NYTimes | Mr.
Trump is right. Black unemployment in the United States reached its
lowest level in December. But, as my colleague Linda Qiu reported two weeks ago, the record is the culmination of a longer trend, and there has been no shift in the larger racial unemployment gap:
The 6.8 percent
unemployment rate for black Americans in December is indeed the lowest
since 1972, according to the latest monthly data that is available from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the rate has been in decline for
several years, decreasing steadily from 16.4 percent in August 2011 to
7.8 percent in January 2017.
The December figures also do not reflect a significantly different
racial unemployment gap. The black unemployment rate has consistently
been double that of the white unemployment rate, and remained at that
level in December. Presidents, especially in their first year, generally
do not single-handedly influence the labor markets — as Mr. Trump
suggests.
Further, it’s an open question whether a president can claim credit for economic outputs like unemployment. As my colleague Neil Irwin has explained:
So
does Mr. Trump deserve any credit for solid economic results? If you
think the economy is driven by concrete, specific policies around taxes,
spending, monetary policy and regulation, the answer is no. If you
think that what really matters is the mood in the executive suite, then
just maybe.
Jay-Z is scheduled to appear at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night. He is nominated for eight awards, including record, album and song of the year.
NYTimes | There are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global
standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for
example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5
million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third
less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as
many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as
many.
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented
the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United
States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural
America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
It
is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the
world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that
makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely
these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.
Of
course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries.
With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to
drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of
medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of
health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the
whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we
would expect given its national income, and there are places — the
Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is
lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case,
has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality
rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long
historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt.
CounterPunch | Why do we live in a society that thinks that it’s reasonable to ask
someone to shoulder an adult’s responsibility at home, support
themselves and perhaps other family members too, and go to school on top
of that? And then why do we call them failures when that doesn’t work?
Some students receive financial aid to cover their tuition, but that
doesn’t cover their other needs. It doesn’t keep them from working long
hours, sometimes on the night shift, in order to make ends meet at home.
This year, some students have an added challenge.
Some are undocumented immigrants, brought here as children through no
fault of their own. Obama allowed them to pay a fee in order to avoid
deportation and legally work in the U.S. temporarily. Trump ended that
program.
When students’ two year work permits run out, what will happen to
them? Some students have had relatives, parents even, get deported.
Students who try to educate themselves in these conditions are
heroes. We should make it easier, not harder, for them to devote
themselves full time to study.
And we certainly shouldn’t discuss them as if they are human garbage who should be deported.
DailyCaller | A California city councilman and high school history teacher at El
Rancho High School in Pico Rivera, Calif, was caught on video
disparaging the United States military and calling its members
“dumbshits” who are not “high-level thinkers.”
Three profanity-laced videos surfaced on Facebook Friday of Salcido
declaring to his students that members of the military are dumb people
who joined because they were poor students and that they are the “lowest
of our low” of the country.
“They’re the frickin’ lowest of our low,” Salcido can be heard saying.
Three video of Salcido’s comments were posted to Facebook by a family
friend of the student who took it and they quickly went viral. The
student, who wished to remain anonymous, is the son and nephew of
military veterans and told the local paper, “It was so disrespectful to my dad and my uncles and all veterans and those still in the military.”
Throughout the three videos, Salcido can be heard using vulgar
language to describe the military as failed students with no other
options but to serve. “We’ve got a bunch of dumbshits over there. Think
about the people who you know who are over there — your freaking stupid
uncle Louis or whatever, they’re dumbshits. They’re not, like,
high-level thinkers, they’re not academic people, they’re not
intellectual people, they’re the freaking lowest of our low. Not
morally, I’m not saying they make bad moral decisions, they’re not
talented people,”
zeroanthropology | The “views” of the university are a mercantile
fiction, a falsehood designed to mislead the public and to caress donors
and politicians, the kinds of individuals who are apparently empty and
infantile enough to believe that the winning arguments are those that
are advanced in the absence of criticism. What if we taught our students
that the best way to learn is to ignore whatever they do not like to
hear? That is indeed what is being pushed, ironically under the signs of
“tolerance” and “inclusion,” the usual neoliberal claptrap. Thus we
witness the university turned into a mere echo chamber for the
comfortable, a safe space for moneyed elites to flatter themselves,
creating a virtual world of unrivalled ideological purity, contrived
harmony, and eternal hegemony.
