Sick Of Covid - Let's Look At Kamala Devi For A Minute...,

alicefromqueens |  Harris opposed legalization as recently as 2014, in her re-election campaign for attorney general of California, even as her Republican opponent supported it. Incidentally, the answer Harris gave a local reporter on the subject that year was the first time her laugh got her in real trouble. Hold onto that for bar trivia-night.

TO BE CLEAR: I HAVE NO PROBLEM with Kamala’s personality type as such. But before she dropped out of the primaries, it amazed me that no one else found her fish-out-of-waterness worth remarking on. Surely it’s not problematic to discuss frankly whether any politician as feminine as Kamala can win a presidential election.

The nearest thing to a high-profile criticism of Harris’s personality was delivered unwittingly in The Washington Post. In an Opinion piece titled, “Vogue got too familiar, too fast,” the paper’s former fashion critic, Robin Givhan, blamed Vogue for making Harris look relatable: “The cover did not give Kamala D. Harris due respect. It was overly familiar. It was a cover image that, in effect, called Harris by her first name without invitation.”

Givhan goes on to suggest that the cover reflected solely the preferences of Vogue’s editor and Hollywood-villain Anna Wintour, and that Wintour’s cluelessness exemplified Vogue’s ongoing problems with race. Astonishingly, this all came after Givhan acknowledged, “Harris styled herself. She chose her ensembles.” 

No one inflicts relatability on Kamala, and no one needs an invite to call her by one name. There’s an invitation in every smile and word from her mouth. Whether Americans want such an invitation from their president is a different question, one we’ll be returning to in this series

Look No Further Than The Generalized Coverup Of The Flint Water Crisis....,

usefulidiots |  The press is a crucial part of democracy, checking on the government and alerting the public to what’s going on. The water supply has been poisoned––that's the kind of thing we depend on the fourth estate to report about.

But where have they been? The national press was universally late in reporting on the Flint Water crisis, and quickly dropped the corruption, greed, and mismanagement that poisoned Flint's water and people. But the story continues, though you'd never know it from mainstream media.  So is the crisis over?

Jordan Chariton and Jenn Dize of Status Coup say no. In their recent article, they uncover mounds of corruption, finding the government guilty of a huge coverup with cleared text messages, piles of thrown away phones, and then-Governor Rick Snyder telling his staff: “Don’t put anything in writing because emails are cannons for our enemies.”

They lay out a real case against Snyder for misconduct, willful neglect of duty, and even involuntary manslaughter. But today, he’s facing penalties equivalent to a parking ticket and a potential of up to one year in prison. And no one else is talking about it.

We Don't Even Need To Pretend Google Had To Show Obama His Location, Search, Or Browsing Histories

politico |  Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when antitrust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the competition — and critics say, blinked. 

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

The documents also add to doubts about whether Washington is any more capable today of reining in the tech industry’s titans, despite efforts by a new generation of antitrust enforcers to turn up the heat on Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — all of which now rank among the United States’ wealthiest companies. That will be a crucial test awaiting President Joe Biden’s regulators, including the outspoken Silicon Valley critic he plans to nominate to an open slot on the FTC’s five-person board.

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

 

 

The President Can Use Lethal Force On American Citizens On American Soil

consortiumnews |  “the final element of the plan concerns insurgency leadership” before going on to criticize Trump’s unwillingness to accept his own defeat.

It’s that last — unspoken — part of Grenier’s plan that I believe is so dangerous and un-American.  What he means when he warns that we may be headed into a period of political violence “not seen since Reconstruction” is that the government needs to start cracking heads. 

In a subsequent interview with NPR, Grenier opened by saying that he’s not predicting that the U.S. is going to go the way of Iraq or Afghanistan.  But that’s exactly what he’s implying.  And it’s what he implied in his Times op-ed.

After all, what does a CIA-style counterinsurgency campaign look like?  Just use Iraq and Afghanistan as a model.  What it looks like is teams of military or paramilitary forces going around, blowing the doors off of houses, and killing everybody inside — killing them before they can commit a crime against the United States.

