Corporatist Conformity Was Normative For Big Social Media To Begin With...,

Counterpunch |  The depressing fact of the matter is, in our brave new Internet-dominated world, corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook (not to mention Amazon), are, for elitist wankers like me, in the immortal words of Colonel Kurz, “either friends or they are truly enemies to be feared.” If you are in the elitist wanker business, regardless of whether you’re Jonathan Franzen, Garth Risk Hallberg, Margaret Atwood, or some “mid-list” or “emerging” author, there is no getting around these corporations. So it’s kind of foolish, professionally speaking, to write a bunch of essays that will piss them off, and then publish these essays in CounterPunch. Literary agents advise against this. Other elitist literary wankers, once they discover what you’ve been doing, will avoid you like the bubonic plague. Although it’s perfectly fine to write books and movies about fictional evil corporations, writing about how real corporations are using their power to mold societies into self-policing virtual prisons of politically-correct, authoritarian consumers is … well, it’s something that is just not done in professional elitist wanker circles.

Normally, all this goes without saying, as these days most elitist wankers are trained how to write, and read, and think, in MFA conformity factories, where they screen out any unstable weirdos with unhealthy interests in political matters. This is to avoid embarrassing episodes like Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize lecture (which, if you haven’t read it, you probably should), and is why so much of contemporary literature is so well-behaved and instantly forgettable. This institutionalized screening system is also why the majority of journalists employed by mainstream media outlets understand, without having to be told, what they are, and are not, allowed to report. Chomsky explains how this system operates in What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream. It isn’t a question of censorship … the system operates on rewards and punishments, financial and emotional coercion, and subtler forms of intimidation. Making examples of non-cooperators is a particularly effective tactic. Ask any one of the countless women whose careers have been destroyed by Harvey Weinstein, or anyone who’s been to graduate school, or worked at a major corporation.

Trump Overcame Significant Oppositional Social Media Collusion

Breitbart |  Twitter “hid” nearly 50 percent of tweets bearing the hashtag #DNCLeak along with a quarter of those with #PodestaEmails during the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to new testimony from Twitter’s general counsel.

On Oct. 31, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism heard testimony from Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett in its investigation of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Edgett said that Twitter systems concealed substantial numbers of tweets relating to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee as well as from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, despite the fact that it knew that only a tiny percentage of these could have even “potential links to Russia.”

“We found that slightly under 4% of Tweets containing #PodestaEmails came from accounts with potential links to Russia,” Edgett said in his written testimony, whereas of tweets bearing the #DNCLeak, “roughly 2% were from potentially Russian-linked accounts,” he said.

Despite the low correlation between those hashtags and possible Russian involvement, Twitter hid 48 percent of tweets with the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets with #PodestaEmails, Edgett said.

Bish Bettah Have My Money!!! Is This A #MeToo Dindu Defection?

politico |  Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested.

I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

Intersectional Allies Absotively Cannot Hold Up Their End In The Coming Civil War...,

ourfiniteworld |  Most of us are familiar with the Politically Correct (PC) World View. William Deresiewicz describes the view, which he calls the “religion of success,” as follows:

There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.

There are other beliefs that go with this religion of success:

• Wind and solar will save us.
• Electric cars will make transportation possible indefinitely.
• Our world leaders are all powerful.
• Science has all of the answers.

To me, this story is pretty much equivalent to the article, “Earth Is Flat and Infinite, According to Paid Experts,” by Chris Hume in Funny Times. While the story is popular, it is just plain silly.

In this post, I explain why many popular understandings are just plain wrong. I cover several controversial topics, including environmentalism, peer-reviewed literature, and climate change models. This post pretty much excludes religion. It was added for people who find it hard to believe that a scientific article could also touch upon religion. If you want the complete discussion, as the post was originally written, please see this post. 

Myth 1: If there is a problem with the lack of any resource, including oil, it will manifest itself with high prices.

As we reach limits of oil or any finite resource, the problem we encounter is an allocation problem. 

As long as the quantity of resources we can extract from the ground keeps rising faster than population, there is no problem with limits. The tiny wedge that each person might get from these growing resources represents more of that resource, on average. Citizens can reasonably expect that future pension promises will be paid from the growing resources. They can also expect that, in the future, the shares of stock and the bonds that they own can be redeemed for actual goods and services.

If the quantity of resources starts to shrink, the problem we have is almost a “musical chairs” type of problem.

In each round of a musical chairs game, one chair is removed from the circle. The players in the game must walk around the outside of the circle. When the music stops, all of the players scramble for the remaining chairs. Someone gets left out.

The players in today’s economic system include

• High paid (or elite) workers
• Low paid (or non-elite) workers
• Businesses
• Governments
• Owners of assets (such as stocks, bonds, land, buildings) who want to sell them and exchange them for today’s goods and services

If there is a shortage of a resource, the standard belief is that prices will rise and either more of the resource will be found, or substitution will take place. Substitution only works in some cases: it is hard to think of a substitute for fresh water. It is often possible to substitute one energy product for another. Overall, however, there is no substitute for energy. If we want to heat a substance to produce a chemical reaction, we need energy. If we want to move an object from place to place, we need energy. If we want to desalinate water to produce more fresh water, this also takes energy.

