The Brookings Institute Is The Hub Of The Russiagate Disinformation Campaign...,

jonathanturley |  The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign.  The indictment of  Igor Danchenko exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier. However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to create a false scandal of collusion. Indeed, Brookings appears so often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.

The fact is that Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new Administrations. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for conservative figures.

However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings is remarkable in the Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal. The effort was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to invent a collusion narrative was “allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation was initiated.

Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those referenced are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.

Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts. While no such crimes were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden Administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from obstruction to bribery.

However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep leading back to Brookings.

The latest indicted figure, Danchenko, worked at Brookings. He proved to be the key unnamed source for Christopher Steele and later admitted to the FBI that the information attributed to him was not just “unsubstantiated” but, after being reworked by Steele, was unrecognizable from the original gossip or speculation.

 

How Dare Devin Nunes Kwestin His Bettors At The Brookings...,

strategic-culture |  As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.

This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on Trump in the first place!

Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).

The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.

Nunes stated:

“You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”\

Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.

Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006 and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a “creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on his Linkedin account.

The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.

Brookings Out'Chere Pushing Clever Together As Controlled Opposition To The Lockstep Scenario

brookings |  The coronavirus crisis will be over at some point in the next few years. Attention will turn to whether the international community can use this moment of shared pain to build a better future. Perhaps, but a necessary first step is to realize that world order has come to an end and is not coming back any time soon. 

World order is rare. It occurs only when there is a shared understanding among the major powers about what constitutes a legitimate action and how to enforce the rules when they break down. Such a moment occurred in 1648 when the European powers agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty, and again after the Napoleonic Wars when they agreed to resist revolution and consult with each other on international crises.

Most recently, signs of world order were evident in the 1990s and early 2000s. U.S. allies in Europe and Asia as well as future rivals like Russia and China and unaligned powers like Brazil and India largely acquiesced in the American-led international order. They went along with innovations like humanitarian intervention and they did not use force to thwart American plans, even if they disagreed with them as in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the expansion of NATO. Many Americans believed that all major powers would eventually become responsible stakeholders in a shared liberal order.

Unfortunately, it was an illusion. The most important driver of this shared order was not that the rest of the world decided they were happy with American leadership. It was the indisputable fact that the United States was much more powerful than its adversaries.

This period is now over. Rivals like China and Russia took an even more authoritarian turn. They grew more powerful and acquired more strategic options. And they grew more ambitious, coveting their own spheres of influence.

This trend was well underway by 2016. It has accelerated since. China has become more repressive and totalitarian, using new technologies to advance this agenda. It challenges liberal norms internationally and seeks to bend smaller powers to its will using the tools of geoeconomic coercion. Russia has brazenly interfered in the domestic politics of the United States and the European Union and is at the vanguard of challenging the principles of the U.S.-led order.

We'll Soon Learn Eric Ciaramella Was Assigned to the Trump Task Force

sicsempertyrannis |  The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former CIA Director John Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump Task Force, and given the mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the campaign of candidate Donald Trump.

This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled Democrats working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash real estate guy from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.

A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project.  But it also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA. Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958.  The author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.

A Task Force operates independent of the CIA "Mission Centers" (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).

So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source that Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel were recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.

Did Y'all Know Lawfare a Brookings Jawnt?

theconservativetreehouse |  After the 2018 mid-terms, and in preparation for the “impeachment” strategy, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler hired Lawfare group members to become House committee staff.

Chairman Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link), and Chairman Nadler hired  Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link).  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then hired Douglas Letter as House General Counsel – all are within the Lawfare network.

After Goldman, Eisen, Berke and Letter were hired in late 2018, Pelosi then went about changing the Rules of the House in January ’19.  Few were paying attention until recently.

In the last month many people have surmised that Pelosi and Schiff moved to utilize the Ukraine/NSC impeachment angle *after* the Mueller angle for impeachment ran into trouble. However, CTH research (widely criticized in 2018) doesn’t reflect the Whistle-blower impeachment plan as an ‘add-on’.  Instead, what we see is the use of the HPSCI; and the use of embeds within National Security Council staff; by design.  The Schiff events of today were always part of a prior planned design.

