The discussion below is reproduced with minor changes
from
idec.gr (work in
progress)
No political system is exempt from corruption and in my opinion this outcome might even be
somehow inexorable due to the nature of a state based polity. The difference between the European systems in particular but also, at the limit, the American
one and those societies the US hypocritically claim as corrupt might be mainly based not on
the extent of corruption, but on different types of corruption used. Partially this might be
due to the fact that younger society which are still in formation exhibit more
"primitive" types of corruption then societies which
have already passed the middle-age period in their life cycle. Revolving door corruption is
rampant in the USA, but not so popular in Russia, Iran and other "younger" countries.
Old style bribes at the same time are more common in Russia, although in many cases they
function not as bribe but as a kind of private insurance again prejudice/friction of the
system: they help to prevent bias in the system or speed up processing of a request,
but not materially affect outcome.
And to answer your question: "how to prevent the hijacking of public interest by state
officials; protect the society form abuse of the possibility of extracting private benefit
inherent in large power of the state official?"
But there is another aspect of corruption which is pretty modern in origin. The dominant Western perspective on
"governance" failed to highlight the major source of corruption
-- neoliberalism as a social system.
The neoliberal anti-corruption campaign served to hide the problems inherent in economic
liberalization. It is variant of "blame the poor" (countries) line when instead of blaming neoliberal reforms themselves,
neoliberals try to divert the attention from neoliberalism as a powerful force of enabling
corruption by highlighting other contributing factors such as
Long history of
crony links between business and state (as if the USA if different in this respect)
Nepotism in the "Global South"
"Strong state tradition" in Turkey,
"The communist past" in Russia,
The "corporatist past"
in Latin America.
Over recent years, IMF and World Bank have been promoting an artificially constructed
discourse on corruption that separates it from its historic narrative -- the neoliberal political
system under which it now flourish. They use pretty elaborate smoke screen designed to hide the key
issues under the set of fuzzy terms such as "transparency", "accountability", "governance",
"anticorruption initiatives". Ignoring the socio-political role of corruption of key mechanism of
the neoliberal debt enslavement of peripheral nations (see
Confessions of an
Economic Hit Man - Wikipedia )
As Wikipedia points out there is no
universally accepted definition of corruption. In this sense privatization might well be the most
widespread type of corruption which occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts
in an official capacity to sell government property for pennies on the dollar to local oligarchs of
international companies. with delayed payment via the "revolving door" mechanism.
If we assume that corruption is 'illegitimate use of government power to benefit a private
interest" then neoliberalism is the most corrupt social system imaginable.
But in neoliberal ideology only the state is responsible for corruption. The private sector under
neoliberalism is immune of any responsibility. In reality it is completely opposite and state
represents a barrier to private companies especially international sharks to get unfair advantage.
And they can use the USA embassy as a source of pressure instead of bribing government officials.
Neoliberals argues without any proof that if the market is let to function through its own
mechanisms, and the role of state diminished to a minimum regulatory role, "good governance" could
be realized and corruption be diminished. As US subprime crisis has shown this is untrue and
destroys the stability of the economy.
Actually the term "governance" serves as the magical universal opener in neoliberal ideology. It is
ideologically grounded up the narrative of previous mismanagement of economy ("blame the
predecessor" trick).
This assumes the ideal economic sphere, in which players somehow get an equal opportunities
automatically without regulatory role of the state and in case of peripheral nations without being
strong armed by more powerful states. Under neoliberalism ethical responsibilities on players are
reduced to the loyalty to contract.
Moreover antisocial behavior under liberalism is explicitly promoted (" greed is good") --
self-enrichment at the expense of others and society as a whole. Also the Western banks serve as a
"treasure vault" for stolen money and Western states provides "safe heaven" for corrupt officials
that face prosecution. At least this is true for Russian oligarchs when each crook automatically
became "fighter for freedom" after landing in London airport and stolen money are indirectly
appropriated by British state and never returned to Russia.
The USA is very similar. It likes to condemn corruption as but seldom returns that money stolen
-- for example it never returned to Ukraine money stolen by Ukrainian Prime minister under President
Kuchma Pavlo Lazarenko (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlo_Lazarenko )
Moreover in
neoliberal ideology only the
state is responsible for corruption, private sector under neoliberalism is immune of any responsibility.
In reality it is completely opposite and state represents a barrier to private companies attempts to
get unfair advantage, for example by bribing government officials. Neoliberals argues without any
proof that if the market is let to function through its own mechanisms, and the role of state
diminished to a minimum regulatory role, "good governance" could be realized and corruption be
diminished. As US subprime crisis has
shown this is untrue and deregulation policies destroys the stability of the economy.
Actually the term "governance" serves as the magical universal opener in neoliberal ideology.
It is ideologically
grounded up in the narrative of previous mismanagement of economy ("blame the predecessor" trick).
It also assumes the ideal economic sphere,
in which players somehow get an equal opportunities automatically without regulatory role of the
state. Ethical responsibilities on players are reduced to the loyalty to contract. Antisocial
behaviour is explicitly promoted (" greed is good"). As
Pope Francis noted
... Such an [neoliberal] economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly
homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case
of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is
a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest,
where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded
and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created
a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression,
but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in
which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised
– they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.
54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic
growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness
in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve
trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing
economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others,
or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost
without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor,
weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s
responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market
offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity
seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.
55. One cause of this situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its
dominion over ourselves and our societies. The current financial crisis can make us overlook the fact
that it originated in a profound human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person! We have
created new idols. The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35) has returned in a
new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking
a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances
and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone:
consumption.
56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the
majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies
which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they
reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.
A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes
its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to
realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power.
To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide
dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour
everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment,
is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule.
57. Behind this attitude lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God. Ethics has come to be
viewed with a certain scornful derision. It is seen as counterproductive, too human, because it makes
money and power relative. It is felt to be a threat, since it condemns the manipulation and debasement
of the person. In effect, ethics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside
of the categories of the marketplace. When these latter are absolutized, God can only be seen as uncontrollable,
unmanageable, even dangerous, since he calls human beings to their full realization and to freedom from
all forms of enslavement. Ethics – a non-ideological ethics – would make it possible to bring about
balance and a more humane social order. With this in mind, I encourage financial experts and political
leaders to ponder the words of one of the sages of antiquity: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor
is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but
theirs”.[55]
58. A financial reform open to such ethical considerations would require a vigorous change of approach
on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and an eye to
the future, while not ignoring, of course, the specifics of each case. Money must serve, not rule! The
Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that
the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of
economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings.
59. Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality
in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence. The poor and
the poorer peoples are accused of violence, yet without equal opportunities the different forms of aggression
and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society – whether
local, national or global – is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes, no political programmes
or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility.
This is not the case simply because inequality provokes a violent reaction from those excluded from
the system, but because the socioeconomic system is unjust at its root. Just as goodness tends to spread,
the toleration of evil, which is injustice, tends to expand its baneful influence and quietly to undermine
any political and social system, no matter how solid it may appear. If every action has its consequences,
an evil embedded in the structures of a society has a constant potential for disintegration and death.
It is evil crystallized in unjust social structures, which cannot be the basis of hope for a better
future. We are far from the so-called “end of history”, since the conditions for a sustainable and peaceful
development have not yet been adequately articulated and realized.
60. Today’s economic mechanisms promote inordinate consumption, yet it is evident that unbridled
consumerism combined with inequality proves doubly damaging to the social fabric. Inequality eventually
engenders a violence which recourse to arms cannot and never will be able to resolve. This serves only
to offer false hopes to those clamouring for heightened security, even though nowadays we know that
weapons and violence, rather than providing solutions, create new and more serious conflicts. Some simply
content themselves with blaming the poor and the poorer countries themselves for their troubles; indulging
in unwarranted generalizations, they claim that the solution is an “education” that would tranquilize
them, making them tame and harmless. All this becomes even more exasperating for the marginalized in
the light of the widespread and deeply rooted corruption found in many countries – in their governments,
businesses and institutions – whatever the political ideology of their leaders.
Neoliberals limit ethical component to adhering to contracts.
However, the contracts themselves might be corrupt, or it can be forces upon other party under duress.
It is important to see all those trick neoliberals use and develop a critical stance towards the
Western anti-corruption
"crusade" of the last decade. At least disclose all the hypocrisy behind it. this is
especially important as "corruption" serves as matches to flare up "color revolutions"
-- a new war strategy
of penetrating of international capital into peripheral countries.
The key neoliberal argument is that corruption is an obstacle to "good governance"
and economic development. They never evaluate corruption within a wider ethical
frame as for example Pope Francis does, not they discuss the implications of neoliberal reforms on social rights.
In ethics corruption refers to a domination of social relations by self-interest and to the perception
of fellow citizens as instruments, obstacles or competitors. “In the morally corrupt society, civic
virtue and social responsibility are displaced and discarded in favor of an intense competition for
spoils.” In neoliberal thinking, however, the term is narrowly defined referring to the misuse of
public office for private gain by bureaucrats, which is just a tip of the iseberg, because it is the
other party -- powerful translational or local oligarchs who are buying those government officials.
Thus the drastic shift in in defining the term after the 1980s coincide with triumphant mach of
neoliberalism over the world. While the state was supposed to produce public interest
and common good before then, the emphasis shifted in the neoliberal era to the opportunities that public
power provided for individual rent-seeking. This is harmonious with the assumptions of neoliberal
approach to governance, which treats the state as an economic entity.
The notion of good governance under neoliberalism typically means market reforms and their political framework
of deregulation and privatization. In reality both are cesspool of corruption. As the business
started to build direct ties with the bureaucracy it automatically obtains a greater role in decision making, and as the capacity of the state to facilitate private
personal rents in the market increased. So corruption served much to the restoration of the power of
financial oligarchy under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism discard the necessity of national and
planned development model of the Keynesian era in terms of facilitating and accelerating capital redistribution
and accumulation, especially in transition economies. It is ironic that a neoliberal
anti-corruption campaign led to tremendous level of corruption of privatization of industry in xUSSR
countries and establishing (with direct help of the West) a strata of powerful, corrupt, often
criminal and closely linked to the West oligarchs.
This, on the other hand, the notion of corruption under neoliberalism is conceptualized
in such a way that trivialize the value of state intervention in the economy, discard any notion of public interest, and even of
national priorities in politics. In order to reverse the neoliberal domination as the ideology it is
important to stress the fact that under neoliberalism the whole the arena over which market competition
occurred is corrupt. The players are not only unethical they are often criminal as recent
investigation of TBTF banks had shown. This way is easier to bring ethics back into discussion of
corruption and start to understand the without state interference it is impossible to have a fair
market. Please note that neoliberals try to avoid discussion the notion of "fair market"
substituting it with "free market" misnomer, which idealize the market as the sphere of voluntary action and freedom.
In reality it is far from that and in unregulated market bigger players simply squash or swallow
the small fish.
The neoliberal discourse on corruption is based on a certain set of assumptions about state-society
relations and on a certain stance about the role of state in economy. As Pinar Bedirhanoğlu argues,
“the neoliberal conception of corruption is ahistoric, biased, contradictory and politicized, and
has been induced by concerns over market competition rather than morality.” This is because neoliberal
conceptualization of corruption has fulfilled significant functions in globalized economy and politics,
particularly at moments of financial crisis, such as the 1997 East Asian financial crisis and in Turkey
after the 2001 crisis.
The neoliberal anti-corruption campaign served to hide the problems inherent in economic liberalisation
and second generation of neoliberal reforms themselves by highlighting the so-called long history of
crony state–business relations and patrimonial state in the South, referring either to the heritage
of the ‘strong state tradition’ in Turkey, ‘the communist past’ in Russia, or the ‘corporatist past’
in Latin America.
Identifying corruption either with the inherent characteristics of bureaucrats and
politicians (this way distorting the key idea of public administration -- providing service to
the people) or traditional and cultural
characteristics of certain regions helps idealizing the Western political and economic model under the
name ‘good governance’. This approach also served for the world elites to partially overcome the legitimacy
crisis that the Western states experienced since the 1980s by articulating the demand of democratic
reforms ("export of democracy"), the language of "good governance", transparency, and building civil society
(at the same time under this rhetoric destroying all the social achievements of welfare state).
Using its dominance in MSM neoliberals manage to brainwash public to the extent it start behaving
contrary to its own economic interests, and in the interests of financial oligarchy (What's
the matter with Kansas)
Neoliberals stress that enlargement of market relations and reduction in state functions would provide not only economic
efficiency but also freedom and democracy, by breaking up the monopolization of power. The market is
accepted as the sphere of freedom since transactions within it are voluntary and decentralized. New
Right theoreticians argue that freedom is the individual control over choices, and it is best exercised
in a market economy.
By the 1970s neolibrals started to remove "the excesses of democracy" of New Deal and European
Welfare states. Cosial reforms on New Deal era were condemned for the economic troubles during the decade,
as was also the Keynesian economy o which they were based. Organized labour and mass movements
were suppressed and as they deemed to be incompatible with unconstrained capitalist accumulation.
Keynesianism was blamed for expanding political decisions into the realm of economics, as if the
desired non-political character of economy in not just another policy, just favoring big ploayers
instead of small fish. It if such approach is not political. Welfare reforms came to be
regarded as an anomaly, as an obstance to economic development. And crusing orgnized labour was
presented as return to the normal distinction between economic
and political spheres. However, the "de-economization" of politics under neoliebral was just a smoke
screen decsined to hide accesnce to power of finacnial olitachy, the political force supressed by
New Deal. So it was a countrrevolution not a revolution. And instead of promotion of democracy it
resulted in promotion of authoritarianism
ans police state (national Security State) were protection of financial olitarchy is disguied as
"fight against terrorisrm". Public debate on the policy of taxation, privatization, on the forced retreat of state from social sectors,
about the level of autonomy of Central Bank etc., was forcefully supressed.
So, to maintain the neolibel system the elites forcefully suppress and hide the relationship between economy
and politics.
The term ‘governance’ started to be positively used by all parties to describe the political form
of global market economy. It is defined as ‘governance without government’. Theories of governance argued
that while government refers to formal acts and procedures at state level, governance is based on a
network of informal relations at all levels. It assumes an interdependency between nations, between
nations and international organizations, and between nations and transnational or subnational structures.
Governance aims at organizing the state and social life in general, along market relations. Even
the state itself is dealt as if it is a business administration job. Politics is identified with corruption,
nepotism, partisanship etc., and the parliamentarian and political party systems are regarded negatively
as sources of populism, which harmed much the functioning of the economy.8
Making economic decisions turned out to be the job of technocrats, who were claimed to be neutral
professionals applying the objective rules of the game called economy. Legislation and regulation are
increasingly carried out by non-parliamentary and non-governmental agents. A neo-corporatist structure
is developing in which interest groups and specialized policy networks represent themselves in a market-like
sphere of politics. As expert knowledge “as opposed to popular, common-sensical, everyday knowledge”
of the people tends to prevail, the democracy of citizens is being replaced by the democracy of organized
interest and lobbies. So, as Jean Grugel states, globalisation
The neoliberal anticorruption campaign served to hide the problems inherent in economic liberalisation
and second generation of neoliberal reforms themselves by highlighting the so-called long history of
crony state – business relations and patrimonial state in the South. Governance are not neutral processes
with regard to their effects on state and society.10 The neoliberal discourse on corruption should be
dealt accordingly. According to the neoliberal approach state is regarded as “the simple sum of profit
maximising bureaucrats and politicians”, and corruption is assumed to arise for the rents created by
the holding of offices. It is perceived as if exploitation and corruption are intrinsic characteristics
of the state itself rather than representing its abuse. The underlying state– market dichotomy has led
to an understanding of corruption primarily as a problem of the state.11 Those corrupt actions which
necessitate the existence of public power –the state- as one of the parties of a mutual relation, such
as bribery or extortion are mostly emphasized in the literature. Fraud or embezzlement, on the other
hand, can be found in the private sector as well. While control mechanisms and measures are regarded
sufficient in the private sector and corruption cases are not related to the nature of the property
ownership, the state cannot benefit from such an exemption. This cannot be evaluated independently from
the neoliberal attack against public ownership. It is for certain that public power is manipulated to
gain economic advantage but so is economic power in private sphere.
Neoliberal discourse assumes that corruption is a phenomenon of the public sector. This interpretation
“obscures the rising possibilities for private sector corruption caused by market-led economic reforms
and has little to say about the complex linkages between abuses in the private and public sectors”.
Neoliberals regard the public sector as the major source of corruption, which is
explained through the rent-seeking behaviour of individual public servants. This is based upon highly
questionable conceptualizations of human motivation and a very poor understanding of the state. Their
major objective is limited to explaining how the activities of public servants distort the efficient
functioning of markets.
Ed Brown and Jonathan Cloke counter the view that the state is inherently more prone to corruption
than the private sector. They argue that this, for example, leads to a lack of recognition of the opportunities
for corruption that privatization and deregulation have provided. Even the World Bank accepts that
transition to market economy has created fertile ground for corruption.
Since neoliberal discourse has a very limited conceptual understanding of the nature and functioning
of the state and its relation to civil society, there appears certain inconsistencies. For example the
writers refer to contradiction between the creation of new public bodies within institutional reform
programmes and the assumption that public officials are primarily motivated by self-interest, and they
question the hidden assumption that the workers within those anti-corruption offices were likely to
be less corrupt than other public sector workers claimed to be naturally prone to rent-seeking behaviour.
Putting “public sector corruption as the most severe impediment to development and growth”, and moreover,
claiming such things that bribery “distorts sectoral priorities and technology choices (by, for example,
creating incentives to contract for large defence projects rather than rural health clinics specializing
in preventive care)” is unfair and misleading. Corrupt behaviour is not limited to state officials;
idealizing private sector actions while attacking state sector is at best naive. It is impossible to
deny the motives for unethical behaviour in private sector and it is claimed that even the economic
liberalization after 1980s, pointed as the solution of corruption problems, opened the path of corporate
corruptions.
Since 1990s anti-corruption agenda has been promoted in developing countries through the reform programmes
of the international financial institutions. It is not easy to determine whether an overall increase
in corruption led to the anti-corruption campaign. Critical studies highlight the instrumentalization
of anti-corruption discourse. Ed Brown and Jonathan Cloke argue that there was little reliable evidence
to determine if corruption levels had been worsening or whether there has simply been increasing legal
and public recognition of corruption cases or perhaps even the conscious manipulation of public sensitivity
about the issue.
The example of Turkey is worth mentioning. Coming to the office to recover Turkish economy after
the Keynesianism was blamed for expanding political decisions into the realm of economics, as if the
desired non-political character of economy was not something political. (14 Ibid., p 287-91 and P. Bedirhanoğlu,
“The Neoliberal Discourse on Corruption as a Means of Consent) 2001 financial crisis, Minister of Economic
Affairs, now the UNDP President Kemal Derviş, have then explained the causes of the crisis with reference
to the corrupt banking structure in Turkey and skilfully introduced the neoliberal discourse that
associates anti-corruption porely with failures of the implementation of the neoliberal reforms.
Through this discourse, neoliberal institutionalisation in Turkey which had been proceeding back
and forth because of the resistance of various social forces for about a decade accelerated. Since this
competition-induced concern over corruption was articulated within the moral based debates in domestic
politics, the strategy received public consent.
The international ‘crusade’ against corruption does not fight with corruption itself but in the first
place “promotes commerce, uniformity in commercial law and the associated disciplines of the market
as indirect constraints on the conduct of states themselves”. In this respect, Barry Hindess regards
the international anti-corruption campaign labelled as the promotion of good governance as an
updated version of the older system of capitulations, which required independent states to
acknowledge the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Western states in the area of commercial law.
Many scholars underline the conscious attempt of neoliberals to use corruption as a strategy for
enabling neoliberal policies and try to demonstrate the consequences or by-products of international
anti-corruption campaign of the last decade. One of those consequences is the strengthening of executive
power and the growing role of international financial institutions. To overcome this problems that undermine
state legitimacy, politics of civil society is gradually articulated in the campaign.
Despite their anti-state stance neoliberals are well aware of the continuing functions of state as
a coercive and legitimizing body in regulating society. A central role is attached to the state in the
launching of anticorruption policies. Pinar Bedirhanoğlu describes this as “to put the foxes in charge
of the chicken house if it is recalled that corruption is assumed to be intrinsic to the state in rentier
state theories”. To balance the state and prevent it from following a national program external
pressure imposed by international financial institutions, NGOs, private sector, autonomous
regulatory agencies, regional development agencies is applied. Rent-creation capacity of these
bodies are usually disregarded. Practical monopoly of technical expertise makes such institutions
extremely powerful and unaccountable.
As to the NGOs, in our case to those fighting against corruption, the question below is worth asking:
“Can NGOs and similar organizations really help socialize citizens into the system, or do they rather
represent a means by which citizens abdicate responsibility for active citizenship, and leave responsibility
for political engagement with NGO staff?”.
Demet Dinler states that anti-corruption measures were functional in the redefinition of the relationship
between the economic and the political. They emerged as a legitimating mechanism to justify market reforms
and the separation of the economic from the political, because the ‘failure’ of the first generation
reforms we explained by the continuing dominance of the political over the economic. “Corruption has
been conceptualized as a ‘purely political’ phenomenon, related only to the politicians and their bureaucratic
companions, by ignoring the major role of the businessmen in corruption and rentseeking.”
While the neoliberal concern on corruption is market-based and competition-induced at the international
level, the domestic debates on corruption rest on moral grounds. This, according to Pınar Bedirhanoğlu,
indicate different attitudes of capital and popular classes towards corruption. That of the latter seems
to provide a more political ground. Corruption is undoubtedly harmful to the public interest through
whatever medium we build the relation. However, it would be in vain to expect that the funds “rescued
from the grasp of the corrupt public servant or politician” will be spent on good causes, such as education
or health facilities for the poor.
The discourse of governance reduces morality to the loyalty to contract. However, we argue that the
contract itself might be corrupt, if corruption is defined in ethical terms as the public opinion perceives
it. The next part of the study will deal with the collapse of welfare policies and the transformation
of labor market in this framework.
A neoliberals also develop , cultivate and support interest groups and specialized policy networks
which promotes neoliberalism and separation of politics and economics.
In the aftermath of
the depression, the WWII and Keynesian revolution, the state actively intervened into the economy, helping
to manage the conflicts arising from market competition In terms of its institutional and policy role,
social provision was central to accumulation, helping to socialize consumption over the life-course
and the reproduction of labor power. The success of the consolidation and expansion of welfare systems
in virtually every Western country from 1950 through the early 1970s had two profound consequences for
the political economy of welfare systems today. First, any attack on or defense of a welfare system
must now operate along three distinct, yet interrelated, spheres: the economic, political and the
cultural. Second, with welfare systems so successfully integrated into the institutional make-up of
nations, the politics of welfare encompass far more than political wheeling and dealing over
national budgets. Although expenditure levels remain important, the politics of welfare are
increasingly about a nation’s class, racial, generational, and gender divisions. As an object of
struggle and conflict, then, welfare politics reflect the interest of myriad social forces, such as
employers’ associations, poverty groups, small business, social movements, and trade unions. Recent
conflict over welfare systems has been intense, with government action from above and recipient
reaction from below being very contentious.
However, both the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism and the ‘Golden Age’ of social reforms came to an
end with the worldwide economic slump of 1974-82, a crisis which covered two distinct generalized recessions
separated by a weak recovery. In a long and drawn out process, the 1974-82 economic slump led to a new
consensus in economic policy across the advanced capitalist economies. In the early 1980s, a neoliberals
started a real offensive with the distinct goals of engineering an economic recovery and restoring
profitability by redistributing the wealth up.
In altering the parameters of state intervention, neoliberalism rejected and turned
away from the post-war reliance on the social right and more fair distribution of the results of economic activity. The return of mass unemployment,
industrial downsizing, the liberalization of capital flows and a rearticulating of hegemony of
financial capital all changed
the terrain of capitalist relations, destroying the post-war accord between the capital and labor.
Through neoliberalism coercive redistribution of wealth up started in full force. The
emerging stage of ‘transnational capitalism’ is marked by high levels of capital mobility and economic integration
between countries (some reduced to supplies of raw materials, like in classic neocolonialism) and defined by capital’s interaction with multiple states and an intensification of international
competition. In this new political economic context, welfare systems are facing a number of transformatory
pressures, including the erosion of government autonomy over social provision, integration induced convergent
welfare effects and welfare system rivalry.
Neoliberal transformation of society put strong downward pressure on welfare systems. Apart
from weakening organized labor outright, neoliberalism targets the economic, social and political
costs of welfare. As John O’Connor argues for most of the 1990s, welfare systems in the advanced capitalist
countries were the object of intense conflict between employers and workers. Governments fought hard
to cut the cost of pensions, health care and benefit payments, while unions struggled to protect their
longstanding social gains.26 In reshaping welfare systems, employers have been seeking to lower costs,
improve labor market flexibility and reduce budget deficits. This is all being done to further international
competitiveness and to help restore profitability. Defensive struggles over welfare systems have not
been able to stop the retrenchment of social provision. Governments have embarked also on strategies
of shifting the role of public and private sector via massive privatization of state assets, in which the private sector
acquired public sector assets (as well as responsibilities and
activities at discounted prices. Neoliberal policies resulted in globalization of capital and goods flows.
It also led to mass outsourcing / off-shoring of whole industries to third world countries. The
capability of swashing the cost of labor has been an important factor for multinational corporations.
That is why reducing the cost of labor has been a major area by developing countries to compete against
each other. Instead of permanent employment neoliberalism prefers the part-time labor / contractor economy,
were employees have not social rights and minimal social protection.
There is a growing sense that social policies are taking new directions as policy debates move from
an earlier embrace of privatization and marketization, to the task of retooling the state to face new
social risks and to reproduce the social (social cohesion, social capital, social inclusion, social
economy).27 Welfare system today have been openly scrutinized and challenged by Neoliberal approaches
have regarded the public sector as the major source of corruption, which is explained through the rentseeking
behaviour of individual public servants, politicians, employers, citizens, and tax payers as never before
in the vast majority of Western nations. The roots of this scrutiny and challenge have been the subject
of much political and scholarly debate. As economic globalisation has progressed, nation states have
forfeited sovereignty to supra-national organizations and treaties, such as the Group of Seven, the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the European
Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Union (NAFTA). These agencies and Organisations represent
a complicated shift in political economic governance from the domestic level toward the supranational.29
With trans-state accumulation, there has been a move within many nations to move from ‘discretionary-based’
to ‘rule-based’ policy making.
This move toward rules is an attempt to implement mechanisms that automatically
force domestic policy to reflect the changes associated with the global economy; e.g., the EU, the
WTO, the IMF or World Bank.
Welfare retrenchment is sold to the public in terms of it being more a dictate
of rules or logic of the global economy. Welfare systems are viewed now as national luxuries that cannot
be afforded in the global economy. Given the enhanced exit options in today’s world, the political relationship
among capital, the state and welfare coalitions have been recast. Capital mobility – or the threat of
capital mobility – has the effect of forcing workers/unions and welfare coalitions into making concessions.31
Because capital is mobile, it can take an extremely aggressive stance in wage bargaining or in political
negotiations. Trans-state accumulation has enhanced the power of capital, while leaving labour and welfare
coalitions politically impotent. In addition to the usual concern over immigration, unemployment and
population aging, it is obvious that governments in Europe and North America point to the pressures
of economic globalisation as being one of the main reasons behind social cutbacks.
This offensive against
the public sector in general and social systems in particular is universal and the language of globalisation
has been central to this neoliberal assault.
As with the recasting of class relations, remaking the mode of production and reorganizing accumulation,
neoliberalism seeks to restructure labour markets, making them more responsive to competitive forces.
The integration of domestic economies has opened the door to welfare system social dumping effects,
in which the benefits and services in one country are lowered the ward off any potential competitive
disadvantages relative to another.32 Social dumping effects reflect governments’ concern that high ‘social
cost’ will undermine a nation’s international competitiveness.
Given the rapid changes in the world market and the intensification of competition, an adaptable
workforce and flexibility in the hiring and firing of workers are considered valuable economic assets.
In general terms, economic flexibility can refer to the ability of capitalist enterprises to adjust
their productive strategies, the ability of workers to move from one job to another and the ability
of wage levels to move according to prevailing economic conditions.33
The early 1980s employers’ offensive was launched to restore profitability. neoliberal transformative
action aimed to reorder post-war capitalism’s structural and institutional arrangements. This neoliberal
reordering unleashed the economic transforming tendencies of state rationalisation, market contestability,
and factor mobility (‘coercive competition’) on all nations. The importance of coercive competition
is that it simultaneously acted on and transcended domestic institutional-policy frameworks.
In this new political economic context, domestic social systems faced a number of transformatory
pressures, including the erosion of government autonomy over social provision, integration induced convergent
welfare effects, and welfare system rivalry. The prime source of retrenchment pressures was that the
mobile capital has an aversion to anything that contributes to competitive locational disadvantage.
These pressures were dealt with politically determines the nature and scope of welfare system retrenchment.
It is obvious that the explanation of globalisation has become a force “helping to create the institutional
realities it purportedly merely describes.”34 Recent welfare practice reflects discursive practices
that communicate an “apolitical logic of inevitabilism” that rules out all alternatives to globalisation
and welfare retrenchment.35
The early 1980s employers’ offensive was launched to restore profitability. Neoliberal transformative
action aimed to reorder post-war capitalism’s structural and institutional arrangements.
As a political strategy neoliberalism tries to restore profitability at the expense of social
well-being of population. the problem of corruption is used as smoke screen for penetration into
third world countries and for extracting raw materials at low, globalised prices. Through such
organizations as WTO a global market was created
where raw materials prices are nearly same in the world and goods can flow globally without borders and customs . This situation transforms the world economies into an open market and also open production
islands not just for goods also for services also. That is why the competition continues over labor
costs where states can still compete over. This competition made the governments cut out welfare expenditures
to reduce costs of production.
Through this neoliberal transformative action and discourse states are
eliminating workers post-war social gains and social protections such as guaranteed pension, health care and benefit
payments. This is done to improve labor market flexibility and reduce budget deficits. Apart from weakening
labor
rights, neoliberalism also redistributes wealth by eliminating high taxes to upper brackets of
population, reducing the cost of welfare and privatizing those saving by financial sector.
Neoliberalism creates "race to the bottom" -- a competition
between developing countries in reducing the cost of labor and also generates an informal economy without any social rights of
labor. Finally both
capital mobility and economic integration have undermined the ability of national governments to pursue
welfare objectives.
We should label the behaviour of perceiving social rights as a competitiveness
tool rather than a means for meeting vital needs of humans a corrupt behaviour. So corruption is an
immanent feature of neoliberalism. That sort of normative questions raised by pope Francis helps to
understand deeper the role of corruption in the neoliberal society. In will not be
exaggeration to say the neoliberal society is based on corruption. In other words,
by redefinition corruption in terms of domination of social
relations by self-interest, and regarding of fellow citizens as instruments, obstacles and competitors,
we get deeper understanding of problem of corruption and related straggle against it the neoliberal
era. That seems the best possible to fight corruption under neoliberalism is to fight neoliberal
policies and to remembrance the ideas of New Deal which provided better the
integrity of the economic and the political like of the society.
"... Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well. ..."
"... the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc). ..."
"... In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal for the same stuff against tRUMP). ..."
"... Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened in the US over the last half Century or so. ..."
"... I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever. ..."
"... Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil ..."
"... you are 40 years off the mark-It was Reagan who's brand of avuncular fascism, celebrating stupidity as a virtue who paved the way. ..."
"... albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge' into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission. ..."
"... Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable. ..."
"... Is it not written that Margaret Thatcher's true legacy was Tony Blair? If that is true, then the true legacy of Dubya is Obama. ..."
"... As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.) Bush should take the award. ..."
"... When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered. Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong enough to keep doing it. ..."
"... The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass. ..."
"... Lambert, you forgot this one" Biden presents Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush Instead of a war crimes trial at the Hague, Biden gave him a (family bloging) medal! ..."
"... A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm ..."
"... It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security. ..."
"... and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall. They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time. ..."
"... Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair, the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling indeed. ..."
"... People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior. ..."
"... We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous than others. ..."
"... We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism of Nazi Germany. ..."
"... Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents, then all of them would hang. ..."
"... We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company. My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. ..."
Bush became President in the year 2000. That was "" let me break out my calculator "" 2021 "" 2000 = 21 years ago. It occurs to
me that our younger readers, born in 2000, or even 1990, may not know how genuinely horrid Bush was, as President.
I was blogging even back then, and I remember how horrid Bush was; certainly worse than Trump, at least for Trump's first three
years in office, until the Covid pandemic. To convey the full horror of the Bush years would not a series of posts, but a book. The
entire experience was wretched and shameful.
Of the many horrors of the Bush years, I will pick three. (I am omitting many, many others, including
Hurricane Katrina , the
Plame Affair
, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force
, that time
Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face ,
Bush's missing
Texas Air National Guard records , Bush gaslighting the 2004 Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on
and on. And I didn't even get to 9/11, "
You've covered your ass ," WMDs, and
the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.) I'm afraid my recounting of these incidents will be sketchy: I lived and blogged in them, and
the memories of the horror well up in such volume and detail that I lose control of the material. Not only that, there was an actual,
functioning blogosphere at that time, which did great work, but unfortunately most of that work has succumbed to link rot. And my
memory of events two decades ago is not as strong as it could be.
The White House Iraq Group
Here I will rely on excerpts from Colonel Sam Gardiner's (PDF) "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence,
Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II" (2003), whose introduction
has been saved from link rot by the
National Security Archive and
a full version
by the University of Leeds . I would bet, long forgotten even by many of those who blogged through those times. ("Gulf II" is
what we refer to as the "War in Iraq.") Quoting from the full version:
You will see in my analysis and comments that I do not accept the notion that the first casualty of war is truth. I think we
have to have a higher standard. In the most basic sense, Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies
to come to right decisions. Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage.
Seems familiar. (Gardiner's report can be read as a brilliant media critique; it's really worth sitting down with a cup of coffee
and reading it all.)[2] More:
My research suggests there were over 50 stories manufactured or at least engineered that distorted the picture of Gulf
II for the American and British people . I'll cover most in this report. At the end, I will also describe some stories that
seem as if they were part of the strategic influence campaign although the evidence is only circumstantial.
What becomes important is not each story taken individually. If that were the case, it would probably seem only more of the
same. If you were to look at them one at a time, you could conclude, "Okay we sort of knew that was happening." It is the pattern
that becomes important. It's the summary of everything. To use a phrase often heard during the war, it's the mosaic. Recognizing
I said I wouldn't exaggerate, it would not be an exaggeration to say the people of the United States and UK can find out more
about the contents of a can of soup they buy than the contents of the can of worms they bought with the 2003 war in the Gulf.
The White House was, naturally, at the center of the operation:
One way to view how the US Government was organized to do the strategic communications effort before, during and after the
war is to use the chart that was used by the Assistant Deputy Director for Information Operations. The center is the White House
Office of Global Communications, the organization originally created by Karen Hughes as the Coalition Information Office. The
White House is at the center of the strategic communications process"¦.
Handy chart:
And:
Inside the White House there was an Iraq Group that did policy direction and then the Office of Global Communications itself.
Membership of the White House Iraq Group:
So, in 2020 Bush's write-in vote for President was Condi Rice, the [x] Black [x] woman who helped run a domestic disinformation
campaign for him in 2003, to sell the Iraq War to the American people. Isn't that"¦. sweet?
Of course, I was very naive at that point. I had come up as a Democrat, and my first real political engagement was the Clinton
impeachment. Back in 2003, I was amazed to discover that there was a White House operation that was planting fake stories in the
press "" and that I had been playing whackamole on them. At a higher level, I was disturbed that "Washington and London did not trust
the peoples of their democracies to come to right decisions." Now it all seems perfectly normal, which is sad.
Torture at Abu Ghraib
There are a lot of images of our torture prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. This one (
via ) is not the
most famous , but to me it is the most shocking:
What kind of country sets dogs on a naked prisoner? Well, my kind of country, apparently. (Later, I remember discussing
politics with somebody who came from a country that might be considered less governed by the rule of law than my own, and they said:
"Abu Ghraib. You have nothing to say." And they were right.)
For those who came in late, here's a snapshot (the detail of the story is in fact overwhelming, and I also have pity for the poor
shlubs the brass tossed into that hellhole[3].) From the Los Angeles Times, "
Few have faced consequences
for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq " (2015):
[A] 44-year-old Al Jazeera reporter named Salah Ejaili, said in a phone interview from Qatar that he was arrested in 2003 while
covering an explosion in the Iraqi province of Diyala. He was held at Abu Ghraib for 48 days after six days in another facility,
he said.
"Most of the pictures that came out in 2004, I saw that firsthand "" the human pyramid where men were stacked up naked on top
of each other, people pulled around on leashes," he said in the interview, with one of his attorneys translating. "I used to hear
loud screams during the torture sessions."
Ejaili says he was beaten, left naked and exposed to the elements for long periods, and left in solitary confinement, among
other acts.
"When people look at others who are naked, they feel like they're animals in a zoo, in addition to being termed as criminals
and as terrorists," he said. "That had a very strong psychological impact."
The plaintiffs also say they suffered electric shocks; deprivation of food, water and oxygen; sexual abuse; threats from dogs;
beatings; and sensory deprivation.
Taha Yaseen Arraq Rashid, a laborer, says he was sexually abused by a woman while he was cuffed and shackled, and also that
he was forced to watch a female prisoner's rape.
Ejaili said that his face was often covered during interrogations, making it difficult for him to identify those involved,
but that he was able to notice that many of the interrogators who entered the facility wore civilian clothing.
His attorneys, citing military investigations into abuses at Abu Ghraib and other evidence, say the contractors took control
of the prison and issued orders to uniformed military.
"Abu Ghraib was pretty chaotic," said Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought suits
against CACI and L-3 Services. "They were involved in a conspiracy with the military police to abuse our clients.""¦. Eleven U.S.
soldiers were convicted in military trials of crimes related to the humiliation and abuse of the prisoners.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers , and effects, against unreasonable searches
and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If our legal system had the slightest shred of integrity, it would be obvious to the Courts, as it is to a six-old-child, that
what we laughingly call our "personal" computers and cellphones contain "paper," not in the tediously literal sense of a physical
material made from wood fibre, but in the sense of content . Bits and bytes are 20th Century paper, stored on silicon and
hard disk platters. Of course a warrant should be needed to read what's on my phone, ffs.
That Fourth Amendment common sense did not prevail is IMNSHO due in large part to Bush's program of warrantless surveillance,
put in place as part of the Global War on Terror. Here again, the complexity is overwhelming and took several years to unravel. I'm
afraid I have to quote Wikipedia on
this one :
A week after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which
inaugurated the "War on Terror". It later featured heavily in arguments over the NSA program.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks President Bush established the President's Surveillance Program. As part of the program, the Terrorist
Surveillance Program was established pursuant to an executive order that authorized the NSA to surveil certain telephone calls
without obtaining a warrant (see 50 U.S.C. § 1802 50 U.S.C. § 1809). The complete details of the executive order are not public,
but according to administration statements, the authorization covers communication originating overseas from or to a person suspected
of having links to terrorist organizations or their affiliates even when the other party to the call is within the US.
In October 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which granted the administration broad powers to fight terrorism. The Bush
administration used these powers to bypass the FISC and directed the NSA to spy directly on al-Qaeda via a new NSA electronic
surveillance program. Reports at the time indicate that an "apparently accidental" "glitch" resulted in the interception of communications
that were between two U.S. parties. This act was challenged by multiple groups, including Congress, as unconstitutional.
The precise scope of the program remains secret, but the NSA was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic
communications between the nation's largest telecommunication companies' major interconnected locations, encompassing phone conversations,
email, Internet activity, text messages and corporate private network traffic .
Of course, all this is perfectly normal today. So much for the Fourth Amendment, good job. (You will note that the telcos had
to be in on it; amusingly, the CEO of Qwest, the only telco that refused to participate, was charged and convicted of insider trading,
good job again.) The legal aspects of all this are insanely complex, but as you see from my introduction, they should be simple.
Conclusion
Here's a video of the Iraqi (now in Parliament) who threw shoes at Bush (who got off lightly, all things considered):
We should all be throwing shoes at Bush, seriously if not literally. We should not be accepting candy from him. We should not
be treating him as an elder statesman. Or a "partner in crime." We should not be admiring his paintings. Bush ran a bad, bad, bad
administration and we are living with the consequences of his badness today. Bush is a bad man. We are ruled by bad people. Tomorrow,
Obama!
NOTES
[1] Indeed.
[2] For example, I vividly remember playing whack-a-mole as a blogger with the following WMD stories: Drones, weapons labs, WMD
cluster bombs, Scuds, nuclear materials from Niger, aluminum tubes, and dirty bombs. They one and all fell apart on close inspection.
And they were only a small part of the operation, as Gardiner shows in detail.
[3] My personal speculation is that Dick Cheney had a direct feed from the Abu Ghraib torture chambers to the White House, and
watched the proceedings live. Some of the soldiers burned images of torture onto CDs as trophies, and the prison also had a server,
whose connectivity was very conveniently not revealed by the judge in a lawsuit I dimly remember being brought in Germany. So it
goes.
Does anyone believe that W, son of H. W. Bush, H. W. son of Senator Prescott Bush, would have been been pres without that familial
lineage and its important govt connections? The pity is W wasn't smart enough to grasp world politics and the US's importance
as an accepted fulcrum in same beyond his momentary wants. imo. Brent Scowcroft and others warned him off his vain pursuits. The
word "squander" come to mind, though I wish it did not.
See for example Kevin Phillips' book American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
. ( Kevin Phillips is a great
modernist American historian, imo, who saw the rise of Nixon before anyone else.)
Don't deny W his agency. As I followed the horrors, from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria to Central America and elsewhere, the
full list that was visible anyway, of the W regime, it sure seemed clear to me that W played the bumbling yuk very well.
He did what he set out to do, no doubt with careful guidance from that sh!t of a father (magically turned into a laid-in-state
"statesman") and mother-of-string-of-pearls, and of course Cheney and the rest of the corpo-gov policy gang.
The Consent Manufacturers are whitewashing an evil man and his slicker but equally evil successor and his glamorous spouse.
Helluva job, Georgie! Full marks for kicking the world a long way down a dark road.
the dumb cluck thing was mostly an act. he was deliberately talking that way not only to paint himself as stupid, but also
because those in power assume we must be spoken to as children (they've studied president speeches since JFK have decreased from
high school level to 6th grade in complexity, word usage etc).
see Pelosi's daughter's film of his campaign trail. He's no Angel Merkel, but sly enough for politics in this country
and most third world corruptocracies.
In our kayfabe duoparty system, it also gave the "opposing" side the "W is a Chimp" talking point to harp on (dress rehearsal
for the same stuff against tRUMP).
Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, Con Son Island served the same purpose during the Vietnam War. When I was young I was proud
to be an American Citizen, we had the Bill of Rights, the Military was controlled by Civilians and their oath was to defend the
Constitution from "All Enemies Foreign and Domestic.". I have been horrified, ashamed and deeply saddened by what has happened
in the US over the last half Century or so.
And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
You actually "˜blogged' back when we had to use punch cards to program our PCs? How oh how did you clamber on up out of "the
Well" so many times a week? I am somewhat convinced that the Hollerith Cards Protocol was the origin of the Twitter 140 character
limit.
I also "lived through" the "˜Reign of "W""˜ and see it as a Time of Prophecy. Most of the things we are now staring down the
barrel of were effectuated then.
I may be foilly, (may be? who am I kidding,) but I view the 2000 election as a major turning point of American history.
I view the 2008 election as the major failing-to-turn-back-when-we-had-the-chance point. Obama could have undone Bush's worst
policies, but instead he cemented them into place forever.
Our elites are both stupid and evil, but Bush is more stupid and Obama is more evil.
All the pomp and circumstance surrounding the personage of the President serves to conceal the people behind the scenes who
vetted and groomed said president, and actively advise him while in office. It's in this way that a Jimmy Carter may be viewed
as a gentle soul so far as presidents go, but he was actually vetted by Brzezinski on behalf of the CFR goons. Once in office
he was then advised by Brzezinski and Volcker, among other assorted lunatics. And he gladly took their advice the entire time.
That's how he came to be president in the first place. And so it goes.
albrt: I agree with your take. Obama campaigned as an anti-war candidate (at least wrt Iraq). He then proceeded to "˜surge'
into Afghanistan and added Libya, Syria, and Yemen, to the regime change mix. Never a thought given to prosecuting the war criminals:
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell, et al; much less even consider a truth and reconciliation commission.
Obama was equally complicit in this never ending horror show and, I am hopeful, history will hold him equally accountable.
Could you explain your view that Obama and Trump are "worse than that" (Bush-Cheney).?
As far as harm that George W. Bush did and launched (illegal/immoral wars, domestic surveillance, tax cuts for the wealthy"¦.)
Bush should take the award.
Obama did push for military action in Libya, but at least held back from Syria.
The administrations after Bush "kicked the can down the road" but he initiated the events they simply continued. And Trump
did attempt to pull troops back from Bush initiated wars. How is Trump worse than Bush? What are your metrics?
I am just a commenter here, but I would say that . . .
When Obama deliberately and with malice aforethought turned all the admitted (and in fact proudly self-avowed) war-criminals
and criminals-against humanity loose, free and clear under "look forward not back", he routinised and permanentized the up-to-that-very-minute
irregular and extra-constitutional novel methods of governance and practice which the Cheney-Bush Administration had pioneered.
Obama deliberately made torture, aggressive war, etc. "legal" when America does it and "permanent" as long as America is strong
enough to keep doing it.
He did some other things like that which I don't have time to mention right now. Maybe others will beat me to it.
Most of all, by slickly conning or permitting to self-con numbers of people about "hope and change" to come from an Obama Administration,
he destroyed all hope of hope. He destroyed hope itself. Hope is not a "thing" any more in this country, thanks to Obama.
He may also have destroyed black politicians' dreams of becoming America's " Second Black President" for several decades to
come. Been there, done that. Never Again. But since I am not Black, that is not my problem. That is something Black America can
thank Obama for, if they decide to wake up to the fact of that reality.
Of course , if the Evil Countess Draculamala becomes President after Biden, then I guess I will be proven wrong about that
particular observation.
The Greatest Disappointment in History. No-one else comes close, in terms of the sheer numbers of people globally who he let
down. The Bait and Switch King, The Great Betrayer. After the nightmare of Bush we got him and his "˜eloquence', pulling the wool over the dazzled sheeple's eyes while he entrenched
the 1% and the neocon MI complex, his paymasters, and sponsors for his entry into the overclass.
Last, does any single person with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton, bear so much responsibility for the election of
Trump?
Remember that Obama voted in favor of FISAA, the bill that immunized Bush and his flunkies from prosecution for their felony
FISA violations, as a senator, not long before the presidential election. It was impossible to make myself vote for him after
that.
Thanks Lambert. I'd add that the intelligence being sent to the "White House Iraq Group" was being manufactured by the Office
of Special Plans (OSP) which was set up and run by Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Following Feith's history and connections
alone is a fruitful endeavor for those so inclined.
Among other things, Feith co-authored, along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser, the A Clean Break: A New Strategy For
Securing the Realm paper prepared for the prime minister of a certain foreign country. This is back in 1996. Around the same
time the PNAC boys were formed by Kagan and Kristol and started selling the same policy prescriptions vis a vis Iraq to the pols
and public here.
Feith was also fired from the NSC back in the early 80's for passing classified information to some little country. Fast forward
to his OSP days and, lo and behold, his employee Larry Franklin is convicted of the same thing, along with Steve Rosen and Keith
Weissman of AIPAC.
This stuff has gone on forever. What amount of ventilation is needed to blow this kind of dung out of the Augean stables of
geopolitics? Not much chance of that anyway, given all the incentives and and interests"
Is it luck that Putin and Xi might be a little less monstrous?
It's really sickening to see George W being "rehabilitated" and made to look like some kind of a senior statesman, when he
should be hauled off to the Hague to spend the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. For me, his election in 2000 was mostly
the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country. As a result, the U.S. has Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, in addition
to all the other events mentioned, and don't forget he tried to privatize Social Security.
His eight years as president, for me, was a horror show. What really bothers me is that he got away with all of it "" and now
he's hailed as an eminence gris. I can't help but think that his rehabilitation is to remind us all of how bad Orange Man was
"" Obama was just as bad because he cemented everything W did "" and more.
That is an assignment, which is a violation of our written site Policies. This applies to reader comments when you could easily
find the answer in less than 30 seconds on Google rather than being a jerk and challenging a reader (or even worse, me derivatively)
on bogus grounds.
> For me, [W's] election in 2000 was mostly the beginning of the end of the rule of law in this country.
At this moment I'm writing it is still early days for this thread: there are only 24 comments. In these comments are named
many bad people. However, one name that does not (yet) appear is "˜Clinton'. W was a monster as president (and likely remains
a monster as a human being) but surely Billy Jeff needn't yield to him in his contempt for the rule of law.
Quite right, of course. My comment was specifically in regard to his disdain for and abuse of the rule, and rôle, of law in
the American polity, e.g., his perjury > disbarment. Sort of like the famous photograph of Nelson Rockefeller who, while serving
as VP, was captured giving the finger to a group of protestors; Clinton also oozed that kind of hubristic impunity.
Regarding Clinton, the damage he caused to his own country and the world was substantial. The destruction of Yugoslavia caused
considerable mayhem "" in addition to bombing and breaking apart a sovereign nation, it enabled "liberals" to feel good about
war again, and paved the way for the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.
And the damage done by NAFTA was enormous "" in terms of leading to deaths of despair in both the US and Mexico I suspect NAFTA
has a higher domestic "body count" than any of the subsequent forever wars.
and welfare "reform", the crime bill. Talk of privatizing SSI made commonplace acceptable. Repeal of Glass Steagall.
They were going to do to healthcare what oBLAM succeeded at, 20 years before him but got sidelined by Lewinsky's blue dress
stains. Clintoon is a criminal and so is his spouse, and he did his share of damage everywhere. people who think otherwise might be
looking back with nostalgia on a simpler (pre 9.11) time.
little known covered up crime from his ARK days is the selling of HIV tainted blood (taken from prisoners) to Canada, among
other things.
yet another who had credible rape allegations. which damages our image at home and abroad.
I read that for the very briefest time, somebody or other was selling Total Information Awareness memorabilia with the Total
Information Awareness symbol on it. I wish I had thought to buy a Total Information Awareness mug.
I imagine knockoffs and parodies exist, but I am not sure the real thing is findable any more.
After Dennis Rader, the Wichita serial killer, murdered someone, the cops always found his semen on the floor next to the mutilated
victim. He got sexual pleasure out of gruesome murder. This is how I always pictured Cheney's attitude toward torture. Well. I
tried not to actually picture it.
Talk about your target rich environment. Where do you even start? Where do you begin? A serial business failure, draft dodger,
military deserter, drunk driver "" and all that was before he became President. A man so incurious about the world "" just like
Trump "" that he never even owned a passport until he actually became President and who never knew that Islam (prior to the Iraq
invasion) , for example, was just not one religion but was divided into Sunni and Shia in the same way Christianity is divided
into "" mostly "" Protestant and Catholics. But to me he was always the "Frat Boy President". His family always protected him
from his many flaws and he never had to grow up like his father had to in WW2. Even as President he never grew into the job, again,
just like Trump.
Lambert gives a few good reminders but there were many others and these are just the top of my head. He cared little for the
US Constitution and called it nothing more than a goddamn scrap of paper. He officially made the US a torture nation, not only
by pretending that US laws did not apply in Guantanamo bay but also aboard US Navy ships for which laws definitely did apply.
As part of a movement to make America an oil-fueled hegemony for the 21st century, he invaded Iraq with the firm intention on
invading Iran next so that Washington would have a firm grip on the fuel pump of the world. As he said "" "America is addicted
to oil." He dropped the ball on 9/11 through over-obsessing on Iraq and in the immediate aftermath sent jets around the country
"" when all jets were grounded "" to fly Saudi royalty back to Saudi Arabia before the FBI could interrogate them about all their
knowledge of the attack. All this to hide his very deep connections with the Saudis.
I could go on for several more paragraphs but what would be the point? For the neocons he was a great fronts-man to be followed
by a even greater one. I sometimes think that if Biden was a "˜real' Republican, then he would have been a great vice-president
for Bush. And now the establishment and their trained seals in the media are trying to make him out as "America's Favourite Uncle"
or something so that when he dies, he will have the same sort of funeral as John McCain did. And I predict that tens of thousands
of veterans around the country will then raise their glasses to him "" and then pour the contents on the ground.
W's rehab continues in the UK MSM, not just the Independent. The worst offenders are probably the Grauniad and Channel 4, both
Blairite.
The rehab mirrored the rise of Trump. His lack of interest in war upset these preachy imperialists.
Using Michelle Obama to facilitate the rehab brought id pol into the equation and made it easier. It was remarkable how often
the above photo is used in the neo liberal and neo con media.
Thank you, Colonel. That foto is remarkable and I suspect that the origins for the idea for it may lay on the other side of
the pond as it seemed so familiar-
There is a blog called Rigorous Intuition 2.0. Many of its blogposts are about the Bush period and Bush related subjects and
events. ( Many others are not). The sections on 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina probably have the highest percent of Bush-related blogposts,
in case one is interested.
Jeff Wells wrote some interesting essays in the Bush years, though many of his connections were a bit too far out, even for
me. He had some striking collateral evidence for his concept of High Weirdness in high places "" sex abuse, torture and magick
figuring prominently, juxtaposed with political skulduggery, and financial crimes and misdemeanours. The Gannon/Guckert affair,
the Franklin ring and Gary Caradori were the sort of thing that laced his quite penetrating analyses of events. Facts were jumping
off points for speculations, but given our lack of facts his imaginings were a nourishment of sorts, though often very troubling
indeed.
Who needs to make shit up during those years?
The facts"¦the shit he actually did, was glossed over or simply forgotten.
If shit was made up about his sorry ass i didn't bother checking, Sir.
I just assumed it was true.
Bushies destroyed the country. If there's a country in 100 years they'll be paying for those years.
And then came obama and big Mike
People have been brain washed by the glossed over history of the US they are taught. It gives people a false belief of our
past. The phrase American Exceptionalism comes to mind. It is a myth. The real history is out there but you have to search it out. From
it's beginning continuing to today our government is responsible for bad behavior.
Some scholars like Noam Chomsky write about
our real history. Unfortunately most people don't read this material. They are content with our glossed over shining star version
of US history that unfortunately continues to be taught in our educational system , starting in elementary school continuing through
a 4 year college education. Our system of government is so corrupted , I don't believe it can be fixed.
Nixon was rehabbed so he could open China, Kissinger got to keep his mantle. W portrayed by Josh Brolin pretty good take. Nice
to see dunking on GW, but the cycle of rehabilitation is due. The question is can he do some good or is there too much mud on
his boots. Can't see W as a new Jimmy Carter. Glossing over history begins the moment it's made. Makes me miss LBJ
Between 1998 and 2000, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, about 1000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib prison were executed and buried
in mass graves.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prison
How many Abu Ghraib prisoners did the US army execute?
Tell me again how many Iraqis were killed by the US Army because they were doing their own version of "Red Dawn"? And that
tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive if Saddam was simply left in place. Here is a video to watch
while you have a little think about it-
We Americans have this thing called exceptionalism which among other things creates the idea that our government is more virtuous
than others. It's a useful idea in that it calls us to be different and better than the average nation, and certainly different
and better than a cruel dictatorship. But it's also a dangerous idea because too many of us actually believe it to be true. Our
atrocities are different in kind, but the scale is the same.
We are not at Hitler/Stalin/Mao standards ""yet"" but who's to say
that could never happen here? One of the bafflements of the 20th century was how a civilized people descended into the dark barbarism
of Nazi Germany.
"(I am omitting many, many others, including Hurricane Katrina, the Plame Affair, Medicare Part D, the Cheney Energy Task Force,
that time Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face, Bush's missing Texas Air National Guard records, Bush gaslighting the 2004
Republican National Convention with terror alerts, and on and on and on. An I didn't even get to 9/11, "You've covered your ass,"
WMDs, and the AUMF. Sorry. It's exhausting.)"
Agree with all the criticism of Bush, Cheney, Obama. On a lighter note, my father-in-law is a high tech oil prospector in W
Texas, much of it in Midland, overlapping in time with W. Both members of the Petroleum Club (been there once, very stuffy) and
worked out at the same gym. Naturally, my wife asked if he had ever seen W naked. Her dad wouldn't answer, but did turn beet red.
We take this as confirmation.
Noam Chomsky observed some thirty years ago that if the Nuremberg standards were applied to all the post-war American Presidents,
then all of them would hang. Chomsky could not have imagined the future sequence of presidents from that point forward, but certainly
they did not break the chain of criminality. My point is that Bush is not unique in the type of crimes, just the enormity of them.
But I also believe he set new standards (lower) for shamelessness. Remember his smirk?
But also remember Obama joking about killing people.
Remember the comedy skit in which GWB "looked" for Iraq WMD's in the Oval office as part of the White House Correspondent's
dinner?
Anyone with any sense of decency would have refused to do this skit, but Bush apparently followed his handlers' advice to get
some laughs. That the USA was led by someone of such limited talent for 8 years speaks volumes. Years ago, a New York Times reader wrote that Hillary Clinton is a "well-connected mediocrity".
That comment may be true for ALL of the recent political candidates, from both parties, for a great many years.
LBJ was definitely not mediocre (civil rights/war on poverty), and would be viewed far more favorably, maybe as great, if he
had pulled out of Vietnam rather than escalating. Carter in his post presidency has much to recommend. Post presidency Bush is painting his portraits rather than having any retrospective regrets for the harm he did.
We have such a dismal record. Little George was the most audacious of all our criminal presidents, but he has plenty of company.
My question is now, looking back, why was the USA incapable of organizing a peaceful world after WW2? I start there. 1945. How
did our ideology become so inept? And everything I have read about our failures over the years is contrasted with what might have
been. We have operated under a system that could not function without extraction. There was always a sell-by date on the cover;
one that we tried to ignore. There's no doubt in my mind that it has finally failed completely. Ignominiously. But we have also
learned and come to admit certain realities. The most important one is that there can be no more war; civilization cannot survive
a modern war. So, ironically, our advanced warfare might well bring a peaceful world without world war. And our advances in science
(mostly militarily inspired) will help us now survive.
Lambert, thank you for this piece. I won't repeat what others have opined. I've had a real problem with Michelle Obama being
the rehabilitation cheerleader leader for Dubya. Imho, we lost all of our rights under the odious Patriot Act, which was pre-written.
Russ Feingold was the lone Senate holdout. And I recall Byrd's ire and rant at the tome they had no time to read, but he caved.
It went downhill from there. The links below, (apologies, I don't know how to fashion a hot link..) are about Bush's crimes and
Amnesty International's exhaustive investigation of them.
I don't have the citation anymore, and I've knocked myself out trying to find it. But there exists a UN human rights commission
memo suggesting (?) Obama to do a number of things: hold Bushco accountable for war crimes etc, as well as address what is termed
as "systematic racism" in incarceration (and more). I had printed it out a number of years ago and can't find it.)
I'm not buying that Bush fils is any elder statesman. He and his cronies used torture, extreme rendition, hired mercenaries and
completely destabilized the Middle East. We still don't have our rights back, and I'm betting the Patriot Act will never go away.
(Nor will data mining under the guise of "targeted advertising" and sold to..the military.) The NYT's link is how Obama elected
to rug sweep and just move ahead! I look forward to Lambert's take on the Obama administration..
Finally, someone has the courage to point out the obvious. An excellent article, well researched and nicely nuanced.
I'm disappointed with the remedy proposed, however. Throwing shoes is not enough; it's merely symbolic. The potential crimes
committed here, including lying us into war, the extent of torture committed, and practices that violate international military
norms and intelligence require a transparent and impartial investigation. One possible venue is the International Criminal Courts
in the Hague.
I've been told many times that sunlight can be an effective deterrent against disease.
Yves here. Tom Engelhardt tries to get his arms around US weapons sales and use. The figures
are depressing, particularly in comparison to those of our nominal peers. And the intensity of
our fixation with killing has only grown only over time. Just look at TV. In its early, tamer
days, frontier shows like The Rifleman and Gunsmoke gave weapons top billing. Now in our
post-Vietnam, post Archie Bunker of greater realism, police shows have gory gunplay as their
prime offering, with big side portions of blowing things up and car chases/crashes. We even
have a prime time show, The Blacklist, where the lead is assured to shoot at least one person
every episode. Better to look at the fictionalized version, where we know no actors were hurt,
than clips of the real thing from the Middle East, which are oddly absent from news shows.
By the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason's simple enough.
No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours,
there's no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here,
there's almost no way even to know.
On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend
not to put together. There's really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and
the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and
internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You'll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that
the
top five arms makers on the planet -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon,
and General Dynamics -- are
all located in the United States.
Put another way, we're a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as
we've known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there
could be far worse to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons makers
and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on a planetary scale, right down
to the latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at
the cost of at least $100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is slated
to be " the
length of a bowling lane " and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times
more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will someday be capable
of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of thousands of people each. (And the Air Force
is planning to order 600 of them.)
By the end of this decade, that new ICBM is slated to join an unequaled American nuclear
arsenal of -- at this moment -- 3,800 warheads . And
with that in mind, let's back up a moment.
Have Gun -- Will Travel
Before we head abroad or think more about weaponry fit to destroy the planet (or at least
human life on it), let's just start right here at home. After all, we live in a country whose
citizens are armed to their all-too-labile fingertips with more guns of every advanced sort
than might once have been imaginable. The figures are stunning. Even before the pandemic hit
and gun purchases soared to record
levels -- about
23 million of them (a 64% increase over 2019 sales) -- American civilians were reported to
possess
almost 400 million firearms. That adds up to about 40% of all such weaponry in the hands of
civilians globally, or more than the
next 25 countries combined.
And if that doesn't stagger you, note that the versions of those weapons in public hands are
becoming ever more militarized and powerful, ever more AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, not .22s.
And keep in mind as well that, over the years, the death toll from those weapons in this
country has grown staggeringly large. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof
wrote
recently , "More Americans have died from guns just since 1975, including suicides, murders
and accidents (more than 1.5 million), than in all the wars in United States history, dating
back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million)."
In my childhood, one of my favorite TV programs was called Have Gun -- Will Travel
. Its central character was a highly romanticized armed mercenary in the Old West and its
theme song -- still
lodged in my head (where so much else is unlodging these days) -- began:
"Have gun will travel is the card of a man.
A knight without armor in a savage land.
His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin."
Staggering numbers of Americans are now ever grimmer versions of Paladin. Thanks to a
largely unregulated gun industry , they're armed like no other citizenry on the planet, not
even -- in a distant second place
-- the civilians of Yemen, a country torn by endless war. That TV show's title could now be
slapped on our whole culture, whether we're talking about our modern-day Paladins traveling to
a set of Atlanta spas ; a
chain grocery store
in Boulder, Colorado; a real-estate office
in Orange, California; a convenience
store near Baltimore; or a home
in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Remember how the National Rifle Association has always defended
the right of Americans to own weapons at least in part by citing this country's hunting
tradition? Well, these days, startling numbers of Americans, armed to the teeth, have joined
that hunting crew. Their game of choice isn't deer or even wolves and
grizzly bears , but that ultimate prey, other human beings -- and all too often themselves.
(In 2020, not only did a record
nearly 20,000 Americans die from gun violence, but another 24,000 used guns to commit
suicide.)
As the rate of Covid-19 vaccination began to rise to remarkable levels in this country and
ever more public places reopened, the first mass public killings (defined as four or more
deaths in a public place) of the pandemic period -- in Atlanta and Boulder -- hit the news
big-time. The thought, however, that the American urge to use weapons in a murderous fashion
had in any way lessened or been laid to rest, even briefly, thanks to Covid-19, proved a
fantasy of the first order.
At a time when so many public places like schools were closed or their use limited indeed,
if you took as your measuring point not mass public killings but mass shootings (defined as
four or more people wounded or killed), the pandemic year of 2020 proved to be a record 12
months of armed chaos. In fact, such mass shootings actually surged by 47%. As USA
Today
recounted , "In 2020, the United States reported 611 mass shooting events that resulted in
513 deaths and 2,543 injuries. In 2019, there were 417 mass shootings with 465 deaths and 1,707
injured." In addition, in that same year, according
to projections based on FBI data, there were 4,000 to 5,000 more gun murders than usual,
mainly in inner-city communities of color.
In the first 73 days of
Joe Biden's presidency, there were five mass shootings and more than 10,000 gun-violence
deaths. In the Covid-19 era, this has been the model the world's "most exceptional" nation (as
American politicians of both parties used to love to call this country) has set for the rest of
the planet. Put another way, so far in 2020 and 2021, there have been two pandemics in America,
Covid-19 and guns.
And though the weaponization of our citizenry and the carnage that's gone with it certainly
gets attention -- President Biden only recently called it "an
international embarrassment" -- here's the strange thing: when reporting on such a binge of
killings and the weapons industry that stokes it, few here think to include the deaths and
other injuries for which the American military has been responsible via its "forever wars" of
this century outside our own borders. Nor do they consider the massive U.S. weapons deliveries
and sales to other countries that often enough lead to the same. In other words, a full picture
of all-American carnage has -- to use an apt phrase -- remained missing in action.
Cornering the Arms Market
In fact, internationally, things are hardly less mind-boggling when it comes to this country
and weaponry. As with its armed citizenry, when it comes to arming other countries, Washington
is without peer. It's the weapons dealer of choice across much of the world. Yes, the U.S. gun
industry that makes all those rifles for this country also sells plenty of them abroad and, in
the Trump years, such sales were only made easier to complete (as was the selling of U.S.
unmanned aerial drones to "less stable governments"). When it comes to semi-automatic weapons
like the AR-15 or even grenades and flamethrowers, this country's arms makers no longer
even need State Department licenses, just far easier-to-get Commerce Department ones, to
complete such sales, even to particularly abusive nations. As a
result , to take one example, semi-automatic pistol exports abroad rose 148% in 2020.
But what I'm particularly thinking about here are the big-ticket items that those five
leading weapons makers of the military-industrial complex eternally produce. On the subject of
the sale of jet fighters like the F-16
and
F-35 , tanks and other armored vehicles, submarines (as well as anti-submarine weaponry),
and devastating bombs and
missiles , among other things, we leave our "near-peer" competitors as well as our
weapons-making allies in the dust. Washington is the
largest supplier to 20 of the 40 major arms importers on the planet.
When it comes to delivering the weapons of war, the U.S. leads all its competitors in a
historic fashion, especially in the war-torn and devastated Middle East. There, between 2015
and 2019, it gobbled up
nearly half of the arms market. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia was its largest customer,
which, of course, only further stoked the brutal civil war in Yemen, where U.S. weapons are
responsible for the deaths of thousands of
civilians
. As Pentagon expert William Hartung wrote
of those years, U.S. arms deliveries to the region added up to "nearly three times the arms
Russia supplied to MENA [the Middle East and North Africa], five times what France contributed,
10 times what the United Kingdom exported, and 16 times China's contribution." (And often
enough, as
in Iraq and Yemen , some of
those weapons end up falling into the hands of those the U.S. opposes.)
In fact, in 2020, this country's arms sales abroad
rose a further 2.8% to $178 billion. The U.S. now supplies no fewer than 96 countries with weaponry and controls
37% of the global arms market (with, for example, Lockheed Martin alone
taking in $47.2 billion in such sales in 2018, followed by the four other giant U.S.
weapons makers and, in sixth place, the British defense firm BAE).
This remains the definition of mayhem-to-come, the international version of that spike in
domestic arms sales and the killings that went with it. After all, in these years, deaths due
to American arms in countries like Afghanistan and Yemen have grown strikingly. And to take
just one more example, arms, ammunition, and equipment sold to or given to
the brutal regime of Rodrigo Duterte for the Philippine military and constabulary have
typically led to deaths (especially in its "war on drugs") that no one's counting up.
And yet, even combined with the dead here at home, all of this weapons-based slaughter
hardly adds up to a full record when it comes to the U.S. as a global mass-killing machine.
Far, Far from Home
After all, this country has a historic 800 or so military bases around the
world and
nearly 200,000 military personnel stationed abroad (
about 60,000 in the Middle East alone). It has a drone-assassination program that extends
from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East to Africa, a series of "forever wars" and
associated conflicts fought over that same expanse, and a Navy with major aircraft carrier task
forces patrolling the high seas. In other words, in this century, it's been responsible for
largely uncounted but remarkable numbers of dead and wounded human beings. Or put another way,
it's been a mass-shooting machine abroad.
Unlike in the United States, however, there's little way to offer figures on those dead. To
take one example, Brown University's invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated that, from
the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to late 2019, 801,000
people , perhaps 40% of them civilians, were killed in Washington's war on terror in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those by any means
were killed by the U.S. military. In fact, some were even American soldiers and contractors.
Still, the figures are obviously sizeable. (To take but one very focused example, from December
2001 to December 2013 at TomDispatch , I was counting up
civilian wedding parties taken down by U.S. air power in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. I came
up with eight well-documented ones with a death toll of nearly 300, including brides, grooms,
musicians, and revelers.)
Similarly, last December, Neta Crawford of the Costs of War Project
released a report on the rising number of Afghan civilians who had died from U.S. air
strikes in the Trump years. She found that in 2019, for instance, "airstrikes killed 700
civilians -- more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war." Overall,
the documented civilian dead from American air strikes in the war years is in the many
thousands, the wounded higher yet. (And, of course, those figures don't include the dead from
Afghan air strikes with U.S.-supplied aircraft.) And mind you, that's just civilians mistaken
for Taliban or other enemy forces.
Similarly, thousands
more civilians were killed by American air strikes across the rest of the Greater Middle
East and northern Africa. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which followed U.S. drone
strikes for years, estimated that, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, by 2019 such
attacks had
killed "between 8,500 and 12,000 people, including as many as 1,700 civilians -- 400 of
whom were children."
And that, of course, is just to begin to count the dead in America's conflicts of this era.
Or thought of another way, in this century, the U.S. military has been a kind of global
Paladin. Its motto could obviously be "have gun, will travel" and its forces and those allied
to it (and often supplied with American arms) have certainly killed staggering numbers of
people in conflicts that have devastated communities across a significant part of the planet,
while displacing an estimated 37 million people .
Now, return to those Americans gunned down in this country and think of all of this as a
single weaponized, well-woven fabric, a single American gun culture that spans the globe, as
well as a three-part killing machine of the first order. Much as mass shootings and public
killings can sometimes dominate the news here, a full sense of the damage done by the
weaponization of our culture seldom comes into focus. When it does, the United States looks
like slaughter central.
Or as that song from Have Gun -- Will Travel ended:
Paladin, Paladin,
Where do you roam?
Paladin, Paladin,
Far, far from home.
Far, far from home -- and close, close to home -- indeed.
The US is a failed experiment. It was always based in nihilism. What we are seeing is like
the rise in human sacrifices of the Mayans as their world was being eclipsed by the Spanish.
Ironically, "thoughts and prayers" are offered up at these sacrifices too. Did the Mayans
realize it was futile?
As more and more Americans realize that it is over and that the American dream is bunkum,
expect to see more carnage.
That figure of 400 Million guns in the USA is undoubtedly low, The late Kevin RC O'Brien
looked at production reports for various manufacturers and came up with the figure of 300
Million sold in the USA this century alone.
Sales of rifles aren't broken out by rifle type or model, but the best guess is that there
are somewhere between 10-15 Million AR 15 style rifles owned by us Citizens if you take into
account home made versions such as those made from 80% recievers or laminated wood.
The last reporting period was 2019 and a total of a little less than 400 murders were
committed by people using rifles of any kind, you ere 4 x as likely to be beaten to death
with fists and feet than killed by someone using any kind of rifle.
Want to reduce violent crime?
Reduce poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity, when the majority of the populace has a
stake in society they act like it, when they don't you get what we have.
TBH the article is a mess, and reading it is rather like being accosted by a stranger in a
bar with a strong personal agenda (" and another thing.")
But (as a non-Murkin) I just wanted to make the point that we're into American Exceptionalism
again, in this case of the negative rather than the positive kind. You get the feeling that
the author's knowledge of the outside world is pretty much limited to what's on CNN, and that
perhaps he doesn't actually know that the US isn't the only nuclear power in the world. And
so on.
How do you put an article like this into context?
Well, for a start, you wouldn't make comparisons with Yemen unless you had been to Yemen,
would you? There are lots of guns in Yemen (virtually the entire adult male population is
armed) but these are in addition to the massive holdings of the military. And we're talking
serious stuff here: AK47s are 7.62mm automatic weapons, and there are millions of them. It
was not uncommon for males you passed in the street to be carrying these weapons, and once
outside the cities (as in Afghanistan) they were everywhere. Shooting incidents were common,
the more so since, after midday, a lot of the male population was blasted out of its skull on
Khat, which is an amphetamine-like substance derived from chewing a local plant. There were
occasional clashes when security forces from different tribes opened fire on each other. Oh,
and many tribesmen in the city carry long bladed knives, and fatal stabbings in the street
are very common. All that's in peacetime, of course.
Second, as in the Yemeni example above, the vast majority of all the deaths in wars since
1989 have been from the use of Soviet, Russian and Chinese weaponry, often dating back to the
1970s. The wars in the DRC from about 1996-2000, involving seven nations and known as
"Africa's World War" killed anything between two and five million people, depending on how
you calculate the figures, and were almost exclusively fought with Soviet and Chinese
supplied weaponry. During the Cold War, the Soviets and Chinese flooded Africa with millions
of AK47s, Makarov automatic pistols, landmines, and 12.7 and 14.5mm heavy machine-guns. As
any African specialist will tell you, these were the real weapons of mass destruction,
because, unlike the F35, they actually work. Together with Soviet-era tanks and APCs, they
were also the principal weapons used in the fighting in Syria and Libya, and in Yemen before
(and mostly since) the Saudi-led intervention. Oh, and those photos you've seen of the
Myanmar military firing on the people? They use mostly weapons supplied by China.
This is not whataboutism. Two wrongs don't make a right. But I wish that, just
occasionally, writers from the US would take the trouble to do a bit of research about the
rest of the world. Perhaps it's true that there is a link between the sale of F35s to Japan
and gun violence among black youths in the inner cities, but that has to be argued, not just
assumed. I don't know how you measure these things, but I seriously doubt that the US is
somehow a uniquely psychopathically violent country. The author needs to get out more.
I assume the authors point is that there is an inherent violence to US culture, and it is
exporting it. There may well be some truth in this, but you can well look at plenty of other
places in the world where there is a cultural worship of violence (or there was at times
past) and it infected other nations. Japan and Germany as obvious examples. But on the
optimistic side of things, both those countries at least partially cured their addition to
worshiping militarism, although to be fair, the USAF had a major say in that.
The one thing that is often missing from this sort of analysis, is they way other
countries use the US's (and others) addition to militarism as a means of exerting control. An
obvious example is the Middle East, where the vast military expenditures are as much a means
of purchasing influence in Washington (and London and Paris and Moscow) as it is a way of
building up their respective militaries.
I think that may well be his point, or the point he's trying to make. I think it's true,
at least to some extent, but it's hardly a unique case, and there are plenty of other
societies in the world where you feel (correctly) much more threatened by violence than I
ever have in the US.
@David
Mr. Engelhardt is a US writer who understandably focuses on current US issues. He lays out
his point at the start: the U.S is "a mass-murder machine". He illustrates it by pointing out
how the US supplies weapons around the world, promoting, funding, and facilitating violence,
and itself slaughters people, directly and through proxies, by the millions. He also outlines
the remarkable violence prevalent in the U.S. These facts are undeniable.
With respect to context, of course the U.S. is not now, nor has it been in the past, the
source of ALL evil in the world. However It has been the source of a very large part of it in
the past century. From a practical point of view, what would be the point of Mr. Engelhardt
focusing on Russian and Chinese actions in, say, the 1980s, when his own country is engaging
in "mass murder" right now? It leads nowhere except to distract from current slaughter that
he may be able to help slow down.
The US as "a uniquely psychopathically violent country": the author does not actually say
that. Nonetheless the US is certainly a very violent country compared to other developed
countries and for that matter past imperialist countries. Collectively Britain, France,
Belgium, etc., etc., massacred millions, even tens of millions, of people in their empires
but to my knowledge were not especially violent at home. Germany was an exception to this.
The fact it slaughtered white people at home is what made its actions unacceptable to the
majority of the elites of most European countries.
The link between US violence abroad and at home: Chris Hedges has written about this. I
suggest you read what he has to say.
It is absurd to pretend that Russia or China is anything like as great a danger to peace
as the United States is. Forty four years ago Martin Luther King observed, ""As I have walked
among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails
and rifles would not solve their problems But they asked, and rightly so, 'what about
Vietnam?' They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its
problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own
government."
The US was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world then; it is an even greater
purveyor of violence today.
The only criticism I would make of the article is the disparagement of Palladin. Though
his business card read, 'Have Gun, Will Travel', in almost every episode the protagonist was
able to resolve the situation without killing anyone. The episodes are very entertaining, as
was his sidekick, Kim Chan (Kam Tong), who went by the extremely un-woke nickname of Hey
Boy.
I am always amazed at the hypocrisy of US politicians complaining of violence in the US
while ignoring or even approving of violence committed by the US outside the US borders.
I also support censoring violence in entertainment media.
Censoring anything, including displays of violence, would require state force, which is
based on the use of guns and other weapons -- another 'war to end war', I suppose.
According to the Violence Policy Center (about which I know nothing but will provisionally
trust), motor vehicle deaths still outnumber gun deaths, although guns are closing the gap.
[1] As I have been hit by private cars far more often than I have been shot at -- I ride
around on a bicycle as basic transportation, so the ratio is about 10:0 -- I'd like to
suggest that the proper metaphor for mortal violence in the US is the automobile, rather than
the gun. However, urban liberals like to focus on their political rivals, and gun fans tend
to be suburban or rural, so guns rather than vehicles are the choice of symbol. Yet again,
tribalism permeates every discussion, indeed, it seems, almost every thought.
"... Back then, I didn't know how contemptuously intelligence agencies spoke about journalists. "You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars a month." These are the words of a CIA agent, as quoted by the Washington Post editor Philip Graham. The agent was referring to the willingness and the price journalists would accept to spread CIA propaganda reports in their articles. ..."
"... I inevitably found out during my decades abroad, almost every foreign reporter with an American or British newspaper was also active for their national intelligence services. That's just something to keep in mind whenever you think you've got "neutral" reporting by the media in front of you. I remember when I got involved with the Federal Academy for Security Politics, with their close ties to intelligence agencies. This was encouraged by my employer. ..."
Looking back, I was a lobbyist. A lobbyist tries to, for example, influence public opinion
through mainstream media in favor of special interest groups. I did that.
Like for the German Foreign Intelligence Service. The FAZ expressly encouraged me to
strengthen my contact with the Western intelligence services and was delighted when I signed my
name to the pre-formulated reports, at least in outline, that I sometimes received from
them.
Like many of the reports I was fed by intelligence services, one of many examples I can
remember well was the expose, "European Companies Help Libya Build a Second Poison Gas Factory"
from March 16, 1993. Needless to say, the report caused a stir around the world.
However, I watched as two employees of the German Federal Intelligence Service (the German
CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND), drafted it in a meeting room of the FAZ offices at
Hellerhofstrasse 2 in Frankfurt. In other words: They basically told me what to write,
paragraph for paragraph, right there in the FAZ editorial offices and then the article was
published. One of the duties of these two BND employees was writing reports for
large-circulation German newspapers. According to employee accounts, the BND fed reports to
many German newspapers at the time - with the knowledge of their publishing houses.
The Federal Intelligence Service even had a little front company with an office directly
above a shop on the Mainzer Landstrasse in Frankfurt, only two blocks away from the FAZ's main
office. In any case, they had classified materials there that came from the BND.
Once you became a "player" on the team that drafted such articles, this was followed by the
next level of "cooperation": You would be given stacks of secret documents that you could
evaluate at your leisure. I remember we brought in a steel filing cabinet just for all the
secret reports at the FAZ. (When I was visiting colleagues at a magazine in Hamburg, I saw that
they'd done the same thing in their editorial offices).
Back then, I didn't know how contemptuously intelligence agencies spoke about
journalists. "You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars a
month." These are the words of a CIA agent, as quoted by the Washington Post editor Philip
Graham. The agent was referring to the willingness and the price journalists would accept to
spread CIA propaganda reports in their articles. Of course, this was also with the
approval of their employers, who knew about and encouraged all of this.
In Germany, the Federal Intelligence Service was the extended arm of the CIA, basically a
subsidiary. I was never offered money by the Federal Intelligence Service, but they never even
had to. I, like many of my German colleagues, found it thrilling to be a freelance writer for
an intelligence agency or to be allowed to work for them in any capacity at all.40
... ... ...
During the summer of 2005 when I was the "chief correspondent" of the glossy magazine Park
Avenue, I had a phone call with the Director of the CIA James Woolsey, which lasted more than
an hour. His wife is active in the transatlantic propaganda organization German Marshall Fund
(but we'll touch on this later). Sitting in my Hamburg office at Griiner + Jalir publishing, I
was amazed that I didn't lose the connection, because at the beginning of our conversation
Woolsey was sitting in his office in Virginia, then he was in a limousine and after that in a
helicopter. The connection was so good, it was as if he was sitting right next to me. We spoke
about industrial espionage. Woolsey wanted me to publish a report through Griiner + Jahr that
would give the impression that the USA doesn't carry out any industrial espionage in Germany
through their intelligence services. For me, the absurd thing about this conversation wasn't
its content, which was fortunately never printed. What I really found absurd was that after the
conversation, Griiner + Jahr sent the CIA henchman Woolsey's secretary in Virginia a bouquet of
flowers after the call, because someone at Griiner + Jahr wanted to keep the line to the CIA
open.
Moreover, don t forget that in addition to 6,000 salaried employees, the Federal
Intelligence Service has around 17,000 more "informal" employees. They have completely ordinary
day jobs, and would never openly admit that they also work for the Federal Intelligence
Service. It is the same all over the world. As I inevitably found out during my decades
abroad, almost every foreign reporter with an American or British newspaper was also active for
their national intelligence services. That's just something to keep in mind whenever you think
you've got "neutral" reporting by the media in front of you. I remember when I got involved
with the Federal Academy for Security Politics, with their close ties to intelligence agencies.
This was encouraged by my employer.
I also remember that in the late summer of 1993 I was given time off to accept a six-week
invitation from the transatlantic lobbying organization, the German Marshall Fund of the
United States. All of this surely affected my reporting. The German Marshall Fund sent me to
New York, and I did a night shift with police officers in the Bronx. I wrote an article for the
FAZ about this titled: "The toughest policemen in the world go through these doors." It was one
of many positive articles I wrote about the USA - discreetly organized by the German Marshall
Fund.
It may be hard to believe, but I was actually given a loaded firearm in New York. There's
even a photo of the New York City Police Department handing it to me. The reader didn't learn
anything about what was going on behind the scenes, behind this favorable reporting in the FAZ.
They also didn't find out about the discreet contacts I made during my stay in the US. These
included a
"... his original title Bought Journalists (Gekaufte Journalisten) was kinder and more modest than my more sensational Presstitutes -- but as he had a pithy sense of humor, ..."
"... There is no free speech protection for setting fire to a crowded theater! In my book ISIS IS U.S., in fury at the fakery of these warmongers, I castigate the mainstream media, the MSM, as the МММ: the Mass Murdering Media, as well as the Military-Monetary- Media complex. Notice how the media only point the finger at the military and industry, but mum's the word about the money masters and the media manipulators, they who control the nerve system of the zombie nation, military-industrial complex and all? ..."
"... Sharmine Narwani is right. These are media combatants, these are war criminals, the lowest circle of hell in the ranks of crimes. ..."
What Is Freedom of the Press? Can censorship be freedom of the press? Legal minds favoring the interests of capital may be quick
to claim that newspaper owners and editors have a freedom-of-speech right to print what they think is fit to print. They affirm a
right of censorship or advocacy, above the duty to hew the line of objective reporting. Business, but not government, they say, may
restrict press freedom.
However, this attitude confuses two very distinct classes of law, the Bill of Rights and civil contract law. The First Amendment
merely forbids the government from infringing on freedom of expression. Thus if communist and nationalist parties each wish to publish
their own books or newspapers, congenial to their respective viewpoints, the state should not intervene. Most newspapers, however,
claim to be independent, objective or non- partisan. Thus there is an implied contract to provide an information service to readers.
Advertising in the paper should be clearly labeled as such. Truly independent media are a public service entrusted with a fiduciary
duty, similar to civil servants. The power and influence of their office is under their care, it is not theirs personally. Thus arises
the temptation of corruption, of selling favors. For a large corporation, the financial value of a decision by an official or a newspaperman
may easily dwarf the salary of the poor fellow, who may sell himself for pennies on the dollar.
A paper that claims to be independent when it actually serves hidden interests is guilty of fraud. That of course comes under
another branch of law, the criminal code.
We hear much more about political corruption, but media corruption may actually be worse. Media reporters are our eyes and ears.
What if our senses didn't reflect what is happening around us, but instead some kind of fantasy, or even remote programming? (Which
sounds a lot like TV;-) If our eyes fooled us like that, we would be asleep and dreaming with eyes open, or disabled, hospitalized
for hallucinations. We could never be masters of our own affairs, without a reliable sensorium. So the media must serve the nation
just as our senses must faithfully serve each one of us. But they serve themselves. With the media we have, we are a zombie nation.