The world economy is a self-organized networked system. The networked system includes businesses, governments, and workers, plus many types of energy, including human energy. Workers play a double role because they are also consumers. The way goods and services are allocated is determined by “market forces.” In fact, the way these market forces act is determined by the laws of physics. These market forces determine which of the players will get squeezed out if there is not enough to go around.

Non-elite workers play a pivotal role in this system because their number is so large. These people are the chief customers for goods, such as homes, food, clothing, and transportation services. They also play a major role in paying taxes, and in receiving government services.

History says that if there are not enough resources to go around, we can expect increasing wage and wealth disparity. This happens because increased use of technology and more specialization are workarounds for many kinds of problems. As an economy increasingly relies on technology, the owners and managers of the technology start receiving higher wages, leaving less for the workers without special skills. The owners and managers also tend to receive income from other sources, such as interest, dividends, capital gains, and rents.

Do You See Yet - How Political Dissidence Is Dealt With As Treason?

countercurrents |  The freedom to publish and speak, and protection from vigilante justice are two examples of what actor Bill felt would most likely fall under an appalling Reagan presidency, as they had in very dramatic fashion under President Wilson. He also underscored the fragility of voting results, emphasizing that “unacceptable results” might not be honored. That’s the sort of thing the U.S. has been doing — not honoring election results — around the world for a very long time, its “Exceptional Good Guy” (carefully honed democratic) image notwithstanding.

Adam Hochschild recently recorded something that came down on that score during Wilson’s tenure:

“When… in 1918 and again in a special election the next year, Wisconsin voters elected a Socialist to Congress, and a fairly moderate one at that, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 330 to 6, simply refused to seat him. The same thing happened to five members of the party elected to the New York state legislature.”

Third parties in the U.S.  don’t tell their members that if they run a candidate for a major office there’s the strong possibility that electoral fraud will kick in if the candidate wins and is seriously offensive to the powers that be, the two major parties and those they really represent for the most part. Which is not the people, of course, in an oligarchy. Or is it a plutocracy? It should be discussed. In schools. Instead of the ideal democratic checks and balances being given more time than they deserve in the classroom, options for dealing with our macabre momentum could be the subject of spot on, useful exchanges.

But third parties themselves have an obligation to do this. To really get down with their members respecting why their major candidates don’t have a shot in hell at taking office even if they win. Again, not just in the context of electoral fraud, but because newspapers and other media outlets — just as they did during Wilson’s wartime antics — are likely to be supportive of anti-democratic actions which keep radicals out of office. Whatever form they take.

Managing The Dangerous Classes - Our Aggressive Domestic War On The Poor

truthdig  |  None of the reforms, increased training, diversity programs, community outreach and gimmicks such as body cameras have blunted America’s deadly police assault, especially against poor people of color. Police forces in the United States - which, according to The Washington Post, have fatally shot 782 people this year - are unaccountable, militarized monstrosities that spread fear and terror in poor communities.

By comparison, police in England and Wales killed 62 people in the 27 years between the start of 1990 and the end of 2016.

Police officers have become rogue predators in impoverished communities. Under U.S. forfeiture laws, police indiscriminately seize money, real estate, automobiles and other assets. In many cities, traffic, parking and other fines are little more than legalized extortion that funds local government and turns jails into debtor prisons.

Because of a failed court system, millions of young men and women are railroaded into prison, many for nonviolent offenses. SWAT teams with military weapons burst into homes often under warrants for nonviolent offenses, sometimes shooting those inside. Trigger-happy cops pump multiple rounds into the backs of unarmed men and women and are rarely charged with murder. And for poor Americans, basic constitutional rights, including due process, were effectively abolished decades ago.

Jonathan Simon’s “Governing Through Crime” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” point out that what is defined and targeted as criminal activity by the police and the courts is largely determined by racial inequality and class, and most importantly by the potential of targeted groups to cause social and political unrest. Criminal policy, as sociologist Alex S. Vitale writes in his new book, “The End of Policing,” “is structured around the use of punishment to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ masquerading as a system of justice.”

The criminal justice system, at the same time, refuses to hold Wall Street banks, corporations and oligarchs accountable for crimes that have caused incalculable damage to the global economy and the ecosystem. None of the bankers who committed massive acts of fraud and were responsible for the financial collapse in 2008 have gone to prison even though their crimes resulted in widespread unemployment, millions of evictions and foreclosures, homelessness, bankruptcies and the looting of the U.S. Treasury to bail out financial speculators at taxpayer expense. We live in a two-tiered legal system, one in which poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes—which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by a New York City policeman in 2014—while crimes of appalling magnitude that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement.

The grotesque distortions of the judicial system and the aggressive war on the poor by the police will get worse under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There has been a rollback of President Barack Obama’s 2015 restrictions on the 1033 Program, a 1989 congressional action that allows the transfer of military weaponry, including grenade launchers, armored personnel carriers and .50-caliber machine guns, from the federal government to local police forces. Since 1997, the Department of Defense has turned over a staggering $5.1 billion in military hardware to police departments.

The Trump administration also is resurrecting private prisons in the federal prison system, accelerating the so-called war on drugs, stacking the courts with right-wing “law and order” judges and preaching the divisive politics of punishment and retribution. Police unions enthusiastically embrace these actions, seeing in them a return to the Wild West mentality that characterized the brutality of police departments in the 1960s and 1970s, when radicals, especially black radicals, were murdered with impunity at the hands of law enforcement. The Praetorian Guard of the elites, as in all totalitarian systems, will soon be beyond the reach of the law. As Vitale writes in his book, “Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory.”