The Bottomline Difference Between Donald Trump and Barack Obama

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

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

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

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

Top Secret Clown Bidnis And The "Intelligence Community"

kunstler |  “For more than a decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of United States interests.”

— The New York Times

 

The Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr. Trump’s failure to throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V. Putin of Russia, onstage in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero is expected to do when facing consummate evil. Instead, the Golden Golem of Greatness voiced some doubts about the veracity of our “intelligence community” — as the shape-shifting Moloch of black ops likes to call itself, as if it were a kindly service organization in Mr. Rogers neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of childhood cancer.

If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger threat to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for instance his alleged “meddling” in US elections. This word, meddling, absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It has a thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds without specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once did in our history. The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling include the disclosure of incriminating emails among the Democratic National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of Facebook trolls making sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American electoral politics.

The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of “aggression.” It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it apparently warms the heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole” Crimea from Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the 1700s. Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship which became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet mega-state in 1990 — and became even more of a problem when the US State Department and our CIA stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of Russia’s only warm water naval bases. Do you suppose that even an experience American CIA analyst might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give up those assets? Please, grow up.

Peace With Russia? Hollywood Made A Blueprint For That Azz....,

wikipedia |  President Kennedy had read Seven Days in May shortly after its publication and believed the scenario as described could actually occur in the United States. According to Frankenheimer in his director's commentary, production of the film received encouragement and assistance from Kennedy through White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who conveyed to Frankenheimer Kennedy's wish that the film be produced and that, although the Pentagon did not want the film made, the President would arrange to be visiting Hyannis Port for a weekend when the film needed to shoot outside the White House.^[7]

The story is set in the early 1970s, ten years in the future at the time of the film's 1964 release, and the Cold War is still a problem (in the 1962 book, the setting was May 1974 after a stalemated war in Iran). U.S. President Jordan Lyman has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, and the subsequent ratification by the U.S. Senate has produced a wave of dissatisfaction, especially among Lyman's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.

A Pentagon insider, United States Marine Corps Colonel "Jiggs" Casey (the Director of the Joint Staff), stumbles on evidence that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by the charismatic Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, intend to stage a coup d'etat to remove Lyman and his cabinet in seven days. Under the plan a secret Army unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country's telephone, radio, and television networks, while Congress is prevented from implementing the treaty. Although personally opposed to Lyman's policies, Casey is appalled by the plot and alerts Lyman, who gathers a circle of trusted advisors to investigate: Secret Service White House Detail Chief Art Corwin, Treasury Secretary Christopher Todd, advisor Paul Girard, and Senator Raymond Clark of Georgia.

Casey uses the pretense of a social visit to General Scott's former mistress to ferret out potential secrets that can be used against Scott, in the form of indiscreet letters. Meanwhile, the alcoholic Clark is sent to Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, to locate the secret base, and Girard leaves for the Mediterranean to obtain a confession from Vice Admiral Barnswell, who declined to participate in the coup. Girard gets the confession in writing, but is killed when his return flight crashes, while Clark is taken captive when he reaches the secret base. However, Clark convinces the base's deputy commander, Colonel Henderson, a friend of Casey's and not party to the coup, to help him escape. They reach Washington, DC, but Henderson is abducted during a moment apart from Clark.

Lyman calls Scott to the White House to demand that he and the other plotters resign. Scott initially denies the existence of the plot, but then tacitly admits to it while denouncing the treaty. Lyman argues that a coup in America would prompt the Soviets to make a preemptive strike. Scott maintains that the American people are behind him. Lyman is on the verge of confronting Scott with the letters obtained from Scott's mistress when he decides against it and allows Scott to leave.