Of course, it's hard to be objective on topics like politics which are matters of opinion. That's what the op-ed page is for. The
problem is systematic bias, when money talks in the news pages.
As a freshman in college, I once volunteered to be a stringer on the college paper, and was sent out to interview some subjects
on a campus controversy. I didn't seem to be cut out for a hard hitting journalist either! The episode always reminds me of a Mulla
Nasrudin story.
Mulla was serving as judge in the village, holding court in his garden. The plaintiff came and pleaded his case so convincingly,
that the Mulla blurted out. By Allah, I think you are right! His assistant demurred, But Mullah, you haven't heard the other side
yet! So now the defendant entered his plea, with even greater vigor and eloquence. Once again, the Mulla was so impressed, he cried
out, By Jove, I believe you are right! And once again his clerk protested: But Mulla, they can't both be right! Oh my God, exclaimed
the Mulla, I guess you are right, too!
My junior high school journalism teacher never tired of telling us. Journalism is a business. In theory it's a public trust, but
money makes the world go round. We all have to please the boss to keep our job. We are all bought one way or another. As Ulfkotte
points out, there are thousands of journalists looking for a job, not the other way about. So his original title Bought Journalists
(Gekaufte Journalisten) was kinder and more modest than my more sensational Presstitutes -- but as he had a pithy sense of humor,
I think he would have liked it anyway. The "privished" edition title Journalists for Hire seems to downplay the matter a shade though.
It's perfectly normal to be hired as a journalist, isn't it?
Perhaps we have to escalate the term to investigative journalist, because a journo is just somebody who writes things down.
In an interview ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/14/journalists-are-prostitutes ), Ulfkotte tells about his first assignment,
during the Iran-Iraq war. The international press corps set out from Baghdad into the desert with extra jerry cans of gasoline --
to set alight some long-destroyed tanks for a film shoot. Innocent sensationalism perhaps? But a million people have died in Iraq,
Libya and Syria because the press didn't just report the news, didn't just lie about the news, but they invented and sold the events
that served as pretexts for wars. That is way out of line.
There is no free speech protection for setting fire to a crowded theater! In my book ISIS IS U.S., in fury at the fakery of these
warmongers, I castigate the mainstream media, the MSM, as the МММ: the Mass Murdering Media, as well as the Military-Monetary- Media
complex. Notice how the media only point the finger at the military and industry, but mum's the word about the money masters and
the media manipulators, they who control the nerve system of the zombie nation, military-industrial complex and all?
Political candidates
who tackle the media do so at their peril. Sharmine Narwani is right. These are media combatants, these are war criminals, the lowest
circle of hell in the ranks of crimes.
We have million-dollar penalties for accidental product liability, but the salesmen of genocide
get off scot-free!? 3,000 died on the spot on 9/11, followed by two decades of wars. The key suspect: Netanyahu crony Larry Silverstcin.
His reward: a S3 billion insurance payout - pure profit, as he was only leasing the Towers.
The MSM cover it up, and revile you as
a "conspiracy theorist" if you protest. "Presstitutes" is too light-hearted a word for them. The tragedy is that many social media
agitators for the destruction of Syria were fools, who thought they were being oh so cool.
Remember the Milgram experiment? 1 like
my book covers to be a depiction of the title, an allegory, which led to the most salacious cover art on "Presstitutes" I've ever
dealt with. "Bought Journalists" could have been a covey of journos in a shopping cart, picking up their perks. Light satire blending
to comedy, but this isn't really a funny story. Too many people, including the author, have given their lives.
One nice thing about this book is you get to know a real nice guy. I like Udo. Decent, intelligent, good sense of humor, conscientious,
level-headed. He tells how he fell into this because he was just out of college and needing a job. We all have our compromises and
our confessions to make. Ulfkotte relates the moment when it became too corrupt for him, when politicians offered him €5000 to use
his cover as a journalist to spy and dig up dirt on the private life of their rival. That was too low down and dirty, too criminal
for him, although it seemed to be expected and natural to them. Ulfkotte was the rarest of courageous whistleblowers.
... ... ...
English translation never moved forward." Another curiosity: during the nearly three years Journalists for Hire was "on sale"
but unavailable on Amazon, it garnered only five-star reviews, 24 of them, from customers who wanted to read the book. Then the day
this edition became available, that edition got a 1 -star troll review, virulently attacking the author as a "yellow journalist"
- which happens to mean "warmonger." Weird.
Of course, there could be some mundane explanations for the failure of the first, or rather zero edition. Business failure. Language
barrier. Death of the author -- for a small publisher, a proactive author promoting the book is a necessity. It was spooky, too,
that the only book Tayen Lane seemed to have published before was a non-starter about suicide...
And what if the author's death was a key part of the pattern of suppression? There we go full conspiracy. It's not that incredible,
though. Ulfkotte's last page here is a declaration of war: "This book is the first volume of an explosive three-part series." It's
been alleged that the CIA has a weapon that works by triggering a heart attack. And like the Mafia, their code of silence calls tor
punishing ex-colleagues who took the oath of secrecy and then turned against them, more than mere bystanders like Joe Blogger or
Johnny Publisher.
So I hope I'm lucky to publish this book. Hopefully it will get reviews in the alternative media, or interviews with our translator
or myself. This is the second time I've published a German bestseller. The first was Mathias Broeckers' Conspiracy Theories and Secrets
of 9/11. It didn't turn a profit, but was a very interesting treatment. In the first part of the book he shows that conspiracy -
in the broadest sense, grouping together against outsiders - is one of three basic principles of life and evolution. Darwinians normally
only talk about competition, but the second one is cooperation, and the hybrid of the two is conspiracy. Our body consists of a collective
of cells cooperating and conspiring together against competing organisms! Conspiracy is as common as the air we breathe. Even the
official story of 9/11 is a theory about a conspiracy of 19 hijackers, who weren't even on the passenger lists... Then there is the
conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories, that the CIA purposely turned the term into an epithet to cover up the JFK assassination.
Of course not everything is a conspiracy. You have to remain skeptical, keep your balance and common sense. We need the flexibility
to add new perspectives, and not try to reduce everything to one perspective. Our brains are perfectly capable of this, we just have
to use them. Don't believe what they tell you, if it doesn't stand to reason. On 9/11, three towers fell at free- fall speed, but
only two were hit by airplanes - which were 5,000 times lighter than the steel buildings anyway. Anyone can do the math. The perps
didn't even bother to make it plausible, having the media to cover it up.
When a huge revelation like 9/11 hits, like it did some of us back in 2002, when I published the first "truther" book in English,
it's a big shock. This can make people either deny the new information, or go overboard with it. Sometimes the shock of losing the
mainstream world view is so great that people switch to the reverse explanation for everything. Yet most of life is still banal or
benign. Major criminal political conspiracies like 9/11 require a lot of effort, and are used strategically.
Although 9/11 showed that these people arc capable of almost anything, that doesn't mean they can or will do everything. For instance,
I don't believe in chemtrails, because it doesn't make sense, and the contrails persist mostly on days when there are natural cirrus
clouds in the upper atmosphere. Manipulation is even more common than conspiracy. We all do it to get other people to do things.
Ulfkotte shows that mass media manipulation is business as usual. It is so prevalent that it starts to get into the realm of a matrix,
a wall-to-wall pseudo-reality. The spider army spins its web 24/7. Their thread is a mix of outrages and banalities, bread and circuses.
The formula is clear to see in the major German tabloid Bild. Its readers go for simplified and emotional narratives, like a cheap
novel with themes of love and hate: "The reader's attention is steered away from what's objective- ly important and diverted to what's
trivial." Yes, there IS a sucker bom every minute. We are still just creatures that go too much on impressions and emotions rather
than logic, and the media play on that with sensationalism and simplified images. Sure, our brain has amazing powers, but it can
only focus on one thing at a time. (Luckily, that's at least one more than machines, that have no awareness of anything.)
Simplification, love and hate, enemy images. Our bane as a nation is our bent for political correctness and demonization. We are
the heirs of the Puritans, who had a nasty habit of picking on little old ladies, demonizing them and then burning them at the stake.
Who were the real demons there? Or in the tragedies of Libya and Syria?? When a huge revelation like 9/11 hits, like it did some
of us back in 2002, when I published the first "truther" book in English, it's a big shock. This can make people either deny the
new information, or go overboard with it. Sometimes the shock of losing the mainstream world view is so great that people switch
to the reverse explanation for everything. Yet most of life is still banal or benign. Major criminal political conspiracies like
9/11 require a lot of effort, and are used strategically.
Although 9/11 showed that these people arc capable of almost anything, that doesn't mean they can or will do everything. For instance,
I don't believe in chemtrails, because it doesn't make sense, and the contrails persist mostly on days when there are natural cirrus
clouds in the upper atmosphere. Manipulation is even more common than conspiracy. We all do it to get other people to do things.
Ulfkotte shows that mass media manipulation is business as usual. It is so prevalent that it starts to get into the realm of a matrix,
a wall-to-wall pseudo-reality. The spider army spins its web 24/7. Their thread is a mix of outrages and banalities, bread and circuses.
The formula is clear to see in the major German tabloid Bild. Its readers go for simplified and emotional narratives, like a cheap
novel with themes of love and hate: "The reader's attention is steered away from what's objective- ly important and diverted to what's
trivial." Yes, there IS a sucker bom every minute. We are still just creatures that go too much on impressions and emotions rather
than logic, and the media play on that with sensationalism and simplified images. Sure, our brain has amazing powers, but it can
only focus on one thing at a time. (Luckily, that's at least one more than machines, that have no awareness of anything.)
Simplification, love and hate, enemy images. Our bane as a nation is our bent for political correctness and demonization. We are
the heirs of the Puritans, who had a nasty habit of picking on little old ladies, demonizing them and then burning them at the stake.
Who were the real demons there? Or in the tragedies of Libya and Syria?? We never learn. Hitler with us is as immortal as Satan,
constantly recycled as the evil icon dictator of the day, sometimes complete with moustache. This is how they demonize populism.
Ulfkotte asks, why should populism be unpopular? Lincoln expounded populism when he spoke of a government by and for and of the people.
Each time you spend a $5 greenback with his icon on it, you distribute a piece of populist propaganda! Trump is right to use the
term "witch hunt" against the puritanical attack dogs of impeachment. He wouldn't have needed to ask favors of foreign potentates
if the MSM, the mainstream media, were doing their job and investigating the Bidens. The pot calling the kettle black, because it
sees itself on the politically correct moral high ground. More important, without die color revolution launched by the MSM and the
Obama regime, Ukraine wouldn't have sunk into this cesspool of corruption. Even Trump won't say what die Bidens were really up to:
stirring up war in East Ukraine so they could get their hands on the oil shale fields of the Donbass, or that they are investors
in the illegal occupation of oil fields in the Golan Heights. Can't remember anyone ever fishing in more troubled waters. What about
the suspicions that the Clintons have murdered people, such as Seth Rich, those are just conspiracy theories and not to be investigated
either. Did the DNC kill this whistleblower and blame Putin instead for losing the election? The Mueller report won't say. But people
do get killed. Like JFK, RFK, MLK.
These are not minor matters they are getting away with behind the protective mask of the media which "covers" the news. Surveys
do reflect declining public faith in die mainstream media - except among Democrats. Tell people what they want to hear: a basic marketing
principle. You may have heard of Operation Mockingbird and how the CLA plays our domestic media like a Wurlitzer. Ulfkotte explains
how in Germany, CIA media operations started with the postwar occupation. It's part of the declared intention (most infamously but
not only by Winston Churchill) to destroy the German people, the German identity. Control of the global media is the firm foundation
of the Anglo-American-Zionist empire.
In his parting shot, "What should we do," Ulfkotte sees one simple ray of hope. "Everyone reading this book has the ultimate power
over the journalism I have described here. All we have to do is stop giving our money and our attention to these 'leading media.'
When enough of us stop buying the products offered by these media houses, when we no longer click on their Internet articles and
we switch off their television or radio programs - at some point, these journalists will have to start producing something of value
for their fellow citizens, or they're going to be out of a job. It's that simple." Instead, we can patronize sources like
https://eluxemagazine.com/magazine/honest-news-sites .
They note that, according to Business Insider, 90% of US media are owned by just six corporations, a similar
problem of lockstep media as in Germany. They recommend these "Honest News Sites Way Better Than Mainstream Media."
The Corbett Report
Moon of Alabama
The Anti-Media
Global Research
We Are Change
ProgressivePress.com,
Consortium News
StormCloudsGathering
Truth In Media
Media Roots
21st Century Wire
And The OffOuardian, which incidentally was one of the strongest voices for publishing this suppressed book.
"What Washington and its allies are doing is trampling over international law and kicking
it to the curb. Their conduct is that of rogue states who perceive themselves to be above the
law, entitled to act in whatever way they please with no accountability.
"Ironically, and sickeningly, the Americans, Europeans, Canadians, Australians and other
partners, talk loftily about respecting "values' and 'rules-based international order'. They
are the ones who are trashing any semblance of order. It is these NATO powers that have
launched numerous criminal wars of aggression without any mandate from the UN Security
Council. They have carried out covert regime-change operations which have unleashed mayhem
and terrorism. They impose unilateral sanctions on nations suffering from NATO's intrigues,
such as Syria and Venezuela. They run assassination programs and torture-renditions to black
sites around the world. Their troops kill Afghan civilians in cold blood after kicking down
their doors in the middle of the night. The United States rips up nuclear arms control
treaties with Russia, while sailing warships into Chinese territory."
So, under the tenets of International Law, both Russia and China have the right to
counter-attack and have. But the initial law breaking by the Outlaws must be stopped, and it
appears they must be forced to do so. And since two of the Outlaws sit on the UNSC, using
that organizations Article 7 powers won't do the job as the Veto will be invoked. IMO, the
only alternative is to turn to the UNGA and ask it to override the deadlocked UNSC and
warrant the arrest of the Outlaws by all UN member states wherever they may be.
I hope barflies take the time to read the editorial as it ends with an excellent news item
that's more than apt for our times.
What are the facts that indicate that "China wants to dominate the entire world"? There is
little or no evidence of that. Just repeating this pabulum on and on doesn't make it true. It
just makes hoi polloi think it is true.
There is no specific speech or document that clearly states that China wants to dominate
the entire world. It is an inference from many things pieced together, some of which are:
1. China's behavior after it was admitted to WTO. When it happened in 1999, the
expectation was that they would open up their market to global firms. Instead, what happened
was rampant technology theft and currency manipulation. They manipulated their industrial
policy to deny foreign firms a level playing field that Chinese companies were given in other
countries.
2. The Belt and Road projects. These are basically debt traps for poorer countries in
Asia, Africa and Europe in the name of infrastructure development. They give soft loans to
these countries for economically unviable infra projects, and when they fail, the Chinese
take ownership. Kinda like loan sharks loaning money to gamblers.
3. They have started grabbing territory from all neighbours using salami tactics, showing
some old "maps" that was never agreed and claiming they own the area. (Google "Nine-dash
line").
Add to this the planting of spies using Confucius institutes, secretly paying many
academic researchers to steal technology (Example: Charles Lieber from Harvard), paying
newspapers to carry China Daily propaganda supplements (WaPo, NYT, LA Ttimes, The Boston
Globe, WSJ just for starters), the Houston embassy spying, They have done this stuff not just
to USA but most major countries in the world.
Now of course we can ask, "But where did they say they want to rule the world?". Well,
Hitler didn't either. In 1938, he solemnly swore to Neville Chamberlain, the British PM that
he had no intention of conquering another country. We all know what happened after that.
Naivete is dangerous in these situations. If a country acquires enough power, it will start
having imperial ambitions. It's human nature. Germany under Bismarck in 1880s tried to stay
away from conquering other countries as long as possible, but they couldn't resist the
temptation. Now none of this means China will try to dominate the world at any cost. If
others resist strongly enough, they will back off. But that's something we have to do, and
get others to do.
1. So China copied the way in which the US industrialized in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century. Following the Washington Consensus script has a history of leading to dependency
– Ha-Joon Chang has written some very good papers and books on the basic hypocrisy of
the West in this area. In the eighteenth century Britain protected its infant textile
industry against the Indian one with very high tariffs. They also stole woollen technology
from the Dutch.
2. This is Western propaganda, perhaps reflecting the IMF/World Bank efforts of yore upon
China. The "debt trap" BRI myth has been pretty much debunked among academic researchers, but
that doesn't fit the Western anti-China discourse.
3. Grabbing territory from all their neighbours? What territory? Compare the nine-dash line
mirrors to the declared hegemony of the US over the Caribbean and Central American nations
– backed up by repeated invasions and destabilizations (Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua,
Guatemala, Cuba etc.). Take a look at the US history of grabbing lands (the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, half of Mexico, Hawaii), China is exceedingly tame compared to US history, as
well as the US recent aggressions such as the illegal invasion of Iraq and destabilization of
Syria.
The MSM that you quote are the purveyors of fake news with no actual backing apart from
intelligence community briefings, the "stenographers of the intelligence community" as one
commentator put it. This is the classic propaganda designed to rile up the population to
support action against a new "enemy", very 1984.
1. Oh I know they are China is copying USA's policy in 18th and 19th century. That is what
is concerning. That is a successful playbook to gain a lot of economic power very quickly. Of
course the USA pointing fingers is hypocrisy. But that does not make this any less of a
threat.
2. Debunked by "academic researchers"? Care to share some sources? Multiple countries like
Malaysia, Kenya, Myanmar, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh have either cancelled projects or
trying to renegotiate them. The reason is because the projects are nothing but jobs and
demand creation programs for Chinese workers and companies. Contracts are awarded at inflated
rates to Chinese contractors without competitive bidding. Then they bring in workers and
equipment wholesale from mainland china. Some projects are economically viable, others are
just white elephants, like the highway in montenegro or a port/airport in Sri Lanka in the
middle of the jungle.
3. I am not denying what USA has done to other countries. China is just starting, so what
they do looks tame. Give them a little time.
I fully agree that the MSM are purveyors of fake news. I was referring to how they all
have taken Chinese money to print stuff favourable to them, and even articles entirely
written by Chinese foreign ministry. Now of course, they might change tack and start beating
the war drums if TPTB wants them to. That confirms my opinion that most MSM are just
mouthpieces for hire with no moral principles.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-global-media-dominance-propaganda-xi-jinping
Please note, I am not defending all the terrible things America has done. Pointing out
that China is a threat need not come attached with any moral judgement on America.
Also, the proper response to China IMO should be more in economic policy than military
saber-rattling. Tariffs are just a start. Why are we not building more manufacturing in USA?
Sure, wages are high and prices will shoot up. But do we really need to import 15bn worth of
sneakers (that's about 200 mn pairs a year)? Let us make shoes in America that may cost twice
as mush, but three times more durable. Same with cellphones. Decrapifying products will go a
long way in making american manufacturing viable. But that requires great sacrifice by the
consumers. Shopping or goodies has been turned into a dopamine-drip. Investing class and
business are just as addicted to high profit margins & ROIs. Cut the dependence on China,
and watch them scramble to fix their internal issues like falling wages and unemployment. The
pity is we have lost the will as a nation to make such sacrifices.
I am not sure the will does not exist. I think the will might be suppressed and
thwarted.
We would need a Protectionist Party to explain everything you have touched on and run
candidates on that basis and on that program to see whether the diffuse and muffled will
might be uncovered and re-aggregated and recovered and weaponised for domestic political
re-conquest of government and hence of political economic policy.
I envision a delicious scenario-vision in which the Protectionist Party finally wins all
three branches and the Protectionist Party President makes a speech and at the end of that
speech, AND IN MANDARIN to to make sure the prime perpetrator of export aggression hears the
message and gets the point, the following phrase . . . . in MANDARIN, remember . . .
Hmmnm "If a country acquires enough power it will start having imperial ambitions?" I
agree completely with your statement. The rest seem pretty much what I have been reading in
the Washington Post and New York Times lately. I am not sure about their objectivity. One
thing is certain and that is that war talk very easily can slip into war. Having served in
the military for over 30 years and deployed many times the best advice I ever got was from
that political analyst Mike Tyson, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
War talk with China and Russia and Iran and trying to cripple economies with sanctions never
has and never will work but we can always try to educate a new young generation of
politicians like Joe.
Nah. But I know we need a military to defend ourselves, especially if something that
happens on the other end of the world would make the supermarket shelves go empty in a jiffy.
I think we need to reduce external economic dependence and then cut the military to a
fraction of it's current size, just enough to patrol the borders and coasts.
The bulk of the "rampant technology theft" was their insistence on building the
requirement for specified technology transfers into the agreements that let companies set up
shop there. They had watched neocolonialist behavior long enough not to want to be locked
permanently into a subservient position. This part was of course not theft at all. For the
rest of it, yeah, industrial espionage is a thing. But one notes that the firms generally
stayed there.
Currency manipulation is only bad when the other guys do it. We have periodically
deliberately weakened the dollar to try to address balance of trade issues, and in the
aftermath of the '08 recession everybody was doing competitive devaluation, trying to
accomplish by that means what they would have tried tariffs for in an earlier era.
I haven't seen a decent scholarly piece that concurs with the propaganda about belt and
road loans as sinister debt traps.
Territorial disputes aside, most of those neighbors have China as a major trading partner,
and none of the disputes have gone hot. The neighbors are also not entirely lacking in power.
Russia and India are nuclear powers, and if Japan chose to field a more formidable military
it could easily do so.
One of the hardest and most disturbing lessons we've learned from the Nixon China gambit
was that capitalism doesn't necessarily lead to democracy. Nor is a democratic society a
prerequisite for capitalism to flourish.
That came much after the Nixon thaw with China, after the fall of Soviet Union. Francis
Fukuyama solemnly proclaiming "End of History" and all that. The turning point was China
being let into WTO in 1999. Clinton, Bush II and Obama swallowed that "capitalism leads to
democracy" idea hook, line and sinker.
Technology theft, spun any way, is still technology theft. Sure, Industrial espionage is
"a thing" that everyone does. So is currency manipulation. Since we feel guilty that USA
gained global power by doing all these, we should let others do it too, just to even the
scales? Foreign policy mixed with moral feelings is a recipe for disaster.
The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead
helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political
oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and
plundered Russia's wealth.
"....Yang responded sharply to the US officials and criticized Washington for both
domestic and foreign policy issues. "The United States uses its military force and financial
hegemony to carry out long arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries," he said. "It
abuses so-called notions of national security to obstruct normal trade exchanges, and incite
some countries to attack China."
"....The US took several steps ahead of the talks that made it clear the meeting would be
contentious. Blinken visited Japan and South Korea with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
earlier this week. While meeting with his Japanese and Korean counterparts, Blinken slammed
Beijing, accusing China of using "coercion and aggression" in the region. On Wednesday, the
US slapped sanctions on 24 Chinese and Hong Kong officials...."
using coercion and aggression - two very definitive qualities of American Imperialism post
WWII
Now they are pushing the "China genociding Uyghurs" lies to frame the minds of Americans
and people in the West and around the global to prepare a hot war against China.
Now they are pushing the "China genociding Uyghurs" lies to frame the minds of Americans
and people in the West and around the global to prepare a hot war against China.
There is no "Hot War" in preparation against China, this is simply procedural posturing in
the absence of any other means of relating to the Chinese civilisation.
The Zio-American empire is well aware this would mean a nuclear annihilation or at the
least a re-shuffling of the global order against their interests.
The US has developed no means of relating to civilizational challenges other than
violence, so it is merely cycling through the motions it knows of but with an understanding
that it cannot take them to their logical conclusion.
Thanks for your perspective, xot! Interesting insights.
trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible
I've heard this about Trump a lot, but I've always wondered why Trump was the ultimate
catalyst for this epiphany. You would think that the Iraq War should have been that watershed
moment, or even Libya (and perhaps they were for many, like me). I suppose from the
perspective of inter-imperialist relations in the first world, a lack of decorum of the level
of Trump's is more anomalous and egregious than the imposition of death and destruction of
people in the global south.
I think that the presidency of Mr. Trump revealed the ugly side of the United States;
suddenly the gilded papier marche of America, carefully created by the best propaganda
techniques over 70 years, was shredded and USA was revealed to be a country just like so many
others.
It is up to American people, Judeo-Christians as well as others, to address the deep deep
social problems of the United States.
Despite a roomful of hot air amerikans will always be considered War Criminals by the
rest of us
I have to admit having become totally bored with the words which any gang of elites from
any nation whose population is far too large to have the types at the top comprehend much
less represent citizens' points of view, spout.
I get that there are fans of particular nations here, who believe some of these nation
states have more humane policies than other nation states, but all of them however humane are
essentially spouting toop down driven attitudes.
We know that amerika with its narrow & prescriptive "you can vote for anyone as long as
it is someone from one of these two virtually identical political organisations" system pays
little attention to their citizens' views. Unfortunately humans being humans, once a person
gains a little power their priorities focus on retaining & increasing power, so that
after time, no matter how egalitarian things may have been at the start, a shift to imbalance
between the governors and the governed is inevitable.
It is impossible to imagine that President Xi Jinping would do as Mao Zedong did and hand
power to the people, especially the nation's young people to trigger the 1966 Cultural
Revolution.
One thing is for sure though, that is however many may have died during the cultural
revolution, the casualties were confined to China's citizens and the casualties &
atrocities were infinitesimal compared to the murders, rapes and savagery committed by
amerika's war upon the people of Indochina.
IOW 50+ years ago China moved to resolve generational differences with an internal, domestic
debate, whilst amerika tried to resolve that issue by indoctrinating its young people into a
thoroughly racist anti-asian POV, then sent their youth to "kick out the jams" on the heads
of the people of Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia.
The results were horrific and since courtesy of TV, they were far better documented than the
horror inflicted upon the citizens of Korea less than a decade before have stuck in all
non-amerikans minds ever since.
I have sounded off here at MoA quite a few times that most amerikans view the Indochina
conflict negatively because it was such a waste of 'young amerikan' lives, rather than the
way the rest of us see it, that amerika butchered and raped their way through Indochina
without the slightest remorse.
Last week I stumbled across an old documentary released back in 1972 "Winter Soldier". The
film documents the
1971 Winter Soldier hearing held by Vietnam Vets Against War.
VVAW had tried to stop the Indochina slaughter by the standard means - protests, marches,
contacting politicians, all to no avail. So then they came up with the 'Winter Soldier'
hearing which had veterans of the war against the people of Indochina, telling their stories
of the atrocities they had committed.
The witnesses came from across the range of amerika's military; from grunts - surprisingly
most were volunteers rather than draftees, to a Marine captain who served as a helicopter
pilot.
These guys who returned to amerika lauded as heroes while deep down feeling nothing but
Guilt & shame,
make it clear that My Lai was no outlier, it was SOP.
It is also clear from what they tell us of their boot camp experience that racist
anti-asian indoctrination featured big time in their training which led them to regard all
Vietnamese as the enemy.
The behaviour got worse and worse, particularly rapes and the mutilation of children, once
the troops realised no one was would restrict their cruel antics against those they all
considered to be less than human. Senior officers either joined in or 'looked the other
way'.
Most of this documentary is in the form of testimony as cameras were generally kept away from
the 'fun' but even so I found just hearing the stories too much to bear.
Anyway although copies of 'Winter Soldier' do become available on You Tube from time to
time, they can be hard to find and are frequently taken down, so if anyone does want to know
what is commonplace for the brave amerikan military, they can download a copy of Winter
Soldier from here .
The hearings likely did the job eventually, in that the thugs in control of amerika got
the message that if the war continued, more and more truth about the scale & horror of
awful amerikan atrocities would become public and that would be counter to satiating these
elite thugs' greed inside and outside amerika. A peace agreement was signed and VVAW went
back to emphasising the damage done to amerikan soldiers rather than the horrors inflicted
upon a much, much larger Indochinese civilian population.
This is why BidenCorp are confidently denying their crimes while asserting all these other
nations are killers, simply because amerikans have never been required to comprehend the true
scale of the crimes amerika has committed upon their (mostly unjustly selected, amerikan
created) enemies.
All the words spouted by elites only ever reinforce prevailing attitudes. Change in the
way amerika views itself will only be effected when amerikans are forced to honestly consider
all the crimes which have been committed in their name.
I'm not holding my breath, neither do I see much point in any analysis of who said what to
whom as words are worthless in the face of fell deeds.
Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, bought more than $1 million of shares of
investment firm AllianceBernstein in February.
Paul Pelosi bought 15,000 AllianceBernstein (ticker: AB) shares on Feb. 18, and then
purchased 25,000 more shares on Feb. 23, according to a form Speaker Pelosi filed on
March 9 . Each transaction was valued at between $500,000 and $1 million. Specific figures
aren't required for disclosure, only ranges.
Paul Pelosi and Speaker Pelosi's office didn't respond to requests for comment on the stock
purchases.
Ron Afar 9 hours ago Wonder if he or others own Workhorse who lost the Postal Service contract
to Oshkosh, and now a Senator is demanding looking at the bidding.
"... In the Risk Alert below, the itemization of various forms of abuses, such as the many ways private equity firms parcel out interests in the businesses they buy among various funds and insiders to their, as opposed to investors' benefit, alone should give pause. And the lengthy discussion of these conflicts does suggest the SEC has learned something over the years. Experts who dealt with the agency in its early years of examining private equity firms found the examiners allergic to considering, much the less pursuing, complex abuses. ..."
"... Undermining legislative intent of new supervisory authority the SEC never embraced its new responsibilities to ride herd on private equity and hedge funds. ..."
"... The agency is operating in such a cozy manner with private equity firms that as one investor described it: It's like FBI sitting down with the Mafia to tell them each year, "Don't cross these lines because that's what we are focusing on." ..."
"... Advisers charged private fund clients for expenses that were not permitted by the relevant fund operating agreements, such as adviser-related expenses like salaries of adviser personnel, compliance, regulatory filings, and office expenses, thereby causing investors to overpay expenses ..."
"... Current SEC chairman Jay Clayton came from Sullivan & Cromwell, bringing with him Steven Peikin as co-head of enforcement. And the Clayton SEC looks to have accomplished the impressive task of being even weaker on enforcement than Mary Jo White. ..."
"... On the same side though, fraud is a criminal offence, and it's SEC's duty to prosecute. And I believe that a lot of what PE engage in would happily fall under fraud, if SEC really wanted. ..."
"... Crimogenic: Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality. An additional factor is that, in the main, the criminals do not take their money and leave the gaming tables but pour it back in and the crime metastasizes. AKA, Kleptocracy. ..."
"... You might add that the threat of consequences for these crimes makes the criminals extremely motivated to elect officials who will not prosecute them (e.g. Obama). They're not running for office, they're avoiding incarceration. ..."
"... Andrew Levitt, for instance, complained bitterly that Joe Lieberman would regularly threaten to cut the SEC's budget for allegedly being too aggressive about enforcement. Lieberman was the Senator from Hedgistan. ..."
"... More banana republic level grift. What happens when investors figure out they can't believe anything they are told? ..."
"... Can we come up with a better descriptor for "private equity"? I suggest "billionaire looters". ..."
"... Where is the SEC when Bain Capital (Romney) wipes out Toys-R-Us and Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum wipes out Payless Shoes. They gain control of the companies, pile on massive debt and take the proceeds of the loan, and they know the company cannot service the loan and a BK is around the corner. ..."
"... Thousands lose their jobs. And this is legal? And we also lost Glass-Steagal and legalized stock buy-backs. The Elite are screwing the people. It's Socialism for the Rich, the Politicians and Govt Employees and Feudalism for the rest of us. ..."
We've embedded an SEC Risk Alert on private equity abuses at the end of this post. 1 What is remarkable about this
document is that it contains a far longer and more detailed list of private abuses than the SEC flagged in its initial round of examinations
of private equity firms in 2014 and 2015. Those examinations occurred in parallel with groundbreaking exposes by Gretchen Morgenson
at the New York Times and Mark Maremont in the Wall Street Journal.
At least some of the SEC enforcement actions in that era look
to have been triggered by the press effectively getting ahead of the SEC. And the SEC even admitted the misconduct was more common
at the most prominent firms.
Yet despite front-page articles on private equity abuses, the SEC engaged in wet noodle lashings. Its pattern was to file only
one major enforcement action over a particular abuse. Even then, the SEC went to some lengths to spread the filings out among the
biggest firms. That meant it was pointedly engaging in selective enforcement, punishing only "poster child" examples and letting
other firms who'd engaged in precisely the same abuses get off scot free.
The very fact of this Risk Alert is an admission of failure by the SEC. It indicates that the misconduct it highlighted five years
ago continues and if anything is even more pervasive than in the 2014-2015 era. It also confirms that its oft-stated premise then,
that the abuses it found then had somehow been made by firms with integrity that would of course clean up their acts, and that now-better-informed
investors would also be more vigilant and would crack down on misconduct, was laughably false.
In particular, the second section of the Risk Alert, on Fees and Expenses (starting on page 4) describes how fund managers are
charging inflated or unwarranted fees and expenses. In any other line of work, this would be called theft. Yet all the SEC is willing
to do is publish a Risk Alert, rather than impose fines as well as require disgorgements?
The SEC's Abject Failure
In the Risk Alert below, the itemization of various forms of abuses, such as the many ways private equity firms parcel out interests
in the businesses they buy among various funds and insiders to their, as opposed to investors' benefit, alone should give pause.
And the lengthy discussion of these conflicts does suggest the SEC has learned something over the years. Experts who dealt with the
agency in its early years of examining private equity firms found the examiners allergic to considering, much the less pursuing,
complex abuses.
Undermining legislative intent of new supervisory authority the SEC never embraced its new responsibilities to ride herd on
private equity and hedge funds.
The SEC has long maintained a division between the retail investors and so-called "accredited investors" who by virtue of having
higher net worths and investment portfolios, are treated by the agency as able to afford to lose more money. The justification is
that richer means more sophisticated. But as anyone who is a manager for a top sports professional or entertainer, that is often
not the case. And as we've seen, that goes double for public pension funds.
Starting with the era of Clinton appointee Arthur Levitt, the agency has taken the view that it is in the business of defending
presumed-to-be-hapless retail investors and has left "accredited investor" and most of all, institutional investors, on their own.
This was a policy decision by the agency when deregulation was venerated; there was no statutory basis for this change in priorities.
Congress tasked the SEC with supervising the fund management activities of private equity funds with over $150 million in assets
under management. All of their investors are accredited investors. In other words, Congress mandated the SEC to make sure these firms
complied with relevant laws as well as making adequate disclosures of what they were going to do with the money entrusted to them.
Saying one thing in the investor contracts and doing another is a vastly worse breach than misrepresentations in marketing materials,
yet the SEC acted as if slap-on-the-wrist-level enforcement was adequate.
We made fun when thirteen prominent public pension fund trustees wrote the SEC asking for them to force greater transparency of
private equity fees and costs. The agency's position effectively was "You are grownups. No one is holding a gun to your head to make
these investments. If you don't like the terms, walk away." They might have done better if they could have positioned their demand
as consistent with the new Dodd Frank oversight requirements.
Actively covering up for bad conduct . In 2014, the SEC started working at giving malfeasance a free pass. Specifically, the SEC
told private equity firms that they could continue their abuses if they 'fessed up in their annual disclosure filings, the so-called
Form ADV. The term of art is "enhanced disclosure". Since when are contracts like confession, that if you admit to a breach, all
is forgiven? Only in the topsy-turvy world of SEC enforcement.
The agency is operating in such a cozy manner with private equity firms that as one investor described it: It's like FBI sitting down with the Mafia to tell them each year, "Don't cross these lines because that's what we are focusing
on."
Specifically, as we indicated, the SEC was giving advanced warning of the issues it would focus on in its upcoming exams, in order
to give investment managers the time to get their stories together and purge files. And rather than view its periodic exams as being
designed to make sure private equity firms comply with the law and their representations, the agency views them as "cooperative"
exercises! Misconduct is assumed to be the result of misunderstanding and error, and not design.
It's pretty hard to see conduct like this, from the SEC's Risk Alert, as being an accident:
Advisers charged private fund clients for expenses that were not permitted by the relevant fund operating agreements, such
as adviser-related expenses like salaries of adviser personnel, compliance, regulatory filings, and office expenses, thereby causing
investors to overpay expenses
The staff observed private fund advisers that did not value client assets in accordance with their valuation processes or in
accordance with disclosures to clients (such as that the assets would be valued in accordance with GAAP). In some cases, the staff
observed that this failure to value a private fund's holdings in accordance with the disclosed valuation process led to overcharging
management fees and carried interest because such fees were based on inappropriately overvalued holdings .
Advisers failed to apply or calculate management fee offsets in accordance with disclosures and therefore caused investors
to overpay management fees.
We're highlighting this skimming simply because it is easier for laypeople to understand than some of the other types of cheating
the SEC described. Even so, industry insiders and investors complained that the description of the misconduct in this Risk Alert
was too general to give them enough of a roadmap to look for it at particular funds.
Ignoring how investors continue to be fleeced . The SEC's list includes every abuse it sanctioned or mentioned in the 2014 to
2015 period, including undisclosed termination of monitoring fees, failure to disclose that investors were paying for "senior advisers/operating
partners," fraudulent charges, overcharging for services provided by affiliated companies, plus lots of types of bad-faith conduct
on fund restructurings and allocations of fees and expenses on transactions allocated across funds.
The SEC assumed institutional investors would insist on better conduct once they were informed that they'd been had. In reality,
not only did private equity investors fail to demand better, they accepted new fund agreements that described the sort of objectionable
behavior they'd been engaging in. Remember, the big requirement in SEC land is disclosure. So if a fund manager says he might do
Bad Things and then proceeds accordingly, the investor can't complain about not having been warned.
Moreover, the SEC's very long list of bad acts says the industry is continuing to misbehave even after it has defined deviancy
down via more permissive limited partnership agreements!
Why This Risk Alert Now?
Keep in mind what a Risk Alert is and isn't. The best way to conceptualize it is as a press release from the SEC's Office of Compliance
Inspections and Examinations. It does not have any legal or regulatory force. Risk Alerts are not even considered to be SEC official
views. They are strictly the product of OCIE staff.
On the first page of this Risk Alert, the OCIE blandly states that:
This Risk Alert is intended to assist private fund advisers in reviewing and enhancing their compliance programs, and also
to provide investors with information concerning private fund adviser deficiencies.
Cutely, footnotes point out that not everyone examined got a deficiency letter (!!!), that the SEC has taken enforcement actions
on "many" of the abuses described in the Risk Alert, yet "OCIE continues to observe some of these practices during examinations."
Several of our contacts who met in person with the SEC to discuss private equity grifting back in 2014-2015 pressed the agency
to issue a Risk Alert as a way of underscoring the seriousness of the issues it was unearthing. The staffers demurred then.
In fairness, the SEC may have regarded a Risk Alert as having the potential to undermine its not-completed enforcement actions.
But why not publish one afterwards, particularly since the intent then had clearly been to single out prominent examples of particular
types of misconduct, rather than tackle it systematically? 2
So why is the OCIE stepping out a bit now? The most likely reason is as an effort to compensate for the lack of enforcement actions.
Recall that all the OCIE can do is refer a case to the Enforcement Division; it's their call as to whether or not to take it up.
The SEC looks to have institutionalized the practice of borrowing lawyers from prominent firms. Mary Jo White of Debevoise brought
Andrew Ceresney with her from Debeviose to be her head of enforcement. Both returned to Debevoise.
Current SEC chairman Jay Clayton came from Sullivan & Cromwell, bringing with him Steven Peikin as co-head of enforcement. And
the Clayton SEC looks to have accomplished the impressive task of being even weaker on enforcement than Mary Jo White. Clayton made
clear his focus was on "mom and pop" investors, meaning he chose to overlook much more consequential abuses by private equity firms
and hedgies. The New York Times determined that the average amount of SEC fines against corporate perps fell markedly in 2018 compared
to the final 20 months of the Obama Administration. The SEC since then levied $1 billion fine against the Woodbridge Group of Companies
and its one-time owner for running a Ponzi scheme that fleeced over 8,400, so that would bring the average penalty up a bit. But
it still confirms that Clayton is concerned about small fry, and not deeper but just as pickable pockets.
David Sirota argues that the OCIE
was out to embarrass Clayton and sabotage what Sirota depicted as an SEC initiative to let retail investors invest in private equity.
Sirota appears to have missed that that horse has left the barn and is in the next county, and the SEC had squat to do with it.
The overwhelming majority of retail funds is not in discretionary accounts but in retirement accounts, overwhelmingly 401(k)s.
And it is the Department of Labor, which regulates ERISA plans, and not the SEC, that decides what those go and no go zones are.
The DoL has already green-lighted allowing large swathes of 401(k) funds to include private equity holdings.
From a post earlier this month :
Until now, regulations have kept private equity out of the retail market by prohibiting managers from accepting capital from
individuals who lack significant net worth.
Moreover, even though Sirota pointed out that Clayton had spoken out in favor of allowing retail investors more access to private
equity investments, the proposed regulation on the definition of accredited investors in fact not only does not lower income or net
worth requirements (save for allowing spouses to combine their holdings) it in fact solicited comments on the idea of raising the
limits.
From a K&L Gates write up :
Previously, the Concept Release requested comment on whether the SEC should revise the current individual income ($200,000)
and net worth ($1,000,000) thresholds. In the Proposing Release, the SEC further considered these thresholds, noting that the
figures have not been adjusted since 1982. The SEC concluded that it does not believe modifications to the thresholds are necessary
at this time, but it has requested comments on whether the final should instead make a one-time increase to the thresholds in
the account for inflation, or whether the final rule should reflect a figure that is indexed to inflation on a going-forward basis.
It is not clear how many people would be picked up by the proposed change, which was being fleshed out, that of letting some presumed
sophisticated but not rich individuals, like junior hedge fund professionals and holders of securities licenses, be treated as accredited
investors. In other words, despite Clayton's talk about wanting ordinary investors to have more access to private equity funds, the
agency's proposed rule change falls short of that.
Moreover, if the OCIE staff had wanted to undermine even the limited liberalization of the definition of accredited investor so
as to stymie more private equity investment, the time to do so would have been immediately before or while the comments period was
open. It ended March 16 .
So again, why now? One possibility is that the timing is purely a coincidence. For instance, the SEC staffers might have been
waiting until Covid-19 news overload died down a bit so their work might get a hearing (and Covid-19 remote work complications may
also have delayed its release).
The second possibility is that OCIE is indeed very frustrated with the enforcement chief Peikin's inaction on private equity.
The fact that Peikin's boss and protector Clayton has made himself a lame duck meant a salvo against Peikin was now a much lower
risk. If any readers have better insight into the internal workings of the SEC these days, please pipe up.