The arguments—including the racist one about “superpredators“—used to justify the expansion of police power have no credibility, as the gun violence in south Chicago, abject failure of the war on drugs and vast expansion of the prison system over the last 40 years illustrate. The problem is not ultimately in policing techniques and procedures; it is in the increasing reliance on the police as a form of social control to buttress a system of corporate capitalism that has turned the working poor into modern-day serfs and abandoned whole segments of the society. Government no longer makes any attempt to ameliorate racial and economic inequality. Instead, it criminalizes poverty. It has turned the poor into one more cash crop for the rich.

Patsy In Hand, Mueller Scripting Collusion Same Way He Scripted Terror Attacks...,

Not a fan of the FBI.  Outside the anti-Russian neoconservative deep state cabal and its flunky political #MeToo Dindu Amen Chorus that wants to take down Trump by any means necessary, what moderately well-informed, self-respecting Black Man American citizen could be? A few examples of the numerous instances in which the FBI has shown itself to be the tainted spawn of what ran down JEdgar Hoover's leg should make the case.

 Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch....,

Counterpunch |  There’s more about Mueller that people should know, too, like the fact that he was the architect of an FBI entrapment program that lured simple-minded gangbangers into terrorist scams and then threw them in the slammer for the rest of their lives.  Check out this blurb from an article at Electronic Intifada titled “The FBI’s penchant for “manufacturing terrorists”:

Does the FBI Organize Almost All Terror Plots in the U.S.?

RT | The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.

If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.

Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes. 

Fuggedabout CoIntelpro - I Want To Know About That Ubiquitous Bee Dee or "Black Desk"

slate | The FBI has a lead. A prominent religious leader and community advocate is in contact with a suspected sleeper agent of foreign radicals. The attorney general is briefed and personally approves wiretaps of his home and offices. The man was born in the United States, the son of a popular cleric. Even though he’s an American citizen, he’s placed on a watchlist to be summarily detained in the event of a national emergency. Of all similar suspects, the head of FBI domestic intelligence thinks he’s “the most dangerous,” at least “from the standpoint of … national security.”

Is this a lone wolf in league with foreign sponsors of terrorism? No: This was the life of Martin Luther King Jr. That FBI assessment was dated Aug. 30, 1963—two days after King told our country that he had a dream.

Comes now Robert Mueller performing and up-to-the-minute cover of all the FBI's greatest hits on none other than the sitting preznit of the U.S. 

theburningplatform |   Baby George’s carelessness about the exact dates and sequences of utterly irrelevant and inconsequential events is enough to get him time in one of Uncle Sam’s hospitality suites:

Defendant PAPADOPOULOS acknowledged that the professor had told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the forms of ‘thousands of emails,’ but stated multiple times that he learned the information prior to joining the Campaign. In truth and fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS learned he would be an advisor to the campaign in early March, and met the professor on or about March 14, 2016……

That’s all she wrote. This damning nugget appears on page  2 of the “Statement of Offense” and the balance of the 14 pages are a complete farcical joke. Papadopoulos’ failure to get anywhere with the Russians in his digging for dirt on Hillary would make for a good episode for the rascals of South Park, but that’s about all.

Anyone not involved in the campaign to reverse the 2106 election and remove the Donald from office should be forgiven for splitting a gut laughing when reading this hideous and utterly bogus case against Baby George Papadopoulos.

Every single player in the cast of characters — mostly unnamed by the prosecutors but already sussed out by the press — identified by Team Mueller had no ability to influence anything, let alone 165 million voters in a US election bombarded with upwards of $20 billion worth of reported and unreported campaign expenses, and the mainstream media’s free nonstop campaign in behalf of Hillary.

Yet the document and Monday mornings announcement are also cause for alarm. The “crime”, if there was any, was the $10 million that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the Trump Dossier. Those scurrilous documents were actually purchased for real money on the back streets of Moscow and do cite actual, live Russian MFA sources, not allegedly “MFA-connected” people, who apparently weren’t.

But, of course, that’s not what’s coming down. The self-righteous Mueller who turned a blind eye to the massive stench of corruption coming out of the Uranium One deal in 2009/2010 when he was FBI director has only one mission in mind: To mug the American electorate for its audacity in electing Donald Trump President, thereby disturbing the equanimity of the Deep State’s untethered rule.

The truth of the matter, however, is nearly the opposite. Prosecuting anyone — one either side of the partisan aisle — for marginal and tangential contacts with a Russian government purportedly wishing to influence the US election amounts to the height of hypocrisy.

We're Witnessing the Implementation of Cass Sunstein's Vile Wet Dream...,

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

Categorical Violation of JFK's Limits of Official Concealment

countercurrents |  REFLECTIONS ON HOW LITTLE IS REVEALED BY JUST-RELEASED JFK ASSASSINATION DOCUMENTS AND JUST SOME OF THE MANY REASONS WHY THERE HAD TO BE A CONSPIRACY

In the recent, and supposedly last, release of files pertaining to the Kennedy assassination, most of the corporate press did not dwell on the fact that the most important and secret files were kept from the public, but, of course, that was actually the big story.

