theburningplatform | The forces of tyranny are winning. Our banking, financial, political,
and media structures are wracked by corruption and controlled by a
“few” insiders for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. Smedley
Butler said war was a racket, but every institution is now a racket,
with a corrupt powerful cadre of evil men reaping riches at the expense
of the many. Their rackets are based upon nothing but lies and the
continued blissful ignorance of the masses to their flagrant criminal
activities.
The dark side of human nature has been on full display as the country
has been hijacked by organizations run by psychopaths like Brennan,
Clapper, Comey, Soros, Dimon, Bernanke, Paulson, Rubin, Zuckerberg,
Bezos and a multitude of lesser known, but equally dangerous,
psychopaths infecting government, business and the media.
Those pulling the strings of our ever-degrading society share many of
the same traits – superficially charming, pathologically deceitful,
manipulative, accepting no responsibility for their actions, lacking
empathy, absence of guilt, no humility, dishonest, treacherous, having a
grandiose sense of self-worth, and prone to dangerous destructive risk
taking. These are the people who rise to power when citizens become
lazy, disinterested, willfully ignorant, distracted by social media,
dumbed down by government run education, and easily led to believe
falsehoods peddled by a media doing the bidding of the psychopaths in
power.
Just listen to Brennan or Clapper on fake news CNN or MSNBC to get a
glimpse of psychopaths in action. It’s almost as if they believe their
own lies. The faux journalist millionaires questioning these scumbags
aren’t paid by their corporate masters to uncover the truth, but
perpetuate the narrative of lies.
strategic-culture |So: America is a dictatorship by the billionaires.
And this means that it operates by fooling the public. France is
similar, though it achieves this via a different way. And, in both
countries, deceit is essential, in order to achieve its dictatorship.
Fooling the public is now what it’s all about, in either
case. Democracy can never be won by fooling the public; because fooling
the public means removing the public’s ability to control the
government. So, calling such a nation a ‘democracy’, is, itself,
deceiving the public — it’s part of the dictatorship, or else support of
the dictatorship.
In
former times, this system was rationalized as ‘the divine right of
kings’. Now it’s rationalized as ‘the divine right of capital’. But it’s
also become covered-over by yet another lie: ‘democracy’. This is a
‘democratic’ aristocracy; it is an ‘equal opportunity’ aristocracy. In
it, each citizen has ‘equal rights’ as every other citizen, no
matter how wealthy. It’s just a castle of lies. And its doors are
actually open only to the few richest-and-well-connected.
Here, a former CIA official tries
to describe how the American dictatorship works — the enforcement-part
of the system, and he does (even if only by implication) also touch upon
the financial sources of it. Starting at 1:07:35 in that video, he
discusses his personal case: why he could no longer tolerate working for
the CIA. But his description of how he, as an Agency official, saw the
system to function, starts at 3:45 in the video. Key passages start at
12:45, and at 20:15. Maybe any American who would email this article to
friends who don’t understand how the system functions, will come under
increased US surveillance, but that CIA official’s career and family
were destroyed by what the system did to him, which was lots worse than
just surveillance. Remarkably, he nonetheless had the courage to persist
(and thus did that video). However, when one sees how politically
partisan (and so obtuse) the viewer-comments to that video are, one
might be even more depressed than by the account this former CIA
official presents. But, even if the situation is hopeless, everyone
should at least have the opportunity to understand it. Because,
if the aristocracy are the only people who understand it, there can’t
be any hope for democracy, at all.
truthdig | Let’s face it: Democracy is dangerous to the powerful who rely on big
money, institutional leverage and mass media to work their will. The
insurgencies of this decade against economic injustice—embodied in the
Occupy movement and then Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—are
potentially dire threats to the established unjust order.
For those determined to retain their positions in the upper reaches
of the Democratic Party hierarchy, democracy within the party sounds
truly scary. And inauthenticity of the party—and its corresponding heavy
losses of seats from state legislatures to Capitol Hill during the last
10 years—don’t seem nearly as worrisome to Democratic elites as the
prospect that upsurges of grass-roots activities might remove them from
their privileged quarters.
As Sanders told a New York Times Magazine reporter
in early 2017: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party
who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the
Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”
Twenty-five years ago, the so-called New Democrats were triumphant.
Today, their political heirs are eager to prevent the Democratic Party
from living up to its name. At stake is whether democracy will have a
chance to function.
A fundamental battle for democracy is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates
to the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate
them entirely. That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party
committee meeting next week and then be decided by the full Democratic
National Committee before the end of this summer.
To understand the Democratic Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to know how we got here.
nakedcapitalism | Back to NAFTA (North American Free-Trade Agreement) for a moment:
imagine yourself working a line job at an auto factory with a family, a
mortgage and kids to raise. One day in 1995 the boss comes forward with
three displaced Mexican immigrants in tow to tell you that they have
been offered your job at one-third of your wages as other factories are
being closed to be reopened with ‘new’ workers in Mexico. This type of
manufactured economic ‘competition’ breeds social divisions even without
Bill Clinton railingagainst ‘criminal aliens.’
This isn’t to understate the social iniquity of institutional racism.
But it is to question the liberal / progressive canard that working
class racists have any material bearing on its existence or persistence.
Racial animosity certainly exists— four hundred years of white
terrorism against blacks is historical fact. But as argued below,
capitalism can cause institutional racism outside of racial animosity.
And the ‘deplorables’ canard is especially offensive given the role of
liberal economists in engineering the economic facts that racism and
xenophobia are being exploited to explain.