It also means a robust drone program.  Remember Anwar al-Awlaki?  The Obama administration accused him of being a major recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen.  They executed him by drone, and then a week later they executed his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew.  The problem, though, is that the Awlakis were all American citizens.  They had Constitutional rights, including the right to face their accusers in a court of law and a right to a trial by jury.  The Awlakis had never been charged with a crime.  The government just decided to murder them without due process.

Recall also former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who, in response to a question from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2013, said that the president had a constitutional right to use lethal force against American citizens on American soil, even if those Americans had never been convicted of a crime.

That is what Grenier is recommending.  He’s supposed to be one of the “moderates,” one of those Americans who is so concerned about America’s future and wants to offer a solution to ensure it.  His recommendation is that we should be prepared to kill Americans whose politics we disagree with.  All we need to do is declare that they’re “extremists” or “insurgents.”

 

The Democratic Party Stands For Nothing And Fights For Nothing

mintpressnews |   Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.

The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders.

An Analysis Of TheAnalysis On Democrats And Their Money Masters

nakedcapitalism |  I hate to have to make a couple of qualifying remarks about an otherwise excellent discussion of how the Democrats have made promises to too many constituencies, particularly Big Finance and top professionals, and will soon go through elaborate exercises to try to pretend that they aren’t betraying some interests to deliver to others.

I’ve mentioned before that Paul Jay has developed a misguided obsession with BlackRock, when it is far from the most powerful financial firm. Goldman, with its astonishing alumni penetration of top level government positions in the US and abroad (Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, William Dudley and Neel Kashkari as as central bankers; Bob Rubin, Hank Paulson, and Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretaries; Gary Gensler, admittedly a bit of a turncoat, as head of the CFTC; John Corzine and Phil Muphy as New Jersey governors; I’m sure I missed plenty). The idea that a former BlackRock official Brian Deese becoming head of the National Economic Council confers some sort of outsized influence is quite a stretch…particularly since former Goldman President and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cheld the same post in Trump’s administration.

Similarly, any of the top private equity firms has vastly more power than BlackRock. Even though BlackRock manages more money, it has an arms-length, virtually nil influence relationship with the companies whose shares are in its funds.

By contrast KKR stated in one of its annual reports in the mid-2000 that it would be the fifth biggest employer in the US through its portfolio companies. Given that private equity has only grown as a share of global equity since then, it’s extremely likely that Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR each through their portfolio companies are among the top ten employers in the US.

All of these private equity firms hire and fire the executives of their portfolio companies and dictate which law and accounting firms they use; they could reach in and fire any employee if they chose to (say they found offensive remarks on Facebook or Twitter). Private equity collectively is the biggest source of fees to Wall Street (their rich merger and acquisition and financing fees dwarf the skimpy stock and bond trading fees a BlackRock pays¹), the biggest source of fees to white shoe law firms, and I am told, since the early 2000s, also pay more than half the fees of top consultants McKinsey, Bain, and BCG

By contrast, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has extremely little direct influence over any of the public or late-stage VC companies in which BlackRock invests. Nearly all shares are held in index funds, which means BlackRock’s overriding concern is index replication at the lowest possible cost. It can’t buy or sell shares to make a point. BlackRock does not hold large enough stakes to appoint directors, let alone hire and fire executives or employees.

And BlackRock’s promotion of ESG, as in environmental, social and governance investing? BlackRock is very late to that party. CalPERS and CalSTRS were true believers long ago; CalPERS famously dumped tobacco stocks at the worst possible time, right before the Federal-state settlement. CalSTRS pressured Cerberus to dump its holdings in gun maker Remington in 2015. A party with inside knowledge of BlackRock told me that the big reason BlackRock suddenly became a vocal advocate was that it hoped to win the mandate to take over CalPERS private equity portfolio. Recall that Bloomberg publicized in late 2017 that that was CalPERS’ plan, despite BlackRock’s lack of meaningful private equity experience. BlackRock was indeed on a short list of firms invited to propose over that Christmas/New Years holiday. BlackRock staring making a full throated defense of ESG investing, which is near and dear to the board’s heart, in early 2018, with CalPERS Chief Investment Officer Ted Eliopoulos at Larry Fink’s side during the press conference. The effort to hand off CalPERS’ portfolio to an outside party and have less control and pay even more fees fell apart under press scrutiny, led by this website.