Now, I say that not knowing just what was not released or indeed whether the unreleased files even contain any serious information. You see, in the world of state secrets, secrecy is often used to hide embarrassing incompetence or even criminality. The unreleased documents may be just as uninformative as much of what has been released. So much of what has been released over recent decades is of little hard value to the case. We may legitimately ask, why was a lot of this junk ever declared national secrets to be squirreled away for a half century and more?

I can’t answer that question, but exactly the same question may be asked about so very many things and activities pertaining to the assassination. Of course, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is, and that fact alone screams that important things always were, and still are, hidden. Are the key facts really that unbelievably sensitive? Are they even known?

The question might even be asked whether the authorities themselves ever really understood accurately what happened. The FBI and CIA not even knowing what happened might itself be a worthy state secret, reflecting on the sheer competence of these two massively-funded and often abusive security agencies. God knows, they both have long records of embarrassing and destructive failures at home and abroad.

And, it must be remembered that outfits like CIA always have fallback positions ready for major activities should the first story spring some unexpected leak. So, even if records were maintained of actual events – something which is not always certain going by CIA’s past record, as in the case of the coup in Guatemala against a democratic government, an event whose files could not be found at their scheduled release date – whatever is eventually released to the public may reflect a fallback narrative. The complexity of filing systems at a place like CIA permits some amazing antics, and no one from the outside is able to check. That of course is just one of the dangers of having such powerful, secret, and largely unaccountable agencies.

The facts of a murder case – no matter who the victim was, a rather simple murder actually if you believe the Warren Report, a murder by one disgruntled man with a rifle and no accomplices of any kind – should be public information in a free society. What possibly warrants secrecy in such a case? Nothing, of course. Yet we know we have had secrecy and still have it, massively so, and since the earliest days after the crime.

We still face a huge, impenetrable, blank wall, much resembling something from an ancient mysterious tomb, when it comes to this history-changing event.

If the assassination of an elected President can be effectively covered-up, what cannot? And a great many terrible events have happened in the United states since that crime. Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria plus many other bloody awful things that make little sense and have never been honestly explained to the people by government.

The press still is very fond of the term, “conspiracy theory,” and it is easy to find articles weekly which employ it, but the term should always serve as a red flag for astute readers. It is said to have been coined by a CIA publicist/disinformation officer in 1967 as a way to express ridicule of those doubting the Warren Report, a document in fact riddled with errors and inconsistencies.

Tony Podesta: Making It Ukraine and the Legalized Bribery Chain...,

pjmedia  |  It is plausible that the Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through Fusion GPS, suggested to Veselnitskaya that she should meet with the Trump campaign. This would have given the Democrats a clear link between Trump and the Russians, and it would have given Veselnitskaya an opportunity to further her work on Putin's behalf, with one of the two leading presidential campaigns. Furthermore, Fusion GPS's role as an intermediary would have given both plausible deniability.

According to a recent FEC complaint, the Clinton campaign and the DNC obfuscated their hiring of Fusion GPS by listing payments to the law firm Perkins Coie as being for "legal services." This violated the law, as the money really went to opposition research. The decision to work through Perkins Coie — and to mislead the FEC about the nature of services — suggests the Clinton campaign and the DNC were hiding something.

Clinton also would have had an incentive to try and manufacture connections between Trump and Russia. Throughout 2015 and into early 2016, Trump was the Republican frontrunner, and he had praised Putin many times, suggesting he would "get along well" with the Russian president. The Russia angle made sense for Clinton to develop, and it would have been a perfect way to distract from her own troubling Russia connections.

If Clinton wanted to convince Americans that Trump is Putin's real puppet, her campaign would need more evidence than a few positive comments. After all, Trump was not the candidate who helped approve a 2010 deal giving Russian company Rosatom 20 percent of U.S. uranium — right at the time when that very Russian company was under FBI investigation. The FBI kept the investigation secret, just when it would have been most important.

In 2015, Peter Schweitzer had published the blistering story in The New York Times uncovering Clinton's connections to and benefits from the 2010 Uranium One purchase. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, had been paid $500,000 for a speech — at a Russian bank promoting Uranium One stock.

According to an anonymous witness threatened by the Obama administration, the FBI investigation into Rosatom also uncovered documents and an eyewitness account rather inconvenient for the Clintons. This evidence corroborated earlier reports that Russian officials had routed millions of dollars into the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which endorsed the Uranium One deal. This past Wednesday night, the Department of Justice finally authorized the informant to disclose his information and documents.

At the same time as the FBI kept its Rosatom investigation secret, the agency acted fast to bust a Russian spy ring because it got too close to Hillary Clinton.

All that makes sense, but why try to manufacture connections between Russia and the Trump campaign — when Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort had worked for Ukraine's Party of Regions, a group backed by Putin?

This past week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that his investigation into Manafort had extended to cover Tony Podesta — a Clinton campaign bundler who co-founded the Podesta Group with his brother, Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta. Both Manafort and Podesta may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), an allegation PJ Media reported last April. Emphasizing Manafort might have revealed Podesta and his connections to Clinton.

#MeToo Dindu Crew BooHoo.., Promised Ponies but Given Sick Goldfish Instead...,

foxnews  |  Somewhere, I’m sure, ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Van Jones were crying.  Again.  Just like the tears they shed on camera election night when Hillary lost. 

Papadopoulos

But wait.  Shortly after the indictments were unsealed, the media’s spirits were suddenly boosted when the special counsel revealed that a former adviser to Trump pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian national during his time on the Trump campaign.  Surely this was evidence of illegal “collusion,” right?