In the current era, when NAFTA was passed, Mexico was floodedwith
American industrial corn. Its lower cost destroyed the peasant economy
in Mexico by rendering locally grown corn ‘uncompetitive.’ This cut the
peasants whose livelihoods depended on selling their corn out of the
cash economy. Millions of suddenly ‘freed’ peasants went to work in
maquiladoras or fled North in search of work as undocumented workers.
Without racial or national animosity, NAFTA created a new sub-class of
industrial labor.
In the context of labor coerced through manufactured circumstances
(work for us or starve) and control of government by the industries
doing the employing, the idea of market wages is nonsense. And therein
lies the point. The ‘free-market’ way to entice labor is to pay the wage
that people are willing to work for— without coercion. The ‘capital
accumulation’ theory behind NAFTA— that sacrifice is required to
accumulate the capital that makes capitalism function, (1) begs the
question: function for whom and (2) was also used to justify slavery.
A crude analogy would be to set the CEOs of major corporations on
life rafts in the middle of the ocean and let them ‘compete’ with one
another for bread to eat. A ‘market’ would have been created for bread,
so how is this not ‘free-market economics?’ These CEOs could be dubbed a
‘criminal flotilla’ intent on invading the U.S. and political talking
points could be traded regarding whether or not they are actually human.
As with NAFTA, few, if any, would likely volunteer for the privilege.
This is how ‘natural’ the economics behind NAFTA are.
By the time NAFTA was fully implemented the powers-that-be behind its central policies busied themselves creating racialized explanationsof
Mexican immigration to the U.S. In their telling, NAFTA had nothing to
do with the millions of Mexicans leaving Mexico for the U.S. or for the
rapidly declining fortunes of American workers who suddenly faced
competition for their paychecks from people willing to work for whatever
they could get. ‘Criminals’ and ‘freeloaders’ were coming for American
jobs went the carefully-crafted storyline.
The actual engineers of NAFTA were corporate lobbyists, ‘free-market’
economists, industrialist-friendly Republicans and Wall Street-friendly
Democrats. There wasn’t a working class racist, a ‘deplorable,’ to be
found amongst those crafting these policies of mass economic
displacement. Liberal / progressive champions Paul Krugman and Bill
Clinton were enthusiastic supporters of NAFTA and ‘free-trade.’ Paul
Krugman, in particular, rode herd over critics of so-called free trade
claiming superior knowledge. And Bill Clinton decries Trumpian
xenophobia while being one of its major causes.
Of current relevance: (1) different classes of workers were created
and placed in competition with one another to benefit a tiny ruling
elite, (2) the interests of this elite were / are centered around
pecuniary and political gain, (3) after implementation racialized
explanations were put forward in lieu of the original economic
explanations used to sell these programs and (4) these explanations
followed the creation of the racialized ‘facts’ they were conceived to
explain. The temporal sequence is important— mass immigration from
Mexico and the destruction of the American working class were
well-underway before racialized explanations were put forward to explain
it.
What bearing does this have on institutional racism and its causes?
The neo-colonial economic model is about coercing labor apart from
whatever racial and / or national animosity might exist. American
industries could have offered market wages to the Mexican peasants that
NAFTA targeted until they agreed to work for them— this is the way that
labor ‘markets’ work. But instead they chose to ‘free’ several million
people from subsistence economies to compete with previously displaced
Mexican labor and American industrial workers with the result that wages
were lowered all around.
The argument was made at the time, and is still made today, that
‘everyone’ benefits from massively disrupting the lives of millions of
people with trade agreements. Theoretical proof is put forward in terms
of dollars / pesos of GDP gained. Left out is that the Mexican peasant
economy wasn’t monetized and therefore its loss wasn’t counted. Even on
its own terms NAFTA was a loser.
And imposing these outcomes from above makes them profoundly
anti-democratic. In other words, even if the outcomes were as promised,
the decisions were made by its largest beneficiaries, not those whose
lives were disrupted.
medium | Anti-Trumpism
has never been about opposing Trump. It’s about killing off what
remains of the true left in America by bullying them into falling in
line with the establishment and accusing them of supporting an evil Nazi
traitor if they don’t. It’s about manufacturing support for new cold
war escalations with Russia. It’s about manufacturing support for
internet censorship to quash anti-establishment ideas. It’s about
rescuing the career of every MSM pundit who’s been proven wrong about
everything since 2015. It’s about distracting from the DNC scandal which
proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that democracy does not exist in
America in any meaningful way. It’s about pacing rank-and-file Democrats
into alignment with Bush era neoconservatives. Opposing Trump has
nothing to do with it.
No,
when it comes to actual policies that actually matter, Trump and those
who McResist him are playing for the same exact team. Same expansion of
the US war machine, same expansion of unaccountable Orwellian
surveillance networks, same increasing government opacity and
persecution of whistleblowers, same increasingly militarized police
state, same soul-crushing Walmart economy, same subversion of anything
resembling democracy, same oligarchy, same agenda. Same play, different
masks.
The
two parties are both lying to you and the entire show is fake. US
politics is a WWE performance with the audience deeply invested in the
outcome of the match, each side of the stadium screaming for their
favorite wrestler when the only determining factor is what will make
Vince McMahon the most money. It’s all a fake spectacle, and it’s
designed to screw you over.
Ignore
the political theater and watch what actually happens, and you will see
a very, very different America than the one you are told to see by
proponents of mainstream narratives. Ignore their words and watch their
actions, and oppose everyone who’s on the side of the machine.
Forbes | There can be no question, at this point, that certain higher ups in
the FBI and the DOJ did not want Hillary to be indicted and did not want
Donald Trump to become President. Those efforts were not entirely
independent of each other.