Another smaller sour note was Mark Blyth depicting Republicans as representing extractive, old economy industries. Top expert on political money in America, Tom Ferguson, says that’s simplistic. While oil and fracking company donations are strongly Republican, of the four biggest private equity firms, the heads of three (KKR, Blackstone, and Carlyle) are established heavyweight Republican donors. Industry insiders report that private equity firms press portfolio company executives to donate in line with parent company preferences. Apollo, as more of a real estate firm, gives to both parties, as do most developers, since they always need friends in office. The arms industry skews Republican. The health care industry gives heavily to both parties.

Barack Obama: Best Asset Ever....,

glenngreenwald  |  Just months before the CIA heralded Obama’s unique ability to sell the war and ensure its continuation, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded Obama its highest honor for what it called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” adding: “for 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.”

Yet the CIA, as it so often does, knew the hidden truth: that Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.

Many have questioned why the CIA would be so vehemently opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy, and then his presidency. Though he did question many of their most prized pieties — from regime change wars such as in Syria to the ongoing viability of NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union — and did harshly criticize their intelligence failures (which is what prompted Chuck Schumer’s pre-inauguration warning that they would exact revenge on him for doing so), it’s not as if Trump were some sort of peacenik President. He made good on his campaign promise to escalate bombing campaigns in the name of fighting terrorism with fewer constraints than before.

But one major reason for the contempt harbored for Trump among security state operatives was his inability and unwillingness to prettify barbaric U.S. actions and to pretend that the U.S. is something other than it is. Recall the fury and rage provoked in 2017 when, in response to a question by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly about Putin’s use of violence against journalists and others, Trump responded: "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"

The rage from that comment was obviously not driven by any doubts about the truth of Trump’s statement. No sentient person would recognize it as anything other than true. The anger was due to the fact that presidents are not supposed to tell the truth about the U.S. and what it does in the world (just as Presidents are supposed to pretend they hate despots even as they support them in every conceivable way). As the 2010 CIA memo reflects, useful presidents are those, like Obama, skilled at deceiving the world and propagandizing them to view U.S. aggression as benign, so as to allow even democratically elected leaders to act in contradiction to public opinion when doing so suits U.S. interests. 

The DNC Is A Hoe'lie Owned Proxy For K-Street - AT ALL LEVELS!!!

realsludge  |  Democrats are looking ahead to the second nominating ballot at the July Democratic National Convention, when superdelegates will be allowed to cast votes if no presidential candidate receives a majority of pledged delegates on the first ballot.

Superdelegates include 75 at-large DNC members, often prominent party figures who are put forward as a slate by DNC Chair Tom Perez and do not directly represent a state or other region. Among the 447 total voting DNC members, who make up the majority of 771 superdelegates, there are scores of corporate lobbyists and consultants—including many of the 75 at-large DNC members, who were not individually elected.

These corporate lobbyists will be allowed to vote on the second ballot under the compromise that emerged from the Unity Reform Commission meeting in 2017. The Unity Reform Commission’s proposed package of reforms was later passed by the Rules and Bylaws Committee and adopted as the 2020 convention rules in a rushed voice vote of full DNC members at the summer 2018 national party meeting.

In October 2017, Perez purged DNC committees of several members who had supported either his rival candidate for chair, then-Rep. Keith Ellison, or Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid. In their place, Perez appointed several handpicked corporate lobbyists to the committees that govern the party’s operating rules, budget, convention delegates, and other matters.

Sludge reviewed a DNC committee membership list from September 2019 and found that nearly two-thirds of the members of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee have backgrounds in corporate influence and legal defense that present possible conflicts of interest for their work on the party rules. Some individuals may not currently hold the same committee assignments, but all are current DNC members. Committee membership details are not made publicly available by the DNC.