Wrong.  George Papadopoulos pled guilty to a single charge of making a false statement to the FBI.  He was not charged with so-called “collusion” because no such crime exists in American statutory law, except in anti-trust matters.  It has no application to elections and political campaigns.

It is not a crime to talk to a Russian. Not that the media would ever understand that.  They have never managed to point to a single statute that makes “colluding” with a foreign government in a political campaign a crime, likely because it does not exist in the criminal codes.

To put it plainly, Mueller is tasked with finding a crime that does not exist in the law. It is a legal impossibility. He is being asked to do something that is manifestly unattainable.

But that did not stop them from accusing Donald Trump, Jr., of illegally conspiring with the Russians when he met with a Russian lawyer to obtain information on Hillary Clinton.  What law did he break?  None.  The Federal Election Commission has made it clear that it is perfectly lawful for foreign nationals to be involved in campaigns, as long as they are not paid and do not donate money.  Which brings us to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton

It is against the law for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to funnel millions of dollars to a British spy and to Russian sources in order to obtain the infamous and discredited Trump “dossier.”  The Federal Election Campaign Act (52 USC 30101) prohibits foreign nationals and governments from giving or receiving money in U.S. campaigns.  It also prohibits the filing of false or misleading campaign reports to hide the true purpose of the money (52 USC 30121).  This is what Clinton and the DNC appear to have done.

Most often the penalty for violating this law is a fine, but in egregious cases, like this one, criminal prosecutions have been sought and convictions obtained.  In this sense, it could be said that Hillary Clinton is the one who was conspiring with the Russians by breaking campaign finance laws with impunity.

But that’s not all.  Damning new evidence appears to show that Clinton used her office as Secretary of State to confer benefits to Russia in exchange for millions of dollars in donations to her foundation and cash to her husband.  Secret recordings, intercepted emails, financial records, and eyewitness accounts allegedly show that Russian nuclear officials enriched the Clintons at the very time Hillary presided over a governing body which unanimously approved the sale of one-fifth of America’s uranium supply to Russia. 

If this proves to be a corrupt “pay-to-play” scheme, it would constitute a myriad of crimes, including bribery (18 USC 201-b), mail fraud (18 USC 1341), and wire fraud (18 USC 1343).  It might also qualify for racketeering charges (18 USC 1961-1968), if her foundation is determined to have been used as a criminal enterprise. 

Despite all the incriminating evidence, Clinton has managed to avoid being pursued by a special counsel.  Trump, on the other hand, is being chased by Robert Mueller and his team, notwithstanding a dearth of evidence.

I Once Believed Smart Meters Were For More Than Remotely Shutting Off Your Power...,

Time |  There was a fascinating story on the front page of the Kansas City Star earlier this week. Reporter Rick Montgomery took a long look at one of the fruits of the 2009 economic stimulus package, the Green Impact Zone of Missouri.

A lot has been written lately about the success or failure of the stimulus five years after it passed into law. For example, my friend and colleague Michael Grunwald, an eloquent advocate for the stimulus, credits the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) with jump-starting an alternative energy revolution and getting the ball rolling on electronic medical records, among other laudable achievements. James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, blames the $800 billion-plus package for driving up debt and muffling economic growth.

Montgomery’s article avoids such broad brushstrokes, instead documenting the observable results of one distinctive ARRA project. At the urging of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), stimulus money destined for Kansas City was concentrated in one section of town. The goal was to transform the area into an environmental showcase while catalyzing a burst of green jobs. Covering five neighborhoods and 150 square blocks, the zone encompasses a troubled section of town where abandoned buildings share streetscapes with the well-tended homes of obviously loving owners. In other words, it is typical of struggling sections found in every great American city—sliding in the wrong direction, but not too far gone to imagine a renaissance.

I’ve seen similar neighborhoods turn around in places as diverse as South Beach, Harlem, and Washington’s Logan Circle. In Denver, marginal neighborhoods around the old Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center are steadily gaining momentum from the new medical complex plopped into their midst. So I was intrigued to see what could be done with a projected $200 million infusion in what was—once upon a time—a thriving section of KC.

The answer: less than folks had hoped.

ARRA has equipped the Green Zone with charging stations for electric cars that residents don’t own. Of the 1,000 or more homes targeted for energy efficiency upgrades, fewer than 200—20 percent—received new windows, insulation and weather-stripping (at an average cost of more than $13,000 per home).  The local utility launched a pilot project in the zone to install “smart” meters that allow homeowners to better regulate their electricity use. An unused school building was given new life, and 11 miles of new sidewalks were built.

But as Montgomery reports, the project has, so far, failed to generate its own momentum. Congressman Cleaver, a former Kansas City mayor, sounded sheepish when he acknowledged that he and other zone backers failed to execute their ideas efficiently enough to get all the money spent. “We left tens of millions of federal dollars on the table,” he told the Star. When funding for the Impact Zone staff ran out, no agency stepped in to keep the office open.

The Root of the New Cold War Between Russia and America

countercurrents |  On 3 January 2015, I submitted to all U.S. newsmedia, for them to consider for possible publication, a news-report that opened:

Czech President Says ‘Only Poorly Informed People’ Don’t Know About Ukraine Coup

Eric Zuesse

The Czech Republic’s President Milos Zeman said, in an interview, in the January 3rd edition of Prague’s daily newspaper Pravo, that Czechs who think of the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, on 22 February 2014, as having been like Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic “Velvet Revolution” are seeing it in a profoundly false light, because, (as Russian Television translated his statement into English) “Maidan was not a democratic revolution.” He said that this is the reason why Ukraine now is in a condition of “civil war,” in which the residents of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s southeast have broken away from the Ukrainian Government.

