominiums."
It would be located in Moscow City, a former industrial complex outside of the city center that has since been converted into
an ambitious commercial district clustered with several of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe.
Its hotel portion would feature "approximately 15 floors" and contain "not fewer than 150 hotel rooms," the letter of intent
stated. The building would feature a luxury spa and fitness center, a commercial component "consistent with the overall luxury
level of the Property," and an office space "consistent with Class A luxury office properties," as well as "luxury" parking. -
BuzzFeed
Also in the plan was "The Spa By Ivanka Trump," as well as a $50 million penthouse suite that they would give to Russian President
Vladimir Putin. "My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units," Sater
told BuzzFeed in November. "All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin."
Show Trump the money
The Trump Organization stood to make $4 million on an up-front payment for the deal; 25% of which would be paid upon execution
of the licensing agreement, another quarter when they finalized a location, and the other half a week before the project's groundbreaking
- or two years after the execution of the licensing agreement, whichever came first.
From there on out, Trump's company would also get a cut of all the condominium sales at the tower, the agreement stated. From
the total selling price of each unit, his company would get 5% for sales up to $100 million, 4% for the next bracket up to $250
million, 3% for anything between that and $500 million, 2% for anything up to $1 billion, and thereafter, a solid cut of 1%. For
commercial and office spaces, it would get a 3% cut of all the rent. It'd get another 3% of sales on food and beverages, spa and
fitness center use, and conference fees.
The deal also stipulated how much Trump's management company would get paid for running operations at Trump Tower Moscow over
25 years. For the first five years, it would get 3% of all revenue generated by operating the hotel per month. Over the next two
decades, it'd receive a flat 4%. In addition, the management company would also receive a monthly "incentive fee" -- an additional
20% of the gross operating profit for the hotel -- subject to annual negotiations. -
BuzzFeed
At the end of the day, Trump Tower Moscow has never happened - and Trump himself has turned out to be the worst "Putin Puppet"
ever after slapping heavy sanctions on Moscow and selling Ukraine weapons that the Obama administration wouldn't.
"Let's make this happen and build a Trump Moscow," wrote Sater to Cohen in October of 2015. "And possibly fix relations between
the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. Help world peace and
make a lot of money, I would say that's a great lifetime goal for us to go after."
STOP THE ******* PRESSES..........BOMB SHELL......BOMB SHELL REPORT...THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN....ORANGE HAIR PRESIDENT SOON
TO BE WARING ORANGE JUMPSUIT....
Dateline Moscow 2013........
The crime:
American Developer explores possibilities of building a hotel in Moscow.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just
because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.
zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building
in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.
And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in
return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe
actually took place between the bribor and bribee.
I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.
Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born.
And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the
pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.
The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.
ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter
that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.
Pure, 100% commie bulls-.
These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down
one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.
We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!
And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then
find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed,
they move in for the kill - literally.
The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The
real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual
behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".
Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government,
we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are
surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back
against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.
Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your
pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.
Justin Case
Keep shoveling that Russia this, that, manure narrative for general consumption. What sanctions? Umm, I'll get back to you
after we extradite the Huawei CEO and extort billions from the corporation for doing business with our (Israel's) adversary.
You voted for this? He talks out of both sides of his mouth. Why do people vote to have someone rule over them?
Among few good things that Trump have done to the USA is that he destoryed credibility of
neoliberal MSM. They all are now firmly belong to the "fake news" catagory.
Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last
two and half years, they shook the earth with
a "bombshell" story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the
Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable
felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic
persons which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of
horseshit.
This time it was BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold, " a
reporter with a checkered past " (i.e., a history of inventing
his sources ) who broke the "bombshell" Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of
horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his
attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow,
thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this "bombshell" story were
allegedly "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the
matter."
Approximately twenty-four hours later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office (i.e., the
office "involved in an investigation of the matter") stated that the BuzzFeed story was "not
accurate," which is a legal term meaning "a bunch of horseshit."
BuzzFeed is standing by its story , and is working to determine what, exactly, Mueller's
office meant by "not accurate." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's Editor-in-Chief, has called on Mueller
"to make clear what he's disputing."
Liberals and other Trump-obsessives have joined in the effort to interpret the Special
Counsel's office's cryptic utterance. French hermeneuticists have been reportedly called in to
deconstruct the meaning of "accurate." Professional Twitter
semioticians are explaining that "not accurate" doesn't mean "wrong," but, rather, refers
to something that is "accurate," but which the user of the word doesn't want to disclose
publicly, or that legal terms don't mean what they mean or something more or less along those
lines.
But Greenwald's list is just a small sample of the Russiagate stories that have turned out
to be horseshit. For the record, here are several more:
"Seventeen intelligence agencies"
confirm Russia interfered in the U.S. elections (
New York Times ) Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum (
The Guardian ) Russia interfered in the German elections ( Reuters )
Russia hacked the French elections ( Politico and numerous other
outlets ) Michael Cohen conspired with the Russians in Prague ( BuzzFeed
)
I am using the terms "horseshit" and "a bunch of horseshit" (as opposed to terms like
"failures" and "errors"), not just to be gratuitously vulgar, but, also, to try to make a
point. One is not supposed to use these terms in connection with "serious," "respected" news
outlets. Which is why journalists like Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who have extensively
reported on the corporate media's ongoing production and dissemination of horseshit) do not use
such terms in the course of their reporting, and instead use less inflammatory terms like
"false," "inaccurate," "mistake," and "error." Principled journalists like Greenwald and
Maté are constrained by (a) their journalistic ethics, (b) their integrity, and (c)
their belief in the idea of a "free and independent press," which is one of the pillars of
Western democracy.
Being neither a respected journalist nor a believer in the existence of an "independent
press," I am under no such constraints. Because I'm not trying to get or keep a job, or
maintain a "respectable" reputation, I'm free to call a spade a spade and a bunch of horseshit
a bunch of horseshit. I am also free to describe "journalists" like Leopold,
Luke Harding ,
Craig Timberg ,
Franklin Foer , and many of their corporate media colleagues (not to mention
TV clowns like Rachel Maddow ) as the liars and rank propagandists they are. I don't need
to pretend their fabricated stories are simply the result of "shoddy journalism," or
"over-reliance on official sources," or any other type of "error" or "failure." These people
know exactly what they are doing, and are being extremely well paid to do it. They went to
school to learn how to do it. Then they butt-sucked and back-stabbed their way up the ladder of
establishment power to be able to do it.
Yes, of course, there are still principled journalists working for the corporate media, but
they are doing so by walking a very fine line. No one has to tell them where it is. Every
professional journalist knows precisely where it is, and what it is there for. Though they are
permitted to walk right up to it, occasionally (to keep them from feeling like abject whores),
one step over it and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and
excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask
Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.
If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as
the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they
have disseminated during the last two years, you'd have to be a total moron or a diehard
neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist
ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment
media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official
narrative of its ruling classes).
Sadly, there's no shortage of morons and cultists. I don't blame the morons, because well,
they're morons. The cultists are another species entirely. These are people who, no matter how
often the corporate media feed them another "explosive," "bombshell" Russiagate story that
turns out to be a bunch of horseshit, will defend the concept of the "independent media" like
head-shaven, bug-eyed Manson followers. Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs
and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing
spells. The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes)
is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism.
Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or
that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy.
Think about it dispassionately for a minute. Why would any ruling establishment permit a
genuinely "independent" press to disseminate ideas and information willy-nilly throughout
society? If it did, it wouldn't last very long.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again.
Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the
other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they
are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.
So let's not be shocked when the corporate media continue to bombard us with "bombshell"
stories about Trump and Russia that turn out to be horseshit. Personally, I welcome these
stories. The more corporate media horseshit the better! Who knows, if they dish out enough
blatant horseshit, more people might lose their "trust in the media," and begin to investigate
matters themselves. I know, that makes me a Nazi, right? Or at least a Russian propagandist? I
mean, encouraging folks to distrust the corporate media? Isn't there some kind of law against
that? Or have they not quite gotten around to that yet?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
The Associated Press (AP) reports the latest bad news for the press: " Just 6 Percent of
People Say They Trust the Media ."
Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson began: Trust in the news media is being eroded by
perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they
read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the
media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of
other institutions.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press,"
People inversely brag about their short comings.
Militarized police states brag about their freedom.
A well heeled synchophant brags about his independence.
Dudes with small dicks -- big belt buckle and big hat.
I used to listen to the BBC and NPR until the corporo-globalist bias became unbearable. I
laughed at incidents such as Marketplace mocking the public's concern about GMO's. But it
went off the rails in 2016. They may have backed off from Trump Derangement Syndrome a bit
since then, but I've noticed that they have to call themselves "credible." Maybe if they say
that enough times we'll believe it, eh?
The Greenwald link is pretty important and I bookmarked it. These fake news outlets do
everything in their power to scrub these mistakes from the Google machine once they happen.
They remove stories, videos -- everything, in the hopes of shoving it all down the memory
hole. And since other fake news outlets don't hold them accountable, they get away with it.
This is why it's important to take screen shots of fake news and download videos if possible,
to create a record that's permanent and useful when you need it.
More than 6% of the population are technically, and this is the technical term, retarded
-- they are mentally disabled.
I know it's obvious our media is propaganda, but I don't think it's quite so obvious such
that adults watching Sesame Street who fully enjoy it (nothing wrong with that!) are aware of
it.
I would like to think it's true, but I think the Associated Press article is not true,
after all, can you identify their funding sources?
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western
capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an
actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with
actual democracy.
Great article. Articles on this theme should be published daily. The fetish must be
destroyed.
There is at least one other person who calls corporate media what it is, and it ain't
"mainstream."
"Sparkie" ain't gonna be happy about it either."Sparky" chewed me out good for correcting
the incomparable and always superb Linh Dinh for using the disgusting and inaccurate term,
"mainstream" when referring to coprophilic media. Oh, and speaking of "horseshit" one wag
suggested we call it main steam media, for accuracy as well as for giggles and that's
fine by me.
the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent
press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The
Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding
you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic
programming.
It's blatantly obvious that the same can be said about the self-legitimizing term,
"mainstream," too, so bless you sir, and to (bleep) with the Sparkies of the world.
Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start
chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells.
Not only is Hopkins correct, but what he says about corporate media is not new. The Civil
Rights movement presented by the media was false. The media promotion of the US re-engaging
in Europe in the post WW1 period so we could defend dear ole England and sacred democracy.
The media preparing us for our need to fight WW1 so we could end all wars was false. The
media stirring us to go into Cuba and end the awfully evil Spanish Empire so we could start
the process of ending all empires
N o doubt it is a pleasure for you because C.J. Hopkins managed to scribble 1500
words about fake news without even once mentioning the CIA.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false."
-- CIA Director, William Casey
Of course, our resident Bumpkin of Unz would have you believe that the CIA is a
corporation.
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-- former CIA Director William Colby
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate -- a red herring, a
misleading label, a pig in a poke -- because it entirely excludes, avoids, overlooks, and
completely dismisses the role of our intelligence agencies in creating fake news ,
a.k.a. disinformation and propaganda.
The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling
classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This comes close to the term "regime media," which I like as a replacement for the
clunky-but-common terms "Mainstream Media" or MSM. "
Hopkins uses "corporate media," which appears fifteen times here including in the
title.
Several commenters have noted the problems with the term "mainstream media":
While better than "mainstream media," I'm not sure "corporate media" is sufficient.
"Corporate media," as a term, may wrongly convey the notion that the 'media' in question
complaisantly both [1] broadcasts the ruling ideology (interventionist capitalist
liberal democracy and multicultacracy) and [2] 'megaphones' (Steve Sailer's useful term)
against enemies thereto, coordinating our regular Two-Minute Hates.
That characterization misses an important point, to wit:
The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously
part of the ruling apparatus . Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the
side, but right at the regime's core. A useful distinction. Hence "regime media."
Jun. 14, 2012 These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
That's consolidated from *50* companies back in 1983. But the fact that a few companies
own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says.
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.
Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the
United States, the home country of both authors. Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one
of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the
field of education. By contrast, Walter Lippmann has been somewhat forgotten, though he
was a major journalist in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a widely familiar author at the
time, and wrote some cynical things about American democracy. The story America tells
itself politically is that since we're a democracy in which the citizens rule themselves,
there is a paramount need for an excellent public education so that the citizens can vote
wisely. We ourselves are the leaders. But of course it doesn't work that way in practice.
We actually have a surplus of ignorant and uninformed people who pay no attention to the
nuances of policy, and who vote based on the workings of demagoguery and short-sighted
self-interest. Any number of foolish decisions have been made by the American public.
This leads Lippmann to take the somewhat cynical line that America is destined to be
ruled by technocrats. We need experts to run things; the people are too clueless to rule
themselves. We'll pretend we have a democracy, but we actually don't. Now, Dewey reads
this, and he is temperamentally more optimistic, and he thinks: 'This is a really
stimulating book, but Lippmann is wrong. He is setting the bar too high for the people.
People were never supposed to be educated in depth about every issue, which is an
impossible demand. Even Lippmann doesn't have the time to master every issue, and he
covers politics for a living. Instead, Dewey says, political issues generate their own
publics in each case. I might care deeply about seven political issues. I might care
about national health insurance, but I don't care about gay marriage, or vice versa. So I
get involved in one debate and not the other. I take the trouble of becoming informed
about issues that interest me.
@Hail
Hail says: "The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself
consciously part of the ruling apparatus. Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on
the side, but right at the regime's core ":
Exactly. The MSM is the government [CIA/NSA/ etc. etc.] grinning right at you as
it continually lies , albeit behind a very thin veil of supposed integrity/respectability
that the general public still refuses to see through.
By way of illustration of this "outrageous" assertion of mine, here is part of a video
analysis of the original 5 channel US MSM "live" coverage of the morning of Sept. 11 2001,
which clearly demonstrates that on that morning, all 5 US networks broadcast entirely fake
"live" footage [ i.e. C.G.I. prefabricated imagery] for about 102 minutes :
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate
I never claimed it was perfect. I do claim that the term, "mainstream," in this context
is entirely inaccurate and misleading. And you should be nice, as you admonished me,
regarding the author of this article. As for your complaint that he didn't mention the CIA,
may I remind you that he wrote, as you noticed, an article, not an encyclopedia.
Anyway, you have yet to establish that the CIA and our corporate masters are entirely
separate entities. Even a Dumb Sheete such as myself would find it somewhat, if not
entirely, incredible if they were.
But of course too everyone knows by now that Jews, Israel and Mossad did 9/11 all by
their lonesomes, and the CIA and the Air Force had nothing to do with it.
Ahem, you forgot to mention big, coprophilic, media. Please try to practice the
inclusiveness that you preach.
one step over [the line] and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the
Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't
believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic
heretic.
To this list I might also add CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, and Larry Conners of KMOV-TV, who
had the big brass balls to question the $85 million the Obamas spent on vacations.
NR kicked Derb to the curb, but that gutter's littered with Internet flotsam who
presumed integrity.
@Sean
Sean says: "Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general
public in the United States, the home country of both authors. "
Debate summary: 2 know-it-alls debating about how "best" to run everybody else's lives
[and with straight faces, I've no doubt].
Two sides of the same [pro-statist] coin, in other words. Oh, and one minor issue one
"thinks" that a ruling technocracy is "the answer".
Sean says: "Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American
philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education."
You mean: Dewey was important in the field of "public education" , otherwise known as
brainwashing.
"... Only the minor Russian RT channel provides, up-to-a-point, some alternative views, defending the American, British and French people's sovereignty, but they can't do much. Paradoxically, RT does not broadcast in Russian and its English-language broadcasts can't be seen in Russia. The rest of the Russian media doesn't differ much from the Western variety. ..."
"... And not only for politics. They want to draw and implement their agenda on all topics disregarding our views. ..."
There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President.
Nobody defended him when he was
accused , brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he
called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with
NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his
Twitter account at his disposal.
The media
accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel's needs. Israel needs US troops in
Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs
the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide,
says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US
statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do
what is needed for them, not for Israel.
The US is not an exception. Millions of French people support the GJ, but not a single
newspaper, not a single TV channel gives them a platform. They are called anti-Semites for they
are revolted by Danny Cohn-Bendit and Bernard-Henri Levi, who are Jewish. They are also called
homophobes because they want to ban same-sex "marriage". They are being attacked by the
bankers' storm-troopers, the Antifa, and no media defends them.
Millions of Brits support Jeremy Corbyn, but all the mainstream media is against him, even
the state-supported BBC, even the Labour Guardian. Corbyn is accused of anti-Semitism, for
Corbyn speaks for the workers and against the bankers. Nobody defends him and there is no
mainstream media to speak for him.
Only the minor Russian RT channel provides, up-to-a-point, some alternative views, defending
the American, British and French people's sovereignty, but they can't do much. Paradoxically,
RT does not broadcast in Russian and its English-language broadcasts can't be seen in Russia.
The rest of the Russian media doesn't differ much from the Western variety.
The mainstream media from Tokyo to Paris to Los Angeles speaks in one voice. All other
opinions had been pushed out of mainstream discussion. It is good that we have the internet and
sites like Unz Review
that allow us to express our views. The problem is with delivery. How can we deliver to the
public? The real mainstream media has so many more views and viewers! For them, hundreds of
thousands or even millions of views are not unusual.
We need our social networks to deliver the ideas and exchange opinions, to inform readers of
our publications, to convince and rally. In over-populated, nuclearized world, with family and
neighbourhood ties torn, there is no substitute for these networks. And Facebook and Twitter
could help us. Google could help us.
Alas, they betrayed us, too. The social networks
And not only for politics. They want to draw and implement their agenda on all topics
disregarding our views.
BuzzFeed's credibility has been seemingly dented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's recent
dismissal of one of its 'Russiagate' stories. However, it is not the first time its stories on
Russia raised flags or were proven false. The New York-based news outlet has been holding
nothing back over the recent years as it diligently pressed the so-called 'Russiagate'
narrative about a supposed collusion between the US President Donald Trump and Moscow. Its
recent exploits, which claimed Trump told his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress to
cover up some of his dealings with Russia, however, apparently led it a bit too far, as it
earned a rebuke from the office
of Robert Muller – the man in charge of the investigation into the very same alleged
collusion, among other aspects of perceived Russia's meddling into the 2016 elections.
'After this I don't even know if I can trust Buzzfeed's cat listicles anymore'
https://t.co/b4vyIKJAUL
The news sparked a wave of criticism on
the social media, with many people saying that the news outlet's credibility is now
discredited.
But was it that flawless before?
Buzzfeed was the first to publish the infamous Steele dossier – a report by an MI6
spy-turned-private investigator – which contained unverified allegations that Russia held
information on Trump which it was using to blackmail the US president. It also alleged
sustained and close working contacts between Trump aides and Kremlin representatives.
None of these allegations, which were used by the FBI as a reason for obtaining a spy
warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, have been proven as of now. Instead, it was
revealed that the report
was based on information fed through people close to Hillary Clinton – Trump's rival at
the 2016 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, some of the reporters, who worked with the dossier, admitted that the
document's claims are "likely false." Christopher Steele himself also revealed
that one of his goals in compiling the report was to provide Clinton with a legal basis to
challenge the 2016 election results.
The publication of the dossier has brought a string of defamation lawsuits not only against
Steele but against BuzzFeed as well. The news media outlet was sued by the owners of a Russian
Alfa Bank and a Russian tech
expert Aleksey Gubarev who
were all mentioned in the infamous dossier. At the same time, Trump's personal lawyer also
filed a
defamation lawsuit against the company for pushing the Steele report.
However, Buzzfeed apparently does hope to get away with it. In case of Gubarev, a US court
already ruled in favor of the
news outlet in December 2018, citing a "fair report privilege." The businessman earlier
scolded the publication as "one of the most reckless and irresponsible moments in modern
journalism."
Steele was the source of another controversial episode in the history of BuzzFeed's attempts
to propagate the 'Russiagate' narrative. In March 2018, it claimed that the FBI was covering
the true causes of the death of a Russian media tycoon in Washington in 2015.
Citing a "secret report " by Steele, it claimed the man was allegedly killed by
associates of a Russian oligarch, who happens to be close to the Kremlin, the news outlet said.
A sheer coincidence, apparently. It also did not bother to give any plausible explanation as to
why the FBI, which did not hesitate to point a finger at Moscow in the past, would hide such
information at all.
Anyway, the whole story was debunked just days later
when the Metropolitan Police said the death of the tycoon was an accident. This fact did not
get much attention in the West, though. Neither did it cool BuzzFeed's ardor in stirring up
anti-Russian hysteria.
"Mounting a campaign against [financial] plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical
Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity.
What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for
those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of
the situation."
"... The French bourgeoisie is the politically most experienced ruling class in Europe. It has no illusions about the challenge it faces. Le Point put its file on the revolt of the vests under the self-telling title "What is waiting us". ..."
"... But it's not only the king who is naked. The whole system is naked. In the many pages devoted by the magazine to demonstrate that what the Vests want is unfeasible, not even a single serious word is written about what needs to be done to deal with the deep causes which led the French to revolt. Today's capitalism of Macron, Merkel and Trump does not produce a Roosevelt and New Deal or Popular Fronts – and we have to wait to see if it will produce a Hitler as some are trying to achieve. For the time being, it only produces Yellow Vests! ..."
"... In Oscar Wilde's masterpiece "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the main character looks every night at his horrible real self in the mirror. But he looks at it alone. ..."
"... This is where Macron made his most fatal mistake, being arrogant and markedly cut off from reality – with the confidence given to him by the mighty elite forces, which elected him and by his contempt of the common people which characterizes him. ..."
"... Observing Macron, the people understood what lied ahead for them. They felt their backs against the wall – they felt that they had only themselves to rely on, that they had to take themselves action to save themselves and their country. ..."
"... This was the decisive moment, the moment the historical mission of Macron was achieved . By establishing the most absolute control of Finance over Politics, he himself invited Revolution. His triumph and his tragedy came together. ..."
"... Many established "leftists" or "radical" intellectuals, who used to feverishly haul capitalism over the coals – although the last thing they really wanted was to experience a real revolution during their lifetime – they too, stand now frightened, looking at an angry Bucephalus running ahead of them. They prefer a stable capitalism, of which they can constitute its "consciousness", writing books, appearing on shows and giving lectures, analyzing its crises and explaining its tribulations. They idea that the People could at some point take seriously what they themselves said, never crossed their minds either! ..."
"... Today, four out of five French people disapprove of Macron's policies and one in two demands that he resigns immediately. We assume that this percentage is greater than the percentage of Russians who wanted the ousting of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917. ..."
"... France is currently almost in a state of Power Vacuum . The president and the government cannot in essence govern and the people cannot tolerate them. It is not a situation of dual power, but a situation of dual legitimacy , in Mélenchon 's accurate description. ..."
"... This is a typical definition of a revolutionary situation . As history teaches us, the emergence of such a situation is necessary but not sufficient condition for a victorious Revolution. What is required in or order to turn a rebellion into a potentially victorious Revolution, is a capable and decided leadership and an adequate strategy, program and vision. These elements do not seem to exist, at last not for now, in today's France, as they did not exist in May 1968 or during the Russian Revolution of February 1917. Therefore, the present situation remains open to all possible eventualities; there must be no doubt however, that this is the beginning of a period of intense political and class conflicts in Europe, and that the Europe, as we know it, is already history. ..."
"... Or at least, for the people to be given the opportunity to develop an effective way of controlling state power. ..."
"... By reversing Marx's famous formula in German Ideology , the ideas of the dominant class do not dominate society. This is why the situation can be described as revolutionary. ..."
"... Although it is difficult to form an opinion from afar about how the situation may unfold, the formation of a such a United Front from grassroots could perhaps offer a way out with regards to the need for a political leadership for the movement, or even of the need to work out a transitional economic program for France, which must also serve as a transitional program for Europe . ..."
"... Contrary to how things were a century ago, certain factors such as the educational level of the lower social classes, the existence of a number of critical, radical thinkers with the necessary intellectual skills and the Internet, render such a possibility a much more realistic scenario today, than in the past. ..."
The magazine LePoint is one of the main media outlets of the French
conservative "centre-right". One of its December issues carries the cover title France
Faces its History. 1648, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 four centuries of revolutions.
The cover features also a painting by Pierre-Jérôme Lordon, showing people
clashing with the army at Rue de Babylone , in Paris, during the
Revolution of 1830. Perhaps this is where Luc Ferry, Chirac's former minister, got his idea
from, when, two days ago, he asked the Army to intervene and the police to start shooting and
killing Yellow Vests.
Do not be surprised if you haven't heard this from your TV or if you don't know that the
level of police repression and violence in France, measured in people dead, injured and
arrested, has exceeded everything the country has experienced since 1968. Nor should you
wonder why you don't know anything about some Yellow Vest's new campaign calling for a
massive run on French banks. Or why you have been lead you to believe that the whole thing is
to do with fuel taxes or increasing minimum wage.
The vast majority of European media didn't even bother to communicate to their readers
or viewers the main political demands of the Yellow Vests ; and certainly, there hasn't
been any meaningful attempt to offer an insightful interpretation of what's happening in
France and there is just very little serious on-the-ground reporting, in the villages and
motorways of France.
Totalitarianism
Following Napoleon's defeat in Waterloo, European Powers formed the Holy Alliance banning
Revolutions.
Nowadays, Revolutions have just been declared inconceivable (Soros – though not just
him – has been giving a relentless fight to take them out of history textbooks or, as a
minimum, to erase their significance and meaning). Since they are unthinkable they cannot
happen. Since they cannot happen they do not happen.
In the same vein, European media sent their journalists out to the streets in Paris on
Christmas and New Year's days, counted the protesters and found that they weren't too many
after all. Of course they didn't count the 150,000 police and soldiers lined up by Macron on
New Year's Eve. Then they made sure that they remain "impartial" and by just comparing
numbers of protesters, led viewers to think that we are almost done with it – it was
just a storm, it will pass.
The other day I read a whole page article about Europe in one of the most "serious" Greek
newspapers, on 30.12. The author devoted just one single meaningless phrase about the Vests.
Instead, the paper still found the way to include in the article the utterly stupid statement
of a European Right-Wing politician who attributed the European crisis to the existence of
Russia Today and Sputnik! And when I finally found a somewhat more serious article online
about the developments in France, I realized that its only purpose was to convince us that
what is happening in France surely has nothing to do with 1789 or 1968!
It is only a pity that the people concerned, the French themselves, cannot read in Greek.
If they could, they would have realized that it does not make any sense to have "Revolution"
written on their vests or to sing the 1789 song in their demonstrations or to organize
symbolic ceremonies of the public "decapitation" of Macron, like Louis XV. And the French
bourgeois press would not waste time everyday comparing what happens in the country now with
what happened in 1968 and 1789.
Totalitarianism is not just a threat. It's already here. Simply it has omitted to
announce its arrival. We have to deduce its precence from its results.
A terrified
ruling class
The French bourgeoisie is the politically most experienced ruling class in Europe. It has
no illusions about the challenge it faces. Le Point put its file on the
revolt of the vests under the self-telling title "What is waiting us".
A few months ago, all we had about Macron in the papers was praise, inside and outside of
France – he was the "rising star" of European politics, the man who managed to pass the
"reforms" one after the other, no resistance could stop him, he would be the one to save and
rebuild Europe. Varoufakis admired and supported him, as early as of the first round of the
2017 elections.
Now, the "chosen one" became a burden for those who put him in office. Some of them
probably want to get rid of him as fast as they can, to replace him with someone else, but
it's not easy – and even more so, it is not easy given the monarchical powers conferred
by the French constitution to the President. The constitution is tailored to the needs of a
President who wants to safeguard power from the people. Those who drafted it could not
probably imagine it would make difficult for the Oligarchy also to fire him!
And who would dare to hold a parliamentary or presidential election in such a situation,
as in France today? No one knows what could come out of it. Moreover, Macron does not have a
party in the sense of political power. He has a federation of friends who benefit as long as
he stays in power and they are damaged when he collapses.
The King is naked
"The King is naked", points out Le Point's editorial, before, with almost sadistic
callousness, posing the question: "What can a government do when a remarkable section of the
people vomits it?"
But it's not only the king who is naked. The whole system is naked. In the many pages
devoted by the magazine to demonstrate that what the Vests want is unfeasible, not even a
single serious word is written about what needs to be done to deal with the deep causes which
led the French to revolt. Today's capitalism of Macron, Merkel and Trump does not produce a
Roosevelt and New Deal or Popular Fronts – and we have to wait to see if it will
produce a Hitler as some are trying to achieve. For the time being, it only produces Yellow
Vests!
They predicted it, they saw it coming, but they didn't believe it!
Yet they could have predicted all that. It would have sufficed, had they only taken
seriously and studied a book published in France in late 2016, six months before the
presidential election, highlighting the explosive nature of the social situation and warning
of the danger of revolution and civil war.
The title of the book was "Revolution". Its author was none other than Emmanuel Macron
himself. Six months later, he would become the President of France, to eventually verify, and
indeed rather spectacularly, his predictions. But the truth is probably, that not even he
himself gave much credit to what he wrote just to win the election.
By constantly lying, politicians, journalists and intellectuals reasonably came to believe
that even their own words are of no importance. That they can say and do anything they want,
without any consequence.
In Oscar Wilde's masterpiece "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the main character looks every
night at his horrible real self in the mirror. But he looks at it alone.
This is where Macron made his most fatal mistake, being arrogant and markedly cut off from
reality – with the confidence given to him by the mighty elite forces, which elected
him and by his contempt of the common people which characterizes him.
Unwise and Arrogant, he made no effort to hide – this is how sure he felt of
himself, this is how convinced his environment was that he could infinitely go on doing
anything he wanted without any consequences (same as our Tsipras). Thus, acting foolishly and
arrogantly, he left a few million eyes to see his real face. This was the last straw that
made the French people realize in a definite way what they had already started figuring out
during Sarkozy's and Hollande's, administration, or even earlier. Observing Macron, the
people understood what lied ahead for them. They felt their backs against the wall –
they felt that they had only themselves to rely on, that they had to take themselves action
to save themselves and their country.
There was nobody else to make it in their place.
Macron as a Provocateur.
Terror in Pompeii
This was the decisive moment, the moment the historical mission of Macron
was achieved . By establishing the most absolute control of Finance over Politics, he himself invited
Revolution. His triumph and his tragedy came together.
It was just then, that Bucephalus (*) sprang from the depths of historical Memory,
galloping without a rider, ready to sweep away everything in his path.
Now those in power look at him with fear, but fearful too are both the "radical right" and
the "radical left". Le Pen has already called on protesters to return to their homes and give
her names to include in her list for the European election!
Mélenchon supports the Vests – 70% of their demands coincide with the program
of his party, La France Insoumise – but so far he hasn't dared to join the
people in demanding Macron's resignation, by adopting the immense, but orphan, cry of the
people heard all over France: "Macron resign". Perhaps he feels that he hasn't got the steely
strength and willpower required for attempting to lead such a movement.
The unions' leadership is doing everything it can to keep the working class away from the
Vests, but this stand started causing increasing unrest at its base.
Many established "leftists" or "radical" intellectuals, who used to feverishly haul
capitalism over the coals – although the last thing they really wanted was to
experience a real revolution during their lifetime – they too, stand now frightened,
looking at an angry Bucephalus running ahead of them. They prefer a stable capitalism, of
which they can constitute its "consciousness", writing books, appearing on shows and giving
lectures, analyzing its crises and explaining its tribulations. They idea that the People
could at some point take seriously what they themselves said, never crossed their minds
either!
In fact, this is also a further confirmation of the depth of the movement. Lenin ,
who, in any event knew something about revolutions, wrote in 1917: "In a revolutionary
situation, the Party is a hundred times farther to the left than the Central Committee and
the workers a hundred times farther to the left than the Party."
"Revolutionary
Situation" and Power Vacuum
Today, four out of five French people disapprove of Macron's policies and one in two
demands that he resigns immediately. We assume that this percentage is greater than the
percentage of Russians who wanted the ousting of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917.
France is currently almost in a state of Power Vacuum . The president and
the government cannot in essence govern and the people cannot tolerate them. It is not a
situation of dual power, but a situation of dual legitimacy , in
Mélenchon 's accurate description.
This is a typical definition of a revolutionary situation . As history
teaches us, the emergence of such a situation is necessary but not sufficient condition for a victorious Revolution. What is required in or order to turn
a rebellion into a potentially victorious Revolution, is a capable and decided leadership and
an adequate strategy, program and vision. These elements do not seem to exist, at last not
for now, in today's France, as they did not exist in May 1968 or during the Russian
Revolution of February 1917. Therefore, the present situation remains open to all possible
eventualities; there must be no doubt however, that this is the beginning of a period of
intense political and class conflicts in Europe, and that the Europe, as we know it, is
already history.
People's Sovereignty at the center of demands
Starting from fuel tax the revolting French have now put at the centre of their demands,
in addition to Macron's resignation, the following:
preserving the purchasingpower of the poorest social strata, e.g.
with the abolition of VAT on basic necessities to ensure decent standards of living for the
entire population,
the right of people to provoke referendums on any issue, the Citizens'
Initiative Referendum (RIC), including referendums to revokeelectedrepresentatives (the President, MPs, mayors, etc. ) when they violate their mandate,
all that in the context of establishing a SixthFrenchRepublic .
In other words, they demand a profound and radical " transformation " of the
Western bourgeois-democratic regime, as we know it, towards a form of directdemocracy in order to take back the state, which has gradually and in a totalitarian
manner – but while keeping up democratic appearances – passed under direct and
full control of the Financial Capital and its employees. Or at least, for the people to be
given the opportunity to develop an effective way of controlling state power.
These are not the demands of a fun-club of Protagoras or of some left-wing or right-wing
groupuscule propagating Self-Management or of some club of intellectuals. Nor are they the
demands of only the lowest social strata of the French nation.
They are supported, according to the polls and put forward by at least three quarters of
French citizens, including a sizeable portion of the less poor. In such circumstances, these
demands constitute in effect the Will of the People, the Will of the Nation.
The Vests are nothing more than its fighting pioneers. And precisely because it is the
absolute majority of people who align with these demands, even if numbers have somewhat gone
down since the beginning of December, the Vests are still wanted out on the streets.
By reversing Marx's famous formula in German Ideology , the ideas
of the dominant class do not dominate society. This is why the situation can be
described as revolutionary.
And also because it is not only the President and the Government, who have been debunked
or at least de-legitimized, but it's also the whole range of state and political
institutions, the parties, the unions, the "information" media and the "ideologists" of the
regime.
The questioning of the establishment is so profound that any arguments about violence and
the protesters do not weaken society's support for them. Many, but not all, condemn violence,
but there are not many who don't go on immediately to add a reminder of the regime's social
violence against the people. When a famous ex-boxer lost his temper and reacted by punching a
number of violent police officers, protesters set up a fundraising website for his legal
fees. In just two hours they managed to raise around 120.000 euro, before removing the page
over officials' complaints and threats about keeping a file on anyone who contributes money
to support such causes.
Until now, an overwhelming majority of the French people supports the demands while an
absolute majority shows supports for the demonstrations; but of course, it is difficult to
keep such a deadlock and power-void situation going for long. They will sooner or later
demand a solution, and in situations such as these it is often the case that public opinion
shifts rapidly from the one end of the political spectrum to the other and vice versa,
depending on which force appears to be more decisive and capable of driving
society out of the crisis.
The organization of the Movement
Because the protesters have no confidence in the parties, the trade unions, or anyone else
for that matter, they are driven out of necessity into self-organization, as they already do
with the Citizens' Assemblies that are now emerging in villages, cities and motorway camps.
Indeed, by the end of the month, if everything goes well, they will hold the first "
AssemblyofAssemblies ".
Similar developments have also been observed in many revolutionary movements of this kind
in various countries. A classic example is the spontaneous formation of the councils (
Soviets ) during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.
Although it is difficult to form an opinion from afar about how the situation may unfold,
the formation of a such a United Front from grassroots could perhaps offer a
way out with regards to the need for a political leadership for the movement,
or even of the need to work out a transitional economic program for
France, which must also serve as a transitional program for Europe .
Contrary to how things were a century ago, certain factors such as the educational level
of the lower social classes, the existence of a number of critical, radical thinkers with the
necessary intellectual skills and the Internet, render such a possibility a much more
realistic scenario today, than in the past.
Because the movement's Achilles' Heel is that, while it is already in the process of
forming a political proposition, it still, at least for now, does not offer any economic
alternative or a politically structured, democratically controlled leadership.
Effective Democracy is an absolute requirement in such a front, because it is the
only way to synthesize the inevitablydifferentlevels of
consciousness within the People and to avoid a split of the movement between "left"
and "right", between those who are ready to resort to violence to achieve their ends and
those who have a preference for more peaceful, gradual processes.
Such a " front " could perhaps also serve as a platform for solidifying a
program and vision, to which the various parties and political organizations could
contribute.
In her CritiqueoftheRussianRevolutionRosaLuxemburg , the leader of the German Social Democracy was overly critical
of the Bolsheviks , even if, I think, a bit too severe in some points. But she closes
her critique with the phrase: " They at least dared "
Driven by absolute Need, guided by the specific way its historical experience has formed
its consciousness, possessing a Surplus of Consciousness, that is able to feel the
unavoidable conclusions coming out of the synthesis of the information we all possess, about
both the "quality" of the forces governing our world and the enormous dangers threatening our
countries and mankind, the French People, the French Nation has already crossed the
Rubicon.
By moving practically to achieve their goals at a massive scale, and regardless of what is
to come next, the French people has already made a giant leap up and forward and, once more
in its history, it became the world's forerunner in tackling the terrible economic,
ecological, nuclear and technological threats against human civilization and its
survival.
Without the conscious entry of large masses into the historical scene, with all the
dangers and uncertainties that such a thing surely implies, one can hardly imagine how
humanity will survive.
The problem is not Russia; the problem is the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. And related legitimization of neoliberal
elite, which now Deep State is trying ot patch with anti-Russian hysteria
Notable quotes:
"... That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present. ..."
Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia.
Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy | The Nation
The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship
-- why mince words and call it "collusion"? -- with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.
Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will
not produce the hoped-for "bombshell" to end Trump's presidency. Certainly,
New York Times columnist
David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, "The president must go," his drop line exhorting, "What are we waiting for?" (In some
countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have
now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no
facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.
And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times '
own recent "bombshells,"
published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials "began investigating whether [President Trump]
had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests." None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those "agents
and officials" almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual,
the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly
in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.")
Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the "news" almost daily in the synergistic print and
cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times , The Washington
Post , MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott,
President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution.
According to Talbott
, "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker . Trump has been colluding
with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency." In fact, we do not "know" any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated
suspicions and allegations.
In this cult-like commentary, the "threat" of "a hostile Russia" must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth,
Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.)
For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI
lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless,
the Times quotes Page
at length : "In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western
alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability to spread our democratic ideals."
Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though
for the Times , in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.
Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened "threat" represented by "Putin's Russia." If true, we would expect
the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has
done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because,
according to The Washington Post , he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed
the records of their private talks, sure signs of "treasonous" behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin
summit in Helsinki in July 2018.
It's hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth
is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged "private
time" for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership
they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies
often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev's détente policies with
Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump's proclaimed goal of "cooperation
with Russia.")
That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy
of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding
information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo
afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin
leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present.
Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October
1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took
notes -- the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result,
in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range
ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)
And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump's meetings
with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep
America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years -- and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the
two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book
War with Russia? -- that anti-Trump
Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.