The 32-member DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee contains the following 20 individuals: a health insurance board member co-chair, three surrogates for presidential campaigns (two for Bloomberg, one for Biden), four current corporate lobbyists, two former corporate lobbyists, six corporate consultants, and four corporate lawyers.

This article, the second in a series on DNC committees, looks at the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which is responsible for the Charter of the Democratic Party, for which it “shall receive and consider all recommendations for adoption and amendments.”

Here are the rules-making DNC members—many of them unelected—whose voting power raises ethics questions, as the Rules and Bylaws Committee continues to block proposed changes for stronger conflict of interest policies.

Tom Perez Was Installed As DNC Chair To Maintain K-Street's Chokehold On The DNC

theintercept |  Members of the Democratic National Committee will meet on Saturday to choose their new chair, replacing the disgraced interim chair Donna Brazile, who replaced the disgraced five-year chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Even though the outcome is extremely unlikely to change the (failed) fundamentals of the party, the race has become something of an impassioned proxy war replicating the 2016 primary fight: between the Clinton/Obama establishment wing (which largely backs Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who vehemently supported Clinton) and the insurgent Sanders wing (which backs Keith Ellison, the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Congress, who was an early Sanders supporter).

The New Republic’s Clio Chang has a great, detailed analysis of the contest. She asks the key question about Perez’s candidacy that has long hovered and yet has never been answered. As Chang correctly notes, supporters of Perez insist, not unreasonably, that he is materially indistinguishable from Ellison in terms of ideology (despite his support for TPP, seemingly grounded in loyalty to Obama). This, she argues, is “why the case for Tom Perez makes no sense”: After all, “if Perez is like Ellison — in both his politics and ideology — why bother fielding him in the first place?”

The timeline here is critical. Ellison announced his candidacy on November 15, armed with endorsements that spanned the range of the party: Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Raúl Grijalva, and various unions on the left, along with establishment stalwarts such as Chuck Schumer, Amy Klobuchar, and Harry Reid. He looked to be the clear frontrunner.

But as Ellison’s momentum built, the Obama White House worked to recruit Perez to run against Ellison. They succeeded, and Perez announced his candidacy on December 15 — a full month after Ellison announced. Why did the White House work to recruit someone to sink Ellison? If Perez and Ellison are so ideologically indistinguishable, why was it so important to the Obama circle — and the Clinton circle — to find someone capable of preventing Ellison’s election? What’s the rationale? None has ever been provided.

I can’t recommend Chang’s analysis highly enough on one key aspect of what motivated the recruitment of Perez: to ensure that the Democratic establishment maintains its fatal grip on the party and, in particular, to prevent Sanders followers from having any say in the party’s direction and identity:

There is one real difference between the two: Ellison has captured the support of the left wing. … It appears that the underlying reason some Democrats prefer Perez over Ellison has nothing to do with ideology, but rather his loyalty to the Obama wing. As the head of the DNC, Perez would allow that wing to retain more control, even if Obama-ites are loath to admit it. …

And it’s not just Obama- and Clinton-ites that could see some power slip away with an Ellison-headed DNC. Paid DNC consultants also have a vested interest in maintaining the DNC status quo. Nomiki Konst, who has extensively covered the nuts and bolts of the DNC race, asked Perez how he felt about conflicts of interest within the committee — specifically, DNC members who also have contracts with the committee. Perez dodged the issue, advocating for a “big tent.” In contrast, in a forum last month, Ellison firmly stated, “We are battling the consultant-ocracy.”

Trickle-Up Fundraising And Social Media Savvy Enabled Obama's Takeover Of The Democrat Party

theintercept  |  It didn’t have to be this way. Obama’s campaign operation, Obama for America, took small-dollar giving to never-before-seen heights and opened up the possibility of a transformation of politics. But he quickly decided to marginalize his group after the 2008 election. He renamed it Organizing for America, but ordered it to do very little organizing, worried that if grassroots activists attacked Blue Dog Democrats, they would bolt from the president and lose in 2010. Then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously told activists such a strategy was “fucking retarded.” (Most lost anyway in 2010, as the tea party wave swept them out.)