______
1 Formally, as you can see, this Risk Alert addresses both private equity and hedge fund misconduct, but on reading
the details, the citing of both types of funds reflects the degree to which hedge funds have been engaging in the buying and selling
of stakes in private companies. For instance, Chatham Asset Management, which has become notorious through its ownership of American
Media, which in turn owns the National Enquirer, calls itself a hedge fund. Moreover, when the SEC started examining both private
equity and hedge funds under new authority granted by Dodd Frank, it described the sort of misconduct described in this Risk Alert
as coming out of exams of private equity firms, and its limited round of enforcement actions then were against brand name private
equity firms like KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, and TPG. Thus for convenience as well as historical reasons, we refer only to private
equity firms as perps.
2 Media stories at the time, including some of our posts, provided substantial evidence that particular abuses, such
as undisclosed termination of monitoring fees and failure to disclose that "senior advisers" presented as general partner "team members"
were in fact consultants being separately billed to fund investments, were common practices. Yet the SEC chose to lodge only marquee
enforcement actions against one prominent firm for each abuse, as if token enforcement would serve as an adequate deterrent. The
message was the reverse, that the overwhelming majority of the abuses were able to keep their ill-gotten gains and not even face
public embarrassment.
TBH, in the view of Calpers ignoring its advisors, I do have a little understanding of the SEC's point "you're grown ups" (the
worse problem is that the advisors who leach themselves to the various accredited investors are often not worth the money.
On the same side though, fraud is a criminal offence, and it's SEC's duty to prosecute. And I believe that a lot of what PE
engage in would happily fall under fraud, if SEC really wanted.
Yes, the SEC conveniently claims a conflicted authority – 1. to regulate compliance but without an "enforcement authority",
and 2. report egregious behavior to their "enforcement authority". So the SEC is less than a permissive nanny. Sort of like "access"
to enforcement authority. Sounds like health care to me.
No, this is false. The SEC has an examination division and an enforcement division. The SEC can and does take enforcement actions
that result in fines and disgorgements, see the $1 billion fine mentioned in the post. So the exam division can recommend enforcement
to the enforcement division. That does not mean it will get done. Some enforcement actions originate from within the enforcement
division, like insider trading cases, and the SEC long has had a tendency to prioritize insider trading cases.
The SEC cannot prosecute. It has to refer cases that it thinks are criminal to the DoJ and try to get them to saddle up.
Crimogenic: Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality. An additional factor is that, in the main, the criminals
do not take their money and leave the gaming tables but pour it back in and the crime metastasizes.
AKA, Kleptocracy.
Thus in 2008 and thereafter the criminal damage required 2-3 trillion, now 7-10 trillion.
Any economic expert who does not recognize crime as the number one problem in the criminogenic US economy I disregard. Why
read all that analysis when, at the end of the run, it all just boils down to bailing out the criminals and trying to reset the
criminogenic system?
You might add that the threat of consequences for these crimes makes the criminals extremely motivated to elect officials who
will not prosecute them (e.g. Obama). They're not running for office, they're avoiding incarceration.
The SEC has been captured for years now. It was not that long ago that SEC Examination chief Andrew Bowden made a grovelling
speech to these players and even asked them to give his son a job which was so wrong-
But there is no point in reforming the SEC as it was the politicians, at the beck and call of these players, that de-fanged
the SEC – and it was a bipartisan effort! So it becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem in the matter of reform. Who do you reform
first?
Can't leave this comment without mentioning something about a private equity company. One of the two major internal airlines
in Oz went broke due to the virus and a private equity buyer has been found to buy it. A union rep said that they will be good
for jobs and that they are a good company. Their name? Bain Capital!
We broke the story about Andrew Bowden! Give credit where credit is due!!!! Even though Taibbi points to us in his first line,
linking to Rolling Stone says to those who don't bother clicking through that it was their story.
Of course I remember that story. I was going to mention it but thought to let people see it in virtually the opening line of
that story where he gives you credit. More of a jolt of recognition seeing it rather than being told about it first.
Of the three branches of government which ones are not captured by big business? If two out of three were to captured then
does it matter what the third does?
Is the executive working for the common good or for the interests of big business?
Is the legislature working for the common good or for the interests of big business?
Is the judiciary working for the common good or for the interests of big business?
In my opinion too much power has been centralised, too much of the productivity gains of the past 40 years have been monetised
and therefore made possible to hoard and centralise. SEC should (in my opinion) try to enforce more but without more support then I do not believe (it is my opinion, nothing more
and nothing less) that they can accomplish much.
The SEC is a mysterious agency which (?) must fall under the jurisdiction of the Treasury because it is a monetary regulatory
agency in the business of regulating securities and exchanges. But it has no authority to do much of anything. The Treasury itself
falls under the executive administration but as we have recently seen, Mnuchin himself managed to get a nice skim for his banking
pals from the money Congress legislated.
That's because Congress doesn't know how to effectuate a damn thing – they legislate
stuff that morphs before our very eyes and goes to the grifters without a hitch. So why don't we demand that consumer protection
be made into hard law with no wiggle room; that since investing is complex in this world of embedded funds and glossy prospectuses,
we the consumer should not have to wade through all the nonsense to make decisions – that everything be on the table. And if PE
can't manage to do that and still steal its billions then PE should be declared to be flat-out illegal.
Please stop spreading disinformation. This is the second time on this post. The SEC has nada to do with the Treasury. It is an independent regulatory agency. It however is the only financial regulator that does not keep what it kills (its own fees and fines) but is instead subject
to Congressional appropriations.
Andrew Levitt, for instance, complained bitterly that Joe Lieberman would regularly threaten
to cut the SEC's budget for allegedly being too aggressive about enforcement. Lieberman was the Senator from Hedgistan.
It should be noted that out here in the countryside of northern Michigan that embezzlement (a winter sport here while the men
are out ice fishing), theft and fraud are still considered punishable felonies. Perhaps that is simply a quaint holdover from
a bygone time. Dudley set the tone for the C of C with his Green Book on bank deregulation. One of the subsequent heads of C of
C was reported as seeing his position as "being the spiritual resource for banks". If bank regulation is treated in a farcical
fashion why should be the SEC be any different?
I was shocked to just now learn that ERISA/the Dept of Labor is in regulatory control of allowing pension funds to buy PE fund
of funds and "balanced PE funds". What VERBIAGE. Are "PE Fund of Balanced Funds" an actual category? And what distinguishes them
from good old straightforward Index Funds? And also too – what is happening before our very glazed-over eyes is that PE is high
grading not just the stock market but the US Treasury itself. Ordinary investors should be buying US Treasuries directly and retirement
funds should too. It will be a big bite but if it knocks PE out of business it would be worth it. PE is in the business of cooking
its books, ravaging struggling corporations, and boldly privatizing the goddamned Treasury. WTF?
What about the wanton destruction of the purchased companies? If this solely about the harm done to the poor investors?
If so, that is seriously wrong.
If, you know, the neoliberal "because markets" is the ruling paradigm then of course there is no harm done. The questions then
become: is "because markets" a sensible paradigm? What is it a sensible paradigm of? Is "because markets" even sensible for the
long term?
an aside: farewell, Olympus camera. A sad day. Farewell, OM-1 and OM-2. Film photography is really not replicated by digital
photography but the larger market has gone to digital. Speed and cost vs quality. Because markets. Now the vulture swoop.
Where is the SEC when Bain Capital (Romney) wipes out Toys-R-Us and Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum wipes out Payless
Shoes. They gain control of the companies, pile on massive debt and take the proceeds of the loan, and they know the company cannot
service the loan and a BK is around the corner.
Thousands lose their jobs. And this is legal? And we also lost Glass-Steagal and
legalized stock buy-backs. The Elite are screwing the people. It's Socialism for the Rich, the Politicians and Govt Employees and
Feudalism for the rest of us.
"... Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them. ..."
"... We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues, state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing the financial system. ..."
"... In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk, in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion. Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions? ..."
Running in the background, though, was a new, darker theme: That the post-2008 reforms had gone too far in restricting policymakers'
discretion in crises. The trio most responsible for making the post-Lehman bailout revolution -- Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner,
and Henry Paulson --
expressed their
misgivings in a joint op-ed :
But in its post-crisis reforms, Congress also took away some of the most powerful tools used by the FDIC, the Fed and the Treasury
the FDIC can no longer issue blanket guarantees of bank debt as it did in the crisis, the Fed's emergency lending powers have
been constrained, and the Treasury would not be able to repeat its guarantee of the money market funds.
These powers were critical in stopping the 2008 panic The paradox of any financial crisis is that the policies necessary to
stop it are always politically unpopular. But if that unpopularity delays or prevents a strong response, the costs to the economy
become greater.
We need to make sure that future generations of financial firefighters have the emergency powers they need to prevent the next
fire from becoming a conflagration.
Sotto voce fears of this sort go back to the earliest reform discussions. But the question surfaced dramatically in Timothy Geithner's
2016 Per Jacobsson Lecture, " Are We Safer? The Case for Strengthening
the Bagehot Arsenal ." More recently, the Group of Thirty
has advanced similar suggestions -- not too surprisingly, since Geithner was co-project manager of the report, along with Guillermo
Ortiz, the former Governor of the Mexican Central Bank, who introduced the former Treasury Secretary at the Per Jacobson lecture.
Aside from the financial collapse itself, probably nothing has so shaken public confidence in democratic institutions as the wave
of bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse. The redistribution of wealth and opportunity that the bailouts wrought surely helped
fuel the populist surges that have swept over Europe and the United States in the last decade. The spectacle of policymakers rubber
stamping literally unlimited sums for financial institutions while preaching the importance of austerity for everyone else has been
unbearable to millions of people.
Especially in money-driven political systems, affording policymakers unlimited discretion also plainly courts serious risks. Put
simply, too big to fail banks enjoy a uniquely splendid situation of "heads I win, tails you lose" when they take risks. Scholars
whose research INET has supported, notably
Edward Kane , have shown how the certainty of government bailouts advantages large financial institutions, directly affecting
prices of their bonds and stocks.
For these reasons INET convened a panel at a G20 preparatory meeting in Berlin on "
Moral Hazard Issues in Extended Financial Safety Nets ."
The Power Point presentations of the three panelists are presented in the order in which they gave them, since the latter ones sometimes
comment on Edward Kane
's analysis of the European banks. Kane, who coined the term "zombie bank" and who famously raised early alarms about American
savings and loans, analyzed European banks and how regulators, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, backstop them.
Peter Bofinger
, Professor of International and Monetary Economics at the University of Würzburg and an outgoing member of the German Economic Council,
followed with a discussion of how the system has changed since 2008.
Helene Schuberth
, Head of the Foreign Research Division of the Austrian National Bank, analyzed changes in the global financial governance system
since the collapse.
The panel took place as public discussion of a proposed merger between two giant German banks, the Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank,
reached fever pitch. The panelists explored issues directly relevant to such fusions, without necessarily agreeing among themselves
or with anyone at INET.
But the point Robert Johnson, INET's President, and I
made some years back , amid an earlier wave of talk about using public money to bail out European banks, remains on target:
We are only interested observers of the arm wrestling between the various EU countries over the costs of bank rescues,
state expenditures, and such. But we do think there is a clear lesson from the long history of how governments have dealt with
bank failures . [If] the European Union needs to step in to save banks, there is no reason why they have to do it for free best
practice in banking rescues is to save banks, but not bankers. That is, prevent the system from melting down with all the many
years of broad economic losses that would bring, but force out those responsible and make sure the public gets paid back for rescuing
the financial system.
The simplest way to do that is to have the state take equity in the banks it rescues and write down the equity of bank shareholders
in proportion. This can be done in several ways -- direct equity as a condition for bailout, requiring warrants that can be exercised
later, etc. The key points are for the state to take over the banks, get the bad loans rapidly out of those and into a "bad bank,"
and hold the junk for a decent interval so the rest of the market does not crater. When the banks come back to profitability,
you can cash in the warrants and sell the stock if you don't like state ownership. That way the public gets its money back .at
times states have even made a profit.
In 2019, another question, alas, is also piercing. In country after country, Social Democratic center-left parties have shrunk,
in many instances almost to nothingness. In Germany the SPD gives every sign of following the French Socialist Party into oblivion.
Would a government coalition in which the SPD holds the Finance Ministry even consider anything but guaranteeing the public a huge
piece of any upside if they rescue two failing institutions?
There needs to be an asset tax on/break up of the megas. End the hyper-agglomeration of deposits at the tail end. Not holding
my breath though. (see NY state congressional delegation)
To be generous, tax starts at $300 billion. Even then it affects only a dozen or so US banks. But would be enough to clamp
down on the hyper-scale of the largest US/world banks. The world would be better off with lot more mid-sized regional players.
Anyone who mentions Timmy Geithner without spitting did not pay attention during the Obama reign of terror. He and Obama crowed
about the Making Home Affordable Act, implying that it would save all homeowners in mortgage trouble, but conveniently neglected
to mention that less than 100 banks had signed up. The thousands of non-signatories simply continued to foreclose.
Not to mention Eric Holder's intentional non-prosecution of banksters. For these and many other reasons, especially his "Islamic
State is only the JV team" crack, Obama was one of our worst presidents.
Fergusons graph on DBK's default probabilities coincides with the ECB's ending its asset purchase programme and entering the
"reinvestment phase of the asset purchase programme". https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.html
The worst of the euro zombie banks appear to be getting tense and nervous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKpzCCuHDVY
Maybe that is why Jerome Powell did his volte-face last month on gradually raising interest rates. Note that the Fed also reduced
its automatic asset roll-off. I'm curious if the other euro-zombies in the "peers" return on equity chart are are experiencing
volatility also.
Apparently the worst fate you can suffer as long as you don't go Madoff is Fuld. According to Wikipedia his company manages
a hundred million which must be humiliating. It's not as humiliating as locking the guy up in prison would be by a very long stretch.
Greenspan famously lamented that there isn't anything the regulators can really do except make empty threats. This is dishonest.
The regulations are not carved in stone like the ten commandments. In China they execute incorrigible financiers all the time.
Greenspan was never willing to counter any problem that might irritate powerful financial constituencies. For example, during
the internet stock bubble of the late 1990's, Greenspan decried the "irrational exuberance" of the stock market. The Greenspan
Fed could have raised the margin requirement for stocks to buttress this view, but did not. As I remembered reading, Greenspan
was in poor financial shape when he got his Fed job.
His subsequent performance at the Fed apparently left him a wealthy man. Real regulation by Greenspan may have adversely affected
his wealth. It may explain why Alan Greenspan would much rather let a financial bubble grow until it pops and then "fix it".
Everybody forgets (or at least does not mention) that Greenspan was a member of the Class of '43, the (mostly Canadian) earliest
members of the Objectivist Cult with guru Ayn Rand. Expecting him to act rationally is foolish. It may happen accidentally (we
do not know why he chose to let the economy expand unhindered in 1999), but you cannot count on it. In a world with information
asymmetry expecting markets to be concerned about reputation is ridiculous. To expect them to police themselves for long term
benefit is even more ridiculous.
I think Finance is currently about 13% of the S&P 500, down from the peak of about 18% or so in 2007. I think we will have
a healthy economy and improved political climate when Finance is about 8-10% of the S&P 500 which is about where I think finance
plays a healthy, but not overwhelming rentier role in the economy.
"... She soldiered through her painful stomach ailments and secretly tape-recorded 46 hours of conversations between New York Fed officials and Goldman Sachs. After being fired for refusing to soften her examination opinion on Goldman Sachs, Segarra released the tapes to ProPublica and the radio program This American Life and the story went viral from there... ..."
"... In a nutshell, the whoring works like this. There are huge financial incentives to go along, get along, and keep your mouth shut about fraud. The financial incentives encompass both the salary, pension and benefits at the New York Fed as well as the high-paying job waiting for you at a Wall Street bank or Wall Street law firm if you show you are a team player . ..."
"But the impotence one feels today -- an impotence we should never consider permanent -- does not excuse one from remaining true
to oneself, nor does it excuse capitulation to the enemy, what ever mask he may wear. Not the one facing us across the frontier or
the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us
its slaves. The worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its
service, all human values in ourselves and in others."
Simone Weil
"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the
checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what
we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies
that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone
else...
If TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the
same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car... I think it's inevitable. I mean, I don't think how you can look at all
the incentives that were in place going up to 2008 and see that in many ways they've only gotten worse and come to any other conclusion."
Neil Barofsky
"Written by Carmen Segarra, the petite lawyer turned bank examiner turned whistleblower turned one-woman swat team, the 340-page
tome takes the reader along on her gut-wrenching workdays for an entire seven months inside one of the most powerful and corrupted
watchdogs of the powerful and corrupted players on Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The days were literally gut-wrenching. Segarra reports that after months of being alternately gas-lighted and bullied at
the New York Fed to whip her into the ranks of the corrupted, she had to go to a gastroenterologist and learned her stomach lining
was gone.
She soldiered through her painful stomach ailments and secretly tape-recorded 46 hours of conversations between New York Fed officials
and Goldman Sachs. After being fired for refusing to soften her examination opinion on Goldman Sachs,
Segarra released the tapes to ProPublica and
the radio program This American Life and the story went viral from there...
In a nutshell, the whoring works like this. There are huge financial incentives to go along, get along, and keep your mouth shut
about fraud. The financial incentives encompass both the salary, pension and benefits at the New York Fed as well as the high-paying
job waiting for you at a Wall Street bank or Wall Street law firm if you show you are a team player .
If the Democratic leadership of the House Financial Services Committee is smart, it will reopen the Senate's aborted inquiry into
the New York Fed's labyrinthine conflicts of interest in supervising Wall Street and make removing that supervisory role a core component
of the Democrat's 2020 platform. Senator Bernie Sanders' platform can certainly be expected to continue the accurate battle cry that
'the business model of Wall Street is fraud.'"
As we saw with Lavrov's latest interview, the gloves are coming off as China and Russia
escalate the diplomatic war in response to the "US-centered, racist, and mafia-styled
community" attacking them. The quote is from the Global Times Editor and deserves to be put
in full:
"Canada, the UK and Australia, three members of the Five Eyes alliance, have recently
taken action to put pressure on China. They have formed a US-centered, racist, and
mafia-styled community, willfully and arrogantly provoking China and trying to consolidate
their hegemony as all gangsters do. They are becoming a racist axis aimed at stifling the
development rights of 1.4 billion Chinese."
Despite the proven fact that there's only one race of humans--the Human Race--the 5-Eyes
nations continue to employ racism as a key tool of their so-called diplomacy. Again, the GT
Editor:
"Five Eyes alliance members are all English-speaking countries. The formation of four
states, except the UK, is the result of British colonization. Those countries share the
Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Five Eyes countries have been brought together by the US to
become the 'center of the West.' They have a strong sense of civilization superiority
. The bloc, which was initially aimed at intelligence sharing, has now become an organization
targeting China and Russia. The evil idea of racism has been fermenting consciously or
unconsciously in their clashes with the two countries."
And this "idea" is nothing new and has existed for centuries. My research led me to a 100+
year-old work, The Day of The Saxon , and to the work that suggested it, The Empire
of "The City" , both of which are freely available at The Archive. What is suggested by
them and the recent work ( Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy ),
reviewed by Pepe about the planning that resulted in the post-war Outlaw US Empire is that
Empire is merely the continuance of the global Saxon Empire that still exists, and that what
we're experiencing are the ongoing "political adjustments" that confer superiority to the
Saxons since that's what they seek. In updated parlance, that would be Full Spectrum
Dominance. As we know, the Chinese have already felt Saxon love and want no more of it and
have finally made the connection between past and present. The Editor again:
"With a common language, a common historical background, and a coordinated attack target,
such an axis is destined to erode international relations and allow hooliganism to rise to
the diplomatic stage in the 21st century." [My Emphasis]
Hooliganism, an apt term given its roots in British football. Do read the entire editorial
for there is much more commendable content. Those in the EU need to understand that they're
doing the Saxon's bidding even through the UK is no longer a member as NATO still remains and
is dominated by Saxons.
Chris Hedges, Just talkin' 'bout revolution [against the Borg? Chris can't quite bring
himself to name just who "they" are] on Jimmy Dore yesterday:
"These people...you know, quite literally, will kill us...not just us...I'm talking about
snuffing out the possibility of the next generation...my kids...and they have to be
stopped"
Astonishing lack of understanding of history, basic humanity and common sense.
It seems no one among the current group of "victors" has heard the phrase "win the battle but
lose the war."
With all the witch hunting and hate mongering going on, it also seems no one in authority has
heard "treat others as you would have them treat you."
Also applies to WEF Great Reset Masters of the Universe.
A huge amount of karma heading their way.
Wall Street killed the truth squad and protected the profits from job and investment
offshoring. This is what happens to elected officials when they attempt to represent the
general interest rather than the special interests that finance political campaigns. The
public interest is blocked off by a brick wall posted with a sign that says get compliant
with the Establishment or get out of politics.
As for the "direct collision course" re the EU and Russia, the collision course has been
imposed by the Master-oligarchy of U. S. on the hapless vassal EU.
The ability of members of U.S. Congress to buy and sell stocks has been controversial over
the years. One of its most prominent members made some purchases in December that could benefit
from the new Biden administration.
What Happened: It was revealed over the weekend
that Speaker of the House and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi purchased 25 call options of Tesla
Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA ). The
purchases could have been done by Pelosi or her husband Paul, who runs a venture capital
firm.
The options were bought at a stake price of $500 and expiration of March 18, 2022. Pelosi
paid between $500,000 and $1,000,000 for the options, according to the disclosure
.
Pelosi also disclosed that she bought 20,000 shares of AllianceBernstein Holdings (NYSE:
AB ), 100 calls of Apple Inc
(NASDAQ: AAPL ) and 100 calls
of Walt Disney Co (NYSE: DIS
).
Tesla shares have risen from $640.34 at the time the calls were purchased to over $890
today. The call options were valued at $1.12 million as of Monday.
Why It's Important: The purchases by Pelosi are questionable as arguments could be made that
the companies stand to benefit from new President Joe Biden's agenda.
Biden's push for electric vehicles, which could include lifting the cap on sales, would give
buyers tax credits again and is advantageous for Tesla. The president has also suggested a
possible cash-for-clunkers program that could incentivize customers for trading in used
vehicles towards the purchase of an electric vehicle.
Pelosi could now have a conflict as she works to pass clean energy initiatives from which
her family could profit.
Former U.S. Senator David Perdue, a Republican, was
criticized for making numerous stock trades during his six years in Congress. Perdue was
the most prominent stock trader from Congress, making 2,596 trades during his time served.
Some of Perdue's transactions came while he was a member of several sub-committees. The
Justice Department investigated Perdue and found no wrongdoing.
How
to Buy Politicians: Corruption and LobbyingPart 16 of 'Elephants in the Room'
series By Rod
Driver Global Research, January 21, 2021
"Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been
corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying"(1)
Until recently, the terms Public Relations (PR) and lobbying were used slightly differently.
Lobbying means direct communications with policy-makers. PR is more general and refers to all
communications. The US introduced regulations to restrict the activities of lobbyists, so
lobbyists tried to get around these regulations by labelling their activities as PR. There is
now considerable overlap between the two activities. This post discusses activities that have
traditionally been known as lobbying.
Political Corruption – It's Not A Bribe If You Call It A 'Donation'
The term corruption conjures up images of brown envelopes stuffed full of used notes being
passed furtively under a table as a bribe. However, this is just one type of corruption. In
Britain, Europe and the US, the corruption that really matters is built into the system, in the
forms of donations, favours and influence. (This is sometimes called collusive corruption,
where politicians and business people collude with each other). Big corporations are happy to
spend a few million dollars/euros/pounds on political 'donations' if they get back billions in
extra profits due to laws and regulations biased in their favor,(2) or from existing laws being
weakened. In any other context we would call this bribery.
Politics in the US is expensive. Many US businesses now make large bribes to both of the
major US political parties.(3) The main method is known as a 'fundraiser'. This is an event
where corporations pay large sums to politicians using a lobbyist as an intermediary. The
politicians know where the money has come from, and they know who expects favourable
legislation in return.(4) US politicians are therefore dependent on their most successful
lobbyists, and their wealthiest supporters. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that money
and wealth influence policy.(5) One former insider said of their work :
" the more money you have, the more your voice is heard It was an endless cycle of money
trading hands for votes every fundraiser is a legal bribe" (6)
America is effectively a business-run society. A good example would be the insurance and
drug companies, who make big profits from the existing US healthcare system. Companies spend
hundreds of millions of dollars each year bribing politicians to avoid changes that would
decrease their profits.(7) President Obama introduced some changes, but the final legislation
was so watered down that the US healthcare system is still nowhere near the type of National
Health Service that is commonplace elsewhere. Some of the changes will actually increase the
profits of the health insurance companies.(8) The donations in Britain are smaller than in the
US, but they have been effective in distorting Britain's economy so that it benefits the rich
at the expense of everyone else. European health services, including Britain's, are slowly and
steadily being privatised.(9) This is not about making the health service better or more
efficient. It is to enable corporations to extract profits.
Lobbying is a Huge Industry
The exact scale of lobbying is unknown. It has been a multi-billion dollar industry in the
US for many years, where the official expenditure on lobbying is $7 billion per year, but there
is a great deal of secret lobbying, so the estimated total is believed to be closer to $14
billion. More recently, lobbying in Brussels to manipulate European legislation has reached a
similar scale.(10) It was estimated in 2017 that there were 25,000 lobbyists in Brussels.
Britain has the third biggest lobbying industry in the world, estimated at £2 billion
each year.(11) However, lobbying in Britain is even more secretive than in the US, so whilst
many examples of lobbying have been well-documented, we do not have a clear picture of
everything that goes on.
To make their lobbying even more effective, companies in an industry will get together to
form organisations, such as the European Banking Federation, to lobby on their behalf. There
are more than 1,000 of these in Brussels. Even larger groups, such as Business Europe, will
represent a wide range of businesses. These groups are well-funded and influential. Due to
their expertise they will initiate discussions about legislation, and even draft first
proposals for new laws or regulations. The bank, Citigroup, wrote US legislation in 2014 to
ensure that banks could be bailed out following a future financial crisis. Key politicians who
supported the bill received large contributions from financial companies.(12)
David vs Goliath
In theory, other groups, such as consumer groups, unions, environmentalists and
non-government organisations (NGOs) are also able to lobby, but their spending and influence
add up to a small fraction of corporate lobbying. One researcher concluded that "For every $1
spent by public interest groups and unions corporations spent $34." (13) A US analysis in 2010
found that the financial companies alone employed 5 lobbyists for each member of congress.(14)
In some industries, such as banking, there is no organised opposition to the corporate
lobby.(15)
The nature of lobbying can also be quite personal, involving long-term social and working
relationships, lunches, dinners, and job opportunities for relatives and friends. Billionaires,
such as Richard Branson, can invite Prime Ministers to holiday on their private island. Rupert
Murdoch, owner of multiple media outlets in many countries, was able to have personal meetings
with US President Trump, various Prime Ministers, and their closest advisors. This type of
meeting is considered mutually beneficial to both parties. NGOs and other groups do not
generally have these close connections. Corporate lobbyists spend more money, employ more
people, with more contacts and better insider knowledge, have better access to policymakers and
better information. This undermines democracy, and creates governments that work well for the
rich and powerful, but not for everyone else.(16)
Echo Chambers
Lobbying strategies are more successful if information appears to come from several,
apparently independent, sources. Therefore lobbyists use many of the same strategies as PR
consultants, such as the media, think tanks and academics, as echo chambers to reinforce their
message. This is important because companies are not trusted as honest sources of information.
Their relationship with the media can be quite complex. Lobbyists actively recruit former
journalists because of their political contacts. Lobbyists feed stories to the press, but they
also try to stop negative stories appearing.(17) They are sometimes able to persuade
journalists to drop a story, either by offering an alternative story, or by threatening to cut
access to their clients in future. This works because journalists get so many stories from
lobbyists, so loss of access would have serious consequences for them. If all else fails
lobbyists will threaten legal action. This has been very effective, particularly in the UK.
Lobbying services are also offered by think tanks, lawyers, management consultants and
accountants. This creates serious conflicts of interest, as accountancy firms and consultants
often advise governments on regulations, but then advise clients on how to get around those
same regulations. This has been particularly clear in the banking sector, where accountants
operate lucrative businesses advising their wealthiest clients on activities such as setting up
layers of subsidiaries and holding companies, so that they can hide their assets overseas in
tax havens, or game the system so that their profits appear in the lowest tax
jurisdiction.(18)
Revolving Doors and Conflicts of Interest
The issue of 'revolving doors', where people move from jobs in government to jobs in big
business, and vice versa, was mentioned in an earlier post about the weapons industry. The
problem is extremely widespread and affects the most important business sectors in Britain,
Europe and the US. When former business-people go to work with the government, they will see
the world from the perspective of big business, irrespective of the downsides to the rest of
society. In Britain this is most clear in the Health Service, where former staff of the biggest
US Healthcare companies have been gradually re-structuring the National Health Service (NHS),
and privatizing parts of it, so that shareholders can extract wealth from it. (This will be
discussed in detail in a later post about the NHS).
The problem is also important when people move in the opposite direction, from government to
business. For example, lots of British politicians involved in decisions about the
privatisation of the healthcare system have gone on to take well-paid jobs with private
companies who benefitted from those decisions. A conflict of interest refers to a situation
where a person is making decisions about an issue, but gains personally from those decisions.
In the UK in 2008 there were 30 former government ministers (who were still politicians) who
had jobs with corporations.(19) A later study in 2010 showed there were over 140 members of the
House of Lords with financial connections to healthcare companies.(20) Their main role is to
help the business manipulate government, by utilizing their contacts, or exploiting their
knowledge of weaknesses in existing legislation.
A growing trend is for policymakers to join lobbying companies, and vice versa. Lobbyists
actively headhunt government employees who have been involved in writing legislation. In the
US, "about half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House members register as
lobbyists."(21) The average salary is approximately 10 times as much as in their government
job. The same happens in Europe, where banking regulators go on to earn big salaries working as
bank lobbyists, and former lobbyists get appointed to senior roles with organisations that are
supposed to regulate particular industries(22). In 2019 the chief lobbyist for Santander Bank,
Jose Manuel Campa, became the new head of the European Banking Authority. It is therefore
unlikely that banks will be properly regulated in the near future.
The Most Powerful Lobbying Organisation in the World is the US Government
There is an additional layer of lobbying which is extremely important, but almost never
discussed openly by the mainstream media. Individual governments lobby other governments and
organisations. This is notable in finance, where the British government lobbied hard to avoid
stricter financial regulation by Europe following the 2008 financial crisis. In a later post we
will talk about political and regulatory capture (this is sometimes called ideological
capture), where politicians see the world from the point of view of big companies. Politicians
lobby for regulations that will be profitable for companies, but might have serious
consequences for citizens.(23)
The US government uses a combination of threats and bribes to achieve its goals all over the
world. It lobbies at the UN to create support for its illegal wars; it lobbies other
governments so that its tobacco companies can be allowed to sell and advertise their cigarettes
abroad; it uses its diplomats and trade negotiators to arrange deals that benefit its
exporters. Government lobbying is just as secretive as corporate lobbying, involving backroom
deals, and promises of aid and loans in exchange for votes. Many countries try to do the same,
but the scale of the US's economic threats and bribes, backed up by its willingness to impose
sanctions and overthrow governments using its military, means that it is usually able to get
its way, irrespective of the downsides for people in other countries. This creates huge
advantages for US companies.
Transparency Is Important, But It Won't Change Anything By Itself
One of the big problems with lobbying is that most of it is secret. Greater transparency
might help, but is probably only a small part of any future solution. Many people have argued
for information about what executives are paid. We now have a fairly good idea of executive
pay, but it has not led to serious change.
From 2005-2010 there was an annual award known as the Worst EU Lobby Award, where people
voted for the worst corporate offenders, and the worst conflicts of interest by politicians who
are helping to manipulate laws on behalf of corporations. In 2005, the fake grassroots
organisation, C4C (Campaign for Creativity) lobbied for stronger patents. In 2006 the oil
company ExxonMobil won for paying millions of dollars in order to fund 39 groups of climate
skeptics. This gave the impression that climate change skeptics come from respectable sources,
when many of them are paid to write corporate propaganda.(24) In 2007 BMW, Daimler and Porsche
won for lobbying against carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions. In 2008 agrofuel (crops used as fuel)
lobbyists tried to claim that they are sustainable, when they are not. In 2010, Goldman Sachs
and the derivatives lobby group ISDA lobbied to protect their most complex financial products,
despite the dangers they create, and the energy company, npower, claimed it was green while
trying to keep coal powerplants open. Whilst these awards irritated people in business and the
lobbying industry, they did not receive mainstream media coverage, so few people were aware of
them, and they had little effect in changing anything.
Various ideas have been discussed to make lobbying more transparent, but none of the
measures attempted so far has teeth. Lobbyists don't want their activities to be out in the
open, and governments like having secret connections with the wealthiest parts of society. The
EU and UK have what are known as transparency registers to monitor lobbyists, but they are
ineffective. The UK register has been described as "completely unfit for purpose".(25) At the
same time, corporate lobbyists keep working behind the scenes to actually decrease
transparency.(26) Transparency by itself is not enough. It is just a starting point. The whole
concept of corporate lobbying needs to be challenged much more seriously.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking
modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the sixteenth in a series entitled Elephants In
The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what's really going on
in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream
media.
A Republican member of the US House of Representatives has filed articles of impeachment
against newly inaugurated President Joe Biden, underscoring how the whole process has become
politically weaponized.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), elected to her first term in November, accused
Biden of being "unfit to hold the office" and a "lengthy and disturbing" pattern
of "abuse of power" while he was Barack Obama's vice president, citing his threats to
the Ukrainian government and his son Hunter Biden's shady business deals overseas among the
examples.
In a statement on Thursday, Greene said Biden has shown he would do "whatever it
takes" to bail out his son and "line his family's pockets with cash from corrupt foreign
energy companies."
"President Biden residing in the White House is a threat to national security and he must
be immediately impeached," she added. In filing the articles, the Georgia congresswoman
kept the promise she made a week ago , to impeach
Biden on his first full day in office.
The motion is extremely unlikely to succeed. Republicans are a minority in the House of
Representatives, and Greene herself hardly speaks for the party as a whole. She has also been
under relentless media attack for months as a conspiracy
theorist , from 'QAnon' to calling the mass shootings in Sandy Hook and Parkland "false
flags."
Her motion to impeach Biden, however, shows that the impeachment process – originally
intended for extreme circumstances in which presidents have to be removed for "high crimes
and misdemeanors" such as treason – have become a political weapon.
Congressman Al Green (D-Texas) actually filed articles of impeachment against President
Donald Trump three times over the first two years of his term, which were voted down in the
House. It wasn't until late 2019 that the Democrat-dominated House voted – along partisan
lines – to impeach Trump, claiming that him bringing up Biden's publicly made admission
about browbeating Ukraine into firing a corruption prosecutor amounted to soliciting foreign
election interference. The Senate acquitted him in January 2020.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) dispensed with even the pretense of an
investigation last week, when she held a vote to impeach Trump a second time. Pelosi accused
Trump of "inciting insurrection" at the Capitol on January 6, when some of the
president's supporters disrupted the joint session of Congress that sought to certify Biden's
election victory.
The incident, which Trump and the entire Republican Party have condemned and disavowed, has
been held up as the same thing as the 1861 rebellion of 11 states that tried to set up the
Confederacy. The evenly divided Senate – with Vice President Kamala Harris as the
tie-breaker – is now reportedly negotiating the terms of Trump's trial sometime next
month, even though he is no longer in office.
When someone pointed out that Democrats have filed impeachment articles against every
Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower, the internet "fact-checkers" quickly
labeled it "mostly false" because there had been no move to impeach Gerald Ford.
"While a handful of Democratic lawmakers have introduced articles of impeachment against
five of the last six Republican presidents, in most cases these efforts weren't taken seriously
by the party at large," Snopes declared in September 2019 , as if
proving a point.
What is Criminal Joe doing in office? There is a video of him admitting he did pay for play
with a billion of our tax money. The FBI is sitting on Hunter's laptop that Giuliani had also
and Rudy put out all kinds of emails that were on there mentioning Biden. We have witnesses
that will testify to his crimes. We have the Biden family that made tons of money off shady
deals. We have Hunter getting 1.5 billion from China. We had a senate investigation led by
Ron Johnson. We have Peter Strok's notes about the meeting with Obama, Biden, etc. about
taking down Trump. It is loud and clear.
Hatetotellyou WakeupSpeakup 11 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 09:38 PM
Their show is garbage as soon as one realizes identity politics is the opposite of unity.
StudsterUSA Richland Yabitches" 10 hours ago 21 Jan, 2021 11:03 PM
The majority of Americans feel powerless, that is the reason conspiracy theories get so much
immediate acceptance. Dialing up the temperature makes it worse because then they are enraged
as well as powerless. It's like they are wounded animal that's trapped in a corner. That's
why so many people are going berserk. Show me⤵some love❤
In the end, it's all about money. And the US has an army that costs more than can be
plundered from the countries it occupies.
The US military costs about a trillion every year. There are no countries left to be
conquered by the US where that kind of treasure can be looted.
"... "A month after the election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his ..."
"... to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet appointments ..."
"... What little organized left political infrastructure exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum deserve a loyal opposition. The ..."
"... being done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp creatures a free pass ..."
"... Despite Tanden's ..."
"... push for Social Security cuts ..."
"... , Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to defend Social Security ..."
"... . Despite Tanden having her organization ..."
"... rake in cash ..."
"... from Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and ( ..."
"... ) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer advocacy group ..."
"... CAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tanden ..."
"... a union at CAP, ..."
"... union leaders ..."
"... in Washington lauded her. ..."
"... American Prospect ..."
"... "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ..."
"... "a President Putin would be in the business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and other nations that are near the U.S. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Bernard Schwartz, ..."
"... a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin ..."
"... (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, ..."
"... "Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter" ..."
"... , and reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate. ..."
That didn't take long. He's not even in office, and he has already surrounded himself, as
the incoming President, with individuals who derive their wealth from (and will be serving)
America's top defense contractors and Wall Street. The likelihood that these Government
officials will be biting the hands that feed them is approximately zero. Great investigative
journalists have already exposed how corrupt they are. For that to be the case so early (even
before taking office) is remarkable, and only a summary of those reports will be provided here,
with links to them, all of which reports are themselves linking to the incriminating evidence,
so that everything can easily be tracked back to the documentation by the reader here, even
before there are any 'Special Prosecutors' (as if those were serving anyone other than the
opposite Party's political campaigns, and, ultimately, the opposite Party's billionaires).
First up, is the independent investigative team of David Sirota and Andrew Perez. On
December 4th, they bannered "The Beltway
Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism" , and reported that "A month after the
election, Biden's nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to
fulfill hispromiseto donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit
admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in
Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden's cabinet
appointments ."
Liberal (that's to say Democratic Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness of Democratic
politicians, and conservative (that's to say Republican Party) U.S. media hide the corruptness
of Republican politicians; and, so, the public today are getting corrupt leaders whichever side
they vote for. No mainstream 'news' media report what independent investigative journalists
such as Sirota and Perez report. Authentically good journalists use as sources -- and link to
in their articles -- neither Democratic nor Republican allegations, but instead are on the
margins, outside of the major media, and so rely on whistleblowers and other trustworthy
outsiders, not on people who are somebody's paid PR flacks, individuals who are being paid to
deceive. As Sirota and Perez state: " What little organized left political infrastructure
exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum
deserve a loyal opposition. Thegood workbeing done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is
getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp
creatures a free pass ." It's all some sort of mega-corporate propaganda -- 100%
billionaire-supported on the conservative side, 100% billionaire-supported also on the liberal
side, and 0% billionaire-supported for anything that is authentically progressive (not
dependent, at all, upon the aristocracy).
That independent reporting team focused on Biden's having chosen an economic team which will
start his Administration already offering to congressional Republicans an initial Democratic
Party negotiating position that accepts Republicans' basic proposals to cut middle class Social
Security and health care benefits in order for the Government to be able to continue expanding
the military budgets and purchases from the billionaire-controlled firms, such as Northrop
Grumman -- firms whose entire sales (or close to it) are to the U.S. Government and to the
governments (U.S. 'allies') that constitute these firms' secondary markets. (In other words:
those budget-cuts aren't going to be an issue between the two Parties and used by Biden's team
as a bargaining chip to moderate the Republicans' position that favors more for 'defense' and
less for the poor, but are actually accepted by both Parties, even before the new
Administration will take office.) Obviously, anything that both sides to a negotiation accept
at the very start of a negotiation will be included in the final product from that negotiation;
and this means that during a Biden Presidency there will be reductions in middle-class Social
security and health care benefits in order to continue, at the present level -- if not to
increase yet further -- Government spending on the products and services of such firms as
Lockheed Martin and the Rand Corporation (firms that control their market by controlling their
Government, which is their main or entire market).
Sirota and Perez focus especially upon one example: Neera Tanden, whom Biden chose on
November 30th to be the White House Budget Director, and who therefore will set the priorities
which determine how much federal money the President will be trying to get the Congress to
allocate to what recipients:
Despite Tanden'spush for Social Security cuts, Beltway liberal groups whose mission is to
defend Social Securitylauded
herthink
tank. Despite Tanden having her organizationrake in
cashfrom Wall Street, Amazon, billionaires and (previously) foreign governments, a Ralph Nader-founded, all-purpose consumer
advocacy group
praisedCAP as "one of our key partners in the fight to tax corporations and the
rich, rein in monopoly power, tackle government corruption, and much more." Despite Tandenbustinga union at CAP,twonationalunion
leadersin Washington lauded her.
Next up: One of the rare honest non-profits in the field of journalism is the Project on
Government Oversight, POGO, which refuses to accept donations from "anyone who stands to
benefit financially from our work," and which states in its unique "Donation Acceptance Policy" that,
"POGO reviews all contributions exceeding $100 in order to maintain this standard." In other
words: they refuse to be corrupt. Virtually all public-policy or think-tank nonprofits are
profoundly corrupt, but POGO is the most determined exception to that general
rule.
On 20 November 2020, POGO headlined "Should
Michèle Flournoy Be Secretary of Defense?" and their terrific investigative team of
Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey delivered a scorching portrayal of Flournoy as irredeemably
corrupt -- it ought to be read by everybody. It's essential reading throughout, and its links
to the evidence are to the very best sources. So, I won't summarize it, because all Americans
need to know what it reports, and to be able to verify, on their own (by clicking onto any link
in it that interests them), any allegation that the given reader has any question about.
However, I shall point out here the sheer hypocrisy of the following which that article quotes
Flournoy as asserting: "It will be imperative for the next secretary to appoint a team of
senior officials who meet the following criteria: deep expertise and competence in their areas
of responsibility; proven leadership in empowering teams, listening to diverse views, making
tough decisions, and delivering results." (Of course, that assertion presumes the
given 'expert' to be not only authentically expert but also honest and trustworthy,
authentically representing the public's interest and no special interests whatsoever -- not at
all corrupt -- which is certainly a false allegation in her own case.) She had urged the 2003
invasion of Iraq, and had participated in planning and overseeing both the war against Syria,
and the coup that destroyed Ukraine (and none of those countries had ever invaded, or even
threatened to invade, the United States); and, so, for her to brag about her
"delivering results" is not merely hypocritical, it is downright evil, because she is obviously
proud, there, of her vicious, outright voracious, record.