The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev
met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied
by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed
in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book
War with Russia? From Putin and
Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate . This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian
Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is
here . Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at
TheNation.com . )
Buzzfeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity
Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares
Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost
Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a
Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to
Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three
Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its
Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew
in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either:
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and
Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to
the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times c laimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme
indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to
turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining
their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems
instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news
consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
"... In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class, most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep State. They now run the show. ..."
Great article and right on target. In fact, we don't have a real democracy anymore. We have a
Potemkin Village democracy. Our national legislature is paralyzed and impotent. And honestly,
that's the way its membership likes it. Pretend to govern. Hold tight to the seats of
privilege and status.
In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a
single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever
the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class,
most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep
State. They now run the show.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media plays the role of Orwell's Squealer the Pig from Animal
Farm. Propagandists. Purveyors of fake news and fake truth. This is not going to end well.
The only question is how and when the ending comes.
Yep,
The party has circled its wagons.
They insist that the Evil Vlad stole the last election.
Therefore, no need to examine Obama's centrist/neoliberal policies and the socio-economic
conditions that fueled the rejection of Hillary.
We're doomed to repeat our errors.
The farcical DNC leadership echoes the days of Brezhnev's intransigent politburo.
This is the realistic perspective we have to adopt in the US: the Democratic establishment
is part of the neoliberal machinery that has generated Bush's wars, Obama's bank bailouts,
deportations, and drone executions, and now Trump's anti-democratic populism.
"... Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly stayed on-message. ..."
In regards to the Hillary v Bernie question, it also didn't help that the primary vote was
wildly skewed by so-called 'superdelegates,' who don't actually commit their votes until the
DNC convention, but were being counted by the media as having already voted for Hillary,
which made it appear to many of the uninformed that Bernie didn't have any chance of winning,
which may have been intended to keep Bernie supporters home on primary day under the
assumption that Hillary was unbeatable.
As sensible as your suggestions may be, what you're calling for would require at least three
constitutional amendments to be practical - including scrapping the first amendment.
Maybe we should strive towards attainable goals instead?
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad. Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
Progressive believe in inclusion and if that is "moralistic rhetoric" then so be it.
The litany goes "round and round.
Hillary Clinton:
" you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you
name it!
"Barack Obama:
"Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the
presidential hopeful said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion "
Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him
in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly
stayed on-message.
Half of Americans don't bother voting for president. Why is the American media full only of people who insist that the country
is divided in half between Democrat and Republican supporters? Where are the people of influence who think it's a problem and
reflects poorly on the country that half of eligible voters don't see a reason to participate, and that it's worth changing things
in order to get more people to change their minds about that?
Both parties are content with being unpopular, but with political mechanisms ensuring they stay in power anyway. The Democrats
aren't concerned with being popular. They're content with being a token opposition party that every once in a while gets a few
token years with power they don't put to any good anyway. It pays more, I guess.
It still looks like if Americans want to live in a progressive country, they'll have to move to one. But as it is clear that the
neoliberalism of establishment Democrats has little or nothing to offer the poor and working class, or to non-wealthy millennials,
the times they are a-changing.
These corporate-Dem candidates are not being forced to sell out to win elections. Quite the
opposite in fact. They are risking losing their elections for the sake of selling out.
Surely, many will comment that Democrats have no choice but to take the money in order to be
competitive. I have one truism for such folks to ponder: Why would you trust your allegiance
to those who don't care if you win?
Basic logic: rich people win the general election either way, so long as the
primary-winning Democrat is in their pocket (the GOP is always on their side). So this
monetary affection is certainly more about fixing an no-lose general than it is about ousting
Trump, or any Republican.
Very accurate review of the agenda aimed at overturning the results of the Election of 2016.
The Deep State is exposed. Corruption, deceit, bias at the upper levels of the FBI, CIA,
Department of Justice, Clinton Foundation & how they attempted to undermine the President
of the U.S.
OK, now Russiagate reached the level when books are written about it ;-). It is clear to any non-biased observer that a color
revolution was launched against Trump by the Deep State using their stooges in Depart of Justice and FBI (Rosenstein and FBI
cabal). Probably coordinated by Brennan, to who essentially McCabe and Strzok reported.
All pretention of democracy and due legal procedure were thrown into the garbage can with amazing ease. And Witch hunt was
unleashed on such a scale that it would make Staling propagandists during Show Trials to blush.
First of all, I am neither a Republican or a Democrat. I have voted on the qualifications of the candidates since I was first
eligible. Many years ago many. I have voted in every single election except for this last Presidential one. And, many by absentee
ballot as I served 20 years in the United States Navy and am now a proud retired USN Chief Petty Officer. Notice I said except
for this last election .I absolutely could not vote for either candidate.
Why? My main objection to voting for Clinton was her handling of the emails. My career in the US Navy involved handling classified
material on a daily basis. And, a Top Secret clearance for the last 6 of my 20 years. And, these clearances were not given out
freely. From receipt of the message to the destruction, every single step every one was recorded and upon destruction, two witnesses
were required. I had more reservations about voting for her but the mishandling of the emails was the major one.
As for voting for Trump, I just could not force myself to vote for him.. Enough said.
I ordered this book to see what Jason Chaffetz , Former Congressman and Chairman of the House Oversight Committee had to say
about the state of affairs in the US. To paraphrase the author the Deep State exists to control information available to the American
public. They don't like exposure, accountability or responsibility in their tactics.
The Transportation Security Agency, the Secret Service, Whistle Blowers, the Veterans Administration problems including Phoenix,
AZ, Fast and Furious scandal, illegal immigration (including catch and release), the Benghazi attack and many more topics are
covered.
The Freedom of Information Act (1966) was detailed in depth including the 9 exceptions to this act. Requests doubled during
the O'Bama Presidency and many requests were denied. It also appears that this is one area that needs to be reformed. And, along
with that comes much more transparency in our government.
One thing I have never understood is the reason that it is so difficult to fire government employees. I did work for 3 agencies
after I retired from the US Navy and found it mind boggling that it was nearly impossible. If one was fired, the Merit Protection
Board stepped in to assist. The entire system of Federal Employees should be overhauled, in my opinion. And, the number of Federal
employees not paying their taxes continues to increase...
Bottom line is that despite the checks and balances in the Congress, they are not being utilized. Our faith in government is
gone and without faith, our nation is suffering.
After reading this, my eyes have been opened in many areas. Do I believe a Deep State exists in the US? Yes, I do. The author
provides many, many examples which are backed up with statistics. Time to do major overhaul and put more transparency back in
our government.
Wanted to edit by adding a few sentences...My AHA moment was when the author went with LCOL Wood (Utah National Guard) on 12
SEP 2012 to visit Benghazi. Jeremy Freeman was present and representing FOIA. He was denied access to a meeting due to his security
clearance not being high enough. Who did he call to try and gain access in the middle of the night? Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's
assistant. . Didn't work as access was still denied. What was this about? It was explained in 'The Deep State'.
Highly recommended.
Note:
Nearly the last 20 % on my Kindle were acknowledgements and an Index. It was stated that the 'index does not match the edition
from which it was created'. So, use the search tools for your E book instead.
This very well written, easy to read for all, book is a composition of several stories of what should be routine successful
United States Congressional oversight over the last 10 years that has allow an administration to defaecate on the rule of law.
In my six years in "The Swamp" I did not meet with Mr. Chaffetz but I appreciated his speaking, now writing style, and the wit
that comes across in this publication.
I ordered this book last month to hear Jason Chaffetz's, Former Congressman and Chairman of the House Oversight Committee,
story regarding the state of affairs of congress during the Obama Regime. To paraphrase the author the Deep State exists to control
information available to the American public. They dislike "Sunshine which is the best disinfectant", accountability or responsibility
in their tactics which we are seeing exposed every night for the last 2 years!
The book confirms my impressions and experience of the existence of the deep state and the governmental groups that continue
to take advantage of the American taxpayer. Chaffetz provides examples where the Deep State continues to impede progress and efficiency
within the US Government. He presents congress as a "Paper Tiger" with impotent and absent oversight due to a growing government.
The Obama Administration had its way with congress for eight long years probably due to the poor leadership at the top, John Boehner
and Paul Ryan, which allowed and undermined the authority of congress to provide oversight (US Code 192).
Chapter eight regarding Benghazi Terrorist Attack which the president, secretary of state, and the UN ambassador outright lied
is very disturbing. It is a prime example of how government agencies block and distort the truth from the American peoples' representatives.
If today with almost 350 million inhabitants in the country and a government three times the size of the 1960's The Deep State
can successfully manipulate the events of the last ten years and the present resist movement on the Trump agenda; with a smaller
government The Deep State could have conspired to assassinate our 35th president.
In several places in the book I noticed the author's animus with government employees earning more that the legislators which
was my experience and exposed to during my times in and out of government. The guide in the last chapter on how to fight the Deep
State is laid out with sound logic and common sense. If congress is too small as the author states to deal with this government
expansion, then allow an outside agent as Judicial Watch (who seems to be more effective) perform the oversight under contract!
Thank God for Jason Chaffetz for writing this must read for every taxpayer.
This is a GREAT book for our times. Chaffetz did this country a GREAT service by writing about his first hand knowledge on how
the Deep State is destroying the United States. The book is super easy to read and very interesting, so practically anyone can
understand it and "enjoy" it. Some of the things that he shares/exposes follow (it's all in the book):
1. The unaccountable Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created by Elizabeth Warren and her minions was "purposely
designed to bypass Congress, checks, and balances, and oversight. It is funded by the Federal Reserve," which means Congress can't
cut its purse strings. What does the CFPB spend its money on? No one knows, because they aren't accountable to anyone and yet
the CFPB is one of the larger government agencies. This agency needs to be shut down.
2. David Nieland (DHS inspector general's office) admitted that he and his staff were directed to delay the report of the investigation
of the Secret Services trysts with prostitutes in foreign countries until after the 2012 election.
3. The DOJ refuses to accept cases of contempt of Congress unless they happen to agree with the case. Furthermore, they refuse
to investigate and charge Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner and other corrupt individuals. These people got off scot-free
with pensions and no punishments for crimes committed.
4. John Koskinen misled and lied to Congress and got off scot-free (page 90).
5. The State Department sent a "spy" to watch over and listen to former Congressman Chaffetz' overseas investigation into the
Benghazi incident. This man, Jeremy Freeman, did not have the security clearance to sit in on some of the briefings, which ultimately
led to a confrontation. Freeman was apparently reporting back to Clinton and her staff so that they could be aware of what information
might be made public which would counter their spin (remember Rice's false claim that the Benghazi incident was entirely cause
by a You Tube video).
6. The State Dept. abandoned the American heroes from Benghazi and left them overseas (page 125) and would not pay to fly them
home. They had to find their own way and pay their own way. Furthermore, these men had the security clearances revoked immediately
after the incident.
7. The Deep State prints thousands of pages of irrelevant material when a demand is made to turn over documents on some subject
to Congress. This is a normal operational procedure for them. They only hold back the important documents that incriminate the
person in question or the issue at hand. They publicly claim having turned over tens of thousands of pages of documents to Congress,
but most of them are copies of websites, copies of magazine articles and other irrelevant material that has very little (or nothing)
to do with the original demand.
8. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is just as reluctant to charge Hillary Clinton as was his predecessor. He has something to hide
just like the rest of them (page 154). What happened to putting criminals in prison???
9. Chaffetz wrote "It's undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day." (p. 158)
10. "The Deep State benefits from illegal immigration." (page 179) This is because it requires a larger government (allowing for
more Deep State cronies) to "figure" out the immigration problem and they are very good at persuading illegals to vote for socialists
(Democrats).
11. G--gle, A--z-n, and the big tech firms "rent" workers from other countries and pay them very, very low salaries. These are
people on H1B visas. This is all while the tech leaders are calling for higher minimum wages etc... (page 180)
12. The number one H1B visa employer in Brooklyn in 2018 is JP Morgan Chase.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The stories are compelling. The facts are there from a U.S. Congressman who served 8.5
years. It's time for all patriotic American's to make a stand and fight back against the socialist Deep State. It's time to fight
their guile, their mischief, their malicious lies, and their goal of tearing down the sovereignty of the United States. I highly
recommend this book. Get it. Read it. Take action now.
The books does not answer the key question: if it was not Russian influence, who of forign
powers tried to influence the election: GB, Israel, Saudi, or all three. We have solid evidence
of interference of British intelligence services into the election. Which means May government
interference.
Also important to understand that FBI from the very beginning was apolitical tool. Nothing
new here.
This dirty political witch hunt has one major goal to cement the cracks in neoliberal society
that appear after 2008 Financial crash. This attempt failed and Pateigenosse Mueller is unable to
change that. Confidence in the ruling neoliberal oligarchy collapsed and problem with the
inequality laid now bare.
My interest in this book occurred by chance. Over the past couple years reading news stories
on sites like Yahoo News I sensed a very overt stance against President Trump. It appeared
very obvious to me, but I wanted some confirmation whether these views may have validity, or
perhaps not. So I started to investigate other opinions via some of the conservative talk
radio shows. Up until this time, I rarely listened to them. One was the Sean Hannity Show and
Gregg Jarrett was sitting in for Sean on one of the shows. He mentioned his book and I
thought it sounded interesting. My basic assumption even prior to reading this book was I
never felt there was any illegal Trump/Russian collusion in our recent election. I couldn't
see how it would ever be done in such a way that would actually affect the voting outcome
(other than if it were some kind of ballot box type fraud). So I had doubts about all the
related investigations. When this book was mentioned I figured it would offer some factual
information to help me understand the investigations better. It did accomplish that. And much
more awareness.
One of the major items about this book is that it is well researched and documented. This
made me feel somewhat comfortable about its content. There is so much misinformation making
its rounds today that knowing what is truthful and what isn't can become a real guessing
game. I could even ask 'Did Mr. Jarrett fabricate his sources'? At this point I will go on
faith that they are real.
Based on that assumption, he presents a very hard case about the Russian collusion
investigation as not being quite what the U.S.A. people are being led to believe by the media
outlets. So much so, I hope this book could be a catalyst for other investigations (assuming
that isn't already being planned). As summarized in this book, a major point is about federal
investigative departments having integrity in performing their duties, and doing so legally
and without prejudice or political partisanship. This book does raise some real concerns.
The author states at the end of the book "The people who should read this book, probably
won't". Unfortunately he is probably correct. As a country we seem so divided today
politically. It is my impression that anti-Trumpers will probably not want to acknowledge any
conflicting thoughts or facts to their beliefs. But this book could be a great exercise in
broadening one's knowledge regarding the investigations on Trump. It would show a different
viewpoint than that being touted by much of the media, and has the facts backing it up. At
the very least, it can provide some food for thought.
As Gregg Jarrett states in the Epilogue of this book, "The people who should read this book,
probably won't... they are intellectually dishonest in believing that the president must have
committed some crime in connection with Russia...There was never any plausible evidence that
Trump or his campaign collaborated with Russia to win the presidency... Comey's scheme to
trigger the appointment of his friend as special counsel was a devious maneuver by an
unscrupulous man..."
As many of these events unfolded I have watched closely and performed my own "tests of
reasonableness" from facts presented. Utilizing logic and common sense I often wondered if I
was missing something? What crystal ball would have predicted that Donald Trump would run for
the presidency? One example: The press told us he had been a political asset for many years
and had been exchanging Intel with the Russians...
Then I heard about this book, purchased it and began reading it... I could hardly put it
down... The information in it is astonishing! It is all to clear now...
Jarrett has researched, compiled and formatted an almost air-tight legal case (within this
book) for prosecuting these "weasels." The astonishing levels of corruption and crimes
committed by those in the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI are unprecedented. He has
compiled an extraordinary amount of source information to back up his many claims throughout
the book. I am totally perplexed that our so-called leaders in Congress are allowing this
abuse to go unpunished... baffling? This disgraceful abuse of power documented by Jarrett
will come back to haunt us! A well written expose by Mr. Jarrett!
Gregg Jarrett's research leaves NO DOUBT that drastic action needs to be taken to hold these
people- PRETENDING to represent the law- accountable & end their "assassination" tactics
on our tax dollar.
This is not Halloween, not a play. This is REALITY with our laws running amok!
And our Congress - our elected officials, supposedly servants of We, the People, - is not
taking action?
How is this possible?
Incredibly well researched and well written book which explains methodically in an easy to
read style the undeniable deep seated bias against President Trump at the highest levels of
the Department of Justice and the FBI. They tried to first prevent him from being elected by
exonerating Hillary Clinton of a long list of crimes committed during her tenure as Secretary
of State and then smearing him with a politically motivated fake "Dossier". When that didn't
work, they have tried to undermine his presidency from the start with an equally politically
motivated Special Prosecutor investigating "Collusion with Russia" in an investigation which
had no crime to investigate from the start. A must read for all Americans.
This author writes with a very smooth, easy, but detailed style. The book brings in much law
for the reader to digest, but, somehow, does not get a reader tangled up in the weeds. As for
the thrust of the book: A detailed 'tick tock' of the day by day events that have taken
America to the point we are today on this entire question of Trump, Russia, and the 2016
election.
This book really is vivid proof that the 'deep state' does emphatically exist. Not as a
structure or organization with secret meetings,rituals or handshakes. But as a mentality, or
common political/social view of government, stemming from the longevity of bureaucracy to
feel invulnerable to popular will because of their simple edict that 'we'll still be here
after you're long gone'. And from this, these bureaucrats build liaisons with favoring
political elites that lead to deep, hidden, obscure --shall we say 'deep state'-- actions to
pervert the popular will for the ends of a few.
This book vividly displays why bureaucrats (whose lifeblood is to promote more government) so
turn their collective hand to supporting Democrats, the party of government. Yates covering
for Comey and the blackmailing of Gen. Flynn, Comey leaking to a friend in Academia that
provokes the appointment of his (Comey's) close associate --indeed, his mentor-- Robert
Mueller. Senior bureaucrats (McCabe, Strzok) playing inside baseball to maneuver themselves
for promotion in the expected new (Democratic) administration that they so much support and
wish for. Indeed friendships with FISA judges to assure bogus warrants can be obtained
against political enemies.
Where money and power are traded as coin of the realm in a way that is so antiseptic and
hidden. Nobody says 'How much money will it take'; instead it's 'I can help you fund raise'.
Rod Blagojevich was foolish enough to call a bribe a bribe...well, he's in jail, but Strzok's
wife isn't.
It just goes on and on................it's simple corruption!!! And the band plays
on......the human comedy continues........
Excellent detailed and researched book that simply amazes me. Lynch, Comey, Clinton, Stzrok,
Orr, Rosenstein, McCabe, Reid and Brennen all worked seamlessly to install Hillary and have a
backup plan B to lay the groundwork to impeach Trump in case she doesn't make it. All under
the oversight of Obama. Neat trick, but what follows is even more orchestrated: MEDIA
COMPLICITY! You can't pull this off unless you have the full cooperation willingly or
otherwise of: NBC, CBS, NPR, ABC, MSNBC, and most of all CNN, the New York Times, and
Washington Post! Here's where the real story lies. The media and the Democrat party are
simpatico, joint at the brain and mouth and one other orifice. This is the real story that
Jarrett only pays passing attention to. Sequel maybe, I hope so. Jon Kuhl Papillion, NE &
New England
This book is very thorough and completely exposes the Deep State. If there were any doubts
about the conspiracy to depose President Trump before reading this book, there certainly
aren't any afterwards. After reading the book, I am very disappointed and discouraged to find
that our government has such liars and criminals in the FBI, the DOJ, and the Congress. I
have completely lost any confidence I had in the U.S. government and will never believe in it
again, unless there is a complete house-cleaning in the FBI and the DOJ.
Jarrett pens a comprehensive review of the Deep State's inordinate fraud on our Constitution
-- perhaps the greatest attack on our constitutional republic in the history of our country.
He writes in clear and empathetic style. His narrative evolves in a coherent and logical
progression that details the conspirators' skullduggery in an "ABC" type of progression. He
cites exactly who violated the relevant federal statute and why and how it was violated.
Unfortunately, as of 30 September 2018 -- the date I'm preparing the review -- none of the
miscreants have been indicted even though the documentation of evidence is ponderous.
Gregg Jarrett's study -- and that is what this book is, a study -- covers two main aspects of
recent history. First and foremost it is an in-depth look at the tactics and forces arrayed
against President Trump. Intertwined with this comes by necessity a parallel look at Hillary
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, her presidential run, as well as a broader look at
the activities of the Clintons with the nearly full support of those same forces that are now
aligned against the presidency of Donald Trump. The nature of the often overlapping issues
and the personnel involved has resulted in a fair amount of repetition of key points. This
was not a lazy attempt to achieve a book-length manuscript, as Jarrett's original copy by his
own admission in the acknowledgments was a hefty 100,000 words before the publisher
encouraged him to trim things down.
It is unfortunate that this book will be dismissed by so many who are unwilling to
understand and accept that the pervasive high-level animosity against President Trump has
evolved into a direct and active threat against our country -- and this threat is compounded
by a complicit media that is eager to pounce. The rule of law has been twisted and contorted
if not completely abandoned. Trump is the primary target, but whether by design or
happenstance it is the U.S. Constitution that is being the most assaulted. The danger of this
cannot be overemphasized -- we are at a critical crossroads. Gregg Jarret understands this
and was motivated to bring this truth to light. He is no sycophant of President Trump. His
loyalty is to the rule of law and to our Constitution rather than to political agendas on
either side.
I withheld one star because a great opportunity was lost. This book will never appear in
classrooms, and it will likely be stocked in few law libraries. It most certainly should be,
and it needs to be read and studied. The flagrant abuses of power by the DOJ, the FBI, and
others need to be brought out into a bright light and the corruption purged. As a people we
need to get our head out of the sand and realize what has been going on behind closed doors
-- our future is most definitely at stake. The lost opportunity that I am alluding to comes
down to the expressed (albeit well deserved) disdain and disgust that Gregg Jarrett now has
towards those who are participating in this hoax that he has so thoroughly revealed. I fear
even the preface itself will turn away those who most need to read this book.
What will be perceived as bias before the facts are presented and developed will allow or
even cause those who need to read this book to close their minds, giving them the excuse they
want to dismiss the evidence. If strictly the evidence and history had alone been presented
with Jarrett's (again, well-deserved) animosity being held in check and edited out, then
perhaps this book could have become a classic for later generations to study assuming that we
survive these perilously subversive times. I did the math, and there are 771 supporting
references -- an average of 70 per chapter -- documenting Jarrett's research, plus 12
references even in the epilogue. Obviously, we are not talking about willfully blind opinion
with no basis in fact.
The antagonists who post their 1-star reviews with almost all of them having obviously
never read the book (Re. few verified purchases) reveal a dangerous willful ignorance that
they are happy to embrace. Their mindset should concern us all.
All links are going to Brennan and CIA. Rosenstein was just a tool, necessary to appoint the Special Prosecutor. And launching
the prove was the meaning of "insurance" that Strock mentioned to his mistress. Both Strzok and McCabe have their liasons
(read bosses) at CIA, so in essence they were "CIA infiltration group" within the FBI. And it is also important to understand that Obama was just a CIA snowperson.
There is Stalin's NKVD chief Beria shadow over CIA and FBI now. He famously said "Show me the man and I'll find you the
crime."
Notable quotes:
"... The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation. ..."
"... Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe ..."
"... As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump. ..."
As FBI Ramped Up "Witch Hunt" When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion
Investigation A Joke
A Friday report in the New York Times revealing that the FBI supercharged its Trump-Russia
collusion investigation after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey appears to have
backfired - especially when one reviews internal FBI communications from the time period in
question.
The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then
the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page,
that there was no merit to the investigation.
Nine days after Comey was fired and the DOJ "sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was
knowingly working for Russia," Strzok texted Page on May 18, 2017: "You and I both know the
odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part
because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there. "
It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the
investigation. The article suggests that the FBI had long considered the move and that
Comey's firing and Trump's subsequent comments marked a tipping point.
...
A source close to Strzok told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Jan. 26, 2018, shortly
after the text was released, that the message reflected Strzok's concern that the FBI would
not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia . - Daily Caller
The Times' explanation for the FBI's rationale that Trump may have been a Russian asset
consists of Trump's call for Moscow to release Hillary Clinton's emails an election debate, and
allegations contained within the unverified Steele Dossier. The Times was also quick to note
that Trump may have "unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence," to temper the accusation
that he was an agent of a foreign power. In short, weak sauce.
It's no wonder Strzok was hesitant to join Mueller's team.
Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation"
after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended
Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe.
As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and
Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump.
" And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok
texted Page the day Comey was fired, referring to then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.
Meanwhile, Page - who served as McCabe's deputy, provided some additional color on the text
messages during her July 2018 congressional testimony, suggesting that the "case we've been
waiting on" text referred to an investigation separate of the obstruction probe we already knew
about.
"Well, other than obstruction, what could it have been?" one lawmaker asked Page in her
interview, details of which were published by The Epoch Times on Friday.
" I can't answer that, sir. I'm sorry ," she replied.
"If I was able to explain in more depth why the Director firing precipitated this text, I
would," she continued while declining to say if the text message referred to an obstruction
of justice investigation or something more. - Daily Caller
That said, Page admitted that Comey's firing prompted the text exchange.
"So the firing of Jim Comey was the precipitating event as opposed to the occupant of the
Director's office?" asked one lawmaker.
"Yes, that's correct," replied Page.
Meanwhile, The Times went to great lengths to imply that the FBI was justified in their
ratcheted-up collusion investigation - failing to mention who started the probe, who led it,
and more importantly - waiting until the 9th paragraph to mention the fact that it turned up
nothing .
"No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took
direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the
special counsel's office both declined to comment."
VideoEng_NC
"It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation."
Should be pretty simple with one question. "Was it Hillary who was the responsible party to open an investigation on Trump?".
About as direct as it gets & we already know the answer.
adampeart
TDS sufferers hate Trump so bad that they have become (at 70%) pro-warmonger. Pathetic. I guess that I shouldn't be
surprised. They were fine with Black Jesus starting wars, overthrowing governments and bombing brown people for 8 years.
Teeter
McCabe initiated the investigation. Nobody likes McCabe, so he is likely to be the one guy that gets thrown under the bus.
Of course what he knows may protect him to some extent... they won't want a trial.
Duc888
Sedition? Treason?
Yippie21
7 Days in May.... except for current version we use the DOJ and FBI! Interesting times.
On Smerconish's show today, Bob Baer, spy extraordinaire, (read his books) asserted that the
various bits and pieces of circumstantial "evidence" about Trump's contacts with and attitude
toward Russia, as well as those of his flunkies and relatives amount to a "good enough" case
for Trump being a Russian agent of influence.
That is how a HUMINT spook judges such things. It
is a matter of probabilities, not hard evidence.
Assets of an alien government are not always
witting (understanding) of their status from the POV of the foreign government, but that does
not necessarily make other than agents. Sometimes they think they are merely cooperating in a
good and normal way when, in fact, the relationship is much deeper. Jane Fonda in North Vietnam
would be an example.
It seems injudicious, to say the least, for a former CIA guy to float the notion in public
that there is a good enough case, whatever that means, to think the President of the US was
an Russian Agent of Influence based on "bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence." I would
say probably intemperate as well. Using it in the current climate, it ammounts to a slur.
And what exactly are we to make of the spook expression "Agent of Influence?" I would say
that unless one knows a good deal about the proclivites of the very person who is using the
expression and what is going on in his mind, one shouldn't want to make very much of it at
all. The expression comprehends pretty much of everything and anything, for good, for bad,
for indifferent; for behavior that nobody in the whole wide world would find worrisome except
someone in the CIA or the CI Branches of today's FBI. Such concerns come when Agencies have
been politicized.
It's dangerous enough that these people find an internal use for the term. I would speculate
that some such cover set them off on Carter Page and ensuing FISA debacle.
Bought and owned. One can guess that there is much compromising financial and probably other
information on the Clinton Foundation in the missing emails that Russia (and likely every
other intelligence agency on the planet), and from elsewhere, has, given her lack of
comprehension of the basics of security or that classification is not only for the little
people.
In Bob Baer's 1st book He said that he was able to confirm that it was Israel that attacked
the USS Liberty. As a CIA officer he was trying, without success ,to recruit a local
government radio operator.(probably Egyptian) He said that soon after the attack the
prospective recruit came to him and volunteered to cooperate.Surprised at this sudden change
of heart Baer asked what had happened?.He said that he had listened to the entire attack of
the USS Liberty and the communication between the Israeli planes and their command station.
.The recruit said that he now believed that the US and Israel could not be allies because the
US would never permit an ally to get away with attacking a US vessel and murdering American
sailors.
As a student officer at Ft. Holabird I read the transcripts generated by NSA of the chatter
between the Israeli planes and their command. There is not doubt whatever that the attack was
deliberate and sustained for hours. I have written aout this many times. Look in the archive.
https://turcopolier.typepad...
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its
customers for the clickbait service (between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional
content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have
been much lower than $100,000.
Does anyone know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but
they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.
This is the typical level of repression that exist in Police State: any politician who deviates from the "Inner Party" (aka Deep
State) course is branded as Russian spy and "counterintelligence" dogs are send to sniff any dirty clothing that might exist to and
this politician career.
Notable quotes:
"... counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence. ..."
"... "anybody who fires corrupt Comey must be a Russian spy." ..."
"... Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin' James Comey, a total sleaze! ..."
President Trump on Saturday lashed out after a Friday evening report in the
New York Times that US
law enforcement officials " became so concerned by the president's behavior " in the days after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director,
that "t hey began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests. "
According to the NYT, agents and senior F.B.I. officials " had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016
campaign " but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed
with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude.
What happened next? Well, a collusion narrative was born and carefully crafted as the paper explains:
The president's activities before and after Mr. Comey's firing in May 2017, particularly
two
instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect
of the inquiry, the people said.
The odd inquiry carried "explosive implications" as counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's
own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working
for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.
The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials
said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation,
that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.'s counterintelligence division handles national security
matters.
Even so, "...some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening
it ."
Then, in paragraph nine we read " No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction
from Russian government officials. " Or, as The Washington Examiner 's Byron York sums it up:
Some were even more laconic, summarizing the "scoop" as "anybody who fires corrupt Comey must be a Russian spy."
Put another way:
Responding to the "bombshell" NYT report - which curiously resurrects the "Russian collusion" narrative right as Trump is set
to test his Presidential authority over the border wall, the president lashed out over Twitter .
Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced
to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired
Lyin' James Comey, a total sleaze!"
Funny thing about James Comey. Everybody wanted him fired, Republican and Democrat alike. After the rigged & botched Crooked
Hillary investigation, where she was interviewed on July 4th Weekend, not recorded or sworn in, and where she said she didn't
know anything (a lie), the FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey's poor leadership and the way he handled
the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department).
My firing of James Comey was a great day for America. He was a Crooked Cop who is being totally protected by his best friend,
Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats - leaking machines who have NO interest in going after the Real Collusion (and much more)
by Crooked Hillary Clinton, her Campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. Just Watch!
I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, &
as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good
relations with Russia again!
Lyin' James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter S and his lover, agent Lisa Page, & more, all disgraced and/or fired and caught in
the act. These are just some of the losers that tried to do a number on your President. Part of the Witch Hunt. Remember the "insurance
policy?" This is it! -Donald Trump
Update: Comey has responded over Twitter with a pithy FDR quote:
Although we seem to recall that Democrats were Comey's enemy when he reopened Hillary Clinton's email investigation during the
election.
While there is nothing new here confirming Trump was colluding with Russia, as Byron York asks following the article, was the
New York Times story about Trump, or about FBI malfeasance?
Voters around the world revolt against leaders who won't improve their lives.
Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post
that savaged Donald Trump's character and leadership. Romney's attack and Trump's response
Wednesday morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the
two men. It's even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican
nomination in 2020. We'll see.
But for now, Romney's piece is fascinating on its own terms. It's well-worth reading. It's a
window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.
Romney's main complaint in the piece is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive
leader. That's true, of course. But beneath the personal slights, Romney has a policy critique
of Trump. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian
civil war. Romney doesn't explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn't appear
to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We
know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.
Corporate tax cuts are also popular in Washington, and Romney is strongly on board with
those, too. His piece throws a rare compliment to Trump for cutting the corporate rate a year
ago.
That's not surprising. Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain
Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an
existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt,
extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions.
Romney became fantastically rich doing this.
Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the
private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It's how they run the
country.
Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based economy and an internationalist
foreign policy as the "mainstream Republican" view. And he's right about that. For generations,
Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while
simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support those
goals enthusiastically.
There are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In
countries around the world -- France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and many others
-- voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a
decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you're watching is entire populations revolting
against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.
Something like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald Trump rode
a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House. Does he understand the political
revolution that he harnessed? Can he reverse the economic and cultural trends that are
destroying America? Those are open questions.
But they're less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest
of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How
do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.
The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning
cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones,
or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They
haven't so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide
are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be
summed up in GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It's happiness.
There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence.
Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your
children. They're what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.
But our leaders don't care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to
the people they rule. They're day traders. Substitute teachers. They're just passing through.
They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can't solve our problems. They don't even
bother to understand our problems.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything
else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture,
meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.
Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party
who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words,
functionally libertarian. They don't care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the
markets function. Somehow, they don't see a connection between people's personal lives and the
health of our economy, or for that matter, the country's ability to pay its bills. As far as
they're concerned, these are two totally separate categories.
Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and yet
reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you'll hear them say, is that the
American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the
libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct.
The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They
refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.
Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies
possible. You can't separate the two. It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The
evidence is now overwhelming. How do we know? Consider the inner cities.
Thirty years ago, conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and many other places and were
horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in poor
neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule.
Crime and drugs and disorder became universal.
What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn't even want to acknowledge the question. They were
benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready
explanation for inner-city dysfunction and it made sense: big government. Decades of
badly-designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what conservatives
called a "culture of poverty" that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in this. But it wasn't the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually
the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways,
rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.
This is striking because rural Americans wouldn't seem to have much in common with anyone
from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different traditions and political
beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives,
mostly.
Yet, the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited downtown
Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A
terrifying drug epidemic. Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You'd
think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they're not. They
don't have to be interested. It's easier to import foreign labor to take the place of
native-born Americans who are slipping behind.
But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here's a big part
of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but
disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools
and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made
more than men.
Now, before you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after
study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don't want to marry them.
Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don't. Over big populations, this causes a drop
in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably
follow -- more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the
next generation.
This isn't speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It's social science.
We know it's true. Rich people know it best of all. That's why they get married before they
have kids. That model works. But increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in
America can afford.
And yet, and here's the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married
people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much
nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight
malaria in Congo. But working to raise men's wages in Dayton or Detroit? That's crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our
mindless cultural leaders act like it's still 1961, and the biggest problem American families
face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or
Facebook executives.
For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it's more
virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own
kids.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our
first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandberg herself is
one of America's biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this has made her rich.
We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.
They're day traders. Substitute teachers. They're just passing through. They have no skin in
this game, and it shows.
What's remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn't question why Sandberg was
saying this. We didn't laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media
celebrated Sandberg as the leader of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean
In." As if putting a corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage. Republicans
should say so.
They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all
commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can't possibly repay? Or
charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect
400 percent annual interest.
We're OK with that? We shouldn't be. Libertarians tell us that's how markets work --
consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it's also
disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans,
whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.
And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, as our leaders should, if it
would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge number of our
kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new
technology has made it odorless. But it's everywhere.
And that's not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich from marijuana,
marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry politicians have legalized or
decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana
industry. His fellow Republicans seem fine with that. "Oh, but it's better for you than
alcohol," they tell us.
Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who's
been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want
that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it on us? You know the
reason. Because they don't care about us.
When you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our leaders don't even
try. They hand out jobs and contracts and scholarships and slots at prestigious universities
based purely on how we look. There's nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes
close.
Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate
as someone who's living off inherited money and doesn't work at all. We tax capital at half of
what we tax labor. It's a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our rich people do.
In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He
paid an effective federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners,
the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But
for everyone else, it's infuriating.
Our leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on
the principles of the free market. Please. It's based on laws that the Congress passed, laws
that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for
those people. They did increase their economic advantage. But for everyone else, it came at a
big cost. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your kids
don't hate you. They hate each other.
That happens in countries, too. It's happening in ours, probably by design. Divided
countries are easier to rule. And nothing divides us like the perception that some people are
getting special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are getting special
treatment. Republicans should oppose that with everything they have.
What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent country. A cohesive
country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own
profit and amusement. A country you might recognize when you're old.
A country that listens to young people who don't live in Brooklyn. A country where you can
make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as
important as the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting
outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects itself. And
above all, a country where normal people with an average education who grew up in no place
special can get married, and have happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that
actually cares about families, the building block of everything.
What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will
have to be Republicans. There's no option at this point.
But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a
religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool
to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do
not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys
families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Internalizing all this will not be easy for Republican leaders. They'll have to unlearn
decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda. They'll likely lose donors
in the process. They'll be criticized. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market
fundamentalism a form of socialism.
That's a lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn't work. It's what we should be working
desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we're going to get, and very soon unless a
group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that
protects normal people.
If you want to put America first, you've got to put its families first.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on January 2,
2019.
"... America's "ruling class," Carlson says, are the "mercenaries" behind the failures of the middle class -- including sinking marriage rates -- and "the ugliest parts of our financial system." He went on: "Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society." ..."
"... He concluded with a demand for "a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement." ..."
"... The monologue and its sweeping anti-elitism drove a wedge between conservative writers. The American Conservative's Rod Dreher wrote of Carlson's monologue, "A man or woman who can talk like that with conviction could become president. Voting for a conservative candidate like that would be the first affirmative vote I've ever cast for president. ..."
"... The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke ..."
"... Carlson wanted to be clear: He's just asking questions. "I'm not an economic adviser or a politician. I'm not a think tank fellow. I'm just a talk show host," he said, telling me that all he wants is to ask "the basic questions you would ask about any policy." But he wants to ask those questions about what he calls the "religious faith" of market capitalism, one he believes elites -- "mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule" -- have put ahead of "normal people." ..."
"... "What does [free market capitalism] get us?" he said in our call. "What kind of country do you want to live in? If you put these policies into effect, what will you have in 10 years?" ..."
"... Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald Trump, whose populist-lite presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as "the smoke alarm ... telling you the building is on fire, and unless you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it." ..."
"... Trump borrowed some of that approach for his 2016 campaign but in office has governed as a fairly orthodox economic conservative, thus demonstrating the demand for populism on the right without really providing the supply and creating conditions for further ferment. ..."
"... Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70-80% income tax on the rich. I agree! Start with the Koch Bros. -- and also make it WEALTH tax. ..."
"... "I'm just saying as a matter of fact," he told me, "a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It's not." ..."
"... Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that labor needs economic power, he told me, "Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed." ..."
"... But Carlson's brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren't just focused on the current state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the "elites" whom he argues are its major drivers aren't working. The free market isn't working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, "If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street" -- sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left. ..."
"... Capitalism/liberalism destroys the extended family by requiring people to move apart for work and destroying any sense of unchosen obligations one might have towards one's kin. ..."
"... Hillbilly Elegy ..."
"... Carlson told me that beyond changing our tax code, he has no major policies in mind. "I'm not even making the case for an economic system in particular," he told me. "All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a function or raw nature." ..."
"All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God."
Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged
monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.
America's "ruling class," Carlson says, are the "mercenaries" behind the failures of the middle class -- including sinking
marriage rates -- and "the ugliest parts of our financial system." He went on: "Any economic system that weakens and destroys families
is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society."
He concluded with a demand for "a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don't accelerate
the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement."
The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, "Republicans
have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars." More
broadly, though, Carlson's position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative
politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.