Below is a timeline of events – abbreviated though it is – that makes
it rather plain that the FBI and DOJ were not investigating potential
crimes objectively.
Indeed, they were committing crimes during the process in aid of their preferred outcomes.
1. 2007. Hillary Clinton wanted to be President.
Hillary’s ambitions to be president started long ago. She ran for
President in the 2008 cycle. In 2009, after losing to Obama, Hillary
became Obama’s Secretary of State. She stayed in that post until 2013.
2. March 2015. The Hillary email scandal breaks.
Hillary was using an unapproved/unsecured server and devices to
communicate. She was using a private email account. Classified
information was being sent through that email, server and devices –
including when Hillary was abroad.
All of that is illegal. As 2015 unfolds, it becomes clear to the FBI
and the DOJ that President Barack Obama was communicating with Hillary
using her non-state department email. Obama was using an email and a
name that masked who he was.
That had to be known to authorities long before March of 2015 given that it occurred prior to 2013.
As Andrew McCarthy points out in his recent article,
there was no chance that the DOJ was going to indict Hillary because
that would have required implicating President Obama. That was never
going to happen. From thereafter, DOJ officials acted with that
understanding, however illegal, in mind.
3. June 2015. Donald Trump announces his Presidential run.
4. March 2016. Trump has enough delegates to claim the nomination.
5.April 10, 2016. Obama makes clear he does not want Hillary indicted.
Obama, on TV, indicates Hillary did not intend to harm national
security. However, intent is not an element of the crime she
committed. At the time of that statement – made by a sitting President
and in plain view of the Nation and more importantly his FBI/DOJ
appointments - many witnesses had yet to be interviewed, including
Hillary.
6.April 2016. Hillary campaign and DNC begin funding infamous Trump dossier.
To conceal payments for the dossier, Hillary’s campaign gives money to
attorneys who then pay for the dossier – a clear campaign law violation.
If that campaign payment had been properly disclosed, the
payment for the dossier, and likely the dossier, would have been exposed
in the summer of 2016. That disclosure likely would have hurt Hillary’s
campaign and LIKELY PREVENT THE USE OF THE DOSSIER to get FISA warrant on Carter Page, which led to other spying and ultimately the Mueller investigation.
7.May 2, 2016. Ted Cruz drops out of Presidential race. Cruz’ departure confirms Trump will be the Republican nominee.
8.May 2016. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page make it clear they need to end the Hillary Investigation. Peter Strzok is the FBI agent in charge of the Hillary investigation,
which is dubbed Mid-Year Exam. He is having an affair with FBI lawyer
Lisa Page. In a text exchange, Page informs Strzok that Cruz dropped
out. Strzok responds:
unz |FBI
procedures and ambiguities aside, this is nevertheless serious business.
If it can be determined that the omissions in submissions to the FISC
were deliberate and calculated, the astute blogger Publius Tacitus
has correctly observed that some senior FBI and DOJ officials who
signed off on misleading or fraudulent applications concealing the
antecedents of the so-called Steele Dossier to the FISC are now facing
possible contempt-of-court charges that would include prison sentences.
They include James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and
Rob Rosenstein.
So
there is likely considerably more controversy to come, whether or not
the Bureau can or cannot provide backstory that credibly challenges the
Republican Intelligence Committee memo. But it is also intriguing to
consider what is missing from the document. As it is focused on the FBI
and DOJ, there is no speculation about the possible role of senior
intelligence officials CIA Director John Brennan and Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper. Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 that the two men were involved in obtaining information on Page and it has also been suggested
that Brennan sought and obtained raw intelligence from British, Polish,
Dutch and Estonian intelligence services, which apparently was then
passed on to the Bureau and might have motivated James Comey to proceed
with his investigation of the Trump associates. One has to consider that
Brennan and Clapper, drawing on intelligence resources and connections,
might have helped the FBI build a fabricated case against Trump.
Senator
John McCain, a highly vocal critic of Trump, might have also become
involved, wittingly or unwittingly, in the project to feed derogatory
information on the GOP president-elect and his associates to the FBI. He
reportedly obtained a copy
of the Steele Dossier in December 2017 and passed it on to Comey,
clearly intending that the FBI Director should take some action
regarding it.
Indeed,
there were many prominent voices raised demanding that something be
done about Donald Trump. Eleven months ago, shortly after Trump took
office, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary
of State Colin Powell, speculated on
how he had been “…led to believe that maybe even the Democratic Party,
whatever element of it, approached John Brennan at the CIA, maybe even
the former president of the United States. And John Brennan, not wanting
his fingerprints to be on anything, went to his colleague in London
GCHQ, MI-6 and essentially said, ‘Give me anything you’ve got.’ And he
got something and he turned it over to the DNC or someone like that. And
what he got was GCHQ MI-6s tapes of conversations of the Trump
administration perhaps, even the President himself. It’s really kind of
strange, at least to me, they let the head of that organization go,
fired him about the same this was brewing up. So I’m not one to defend
Trump, but in this case he might be right.”
consortiumnews | In addition to Assange’s assertion that government secrecy has far
less to do with national security than political security (a claim he has made before which seems to be proving correct time and time again), there’s the jarring question posed by Republican
Congressman Thomas Massie: “who made the decision to withhold evidence
of FISA abuse until after Congress voted to renew FISA program?”
Whoa, Nelly. Hang on. What is he talking about?
It would be understandable if you were unaware of the debate over the reauthorization of FISA surveillance which resulted in unconditional bipartisan approval last
month – the mainstream media barely touched it. In point of fact,
though, the very surveillance practices alleged to have been abused in
this hotly controversial memo are the same which was waved through by
both the House and the Senate, and by the very same people promoting the memo in many cases.
