Exact Same Elite Marketing Playbook and Script For Nobody Diversity Candidate Bootyplug

On March 16th 2008 I called out and subsequently rejected the Great "Unifier" after he made his responsible negroe speech and repudiated Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Like Obama, Cheat Bootyplug is a nobody selected by elites from sociopath central casting for the purpose of installing a republican blue dog as the head of the DNC corporatist shill party. Bootyplug is toast with Black and Latino voters, so I'm not quite sure who his handlers thought he could "unify" with his glib, empty rhetoric.

Obama has pegged his Jeremiah Wright response to the speech delivered by Bobby Kennedy in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination;

Kennedy was the first to inform the audience of the death of Martin Luther King, causing some in the audience to scream and wail. Several of Kennedy's aides were even worried that the delivery of this information would result in a riot. Once the audience quieted down Kennedy acknowledged that many in the audience would be filled with anger, especially since the assassin was believed to be a white, and that he had felt the same when his brother John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. These remarks surprised Kennedy aides, who had never heard him speak of John Kennedy's death. Kennedy continued, saying that the country had to make an effort to "go beyond these rather difficult times," and then quoted a poem by the Greek playwright Aeschylus. To conclude Kennedy said that the country needed and wanted unity between blacks and whites, asked the audience members to pray for the King family and the country, and once more quoted the ancient Greeks. Despite rioting in other major American cities, Indianapolis was calm the night after Kennedy's remarks, which is believed to have been in part because of the speech. The speech itself has been listed as one of the greatest in American history, ranked 17th on American Rhetoric's Top 100 speeches in the 20th century. Former US Congressman and media host Joe Scarborough said that it was Kennedy's greatest speech, and was what prompted him into entering into public service. Journalist Joe Klein has called it "politics in its grandest form and highest purpose," and said that it "marked the end of an era" before American political life was taken over by consultants and pollsters. It is also featured as the prologue of his book, Politics Lost.

Real Reason Obama Heir Apparent Cheat Bootyplug Claimed to Have Iowa in the Bag...,

thegrayzone |  Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups. 

At the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.

This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.

The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.

The bizarre scenario was made possible by a mysterious voting app whose origins had been kept secret by Democratic National Committee officials. For hours, it was unclear who created the failed technology, or how it wound up in the hands of Iowa party officials.

Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.

Who Did 4 Million Jobs Worth of Damage to America?

nakedcapitalism |  A newly released study by the Economic Policy Institute reaches a devastating but not surprising conclusion: globalization has screwed American workers. However, putting numbers on how much sustained trade deficits with China translate into lost American jobs, and those numbers turning out to be large, gives free trade cheerleaders a lot less wriggle room.

EPI estimates that American sacrificed 3.7 million jobs as a result of US-China trade deficits since China joined the WTO in 2001, with 3/4 of the losses taking place in manufacturing positions. They also point out that job losses to China have increased since Trump took office.

The EPI estimates are consistent with earlier studies. From a 2017 Wall Street Journal article, How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump:

What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled….

Both presidential candidates aimed much of their criticism at 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted imports from Mexico. Even then, though, the real culprit was China, economists now say.

Many U.S. factories that moved to Mexico did so to match prices from China. Some of the new Mexican factories helped support U.S. jobs. For example, fabrics made in the U.S. are turned into clothing in Mexico for sale globally by U.S. companies….
A group of economists that includes Messrs. Hanson and Autor estimates that Chinese competition was responsible for 2.4 million jobs lost in the U.S. between 1999 and 2011. Total U.S. employment rose 2.1 million to 132.9 million in the same period.

Recall that the much-touted NAFTA was supposed to deliver one million American jobs, but instead resulted in job destruction, with studies estimating anywhere from nearly 800,000 jobs to over a million.

Now to the executive summary of the EPI report:

U.S. jobs lost are spread throughout the country but are concentrated in manufacturing, including in industries in which the United States has traditionally held a competitive advantage.

Bidens Corrupt AF!!!

NYPost |  Political figures have long used their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. In my new book, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite,” one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for commercial gain. In Biden’s case, these deals include foreign partners and, in some cases, even U.S. taxpayer dollars.

The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.

When this subject came up in 2019, Biden declared, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”

As we will see, this is far from the case…

 oe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the U.S. Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.