Moreover, in Carlson's words: "At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone too. The country will remain.
What kind of country will be it be then?"
The monologue and its sweeping anti-elitism drove a wedge between conservative writers. The American Conservative's Rod Dreher
wrote of Carlson's monologue,
"A man or woman who can talk like that with conviction could become president. Voting for a conservative candidate like that would
be the first affirmative vote I've ever cast for president." Other conservative commentators scoffed. Ben Shapiro wrote in
National Review that Carlson's monologue sounded far more like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren than, say, Ronald Reagan.
I spoke with Carlson by phone this week to discuss his monologue and its economic -- and cultural -- meaning. He agreed that his
monologue was reminiscent of Warren, referencing her 2003
bookThe Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Growing Broke . "There were parts of the book that I disagree
with, of course," he told me. "But there are parts of it that are really important and true. And nobody wanted to have that conversation."
Carlson wanted to be clear: He's just asking questions. "I'm not an economic adviser or a politician. I'm not a think tank
fellow. I'm just a talk show host," he said, telling me that all he wants is to ask "the basic questions you would ask about any
policy." But he wants to ask those questions about what he calls the "religious faith" of market capitalism, one he believes elites
-- "mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule" -- have put ahead of "normal people."
But whether or not he likes it, Carlson is an important voice in conservative politics. His show is among the
most-watched television programs in America. And his raising questions about market capitalism and the free market matters.
"What does [free market capitalism] get us?" he said in our call. "What kind of country do you want to live in? If you put
these policies into effect, what will you have in 10 years?"
Populism on the right is gaining, again
Carlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald
Trump, whose populist-lite
presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as "the smoke alarm ... telling you the building is on fire, and unless
you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it."
Populism is a rhetorical approach that separates "the people" from elites. In the
words of Cas
Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia, it divides the country into "two homogenous and antagonistic groups: the pure people
on the one end and the corrupt elite on the other." Populist rhetoric has a long history in American politics, serving as the focal
point of numerous presidential campaigns and powering William Jennings Bryan to the Democratic nomination for president in 1896.
Trump borrowed some of that approach for his 2016 campaign but in office has governed as a fairly orthodox economic conservative,
thus demonstrating the demand for populism on the right without really providing the supply and creating conditions for further ferment.
When right-leaning pundit Ann Coulter
spoke with Breitbart Radio about Trump's Tuesday evening Oval Office address to the nation regarding border wall funding, she
said she wanted to hear him say something like, "You know, you say a lot of wild things on the campaign trail. I'm speaking to big
rallies. But I want to talk to America about a serious problem that is affecting the least among us, the working-class blue-collar
workers":
Coulter urged Trump to bring up overdose deaths from heroin in order to speak to the "working class" and to blame the fact
that working-class wages have stalled, if not fallen, in the last 20 years on immigration. She encouraged Trump to declare, "This
is a national emergency for the people who don't have lobbyists in Washington."
Ocasio-Cortez wants a 70-80% income tax on the rich. I agree! Start with the Koch Bros. -- and also make it WEALTH tax.
These sentiments have even pitted popular Fox News hosts against each other.
Sean Hannity warned his audience that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's economic policies would mean that "the rich people
won't be buying boats that they like recreationally, they're not going to be taking expensive vacations anymore." But Carlson agreed
when I said his monologue was somewhat reminiscent of Ocasio-Cortez's
past comments on the economy , and how even a strong economy was still leaving working-class Americans behind.
"I'm just saying as a matter of fact," he told me, "a country where a shrinking percentage of the population is taking home
an ever-expanding proportion of the money is not a recipe for a stable society. It's not."
Carlson told me he wanted to be clear: He is not a populist. But he believes some version of populism is necessary to prevent
a full-scale political revolt or the onset of socialism. Using Theodore Roosevelt as an example of a president who recognized that
labor needs economic power, he told me, "Unless you want something really extreme to happen, you need to take this seriously and
figure out how to protect average people from these remarkably powerful forces that have been unleashed."
"I think populism is potentially really disruptive. What I'm saying is that populism is a symptom of something being wrong," he
told me. "Again, populism is a smoke alarm; do not ignore it."
But Carlson's brand of populism, and the populist sentiments sweeping the American right, aren't just focused on the current
state of income inequality in America. Carlson tackled a bigger idea: that market capitalism and the "elites" whom he argues are
its major drivers aren't working. The free market isn't working for families, or individuals, or kids. In his monologue, Carlson
railed against libertarian economics and even payday loans, saying, "If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation
of Americans, whether it's happening in the inner city or on Wall Street" -- sounding very much like Sanders or Warren on the left.
Carlson's argument that "market capitalism is not a religion" is of course old hat on the left, but it's also been bubbling on
the right for years now. When National Review writer Kevin Williamson
wrote
a 2016 op-ed about how rural whites "failed themselves," he faced a massive backlash in the Trumpier quarters of the right. And
these sentiments are becoming increasingly potent at a time when Americans can see both a booming stock market and perhaps their
own family members struggling to get by.
Capitalism/liberalism destroys the extended family by requiring people to move apart for work and destroying any sense
of unchosen obligations one might have towards one's kin.
At the Federalist, writer Kirk Jing
wrote of Carlson's
monologue, and a
response
to it by National Review columnist David French:
Our society is less French's America, the idea, and more Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" (involving a very different
French). The lowest are stripped of even social dignity and deemed
unworthy of life . In Real America, wages are stagnant, life expectancy is crashing, people are fleeing the workforce, families
are crumbling, and trust in the institutions on top are at all-time lows. To French, holding any leaders of those institutions
responsible for their errors is "victimhood populism" ... The Right must do better if it seeks to govern a real America that exists
outside of its fantasies.
J.D. Vance, author of
Hillbilly Elegy
, wrote that the [neoliberal] economy's victories -- and praise for those wins from conservatives -- were largely meaningless
to white working-class Americans living in Ohio and Kentucky: "Yes, they live in a country with a higher GDP than a generation ago,
and they're undoubtedly able to buy cheaper consumer goods, but to paraphrase Reagan: Are they better off than they were 20 years
ago? Many would say, unequivocally, 'no.'"
Carlson's populism holds, in his view, bipartisan possibilities. In a follow-up email, I asked him why his monologue was aimed
at Republicans when many Democrats had long espoused the same criticisms of free market economics. "Fair question," he responded.
"I hope it's not just Republicans. But any response to the country's systemic problems will have to give priority to the concerns
of American citizens over the concerns of everyone else, just as you'd protect your own kids before the neighbor's kids."
Who is "they"?
And that's the point where Carlson and a host of others on the right who have begun to challenge the conservative movement's orthodoxy
on free markets -- people ranging from occasionally mendacious bomb-throwers like Coulter to writers like
Michael Brendan Dougherty -- separate
themselves from many of those making those exact same arguments on the left.
When Carlson talks about the "normal people" he wants to save from nefarious elites, he is talking, usually, about a specific
group of "normal people" -- white working-class Americans who are the "real" victims of capitalism, or marijuana legalization, or
immigration policies.
In this telling, white working-class Americans who once relied on a manufacturing economy that doesn't look the way it did in
1955 are the unwilling pawns of elites. It's not their fault that, in Carlson's view, marriage is inaccessible to them, or that marijuana
legalization means more teens are smoking weed (
this probably isn't true ). Someone,
or something, did this to them. In Carlson's view, it's the responsibility of politicians: Our economic situation, and the plight
of the white working class, is "the product of a series of conscious decisions that the Congress made."
The criticism of Carlson's monologue has largely focused on how he deviates from the free market capitalism that conservatives
believe is the solution to poverty, not the creator of poverty. To orthodox conservatives, poverty is the result of poor decision
making or a
lack of virtue that can't be solved by government programs or an anti-elite political platform -- and they say Carlson's argument
that elites are in some way responsible for dwindling marriage rates
doesn't make sense .
But in French's response to Carlson, he goes deeper, writing that to embrace Carlson's brand of populism is to support "victimhood
populism," one that makes white working-class Americans into the victims of an undefined "they:
Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes -- civil rights, women's
rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual
revolution, etc. -- and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are
doing to you .
And that was my biggest question about Carlson's monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other
groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family
dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say,
less than
enthusiastic .
Really, it comes down to when black people have problems, it's personal responsibility, but when white people have the same
problems, the system is messed up. Funny how that works!!
Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy. And conservatives are far more likely to
identify with a criticism of "elites" when they believe those elites are responsible for the
expansion of trans
rights or creeping secularism
than the wealthy and powerful people who are investing in
private prisons or an expansion
of the
militarization of police . Carlson's network, Fox News, and Carlson himself have frequently blasted leftist critics of market
capitalism and efforts to
fight
inequality .
I asked Carlson about this, as his show is frequently centered on the turmoils caused by "
demographic change
." He said that for decades, "conservatives just wrote [black economic struggles] off as a culture of poverty," a line he
includes in his monologue .
He added that regarding black poverty, "it's pretty easy when you've got 12 percent of the population going through something
to feel like, 'Well, there must be ... there's something wrong with that culture.' Which is actually a tricky thing to say because
it's in part true, but what you're missing, what I missed, what I think a lot of people missed, was that the economic system you're
living under affects your culture."
Carlson said that growing up in Washington, DC, and spending time in rural Maine, he didn't realize until recently that the same
poverty and decay he observed in the Washington of the 1980s was also taking place in rural (and majority-white) Maine. "I was thinking,
'Wait a second ... maybe when the jobs go away the culture changes,'" he told me, "And the reason I didn't think of it before was
because I was so blinded by this libertarian economic propaganda that I couldn't get past my own assumptions about economics." (For
the record, libertarians have
critiqued Carlson's
monologue as well.)
Carlson told me that beyond changing our tax code, he has no major policies in mind. "I'm not even making the case for an
economic system in particular," he told me. "All I'm saying is don't act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God or a
function or raw nature."
And clearly, our market economy isn't driven by God or nature, as the stock market soars and unemployment dips and yet even those
on the right are noticing lengthy periods of wage stagnation and dying little towns across the country. But what to do about those
dying little towns, and which dying towns we care about and which we don't, and, most importantly, whose fault it is that those towns
are dying in the first place -- those are all questions Carlson leaves to the viewer to answer.
Did Krugman just issue a veiled warning to Pelosi, Schumer, and Clinton Democrats? Did he see
this as a teaching moment for them? Has he turned from unabashed megaphone for establishment
Democrats to an honest broker, willing to explain economics to Demcoratic Big Money
parasites? Could be... If so, this might be a turning point for Krugman from partisan hack to
honest broker!
As always, Robert Reich pulls fewer punches: "Do not ever underestimate the influence of
Wall Street Democrats, corporate Democrats, and the Democrats' biggest funders. I know. I've
been there.
In the 2018 midterms, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, big
business made more contributions to Democrats than to Republicans. The shift was particularly
noticeable on Wall Street. Not since 2008 have donors in the securities and investment
industry given a higher percentage to Democratic candidates and committees than to
Republicans.
The moneyed interests in the Democratic party are in favor of helping America's poor and
of reversing climate change – two positions that sharply distinguish them from the
moneyed interests in the Republican party.
And maybe, just maybe, Krugman, in a veiled warning to Democrats enamored with Trump's tax
cuts, has decided to trump partisan loyalty with economic reality...as any decent economist
should do.
EMichael and kurt will be disappointed, very disappointed that Krugman sided with AOC over
corrupt, sclerotic, corporate Democrats...
There is no reason to think that mainstream liberals would not just go along with whatever
direction the liberal establishment takes. OTOH, there is a major difference in the context
between the rank and file of mainstream liberals and the actual liberal establishment itself.
Mainstream liberals just want to fit in and win elections. They are concerned with
electability and the constraints of legislative process. There is nothing wrong with that. It
is the role of the rank and file.
However, AOC is correct. It is radicals that bring about all significant change.
Mainstream radical is an oxymoron. After radicals cause change then it is no longer radical,
but it becomes mainstream instead.
In contrast, the liberal establishment is also concerned with electability because that is
what they do for a living, either get elected or ride along on the coattails of the elected,
but they are elites and elitists not to be separated from the status quo economic
establishment without considerable consternation. However, the elitists' trepidation over
being separated from their wealthy elite supporters would be greatly reduced by severe limits
on private campaign financing. Still, it would be a rare elected official that would rather
eat in a soup kitchen than a five-star restaurant both for the good food and for the good
company. In both regards though that depends upon what your definition of "good" is.
"Mainstream liberals just want to fit in and win elections..." And they are precisely they
kind of "go-along to get along types" who let bad things happen...and then pretend to not
understand what went wrong...Vietnam, Iraq, GWOT, Glass-Steagall repeal, trade
liberalization/offshoring profits, banksters who go Scot free after bringing the economy
down. The list goes on.
There are leaders, followers, and radicals. One can choose to be any one or two or those they
want, but no more than two. It is not very rewarding to be a radical from the back of the
line unless there is also a radical to follow at the front of the line. Leaders that are also
followers inherit the status quo and guard it like it was their own because it is. Radical
leaders rarely succeed, but often die young.
Trump is a bad example of a leader, but he follows his nose at least rather than just the
status quo. Trump has a nose for trouble and he cannot resist its stench any more than a
jackal or hyena can resist rotting carrion. Fortunate for Trump the US has a long history of
stockpiling trouble for future consumption that reaches all the way back to colonial times.
Trump likes to think that orange is the new black, but the old black, brown, and red are
still around and neither yellow nor orange can take their place.
The majority of people are just plain old followers. If people think that there is chaos
in the world already, just imagine what it would be like if most people were not just plain
old followers. The status quo always has the advantage of the natural force of inertia.
"...banksters who go Scot free after bringing the economy down. The list goes on."
Because you believe in government as done by Putin, Maduro, Saddam, Saudi Arabia, etc:
jail, torture, kill enemies by the people in power being the law.
You reject the US Constitution where voters are allowed to elect Republicans who legalize
fraud and theft by deception based on voters wanting the free lunch of easy credit requiring
bankers have no liability for the bad loans from easy credit. You reject the US Constitution
prohibition on retroactive laws criminalizzing legal actions.
Only if you were leading protests in the 90s in opposition to laws making credit easy for
below $80,000 workers whether buying houses or trucks/SUV.
Only if you were picketing real estate agents and car dealers from 2001 to 2005 to keep
out customers, you were not doing enough to stop easy credit.
The GOP was only dellivering what voters wanted, stuff they could not afford paid for by
workers saving for their retirement.
Elections have consequences.
The elections from 1994 to 2004 were votes for free lunch economics. The GOP promised and
delivered free lunch economic policies.
In 2005, voters on the margins realized tanstaafl, and in 2006 elected Pelosi to power,
and Pelosi, representing California knows economies are zero sum, so she increased costs to
increase general welfare. One of the costs was reccognizing the costs, and benefits, of the
US Constitution.
In 2008, she did not try to criminalize past action, and when she could not get the votes
to punish the bankers who bankrupted the institutions they ran by prohibiting bonuses in the
future,, she insread delivered the best deal possible for the US Constitutional general
welfare.
I think Bernie wanted all voters who voted GOP to lose their jobs, or maybe he simply
believes in free lunch economist claims that welfare payments in Ohio and Michigan are higher
than union worker incomes.
Maybe he thinks bankruptcy court nationalize businesses, not liquidate them.
Or maybe he figured the solution was a 21st Century Great Depression which would elect a
socialist instead of a capitalist FDR, and he would get to run all the automakers, all the
food industry, and employ all the workers deciding what they can buy?
I can never figure out how the economy would work if Bernie were running it. He talks
about Europe, but never advocates the cost of EU economy that is part of EU law: the VAT. All
EU members must have a VAT that is a significant cost to every person in the EU.
Free lunch economics is when you promise increased benefits with no costs, or lower
costs.
Free lunch Trump and free lunch Bernie differ only in their winners, but their losers are
always the same.
When progressives argue for unlimited increases in debt just like Reagan, they are
rejecting the pokicies of FDR, Keynes, the US when the general welfare increased most by
increasing assets faster than debt.
"'elitists' trepidation over being separated from their wealthy elite supporters would be
greatly reduced by severe limits on private campaign financing." Which is why so many liberal
establishment politicians...per Reich...pay only lip service to real campaign finance reform.
Being parasites, they feed off of their hosts and dare not disrupt the gravy train.
"elitists' trepidation over being separated from their wealthy elite supporters would be
greatly reduced by severe limits on private campaign financing."
So, the wealthy liberal elites who pay no taxes by cleverly paying all revenue to workers
need to be punished because they pay too much to too many workers?
Warrren Buffett has never paid much in taxes even when tax rates on corporations were over
50% and individuals reached over 70%. Money paid to workers, directly or indirectly, was and
still is the number one tax dodge.
Unless you go to a sales tax aka VAT which taxes all revenue, expecially business income
paid to workers.
VAT is an income tax with zero tax dodges aka loopholes aka deductions.
""'elitists' trepidation over being separated from their wealthy elite supporters would be
greatly reduced by severe limits on private campaign financing." Which is why so many liberal
establishment politicians...per Reich...pay only lip service to real campaign finance reform.
Being parasites, they feed off of their hosts and dare not disrupt the gravy train."
In your view, its the poor who create high paying jobs?
It's wrong to listen to people who convince rich people to give their money to people
paying US workers to build factories, wind farms, solar farms battery factories,
transportation systems, vehicles, computer systems in the US?
Instead Democrats should listen to people who have never created long term paying jobs,
but only pay elites who run campaigns using mostly unpaid workers, or workers paid only a few
months every few years? Like Bernie does?
When it comes to how to run a "Green New Deal", I want the policy crafted by someone who
listens to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and the CEOs of California energy corporations,
tech companies, who are commited to consuming more and more energy that requires no fossil
fuels. Listening to Home Depot and Walmart building managers and retail sales managers should
be a priority. All these guys both focus on paying more workers, and selling more to workers
paid more.
AOC and Bernie seem to listen to the Lamperts who are destroying the value of companies
like Sears by "taxing" both the customers, workers, and owners, by giving money to people who
don't work to produce anything.
I make going to RealClearPolicy, Politics, etc a daily practice to see how bad
progressives are at selling their policies, making it easy for find all sorts of costs,
without any benefits to anyone.
The New Deal was not about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. The New
Deal was about paying workers more.
In 1930, half the population still lived on farms. (They might work off the farm, but they
were farmworkers first.) The problem for farmers is Europe had recovered from the war and was
no longer sending gold to the US to secure loans to buy food, but instead repaying the loans
by shipping high value food to the US, wine, cheese, etc, and that meant too much food drove
prices down, which meant farmworkers earned less and less.
One of the first laws set minimum prices for food, enforced by destroying crops, or
government overpaying for food like milk, cheese, bread, which the government gave away to
the poor who could never buy this food. It was not about giving food away, but about paying
workers, the farmers, ranchers, etc. Giving the food to the poor who could not afford to buy
food was simply to avoid the attacks on FDR for destroying good food to drive up farmer pay.
Which was the truth.
FDR talked about creating a healthy workforce to make America great, then about building a
healthy soldier. Ike in the 50s and JFK in the 60s campaigned on creating healthy soldiers.
And smart, educated soldiers and workers.
The policies of liberals was about better workers, richer workers.
Conservatives since Reagan has been about cutting the costs of workers. Sold based on
consumers benefiting from lower cost workers, because consumees are never workers, workers
never consumers, because if workers equal consumers, economics must be zero sum.
By attracting the intense ire of the GOP, AOC activates the negative polarization of lib
pundits and makes them look for ways to defend left policy items they'd attack in any other
scenario. It's very effective at pushing the discourse forward.
"But the Democrats' moneyed interests don't want more powerful labor unions. They are not in
favor of stronger antitrust enforcement against large corporations."
So, you think beef at $10 plus per pound, salad greens at $5 plus per pound, a fast food
meal at $10 plus, is a winning issue for Democrats?
Or by powerful labor unions, you mean for only white male blue collar factory workers,
long haul white truckers, white construction workers?
Making all work pay enough to reach middle class status at the low end will not happen by
unions because many parts of the US, and workers, and jobs, will oppose unions. Instead,
labor laws and enforcement to lift wages and working conditions rapidly in conservative
regions are required.
Better to get the minimum wage in Indiana and Kansas to $10 than in California to $15.
More important to get farm workers fully covered by Federal law like factory workers, with
exemptions only for farmer family members.
Raising incomes in low living cost regions will not raise prices much nationally, but
increase living standards among the most disadvantaged who feel "left behind".
Automatic increases annually of 10% for 7 years, then indexed by cpi.
Constantly emphasizing this minimum is way below what the low wage is in SF, NYC, LA, but
the goods produced will be bought and thus wages paid mostly by high income liberal elites.
Conservatives sticking it to liberals!
Wow... you need to do a lot better at shopping sales. I wait for sales and then buy burger
at $2.50, crud cuts at $3-4, and can frequently get t-bone and ribeye for under $5.
BUT, on the larger scale, what is the difference if I pay $1 a pound for burger and earn
$20K a year, or I pay $3 for burger and earn $60K a year?
Inflation punishes savers? Really? What is the difference if I earn 3% at 2% inflation or
1% at 0% inflation? The answer is, none.
"In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra
hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income
of everyone else doesn't change, does it? Ah, but it does – because he pays taxes on
that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit
harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort – and conversely the cost of
their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay."
This is not right. Heck, it's not even wrong.
Say the $1000 is for a surgery. The social benefit is the tax they pay on it? The surgery
itself is irrelevant?
Krugman confuses the flow of money, which supports and correlates with production, with
the actual production, the real "social benefit".
If you invent a widget that everyone on earth is willing to pay $1 over cost to get,
congratulations, you just earned $7 billion.
Now, does that mean you get to consume $7 billion worth of stuff other people produce? I
think so.
Or, does it mean you get to trap the world in $7 billion of debt servitude from which it
is impossible for them to escape, because you are hoarding, and then charging interest on,
the $7 billion they need to pay back their debts.
The key is to understand that money is created via debt. Money has value because people
with debt need to get it to repay their debts.
If we all decide BitCoin is worthless, then BitCoin is worthless. It has no fundamental
usefulness.
If we all decide money is worthless, then a bunch of people with debt will gladly take it
off our hands so that they can repay their debt. Heck, they may even trade us stuff to get
the debt... which is why money is NOT worthless.
If $1 per day make everyone live better with no added climate change, PLUS paid an extra $7
billion per day to production workers, service workers, that would be good, or bad?
Say, the $7 billion in wages was to sing and dance so no matter where in the world he was,
he was entertained by song and dance?
Economies are zero sum. Every cost has an equal benefit aka income or consumption. Work
can't exist without consumption, consumption without work.
"If $1 per day make everyone live better with no added climate change, PLUS paid an extra $7
billion per day to production workers, service workers, that would be good, or bad?"
Obviously, good. Which is what I say in my post.
"Money is merely work in the past or future."
Money is other peoples' debt. They have borrowed money into existence and then spent it
into the economy, AND they have pledged to do work in the future, to get the money back so
they can repay the debt.
That "doing work in the future to get the money back" is only possible if the people with
the money actually spend it back into the economy.
The problem is that the people in debt also agreed to pay interest, and the people with
the money want to keep collecting the interest... so keep holding the money... making it
absolutely impossible for those with debt to pay it back.
I'm saying is that there is obligation on both sides. There is obligation on the part of
people with debt to produce goods and services and sell them for money to repay their debts,
AND for that to be possible, there is obligation on those with money to actually spend the
money...
Contrary to CONservative opinion, money is not created by work, it is earned by selling,
and that means for the economy to function, there has to be spending.
We need a tax code with very high top rates, but deductions for spending and capital
investing... not to take from the rich, but rather to force them to spend and invest to get
deductions.
Clinton Democrats (DemoRats) are so close to neocons that the current re-alliance is only natural and only partially caused by
Trump. Under Obama some of leading figures of his administration were undistinguishable from neocons (Samantha Power is a good
example here -- she was as crazy as Niki Haley, if not more). There is only one "war party in the USA which
continently consists of two wings: Repugs and DemoRats.
Notable quotes:
"... Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham , one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton , who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon. ..."
"... That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's way" ..."
"... But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent. ..."
"... This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan ..."
"... While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining ..."
"... At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives , even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump ). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. ..."
"... By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a "national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism"). ..."
"... All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation -- which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way. ..."
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S.
troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the
anti-war wings of bothparties , but largely provoked
bipartisan outrage among in Washington's reflexively pro-war establishment.
Both
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary
Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient
hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror
jargon.
But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from
Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump's Syria
withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.
That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the
proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's
way" far more than they agree with the pro-war view that "the U.S. needs to keep troops in
places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and
maintain our foreign policy interests in the region."
But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support
for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents
overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in
2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump
voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28
percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support
for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump's announced intention to withdraw half
of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping
troops there than Republicans and independents.
This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in
Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data
consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all
troops from Afghanistan:
With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this
has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans
and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed . Among 2016 Trump voters,
there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however,
oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent
opposed.
This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy
documented early this week , separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on
questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.
While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should
continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to
withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. "Those who voted for
Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do
something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS," Edwards-Levy wrote, "while Trump voters
said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility." (Similar trends can be
seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump
has moved away from his posture of the last two years --
escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians , as he
repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign -- to his return to his other campaign pledge to
remove troops from the region.)
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their
"beliefs" based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party's
base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations,
drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those
policies once they
became hallmarks of the Obama presidency .
But what's happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance
has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats
using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is
insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he's willing to allow the Bad Countries to take
over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with
adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.
By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet,
MSNBC, is
stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while
even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the
pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a
"national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism").
All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first
time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and
imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max
Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of
conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly
pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation --
which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way.
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made
many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the
rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a
glorious end!"
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it
says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.
Indeed, it's
looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to
withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist
base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political
aisle, just like they always do:
Trump supporters are acting like he's a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik...
...his enemies are acting like he's feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into
Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin's breakfast, when in
reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact
that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on
words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate
headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely
ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist
policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic
mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation
from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions
and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often
claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in
this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An
excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at
Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the
infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing
but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who
helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's
said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive
behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every
breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and
it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way
is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant
analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available
evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as
well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and
there's no evidence that it did.
So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated
election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually
been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet
Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear
rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his
insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any
little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts,
Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear
posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear
superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it
combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which
existed in secretive US government agencies
long before the 2016 election .
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things
people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been
highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all
the time.
Humanity
lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of
heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in
through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and
attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it
would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going
on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and
identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our
very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so
nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental
narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are
wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can
control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell
themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political
influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more
efficiently than any dictatorship.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment
agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be
more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant
narratives is because an alliance
of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over
the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of
smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn.
It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics
are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only
potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that
it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share
information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the
establishment propaganda machine is
acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the
internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when
a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the
cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks
appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
"... Excessive financialization is the Achilles' heel of neoliberalism. It inevitably distorts everything, blows the asset bubble, which then pops. With each pop, the level of political support of neoliberalism shrinks. Hillary defeat would have been impossible without 2008 events. ..."
Barkley insists on a left-right split for his analysis of political parties and their attachment to vague policy tendencies
and that insistence makes a mess of the central issue: why the rise of right-wing populism in a "successful" economy?
Naomi Klein's book is about how and why centrist neoliberals got control of policy. The rise of right-wing populism is often
supposed (see Mark Blyth) to be about the dissatisfaction bred by the long-term shortcomings of or blowback from neoliberal policy.
Barkley Rosser treats neoliberal policy as implicitly successful and, therefore, the reaction from the populist right appears
mysterious, something to investigate. His thesis regarding neoliberal success in Poland is predicated on policy being less severe,
less "shocky".
In his left-right division of Polish politics, the centrist neoliberals -- in the 21st century, Civic Platform -- seem to disappear
into the background even though I think they are still the second largest Party in Parliament, though some seem to think they
will sink in elections this year.
Electoral participation is another factor that receives little attention in this analysis. Politics is shaped in part by the
people who do NOT show up. And, in Poland that has sometimes been a lot of people, indeed.
Finally, there's the matter of the neoliberal straitjacket -- the flip-side of the shock in the one-two punch of "there's no
alternative". What the policy options for a Party representing the interests of the angry and dissatisfied? If you make policy
impossible for a party of the left, of course that breeds parties of the right. duh.
Likbez,
Bruce,
Blowback from the neoliberal policy is coming. I would consider the current situation in the USA as the starting point of this
"slow-motion collapse of the neoliberal garbage truck against the wall." Neoliberalism like Bolshevism in 1945 has no future,
only the past. That does not mean that it will not limp forward in zombie (and pretty bloodthirsty ) stage for another 50 years.
But it is doomed, notwithstanding recently staged revenge in countries like Ukraine, Argentina, and Brazil.
Excessive financialization is the Achilles' heel of neoliberalism. It inevitably distorts everything, blows the asset bubble,
which then pops. With each pop, the level of political support of neoliberalism shrinks. Hillary defeat would have been impossible
without 2008 events.
At least half of Americans now hate soft neoliberals of Democratic Party (Clinton wing of Bought by Wall Street technocrats),
as well as hard neoliberal of Republican Party, which created the " crisis of confidence" toward governing neoliberal elite in
countries like the USA, GB, and France. And that probably why the intelligence agencies became the prominent political players
and staged the color revolution against Trump (aka Russiagate ) in the USA.
The situation with the support of neoliberalism now is very different than in 1994 when Bill Clinton came to power. Of course,
as Otto von Bismarck once quipped "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." and another
turn of the technological spiral might well save the USA. But the danger of never-ending secular stagnation is substantial and
growing. This fact was admitted even by such dyed- in-the-wool neoliberals as Summers.
This illusion that advances in statistics gave neoliberal access to such fine-grained and timely economic data, that now it
is possible to regulate economy indirectly, by strictly monetary means is pure religious hubris. Milton Friedman would now be
laughed out the room if he tried to repeat his monetarist junk science now. Actually he himself discarded his monetarist illusions
before he died.
We probably need to the return of strong direct investments in the economy by the state and nationalization of some assets,
if we want to survive and compete with China. Australian politicians are already openly discussing this, we still are lagging
because of "walking dead" neoliberals in Congress like Pelosi, Schumer, and company.
But we have another huge problem, which Australia and other countries (other than GB) do not have: neoliberalism in the USA
is the state religion which completely displaced Christianity (and is hostile to Christianity), so it might be that the lemming
will go off the cliff. I hope not.
The only thing that still keeps neoliberalism from being thrown out to the garbage bin of history is that it is unclear what
would the alternative. And that means that like in 1920th far-right nationalism and fascism have a fighting chance against decadent
neoliberal oligarchy.
Previously financial oligarchy was in many minds associated with Jewish bankers. Now people are more educated and probably
can hang from the lampposts Anglo-Saxon and bankers of other nationalities as well ;-)
I think that in some countries neoliberal oligarchs might soon feel very uncomfortable, much like Soros in Hungary.
As far as I understood the level of animosity and suppressed anger toward financial oligarchy and their stooges including some
professors in economics departments of the major universities might soon be approaching the level which existed in the Weimar
Republic. And as Lenin noted, " the ideas could become a material force if they got mass support." This is true about anger as
well.
"... Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines. ..."
"... He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. ..."
"... " Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller 's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of Justice Department scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective." ..."
"... The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord 's chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says. "When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing. ..."
"... "That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have," Mr. Dubelier said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years." ..."
"... But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord 's access to "sensitive" evidence that Mr. Mueller won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin. Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation. "This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate." ..."
"... On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery. Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence for its national security implications. ..."
"... In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti- Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians? ..."
"... Mr. Steele didn't register under the Justice Department 's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier 's argument of "selective prosecution." ..."
A former federal prosecutor has emerged as special counsel
Robert
Mueller
's most persistent courtroom critic.
It's not Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and now President
Trump
's
ubiquitous defender, or any of cable TV's prosecutors-turned-pundits.
He is
Eric
A. Dubelier
, a litigator for the Reed Smith law firm who knows international law and the D.C. playing
field. He served eight years prosecuting cases as a
Justice
Department
assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. He refers to his former employer as "the real
Justice
Department
," implying that
Mr.
Mueller
's team is something less.
His biting remarks have come in months of court filings and oral arguments.
Mr.
Dubelier
has depicted
Mr.
Mueller
as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring
Justice
Department
guidelines.
He has accused
Mr.
Mueller
of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and
Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election.
So far, the federal judge presiding over the case has sided with
Mr.
Mueller
.
Mr. Dubelier
charges that the Mueller team violated the confidentially of
Concord
's
counter evidence while hiding documents
Concord needs
for its defense. The prosecutor wants to "whisper secrets to the judge,"
Mr.
Dubelier
says, as
Mr.
Mueller
is calculating the "short-term political value of a conviction" and not worrying about an
appeals court defeat years later.
An example: In a Dec. 20 motion,
Mr.
Dubelier
resurrected a botched case spearheaded by
Mr.
Mueller
's top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.
Mr. Weissmann headed the
Justice
Department
's Enron task force nearly two decades ago. He won a conviction against the accounting firm
Arthur Andersen for shredding the defunct energy firm's financial documents.
Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. The 2005 decision effectively said
that Andersen, by then out of business and its 28,000 employees gone, hadn't committed a crime.
"Mr.
Dubelier
is exactly right on
Mr.
Mueller
's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of
Justice
Department
scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no
regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team
views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective."
'Made up a crime to fit the facts'
Concord Management and Consulting is an unlikely client. Legal observers opined that when
Mr.
Mueller
brought charges against various Russians who hacked computers and trolled the 2016 election, no
defendant would travel the nearly 5,000 miles to show up for trial.
No defendant has personally arrived. But
Concord
did
appear quickly after the February indictment. Of 28 Russian individuals and firms charged with election
interference by
Mr.
Mueller
, only
Concord
has
appeared in U.S. District Court, in this instance in the person of the aggressive
Mr.
Dubelier
.
The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding
disclosure of evidence. Disclosure,
Mr.
Dubelier
argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin,
Concord
's
chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Concord
is accused of an elaborate conspiracy with another Russian operation, the Internet Research
Agency. The indictment accuses
Concord
of
providing the troll farm $1.2 million monthly to defraud the U.S. The two firms set up fake personas and
false Twitter accounts, Facebook ads and other social media posts mostly to disparage Hillary Clinton and
support
Donald
Trump
.
In a separate case,
Mr.
Mueller
brought charges in July against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic
computers, stealing emails and funneling them to three websites for distribution.
Mr. Dubelier
argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says.
"When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say
whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing.
"That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have,"
Mr.
Dubelier
said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they
operate outside the parameters of the
Department
of Justice
in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the
Department
of Justice
in these cases for the past 30 years."
Mr. Dubelier
lost that argument with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who rejected his bid to
dismiss the case.
But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over
Concord
's
access to "sensitive" evidence that
Mr.
Mueller
won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Dubelier
has expressed exasperation.
"This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the
client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the
notion is too ludicrous to contemplate."
What
Mr.
Mueller
has turned over is often irrelevant to mounting a defense, such as promotion emails for airlines
and personal naked selfie photographs,
Mr.
Dubelier
said in a December filing.
The special counsel is keeping most relevant information between himself and Judge Friedrich, excluding
Mr.
Dubelier
.
Why no probe of dossier writer?
Mr. Mueller
won the argument over "sensitive" material. He now wants to hold closed sessions with the
judge over classified information -- again, without
Mr.
Dubelier
.
Mr. Dubelier
responded in a Dec. 27 filing: "The Special Counsel has made up a crime that has never been
prosecuted before in the history of the United States, and now seeks to make up secret procedures for
communicating ex parte [meaning no defense counsel present] to the court which have never been employed in
any reported criminal case not involving classified discovery."
The defense attorney admitted his motion is "likely fruitless" because Judge Friedrich previously has ruled
against
Concord
.
Many documents are in Russian, a culturally different language than English.
One Russian word,
Mr.
Dubelier
says, "can be translated into the English words 'chief,' 'boss' or 'chef' -- a distinction that
is critically important since international media often refers to Mr. Prigozhin as 'Putin's chef.'"
On another matter,
Mr.
Dubelier
is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery.
Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence
for its national security implications.
Mr. Dubelier
said he submitted evidence to the firewall lawyer only to see it fall into the hands of
Mr.
Mueller
's team, who began using it to further investigate
Concord
.
"Surely a remarkable coincidence,"
Mr.
Dubelier
said.
In another pre-trial argument,
Mr.
Dubelier
is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher
Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti-
Trump
information
from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the
Justice
Department
for election interference just like the Russians?
Mr. Steele didn't register under the
Justice
Department
's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which
Mr.
Mueller
has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the
Concord
team.
Judge Friedrich rejected
Mr.
Dubelier
's argument of "selective prosecution."
Mr. Mueller
's counter-motion boils down to this: Mr. Prigozhin is a criminal fugitive who blatantly
interfered in the U.S. election and is not entitled to sensitive national security information he would
share with the Kremlin intelligence.
In a new battleground, the Mueller team wants to show the judge top secret material to persuade her to keep
it from the defense.
"Disclosure of such information could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security," the
Mueller filing stated.
Judge Friedrich ruled in June that Mr. Prigozhin is prohibited from viewing non-classified sensitive
information that details how the government obtained evidence.
The Mueller team argued: "Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative
techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial
Information within this case's discovery identifies sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the
foreign actors behind these interference operations the government has particularized concerns about
discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services."
Mr. Mueller
says that as long as Mr. Prigozhin, whom the U.S. sanctioned and then indicted for election
interference, remains in Russia, he isn't entitled to see sensitive evidence.
4.
Matt Whitaker will block public release of the Mueller report.
Special counsel Robert Mueller will finalize his investigation and send his report to Acting
Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who has never been supportive of the inquiry. Using his powers
as attorney general, Whitaker will block public disclosure of Mueller's conclusions and release
a sanitized summary detailing no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the
Russian government. Democrats will be outraged -- as will be Bob Mueller, who will proceed to
give his first on-air, primetime interview detailing what he did and did not find. The next
week, the House Judiciary Committee will debate opening an impeachment inquiry based solely on
Mueller's interview.
"The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Demorats Experts
masquerading as progressive Republicans and Democrats"............FIFY
It's all they have left after being rendered politically irrelevant and statistically
insignificant in November 2016 by the deplorables. ROFLMAO.........this civil war needs to
die in federal government so we do not waste money in mass deportations to an established
island nation surrounded by 1000 nautical miles of water.
"Election tampering via false identity" sounds like the right kind of language for
a federal law -- but I'm betting there is something already out there (at state/fed level),
and am not wild about yet more laws (which [[[they]]] get to ignore anyway).
a text book case of "projection" by demorats -their own crimes of sedition and treason
projected onto trump via the russians.
one can only hope that Mueller has found the proof that DemoRats were responsible for
attempts to rig the presidential elections - aided and abetted by criminal journalists also
guilty of sedition and treason.
As if it ******* matters at this point. Get real. We are watching a display of raw power
right now. Well connected individuals are calling the shots right now, well outside of the
legal system. If you haven't realized that over the past 2 years, you haven't been paying
attention. Furthermore, no amount of factual proof is going to result in the actual criminals
being held to account. The thing that is most difficult for Americans to grasp is that they
do not control their own government and have not for many decades. They do not have an equal
system of justice. Instead, the US is ruled by a secret oligarchy which exists above the US
legal code. This is the harsh reality we are watching be revealed right now.
We're watching an attempted display of raw power...that hasn't been going as
planned. If it had, Trump would either be gone or automagically transformed into the next
iteration of BushBama. We are fly in the ointment...buzz buzz
No prosecution... our DOJ does not prosecute anything political... no matter how serious
the felony. Just ask the ***-maggots Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and Lynch.