The McCabe testimony was in December. FISA was renewed in January.
Why is all this just coming out now? If the Republicans truly believed
that McCabe said what the memo claims he said, why wasn’t the public
informed before their elected representatives renewed the intelligence
community’s dangerously intrusive surveillance approval? Was this
information simply forgotten about until after those Orwellian powers
had been secured?
Of course not. Don’t be an idiot.
This makes the kicking, screaming, wailing and gnashing of teeth by
the political establishment make a lot more sense, doesn’t it? Now
suddenly we’re looking at a he-said, she-said partisan battle over an
issue which can only be resolved with greater and greater transparency
of more and more government documents, and we can all see where that’s
headed. In their rush to win a partisan battle and shield their
president from the ongoing Russiagate conspiracy theory, the Republicans
may have exposed too much of the establishment foundation upon which
both parties are built.
The term “deep state” does not mean “Democrats and Never-Trumpers” as
Republican pundits would have you believe, nor does the term refer to
any kind of weird, unverifiable conspiracy theory. The deep state is
in fact not a conspiracy theory at all, but simply a concept used in
political analysis for discussing the undeniable fact that unelected
power structures exist in America, and that they tend to form alliances
and work together in some sense.
There is no denying the fact that plutocrats, intelligence agencies,
defense agencies and the mass media are both powerful and unelected, and
there is no denying the fact that there are many convoluted and often
conflicting alliances between them. All that can be debated is the
manner and extent to which this is happening.
The deep state is America’s permanent government,
the U.S. power structures that Americans don’t elect. These power
structures plainly have a vested interest in keeping America’s Orwellian
surveillance structures in place, as evidenced by the intelligence
community’s menacingly urgent demand for
FISA renewal back in December. If there’s any thread to be pulled that
really could make waves in the way Official Washington (hat tip to the
late Robert Parry) operates, it is in the plot holes between the
bipartisan scramble toward unconditional surveillance renewal and the
highly partisan battle over exposing the abuse of those very powers.
If we’re going to see a gap in the bars of our cages, that’s a great
place to keep our eyes trained, so keep watching. Watch what happens in a
partisan war where both parties have a simultaneous interest in
revealing as little of the game as possible and exposing the other
party. Things could get very interesting.
WSJ | A
bipartisan pair of senators said they would introduce a new immigration
bill Monday in an effort to move negotiations toward a narrow agreement
that leaves out
more contentious proposals sought
by President Donald Trump.
The government’s current funding expires at 12:01 a.m. Friday. While lawmakers
expect to pass another short-term spending bill
to keep federal agencies open, they are frustrated by the gridlock that
has prevented them from striking a long-term deal on either immigration
or spending levels. Immigration has become entangled in the spending
negotiations ever since Mr. Trump last year ended an Obama-era program
that protects young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, known as Dreamers.
Senate
Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Sen.
Chris Coons (D., Del.) plan to unveil a proposal that offers a path to
citizenship for Dreamers and orders a comprehensive study to determine
what border-security measures are needed. But the bill stops well short
of almost all of Mr. Trump’s demands—including immediate funding for the
wall along the southern border—and is likely to meet a chilly reception
from conservative Republicans.
Still,
Mr. McCain, who was diagnosed with brain cancer last summer and has
been working from Arizona since late 2017, retains powerful sway among
his GOP colleagues. His bill with Mr. Coons could also benefit from good
timing, as the March 5 deadline draws closer and lawmakers grapple with
the political consequences of failing to reach any agreement.
“It’s
time we end the gridlock so we can quickly move on to completing a
long-term budget agreement that provides our men and women in uniform
the support they deserve,” Mr. McCain said in a statement Sunday.
“While
reaching a deal cannot come soon enough for America’s service members,
the current political reality demands bipartisan cooperation to address
the impending expiration of the DACA program and secure the southern
border,” he said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill.
CounterPunch | Even if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, women Resisters
who fall the Dems’ co-option game hoping for “equal pay” and “equal
rights” will be sorely disappointed. Not because Trump will get in the
way — because Democrats won’t fight for anything substantial.
Consider the Democrat most Women’s Marchers probably voted for. Like
the rest of her fellow Democrats, Hillary Clinton (a multimillionaire)
supported raising the minimum wage to a pitiful $12 per hour. (If it had
merely kept up with inflation, it would be $23 per hour now. Given
increases in worker productivity, it ought to be at least $25 per hour.)
Nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage earners are women.
Clinton gets better-a-century-late-than-never cred for endorsing the
long-stalled Equal Rights Amendment. But Democrats controlled the White
House, House and Senate as recently as 2010 — and never mentioned it.
Even on the signature identity-politics issue of abortion rights,
Democrats have long deployed a form of psychological terrorism against
women. Unless you vote for us, they’ve been telling women, some
Republican president might appoint a Supreme Court justice who might
cast the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Women and their partners shouldn’t have to rely on a wobbly
45-year-old court decision. Why don’t Democrats ever propose a bill
legalizing abortion nationwide? Considering that 58% of voters,
including many Republicans, support abortion rights, and that Democrats
could characterize Congressional opponents as misogynists in attack ads,
it’s entirely possible that an abortion-rights law could pass Congress.
They certainly could have tried under Obama. But they didn’t. Because
Democrats don’t care about people. Democrats care about electing and
collecting campaign donations for Democrats.