When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.

Stakes is High - So the DNC Lies, and Lies, and Lies....,

CNN |  The stakes were high when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met at Warren's apartment in Washington, DC, one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. 

The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters.

 

Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.

 

The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting. 

 

That evening, Sanders expressed frustration at what he saw as a growing focus among Democrats on identity politics, according to one of the people familiar with the conversation. Warren told Sanders she disagreed with his assessment that a woman could not win, three of the four sources said.

Sanders denied the characterization of the meeting in a statement to CNN. 

 

"It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win," Sanders said. "It's sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren't in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."

 

Warren's communications director Kristen Orthman declined to comment.

DNC Pissing Its Granny Pannies Over Truth and Popularity of the Bern...,

thehill |  Democrats who believe Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had a negative influence on the 2016 general election against President Trump are increasingly expressing worries he’ll hurt the party again in 2020. 

The Democrats complaining about Sanders, some of whom have histories with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, argue the rhetoric being employed by the Vermont senator in some cases goes too far in damaging his rivals. 

They say it will make it harder for the party to unify around a nominee, and they’re particularly worried that supporters of Sanders won’t back any nominee who isn’t their favored candidate.

“He needs to stop,” said one Democratic strategist, who is not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns. “It's not helpful and it actually hurts the party. It’s like he didn't learn his lesson the last time. It’s incredibly short-sighted and terrible.”

This strategist pointed to the senator’s recent remarks in a Los Angeles Times editorial board meeting where he said that Trump would eat former Vice President Joe Biden’s lunch if he is the nominee. 

“Joe Biden is a personal friend of mine, so I’m not here to, you know, to attack him, but my God, if you are, if you’re a Donald Trump and got Biden having voted for the war in Iraq, Biden having voted for these terrible, in my view, trade agreements, Biden having voted for the bankruptcy bill. Trump will eat his lunch,” Sanders told the Times.

Biden isn't the only rival Democrat taking fire from Sanders, and it's not just those who worked on the Clinton campaign who are complaining about him....

... Sanders is rising in polls and increasingly is seen as a real contender in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — and for the general election. A new poll released Friday found Sanders with 20 percent support and Warren in second with 17 percent, just ahead of former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with 16 percent and Biden with 15 percent.

Some of the Democratic angst about his rhetoric seems linked to the idea that he could actually win. 

.45 Had Drone Assassination on Good Authority...,

craigmurray |  Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack. That is something most people, and most international law experts and judges, would accept. Including me. 

What very few people, and almost no international lawyers, accept is the key to the Bethlehem Doctrine – that here “Imminent” – the word used so carefully by Pompeo – does not need to have its normal meanings of either “soon” or “about to happen”. An attack may be deemed “imminent”, according to the Bethlehem Doctrine, even if you know no details of it or when it might occur. So you may be assassinated by a drone or bomb strike – and the doctrine was specifically developed to justify such strikes – because of “intelligence” you are engaged in a plot, when that intelligence neither says what the plot is nor when it might occur. Or even more tenuous, because there is intelligence you have engaged in a plot before, so it is reasonable to kill you in case you do so again.

I am not inventing the Bethlehem Doctrine. It has been the formal legal justification for drone strikes and targeted assassinations by the Israeli, US and UK governments for a decade. Here it is in academic paper form, published by Bethlehem after he left government service (the form in which it is adopted by the US, UK and Israeli Governments is classified information). 

While the Bethlehem Doctrine allows you to kill somebody because they might be going to attack someone, sometime, but you don’t know who or when, there is a reasonable expectation that if you are claiming people have already been killed you should be able to say who and when.

The truth of the matter is that if you take every American killed including and since 9/11, in the resultant Middle East related wars, conflicts and terrorist acts, well over 90% of them have been killed by Sunni Muslims financed and supported out of Saudi Arabia and its gulf satellites, and less than 10% of those Americans have been killed by Shia Muslims tied to Iran.

This is a horribly inconvenient fact for US administrations which, regardless of party, are beholden to Saudi Arabia and its money. It is, the USA affirms, the Sunnis who are the allies and the Shias who are the enemy. Yet every journalist or aid worker hostage who has been horribly beheaded or otherwise executed has been murdered by a Sunni, every jihadist terrorist attack in the USA itself, including 9/11, has been exclusively Sunni, the Benghazi attack was by Sunnis, Isil are Sunni, Al Nusra are Sunni, the Taliban are Sunni and the vast majority of US troops killed in the region are killed by Sunnis. 