Wow! What does Sherlock Holmes Mueller think of this? This story makes Mueller out to be
the biggest fraud of all time and his attorneys tantamount to the Keystone Cops. Where are
they on all this?
"... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
"... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
"... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
"... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
"... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
"... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
"... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
"... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
"... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
"... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
"... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the
uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to
produce fake results.
SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week,
Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up
the gun control debate.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the
hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on
Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following
the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they
immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some
nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive
issues.
Those claims are based on this propaganda project:
Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall
Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds
of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian
influence campaign.
The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is
run by military lobbyists, CIA
minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its
claimed task is:
... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy
in the United States and Europe.
There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.
The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items"
and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing
complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the
hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It
claims
that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also
appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites
sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3.
accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and
2 tweet about.
Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which
group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one
"openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.
On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want
to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy,
wished everyone
a #MerryChristmas.
The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is
unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters,
Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all
of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably
nefarious:
Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President
Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started
kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...
The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is
definitely false :
Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not
Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary
indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is
either predominantly Russian.
The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.
The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch
keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found (
Dutch ,
English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:
In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag
was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment
and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to
be from a Russian troll.
In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the
Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the
Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And
even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero.
Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.
Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.
The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored
by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff
to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the
"Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended
to rank 2 of the
dashboard.
Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes
of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.
The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found
that only six people on Twitter, none
of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of
the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself
says :
[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents
The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda
shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with
rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those
then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.
Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of
active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the
dashboard?
But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow
shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian
influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.
This is nuts.
Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the
only site critical of it. It
predicted :
The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad
light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.
It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that
the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are
normal people.
The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence"
into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false
"Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy
contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times -
are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package
the venom and spread it to the public.
How long will it take until people die from it?
Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM |
Permalink
Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the
United States and Europe."
That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in
proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the
clearest cases.
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't
believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even
during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has
important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich
Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my
assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will
NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian
[sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are
the Big Lies.]
Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done
contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security
breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the
general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I
hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be
several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate
in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not
just economic and political but cultural and historical.
In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological
descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to
"correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World
War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk
That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from
an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical
officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council,
a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary
Clinton ally.
Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged
electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty
party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped
away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet
declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the
name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret
police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main
intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world
while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you
neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?
when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the
huge defense budget?
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia
and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly
hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream
political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The
collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The
idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that
their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things
like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.
let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one
regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid.
Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.
"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm
Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree,
February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar
Republic's democratic constitution.
Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933
and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen
the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political
interests.
Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people
vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump
openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral
success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become
a pressing one.
An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.
Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers
like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street.
Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.
How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact
a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back
to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?
Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully
ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished
hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.
Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."
I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government.
But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic
and many simply don't know how to change things.
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his
farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country.
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources"
to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The
skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only
reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill
Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the
discussion!
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the
proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no
circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much
government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was.
59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After
that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical
reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a
major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news
organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win
a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow.
It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.
Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you
know. :-)
Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions.
When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot
and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots
hang around to argue ad infinitum.
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how
poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I
wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag
event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...
They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the
west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like
Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident
that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the
actual powerlessness of the bully.
But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they
strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the
right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious
phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.
It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the
fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts
- are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is
over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually
shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its
non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way
to complete failure.
Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study
and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China -
and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on
the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC)
today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in
critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own
emotions or other people's emotions.
Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions
and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion"
(1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the
mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda
Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the
US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.
You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street
Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie
Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore
and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the
conductor?
When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray
McGovern somewhere among the flock.
Many of my thoughts as well.
The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact.
They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with
the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the
effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians.
Even the god's have abandoned the west...
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the
2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but
has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her
leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for
barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this
believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs
lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a
quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed
exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had
proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called
contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors
were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in
Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a
letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any
honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also
fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media
'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being
delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in
Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the
Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate
based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view.
Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes
to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.
The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly
giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children
with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous
artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or
that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured
children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent
offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and
blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.
Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.
Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing
Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what
one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the
"security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media
Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the
world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure
evil (TPTB contend).
So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.
re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was
both a Bolshevik and a Pole.
I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is
back into its highest gears promoting war.
"The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the
best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance
everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.
"China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the
combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.
Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans,
perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war
by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses
will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and
allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be
dealt with.
The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them
and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility
against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are
being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia
and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our
hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia
is a vital necessity.
It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population
had chosen Trump for that reason.
You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on
the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face
very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or
poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential
threat.
Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their
situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.
The Chicago boys were telling the
Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym
of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and
started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky
(?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft.
This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so
on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings,
lies and cheating is still deafening me.
It was the first Russian crime. The second one was
to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions).
They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A
third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.
The fourth was to put
back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were
not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a
political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.
More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions
(western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism -
remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to
discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side
their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored
reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was
decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to
fight it.
It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside
their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a
crime of treason to them in war time.
I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I
do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because
those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the
consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless
and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a
very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the
immediate and maximal profit.
You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet.
That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...
Conclusion regarding IP address data:
What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of
the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be
anonymous online, including malicious actors.
Overall Conclusion:
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like
Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used
by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor
exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent
relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any
website.
Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the
continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question
has again become a pressing one."
The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy
in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's
desired candidate, Hillary.
70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates,
and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would
win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our
anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).
In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with
the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less
immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions.
That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in
fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the
confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own
opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism
of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's
what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught
in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all
those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be
modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or
the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists
one.
One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.
When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the
future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB
are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in
themselves.
We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the
end, we just about deserve everything we get.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Media and its politicians have lost it completely,
and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western
MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3
with Russia will come easy.
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago.
"In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist
International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly
campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who
would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked
that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the
elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter -
Henry Jackson Society (UK) .
With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the
poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be
considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.
I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a
"knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign
Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm
for honest reporting.
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in
it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read
"No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.
The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia
is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it
as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as
the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need
some entity onto which they can project their own faults.
The US is progressing toward a
fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin.
The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the
Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the
planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of
"aggression." And so on
@Noirette 70
Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were
already there. gizmodo
, Jun 12, 2014: It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized
Nevertheless, now in WIRED
magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical
groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social
movements."
Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference
during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting
him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the
Russia....."
Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to
believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .
Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.
"Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like.
[Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT
spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion
defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth.
An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual
budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated,
highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."
Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.
james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"
You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how
psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a
large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand
Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which
boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling
off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).
Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last
target.
Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the
way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to
the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by
the book."
Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This
has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet
untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see
ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is
certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).
"Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.
nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety
legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern
for the environment and the workers.
That is the main issue I have with globalization.
Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and
productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will
have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition,
no matter how efficiently we work.
Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a
large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and
paranoia.
"....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's
businesses and workers."
it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the
right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this
planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon.
Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in
Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which
were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.
Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.
Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend
or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by
national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping
or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted
chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and
the United States.
One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs.
Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich
countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion
of secure employment.
the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty
much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality,
but certainly dangerous nonetheless.
no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .
Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering
to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the
differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the
other forces at play."
Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used
to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually
ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.
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 Timesas a
group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S.
military and the intelligence agencies.
Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being
after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan,
for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that
purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also
worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by
NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and
USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims.
This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well
as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in
Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. 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 ." – RT
This scandal is being perpetrated by the
United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. 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 dubious creation,
Hamilton 68.
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es
piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the
organizers boasted about it!
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 hurt Moore. He
dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT
There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots
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 ,
brainwashing, and
Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.
"... 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?
'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.
"... 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?
The Trump Tower meeting was arranged by Fusion GPS associate Rob Goldstone, who said during
Congressional testimony reviewed by
Breitbart that he believes the June 9, 2016 meeting was a "bait and switch" by a Russian
lobbyist who promised "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, and admitted that he used hyperbolic language
on purpose to ensure that the meeting would take place.
"I, therefore, used the strongest hyperbolic language in order to secure this request from
Donald Trump Jr. based on the bare facts I was given," said Goldstone, a UK publicist and music
manager.
"It was an example of, I was given very limited information, and my job was to get a
meeting, and so I used my professional use of words to emphasize what my client had only
given bare-bones information about, in order to get the attention of Mr. Trump Jr. " -Rob
Goldstone
Goldstone then said " it appeared to me to have been a bait and switch of somebody who
appeared to be lobbying for what I now understood to be the Magnitsky act," - which sanctions
Russian officials thought to be involved in the death of a Russian tax accountant.
Fusion GPS associate Natalia Veselnitskaya, an attorney for Russian businessman and Fusion
GPS client Denis Katsy, said that Emin Agalarov - the son of Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov -
told her to contact his representative, Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze to set up the Trump Tower
meeting, which Kaveladze attended.
While both Agalarov and Katsyv opposed the Magnitsky act, Veselnitskaya worked only for
Katsyv, while approaching Agalarov and his associates to participate in the Trump Tower
meeting. Of ntoe, Agalarov organized the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow when it was
partially owned by Donald Trump.
Veselnitskaya said Agalarov told her to get in touch with Kaveladze about the meeting
because he had connections with the Trump team.
Veselnitskaya said she made a point of asking Goldstone -- who she mistakenly thought was
a lawyer -- whether it was OK to include Akhmetshin, given that he was a registered lobbyist.
Goldstone told her it was fine, she said. -
NBC News
On June 3, 2016, Goldstone sent an email to Trump Jr. on behalf of Emin Agalarov to set up
the meeting. Goldstone was described last July as "associated with Fusion GPS" by Mark Corallo
- spokesman for Trump's outside legal counsel, according to the
Washington Post .
"Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with
Fusion GPS , a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives
to develop opposition research on the president and which commissioned the phony Steele
dossier" -Mark Corallo
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 obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its
government's support for Mr. Trump -- helped along by Aras and Emin.
Trump Jr. replied to Goldstone that " if it's what you say I love it especially later in the
summer ."
Breitbart News previously
reported that Russian-born Washington lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who attended the meeting
with Veselnitskaya, evidenced a larger relationship with Fusion GPS and the controversial
firm's co-founder Glenn Simpson , according to Akhmetshin's testimony before the same
committee. -
Breitbart
Fusion's fingerprints are all over this...
Hours before Veselnitskaya attended the Trump Tower meeting to lobby Trump Jr. about the
Magnitsky act, she met with Fusion GPS co-founder
Glenn Simpson .
While most people know that Fusion GPS was paid by the Clinton campaign to produce the
infamous "Steele Dossier" - assembled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, Fusion was also
working for a Russian businessman who wanted the Magnitsky act repealed, Denis Katsyv, and
Veselnitskaya was his lawyer who was given special permission by the Obama DOJ to enter the
U.S. to represent him.
In late November of 2017, The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross reported that
heavily redacted Fusion GPS bank records reveal DNC law firm Perkins Coie
paid Fusion a total of $1,024,408 in 2016 for opposition research on then-candidate Donald
Trump - including the 34-page dossier.
Ross also reported that law firm Baker Hostelter paid Fusion $523,651 between March and
October 2016 on behalf of a company owned by Katsyv
to research Bill Browder , a London banker who helped push through the Magnitsky Act.
Keep in mind, Veselnitskaya really doesn't like Donald Trump based on several archived
Facebook posts:
I'm unsure of the zeitgeist being proposed here but it sure sounds like you are offering
up the theory that the Deep State actually wanted Trump.
Yet he..."colluded"...among outside parties like the DNC funded Fusion, Perkins Coie, MI6
and then the FBI, the CIA, DNI and the DoJ to manufacture FALSE EVIDENCE.
In order to produce that "evidence" to a FISA court, in order to "legally" surveil (with
taxpayer funds, of course) the very same man (and his associates).
So as to, gather incriminating evidence against him (Trump) so he could be removed from
office in disgrace (almost immediately) because he is actually the one the Deep State wants
in office, as President of the United States.
The only one telling a different story is the guy who's trying desperately to stay out of
prison. Not the best witness. Particularly since he didn't remember for two years prior.
Reasonable doubt anyone?
So hold on this chick is employed by Fusion GPS- who was paid to concoct a dossier against
Trump- using Russian sources and UK intelligence, has dinner with the head of Fusion GPS the
night before the meeting, she gets the meeting offering information- within minutes changes
the course of the meeting- realizing something was wrong, Donald Trump Jr ends the meeting-
and the crime is Trump may have known about it??
It's a set up plain and simple. These fucking people are dirty AS SHIT- including the
Brown Clown Kenyan.
The big story is using opposition research- paid for- submitted to the court as proof to
secure a FISA warrant, and if they didn't know the information was false and paid for- what
the fuck is the "I" in FBI for??
April 2018...."Michael is in business, he is really a businessman, a fairly big business,
as I understand it. I don't know his business." He "also practices law." And, "I have many
attorneys. Sadly, I have so many attorneys you wouldn't even believe it." Cohen handled only
a "tiny, tiny little fraction of my overall legal work."
According to Adam Davidson of the New Yorker, Cohen was not part of the Trump
Organization's Legal Team in any sense. Alan Garten was the Trump Org's attorney on real
estate matters and Marc Kasowitz usually represented Trump in important cases.
Cohen's legal education was not stellar by any sense of the word. Cohen often told this
joke:
Q: "What do you call a lawyer who graduated with a 2.0?"
A: "Counselor."
Would Trump actually hire a guy like this to be his "personal" attorney? He was
effectively a trip-and-fall attorney up to the point he was brought into the organization by
Trump Sr. In truth, Cohen was a fairly savvy real estate investor and, as such, was appointed
Trump's "deal maker" for international projects. He was also Trump's personal "fixer." Cohen
made things 'go away.' You don't need to be an attorney to "make things go away."
It's doubtful that there was a legitimate "attorney/client" relationship there.
In any case, reports are out tonight that the Trump Organization's CFO has been subpoenaed
to testify in the Cohen investigation. Why? Allen Weisselberg's name came up in the recording
that Lanny Davis released yesterday. While everyone was getting their thongs in a twist about
who said "cash," the Weisselberg mention was actually the biggest shoe to drop on that tape.
Weisselberg has a thorough knowledge of all Trump's deals, payments and income.
It was setup by Democrats trying to tie Trump to Russia
The Russian lawyer was briefed before and after the meeting by Fusion GPS
The lawyer was offering dirt on Clinton, but lied and had another agenda
What people should care about, is that Democrats were attempting to frame Trump, in the
dirtiest campaign trick in my lifetime, and using it as a pretext to get the government to
spy on Trump. But you're right that the Dems care about it, because they think (magically)
that it means Trump was colluding with Russia. LOL Consider, wouldn't Trump be doing the USA
a great favor by obtaining Hillary's emails from Russia, which would prove that Putin was
blackmailing her and Obama. The Democrats are completely ignoring this narrative, as if it's
Trump's fault Putin has her emails. LOL
You're a funny guy...The perverse inquisition by the Purple Inquisitors strike again.
Nothing but a pathetic Op to "Sting" Trump by the Psyop Deep State Dip Shits. Cohen squeals
on cue, check his Cayman Isle bank account. Mr Mueller is beyond desperate as you should be
well able to relate to. Ha F'n Ha, but you'll always have Hillary's " "Precious" pee pee
dossier...
Trump knew about a meeting re: oppo research on Hellary. Which is the same crime Hellary
and the DNC did with the bogus Russo 8ntel from the Steele Dossier against What is good for
the goose not good for the gander.
It's like a George Webb wayback machine.
Also funny how no one ever mentions that the Podesta Group closed shop immediately after
George Webb filed his lawsuit against them.
Who were in bed with Fusion... who were in bed with the DNC... who were in bed with Awan.
Also funny how that fake ass Rosenstein Russian indictment stole George Webbs lawsuits
actblues paragraph almost word for word, but substituting Russians for Awan.
The Awan who also downloaded terabytes of congressional data From Pakistan, ffs.
My, what a wicked web they weave.
Cohen is a plant. The guy was in no danger of anything happening to him. Once the DOJ took
everything they broke the law for lawyer client confidentiality. Cohen could just stfu and
say nothing and no judge would prosecute him given he never broke a law... So why is he
singing like a bird? Because its all a fucking setup.
Who knows, maybe he disliked Trump, Maybe his bitch wife made him do it at the end of the
day its his word against a bunch of other people.
Incredible what they are allowing Mueller to do. He basically makes it clear to the person
that if they do not say what they want to hear they are going to ruin them financially, so
people say tell me what you want me to say, and Mueller backs off. I am blown away this
charade is being allowed to go forward. Mueller has done more to destroy the faith people
have in our justice system than any other figure in our modern history. Truly, Mueller should
be rotting in prison for a very long time since it is clear that he is attempting a silent
coup, the US and the American public be damned. This is all about Mueller and appeasing his
puppet masters.
But slowly, ever so slowly, this charade is unraveling. This is throwing his constituents
a bone.
How do I really feel? FUCK YOU, Mueller. Fuck you and your outsized ego.
Was just reported Cohen has already testified to Congress under oath Trump didn't know and
Lanny Davis is accusing the Trump team of leaking this made up story...Cohen getting the
treatment by Trump..
President Trump's former longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, is prepared to tell
special counsel Robert Mueller that then-candidate Donald Trump knew in advance about the June
2016 Trump tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Fusion GPS associate Natalia
Veselnitskaya - who is not a fan of Trump Sr., and several other individuals - including Cohen
who says he was there, reports
CNN .
So British were involved in fabricating of 'Guccifer 2.0' persona. Nice...
Notable quotes:
"... It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata' of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the 'WP.' ..."
"... 'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.' ..."
"... As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security', which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London underground, perhaps? ..."
"... The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment for the office. ..."
"... He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May. ..."
"... However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on the 'Lawfare' site: ..."
"... Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.' ..."
"... Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but before and after. ..."
"... Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual "Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test. ..."
"... One quick way to know their bias is the AC test. Google their name plus "Atlantic Council". Ridd fails badly. ..."
"... The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues. The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive. Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer, when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence would be 100 to the 50th power. ..."
"... There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment. The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note. ..."
"... It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no one trusted the contents in Pravda. ..."
"... What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats. ..."
"... I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous. ..."
"... You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia. ..."
"... Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition), is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain. ..."
"... I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British! ..."
"... So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire by the whole novichok hoax. ..."
As some commenters on SST seem still to have difficulty grasping that the presence of 'metadata' alluding to 'Iron Felix' in the
'Guccifer 2.0' material is strong evidence that the GRU were being framed over a leak, rather than that they were responsible for
a hack, an update on the British end of the conspiracy seems in order.
If you look at the 'Lawfare' blog, in which a key figure is James Comey's crony Benjamin Wittes, you will find a long piece published
last Friday, entitled 'Russia Indictment 2.0: What to Make of Mueller's Hacking Indictment.'
Among the authors, in addition to Wittes himself, is the sometime GCHQ employee Matt Tait. It appears that the former head of
that organisation, the Blairite 'trusty' Robert Hannigan, who must know where a good few skeletons are buried, is a figure of some
moment in the conspiracy.
It was Matt Tait who, using the 'Twitter' handle @pwnallthethings, identified the name and patronymic of Dzerzhinsky in the 'metadata'
of the 'Guccifer 2.0' material on 15 June 2016, the day after Ellen Nakashima first disseminated the BS from 'CrowdStrike' in the
'WP.'
The story was picked up the following day in a report on the 'Ars Technica' site, and Tait's own account appeared on the 'Lawfare'
site, to which he has been a regular contributor, on 28 July.
According to the CV provided in conjunction with the new article:
'Matt Tait is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University
of Texas at Austin. Previously he was CEO of Capital Alpha Security, a consultancy in the UK, worked at Google Project Zero, was
a principal security consultant for iSEC Partners, and NGS Secure, and worked as an information security specialist for GCHQ.'
As I have noted before on SST, a cursory examination of records at 'Companies House' establishes that 'Capital Alpha Security',
which was supposed to have provided Tait with an – independent – source of income at the time he unearthed this 'smoking gun' incriminating
the GRU, never did any business at all. So, a question arises: how was Tait making ends meet at that time: busking on the London
underground, perhaps?
Actually, there has been a recent update in the records. Somewhat prematurely perhaps, there is an entry dated 24 July 2018, entitled
'Final Gazette dissolved via compulsory strike-off. This document is being processed and will be available in 5 days.'
The document, when available, may clarify a few loose ends, but the general picture seems clear. Last November, Tait filed 'dormant
company accounts' for the company's first year in existence, up until February 2017. One can only do this if one has absolutely no
revenue, and absolutely no expenditure. Not even the smallest contract to sort out malware on someone's computer, or to buy equipment
for the office.
He then failed to file the 'Confirmation statement', which every company must is legally obliged to produce annually, if it is
not to be struck off. This failure led to a 'First Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off' in May.
It is, of course, possible that at the time Tait set up the company he was genuinely intending to try to make a go of a consultancy,
and simply got sidetracked by other opportunities.
However – speaking from experience – people who have set up small 'one man band' companies to market skills learnt in large organisations,
and then go back into such organisations, commonly think it worth their while to spend the minimal amount of time required to file
the documentation required to keep the company alive.
If one sees any realistic prospect that one may either want to or need to go back into the big wide world again, this is the sensible
course of action: particularly now when, with the internet, filing the relevant documentation takes about half an hour a year, and
costs a trivial sum.
However, Tait may well anticipate that there is there will never be any call for him to go back into the big wide world, as the
large organisation in which he has now found employment is part of a 'Borgist' network. So much is evident from another entry on
the 'Lawfare' site:
'Bobby Chesney is the Charles I. Francis Professor in Law and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas School
of Law. He also serves as the Director of UT-Austin's interdisciplinary research center the Robert S. Strauss Center for International
Security and Law. His scholarship encompasses a wide range of issues relating to national security and the law, including detention,
targeting, prosecution, covert action, and the state secrets privilege; most of it is posted here. Along with Ben Wittes and Jack
Goldsmith, he is one of the co-founders of the blog.'
Also relevant here is the fact that, rather transparently, this placing of the GRU centre stage is bound up with the attempt to
suggest that there is some kind of 'Gerasimov doctrine', designed to undermine the West by 'hybrid warfare.' Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted
and confessed. In March, he published a piece on the 'Foreign Policy' site, under the title: 'I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov
Doctrine'; I was the first to write about Russia's infamous high-tech military strategy. One small problem: it doesn't exist.'
If anyone wants to grasp what the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, General Valery Gerasimov,
was actually saying in the crucial February 2013 article which Galeotti was discussing, and how his thinking has developed subsequently,
the place to look is, as so often, the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth.
In relation to the ongoing attempt to frame the GRU, it is material that, in his 2013 piece, Gerasimov harks back to two pivotal
figures in the arguments of the interwar years. Of these, Georgy Isserson, the Jewish doctor's son from Kaunas who became a Civil
War 'political commissar' and then a key associate of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was the great pioneer theorist of 'deep operations.'
The ideas of the other, Aleksandr Svechin, the former Tsarist 'genstabist', born in Odessa into an ethnically Russian military
family, who was the key opponent of Tukhachevky and Isserson in the arguments of the 'Twenties, provided key parts of the intellectual
basis of the Gorbachev-era 'new thinking.'
The 'Ars Technica' article in which Tait's claims were initially disseminated opened:
'We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 – the nom
de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove
it – left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.'
In his 2013 article, Gerasimov harks back to the catastrophe which overcame the Red Army in June 1941. Ironically, this was the
product of the Stalinist leadership's disregard of the cautions produced not only by Svechin, but by Isserson. In regard to the latter,
the article remarks that:
'The fate of this "prophet of the Fatherland" unfolded tragically. Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening
to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.'
As it happens, while both Svechin and Tukhachevsky were shot by the heirs of 'Felix Edmundovich', the sentence of death on Isserson
was commuted, and he spent the war in prison and labour camps, while others used his ideas to devastating effect against the Germans.
Quite clearly, the 'Guccifer 2.0' persona is a crude fabrication by someone who has absolutely no understanding of, or indeed
interest in, the bitter complexities of both of the history of Russia and of the 'borderlands', not only in the Soviet period but
before and after.
Using this criterion as a 'filter', the obvious candidates are traditional Anglo-Saxon 'Russophobes', like Sir Richard Dearlove
and Christopher Steele, or the 'insulted and injured' of the erstwhile Russian and Soviet empires, so many of them from the 'borderlands',
of the type of Victoria Nuland, or the various Poles, Ukrainians and Balts and Jews who have had so much influence on American policy.
(I should note that other Jews, not only in Russia, but outside, including in Israel, think quite differently, in particular as
they are very well aware, as Isserson would have been, of the extent to which 'borderlands' nationalists were enthusiastic collaborators
with the Germans in the 'Final Solution'. On this, there is a large and growing academic literature.)
It is not particularly surprising that many of the victims of the Russian and Soviet empires have enjoyed seeing the tables turned,
and getting their own back. But it is rather far from clear that this makes for good intelligence or sound policy. We were unable
to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting
guide .
How does the objective truth get disclosed in an environment of extreme deceit by so many parties?
How to trust western intelligence when they have such a long and sordid track record of deceit, lies and propaganda? At the
same time there is such a long history of Russian and Chinese intelligence and information operations against the west.
Then there is the nexus among the highest levels of US law enforcement and intelligence as well as political elites in both
parties and key individuals in the media complex.
We are living in a hall of mirrors and it seems the trend is towards confirmation bias in information consumption.
Excellent post, especially the debunking of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' which I always thought was more hand-waving and Russian mind-reading.
It's important to realize that there are a number of people in the infosec community who have biases against Russia, just as
there are in the general population. Then there are more cautious people, who recognize the difficulty in attributing a hack to
any specific person absent solid, incontrovertible, non-circumstantial and non-spoofable (and preferably offline) evidence.
Tait doesn't appear to be one of the latter. Thomas Rid would be another. There are others.
Jeffrey Carr is one of the latter, and his familiarity with intelligence matters is clear from his organization of the annual
"Suits and Spooks" Conference. I believe he was the first to raise questions about the DNC hack which didn't pass his smell test.
There are also a number of companies in infosec who rely on latching onto a particular strain of hacker, the more publicly
exploitable for PR purposes the better, as a means of keeping the company name in front of potential high-profile and highly billable
clients. CrowdStrike and its Russia obsession isn't the only one that's been tagged with that propensity.
Mandiant could be referred to as the "Chinese, all the time" company, for example. Richard Bejtlich was at Fireeye and the
became Chief Security Officer when they acquired Mandiant. He spent quite a bit of effort on his blog warning about the Chinese
military buildup as a huge threat to the US. He's former USAF so perhaps that's not surprising.
Glad David's comment has been reproduced as a post in its own right, this is a critically important topic. IMO Matt Tait plays
the role of midwife in this conspiracy. His
Twitter thread
The Comey, Brennan, Mueller claim - indeed a central one upon which the recent indictment rests- that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian
State agent that hacked the DNC- was discredited and put to rest last year by the forensics conducted by Bill Binney and his colleagues.
The Guccifer 2.0 metadata was analyzed for its transmission speed, and based on the internet speeds to and from numerous test
locations abroad and in the U.S., it was determined to have been impossible for the so-called Guccifer 2.0 to have hacked the
DNC computers over the internet. The transmission speed however did correspond to the speed of the transfer to a thumb drive.
Additionally, it was found that the data had been manipulated and split into two parts to simulate a July and a September transfer,
when in fact the parts merge perfectly as single file, and where, according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence
would be 100 to the 50th power.
As for the crude trace fingerprints (e.g. the referencing of Dzerzinsky), one of the Wikileaks data dumps (Vault 7 Marble)
during a period when Assange was negotiating with the Administration - there were two at the time (Vault 7 Marble and Vault 7
Grasshopper), the release of which apparently enraged Mike Pompeo- was designed to obfuscate, fabricate and frame countries such
as Russia, Iran or North Korea by pretending to be the target country, including in the use of target's alphabet and language.
VIPs has written numerous articles on this in Consortium News. See also the report by Patrick Lawrence Smith in The Nation
at:
https://www.thenation.com/a... . (It was apparently so hot at the time- and disputed by several other VIPs members- that The
Nation sought an independent assessment by third party, though those comments were easily addressed and dismissed in seriatim
by Binney in an annex to the article.)
Binney has explained his forensic analysis and conclusions at numerous forums, and in a sit-down with Secretary Pompeo in October,
2017- though Mueller, the FBI, and mainstream and some of the alternative press seem either deaf, dumb and blind to it all, or
interested in discrediting the study. The irony is, I'd venture to guess, that Binney, with his 40 years of experience, including
as Technical Director and technical guru at the NSA, is, even in retirement, more sophisticated in these matters than any one
at the Agency, or the FBI, or CIA, or certainly, the Congressional Intelligence Committees. So, it is astounding that any or all
of them could have, but did not, invite him to testify as an expert.
Moreover, the NSA has a record of every transmission, and also would have it on backup files. And, the FBI has been sitting
on Seth Rich's computer and his communications with Wikileaks, and presumably has a report that it has not released. And of course,
as Trump asked in his press conference, where's the DNC server, any or all of which would put this question to rest.
The last clause of the first paragraph should have said: "according to Binney, the probability of the split being a coincidence
would be one over 100 to the 50th power
There is a pattern of abuse of formerly well regarded institutions to achieve the propaganda aims of the Deep State establishment.
The depths that were plumbed to push the Iraq WMD falsehoods are well known. Yet no one was held to account nor was there any
honest accounting of the abuse. There have been pretenses like the Owen inquiry that you note.
We see the same situation of sweeping under the rug malfeasance and even outright criminality through obfuscation and obstruction
in the case of the meddling in the 2016 election by top officials in intelligence and law enforcement. Clearly less and less people
are buying what the Deep State sells despite their overwhelming control of the media channels.
It seems that we are marching towards a credibility crisis similar to what was experienced in the Soviet Union when no
one trusted the contents in Pravda.
What is to be gained by the leadership in Britain in promoting these biological weapons cases since Litvinenko? In the
US it is quite apparent that the Deep State have become extremely powerful and the likelihood that Trump recognizes that resistance
is futile is very high. Schumer may be proven right that they have six ways from Sunday to make you kowtow to their dictats.
That was one of the changes being hoped for when Obama was first elected. Instead we got little, except for things such as
bailed out bankers and the IRS scandal which lasted until the end of his 2nd term. The panic from the left over the 2016 election
issues the are still going on is that the expected candidate isn't in office and they are being exposed. Whether they get prosecuted
is another story.
I think Matt Tait, David Habakkuk and many others are reading far more into this Dzerzinsky thing than what it warrants. The government
dependent ID cards used by my family while I was working as a clandestine case officer overseas were signed by Robert Ludlum.
Intelligence officers often have an odd sense of humor.
On a different note, I fully endorse David Habakkuk's recommendation of the writings of Bartles, McDermott and many others
at the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. They are top notch. I learned a lot from Tim Thomas many years ago.
I agree that taken by itself, the Dzerzinsky thing would be an anomaly only and could be dismissed as "black humor" of a kind
often found in hackers. However, taken with all the other evidence produced by Adam Carter, it becomes much more obviously an
attempt to support a false flag "Russian hacker" narrative that otherwise is porous.
I believe there is a phrase going something like "an attempt to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
You want us to believe that the GRU are so sloppy and so inexperienced that they would launch a hack on the DNC and not
take every measure to ensure there was no link whatsoever to anything Russian? Any former intel officer worth a damn knows that
an operation to disrupt the election in a country the size of the United States would start with a risk/reward assessment, would
require a team of at least 100 persons and would not be writing any code that could in any way be traced to Russia.
Unfortunately, the original author of this claptrap, Mark Galeotti, who, I regret to say, is, like Tait, British, has now recanted
and confessed.
Doctrine-mongering and repeating birth of new faux-academic "entities", such as a "hybrid war" (any war is hybrid by definition),
is a distinct feature of the Western "political science-military history" establishment. Galeotti, who for some strange reason
passes as Russia "expert" is a perfect example of such "expertise" and doctrine-mongering. Military professionals largely met
this "hybrid warfare" BS with disdain.
I have to say that the more I look into this whole Russiagate affair, which is mostly in the minds of democrats (and a few
republicans) and the MSM, the more it seems that there is indeed a foreign conspiracy to meddle in the internal affairs of the
US (and in the presidential elections) but the meddling entity is not Russia. It is the British!
So many (ex-) MI6 operators (Steele, Tait, etc) involved in the story. It is interesting that the media don't question
the intense involvement of the British in all this. And of course, the British haven't been laggards in adding fuel to the fire
by the whole novichok hoax.
This needs to be looked at in more detail by the alternative media and well informed commentators like the host of this site.
"... Comey's memo was a key component in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's decision to launch a special counsel investigation headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller. ..."
"... Some have also suggested ( Paul Sperry to be exact) that Cambridge professor and FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper, may have had a much larger role in the operation. ..."
"... Halper is a longtime spook whose ex-father-in-law, Ray Cline , was the former chief Soviet analyst and Deputy Director of the CIA from 1962 - 1966. Halper also spied on the Carter campaign during the 1980 election for Reagan - whose Vice President was former CIA director George H.W. Bush ( Ray Cline denied the spying took place). ..."
"... Papadopoulos' statement of offense also detailed his April 26, 2016, meeting with Mifsud at a London hotel. Over breakfast Mifsud told Papadopoulos "he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian governmental officials." Mifsud explained "that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained 'dirt' on then-candidate Clinton." Mifsud told Papadopoulos "the Russians had emails of Clinton." - The Federalist ..."
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) says he'll issue subpoenas for former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney
General Loretta Lynch, but the panel's top Democrat Dianne Feinstein (CA) has to agree to it per committee rules. Grassley also said
he would be open to exploring immunity for Comey's former #2, Andrew McCabe.
"I will want to subpoena him," Grassley said of Comey during an appearance on C-SPAN's Newsmakers ."
The Iowan added that committee rules require that he and Feinstein "agree to it, and at this point I can't tell you if she
would agree to it. But if she will, yeah, then we will subpoena . " -
Politico
Feinstein may be hesitant to sign on, as she says she thinks Comey acted in good faith - which means she thinks Congress shouldn't
have a crack at questioning a key figure in the largest political scandal in modern history.
"While I disagree with his actions, I have seen no evidence that Mr. Comey acted in bad faith or that he lied about any of his
actions," said Feinstein during a Monday Judiciary panel hearing. Former Feinstein staffer and FBI investigator Dan Jones, meanwhile,
continues to work with Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS on a
$50 million investigation privately funded by George Soros and other "wealthy donors" to continue the investigation into Donald
Trump.
Also recall that
Feinstein
leaked Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson's Congressional testimony in January.
Comey skipped out on appearing before Grassley's committee this week following the June 14 release of DOJ Inspector General Michael
Horowitz's (OIG) report on FBI conduct during the Hillary Clinton email investigation - which dinged Comey for being "insubordinate"
and showing poor judgement. Horowitz is conducting a separate investigation into the FBI's counterintelligence operation on the Trump
campaign, including allegations of FISA surveillance abuse.
Maybe Comey also decided to bail after Horowitz admitted on Monday that
he's under a separate investigation for mishandling classified information after leaking a memo to the press documenting what
he felt was President Trump obstructing the FBI's probe into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn - which was conducted
by the FBI under dubious circumstances, and for which evidence may have been
tampered
with .
Comey's memo was a key component in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's decision to launch a special counsel investigation
headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Loretta Lynch, on the other hand , was dinged in the IG report over an "ambiguous" incomplete recusal from the Clinton email "matter"
despite a clandestine 30-minute "tarmac" meeting with Bill Clinton
one week before the FBI exonerated
Hillary Clinton .
All part of the bigger picture...
Despite IG Horowitz ultimately concluding that pro-Clinton / anti-Trump bias among the FBI's top brass did not make its way into
the Clinton email investigation, his report revealed alarming facts about FBI officials handling parallel investigations into each
candidate who received vastly different treatment.
For starters, it's clear that the FBI rushed to wrap up the Clinton email investigation before the election, while at the same
time the agency launched an open-ended counterintelligence operation against those in Trump's orbit.
We also know that opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton was used by the FBI to justify surveilling the Trump campaign
- while new facts point to a multi-pronged campaign of espionage and deceit spanning several continents, governments and agencies
which was deployed at the highest levels in an effort to undermine Donald Trump before and after the 2016 U.S. election.
Some have also suggested ( Paul Sperry to be exact) that Cambridge
professor and FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper, may have had a much larger role in the operation.
Halper is a longtime spook whose ex-father-in-law, Ray Cline , was the
former chief Soviet analyst and Deputy Director of the CIA from 1962 - 1966. Halper also
spied on the Carter campaign during the 1980 election for Reagan - whose Vice President was former CIA director
George H.W. Bush (
Ray Cline denied the spying took place).
From 2012 - 2017, the Pentagon under Obama awarded Halper over
$1 million in "research" contracts - nearly half of which was awarded during the 2016 US election .
Then there's the mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud - a key witness in the Mueller investigation who
disappeared last fall , and who told Trump aide George Papadopoulos that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos would
drunkenly repeat the rumor to seasoned Australian diplomat (and
Clinton ally ) Alexander Downer in a London Bar, only to be construed by the FBI as potential collusion in order to justify their
counterintelligence operation against Trump.
And just Monday Trump advisor Roger Stone said that a
second FBI informant , Henry Greenberg, tried to entrap the Trump campaign with an offer to sell dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange
for $2 million.
While the entire mosaic of events is multi-faceted and requires perhaps the world's biggest corkboard - here's a basic timeline
of various espionage or other spycraft conducted against the Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos' statement of offense also detailed his April 26, 2016, meeting with Mifsud at a London hotel. Over breakfast
Mifsud told Papadopoulos "he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian governmental officials."
Mifsud explained "that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained 'dirt' on then-candidate Clinton."
Mifsud told Papadopoulos "the Russians had emails of Clinton." -
The Federalist
May 10, 2016 - Papadopoulos tells this to former Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer during an alleged "
drunken barroom admission ."
Late May, 2016 - Roger Stone is approached by Greenberg with the $2 million offer for dirt on Clinton
July 2016 - FBI informant (spy) Stefan Halper meets with Trump campaign aide Carter Page for the first time, which would be one
of many encounters.
July 31, 2016 - the FBI officially launches operation
Crossfire Hurricane , the code name given to the counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign.
September, 2016 - Halper invites Papadopoulos to London, paying him $3,000 to work on an energy policy paper while wining and
dining him at a 200-year-old private London club on September 15.
While the FBI has yet to find any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, they were able to use information Mifsud
planted with Papadopoulos to launch a
counterintelligence operation .
And as new facts and revelations continue to emerge, and IG Horowitz continues to unravel the FBI's counterintelligence operation
on Donald Trump, several rank-and-file FBI employees say
they want Congress to subpoena them so that they can step forward and testify against Comey and Andrew McCabe.
Funny - for two "innocent" people, Comey and Lynch want the exact opposite!
~Grassley also said he would be open to exploring immunity for Comey's former #2, Andrew McCabe.~
Screw you, Chuck. No one gets immunity. Stay the fuck out of what should be the business of a federal criminal grand jury.
Diane has enough trouble of her own with the leaky aide.
No, I think she will. They have the goods on her for leaking like a sieve through her aide and on to the entry level Pulitzer
Prize media whore (remember, they raided the newspaper. The goods are still there).
Rumor has it there is a subpoena waiting for DiFi out there. It would be best if she complied.
If two or more
persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the
United States , conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the
United States , or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder,
or delay the execution of any law of the
United States , or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the
United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty
years, or both.
We don't need Commey and Lynch questioned by those losers on Capitol Hill, that is a waste of money and time. What is required
is a DOJ inquiry, or better yet, a special council for the HRC Mail Server and Corruption in the Meuller probe.