Her business-partner, Tony Blinken, has already received Biden's approval to become his
Secretary of State, and the first really good investigative journalist that American
Prospect magazine has had, Jonathan Guyer, headlined on November 23rd, "What You Need to Know About Tony Blinken" , and what Guyer
reports is just what any well informed reader would expect to see for a business
partner of Flournoy's.
Guyer's report closes by making passing reference to a CBS 'news' puff-piece for Blinken. In
that CBS
puff-piece , Blinken says, "a President Biden would be in the business of confronting
Mr. Putin for his aggressions, not embracing him. Not trashing NATO, but strengthening its
deterrence, investing in new capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer
space, under the sea, A.I., electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to
countries like Ukraine, Georgia, the Western Balkans ." What would Americans think if
Russia were to have retained its Warsaw Pact, and "a President Putin would be in the
business of confronting Mr. Biden for his aggressions (in Syria, or elsewhere), not embracing
them. Not trashing the Warsaw Pact, but strengthening its deterrence, investing in new
capabilities to deal with challenges in cyberspace, in outer space, under the sea, A.I.,
electronic warfare, and give robust security assistance to countries like Canada, Mexico, and
other nations that are near the U.S. "? Guyer pointedly noted that "The [CBS News] podcast
was sponsored by a major weapons maker. 'At Lockheed Martin, your mission is ours,' read an
announcer." Tony Blinken's mission is theirs. These people get the money both coming and going
-- on both sides of the "revolving door." Today's American Government is for sale to
the highest bidders, on any policy, domestic or foreign. 'Government service' is just a
sabbatical to boost their value to the firms that will be paying them the vast majority of
their lifetime 'earnings'. This is the reality that mainstream U.S.-and-allied 'news' media
refuse to publish (or, especially , to make clear). Only an electorate which
is ignorant of this reality can accept such a government.
Back on 26 January 2020, I had headlined "Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They
Come" and documented the reality of this, but America's mainstream media were hiding that
fact so as to decrease the likelihood that the only Democratic Party Presidential candidate whom no billionaire
supported , Bernie Sanders, might win the nomination. Perhaps now that it's too late, even
those 'news' organizations (such as CNN, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC, New York Times ,
Washington Post , PBS, and NPR) will start reporting the fact of Biden's corruptness.
Where billionaires control all of the mainstream media, there is no democracy -- it's not even
possible , in such a country
Bernard Schwartz,a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin(which is by far
the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America's
allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden's top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th,"Biden
allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter", and
reported that, "Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president's
campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just
that." It's not for nothing that throughout Biden's long Senate career, he has voted in favor
of every U.S. invasion that has been placed before the U.S. Senate.
Near the end of the Democratic Party's primaries, on 16 March 2020, CNBC headlined
"Megadonors pull plug on plan for anti-Sanders super PAC as Biden racks up wins" , and
reported that Bernard Schwartz had become persuaded by other billionaires that, by this time,
"Biden could handle Sanders on his own." They had done their job; they would therefore control
the U.S. Government regardless of which Party's nominee would head it.
Biden -- like Trump, and like Obama and Bush and Clinton before him -- doesn't represent the
American people. He represents his mega-donors. And he is staffing his Administration
accordingly. He repays favors: he delivers the services that they buy from him. This is today's
America. And that is the way it functions.
46 Follow RT on Outgoing US
President Donald Trump has delivered his "parting gift" to the Moscow-led Nord Stream 2 gas
pipeline, with newly announced sanctions targeting a pipe-laying vessel and companies involved
in the multinational project.
The specialist ship concerned, named, 'Fortuna,' and oil tanker 'Maksim Gorky', as well as
two Russian firms, KVT-Rus and Rustanker, were blacklisted on Tuesday under CAATSA (Countering
America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) as part of Washington's economic war on Moscow.
The same legislation had been previously used by the US to target numerous Russian officials
and enterprises.
Russian energy giant Gazprom warned its investors earlier on Tuesday that Nord Stream 2
could be suspended or even canceled if more US restrictions are introduced.
However, Moscow has assured its partners that it intends to complete the project despite
"harsh pressure on the part of Washington," according to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry
Peskov. Reacting to the new package of sanctions on Tuesday, Peskov called them
"unlawful."
Meanwhile, the EU said it is in no rush to join the Washington-led sanction war on Nord
Stream 2. EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said that the bloc is not going to resist
the construction of the project.
"Because we're talking about a private project, we can't hamper the operations of those
companies if the German government agrees to it," Borrell said Tuesday.
Nord Stream 2 is an offshore gas pipeline, linking Russia and Germany with aim of providing
cheaper energy to Central European customers. Under the agreement between Moscow and Berlin, it
was to be launched in mid-2020, but the construction has been delayed due to strong opposition
from Washington.
The US, which is hoping to sell its Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe, has hit the
project with several rounds of sanctions over scarcely credible claims that it could undermine
European energy security. Critics say the real intent is to force EU members to buy from
American companies.
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Fatback33 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM
The group that owns Washington makes the foreign policy. That policy is not for the benefit
of the people.
DukeLeo Fatback33 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:06 PM
That is correct. The private banks and corporations in the US are very upset about Nord
Stream - 2, as they want Europe to buy US gas at double price. Washington thus introduces
additional political gangsterism in the shape of new unilateral sanctions which have no merit
in international law.
noremedy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:22 AM
Is the U.S. so stupid that they do not realize that they are isolating themselves? Russia has
developed SPFS, China CIPS, together with Iran, China and Russia are further developing a
payment transfer system. Once in place and functioning this system will replace the western
SWIFT system for international payment transfers. It will be the death knell for the US
dollar. 327 million Americans are no match for the rest of the billions of the world's
population. The next decade will see the total debasement of the US monetary system and the
fall from power of the decaying and crumbling in every way U.S.A.
Hanonymouse noremedy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:37 PM
They don't care. They have the most advanced military in the world. Might makes right, even
today.
Shelbouy 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:25 PM
Russia currently supplies over 50% of the natural gas consumed by The EU. Germany and Italy
are the largest importers of Russian natural gas. What is the issue of sanctions stemming
from and why are the Americans doing this? A no brainer question I suppose. It's to make more
money than the other supplier, and exert political pressure and demand obedience from its
lackey. Germany.
David R. Evans Shelbouy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
Russia and Iran challenge perpetual US wars for Israel's Oded Yinon Plan. Washington is
Israel-controlled territory.
Jewel Gyn 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:34 AM
Sanctions work both ways. With the outgoing Trump administration desperately laying mines for
Biden, we await how sleepy Joe is going to mend strayed ties with EU.
Count_Cash 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:20 AM
The US mafia state continues with the same practices. The dog is barking but the caravan is
going. The counter productiveness of sanctions always shows through in the end! I am sure
with active efforts of Germany and Russia against US mafia oppression that a blowback will be
felt by the US over time!
Dachaguy 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:24 AM
This is an act of war against Germany. NATO should respond and act against the aggressor,
America.
xyz47 Dachaguy 42 minutes ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:20 PM
NATO is run by the US...
lovethy Dachaguy 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:04 PM
NATO has no separate existence. It's the USA's arm of aggression, suppression and domination.
Germany after WWII is an occupied country of USA. Thousand of armed personnel stationed in
Germany enforcing that occupation.
Chaz Dadkhah 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:19 PM
Further proof that Trump is no friend of Russia and is in a rush to punish them while he
still has power. If it was the swamp telling him to do that, like his supporters suggest,
then they would have waited till their man Biden came in to power in less than 24 hours to do
it. Wake up!
Mac Kio 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:34 PM
USA hates fair competition. USA ignores all WTO rules.
Russkiy09 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:33 PM
By whining and not completing in the face of US, Russia is losing credibility. They should
not have delayed to mobilize the pipe laying vessel and other equipment for one whole year.
They should have mobilized in three months and finished by now. Same happens when Jewtin does
not shoot down Zio air force bombing Syria everyday. But best option should have been to tell
European vassals that "if you can, take our gas. But we will charge the highest amount and
sell as much as we want, exclude Russophobic Baltic countries and Poland and neo-vassal
Ukraine. Pay us not in your ponzi paper money but real goods and services or precious metals
or other commodities or our own currency Ruble." I so wish I could be the President of
Russia. Russians deserve to be as wealthy as the Swiss or SIngapore etc., not what they are
getting. Their leaders should stand up for their interest. And stop empowering the greedy
merchantalist Chinese and brotherhood Erdogan.
BlackIntel 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:27 PM
America i captured by private interest; this project threatens American private companies
hence the government is forced to protect capitalism. This is illegal
Ohhho 3 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 12:15 PM
That project was a mistake from the start: Russia should distance itself from the Evil
empire, EU included! Stop wasting time and resources on trying to please the haters and
keeping them more competitive with cheaper Russian natural gas: focus on real partners and
potential allies elsewhere!
butterfly123 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 01:58 PM
I have said it before that part of the problem is at the door of the policy-makers and
politicians in Russia. Pipeline project didn't spring up in the minds of politicians in
Russia one morning, presumably. There should have been foresight, detailed planning, and
opportunity creation for firms in Russia to acquire the skill-set and resources to advance
this project. Not doing so has come to bite Russia hard and painful. Lessons learnt I hope Mr
President!
jakro 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:37 AM
Good news. The swamp is getting deeper and bigger.
hermaflorissen 4 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 11:49 AM
Trump finally severed my expectations for the past 4 years. He should indeed perish.
ariadnatheo 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 03:06 PM
That is one Trump measure that will not be overturned by the Senile One. They will need to
amplify the RussiaRussiaRussia barking and scratching to divert attention from their dealings
with China
Neville52 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:01 PM
Its time the other nations of the world turned their backs on the US. Its too risky if you
are an international corporation to suddenly have large portions of your income cancelled due
to some crazy politician in the US
5th Eye 2 hours ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:03 PM
From empire to the collapse of empire, US follows UK to the letters. Soon it will be
irrelevant. The only thing that remains for UK is the language. Probably hotdog for the US.
VonnDuff1 1 hour ago 19 Jan, 2021 02:10 PM
The USA Congress and its corrupt foreign policy dictates work to the detriment of Europe and
Russia, while providing no tangible benefits to US states or citizens. So globalist demands
wrapped in the stars & stripes, should be laughed at, by all freedom loving nations.
@Observator the state
legislatures. They mandated that election law be set by those same legislatures. They set up
the whole rigmarole of the Electoral College with multiple stages of certification, and set
the inauguration for March to leave enough time to sort out election controversies. All of
these have of course been either eliminated, ignored or watered down enough to make the
certification process simply pro forma . Apparently no one has standing to challenge
anything.
The founders could do little about secret societies. They were already a staple of 18th
Century society and subverting everything. Right across the political spectrum.
@Jake of usurping the
Catholic Church's lands within England which made them fabulously rich, only to apply the
same strategy to any tribe or nation to be subdued into the British Empire. This same class,
by confiscating most of the lands in England, pushed the pleb into utmost poverty. Since the
US government is only nominally independent from the 'city' in London, the term Anglo Zionist
is the best abbreviation to a stark reality. And BTW, I do not implicate most Jews as
Zionists even though many of them think wrongly that they belong to the club. Anyone
remembers Joe Biden's pleading to Netanyahu ' you don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist".
"... Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough in my opinion. ..."
"... Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a bedraggled starving bear. ..."
"So when was this golden age? Under Reagan? Well, this is when the dismantling of the
inner core of the empire began."
Beg to differ. Reagan understood how to administer the US empire. He knew the risks of
overstretching it. He made the promise to the Soviets not to encroach on their sphere of
influence. He defended the high interest rates which strengthened the USD and which kept the
banking sector in check.
All of that went to hell with Bill Clinton:
He broke Reagan's promise and expanded NATO eastwards, he dismantled the Glass Steagall act
which led to a malignant hypergrowth of the banking sector, and he was the who introduced the
telecommunications act in 1996 which allowed for the concentration of corporate media in the
hands of the few.
Bill Clinton basically turned the empire into a rapacious and uncontrollable animal.
(Funny how noone here is talking about imprisoning him )
There is a silver lining to Bill C's blood-soaked administration. It was while he was in
power, that the Russians finally awoke from their 1990s stupor. They began to understand the
mortal danger they were facing, and they patriotically chose Putin to lead them in 1999.
– Reagan was a disgusting Russophobe and Serbophobe who proclaimed 10th April (the
founding of the Independent State of Croatia) a national holiday in California as governor.
Not surprising given that his was the most RC government ever – he also colluded with
the Polish anti-Christ to destroy the USSR. In the process he encouraged the German Nazis
(see visit to Bitburg) who then destroyed Yugoslavia.
– He brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust that was prevented by a
vigilant Russian officer (in 1983?).
– He turbo-charged the power of corporations and decimated social structures and the
rights of the working class (the Americans are paying for this now).
This is not to say that the scumbag Clinton was good – after all he was trained at
Georgetown – that seminary for American murderers.
Thanks for this Ken. Good to know who Reagan really was!
To get back to your point about the "dismantling of the empire" Reagan, for all his
personal awfulness and recklessness (and subversiveness) was still more restrained than
Clinton. Clinton hollowed out his own country in order to completely remove all
constraints (financial, mediatic, military). He doesn't get called out for it nearly enough
in my opinion. I guess it's personal, after what he did to us.
Clinton was a particular type of low-class, sybaritic evil but he didn't have a strong
USSR to contend with. Instead he had the drunken traitor Yeltsin dance for him like a
bedraggled starving bear. Never again!
Summers' second big problem is the scandal that led to his ouster at Harvard, which was NOT
his infamous "women suck at elite math and sciences" remarks. The university has conveniently
let that be assumed to be the proximate cause.
In fact, it was Summers' long-standing relationship with and protection of Andrei Shleifer,
a Harvard economics professor, who was at the heart of a corruption scandal where he used his
influential role on a Harvard contract advising on Russian privatization to enrich himself and
his wife, his chief lieutenant Jonathan Hay, and other cronies. The US government sued Harvard
for breach of contract and Shleifer and Hay for fraud and won. This section comes from a
terrifically well reported account in Institutional
Investor by David McClintick :
The judge determined that Shleifer and Hay were subject to the conflict-of-interest rules
and had tried to circumvent them; that Shleifer engaged in apparent self-dealing; that Hay
attempted to "launder" $400,000 through his father and girlfriend; that Hay knew the claims
he caused to be submitted to AID were false; and that Shleifer and Hay conspired to defraud
the U.S. government by submitting false claims.
On August 3, 2005, the parties announced a settlement under which Harvard was required to
pay $26.5 million to the U.S. government, Shleifer $2 million and Hay between $1 million and
$2 million, depending on his earnings over the next decade. Shleifer was barred from
participating in any AID project for two years and Hay for five years. Shleifer and Zimmerman
were required by terms of the settlement to take out a $2 million mortgage on their Newton
house. None of the defendants acknowledged any liability under the settlement. (Forum
Financial also settled its lawsuit against Harvard, Shleifer and Hay under undisclosed
terms.
And while Harvard can't be held singularly responsible for the plutocratic land-grab in
Russia, the fact that its project leaders decided to feed at the trough sure didn't help:
Reinventing Russia was never going to be easy, but Harvard botched a historic opportunity.
The failure to reform Russia's legal system, one of the aid program's chief goals, left a
vacuum that has yet to be filled and impedes the country's ability to confront economic and
financial challenges today.
And while Summers was not responsible for Shleifer getting the contract, he was a booster
and later protector of Shleifer:
Summers wasn't president of Harvard when Shleifer's mission to Moscow was coming apart.
But as a Harvard economics professor in the 1980s, a World Bank and Treasury official in the
1990s, and Harvard's president since 2001, Summers was positioned uniquely to influence
Shleifer's career path, to shape US aid to Russia and Shleifer's role in it and even to
shield Shleifer after the scandal broke. Though Summers, as Harvard president, recused
himself from the school's handling of the case, he made a point of taking aside Jeremy
Knowles, then the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and asking him to protect
Shleifer.
And the protection Shleifer got was considerable:
Knowles tells Institutional Investor that he does not remember Summers' approaching him
about Shleifer However, not long after Summers says he intervened on the professor's behalf,
Knowles promoted Shleifer from professor of economics to a named chair, the Whipple V.N.
Jones professorship.
Shleifer's legal position changed on June 28, 2004, when Judge Woodlock ruled that he and
Hay had conspired to defraud the U.S. government and had violated conflict-of-interest
regulations. Still, there was no indication that the Summers administration had initiated
disciplinary proceedings. To the contrary, efforts were seemingly made to divert attention
from the growing scandal. The message from the top at Harvard was, "No problem -- Andrei
Shleifer is a star," says one senior Harvard figure
One instance was a meeting early in the academic year that began in September 2004, less
than two months after the federal court formally adjudicated Shleifer's liability for
conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. A faculty member asked [Dean] Kirby why Harvard
should defend a professor who had been found liable for conspiring to commit fraud. The
second confrontation came early in the current academic year when another professor asked
Kirby why Harvard should pay a settlement of $26.5 million and legal fees estimated at
between $10 million and $15 million for legal violations by a single professor and his
employee, about which it was unaware. On both occasions Kirby is said to have turned red in
the face and angrily cut off discussion.
On at least one other occasion, Summers himself told members of the faculty of arts and
sciences that the millions of dollars that Harvard paid in damages did not come from the
budget of the faculty of arts and sciences, but didn't say where the money came from. Those
listening inferred he meant that the matter shouldn't be of concern to the faculty and that
they shouldn't raise it, a curious notion, given that Shleifer was one of their own
Shleifer has never acknowledged doing anything wrong. Summers has said nothing. And so far
as is known, there has been no internal investigation or sanction. "An observer trying to
make sense of the University's position on Shleifer, Ogletree and Tribe is driven to an
unhappy conclusion. Defiance seems to be a better way to escape institutional opprobrium than
confession and apology. . . . And most of all being a close personal friend of the president
probably does one no harm."
And that's before we get to Summers' role in the ouster of Brooksley Born over credit
default swaps and in supporting the passage of Gramm–Leach–Bliley and the repeal of
Glass Steagall (admittedly so shot full of holes at that point as to be close to a dead letter,
but still necessary to allow Traveler and Citigroup to merge). Yet Summers has refused to
recant any of these actions .
In the world of Democrat politics, there are no coincidences.
With that principle
in mind, it's possible to understand why Democrat media outlets are suddenly reporting about Hunter Biden's corruption, a story
that spills over onto his father. The first is to get ahead of potential breaking news about Hunter's imminent arrest. The
second theory is the one Monica Showalter advanced:
The leftists used Biden to attain
the White House
(or so they believe) and are now ready to get rid of him.
Having
a criminal son may be just what the Obama/Harris camp needs
to make that happen. And if there's any doubt about this
theory, an article in
The New York Times
seems to lay it to rest.
We conservatives remember how,
in October, the media and the tech tyrants conspired
to block any reports about Hunter Biden
, whether those reports were the Senate Intelligence Committee's findings about
the $3.5 million Hunter received from the wife of a Russian politician, or the shocking details of political corruption, drug
addiction, and sexual debauchery contained on his hard drive.
Well, to ordinary people, these stories were shocking.
To the media and the
tech tyrants, these stories were potential dangers to Joe Biden's candidacy. They had to be stopped – and stopped they were.
Twitter and Facebook, the two biggest social media tech tyrants, refused to allow any reports to circulate and banned people,
including President Trump's press secretary
, from their platforms when they refused to bow down to this censorship.
News outlets derided the reports
about the Biden family's corrupt dealings,
all of which implicated Joe Biden as the man who pimped out his addled son for huge sums of money, as non-stories. That's not
an exaggeration. It's explicitly what NPR's public editor said:
Likewise, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who's served as a shill for every tyrannical regime on earth, insisted that, because she
was a real "journalist," it was not her job to investigate stories. Instead, it was only her job to determine whether the results
of other people's investigations met her standards. The Hunter Biden story did not:
When President Trump tried to bring the story to Americans' attention during the first
presidential debate, Biden snapped back that it was Russian disinformation, a lie that the media and tech tyrants enthusiastically
disseminated
Suddenly, though, the media is releasing information about the criminal investigations into not both Hunter Biden and Joe's
brother, James Biden. As the above tweet notes, these investigations have been ongoing for years. We also know that a
sizable number of voters
would have passed over Biden for Trump had they known about Biden family corruption. So, what
gives? Why are Hunter and, by extension, Joe himself, suddenly fair game?
It could be that bad things are about to come down from the FBI. After all,
Trump did promise
that "a lot of big things" will happen soon.
The sudden flurry of reports about the Bidens could
just be the Democrats' way of getting ahead of the story so that, if Hunter is shown doing the perp walk, they can say that
it's "old news."
However, it's equally likely that the Democrats are making plans to get Biden out of office as quickly as possible – or perhaps,
sideline him before he's even sworn in (assuming, of course, that Biden hangs onto that president-elect title). As
Monica Showalter pointed out
on Thursday,
Biden is not making leftists happy
.
He's filling his possible administration with
corporate insiders
, he wants a
former military officer
to head the defense department, and he's continuing to show
a very rapid cognitive decline
. He's offering Clinton-era politics with a side of dementia and that is not what the hard
left side of the party wants.
In any event, the goal, always, was to get Kamala into the White House.
It
didn't and doesn't matter that the voters don't like her -- as demonstrated by the fact that even her home state of California
didn't like her
and her
early retreat
from the primaries. What matters is that she, unlike both Hillary and Joe, is Barack Obama's true third term.
Harris is as hard left as they come and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain
power.
While Joe Biden, despite his corruption and his shift to the hard left, still cherishes some residual notions
about the Constitution, Kamala is not hindered by such old-fashioned ideas:
Harris is as hard left as they come and willing to do whatever it takes to maintain
power.
While Joe Biden, despite his corruption and his shift to the hard left, still cherishes some residual notions
about the Constitution, Kamala is not hindered by such old-fashioned ideas:
With Americans at large finally learning that Hunter Biden and James Biden are crooked and that Joe is the big, corrupt tree
from which these rotten apples fell, there's going to be lots of pressure on Joe to retire as quickly as is politely possible.
It's
The New York Times
that gives the game away. On Thursday, it published a positively wistful article entitled "Investigation
of His Son Is Likely to Hang Over Biden as He Takes Office: Unless the Trump Justice Department clears Hunter Biden, the new
president will confront the prospect of his own administration handling an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution."
The opening paragraph, speaks of Biden in a "no-win situation" that could be "politically and legally perilous," and the report
continues in that vein. The subtext is clear: Leave. Leave now.
Joe served his purpose by being the bland front person for a full leftist assault on
the White House. Now it's time for him to go.
And while his handlers may reward him for a job well done with the pleasure
of the inauguration, you can be sure that they'll pressure him to do
what he promised to do
, which is to invent a respectable disease and quit ASAP.
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Now Sachs, an economist parroting syllogistic science falsehoods, now pontificates about
matters, once again, that he has a tenuous grasp of ... at best. For a compelling
counter-argument to Sachs' scientific schlock see:
A search at Michael Hudson's website for Yellen reveals the following:
" Federal
Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen's husband , George Akerlof, has written a good article
about looting and fraud as ways to make money. But instead of saying that looting and fraud
are bad, the Fed has refused to regulate or move against such activities. It evidently
recognizes that looting and fraud are what Wall Street is all about – or at least that
the financial system would come crashing down if an attempt were made to clean it up!"
Peter Schweizer has been fighting corruption―and winning―for years. In
Throw Them All Out,
he
exposed insider trading by members of Congress, leading to the passage of the STOCK Act. In
Extortion
,
he uncovered how politicians use mafia-like tactics to enrich themselves. And in
Clinton Cash
,
he revealed the Clintons' massive money machine and sparked an FBI investigation.
Now he explains how a new corruption has taken hold, involving larger sums of money than ever before. Stuffing tens of thousands
of dollars into a freezer has morphed into multibillion-dollar equity deals done in the dark corners of the world.
An American bank opening in China would be prohibited by US law from hiring a slew of family members of top Chinese politicians.
However, a Chinese bank opening in America can hire anyone it wants. It can even invite the friends and families of American
politicians to invest in can't-lose deals.
President Donald Trump's children have made front pages across the world for their dicey transactions. However, the media has
barely looked into questionable deals made by those close to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, and
lesser-known politicians who have been in the game longer.
In many parts of the world, the children of powerful political figures go into business and profit handsomely, not necessarily
because they are good at it, but because people want to curry favor with their influential parents. This is a relatively new
phenomenon in the United States. But for relatives of some prominent political families, we may already be talking about hundreds
of millions of dollars.
Deeply researched and packed with shocking revelations,
Secret Empires
identifies public
servants who cannot be trusted and provides a path toward a more accountable government.
5.0 out of 5 stars
HUGELY
important book!
Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2018
This was my most anticipated book of the year, so I bought the audio version at
the earliest possible moment and listened to it eagerly. It completely delivers on its promise, exposing potential new
political self-dealing scandals.
Previously, Schweizer's "Clinton Cash" book contributed to Hillary Clinton's election loss. This new book could be the
death knell for Joe Biden's presidential hopes, as it reveals how his son, Hunter Biden, benefited from the former Vice
President's dealings with foreign countries. Schweizer is evenhanded, though, targeting politicians from both parties.
Mitch McConnell could easily become the target of an ethics investigation based on this book's suggestion that McConnell
has taken official acts that benefit his Chinese in-laws financially.
The book reveals a kind of self-dealing that I had not considered before by suggesting that Obama (1) used regulations
in the education and energy sectors to depress the prices of certain stocks (e.g., the University of Phoenix and fossil
fuel companies), at which time friends of Barack, including George Soros, bought the stocks and then (2) eased pressure,
allowing the stocks to rebound and enriching anyone who invested at the stocks' low points.
For any reader who worries about the mainstream media's failure to investigate the financial dealings of Obama and other
politicians, this book is a partial remedy. Highly recommended!
The
New
York Post
confirmed Saturday what Breitbart News and others had reported earlier this year: that the Biden Cancer
Initiative, founded by former Vice President Joe Biden, spent millions on staff salaries but did little about cancer research.
A cancer charity started by Joe Biden gave out no money to research, and spent most of its contributions on staff salaries,
federal filings show.
The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to "develop and drive
implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to
reduce disparities in cancer outcomes," according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two
years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.
Biden headed up the Cancer Moonshot Task Force when he was veep after his son Beau died of a brain tumor in 2015. After
leaving office, the Biden Cancer Initiative sought to continue such efforts to provide "urgent" solutions to treating
cancer,
according
to a 2017 press statement
announcing its launch.
The
Post
report
confirmed earlier
reporting
by
the Washington Free Beacon, via Breitbart News, in June:
The cancer research non-profit that former Vice President Joe Biden created after leaving the Obama administration in 2017
spent two thirds of its money on staff, with top executives getting as much as six-figures, before shuttering.
The Washington Free Beacon
reported
on
Thursday that the Biden Cancer Initiative directed 65 percent of its total expenditures to staff compensation between 2017
and 2018. Overall, the group raised $4.8 million during the those two years, spending slightly more than $3 million on
salaries and benefits for its employees.
"That is well above the 25 percent charity watchdogs recommend nonprofits spend on administrative overhead and fundraising
costs combined," the outlet reported, noting that Biden's nonprofit "did not cut a single grant to any other group or
foundation during its two-year run."
As Breitbart News
noted
in
October, Biden met with businessman Tony Bobulinski in May 2017 to discuss a potential business venture with a Chinese energy
company. The meeting took place before the prestigious Milken conference in Los Angeles -- where Biden was to speak about his
family's efforts to fund cancer research.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of
Breitbart News Sunday
on
Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is
The
Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump's Presidency
. His recent book,
RED
NOVEMBER
,
tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert
Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at
@joelpollak
.
Get short URL A cancer charity created by presumed
president-elect Joe Biden failed to allocate a single dollar for medical research, according to
media reports, with most of the group's cash going towards generous salaries.
Federal tax filings reveal that the Biden Cancer Initiative, founded in 2017 by the former
vice president and his wife Jill, did not distribute grants during its first two years of
operations, the New York Post reported. The charity, created after Biden's oldest son, Beau,
died from brain cancer in 2015, states that its mission is to "develop and drive
implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis,
research and care."
The Daily Mail confirmed the curious budgetary decisions after also reviewing the
organization's tax paperwork.
According to the Post, Biden's charity raised $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years
2017 and 2018, spending $3,070,301 on salaries in those two years. Gregory Simon, a former
Pfizer executive and healthcare lobbyist who was tapped to serve as the organization's
president, took home $429,850 in the 2018 fiscal year, nearly doubling his salary from the year
before. Like Biden, Simon was a member of the Obama administration, spearheading the White
House's cancer task force.
Travel expenses also ballooned between 2017 and 2018, despite the organization never having
made a financial contribution towards cancer research. The group had previously claimed its
main focus was making cancer treatment more affordable and accessible, as opposed to raising
funds to find a cure.
After only two years, the charity "paused" its operations when Biden and his wife
stepped down for Joe Biden's presidential run.
The Biden Cancer Initiative halted its activities in July 2019, after Joe Biden stepped down
to focus on his presidential candidacy. Although technically still active, it has gone into
deep hibernation, with Simon acknowledging in a 2019 interview that, without Biden's
participation, it has become "increasingly difficult to get the traction we needed to
complete our mission."
The NY Post's story caught the eye of US President Donald Trump, who retweeted it without
comment.
Trump has previously described the Biden family as a "criminal enterprise," and said
the former vice president's alleged involvement in shady deals with foreign companies show
Biden is a "corrupt" politician. The Post ran a series of stories suggesting Biden may
have been linked to a questionable business arrangement with a Chinese firm, based on emails
and messages purportedly taken from a hard drive that once belonged to his son Hunter. Hunter's
former business partner later confirmed that the emails were genuine and the former vice
president was intimately involved in the scheme. Biden dismissed the Post's reporting as an
attempt to "smear" his son.
Mondo697 3 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 04:44 AM
Nearly all charities are run primarily if not solely for the benefit of those running them.
Only a miniscule amount is spent on the declared aims of the charity. They are tax fiddles
plain and simple.
fraudchild Mondo697 6 minutes ago 15 Nov, 2020 08:31 AM
biden is cancer? i agree.
lectrodectus 3 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 04:52 AM
It has become .."Increasingly Difficult To Get The Traction We Need To Complete Our Mission"
To Paraphrase...ALL THE MONEY HAS BEEN SPENT... DONATIONS HAVE DRIED UP.
11BangBangBaby 3 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 04:54 AM
Biden dismissed the Post's reporting as an attempt to "smear" his son.
why does he always use his dead son as a shield before running away? he
constantly does this....when asked an awkward question at all it's just his go to excuse.
what kind of a parent uses the memory of their dead son as an excuse to admit to their own
failings?
acacko 11BangBangBaby 1 hour ago 15 Nov, 2020 06:43 AM
a corrupt democrat politician with dementia? Oh.. Wait.. was that a philosophical question?
Mickey Mic 2 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 05:38 AM
Black mailer Joe Biden threatened to cut funds to medical research institutions that don't
report their clinical trial results in a timely manner. "Under the law, it says you must
report. If you don't report, the law says you shouldn't get funding," "I'm going to find out
if it's true" that the research centers aren't reporting the results " and if it's true, I'm
going to cut funding. That's a promise." He should've been locked up after his proclamation
confession to the CFR on Ukraine, where he held back funds until a prosecutor investigating
his son Hunter was fired. What can you expect from one of the biggest crime families in US...
"Honesty" ? Ha, Slow Joe is about as honest as Hillary's innocent record on the Haitian
Relief foundation. For the first time in my life, I'm seeing Americans not liking their cup
of Joe ! PS: Joe Biden is like a web browser with 19 tabs open: 17 are frozen and he don't
know where the music is coming from.
Eviscerate Mickey Mic 10 minutes ago 15 Nov, 2020 08:27 AM
Hilarious and I have little doubt true.
far_cough 3 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 05:24 AM
the whole biden family is so crooked. i hope after the election confusion is over the matter
of their worldwide crime network is reinvigorated and bought to justice...
DR64 1 hour ago 15 Nov, 2020 06:50 AM
We all know Trump is not squeaky clean when it comes to finances and deals which probably
means he is well able to spot Biden's activities. Like they say it takes a crook to spot a
crook. Americans have just jumped from frying pan into the fire. I think Biden is far more
dangerous as well as those yanking his strings.
Sinalco 3 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 04:45 AM
Same as the Clinton Haiti Hurricane Charity, or the Trump Charity that does not give to
Charity... The system is corrupt...
Sapphire1 2 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 06:02 AM
Looks like a tax scam for Biden.
Madbovineuk Sapphire1 2 hours ago 15 Nov, 2020 06:04 AM
Oh yes and US lawmakers are good at that
beliefmakr 1 hour ago 15 Nov, 2020 07:20 AM
A crooked politician? I'm shocked! But I get the feeling that Trump is more jealous than
indignant. He didn't steal nearly as much with Trump University, Trump Steaks, or Trump
Magazine despite his best efforts. I think people in his camp are just upset that the Bidens,
the Clintons, and a few others are just better crooks. They don't want to end corruption.
They just want a bigger slice.
Lois E. Winters 35 minutes ago 15 Nov, 2020 08:10 AM
It seems as though these politicians with their so called charities are nothing more than a
tax exclusion loop hole. Everyone of them ought to be investigated.
"... Same principle with speaking engagements. Nobody in the corporate world seriously believed that listening to a speech from Hillary Clinton was worth $200,000 - especially when she sometimes kept getting these gigs at the same company every few months: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-03/every-hillary-and-bill-clinton-speech-2013-fees ..."
"... Furthermore, the book sales conduit adds an extra degree of separation between the ultimate source of the money and the recipient of the money. Somebody who wants to buy a politician could for example donate money to an NGO that does "political education" and buys political books to distribute to people, and that NGO buys the copies of the corrupt politician's book in bulk. ..."
Learned here on SST that a lot of the huge book contracts given to swampies are a form of
money laundering. I have long tried to figure out how the publishing companies could afford to
pay yuudge advances for ghost written books in a country where so few people read much of
anything any longer. Simple answer! Big money people order yuudge numbers of books in advance
so that the publisher is assured a profit.
I think it was the previous mayor of Baltimore who got a multi-million dollar windfall
from her best-selling children's book. I wonder how many kids actually read it.
Lots of trucks out with their flags here, people are becoming optimistic here in South
Florida, feels almost normal here.
Trump taking New York would be the ultimate, lets hope. I'm looking forward to watching
CNN's Wolf Blitzer on election night, it's been 4 years for me and CNN. I just want to see
him squirm.
it looks a lot less like corruption when a politician receives money because he wrote an
"inspiring book" that seemingly sells lots of copies than when he receives money outright for
political favors.
Furthermore, the book sales conduit adds an extra degree of separation between the
ultimate source of the money and the recipient of the money. Somebody who wants to buy a
politician could for example donate money to an NGO that does "political education" and buys
political books to distribute to people, and that NGO buys the copies of the corrupt
politician's book in bulk.
Interesting question about book deals. Certainly it could be a channel to hide the names
of donors, which would seem the only rational reason to do so. I would guess the lecture
circuit a more appropriate way to do that. If I'm going to part with that much I'd at least
want a song for their dinner out of it.
The 10 biggest book deals have a mixture of celebrities, I can't imagine anyone wanting to
slip Bruce Springsteen $10 million under the table so it appears the publishers do make money
on these deals, counter-intuitive though it be.
Book writing can be far more lucrative than I ever thought possible. James Patterson got
150 million for a 17 book series. I would say he earned it although I've never read any of
his stuff. Michelle Obama's first book sold over 10 million copies and netted her at least 65
million in a deal for both her and Barrack's memoirs.
Ken Follett got 50 million for his trilogy.
Bill Clinton got 15 million for his book while George W. Bush only got 7 million for
his.
Hillary got 14 million for hers. Springsteen got 10 million for his autobiography.
Even Pope Jan Pavel II made a cool 8.5 million for his memoirs back in 1994. There are an
awful lot of 7 figure book advances out there.
Another phenomenon in the book world is the mass purchase of books by organizations. For
example the RNC bought $100K worth of Don Trump Jr's book and more than $400K worth of Sean
Hannity's latest. I'm sure the RNC is not alone in this practice.
There are now much stronger arguments to believe that both Harvard mafia players and Browder
were puppets of certain intelligence agencies.
Notable quotes:
"... Just how much this changed is partly witnessed in the life of bill browder - a person well known to most here... so, clearly russia made changes to try to protect itself from the encouraged kleptocracy that was in full swing in the early 1990s ..."
"... You mention Bill Browder. He is the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1930-1945. It is now freely admitted that Earl was always in the employ of the FBI. Bill simply continues the family business, which is Get Russia. The odds that Bill is an independent actor and is not working for .gov are same as odds that Easter Bunny is real. ..."
@ 26 eric... thanks... unfortunately it seems michael hudson hasn't really commented on
russia in any significant way unless one goes back 5 years or so... i wonder how things have
changed since?? here is a link to the articles that top up using russia as the search term -
https://michael-hudson.com/?s=russia
i enjoyed the paul craig roberts - michael hudson article from 2019 on pcr's website...
again, i am not informed enough to make an informed comment on pcr's conclusions from march
of 2019... he and however much of the article hudson contributed - might be exactly right,
especially in the conclusions of the 3rd to last paragraph in the article.. i don't know...
thanks for the ongoing conversation..
@ Jen | Oct 24 2020 23:04 utc | 29 / 31.. thanks jen.. i haven't been to marks website in
a long time! i recall moscow exile.. is he still posting their?? regarding central banks and
nabiullina the head of russias central bank... i am not sure how many know this but the
position of being the head of a central bank in any country is not a position that is decided
upon by the country itself, or at least not in any democratic way... and the country is
supposed to not get involved in the politics of it either as i understand it... instead these
people are suggested in some other way - not elected - and while they do have to work with
the political leadership - they can't be gotten rid of easily as i understand it.. i think a
lot of this has to do with the way the international institutions work and how if a country
wants to be a part of this same international system of money, they need to accept the
structure as it is opaquely set up as... thus the central banks are under specific guidelines
that they have to follow that comes from somewhere outside the actual country.... i would
love someone to correct me on all this, but it is my present understanding of how this
particular system works... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank
As for what happened in Russia during the breaking up of the USSR and the transition of
Russia during the 1990's - one could argue the agenda of the Harvard plan for Russia was to
exploit russia for it's resource rich territory and install people like Yletsin who would
happily go along with this madness..
Just how much this changed is partly witnessed in the life of bill browder - a person
well known to most here... so, clearly russia made changes to try to protect itself from the
encouraged kleptocracy that was in full swing in the early 1990s ... just how much they
have managed to ween themselves off private finance - i have no idea... it sounds like they
are in the same boat as the rest of the planet in being beholden to private finance....
Of course private verses public finance is a confusing topic that keeps on getting
revisited here at moa and for good reason... i don't really know how all this interfaces with
everything else.. i appreciate erics particular vantage and am curious to hear of others
viewpoint as well.. thanks jen.. i have some other comments to read now on this topic from
H.Schmatz @ 28
You mention Bill Browder. He is the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the
Communist Party USA from 1930-1945. It is now freely admitted that Earl was always in the
employ of the FBI. Bill simply continues the family business, which is Get Russia. The odds
that Bill is an independent actor and is not working for .gov are same as odds that Easter
Bunny is real.
@ old hippie... yes, i was aware of that - thanks.. if you haven't seen it yet - the movie
the Russian guy made on Browder is quite good - worth the watch, but i think you have to pay
for it now.. there was a time where you could watch it for free... yes indeed, the son worked
or works for the same folks as the father did...here is a link to the movie.. http://magnitskyact.com/
here is an interesting link that i found just looking for a link to the movie... if you
haven't watched the movie, this is a good start and covers it from a particular angle.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOx78CBq0Ck
Earl Browder was an interesting dude who led an interesting life..
I have not yet read the whole transcript of Putin´s long intervention in the Valdai
Discussion Club, and thus, I do not know how deep he went about last frenzy on "regime
change" intends in the post-Soviet space, but in case he did not put it clear enough,
background of the recent explosions of regime change intends in countries surrounding Russia
( Spoiler: it was all there in a 2019 Reand Corporation file...)
"... Political collapse: obviously there wasn't really a functional government at all for a period of time in the nineties. Lots of American consultants running around and privatizing things in a fashion that created a lot of incredibly corrupt, super-rich oligarchs who then fled with their money, a lot of them. ..."
Welcome back to Turning Hard Times into Good Times. I'm your host Jay Taylor. I'm really
pleased to have with me once again Dmitry Orlov.
Dmitry was born and grew up in Leningrad, but has lived in the United States. He moved
here in the mid-seventies. He has since gone back to Russia, where he is living now.
But Dmitry was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his
Russian homeland between the eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer who has contributed
to fields as diverse as high-energy Physics and Internet Security, as well as a leading Peak
Oil theorist. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American
Prospects (2008) and The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit (2013).
Welcome, Dmitry, and thank you so much for joining us again.
A: Great to be on your program again, Jay.
Q: It's really good to hear your voice. I know we had you on [the program] back in 2014.
It's been a long time -- way too long, as far as I'm concerned. In that discussion we talked
about the five stages of collapse that you observed in the fall of the USSR. Could you review
them really quickly, and compare them to what you are seeing, what you have witnessed and
observed in the United States as you lived here, and of course in your post now in
Russia.
A: Yes. The five stages of collapse as I defined them were financial, commercial,
political, social and cultural. I observed that the first three, in Russia. The finance
collapsed because the Soviet Union basically ran out of money. Commercial collapse because
industry, Soviet industry, fell apart because it was distributed among fifteen Soviet
socialist republics, and when the Soviet Union fell apart all of the supply chains broke
down.
Political collapse: obviously there wasn't really a functional government at all for a
period of time in the nineties. Lots of American consultants running around and privatizing
things in a fashion that created a lot of incredibly corrupt, super-rich oligarchs who then
fled with their money, a lot of them.
Surprisingly, social and cultural collapse didn't really get very far until Russia started
regaining its health. Some of the other Soviet socialist republics are in the throes of
full-on social and cultural collapse, but Russia avoided this fate.....
The goal of this movement is ending nation states to end their influence, laws and
regulations, and thus try to dynamite, through sowing divide ( and in this they are helped by
alleged opponent Soros and his network of franchises mastering regime change, color
revolutions
Blunt coups d´etat and lately "peaceful transitions of power", being both, Soros and
the NRx, connected to the CIA...)countries with which make what they call "The Mosaic" of
regions resulting, at the head of which there will be a corporation CEO and their stakeholders
in a hierarchical autocratic order. These people think that Democracy simply does not work and
thus must be finished, and that there are people ( white, of course ) who have developed a
higher IQ ( at this poin
t I guess some of you have noticed this creed sound very familiar to you, from our neighbors
here by the side at SST, where "james" and Pat lately love each other so much...) and must rule
over the rest.