He furthermore said that, “Judging by some of the statements of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, I think that he is rather a prime minister of war because he does not want a peaceful solution, as recommended by the European Union (EU), but instead prefers to use force.”

He added, by way of contrast to Yatsenyuk, the possibility that Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko “might be a man of peace.” So: though Zeman held out no such hope regarding Yatsenyuk (who was Obama’s choice to lead Ukraine), he did for Poroshenko (who wasn’t Obama’s choice, but who became Ukraine’s President despite Obama’s having wanted Yatsenyuk’s sponsor, the hyper-aggressive Yulia Tymoshenko, to win the May 25th Presidential election, which was held only in Ukraine’s pro-coup northwest, but claimed to possess authority over the entire country). …

That news-report was published at no mainstrean news-site and was rejected by almost all alternative-news sites, but was published at the following six: RINF, washingtonsblog, thepeoplesvoice, countercurrents, blacklistednews, and pontiactribune.

If such news-reports were published in U.S. newsmedia, especially in mainstream ones, then one could reasonably trust U.S. newsmedia, but such news-reports are not published in the U.S. (nor in its allied countries)

Here is terrific journalism (click onto that link) from “The Saker” documenting both with video from Hromadske TV, and with links to that TV operation’s annual financial reports, that the three top funders of Hromadske TV — Nayem’s springboard into Ukraine’s Rada —  were, in order: the Dutch Embassy, the American Embassy, and the International Renaissance Foundation (mis-identified there as the “International Renaissance Fund” — this is one of Soros’s ‘non-profits’, not one of his hedge funds). That report by The Saker was dated 3 August 2014, and afterward the linked-to “Hromadske TV Annual Financial Report, 2013” was taken down, but here it had been web-archived, so that you can see and authenticate it for yourself, showing on its second-to-last page, exactly what the screen-shot by The Saker showed. Interestingly, the “International Renaissance Fund” error was in the original financial report itself. The error wasn’t by The Saker.

That article by The Saker included the 31 July 2014 video of a Ukrainian ‘journalist’ being interviewed on George Soros’s and Mustafa Nayem’s and the U.S. Government’s and the Dutch Government’s Ukrainian TV station, explaining why “You need to kill 1.5 million people in Donbass” — arguing for ethnic cleansing there, of the genocidal type. The U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime did attempt that, and such ethnic-cleansing started being Ukrainian Government policy as soon as the new Government was installed. On 19 November 2014, I headlined “Meet Ukraine’s Master Mass-Murderer: Dmitriy Yarosh” and noted that Yarosh had been the person who not only was very active in the ethnic-cleansing program, but he had trained the paramilitaries who had executed the overthrow, and I linked to a video of Yarosh being interviewed as a hero on the new regime’s television. I also wrote:

As Yarosh said this past March in an interview with Newsweek, he has “been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years,” and his “divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine, but over 10,000 people for sure.” More recently, in October, a pro-Government Ukrainian site interviewed Yarosh and he mentioned specifically a “DUC,” or Volunteer Ukrainian Corps of fighters. He was then asked “How many soldiers in DUC?” and he answered, “About seven thousand men.” These would be his real military force, by far the biggest private army in Ukraine. So, in his private files are everyone’s individual background and skill-level as a “paramilitary,” or far-right mercenary, and they all respect and obey him as the top man. He is the indispensable person in this new Ukraine. Yarosh’s teams carry out the most violent operations for the CIA in Ukraine (including the coup).

Valodya the GOAT! Accept No Substitutes...,

zerohedge |  The Trump dossier was reckless and irresponsible in the extreme, but only consequential after Election Day. It didn’t prevent Mr. Trump from becoming president.

In the new spirit of non-non-disclosure, it’s time for Mr. Comey to tell us about the Russian intelligence scam that may really have changed the election outcome.

In closed hearings, he reportedly acknowledged that his intervention in the Hillary Clinton email case was prompted by what is now understood to have been planted, fake Russian intelligence. The fake Russian intelligence purported to discuss a nonexistent email between then-DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz and George Soros-employed activist Leonard Benardo.

This led directly to Mr. Comey’s second intervention, reopening the case 11 days before Election Day, a shocking development that appears now to have moved enough votes into Mr. Trump’s column to account for his win.

At the time, the press was all too happy to blame Bill Clinton for his wife’s loss when Mr. Comey, for nonclassified consumption, cited Mr. Clinton’s tarmac meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch as the reason for his intervention.

The press is silent now.

The new story satisfies nobody’s agenda, and only makes the FBI look foolish. Mr. Trump is not eager to hear his victory portrayed as an FBI-precipitated accident. Democrats cling to their increasingly washed-out theory of Trump-Russia collusion.

And yet, if Mr. Comey’s antic intervention in response to Russian disinformation inadvertently led to Mr. Trump becoming president, this was the most consequential outcome by far.

