Friday, September 02, 2016

Courting the Right, Smearing the Left, the Ethos of Granny Goodness Unmistakable Fascism


commondreams |  Last month, adding to the archive of left-punching, conservative writer and ardent Clinton supporter James Kirchick enthusiastically denounced those he called "the Hillary Clinton-loathing, Donald Trump-loving useful idiots of the left."

"In this weirdest year," Kirchick wrote, "there may be no weirder phenomenon than the rise of the progressive Donald Trump supporter."

Among those apparently deserving of the label "progressive Trump fan" are Glenn Greenwald, Rania Khalek, Zaid Jilani, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, all of whom, according to Kirchick, are "captive to a crude and one-dimensional anti-Americanism."

The one sin that unites these progressive commentators, journalists, and political figures with Trump is, in other words, that they all dare to question the morality of America's use of force abroad.
By linking left-wing criticism of American foreign policy with Trumpism, Kirchick is attempting, as Eric Levitz has noted, to delegitimize ideas without having to put forward anything resembling a coherent argument. Instead, Kirchick dubiously portrays Trump as an anti-imperialist (which he's not) to smear actual anti-imperialists.

"For champions of the bipartisan consensus on issues of national security and globalization," Levitz writes, "Trump is an awfully convenient figurehead for challenges to the status quo."

Far from innovative, Kirchick's tactic of using Trump to dismiss legitimate critiques of Hillary Clinton has become commonplace within American political discourse. And shamefully, the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic Party has silently capitulated to this framework.

Such a state of affairs is immensely revealing, in several ways.

First, it demonstrates clearly the striking ideological bankruptcy of the Democratic establishment. As Neera Tanden, a long-time Clinton confidante, made clear in a recent interview with Politico's Glenn Thrush, loyal partisans are not at all concerned with addressing—or even acknowledging—the critiques of Hillary Clinton offered by independent progressives. Instead, they are concerned primarily with optics and deflection.

Tanden, while acknowledging that Sanders "brought a lot of really important issues to the floor," lamented that "Sanders was prosecuting a much tougher character attack" than the one Clinton faced in 2008. She also observed—contradicting the facts—that Sanders's attacks did "significant damage to Hillary's negatives," implying that Sanders is responsible for the perception that Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy.

Of course, as Ben Spielberg has observed, "If legitimate critiques damage a candidate's approval rating, the problem isn't the person making the critiques."

But Tanden's narrative is consistent with the message put forward by the Clinton campaign throughout the primary: The very act of pointing to Clinton's record, the story goes, is tantamount to, as Clinton herself put it, "an artful smear."

A Generation of Fascism Feebly Pretending at Democratic Political Governance


HuffPo |  The financial calamity of 2008 laid bare ugly problems in the global economic order. The mess has now festered into a political crisis that jeopardizes the link between market-driven economies and representative democracy.

So argues Martin Wolf, the most influential living British economics writer, in a Wednesday column for the Financial Times titled “Capitalism and Democracy: The Strain is Showing.” Fixing the economic norms most English-speaking people refer to as “capitalism,” Wolf argues, will be difficult. But a first step requires rethinking what elites have referred to for three decades as “free trade” or “globalization.”

“Those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions,” Wolf writes. “One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations. My view increasingly echoes that of Prof Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who has argued that ‘international agreements [should] be judged not by how much is harmonised or by how many barriers are torn down but whether citizens are empowered.’ Trade brings gains but cannot be pursued at all costs.” 

The global economic order of the past three decades has privileged a few elites ― who have seen their incomes and political power expand ― at the expense of a far greater number of working people ― who have seen their incomes stagnate and their political influence wane. Global economic rules allow jobs to be offshored and capital to be reallocated in ways that do not benefit the vast majority of people who vote in elections. The idea that markets promoting individual choice are compatible with democratic forms of government has become an open question, according to Wolf.

These words are an intellectual assault on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership ― two major international pacts spearheaded by President Barack Obama. Public controversy surrounding TTIP is largely constrained within the European Union at the moment, but the TPP has become one of the most important issues of the 2016 U.S. presidential election ― though it rarely receives coverage on cable news. 

The TPP is modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization treaties that preceded it. The deal would grant corporations the right to challenge the laws and regulations of sovereign governments before a secretive international tribunal. Labor unions, environmental activists and other representatives of civil society would not be afforded the same privilege. The agreement is widely viewed as an effort to give multinational corporations greater influence over political decision-making.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

why is populism here to stay? ISDS investor-state dispute settlement


buzzfeed |  Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will.

Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars as retribution.

Imagine that this court is so powerful that nations often must heed its rulings as if they came from their own supreme courts, with no meaningful way to appeal. That it operates unconstrained by precedent or any significant public oversight, often keeping its proceedings and sometimes even its decisions secret. That the people who decide its cases are largely elite Western corporate attorneys who have a vested interest in expanding the court’s authority because they profit from it directly, arguing cases one day and then sitting in judgment another. That some of them half-jokingly refer to themselves as “The Club” or “The Mafia.”