Precisely which are these hundreds of deaths for which the Shia forces of Soleimani were responsible? Is there a list? It is of course a simple lie. Its tenuous connection with truth relates to the Pentagon’s estimate – suspiciously upped repeatedly since Iran became the designated enemy – that back during the invasion of Iraq itself, 83% of US troop deaths were at the hands of Sunni resistance and 17% of of US troop deaths were at the hands of Shia resistance, that is 603 troops. All the latter are now lain at the door of Soleimani, remarkably.

You Talk About Identity Politics When That's All You've Got to Sell...,

wsws |  What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same pathology? Ultimately, it’s a race reductionist argument. What the Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an insistence that we can’t ever talk about anything except race. And that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to sell.

If you follow through the logic of disparities discourse, and watch the studies and follow the citations, what you get is a sort of bold announcement of findings, but finding that anybody who has been reading a newspaper over the last 50 or 70 years would assume from the outset: blacks have it worse, and women have it worse, and so on.

It’s in part an expression of a generic pathology of sociology, the most banal expression of academic life. You follow the safe path. You replicate the findings. But it’s not just supposed to be a matter of finding a disparity in and of itself, like differences in the number of days of sunshine in a year. It’s supposed to be a promise that in finding or confirming the disparity in this or that domain that it will bring some kind of mediation of the problem. But the work never calls for that.

Q. You make important points about the way social problems are approached. As an example, we have a scourge of police violence in this country. Over 1,000 Americans are killed each year by police. And the common knowledge, so to speak, is that this is a racial problem. The reality is that the largest number of those killed are white, but blacks are disproportionately killed. But if the position is that this is simply a racial problem, there is no real solution on offer. We have a militarized police force operating under conditions of extreme social inequality, with lots of guns on the streets, with soldiers coming back from serving in neocolonial wars abroad becoming police officers. And all of this is excised in the racialist argument, which if taken at face value, boils down to allegations about racial attitudes among police.

A. Cedric Johnson [3] has made good points on this and I’ve spoken with him at considerable length about the criminal justice system. To overdraw the point, a black Yale graduate who works on Wall Street is no doubt several times more likely to be jacked up by the police on the platform of Metro North than his white counterpart, out of mistaken identity. And that mistaken identity is what we might call racism. But it’s a shorthand. He’s still less likely to be jacked up by the police than the broke white guy in northeast Philadelphia or west Baltimore.

The point of this stress on policing is containing those working-class and poor populations and protecting property holders downtown, and in making shows of force in doing so. I mean the emergence of, or the intensification of, militarized policing in the 1990s and 2000s was directly connected with an increased focus on urban redevelopment directed toward turning central cities into havens for play and leisure. To do this you have to accomplish a couple of things, as Saskia Sassen pointed out almost 30 years ago, in the reconfiguration of the urban political economy in ways that create a basis for upscale consumption, and an industrial reserve army who will work for little enough to make that culture of upscale consumption profitable. Then you have to have the police to protect all of this. It’s really like a tourist economy.

So that’s kind of natural enough and you don’t need to have a devil theory like the crack epidemic to explain it—all of this pointless back-and-forth about how the cultural and political authorities are responding to the opioid crisis compared to how they responded to the crack epidemic. I mean, it’s all beside the point.

A Wholly Unselfconscious Choice to be Talking About Wealth Inequality...,

NYPost |  Not content with more than 10 million books sold, a Netflix deal in the high eight figures, a joint publishing advance with husband Barack worth $65 million, a highly profitable world tour, speaking fees that by now surely average around $500,000 per, and a recently acquired waterfront Martha’s Vineyard mansion purchased for $15 million, Michelle Obama is back with another craven money grab.

“Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice” is her new publishing venture.

Billed as a sequel of sorts to Obama’s best-selling memoir, this squat, slim volume, priced at $19.99, is Michelle “now provid[ing] you with the encouragement to find value in your own personal journey,” the publisher says.