Finally, messages from university administrators
along the lines of “this does not represent the views of the
university,” might serve an additional function, but I am just
speculating. This might be a polite way of telling rabid members of the
public to lay off. We heard you, yes it’s all quite disconcerting, and
here is our little statement, now move along. Had universities with
their bloated administrations and overt political leanings not wished to
enhance their public profiles and represent themselves as quasi-media
outlets, they would spare themselves such unnecessary exercises. In the
end, pronouncements about “the views of the university” end up
multiplying the damage to the university, both as a self-inflicted
wounds within the university, and as a sign of intellectual cowardice in
the face of bullies. A university administration that engages in such
conduct has failed its first and most basic function: to administer
university resources in order to facilitate teaching and learning.
BostonGlobe |Is the doctrinaire left
as dangerous to liberal democracy as the unified rule of the right?
Certainly, the Trump-era Republican Party has the potential to do grave
damage to democratic institutions and is already damaging liberal norms.
But the academic left’s hostility to these norms should not be
discounted, and its influence over progressive and Democratic dogma is
only growing.
What’s more, left-wing campus politics also feed and
empower the right. Stories of political correctness run amok, gleefully
picked up by conservative media (and in some cases overblown), boost
the perception of rampant hypersensitivity, speech policing, and
anti-male and/or anti-white bias. New research
by Georgia State University Ph.D. candidate Zack Goldberg confirms
anecdotal reports that many Trump voters were at least partly motivated
by concerns about political correctness.
Perhaps the real danger
is that “social justice warriors” on the left are propping up Trumpism
on the right, and vice versa. With each side spurring the other to
action in a feedback loop, there will soon be little room left for
anyone else.
CounterPunch | After the ascendancy of Cyril Ramaphosa to the leadership of the
African National Congress (ANC) last month and his imminent replacement
of Jacob Zuma as national president, it is vital to understand deep
structural barriers that prevent South Africa’s achievement of
desperately needed socio-economic justice.
The ideological shifts that took place in the ANC’s economic views
from 1990 can only be described as breathtaking: from an explicitly
redistributive approach, towards embracing the American ideologies of
neoliberal globalism and market fundamentalism.
From 1990 Nelson Mandela and Harry Oppenheimer met regularly for
lunch or dinner and the main corporations of the Minerals Energy Complex
(MEC) met regularly with a leadership core of the ANC at Little
Brenthurst, Oppenheimer’s estate. When other corporate leaders joined
the secret negotiations on the future of the economic policy of South
Africa, the meetings were shifted to the Development Bank of Southern
Africa during the night.
Although I was involved in the ‘talks about talks’ from 1987 until
1989, I did not take part in the 1990-94 negotiation process. I have
been told that at the time senior individuals attached to the Sanlam
Group of corporations were very much against my involvement because of
my preference for social-democratic capitalism.
During these meetings an elite compromise gradually emerged between
white politicians and capitalists under the leadership of the MEC, a
leadership core of the ANC, and American and British pressure groups.
From February 1990 until early 1992, all the ANC policy documents
emphasised the need for ‘growth through redistribution’. But when a
reworked economic document of the ANC entitled ‘Ready to Govern’ was
published in May 1992, the phrase ‘growth through redistribution’ was
conspicuously omitted. Since then the ANC has never again emphasised the
need for a comprehensive redistribution policy.
The secret negotiations reached a climax in November 1993. At that
stage South Africa was preparing for interim government by the
Transitional Executive Council (TEC), which decided that South Africa
needed a loan of $850 million from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). The ‘statement on economic policies’ in the IMF deal committed
the TEC to neoliberalism and market fundamentalism.
There can be little doubt that the secret negotiations between the
MEC and a leadership core of the ANC were mainly responsible for the
party’s ideological somersault. It was, however, not the influence of
the MEC alone. There was also pressure and persuasion from Western
governments, and from the IMF and World Bank, and global corporations. A
large group of leading ANC figures received ideological training at
American universities and international banks.
In the years after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, an atmosphere
of triumphalism reigned supreme in American political and economic
circles: the ‘American economic model’ triumphed and every country in
the world could only survive and prosper if it adapted as quickly and
completely as possible to anti-statism, deregulation, privatisation,
fiscal austerity, market fundamentalism and free trade.
Washingtonsblog |According to journalist Robert Parry “The
people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign
policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash
against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach
and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East.”