And imagine that the penalties this court has imposed have been so crushing — and its decisions so unpredictable — that some nations dare not risk a trial, responding to the mere threat of a lawsuit by offering vast concessions, such as rolling back their own laws or even wiping away the punishments of convicted criminals.

This system is already in place, operating behind closed doors in office buildings and conference rooms in cities around the world. Known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, it is written into a vast network of treaties that govern international trade and investment, including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Congress must soon decide whether to ratify.

These trade pacts have become a flashpoint in the US presidential campaign. But an 18-month BuzzFeed News investigation, spanning three continents and involving more than 200 interviews and tens of thousands of documents, many of them previously confidential, has exposed an obscure but immensely consequential feature of these trade treaties, the secret operations of these tribunals, and the ways that business has co-opted them to bring sovereign nations to heel.

The BuzzFeed News investigation explores four different aspects of ISDS. In coming days, it will show how the mere threat of an ISDS case can intimidate a nation into gutting its own laws, how some financial firms have transformed what was intended to be a system of justice into an engine of profit, and how America is surprisingly vulnerable to suits from foreign companies.

The series starts today with perhaps the least known and most jarring revelation: Companies and executives accused or even convicted of crimes have escaped punishment by turning to this special forum.

face the facts - populism is here to stay...,


theconversation |  We are witnessing what I have termed The Global Rise of Populism. Populism, once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world, is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe, from the Americas to Europe, from Africa to the Asia Pacific.

Populism – a political style that features 1) an appeal to “the people” versus “the elite”; 2) the use of “bad manners” that are allegedly “unbecoming” for politicians; and 3) the evocation of crisis, breakdown or threat – isn’t going anywhere. It is here to stay. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can do something about it.

First, “the elite” is on the nose in many parts of the world. Mainstream parties are increasingly seen as incapable of channelling popular interests, governments are viewed as being in thrall to global finance, and experts are increasingly distrusted and questioned. In many cases, this cynicism is justified.

Populists posit themselves as representing a break from the status quo. They claim to be able to return power to “the people”. This message has great resonance at this particular historical juncture, where faith in institutions has been badly shaken.

Second, the shifting media landscape favours populists. In a time of communicative abundance, populists deliver a simple, often headline-grabbing message that plays to mass media’s desire for polarisation, dramatisation and emotionalisation.

This allows them to “break through” the constant noise and grab free media attention. There is no better example of this than Trump, whose single tweets inspire media frenzy, or, on a local level, the Australian media’s willingness to report every utterance of Hanson since her election.

Also, many populists have been at the forefront of using social media to communicate “directly” with their followers. The examples of Italy’s Five Star Movement, the US Tea Party and Hungary’s Jobbik are instructive here. This type of engagement is something on which mainstream parties have tended to be woefully behind the times.

Third, populists have become more savvy and increased their appeal in the past decade. In fields of candidates who often seem to be cut from a very similar cloth, populists stand out by offering a performance that seems more authentic, more appealing and often downright more entertaining than other politicians.

New DNC Chair Says Outrage Over Clinton's Pay-To-Play Is "Attempt To Criminalize Normal Behavior"


zerohedge |  Donna Brazile, the new DNC Chair, appeared on ABC's "This Week" and declared that pay for play like "someone who is a donor...saying I want access" is just an attempt to "criminalize behavior that is normal."  Specifically, when asked about pay for play allegations against the Clinton Foundation, Brazile responded as follows:
"First of all, Martha, the way I look at it, I’ve been a government official. So, you know, this notion that, somehow or another, someone who is a supporter, someone who is a donor, somebody who’s an activist, saying I want access, I want to come into a room and I want to meet people, we often criminalize behavior that is normal. And I don’t see what the smoke is."
Brazile also took the opportunity to ramp up the rhetoric against Julian Assange saying that the DNC was a "victim of a cyber crime led by thugs" seeking to "destabilize our democracy."  
"There was Russian involvement in this to destabilize not just our institution, the Democratic Party, but our democracy itself."
When asked whether she was concerned about recent TV interviews where Julian Assange had promised additional Hillary disclosures, Brazile said:
"The smoking gun is that we're interviewing somebody who's involved in a cyber crime and not calling him a criminal."
Just to clarify Brazile's position, trading "access" to the Secretary of State in return for donations from questionable international characters and misappropriating DNC funds is in no way criminal but revealing such information to the public is.  So as long as we're kept in the dark there is no crime.  Got it.  Thanks.

swole patrol say "examine what Trump said, re-examine the relationship"


shtfplan |  It seems that Donald Trump’s recent speech urging black Americans to vote for him because of failing Clinton and Obama policies has not fallen on deaf ears.

African Americans, who have for decades voted en masse for democrat party candidates to the tune of 90% support or more, have finally realized that just because a politician says he or she is going to do something doesn’t mean it will actually happen.

We’re sure you remember Obama’s promises of free health care, free education, more jobs and better communities. That not even the first black American President was able to improve the lives of minorities may have finally woken some people up.