There is no reason — zero, none, nada — to believe that the
Democratic Party’s half-century-old refusal to lift a finger to help the
disenfranchised will change if and when they win back Congress. Which
makes the squandering of the anti-Trump historical moment so tragic.
theintercept | In his farewell address, President Barack Obama had some practical
advice for those frustrated by his successor. “If you’re disappointed by
your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run
for office yourself,” Obama implored.
Yet across the country, the DCCC, its allied groups, or leaders
within the Democratic Party are working hard against some of these new
candidates for Congress, publicly backing their more established
opponents, according to interviews with more than 50 candidates, party
operatives, and members of Congress. Winning the support of Washington
heavyweights, including the DCCC — implicit or explicit — is critical
for endorsements back home and a boost to fundraising. In general, it
can give a candidate a tremendous advantage over opponents in a
Democratic primary.
In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight
behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood. The DCCC —
known as “the D-trip” in Washington — has officially named 18
candidates as part of its “Red to Blue” program. (A D-trip spokesperson
cautioned that a red-to-blue designation is not an official endorsement,
but functions that way in practice. Program designees get exclusive
financial and strategy resources from the party.) In many of those
districts, there is at least one progressive challenger the party is
working to elbow aside, some more viable than others.
Outside of those
18, the party is coalescing in less formal ways around a chosen
candidate — such as in the case of Pennsylvania’s Hartman — even if the
DCCC itself is not publicly endorsing.
It’s happening despite a very real shift going on inside the party’s
establishment, as it increasingly recognizes the value of small-dollar
donors and grassroots networks. “In assessing the strength of candidates
for Congress this cycle, we have put a greater premium on their
grassroots engagement and local support, recognizing the power and
energy of our allies on the ground,” said DCCC Communications Director
Meredith Kelly. “A deep and early connection to people in the district
is always essential to winning, but it’s more important than ever at
this moment in our history.” The committee, meanwhile, has made major investments in grassroots organizing, field work and candidate training, which also represents a genuine change.
But change is hard, and it isn’t happening fast enough for candidates
like King. So a constellation of outside progressive groups — some new
to this cycle, some legacies of the last decade’s growth in online
organizing — are stepping in, seeing explosive fundraising gains while the Democratic National Committee falls further and further behind.
The time between now and July, by which most states will have held
primaries, will be among the most important six months for the future of
the Democratic Party, as the contests will decide what kind of party
heads into the midterms in November 2018. The outcome will also shape
the Democratic strategy for 2020, which in turn will shape the party’s
agenda when and if it does reclaim power.
“We are proud to work with women, veterans, local job creators, and
first-time candidates in their runs for Congress, whose records of
service to our country and communities are being recognized – first and
foremost – in the districts they aim to serve,” Kelly said.
CounterPunch | Beneath the surface of meanness by the political elite are the needs
of corporate masters who anoint them to be our leaders. An essential
characteristic of twenty-first century capitalism is unending war to
complete the pillaging of resources from every corner of the Earth.
Those wars are best carried out by politicians who hate not just their
opponents but everyone around them. An economically destructive system
encourages, molds and rewards those individuals who are most vile to
their fellow humans.
Though Greitens is currently being investigated by St. Louis Circuit
Attorney Kim Gardner, it is not clear if criminal charges will be
filed. While local press are on his trail like a hound dog, the still
unidentified woman who reports being tied up, photographed and
blackmailed is currently protecting her identity by not pressing
charges. Missouri Republicans are saying it is “too early” to tell if
the entire affair will blow over. Greitens, who admits to an
extramarital affair while denying taking a photo for blackmail, is going
to each GOP legislator and personally apologizing for the Trump-like
insults that he hurled at them during the first year of his reign.
Also disturbing is the revelation that before his election Greitens
had reserved “Greitens for President” websites, revealing the
ego-maniacal core of his soul. Before the bondage scandal, Republicans
across the country were eyeing Greitens. They could still end up
thinking that someone who could escape prosecution for terrorizing a
woman and glorify gun-toting and union-smashing would, in fact, have
what it takes to be their man for the white house.
What could be more frightening? It’s the possibility that Greitens
would lose a presidential race to a Democrat who was worse. Isn’t it
time to put aside the fantasy that demonstrating the contemptible nature
of a Republican somehow proves that a Democrat is “better?”
counterpunch | Reason number one is why we currently have Donald Trump for
president. The man cannot hold a train of thought for the ten or 15
seconds it takes to express it or to type it into a Tweet, lies so often
I don’t think he even knows when he’s doing it half the time, and has
no moral core. And yet a third of American voters think he’s just great.
And even though all his policies are damaging the very people — the
poor, forgotten white working class — that he likes to highlight as
being his main concern, those people, who are now at risk of losing
their subsidized health insurance available under Obamacare, their
Medicaid, their Supplemental Security Income checks (available to the
disabled and to children and young single parents left in need by the
death of a working parent/spouse) and the protection against
predatory lenders afforded by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB), continue to back him, and will likely vote for him in 2020.
Reason number two is why, despite proof that the Democratic Party
leadership and its pre-annointed 2016 presidential candidate preference
Hillary Clinton, worked hand-in-glove to steal the nomination from
Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and his tens of millions of
supporters last year, and despite the knowledge that that same corrupt
leadership is hard at work now blocking progressive efforts to
democratize the next Democratic primary, and to run real progressives as
candidates for House and Senate in 2018 instead of more of the same
corporatist mob, Democratic voters will submissively cave in as always
and vote for those same lackluster and corrupted corporatists, either
handing wins to Republican opponents, or electing/re-electing
ineffective, self-aggrandizing hacks.