Scott meets the other three Joint Chiefs, demanding they stay in line and reminding them that Lyman does not seem to have concrete evidence of their plot. Somewhat reassured, the others agree to continue the plan to appear on television and radio simultaneously on the next day to denounce Lyman. However, Lyman first holds a press conference, at which he demands the men's resignations. As he is speaking, Barnswell's hand-written confession, recovered from the plane crash, is handed to him. Copies are given to Scott and the other plotters, who have no choice but to call off the coup. The film ends with an address by Lyman to American people on the country's future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t buy into it.

Jenny Frum Da Block Aint...,

Breitbart  |  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.

“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

She similarly told the Washington Post: “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip code determines your destiny.”

The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.

So what’s the issue? For most of her formative years, Ocasio-Cortez was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.

The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes, wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to the theater.”

DNC Pretending To Feel The Heat From Below...,

consortiumnews |  Conventional wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat. But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

 

In a symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential nominations since 1984 to prevent leftwing candidates from being nominated.    

Crowley’s defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3 million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people. 

As the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and racial justice. She ran on a platform in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the scale.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)

As NPR reported, the committee “voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’ play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot of presidential nominating conventions.”

Make no mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay off.

2016 First Time In A Century CFR Couldn't Get Its Man Into The White House

swprs |  Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.

Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group (covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.

In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.

Is There Any Point In Talking About What You Don't Have?

slate |  One of the nice things about Occupy Wall Street was that it provided a tidy shorthand to describe the problem of income inequality at a moment when the world didn’t really have one. Today, it’s a cliche: the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent. But at the time, that brief phrase awakened many people to the idea that America’s riches were distributed more unevenly than they thought, and that an increasingly outrageous share was being concentrated at the very top. The winners in this story were corporate executives, business owners, and highly paid professionals—especially bankers. The losers were just about everybody else. Like all shorthand, this tale was a bit oversimplified. But in the wake of a financial crisis brought on by the greed and recklessness of those 1 percenters, it felt apt. 

Back then, the people who took issue with framing America’s economy as a tug of war between the ultrarich and the rest of us generally fell into two camps. They were either inequality skeptics, who insisted unconvincingly that research showing the rise of the 1 percent was flawed, or inequality apologists, who argued that letting some people get exorbitantly wealthy was good for the economy, since it rewarded hustle and entrepreneurship (basically, Paul Ryan during his peak makers-vs.-takers period). 

Lately, though, a few writers have tried to play down the idea of the 1 percent for a different reason: They say it’s making us miss the real story of class and inequality in America. Last year, a Brookings Institution scholar named Richard Reeves published a book titled Dream Hoarders, in which he argues that America’s upper-middle class is rigging the economy in its own favor. Our national focus on the very rich, he suggests, is blinding us to the reality of how well-off soccer moms and dads in places like Arlington, Virginia, are killing the American dream for everyone but their own kids. “Too often, the rhetoric of inequality points to a ‘top 1 percent’ problem, as if the ‘bottom’ 99 percent is in a similarly dire situation,” he writes. “This obsession with the upper class allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true.”\

Reeves’ book received a brief burst of national attention after David Brooks used it as a launching point for a weird and widely pilloried New York Times column, in which he recounted a story about seeing his friend get flustered by the selection of Italian cold cuts at a sandwich shop. (He assumed this was because she only had a high school education, since you apparently need a philosophy degree to be familiar with soppressata.) But this week, the Atlantic published a long feature more or less rehashing most of Dream Hoarders’ arguments. In “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” writer Matthew Stewart argues that aside from a small sliver of true plutocrats who can actually afford to buy an election or two, the top 10 percent of wealthiest Americans are all essentially part of the same highly educated and privileged group—the “meritocratic class”—which has “mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” 

Reeves and Stewart are both attempting to give us a new shorthand for who is ruining the economy. Instead of the 1 percent, they would like us to talk about the dream hoarders, or the 9.9 percent. But in the end, both authors fail by lumping together large groups of Americans who haven’t really benefited equally from our winner-take-all economy. As a result, their stories about how the country has changed, and who has gained, just don’t track.