The following interview with New Black Panther Quanell X requires no further commentary – he breaks it down quite succinctly:
Let me say this to the brothers and sisters who listened and watched that speech… We may not like the vessel [Donald Trump] that said what he said, but I ask us to truly examine what he said.
Because it is a fact that for 54 years we have been voting for the Democratic Party like no other race in America. And they have not given us the same loyalty and love that we have given them. We, as black people, have to reexamine the relationship. We’re being pimped like prostitutes and they’re the big pimps pimping us politically… promising us everything and we get nothing in return. We gotta step back now as black people and we gotta look at all the parties and vote our best interests.

I want to say and encourage the brothers and sisters… Barack Obama, our president, served two terms… the first black president ever… but did our condition get better?  Did financially, politically, academically with education in our community… did things get better? Are our young people working more?
The condition got worse.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

FACT: Nessa Diab a phoine muhuggah...,


unclesamsmisguidedchildren |  There are some facts about Colin Kaepernick that you should know. 1) He recently converted to Islam, 2) His girlfriend,  DJ Nessa Diab, is a prominent activist in Black Lives Matter and is Muslim. She is also a fan of the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro.

Our writer James Tuttle has already given you the skinny from his and another veteran’s perspective. Now Tank and I want to talk about the underlying agenda propagated by these  so-called “Activists.”
Oppression- the real kind- from Tank
Mr. Kaepernick, you have no clue what Oppression feels like. I know exactly what it feels like. I can tell you as a communist survivor who almost saw his family sent to prison because of bringing a drawing of the birth of Christ and telling my 1st grade kids about Jesus. 

I remember clearly watching my father being beaten by Castro henchmen right in front of my grandma’s house… all because we were coming to America.

I remember having only a glass of sugar with water because no one would hire my father or mother for fear they would receive the same discrimination. 

I understand you embrace communist/socialist ideas, yet I do not see you giving away all of your millions of dollars to charity. And if you hate it here so much, why aren’t you fleeing to North Korea or Cuba?

You are a new Moslem convert who supports an ideology that has kept women oppressed for thousands of years, without even the right to vote or participate in any leadership role without permission of their father or husband. 

You talk about ‘oppression’ from the white men, yet your own white parents have given you a college education  and life of  “white privilege.”
History shows that blacks sold blacks into slavery.  Today, the ‘human trade’ as they call it now is predominantly run by Moslem Arabs: the diamond slavery is a huge example. 

It shows that no matter how many millions you have, you can still be a slave in your own plantation.

the coward Gattine hiding from Gov. LePage behind long Cathedral skirts...,


PressHerald |  Since Friday, many lawmakers, including a growing listnumber of Republicans, have called on the governor to seek professional treatment. Democratic leaders have asked him to resign. Senate Republican leaders said Monday that they met with the governor to discuss “corrective action.”

Westbrook’s Mayor Colleen Hilton, a Democrat, was among many who condemned the governor’s recent words and actions. Along with City Council President Brendan Rielly and School Committee Chairman James Violette, Hilton last week addressed an “Open Letter to the People of Maine.”

“Once more Governor LePage has humiliated himself and the Office of the Governor,” it read. “He continues to again embarrass the citizens of this wonderful state. Unfortunately, the current target of his inappropriate outbursts is Drew Gattine, a respected member and leader of our community, the City of Westbrook, and a highly respected member of the Maine State Legislature.

“Drew Gattine is what we want in a Maine leader. He is totally dedicated to helping others, has integrity and a strong ethical compass, is willing to lead with humor and humility, is articulate and is open to dialogue with those who disagree with him.”

Rielly also confirmed that the town hall had been canceled and said that a rally for decency was scheduled for Riverside Park at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

Westbrook, a mostly blue-collar mill city of about 18,000 residents, has seen its demographic makeup shift in recent years. Many immigrants and refugees have settled in the city, in large part because of affordable housing, and recent events have created racial and ethnic tension.

After it was learned this month that Adnan Fazeli – an Iranian refugee who became an Islamic State radical – had lived in Westbrook, Muslims in the same housing complex were targeted with anonymous typed notes that read, “All Muslims are Terrorists should be Killed.”

Westbrook, like many communities, also has been hit hard by the heroin and opiate epidemic. Following a rash of overdose calls, the city’s police department accepted an offer by Maine’s attorney general to equip officers with more doses of the life-saving drug Narcan.

In 2014, Westbrook had 11,770 registered voters, made up of 38 percent Democrats, 22.9 percent Republicans, 4.5 percent independent and 34.6 unenrolled,according to the secretary of state. When LePage was re-elected in 2014, he received 41 percent of the votes cast in Westbrook.

House Majority Leader Jeff McCabe, D-Skowhegan, criticized LePage for wanting to schedule the town hall event in Gattine’s hometown.

Granny Goodness: “Black Americans, THANK YOU FOR YOUR VOTES and letting me use you again!"


rawstory |  “You’re accusing Hillary Clinton of pandering to African-American voters — and yet Donald Trump has yet to lay out and enumerate his plans to create jobs, to deal with the crime issues that he’s talking about,” Welker told Burns, who has acted as a surrogate for Trump. “So how can African-American voters feel as though he is validly trying to address some of their top concerns when he has not spoken directly to them and to their communities?”