There are other problems too, of course. To a certain extent, both
Republican and Democratic voters in the US are blinded to reality. In
the case of Republicans, who tend to be less well educated, or even if
they have higher degrees, to be in thrall to fanatic religious doctrines
that over-ride any scientific thinking they might once have learned,
this blindness to reality is celebrated. Among Democrats, who fancy
themselves to be the “reality-based” voters, however, there is also a
blindness to reality. Democrats refuse for example to see the larger
picture: for example that the US is absurdly over-militarized and badly
in need of being pacified and disarmed. No amount of calls for better
funding for social needs can succeed without first closing down the over
800 bases that the US operates abroad, terminating all the undeclared
foreign wars and military adventures in places like Syria, Pakistan,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc., shrinking the Army, Navy, Air Force,
Marines and Special Forces and the nuclear forces and slashing the
overall military budget by at least 75%. To fail to recognize this
reality is as stupid as your typical Republican yahoo’s refusal to
accept the reality of rampaging climate change. It is simply Democratic
yahooism.
theintercept | The Trump transition team — in the form of key Trump advisers Kushner
and Flynn — reached out to the Russian government in order to undermine
the U.S. government because the Israeli government asked them to.
Where’s the outrage? How is the sheer “scope and audacity” of the
Trump-Netanyahu backchannels — to quote one U.S. official who spoke to
me on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak
publicly on this issue — not a bigger story? For a start, as University
of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner argued in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, the much-mocked Logan Act
of 1799 remains “a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from
undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president.” These
two legal scholars point out that “if Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act,
then so did the ‘very senior’ official who directed his actions. If that
official is Mr. Kushner, then Mr. Kushner could go to jail.”
Then there is the issue of Middle East policy itself. It wasn’t
outsourced to the Israelis by Trump and Co. only during the transition
or only over settlements. The outsourcing has continued in office.
Tomorrow, Trump is expected to announce
that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel — another key Israeli demand that every single previous
president, Republican and Democrat, has resisted. The decision on
Jerusalem is so contentious that it both undermines any chance of reviving the peace process and threatens to cost lives — not just those of Israelis and Palestinians, but of Americans too.
unz |Reading
the mainstream media headlines relating to the flipping of former
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to provide evidence relating to
the allegations about Russian interference in America’s last
presidential election requires the suspension of one’s cognitive
processes. Ignoring completely what had actually occurred, the “Russian
story” with its subset of “getting Trump” was on display all through the
weekend, both in the print and on the live media.
Flynn’s
guilty plea is laconic, merely admitting that he had lied to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about what was said during two
telephone conversations with then Russian Ambassador to the United
States Sergey Kislyak, but there is considerable back story that emerged
after the plea became public.
The
two phone calls in question include absolutely nothing about possible
collusion with Russia to change the outcome of the U.S. election, which
allegedly was the raison d’etre behind the creation of Robert Mueller’s
Special Counsel office in the first place. Both took place more than a
month after the election and both were initiated by the Americans
involved. I am increasingly convinced that Mueller ain’t got nuthin’ but
this process will grind out interminably and the press will be hot on
the trail until there is nowhere else to go.
Based
on the information revealed regarding the two conversations, and,
unlike the highly nuance-sensitive editors working for the mainstream
media, this is the headline that I would have written for a featured
article based on what I consider to be important: “Israel Colluded with Incoming Trump Team to Subvert U.S. Foreign Policy,” with a possible subheading “FBI Entraps National Security Adviser.”
consortiumnews | So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their
stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed?
The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has
provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the
plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned
media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and
through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).
The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television
network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that
most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these
views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what
you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them
“propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.
As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT
also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give
an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream
journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and
believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow
American view of the world.
The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and
others are never fully reported in the Western media although the
supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a
frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s
impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or
systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those
countries, making it easier to gain popular support to go to war against
them.
Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are
sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness,
racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these
divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also
seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70
years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions,
coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.
Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow. There’s
also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a
stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how
wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.
The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that
when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the
electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the
American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be
blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.
The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election
meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is
an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on
Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all
things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”
According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting
that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least
one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights
criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil
liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing
third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.
The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign
to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,”
but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are
against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo
that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.
There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The
Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long
predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government
lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable
President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on
getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There
is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.
Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000
NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria
with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as
a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to
foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as
foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.
Counterpunch | Only the great Terry Southern could’ve scripted it: an American
madman standing in front of the nations of this world in all his naked,
toxic, Other-hating Old Glory, for all intents and purposes telling the
assembled dignitaries that yes, women seek his life essence, but he
denies it to them, because of that feeling of emptiness which follows the physical act of love…
…And by the way, I may want to kill twenty-five million people.
You wondered how this sickest of all sick Trump tropes would be
dissected by those scalpel-wits at MSNBC. Surely this would be an
opportunity for them to have some cheap pulpy fun at Trump’s expense?
After all, this is the network that employs Joy Reid, who is so
desperate to red-bait Trump that she insists on pretending that Russia
is still a communist country. Surely they would seize upon Trump’s
genocide threat to lay bare the horror of the entire speech.
Actually, they loved it.
Brian Williams—the man who contorted a Leonard Cohen lyric so he
could rhapsodize about the beauty of American bombs—had two “experts” on
to break down the speech. And how Williams’ voice quavered with
patriotic fervor as he announced them—-we are in the presence of greatness!—-“John Negroponte and Colonel Jack Jacobs.”
Negroponte, of course, is famous for being Our Man in Honduras in the
1980s, a tough job that required a lot of co-ordinating with death
squads and torturers, many of whom spoke limited English. He always
played dumb when called to testify before Congress, but as The National Catholic Register
reported, he “deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and
played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a
CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently
found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.”