To achieve their goals, these people, as geeks from Silicon Valley, are willing to cross the
human frontier to transhumanism so as to enhance their human capabilities to submit the
rest...
Wondering why this topic have never been treated at MoA...nor at the Valdai Discussion
Club...
The Alt-Right and the Europe of the Regions. According to Wikipedia, Steve Bannon is inspired
by the theorist Curtis Yarvin ( https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilustration_oscura),
who states that countries should be divided into feudal areas in the hands of corporations
(Patchwork).
Former Vice President Joe Biden sided with his top donor, the one-time credit card giant
MBNA Corp., against consumers on bankruptcy reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Starting in 1996, when Biden was seeking a fifth term representing Delaware in the U.S.
Senate, MBNA's top leadership began donating heavily to his campaign coffers. From 1996 to
2006, individuals employed by the company gave more than $212,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The sum was
large enough to make the company Biden's largest campaign contributor throughout his nearly
40-year career in public office.
The money would not have drawn interest, let alone controversy, if not for the manner and
timing of the contributions. In total, more than $63,000 went to Biden between April and
October 1996. The total was by far the
largest given to any Democrat by MBNA that cycle.
As Byron York detailed in a widely publicized The American Spectator exposé --
titled, "The Senator from MBNA" -- in 1998, the donations arrived in what looked to a be a
coordinated pattern.
On April 16 MBNA executive vice-president and chief technology officer Ronald Davies sent
in $1,000. Kenneth Boehl, another top executive, also sent in $1,000 on the 16th. And senior
vice-president Gregg Bacchieri. And William Daiger, another executive vice-president. And
David Spartin, the vice-chairman and company spokesman. The next day, April 17, vice-chairman
and chief financial officer Scot Kaufman sent $1,000, as did Bruce Hammonds, MBNA's
vice-chairman and chief operating officer. And John Hewes, senior executive vice-president of
MBNA's credit division. And vice-chairman and chief administrative officer Lance Weaver. On
April 18, MBNA general counsel John Scheflen sent in $1,000. On April 20, group president
David Nelms sent in $1,000, as did vice-chairman Vernon Wright. On April 22, John Cochran
sent in $1,000. So did senior executive vice-president Peter Dimsey. And finally, on April
26, Charles Cawley sent in his $1,000.
York noted a similar pattern emerged after Biden had won his primary campaign that August
and was preparing for the general election against a little known Republican. A review of
Biden's campaign finance filings from the time by Breitbart News
shows the money flowed mainly in $1,000 increments, the maximum then allowed by Federal
Election Commission guidelines.
Since Biden had sworn off political action committees in his bid to pass campaign finance
reform, MBNA would have only been able to donate through individuals under its employ. Luckily,
as the Wilmington News-Journal reported in 1995, the company already had a protocol in
place for exactly such a purpose.
"MBNA Corp. crashed onto the political money scene in 1994 by distributing more than $1
million in campaign contributions, much of it raised through carefully worded memos advising
its top executives to give to the bank's favorite candidates in Delaware and in key races
across the country," the article states.
The memos raised eyebrows among campaign finance experts, as they seemed to skirt the limits
in place on how much corporations could donate to candidates. MBNA defended its conduct,
claiming it had not violated any federal laws or forced its employees to donate against their
will. The latter, however, was viewed skeptically, as MBNA had not only requested proof of
contributions, but also reasons for refusing to donate.
"The memos were from John W. Scheflen, MBNA's general counsel," the News-Journalreported . "He kept records of
the contributions and requested confirmation. Instructions read in boldface: 'Please send me a
copy of each of your checks.'"
According to the paper, Scheflen requested in a follow-up memo "to know in writing who
wasn't giving: 'If you do not plan to make any suggested contributions, I would appreciate it
if you would so note.'"
Biden's 1996 campaign appears to be the first time MBNA made a concerted effort to see him
reelected. Despite having relocated its headquarters to Delaware in 1982, MBNA or its employees
did not donate to Biden's campaigns in 1990 or 1984, according to FEC filings .
Campaign filings dating back to Biden's 1972 and 1978 races were not readily available, as the
FEC has archived reports from more than 40-years-ago.
Even more interesting is that Biden was one of the few Democrats that MBNA favored with its
donation. From 1992 until its sale to Bank of America, MBNA and its employees never donated
less than 73 percent of their contributions to Republicans. The company's employees gave more
than $575,000 to see President George W. Bush elected in both 2000 and 2004.
Starting in 2000, when Biden took a keener interest in bankruptcy reform, MBNA's employees
began contributing to him regardless of whether he was on the ballot or not. That year, Biden
received more than $69,000 from MBNA, even though he was not seeking reelection for another two
years. Similarly, MBNA contributed more than $49,000 to Biden in 2004, albeit he was not on the
ballot again until 2008.
Although it is impossible to tell what impact the money had on Biden's views -- especially
as he supported efforts to tighten student loan bankruptcy laws throughout the 1970s and 1980s
-- it is clear that after 1996 he championed MBNA's legislative agenda with vigor.
In 1999, Biden was one of the lead
backers of an initial bankruptcy reform package that held many of the provisions that would
eventually end up in the 2005 bill. The legislation was a top priority for MBNA and a
conglomerate of other credit card and banking interests.
Biden, along with a cadre of business-friendly Democrats and Senate Republicans, labored to
pass the bill in the face of opposition from liberals and consumer advocates. Among those on
the opposing side was then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, a bankruptcy expert who
argued the measure favored companies like MNBA over working families.
After an intense back and forth, Biden's side prevailed and the bill passed in late 2000. It
was not signed into law, though, as President Bill Clinton opted to pocket veto the measure on
his way out of office.
Biden and allies were not dispirited, instead seizing the opportunity presented by the
incoming-Republican president to pass a bill more favorable to banking interests. They
ultimately succeeded in 2005 after MNBA and financial institutions bankrolled an intense
lobbying campaign.
The following year, the law's results were evident when bankruptcy filings fell by more than
70 percent across the country.
Psychopaths will say anything. I knew Hillary was one, but I never figured Joe to be one
too. It looks like he is now setting up Hunter to take the fall so he can pardon him if he
becomes president.
Banana Republican , 3 hours ago
We used to call him "the Plagiarist." That was in the '90s. Because he's a plagiarist.
That he's the leading Democrat says all you need to know about every Democrat.
MoreFreedom , 2 hours ago
The political class of both parties have been doing this for decades. They don't want it
to stop, because that means it threatens their deals with foreigners yielding cash into their
pockets as they also sell out the US for power and money. It's what I consider
unconstitutional meddling into our freedoms including the freedom of free markets, that
politicians want to control because commerce is where the money is (Willie Sutton being short
sighted regarding the amount of cash in banks compared to the amount of cash to be made
picking winners and losers in commerce via government force).
Joe doesn't want Hunter to take the fall; they'll usually find someone else to be the fall
guy. But preferably, Joe will use his government position to ensure no action is taken, just
as no action was taken on Hunter's laptop, even though there was an impeachment hearing going
on because Trump was concerned the Bidens were selling out the US to Ukraine and Biden
family. Trump was of course, right. And the FBI hid the exculpatory evidence. The Bidens
already have a record of a business partner going to jail for fraud.
We'll have to wait and see what happens. Personally, I think it will come to a head, if,
and after, Trump wins re-election. The Dem criminals might use their resistors remaining in
government to attempt another coup on false pretenses, and go down hard. I think we'll start
to see a more aggressive DOJ then. The problem has been the extent of the corruption and
getting cooperation from people in government, who are likely corrupt, don't want to
cooperate, and they have "friends" in other government positions to cover their back. But I
give credit to Durham who found Clinesmith's altered email. The prevalence of corruption in
the federal government has become a problem, and I thank Trump for exposing it. The way I see
it, he's not part of the elitist corrupt club, they don't like it so they accuse him of what
they've done, and it has blown back on them because he hasn't sold out the US while they
have, and because he didn't cheat and they did.
Schweizer is an excellent researcher and you can be certain he has done his homework. In SECRET EMPIRES he went after
the PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION on both sides of the political aisle, including Senator Mitch McConnell and his wife's ties to
the Chinese government.
In PROFILES IN CORRUPTION, Schweizer goes after the Biden 5, using extensive documentation to reveal the network of
corrupt tributaries which feed the Washington DC swamp. He also attacks Senator Elizabeth Warren's work on bankruptcy
laws, then advising the same corporate clients impacted by those laws. Also put under scrutiny is Senator Amy
Klobuchar's interesting habit of taking big money from donors, then introducing laws to benefit those same donors a few
days later.
Schweizer's writing reminds one of a fantastic criminal prosecutor, laying down a fast-paced and bullet-proof case for
crimes on a scale which will be shocking to the average man or woman who tries to live a moral life. The biggest
criminals are those who claim to be better than us.
All Americans should give thanks to Peter Schweizer for the type of journalism that used to be done by our TV and print
journalists before they were decimated by the internet.
>
~~Well,
well, well....the Abuse of Power runs deep...~~
HALL OF FAME
TOP
10 REVIEWER
4.0 out of 5 stars
~~Well,
well, well....the Abuse of Power runs deep...~~
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
Yesterday afternoon I spent an hour or so researching the bio of Peter Schweizer.
The blurb for this book doesn't mention much about him although it does mention several of his previous books ...which I
have not read. According to what I found, the author is the President of Government Accountability Institute (GAI). I
did a little more research on 'Clinton Cash:...." and checked several sources on the internet and this is what I
found...... 'Clinton Cash...." apparently had some factual errors in it that were corrected after publication. (7 or 8
passages) and it is also mentions that the Clinton Foundation admitted that it had made some mistakes and they had
implemented new rules... That is as far as I went
There is a certain amount of trust, I believe, when reading any book but especially now with books on politics being
published at an alarming rate it is even more important that we trust what is being written. I read with an open mind
and trust this author that the information presented is credible and well-researched.
Such an interesting topic for me...And, as my title suggests, the abuse of power does indeed run deep. The author has
presented 'corporate documents and legal findings from around the globe' (as stated in the description for the book).
In the book itself, eight politicians are discussed and in detail. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Bernie
Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Eric Garcetti and Sherrod Brown. I will admit that I was interested in Bernie
Sanders the most as I am from Vermont. And, with the race for the Democratic nomination in full swing, Elizabeth Warren,
and Joe Biden were next on my list.
According to the author this abuse of power comes in different forms. It may be that they use their positions to advance
their position; it may be that they use their positions to advance and enrich themselves, using public power for
personal gain and the use of the judicial system to right social wrongs. As one may envision, the more power one has,
the more abuse of power is possible. And, there are financial ties to special interest.
Am not going into detail about the eight mentioned in this book. I will admit that some were shocking revelations to me.
It is amazing what one will do when power is at your beck and call. This book should be on your 'read' list prior to
placing your vote in the upcoming Presidential election. The information presented in this one could very well change
your thought process. Personally, I do not hold the same ideas about most of these individuals as I did prior to reading
this one.
Lots of notes are in the text so one can go to the back of the book, if interested, to check the sources. I thought it
was a well researched book from the notes given.
For me, a most interesting read and am glad that I purchased it. The manners in which power has been abused was indeed
an eye opener (in some cases) for me. I think we all know that with the accumulation of power, there is the tendency to
abuse it. Doesn't make it right but...
Chock
FULL OF BOMBSHELLS You Won't Hear About Anywhere Else!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chock
FULL OF BOMBSHELLS You Won't Hear About Anywhere Else!
Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
I bought the book after I saw Schweizer on TV last night. But there is so much
more in this page turning book that I never thought possible. So you have the Biden five, Bernie Sanders and his wife's
relentless pursuit of capitalist gains, Kamala Harris who appears to be a very dirty cop, Elizabeth Warren and her three
layer cake of corruption, Amy Klobuchar and her low energy cronyism... ON AND ON AND ON!!
There just isn't enough time in a TV segment for Schweizer to lay out all the evidence he has uncovered of terrible
corruption among Americas progressive elite! You have to buy the book to believe it
>
Chock
FULL OF BOMBSHELLS You Won't Hear About Anywhere Else!
Barry E. Sheridan
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exposing
the hypocrisy of those political figures who seek greater power.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 24, 2020
Verified Purchase
Any analysis of powerful figures that concludes they are not what they pretend to
be demands courage from the writer, such is the case here where Peter Schweizer assesses some of the leading progressive
political leaders in the US. All of those scrutinised in this thoroughly researched volume are either already standing,
or intend to stand, for the position of President of the United States. What is also quite clear is that none of them
are remotely worthy of that Office. In each case it is obvious that despite what they claim, all have used, or are using
their elected office to enrich themselves, their families and cronies. America does not need people like that running
the country, it needs individuals like Donald J Trump, or those like him. Having spectated from afar on events since Mr
Trump was elected, you can see, at least in part, why there is so much antipathy towards him, he is a danger to a
political class, many of whom are more intent on personal gain than they are serving the American people.
A very good article. A better title would be "How neoliberalism collapsed" Any religious doctrine sonner or later collased
under the weight of corruption of its prisets and unrealistic assumptions about the society. Neoliberalism in no expection as in
heart it is secular religion based on deification of markets.
He does not discuss the role of Harvard Mafiosi in destruction of Russian (and other xUSSR republics) economy in 1990th, mass
looting, empowerment of people (with pensioners experiencing WWII level of starvation) and creation of mafia capitalism on post
Soviet state. But the point he made about the process are right. Yeltsin mafia, like Yeltsin himself, were the product of USA and
GB machinations
Notable quotes:
"... If the US (and the UK, if as usual we tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and endangering the world. ..."
"... One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. ..."
"... These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative," which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era ..."
"... This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato expansion ..."
"... Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history. This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media ..."
"... By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist. ..."
"... "A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values" ..."
"... Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned. ..."
"... This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo majorities in their countries. ..."
"... I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct. ..."
"... If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks, which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight." ..."
"... The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the US. ..."
"... Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. ..."
"... Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels. ..."
A s the US prepares to plunge into a new cold war with China in which its chances do not
look good, it's an appropriate time to examine how we went so badly wrong after "victory" in
the last Cold War. Looking back 30 years from the grim perspective of 2020, it is a challenge
even for those who were adults at the time to remember just how triumphant the west appeared in
the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism and the break-up of the USSR itself.
Today, of the rich fruits promised by that great victory, only wretched fragments remain.
The much-vaunted "peace dividend," savings from military spending, was squandered. The
opportunity to use the resources freed up to spread prosperity and deal with urgent social
problems was wasted, and -- even worse -- the US military budget is today higher than ever.
Attempts to mitigate the apocalyptic threat of climate change have fallen far short of what the
scientific consensus deems to be urgently necessary. The chance to solve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and stabilise the Middle East was thrown away even before 9/11 and
the disastrous US response. The lauded "new world order" of international harmony and
co-operation -- heralded by the elder George Bush after the first Gulf War -- is a tragic joke.
Britain's European dream has been destroyed, and geopolitical stability on the European
continent has been lost due chiefly to new and mostly unnecessary tension with Moscow. The one
previously solid-seeming achievement, the democratisation of Eastern Europe, is looking
questionable, as Poland and Hungary (see Samira Shackle, p20) sink into semi-authoritarian
nationalism.
Russia after the Cold War was a shambles and today it remains a weak economy with a limited
role on the world stage, concerned mainly with retaining some of its traditional areas of
influence. China is a vastly more formidable competitor. If the US (and the UK, if as usual we
tag along) approach the relationship with Beijing with anything like the combination of
arrogance, ignorance, greed, criminality, bigotry, hypocrisy and incompetence with which
western elites managed the period after the Cold War, then we risk losing the competition and
endangering the world.
One of the most malign effects of western victory in 1989-91 was to drown out or marginalise
criticism of what was already a deeply flawed western social and economic model. In the
competition with the USSR, it was above all the visible superiority of the western model that
eventually destroyed Soviet communism from within. Today, the superiority of the western model
to the Chinese model is not nearly so evident to most of the world's population; and it is on
successful western domestic reform that victory in the competition with China will depend.
Hubris
Western triumph and western failure were deeply intertwined. The very completeness of the
western victory both obscured its nature and legitimised all the western policies of the day,
including ones that had nothing to do with the victory over the USSR, and some that proved
utterly disastrous.
As Alexander Zevin has written of the house journal of Anglo-American elites, the
revolutions in Eastern Europe "turbocharged the neoliberal dynamic at the Economist ,
and seemed to stamp it with an almost providential seal." In retrospect, the magazine's 1990s
covers have a tragicomic appearance, reflecting a degree of faith in the rightness and
righteousness of neoliberal capitalism more appropriate to a religious cult.
These beliefs interacted to produce a dominant atmosphere of "there is no alternative,"
which made it impossible and often in effect forbidden to conduct a proper public debate on the
merits of the big western presumptions, policies or plans of the era. As a German official told
me when I expressed some doubt about the wisdom of rapid EU enlargement, "In my ministry we are
not even allowed to think about that."
This was a sentiment I encountered again and again (if not often so frankly expressed) in
western establishment institutions in that era: in economic journals if it was suggested that
rapid privatisation in the former USSR would lead to massive corruption, social resentment and
political reaction; in security circles, if anyone dared to question the logic of Nato
expansion; and almost anywhere if it was pointed out that the looting of former Soviet
republics was being assiduously encouraged and profited from by western banks, and regarded
with benign indifference by western governments.
The atmosphere of the time is (nowadays notoriously) summed up in Francis Fukuyama's The
End of History , which essentially predicted that western liberal capitalist democracy
would now be the only valid and successful economic and political model for all time. In fact,
what victory in the Cold War ended was not history but the study of history by western
elites.
"The US claiming the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world was an
ambition greater than that of any previous power"
A curious feature of 1990s capitalist utopian thought was that it misunderstood the
essential nature of capitalism, as revealed by its real (as opposed to faith-based) history.
One is tempted to say that Fukuyama should have paid more attention to Karl Marx and a famous
passage in The Communist Manifesto :
"The bourgeoisie [ie capitalism] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the
instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society All fixed, fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable
prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market drawn from under the
feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed "
Then again, Marx himself made exactly the same mistake in his portrayal of a permanent
socialist utopia after the overthrow of capitalism. The point is that utopias, being perfect,
are unchanging, whereas continuous and radical change, driven by technological development, is
at the heart of capitalism -- and, according to Marx, of the whole course of human history. Of
course, those who believed in a permanently successful US "Goldilocks economy" -- not too hot,
and not too cold -- also managed to forget 300 years of periodic capitalist economic
crises.
Though much mocked at the time, Fukuyama's vision came to dominate western thinking. This
was summed up in the universally employed but absurd phrases "Getting to Denmark" (as if Russia
and China were ever going to resemble Denmark) and "The path to democracy and the free
market" (my italics), which became the mantra of the new and lucrative academic-bureaucratic
field of "transitionology." Absurd, because the merest glance at modern history reveals
multiple different "paths" to -- and away from -- democracy and capitalism, not to mention
myriad routes that have veered towards one at the same time as swerving away from the
other.
Accompanying this overwhelmingly dominant political and economic ideology was an American
geopolitical vision equally grandiose in ambition and equally blind to the lessons of history.
This was summed up in the memorandum on "Defence Planning Guidance 1994-1999," drawn up in
April 1992 for the Bush Senior administration by Under-Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and subsequently leaked to the media. Its central message was:
"The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds
the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or
pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests We must maintain the
mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role "
By claiming for the US the right of unilateral intervention anywhere in the world and
denying other major powers a greater role in their regions, this strategy essentially extended
the Monroe Doctrine (which effectively defined the "western hemisphere" as the US sphere of
influence) to the entire planet: an ambition greater than that of any previous power. The
British Empire at its height knew that it could never intervene unilaterally on the continent
of Europe or in Central America. The most megalomaniac of European rulers understood that other
great powers with influence in their own areas of the world would always exist.
While that 1992 Washington paper spoke of the "legitimate interests" of other states, it
clearly implied that it would be Washington that would define what interests were legitimate,
and how they could be pursued. And once again, though never formally adopted, this "doctrine"
became in effect the standard operating procedure of subsequent administrations. In the early
2000s, when its influence reached its most dangerous height, military and security elites would
couch it in the terms of "full spectrum dominance." As the younger President Bush declared in
his State of the Union address in January 2002, which put the US on the road to the invasion of
Iraq: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War A world once divided into two armed camps
now recognises one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America."
Nemesis
Triumphalism led US policymakers, and their transatlantic followers, to forget one cardinal
truth about geopolitical and military power: that in the end it is not global and absolute, but
local and relative. It is the amount of force or influence a state wants to bring to bear in a
particular place and on a -particular issue, relative to the power that a rival state is
willing and able to bring to bear. The truth of this has been shown repeatedly over the past
generation. For all America's overwhelming superiority on paper, it has turned out that many
countries have greater strength than the US in particular places: Russia in Georgia and
Ukraine, Russia and Iran in Syria, China in the South China Sea, and even Pakistan in southern
Afghanistan.
American over-confidence, accepted by many Europeans and many Britons especially, left the
US in a severely weakened condition to conduct what should have been clear as far back as the
1990s to be the great competition of the future -- that between Washington and Beijing.
On the one hand, American moves to extend Nato to the Baltics and then (abortively) on to
Ukraine and Georgia, and to abolish Russian influence and destroy Russian allies in the Middle
East, inevitably produced a fierce and largely successful Russian nationalist reaction. Within
Russia, the US threat to its national interests helped to consolidate and legitimise Putin's
control. Internationally, it ensured that Russia would swallow its deep-seated fears of China
and become a valuable partner of Beijing.
On the other hand, the benign and neglectful way in which Washington regarded the rise of
China in the generation after the Cold War (for example, the blithe decision to allow China to
join the World Trade Organisation) was also rooted in ideological arrogance. Western
triumphalism meant that most of the US elites were convinced that as a result of economic
growth, the Chinese Communist state would either democratise or be overthrown; and that China
would eventually have to adopt the western version of economics or fail economically. This was
coupled with the belief that good relations with China could be predicated on China accepting a
so-called "rules-based" international order in which the US set the rules while also being free
to break them whenever it wished; something that nobody with the slightest knowledge of Chinese
history should
have believed.
Throughout, the US establishment discourse (Democrat as much as Republican) has sought to
legitimise American global hegemony by invoking the promotion of liberal democracy. At the same
time, the supposedly intrinsic connection between economic change, democracy and peace was
rationalised by cheerleaders such as the New York Times 's indefatigable Thomas
Friedman, who advanced the (always absurd, and now flatly and repeatedly falsified) "Golden
Arches theory of Conflict
Prevention." This vulgarised version of Democratic Peace Theory pointed out that two countries
with McDonald's franchises had never been to war. The humble and greasy American burger was
turned into a world-historical symbol of the buoyant modern middle classes with too much to
lose to countenance war.
Various equally hollow theories postulated cast-iron connections between free markets and
guaranteed property rights on the one hand, and universal political rights and freedoms on the
other, despite the fact that even within the west, much of political history can be
characterised as the fraught and complex brokering of accommodations between these two sets of
things.
And indeed, since the 1990s democracy has not advanced in the world as a whole, and belief
in the US promotion of democracy has been discredited by US patronage of the authoritarian and
semi-authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and elsewhere. Of the predominantly
Middle Eastern and South Asian students whom I teach at Georgetown University in Qatar, not one
-- even among the liberals -- believes that the US is sincerely committed to spreading
democracy; and, given their own regions' recent history, there is absolutely no reason why they
should believe this.
The one great triumph of democratisation coupled with free market reform was -- or appeared
to be -- in the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, and this success was
endlessly cited as the model for political and economic reform across
the globe.
But the portrayal of East European reform in the west failed to recognise the central role
of local nationalism. Once again, to talk of this at the time was to find oneself in effect
excluded from polite society, because to do so called into question the self-evident
superiority and universal appeal of liberal reform. The overwhelming belief of western
establishments was that nationalism was a superstition that was fast losing its hold on people
who, given the choice, could everywhere be relied on to act like rational consumers, rather
than citizens rooted in one particular land.
The more excitable technocrats imagined that nation state itself (except the US of course)
was destined to wither away. This was also the picture reflected back to western observers and
analysts by liberal reformers across the region, who whether or not they were genuinely
convinced of this, knew what their western sponsors wanted to hear. Western economic and
cultural hegemony produced a sort of mirror game, a copulation of illusions in which local
informants provided false images to the west, which then reflected them back to the east, and
so on.
Always the nation
Yet one did not have to travel far outside the centres of Eastern European cities to find
large parts of populations outraged by the moral and cultural changes ordained by the EU, the
collapse of social services, and the (western-indulged) seizure of public property by former
communist elites. So why did Eastern Europeans swallow the whole western liberal package of the
time? They did so precisely because of their nationalism, which persuaded them that if they did
not pay the cultural and economic price of entry into the EU and Nato, they would sooner or
later fall back under the dreaded hegemony of Moscow. For them, unwanted reform was the price
that the nation had to pay for US protection. Not surprisingly, once membership of these
institutions was secured, a powerful populist and nationalist backlash set in.
Western blindness to the power of nationalism has had several bad consequences for western
policy, and the cohesion of "the west." In Eastern Europe, it would in time lead to the
politically almost insane decision of the EU to try to order the local peoples, with their
deeply-rooted ethnic nationalism and bitter memories of outside dictation, to accept large
numbers of Muslim refugees. The backlash then became conjoined with the populist reactions in
Western Europe, which led to Brexit and the sharp decline of centrist parties across the
EU.
More widely, this blindness to the power of nationalism led the US grossly to underestimate
the power of nationalist sentiment in Russia, China and Iran, and contributed to the US attempt
to use "democratisation" as a means to overthrow their regimes. All that this has succeeded in
doing is to help the regimes concerned turn nationalist sentiment against local liberals, by
accusing them of being US stooges.
"A stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on
some minimal moral values"
Russian liberals in the 1990s were mostly not really US agents as such, but the collapse of
Communism led some to a blind adulation of everything western and to identify unconditionally
with US policies. In terms of public image, this made them look like western lackeys; in terms
of policy, it led to the adoption of the economic "shock therapy" policies advocated by the
west. Combined with monstrous corruption and the horribly disruptive collapse of the Soviet
single market, this had a shattering effect on Russian industry and the living standards of
ordinary Russians.
Many liberals gave the impression of complete indifference to the resulting immiseration of
the Russian population in these years. At a meeting of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington
that I attended later, former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar boasted to an applauding US audience
of how he had destroyed the Russian military industrial complex. The fact that this also
destroyed the livelihoods of tens of millions of Russians and Ukrainians was not mentioned.
This attitude was fed by contempt on the part of the educated classes of Moscow and St
Petersburg for ordinary Russians, who were dubbed Homo Sovieticus and treated as an
inferior species whose loathsome culture was preventing the liberal elites from taking their
rightful place among the "civilised" nations of the west. This frame of mind was reminiscent of
the traditional attitude of white elites in Latin America towards the Indio and Mestizo
majorities in their countries.
I vividly remember one Russian liberal journalist state his desire to fire machine guns into
crowds of elderly Russians who joined Communist demonstrations to protest about the collapse of
their pensions. The response of the western journalists present was that this was perhaps a
little bit excessive, but to be excused since the basic sentiment was correct.
The Russian liberals of the 1990s were crazy to reveal this contempt to the people whose
votes they needed to win. So too was Hillary Clinton, with her disdain for the "basket of
deplorables" in the 2016 election, much of the Remain camp in the years leading up to Brexit,
and indeed the European elites in the way they rammed through the Maastricht Treaty and the
euro in the 1990s.
If the post-Cold War world order was a form of US imperialism, it now looks like an empire
in which rot in the over-extended periphery has spread to the core. The economic and social
patterns of 1990s Russia and Ukraine have come back to haunt the west, though so far thank God
in milder form. The massive looting of Russian state property and the systematic evasion of
taxes by Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was only possible with the help of western banks,
which transferred the proceeds to the west and the Caribbean. This crime was euphemised in the
western discourse (naturally including the Economist ) as "capital flight."
Peter Mandelson qualified his famous remark that the Blair government was "intensely relaxed
about people becoming filthy rich" with the words "as long as they pay their taxes." The whole
point, however, about the filthy Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Pakistani and other money that
flowed to and through London was not just that so much of it was stolen, but that it was
escaping taxation, thereby harming the populations at home twice over. The infamous euphemism
"light-touch regulation" was in effect a charter
for this.
In a bitter form of poetic justice, however, "light-touch regulation" paved the way for the
2008 economic crisis in the west itself, and western economic elites too (especially in the US)
would also seize this opportunity to move their money into tax havens. This has done serious
damage to state revenues, and to the fundamental faith of ordinary people in the west that the
rich are truly subject to the same laws as them.
The indifference of Russian elites to the suffering of the Russian population has found a
milder echo in the neglect of former industrial regions across Britain, Western Europe and the
US that did so much to produce the votes for Brexit, for Trump and for populist nationalist
parties in Europe. The catastrophic plunge in Russian male life expectancy in the 1990s has
found its echo in the unprecedented decline in white working-class male life expectancy in the
US.
Perhaps the greatest lesson of the period after the last Cold War is that in the end, a
stable and healthy polity and economy must be based on some minimal moral values. To say this
to western economists, businessmen and financial journalists in the 1990s was to receive the
kindly contempt usually accorded to religious cranks. The only value recognised was shareholder
value, a currency in which the crimes of the Russian oligarchs could be excused because their
stolen companies had "added value." Any concern about duty to the Russian people as a whole, or
the fact that tolerance of these crimes would make it grotesque to demand honesty of policemen
or civil servants, were dismissed as irrelevant sentimentality.
Bringing it all back home
We in the west are living with the consequences of a generation of such attitudes. Western
financial elites have mostly not engaged in outright illegality; but then again, they usually
haven't needed to, since governments have made it easy for them to abide by the letter of the
law while tearing its spirit to pieces. We are belatedly recognising that, as Franklin Foer
wrote in the Atlantic last year: "New York, Los Angeles and Miami have joined London as
the world's most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American
elites who have enabled it -- and it has degraded the nation's political and social mores in
the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on
the best values of America, [Richard] Palmer [a former CIA station chief in Moscow] had
glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become
America's own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition."
Those analysing the connection between Russia and Trump's administration have looked in the
wrong place. The explanation of Trump's success is not that Putin somehow mesmerised American
voters in 2016. It is that populations abandoned by their elites are liable to extreme
political responses; and that societies whose economic elites have turned ethics into a joke
should not be surprised if their political leaders too become scoundrels.
"... The U.S. has spent a century or more trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences. ..."
"... The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal, nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. ..."
"... To the point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so? ..."
"... Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business. ..."
"... Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers, including former Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin, Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world. ..."
"... Under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the ' Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to have played a role in the murder of Che Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered. ..."
"... To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,' adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind. ..."
"... Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War. ..."
"... the U.S. had indicated its intention to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be taken in good faith. ..."
"... Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them. In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former Baltic states were brought under NATO's control . ..."
"... The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC) in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here . The economic and military annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2 . The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis on its payroll in 1948. ..."
"... That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges ..."
"... Its near instantaneous adoption by bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?' ..."
"... Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this move. ..."
The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a
façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a
straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war
economy in 1946 to the CIA's alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC
(National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the
CIA's actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the 'fall of communism' suggests
that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.
The first Cold War was an imperial business enterprise to keep the Generals, bureaucrats,
and war materiel suppliers in power and their bank accounts flush after WWII. Likewise, the
American side of the nuclear arms race left former
Gestapo and SS officers employed by the CIA to put their paranoid fantasies forward as
assessments of Russian military capabilities. Why, of all people, would former Nazi officers be
put in charge military intelligence if accurate assessments were the goal? The Nazis hated the
Soviets more than the Americans did.
The ideological binaries of Russiagate -- for or against Donald Trump, for or against
neoliberal, petrostate Russia, define the boundaries of acceptable discourse to the benefit of
deeply nefarious interests. The U.S. has spent a century or more
trying to install a U.S.-friendly government in Moscow. Following the dissolution of the USSR
in 1991, the U.S. sent neoliberal economists to
loot the country as the Clinton administration, and later the Obama administration, placed
NATO troops and armaments on the Russian border after a
negotiated agreement not to do so . Subsequent claims of realpolitik are cover for a
reckless disregard for geopolitical consequences.
The paradox of American liberalism, articulated when feminist icon and CIA asset Gloria
Steinem described the CIA as ' liberal,
nonviolent and honorable ,' is that educated, well-dressed, bourgeois functionaries have
used the (largely manufactured) threat of foreign subversion to install right-wing nationalists
subservient to American business interests at every opportunity. Furthermore, Steinem's
aggressive ignorance of the actual history of the CIA illustrates the liberal propensity to
conflate bourgeois dress and attitude with an imagined
gentility . To the
point made by Christopher Simpson , the CIA could have achieved better results had it not
employed former Nazi officers, begging the question of why it chose to do so?
On the American left, Russiagate is treated as a case of bad reporting, of official outlets
for government propaganda serially reporting facts and events that were subsequently disproved.
However, some fair portion of the American bourgeois, the PMC that acts in supporting roles for
capital, believes every word of it. Russiagate is the nationalist party line in the American
fight against communism, without the communism. Charges of treason have been lodged every time
that military budgets have come under attack since 1945. In 1958 the senior leadership of the
Air Force was charging the other branches of the military with treason for doubting its utterly
fantastical (and later disproven) estimate of Soviet ICBMs. Treason is good for business.
Shortly after WWII ended, the CIA employed hundreds of former Nazi military officers,
including former
Gestapo and SS officers responsible for murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of human
beings , to run a spy operation known as the Gehlen Organization from Berlin,
Germany. Given its central role in assessing the military intentions and capabilities of the
Soviet Union, the Gehlen Organization was more likely than not responsible for the CIA's
overstatement of Soviet nuclear capabilities in the 1950s used to support the U.S. nuclear
weapons program. Former Nazis were also integrated
into CIA efforts to install right wing governments around the world.
By the time that (Senator) John F. Kennedy claimed a U.S. 'missile gap' with the Soviets in
1958, the CIA was providing estimates of Soviet ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles),
that were
wildly inflated -- most likely provided to it by the Gehlen Organization. Once satellite
and U2 reconnaissance estimates became available, the CIA lowered its own to 120 Soviet ICBMs
when the actual number
was four . On the one hand, the Soviets really did have a nuclear weapons program. On the
other, it was a tiny fraction of what was being claimed. Bad reporting, unerringly on the side
of larger military budgets, appears to be the constant.
Under the
Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act passed by Congress in 1998, the CIA was made to partially
disclose its affiliation with, and employment of, former Nazis. In contrast to the '
Operation Paperclip ' thesis that it was Nazi scientists who were brought to the U.S. to
labor as scientists, the Gehlen Organization and CIC employed known war criminals in
political roles. Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyon,' was employed by the CIC, and claims to
have played a role in the murder of Che
Guevara . Wernher von Braun, one of the Operation Paperclip 'scientists,' worked in a Nazi
concentration camp as tens of thousands of human beings were murdered.
The historical sequence in the U.S. was WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, to an economy that
was heavily dependent on war production. The threatened decommissioning of the war economy in
1946 was first met with an
honest assessment of Soviet intentions -- the Soviets were moving infrastructure back into
Soviet territory as quickly as was practicable, then to the military budget-friendly claim that
they were putting resources in place to invade Europe. The result of the shift was that the
American Generals kept their power and the war industry kept producing materiel and weapons. By
1948 these weapons had come to include atomic bombs.
To understand the political space that military production came to occupy, from 1948 onward
the U.S. military became a well-funded bureaucracy where charges of treason were regularly
traded between the branches. Internecine battles for funding and strategic dominance were (and
are) regularly fought. The tactic that this bureaucracy -- the 'military industrial complex,'
adopted was to exaggerate foreign threats in a contest for bureaucratic dominance. The nuclear
arms race was made a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the U.S. produced world-ending weapons
non-stop for decades on end, the Soviets responded in kind.
What ties the Gehlen Organization to CIA estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons from 1948
– 1958 is 1) the Gehlen Organization was central to the CIA's intelligence operations
vis-à-vis the Soviets, 2) the CIA had limited alternatives to gather information on the
Soviets outside of the Gehlen Organization and 3) the senior leadership of the U.S. military
had
long demonstrated that it approved of exaggerating foreign threats when doing so enhanced
their power and added to their budgets. Long story short, the CIA employed hundreds of former
Nazi officers who had the ideological predisposition and economic incentive to mis-perceive
Soviet intentions and misstate Soviet capabilities to fuel the Cold War.
Where this gets interesting is that American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was working for the Rand
Corporation in the late 1950s and early 1960s when estimates of Soviet ICBMs were being put
forward. JFK had run (in 1960) on a platform that included closing the Soviet – U.S. '
missile
gap .' The USAF (U.S. Air Force), charged with delivering nuclear missiles to their
targets, was estimating that the Soviets had 1,000 ICBMs. Mr. Ellsberg, who had limited
security clearance through his employment at Rand, was leaked the known number of Soviet ICBMs.
The Air Force was saying 1,000 Soviet ICBMs when the number confirmed by reconnaissance
satellites was four.
By 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA had shifted nominal control of the
Gehlen Organization to the BND, for whom Gehlen continued to work. Based on ongoing satellite
reconnaissance data, the CIA was busy lowering its estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities.
Benjamin Schwarz, writing
for The Atlantic in 2013, provided an account, apparently informed by the CIA's lowered
estimates, where he placed the whole of the Soviet nuclear weapons program (in 1962) at roughly
one-ninth the size of the U.S. effort. However, given Ellsberg's known count of four Soviet
ICBMs at the time of the missile crisis, even Schwarz's ratio of 1:9 seems to overstate Soviet
capabilities.
Further per Schwarz's reporting, the Jupiter nuclear missiles that the U.S. had placed in
Italy prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis only made sense as first-strike weapons. This
interpretation is corroborated by Daniel Ellsberg , who argues
that the American plan was always to initiate the use of nuclear weapons (first strike). This
made JFK's posture of equally matched contestants in a geopolitical game of nuclear chicken
utterly unhinged. Should this be less than clear, because the U.S. had indicated its intention
to use nuclear weapons in a first strike -- and had demonstrated the intention by placing
Jupiter missiles in Italy, nothing that the U.S. offered during the Missile Crisis could be
taken in good faith.
The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was met with a promised reduction in U.S. military
spending and an end to the Cold War, neither of which ultimately materialized. Following the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Cold War entered a new phase. Cold War logic was
repurposed to support the oxymoronic 'humanitarian wars' -- liberating people by bombing them.
In 1995 'Russian meddling' meant the Clinton administration rigging
the election of Boris Yeltsin in the Russian presidential election. Mr. Clinton then
unilaterally reneged on the American agreement to keep NATO from Russia's border when former
Baltic
states were brought under NATO's control .
The Obama administration's 2014 incitement in Ukraine , by way of
fostering and supporting the Maidan uprising and the ousting of Ukraine's democratically
elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, ties to the U.S. strategy of containing and overthrowing
the Soviet (Russian) government that was first codified by the National Security Council (NSC)
in 1945. The NSC's directives can be found here and here .
The economic and military
annexation of Ukraine by the U.S. (NATO didn't exist in 1945) comes under NSC10/2
. The alliance between the CIA and Ukrainian fascists ties to directive NSC20 , the plan
to sponsor Ukrainian-affiliated former Nazis in order to install them in the Kremlin to replace
the Soviet government. This was part of the CIA's rationale for putting Ukrainian-affiliated
former Nazis on its payroll in 1948.
That Russiagate is the continuation of a scheme launched in 1945 by the National Security
Council, to be engineered by the CIA with help from former Nazi officers in its employ, speaks
volumes about the Cold War frame from which it emerges.
Its near instantaneous adoption by
bourgeois liberals demonstrates the class basis of the right-wing nationalism it supports. That
liberals appear to perceive themselves as defenders 'democracy' within a trajectory laid out by
unelected military leaders more than seven decades earlier is testament to the power of
historical ignorance tied to nationalist fervor. Were the former Gestapo and SS officers
employed by the CIA 'our Nazis?'
The Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act came about in part because Nazi hunters kept coming across Nazi war
criminals living in the U.S. who told them they had been brought here and given employment by
the CIA, CIC, or some other division of the Federal government. If the people in these agencies
thought that doing so was justified, why the secrecy? And if it wasn't justified, why was it
done? Furthermore, are liberals really comfortable bringing fascists with direct historical
ties to the Third Reich to power in Ukraine? And while there are no good choices in the
upcoming U.S. election, the guy who liberals want to bring to power is lead architect of this
move.Cue the Sex
Pistols .
So former tank repairman decided again managed to make a make a mark in world diplomacy
:-).
Notable quotes:
"... Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the U.N. on Tuesday, and his attempt to gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the old P5+1: ..."
"... The Trump administration has abused our major European allies for years in its push to destroy the nuclear deal, and their governments have no patience with any more unilateral U.S. stunts. This is the result of two years of a destructive policy aimed solely at punishing Iran and its people. The administration's open contempt for international law and the interests of its allies has cost the U.S. their cooperation. ..."
"... Underscoring the absurdity of the Trump administration's arms embargo appeal were Pompeo's alarmist warnings that an end to the arms embargo would allow Iran to purchase advanced fighters that it would use to threaten Europe and India: ..."
"... This is a laughably unrealistic scenario. Even if Iran purchased advanced fighters, the last thing it would do is send them off on a suicide mission to bomb Italy or India. This shows how deeply irrational the Iran hawks' fearmongering is. Iran has already demonstrated an ability to launch precise attacks with drones and missiles in its immediate neighborhood, and it developed these capabilities while under the current embargo. ..."
"... The Secretary of State called on the U.N. to reject "extortion diplomacy." The best way to reject extortion diplomacy would be for them to reject the administration's desperate attempt to use America's position at the U.N. to attack international law. ..."
Mike Pompeo delivered an embarrassing, clownish performance at the U.N. on Tuesday, and his
attempt to
gain support for an open-ended conventional arms embargo on Iran was rejected the rest of the
old P5+1:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Tuesday for an arms embargo on Iran to be
extended indefinitely, but his appeal fell flat at the United Nations Security Council, where
Russia and China rejected it outright and close allies of the United States were
ambivalent.
The Trump administration is more isolated than ever in its Iran obsession. The ridiculous
effort to invoke the so-called "snapback" provision of the JCPOA more than two years after
reneging on the agreement met with failure, just as most observers predicted months
ago when it was first floated as a possibility. As I said at the time, "The
administration's latest destructive ploy won't find any support on the Security Council. There
is nothing "intricate" about this idea. It is a crude, heavy-handed attempt to employ the
JCPOA's own provisions to destroy it." It was never going to work because all of the other
parties to the agreement want nothing to do with the administration's punitive approach, and
U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA meant that it forfeited any rights it had when it was still part
of the deal.