“Tell me: where are your ancestors from?” Burns asked her. 

“I have a lot of ancestors,” Welker replied. “Let’s just stick on the topic, though.”

“When you talk to one black family, you’re not talking to all black families,” said Burns, who is black. “We need to quit talking as though when you talk to ‘the African-American community’ as though that resonates with all –”

“But he’s not talking to them at all, Pastor Burns, that’s my point,” she interjected. 

“That’s not true. He’s talking to Americans!” Burns yelled. “And we as African-Americans are Americans. We are American. We are American. and we deserve to have the same respect as all Americans. When Donald Trump talked about jobs, he didn’t talk to white America — he talked to America. And that’s the problem we have in this society.”

While Trump drew criticism last week for making his pitch to African-American voters in front of all-white audiences, Burns did so on Monday for posting the drawing of Clinton, along with the caption, “Black Americans, THANK YOU FOR YOUR VOTES and letting me use you again..See you again in 4 years.”

Monday, August 29, 2016

is zika the first front in the 21st century biowar?


FP |  A main element of the biological revolution will be its impact on security in the broadest sense of the term, as well as on the more specific realm of military activity. Both of these are part of the work being done by various laboratories around the globe, including here in the United States at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, where I serve as a senior fellow.

Some of the most promising advances made at JHU APL and elsewhere involve man-machine interfaces, with particular emphasis on brain-machine connections that would allow the use of disconnected limbs; more rapid disease identification in response to both natural and man-made epidemics; artificial intelligence, which offers the greatest near-term potential for both positive benefit and military application (i.e., autonomous attack drones); human performance enhancement, including significant reduction in sleep needs, increases in mental acuity, and improvements in exoskeleton and skin “armor”; and efficient genome editing using CRISPR-Cas, a technology that has become widely available to ever smaller laboratory settings, including individuals working out of their homes.

The most important question is how to appropriately pursue such research while remaining within the legal, ethical, moral, and policy boundaries that our society might one day like to set, though are still largely unformed. Scientists are like soldiers on patrol in unmarked terrain, one that is occasionally illuminated by a flash of lightning, revealing steeper and more dangerous ground ahead. The United States needs to continue its research efforts, but, equally important, it needs to develop a coherent and cohesive biological strategy to guide those efforts.

But national biological research efforts will also have international implications, so over time there will need to be international diplomacy to set norms of behavior for the use of these technologies. The diplomacy that went into developing the Law of the Sea, and is under consideration in the cyberworld, could serve as a useful model.

A major challenge for such diplomacy is that individual nations, transnational organizations, or even individuals will soon have access — if they don’t already — to biological tools that permit manipulation of living organisms. The rise of low-cost synthetic biology technologies, the falling cost of DNA sequencing, and the diffusion of knowledge through the internet create the conditions for a breakout biological event not dissimilar to the Spanish influenza of roughly a century ago. In that plague, by some estimates, nearly 40 percent of the world’s population was infected, with a 10 to 20 percent mortality rate. Extrapolated to our current global population, that would equate to more than 400 million dead.

I didn't serve, I was used...,


tomdispatch |  By 2008, congressional legislation had been written -- the Veterans’ Mental Health and Other Care Improvement Act -- directing the VA to develop a plan to evaluate all patients for pain. When the VA objected to Congress dictating its medical procedures, Big Pharma launched a “Freedom from Pain” media blitz, enlisting veterans’ organizations to campaign for the bill and get it passed.

Those painkillers were also dispatched to the war zones where our troops were physically breaking down under the weight of the equipment they carried. By 2010, a third of the Army’s soldiers were on prescription medications -- and nearly half of them, 76,500, were on prescription opioids -- which proved to be highly addictive, despite the assurance of experts like Rollin Gallagher. In 2007, for instance, “The American Veterans and Service Members Survival Guide,” distributed by the American Pain Foundation and edited by Gallagher, offered this assurance: “[W]hen used for medical purposes and under the guidance of a skilled health-care provider, the risk of addiction from opioid pain medication is very low.”

By that time, here at home, soldiers and vets were dying at astonishing rates from accidental or deliberate overdoses. Civilian doctors as well had been persuaded to overprescribe these drugs, so that by 2011 the CDC announced a national epidemic, affecting more than 12 million Americans.  In May 2012, the Senate Finance Committee finally initiated an investigation into the perhaps “improper relation” between Big Pharma and the pain foundations. That investigation is still “ongoing,” which means that no information about it can yet be revealed to the public.

Meanwhile, opioid addicts, both veterans and civilians, were discovering that heroin was a cheaper and no less effective way to go.  Because heroin is often cut with Fentanyl, a more powerful opioid, however, drug deaths rose dramatically.