Oh, in addition to his crimes against humanity, Negroponte also
endorsed Hillary Clinton, who obviously shared his interest in
perpetuating mass suffering among nonwhite, non-loyal Hondurans. And she
trumpeted his endorsement loudly, as she did with Henry Kissinger. Not
that there’s anything tone-deaf about that.
It turns out that old John Negroponte was very impressed with Trump’s
speech—only Benjamin Netanyahu was more girlish in his excitement. But
surely Jack Jacobs, decorated war hero, would call out the insanity of
threatening to commit war crimes in a speech at The United Nations. And
Williams teed it up for him, asking Jacobs how America could start to
“walk back” Trump’s Jack D. Ripper idiocy.
I don’t think we do want to walk it back, said Colonel Jacobs. He
too felt good about the speech. The way it showed our toughness. Our
resolve.
Our bipartisan resolve, he might’ve added, because it turns
out that he too was a Hillary supporter. And wasn’t Hillary the one who
threatened to “obliterate” Iran?
Look, MSNBC, I understand: it’s been a tough week for you.
Hurricanes and earthquakes have occasionally forced you to steal time
and attention from the latest Robert Mueller deposition. But you may
have inadvertently done us a great service: in real time, you helped us
connect the genocidal madness of Donald Trump, via the connections of
two neo-con hacks, directly back to Hillary Clinton. Which is a fancy
way of saying-—heck, we’re all Americans, at the end of the dayTo quote a
great American, “God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural bodily fluids.”
Alt-Market | The false left/right paradigm is an often misunderstood concept.
Many people who are aware of it sometimes wrongly assume that it
asserts the claim that there is "no left or right political
spectrum;" that it is all a farce. This is incorrect. In regular
society there is indeed a political spectrum among the general
populace from socialism/communism/big government (left) to
conservatism/free markets/individualism/small government (right). Each
citizen sits somewhere on the scale between these two dynamics. The
left/right spectrum is in fact real for the average person.
We do not find a " false" paradigm until we examine the beliefs and
behaviors of the elitist and political classes. For many banking
oligarchs and high level politicians, there is no loyalty to a
particular political party or an identifiable "left" or "right"
ideology. Many of these people are happy to exploit both sides of the
spectrum, if they can, to achieve the goals of globalism; a separate
ideology that doesn't really serve the interests of groups on the
left or the right. That is to say, globalists pretend as if they care
about one side or the other on occasion, but in truth they could not
care less about the success of either. They only care about the
success of their own exclusive elitist club.
This reality also tends to apply to national loyalty as well.
Globalists do not carry any ideological love for any particular nation
or culture. They are more than happy to sacrifice and sabotage a
country if the action will gain them greater power or centralization
in return. A globalist is only "Democrat" or "Republican," or American
or Russian or Chinese or European, etc., insofar as the label gets
them something that they want.
The reason globalists and the people that work for them adopt
certain labels is because through this they can act as gatekeepers and
better manipulate the masses. The hot button issue of the week
provides us with a case in point...
The organizer of the "Unite The Right" group during the
Charlottesville circus, which ended in one death and numerous injured,
happened to be an ideological playmate of the extreme left only a
year ago. Jason Kessler seemed to come out of nowhere as a leading figure in the white identity or "white nationalist" movement in 2017, but in 2016, he was an avid supporter of Barack Obama, and before that, an active champion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I suppose anyone can change their ideological worldview over time,
but I'm certainly not stupid enough to believe that Jason Kessler
went from hardcore leftist to white nationalist in less than a year.
Though it cannot be proven conclusively that Kessler is a
provocateur, he certainly idolized the position. Kessler is quoted in his own blog on December 12, 2015, (now shut down but archived) as stating:
"I can't think of any occupation I admire more than the
professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination
to court controversy despite all the slings and arrows of the world."
This is not the first time white nationalists have been exploited
by agent provocateurs to make the "political right" in general look
bad. And, it is certainly not the first time white nationalists have
been discovered to be working directly for the federal government.
Klu Klux Klan leader Bill Wilkinson openly admitted to being a FBI informant and
cooperator in 1981. Hal Turner, a white supremacist radio
personality notorious for calling for the deaths of judges and
lawmakers, turned out to be a provocateur paid by the FBI to drum up extremism.
He was exposed in 2009 after his arrest led to his admission that
almost everything he did was "at the behest of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations..."
Why would the government seek to instigate white nationalist groups
into violence? Well, you have to examine the larger narrative here.
Anti-conservative propaganda has been overwhelmingly one-track over
the past several years. If you are well educated on the activities
of deceit machines like the Southern Poverty Law Center, you
understand that the thrust of all of their operations has been to tie
white nationalism directly to conservative organizations even if
there is no connection. I call this "guilt by false association."
Keep in mind that the SPLC cooperates closely with government
agencies like the DHS and their "Working Group To Counter Violent
Extremism" to create profiling techniques to identify "right wing
extremists." Meaning, their skewed propaganda is often what the media and government agencies use as a reference when writing articles or implementing policy.
The SPLC is inseparable from the mainstream media and government agendas dealing with conservatives.
In order to justify the madness and violence of the left in recent
months, it is more important than ever for the establishment to
maintain the lie that conservatives are also all violent racists and
"fascists" that need to be destroyed. Propaganda alone is rarely
enough to make such notions stick in the public consciousness.
Sometimes, provocateurs are needed to "stir the pot."