A Tedious And Wholly Unselfconscious Current State Assessment Of White Supremacy

theatlantic |  The defining challenge of our time is to renew the promise of American democracy by reversing the calcifying effects of accelerating inequality. As long as inequality rules, reason will be absent from our politics; without reason, none of our other issues can be solved. It’s a world-historical problem. But the solutions that have been put forward so far are, for the most part, shoebox in size.

Well-meaning meritocrats have proposed new and better tests for admitting people into their jewel-encrusted classrooms. Fine—but we aren’t going to beat back the Gatsby Curve by tweaking the formulas for excluding people from fancy universities. Policy wonks have taken aim at the more-egregious tax-code handouts, such as the mortgage-interest deduction and college-savings plans. Good—and then what? Conservatives continue to recycle the characterological solutions, like celebrating traditional marriage or bringing back that old-time religion. Sure—reforging familial and community bonds is a worthy goal. But talking up those virtues won’t save any families from the withering pressures of a rigged economy. Meanwhile, coffee-shop radicals say they want a revolution. They don’t seem to appreciate that the only simple solutions are the incredibly violent and destructive ones.

The American idea has always been a guide star, not a policy program, much less a reality. The rights of human beings never have been and never could be permanently established in a handful of phrases or old declarations. They are always rushing to catch up to the world that we inhabit. In our world, now, we need to understand that access to the means of sustaining good health, the opportunity to learn from the wisdom accumulated in our culture, and the expectation that one may do so in a decent home and neighborhood are not privileges to be reserved for the few who have learned to game the system. They are rights that follow from the same source as those that an earlier generation called life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Yes, the kind of change that really matters is going to require action from the federal government. That which creates monopoly power can also destroy it; that which allows money into politics can also take it out; that which has transferred power from labor to capital can transfer it back. Change also needs to happen at the state and local levels. How else are we going to open up our neighborhoods and restore the public character of education?

It’s going to take something from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors. We should be fighting for opportunities for other people’s children as if the future of our own children depended on it. It probably does.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

Communications NATO: Psychological Defense of the Status Quo

defenseone |  Fending off disinformation will get even harder when a new Russian news outlet launches in the United States this month. Going by the unwieldy name of “USA Really. Wake Up Americans,” this private counterpart to the Russian government’s RT is owned by the media company RIA FAN, which previously resided at the St. Petersburg “troll factory” the Internet Research Agency.

“Why do we even allow RT to broadcast in our countries?” asked Ilves. Why, indeed. But as “USA Really” shows, even if EU or NATO member states collectively revoked RT’s broadcasting licenses, Russian disinformation would not go away. The EU is trying to provide some sort of coordinated response. According to an April 26 statement, the European Commission will introduce a Code of Practice for online platforms; it will, for example, require the platforms to be transparent about political advertising and to identify and close fake accounts (“bots”). The EU also runs the three-year-old East StratCom Task Force.

That’s an excellent start, but it’s dwarfed by Russia’s massive and highly sophisticated information operations. Though the East StratCom Task Force does a valiant job documenting mostly Russian disinformation, it consists of only 14 people. In a new report on Russian disinformation campaigns, the RAND Corporation advises governments to increase their populations’ media literacy. That’s a laudable goal, but a long-term one. So who will go head-to-head with Sergey Lavrov, the way NATO would confront, say, Russia’s armed forces if they made aggressive moves? And what if other countries or entities (say, ISIS at its zenith) attack us with propaganda campaigns? We can’t hang the job on our own news media. “You can’t press news organizations into the service of the nation,” noted Prof. Robert Picard, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

And yet our citizens consider disinformation a serious threat. In a Eurobarometer poll conducted in March, 83 percent of EU citizens called fake news a problem for democracy. NATO has proven that a defense alliance can withstand severe military threats, but because today’s national security threats no longer involve only armed forces, our defense most be more wide-ranging too. Indeed, earlier this year Sweden announced that it will establish an Agency for Psychological Defense.