I am normally against a special council, but in this case the DOJ is clearly biased. They should get to the bottom of the crimes
committed by hillery on her mail server including realated crime transacted on the server like uranium one. That is what the FBI
would do to us, and they should be no different. Equal protection under the law means equal punishment under the law as well.
An additional special council should be formed to get to the bottom of the FISA warrant to used for surveillance on the Trump
team and find out if there was any malfeasance obtaining those warrants. This would also bring up the question of whether the
meuller probe obstructed justice by obscuring exonerating evidence that the probe was established with junk evidence.
If a good prosecutor was used, there is enough evidence in the public forum now to throw a bunch of the obama administration
in prison for political corruption and the higher echelon members of the FBI in jail for bribery. That's right, the FBI can't
take gifts, even if the media are offering them. This is corruption of the highest order and our country will not survive this
if it is not prosecuted properly.
IF WE WANT THE SWAMP DRAINED PEOPLE HAVE TO GO TO PRISON FOR LIFE TO PUT THE FEAR OF GOD AND THE PEOPLE BACK INTO BUTEAUCRATS.
"... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
"... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
"... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
"... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
"... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
"... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
"... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
"... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
"... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
"... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
"... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
"... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
"... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
"... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
"... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
"... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
"... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
"... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
"... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
"... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
"... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
"... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
"... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
"... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked
into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand
close scrutiny . It
could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to
investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with
WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former
National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange
did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the
Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access
to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage
device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained
this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.
On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted
that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to
WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of
Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to
blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained
no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of
that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian
intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to
WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.
Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the
blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that
Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had
to have been the Russians.
Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to
challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks.
Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not
exist.
WikiLeaks
It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that
Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the
Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of
Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails
were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to
create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the
emails by blaming Russia for their release.
Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various
media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even
we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails
from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The
diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave
little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer'
Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.
Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic
facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:
June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to
Hillary Clinton."
June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there
is evidence it was injected by Russians.
June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the
"hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was
synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."
The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a
pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish
and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.
Enter Independent Investigators
A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for
reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts"
who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found
verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5,
2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or
anyone else.
Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for
example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016
for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics"
principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to
disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)
One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May
31
published new evidence that
the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not
from Russia.
In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated ,
"We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."
Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be
related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this
general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA
documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or
former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the
information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.
"No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which
disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's
Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital
Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned
President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]
Marbled
"Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it
race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described
and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part
3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too
delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has
never been mentioned since .
"The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March
31
article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA
cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'
"The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use
'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text
obfuscation.
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution
double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian,
Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on
Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version
published in The Baltimore Sun
The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was
neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his
associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a
non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24
Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like
it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we
know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and
with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [
President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017
VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together
at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary
straightforwardness. ]
We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin.
In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager
– to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7
disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's
technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can
understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or
any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.
"'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States
who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a
scenario? I can.'
New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published
16-minute
interview last Friday.
In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must
append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24,
2017:
"Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in
the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we
add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political
agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our
former intelligence colleagues.
"We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say
and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it
is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the
Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as
a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the
President's Daily Brief.
ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am
"More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post
report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by
WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic
attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in
Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."
Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of
choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies.
MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to
blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the
supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US
allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not
capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of
the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during
the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis
could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth
Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted
by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.
The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the
CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all
over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple
conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security
firms (Wikipedia):
cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant,
SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of
"Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the
cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy
Bear).
Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had
"dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally
obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of
the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with
connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly
thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday,
Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known
evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.
Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it
lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.
anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am
I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed
out" propaganda.
One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not.
No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin
supply."
CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm
There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence
agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false
flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false
flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible
to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.
In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to
create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many
examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by
the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.
Examples:
The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship
Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying
munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the
Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was
torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but
it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.
There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor
Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning
radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the
Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that
our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.
There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was
planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out
the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq
which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with
Iraq.
The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was
greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in
Vietnam.
The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow
journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed
by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a
boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be
caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and
war was waged.
In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made
up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was
led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every
case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under
attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or
justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our
nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or
just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a
publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support
for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.
Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which
enable global communication and commerce.
Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on
military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create
in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false
flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the
government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world
events to justify military action?
Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we
get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.
Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags
will happen for better or worse in any medium available.
susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm
I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral
"highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before
anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.
The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so
many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism
writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked"
to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another
(FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund
marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy
targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is
able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and
printed.
Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as
source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal
State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.
Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm
I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict
control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7
releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."
I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party
candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a
lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC
skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green,
but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows
what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone
tells you it is possible he might have won.
Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another
Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos)
gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.
willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm
It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep
donors from abandoning any future
Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It
was the Rooskies."
Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am
An earlier time line.
March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.
April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".
May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.
May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically
e-mails.
June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.
It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably
Intelligence services) for > 6 months.
Specific points.
On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the
(presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his
domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?
There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the
unlikely event that he went on to win.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm
Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being
"Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the
two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long
before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to
use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are
right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to
the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were
trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest
(more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.
Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Steven Halper?
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am
I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been
ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and
visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails
were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and
angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost
knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her
defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which
covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was
please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing,
though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another
innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this
story.
MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm
"no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"
Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation –
with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not
done?
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am
MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency
agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan,
Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing
there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he
will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is
probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18
minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean
Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller
investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and
witness TAMPERING. A great American there!
Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am
strgr-tgther:
Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.
As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents,
politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am
Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the
Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant
rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who
was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)
It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC
machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively,
show.)
incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am
What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are
alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate,
which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground
– and it would have been published for all to read.
The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating
Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a
strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress
such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical
directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven
through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC
computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many
times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the
facts?
As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the
Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which
Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page,
McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say,
what matters is the evidence.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles,
and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm
The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before
Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse,
bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms.
Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or
in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the
electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the
Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the
septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal
government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in
Washington.
Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am
"We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."
You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked
spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17
sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice
a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and
deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive
to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were
you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential
campaign and candidate.
strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm
/horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep
comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be
are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY
why. Stay tuned!!!
irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night
fireworks
celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.
And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm
Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason
why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted
and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the
Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to
hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you,
that's why she lost.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm
Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start
focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see
the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections.
Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them
"shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack
trade.)
Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm
Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two:
"we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time
ago.
Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all
this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this
will benefit all.
Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since
our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters,
and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to
determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.
It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has
re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build
out from there This is just a suggestion.
What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were
bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as
well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever
attributed to Trump?
Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm
Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on
their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their
"investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry
picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.
More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable
public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered
Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party
debates! In a democracy! How dare they?
Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why
did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board
member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made
about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie
artillery?
Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am
Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never
questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to
Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.
Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm
Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to
divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the
truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's
activities are a complete sham.
MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's
investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks
– has and has not done?"
Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special
counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the
Department of Justice.
I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power
to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016
presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.
That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself.
The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate
the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via
impeachment.
As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow
investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a
corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon
did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively
investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no
democratic control.
The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the
Constitution intended.
As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act
as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it
must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't
happen.
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm
There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
Or so claim those CIA spies-
McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
He'll dissemble when he testifies!
No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
There's no jury and no prosecutor.
Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
Special council might someday recruit her!
Assange is still embassy bound.
Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
To Israelis they haven't yet found!
Halper and Mifsud are players.
John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
They'll go after them all as betrayers!
They needed historical fiction.
A dossier with salacious depiction!
Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!
Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
But the dossier's not copyrighted!
That story about Novichok,
Smells a lot like a very large crock.
But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
The Skripals have toxic brain block!
Papadopolis shot off his yap.
He told Downer, that affable chap-
There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!
She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
Papadopolis thought she was cute.
She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!
But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
The Clinton team had some discussions.
Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!
There must have been Russian collusion.
That explained all the vote count confusion.
Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
If he won, it was just an illusion!
Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!
There had to be cyber subversion.
It would serve as the perfect perversion.
They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
It's a logically perfect diversion!
F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.
KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm
What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered &
committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just
about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal
invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for
something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not
to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The
point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander &
demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for
the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just
happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump
impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away
from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities
& her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate
nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public
apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a
crime they never committed?
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm
Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely
cause of the Russiagate scams.
I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True
elections are now impossible.
Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any
resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely
coincidental."
Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm
Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All
of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only
they could realize it.
Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.
mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm
For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which
pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering
a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic
conspiracy.
And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will
automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the
higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the
way the oligarchs do business.
John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am
Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in
knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is
involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB
drive, it is not a known.
There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that
the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth
Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being
done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated
reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.
" whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.
Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm
Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic
charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and
Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the
mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by
Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was
the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable
DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his
crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they
even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?
So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to
their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill
Gang!
jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm
If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They
know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The
Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.
Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm
Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in
our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your
disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government
official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If
they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you
know they are lying.
john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm
I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know
this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is
supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find
anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as
they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm
I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this
Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.
My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After
all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart
Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not
be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for
justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved
in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?
Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful
handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN
nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news,
meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be
that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.
In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals
in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place
leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make
more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When
will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for
all?
Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm
Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to
hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your
attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn &
Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying
eyes?
Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our
Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes
uninterrupted. Joe
F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm
Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about
Freddy Fleitz!
Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm
That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last
line:
"Swamp draining progresses apace.
It's being accomplished with grace:
They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
New swamp creatures will need all that space!
Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am
We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New
Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right
are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank
control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution,
etc.
So Strzok was involved with this part of the story too. Strzokgate now has distinct British accent and probably was coordinated
by CIA and MI6.
Harper was definitely acted like an "agent provocateur", whose job was to ask leading questions to get Trump campaign advisers to
say things that would corroborate-or seem to corroborate-evidence that the FBI believed it already had in hand. It looks like among
other things Halper was tasked with the attempt elaborate on the claims made in Steele's
September 14 dossier memo: "Russians
do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it."
London was the perfect place for such dirty games -- the territory where the agent knew he could operate safely.
"Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true. The real story is therefore
the continuing attempt to assert that the dossier, or key parts of it, are true, after large-scale investigations by the FBI, and now
by special counsel Robert Mueller, have failed to turn up any evidence of a plot hatched between Trump and Vladimir Putin to take over
the White House."
"... So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing? ..."
Notable quotes:
"... The New York Times' ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names? What were they doing? ..."
"... Under whose authority were they spying on a political campaign? Did FBI and DOJ leadership sign off? Did FBI director James Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch know about it? What about other senior Obama administration officials? CIA Director John Brennan? Did President Obama know the FBI was spying on a presidential campaign? Did Hillary Clinton know? What about Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta? ..."
The New York Times'
4,000-word report last week on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign's possible ties to Russia
revealed for the first time that the investigation was called "Crossfire Hurricane."
The name, explains the paper, refers to the Rolling Stones lyric "I was born in a crossfire hurricane," from the 1968 hit "Jumpin'
Jack Flash." Mick Jagger, one of the songwriters, said the song was a "metaphor" for psychedelic-drug induced states. The other,
Keith Richards, said it "refers to his being born amid the bombing and air raid sirens of Dartford, England, in 1943 during World
War II."
Investigation names, say senior U.S. law enforcement officials, are designed to refer to facts, ideas, or people related to the
investigation. Sometimes they're explicit, and other times playful or even allusive. So what did the Russia investigation have to
do with World War II, psychedelic drugs, or Keith's childhood?
The answer may be found in the 1986 Penny Marshall film named after the song, "Jumpin' Jack Flash." In the Cold War-era comedy,
a quirky bank officer played by Whoopi Goldberg comes to the aid of Jonathan Pryce, who plays a British spy being chased by the KGB.
The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is therefore most likely a reference to the former British spy whose allegedly Russian-sourced
reports on the Trump team's alleged ties to Russia were used as evidence to secure a Foreign Intelligence Service Act secret warrant
on Trump adviser Carter Page in October 2016: ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
Helping Spin a New Origin Story
It is hardly surprising that the Times refrained from exploring the meaning of the code name. The paper of record has
apparently joined a campaign, spearheaded by the Department of Justice, FBI, and political operatives pushing the Trump-Russia collusion
story, to minimize Steele's role in the Russia investigation.
After an October news report showed his dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, facts that
further challenged the credibility of Steele's research, the FBI investigation's origin story shifted.
In December, The New York Times
published a "scoop " on the new origin story. In the revised narrative, the probe didn't start with the Steele dossier at all.
Rather, it began with an April 2016 meeting between Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a Maltese professor named Joseph
Mifsud. The professor informed him that "he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had 'dirt'
on Mrs. Clinton in the form of 'thousands of emails.'"
Weeks later, Papadopoulos boasted to the Australian ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, that he was told the Russians had
Clinton-related emails. Two months later, according to the Times , the Australians reported Papadopoulos' boasts to the
FBI, and on July 31, 2016, the bureau began its investigation.
Further reinforcement of the new origin story came from congressional Democrats. A
January 29 memo
written by House Intelligence Committee minority staff under ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff further distances Steele from the opening
of the investigation. "Christopher Steele's raw reporting did not inform the FBI's decision to initiate its counterintelligence investigation
in late July 2016. In fact, the FBI's closely-held investigative team only received Steele's reporting in mid-September."
Last week's major Times article echoes the Schiff memo. Steele's reports, according to the paper, reached the "Crossfire
Hurricane team" "in mid-September."
Yet the new account of how the government spying campaign against Trump started is highly unlikely. According to the thousands
of favorable press reports asserting his credibility, Steele was well-respected at the FBI for his work on a 2015 case that helped
win indictments of more than a dozen officials working for soccer's international governing body, FIFA. In July 2016, Steele met
with the agent he worked with on the FIFA case to show his early findings on the Trump team's ties to Russia.
The FBI took Steele's reporting on Trump's ties to Russia so seriously it was later used as evidence to monitor the electronic
communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But, according to Schiff and the Times , the FBI somehow lost track
of reports from a "credible" source who claimed to have information showing that the Republican candidate for president was compromised
by a foreign government. That makes no sense.
The code name "Crossfire Hurricane" is further evidence that the FBI's cover story is absurd. A reference to a movie about a British
spy evading Russian spies behind enemy lines suggests the Steele dossier was always the core of the bureau's investigation into the
Trump campaign.
Was Halper an Informant, Spy, Or Agent Provocateur?
Taken together with the other significant revelation from last Times story, the purpose and structure of Crossfire Hurricane
may be coming into clearer focus. According to the Times story: "At least one government informant met several times with
[Trump campaign advisers Carter] Page and [George] Papadopoulos, current and former officials said."
As we now know, the informant is Stefan Halper, a
former classmate of Bill Clinton's at Oxford University who worked in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations. Halper is
known for his good connections in intelligence circles. His father-in-law
was Ray Cline , former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halper
is also reported to have led the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign team that collected intelligence on sitting U.S. President Jimmy
Carter's foreign policy.
So what was Halper doing in this instance? He wasn't really a spy (a person who is generally tasked with stealing secrets) or
an informant (a person who provides information about criminal activities from the inside). Rather, it seems he was more like an
agent provocateur, whose job was to ask leading questions to get Trump campaign advisers to say things that would corroborate --
or seem to corroborate -- evidence that the bureau believed it already had in hand.
It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things.
Halper met with at least three Trump campaign advisers: Sam Clovis, Page, and George Papadopoulos. The latter two he met with
in London, where Halper had reason to feel comfortable operating.
Halper's close contacts in the intelligence world weren't limited to the CIA. They also include foreign intelligence officials
like Richard Dearlove , the former head of the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, MI6. According to
a Washington Times report , Halper and Dearlove are partners in a UK consulting firm, Cambridge Security Initiative.
Dearlove is also close to Steele. According
to the Washington Post , Dearlove met with Steele in the early fall of 2016, when his former charge shared his "worries"
about what he'd found on the Trump campaign and "asked for his guidance."
London was therefore the perfect place for Halper to spring a trap -- outside the direct purview of the FBI, but on territory
where he knew he could operate safely. It appears Halper's job was to induce inexperienced Trump campaign figures to say things that
corroborated the 35-page series of memos written by Steele -- the centerpiece of the Russiagate investigation -- in order to license
a broader campaign of government spying against Trump and his associates in the middle of a presidential election.
Halper Reached Out to Trump Campaign Members
Chuck Ross's reporting in The Daily Caller provides invaluable details and insight. As Ross
explained in The Daily Caller back
in March, Halper emailed Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 with an invitation to write a research paper, for which he'd be paid $3,000,
and a paid trip to London. According to Ross, "Papadopoulos and Halper met several times during the London trip," with one meeting
scheduled for September 13 and another two days later.
Ross writes: "According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: 'George, you know about hacking
the emails from Russia, right?' Papadopoulos told Halper he didn't know anything about emails or Russian hacking." It seems Halper
was looking to elaborate on the claims made in Steele's
September 14 dossier
memo : "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and considering disseminating it."
Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true.
Had Papadopoulos confirmed that a shadowy Maltese academic had told him in April about Russians holding Clinton-related emails,
presumably that would have entered the dossier as something like, "Trump campaign adviser PAPADOPOULOS confirms knowledge of Russian
'kompromat.'"
Another Trump campaign adviser Halper contacted was Page. They first met in Cambridge, England at a July 11, 2016 symposium. Halper's
partner Dearlove spoke at the conference, which was held just days after Page had delivered a widely reported speech at the New Economic
School in Moscow. According to another
Ross article reporting on Page and Halper's interactions, the Trump adviser "recalls nothing of substance being discussed other
than Halper's passing mention that he knew then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort."
Page and Manafort both figure prominently in the Steele dossier's July 19 memos. According to
the document ,
Manafort "was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries." Page had also, according to the dossier,
met with senior Kremlin officials -- a charge he later denied in
his November
2, 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Evidently, he also gave Halper nothing to use in verifying the charges
made against him.
Halper's fishing expedition therefore came up with nothing to suggest the Steele dossier was true. The real story is therefore
the continuing attempt to assert that the dossier, or key parts of it, are true, after large-scale investigations by the FBI, and
now by special counsel Robert Mueller, have failed to turn up any evidence of a plot hatched between Trump and Vladimir Putin to
take over the White House.
Using Spy Powers on Political Opponents Is a Big Problem
That portions of the American national security apparatus would put their considerable powers -- surveillance, spying, legal pressure
-- at the service of a partisan political campaign is a sign that something very big is broken in Washington. Our Founding Fathers
would not be surprised to learn that the post-9/11 surveillance and spying apparatus built to protect Americans from al-Qaeda has
now become a political tool that targets Americans for partisan purposes. That the rest of us are surprised is a sign that we have
stopped taking the U.S. Constitution as seriously as we should.
The damage done to the American press is equally large. Since the November 2016 presidential election, a financially imperiled
media industry gambled its remaining prestige on Russiagate. Yet after nearly a year and a half filled with thousands of stories
feeding the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, last week still represented a landmark moment in American journalism. The New
York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential campaign.
The New York Times , which proudly published the Pentagon Papers, provided cover for an espionage operation against a presidential
campaign.
There are significant errors and misrepresentations in the article that the Times could've easily checked, if it weren't
in such a hurry to hide the FBI and DOJ's crimes and abuses. Perhaps most significantly, the Times avoided asking the key
questions that the article raised with its revelation that "at least one government informant" met with Trump campaign figures.
So, how many "informants" targeted the Trump campaign? Were they being paid by the U.S. government? What are their names?
What were they doing?
Under whose authority were they spying on a political campaign? Did FBI and DOJ leadership sign off? Did FBI director James
Comey and Attorney General Loretta Lynch know about it? What about other senior Obama administration officials? CIA Director John
Brennan? Did President Obama know the FBI was spying on a presidential campaign? Did Hillary Clinton know? What about Clinton campaign
chairman John Podesta?
These questions are sure to be asked. What we know already is that the Times reporters did not ask them, because they
do not bother to indicate that the officials interviewed for the story had declined to answer. That they did not ask these questions
is evidence the Times is no longer a newspaper that sees its job as reporting the truth or holding high government officials
responsible for their crimes. Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet.
"... FUsion GPS arranged the meeting at trump tower. ..."
"... IF Misfud told papaD that he had access to Hillary's emails, why did they not bother looking for him for 9 months and then let him walk free? Because he was a set up. ..."
'Collusion' would mean actively conspiring with a foreign government. To this day there is no evidence that the Russian lawyer
was working for the Russian government (I have seen some media simply assert that she has Kremlin 'connections', whatever that's
supposed to mean). Also, why exactly would the Trump campaign have any need to meet with someone promising dirt if, as the Steele
Dossier claims, Trump had been a Russian agent for 5 years? The Kremlin would surely have already been providing any possible
dirt, and more besides.
And is this really where we are now? Is this what we've come to? Russia is a country of 144 million people. Is simply being
Russian, or talking to a Russian, now a crime? Because that's what our current atmosphere seems to think. It's shocking to see
so many people, especially supposedly tolerant and multicultural liberals, ignore any distinction between a government and private
citizens, and engage in what can only be called bigotry about 'Russians'. Replace 'Russian' with 'Jew', or a slur like 'Jap',
and how incredibly ugly the atmosphere has become in the last 18 months or so becomes obvious.
That Trump is comically corrupt is a given. But the two central claims of Russiagate were that a. Trump is a Russian agent
(or at least being blackmailed by Russia), and that b. Russia in some way hacked or interfered in the election to get Trump elected.
There is, to this day, exactly zero evidence for either.
No, his son meeting with a Russian citizen promising political dirt (even if dirt had been exchanged, which it wasn't because
she was lying and just wanted to get a meeting to lobby for some business interests), doesn't constitute 'collusion', or interference
by a foreign government.
Nor does some St. Petersburg company spending a paltry amount of money to run a clickbait ad revenue scheme on Facebook. Nor
do Macedonian teenagers running troll accounts (Macedonia isn't even in Russia, and to this day I've never seen any evidence that
any Russian, much less the Russian government, is behind their activities).
The above two are especially damning, because they make it painfully obvious that Russiagate has exactly nothing. In the absence
of any evidence that Russia hacked the election, proponents have been forced to venture far and wide to find something, anything,
they can remotely pin on Russia. A few hundred thousand dollars spent on social media ads, including ads for Clinton and Sanders,
many of which were seen by literally no one, and half of which didn't run until AFTER the election? Are you freaking kidding me?
As for 'shady Russian money', maybe Trump has taken some. It certainly wouldn't surprise me that he's done something like launder
money for Russian oligarchs. Now prove to me took money from the Russian government. Because, again, those are two very different
prospects. And if you think the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs are interchangeable or in lockstep with each other, you clearly
don't know much about recent Russian history.
The Russiagate claim wasn't that Trump is skeevy and corrupt. Of course he is. The claim is that he is corrupt in very specific
ways, ways that constitute treason.
Vivian O'Blivion , May 21, 2018 at 6:30 am
Marasmus.
Difficult to argue with any of your points.
Mueller has filed charges against some of the staff in the St Petersburg operation, if you can connect Trump to this entity
then cooperation becomes criminal collusion. As charges have already been filed it matters not whether the St Petersburg staff
are private or state employees.
The fact that America has laws prohibiting foreign interference in its elections is I guess understandable, but hypocritical
and exceptionalist in the extreme given the cart blanch attitude America takes to interfering in the internal affairs of other
nations.
The Donald Jr meeting with Russians is just a rats nest of conflicting stupidities. If as many others state (and I don't disagree)
everyone tries to get dirt on the opposition and foreign sources of information are regularly tapped, then the secret is not to
get caught. The Democrats have a plausible cut out (or two) in place between the Russian sources for the Steele dossier and themselves.
As Steve Bannon has stated, meeting directly with the Russians was weapons grade stupid, but hey it's Don Jr. and Jared Kushner
we're talking about.
The really odd part is that the Russians would attend given that they must have known that their names would be logged by the
Secret Service detail providing security for the Republican candidate. To me, this does not suggest an attempt to help Trump as
"their man", but rather to dirty by association a candidate that could become President. This interpretation would concur with
analysis of the activities of the St Petersburg operation, which was to sow chaos into American social and political discourse.
andy--s , May 23, 2018 at 12:13 am
Heres the problem with that. FUsion GPS arranged the meeting at trump tower. The Russians paid them to connect with the trump campaign in order to
discuss the magnitsky act. They did not come to the meeting with any notion of DIRT. Trump Jr was told they had DIRT.
THe problem the FBI has, is that they never investigated the Russian contacts to the extent that they investigated the Americans
being contacted. Dig? :) IF Misfud told papaD that he had access to Hillary's emails, why did they not bother looking for
him for 9 months and then let him walk free? Because he was a set up.
PapaD got nailed for not being able to remember if the meeting was the tuesday prior or after joing the trump Campaign. It
doesnt make sense unless the FBI was looking to spy
Let's all assume for one second that all the fantasies of Russia gate are true. That every Russian that Trump and his associates/family
ever had any contact with are directed by Putin himself. Who believes for one second that this collusion has had more of a negative
impact 2016 election then the collusion that occured between Clinton and the DNC to subvert Sanders, Clinton and the media to
1st subvert Sanders and then Trump (side note, why doesn't Clinton/MSM collusion against Trump balance with the Trump/Russian
collusion for Trump?) How about the collusion between Wall Street and the DNC to such an extent that Citi Group was exposed as
having picked Obama's cabinet. And then let's remember that the Trump collusion with Kremlin has alot of guilt by association
through 6 degrees of separation and the Clinton/DNC/MSM/Wall Street collusion was proven in black and white through the publication
of Clinton/DNC/Podesta emails in Wikileaks.
That this point gets ignored by the MSM, is proof to me that they have lost all objectivity.
andy--s , May 23, 2018 at 12:16 am
MOre so.. Homer If Clintons personal server was a nothing burger not worthy of a single indictment, then why was it a national
security issue when some stranger offered the emails to Papadopoulos? They didnt bother investigating the stranger. they investigated
Papadopoulos!
Nobody will touch that with a ten foot poll in the main stream media.
strngr
You cite quite a number of examples, presumably without detailed knowledge of few, if any. I
will not fall into the same trap.
The Brexit vote was an outbreak of mass hysteria amongst English and Welsh working class
voters. The sentiment that powered the grass roots "rebellion" against the perceived wisdom
of the ruling elite was understandable frustration at social and economic neglect. My guess
is that in this regard it was a mirror of the rise of Trumpism. Interestingly Scotland voted
to remain in the EU by a substantially stronger margin than England voted to leave, because
there was already established a vivid, informed, grass roots political discourse mainly based
on Scottish social media. The Brexit outcome was influenced by some pretty underhand digital
media manipulation, but those doing the manipulation were domestic and hard right wing, not
Russian. The Guardian cannot be considered a source of untainted information, it is
increasingly Atlantasist and Zionist.
The Scottish independence vote in 2014 was heavily influenced by digital media but it was
entirely indigenous and grass roots. There was no credible claim of Russian interference then
or since. The Daily Express is a far right rag owned at the time of the article you cite by a
pornographer, and deeply unpleasant Zionist.
Over to a more general discussion.
Is there on any level a Russian state programme using a digital platform to influence
politics and social cohesion in other states? Frankly I would be astonished if there
wasn't.
The UK has had the British Council working out of its embassies since the beginning of
time.
The American State Department has been creating and financing Atlantasist think tanks and
associations for decades to skew British politics to meet American ends.
I doubt there is a country on the planet that has not felt the malign influence of the
State Department or CIA.
In the circumstances, Russia would be entirely justified in operating troll factories and
similar vehicles.
Next, what would the objectives of a Russian cyber operation be in the run up to the
American Presidential election? All academic evaluation of content believed to originate in
Russia and to be presented as domestic American input, suggests that the goal of the
intervention was to sew discord and chaos in society. That is to say that the Kremlin did not
have a favoured candidate.
How effective would the efforts of the St Petersburg troll factory be in exasperating
social divisions? My guess is that it would have been analogous with taking a hair dryer
outside in a category 5 hurricane.
Let us consider the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian delegation. As Steve Bannon
stated, meeting with the Russians at a venue under Secret Service control was monumentally
stupid. Monumentally stupid is entirely believable of Donald Jr., Jared Kushner and possibly
Manafort, but the Russians can't have been that dumb. By meeting at a venue where their names
would be openly logged by the State, they would be sabotaging any serious attempt to "get
their man into the White House", if that was their true goal. Taking this into account, the
object of the meeting from a Russian perspective can only have been to generate chaos.
Seventeen months on in the new administration and if I were them I would be awarding myself
an A+.
Try this though experiment and subdue your moral indignation at Russian interference for a
minute. In the circumstances is Russia entitled to do that which it you accuse it of? I will
not offer an answer to the question I pose, I am genuinely asking that you try and project to
see an alternative perspective.
"... Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . . ..."
"... Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief Downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did inspire the CI investigation? ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what's driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Trump-Russia probe. "If the campaign was somehow set up," he told the hosts, "I think that would be a problem." ..."
"... government "officials" acknowledged that the bureau had used "at least one" human "informant" to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. ..."
"... Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands -- one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials -- all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI -- and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected -- and one crucial question is how early that happened. ..."
"... Which brings us to timing. It's long been known that Mr. Steele went to the FBI in early July to talk about the dossier, and that's the first known intersection of the strands. But given the oddity and timing of those U.K. interactions concerning Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos, and given the history of some of the people involved in arranging them, some wonder if the two strands were converging earlier than anyone has admitted. The Intelligence Committee subpoena is designed to sort all this out: Who was pulling the strings, and what was the goal? Information? Or entrapment? ..."
"... Whatever the answer-whether it is straightforward, or whether it involves political chicanery-Congress and the public have a right to know. And a Justice Department willing to leak details of its "top secret" source to friendly media can have no excuse for not sharing with the duly elected members of Congress. ..."
"... Thanks for stopping by, Bob. Before you ask me your questions I need you to answer a few of mine: ..."
"... You have had a full year to investigate the allegations that my campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in our election. Has anyone obstructed you from doing this job to the best of your ability? If so, who have you notified of this and what corrective action have you taken or requested be taken? ..."
"... Have you found any evidence that I personally committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election? ..."
"... Have you found any evidence that any member of my campaign committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with the election? ..."
Earlier in the week, with Trump now calling out the debacle as
"possible
bigger than Watergate," Strassel tweet-stormed some key points that everyone - leftist and right - should consider ... (that's
wishful thinking)...
1. So a few important points on that new NYT "Hurricane Crossfire" piece. A story that, BTW, all of us following this knew
had to be coming. This is DOJ/FBI leakers' attempt to get in front of the facts Nunes is forcing out, to make it not sound so
bad. Don't buy it. It's bad.
2. Biggest takeaway: Govt "sources" admit that, indeed, the Obama DOJ and FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Spied . (Tho NYT
kindly calls spy an "informant.") NYT slips in confirmation far down in story, and makes it out like it isn't a big deal. It is
a very big deal.
3. In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ/FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details
about that "top secret" source (namely, that spying was aimed at Page/Papadopoulos) -- making all more likely/certain source will
be outed. That's on them
4. DOJ/FBI (and its leakers) have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with subpoena .
They are willing to provide details to friendly media, but not Congress? Willing to risk very source they claim to need to protect?
5. Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence
operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . .
6. Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief Downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was
delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did
inspire the CI investigation?
7. As for whether to believe line that FBI operated soberly/carefully/judiciously in 2016, a main source for this judgment
is, um . . .uh . . . Sally Yates. Who was in middle of it all. A bit like asking Putin to reassure that Russia didn't meddle in
our election.
8. On that, if u r wondering who narrated this story, note paragraphs that assure everybody that hardly anybody in DOJ knew
about probe. Oh, and Comey also was given few details. Nobody knew nothin'! (Cuz when u require whole story saying u behaved,
it means u know you didn't.)
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive
hint at what's driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Trump-Russia probe. "If the campaign
was somehow set up," he told the hosts, "I think that would be a problem."
Or an understatement. Mr. Nunes is still getting stiff-armed by the Justice Department over his subpoena, but this week his efforts
did force the stunning admission that the FBI had indeed spied on the Trump campaign. This came in the form of a Thursday New York
Times apologia in which government "officials" acknowledged that the bureau had used "at least one" human "informant" to spy
on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The Times slipped this mind-bending fact into the middle of an otherwise glowing
profile of the noble bureau -- and dismissed it as no big deal.
But there's more to be revealed here, and Mr. Nunes's "set up" comment points in a certain direction. Getting to the conclusion
requires thinking more broadly about events beyond the FBI's actions.
Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands -- one politics, one law enforcement. The political side
involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials -- all of whom were focused on destroying Donald
Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI -- and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point
these strands intersected -- and one crucial question is how early that happened.
What may well have kicked off both, however, is a key if overlooked moment detailed in the House Intelligence Committee's recent
Russia report .
In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National Security Council Principals" that the FBI
had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul
Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law
enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama
that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.
And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion
turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections. The job of any good swamp operator is to gin up a fatal October surprise for the
opposition candidate. And what could be more devastating than to paint a picture of Trump-Russia collusion that would provoke a full-fledged
FBI investigation?
We already know of at least one way Fusion went about that project, with wild success. It hired former British spy Christopher
Steele to compile that infamous dossier. In July, Mr. Steele wrote a memo that leveled spectacular conspiracy theories against two
particular Trump campaign members -- Messrs. Manafort and Page. For an FBI that already had suspicions about the duo, those allegations
might prove huge -- right? That is, if the FBI were to ever see them. Though, lucky for Mrs. Clinton, July is when the Fusion team
decided it was a matter of urgent national security for Mr. Steele to play off his credentials and to take this political opposition
research to the FBI.
The question Mr. Nunes's committee seems to be investigating is what other moments -- if any -- were engineered in the spring,
summer or fall of 2016 to cast suspicion on Team Trump. The conservative press has produced some intriguing stories about a handful
of odd invitations and meetings that were arranged for Messrs. Page and Papadopoulos starting in the spring -- all emanating from
the United Kingdom. On one hand, that country is home to the well-connected Mr. Steele, which could mean the political actors with
whom he was working were involved. On the other hand, the Justice Department has admitted it was spying on both men, which could
mean government was involved. Or maybe . . . both.
Which brings us to timing. It's long been known that Mr. Steele went to the FBI in early July to talk about the dossier, and
that's the first known intersection of the strands. But given the oddity and timing of those U.K. interactions concerning Messrs.
Page and Papadopoulos, and given the history of some of the people involved in arranging them, some wonder if the two strands were
converging earlier than anyone has admitted. The Intelligence Committee subpoena is designed to sort all this out: Who was pulling
the strings, and what was the goal? Information? Or entrapment?
Whatever the answer-whether it is straightforward, or whether it involves political chicanery-Congress and the public have
a right to know. And a Justice Department willing to leak details of its "top secret" source to friendly media can have no excuse
for not sharing with the duly elected members of Congress.
Thanks for stopping by, Bob. Before you ask me your questions I need you to answer a few of mine:
You have had a full year to investigate the allegations that my campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle
in our election. Has anyone obstructed you from doing this job to the best of your ability? If so, who have you notified of this
and what corrective action have you taken or requested be taken?
Have you found any evidence that I personally committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to interfere with
the election?
Have you found any evidence that any member of my campaign committed any crime involving collusion with the Russians to
interfere with the election?
Assuming the answers to all 3 are "No" (which they likely are or such evidence would have already leaked to CNN via Clapper)
or if he refuses to answer, inform Muller the meeting and his investigation are over. He is will be escorted to his office to
turn over all records gathered in the investigation to the appropriate DOJ officials, debrief them on his findings and then is
fired and all security clearances revoked.
Let the MSM and Dems bitch and cry all they want. You had a year to find evidence for your phony allegations with your top
investigator on the job, access to millions of documents and millions of taxpayer dollars. You failed because there was no crime
committed. Time to move on.
Of course this is assuming the Mueller investigation is actually what it is purported to be which I have serious doubts about.
I think it's more likely Mueller cut an immunity deal for himself when he met with Trump the day before being appointed as SC
and this whole thing was nothing but a charade to keep Trump's enemies believing Mueller is their guy. This way they put all their
attention and energy into this investigation only to have it blow up in their faces just before the midterms when Trump is fully
vindicated by the guy all his enemies said was above reproach. If that happens watch how fast they all turn on Mueller and every
MSM outlet starts running hit pieces on him the next morning.
Mollie Hemingway's piece on a similar vein in The Federalist. Cunts leak like a sieve to their collusional media scum, but
woe-betied Congress getting access. Fuckers should be hanging from lamposts.
The 2016 Trump Tower meeting set up to reveal dirt on Hillary Clinton "infuriated" Jared
Kushner, was a "waste of time" and had nothing to do with Clinton, according to transcripts of
interviews with the meeting's participants. The US Senate Judiciary Committee has released more
than 1,800 pages of transcripts, which provide new insight into the controversial meeting
during which Donald Trump Jr, along with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign
chairman Paul Manafort, was expecting to receive "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Overall, the newly-released documents seem to indicate that a short 20-minute meeting
resulted in hours of interviews and thousands of pages of documents for little reason.
In the transcripts, Trump Jr. said that he was skeptical that Rob Goldstone, the publicist
who had been the first to contact him about a meeting, had colleagues who possessed
incriminating information about Clinton, but said felt he should at least "hear them
out." Read more 'Wasting taxpayers'
money': Lawyer Veselnitskaya talks Trump's dossier & Fusion GPS
He also said that it was important to note that when he accepted the invitation to go to the
meeting there was "no focus on Russian activities" surrounding the campaign and
claimed that Goldstone had not even confirmed the names of the attendees who would join them at
the meeting.
Goldstone had set up the meeting on behalf of Russian musical artist Emin Agaralov, the son
of a wealthy Russian businessman, but revealed in his interview that he later told Agaralov
that the meeting was "the most embarrassing thing you've ever asked me to do" given
that it ended up having nothing to do with Clinton. Goldstone also revealed that
Veselnitskaya's apparently Clinton-free presentation in the meeting had "infuriated"
Kushner.
In another indication that the meeting was not supposed to be a top-secret attempt for the
Trump campaign to collude with Russia, Goldstone also revealed that he "checked in" to
Trump Tower on Facebook when he arrived.
In a supplemental interview, Goldstone also told investigators that Russian President
Vladimir Putin was not able to meet Trump during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, but
invited him through a phone call with his spokesman Dmitry Peskov, organized by Agaralov, to
attend the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi instead. According to Goldstone, Peskov said Putin
would be happy to meet him there -- but that meeting did not end up happening.
Anatoli Samochornov, a Russian translator who attended the meeting, said that no one present
had said the Russian government either supported Trump or opposed Clinton for president. He
also said there were no offers from the Russian side to release hacked emails, hack voting
totals or anything else.
The other translator present, Ike Kaveladze, said he spoke to Agaralov about two hours after
the meeting and told him it was a "complete loss of time" and a "useless"
meeting.
The committee released the thousands of pages of transcripts along with hundreds of
additional pages of related material, including the interviews with Goldstone, Russian-American
lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and translators Samochornov and Kaveladze.
The meeting has been the subject of controversy, particularly the question of whether
then-candidate Trump knew about it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has looked closely at the
meeting as part of his investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which
has not yet turned up any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Following the publication of the documents, Trump Jr. said they showed that he "answered
every question asked" by the committee.
"I appreciate the opportunity to have assisted the Judiciary Committee in its
inquiry," he said in a statement. "The public can now see that for over five hours I
answered every question asked and was candid and forthright with the Committee."
Note how NYT try to hide the fact that the meeting was most probably yet another a false flag operation (along with Steele
dossier) to implicate
Russia staged with the help of a person connected to British intelligence service, Mr. Goldstone,
a British music promoter. That in an interesting fact in additional to CIA mode within Trump campaign.