However, this is only half the equation of the American civil war being engineered before our eyes.
theintercept | That core truth is: The war on drugs has always been a pointless
sham. For decades the federal government has engaged in a shifting
series of alliances of convenience with some of the world’s largest drug
cartels. So while the U.S. incarceration rate has quintupled since
President Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs in 1971, top
narcotics dealers have simultaneously enjoyed protection at the highest
levels of power in America.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be surprising. The voluminous
documentation of this fact in dozens of books has long been available to
anyone with curiosity and a library card.
Yet somehow, despite the fact the U.S. has no formal system of
censorship, this monumental scandal has never before been presented in a
comprehensive way in the medium where most Americans get their
information: TV.
That’s why “America’s War on Drugs” is a genuine milestone. We’ve
recently seen how ideas that once seemed absolutely preposterous and
taboo — for instance, that the Catholic Church was consciously
safeguarding priests who sexually abused children, or that Bill Cosby
may not have been the best choice for America’s Dad — can after years of
silence finally break through into popular consciousness and exact real
consequences. The series could be a watershed in doing the same for the
reality behind one of the most cynical and cruel policies in U.S.
history.
There’s no mealy mouthed truckling about what happened. The first
episode opens with the voice of Lindsay Moran, a one-time clandestine
CIA officer, declaring, “The agency was elbow deep with drug
traffickers.”
Then Richard Stratton, a marijuana smuggler turned writer and
television producer, explains, “Most Americans would be utterly shocked
if they knew the depth of involvement that the Central Intelligence
Agency has had in the international drug trade.”
Next, New York University professor Christian Parenti tells viewers,
“The CIA is from its very beginning collaborating with mafiosas who are
involved in the drug trade because these mafiosas will serve the larger
agenda of fighting communism.”
For the next eight hours, the series sprints through history that’s
largely the greatest hits of the U.S. government’s partnership with
heroin, hallucinogen, and cocaine dealers. That these greatest hits can
fill up most of four two-hour episodes demonstrates how extraordinarily
deep and ugly the story is.
carrollquigley | I am going to give you an
historical view of the American democratic tradition with analytical
overtones showing how democracy has changed over the course of our history.
The United States is a democracy. I think there is no doubt of that — but
the American democratic tradition is largely a myth.
First, a few definitions. I define democracy as majority rule and
minority rights. Of these the second is more important than the
first. There are many despotisms which have majority rule. Hitler held
plebiscites in which he obtained over 92 percent of the vote, and most of
the people who were qualified to vote did vote. I think that in China today
a majority of the people support the government, but China is certainly not
a democracy.
The essential half of this definition
then, is the second half, minority rights. What that means is that a
minority has those rights which enable it to work within the system and to
build itself up to be a majority and replace the governing majority.
Moderate deviations from majority rule do not usually undermine democracy.
In fact, absolute democracy does not really exist at the nation-state level.
For example, a modest poll tax as a qualification for voting would be an
infringement on the principle of majority rule but restrictions on the
suffrage would have to go pretty far before they really abrogated democracy.
On the other hand relatively slight restrictions on minority rights — the
freedoms of speech, assembly, and other rights — would rapidly erode
democracy.
Another basic point. Democracy is not the
highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic
tradition might lead you to think this is the most perfect political system
ever devised. That just isn't true. There are other political values which
are more important and urgent—security, for example. And I would suggest
that political stability and political responsibility are also more
important.
In fact, I would define a good government as
a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A
government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power
structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to
overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority
because that elite had power to rule and the political system reflected that
situation by giving governing power to that elite, then, it seems to me, we
would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.
Some of you are looking puzzled. Why do we have democracy
in this country? I'll give you a blunt and simple answer, which means, of
course, that it's not the whole truth. We have democracy because around 1880
the distribution of weapons in this society was such that no minority could
make a majority obey. If you have a society in which weapons are cheap, so
that almost anyone can obtain them, and are easy to use — what I call
amateur weapons — then you have democracy. But if the opposite is true,
weapons extremely expensive and very difficult to use — the medieval knight,
for example, with his castle, the supreme weapons of the year 1100 — in such
a system, with expensive and difficult-to-use weapons, you could not
possibly have majority rule. But in 1880 for $100 you could get the two best
weapons in the world, a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver; so almost
anyone could buy them. With weapons like these in the hands of ordinary
people, no minority could make the majority obey a despotic government.
Now there are some features of democracy that many people
really do not understand. It is said, for example, that our officials are
elected by the voters, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. I
suggest that this is misleading. The outcome of an election is not
determined by those who vote, but by those who don't vote. Since 1945 or so,
we have had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the
people voting. In the 1968 election about 80 million voted, and about 50
million qualified to vote did not. The outcome was determined by the 50
million who didn't vote. If you could have got 2 percent of the nonvoters to
the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that
has been true of most of our recent elections. It's the ones who don't vote
who determine the outcome.
Something else we tend to
overlook is that the nomination process is much more important than the
election process. I startle a lot of my colleagues who think they know
England pretty well by asking them how candidates for election are nominated
in England. They don't have conventions or primary elections. So the
important thing is who names the candidates. In any democratic country, if
you could name the candidates of all parties, you wouldn't care who voted or
how, because your man would be elected. So the nominations are more
important than the elections.
A third point is one I
often make in talking with students who are discouraged about their
inability to influence the political process. I say this is nonsense. There
never was a time when it was easier for ordinary people to influence
political affairs than today. One reason, of course, is that big mass of
nonvoters. If you can simply get 2 or 3 percent of them to the polls — and
that shouldn't be too difficult — then you can elect your candidate, whoever
he is.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