What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation — call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart. (And militarily non-aligned countries such as Sweden and Finland could join too.)

Democracy is Dangerous to the Powerful

truthdig |  Let’s face it: Democracy is dangerous to the powerful who rely on big money, institutional leverage and mass media to work their will. The insurgencies of this decade against economic injustice—embodied in the Occupy movement and then Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—are potentially dire threats to the established unjust order.

For those determined to retain their positions in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party hierarchy, democracy within the party sounds truly scary. And inauthenticity of the party—and its corresponding heavy losses of seats from state legislatures to Capitol Hill during the last 10 years—don’t seem nearly as worrisome to Democratic elites as the prospect that upsurges of grass-roots activities might remove them from their privileged quarters.

As Sanders told a New York Times Magazine reporter in early 2017: “Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

Twenty-five years ago, the so-called New Democrats were triumphant. Today, their political heirs are eager to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its name. At stake is whether democracy will have a chance to function.

A fundamental battle for democracy is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates to the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate them entirely. That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party committee meeting next week and then be decided by the full Democratic National Committee before the end of this summer.

To understand the Democratic Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to know how we got here.

The Democratic Party Has A Diversity Problem...,

BostonGlobe |  “She is the most unpopular politician in every single competitive district in the country,” said Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm. A March NBC poll found her approval rating in the low 20s. (House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, is also unpopular, with an approval rating just three points higher than hers in the NBC poll.)

Pelosi said the GOP strategy shows the “bankruptcy” of the opposition’s ideas and the negative ads only help her cause. “The more they do it, the more money I raise,” Pelosi said. “Because I have a following.”

RELATED: Nancy Pelosi speaks for eight hours at the House of Representatives on ‘Dreamers’

She says Democrats are running on an economic message of raising the minimum wage, boosting education, and strengthening the health care system. But Democrats are mostly counting on a Trump backlash to provide big gains in midterm elections.

Pelosi is a master fund-raiser, pulling in tens of millions of dollars that Democrats will use to help House candidates across the country, even those who are skeptical of her leadership. In a show of force, she raised more than $16 million for Democrats in the first quarter of this year. 

Even Pelosi’s fiercest critics admit she is a whiz at raking in money and at counting votes. She’s managed to keep her fractious caucus together in the Trump era, increasing her clout in spending talks and wresting key concessions from Republicans even while in the minority.

But some in the party are questioning the message it sends to the grass roots that the top three House Democrats are all in their late 70s and have been in power for years, despite running on a message of change in the midterms. 

“I think there’s a strong desire out there in America for new leadership in Washington, not just getting rid of Republicans but getting new leadership in the Democratic Party,” said Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, one of the loudest voices in the party calling for Pelosi to go.

NYTimes |  Democrats venerate diversity as they do no other value. Yet the party’s Senate leader is a white man, Charles Schumer. Many will wonder whether a party that now gets nearly half of its votes from nonwhite people — 46 percent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote was from nonwhites — should be led nationally by two white people.

The full picture is actually even a little weirder. Mr. Crowley would not be a shoo-in should Ms. Pelosi not be able to get the votes. There are two others who want the job: Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the current No. 2 and Ms. Pelosi’s rival of 50 years; and Tim Ryan of Ohio, who challenged Ms. Pelosi two years ago for the minority leader job and lost, 134 votes to 63.

So, should Ms. Pelosi decide not to seek the speakership again, the main contenders to replace her, at least as of now, would be three white men. For a Democratic Party leadership post in 2018! That sounds more like a race for Queens borough president in 1961.

To me, though, the diversity issue isn’t even the main problem. Even if two white men ended up leading the Democrats, no one would doubt that the Democratic Party is the multiracial party. That much is well established, and presumably Mr. Crowley (or whoever) would name a Rainbow Coalition-ish leadership team and surely have a woman as his No. 2.