Parry goes on to say that at the forefront of this is the Atlantic
Council, a think tank associated with NATO. Their main goal is a major
confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.”
So, to make sense of all this, most of the people listed would have
held cabinet positions in a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the
Interpreter is a project of RFE/RL then the decision to go ahead with
Propornot would have to go across their desk. That includes then Sec of
State, John Kerry.
The unasked question of why would a US Government Agency do this (?)
needs to be addressed. All the people listed above were actively working
for Clinton to get her elected and throw Donald Trump’s campaign off
the rails.
After the election, they were going to take care of Clinton’s
“deplorables” by dissecting alternative media. I wrote about this before
the election and I warned several major new sites what they could
expect. I was right on the money. After she lost, it was already in
motion. The deplorable media didn’t fall into a particular political
pattern other than they did not promote Hillary Clinton.
These people want reality shaped on what the perceived majority
(louder) group believes to be true, regardless of what the facts are.
Perception based reality is only a Facebook like away from killing one
person or elevating another to hero status regardless of what they have
done.
thehill | Conservative commentator Bill Kristol rips Fox News's Tucker Carlson
in a new interview, saying his show could be "close now to racism" or
"ethnonationalism."
"I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I
mean, I don't know if it's racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of
some kind, let's call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said
earlier, and stirring people's emotions in a very unhealthy way,"
Kristol told CNBC's John Harwood in the interview published on Thursday.
Back from Israel, where you see "that inner freedom, that simple dignity" of "people who remember their heritage & are loyal to their fate."
Carlson recently questioned the
widespread outrage over Trump's reported comments referring to Haiti,
El Salvador and African nations as "shithole countries."
"So, if
you say Norway is a better place to live and Haiti is kind of a hole,
well anyone who’s been to those countries or has lived in them would
agree. But we’re jumping up and down, ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ Why
can’t you say that?" Carlson asked.
CounterPunch | Even if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, women Resisters
who fall the Dems’ co-option game hoping for “equal pay” and “equal
rights” will be sorely disappointed. Not because Trump will get in the
way — because Democrats won’t fight for anything substantial.
Consider the Democrat most Women’s Marchers probably voted for. Like
the rest of her fellow Democrats, Hillary Clinton (a multimillionaire)
supported raising the minimum wage to a pitiful $12 per hour. (If it had
merely kept up with inflation, it would be $23 per hour now. Given
increases in worker productivity, it ought to be at least $25 per hour.)
Nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage earners are women.
Clinton gets better-a-century-late-than-never cred for endorsing the
long-stalled Equal Rights Amendment. But Democrats controlled the White
House, House and Senate as recently as 2010 — and never mentioned it.
Even on the signature identity-politics issue of abortion rights,
Democrats have long deployed a form of psychological terrorism against
women. Unless you vote for us, they’ve been telling women, some
Republican president might appoint a Supreme Court justice who might
cast the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Women and their partners shouldn’t have to rely on a wobbly
45-year-old court decision. Why don’t Democrats ever propose a bill
legalizing abortion nationwide? Considering that 58% of voters,
including many Republicans, support abortion rights, and that Democrats
could characterize Congressional opponents as misogynists in attack ads,
it’s entirely possible that an abortion-rights law could pass Congress.
They certainly could have tried under Obama. But they didn’t. Because
Democrats don’t care about people. Democrats care about electing and
collecting campaign donations for Democrats.
There is no reason — zero, none, nada — to believe that the
Democratic Party’s half-century-old refusal to lift a finger to help the
disenfranchised will change if and when they win back Congress. Which
makes the squandering of the anti-Trump historical moment so tragic.
theintercept | In his farewell address, President Barack Obama had some practical
advice for those frustrated by his successor. “If you’re disappointed by
your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run
for office yourself,” Obama implored.
Yet across the country, the DCCC, its allied groups, or leaders
within the Democratic Party are working hard against some of these new
candidates for Congress, publicly backing their more established
opponents, according to interviews with more than 50 candidates, party
operatives, and members of Congress. Winning the support of Washington
heavyweights, including the DCCC — implicit or explicit — is critical
for endorsements back home and a boost to fundraising. In general, it
can give a candidate a tremendous advantage over opponents in a
Democratic primary.