OFA became Obama’s primary campaign apparatus, supplanting the DNC, which became an afterthought handed to Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who later became Clinton’s running mate. After the 2010 wave, Obama put Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on top of the moribund institution, a clear signal that he was uninterested in it as a central component of the party. Obama’s poor relationship with Wasserman Schultz was widely known and written about, but he left her in the job for six years regardless.

Raising money for a bland outfit like the DNC isn’t easy in the best of times, but with Obama offering little to no help, and clinging to his invaluable email list, Wasserman Schultz was set up to fail, even if she would have done so on her own.

Obama instead reasoned that he could become the party, his dynamic and charismatic personality carrying it at the national level.

Obama was re-elected, but the party itself went on a historic losing spree, ultimately shedding nearly 1,000 seats across the country. Even after Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, and the DNC continued spending money on consultants at an eye-popping rate, Obama decided not to make a leadership change. Instead, he left it saddled with debt — debt the Clinton campaign would later agree to pay off in exchange for control.

Obama finally became interested in the party after the 2016 loss. His final gift to the party apparatus was Tom Perez, his labor secretary, who he recruited to stop Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., from winning the race for DNC chair. Obama and Perez won. DNC funding has been anemic, and it recently had to add to its roughly $3 million in debt.

Obama's The Poster Child And His Cousin Warren Buffet's The Money Behind Black Lives Matter

tabletmag  |  Tides was founded in 1976 by Drummond Pike, a California real estate investor who named the entity after a Bay Area bookstore popular among left-leaning activists. From the beginning, according to their own documents, Tides was designed unlike most other nonprofit institutions. Rather than building up or spending down an endowment, it sought to become more like a sophisticated piece of software—a financial instrument that would allow wealthy individuals and donors to contribute to the causes of their choosing with more anonymity than is generally allowed by the laws governing ordinary nonprofits.

Recently, after Pike stepped away, the Tides network has taken on a distinctly political role, whose guiding star appears to be Barack Obama. The secretary of the Tides board is Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration; board member Cheryl Alston was appointed by Obama to the advisory committee of the federal pension program. Peter Buttenwieser, the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune who passed away in 2018, financed a fund in his own name which is administered and distributed entirely by the Tides Foundation. A “major behind-the-scenes supporter of Democratic candidates,” Buttenwieser was one of President Obama’s earliest high profile backers, helping the then-senator organize his bid for the White House.

Moreover, Atlantic Philanthropies, a nonprofit created by billionaire retailer Chuck Feeney in the 1980s, has directed more than $42 million in grants through the Tides network since 2000. Based in Bermuda, Atlantic Philanthropies was able to participate in political lobbying efforts in ways that continental United States nonprofits cannot. Atlantic became increasingly aggressive under the Obama administration. As Gara LaMarche, Atlantic’s president, said in one think tank address, when Obama was elected “we saw opportunities to assist our grantees in moving forward more rapidly and broadly in a number of areas central to our mission.” In return, Atlantic dispensed $27 million to help push Obamacare through Congress. At the ceremony to sign Obamacare into law, LaMarche stood beside President Obama in the East Room of the White House.

In any case, what’s clear is that there is now a sophisticated and complex structure underneath what many assume to be an organic and spontaneous social movement, one with deep pockets and ambitious goals. “After over fourteen years of learning and over 700 million dollars invested ... the collapse we have been expecting is surely underway,” reads the NoVo Foundation’s website. Right now there’s only this one statement on the site, which is under construction as noted: “Working on solutions now so old patterns of power can’t, once again, re-form to rebuild and continue to repress.”

Was Trump Collateral Roadkill In A Trilateral Battle For Control Of The DNC?

tomluongo  |  Back during the early days of the Democratic primaries I told you that the real story behind the scenes was a three-sided civil war for control of the DNC.

Not quite an equilateral triangle, the two major factions were the Clintons and the Obamas with the Soros-backed squad pushing them both farther and farther left, through the fake Progressivism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

And with the ascension of Joe Biden as the candidate, triumphing over the inept Hillary-backed challenge from Mini Mike Bloomberg, it was clear that the Obamas won the internal battle.

Hillary eventually bent the knee and endorsed Biden along with everyone else.