Notable quotes:
"... The intermediary, Rob Goldstone, told the committee that he proposed a second meeting between the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and members of Mr. Trump's team in November 2016. He said he contacted Mr. Trump's longtime executive assistant at the behest of Aras Agalarov, a Russia-based billionaire who knows Mr. Putin. ..."
Most of the participants in the meeting have already publicly described their version of
events. Nonetheless, the records reveal some new details about the players involved and what
happened after the meeting was reported
by The New York Times last summer.
Among them: Six months after the Trump
Tower meeting , an intermediary contacted Donald J. Trump's office asking for a follow-up,
the newly released documents showed.
The intermediary, Rob Goldstone, told the committee that he proposed a second meeting
between the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and members of Mr. Trump's team in November 2016. He
said he contacted Mr. Trump's longtime executive assistant at the behest of Aras Agalarov, a
Russia-based billionaire who knows Mr. Putin.
The second session never took place. But the invitation shows the determination of Russians
with close Kremlin connections to convince the Trump team that the Magnitsky Act, which imposed
sanctions on a host of Russian officials for human rights abuses, was a mistake. The 2012 law,
which froze the bank accounts of some Russian officials and barred them from entering the
United States, infuriated Mr. Putin.
In a late November 2016 email to Mr. Trump's assistant, Mr. Goldstone, a British music
promoter, attached a three-page document marked "confidential" that called for "the launch of a
congressional investigation into the circumstances of passing the Magnitsky Act." He wrote that
Mr. Agalarov hoped the document would be delivered to "the appropriate team." Ms. Veselnitskaya
also attacked the
law in the June meeting.
The transcripts also highlight how lawyers for the Trump Organization tried to manage
the fallout by coordinating the statements of Mr. Goldstone and others.
In testimony, Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that his father may have helped draft the
statement that he put out to the press after the meeting became public, but he said that they
had not discussed the meeting when it happened.
Investigators stopped the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg at a New York-area airport
after he stepped off a private plane, according to the Times. They proceeded to search his
electronic devices and question him.
There is no indication that Vekselberg is suspected of wrongdoing. But the search and
interview suggests that Mueller's team is homing in on the Trump campaign and inauguration
committee's potential ties with Russians.
in
Analysis
,
Latest
Russiagate-Trump Gets Solved by Giant of
American Investigative Journalism
Some people's greed, apparently, knows
no limits -- not even when it could produce a world-ending nuclear war.
"... The bottom line is that the memo exposed the ugly truth that, at least in the case of Page, the FBI and DOJ, on multiple occasions, deliberately lied to or otherwise misled the FISA court in an effort to violate Page's Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure, or that the FISA court is, in fact, little more than a rubber-stamp entity incapable of adequate oversight of the enormous responsibilities it has been entrusted with---or both. ..."
"... WSJ confirms Carter Page was cooperating with FBI before he entered campaign ..."
"... 'What's notable here that seems to have evaded previous notice is that instead of being a Russian agent of influence, Page at the time he spang briefly into a prominent role within the Trump campaign in early 2016, was already an FBI informant, something the Russians would obviously know. This becomes even more crucial later that summer after Page returned from a business trip to Moscow when he was repeatedly named in the James Steele "dirty dossier" as a close confident of Russian energy officials and bankers. Page actually appears to have all the hallmarks of an FBI informant, or an agent provocateur, who was planted into the Trump campaign as part of an intelligence operation. Only, it seems apparent, the intelligence service he was actually serving was American rather than Russian. ..."
This presupposes that the FISA renewal left unchanged the information linked to Steele that underpinned its initial application.
By January 2018, however, the FBI had terminated its relationship with Steele based on the deceit of the former British intelligence
officer. As such, all Steele's reporting should have been recalled as unreliable, as well as any corroborating information that could
be linked to Steele in any way (such as the Isikoff article, the Papadopoulos investigation and the CIA's information as briefed
to Sen. Reid). Any sworn affidavit and application used in support of a FISA renewal that sustained the Steele reporting would have
been misleading at best, and most probably false, making anyone whose signature appears in any certifying capacity open to charges
of making a false statement---including both Comey and Yates.
The next application for renewal occurred in April 2017. This one would have been signed off by Comey and then-acting Attorney
General Dana Boente, who took over from Yates after she was fired by Trump in January 2017---shortly after she signed off on Page's
FISA warrant renewal application.
What is interesting about the April 2017 application is that the level of public scrutiny of the Steele dossier engendered by
BuzzFeed's publication of it in January 2017 would seem to have at least raised the issue of Steele's credibility as a source, something
that should have been reflected in the FISA renewal application.
Moreover, by the time of the renewal application,
Page had met with the FBI over the course of 10 hours in March 2017, when he was questioned in depth about his interactions with
Russia. Following past practice, the FBI agents conducting the interview would have relied upon FISA material to try and catch Page
in a "perjury trap," where it could be proved that he made a false statement to a federal agent. No such charges have been filed,
strongly suggesting that Page was honest and forthright with the FBI. To what extent, if any, the Steele dossier factored in the
April 2017 application for renewal, and whether the FBI informed the FISA court about the 10 hours of questioning it conducted with
Page, is not known. Nor is the context, if any, the FBI provided to any intercepted communications that would raise them to the level
needed to sustain a renewal of a FISA warrant.
The final FISA renewal application was submitted and approved in July 2017. This one was signed off by McCabe and acting Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein. By this time, the media had run with numerous stories about Page being the subject of a FISA warrant, and
Page himself had appealed to both Rosenstein and Mueller to make public the application used to grant his FISA warrant. Page was
unemployed, his professional life ruined by the public revelations about allegations that he had colluded with the Russians and was
under active FBI investigation, the totality of which could be linked back to the information Steele provided the FBI.
And yet somehow, in the face of overwhelming evidence of Page's innocence, the FISA court saw fit to grant yet another renewal
of its warrant.
... ... ...
The bottom line is that the memo exposed the ugly truth that, at least in the case of Page, the FBI and DOJ, on multiple occasions,
deliberately lied to or otherwise misled the FISA court in an effort to violate Page's Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search
and seizure, or that the FISA court is, in fact, little more than a rubber-stamp entity incapable of adequate oversight of the enormous
responsibilities it has been entrusted with---or both.
Scott Ritter spent more than a dozen years in the intelligence field, beginning in 1985 as a ground intelligence officer
with the US Marine Corps, where he served with the Marine Corps component of the Rapid Deployment Force at the Brigade and Battalion
level. In 1987 Ritter was hand-picked to serve with the On Site Inspection Agency, where he was responsible for carrying out the
provisions of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Chairman Mikhail
Gorbachev. Ritter served as a Deputy Site Commander of a specialized inspection team stationed outside a Soviet missile factory.
For his work, Ritter received two classified commendations from the CIA. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Ritter was
assigned to a special planning cell that reported directly to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, where he helped plan the employment
of Marine Corps combat forces in response to Iraq's actions. He was later deployed to Saudi Arabia, where he served on the intelligence
staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf .
It gets better.......Carter Page was an FBI informant.
WSJ confirms Carter Page was cooperating with FBI before he entered campaign
'What's notable here that seems to have evaded previous notice is that instead of being a Russian agent of influence, Page
at the time he spang briefly into a prominent role within the Trump campaign in early 2016, was already an FBI informant, something
the Russians would obviously know. This becomes even more crucial later that summer after Page returned from a business trip to
Moscow when he was repeatedly named in the James Steele "dirty dossier" as a close confident of Russian energy officials and bankers.
Page actually appears to have all the hallmarks of an FBI informant, or an agent provocateur, who was planted into the Trump campaign
as part of an intelligence operation. Only, it seems apparent, the intelligence service he was actually serving was American rather
than Russian.
That is significant for another very important reason – according to the Washington Post, the FBI obtained a FISA warrant last
summer to spy on the Trump campaign under the pretext that Page was alleged to be a Russian agent.
First!! the agony of those democrats (union rights, civil liberties, protection of the poor etc.) is understood in the light
that there is no democratic party. where have you been?? the clintons and all their charm have wrecked it. bernie sanders is nothing
but 'clinton lite'. look at the record and enlighten yourself. if hellary were elected in 2016 we would be in trouble more so
than trump. fascism is crawling beneath the feet of both these miscreants but hellary had the mechanism of the deep state. they
failed to elect her. forget about the rules and know that, now, trump is the deep state's favorite boy (look his people). trump
has failed to gain the media's favoritism but that will change. given what the FBI has done (if there is no punitive action) we
will have slipped another gear into grinding fascism. we are reaching an overt state. Scott Ritter did well writing about the
bungling of the FBI but that is not new. Some people are welcomed to lie to agents some are not.
But most of all do not forget what Scott Ritter did in the investigation of WMD prior to Bush (deep state) and the Iraq war. Nobody
listened because they did not know how.
If Ritter has the correct analysis then we are all royally screwed. The Dems will be burned for a generation, Trump will be
vindicated and we will all have to drag our sorry butts to Trumps military parade and lick his shoes. I am so depressed after
reading this. I hope Ritter is wrong and overlooking that he may not have all the facts himself. I find it hard to believe the
FISA courts would renew three times when public skepticism was in the air. That would be a major scandal. The problem is that
the GOP won't get religion and start distrusting the police state they helped create. They will ignore the fact that they just
passed legislation bolstering the FISA courts and go back to locking up the plebes and shielding their big money benefactors.
What's funny about this is that this piece is way more solid then the "memo". That alone makes you wonder. I'm not sure what
it means. I await the counter memo with much interest.
The Nunes memo is just a precis of good deal of information, and even that is but a part of the evidence of the Demonazi, and
elements of the FBI and Justice Department, conspiracy to stop Trump. If Trump is capo di tutti capi in Thanatopolis DC, it is
Clinton and her incompetent fellow conspirators' fault.
Democrats are now the Neo-con party and far more dangerous.
Neo -cons wanted Hillary and its why they are going after Trump.Trump was never supposed to win.Trump was a anti-gop candidate.So
republicans are the anti -war party now.
Ironinc no?
How Donald Trump blasted George W. Bush in S.C. -- and won ...
These people--and all these folks in law enforcement and corporate hierarchies and the list goes on and on--they LIE. They
manipulate. Newsflash, that is human nature, despite all of the bogus, idealistic posturing made in these comments and in the
world at large.
But my point is that these same people play by a set of rules that they defined for themselves, and now the conservative faction
wants special treatment for their buffoon Trump. They need to suck it up and take their medicine. Trump is a vile, unintelligent
cretin and a criminal, and I really don't care if the means by which they remove him doesn't rise to the level of your or others
supposed BS-idealism.
The U.S. government is an unethical $hit show driven by the most heinous form of capitalism ever imagined, so what the hell
do you expect? Do try to get in touch with reality and put down your tome of rightwing talking points.
Im a left Sanders voter.Trump is literally doing what you say you want and your too bias to notice.
Newsflash........Trump is bringing to the forefront just how corrupted our system is.The $shitshow has just started........even
MSNBC cant ignore the treason of the FBI and DOJ any more.
And did you miss Trump tweet about the wallstreet crash?
Didnt he call out the fact wallstreet bets against the US economy?
Trump tweeted Wednesday:
"In the 'old days,' when good news was reported, the Stock Market
would go up. Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news
about the economy!"
Didnt Trump just make an important criticism of capitalism?.....I think he did.Sorry you missed it.
The Two Faces of a Police State: Sheltering Tax Evaders, Financial Swindlers and Money Launderers while Policing the Citizens
http://petras.lahaine.org/?...
As is now becoming the way as the Russiagate scandal unravels, confirmation of the collapse of one of its
central pillars – the claim of proof of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign which some have
claimed to see in the meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 between the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
and Donald Trump Junior – has slipped out in the most covert way possible.
Nonetheless the confirmation is there and originates in what all the indications suggest is a deliberate
leak either from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team or from the White House's legal team.
The confirmation is provided in an NBC News
article
which reads as follows
Two sources familiar with the questions Mueller's team have been asking about the meeting say the
investigators are most interested in why the president crafted a misleading statement about the meeting
much later, in July 2017, after a New York Times report about it. The sources say Mueller's office is
trying to confirm every detail it can about the meeting.
Mueller's team is less interested in the meeting as a direct example of collusion, the sources said,
although Trump Jr. accepted the meeting after being told he would receive incriminating information about
Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government effort to help his father.
No evidence has emerged publicly to contradict Veselnitskaya's account that she wanted to press a case
about U.S. Magnitsky Act sanctions, and that she did not possess significant derogatory information about
Clinton, despite the email from a music promoter to Trump Jr. promising incriminating details about the
Democrat.
Moreover, no evidence has emerged publicly that connects the Russians in the meeting with the Russian
intelligence effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
The issue of Donald Trump's supposedly misleading statement about the meeting is a red herring since it
can have no possible connection to the collusion allegations which Mueller's inquiry is supposed to be
investigating.
Even assuming that Trump's statement was misleading – which some might question – it would hardly be the
first case of a US President making a misleading statement, and it is impossible to see how it can possibly
give rise to a law enforcement issue for Mueller to investigate.
Of much more importance is the confirmation that Mueller's team now acknowledge that there is no evidence
to connect Veselnitskaya to Russian intelligence and that her and Donald Trump Junior's accounts of their
meeting must be accepted as true since there is no evidence to contradict them.
In truth this was obvious from the start as I pointed out in an
article
I wrote on 12th July 2017, written immediately after details of the meeting came to light
The meeting with Veselnitskaya duly took place on 9th June 2016. It turned out that she had no
information about Hillary Clinton to offer and was not a "Russian government attorney". Instead she
wanted to discuss the Magnitsky Act, upon which a baffled Donald Trump Junior politely showed her the
door.
That is the unanimous account of all the participants of the meeting including Donald Trump Junior and
Veselnitskaya herself. All agree that the meeting lasted no more than 20 minutes.
There is no evidence that contradicts their account and the absence of any follow-up to the meeting
essentially corroborates their account.
It seems that Donald Trump Junior and Veselnitskaya have never met since and have had no further
contact with each other.
There is
no
evidence here of any crime or wrongdoing being committed or –
contrary to what many are saying – of any intention to commit one.
Russiagate would not however be Russiagate if this important news that Mueller and his team have come to
the same conclusion was not smuggled out in an NBC News article whose title gives the impression that it is
about the totally meaningless fact that Veselnitskaya after leaving the meeting with Donald Trump Junior had
a brief encounter in the lift of Trump Tower with a blonde woman who might – or might not – have been Donald
Trump's daughter Ivanka.
To such ridiculous lengths to conceal embarrassing truths about Russiagate is the media in the US
increasingly reduced to.
Though the Veselnitskaya-Trump Junior meeting is now being finally acknowledged to be the red herring it
always was, there is one further point about it to make.
In my 12th July 2017 article I speculated that the meeting might have been a sting intended to
corroborate the collusion allegations between the Trump campaign and Russia which were to achieve written
form in the first 20th June 2016 entry of the Trump Dossier, written a few weeks after the
Veselnitskaya-Trump Junior took place.
What led others subsequently to speculate along the same lines was that there appeared to be a connection
between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the political consultancy firm which commissioned the Trump Dossier on
behalf of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It turns out that Veselnitskaya was not working for Fusion GPS but rather Fusion GPS was working for her,
in connection with her work on the Magnitsky case.
That in itself makes it inherently unlikely that she was acting as a catspaw for Fusion GPS when she met
Donald Trump Junior.
More to the point, Glenn Simpson's comments about Veselnitskaya are anything but complimentary. He
basically describes her – rather convincingly – as a self-important busybody and a minor league player, and
expresses incredulity at the suggestion that she was a Russian intelligence agent who was working for the
Kremlin.
Simpson's characterisation of Veselnitskaya in testimony in which he strongly promotes the Russiagate
collusion allegations and vouches for the truth of the Trump Dossier makes it all but inconceivable
Veselnitskaya was involved in a sting to set Trump Junior up.
Despite taking place at a time when the Trump-Russia collusion allegations were about to take off,
Veselnitskaya's meeting with Trump Junior must instead be seen as one of those annoying coincidences which
lawyers, journalists, policemen and the public automatically distrust, but which happen in real life.
"... House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said that after lengthy closed-door testimony by two former top Trump aides, he found that one of the men appears to have a "credibility" problem. ..."
"... But, he said that Bannon's testimony was more eventful. Gowdy said that at one point, Bannon attempted to dodge questions by exercising a privilege that does not exist. "That was his slip-up," Gowdy said. "He got this notion that 'hey, I'm going to create a privilege that no one's ever heard of before that doesn't exist in the law." Gowdy said the only "dangerous" issue for President Donald Trump is if "credible evidence" is presented. ..."
"... He said Bannon's credibility has taken a hit, since he once said there was no chance the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. did not meet Trump Sr. ..."
"... But, after he was fired, Bannon reportedly told author Michael Wolff that there was no chance the meeting hadn't occurred. ..."
"... "This is the same witness that said that members of the president's family committed acts of treason. So, he's got a credibility issue," Gowdy said. "If they're hinging the entire case on Steve Bannon's credibility, good luck to the prosecution." ..."
House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said that after lengthy closed-door
testimony by two former top Trump aides, he found that one of the men appears to have a
"credibility" problem.
Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former White House adviser Steve Bannon spent
several hours testifying before Gowdy's committee Tuesday.
Gowdy said Lewandowski wanted to answer every question posed to him, but that his lawyers
advised him against answering those regarding his work after he left the campaign. "That [onus is] on the lawyer, not the witness. Corey is going to come back and answer every
question anyone has," Gowdy said.
But, he said that Bannon's testimony was more eventful. Gowdy said that at one point, Bannon attempted to dodge questions by exercising a privilege
that does not exist. "That was his slip-up," Gowdy said. "He got this notion that 'hey, I'm going to create a
privilege that no one's ever heard of before that doesn't exist in the law." Gowdy said the only "dangerous" issue for President Donald Trump is if "credible evidence"
is presented.
He said Bannon's credibility has taken a hit, since he once said there was no chance the
Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. did not meet Trump Sr.
But, after he was fired, Bannon reportedly told author Michael Wolff that there was no
chance the meeting hadn't occurred.
"This is the same witness that said that members of the president's family committed
acts of treason. So, he's got a credibility issue," Gowdy said. "If they're hinging the entire
case on Steve Bannon's credibility, good luck to the prosecution."
"... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
"... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. ..."
"... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
"... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
"... OK Ron Johnson (R-WI), the author was Steven Boyd, Assistant for Legislative Affairs / DOJ - Hold him in contempt of congress. ..."
Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run
domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself.
To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced
the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ.
The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of
two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump
associates.
GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's
headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping
surveillance on Trump associates.
The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier
compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr.,
Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear
compromised.
Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump
Jr., and Kushner.
After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially
justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian
lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk
and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK,
federal sources said.
By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to
wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones
and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal
for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort
Meade.
The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel
Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the
evidence is considered "poisoned fruit."
OK Ron Johnson (R-WI), the author was Steven Boyd, Assistant for Legislative Affairs / DOJ
- Hold him in contempt of congress. Have him arrested. During questioning, press him to the
wall, get him to tell him who in the FBI told him 'they couldn't find them.' Then go arrest
that guy too. Rinse and repeat. Look what these bastards did to Mike Flynn. Go get 'em.
NOW!!!
One of the silver linings in this mess is the clear view that the FBI is ridiculously
compromised & has chucked its standard of non-political leanings right out the window.
Shutting it down may have once seemed a long shot, now maybe not so much. If you haven't
noticed, another Trump boomerang has happened to the Left with their favorite word starting
with the letter S. This time I'm thinking Storm is what's about to follow instead of hole or
house.
If the republican leadership hiccup here on the release of the memo then it's things as
usual and forget a full on war from them. I don't trust those bastards as far as I can throw
them. Trump then needs to fire Sessions and Mueller and go full on attack mode with a press
conference doing what he does and light the left's hair on fire like never before. This is
war and it needs kicked off in grand fashion. The left's ability to guilt shame has been
neutered and they know it and are scared to death.
The Genius has lost control. Washington is oozing and dripping its corrupt, manipulating,
narcissistic and deceiving bile. Just one thin mint is all it will take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJZPzQESq_0
At one point, Peter Strzok made reference to a phone that "could not be traced". He
probably had a 2nd phone for a period. I'd be willing to bet it was a BlackBerry. While he
had (if he had) that 2nd phone, he could have used that more secure phone for his
communications with Lisa Page.
The IG may have all of Strzok's text messages with Lisa Page from his official phone, but
none from the 2nd phone.
The article says that it was Lisa Page who suggested using the 2nd phone. That message
from her was in March 2016.
"Also in March, Page seems to be concerned about whether the things they say about Mr.
Trump can be found out. "So look, you say we can text on that phone when we talk about
Hillary because it cant be traced," she wrote."
Haven't read through the entire thread here, but the end date of the interval for the
missing data is also the date that Mueller was appointed.
All of this shit is at the NSA Blufdale, Utah, facility. Why are the taxpayers spending
umpteen billion dollars collecting and storing this stuff if the government is going to
pretend it doesn't exist? You can bet this internet post, and anyone who replies to it, is
archived there. We are supposed to be afraid of being surveiled by assholes like Clapper and
Brennan. Guess what? We're not.
If Horowitz now claims he really didn't receive all the text messages he requested, then
he too is part of a massive cover-up and any report that is issued by the DOJ's Inspector
General's office can't be believed by definition.
It's possible Horowitz lied then to placate the Congressional inquiry. I believe that the
Deep State believes that they can get Trump impeached before the shit hits the fan with the
Sedition by the FBI. There is always Plan B for the Deep State but 50 years after they rid
the world of 2 Kennedys the general population isn't buying it.
If I understand how US communication systems work, every network has a splitter which
copies all transmissions to NSA, or related agencies, storage devices. I would be shocked if
they didn't collect everything from FBI or DOJ employees, and I mean everything, from FBI
devices or their private devices. If the files are sitting safe and secure on NSA storage
devices, only the NSA could really "lose" them. And this would also be true for every one of
Clinton's messages. Why don't we ever see Congress ask NSA for anything? Is that
verboten?
FBI and DOJ and the Weasel Liar Rosenstein are LIARS. They don't want the world and the
American people know what Liars, corrupt, in the tank for Hilray to know what they did are
still trying to due. Trump needs to clean house of the FBI and DOJ of all Clinton and Obama
people.
A more interesting question is how those testimonies might affect Bannon -- he is in a very hot water now. If he thought that the
meeting was so incriminating why he did not contact FBI and just decided to feed juicy gossip to Wolff?
Also he was not present at the meeting and was not a member of Trump team until two months later. From who he got all this information
? Was is just a slander by disgruntled employee?
Notable quotes:
"... To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr. ..."
"... Bannon has denied that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the election ..."
"... Wolff also quotes the former White House strategist as saying, "This is all about money laundering. [Robert] Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It's as plain as a hair on your face." ..."
"... Bannon then zeroed in on Kushner specifically, adding that "[i]t goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me." ..."
"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the
conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon is quoted as saying in Fire and Fury.
"Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should
have called the F.B.I. immediately." Bannon reportedly speculated that the chance the eldest Trump son did not involve his father
in the meeting "is zero."
When Bannon's comments became public, Trump excoriated his former strategist, whom
he accused of having "lost his mind."
But while Bannon has since apologized for the remarks and sought to walk back a number of the quotes, he's stopped short of denying
that he viewed the Trump Tower meeting as treasonous. Instead, he's merely shifted the blame away from Trump Jr. and onto Manafort.
"My comments were aimed at Paul Manafort, a seasoned campaign professional with experience and knowledge of how the Russians operate.
He should have known they are duplicitous, cunning, and not our friends. To reiterate, those comments were not aimed at Don Jr.
," Bannon said in
a statement to Axios. ( Bannon has denied that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government during the election
.)
... ... ...
Though the Trump Tower meeting took place before Bannon joined the Trump campaign, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House
panel, told
CNN last week that he plans to question Bannon about "why this meeting at Trump Tower represented his treason and certainly unpatriotic
at a minimum."
Jared Kushner's "greasy shit"
Wolff also quotes the former White House strategist as saying, "This is all about money laundering. [Robert] Mueller chose
[senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul
Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It's as plain as a hair on your face." (Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort have all
denied wrongdoing.) Bannon then zeroed in on Kushner specifically, adding that "[i]t goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner
shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me
or trade me."
He and Trump's son-in-law have never seen eye to eye; their White House feuds were a poorly kept secret, and following his ouster,
Bannon has given numerous interviews knocking Kushner, including one to my colleague Gabriel Sherman in which he
questioned Kushner's
maturity level. If Bannon has dirt on Kushner, he will likely get his chance to reveal it; Schiff also
declared
his intent to question Bannon on "the basis of his concern over money laundering."
Emails
released Tuesday by Trump Jr. reveal that his friend Rob Goldstone pitched the meeting
based on the promise of damning information on Hillary Clinton that supposedly was being
offered by senior Russian government officials. On Monday, Mark
Corallo , a spokesman for President Trump's outside counsel, alleged that the meeting had
been set up under false pretenses and implied that Veselnitskaya's association with Fusion GPS
was relevant to the alleged deception.
"... "Bannon is gone, but he's now become fodder for the book by Michael Wolff which is now being mined by both Mueller and the House Intelligence Committee. We don't know what Bannon told the intelligence committee, since it was behind closed doors. But the New York Times, who broke the story, speculate that the subpoena is a way to get Bannon to agree to an interview rather than stand before the grand jury." ..."
"... Lauria also discussed Wolff's "Fire and Fury," which paints a highly negative image of the first year of the Trump White House -- including a quote from Bannon describing Donald Trump, Jr. and former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as "treasonous." ..."
"... The conversation then turned to the specifics of Bannon's claim of treason, the meeting between Manafort, Trump, Jr. and several Russian lobbyists in Trump Tower, and its connection with the famous "dodgy dossier" compiled by Christopher Steele. ..."
"... "The difference is that intelligence reports are vetted by the intelligence agent and then by his superiors and usually by other agencies in his country's intelligence community. It's also a taxpayer-funded operation, supposedly to protect society, although that's not always what intelligence agencies do. Opposition research is a completely different thing: getting dirt on a political opponent, which is what Steele did," Lauria explained. ..."
"... "The idea that Trump, Jr. had gotten this opposition research from the Russian government, as apparently Bannon said, is completely incorrect because there was no one from the Russian government, there was a former KGB agent. The lawyer was not a member of the government and no dirt was ever turned over. [There's] only been one campaign that received opposition research from foreigners during the 2016 campaign: the Clinton campaign that paid for it via a British former intelligence agent and his supposed Russian sources. But foreign opposition research [has] never been established as a crime." ..."
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been subpoenaed to testify before a
grand jury, supposedly on alleged ties between the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and
Russian actors. Brian Becker on Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear was joined by Joe Lauria,
a veteran journalist who has also worked for major newspapers in four countries, perhaps most
notably as the Wall Street Journal's correspondent to the United Nations.
"Mr. Bannon has fallen and I think he was the ideological force behind Trump,
particularly in relations with Russia," said Lauria. "It's interesting to know why did Trump
call for detente, and still seems to be pursuing detente, with Russia. Many people who believe
in Russiagate believe it's because he's somehow beholden to them or has been blackmailed or
whatever. But professor Jeffrey Summers with the University of Wisconsin wrote an interesting
piece where he said Bannon was the one who had impressed upon Trump that he should improve
relations with Russia so they can team up against Islamic extremism."
"Bannon is gone, but he's now become fodder for the book by Michael Wolff which is now being
mined by both Mueller and the House Intelligence Committee. We don't know what Bannon told the
intelligence committee, since it was behind closed doors. But the New York Times, who broke the
story, speculate that the subpoena is a way to get Bannon to agree to an interview rather than
stand before the grand jury."
Lauria also discussed Wolff's "Fire and Fury," which paints a highly negative image of the
first year of the Trump White House -- including a quote from Bannon describing Donald Trump,
Jr. and former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as "treasonous."
"If you read the key quote in that book, the House Intelligence Committee wants to question
him about an allegation against Paul Manafort and Donald Trump, Jr. for treason. I find this
very curious. If Bannon wanted Trump to have better relations with Russia, it's curious that he
would roll out an accusation of treason. He's far from the only one to bring the charge against
Trump in this entire Russiagate fiasco, but if you look at treason, it's the only crime defined
in the US Constitution. It says clearly treason against the US consists only of assisting an
enemy of the US in a state of open hostility with us."
"Russia is not in open hostilities with the United States, no one would argue that. The idea
that Trump, Jr. has committed treason is ridiculous. I don't know why Bannon used [the term].
Clearly he was angry at Trump for being fired, I don't know if he was begging for his job back
as Trump tweeted," Lauria said.
The conversation then turned to the specifics of Bannon's claim of treason, the meeting
between Manafort, Trump, Jr. and several Russian lobbyists in Trump Tower, and its connection
with the famous "dodgy dossier" compiled by Christopher Steele.
"If I could talk a second about that Don Jr meeting, there's a core issue in it over the
difference in opposition research and intelligence," Lauria said. "While Christopher Steele was
an MI-6 intelligence agent for Britain, he was working for a private company at the time. He
was hired by the Clinton campaign and the [Democratic National Committee] through Fusion GPS.
Glenn Simpson, of Fusion, who hired Steele directly, wrote in a New York Times editorial that
Steele produced intelligence memos. He was either lying or misleading the readers -- he has to
know the difference between them."
"The difference is that intelligence reports are vetted by the intelligence agent and then
by his superiors and usually by other agencies in his country's intelligence community. It's
also a taxpayer-funded operation, supposedly to protect society, although that's not always
what intelligence agencies do. Opposition research is a completely different thing: getting
dirt on a political opponent, which is what Steele did," Lauria explained.
"The idea that Trump, Jr. had gotten this opposition research from the Russian government,
as apparently Bannon said, is completely incorrect because there was no one from the Russian
government, there was a former KGB agent. The lawyer was not a member of the government and no
dirt was ever turned over. [There's] only been one campaign that received opposition research
from foreigners during the 2016 campaign: the Clinton campaign that paid for it via a British
former intelligence agent and his supposed Russian sources. But foreign opposition research
[has] never been established as a crime."
It would be interesting if they get Wolff to testify too ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Fox News is reporting that Steve Bannon was told by the White House not to answer questions before House Intel Committee about the White House or the transition. Bannon testified before the committee on Tuesday. ..."
"... the NYT reports that Trump's former chief strategist was subpoenaed last week by the special counsel, Robert Mueller to testify before a grand jury as part of the investigation into possible links between Trump's associates and Russia. ..."
"... After excerpts from the book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," were published this month, Mr. Trump derided Mr. Bannon publicly and threatened to sue him for defamation. Mr. Bannon was soon ousted as the executive chairman of the hard-right website Breitbart News. ..."
"... The experts also said it could be a signal to Mr. Bannon, who has tried to publicly patch up his falling-out with the president, that despite Mr. Trump's legal threats, Mr. Bannon must be completely forthcoming with investigators. ..."
"... Prosecutors generally prefer to interview witnesses before a grand jury when they believe they have information that the witnesses do not know or when they think they might catch the witnesses in a lie. It is much easier for a witness to stop the questioning or sidestep questions in an interview than during grand jury testimony, which is transcribed, and witnesses are required to answer every question. ..."
"... Whether or not Bannon actually knows something that can help the Mueller probe, of course, remains to be seen. ..."
"... Good! Every time Mueller has tried to tighten the noose in the past more info on his own corruption has come out. Can't wait to find out more about what a fuck-up stoolie for the Clinton eradicate america campaign he's been. ..."
"... Yes, but how long before he finds anything. A blind squirrel could find something with this much time and resources. This really is a witch hunt. ..."
"... So fucking tired of this Democrat led witch hunt. This must be how ordinary people felt in Salem back in 1692-1693. We look like fucking fools and a fucking joke to the rest of the world. ..."
"... Grand Inquisitor Mueller, drowning in a sea of DEMOCRAT Russian collusion, subpoenas...Bannon...lol. ..."
"... How much has this idiot Mueller pissed away in taxpayer money? ..."
"... First, did he even say some of that stuff to the author of the book, as has been well publicized that the author is a known liar, fabricator, creating fiction for the sake of book sales. This stinks of the collusion story from the NY Times, which was BS, that got this whole colossal crock of simmering cow crap started. ..."
"... In his emails to Trump Jr., Goldstone referred to Veselnitskaya as a "Russian government lawyer" who had damaging info on Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." ..."
"... If the above were a pedophile sting operation, Jr. would be considered beyond any doubt a child predator, even though he didn't actually get the opportunity to act upon the intent of the meeting. ..."
Update:Fox News is reporting that Steve Bannon was told by the White House not to answer questions before House Intel
Committee about the White House or the transition. Bannon testified before the committee on Tuesday.
The bad news for Steve Bannon just keeps on coming.
Not long after Bannon was bounced from Breitbart following his feud with Trump
over his comments in Michael Wolff's book, moments ago the
NYT reports
that
Trump's former chief strategist was subpoenaed last week by the special counsel, Robert Mueller
to testify before a grand
jury as part of the investigation into possible links between Trump's associates and Russia.
And the reason why stocks dipped modestly and the VIX bounced on the news, is that the subpoena marks the first time Mueller is
known to have used a grand jury subpoena to seek information from a member of Mr. Trump's inner circle.
After excerpts from the book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," were published this month, Mr. Trump derided Mr.
Bannon publicly and threatened to sue him for defamation. Mr. Bannon was soon ousted as the executive chairman of the hard-right
website Breitbart News.
Mueller reportedly issued the subpoena after Mr. Bannon was quoted in a new book criticizing Mr. Trump, saying that Donald
Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and predicting that the special counsel investigation would ultimately center
on money laundering.
According to the NYT, the subpoena could be a negotiating tactic:
Mr. Mueller is likely to allow Mr. Bannon to forgo the grand jury appearance if he agrees to instead be questioned
by investigators in the less formal setting of the special counsel's offices in Washington, according to the person, who would
not be named discussing the case.
But it was not clear why Mr. Mueller treated Mr. Bannon differently than the dozen
administration officials who were interviewed in the final months of last year and were never served with a subpoena.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday Bannon was testifying behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee, which is also investigating
Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The NYT quotes legal experts who said
the subpoena could be a sign that the investigation was intensifying, while others
said it may simply have been a negotiating tactic to persuade Mr. Bannon to cooperate with the investigation.
The experts
also said it could be a signal to Mr. Bannon, who has tried to publicly patch up his falling-out with the president, that despite
Mr. Trump's legal threats, Mr. Bannon must be completely forthcoming with investigators.
Prosecutors generally prefer to interview witnesses before a grand jury when they believe they have information that the witnesses
do not know or when they think they might catch the witnesses in a lie. It is much easier for a witness to stop the questioning
or sidestep questions in an interview than during grand jury testimony, which is transcribed, and witnesses are required to answer
every question.
The news will hardly come as a surprise to Trump: "the president appeared to ease his anger toward Mr. Bannon at the end of last
week. When asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal whether his break with Mr. Bannon was "permanent," the president replied,
"I don't know what the word 'permanent' means.""
As a result, "people close to Mr. Bannon took the president's comments as a signal that Mr. Trump was aware that his fired
strategist would soon be contacted by investigators."
Whether or not Bannon actually knows something that can help the Mueller probe, of course, remains to be seen.
Good! Every time Mueller has tried to tighten the noose in the past more info on his own
corruption has come out. Can't wait to find out more about what a fuck-up stoolie for the
Clinton eradicate america campaign he's been.
Yes, but how long before he finds anything. A blind squirrel could find something with
this much time and resources. This really is a witch hunt. Meanwhile mountains of evidence
being ignored on Comey, Clinton, Lynch
How does a probe "intensify"? Does it mean they discuss things in louder voices?
Wear more colorful clothing? Increase the office lighting brightness?
What I wish would "intensify" is the brainpower of journalists.
Oh . . . and "Hillary" has two l's. Like "hell" has two l's.
They think Bannon is at odds with Trump and will roll over on him.
Must.Get.Moar.Popcorn.
This episode is about to start...
Mike Masr • Jan 16, 2018 1:49 PM Permalink
So fucking tired of this Democrat led witch hunt. This must be how ordinary people felt in Salem back in 1692-1693. We
look like fucking fools and a fucking joke to the rest of the world.
How much has this idiot Mueller pissed away in taxpayer money? Washington
Gov is a total waste.....beyond repair I would say. From that Idiot Black
Chick who wears the Cowboy hats like a Clown from the Circus, to the 84
fucking year old senile Bitch Feinstein......to waste of time and money.
This Country is lost.
First, did he even say some of that stuff to the author of the book, as has been well
publicized that the author is a known liar, fabricator, creating fiction for the sake of book
sales. This stinks of the collusion story from the NY Times, which was BS, that got this
whole colossal crock of simmering cow crap started.
Second, is Bannon that petty or does he
see the bigger picture?
In his
emails
to
Trump Jr., Goldstone referred to Veselnitskaya as a "Russian government lawyer" who had
damaging info on Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
"If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer," Trump Jr. replied to
Goldstone in one email.
Bannon doesn't have to say a word. Trump Jr. stated he loved the idea of Russian Government
support. Bannon is right. Jr.'s intent was treasonous-not to be confused with actually
committing treason.
If the above were a pedophile sting operation, Jr. would be considered beyond any doubt a
child predator, even though he didn't actually get the opportunity to act upon the intent of the
meeting.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said it was "wild" that Trump's son was being
blamed for speaking with a Russian attorney. Lavrov – who met Trump last week at the G20
summit in Hamburg, together with Vladimir Putin – said he knew nothing of the meeting
with the lawyer. Serious people were trying to "make a mountain out of a molehill", Lavrov
said.
In the emails, Goldstone said he made contact with Trump Jr at the behest of the
Russian-Azeri businessman Aras Agalarov and Aglaravov's pop-star son, Emin. The Agalarovs
hosted Trump when he visited Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.
On Wednesday, Aras Agalarov claimed the story was invented. "I think this is some sort of
fiction. I don't know who is making it up," he told Russia's Business FM radio station, adding:
"What has Hillary Clinton got to do with anything? I don't know."
"... It is amazing that the media is picking apart meetings. I have observed that what ever the deep state wants to hide they play a game of blame and twisting the facts. ..."
"... Anderson Cooper is such an arrogant self righteous elite from an elite family. Jay Sekulow is a great man an one of the greatest attorneys in American. He knows his stuff and could run circles around the entitled Cooper! ..."
"... Cooper is absolute garbage... complete and utter, absolute garbage. If he actually did a true journalistic story that wasn't just cia and deepstate bs talking points, i would have a heart attack. These "news" organizations are terrible ..."
"... CNN is fake news. Don't talk to CNN ..."
"... They conveniently over-look all the Hillary mess. Hmm, wonder why??? ..."
The Clintons and Trump were friends not too long ago. I think they're all elitists. New boss, same owners. Trump is crass but
I think he's doing a surprisingly good job. I am hoping things will continue to look up, economically...because, money changes
everything.
It is amazing that the media is picking apart meetings. I have observed that what ever the deep state wants to hide they play
a game of blame and twisting the facts. It is amazing what the Liberals are emphasizing especially with the terrible things that
occurred with Obama Administration, spending, loss of millions of dollars, and illegal activity.
Anderson Cooper is such an arrogant self righteous elite from an elite family. Jay Sekulow is a great man an one of the
greatest attorneys in American. He knows his stuff and could run circles around the entitled Cooper!
Cooper is absolute garbage... complete and utter, absolute garbage. If he actually did a true journalistic story that wasn't
just cia and deepstate bs talking points, i would have a heart attack. These "news" organizations are terrible
Cooper sounded more like one of the nut job conspiracy theorists, just like all the rest on CNN and MSNBC. They conveniently
over-look all the Hillary mess. Hmm, wonder why???