This epidemic of death is in the news almost every day now as hard-hit cities and states sue the drug makers, but rarely is it traced to its launching pad: the Big Pharma conspiracy to make big bucks off our country’s wounded soldiers.

It took the VA far too long to extricate itself from medical policies marketed by Big Pharma and, in effect, prescribed by Congress. It had made the mistake of turning to the Pharma-funded pain foundations in 2004 to select its Deputy National Program Director of Pain Management: the ubiquitous Dr. Gallagher. But when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency finally laid down new restrictive rules on opioids in 2014, the VA had to comply. That’s been hard on the thousands of opioid-dependent vets it had unwittingly hooked, and it’s becoming harder as Republicans in Congress move to privatize the VA and send vets out with vouchers to find their own health care.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Details of Clinton Pay-to-Play Will Be Withheld Until After Election


RT |  Earlier this week, the Associated Press (AP) has revealed that more than half of all Clinton's meetings with the people outside the government, when she was secretary of state, were with donors to her private foundation.

"At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press," the investigating journalists reported, saying that "it's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president."

In total, the Clinton Foundation received as much as $156 million from those 85 donors, who contributed financially either personally or through companies or groups, according to AP. At least 20 of those donors gave more than $1 million each, the report added.

Some of Clinton's emails that she failed to turn over to the US government, but were released after a Freedom of Information Act request, suggest the charitable foundation might have possibly rewarded its donors with special access and influence inside the State Department. The social media reacted with a #PayToPlay hashtag, with Twitter users angered by the Democratic candidate's alleged "corruption."

Clinton Victory Fund Laundering and Squidding $$$


zerohedge |  Is the Hillary Victory Fund using state democratic committees to launder donations from wealthy individuals to the Democratic National Committee?  Evidence gathered by Bloomberg would certainly seem to suggest so.

So how does it work?  Campaign finance laws specifically restrict the amount of money any single person can give to individual candidates ($2,700), a party's various state committees ($10,000) as well as a party's national committee ($33,400).  In theory, therefore, that would imply a person would be capped out at $46,100 if he contributed the max his Presidential candidate, his party's national committee and his party's state committee.  But, that's just a narrow "interpretation" of the "intent" of the campaign finance laws and Hillary isn't really all about "intent"...just ask FBI Director Comey.  

So, the Hillary Victory Fund has come up with a clever way to use state democratic committees (of which there are 33) as money-laundering tools to effectively increase the amount that can be contributed to the Democratic National Committee from $33,400 to $363,400 (it's only like 1,000% more than intended).

How do they do it?  Well, the rules say that a single person can only contribute $10,000 to any one State.  That said, they don't restrict people from contributing $10,000 to multiple states.  Moreover, there are no restrictions on transfers of funds from Democratic State Committees to the Democratic National Committee.  See where we're going with this?

Effectively the Hillary Victory Fund acts as a "bundler" which collects large donations from wealthy investors.  Per the diagram below, contributions are then maxed out to "Hillary For President" and the "Democratic National Committee."  Any remaining funds are then spliced up and sent in $10,000 increments to the 33 different State Democratic Committees.  That said, the state committees simply act as flow through entities which subsequently pass the contributions from the Hillary Victory Fund along to the Democratic National Committee.  Isn't that neat?

The beauty of this system, of course, is that once the money is aggregated at the Democratic National Committee it becomes very "flexible."  The DNC can then use that money to support Hillary and/or any of a number of contentious races in any state it wants (e.g. battleground states).

Clinton Corruption Conspicuously Obvious to the Casual Observer

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Saturday, August 27, 2016

maine governor: people of color are the enemy



HuffPo | Perhaps Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) thought he had been too subtle in expressing his views on black and Hispanic people in the past. How else to explain what he said in a Friday press conference while discussing a threatening, expletive-filled voicemail that he’d left for a state legislator?

LePage was widely criticized earlier this year for claiming men with names like “Smoothie, D-Money and Shifty” were coming into his state to deal drugs. Earlier this week, he said he keeps a binder with mugshots of all the drug dealers arrested in Maine, and he claimed that 90 percent of the people in that binder were black or Hispanic.

Note that 95 percent of Maine residents are white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

On Friday, LePage first denied that Maine police officers were racially profiling people ― an obvious concern if they really are arresting almost exclusively people of color for drug crimes.

Then the governor suggested that people of color in Maine were “the enemy.”

PressHerald | LePage later invited a Portland Press Herald reporter and a two-person television crew from WMTW to the Blaine House, where during a 30-minute interview the governor described his anger with Gattine and others, told them he had left the phone message and said he wished he and the lawmaker could engage in an armed duel to settle the matter.

“When a snot-nosed little guy from Westbrook calls me a racist, now I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” LePage said. “And we would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be (Alexander) Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.”

Gattine is the House chair of the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, which has opposed some of LePage’s welfare, drug enforcement and other reforms. He said the governor’s phone message was uncalled for. 

LOL@Granny Goodness Trying Negroe-Whispering On The Broken Chessboard...,


thehill |  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.  Racist ideas. 

Race-baiting ideas.  Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”

Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.” 