After her failure to beat Trump in 2016 it became clear that Obama was the choice by The Davos Crowd to deliver the U.S. into their hands weak, divided, literally on fire and close to irretrievably insane.

In the words of Bush the Lesser, “Mission Accomplished.”

But what’s been sticking in the back of my mind for months was Trump’s tweet from May: 

OBAMAGATE! pic.twitter.com/pFbb6hgDhF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

That was the rallying cry from him to repurpose his base’s energy towards the real villain in the RussiaGate story, Obama.

And what’s really clear now with the latest set of releases — specifically Former CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes on a CIA memo — that Obama directed his people to point all the fingers at Hillary for RussiaGate’s worst abuses while keeping Obama neatly above it all.

 

Do Politicians Causing This Economic Human Catastrophe Believe They Won't Be Held Accountable?

tribunemag  |  All over the world, Covid-19 is putting jobs and incomes under threat. As UNCTAD’s most recent Trade and Development report outlined, more than 500 million jobs across the globe are at risk during the crisis, and at least 100 million won’t be coming back. And this is only half the story. Much of the world’s population never had formal employment to begin with; for them, the future looks particularly bleak. Between 90 to 120 million people are likely to be pushed into extreme poverty by the pandemic.

UNCTAD’s report points out that the dire predictions about the potential impact of the crisis are not preordained; what happens between now and the discovery of a vaccine, and the shape of the recovery after that, will be determined by policy decisions made by governments. In much of the rich world, jobs protection schemes of one kind or another seem to have limited the impact of the crisis on formal employment so far. The main outlier is the United States, which had no such centralised scheme. While statistical estimates aren’t all that reliable in the midst of a crisis like this, unemployment claims, which tend to understate the scale of the problem, hit one million in the US this August.

In the Global South, the picture is far bleaker. UNCTAD’s report points to precarious work conditions, high debt levels and pressure from international financial markets as the main constraints on Global South states seeking to respond to the crisis. The report claims that the Global South is facing a $2-3 trillion financing gap as a result of the pandemic. If this gap is not bridged, many of these states will simply be unable to implement the public health and employment support measures needed to tackle the crisis.

One of the most significant challenges for states in the Global South is the scale of the euphemistically termed ‘informal’ economy, which often employs the majority of the population. Street vendors, transport workers and waste collectors make up a significant proportion of the urban economies of the Global South, which have swelled substantially in recent years due, in part, to falling employment in agriculture. Providing targeted support for these workers is much harder than those in ‘formal’ employment – i.e. employment recognised by the state.

Yet these workers tend to be the ones who will require the most help. Many live on or near the poverty line, have few savings and large families. Informal workers are also disproportionately likely to live in informal housing, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation facilitate the spread of the virus. In fact, many of these workers may already have had the virus – recent research suggests that 80% cases of Covid-19 in Africa have been asymptomatic, and the mortality rate for Covid-19 on the continent is much lower, meaning the virus may have swept through the population almost unnoticed. This is substantially due to Africa’s youthful population and lower life expectancy.

Even if the virus may prove less deadly among younger populations in the Global South, the economic impact of the looming global economic crisis will be severe. Indeed, the entirely avoidable economic consequences of Covid-19 may end up killing more people than the virus itself.

Will Durham Investigation "Strike The Root" And Go Back To The Clinton Foundation?

washingtonexaminer |   U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the handling of the FBI’s investigation of possible bribery and pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation as part of his broader inquiry of the Trump-Russia investigators, according to a new report.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Durham “has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation … into allegations of political corruption” at the Clinton Foundation, founded by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Durham was picked by Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation, and the outlet said that “Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations.” The article claimed that “it was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation."

Durham’s office declined the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. The Clinton Foundation told the New York Times that it “has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false.”

Barr has denied that he is being pressured by President Trump in his handling of Durham’s inquiry and claimed that any actions taken won't affect the 2020 election. House and Senate Democrats have called for the Justice Department's independent watchdog to investigate Durham’s work.

After Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 to look into the Russia matter, Republicans called for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate Clinton-related controversies. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked U.S. Attorney John Huber of Utah in November 2017 to investigate several issues, including the FBI's corruption investigation into the 2010 Uranium One deal and allegations that Clinton orchestrated a "quid pro quo." The sale of Uranium One, a Canada-based company with U.S. mine holdings, to Russian state-owned Rosatom was the focus of scrutiny from Republicans who claimed Clinton may have helped coax the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States not to block the deal and that the Clinton Foundation may have stood to benefit.

Barr told CBS’s Jan Crawford in May 2019 that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Durham had taken over much of Huber’s inquiry. Barr said that “the other issues [Huber has] been working on relate to Hillary Clinton” are "winding down and hopefully we'll be in a position to bring those to fruition.” Crawford asked Barr if “now Durham is going to pick up this” Huber inquiry, and Barr said, “Yes, right.” Huber's inquiry did not lead to any "known impacts," according to a Washington Post report in January. Fox News reported Thursday that "parts of what Huber was investigating in 2017 — involving the Clinton Foundation — have been incorporated in Durham’s investigation."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said in August that “there was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016.” Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley told Fox News in April 2019 that “if the Democrats want to be consistent, they'll have to treat Clinton, Uranium One, and Russia-related investigations the same.”

Will The October Surprise Encompass John Brennan?

 realclearinvestigations |  Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.

The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”

The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

 

Get Sara Carter A Little Cosmetic Dentistry And Jeanine Piro's Timeslot On Fox

saracarter |  Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham hinted more than a week ago that more bombshell information regarding the FBI’s handling of its probe into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia was about to be public. He was right because it was Graham’s committee that discovered the information., 

In a bombshell letter released a letter Thursday night by Graham’s committee from Justice Department Attorney General William Barr revealed a declassified summary from the bureau indicating that former British spy Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source in his debunked dossier was believed to be a Russian spy. Not only was the sub source believed to be a spy but the FBI knew about it and had conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the individual. 

“In light of this newly declassified information, I will be sending the FISA Court the information provided to inform them how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information regarding the Carter Page warrant application was in 2016 and 2017,” said Graham. “A small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court.  I do not believe they represent the overwhelming majority of patriotic men and women who work at the Department of Justice and FBI.”

One of those individuals being investigated by Connecticut Prosecutor John Durham is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for lying to the Inspector General on multiple occasions. He is now in Durham’s crosshairs, along with multiple other former senior FBI officials that were involved in the investigation, according to a source with direct knowledge. 

McCabe, along with other FBI officials, withheld that information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as some of the FBI special agents investigating Trump’s campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, according to the source.

“McCabe and others were suppressing information, misrepresenting it or lying about the information that they had in order to purposefully undermine the Trump candidacy and that turned into the predication for undermining the Trump presidency,” said a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Biden-DNC Level Of Political Croney Parasitism Makes Vulture Capitalism Seem Respectable

dailywire |  A bombshell report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) and the Committee on Finance makes a series of damning new allegations against Hunter Biden, the son of Democrat presidential nominee.

The investigation launched after Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) publicly raised conflict-of-interest concerns about the sale of a U.S. company to a Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden a month before Congress was notified about a whistleblower complaint that was the catalyst for Democrats’ impeachment of President Donald Trump. The Senate’s investigation relied on records from the U.S. government, Democrat lobbying groups, and interviews of numerous current and former officials.

The report also stated that the investigation found that the Obama administration “knew that Hunter Biden’s position on Burisma’s board was problematic and did interfere in the efficient execution of policy with respect to Ukraine.”

Hunter Biden, Burisma and Corruption: The Impact On U.S. Government Policy And Related Concerns

FBI Agent Who Investigated Anthony Weiner's Laptop Told To Erase His Own Computer

thepoliticalinsider |  FBI agent John Robertson, the man who found Hillary Clinton’s emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, claims he was advised by bosses to erase his own computer.

Former FBI Director James Comey, you may recall, announced days before the 2016 presidential election that he had “learned of the existence” of the emails on Weiner’s laptop.

Weiner is the disgraced husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Robertson alleges that the manner in which his higher-ups in the FBI handled the case was “not ethically or morally right.”