Gorka was actually great in very difficult situation when this smug neoliberal shill Cooper try to bully his way in best tradition
of Bill Oreilly. But Cooper is so well trained in bullshit that it is impossible to 'convert" him on anything. He will try to
promote his fake new lines.
Notable quotes:
"... "Why don't you report on Hillary Clinton's collusion instead?" "Because there's no active FBI investigation into it. There's literally no evidence of anything like that taking place, unlike the Trump investigation, which DOES have an active FBI investigation looking into it." "....yeah, but... why don't you report it anyway? You're fake news." ..."
"Why don't you report on Hillary Clinton's collusion instead?" "Because there's no active FBI investigation into it. There's
literally no evidence of anything like that taking place, unlike the Trump investigation, which DOES have an active FBI investigation
looking into it." "....yeah, but... why don't you report it anyway? You're fake news."
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya has become a central figure in the Russia investigation
because of her involvement in the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
And one of the stranger wrinkles in that saga is Veselnitskaya's interactions with Simpson
just hours before that controversial conclave.
Simpson's interview transcript confirms past reporting that he was with Veselnitskaya the
day of that meeting as well as the day before and day after.
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks during an interview in Moscow, Russia
November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Kommersant Photo/Yury Martyanov
But in her own testimony to the Judiciary committee, Veselnitskaya denied encountering
Simpson on those days.
"Did you have contact with Glenn Simpson on June 8, 9, or 10, 2016?" reads one of the 94
questions posed to Veselnitskaya by the Senate panel.
Undercutting that testimony, Simpson said that Veselnitskaya attended dinners
where he was also present on June 8 and June 10. They were also together in a Manhattan court
room on the morning of the Trump Tower meeting.
Simpson's work with Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who also
visited Trump Tower, has stoked speculation that the Russians provided information that ended
up in the dossier.
But Simpson denied in his testimony that either Russian contact told him about the Trump
Tower meeting. He also said he doubted that either provided information to Steele.
What a wonderfully clear and uncompromising analysis of the current political situation in
the US. And done by two of the sharpest and most charismatic truth-telling figures of the
news landscape! Thank you both, it's such a pleasure to listen to you. I pray to our God that
2018 will be the year that sees the beginning of the swamp draining! God bless you both and
God bless America!
Take all of the clintons money, and don't let them leave the country. And never hold any
government position. And life probation and monitoring on their bank funds from their minimum
wage job. That would probably be the worst thing they could be made to experience. Reduced to
commoners.
I'm concerned, irrationally, about how much Stone is shining right now, as a person. Like
fire burning brightest before the light goes out. Christopher Lee was the same way; embraced
the youth culture, wore a funny hat, and did awesome things then died. I'm selfishly
desperate for Stone to stay alive and remain a champion in this fight.
Roger Stone continually blames Bannon as the one who brought globalist McMaster into the
Trump admin. Yet McMaster was the reason Bannon was booted out, because the two of them did
not agree on the agenda & did not get along. Doesn't make sense.
Sessions is a scum! He's a traitor, who needs to be brought up on charges. An act that
would kill two birds with one stone! Prove the Russian Wikileaks allocations fraudulent, and
get Sessions fired. Inturn getting us, an honest new AG!... Preferably one willing to do his
job!
Central to the Trump-Bannon approach to US politics has been the fist of defiance against
those entities of establishment fame. There is the Central Intelligence Agency, which Trump
scorned; there is the FBI, which Trump is at war with. Then there is the Department of Justice,
which he regards as singularly unjust.
Now he is fraternizing with former enemy
Meantime the Trump machine, continues to function with indignant disdain toward the old Obama
establishment. As long as that lasts, he will thrive.
It was always about the money laundering.
From today's Guardian:
Trump predicted in an interview with the New York Times last week that the special counsel
was "going to be fair", though he also said the investigation "makes the country look very
bad". The president and his allies deny any collusion with Russia and the Kremlin has denied
interfering.
Bannon has criticised Trump's decision to fire Comey. In Wolff's book, obtained by the
Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes
for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced.
"You realise where this is going," he is quoted as saying. "This is all about money
laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a
money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr
and Jared Kushner It's as plain as a hair on your face."
Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche
Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the
Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: "It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner
shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to
roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me."
Bannon is being quoted in the Guardian from his forthcoming book, paraphrasing: "they had
(sic) top officials from the new administration meeting with Russians in Trump Tower and
nobody thought to have a lawyer present? The minimum they could've done was call the
FBI."
This statement doesn't pass the smell test or Bannon is smoking some Colorado grass. One
minute he's against deep state and the next minute he wants to call the FBI? I don't think
so.
The ongoing feud between Steve Bannon and various members of Trump's inner circle, including
family members Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr., is hardly a secret (we wrote about it here:
Steve Bannon In "Self-Imposed Exile" After Disputes With Trump's Inner Circle ). But, if
The Guardian 's reporting on excerpts from an explosive new book penned by Michael Wolff
are even directionally accurate, then Bannon has just taken his White House feud to a whole new
level.
According to The Guardian, which apparently got its hands on a copy of "Fire and Fury" ahead
of its expected release next week, Bannon unloads on Don Jr. and Kushner saying that their
meeting with
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York was "treasonous" and/or
"unpatriotic" and the FBI should have been called immediately.
Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting
between the president's son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as
"treasonous" and "unpatriotic", according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to
say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked
mockingly: "The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a
foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with
no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers.
"Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I
happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."
Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should
have been set up "in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet
with these people". Any information, he said, could then be "dump[ed] down to Breitbart or
something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication".
... ... ...
Trump is not spared in the new book either. According to The Guardian, Wolff writes that
Thomas Barrack Jr, the billionaire founder of Colony Capital who counts himself as one of
Trump's earliest supporters, allegedly told a friend: "He's not only crazy, he's stupid."
All of which should make for some very entertaining Trump tweets once the book drops next
week.
Meanwhile, even Drudge couldn't avoid getting dragged into the fray and on Wednesday morning
tweeted: "No wonder schizophrenic Steve Bannon has been walking around with a small army of
bodyguards..."
She called the controversy a "very well-orchestrated story concocted by one particular
manipulator," whom she identified repeatedly as American businessman Bill Browder.
Browder was once the biggest foreign investor in Russia, but he has since become a vocal
critic of the country's leadership and has clashed with Putin's inner circle.
Browder was a driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law passed in 2012 that imposes
economic sanctions and travel restrictions on Russians named as human rights abusers. Browder
believes it is Putin's No. 1 priority to get the U.S. to lift the sanctions imposed under the
act, which currently affect 44 Russians.
In her interview with Russian government-funded RT, Veselnitskaya called Browder "one of the
greatest experts in the field of manipulating the mass media," and said she had "no doubt that
this whole information campaign is being spun, encouraged and organized by that very man as
revenge" for a legal settlement earlier this year which effectively saw his efforts to expose
alleged Russian money-laundering in the U.S. hit a brick wall.
During Browder's appearance on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday, co-host Charlie Rose called
attention to Browder's description of Veselnitskaya as "probably the most aggressive person I
have ever encountered in all of my contacts with Russians" -- to which Browder replied, "Yes,
she's a remarkable person. I should caveat that: she's not aggressive in a physical
way."
The fact that he is employed by Guardia tells a lot how low Guardian fall. It's a yellow press (owned by intelligence agencies
if we talk about their coverage of Russia).
Notable quotes:
"... In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal". ..."
"... Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument. ..."
"... 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. ..."
Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel
debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate
those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely
clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.
Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most
articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy
theory, and has published in The Nation some of the
clearest
arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian
where he has been
writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of
New
York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald
Trump Win.
In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of
this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy
Scahill accurately described as "brutal".
The term Gish gallop
, named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a
fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in
rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the
opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the
Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a
deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by
Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.
In this part here , for
example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the
back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's
happening here:
Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or
the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most
recently when President Macron was elected ? -
Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ?
-
Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed
didn't happen?
Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?
Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just
claimed actually is not true?
Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive,
but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European
states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.
Maté: Where else?
Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was
crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and
former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the
time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing
thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does
the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was
different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public
space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a
matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.
Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently
presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world
prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot
of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's
plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no
Russian hack in Germany.
In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually
admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more
flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a
completely
false example .
That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the
fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that
Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté
just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite
obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.
The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim,
Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom
things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact
that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that
Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding
has.
jeremy scahill 0
@jeremyscahill
This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to
defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' -
YouTube
11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
Q 131 11597 C? 1,148
The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of
the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive
government it is, after which the following exchange took place:
Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir
Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the
topic of your book.
Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort
of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing
would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.
At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up
the show and promote Harding's book on his own.
You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy
it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a
cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate
conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of
trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.
The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many
suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for
there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their
conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as
Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain
zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the
appearance of a legitimate argument.
Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.
* * *
Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece
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Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History4
days ago (edited) 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.
"... In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0. ..."
"... But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role. ..."
"... While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value. ..."
"... In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968. ..."
"... Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US. ..."
"... It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm. ..."
"... "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one. ..."
"... The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak). ..."
"... So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel. ..."
"... So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first. ..."
"... Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection. ..."
"... Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference. ..."
"... I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." ..."
"... The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy. ..."
"... FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story. ..."
"... God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact. ..."
"... I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war. ..."
"... Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence. ..."
The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate December 23, 2017
While unproven claims of Russian meddling in U.S. politics have whipped Official Washington
into a frenzy, much less attention has been paid to real evidence of Israeli interference in
U.S. politics, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.
By Dennis J Bernstein
In investigating Russia's alleged meddling in U.S. politics, special prosecutor Robert
Mueller uncovered evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured the Trump
transition team to undermine President Obama's plans to permit the United Nations to censure
Israel over its illegal settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank, a discovery
referenced in the plea deal with President Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn.
President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the United
Nations General Assembly (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took
the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call
with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal
to block the resolution).
I spoke on Dec, 18 with independent journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, who writes
on national security and other issues for a number of blogs at Tikun Olam .
Dennis Bernstein: A part of Michael Flynn's plea had to do with some actions he took before
coming to power regarding Israel and the United Nations. Please explain.
Richard Silverstein:
The Obama administration was negotiating in the [UN] Security Council
just before he left office about a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements.
Obviously, the Israeli government did not want this resolution to be passed. Instead of going
directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to
Trump instead. They approached Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner became involved in this. While
they were in the transition and before having any official capacity, they negotiated with
various members of the Security Council to try to quash the settlement resolution.
One of the issues here which is little known is the Logan Act, which was passed at the
foundation of our republic and was designed to prevent private citizens from usurping the
foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. It criminalized any private citizen who attempted
to negotiate with an enemy country over any foreign policy issue.
In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign
policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because
that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on
the resolution and it passed 14-0.
But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the
Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to
derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and
disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role.
This speaks to the power of the Israel lobby and of Israel itself to disrupt our foreign
policy. Very few people have ever been charged with committing an illegal act by advocating on
behalf of Israel. That is one of the reasons why this is such an important development. Until
now, the lobby has really ruled supreme on the issue of Israel and Palestine in US foreign
policy. Now it is possible that a private citizen will actually be made to pay a price for
that.
This is an important development because the lobby till now has run roughshod over our
foreign policy in this area and this may act as a restraining order against blatant disruption
of US foreign policy by people like this.
Bernstein: So this information is a part of Michael Flynn's plea. Anyone studying this would
learn something about Michael Flynn and it would be part of the prosecution's
investigation.
Silverstein:
That's absolutely right. One thing to note here is that it is reporters who
have raised the issue of the Logan Act, not Mueller or Flynn's people or anyone in the Trump
administration. But I do think that Logan is a very important part of this plea deal, even if
it is not mentioned explicitly.
Bernstein: If the special prosecutor had smoking-gun information that the Trump
administration colluded with Russia, in the way they colluded with Israel before coming to
power, this would be a huge revelation. But it is definitely collusion when it comes to
Israel.
Silverstein: Absolutely. If this were Russia, it would be on the front page of every major
newspaper in the United States and the leading story on the TV news. Because this is Israel and
because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby and they have so much influence
on US policy concerning Israel, it has managed to stay on the back burner. Only two or three
media outlets besides mine have raised this issue of Logan and collusion. Kushner and Flynn may
be the first American citizens charged under the Logan Act for interfering on behalf of Israel
in our foreign policy. This is a huge issue and it has hardly been raised at all.
Bernstein: As you know, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has made a career out of investigating the
Russia-gate charges. She says that she has read all this material carefully, so she must have
read about Flynn and Israel, but I haven't heard her on this issue at all.
Silverstein:
Even progressive journalists, who you'd think would be going after this with a
vengeance, are frightened off by the fact the lobby really bites back. So, aside from outlets
like the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, there is a lot of hesitation about going after
the Israel lobby. People are afraid because they know that there is a high price to be paid. It
goes from being purely journalism to being a personal and political vendetta when they get you
in their sights. In fact, one of the reasons I feel my blog is so important is that what I do
is challenge Israeli policy and Israeli intervention in places where it doesn't belong.
Bernstein: Jared Kushner is the point man for the Trump administration on Israel. He has
talked about having a "vision for peace." Do you think it is a problem that this is someone
with a long, close relationship with the prime minister of Israel and, in fact, runs a
foundation that invests in the building of illegal Israeli settlements? Might this be
problematic?
Silverstein:
It is quite nefarious, actually. When Jared Kushner was a teenager, Netanyahu
used to stay at the Kushner family home when he visited the United States. This relationship
with one of the most extreme right political figures in Israel goes back decades. And it is not
just Kushner himself, but all the administration personnel dealing with these so-called peace
negotiations, including Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the ambassador. These are all
orthodox Jews who tend to have very nationalist views when it comes to Israel. They all support
settlements financially through foundations. These are not honest brokers.
We could talk at length about the history of US personnel who have been negotiators for
Middle East peace. All of them have been favorable to Israel and answerable to the Israel
lobby, including Dennis Ross and Makovsky, who served in the last administration. These people
are dyed-in-the-wool ultra-nationalist supporters of [Israeli] settlements. They have no
business playing any role in negotiating a peace deal.
My prediction all along has been that these peace negotiations will come to naught, even
though they seem to have bought the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, which is something new in the
process. The Palestinians can never accept a deal that has been negotiated by Kushner and
company because it will be far too favorable to Israel and it will totally neglect the
interests of the Palestinians.
Bernstein: It has been revealed that Kushner supports the building of settlements in the
West Bank. Most people don't understand the politics of what is going on there, but it appears
to be part of an ethnic cleansing.
Silverstein:
The settlements have always been a violation of international law, ever since
Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. The Geneva Conventions direct an occupying power to
withdraw from territory that was not its own. In 1967 Israel invaded Arab states and conquered
the West Bank and Gaza but this has never been recognized or accepted by any nation until
now.
The fact that Kushner and his family are intimately involved in supporting
settlements–as are David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt–is completely outrageous. No
member of any previous US administration would have been allowed to participate with these
kinds of financial investments in support of settlements. Of course, Trump doesn't understand
the concept of conflict of interest because he is heavily involved in such conflicts himself.
But no party in the Middle East except Israel is going to consider the US an honest broker and
acceptable as a mediator.
When they announce this deal next January, no one in the Arab World is going to accept it,
with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia because they have other fish to fry in terms of
Iran. The next three years are going to be interesting, supposing Trump lasts out his term. My
prediction is that the peace plan will fail and that it will lead to greater violence in the
Middle East. It will not simply lead to a vacuum, it will lead to a deterioration in conditions
there.
Bernstein: The Trump transition team was actually approached directly by the Israeli
government to try to intercede at the United Nations.
Silverstein:
I'm assuming it was Netanyahu who went directly to Kushner and Trump. Now, we
haven't yet found out that Trump directly knew about this but it is very hard to believe
that Trump didn't endorse this. Now that we know that Mueller has access to all of the emails
of the transition team, there is little doubt that they have been able to find their smoking
gun. Flynn's plea meant that they basically had him dead to rights. It remains to be seen what
will happen with Kushner but I would think that this would play some role in either the
prosecution of Kushner or some plea deal.
Bernstein: The other big story, of course, is the decision by the Trump administration to
move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Was there any pre-election collusion in that
regard and what are the implications?
Silverstein:
Well, it's a terrible decision which goes against forty to fifty years of US
foreign policy. It also breaches all international understanding. All of our allies in the
European Union and elsewhere are aghast at this development. There is now a campaign in the
United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the announcement, which we will
veto, but the next step will be to go to the General Assembly, where such a resolution will
pass easily.
The question is how much anger, violence and disruption this is going to cause around the
world, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a slow-burning fuse. It is not going to
explode right now. The issue of Jerusalem is so vital that this is not something that is simply
going to go away. This is going to be a festering sore in the Muslim world and among
Palestinians. We have already seen attacks on Israeli soldiers and citizens and there will be
many more.
As to collusion in all of this, since Trump always said during the campaign that this was
what he was going to do, it might be difficult to treat this in the same way as the UN
resolution. The UN resolution was never on anybody's radar and nobody knew the role that Trump
was playing behind the scenes with that–as opposed to Trump saying right from the get-go
that Jerusalem was going to be recognized as the capital of Jerusalem.
By doing that, they have completely abrogated any Palestinian interest in Jerusalem. This is
a catastrophic decision that really excludes the United States from being an honest broker here
and shows our true colors in terms of how pro-Israel we are.
As most regular readers of CN already know, some dynamite books on the inordinate amount
of influence pro-Israel zealots have on Washington:
1.) 'The Host and the Parasite' by Greg Felton
2.) 'Power of Israel in the United States' by James Petras
3.) 'They Dare to Speak Out' by Paul Findley
4.) 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt
5.) 'Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power' by James Petras
I suggest that anyone relatively knew to this neglected topic peruse a few of the
aforementioned titles. An inevitable backlash by the citizens of the United States is
eventually forthcoming against the Zionist Power Configuration. It's crucial that this
impending backlash remain democratic, non-violent, eschews anti-Semitism, and travels in a
progressive in direction.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 5:47 pm
Which one would you suggest? I already read "The Israel Lobby."
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:38 pm
Findley and Mearsheimer are certainly worthwhile. I will look for Petras.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm
If you haven't already read them, the end/footnotes in "The Israel Lobby" are more
illuminating.
That influence is also shown, of course, by the fact that Obama waited until the midnight
hours of his tenure and after the 2016 election to even start working on this resolution.
While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated,
probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value.
In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think
he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew
calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:41 pm
Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case
against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel
collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will
awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:32 am
It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention
from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind
the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm.
The leaked emails showed the corruption
plainly, and based on the ACTUAL evidence (recorded download time), most likely came from a
highly disgruntled insider. The picture was starting to spill into public view. I'd estimate
the real huge worry was that if this stuff came out, it could bring out other Israeli
secrets, like their involvement in 9/11. That would mean actual jail time. Might be hard to
buy your way out of that no matter how much money you have.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 10:48 pm
The Logan act states that anyone who negotiates with an enemy of the US, and Israel is not
defined as an enemy.
Annie , December 23, 2017 at 6:59 pm
The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would. I don't think anyone has
been convicted based on this act, and they were part of a transition team not to mention the
Logan act clearly states a private citizen who attempts to negotiate with an enemy state, and
that certainly doesn't apply to Israel. In this administration their bias is so blatant that
they can install Kushner as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestine peace process while his
family has a close relationship with Netanyahu, and he runs a foundation that invests in the
building of illegal settlements which goes against the Geneva conventions. Hopefully Trump's
blatant siding with Israel will receive a lot of backlash as did his plan to make Jerusalem
the capital of Israel.
I also found that so called progressive internet sites don't cover this the way they
should.
Al Pinto , December 24, 2017 at 9:16 am
@Annie
"The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would."
You and me both .
From the point of starting to read this article, it has been in my mind that the Logan act
would not apply here. After reading most of the comments, it became clear that not many
people viewed this as such. Yes, Joe Tedesky did as well
The UN is the "clearing house" for international politics, where countries freely contact
each other's for getting support for their cause behind the scene. The support sought after
could be voting for or against the resolution on hand. At times, as Israel did, countries
reach out to perceived enemies as well, if they could not secure sufficient support for their
cause. This is the normal activity of the UN diplomacy.
Knowing that the outgoing administration would not support its cause, Israel reached out
to the incoming administration to delay the vote on the UN resolution. I fail to see anything
wrong with Israel's action even in this case; Israel is not an enemy state to the US. As
such, there has been no violation of any acts by the incoming administration, even if they
tried to secure veto vote for Israel. I do not like it, but no action by Mueller in this case
is correct.
People, just like the article in itself, implying that the Logan Act applies in this case
are just plain wrong. Not just wrong, but their anti-Israel bias is in plain view.
Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state. Even then, Russia contacting the incoming administration is not a violation of
the Logan Act. That is just normal diplomacy in the background between countries. What would
be a violation is that the contacted official acted on the behalf of Russia and tried to
influence the outgoing administration's decision. That is what the Mueller investigation
tries to prove hopelessly
"Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an
enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and
therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with
Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing
their best to provoke Russia into one.
Annie , December 24, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for your reply. When I read the article and it referenced the Logan Act, which I am
familiar with in that I've read about it before, I was surprised that Bernstein and
Silverstein even brought it up because it so obviously does not apply in this case, since
Israel is not considered an enemy state. Many have even referenced it as flimsy when it comes
to convictions against those in Trump's transition team who had contacts with Russia. No one
has ever been convicted under the Logan Act.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:41 pm
The Logan Act either should apply equally, or not apply at all. This "Russia-gate" hype
seems to apply it selectively.
mrtmbrnmn , December 23, 2017 at 7:36 pm
You guys are blinded by the light. The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer
hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak).
There is no doubt that Trump is Bibi's and the Saudi's ventriloquist dummy and Jared has
been an Israel agent of influence since he was 12.
But half the Dementedcrat Sore Loser Brigade will withdraw from the field of battle (not
to mention most of the GOP living dead too) if publically and noisily tying Israel to Trump's
tail becomes the only route to his removal. Which it would have to be, as there is no there
there regarding the yearlong trumped-up PutinPutinPutin waterboarding of Trump.
Immediately (if not sooner) the mighty (pro-Israel) Donor Bank of Singer (Paul), Saban
(Haim), Sachs (Goldman) & Adelson (Sheldon), would change their passwords and leave these
politicians/beggars with empty begging bowls. End of $ordid $tory.
alley cat , December 23, 2017 at 7:45 pm
So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What
of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are
orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator
bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel.
Mueller can use that evidence of sabotage and/or obstruction of justice to try to coerce
false confessions from Kushner and Flynn. But what are the chances of that, barring short
stayovers for them at some CIA black site?
So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem
witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and
Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's
flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first.
Leslie F. , December 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm
He used it, along with other info, to turn flip Flynn and possibly can use it the same way
again Kusher. Not all evidence has end up in court to be useful.
JWalters , December 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm
This is an extremely important story, excellently reported. All the main "facts" Americans
think they know about Israel are, amazingly, flat-out lies.
1. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a
defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor
shape and would not be able to resist the zionist army.
2. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews.
3. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are
under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis.
4. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of
equal human rights for all.
Maintaining such a blanket of major lies for decades requires immense power. And this
power would have to be exercised "under the radar" to be effective. That requires even more
power. Both Congress and the press have to be controlled. How much power does it take to turn
"Progressive Rachel" into "Tel Aviv Rachel"? To turn "It Takes a Village" Hillary into
"Slaughter a Village" Hillary? It takes immense power AND ruthlessness.
War profiteers have exactly this combination of immense war profits and the ruthlessness
to victimize millions of people. "War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror" http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Vast war profits easily afford to buy the mainstream media. And controlling campaign
contributions for members of Congress is amazingly cheap in the big picture. Such a squalid
sale of souls.
And when simple bribery is not enough, they ruin a person's life through blackmail or
false character assassination. And if those don't work they use death threats, including to
family members, and finally murder. Their ruthlessness is unrestrained. John Perkins has
described these tactics in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".
For readers who haven't seen it, here is an excellent riff on the absurdly overwhelming
evidence for Israel's influence compared to that of Russia, at a highly professional news and
analysis website run by Jewish anti-Zionists. "Let's talk about Russian influence" http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/about-russian-influence/
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:44 pm
Hitler and Mussolini, Trump and Netanyahoo – matches made in Hell. These characters
are so obviously, blatantly evil that it is deeply disturbing that people fail to see that,
and instead go to great lengths to find some complicated flaws in these monsters.
mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:49 pm
Keep it simple folks. No need for complex analyses. Just remember that these characters as
simply as evil as it gets, and proceed from there. These asinine shows that portray mobsters
as complex human beings are dangerously deluding. If you want to be victimized by these
types, this kind of overthinking is just the way to go.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 9:00 pm
There is a modern theory of fiction that insists upon the portrayal of inconsistency in
characters, both among the good guys and the bad guys. It is useful to show how those who do
wrongs have made specific kinds of errors that make them abnormal, and that those who do
right are not perfect but nonetheless did the right thing. Instead it is used by commercial
writers to argue that the good are really bad, and the bad are really good, which is of
course the philosophy of oligarchy-controlled mass publishers.
Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:54 pm
A very important article by Dennis Bernstein, and it is very appropriate that non-zionist
Jews are active against the extreme zionist corruption of our federal government. I am sure
that they are reviled by the zionists for interfering with the false denunciations of racism
against the opponents of zionism. Indeed critics face a very nearly totalitarian power of
zionism, which in league with MIC/WallSt opportunism has displaced democracy altogether in
the US.
backwardsevolution , December 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm
A nice little set-up by the Obama administration. Perhaps it was entrapment? Who set it
up? Flynn and Kushner should have known better to fall for it. So at the end of his
Presidency, Obama suddenly gets balls and wants to slap down Israel? Yeah, right.
Nice to have leverage over people, though, isn't it? If you're lucky and play your cards
right, you might even be lucky enough to land an impeachment.
Of course, I'm just being cynical. No one would want to overturn democracy, would
they?
Certainly people like Comey, Brenner, Clinton, Clapper, Mueller, Rosenstein wouldn't want
that, would they?
Joe Tedesky , December 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm
I just can't see any special prosecutor investigating Israel-Gate. Between what the
Zionist donors donate to these creepy politicians, too what goods they have on these same
mischievous politicians, I just can't see any investigation into Israel's collusion with the
Trump Administration going anywhere. Netanyahu isn't Putin, and Russia isn't Israel. Plus,
Israel is considered a U.S. ally, while Russia is being marked as a Washington rival. Sorry,
this news regarding Israel isn't going to be ranted on about for the next 18 months, like the
MSM has done with Russia, because our dear old Israel is the only democracy in the Middle
East, or so they tell us. So, don't get your hopes up.
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:33 am
It's true the Israelis have America's politicians by the ears and the balls. But as this
story gets better known, politicians will start getting questions at their town meetings.
Increasingly the politicians will gag on what Israel is force-feeding them, until finally
they reach a critical mass of vomit in Congress.
Joe Tedesky , December 24, 2017 at 11:12 am
I hope you are right JWalters. Although relying on a Zionist controlled MSM doesn't give
hope for the news getting out properly. Again I hope you are right JWalters. Joe
Actually, Netanyahu was so desperate to have the resolution pulled and not voted on that
he reached out to any country that might help him after the foreign minister of New Zealand,
one of its co-sponsors refused to pull the plug after a testy phone exchange with the Israeli
PM ending up threatening an Israeli boycott oturnef the KIwis.
He then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin, who owed him a favor for having Israel's UN
delegate absent himself for the UNGA vote on sanctioning Russia after its annexation of
Crimea.
Putin then called Russia's UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, since deceased, and asked him to
get the other UNSC ambassadors to postpone the vote until Trump took over the White House but
the other ambassadors weren't buying it. Given Russia's historic public position regarding
the settlements, Churkin had no choice to vote Yes with the others.
This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US which,
due to Zionist influence on the media, does not want the American public to know about the
close ties between Putin and Netanyahu which has led to the Israeli PM making five state
visits there in the last year and a half.
Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto. That
Netanyahu apparently knew in advance that the US planned to veto the resolution was, I
suspect, leaked to the Israelis by US delegate Samantha Power, who was clearly unhappy at
having to abstain.
Abe , December 24, 2017 at 12:39 am
The Israeli Prime Minister made five state visits to Russia in the last year and a half to
make sure the Russians don't accidentally on purpose blast Israeli warplanes from the sky
over Syria (like they oughtta). Putin tries not to snicker when Netanyahu bloviates ad
nauseum about the purported "threat" posed by Iran.
He thinks Putin is a RATS ASS like the yankee government
JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:34 am
"This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the
US"
We've just had a whole cluster of big stories involving Israel that have all been
essentially blacked out in the US press. e.g. "Dionne and Shields ignore the Adelson in the room" http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/jerusalem-israels-capital
This is not due to chance. There is no doubt that the US mainstream media is wholly
controlled by the Israelis.
alley cat , December 24, 2017 at 4:49 am
"He [Netanyahu] then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin "
Jeff, that characterization of Putin and Netanyahu's relationship makes no sense, since
the Russians have consistently opposed Zionism and Putin has been no exception, having
spoiled Zionist plans for the destruction of Syria.
"Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US
veto."
Not sure where you're going with that, since the US vote was up to Obama, who wanted to
get some payback for all of Bibi's efforts to sabotage Obama's treaty with Iran.
For the record, Zionism has had no more rabid supporter than the Dragon Lady. If we're
going to make assumptions, we could start by assuming that if she had won the White House
we'd all be dead by now, thanks to her obsession (at the instigation of her Zionist/neocon
sponsors) with declaring no-fly zones in Syria.
Brendan , December 24, 2017 at 6:18 am
Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves
their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will
simply ignore the Israeli connection.
Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as
evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone
call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of
this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference.
Skip Scott , December 24, 2017 at 7:59 am
I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would
never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy.
"Nothing to see here folks, move along."
The zionist will stop at nothing to control the middle east with American taxpayers
money/military equiptment its a win win for the zionist they control America lock stock and
barrel a pity though it is a great country to be led by a jewish entity.
What will Israel-Palestine look like twenty years from now? Will it remain an apartheid
regime, a regime without any Palestinians, or something different. The Trump decision, which
the world rejects, brings the issue of "final" settlement to the fore. In a way we can go
back to the thirties and the British Mandate. Jewish were fleeing Europe, many coming to
Palestine. The British, on behalf of the Zionists, were delaying declaring Palestine a state
with control of its own affairs. Seeing the mass immigration and chafing at British foot
dragging, the Arabs rebelled, What happened then was that the British, responding to numerous
pressures notably war with Germany, acted by granting independence and granting Palestine
control of its borders.
With American pressure and the mass exodus of Jews from Europe, Jews defied the British
resulting in Jewish resistance. What followed then was a UN plan to divide the land with a
Jerusalem an international city administered by the UN. The Arabs rebelled and lost much of
what the UN plan provided and Jerusalem as an international city was scrapped.
Will there be a second serious attempt to settle the issue of the land and the status of
Jerusalem? Will there be a serious move toward a single state? How will the matter of
Jerusalem be resolved. The two state solution has always been a fantasy and acquiescence of
Palestinians to engage in this charade exposes their leaders to charges of posturing for
perks. Imagined options could go on and on but will there be serious options placed before
the world community or will the boots on the ground Israeli policies continue?
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 1:34 pm
As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and
the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both
parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.
The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with
the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to
both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Truly mind-boggling. Ahistorical, and as you say, fantasy.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:48 pm
FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy
(against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End
of story.
$50K of Facebook ads about puppies pales in comparison to that blatant, prima facia,
public manipulation. God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:11 pm
Just for the record, Richard Silverstein blocked me on Twitter because I pointed out that
he slammed someone who was suggesting that the Assad government was fighting for its
(Syria's) life by fighting terrorists. Actually, more specifically, because of that he read
my "Free Palestine" bio on Twitter and called me a Hamas supporter (no Hamas mentioned) and a
"moron" for some seeming contradiction.
I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy.
If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria
and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving
their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing
brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote,
arguably, perpetual war.
Silverstein is probably not a good (ie. consistent) arbiter of Israeli impact on US
politics. Just sayin'.
This may be a tad ot but it relates to the alleged hacking of the DNC, the role debbie
wasserman schultz plays in the spy ring (awan bros) in house of rep servers: I have long
suspected that mossad has their fingers in this entire mess. FWIW
Good site, BTW.
Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 7:35 pm
I can't recall why I removed the Tikun Olam site from my bookmarks – it happened
quite a while back. Generally I do that when I feel the blogger crossed some kind of personal
red line. Something Mr. Silverstein wrote put him over that line with me.
In the course of a search I found that at the neocon NYT. Mr. Silverstein claims several
things I find unbelievable, and from that alone I wonder about his ultimate motives. I may be
excessively touchy about this, but that's how it is.
Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 8:51 pm
Yeah Zachary, "wondering about ultimate motives" is probably a good way to put it/his
views. He's obviously conflicted, if not deferential in some aspects of Israeli policy. He
really was a hero of mine, but now I just don't get whether what he says is masking something
or a true belief. He says some good stuff, but, but, but .
P. Michael Garber , December 24, 2017 at 11:54 pm
Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than
reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel
lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible
relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was
manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's
influence.
India was naughty as well and Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley ought to have taken the Indian
ambassador's name down as well. Maybe she'll even declare she won't ever set foot in India
again. Her relatives there will breathe sighs of relief!
That's what Trump's "bastard neoliberalism" is about. He is not a New Dealer.
Notable quotes:
"... He forgot them on health care. Jettisoning his campaign pledge to "take care of everybody" regardless of income, he proposed cutting federal health subsidies for the hard-pressed blue-collar voters who put him into office. ..."
"... He forgot them on financial regulation. Abandoning talk of cracking down on Wall Street executives who "rigged" the economy to hobble the working class, he seeks to undercut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. ..."
"... And he forgot them on taxes. Discarding his vow to reshape taxation for average families at the expense of rich people like himself, he's working with Republican leaders to hand the biggest benefits to corporations and the wealthy ..."
"... The president hasn't forgotten everything. In lieu of big financial benefits, Trump has steadily given "the forgotten people" at least one visceral commodity [: ] affirmation of shared racial grievances. ..."
"... But on economic issues he has behaved exactly like a standard issue country club republican. The requirement that the GOP enact a "replacement" for Obamacare? Gone. Preventing the offshoring of manufacturing jobs? Gone. Enacting at least something like a tariff at the borders? Gone. Actually *doing* something about the opioid crisis, which is strongly correlated with areas of economic distress (as opposed to lip service)? Nothing. ..."
He forgot them on health care. Jettisoning his campaign pledge to "take care of everybody" regardless of income, he proposed
cutting federal health subsidies for the hard-pressed blue-collar voters who put him into office.
He forgot them on financial regulation. Abandoning talk of cracking down on Wall Street executives who "rigged" the economy
to hobble the working class, he seeks to undercut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
And he forgot them on taxes. Discarding his vow to reshape taxation for average families at the expense of rich people like
himself, he's working with Republican leaders to hand the biggest benefits to corporations and the wealthy.
To the contrary, his budget includes big cuts to Social Security disability program. Meanwhile his much-vaunted infrastructure
plan has 'failed to materialize."
But, Harwood points out:
The president hasn't forgotten everything. In lieu of big financial benefits, Trump has steadily given "the forgotten people"
at least one visceral commodity [: ] affirmation of shared racial grievances.
I think this is a good summary of Trump's domestic policies as revealed by the past year. On social issues, he has governed exactly
as he promised during his campaign, issuing a de facto ban on Muslim immigration, unleashing ICE against Latinos, and fulminating
against protesting black NFL players.
But on economic issues he has behaved exactly like a standard issue country club republican. The requirement that the GOP enact
a "replacement" for Obamacare? Gone. Preventing the offshoring of manufacturing jobs? Gone. Enacting at least something like a tariff
at the borders? Gone. Actually *doing* something about the opioid crisis, which is strongly correlated with areas of economic distress
(as opposed to lip service)? Nothing.
Joel , December 7, 2017 9:03 am
Forgotten? LOL! No, Trump didn't forget. He was lying.
little john , December 7, 2017 4:01 pm
I hate doing this because I am not a fan of the President but a "de facto ban on Muslim immigration"? I cannot remember but
I don't think Indonesia, Pakistan, India or Turkey was on the list. Those a pretty big Muslim nations. Maybe you should look it
up. "Unleashing ICE against Latinos"? I have three Latino neighbors on my street, my next door neighbor doesn't even speak English,
but I haven't seen any ICE agents around. Maybe I should just wait they're on their way? "Fulminating against NFL players"? You're
right about that.
As an aside I have recently had to laugh when I see your pseudonym. Here in Dallas we've taken down the statue of Robert E.
Lee from Robert E. Lee Park. (Now named Oak Lawn Park.) At the opening of the park in 1936 there is a great picture of the statue
with FDR, Robert E Lee IV and D.W. Griffith. I am wondering if NewDealDemocrat is a microaggression?
run75441 , December 8, 2017 9:35 am
NDD:
Before you bemoan the loss of the CSR (covered by Section 1402 of the ACA) for those making between 138 and 250% FPL, you do
understand premium subsidies will pick up the difference. If the states apply the premium increase properly to the Silver plans,
the impact is felt across all other levels between 138% and 400% FPL. Indeed, in many cases Bronze plans are free, Gold plans
become less costly, and premiums decrease. A person can go to a lower deductible/copay for the same or less cost than the original
silver plan.
I think as some will tell you here, this does nothing for those greater than 400% FPL who now find themselves being hit with
the full impact of a premium increase due to Trump's action. While a much smaller percentage of the insured, it still numbers
around 9 million.
spencer , December 8, 2017 1:45 pm
Isn't that 8 million being hit out of the under 20 million that had signed up for Obamacare.
So on a percent basis doesn't you quote imply about half of the relevant population is being hit?
That's neoliberal elite after all. Why the author expects them to be ashamed is unclear
Notable quotes:
"... Business practices aimed at boosting shareholder value – like outsourcing, offshoring, automation, union-busting, predatory lending, and a range of anti-competitive abuses – have undermined the security of large swaths of the country. In turn, a flood of business dollars for campaign donations and lobbying over decades has helped thwart effective government responses to rising pain on Main Street. ..."
"... History tells us that societies with extractive and self-serving upper classes tend to fall into decline – whereas societies with inclusive elites are more likely to thrive. With the rise of Trump, we're seeing what an unraveling of the social fabric looks like after decades in which nearly all the nation's income gains have flowed upwards to a tiny sliver of households. ..."
Since January, though, we've also seen a new level of rapaciousness by corporate interests in
Washington DC that seem intent on extracting as much wealth as they can from wherever they can: consumers,
investors, public lands, student borrowers, the tax code and even the war in Afghanistan.
Longtime watchers of the .01% won't be surprised by this bifurcated picture. For over two decades,
an ever more educated wealthy elite has trumpeted its belief in tolerance, diversity, and meritocracy
– even as it's also helped usher in record levels of inequality that have left many Americans feeling
economically excluded and increasingly angry.
Trump's retrograde presidency has revealed the profound contradictions at the top of the US income
ladder.
... ... ...
Corporate leaders have already been supportive of Trump's sweeping push to gut regulations in
ways that would tilt the rules governing the economy more in favor of business and the wealthy. Social
inclusion may be a growing public mantra of the far upper class. But economic extraction remains
among its core operating principles.
... ... ...
Social inclusion is a public mantra of the upper class. But economic extraction remains
a core operating principle
The answer is that many corporate and financial leaders were, and still are, a big part of the
problem. These leaders have fostered the economic conditions that have thrown the values of tolerance
and diversity on the defensive in America.