The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loosely organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the “Alt-Right.”  A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.   

This is part of a broader story -- the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world. 
Just yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi. 

Farage has called for a ban on the children of legal immigrants from public schools and health services, has said women are quote “worth less” than men, and supports scrapping laws that prevent employers from discriminating based on race -- that’s who Trump wants by his side.

The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

In fact, Farage has appeared regularly on Russian propaganda programs. 

Now he’s standing on the same stage as the Republican nominee.  

Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies.

He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally. 

American presidents from Truman to Reagan have rejected the kind of approach Trump is taking on Russia. 

We should, too. 

All of this adds up to something we’ve never seen before.

Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment.  But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone.  Until now.  

On David Duke’s radio show the other day, the mood was jubilant. 

“We appear to have taken over the Republican Party,” one white supremacist said. 

Duke laughed.  There’s still more work to do, he said.

No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here.  The names may have changed… Racists now call themselves “racialists.”  White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.”  The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.”  But the hate burns just as bright. 
And now Trump is trying to rebrand himself as well.  Don’t be fooled. 

There’s an old Mexican proverb that says “Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.”

We know who Trump is.  A few words on a teleprompter won’t change that.

He says he wants to “make America great again,” but his real message remains “Make America hate again.”

Friday, August 26, 2016

Granny Goodness and the Broken Chessboard...,


counterpunch |  The main architect of Washington’s plan to rule the world has abandoned the scheme and called for the forging of ties with Russia and China. While Zbigniew Brzezinski’s article in The American Interest titled “Towards a Global Realignment” has largely been ignored by the media, it shows that powerful members of the policymaking establishment no longer believe that Washington will prevail in its quest to extent US hegemony across the Middle East and Asia. Brzezinski, who was the main proponent of this idea and who drew up the blueprint for imperial expansion in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, has done an about-face and called for a dramatic revising of the strategy. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the AI:
“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.
Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.
The first of these verities is that the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.” (Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest)
Repeat: The US is “no longer the globally imperial power.”

We have not yet reached the tipping point for US primacy, but that day is fast approaching and Brzezinski knows it.

In contrast, Clinton is still fully-committed to expanding US hegemony across Asia. She doesn’t understand the risks this poses for the country or the world. She’s going to persist with the interventions until the US war-making juggernaut is stopped dead-in-its-tracks which, judging by her hyperbolic rhetoric, will probably happen some time in her first term.

Brzezinski presents a rational but self-serving plan to climb-down, minimize future conflicts, avoid a nuclear conflagration and preserve the global order. (aka–The “dollar system”) But will bloodthirsty Hillary follow his advice?

Not a chance.

vast cauldron (you ese) calls tiny kettle(saudi) "pre-eminent purveyor of terrorism worldwide...,"


NYTimes |  Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do not agree on much, but Saudi Arabia may be an exception. She has deplored Saudi Arabia’s support for “radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism.” He has called the Saudis “the world’s biggest funders of terrorism.”

The first American diplomat to serve as envoy to Muslim communities around the world visited 80 countries and concluded that the Saudi influence was destroying tolerant Islamic traditions. “If the Saudis do not cease what they are doing,” the official, Farah Pandith, wrote last year, “there must be diplomatic, cultural and economic consequences.”

And hardly a week passes without a television pundit or a newspaper columnist blaming Saudi Arabia for jihadist violence. On HBO, Bill Maher calls Saudi teachings “medieval,” adding an epithet. In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Saudis have “created a monster in the world of Islam.”

The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.

Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex causes — the United States’s own actions among them?

Thursday, August 25, 2016

B'More-PD Conducts Secret, Privately-Funded, Military-Style Aerial Surveillance



bloomberg |  Since January, police have been testing an aerial surveillance system adapted from the surge in Iraq. And they neglected to tell the public. Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there.

A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, based in Dayton, Ohio, provided the service to the police, and the funding came from a private donor. No public disclosure of the program had ever been made.

Outside the courthouse, several of the protesters began marching around the building, chanting for justice. The plane continued to circle overhead, unseen.

NYPD Muslim Surveillance Violated Civil Rights and Surveillance Laws


RT |  An independent police monitor found the New York Police Department violated surveillance laws, particularly when spying on Muslim groups. The report found NYPD’s intelligence division often continued surveillance after court permission for it expired. 

As far back as 2004, the NYPD failed to get permission to continue investigations of Muslims groups, the New York Inspector General said. For its investigation, the IG used a sample of all cases closed between 2010 and 2015, some of which go back to 2004.

In 25 percent of the cases, surveillance investigations continue for more than a month past the when the bureau should have obtained renewed authorization.

The report, released on Tuesday, found that more than 95 percent of the people under investigation in the cases were “associated with Muslims and/or engaged in political activity that those individuals associated with Islam.”

trilateral commission: crisis of democracy


chomsky |  The Trilateral Commission has issued one major book-length report, namely, The Crisis of Democracy (Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, 1975). Given the intimate connections between the Commission and the Carter Administration, the study is worth careful attention, as an indication of the thinking that may well lie behind its domestic policies, as well as the policies undertaken in other industrial democracies in the coming years.