“Printed on cream writing paper, with a grosgrain ribbon, foil-stamped cover, and removable half-jacket, ‘Becoming’ … includes thought-provoking prompts designed to help you reflect on your personal and family history: your goals, challenges and dreams; what moves you and brings you hope; and what future you imagine for yourself and your community.”

Axios |  "We need to stop believing that more and bigger is better. We are chasing the wrong things," former president Barack Obama told a Silicon Valley audience Thursday. 

Why it matters: Obama's warning has an added layer of meaning here, where the tech industry has grown powerful and rich by mastering the art of "scaling up."

The big picture: Speaking at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, Obama traced many of the problems in today's society to uncertainty fueled by globalization and automation, along with an underlying misconception of what it takes to be satisfied.

• "What I also see is just this sense of anxiety and rootlessness and uncertainty in so many people some of which is fed by globalization and technology," he said. "So much of the political turmoil we are seeing right now has to do with people feeling materially insecure."

The bigger picture: Technology and globalization have "turbocharged" the anxiety, and we need to deal with the social issues that has created, he said.

• "Part of the goal of solving big problems is not just a matter of finding the right technical solution," he said. "Part of it is also finding out how do we restore some sense of our common values."

Burisma was a Huge Issue for V.P. Joe Biden

johnsolomon |  In recent interviews, Joe Biden has distanced himself from his son’s work at a Ukrainian gas company that was under investigation during the Obama years, with the former vice president  suggesting he didn’t even know Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings.

There is plenty of evidence that conflicts with the former vice president’s account, including Hunter Biden’s own story that he discussed the company once with his famous father. 

There also was a December 2015 New York Times story that raised the question of whether Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma posed a conflict of interest for the vice president, especially when Joe Biden was leading the fight against Ukrainian corruption while Hunter Biden’s firm was under investigation by Ukrainian prosecutors.

But whatever the Biden family recollections, the Obama State Department clearly saw the Burisma Holdings investigation in the midst of the 2016 presidential election as a Joe Biden issue.

Memos newly released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on my behalf detail how State officials in June 2016 worked to prepare the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, to handle a question about “Burisma and Hunter Biden.”

In multiple drafts of a question-and-answer memo prepared for Yovanovitch’s Senate confirmation hearing, the department’s Ukraine experts urged the incoming ambassador to stick to a simple answer.

“Do you have any comment on Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, serving on the board of Burisma, a major Ukrainian Gas Company?,” the draft Q&A asked.

The recommended answer for Yovanovitch: “For questions on Hunter Biden’s role in Burisma, I would refer you to Vice President Biden’s office.”

Tried to Tell Y'all Cats Two and a Half Years Ago..., (Search Susan Rice Here)

sicsempertyrannis |  I was chatting last night with a retired CIA colleague, a person well connected to many folks still working at our former employer, and he dropped a bombshell--he had learned that John Brennan set up a Trump Task Force at CIA in early 2016. 

This is definitely something Prosecutor John Durham should explore. A "Task Force" normally is a short term creation comprised of operations officers (i.e., guys and gals who carry out espionage activities overseas) and intelligence analysts. The purpose of such a group is to ensure all relevant intelligence capabilities are brought to bear on the problem at hand.

While a "Task Force" can be a useful tool for tackling issues of terrorism or drug trafficking, it is not appropriate or lawful for collecting on a U.S. candidate for the Presidency. But Brennan did it, so I'm told, and it had the blessing of the Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper. 

The Task Force members were handpicked. The job was not posted. Instead, people were specifically invited to join up. Not everyone accepted the invitation, and that is now a problem for John Brennan. If those folks are talking to Durham's folks then Brennan's days are numbered.

Brennan reportedly took it upon himself to recruit foreign intelligence organizations, such as MI-6, the Aussies, the Italians and the Israelis, to help in spying on Trump and his campaign. He sold it as a "counter-intelligence" mission citing his fear that Trump was a Russian puppet. And these foreign services agreed to help. But they did more than passive collection. They helped create and implement covert actions, such as entrapping Michael Flynn as a foreign agent and cultivating and ensnaring George Papadopoulos.

Brennan "Concerned" About All The Dot-Connecting...,

thefederalist |  Last weekend, NBC News reported that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”

However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia collusion. And it all started with Brennan.

That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision to target the Trump campaign.

The Upper Echelon of __________ Met to Orchestrate It All

thefederalist |  Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell, filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn.