Business practices aimed at boosting shareholder value – like outsourcing, offshoring, automation,
union-busting, predatory lending, and a range of anti-competitive abuses – have undermined the security
of large swaths of the country. In turn, a flood of business dollars for campaign donations and lobbying
over decades has helped thwart effective government responses to rising pain on Main Street.
... ... ...
History tells us that societies with extractive and self-serving upper classes tend to fall
into decline – whereas societies with inclusive elites are more likely to thrive. With the rise of
Trump, we're seeing what an unraveling of the social fabric looks like after decades in which nearly
all the nation's income gains have flowed upwards to a tiny sliver of households.
Rarely has the American experiment – the notion of a country united by ideas rather than shared
heritage – felt more fragile than it does right now. It's an ugly picture of division and resentment,
but a predictable one given the economic trauma inflicted on millions of people over recent decades.
... ... ...
David Callahan is the author of The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded
Age. He is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy
MOSCOW - The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign denied in an exclusive interview with
NBC News that she had any connection to the Kremlin and insists she met with President Donald Trump's son to press her client's interest
in the Magnitsky Act - not to hand over information about Hillary Clinton's campaign.
"I never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton. It was never my intention to have that," Natalia Veselnitskaya
said.
When asked how Trump Jr. seemed to have the impression that she had information about the Democratic National Committee, she responded:
"It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear
the thought that they wanted."
Trump Jr. has confirmed that the meeting occurred, saying in a statement to The New York Times that he attended "a short introductory
meeting" with the lawyer, where the topic of conversation was primarily about adoption.
On Monday, Trump Jr. seemed to confirm that he had been offered information about Hillary or her campaign but insisted that nothing
untoward in the meeting had occurred.
"Obviously I'm the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to
listen," he tweeted, seemingly sarcastic.
The New York Times on Monday reported that Trump Jr. was told in an email before the meeting that the information Veselnitskaya
had was part of a Russian government effort to help his father's candidacy.
But Veselnitskaya flatly denied any connection to the Russian government.
This female lawyer probably can be characterized as anti-Russian lawyer. She is more probably MI6 asset then FSB asset ;-) (connection
with William F. Browder
).
But attempts to stir the pot of Purple Color Revolution ( aka Russiagate) will continue. Neocons are pretty tenacious.
Notable quotes:
"... That it was, yes, ethically promiscuous!but, worse, incredibly stupid. One recalls the line, often incorrectly attributed to Talleyrand, in response to a burgeoning scandal at the French court: "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.'' ..."
"... But he didn't give up. At last week's G-20 Summit in Hamburg, in a long meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump sought to get beyond the matter of Russia's U.S. political interference and take up other serious matters of mutual interest to the two countries, with a hope of easing tensions. It was an important development in a crucial area of U.S. foreign policy. Now the president is back on the defensive, his back to the wall, with his opponents positioned to immobilize him on his Russian policy. ..."
"... But, in terms of Trump's command of his policy toward Russia, it almost doesn't matter because the new revelations will constrict his range of action irrespective of what may lie behind them. The forces that have wanted to destroy the president, or at least destroy his ability to bring about a détente with Putin, are once again in the saddle. One has to wonder at, perhaps even marvel at, the timing in all this. ..."
During a post-dinner cigar session at his elegant Cleveland mansion, Hanna reported back to McKinley on the results of his mission.
Another participant recalled that the excited Hanna seemed "as keen as a razor blade.''
"Now, Major," said the political operative, addressing the governor by his Civil War title, "it's all over but the shouting. You
can get both New York and Pennsylvania, but there are certain conditions." He didn't show any discomfort with the conditions, but
McKinley was wary.
"What are they?" he asked. Hanna explained that Quay wanted control of all federal patronage in Pennsylvania, while others wanted
to dominate government jobs in New England and Maine. But Platt wanted a bigger prize!the job of secretary of the Treasury!and he
wanted a promise in writing.
McKinley stared ahead, puffing on his cigar. Then he rose from his chair, paced the room a few moments, and turned to Hanna.
"Mark," he said, "there are some things in this world that come too high. If I were to accept the nomination on those terms, the
place would be worth nothing to me, and less to the people. If those are the terms, I am out of it.''
Hanna was taken aback. "Not so fast," he protested, explaining that, while it would be "damned hard" to prevail over the powerful
bosses, who would surely not take kindly to a rebuff, Hanna thought it could be done and he welcomed the challenge. The men in the
room pondered the situation and came up with a slogan: "The People Against the Bosses.''
McKinley ultimately beat the bosses, stirring a Washington Post reporter to write that "the big three of the Republican
Party hoped to find McKinley as putty in their hands. When they failed, they vowed war on him." But now, said the reporter, their
war was sputtering. "And over in the Ohio city by the lake, one Mark Hanna is laughing in his sleeve.''
This little vignette from the mists of the political past comes to mind with the latest development in the ongoing saga involving
suspected Russian interference in last year's presidential campaign and the search for evidence that President Trump or his top campaign
officials "colluded" with Russians to influence the electoral outcome. Now it turns out that the president's son, Donald Jr., met
with a Russian lawyer, at the behest of a Russian friend, with an understanding beforehand that the lawyer could provide "official
documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and be very useful to your father."
For good measure, Donald Jr. took along his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top Trump adviser, and his father's campaign manager
at the time, Paul Manafort.
This is no small matter, and it is certain to roil the waters of the ongoing investigations. More significantly, it will roil
the political scene, contributing mightily to the deadlock crisis that has America in its grip. White House officials and Trump supporters
are defending young Trump with pronouncements that nothing was amiss here; every campaign collects dirt on opponents; nothing done
was against the law; we must get beyond these "gotcha" political witch hunts, etc., etc.
Meanwhile. Trump opponents see skulky tendencies, nefarious intent, moral turpitude, and likely illegality. Both sides are trotting
out criminal lawyers declaring, based on their prior political proclivities, that no laws were broken!or that laws were clearly broken.
The cable channels are crackling with competition over who can be more definitive and sanctimonious on the air!Lou Dobbs and Sean
Hannity at Fox in defending the president; or Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews in attacking him on MSNBC.
Meanwhile, the country will continue to struggle with the question of what all this Sturm und Drang actually means. What
to think? Whom to believe?
Let's stipulate, for purposes of analysis, that what we see is what there is, that what we know is not a harbinger of worse to
come. How should we assess what we know thus far? What should we make of that meeting with the Russian lawyer?
That it was, yes, ethically promiscuous!but, worse, incredibly stupid. One recalls the line, often incorrectly attributed
to Talleyrand, in response to a burgeoning scandal at the French court: "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.''
Consider that, after months of investigation, with leaks all over the place from those conducting the probe, no serious evidence
emerged of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. The collusion story was receding in the national consciousness,
and even in the Washington consciousness, with questions of "obstruction of justice" supplanting collusion as the more significant
avenue of inquiry. Now the question of collusion is once again in the air.
The fate of Donald Trump Jr. is a puny matter in the scheme of things, but the state of the union is a huge matter. And the young
man's stupidity of a year ago will have!indeed, is already having!a significant impact on the president's leadership. He campaigned
on a pledge to improve relations with Russia, with an implicit acknowledgment that the West was probably equally responsible, along
with Moscow, for the growing tensions between the two nations. He was right about that. Then came the evidence of Russian meddling
in the U.S. election and the allegations of collusion, and Trump's effort at improving relations was killed in the crib.
But he didn't give up. At last week's G-20 Summit in Hamburg, in a long meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump
sought to get beyond the matter of Russia's U.S. political interference and take up other serious matters of mutual interest to the
two countries, with a hope of easing tensions. It was an important development in a crucial area of U.S. foreign policy. Now the
president is back on the defensive, his back to the wall, with his opponents positioned to immobilize him on his Russian policy.
Now let's set aside, for just a moment, the previous stipulation that what we see is all there is. It's possible, of course, that
this unfortunate meeting actually was part of a much bigger conspiracy that, if disclosed in full, could engulf the administration
in revelations of such magnitude as to bring down the president. It's possible, but not likely.
But, in terms of Trump's command of his policy toward Russia, it almost doesn't matter because the new revelations will constrict
his range of action irrespective of what may lie behind them. The forces that have wanted to destroy the president, or at least destroy
his ability to bring about a détente with Putin, are once again in the saddle. One has to wonder at, perhaps even marvel at, the
timing in all this.
Actions, even more than ideas, have consequences. That's what Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort ignored when they accepted an invitation
to meet with a Russian representative with "official documents" that could harm the candidacy of the Democratic contender.
And that's precisely what William McKinley had in mind when he said he wouldn't enter into unsavory bargains with the Eastern
bosses even if it meant giving up his presidential dream. Of course, McKinley was thinking in part about his own personal code of
conduct!his inability to live with a decision that was beneath his concept of rectitude. But note that he also invoked the American
people when he recoiled at the thought. He wouldn't take an action that he considered inconsistent with his duty to the electorate.
That was a long time ago!and a world away. Today we have the likes of the Trumps!and, for that matter, the Clintons, who leave
nearly everyone in their wake when it comes to moral and ethical laxity in matters of public policy. And so it must have seemed perfectly
normal for those three men, part of Donald Trump's inner circle of campaign confidantes, to accept the idea of sitting down with
someone from a foreign power and talk about how official documents from that power could help upend their opponent. Did Trump himself
know about all this as it was unfolding? We don't know, but probably. In any event, it probably wasn't a crime, but it was a hell
of a blunder.
... ... ...
Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and publishing executive, is editor of The American Conservative.
His next book, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century , is due
out from Simon & Schuster in November.
David Stockman provides one of the best commentaries on Flynn assassination by deep state and Obama neocon holdovers in the administration.
This is a really powerful astute, first class analysis of the situation:
Flynn's Gone But They're Still Gunning For You, Donald
== quote ==
... ... ...
This is the real scandal as Trump himself has rightly asserted. The very idea that the already announced #1 national security advisor
to a President-elect should be subject to old-fashion "bugging," albeit with modern day technology, overwhelmingly trumps the utterly
specious Logan Act charge at the center of the case.
As one writer for LawNewz noted regarding acting Attorney General Sally Yates' voyeuristic pre-occupation with Flynn's intercepted
conversations, Nixon should be rolling in his grave with envy:
Now, information leaks that Sally Yates knew about surveillance being conducted against potential members of the Trump administration,
and disclosed that information to others. Even Richard Nixon didn't use the government agencies themselves to do his black bag surveillance
operations. Sally Yates involvement with this surveillance on American political opponents, and possibly the leaking related thereto,
smacks of a return to Hoover-style tactics. As writers at Bloomberg and The Week both noted, it wreaks of 'police-state' style tactics.
But knowing dear Sally as I do, it comes as no surprise.
Yes, that's the same career apparatchik of the permanent government that Obama left behind to continue the 2016 election by other
means. And it's working. The Donald is being rapidly emasculated by the powers that be in the Imperial City due to what can only
be described as an audacious and self-evident attack on Trump's Presidency by the Deep State.
Indeed, it seems that the layers of intrigue have gotten so deep and convoluted that the nominal leadership of the permanent government
machinery has lost track of who is spying on whom. Thus, we have the following curious utterance by none other than the Chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes:
'I expect for the FBI to tell me what is going on, and they better have a good answer,' he told The Washington Post. 'The big
problem I see here is that you have an American citizen who had his phone calls recorded.'
Well, yes. That makes 324 million of us, Congressman.
But for crying out loud, surely the oh so self-important chairman of the House intelligence committee knows that everybody is
bugged. But when it reaches the point that the spy state is essentially using its unconstitutional tools to engage in what amounts
to "opposition research" with the aim of election nullification, then the Imperial City has become a clear and present danger to
American democracy and the liberties of the American people.
As Robert Barnes of LawNewz further explained, Sally Yates, former CIA director John Brennan and a large slice of the Never Trumper
intelligence community were systematically engaged in "opposition research" during the campaign and the transition:
According to published reports, someone was eavesdropping, and recording, the conversations of Michael Flynn, while Sally Yates
was at the Department of Justice. Sally Yates knew about this eavesdropping, listened in herself (Pellicano-style for those who remember
the infamous LA cases), and reported what she heard to others. For Yates to have such access means she herself must have been involved
in authorizing its disclosure to political appointees, since she herself is such a political appointee. What justification was there
for an Obama appointee to be spying on the conversations of a future Trump appointee?
Consider this little tidbit in The Washington Post . The paper, which once broke Watergate, is now propagating the benefits of
Watergate-style surveillance in ways that do make Watergate look like a third-rate effort. (With the) FBI 'routinely' monitoring
conversations of Americans...... Yates listened to 'the intercepted call,' even though Yates knew there was 'little chance' of any
credible case being made for prosecution under a law 'that has never been used in a prosecution.'
And well it hasn't been. After all, the Logan Act was signed by President John Adams in 1799 in order to punish one of Thomas
Jefferson's supporters for having peace discussions with the French government in Paris. That is, it amounted to pre-litigating the
Presidential campaign of 1800 based on sheer political motivation.
According to the Washington Post itself, that is exactly what Yates and the Obama holdovers did day and night during the interregnum:
Indeed, the paper details an apparent effort by Yates to misuse her office to launch a full-scale secret investigation of her political
opponents, including 'intercepting calls' of her political adversaries.
So all of the feigned outrage emanating from Democrats and the Washington establishment about Team Trump's trafficking with the
Russians is a cover story. Surely anyone even vaguely familiar with recent history would have known there was absolutely nothing
illegal or even untoward about Flynn's post-Christmas conversations with the Russian Ambassador.
Indeed, we recall from personal experience the thrilling moment on inauguration day in January 1981 when word came of the release
of the American hostages in Tehran. Let us assure you, that did not happen by immaculate diplomatic conception -- nor was it a parting
gift to the Gipper by the outgoing Carter Administration.
To the contrary, it was the fruit of secret negotiations with the Iranian government during the transition by private American
citizens. As the history books would have it because it's true, the leader of that negotiation, in fact, was Ronald Reagan's national
security council director-designate, Dick Allen.
As the real Washington Post later reported, under the by-line of a real reporter, Bob Woodward:
Reagan campaign aides met in a Washington DC hotel in early October, 1980, with a self-described 'Iranian exile' who offered,
on behalf of the Iranian government, to release the hostages to Reagan, not Carter, in order to ensure Carter's defeat in the November
4, 1980 election.
The American participants were Richard Allen, subsequently Reagan's first national security adviser, Allen aide Laurence Silberman,
and Robert McFarlane, another future national security adviser who in 1980 was on the staff of Senator John Tower (R-TX).
To this day we have not had occasion to visit our old friend Dick Allen in the US penitentiary because he's not there; the Logan
Act was never invoked in what is surely the most blatant case ever of citizen diplomacy.
So let's get to the heart of the matter and be done with it. The Obama White House conducted a sour grapes campaign to delegitimize
the election beginning November 9th and it was led by then CIA Director John Brennan.
That treacherous assault on the core constitutional matter of the election process culminated in the ridiculous Russian meddling
report of the Obama White House in December. The latter, of course, was issued by serial liar James Clapper, as national intelligence
director, and the clueless Democrat lawyer and bag-man, Jeh Johnson, who had been appointed head of the Homeland Security Department.
Yet on the basis of the report's absolutely zero evidence and endless surmise, innuendo and "assessments", the Obama White House
imposed another round of its silly school-boy sanctions on a handful of Putin's cronies.
Of course, Flynn should have been telling the Russian Ambassador that this nonsense would be soon reversed!
But here is the ultimate folly. The mainstream media talking heads are harrumphing loudly about the fact that the very day following
Flynn's call -- Vladimir Putin announced that he would not retaliate against the new Obama sanctions as expected; and shortly thereafter,
the Donald tweeted that Putin had shown admirable wisdom.
That's right. Two reasonably adult statesman undertook what might be called the Christmas Truce of 2016. But like its namesake
of 1914 on the bloody no man's land of the western front, the War Party has determined that the truce-makers shall not survive.
"... Trump has ideas that he is not disclosing. He is new and the bureaucracy will run him instead of the other way around. Much will be half implemented because neither Trump nor GOP policies are popular. ..."
"... MinWage increases is one of the most popular policies but one the GOP is least likely to pass ..."
"... Domestic policy? Trump might act pseudo-magnanimous and come out for single payer, or something like that. The politically smartest next move would be to buy-off some progressive Berniecrats, while sticking it to Wall Street (in a phony, visual way). ..."
"... But more likely it will be Reaganoid business as usual. Why? Because: ..."
"... The system is complicated, and every thread you pull on, unravels something else. That's systems theory, folks! ..."
"... The power of the Presidency is limited, and overrated by partisans on both sides. ..."
"... A President's information is restricted to what comes in through his advisors, and this bunch are looking like, kwite a kwazy krew. ..."
"... Trump's low cognition and narcissism will result in short-sighted moves and more foreign policy quagmires for the US: "Look at the black eye the US gave itself, with the Bush-Cheney War! -- Let's make America stupid again!" ..."
"... On trade? Trump is setting up the conditions where the richest people can plunder what's remains of the U.S., before getting out of the country: ..."
"... The new global slogan will be, "Trade with China -- We're the Crooks You Can TRUST!" ..."
"... Meanwhile Trump will give big tax cuts to the richest Americans, because his knuckleheaded voters believe all the "makers vs. takers" baloney; they haven't been schtupped up the keister enough... ..."
"... Then the rich will slowly start taking that money out of the U.S. to some other country that gets a higher global ROI under the new Chinese trade rules, because U.S. exporters under protectionism won't be nearly as profitable. ..."
"... The bureaucracy is too massive for any one person to control. Change requires action from the top or its business as usual. Trump does not have enough trusted aids and insiders to manage the government ..."
"... Right now it's hard to know if Trump's administration really wants to deliver change. Its cabinet-level staffing is hard to read. It is full of establishment types who could deliver change if that is really their mission. They are not beholden to anyone for their positions and they are not in need of lucrative employment after cabinet service that might otherwise make them tend to curry favor with interests they affect in office. ..."
"... Tillerson became CEO of Exxon and has been successful there, nontrivial achievements both. He is not a professional foreign service officer, neither was HRC. For many oil-producing countries, their most important foreign patron is Exxon. Tillerson is very familiar with the inside game in the Middle East where all kinds of shit has been hitting the fan for the past 25 years without the US having much success there. HRC and Kerry have been particularly ineffective and had far less accomplishments in life before assuming SoS office than Tillerson. ..."
"... Mnuchin got rich in Hollywood because he knew what people wanted from Hollywood. he was also chief of the NY bond desk for GS and was CIO for GS for five years. That is CIO of the most technologically sophisticated investment bank in the world. ..."
"... Mnuchin knows the technology and how it can be used to execute or hide chicanery better than anyone else in the industry. If he aims to reform the TBTF banks, he is better equipped than anyone who has been Treasury secretary over the 25 years during which computer technology assumed a key role in skulduggery in the industry. ..."
"... Marine nicknames are often ironic. "Mad Dog" Mattis probably reflects recognition of his intellect and coolness by his Marine colleagues. ..."
"... Mattis has been well known to be a smart, tough, effective achiever. If pentagon reform is really the goal, he would be hard to beat. ..."
"... These men have all been very successful at running large organizations. Let's see what direction they try to take the government and how they do at it. Should be interesting. ..."
"... History without context is meaningless. ..."
"... Wars play too great a role in history as taught. Neither of the Bushes, with their limited thinking, like the generals above, should have ever been allowed near hammers ..."
"... Colonialism took a bit too long to die, but Archduke Ferdinand was indeed about the dying throws of monarchies. ..."
We have very little indication of what policies Donald
Trump will try to follow or even what kind of president he will be. The U.S. press corps did an
extraordinarily execrable job in covering the rise of Trump--even worse than it usually does.
Even the most sophisticated of audiences--those interested in asset prices and how they are affected
by government policies--have very little insight into Trump's views or those of his key associates.
Will Donald Trump turn out to be the equivalent of Ronald Reagan -- someone who comes into office
from the world of celebrity with a great many unfixed policy intuitions, but no consistent plan?
Will he turn out to be the equivalent of Silvio Berlusconi, who regards the presidency as an opportunity
to wreak his kleptocratic will on the country?
Or will he turn out to be someone worse than Berlusconi?
I would say that Trump could be any of four figures...
Trump has ideas that he is not disclosing. He is new and the bureaucracy will run him instead
of the other way around. Much will be half implemented because neither Trump nor GOP policies
are popular.
MinWage increases is one of the most popular policies but one the GOP is least likely to
pass
Congress has power but they must shift from opposition mode to governing mode. I expect much
overreach and 'creative' destruction
Domestic policy? Trump might act pseudo-magnanimous and come out for single payer, or something
like that. The politically smartest next move would be to buy-off some progressive Berniecrats,
while sticking it to Wall Street (in a phony, visual way).
But more likely it will be Reaganoid business as usual. Why? Because:
1. The system is complicated, and every thread you pull on, unravels something else. That's
systems theory, folks!
2. The power of the Presidency is limited, and overrated by partisans on both sides.
3. A President's information is restricted to what comes in through his advisors, and this
bunch are looking like, kwite a kwazy krew.
4. There is a mid-term election less than 2 years from now.
Foreign policy? Putin wanted Trump to win, but NOT to make the U.S. stronger. He wants a weaker
US. Why? Because the Russians hate the US for screwing them economically after the Iron Curtain
fell, with trying to impose a bunch of free-market fundamentalist ignorance...
Were that not bad enough, the US slapped on oil sanctions recently, after Putin tried shoring-up
his borders against NATO expansion and against Islamic terrorists.
... ... ...
Whether you yourself think it's good or bad to oppose Russia -- and whatever you think of Putin's
tactics in response -- is not the point here. Fact is, Putin hates the US. Therefore, Putin is
not going to help anyone whom he thinks will make the US stronger or more respected in the world.
Russian psych profiling may suggest that Trump's low cognition and narcissism will result in short-sighted
moves and more foreign policy quagmires for the US: "Look at the black eye the US gave itself,
with the Bush-Cheney War! -- Let's make America stupid again!"
On trade? Trump is setting up the conditions where the richest people can plunder what's remains
of the U.S., before getting out of the country: Trump wants to tear up the big trade deals and
make every country go into bilateral negotiations with his trade team... BUT those countries are
all going to say, "Forget it! We just spent 6 years negotiating, and we know we can't trust the
US anymore!"...
Then, they are going to turn around and join China's new global trade organization, which was
suddenly announced the DAY AFTER Trump's election (funny, that, after years of planning, building
forward military bases in the Pacific, etc.) The new global slogan will be, "Trade with China
-- We're the Crooks You Can TRUST!"
Meanwhile Trump will give big tax cuts to the richest Americans, because his knuckleheaded
voters believe all the "makers vs. takers" baloney; they haven't been schtupped up the keister
enough... Then the rich will slowly start taking that money out of the U.S. to some other country that
gets a higher global ROI under the new Chinese trade rules, because U.S. exporters under protectionism
won't be nearly as profitable.
"...And golly, honey, there's plenty of pretty places over there to build new mansions, for
both you, AND the mistress..." Meanwhile, back in the U.S., voters will continue walking around
with their thumbs up their butts, & trying to prevent other Americans from getting healthcare,
trying to prevent them from voting, etc... To get cash, the U.S. can join into a big flea market
with the Brexiters, and we can all swap old Beatles vinyl...
The bureaucracy will run things? This is not going to happen, governance will stall or cease.
Let me see, a party that says our form of govt is the problem. A party who has obstructed matters
to cause dysfunction in govt on purpose, and who is entertaining nominees to head these agencies
who do not care that they exist, bills introduced already to allow pay even to the individual
to be cut , and to smooth firing processes, with an incoming group who surfaces transition-team
surveys for the purposes of chilling efforts with the agencies even before they take control,
on climate change for instance, well, the bureaucracy is demoralized, and threatened. The dysfunction
of the American 'experiment' in self government will be harmed, perhaps accomplished finally.
And when they get their legs about them with new judiciary appointments they then should thread
cases via these courts so holdings they get won't be appealed, giving them full control, with
still the purpose being dysfunction for what has been the generally applicable law before. Ok
with them, it would seem.
jonny bakho -> JF... , -1
The bureaucracy is too massive for any one person to control. Change requires action from
the top or its business as usual. Trump does not have enough trusted aids and insiders to manage
the government
"Reagan did not campaign for and enter the presidency thinking that he was going to push the value
of the dollar up by 70%..."
-- Brad DeLong
[ The real trade-weighted price of the dollar increased by about 45% between 1980 and March
1985 and then declined and finished the Reagan presidency about 5% below the level of 1980. ]
[I set the Way-back machine to Links for 12-31-16 and copied what mrrunangun said to me then.
From my experience mrrunangun is a more reliable source than the MSM, but then so is my wife and
over half of the random strangers that I meet in Walmart.]
Right now it's hard to know if Trump's administration really wants to deliver change. Its
cabinet-level staffing is hard to read. It is full of establishment types who could deliver change
if that is really their mission. They are not beholden to anyone for their positions and they
are not in need of lucrative employment after cabinet service that might otherwise make them tend
to curry favor with interests they affect in office.
Tillerson became CEO of Exxon and has been successful there, nontrivial achievements both.
He is not a professional foreign service officer, neither was HRC. For many oil-producing countries,
their most important foreign patron is Exxon. Tillerson is very familiar with the inside game
in the Middle East where all kinds of shit has been hitting the fan for the past 25 years without
the US having much success there. HRC and Kerry have been particularly ineffective and had far
less accomplishments in life before assuming SoS office than Tillerson.
Mnuchin got rich in Hollywood because he knew what people wanted from Hollywood. he was
also chief of the NY bond desk for GS and was CIO for GS for five years. That is CIO of the most
technologically sophisticated investment bank in the world.
Many of the big errors in banking
over the past 20 years have been due to inadequate supervision of trading units. Traders learn
to hide losses using the computer systems of the banks and clearing houses. The Barclay's Singapore
disaster, the London whale, the UBS fiasco, the DB bond desk fiasco all got out of hand because
traders' losing positions went undetected by the traders' supervisors who lacked the technical
sophistication necessary to provide adequate supervision. Mnuchin knows the technology and
how it can be used to execute or hide chicanery better than anyone else in the industry. If he
aims to reform the TBTF banks, he is better equipped than anyone who has been Treasury secretary
over the 25 years during which computer technology assumed a key role in skulduggery in the industry.
Marine nicknames are often ironic. "Mad Dog" Mattis probably reflects recognition of his
intellect and coolness by his Marine colleagues. In the movie Full Metal Jacket, a dark-skinned
black man was named "snowball" and, after getting slapped around for smiling at the DI's jokes,
the main character was named "Joker". Victor Krulak, a Marine general during the VietNam war,
got the name Brute because of his diminutive size. He became probably the only five foot four-inch
Marine general of the twentieth century. Mattis has been well known to be a smart, tough,
effective achiever. If pentagon reform is really the goal, he would be hard to beat.
These men have all been very successful at running large organizations. Let's see what
direction they try to take the government and how they do at it. Should be interesting.
Suri never really makes his case against belligerent deterrence because his historical references
are inconsistent with his thesis. As much as I agree with TR's "Walk soft and carry a big stick"
even that is a superficial take on Teddy Roosevelt's approach to diplomatic engagement, which
was a superior way to conduct foreign policy even compared to Taft's dollar diplomacy.
Taft's way was more readily assessable to the mediocre men that would normally lead our country
though, which is why Kissinger as Secretary of State held to it dearly. Buying peace is much cheaper
than waging war.
Understood. Woodrow Wilson was a pacifist and the US during his administration was isolationist.
That hardly sounds like a case of belligerent deterrence going wrong, but more like the opposite.
Suri's point was that circumstances can dictate significant reversals from original intentions
though. WW-II did not seem like our choice and certainly was reluctant more like WW-I rather than
a case of belligerent deterrence going wrong.
The US entered the Korean War because its presidents, first Truman and then Eisenhower were
more afraid of Joe McCarthy than China, also not a case of belligerent deterrence, just domino
theory.
Kennedy and Johnson just feared the anti-communist Republican hawks that remained after McCarthy
died more than they feared China, just more domino theory there too.
When we finally got a POTUS that did the full court press on belligerent deterrence, Reagan,
then peace broke out.
By this time Suri's case is getting real weak. The first Bush war, the daddy Bush war, was
just a reaction function and limited at that. The next two Bush wars, the baby Bush wars, were
finally belligerent deterrence on steroids, but also a reaction function or an over-reaction function
to 9/11.
Suri stands empty handed on his history, but that does not mean that he is wrong on his prognostications,
just unconvincing in his larger historical based argument aside from the notion of unintended
consequences. That alone may however be Donald Trumps undoing, but just as easily so from domestic
policy as foreign policy. Only time will tell. I prefer not to guess this one out too far myself,
unintended consequences being what they are and all.
Quite a lot; where to start? The world as it is vs. our wishful perceptions? I think remembering
that most problems requiring governmental action are really quite complicated and often have more
than one possible answer is essential. It's the simple arsed responses, so loved by the many,
that get us into some of the worst messes. The urge to tear it down and start anew, another source
of grief, again linked to the simple arsed, our most current response.
See Reagan and Ike as being dependent to a fault on their advisers (in the case of Reagan,
we really lucked out with Baker, Schultz, Deaver); Bush II as being dumb enough to think he was
smart when, in fact, he was too dumb for the job; and Drumpf, I suspect/fear, being of the same
ilk as Bush II.
For WWI context, I see: the swell of the industrial age, the vying for raw materials and markets,
all in a period when one saw the dying throes of colonialism and monarchies whilst no one seem
to grasp the reality of what was going on (bout where we find ourselves). Wars play too great a role in history as taught. Neither of the Bushes, with their limited
thinking, like the generals above, should have ever been allowed near hammers
Colonialism took a bit too long to die, but Archduke Ferdinand was indeed about the dying
throws of monarchies.
Relative to Suri's argument there was nothing about US foreign policy activism that got
us into WWI unless you want to consider the negative. Had the US been more involved in European
diplomacy in a cogent and persuasive manner then it may have averted the Prussian brinksmanship
that ignite WW-I. Theodore Roosevelt may have been capable of that, but not Taft nor Wilson.
I am actually surprised by the amount of Trump hating comments to this article.... What is so
criminal in trying to reorganize two of 12 Us intelligence agencies. Which might become too bloated
and deviate from their original purposes. Is not how restructuring is used in business world
?
And the number of commenters blaclmpousing Putin and Russia create great alarm.
Looks like the US MSM managed to brainwash the US population like in 50th during "Red Scare". Some
comments looks like
hate sessions from 1984.
Notable quotes:
"... Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 - Amends the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, including about its people, its history, and the federal government's policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers and instructors. ..."
"... This use of propaganda on the American public effectively nullified the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. ..."
"... The NDAA in its current form allows the State Department and Pentagon to go beyond manipulating mainstream media outlets to directly disseminate campaigns of misinformation to the U.S. public. ..."
"... They refused to brief Congress. They were never allowed to release their findings publicly, because they still haven't. They leaked their conclusions. All to attempt to undermine the stability of their own country. And you don't see this. ..."
"... This is why Wikileaks exists. What the MSM can no longer deliver (the TRUTH and credible news), Wikileaks can deliver to the American people. ..."
"... Are you claiming the US hasn't done all it can to destabilize and destroy Russia? ..."
"... This blame Russia frenzy is a loser strategy. The sole purpose is to deligitimize Trump's victory. Can't wait for Trump to start firing a**es. ..."
"The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world [is] becoming completely politicized,"
an individual close to Trump's transition operation said. "They all need to be slimmed down. The
focus will be on restructuring agencies and how they interact." Trump is targeting the CIA and the ODNI as he publicly wars with the U.S. intelligence community
over its conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump wants to shrink the ODNI, as he believes the agency established in 2004 as a response
to the 9/11 terror attacks has become bloated and politicized.
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 - Amends the United States Information and Educational
Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors
to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information intended for foreign audiences
abroad about the United States, including about its people, its history, and the federal government's
policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information
media, including social media, and through information centers and instructors.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 passed Congress as part of the NDAA 2013 on December
28, 2012.
This use of propaganda on the American public effectively nullified the Smith-Mundt Act
of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing
U.S. public opinion.
The NDAA in its current form allows the State Department and Pentagon to go beyond manipulating
mainstream media outlets to directly disseminate campaigns of misinformation to the U.S. public.
But the US public learned quickly and they are not buying the misinformation anymore.
1) Renewables:
"I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth." - April 2016
2) Social media
"I understand social media. I understand the power
of Twitter. I understand the power of Facebook maybe better than almost
anybody, based on my results, right?" - November 2015
3) Debt
"Nobody knows more about debt. I'm like the king. I love debt." - May 2016
4) Taxes, again
"I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe
in the history of the world. Nobody knows more about taxes." - May 2016
I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has
ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them. #failing@nytimes
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2016
They refused to brief Congress. They were never allowed to release their findings publicly, because
they still haven't. They leaked their conclusions. All to attempt to undermine the stability of
their own country. And you don't see this.
No, we haven't, and we didn't. In fact, his former boss -- Yeltsin -- hired Republican political consultants
to help his campaign.
Putin would like the world to believe that Russians fed up with bribery, extortion, the fall
of the ruble, and the fact that their votes don't count rising up and protesting was about outside
meddling, but it was internal.
And he responded by making protests illegal, getting rid of the election of governors (he appoints
them now), closing down critical reporting outlets, and some journalists were murdered.
You moron, I served the US for 20 years in the military, but facts are facts and we need to butt
the he!! out of other countries business, and until we do, they will continue to come after us.
How long were you in?
"... It was possible to say, before Warren G. Harding was elected, that he wasn't particularly well-qualified to be president. And he did turn out as president to have, as we say nowadays, some issues. But his administration was stocked with (mostly) well-qualified men who served with considerable distinction. ..."
"... But how Hegelian it would be if the thesis of the Bush and Clinton dynasties, followed by the antithesis of a Trump victory over first a Bush and then a Clinton in 2016, were to produce an unanticipated synthesis: a Trump administration marked by the reconstruction of republican normalcy in America. In its own way, that would be a genuine contribution to making America great again. ..."
"... Kristol is mad Trump lambasted the Iraq war. Was Putin against the Iraq war? I think the whole world was except for the "Coalition of the Willing." You'll never see the UK back another war like that. ..."
"... "Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone and others have denounced Clinton's uncritical praise of the "opportunity" and "freedom" of American capitalism vis-à-vis other developed nations. "With this bit of frankness," Featherstone explains, referring to the former Secretary of State's "Denmark" comments, "Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist-indeed, no non-millionaire-should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark-yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way." Indeed, Clinton's denunciation of the idea that the United States should look more like Denmark betrayed one of the glaring the fault lines within the Democratic Party, and between Clintonian liberalism and Sandersite leftism." ..."
"... Of course the progressive neoliberals in this forum regularly resort to ad hominem to any ideas or facts that don't line up with the agreed-upon party line. ..."
The Trump Administration http://tws.io/2iFd3rC
via @WeeklyStandard
Nov 28, 2016 - William Kristol
Who now gives much thought to the presidency of Warren G. Harding? Who ever did? Not us.
But let us briefly turn our thoughts to our 29th president (while stipulating that we're certainly
no experts on his life or times). Here's our summary notion: Warren G. Harding may have been a
problematic president. But the Harding administration was in some ways an impressive one, which
served the country reasonably well.
It was possible to say, before Warren G. Harding was elected, that he wasn't particularly
well-qualified to be president. And he did turn out as president to have, as we say nowadays,
some issues. But his administration was stocked with (mostly) well-qualified men who served with
considerable distinction.
Andrew Mellon was a successful Treasury secretary whose tax reforms and deregulatory efforts
spurred years of economic growth. Charles Dawes, the first director of the Bureau of the Budget,
reduced government expenditures and, helped by Mellon's economic policies, brought the budget
into balance. Charles Evans Hughes as secretary of state dealt responsibly with a very difficult
world situation his administration had inherited-though in light of what followed in the next
decade, one wishes in retrospect for bolder assertions of American leadership, though in those
years just after World War I, they would have been contrary to the national mood.
In addition, President Harding's first two Supreme Court appointments -- William Howard Taft
and George Sutherland -- were distinguished ones. And Harding personally did some admirable things:
He made pronouncements, impressive in the context of that era, in favor of racial equality; he
commuted the wartime prison sentence of the Socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs. In these ways, he
contributed to an atmosphere of national healing and civility.
The brief Harding administration-and for that matter the eight years constituting his administration
and that of his vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge-may not have been times of surpassing
national greatness. But there were real achievements, especially in the economic sphere; those
years were not disastrous; they were not dark times.
President-elect Donald J. Trump probably doesn't intend to model his administration on that
of President Warren G. Harding. But he could do worse than reflect on that administration's successes-and
also on its failures, particularly the scandals that exploded into public view after Harding's
sudden death. These were produced by cronies appointed by Harding to important positions, where
they betrayed his trust and tarnished his historical reputation.
Donald Trump manifestly cares about his reputation. He surely knows that reputation ultimately
depends on performance. If a Trump hotel and casino is successful, it's not because of the Trump
brand-that may get people through the door the first time-but because it provides a worthwhile
experience thanks to a good management team, fine restaurants, deft croupiers, and fun shows.
If a Trump golf course succeeds, it's because it has been built and is run by people who know
something about golf. The failed Trump efforts-from the university to the steaks-seem to have
in common the assumption that the Trump name by itself would be enough to carry mediocre or worse
enterprises across the finish line.
To succeed in business, the brand only gets you so far. Quality matters. To succeed in the
presidency, getting elected only gets you so far. Governing matters.
It would be ironic if Trump's very personal electoral achievement were followed by a mode of
governance that restored greater responsibility to the cabinet agencies formally entrusted with
the duties of governance. It would be ironic if a Trump presidency also featured a return of authority
to Congress, the states, and to other civic institutions. It would be ironic if Trump's victory
led not to a kind of American Caesarism but to a strengthening of republican institutions and
forms. It would be ironic if the election of Donald J. Trump heralded a return to a kind of constitutional
normalcy.
If we are not mistaken, it was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (though sadly unaware of the phenomena
of either Warren G. Harding or Donald J. Trump) who made much of the Irony of History.
But how Hegelian it would be if the thesis of the Bush and Clinton dynasties, followed
by the antithesis of a Trump victory over first a Bush and then a Clinton in 2016, were to produce
an unanticipated synthesis: a Trump administration marked by the reconstruction of republican
normalcy in America. In its own way, that would be a genuine contribution to making America great
again.
(Harding-Coolidge-Hoover were a disastrous triumvirate that ascended to power after the Taft
& Wilson administrations, as the GOP - then the embodiment of progressivism - split apart due
to the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt.)
Peter K. -> Fred C. Dobbs... , -1
Kristol is mad Trump lambasted the Iraq war. Was Putin against the Iraq war? I think the whole
world was except for the "Coalition of the Willing." You'll never see the UK back another
war like that.
"Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone and others have denounced Clinton's uncritical praise
of the "opportunity" and "freedom" of American capitalism vis-à-vis other developed nations. "With
this bit of frankness," Featherstone explains, referring to the former Secretary of State's "Denmark"
comments, "Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist-indeed, no non-millionaire-should support
her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment,
and food insecurity than women in Denmark-yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to
keep it that way." Indeed, Clinton's denunciation of the idea that the United States should look
more like Denmark betrayed one of the glaring the fault lines within the Democratic Party, and
between Clintonian liberalism and Sandersite leftism."
Is it better to ignore this fault line and try to paper it over or is it better to debate the
issues in a polite and congenial manner?
Of course the progressive neoliberals in this forum regularly resort to ad hominem to any
ideas or facts that don't line up with the agreed-upon party line.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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