The Commission’s report is concerned with the “governability of the democracies.” Its American author, Samuel Huntington, was former chairman of the Department of Government at Harvard, and a government adviser. He is well-known for his ideas on how to destroy the rural revolution in Vietnam. He wrote in Foreign Affairs (1968) that “In an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation.'” The answer is “forced-draft urbanization and modernization.” Explaining this concept, he observes that if direct application of military force in the countryside “takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city” then the “Maoist-inspired rural revolution may be “undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution.” The Viet Cong, he wrote, is “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.” 

Thus “in the immediate future” peace must “be based on accommodation” particularly since the US is unwilling to undertake the “expensive, time consuming and frustrating task” of ensuring that the constituency of the Viet Cong no longer exists (he was wrong about that, as the Nixon-Kissinger programs of rural massacre were to show). “Accommodation” as conceived by Huntington is a process whereby the Viet Cong “degenerate into the protest of a declining rural minority” while the regime imposed by US force maintains power. A year later, when it appeared that “urbanization” by military force was not succeeding and it seemed that the United States might be compelled to enter into negotiations with the NLF [National Liberation Front] (which he recognized to be “the most powerful purely political national organization”), Huntington, in a paper delivered before the AID-supported Council on Vietnamese Studies which he had headed, proposed various measures of political trickery and manipulation that might be used to achieve the domination of the U.S.-imposed government, though the discussants felt rather pessimistic about the prospects….

In short, Huntington is well-qualified to discourse on the problems of democracy.

The report argues that what is needed in the industrial democracies “is a greater degree of moderation in democracy” to overcome the “excess of democracy” of the past decade. “The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” This recommendation recalls the analysis of Third World problems put forth by other political thinkers of the same persuasion, for example, Ithiel Pool (then chairman of the Department of Political Science at MIT), who explained some years ago that in Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic, “order depends on somehow compelling newly mobilized strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism… At least temporarily the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired aspirations and levels of political activity.” The Trilateral recommendations for the capitalist democracies are an application at home of the theories of “order” developed for subject societies of the Third World.

the corporate blueprint to dominate democracy


RT |  Forty-five years ago this week, a single memo written by Lewis Powell kicked off the corporate takeover of the US government and inspired a generation of think tanks, lobbyists, and dirty money. 

The conservative corporate lawyer, who would later be appointed to the US Supreme Court by Republican President Richard Nixon, wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce’s Eugene Sydnor, putting forth a plan to tackle the environmental and civil rights movements which were pushing for more health and safety regulations.

Powell was addressing concerns held by conservatives surrounding the New Deal and the Great Society, which included Social Security, the Labor Relations Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and anti-discrimination laws.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Du-Tard-E Wanna Know Why You-Ess-Ey Killing Up the Black People?


psychopathicplutocratic profiting from public office...,


zerohedge |  Yesterday's report that more than half, or at least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or spoke to Hillary Clinton while she led the State Department, donated at least $156 million to her family charity or pledged commitments with at least 16 foreign governments donating as much as $170 million, has become the latest goldmine for Donald Trump and Republicans who finally have a break in the anti-Trump news cycle to pounce on.
 
"It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history," Trump said in a statement, reiterating a claim he made earlier in the week. "We've now learned that a majority of the non-government people she met with as secretary of state gave money to the corrupt Clinton Foundation. ... It was wrong then, and it is wrong now -- and the foundation must be shut down immediately."

barbell crushes, georgetown jackings, traintrack jumps...,


archive |  A “brilliant” barrister who represented Julian Assange ended his life by leaping under a train after he was allowed to leave a private mental health hospital to go for a walk at 5am.

John Jones QC, a 48-year-old married father of two who worked at renowned legal chambers Doughty Street, was being treated for severe depression and had recently had his medication changed when he died at West Hampstead Thameslink station on April 18 this year.

An inquest at St Pancras Coroner’s Court heard that the lawyer – who worked on high profile war crimes cases at The Hague – suffered from “obsessive overthinking” which had become prevalent following a stressful period in his life. 

He lived in Golders Green, and was staying as a voluntary patient at The Nightingale hospital in Marylebone in the weeks leading up to his death.

FBI Reports Linking Granny Goodness to Vince Foster Suicide Go Missing From National Archives


dailymail |  FBI agents' reports of interviews documenting that Hillary Clinton's stinging humiliation of her friend and mentor Vince Foster in front of White House aides triggered his suicide a week later are missing from where they should be filed at the National Archives, Daily Mail Online has learned exclusively.

On two separate occasions, this author visited the National Archives and Records Service in College Park, Md., to review the reports generated by FBI agents assigned to investigate the 1993 death of Bill Clinton's deputy White House counsel.

On the first visit, archivist David Paynter provided the box of records that he said contained the FBI reports of interviews conducted by FBI agents on Foster's death. 
On a second visit, archivist James Mathis provided what he said were those same documents.