In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight
behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood. The DCCC —
known as “the D-trip” in Washington — has officially named 18
candidates as part of its “Red to Blue” program. (A D-trip spokesperson
cautioned that a red-to-blue designation is not an official endorsement,
but functions that way in practice. Program designees get exclusive
financial and strategy resources from the party.) In many of those
districts, there is at least one progressive challenger the party is
working to elbow aside, some more viable than others.
Outside of those
18, the party is coalescing in less formal ways around a chosen
candidate — such as in the case of Pennsylvania’s Hartman — even if the
DCCC itself is not publicly endorsing.
It’s happening despite a very real shift going on inside the party’s
establishment, as it increasingly recognizes the value of small-dollar
donors and grassroots networks. “In assessing the strength of candidates
for Congress this cycle, we have put a greater premium on their
grassroots engagement and local support, recognizing the power and
energy of our allies on the ground,” said DCCC Communications Director
Meredith Kelly. “A deep and early connection to people in the district
is always essential to winning, but it’s more important than ever at
this moment in our history.” The committee, meanwhile, has made major investments in grassroots organizing, field work and candidate training, which also represents a genuine change.
But change is hard, and it isn’t happening fast enough for candidates
like King. So a constellation of outside progressive groups — some new
to this cycle, some legacies of the last decade’s growth in online
organizing — are stepping in, seeing explosive fundraising gains while the Democratic National Committee falls further and further behind.
The time between now and July, by which most states will have held
primaries, will be among the most important six months for the future of
the Democratic Party, as the contests will decide what kind of party
heads into the midterms in November 2018. The outcome will also shape
the Democratic strategy for 2020, which in turn will shape the party’s
agenda when and if it does reclaim power.
“We are proud to work with women, veterans, local job creators, and
first-time candidates in their runs for Congress, whose records of
service to our country and communities are being recognized – first and
foremost – in the districts they aim to serve,” Kelly said.
RollingStone | A year removed from the Women's March, a lot has changed. Around the
country, events marking the one year anniversary of the protests are
focused on channeling their energy into political organizing. But the
movement is more fractured than ever. Even the name – Women’s March –
has become a bitter point of contention between the women who were the
public face of last year's march in D.C. — Tamika Mallory, Linda
Sarsour, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez — and the organizers of sister marches
around the country and the world.
A number of marches across the
United States have received letters from Women's March Inc., protesting
their use of the term "women’s march." As theNew York Timesreported
earlier this week, Amber Selman-Lynn, a Mobile, Alabama-based
organizer, received a letter from Women's March, Inc. requesting the
name be removed from materials promoting the march. The letter said that
while the group was "supportive of any efforts to build our collective
power as women," they would prefer Selman-Lynn "not advertise your event
as a ‘Women's March' action." At issue was Selman-Lynn's use of the
slogan, "March on the Polls," created by another group with a similar
agenda, March On, in her material. (She removed the name and had them
re-printed.)
Many of the organizers of last year's local marches
have chosen to incorporate independently – New York's march is being
organized by Women's March Alliance, Corp.; Philadelphia’s by Philly
Women Rally, Inc. – and some have chosen to affiliate with March On, an
umbrella group that sprung up with the express purpose of connecting
sister marches after last year's worldwide protest.
Part of the
problem, according to Carolyn Jasik, a pediatrician new to activism who
helped organize Women's Marches across California last year, is the fact
that Women's March Inc. have empowered state coordinators who organized
transport from states to the flagship march in D.C., rather than the
local activists who organized events in their own communities.
"The
local city leads have the best inroads into the community. So if boots
on the ground were needed for an action, the city organizers were a lot
more equipped to make that happen," Jasik says. After the march, as
local groups were primed to get to work right away on issues in their
communities, the national organization was still working to formalize a
structure and acquire nonprofit status. "These first-time activist
leaders needed urgent help with practical matters like legal advice on
how to form a non-profit, website support, mailing list management,
funding [and] merchandise."
theintercept | At what point did we settle upon this fulcrum, over which our options
are empowerment or helpless victimhood? The answer, of course, is that
some establishment, centrist feminists have leveraged positions in the
media to determine the terrain of this fight for the rest of us.
They
presume that at its best, a feminist movement is all about individual
empowerment, as opposed to fighting patriarchal oppression. Only a
narrow outlook of feminism could see these two things as coextensive or
interchangeable. It’s a position that wants to see the status quo
improved but not upended. In political terms, this view is at best a
reformist strategy, articulating a position that power can be shared,
that power structures can be joined without first being radically
challenged and broken.