Opposition from Russia and China was a given, but the striking thing about the scene at the
U.N. this week was that major U.S. allies
joined them in rebuking the administration's obvious bad faith maneuver:
The pointedly critical tone of the debate saw Germany accusing Washington of violating
international law by withdrawing from the nuclear pact, while Berlin aligned itself with
China's claim that the United States has no right to reimpose U.N. sanctions on Iran.
The Trump administration has abused our major European allies for years in its push to
destroy the nuclear deal, and their governments have no patience with any more unilateral U.S.
stunts. This is the result of two years of a destructive policy aimed solely at punishing Iran
and its people. The administration's open contempt for international law and the interests of
its allies has cost the U.S. their cooperation.
Underscoring the absurdity of the Trump administration's arms embargo appeal were Pompeo's
alarmist
warnings that an end to the arms embargo would allow Iran to purchase advanced fighters
that it would use to threaten Europe and India:
If you fail to act, Iran will be free to purchase Russian-made fighter jets that can
strike up to a 3,000 kilometer radius, putting cities like Riyadh, New Delhi, Rome, and
Warsaw in Iranian crosshairs.
This is a laughably unrealistic scenario. Even if Iran purchased advanced fighters, the last
thing it would do is send them off on a suicide mission to bomb Italy or India. This shows how
deeply irrational the Iran hawks' fearmongering is. Iran has already demonstrated an ability to
launch precise attacks with drones and missiles in its immediate neighborhood, and it developed
these capabilities while under the current embargo.
It has no need for expensive fighters, and
it is not at all certain that their government would even be interested in acquiring them. Pompeo's presentation was a weak attempt to exaggerate the potential threat from a state that
has very limited power projection, and he found no support because his serial fabrications
about Iran have rendered everything he says to be worthless.
The same administration that wants to keep an arms embargo on Iran forever has no problem
flooding the region with U.S.-made weapons and providing them to some of the worst governments
in the world. It is these client states that are doing the most to destabilize other countries
in the region right now. If the U.N. should be putting arms embargoes on any country, it should
consider imposing them on Saudi Arabia and the UAE to limit their ability to wreak havoc on
Yemen and Libya.
The Secretary of State called on the U.N. to reject "extortion diplomacy." The best way to
reject extortion diplomacy would be for them to reject the administration's desperate attempt
to use America's position at the U.N. to attack international law.
divideand conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful,
so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment.
In its most
general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that
members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different
things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal,
but I'm hoping I can say something new.
You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.
To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's
radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into
identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting
through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.
When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes
harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.
Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism,
which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and
marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for
a free and democratic society.
The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies.
As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that
some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they
then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.
Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies
of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.
Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals
claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better
than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan
for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in
Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has
shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi
government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.
Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy
but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups.
On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand
human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.
Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers
largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening
China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal
through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.
They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political
system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump
had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.
If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members,
who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.
Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so
of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with
Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.
So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the
"soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable
to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups,
such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals,
etc)
That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and
can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal
ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.
Re: the Nuremberg trials , I became fascinated by the writings of Paul R. Pillar who
pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to
war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace' . This is when one country sets up an
environment for war against another country. I'll grant you that this is vague but if this is
applicable at all how is this not an accurate description of what we are doing against Iran
and Venezuela?
In both cases, we are imposing a full trade embargo (not sanctions) on basic civilian
necessities and infrastructures and threatening the use of military force. As for Iran, the
sustained and unfair demonization of Iranians is preparing the U.S. public to accept a
ruthless bombing campaign against them as long overdue. We are already attacking the civilian
population of their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
How Ironic that the country that boasts that it won WW2 is now guilty of the very crimes
that it condemned publicly in court.
"... "Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading," ..."
"... "Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks." ..."
"... "stomach churning," ..."
"... "For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this," ..."
"... "Richard Burr had critical information that might have helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself." ..."
"... "If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest," ..."
"... "calling for immediate investigations" ..."
"... "for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading laws." ..."
"... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, commenters from all sides have demanded swift punishment for US
senators who dumped stock after classified Covid-19 briefings. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has called
for criminal prosecution.
As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) has received daily
briefings on the threat posed by Covid-19 since January. Burr insisted to the public that America was
ready to handle the virus, but sold up to $1.5 million in stocks on February 13, less than a week
before the stock market nosedived, according to Senate
filings
. Immediately before the sale, Burr wrote an
op-ed
assuring Americans that their government is
"better prepared than ever
" to handle
the virus.
After the sale, NPR
reported
that he told a closed-door meeting of North Carolina business leaders that the virus
actually posed a threat
"akin to the 1918 pandemic."
Burr does not dispute the NPR report.
In a tweet on Saturday, former 2020 presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard called for
criminal investigations.
"Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated and prosecuted for insider trading,"
she wrote.
"Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks."
Congress/staff who dumped stocks after private briefings on impending
coronavirus epidemic should be investigated & prosecuted for insider trading (the STOCK Act). It
is illegal & abuse of power. Members of Congress should not be allowed to own stocks.
https://t.co/rbVfJxrk3r
Burr was not the only lawmaker on Capitol Hill to take precautions, it was reported. Fellow
Intelligence Committee member Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and her husband sold off more than a
million dollars of shares in a biotech company five days later, while Oklahoma's Jim Inhofe (R) made a
smaller sale around the same time. Both say their sales were routine.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) attended a Senate Health Committee briefing on the outbreak on
January 24. The very same day, she began offloading stock, dropping between $1.2 and $3.1 million in
shares over the following weeks. The companies whose stock she sold included airlines, retail outlets,
and Chinese tech firm Tencent.
She did, however, invest in cloud technology company Oracle, and Citrix, a teleworking company
whose value has increased by nearly a third last week, as social distancing measures forced more and
more Americans to work from home. All of Loeffler's transactions were made with her husband, Jeff
Sprecher, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) have joined the clamor of
voices demanding punishment. Ocasio-Cortez
described
the sales as
"stomach churning,"
while Omar reached across the aisle to side
with Fox News' Tucker Carlson in calling for Burr's resignation.
"For a public servant it's pretty hard to imagine many things more immoral than doing this,"
Carlson said during a Friday night monolog.
"Richard Burr had critical information that might have
helped the people he is sworn to protect. But he hid that information and helped only himself."
As of Saturday, there are nearly 25,000 cases of Covid-19 in the US, with the death toll heading
towards 300. Now both sides of the political aisle seem united in disgust at the apparent profiteering
of Burr, Loeffler, and Feinstein.
Right-wing news outlet Breitbart
savaged
Burr for voting against the STOCK Act in 2012, a piece of legislation that would have
barred members of Congress from using non-public information to profit on the stock market. At the
same time, a host of Democratic figures - including former presidential candidates
Andrew Yang
and
Kirsten Gillibrand
- weighed in with their own criticism too.
"If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move is to adjust your
stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public interest,"
Yang
tweeted on Friday.
If you find out about a nation-threatening pandemic and your first move
is to adjust your stock portfolio you should probably not be in a job that serves the public
interest.
Watchdog group Common Cause has filed complaints with the Justice Department, the Securities and
Exchange Commission and the Senate Ethics Committee
"calling for immediate investigations"
of
Burr, Loeffler, Feinstein and Inhofe
"for possible violations of the STOCK Act and insider trading
laws."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
who make profits as well. I cannot remember exactly when insider trading for
them became legal but it should be no surprise to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention
that they're ALL doing it. That is one reason, at least in my semi-educated opinion, they did
not go after Trump for emoluments during Shampeachment, because THEY ALL DO IT.
That goes all the way to the White House, no doubt.
No matter who comes away with the nomination, it has to be asked "was any of this process
legitimate?". We know from a plethora of examples that US elections are not fair. They border
on meaningless most of the time. The DNC's doubly so, having argued in court they have no duty
to be fair.
Any result, then, you could safely assume was contrived, for one reason or another.
If the Buttigieg-Klobuchar-Biden gambit works, we end up with Trump vs. Biden. And,
realistically, that means a second Trump term.
Biden is possibly senile and definitely creepy . Watching him shuffle and stutter
through a Presidential campaign would be almost cruel.
Politically, he has all of Hillary's weaknesses, being a big-time establishment type with a
pro-war record, without even the "I have a vagina" card to play.
He'll get massacred.
Is that the plan?
There's more than enough signs that Trump has abandoned all the policies that made him any
kind of threat to the political establishment. Four years on: no wars ended, no walls built, no
swamp drained. Just more of the same. He's an idiot who talked big and got co-opted. It
happens.
The Senate and other institutions might talk about Trump being a criminal or an idiot or a
"Nazi", but the reality is he's barely perceptibly different from any other POTUS this side of
JFK.
#TheResistance was a puppet show. A weak game played for toy money. When it really counts,
they're all in it together. Biden getting on the ticket would be a public admittance of that.
It would mean the DNC is effectively throwing the fight. Trump is a son of a bitch, but he's
their son of a bitch. And that's much better than even the idea of President
Bernie.
Does it really matter?
Empire of kaos will never move one inch to change the status quo.
The quaisi fascist state that most western /antlantacist nations have become it will make no
difference
Gianbattista Vico"Their will always be an elite class" Punto e basta.
Name me one politico that made any difference to we the sheeple in the modern era.
If someone were to mention FDR I will scream.
Aldo Moro got murdered by the deep state for only suggesting to make a pact with Berlinguer
the head of Il Partito Communista Italiano.
re ... Your house foreclosed upon by shady bank: naked capitalism, .0001% paid on interest
savings: naked capitalism, poor wages: naked capitalism, dangerous workplace: naked
capitalism, etc. ...
"naked capitalism" is not a clear description. Consider using "predatory capitalism",
which clearly describes what it is.
Here's the Wiki dictionary definition:
Predatory--
1. relating to or denoting an animal or animals preying naturally on others.
synonyms: predacious, carnivorous, hunting, raptorial, ravening;
Example: "predatory birds".
2. seeking to exploit or oppress others.
synonyms: exploitative, wolfish, rapacious, greedy, acquisitive, avaricious
Example: "I could see a predatory gleam in his eyes"
Note where the word comes from:
The Latin "praedator", in English meaning "plunderer".
And "plunderer" helps the reader understand and perhaps recognize what is happening.
I've heard and read about a claim that Trump actually called PM Abdul Mahdi and demanded that
Iraq hand over 50 percent of their proceeds from selling their oil to the USA, and then
threatened Mahdi that he would unleash false flag attacks against the Iraqi government and
its people if he did not submit to this act of Mafia-like criminal extortion. Mahdi told
Trump to kiss his buttocks and that he wasn't going to turn over half of the profits from oil
sales.
This makes Trump sound exactly like a criminal mob boss, especially in light of the fact
that the USA is now the world's #1 exporter of oil – a fact that the arrogant Orange
Man has even boasted about in recent months. Can anyone confirm that this claim is accurate?
If so, then the more I learn about Trump the more sleazy and gangster like he becomes.
I mean, think about it. Bush and Cheney and mostly jewish neocons LIED us into Iraq based
on bald faced lies, fabricated evidence, and exaggerated threats that they KNEW did not
exist. We destroyed that country, captured and killed it's leader – who used to be a
big buddy of the USA when we had a use for him – and Bush's crime gang killed close to
2 million innocent Iraqis and wrecked their economy and destroyed their infrastructure. And,
now, after all that death, destruction and carnage – which Trump claimed in 2016 he did
not approve of – but, now that Trump is sitting on the throne in the Oval office
– he has the audacity and the gall to demand that Iraq owes the USA 50 percent of their
oil profits? And, that he won't honor and respect their demand to pull our troops out of
their sovereign nation unless they PAY US back for the gigantic waste of tax payers money
that was spent building permanent bases inside their country?
Not one Iraqi politician voted for the appropriations bill that financed the construction
of those military bases; that was our mistake, the mistake of our US congress whichever POTUS
signed off on it.
...Trump learned the power of the purse on the streets of NYC, he survived by playing ball
with the Jewish and Italian Mafia. Now he has become the ultimate Godfather, and the world
must listen to his commands. Watch and listen as the powerful and mighty crumble under US
Hegemony.
Right TG, traditionally, as you said up there first, and legally too, under the supreme law
of the land. Economic sanctions are subject to the same UNSC supervision as forcible
coercion.
UN Charter Article 41: "The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the
use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon
the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or
partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio,
and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations."
US "sanctions" require UNSC authorization. Unilateral sanctions are nothing but illegal
coercive intervention, as the non-intervention principle is customary international law,
which is US federal common law.
The G-192, that is, the entire world, has affirmed this law. That's why the US is trying
to defund UNCTAD as redundant with the WTO (UNCTAD is the G-192's primary forum.) In any
case, now that the SCO is in a position to enforce this law at gunpoint with its
overwhelmingly superior missile technology, the US is going to get stomped and tased until it
complies and stops resisting.
In 2018 total US petroleum production was under 18 million barrels per day, total
consumption north of 20 mmb/d. What does it matter if the US exports a bunch of super light
fracked product the US itself can't refine if it turns around and imports it all back in
again and then some.
The myths we tell ourselves, like a roaring economy that nevertheless generates a $1
trillion annual deficit, will someday come back to bite us. Denying reality is not a winning
game plan for the long run.
I long tought that US foreign policies were mainly zionist agenda – driven, but the
Venezuelan affair and the statements of Trump himself about the syrian oil (ta be "kept"
(stolen)) make you think twice.
Oil seems to be at least very important even if it's not the main cause of middle east
problems
So maybe it's the cause of illegal and cruel sanctions against Iran : Get rid of
competitor to sell shale oil everywhere ?( think also of Norstream 2 here)
Watch out US of A. in the end there is something sometimes referred to as the oil's
curse . some poor black Nigerians call oil "the shit of the devil", because it's such a
problem – related asset Have you heard of it ? You get your revenues from oil easily,
so you don't have to make effort by yourself. And in the end you don't keep pace with China
on 5G ? Education fails ? Hmm
Becommig a primary sector extraction nation sad destiny indeed, like africans growing cafe,
bananas and cacao for others. Not to mention environmental problems
What has happened to the superb Nation that send the first man on the moon and invented
modern computers ?
Disapointment
Money for space or money for war following the Zio. Choose Uncle Sam !
Difficult to have both
Everyone seems to forget how we avoided war with Syria all those years ago It was when John
Kerry of all people gaffed, and said "if Assad gives up all his chemical weapons." That was
in response to a reporter who asked "is there anything that can stop the war?" A intrepid
Russian ambassador chimed in loud enough for the press core to hear his "OK" and history was
averted. Thinking restricting the power of the President will stop brown children from dying
at the hands of insane US foreign policy is a cope. "Bi-partisanship" voted to keep troops in
Syria, that was only a few months ago, have you already forgotten? Dubya started the drone
program, and the magical African everyone fawns over, literally doubled the remote controlled
death. We are way past pretending any elected official from either side is actually against
more ME war, or even that one side is worse than the other.
The problem with the supporters Trump has left is they so desperately want to believe in
something bigger than themselves. They have been fed propaganda for their whole lives, and as
a result can only see the world in either "this is good" or "this is bad." The problem with
the opposition is that they are insane. and will say or do anything regardless of the truth.
Trump could be impeached for assassinating Sulimani, yet they keep proceeding with fake and
retarded nonsense. Just like keeping troops in Syria, even the most insane rabid leftoids are
just fine with US imperialism, so long as it's promoting Starbucks, Marvel and homosex, just
like we see with support for HK. That is foreign meddling no matter how you try to justify
it, and it's not even any different messaging than the hoax "bring
democracyhumanrightsfreedom TM to the poor Arabs" justification that was used in Iraq. They
don't even have to come up with a new play to run, it's really quite incredible.
@OverCommenter
A lot of right-wingers also see military action in the Middle East as a way for America to
flex its muscles and bomb some Arabs. It also serves to justify the insane defence budget
that could be used to build a wall and increase funding to ICE.
US politics has become incredibly bi-partisan, criticising Trump will get you branded a
'Leftist' in many circles. This extreme bipartisanship started with the Obama birth
certificate nonsense which was being peddled by Jews like Orly Taitz, Philip J. Berg, Robert
L. Shulz, Larry Klayman and Breitbart news – most likely because Obama was pursuing the
JCPOA and not going hard enough on Iran – and continued with the Trump Russian agent
angle.
Now many Americans cannot really think critically, they stick to their side like a fan
sticks to their sports team.
The first person I ever heard say sanctions are acts of war was Ron Paul. The repulsive
Madeleine Albright infamously said the deaths of 500,000 Iranian children due to US sanctions
was worth it. She ought to be tried as a war criminal. Ron Paul ought to be Secretary of
State.
Looks like the end of Full Spectrum Dominance the the USA enjoyed since 1991. Alliance of Iran, Russia and China (with Turkey
and Pakistan as two possible members) is serious military competitor and while the USA has its set of trump cards, the military
victory against such an alliance no longer guaranteed.
Days after the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, new and important information is
coming to light from a speech given by the Iraqi prime minister. The story behind Soleimani's
assassination seems to go much deeper than what has thus far been reported, involving Saudi
Arabia and China as well the US dollar's role as the global reserve currency .
The Iraqi prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, has revealed details of his interactions with
Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani's assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament.
He tried to explain several times on live television how Washington had been browbeating him
and other Iraqi members of parliament to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in
false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the
situation, recalling similar modi operandi seen in Cairo in 2009, Libya in 2011, and Maidan in
2014. The purpose of such cynicism was to throw Iraq into chaos.
Here is the reconstruction of the story:
[Speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq] Halbousi attended the parliamentary
session while almost none of the Sunni members did. This was because the Americans had
learned that Abdul-Mehdi was planning to reveal sensitive secrets in the session and sent
Halbousi to prevent this. Halbousi cut Abdul-Mehdi off at the commencement of his speech and
then asked for the live airing of the session to be stopped. After this, Halbousi together
with other members, sat next to Abdul-Mehdi, speaking openly with him but without it being
recorded. This is what was discussed in that session that was not broadcast:
Abdul-Mehdi spoke angrily about how the Americans had ruined the country and now refused
to complete infrastructure and electricity grid projects unless they were promised 50% of oil
revenues, which Abdul-Mehdi refused.
The complete (translated)
words of Abdul-Mahdi's speech to parliament:
This is why I visited China and signed an important agreement with them to undertake the
construction instead. Upon my return, Trump called me to ask me to reject this agreement.
When I refused, he threatened to unleash huge demonstrations against me that would end my
premiership.
Huge demonstrations against me duly materialized and Trump called again to threaten that
if I did not comply with his demands, then he would have Marine snipers on tall buildings
target protesters and security personnel alike in order to pressure me.
I refused again and handed in my resignation. To this day the Americans insist on us
rescinding our deal with the Chinese.
After this, when our Minister of Defense publicly stated that a third party was targeting
both protestors and security personnel alike (just as Trump had threatened he would do), I
received a new call from Trump threatening to kill both me and the Minister of Defense if we
kept on talking about this "third party".
Nobody imagined that the threat was to be applied to General Soleimani, but it was difficult
for Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to reveal the weekslong backstory behind the terrorist
attack.
I was supposed to meet him [Soleimani] later in the morning when he was killed. He came to
deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered to the Iranians from
the Saudis.
We can surmise, judging by Saudi Arabia's reaction , that some kind of
negotiation was going on between Tehran and Riyadh:
The Kingdom's statement regarding the events in Iraq stresses the Kingdom's view of the
importance of de-escalation to save the countries of the region and their people from the
risks of any escalation.
Above all, the Saudi
Royal family wanted to let people know immediately that they had not been informed of the
US operation:
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was not consulted regarding the US strike. In light of the
rapid developments, the Kingdom stresses the importance of exercising restraint to guard
against all acts that may lead to escalation, with severe consequences.
And to emphasize his reluctance for war, Mohammad bin Salman
sent a delegation to the United States.
Liz Sly , the Washington Post Beirut bureau chief, tweated:
Saudi Arabia is sending a delegation to Washington to urge restraint with Iran on behalf
of [Persian] Gulf states. The message will be: 'Please spare us the pain of going through
another war'.
What clearly emerges is that the success of the operation against Soleimani had nothing to
do with the intelligence gathering of the US or Israel. It was known to all and sundry that
Soleimani was heading to Baghdad in a diplomatic capacity that acknowledged Iraq's efforts to
mediate a solution to the regional crisis with Saudi Arabia.
It would seem that the Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis were well on the way towards averting a
regional conflict involving Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Riyadh's reaction to the American strike
evinced no public joy or celebration. Qatar, while not seeing eye to eye with Riyadh on many
issues, also immediately expressed solidarity with Tehran, hosting a meeting at a senior
government level with Mohammad Zarif Jarif, the Iranian foreign minister. Even Turkey
and
Egypt , when commenting on the asassination, employed moderating language.
This could reflect a fear of being on the receiving end of Iran's retaliation. Qatar, the
country from which the drone that killed Soleimani took off, is only a stone's throw away from
Iran, situated on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Tehran's
regional enemies, both know that a military conflict with Iran would mean the end of the Saudi
royal family.
When the words of the Iraqi prime minister are linked back to the geopolitical and energy
agreements in the region, then the worrying picture starts to emerge of a desperate US lashing
out at a world turning its back on a unipolar world order in favor of the emerging multipolar
about which
I have long written .
The US, now considering itself a net energy exporter as a result of the shale-oil revolution
(on which the jury is still out), no longer needs to import oil from the Middle East. However,
this does not mean that oil can now be traded in any other currency other than the US
dollar.
The petrodollar is what ensures that the US dollar retains its status as the global reserve
currency, granting the US a monopolistic position from which it derives enormous benefits from
playing the role of regional hegemon.
This privileged position of holding the global reserve currency also ensures that the US can
easily fund its war machine by virtue of the fact that much of the world is obliged to buy its
treasury bonds that it is simply able to conjure out of thin air. To threaten this comfortable
arrangement is to threaten Washington's global power.
Even so, the geopolitical and economic trend is inexorably towards a multipolar world order,
with China increasingly playing a leading role, especially in the Middle East and South
America.
Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia together make up the overwhelming
majority of oil and gas reserves in the world. The first three have an elevated relationship
with Beijing and are very much in the multipolar camp, something that China and Russia are keen
to further consolidate in order to ensure the future growth for the Eurasian supercontinent
without war and conflict.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is pro-US but could gravitate towards the Sino-Russian camp
both militarily and in terms of energy. The same process is going on with Iraq and Qatar thanks
to Washington's numerous strategic errors in the region starting from Iraq in 2003, Libya in
2011 and Syria and Yemen in recent years.
The agreement between Iraq and China is a prime example of how Beijing intends to use the
Iraq-Iran-Syria troika to revive the Middle East and and link it to the Chinese Belt and Road
Initiative.
While Doha and Riyadh would be the first to suffer economically from such an agreement,
Beijing's economic power is such that, with its win-win approach, there is room for
everyone.
Saudi Arabia provides China with most of its oil and Qatar, together with the Russian
Federation, supply China with most of its LNG needs, which lines up with Xi Jinping's 2030
vision that aims to greatly reduce polluting emissions.
The US is absent in this picture, with little ability to influence events or offer any
appealing economic alternatives.
Washington would like to prevent any Eurasian integration by unleashing chaos and
destruction in the region, and killing Soleimani served this purpose. The US cannot contemplate
the idea of the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency. Trump is engaging in a
desperate gamble that could have disastrous consequences.
The region, in a worst-case scenario, could be engulfed in a devastating war involving
multiple countries. Oil refineries could be destroyed all across the region, a quarter of the
world's oil transit could be blocked, oil prices would skyrocket ($200-$300 a barrel) and
dozens of countries would be plunged into a global financial crisis. The blame would be laid
squarely at Trump's feet, ending his chances for re-election.
To try and keep everyone in line, Washington is left to resort to terrorism, lies and
unspecified threats of visiting destruction on friends and enemies alike.
Trump has evidently been convinced by someone that the US can do without the Middle East,
that it can do without allies in the region, and that nobody would ever dare to sell oil in any
other currency than the US dollar.
Soleimani's death is the result of a convergence of US and Israeli interests. With no other
way of halting Eurasian integration, Washington can only throw the region into chaos by
targeting countries like Iran, Iraq and Syria that are central to the Eurasian project. While
Israel has never had the ability or audacity to carry out such an assassination itself, the
importance of the Israel Lobby to Trump's electoral success would have influenced his decision,
all the more so in an election year .
Trump believed his drone attack could solve all his problems by frightening his opponents,
winning the support of his voters (by equating Soleimani's assassination to Osama bin Laden's),
and sending a warning to Arab countries of the dangers of deepening their ties with China.
The assassination of Soleimani is the US lashing out at its steady loss of influence in the
region. The Iraqi attempt to mediate a lasting peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been
scuppered by the US and Israel's determination to prevent peace in the region and instead
increase chaos and instability.
Washington has not achieved its hegemonic status through a preference for diplomacy and calm
dialogue, and Trump has no intention of departing from this approach.
Washington's friends and enemies alike must acknowledge this reality and implement the
countermeasures necessary to contain the madness.
Very good article, straight to the point. In fact its much worse. I know is hard to
swallow for my US american brother and sisters.
But as sooner you wake up and see the reality as it is, as better chances the US has to
survive with honor. Stop the wars around the globe and do not look for excuses. Isnt it
already obvious what is going on with the US war machine? How many more examples some people
need to wake up?
Not all said in video above is accurate but the recent events in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan,
Africa are all related to prevent China from overtaking the zionist hegemonic world and to
recolonize China (at least the parasite is trying to hop to China as new host).
Trade war, Huawei, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet ..... the concerted efforts from all zionist
controlled media (ZeroHedge included) to slander, smearing, fake news against China should
tell you what the Zionists agenda are :)
The American President's threatened the Iraqi Prime Minister to liquidate him directly
with the Minister of Defense. The Marines are the third party that sniped the demonstrators
and the security men:
Abdul Mahdi continued:
"After my return from China, Trump called me and asked me to cancel the agreement, so I
also refused, and he threatened me with massive demonstrations that would topple me. Indeed,
the demonstrations started and then Trump called, threatening to escalate in the event of
non-cooperation and responding to his wishes, so that the third party (Marines snipers) would
target the demonstrators and security forces and kill them from the highest structures and
the US embassy in an attempt to pressure me and submit to his wishes and cancel the China
agreement, so I did not respond and submitted my resignation and the Americans still insist
to this day on canceling the China agreement and when the defense minister said that who
kills the demonstrators is a third party, Trump called me immediately and physically
threatened me and defense minister in the event of talk about the third party."
.........
The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission found George W. Bush guilty of war crimes in absentia
for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush, **** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers
Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in
absentia in Malaysia.
Unfortunately, this article makes a lot of sense. The US is losing influence and lashing
out carelessly. I hope the rest of the world realizes how detached majority of the citizens
within the states are from the federal government. The Federal government brings no good to
our nation. None. From the mis management of our once tax revenues to the corrupt Congress
who accepts bribes from the highest bidder, it's a rats best that is not only harmful to its
own people, but the world at large. USD won't go down without a fight it seems... All empires
end with a bang. Be ready
lizabeth Warren wrote an
article
outlining in general terms how she would bring America's current foreign wars to an end. Perhaps the most significant part of the
article is her commitment to respect Congress' constitutional role in matters of war:
We will hold ourselves to this by recommitting to a simple idea: the constitutional requirement that Congress play a primary
role in deciding to engage militarily. The United States should not fight and cannot win wars without deep public support.
Successive administrations and Congresses have taken the easy way out by choosing military action without proper authorizations
or transparency with the American people. The failure to debate these military missions in public is one of the reasons
they have been allowed to continue without real prospect of success [bold mine-DL].
On my watch, that will end. I am committed to seeking congressional authorization if the use of force is required. Seeking
constrained authorizations with limited time frames will force the executive branch to be open with the American people and
Congress about our objectives, how the operation is progressing, how much it is costing, and whether it should continue.
Warren's commitment on this point is welcome, and it is what Americans should expect and demand from their presidential
candidates. It should be the bare minimum requirement for anyone seeking to be president, and any candidate who won't commit to
respecting the Constitution should never be allowed to have the powers of that office. The president is not permitted to launch
attacks and start wars alone, but Congress and the public have allowed several presidents to do just that without any consequences.
It is time to put a stop to illegal presidential wars, and it is also time to put a stop to open-ended authorizations of military
force. Warren's point about asking for "constrained authorizations with limited time frames" is important, and it is something that
we should insist on in any future debate over the use of force. The 2001 and 2002 AUMFs are still on the books and have been abused
and stretched beyond recognition to apply to groups that didn't exist when they were passed so that the U.S. can fight wars in
countries that don't threaten our security. Those need to be repealed as soon as possible to eliminate the opening that they have
provided the executive to make war at will.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is
unimpressed with Warren's rhetoric:
But what has Warren offered to do differently, or better? She's made no notable break with the class of experts who run our
failing foreign policy. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and like Trump or Obama, she hasn't hired a foreign-policy staff committed to a
different vision. And so her promise to turn war powers back to Congress should be considered as empty as Obama's promise to do
the same. Her promise to bring troops home would turn out to be as meaningless as a Trump tweet saying the same.
We shouldn't discount Warren's statements so easily. When a candidate makes specific commitments about ending U.S. wars during a
campaign, that is different from making vague statements about having a "humble" foreign policy. Bush ran on a conventional hawkish
foreign policy platform, and there were also no ongoing wars for him to campaign against, so we can't say that he ever ran as a
"dove." Obama campaigned against the Iraq war and ran on ending the U.S. military presence there, and before his first term was
finished almost all U.S. troops were out of Iraq. It is important to remember that he did not campaign against the war in
Afghanistan, and instead argued in support of it. His subsequent decision to commit many more troops there was a mistake, but it was
entirely consistent with what he campaigned on. In other words, he withdrew from the country he promised to withdraw from, and
escalated in the country where he said the U.S. should be fighting. Trump didn't actually campaign on ending any wars, but he did
talk about "bombing the hell" out of ISIS, and after he was elected he escalated the war on ISIS. His anti-Iranian obsession was out
in the open from the start if anyone cared to pay attention to it. In short, what candidates commit to doing during a campaign does
matter and it usually gives you a good idea of what a candidate will do once elected.
If Warren and some of the other Democratic candidates are committing to ending U.S. wars, we shouldn't assume that they won't
follow through on those commitments because previous presidents proved to be the hawks that they admitted to being all along.
Presidential candidates often tell us exactly what they mean to do, but we have to be paying attention to everything they say and
not just one catchphrase that they said a few times. If voters want a more peaceful foreign policy, they should vote for candidates
that actually campaign against ongoing wars instead of rewarding the ones that promise and then deliver escalation. But just voting
for the candidates that promise an end to wars is not enough if Americans want Congress to start doing its job by reining in the
executive. If we don't want presidents to run amok on war powers, there have to be political consequences for the ones that have
done that and there needs to be steady pressure on Congress to take back their role in matters of war. Voters should select
genuinely antiwar candidates, but then they also have to hold those candidates accountable once they're in office.
The deep state clearly is running the show (with some people unexpected imput -- see Trump
;-)
Elections now serve mainly for the legitimizing of the deep state rule; election of a
particular individual can change little, although there is some space of change due to the power
of executive branch. If the individual stray too much form the elite "forign policy consensus" he
ether will be JFKed or Russiagated (with the Special Prosecutor as the fist act and impeachment
as the second act of the same Russiagate drama)
But a talented (or reckless) individual can speed up some process that are already under way.
For example, Trump managed to speed up the process of destruction of the USA-centered neoliberal
empire considerably. Especially by launching the trade war with China. He also managed to
discredit the USA foreign policy as no other president before him. Even Bush II.
>This is the most critical U.S. election in our lifetime
> Posted by: Circe | Jan 23 2020 17:46 utc | 36
Hmmm, I've been hearing the same siren song every four years for the past fifty. How is it
that people still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of
murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?
Bureaucracies are reactionary and conservative by nature, so any new and more repressive
policy Trumpy wants is readily adapted, as shown by the continuing barbarity of ICE and the
growth of prisons and refugee concentration camps. Policies that go against the grain are
easily shrugged off and ignored using time-tested passive-aggressive tactics.
One of Trump's insurmountable problems is that he has no loyal organization behind him
whose members he can appoint throughout the massive Federal bureaucracy. Any Dummycrat whose
name is not "Biden" has the same problem. Without a real mass-movement political party to
pressure reluctant bureaucrats, no politician of any name or stripe will ever substantially
change the direction of US policy.
But the last thing Dummycrats want is a real mass movement, because they might not be able
to control it. Instead Uncle Sam will keep heading towards the cliff, which may be coming
into view...
The amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me.
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to believe A politician will/can change anything and give your consent to
war criminals and traitors?
NO person(s) WILL EVER get to the top in imperial/vassal state politics without being on the
rentier class side, the cognitive dissonans in voting for known liars, war criminals and
traitors would kill me or fry my brain. TINA is a lie and "she" is a real bitch that deserves
to be thrown on the dump off history, YOUR vote is YOUR consent to murder, theft and
treason.
DONT be a rentier class enabler STOP voting and start making your local communities better
and independent instead.
The amount of TINA worshipers and status quo guerillas is starting to depress me. <-
Norway
Of course, There Is Another Way, for example, kvetching. We can boldly show that we are
upset, and pessimistic. One upset pessimists reach critical mass we will think about some
actions.
But being upset and pessimistic does fully justify inactivity. In particular, given the
nature of social interaction networks, with spokes and hubs, dominating the network requires
the control of relatively few nodes. The nature of democracy always allows for leverage
takeover, starting from dominating within small to the entire nation in few steps. As it was
nicely explained by Prof. Overton, there is a window of positions that the vast majority
regards as reasonable, non-radical etc. One reason that powers to be invest so much energy
vilifying dissenters, Russian assets of late, is to keep them outside the Overton window.
Having a candidate elected that the curators of Overton window hate definitely shakes the
situation with the potential of shifting the window. There were some positive symptoms after
Trump was elected, but negatives prevail. "Why not we just kill him" idea entered the window,
together with "we took their oil because we have guts and common sense".
From that point of view, visibility of Tulsi and election of Sanders will solve some
problems but most of all, it will make big changes in Overton window.
One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the
verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we
don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am
telling you now which candidate to vote for.
"... Of course, Biden in 2019 said "I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else -- even distant family -- about their business interests. Period." ..."
"... James Biden : Joe's younger brother James has been deeply involved in the lawmaker's rise since the early days - serving as the finance chair of his 1972 Senate campaign. And when Joe became VP, James was a frequent guest at the White House - scoring invites to important state functions which often "dovetailed with his overseas business dealings," writes Schweizer. ..."
"... According to Fox Business 's Charlie Gasparino in 2012, HillStone's Iraq project was expected to "generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years," more than tripling their revenue. According to the report, James Biden split roughly $735 million with a group of minority partners . ..."
"... David Richter - the son of HillStone's parent company's founder - allegedly told investors at a private meeting; it really helps to have "the brother of the vice president as a partner." ..."
Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer is out with a new book, "
Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite," in which he reveals
that five members of the Biden family, including Hunter, got rich using former Vice President
Joe Biden's "largesse, favorable access and powerful position."
While we know of Hunter's profitable exploits in Ukraine and China - largely in part thanks
to Schweizer, Joe's brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and his son-in-law Howard all
used the former VP's status to enrich themselves.
Of course, Biden in 2019 said "I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else --
even distant family -- about their business interests. Period."
As Schweizer puts writes in the
New York Post ; "we shall see."
James Biden : Joe's younger brother James has been deeply involved in the lawmaker's rise since the early days - serving
as the finance chair of his 1972 Senate campaign. And when
Joe became VP, James was a frequent guest at the White House - scoring invites to important
state functions which often "dovetailed with his overseas business dealings," writes Schweizer.
Consider the case of
HillStone International , a subsidiary of the huge construction management firm, Hill
International. The president of HillStone International was Kevin Justice, who grew up in
Delaware and was a longtime Biden family friend. On November 4, 2010, according to White
House visitors' logs, Justice visited the White House and met with Biden adviser Michele
Smith in the Office of the Vice President .
Less than three weeks later, HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the
firm as an executive vice president . James appeared to have little or no background in
housing construction, but that did not seem to matter to HillStone. His bio on the company's
website noted his "40 years of experience dealing with principals in business, political,
legal and financial circles across the nation and internationally "
James Biden was joining HillStone just as the firm was starting negotiations to win a
massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build
100,000 homes. It was part of a $35 billion, 500,000-unit project deal won by TRAC
Development , a South Korean company. HillStone also received a $22 million U.S. federal
government contract to manage a construction project for the State Department. -
Peter Schweizer, via NY Post
According to Fox Business 's Charlie Gasparino in 2012, HillStone's Iraq project was
expected to "generate $1.5 billion in revenues over the next three years," more than tripling
their revenue. According to the report, James Biden split roughly $735 million with a group of
minority partners .
David Richter - the son of HillStone's parent company's founder - allegedly told investors
at a private meeting; it really helps to have "the brother of the vice president as a
partner."
Unfortunately for James, HillStone had to back out of the major contract in 2013 over a
series of problems, including a lack of experience - but the company maintained "significant
contract work in the embattled country" of Iraq, including a six-year contract with the US Army
Corps of Engineers.
In the ensuing years, James Biden profited off of Hill's lucrative contracts for dozens of
projects in the US, Puerto Rico, Mozambique and elsewhere.
Frank Biden , another one of Joe's brothers (who said the Pennsylvania Bidens
voted for Trump over Hillary), profited handsomely on real estate, casinos, and solar power
projects after Joe was picked as Obma's point man in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Months after Joe visited Costa Rica, Frank partnered with developer Craig Williamson and the
Guanacaste Country Club on a deal which appears to be ongoing.
In real terms, Frank's dream was to build in the jungles of Costa Rica thousands of homes,
a world-class golf course, casinos, and an anti-aging center. The Costa Rican government was
eager to cooperate with the vice president's brother.
As it happened, Joe Biden had been asked by President Obama to act as the Administration's
point man in Latin America and the Caribbean .
Frank's vision for a country club in Costa Rica received support from the highest levels
of the Costa Rican government -- despite his lack of experience in building such
developments. He met with the Costa Rican ministers of education and energy and environment,
as well as the president of the country. -
NY Post
And in 2016, the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education inked a deal with Frank's Company,
Sun Fund Americas to install solar power facilities across the country - a project the Obama
administration's OPIC authorized $6.5 million in taxpayer funds to support.
This went hand-in-hand with a solar initiative Joe Biden announced two years earlier, in
which "American taxpayer dollars were dedicated to facilitating deals that matched U.S.
government financing with local energy projects in Caribbean countries, including Jamaica,"
known as the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative (CESI).
Frank Biden's Sun Fund Americas announced later that it had signed a power purchase
agreement (PPA) to build a 20-megawatt solar facility in Jamaica.
Valerie Biden-Owens , Joe's sister, has run all of her brother's Senate campaigns - as well
as his 1988 and 2008 presidential runs.
She was also a senior partner in political messaging firm Joe Slade White & Company ,
where she and Slade White were listed as the only two executives at the time.
According to Schweizer, " The firm received large fees from the Biden campaigns that Valerie
was running . Two and a half million dollars in consulting fees flowed to her firm from
Citizens for Biden and Biden For President Inc. during the 2008 presidential bid alone."
Dr. Howard Krein - Joe Biden's son-in-law, is the chief medical officer of StartUp Health -
a medical investment consultancy that was barely up and running when, in June 2011, two of the
company's execs met with Joe Biden and former President Obama in the Oval Office .
The next day, the company was included in a prestigious health care tech conference run by
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) - while StartUp Health executives became
regular White House visitors between 2011 and 2015 .
StartUp Health offers to provide new companies technical and relationship advice in
exchange for a stake in the business. Demonstrating and highlighting the fact that you can
score a meeting with the president of the United States certainly helps prove a strategic
company asset: high-level contacts. -
NY Post
Speaking of his homie hookup, Krein described how his company gained access to the highest
levels of power in D.C.:
"I happened to be talking to my father-in-law that day and I mentioned Steve and Unity were
down there [in Washington, D.C.]," recalled Howard Krein. "He knew about StartUp Health and was
a big fan of it. He asked for Steve's number and said, 'I have to get them up here to talk with
Barack.' The Secret Service came and got Steve and Unity and brought them to the Oval
Office."
And then, of course, there's Hunter Biden - who was paid millions of dollars to sit on the
board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma while his father was Obama's point man in the
country.
But it goes far beyond that for the young crack enthusiast.
With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused
to his father's power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue's gallery of governments
and oligarchs around the world . Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father
aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the
deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to
be seeking something from his father.
There was, for example, Hunter's involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group
, where his business partner Devon Archer -- who'd been at Yale with Hunter -- sat on the
board of directors. Burnham became the vehicle for a number of murky deals abroad, involving
connected oligarchs in Kazakhstan and state-owned businesses in China.
But one of the most troubling Burnham ventures was here in the United States, in which
Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme
against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America , the Oglala Sioux.
Devon Archer was arrested in New York in May 2016 and
charged with "orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors and a Native American tribal
entity of tens of millions of dollars." Other victims of the fraud included several public
and union pension plans. Although Hunter Biden was not charged in the case, his fingerprints
were all over Burnham . The "legitimacy" that his name and political status as the vice
president's son lent to the plan was brought up repeatedly in the trial. -
NY Post
I can't quite understand how gratuitous US piracy and adventurism in places on the globe
beyond the knowledge and reach of most Americans could possibly be compared to Iranian
actions securing their immediate regional borders and interests. You can at least understand
(even if you critique) a US preoccupation with Cuba over the years, or drug cartels in
central America, or economic refugees in Mexico because they are close by and have a more
less direct effect on the stability of the US. But they have no authority beyond that other
than the ability to project violence and force. That's just simple imperialism. But now the
US have whacked a made guy without any real reason (i.e. looking at you the wrong way is not
a reason). Any mafia hood knows that, especially a New Yorker like Trump. So the climax of
The Godfather comes to mind. It is staggeringly naive and frankly moronic to think
that this is about good and evil. I bet Soleimani was no angel, but he wasn't whacked because
he was a bad guy, but because he was extraordinarily effective military organizer. Star Wars
has a lot to answer for in stunting the historical sensibilities of entire generations, but
its underlying narrative is the only MSM playbook now. Even more staggering is the stupendous
arrogance of the US belief in its 'rights' (based on thuggery and avarice), as though it were
the only power in the world capable of establishing a moral order. The lesson in humility to
come will be both long-awaited and go unheeded. Even the mob understand there has to be
rules.
After reading Crooke and Federicci's articles, there is only one way to stop this madness
blowing into a global conflict. Russia and China need to get involved whether they like it or
not. Diplomacy and sideline analysis has run its course. This is their time to stamp their
influence in the region and finish off the empire once and for all. Maybe that way, The
Europeans will grow some minerals and become sovereign again.
Otherwise, China can kiss its Belt and Road goodbye and go into a recession with the loss
of their investments up to this point and become slaves to the Americans again.
And Russia, the enemy du jour of Europe and US will be next and be crushed under economic
sanctions and isolation.