While the briefing at issue concerns Powell’s motion to compel the government to hand over evidence required by Brady and presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan’s standing order, Powell’s 37-page brief pivots between showcasing the prosecution’s penchant for withholding evidence and exposing significant new evidence the defense team uncovered that establishes a concerted effort to entrap Flynn. Along the way, Powell drops half-a-dozen problems with Flynn’s plea and an equal number of justifications for outright dismissal of the criminal charges against Flynn.

What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence Powell lays out shows that a team of “high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false.”

In League with a Hostile Foreign Power and Using Federal Agencies to Spy on a Political Opponent

investors |  Russia Investigation: It's beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn't Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.

That's the stunning conclusion of a RealClear Investigations report by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level officials in Vladimir Putin's government.

The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting.

But "a growing body of evidence ... indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials," wrote Smith.

Smith painstakingly weaves together the evidence that's already out there but has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which have become so seized with Trump-hatred that their reporting even on routine matters can no longer be trusted.

But he adds in more evidence that the Justice Department only recently handed over to Congress. And It's damning.

Memos, emails and texts now in Congress' possession show that the Justice Department and the FBI worked together both before and after the election with Fusion GPS and their main link to the scandal, former British spy and longtime FBI informant Chris Steele.

As a former British spook in Moscow, Steele had extensive ties to Russia. That's why he was picked as the primary researcher to compile the "unverified and salacious" Trump dossier, as former FBI Director James Comey once described it.

The Bottomline Difference Between Donald Trump and Barack Obama

strategic-culture |  Both Obama and Trump have been aiming to extend America’s aristocracy’s dominance around the world, but they employ different strategies toward that politically bipartisan American-aristocratic objective: the US Government’s global control, for the benefit of the US aristocracy, at everyone else’s expense. Obama and Trump were placed into the White House by different groups of US billionaires, and each nominee serves his/her respective sponsors, no public anywhere — not even their voters’ welfare.

An analogous example is that, whereas Fox News, Forbes, National Review, The Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart News, InfoWars, Reuters, and AP, are propagandists for the Republican Party; NPR, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New Republic, New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and Salon, are propagandists for the Democratic Party; but, they all draw their chief sponsors from the same small list of donors who are America’s billionaires, since these few people control the top advertisers, investors, and charities, and thus control nearly all of the nation’s propaganda. The same people who control the Government control the public; but, America isn’t a one-Party dictatorship. America is, instead, a multi-Party dictatorship. And this is how it functions.

Trump cancelled the Iran deal because a different group of billionaires are now in control of the White House, and of the rest of the US Government. Trump’s group demonize especially Iran; Obama’s group demonize especially Russia. That’s it, short. That’s America’s aristocratic tug-of-war; but both sides of it are for invasion, and for war. Thus, we’re in the condition of ‘permanent war for permanent peace’ — to satisfy the military contractors and the billionaires who control them. Any US President who would resist that, would invite assassination; but, perhaps in Trump’s case, impeachment, or other removal-from-office, would be likelier. In any case, the sponsors need to be satisfied — or else — and Trump knows this.

Trump is doing what he thinks he has to be doing, for his own safety. He’s just a figurehead for a different faction of the US aristocracy, than Obama was. He’s doing what he thinks he needs to be doing, for his survival. Political leadership is an extremely dangerous business. Trump is playing a slightly different game of it than Obama did, because he represents a different faction than Obama did. These two factions of the US aristocracy are also now battling each other for political control over Europe.

Obamamandius - Blackness' Permanent Epitaph...,

LRB |  Despite his hankering for historical significance, Rhodes understands the anomalousness of his own situation. To travel the world with the American president – and not just any president, but this one – was to get access to some of the most famous people in the world, who nevertheless continued to regard Obama with a kind of awe. Even as his popularity waned back home, Obama remained the biggest draw on the world stage. Stars were starstruck by him, and some of the fairy dust inevitably got sprinkled on whoever was standing nearby. Only on very rare occasions did someone manage to break the spell. In early 2011 Rhodes gets an invitation with the rest of Team Obama to a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. He rents a white-tie tuxedo – ‘You guys clean up pretty well,’ the impeccably turned-out Obama tells his normally scruffy speechwriters – and goes to see the British aristocracy put on a show. ‘The women wore diamond tiaras; some of the men, military uniforms. One of these ladies, after telling me about her various hobbies, looked at me quizzically – “You do know who I am, don’t you?” she said. Of course, I assured her … I didn’t have the slightest idea.’ Then the real centre of attention arrives:

Obama stood next to the queen, a stoic yet kindly-looking woman adorned in jewels. Standing there, you got the sense of the impermanence of your own importance – this woman had met everyone there was to know over the last fifty years … When the dinner was over, we were moved to another room, where they served after-dinner drinks. I found myself in a conversation with David Cameron about the HBO show Entourage, which we both apparently enjoyed – in a room full of royals, the prime minister is oddly diminished, just another staffer.

‘The Impermanence of Importance’ would have made a good alternative title for this book.

That said, the title Rhodes chose is better, because it has a deeper meaning. At one level, it refers to the ongoing contest between Obama’s realism and the hopes of people like Rhodes that he would deliver lasting change. The tension between what is and what ought to be forms the essence of most political coming-of-age memoirs and this one is no different from other classics of the genre, such as The Education of Henry Adams: the dilemmas it describes could come from any time in the history of modern politics, not just our own. But the other reference point for the title is more about now. We are witnessing the increasingly fraught contest between the world as it is – the world of facts – and the world as it is described by people with little or no regard for the facts. Obama and Rhodes may sometimes have found themselves on different sides of the struggle between what is and what ought to be, but they were always on the same side of the struggle between the world as it is and the world as they say it is. Both men were victims of character assassinations by their opponents, who showed increasing disregard for anything that might be called common ground. During Obama’s presidency, the world as it is started to disappear, buried beneath the accusations and counter-accusations of those who said it was another way entirely, simply because they could.

This story is best told backwards, because it is a tale that culminates in the election of Trump. If that represented the ultimate catastrophe for Team Obama – ‘after all the work you guys did,’ as Rhodes’s wife says to him the morning after Trump’s victory – what precedes it has to be sifted for clues that it might be coming. They are easy to miss and Obama’s people missed plenty of them at the time. Sometimes this was down to political incompetence, but there was also some arrogance. In April 2016 Obama travelled to London on a hastily arranged trip to help Cameron fight off the threat of defeat in the Brexit referendum. Obama is greeted by an op-ed from Boris Johnson in the Telegraph attacking him for removing a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office. ‘Some said,’ Johnson wrote, ‘that it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.’

Obamamandius - Peak Globalist Bullshitter

ChicagoTribune |  “We have a sense of urgency about this project (and) when we started, we wanted the public to know we would break ground as soon as possible,” said Michael Strautmanis, the vice president for civic engagement for the foundation. “But we also knew there were some things that were not in our control. We insist on going through the process with integrity and without rushing.”

READ: Federal lawsuit accuses Obama center organizers of pulling an 'institutional bait and switch' »

Before the presidential center can be built, the federal government will review its impact on Jackson Park, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and evaluate the project’s environmental effects. Any impact that the review highlights will have to be resolved before construction can be allowed.

There have already been two public federal review meetings. A third was scheduled in June, but then it was delayed until July. Now it has been delayed until late summer, according to the city of Chicago’s website.

The federal review process has to be conducted because of Jackson Park’s historic status and because it involved closing and expanding major streets.

The news of the delay comes just a day after activists gathered on the South Side at a meeting to discuss placing a community benefits agreement proposition on the February ballot.

“We have a new window of opportunity before the next election to protect the most vulnerable people in our community,” said Parrish Brown, an activist with the Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter, in a written statement. “We’re gathering to make sure Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel and the local aldermen do the right thing, or we’ll have to elect people who will.”

The coalition wants an ordinance that would require that 30 percent of all newly constructed housing near the presidential center be set aside as affordable housing. They want a property tax freeze for the longtime homeowners closest to the site and an independent monitor to make sure local residents are hired to work on the project. In addition, they are now calling for a community trust fund and support for the neighborhood schools.

Hindsight Shows Quite Clearly Why It's Easier To Trust And Respect Putin

medium |  We were scheduled to have sixty minutes with Putin. After pleasantries were exchanged, Obama opened the conversation by expressing his optimism for U.S.-Russia relations. Putin interrupted him early to express a different view.