The bigger problem is geographic. If Mr. Crowley became the House Democrats’ leader, the Democrats would be led by two legislators from New York City. And that is deeply weird.

The Democrats are coming off an election in which their presidential candidate won only 487 of the nation’s 3,141 counties. Four years before, Barack Obama won just 689 against Mitt Romney. The party is in severe geographic retreat, and it has happened with alarming speed.

If I told you that Democrats once controlled the governors’ mansions in the unlikely states of Tennessee, Wyoming, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma, what year would you think I was referring to? Maybe 1987? Nope. Up through the 2010 elections, Democrats governed all these states. Likewise, the Democrats had a House majority until those elections. They controlled seats in large swaths of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, both Dakotas, Indiana, West Virginia and Appalachian Ohio.

They held up to 257 seats in those days. They got decimated in 2010 and 2014, and maybe there just wasn’t that much they could have done about it. But they could have identified some young comers from swing and heartland states and elevated them to positions of greater prominence than they did. For example, in the 114th Congress (2015-2016), the Democrats had nine leadership positions — and only one was held by a representative from a state that didn’t have a coastline.

The Unselfconscious Nakedness of the Military Industrial Congressional Establishment...,

Counterpunch |  Beals isn’t the only candidate for NY-19’s Democratic nomination with ties to the Iraq War and the intelligence establishment. Patrick Ryan, who served two tours in Iraq as an intelligence officer after graduating from West Point, is also running in the primary against Beals.

As The Intercept reported in February 2018:

“Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions… The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports.

Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.”

Interestingly, Ryan has gone the traditional fundraising route, and is orders of magnitude more flush with cash than Beals ($900,000 as of the end of 2017 versus Beals’ $174,000). In a sense, these are two very similar, odious candidates following two divergent campaign models utilizing different elements of the Democratic Party machine.

Ryan is backed by right-wing elements of the Democratic Party, as evidenced by his receiving support from the New Democrat Coalition PAC, a conservative, pro-business element of the party. In contrast, Beals doesn’t have such overt institutional support, and is instead handled by a Clinton surrogate who actively discourages large-scale fundraising as part of his strategy to build up his candidate as the true voice of the grassroots.

As such, Beals is attempting to craft an image as a progressive who stands in contrast to the Blue Dog conservatism of Ryan. What can you call this farce? It is the primary equivalent of professional wrestling. A rigged game.

Beals and Ryan represent a disturbing trend taking place across the country: intelligence insiders and military officers running as Democrats in an election year that expects to see triumphs for Democrats in reaction to the Trump shit show.

The World Socialist Website’s Patrick Martin has compiled a rather exhaustive list of other candidates who fall into this trend as well, including, but not limited to:

Hiding Payments Under The Table At The Highest Levels Of Federal Law Enforcement

dailycaller |  The DOJ says, “Financial disclosure reports are used to identify potential or actual conflicts of interest. If the person charged with reviewing an employee’s report finds a conflict, he should impose a remedy immediately.”

• Justice Department official Bruce Ohr did not disclose Fusion GPS was paying his wife
• Ohr was demoted from his post after the information emerged
• Willfully falsifying government ethics documents can result in jail time

Bruce Ohr, the Department of Justice official who brought opposition research on President Donald Trump to the FBI, did not disclose that Fusion GPS, which performed that research at the Democratic National Committee’s behest, was paying his wife, and did not obtain a conflict of interest waiver from his superiors at the Justice Department, documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation show.

The omission may explain why Ohr was demoted from his post as associate deputy attorney general after the relationship between Fusion GPS and his wife emerged and Fusion founder Glenn Simpson acknowledged meeting with Ohr. Willfully falsifying government ethics forms can carry a penalty of jail time, if convicted.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired Fusion GPS to gather and disseminate damning info about Trump, and they in turn paid Nellie Ohr, a former CIA employee with expertise in Russia, for an unknown role related to the “dossier.” Bruce Ohr then brought the information to the FBI, kicking off a probe and a media firestorm.