Peeping At Smear-Peddling Presstitutes In The Campaign Industrial Complex

thedailycaller |  At no point in Perez’s reporting did he disclose his close ties to the Fusion GPS operatives.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board sounded the alarm about its former reporters in a remarkable editorial earlier this month, accusing Beltway media of being complicit in a coverup with Fusion. “Americans don’t need a Justice Department coverup abetted by Glenn Simpson’s media buddies,” the editors wrote in a scathing takedown of the firm.

Simpson’s wife, Mary Jacoby, bragged about his role in the dossier in a lengthy June 2017 Facebook post reviewed by The Daily Caller. 

Jacoby claimed that “some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” referencing the dossier’s thesis. The dossier claimed that Russians had evidence of damaging information on Trump that they would use to blackmail him, an explosive accusation for which there remains no public evidence. 

CNN’s coverage of the dossier has been relatively soft. CNN anchor Jake Tapper, usually known for his aggressive coverage, gave Fusion a pass while reporting on the story Wednesday evening.

“Certainly some of the more lurid charges in that dossier remain uncorroborated, but some of the details have been proven accurate,” Tapper said. But the newsman failed to mention reporting he did back in January that called the dossier’s credibility into question.

On Jan. 10, the day that BuzzFeed published the dossier, Tapper cited a government source who told him that a key claim in the dossier about Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, was false. The dossier alleged that Cohen traveled to Prague last August to meet with Kremlin operatives. But Tapper reported that government officials believed that a different Michael Cohen had actually traveled to the Czech Republic. Tapper has not acknowledge that reporting since that initial segment. (RELATED: Jake Tapper’s Dodgy Dossier Reporting)

CNN’s reporting on the dossier has similarly muddied the waters with incorrect information on multiple other occasions.

CNN did not respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment about Perez’s ties to Fusion’s partners.

A View From Within the Belly of the Beast

theburningplatform |  The phony Russian election hacking narrative, additionally, provided cover for the beast to utilize its online social networks to censor the alternative media, sign into law the “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act” on December 23, 2016, allow National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, to feloniously unmask Trump administration officials, pressure the new president’s National  Security Advisor to resign, and the nation’s new Attorney General to recuse himself from the Russia investigation; the last of which, of course, led to special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump.

In fact, all throughout the early months of the new president’s administration, the Russia investigation dominated the headlines.  The headlines were disseminated by the media corporations, owned by the beast, which comprised ninety percent of all news media outlets throughout the once free nation.

However, in a recent turn of events, the beast-owned mainstream media has been forced to report that Former President Obama, former Secretary State Hillary Clinton, former FBI director Robert Mueller and former attorney general Eric Holder are at the center of a new probe involving the sale of a large percentage of the nation’s uranium deposits to Russia, the same country the beast had accused of hacking the 2016 presidential election.

In addition, the partners of Fusion GPS, the obscure political research firm behind President Trump’s phony “Golden Shower” dossier, have recently asserted their Fifth Amendment rights as guaranteed by the very same constitution they tried to subvert.  It is, furthermore, being ever so reluctantly reported in the corporate media that the bogus “Golden Shower” dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee.  Yet, in spite of this strange turning of the tables in the national media, there are some therein, including former presidential debate moderator, Chris Wallace, who just can’t understand  why anyone would ever want to attack the media minions of the beast; as Republican Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake label President Trump as a bully and bad role model.

Obviously, a threatened beast will do, and say, anything to survive.

Now, other minions of the beast are resurrecting the “fake news” scam and threatening to use the legal system to eliminate the First Amendment rights of the citizens of the once free nation

Only Baptism By Cleansing Blue Fire...,

countercurrents |  Gandhi was a so called "high caste". High castes represent a small minority in India, some 10-15% of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

 

The Indian Constitution was authored by Gandhi's main critic and political opponent, Dr.Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education (if you have never heard of Dr. Ambedkar I would urge you to try and keep an open mind about what I am saying for it is a bit like me talking to you about the founding of the USA when you have never heard of Thomas Jefferson).

Most readers are familiar with Gandhi's great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in Law from Cambridge, had been choosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalits could vote for these reserved positions.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkar agreed, with Gandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would have refused to give up Dalit only representation, even if it meant Gandhi's death. 

As history has shown, life for the overwhelming majority of Dalits in India has changed little since the arrival of Indian independence over 50 years ago. The laws written into the Indian Constitution by Dr. Ambedkar, many patterned after the laws introduced into the former Confederate or slave states in the USA during reconstruction after the Civil War to protect the freed black Americans, have never been enforced by the high caste dominated Indian court system and legislatures. A tiny fraction of the "quotas" or reservations for Dalits in education and government jobs have been filled. Dalits are still discriminated against in all aspect of life in India's 650,000 villages despite laws specifically outlawing such acts. Dalits are the victims of economic embargos, denial of basic human rights such as access to drinking water, use of public facilities and education and even entry to Hindu temples.

To this day, most Indians still believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalits only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated a high caste. This is called varna in Sanskrit, the language of the original Aryans who imposed Hinduism on India beginning some 3,500 years ago. Interestingly, the word "varna" translates literally into the word "color" from Sanskrit.

This is one of the golden rules of Dalit liberation, that varna means color, and that Hinduism is a form of racially based oppression and as such is the equivalent of Apartheid in India. Dalits feel that if they had the right to elect their own leaders they would have been able to start challenging the domination of the high castes in Indian society and would have begun the long walk to freedom so to speak. They blame Gandhi and his hunger strike for preventing this. So there it is, in as few words as possible, why in todays India the leaders of India's Dalits hate M.K. Gandhi.