For the next hour, Putin walked through the complete history of U.S.-Russian relations during his time as president. He punctuated his narrative with several instances of disrespect from the Bush administration. He liked President George W. Bush as a person, he told Obama, but loathed his administration. As Putin explained, he had reached out to Bush after September 11, believing that the United States and Russia should unite to fight terrorists as a common enemy. He had helped persuade leaders in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to allow the U.S. to open air bases in their countries to help fight the war in Afghanistan. But in return, so he claimed, the Bush administration had snubbed him. 

Putin even suggested that Russia and the United States could have cooperated on Iraq had the Bush administration treated Russia as an equal partner. But it did not, and that’s why U.S.-Russia relations deteriorated so dramatically while Bush was president. The Bush team had supported color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine — a blatant threat to Russia’s national interests. In Putin’s view, Russia had done nothing wrong; America was to be blamed for the poor relations between the two countries.

Putin knew how to tell a dramatic story. For each vignette of disrespect or confrontation, he told the president the date, the place, and who was at the meeting. During one story, he pointed to a chair he recalled Condoleezza Rice sitting in at the time, right next to Sergei Ivanov, then Putin’s defense minister. He must have rehearsed all these details beforehand. For one story about counterterrorism cooperation, Putin told Obama how the Russians had benefited from some information shared with them by American officials. Dramatically, he waved away the waiters serving us tea, leaned in, and told Obama that they had used this information to “liquidate” the terrorists.

As I remember it, Putin spoke uninterrupted for nearly the entire time scheduled for the meeting, documenting the injustices of the Bush administration. This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder. Obama listened patiently, maybe too patiently. I was amazed. There was no way I could have sat for a full hour without saying something. I was also nervous. The meeting was scheduled for sixty minutes, and by minute fifty-five the U.S. president had not said a thing. It was my assignment to read out this meeting to our press corps later that day. I couldn’t tell them that Obama had merely listened the entire time!

My worries were misplaced. In the end the meeting went well beyond three hours, and Obama had plenty to say. His main message was again about Reset. He asked Putin to have an open mind about resuming engagement with the United States on issues of common interest. He explained to Putin that he was different, representing a break with many of the policies of the Bush administration. Obama avoided flowery language about friendships and strategic partnerships. Instead, he pledged to always be straight with Putin and to respect Russia.

The two most contentious subjects that morning were missile defense and Iran. Putin explained to Obama why planned American missile deployments in Europe threatened “strategic stability” — otherwise known as mutual assured destruction (MAD) — between our two countries. Putin seemed annoyed — irrationally annoyed — with the Bush administration’s plan for missile-defense deployments so close to Russia’s borders. Obama pledged to review America’s missile-defense plans and get back to Putin on his decisions. Putin expressed less concern about the Iranian threat than Medvedev had. He talked more generally about the strategic importance of Russia’s bilateral relationship with Iran as its most significant partner in the Middle East.

Ass-Clowns Jaw Jacking With Civil Race War Pending...,

Newsweek |  The architects of South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s envisioned a much different outcome: The post-apartheid constitution says the government must help citizens get better access to land. The African National Congress, which has been in power since 1994, now wants to transfer 30 percent of the country’s agricultural land from white to black ownership. In addition to buying it from white owners and redistributing to black ones, the ANC runs programs to help people claim territory and firm up the rights of those whose tenure is insecure.

But apartheid’s legacy has been difficult to dislodge, and many think land reform has been a disaster. To date, only 9 percent of commercial farmland has been transferred to black owners through claims and redistribution. The backlog to settle existing claims is 35 years; for new ones, there’s a wait of well over a century. Many large agricultural reform projects have failed; success stories like Msimanga’s are the exception. “You can move as many hectares of land as you want, but if you don’t get them to be productive, then society’s problems will remain,” says Wandile Sihlobo, an agricultural economist for South Africa’s Agricultural Business Chamber.

The slow pace of change has made land one of the most polarizing issues in South Africa today. With national elections looming in 2019, the small but influential Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) opposition group has tapped into popular frustration over the ANC’s failure to address the problem. The party has been pushing the government to seize white-owned property without paying landowners, as former President Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe, which borders South Africa to the north. Critics of Mugabe’s policy point to the period of economic collapse that followed: Food production dropped, due in part to a lack of equipment and training, and unemployment soared as thousands of evicted white Zimbabwean employers left the country.