The DOJ used it to obtain a warrant to wiretap a Trump adviser, but didn’t disclose to the judge that the DNC and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign had funded the research and that Ohr had a financial relationship with the firm that performed it — which could be, it turns out, because Ohr doesn’t appear to have told his supervisors. Some have suggested that the financial payments motivated Bruce Ohr to actively push the case.

For 2014 and 2015, Bruce Ohr disclosed on ethics forms that his wife was an “independent contractor” earning consulting fees. In 2016, she added a new employer who paid her a “salary,” but listed it vaguely as “cyberthreat analyst,” and did not say the name of the company.

The instructions require officials to “Provide the name of your spouse’s employer. In addition, if your spouse’s employer is a privately held business, provide the employer’s line of business.” As examples, it gives “Xylophone Technologies Corporation” and “DSLK Financial Techniques, Inc. (financial services).” The dollar amount does not need to be disclosed. “Report each source, whether a natural person or an organization or entity, that provided your spouse more than $1,000 of earned income during the reporting period,” they say.

Russia Hacks Forbes With "Lock'Em All Up" Fake News Narrative

Forbes |  There can be no question, at this point, that certain higher ups in the FBI and the DOJ did not want Hillary to be indicted and did not want Donald Trump to become President.  Those efforts were not entirely independent of each other.

Below is a timeline of events – abbreviated though it is – that makes it rather plain that the FBI and DOJ were not investigating potential crimes objectively.

Indeed, they were committing crimes during the process in aid of their preferred outcomes.

1.  2007. Hillary Clinton wanted to be President.  Hillary’s ambitions to be president started long ago.  She ran for President in the 2008 cycle.  In 2009, after losing to Obama, Hillary became Obama’s Secretary of State.  She stayed in that post until 2013.

2. March 2015. The Hillary email scandal breaks. Hillary was using an unapproved/unsecured server and devices to communicate.  She was using a private email account.  Classified information was being sent through that email, server and devices – including when Hillary was abroad.

All of that is illegal.  As 2015 unfolds, it becomes clear to the FBI and the DOJ that President Barack Obama was communicating with Hillary using her non-state department email.  Obama was using an email and a name that masked who he was.

That had to be known to authorities long before March of 2015 given that it occurred prior to 2013.

As Andrew McCarthy points out in his recent article, there was no chance that the DOJ was going to indict Hillary because that would have required implicating President Obama.  That was never going to happen.  From thereafter, DOJ officials acted with that understanding, however illegal, in mind.

3.  June 2015. Donald Trump announces his Presidential run.

4.  March 2016. Trump has enough delegates to claim the nomination.

5.  April 10, 2016. Obama makes clear he does not want Hillary indicted.  Obama, on TV, indicates Hillary did not intend to harm national security.  However, intent is not an element of the crime she committed.  At the time of that statement – made by a sitting President and in plain view of the Nation and more importantly his FBI/DOJ appointments - many witnesses had yet to be interviewed, including Hillary.

6.  April 2016. Hillary campaign and DNC begin funding infamous Trump dossier.  To conceal payments for the dossier, Hillary’s campaign gives money to attorneys who then pay for the dossier – a clear campaign law violation. If that campaign payment had been properly disclosed, the payment for the dossier, and likely the dossier, would have been exposed in the summer of 2016. That disclosure likely would have hurt Hillary’s campaign and LIKELY PREVENT THE USE OF THE DOSSIER to get  FISA warrant on Carter Page, which led to other spying and ultimately the Mueller investigation.

7.  May 2, 2016. Ted Cruz drops out of Presidential race. Cruz’ departure confirms Trump will be the Republican nominee.

8.  May 2016. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page make it clear they need to end the Hillary Investigation. Peter Strzok is the FBI agent in charge of the Hillary investigation, which is dubbed Mid-Year Exam.  He is having an affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page.  In a text exchange, Page informs Strzok that Cruz dropped out.  Strzok responds:

“What?!?!?!?!”   Fist tap Dale.