Tiny Glimpse of America's Coming Civil War In My Hood This Week...,

jimmycsays |  The lawyer, Thomas Pickert, had walked his two sons to school — not sure which school — and had returned home. “It appears that our victim was sitting on his front porch of his residence when he was shot,” police spokeswoman Sgt. Kari Thompson was quoted as saying. “The victim’s spouse heard something and came out and discovered her spouse on the ground.”

This murder — again as most of you know by now — was not random. The Star’s story provides the backdrop for this most unusual occurrence:

“Pickert won a $5.75 million judgment this summer against a businessman who had shot a homeless man on his property. Last week, Jackson County court officials started the process of seizing the man’s real estate to pay the judgment. The court filed paperwork that would prevent the man from selling or transferring the property.

“On Tuesday, the court sent the man’s attorney notice of its actions. The real estate to be seized for the judgment were the man’s business building and a home.”

Another extremely unusual thing about this case — besides occurring in quiet, upscale Brookside: 

The likely murderer is a 79-year-old man who owns a significant amount of property — or at least he did back in 2010.

That man, David Jungerman of Raytown, is the prime suspect in the murder. A 1997 Chevy van is registered to him — and that police were looking for — was found this afternoon.

theodoresworld |  A Missouri man’s sign painted on the side of an empty trailer along U.S. 71 has been torched twice in recent weeks. David Jungerman placed the trailer and sign in his field along the major highway, saying:

Are you a Producer or Parasite

Democrats – Party of the Parasites

Kansas City.com

David Jungerman farms 6,800 acres of river bottom land in western Missouri.

He’s not the kind of guy who posts on Twitter or has a Facebook profile.

So when the 72-year-old Raytown man wanted to speak out politically, he used what he had handy: a 45-foot-long, semi-truck box trailer.

Are you a Producer or Parasite

Democrats - Party of the Parasites

He planted the trailer with its professionally painted message in his Bates County cornfield along heavily traveled U.S. 71 about an hour south of Kansas City. He wanted lots of people to see it.

They did. Including at least one with a good case of outrage, matches and a can of gas.

On May 12, Jungerman’s trailer was torched. The Rich Hill volunteer fire department responded. A week later, it was set afire again. The firefighters put it out again.

Then flames erupted in an empty farm house that Jungerman owns.

“They don’t like free speech,” said Jungerman. He put out a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

fox4news |  Kansas City police tell Fox 4 they are still trying to determine who killed a Kansas City attorney in front of his home on West 66th Terrace near Brookside Road on Wednesday morning.

Tom Pickert, 39, had just returned home from walking his children to school when he was shot and killed.

Major Donna Greenwall told Fox 4 Thursday that  police have interviewed the registered owner of the white van that was seen leaving the crime scene. The owner was released after questioning.

Although Major Greenwall would not use the owner's name, records show that the van is registered to a man named David Jungerman. FOX 4's Dave D'Marko was reporting near Jungerman's home in Raytown late on Wednesday night when the van was recovered and towed away from the scene.

Police have not said if they believe Jungerman was driving the van or if it was someone else who was driving Jungerman's van.

"We at the scene talked to several individuals, and we'd ask anybody that has information with regards to this that they contact us," Major Greenwall said. "It's an ongoing investigation, and any information that anybody has would help us and we'd welcome that information. "

Investigators say they are still collecting tips. No suspects have been taken into custody. If you have any information that could help them in their investigation please call the TIPS Hotline at (816) 474-TIPS.

Why Do Americans Own So Many Guns?

peggynoonan |  I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.

Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.

Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.

Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.

Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?

Having Nothing to Hide - Kaspersky Opens Transparency Centers

theintercept |  Responding to U.S. government suggestions that its antivirus software has been used for surveillance of customers, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is launching what it’s calling a transparency initiative to allow independent third parties to review its source code and business practices and to assure the information security community that it can be trusted.

The company plans to begin the code review before the end of the year and establish a process for conducting ongoing reviews, of both the updates it makes to software and the threat-detection rules it uses to detect malware and upload suspicious files from customer machines. The latter refers to signatures — search terms used to detect potential malware —  which are the focus of recent allegations.

The company will open three “transparency centers” in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, where trusted partners will be able to access the  third-party reviews of its code and rules. It will also engage an independent assessment of its development processes and work with an independent party to develop security controls for how it processes data uploaded from customer machines.

“[W]e want to show how we’re completely open and transparent. We’ve nothing to hide,” Eugene Kaspersky, the company’s chair and CEO, said in a written statement.

The moves follow a company offer in July to allow the U.S. government to review its source code.

Although critics say the transparency project is a good idea, some added it is insufficient to instill trust in Kaspersky going forward.

“The thing [they’re] talking about is something that the entire antivirus industry should adopt and should have adopted in the beginning,” said Dave Aitel, a former NSA analyst and founder of security firm Immunity. But in the case of Kaspersky, “the reality is … you can’t trust them, so why would you trust the process they set up?”

Kaspersky has come under intense scrutiny after its antivirus software was linked to the breach of an NSA employee’s home computer in 2015 by Russian government hackers who stole classified documents or tools from the worker’s machine. News reports, quoting U.S. government sources, have suggested Kaspersky colluded with the hackers to steal the documents from the NSA worker’s machine, or at least turned a blind eye to the activity.