While the box contained dozens of FBI reports concerning Foster's death - including interviews with the medical examiner, U.S. Park Police officers, and White House aides about the contents of Foster's office -  the reports on Hillary Clinton's role in his death were absent.

After filing a Freedom of Information request with the National Archives, Martha Murphy, the archives' public liaison, reported that she directed a senior archivist to conduct a more thorough review of the relevant FBI files, including those that had not been previously made public in response to FOIA requests.

'He examined all eight boxes but found no interviews by any investigator that detail either a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster or the effects of a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster on Vince Foster's state of mind,' Murphy reported in an email.


Tuesday, August 23, 2016

lied to you, lied about you, turned you out, and played you for fools...,


theroot |  American empires are built on the little white lie that rests on the premise that people of color are scary and dangerous. There is a long history of white people gaining money, power, influence, sympathy or a few more Twitter followers by using the currency that is the dark-skinned demon. It buys white fright, and in America, with white fright on your side, you can get anything you want.

There are countless white-fright stories of white men coercing women into accusing black men of rape to initiate lynchings and retake valuable land from newly freed slaves in the post-Reconstruction South. In 1918, when black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Ark., decided to unionize and combine resources, farmers spread the word as far as Mississippi of a black conspiracy to murder white planters. The result was 237 dead black men, women and children in one of the worst mass lynchings in U.S. history. Lying-ass dogs.

America’s war on drugs began when newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst decided that hemp production might endanger his pulp and paper empire, so one of his papers editorialized the now famous quote, “Marijuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.” That the drug war was a black thing always sounded like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory until last year, when an aide from the Nixon administration—who invented the term “war on drugs”—revealed to CNN:
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. […] We could arrest their leaders[,] raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
One of the reasons accusations of racism seem so inflammatory is that there is widespread belief that pointing out a racist act automatically means the person who did it hates people of color. Contrary to popular belief, racism does not necessarily equal hate. Racism sometimes manifests itself in the privileged apathy that does not consider people of color a lower, lesser form of humanity. Instead, people of color aren’t considered at all. To some people they are just brown props on a white stage—to be manipulated and used as needed. We are step stools and tools. They don’t always shoot black people in the face or string them from trees; sometimes they just carelessly toss us under the bus of their choosing.

Like when, in 1994, white fright went viral with Susan Smith, who told the story of how a black man carjacked her in South Carolina while her sons were in the car, only for it to turn out that she murdered them and drove them into a lake.

they never remember what you said or what you did, but they never forget how you made them feel...,


vox |  Contrary to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, welfare had created chronic dependence on subsidies like Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). But rather than adjust the policy or address the core reasons so many people were stuck in the cycle, the conversation focused largely on vilifying welfare recipients as corrupt drains on society, leeching off hard-working American’s tax dollars.

And even though white and black families made up similar numbers of AFDC cases between 1983 and 1995, black women were the face of both welfare’s failure and the culprits who corrupted it, and an indictment of the Democratic Party that supported them.

Clinton, however, offered a different vision. After some back and forth with the GOP, the AFDC was effectively renamed the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Through block grants, the policy required recipients to find a job two years after they began seeking benefits, and put a five-year lifetime limit on receiving benefits. Also among its goals was a push to promote two-parent households and marriage, drawing heavily from dubious ideas that women were using out-of-wedlock births to cash in on welfare checks.

PWRORA helped Clinton effectively dismantle a social safety net for the poorest Americans with a program that incentivized them to seek work because there was little money invested in supporting them otherwise.

Clinton also found a way to rebrand the political party he led by putting an end to the system championed by Democratic presidents before him. But he did so by following Reagan and other Republicans.

Clinton drew the ire of liberals, including Mary Jo Bane, Wendell Primus, and Peter Edelman — prominent officials at Health and Human Services under his administration who resigned in protest.
In a 1997 Atlantic essay titled "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done," Edelman, a longtime friend of Clinton, lambasted just what was wrong with PRWORA: "The bill closes its eyes to all the fact and complexities of the real world and essentially says to recipients, Find a job. That has a nice bumper-sticker ring to it. But as a one-size-fits-all recipe it is totally unrealistic."

A part of this was simply politics. Clinton entered the White House as a Democrat appealing to "white flight Democrats," or those voters prepared to leave the party out of resentment for its growing alignment with the concerns of racial minorities. And like his infamous "Sister Souljah moment," welfare reform helped him capture racial resentment to his advantage.

In the 1990s, Clinton sought to champion both hard-working Americans and nonworking Americans alike by gutting government subsidies for the nation’s poorest, who, due to welfare, had little if any reason to work like their counterparts.

But with Harden, Clinton did what his GOP counterparts couldn’t: advocate for welfare reform without completely alienating black constituents. By pushing personal responsibility, Harden helped Clinton chastise welfare without completely vilifying black women. Harden showed that the "welfare queen" could be redeemed, transforming the face of welfare’s alleged problems into the same fare of welfare reform’s promise.

When Zakharova Talks Men Of Culture Listen...,

mid.ru  |   White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not ...