As journalist Halima Mansoor pointed out on Twitter, the line taken by Weiss and others, Banfield and Whoopi Goldberg
among them, betrays the privilege of their position by condemning a
woman — “Grace,” the pseudonym of the Ansari accuser — for failing to
speak up and walk out when made to feel sexually uncomfortable and
violated. “Privilege blinds people who have it to assume everyone else
has the same power and therefore should react how they might,” Mansoor
wrote.
This is the problem with empty calls for more “empowerment”: They show little to no interest in how power works.
#MeToo risked limitations from the outset, popularized as it
was mostly by white, liberal celebrities and framed around the
excavation of individualized narratives of trauma. Any movement
dependent on an endless string of victim and survivor stories accusing
well-known predators and perpetrators can only reach so far.
When the national farmworker women’s organization Alianza Nacional de Campesinas wrote an open letter
to sexual assault survivors in Hollywood “on behalf of the
approximately 700,000 women who work in the agricultural fields and
packing sheds across the United States,” it was an invitation for mutual
solidarity that goes further than the tony neighborhoods of Los Angeles
and New York.
Invocations of “empowerment” are of little use to these women who
face harassment and sexual violence in workplaces, relationships, and
situations they feel structurally, emotionally, or financially unable to
walk away from — something the attacks against Ansari’s accuser seem to
miss.
Divisions have attended every aspect of the so-called resistance
since its birth after Trump’s election. Indeed, they color the history
of social movements. The lead-up to the Women’s March a year ago was
riddled with tensions over privileged, liberal leadership and framing.
The demonstration was originally announced under the banner “Million
Women March,” until activists condemned the name as an appropriation of
the 1997 mass march by black women in Philadelphia.
It was only when a diverse and radically progressive group of
organizers, including Sarsour, People for Bernie’s Winnie Wong,
transgender icon Janet Mock, and the Working Families Party’s Nelini
Stamp developed the Women’s March “Unity Principles”
that a vision for an intersectional political movement emerged.
Migrants, sex workers, and other vulnerable women were highlighted for
solidarity.
(CNN)
Author and foreign policy analyst Max Boot feels President Donald Trump
is making him feel like a “foreigner” in his own country.
“He’s making me feel like an outsider, a Russian, a Jew, an immigrant,” Boot told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
“Anything
but kind of a normal mainstream American, because of the way that he is
dividing us and balkanizing us and seems to be catering to this white
nationalist agenda.” …
Boot
said it was “especially chilling” to hear people like Steve Bannon and
Steve Miller trying to change the character of the country by “saying
we’re not a nation of immigrants.”
And now from Foreign Policy, Mr. Invade-the-World/Invite-the-World himself, Max Boot, announced that Trump’s election has opened his eyes to White Privilege:
I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes.
BY MAX BOOT | DECEMBER 27, 2017, 1:55 PM
Max
Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is
“The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in
Vietnam.”
In
college — this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University
of California, Berkeley — I used to be one of those smart-alecky young
conservatives who would scoff at the notion of “white male privilege”
and claim that anyone propagating such concepts was guilty of “political
correctness.” As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was
ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and
segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace
discrimination suffered by women. I wasn’t racist or sexist. (Or so I
thought.) I hadn’t discriminated against anyone. (Or so I thought.) My
ancestors were not slave owners or lynchers; they were more likely
victims of the pogroms.
I
saw America as a land of opportunity, not a bastion of racism or
sexism. I didn’t even think that I was a “white” person — the catchall
category that has been extended to include everyone from a Mayflower
descendant to a recently arrived illegal immigrant from Ireland….
That
last sentence is just bizarre: if you are claiming that “white” is a
“catchall category” that has been “extended” to “include everyone” … and
then as your examples of apparent polar opposites you come up with a
Mayflower WASP and an Irishman … huh? What is going on in Max Boot’s
head?
NYPost | In one text message, an agent suggests that Attorney General Loretta
Lynch knew while the investigation was still going on that the FBI would
not recommend charges against Clinton.
How could she know unless the fix was in?
All roads in the explosive developments lead to James Comey, whose
Boy Scout image belied a sinister belief that he, like his infamous
predecessor J. Edgar Hoover, was above the law.