His startling claims are made in a book titled, “October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election,” an excerpt of which has been published by the Washington Post.

Robertson alleges that the FBI did nothing for a month after discovering Clinton’s emails on the Anthony Weiner laptop.

It was only after he spoke with the U.S. Attorney’s office overseeing the case, he claims, that the agency took action.

“He had told his bosses about the Clinton emails weeks ago,” the book contends. “Nothing had happened.”

“Or rather, the only thing that had happened was his boss had instructed Robertson to erase his computer work station.”

This, according to the Post report, was to “ensure there was no classified material on it,” but also would eliminate any trail of his actions taken during the investigation.

As Goes Blackness: There Is No Fixing The Past To Escape The Present

Counterpunch  |  It is September 2020. Americans are focused on an election between an Orange Fascist criminal and an old-school right-wing Democrat war criminal. Where Donald Trump projects chaos and disorder, Biden projects stability, order, and a return to normalcy. If Trump is the virus, then surely Biden is the cure.

It is September 2020. Libya prepares to enter its eighth year of civil war. Slave markets like the one in Bani Walid are as common as youth literacy centers were in Gaddafi’s Libya. Armed gangs and militias wield power even in areas nominally under government control. A warlord regroups in the East as he looks to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates for support.

It is September 2020 and the US-NATO war on Libya has faded to a distant memory as other issues like Black Lives Matter and police murder of Black youth have captured the public imagination and discourse.

But these issues are, in fact, united by the bond of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. The Libya once known as the “Jewel of Africa,” a country that provided refuge for many sub-Saharan African migrant workers while maintaining independence from the US and the former colonial powers of Europe, is no more. In its place is a failed state that now reflects the kind of vicious anti-Black racism forcefully suppressed by the Gaddafi government.

Libya as the global exemplar of the exploitation and disposability of the black body.

Squint a little and you can see President Joe Biden getting the old band back together. Hillary Clinton welcomed into the Oval Office as an influential voice, someone to give words to the demented thoughts of the living corpse serving as Commander-in-Chief. Derek Chollet and Ben Rhodes laughing together as they buy another round at their favorite DC hangout, toasting to the re-establishment of order in Washington. Barack Obama as the éminence grise behind the political resurgence of the liberal-conservative dominant structure.

But in Libya, there is no going back, no fixing the past to escape the present.

Perhaps the same might be true of the United States.

Jessica Krug Performed "Blackness", Just Not As Well Or As Usefully As Obama Or Kamala...,

jacobinmag |  Simply put, Jessica Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature. But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in liberal academic circles.

I don’t know George Washington University history professor Jessica Krug. I have no special insights into either her motives or personal struggles, nor do I have any reason to feel personally betrayed by the recent revelations that she had been passing for black for many years.

But while the court of public opinion has already found her guilty of at least one, perpetual count of “cultural appropriation,” in my view this conclusion misses the mark. To be clear, if I did not find “Jess La Bombalera” offensive, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this essay. Still, if one considers, first, that culture — the folk’s shared sensibilities informed by common experiences — exists, on some level, to be appropriated, second, the variety of black experiences precludes the existence of a singular black culture, and third, the implications for mass culture of thirty-years of mainstream hip hop, then calling Krug’s performance “appropriation of black culture” only compounds the problem Krug personifies.

If Krug is not guilty of appropriating “black culture,” she is guilty of attempting to establish her bona fides as a scholar of black people through a persona that both pandered to and reinforced commonplace stereotypes about black and brown people. Simply put, Krug was a minstrel act, a racist caricature.

But while Krug’s persona was certainly offensive, what’s far more offensive is that there is a demand for this kind of performance in some liberal academic circles.

Because I’ve lived most of my life either on the near periphery or within academia, I’ve had nearly four decades of experience with the creepy essentialist language of “racial authenticity” that lives and thrives in more than one corner of putatively liberal academia. As a result, I learned a long time ago that some white liberals expect black and brown people to “perform” in ways that comport with their well-meaning, usually underclass-informed, and fundamentally racist expectations of black people.