The ANC, whose popularity plummeted under the controversial tenure of former President Jacob Zuma, declared in December it would use “land expropriation without compensation,” as the process is known, to speed up reform. The party promised to do it without compromising the economy, food security or jobs. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who replaced Zuma this year, has repeatedly said the taking of land from the indigenous people was South Africa’s “original sin,” and that its return to its rightful owners will unlock the country’s economic potential.

In February, Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution to pursue the expropriation policy and appointed a committee to investigate whether the constitution needs to be amended to do it. The committee is due to report back on its findings later this year, before the 2019 elections.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of state-sanctioned land seizures has spooked white landowners in South Africa. Media coverage of “land invasions” has increased across the country, where black South Africans have moved onto unused, privately owned property and claimed the right to live there. 

“Once it becomes a free-for-all, how are you going to stop millions of people from lawlessness?” says Louise Rossouw, former regional chairperson of the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa in Eastern Cape province. “It’s crazy. People are already starting to talk of civil war. ”

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The ANC has tried to stamp out fears that South Africa’s economy is going to crash like Zimbabwe’s. It has emphasized that unused land would be targeted first, but party leaders have also doubled down on their original pledge. “For people who think that the issue of land in South Africa will be swept under the carpet, I say, ‘Wake up, my friend,’” Ramaphosa recently said in Parliament. “Our people want the land.”

.45, Double-O, And The True Nature Of Facism...,

Counterpunch |  Clinton lost to Trump, not because millions of poor people were mobilized by a fascist message; but because millions of poor people didn’t turn out to vote; they understood that Obama was a friend of war, a guardian of Wall Street, and a keeper of the neoliberal status quo. They didn’t require more of the same in Clinton.  But the actual facts of Obama’s presidency are increasingly drowned out by the howls of ‘fascist’ which are hurled at Donald Trump week by week, month by month.  This is nothing new, incidentally. Every single thoroughly reactionary Republican president of the past fifty years has had this charge levelled at them: Nixon, Raegan, both Bushes and now Trump.  They were all fascists in their day.

But in allocating to an administration the label fascist – even if it is headed by a person with clear fascist ideological tendencies – we run the risk of underestimating not only the everyday run-of-the-mill racist and war mongering policies enacted by the ‘respectable’ parties of the parliamentary mainstream; we also fail to comprehend the symbiotic connection which opens up between the period of Obama and the time of Trump.  Trump’s regime is, for the most part, more reactionary, and more overtly and rabidly racist than the Obama administration ever was; this cannot be denied.  Trump’s accession marks a truly awful period in American politics.

But it reached its fruition precisely because the Obama administration had exhausted its facile promises of hope and change in the flames of international war and the unrelenting economic oppression of the poorer layers of the domestic population.  It is the continuation of such politics by more extreme means, with the ideological veneer of progressivism set aside, born from the thickening disillusionment of the poorer layers in a decaying political system and their increasing lack of interest in the ballot box (for very good reason).  It has the features of ineptitude and corruption which are the product of such a development.

But is not a fascist administration.  It does not mark a qualitative break in what has come before. The latest farrago involving immigrant children is unutterably awful, but its closest parallel in US history – if not the immigration policies of Obama himself – might be something like the locking up of the families of Japanese Americans in WW2.  That policy was carried out by the Democratic Party headed by Roosevelt.  The same party which, by the way, supported slavery, used nuclear weapons against Japanese cities and escalated the war in Vietnam to a shrieking crescendo.

In describing the Trump administration as fascist we subscribe to a liberal logic which separates out the material realities of fascism from its ideological expression. This helps whitewash the reality of the Democratic Party as a party of war and the financial elite, and instead recasts it in the type of morality play where the beleaguered and high minded liberals like Obama and Clinton become the last bastions of reason and humanity against an ever encroaching darkness – only their tragic struggle against barbarism is doomed to founder on the rocks of the prejudices and the whims of an easily excitable and unsophisticated mob.  It is a vision which combines hatred of the lower classes with a drooling sycophancy toward the elite.  As tragedy goes, it is more Vanity Fair then Shakespeare.

Don’t buy into it.