It was in the office of Comey’s top deputy, Andrew McCabe, where
agents discussed an “insurance policy” in the event that Trump won.
Reports indicated that the Russia collusion probe was that insurance
policy.
The text was from Peter Strzok, the top investigator on the Trump
case, and was sent to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer and also his mistress.
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s
office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t
take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you
die before you’re 40 . . .,” Strzok wrote.
It is frightening that Strzok, who called Trump “an idiot,” was the lead investigator on both the Clinton and Trump cases.
After these messages surfaced, special counsel Robert Mueller removed
Strzok and Page from his probe, though both still work at the FBI.
Strzok, despite his talk of an “insurance policy” in 2016, wrote in
May 2017 that he was skeptical that Mueller’s probe would find anything
on Trump because “there’s no big there there.”
Talk about irony. While Dems and the left-wing media already found
Trump guilty of collusion before Mueller was appointed, the real scandal
might be the conduct of the probers themselves.
Suspicions are hardly allayed by the fact that the FBI says it can’t
find five months of messages between Strzok and Page, who exchanged an
estimated 50,000 messages overall. The missing period — Dec. 14, 2016,
through May 17, 2017 — was a crucial time in Washington.
There were numerous leaks of classified material just before and after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
And the president fired Comey last May 9, provoking an intense
lobbying effort for a special counsel, which led to Mueller’s
appointment on May 19.
EIR | For anyone who wishes to understand the real story of what is behind
the “Russiagate” regime change operation in the U.S. today, an expose in
the Sept. 29, 2017 issue of Executive Intelligence Review, is a “must
read”. There, investigative journalist Barbara Boyd takes apart the
cover story of Robert S. Mueller as “incorruptible” and fair-minded,
revealing instead that he is a corrupt operative of the British-U.S.
intelligence services known as the “Deep State.”
The article, titled “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job if You Let Him,”
documents his career up to the role he plays today as the coordinator
of the investigation against President Donald Trump. The story begins in
1982, when Mueller joined the staff of Anglophile U.S. Attorney William
Weld in Boston, during the time of a new phase of attacks on American
economist and then-Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.
mediamatters | Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones purported to exclusively release a
secret memo that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has touted which supposedly
undermines the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign
in Russia. The document that Jones displayed on air during his January
23 show has actually been publicly available on a government website
since at least May 2017.
Jones tried to do damage control later in the show, claiming that
forces in the government hacked a computer in his offices to try to
prevent him from releasing it, but that it wouldn’t work because “Trump
already published it."
Nunes’ memo has been the subject of widespread speculation and triggered the right-wing social media campaign #releasethememo. According to Mother Jones,
“The now infamous document was prepared by Republican staffers for the
House Intelligence Committee, which is chaired by Nunes, and it
supposedly details how the FBI and the Justice Department improperly
conducted surveillance in connection with the Trump-Russia probe.”
The Mother Jones
article added that “Conservatives looking to discredit the Russia
investigation have embraced the classified memo, though they haven’t
seen it, and have called for its release. But Nunes has so far insisted
on keeping it secret -- even from the Justice Department.”
During his January 23 broadcast, Jones claimed that William Binney, a
former National Security Agency official, provided him with “the actual
memo they’re talking about.” Jones printed out a copy of the memo and
called for his producers to put it on a “document cam” to show viewers,
claiming that it was “tomorrow’s news, today.”
The document shown on screen was promptly identified as as a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court memo that is publicly available
on the website of the Office of Director of National Intelligence.
According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the document has
been available online since at least May 2017.
While presenting the document to viewers, Jones said, “I’ve got to go
off air, this is the classified memo right here. I mean I told you I
have sources and that I’d reverse engineered it, but I guess the
decision has been made by whoever’s telling Binney to send this to us”
and “Here it is ladies and gentlemen, the first look. You want to look
at it? Got the whole thing.”
theintercept |Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA agent convicted under the
Espionage Act for talking to a New York Times reporter, has been
released from prison after serving more than two years of his 42-month
sentence, and is now in a halfway house.
Sterling’s case drew nationwide attention because the Obama-era
Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to force the reporter, James
Risen, to divulge the identity of his sources for “State of War,”
a book in which he revealed the CIA had botched a covert operation
against Iran’s nuclear program. Risen reported that instead of
undermining the Iranians, the CIA had provided them with useful
information on how to build a nuclear bomb. (Risen is now The
Intercept’s senior national security correspondent and directs First
Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.)
The case had a racial dimension, too. Sterling, who had joined the
agency in 1993, was one of the few black undercover operatives at the
CIA. After several years of what he believed was discriminatory
treatment, he filed a complaint against the agency, and then a lawsuit.
The CIA fired Sterling in 2002, and his lawsuit was blocked by the courts after the government argued successfully that proceeding with the suit would expose state secrets.
Sterling subsequently met with Senate investigators as a
whistleblower about the mismanagement of a classified program he worked
on at the agency, the same Iranian program that Risen wrote about in his
book. Risen had interviewed Sterling in 2002 for an article
about his discrimination lawsuit — but Sterling has denied talking to
Risen about the Iranian program. In 2011, when Sterling was arrested,
the government’s indictment accused him of leaking about Iran out of “anger and resentment.”
theatlantic | “The lifeblood of democracy is a common understanding of the facts
and information that we can then use as a basis for negotiation and for
compromise,” said Bersoff. “When that goes away, the whole foundation of
democracy gets shaken.”
“This is a global, not an American
issue,” Edelman told me. “And it’s undermining confidence in all the
other institutions because if you don’t have an agreed set of facts,
then it’s really hard to judge whether the prime minister is good or
bad, or a company is good or bad.” A recent Pew Research Center poll,
in fact, found across dozens of countries that satisfaction with the
news media was typically highest in countries where trust in government
and positive views of the economy were highest, though it didn’t
investigate how these factors were related to one another.
America
actually falls in the middle of surveyed countries in terms of trust in
the media, which emerges from the Edelman poll as the least-trusted
institution globally of the four under consideration. (In the United
States, the firm finds, Donald Trump voters are over two times more
likely than Hillary Clinton voters to distrust the media.) Nearly 70
percent of respondents globally were concerned about “fake news” being
used as a weapon and 63 percent said they weren’t sure how to tell good
journalism from rumor or falsehoods. Most respondents agreed that the
media was too focused on attracting large audiences, breaking news, and
supporting a particular political ideology rather than informing the
public with accurate reporting. While trust in journalism actually
increased a bit in Edelman’s survey this year, trust in search and
social-media platforms dipped.
In last year’s survey, the perspective that many respondents
expressed was “‘I’m not sure about the future of my job because of
robots or globalization. I’m not sure about my community anymore because
there are a lot of new people coming in. I’m not sure about my economic
future; in fact, it looks fairly dim because I’m downwardly mobile,’”
Edelman said. These sentiments found expression in the success of
populist politicians in the United States and Europe, who promised a
return to past certainties. Now, this year, truth itself seems more
uncertain.
“We’re desperately looking for land,” Edelman observed.
“We’re flailing, and people can’t quite get a sense of reality.” It’s
no way to live, let alone sustain a democracy.
theburningplatform | What’s becoming clear now is Fusion GPS, the political dirty tricks
operation, functioned as a cutout for the FBI and the Clinton campaign.
The FBI shared secret intel with Fusion, who then sold it to the Clinton
campaign or distributed to the media at the direction of the campaign.
There’s a word for all of this and it is called treason. It’s one
thing for a career intelligence officer to go bad and start selling
intelligence to a foreign government. That just a part of the life of a
nation state. It is an entirely different thing when senior members of
the political class are working to undermine the fundamentals of the
political system. It is the sort of thing that results in hangings or
civil wars. It’s why the infamous memo has not been released, despite the fact it could be leaked or declassified by the White House.
That’s what brings us back to Dick Nixon. The mere hint of abuse of
the FBI and CIA by the political side of the White House was considered
enough of a threat to warrant impeachment. What we have here is worse
than anything Nixon was accused of doing, even by his fiercest critics.
Stuff that is orders of magnitude worse went on in the Obama White
House. Imagine senior FBI men, faced with federal prison, agreeing to
rat out major political actors. Imagine them pointing the finger at
Obama or his top aides.
Again, this is fundamentally a political problem, but it cannot be
ignored. That’s probably why no one is in a hurry to release that memo.
It’s not just about partisan politics. Imagine how blacks would react if
we have a full blown political crisis that paints Obama as worse than
Nixon. That is looking increasingly possible. People have forgotten
about the systematic abuse of the IRS, using it against conservative
activists in the run-up to the 2012 election. There’s only so much that
can be swept under the rug to protect Obama.
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