This is the moment that stars are aligned . Russia and China should park their battle
carriers off the Gulf and gives direct warning to Israel and US that any nuclear threat ,
tactical or otherwise, against anyone in the region is a non-starter.
I read so much about these two countries and that they will get involved. I have recited
those lines myself. But after these events and how things are escalating, I cannot see how
they cannot be involved. US is its most vulnerable and weakest with respect to economic,
diplomatic and military conditions.
The time of condemnations, letters of objection to the UN and veto votes in UNSC is over.
There is only one way to deal with a rogue nation and that is by force.
"We have learned today from #Iraq Prime Minister AdilAbdl Mahdi how @realDonaldTrump uses
diplomacy:
#US asked #Iraq to mediate with #Iran. Iraq PM asks #QassemSoleimani to come and talk to him
and give him the answer of his mediation, Trump &co assassinate an envoy at the airport."
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Forgive me for the somewhat redundant post, and again I hope this is not a waste of anyone's
time, but this is the source of the Interfax report I posted just above currently at #56. It
is relevant to the Ukrainegate impeachment fiasco.
The U.S. and lapdog EU/UK media will not touch this with a 10 foot pole.
KYIV. Dec 17 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine and the United States should investigate
the transfer of $29 million by businessman Victor Pinchuk from Ukraine to the Clinton
Foundation, Ukrainian Member of Parliament (independent) Andriy Derkach has said. According
to him, the investigation should check and establish how the Pinchuk Foundation's
activities were funded; it, among other projects, made a contribution of $29 million to the
Clinton Foundation. "Yesterday, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies registered criminal
proceeding number 12019000000001138. As part of this proceeding, I provided facts that
should be verified and established by the investigation. Establishing these facts will also
help the American side to conduct its own investigation and establish the origin of the
money received by [Hillary] Clinton," Derkach said at a press conferences at
Interfax-Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, December 17.
According to him, it was the independent French online publication Mediapart that first
drew attention to the money withdrawal scheme from Ukraine and Pinchuk's financing of the
Clinton Foundation.
"The general scheme is as follows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent money to
Ukraine in 2015. The same year, Victor Pinchuk's Credit Dnepr [Bank] received UAH 357
million in a National Bank stabilization loan from the IMF's disbursement. Delta Bank was
given a total of UAH 5.110 billion in loans. The banks siphoned the money through Austria's
Meinl Bank into offshore accounts, and further into [the accounts of] the Pinchuk
Foundation. The money siphoning scam was confirmed by a May 2016 ruling by [Kyiv's]
Pechersky court. The total damage from this scam involving other banks is estimated at $800
million. The Pinchuk Foundation transferred $29 million to the Foundation of Clinton, a
future U.S. presidential candidate from the Democratic Party," Derkach said.
And again, if we do win despite all the structural injustices in the system the Rs inherited and seek to expand, well, those
injustices don't really absolutely need to be corrected, because we will still have gotten the right result from the system
as is.
This is a pretty apt description of the mindset of Corporate Democrats. Thank you !
May I recommend you to listen to Chris Hedge 2011 talk
On Death of the Liberal Class At least to the first
part of it.
Corporate Dems definitely lack courage, and as such are probably doomed in 2020.
Of course, the impeachment process will weight on Trump, but the Senate hold all trump cards, and might reverse those effects
very quickly and destroy, or at lease greatly diminish, any chances for Corporate Demorats even complete on equal footing in 2020
elections. IMHO Pelosi gambit is a really dangerous gambit, a desperate move, a kind of "Heil Mary" pass.
Despair is a very powerful factor in the resurgence of far right forces. And that's what happening right now and that's why
I suspect that far right populism probably will be the decisive factor in 2020 elections.
IMHO Chris explains what the most probable result on 2020 elections with be with amazing clarity.
It seems to me an important tenet of the neoliberal ideology is the arbiter (or
auctioneer) role it gives the state and other political institutions with respect to markets.
Markets are the locus of justice and efficiency, but political institutions have the
essential task of organizing them and the competitions that takes place within them,
supposedly at least.
In practice, this translated in a central role of political power not only in privatizing
and breaking state monopolies, but also in the creation, sometimes ex nihilo, of markets
supervised by state or quasi-state agencies (shielded of electoral choices by regulatory or
ideally constitutional provisions) whose role was to organize concurrence in domains
classical liberal economic theory would consider natural monopolies or natural public
properties (education, health service, energy distribution, infrastructure of transportation,
telecommunication, postal and banking service etc.)
What an excellent and deep observation ! Thank you ! This is the essence of the compromises
with financial oligarchy made by failing social democratic parties. Neoliberalism is kind of
Trotskyism for the rich in which the political power is used to shape the society "from above".
As Hayek remarked on his visit to Pinochet's Chile – "my personal preference leans toward
a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism".
George Monblot observed that "Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket [of
the financial oligarchy], but it rapidly became one." ( The Guardian, Apr 15, 2016):
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It
redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and
selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the
market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation
should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and
collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the
formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a
reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts
to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market
ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
The free (as in absence of regulation for FIRE) market produces a tiny cadre of winners and
an enormous army of losers (10% vs 90%) – and the losers, looking for revenge, have
turned to Trump. Now entrenched centers of "resistance" (and first of all CIA, the Justice
Department, The Department of State and a part of Pentagon) are trying to reverse the
situation. Failing to understand that they created Trump and each time will reproduce it in
more and more dangerous variant.
Trumpism is the inevitable result of the gap between the utopian ideal of the free (for the
FIRE sector only ) market and the dystopian reality for the majority of the population
("without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape" Pope Francis, "Evangelii
Gaudium")
The situation in which the financial sector generates just 4% of employment, but accounts
for more than 25% of corporate profits is unsustainable. It should be reversed and it will be
reversed.
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic
profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.
Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming
anytime soon.
So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's
work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.
Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his
exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
Transcription
[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]
Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte
Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't
know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard
this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from
the audience]
I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.
To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one
of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.
The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority
don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.
What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two
different things.
I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences
with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.
I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political
Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back
to that later.
From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war
reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.
Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July
1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.
I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in
a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign
TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The
first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops,
if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry
a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.
We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing.
First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents
of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks
in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.
It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.
While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames
and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war
in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.
So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking
all the time? '
'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'
That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you
didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'
I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed,
sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't
know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.
Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'
'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind
from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!
I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism
and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional
case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my
father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out
of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that
for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't
only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media
outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private
media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles
extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't
question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't
– I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that
I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has
to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president
or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip,
the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or
the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations,
briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the
same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.
All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that
way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are
out.
Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You
can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues
who went along on a trip to the US.
They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany,
and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance.
No one talks about it.
You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed?
I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly
similar way?'
In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation
The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.
We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow.
I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close
connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone
I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.
Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular
media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman
on the Arabian peninsula.
When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the
head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought
a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country,
so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is
also the head of an environmental foundation.
But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had
never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite
in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.
I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to
learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate.
On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid
for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism.
In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.
There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about
human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to
this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing
everything else – because I was bought.
Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in
my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline,
invited me to such a trip.
I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively,
because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns,
from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two
days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.
Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer
tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed
– maybe they do exist.
They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my
newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many
colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels,
when a new car is presented.
Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".
But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns
the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't
about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.
I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German
Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And
the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during
my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received
an honorary citizenship.
I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively.
I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said
'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'
I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.
I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But
I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal.
When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line',
for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.
This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s,
Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper,
we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.
I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia
– I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception
and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]
Without any fuss I got another room.
Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what
had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.
With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite
simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.
This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls
the wires.
No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or
if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the
reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.
But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with
CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.
I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.
I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.
I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before
end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.
He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'
I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean
for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.
I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for
you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'
I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get
20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop
telling me what I would receive.
It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate
in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'
So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls
one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks
and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought
of East Germany, we had to do role play.
The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house,
in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.
We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for
free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were
allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.
After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.
He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction
to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at
potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact
me later, in my occupation.
They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then
working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.
Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.
Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given,
but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.
I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly
say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'
I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because
what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing
were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.
It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission.
Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte
fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'
I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well
until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.
But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely
integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.
That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and
so-called serious papers.
Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not
being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the
background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence
services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.
I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received
stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.
They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer
should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because
he wasn't allowed
For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room.
In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When
I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that
I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.
These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.
If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have
received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based
on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of
something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign
intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that
they received them as a reward for well performed service.
You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.
If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts,
everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.
It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.
It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this
is wrong.
But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next
day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists
are looking for work or commissions.
That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising,
doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.
But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that
be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.
September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery.
I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about
this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial
crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should
embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.
But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times,
and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw
their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything
will be fine.
In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy
theory.
I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described
in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?
Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble.
Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?
I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.
It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.
But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.
Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned.
Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'
Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be
big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like
to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience
can tell me how to do so without all these problems?
Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from
alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.
I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many
portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white,
religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there,
and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know
how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.
And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.
To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different
opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.
But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my
personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this,
quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What
I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.
I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write
books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that
you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line,
but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.
That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an
engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but
if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.
I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles
are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.
I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise;
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international
organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the
Middle East..
If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam
Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty,
at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.
We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable
situation than ever.
You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if
I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North
Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.
But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting
with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'
Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?
End transcription
The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the
first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial
purposes.
Terje Maloy (
Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working
in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western
governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian,
but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting
perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with
& propagate . . .
Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents
Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't
Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists'
hands tied, too.
The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand
that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many
ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing
feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling
you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled
" and the only reply possible is,
"Which case number ?"
life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d
extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: congrats.@OffG
Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at
best just reason with him or her :- better than calling
INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would
you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude,
with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.
Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter
and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?
From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on
a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany
& Austria.
But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches
gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda
fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption
& the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten
? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret
services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?
Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure
(and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM
eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate
interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap
of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.
You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is
untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.
This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?
mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell
your soul?
Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described.
DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems
Part II:
Bought Science
Part III:
Bought Health Services
mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share.
boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best
selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't
get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could
have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as
they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."
Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and
completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human
rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs,
politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used
to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice
is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities
that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."
Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:
"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who
lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have
to live on lentils.'
To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."
which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream,
the illusion of being free..
Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News
by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.
Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?
Book burning anyone?
nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross
hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte
had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').
The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle
Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran
– that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German
chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous
and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism
– but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness
in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran.
The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand
containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.
Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric
and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological
projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.
Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:
If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use
it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.
nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.
So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.
nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired
outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You
are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.
But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.
Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the
get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had
his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting
attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).
This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything
required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global
economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.
Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.
If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest
publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold
standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy)
against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools
for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the
greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption
and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing
participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical
assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.
Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least
the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have
instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.
Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all
writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as
writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers
don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence
Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they
could get their greedy hands on at the time.
Developing a conscience late in life is too late.
May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.
Once pond scum always pond scum.
MOU
nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different
altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was
offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.
It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm
– always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other
name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.
And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is
that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I
received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.
Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.
MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is
involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can
to get what they want.
All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable
than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.
If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.
"... Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic growth without end/crisis. ..."
"... I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent, rigid class system ..."
"... If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive. Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners. ..."
"... The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things (despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly likely to be manipulated like Trump. ..."
"... I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral values against socialism, no matter what voters say. ..."
The headline will become operative in December, if as expected, the Trump Administration
maintains its refusal to nominate new judges
to the WTO appellate panel . That will render the WTO unable to take on new cases, and
bring about an effective return to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which
preceded the WTO .
An interesting sidelight is that Brexit No-Dealers have been keen on the merits of trading
"on WTO terms", but those terms will probably be unenforceable by the time No Deal happens (if
it does).
likbez 10.27.19 at 11:22 pm
That's another manifestation of the ascendance of "national neoliberalism," which now is
displacing "classic neoliberalism."
Attempts to remove Trump via color revolution mechanisms (Russiagate, Ukrainegate) are
essentially connected with the desire of adherents of classic neoliberalism to return to the
old paradigm and kick the can down the road until the cliff. I think it is impossible because
the neoliberal elite lost popular support (aka support of deplorables) and now is hanging in
the air. "Greed is good" mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to
be very destructive.
That's why probably previous attempts to remove Trump were unsuccessful. And if corrupt
classic neoliberal Biden wins Neoliberal Dem Party nomination, the USA probably will get the
second term of Trump. Warren might have a chance as "Better Trump then Trump" although she
proved so far to be pretty inept politician, and like "original" Trump probably can be easily
coerced by the establishment, if she wins.
All this weeping and gnashing of teeth by "neoliberal Intelligentsia" does not change the
fact that neoliberalism entered the period of structural crisis demonstrated by "secular
stagnation," and, as such, its survival is far from certain. We probably can argue only about
how long it will take for the "national neoliberalism" to dismantle it and what shape or form
the new social order will take.
That does not mean that replacing the classic neoliberalism the new social order will be
better, or more just. Neoliberalism was actually two steps back in comparison with the New
Deal Capitalism that it replaced. It clearly was a social regress.
John, I am legitimate curious what you find "exactly right" in the comment above. Other than
the obvious bit in the last line about new deal vs neoliberalism, I would say it is
completely wrong, band presenting an amazingly distorted view of both the last few years and
recent history.
Neo-liberalism is not a unified thing. Right wing parties are not following the original
(the value of choice) paradigm of Milton Friedman that won the argument during the 1970s
inflation panic, but have implemented a deceitful bait and switch strategy, followed by
continually shifting the goalposts – claiming – it would of worked but we weren't
pure enough.
But parts of what Milton Friedman said (for instance the danger of bad micro-economic
design of welfare systems creating poverty traps, and the inherent problems of high tariff
rates) had a kernel of truth. (Unfortunately, Friedman's macro-economics was almost all wrong
and has done great damage.)
"In that context it felt free to override national governments on any issue that
might affect international trade, most notably environmental policies."
Not entirely sure about that. The one case where I was informed enough to really know
detail was the China and rare earths WTO case. China claimed that restrictions on exports of
separated but otherwise unprocessed rare earths were being made on environmental grounds.
Rare earth mining is a messy business, especially the way they do it.
Well, OK. And if such exports were being limited on environmental grounds then that would
be WTO compliant. Which is why the claim presumably.
It was gently or not pointed out that exports of things made from those same rare earths
were not limited in any sense. Therefore that environmental justification might not be quite
the real one. Possibly, it was an attempt to suck RE using industry into China by making rare
earths outside in short supply, but the availability for local processing being unrestricted?
Certainly, one customer of mine at the time seriously considered packing up the US factory
and moving it.
China lost the WTO case. Not because environmental reasons aren't a justification for
restrictions on trade but because no one believed that was the reason, rather than the
justification.
I don't know about other cases – shrimp, tuna – but there is at least the
possibility that it's the argument, not the environment, which wasn't sufficient
justification?
Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every political and
institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of the free market.
In the EU, East Asia, and North America, some of what has taken place is the
rationalization of bureaucratic practices and the weakening of archaic localisms. Some of
these developments have been positive.
In this respect, neoliberalism in the blanket sense used by Likbez and many others is like
what the the ancien regime was, a mix of regressive and progressive tendencies. In the
aftermath of the on-going upheaval, it is likely that it will be reassessed and some of its
features will be valued if they manage to persist.
I'm thinking of international trade agreements, transnational scientific organizations,
and confederations like the European Union.
steven t johnson 10.29.19 at 12:29 am
If I may venture to translate @1?
Right-wing populism like Orban, Salvini, the Brexiteers are sweeping the globe and this is
more of the same.
Trying to head off redivision of the world into nationalist trade blocks by removing
Trump via dubiously democratic upheavals (like color revolutions) with more or less fictional
quasi-scandals as pro-Russian treason or anti-Ukrainian treason (which is "Huh?" on the face
of it,) is futile. It stems from a desire to keep on "free" trading despite the secular
stagnation that has set in, hoping that the sociopolitical nowhere (major at least) doesn't
collapse until God or Nature or something restores the supposedly natural order of economic
growth without end/crisis.
I think efforts to keep the neoliberal international WTO/IMF/World Bank "free" trading
system is futile because the lower orders are being ordered to be satisfied with a permanent,
rigid class system .
If the pie is to shrink forever, all the vile masses (the deplorables) are going to
hang together in their various ways, clinging to shared identity in race or religion or
nationality, which will leave the international capitalists hanging, period. "Greed is good"
mantra, and the redistribution of the wealth up at the end proved to be very destructive.
Saying "Greed is good," then expecting selflessness from the lowers is not high-minded but
self-serving. Redistribution of wealth upward has been terribly destructive to social
cohesion, both domestically and in the sense of generosity towards foreigners.
The pervasive feeling that "we" are going down and drastic action has to be taken is
probably why there hasn't been much traction for impeachment til now. If Biden, shown to be
shady in regards to Hunter, is nominated to lead the Democratic Party into four/eight years
of Obama-esque promise to continue shrinking the status quo for the lowers, Trump will
probably win. Warren might have a better chance to convince voters she means to change things
(despite the example of Obama,) but she's not very appealing. And she is almost certainly
likely to be manipulated like Trump.
Again, despite the fury the old internationalism is collapsing under stagnation and
weeping about it is irrelevant. Without any real ideas, we can only react to events as
nationalist predatory capitals fight for their new world.
I'm not saying the new right wing populism is better. The New Deal/Great Society did more
for America than its political successors since Nixon et al. The years since 1968 I think
have been a regression and I see no reason–alas–that it can't get even worse.
I *think* that's more or less what likbez, said, though obviously it's not the way
likbez wanted to express it. I disagree strenuously on some details, like Warren's problem
being a schoolmarm, rather than being a believer in capitalism who shares Trump's moral
values against socialism, no matter what voters say.
It is a particular mutation of the original concept similar to mutation of socialism into
national socialism, when domestic policies are mostly preserved (including rampant
deregulation) and supplemented by repressive measures (total surveillance) , but in foreign
policy "might make right" and unilateralism with the stress on strictly bilateral regulations
of trade (no WTO) somewhat modifies "Washington consensus". In other words, the foreign
financial oligarchy has a demoted status under the "national neoliberalism" regime, while the
national financial oligarchy and manufactures are elevated.
And the slogan of "financial oligarchy of all countries, unite" which is sine qua
non of classic neoliberalism is effectively dead and is replaced by protection racket of
the most political powerful players (look at Biden and Ukrainian oligarchs behavior here
;-)
> I think every sentence in that comment is either completely wrong or at least
debatable. And is likbez actually John Hewson, because that comment reads like one of John
Hewson's commentaries
> Most obviously, to define Warren and Trump as both being neoliberals drains the
term of any meaning
You are way too fast even for a political football forward ;-).
Warren capitalizes on the same discontent and the feeling of the crisis of neoliberalism
that allowed Trump to win. Yes, she is a much better candidate than Trump, and her policy
proposals are better (unless she is coerced by the Deep State like Trump in the first three
months of her Presidency).
Still, unlike Sanders in domestic policy and Tulsi in foreign policy, she is a neoliberal
reformist at heart and a neoliberal warmonger in foreign policy. Most of her policy proposals
are quite shallow, and are just a band-aid.
> Neoliberalism gets used as a generalized term of abuse these days. Not every
political and institutional development of the last 40 years comes down to the worship of
the free market.
This is a typical stance of neoliberal MSM, a popular line of attack on critics of
neoliberalism.
Yes, of course, not everything political and institutional development of the last 40
years comes down to the worship of the "free market." But how can it be otherwise? Notions of
human agency, a complex interaction of politics and economics in human affairs, technological
progress since 1970th, etc., all play a role. But a historian needs to be able to somehow
integrate the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story.
And IMHO this story for the last several decades is the ascendance and now decline of
"classic neoliberalism" with its stress on the neoliberal globalization and opening of the
foreign markets for transnational corporations (often via direct or indirect (financial)
pressure, or subversive actions including color revolutions and military intervention) and
replacement of it by "national neoliberalism" -- domestic neoliberalism without (or with a
different type of) neoliberal globalization.
Defining features of national neoliberalism along with the rejection of neoliberal
globalization and, in particular, multiparty treaties like WTO is massive, overwhelming
propaganda including politicized witch hunts (via neoliberal MSM), total surveillance of
citizens by the national security state institutions (three-letter agencies which now
acquired a political role), as well as elements of classic nationalism built-in.
The dominant ideology of the last 30 years was definitely connected with "worshiping of
free markets," a secular religion that displaced alternative views and, for several decades
(say 1976 -2007), dominated the discourse. So worshiping (or pretense of worshiping) of "free
market" (as if such market exists, and is not a theological construct -- a deity of some
sort) is really defining feature here.
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
The term "centrist" is replaced by a more appropriate term "neoliberal oligarchy"
Notable quotes:
"... Furthermore, Donald Trump might well emerge from this national ordeal with his reelection chances enhanced. Such a prospect is belatedly insinuating itself into public discourse. For that reason, certain anti-Trump pundits are already showing signs of going wobbly, suggesting , for instance, that censure rather than outright impeachment might suffice as punishment for the president's various offenses. Yet censuring Trump while allowing him to stay in office would be the equivalent of letting Harvey Weinstein off with a good tongue-lashing so that he can get back to making movies. Censure is for wimps. ..."
"... So if Trump finds himself backed into a corner, Democrats aren't necessarily in a more favorable position. And that aren't the half of it. Let me suggest that, while Trump is being pursued, it's you, my fellow Americans, who are really being played. The unspoken purpose of impeachment is not removal, but restoration. The overarching aim is not to replace Trump with Mike Pence -- the equivalent of exchanging Groucho for Harpo. No, the object of the exercise is to return power to those who created the conditions that enabled Trump to win the White House in the first place. ..."
"... For many of the main participants in this melodrama, the actual but unstated purpose of impeachment is to correct this great wrong and thereby restore history to its anointed path. ..."
"... In a recent column in The Guardian, Professor Samuel Moyn makes the essential point: Removing from office a vulgar, dishonest and utterly incompetent president comes nowhere close to capturing what's going on here. To the elites most intent on ousting Trump, far more important than anything he may say or do is what he signifies. He is a walking, talking repudiation of everything they believe and, by extension, of a future they had come to see as foreordained. ..."
"... Moyn styles these anti-Trump elites as "neoliberal oligarchy", members of the post-Cold War political mainstream that allowed ample room for nominally conservative Bushes and nominally liberal Clintons, while leaving just enough space for Barack Obama's promise of hope-and-(not-too-much) change. ..."
"... These "neoliberal oligarchy" share a common worldview. They believe in the universality of freedom as defined and practiced within the United States. They believe in corporate capitalism operating on a planetary scale. They believe in American primacy, with the United States presiding over a global order as the sole superpower. They believe in "American global leadership," which they define as primarily a military enterprise. And perhaps most of all, while collecting degrees from Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Yale, they came to believe in a so-called meritocracy as the preferred mechanism for allocating wealth, power and privilege. All of these together comprise the sacred scripture of contemporary American political elites. And if Donald Trump's antagonists have their way, his removal will restore that sacred scripture to its proper place as the basis of policy. ..."
"... "For all their appeals to enduring moral values," Moyn writes, "the "neoliberal oligarchy" are deploying a transparent strategy to return to power." Destruction of the Trump presidency is a necessary precondition for achieving that goal. ""neoliberal oligarchy" simply want to return to the status quo interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility." Precisely. ..."
"... how does such misconduct compare to the calamities engineered by the "neoliberal oligarchy" who preceded him? ..."
"... Trump's critics speak with one voice in demanding accountability. Yet virtually no one has been held accountable for the pain, suffering, and loss inflicted by the architects of the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Why is that? As another presidential election approaches, the question not only goes unanswered, but unasked. ..."
"... To win reelection, Trump, a corrupt con man (who jumped ship on his own bankrupt casinos, money in hand, leaving others holding the bag) will cheat and lie. Yet, in the politics of the last half-century, these do not qualify as novelties. (Indeed, apart from being the son of a sitting U.S. vice president, what made Hunter Biden worth $50Gs per month to a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch? I'm curious.) That the president and his associates are engaging in a cover-up is doubtless the case. Yet another cover-up proceeds in broad daylight on a vastly larger scale. "Trump's shambolic presidency somehow seems less unsavory," Moyn writes, when considering the fact that his critics refuse "to admit how massively his election signified the failure of their policies, from endless war to economic inequality." Just so. ..."
"... Exactly. Trump is the result of voter disgust with Bush III vs Clinton II, the presumed match up for a year or more leading up to 2016. Now Democrats want to do it again, thinking they can elect anybody against Trump. That's what Hillary thought too. ..."
"... Trump won for lack of alternatives. Our political class is determined to prevent any alternatives breaking through this time either. They don't want Trump, but even more they want to protect their gravy train of donor money, the huge overspending on medical care (four times the defense budget) and of course all those Forever Wars. ..."
"... Trump could win, for the same reasons as last time, even though the result would be no better than last time. ..."
"... I wish the slick I.D. politics obsessed corporate Dems nothing but the worst, absolute worst. They reap what they sow. If it means another four years of Trump, so be it. It's the price that's going to have to be paid. ..."
"... At a time when a majority of U.S. citizens cannot muster up $500 for an emergency dental bill or car repair without running down to the local "pay day loan" lender shark (now established as legitimate businesses) the corporate Dems, in their infinite wisdom, decide to concoct an impeachment circus to run simultaneously when all the dirt against the execrable Brennan and his intel minions starts to hit the press for their Russiagate hoax. Nice sleight of hand there corporate Dems. ..."
There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they
think.
From the time of Donald Trump's election, American elites have hungered for this moment. At
long last, they have the 45th president of the United States cornered. In typically ham-handed
fashion, Trump has given his adversaries the very means to destroy him politically. They will
not waste the opportunity. Impeachment now -- finally, some will say -- qualifies as a virtual
certainty.
No doubt many surprises lie ahead. Yet the Democrats controlling the House of
Representatives have passed the point of no return. The time for prudential judgments -- the
Republican-controlled Senate will never convict, so why bother? -- is gone for good. To back
down now would expose the president's pursuers as spineless cowards. TheNew York
Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC would not soon forgive such craven behavior.
So, as President Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919 put it, "The stage is set, the
destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God." Of
course, the issue back then was a notably weighty one: whether to ratify the Versailles Treaty.
That it now concerns a "
Mafia-like shakedown " orchestrated by one of Wilson's successors tells us something about
the trajectory of American politics over the course of the last century and it has not been a
story of ascent.
The effort to boot the president from office is certain to yield a memorable spectacle. The
rancor and contempt that have clogged American politics like a backed-up sewer since the day of
Trump's election will now find release. Watergate will pale by comparison. The uproar triggered
by Bill Clinton's "
sexual relations " will be nothing by comparison. A de facto collaboration between
Trump, those who despise him, and those who despise his critics all but guarantees that this
story will dominate the news, undoubtedly for months to come.
As this process unspools, what politicians like to call "the people's business" will go
essentially unattended. So while Congress considers whether or not to remove Trump from office,
gun-control legislation will languish, the deterioration of the nation's infrastructure will
proceed apace, needed healthcare reforms will be tabled, the military-industrial complex will
waste yet more billions, and the national debt, already at $22 trillion --
larger, that is, than the entire economy -- will continue to surge. The looming threat posed by
climate change, much talked about of late, will proceed all but unchecked. For those of us
preoccupied with America's role in the world, the obsolete assumptions and habits undergirding
what's still called " national
security " will continue to evade examination. Our endless wars will remain endless and
pointless.
By way of compensation, we might wonder what benefits impeachment is likely to yield.
Answering that question requires examining four scenarios that describe the range of
possibilities awaiting the nation.
The first and most to be desired (but least likely) is that Trump will tire of being a
public piñata and just quit. With the thrill of flying in Air Force One having
worn off, being president can't be as much fun these days. Why put up with further grief? How
much more entertaining for Trump to retire to the political sidelines where he can tweet up a
storm and indulge his penchant for name-calling. And think of the "deals" an ex-president could
make in countries like Israel, North Korea, Poland, and Saudi Arabia on which he's bestowed
favors. Cha-ching! As of yet, however, the president shows no signs of taking the easy (and
lucrative) way out.
The second possible outcome sounds almost as good but is no less implausible: a sufficient
number of Republican senators rediscover their moral compass and "do the right thing," joining
with Democrats to create the two-thirds majority needed to convict Trump and send him packing.
In the Washington of that classic 20th-century film director Frank Capra, with Jimmy Stewart
holding
forth on the Senate floor and a moist-eyed Jean Arthur cheering him on from the gallery,
this might have happened. In the real Washington of "Moscow Mitch"
McConnell , think again.
The third somewhat seamier outcome might seem a tad more likely. It postulates that
McConnell and various GOP senators facing reelection in 2020 or 2022 will calculate that
turning on Trump just might offer the best way of saving their own skins. The president's
loyalty to just about anyone, wives included, has always been highly contingent, the people
streaming out of his administration routinely making the point. So why should senatorial
loyalty to the president be any different? At the moment, however, indications that Trump
loyalists out in the hinterlands will reward such turncoats are just about nonexistent. Unless
that base were to flip, don't expect Republican senators to do anything but flop.
That leaves outcome No. 4, easily the most probable: while the House will impeach, the
Senate will decline to convict. Trump will therefore stay right where he is, with the matter of
his fitness for office effectively deferred to the November 2020 elections. Except as a source
of sadomasochistic diversion, the entire agonizing experience will, therefore, prove to be a
colossal waste of time and blather.
Furthermore, Donald Trump might well emerge from this national ordeal with his reelection
chances enhanced. Such a prospect is belatedly insinuating itself into public discourse. For
that reason, certain anti-Trump pundits are already showing signs of going wobbly,
suggesting , for instance, that censure rather than outright impeachment might suffice as
punishment for the president's various offenses. Yet censuring Trump while allowing him to stay
in office would be the equivalent of letting Harvey Weinstein off with a good tongue-lashing so
that he can get back to making movies. Censure is for wimps.
Besides, as Trump campaigns for a second term, he would almost surely wear censure like a
badge of honor. Keep in mind that Congress's
approval ratings are considerably worse than his. To more than a few members of the public,
a black mark awarded by Congress might look like a gold star.
Restoration Not Removal
So if Trump finds himself backed into a corner, Democrats aren't necessarily in a more
favorable position. And that aren't the half of it. Let me suggest that, while Trump is being
pursued, it's you, my fellow Americans, who are really being played. The unspoken purpose of
impeachment is not removal, but restoration. The overarching aim is not to replace Trump with
Mike Pence -- the equivalent of exchanging Groucho for Harpo. No, the object of the exercise is
to return power to those who created the conditions that enabled Trump to win the White House
in the first place.
Just recently, for instance, Hillary Clinton
declared Trump to be an "illegitimate president." Implicit in her charge is the conviction
-- no doubt sincere -- that people like Donald Trump are not supposed to be president.
People like Hillary Clinton -- people possessing credentials
like hers and sharing her values -- should be the chosen ones. Here we glimpse the true
meaning of legitimacy in this context. Whatever the vote in the Electoral College, Trump
doesn't deserve to be president and never did.
For many of the main participants in this melodrama, the actual but unstated purpose of
impeachment is to correct this great wrong and thereby restore history to its anointed
path.
In a
recent column in The Guardian, Professor Samuel Moyn makes the essential point:
Removing from office a vulgar, dishonest and utterly incompetent president comes nowhere close
to capturing what's going on here. To the elites most intent on ousting Trump, far more
important than anything he may say or do is what he signifies. He is a walking, talking
repudiation of everything they believe and, by extension, of a future they had come to see as
foreordained.
Moyn styles these anti-Trump elites as "neoliberal oligarchy", members of the post-Cold War political
mainstream that allowed ample room for nominally conservative Bushes and nominally liberal
Clintons, while leaving just enough space for Barack Obama's promise of hope-and-(not-too-much)
change.
These "neoliberal oligarchy" share a common worldview. They believe in the universality of freedom as
defined and practiced within the United States. They believe in corporate capitalism operating
on a planetary scale. They believe in American primacy, with the United States presiding over a
global order as the sole superpower. They believe in "American global leadership," which they
define as primarily a military enterprise. And perhaps most of all, while collecting degrees
from Georgetown, Harvard, Oxford, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, and Yale, they came to
believe in a so-called meritocracy as the preferred mechanism for allocating wealth, power and
privilege. All of these together comprise the sacred scripture of contemporary American
political elites. And if Donald Trump's antagonists have their way, his removal will restore
that sacred scripture to its proper place as the basis of policy.
"For all their appeals to enduring moral values," Moyn writes, "the "neoliberal oligarchy" are deploying
a transparent strategy to return to power." Destruction of the Trump presidency is a necessary
precondition for achieving that goal. ""neoliberal oligarchy" simply want to return to the status quo
interrupted by Trump, their reputations laundered by their courageous opposition to his
mercurial reign, and their policies restored to credibility." Precisely.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
The U.S. military's "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad at the start of the Iraq War, as
broadcast on CNN.
For such a scheme to succeed, however, laundering reputations alone will not suffice.
Equally important will be to bury any recollection of the catastrophes that paved the way for
an über -qualified centrist to lose to an indisputably unqualified and
unprincipled political novice in 2016.
Holding promised security assistance hostage unless a foreign leader agrees to do you
political favors is obviously and indisputably wrong. Trump's antics regarding Ukraine may even
meet some definition of criminal. Still, how does such misconduct compare to the calamities engineered by the "neoliberal
oligarchy" who preceded him? Consider, in particular, the George W. Bush
administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (along with the spin-off wars that followed).
Consider, too, the reckless economic policies that produced the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
As measured by the harm inflicted on the American people (and others), the offenses for which
Trump is being impeached qualify as mere misdemeanors.
Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental
hubris. When it comes to tallying up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who
sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include
thousands of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to
struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands of non-Americans killed or injured ;
millions displaced ;
trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and in its case
even formed
inside a U.S. prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it
has yet to recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the
administration of President Bill Clinton and continued by his successor. Deregulating the
banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet, as a
direct result of
the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment
shot up to 10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock
market cratered and millions saw their life savings evaporate. Again, the question must be
asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?
Trump's critics speak with one voice in demanding accountability. Yet virtually no one has
been held accountable for the pain, suffering, and loss inflicted by the architects of the Iraq
War and the Great Recession. Why is that? As another presidential election approaches, the
question not only goes unanswered, but unasked.
Sen. Carter Glass (D–Va.) and Rep. Henry B. Steagall (D–Ala.-3), the co-sponsors of
the 1932 Glass–Steagall Act separating investment and commercial banking, which was
repealed in 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)
To win reelection, Trump, a corrupt con man (who jumped ship
on his own bankrupt casinos, money in hand, leaving others holding the bag) will cheat and lie.
Yet, in the politics of the last half-century, these do not qualify as novelties. (Indeed,
apart from being the son of a sitting U.S. vice president, what made Hunter Biden
worth $50Gs per month to a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch? I'm curious.) That
the president and his associates are engaging in a cover-up is doubtless the case. Yet another
cover-up proceeds in broad daylight on a vastly larger scale. "Trump's shambolic presidency
somehow seems less unsavory," Moyn writes, when considering the fact that his critics refuse
"to admit how massively his election signified the failure of their policies, from endless war
to economic inequality." Just so.
What are the real crimes? Who are the real criminals? No matter what happens in the coming
months, don't expect the Trump impeachment proceedings to come within a country mile of
addressing such questions.
Exactly. Trump is the result of voter disgust with Bush III vs Clinton II, the presumed
match up for a year or more leading up to 2016. Now Democrats want to do it again, thinking they can elect anybody against Trump. That's
what Hillary thought too.
Now the Republicans who lost their party to Trump think they can take it back with
somebody even more lame than Jeb, if only they could find someone, anyone, to run on that
non-plan.
Trump won for lack of alternatives. Our political class is determined to prevent any
alternatives breaking through this time either. They don't want Trump, but even more they
want to protect their gravy train of donor money, the huge overspending on medical care (four
times the defense budget) and of course all those Forever Wars.
Trump could win, for the same reasons as last time, even though the result would be no
better than last time.
LJ , October 9, 2019 at 17:01
Well, yeah but I recall that what won Trump the Republican Nomination was first and
foremost his stance on Immigration. This issue is what separated him from the herd of
candidates . None of them had the courage or the desire to go against Governmental Groupthink
on Immigration. All he then had to do was get on top of low energy Jeb Bush and the road was
clear. He got the base on his side on this issue and on his repeated statement that he wished
to normalize relations with Russia . He won the nomination easily. The base is still on his
side on these issues but Governmental Groupthink has prevailed in the House, the Senate, the
Intelligence Services and the Federal Courts. Funny how nobody in the Beltway, especially not
in media, is brave enough to admit that the entire Neoconservative scheme has been a disaster
and that of course we should get out of Syria . Nor can anyone recall the corruption and
warmongering that now seem that seems endemic to the Democratic Party. Of course Trump has to
wear goat's horns. "Off with his head".
Drew Hunkins , October 9, 2019 at 16:00
I wish the slick I.D. politics obsessed corporate Dems nothing but the worst, absolute
worst. They reap what they sow. If it means another four years of Trump, so be it. It's the
price that's going to have to be paid.
At a time when a majority of U.S. citizens cannot muster up $500 for an emergency dental
bill or car repair without running down to the local "pay day loan" lender shark (now
established as legitimate businesses) the corporate Dems, in their infinite wisdom, decide to
concoct an impeachment circus to run simultaneously when all the dirt against the execrable
Brennan and his intel minions starts to hit the press for their Russiagate hoax. Nice sleight
of hand there corporate Dems.
Of course, the corporate Dems would rather lose to Trump than win with a
progressive-populist like Bernie. After all, a Bernie win would mean an end to a lot of
careerism and cushy positions within the establishment political scene in Washington and
throughout the country.
Now we even have the destroyer of Libya mulling another run for the presidency.
Forget about having a job the next day and forget about the 25% interest on your credit
card or that half your income is going toward your rent or mortgage, or that you barely see
your kids b/c of the 60 hour work week, just worry about women lawyers being able to make
partner at the firm, and trans people being able to use whatever bathroom they wish and male
athletes being able to compete against women based on genitalia (no, wait, I'm confused
now).
Either class politics and class warfare comes front and center or we witness a burgeoning
neo-fascist movement in our midst. It's that simple, something has got to give!
"The president is dropping by the city on Thursday for one of his periodic angry
wank-fests at the Target Center, which is the venue in which this event will be inflicted
upon the Twin Cities. (And, just as an aside, given the events of the past 10 days, this one
should be a doozy.) Other Minneapolis folk are planning an extensive unwelcoming party
outside the arena, which necessarily would require increased security, which is expensive.
So, realizing that it was dealing with a notorious deadbeat -- in keeping with his customary
business plan, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has stiffed 10 cities this year for bills relating
to security costs that total almost a million bucks -- the company that provides the security
for the Target Center wants the president*'s campaign to shell out more than $500,000.
This has sent the president* into a Twitter tantrum against Frey, who seems not to be that
impressed by it. Right from when the visit was announced, Frey has been jabbing at the
president*'s ego. From the Star-Tribune:
"Our entire city will stand not behind the President, but behind the communities and
people who continue to make our city -- and this country -- great," Frey said. "While there
is no legal mechanism to prevent the president from visiting, his message of hatred will
never be welcome in Minneapolis."
It is a mayor's lot to deal with out-of-state troublemakers. Always has been."
This is not about Trump. This is not even about Ukraine and/or foreign powers influence on
the US election (of which Israel, UK, and Saudi are three primary examples; in this
particular order.)
Russiagate 2.0 (aka Ukrainegate) is the case, textbook example if you wish, of how the
neoliberal elite manipulates the MSM and the narrative for purposes of misdirecting attention
and perception of their true intentions and objectives -- distracting the electorate from
real issues.
An excellent observation by JohnH (October 01, 2019 at 01:47 PM )
"It all depends on which side of the Infowars you find yourself. The facts themselves are
too obscure and byzantine."
There are two competing narratives here:
1. NARRATIVE 1: CIA swamp scum tried to re-launch Russiagate as Russiagate 2.0. This is
CIA coup d'état aided and abetted by CIA-democrats like Pelosi and Schiff. Treason, as
Trump aptly said. This is narrative shared by "anti-Deep Staters" who sometimes are nicknamed
"Trumptards". Please note that the latter derogatory nickname is factually incorrect:
supporters of this narrative often do not support Trump. They just oppose machinations of the
Deep State. And/or neoliberalism personified by Clinton camp, with its rampant
corruption.
2. NARRATIVE 2: Trump tried to derail his opponent using his influence of foreign state
President (via military aid) as leverage and should be impeached for this and previous
crimes. ("Full of Schiff" commenters narrative, neoliberal democrats, or demorats.)
Supporters of this category usually bought Russiagate 1.0 narrative line, hook and sinker.
Some of them are brainwashed, but mostly simply ignorant neoliberal lemmings without even
basic political education.
In any case, while Russiagate 2.0 is probably another World Wrestling Federation style
fight, I think "anti-Deep-staters" are much closer to the truth.
What is missing here is the real problem: the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA (and
elsewhere).
So this circus serves an important purpose (intentionally or unintentionally) -- to disrupt
voters from the problems that are really burning, and are equal to a slow-progressing cancer in the
US society.
And implicitly derail Warren (being a weak politician she does not understand that, and
jumped into Ukrainegate bandwagon )
I am not that competent here, so I will just mention some obvious symptoms:
Loss of legitimacy of the ruling neoliberal elite (which demonstrated itself in 2016
with election of Trump);
Desperation of many working Americans with sliding standard of living; loss of meaningful
jobs due to offshoring of manufacturing and automation (which demonstrated itself in opioids
abuse epidemics; similar to epidemics of alcoholism in the USSR before its dissolution.
Loss of previously available freedoms. Loss of "free press" replaced by the neoliberal
echo chamber in major MSM. The uncontrolled and brutal rule of financial oligarchy and allied
with the intelligence agencies as the third rail of US politics (plus the conversion of the
state after 9/11 into national security state);
Coming within this century end of the "Petroleum Age" and the global crisis that it can
entail;
Rampant militarism, tremendous waist of resources on the arms race, and overstretched
efforts to maintain and expand global, controlled from Washington, neoliberal empire. Efforts
that since 1991 were a primary focus of unhinged after 1991 neocon faction US elite who
totally controls foreign policy establishment ("full-spectrum dominance). They are stealing money from
working people to fund an imperial project, and as part of neoliberal redistribution of wealth up
Most of the commenters here live a comfortable life in the financially secured retirement,
and, as such, are mostly satisfied with the status quo. And almost completely isolated from
the level of financial insecurity of most common Americans (healthcare racket might be the
only exception).
And re-posting of articles which confirm your own worldview (echo chamber posting) is nice
entertainment, I think ;-)
Some of those posters actually sometimes manage to find really valuable info. For which I
am thankful. In other cases, when we have a deluge of abhorrent neoliberal propaganda
postings (the specialty of Fred C. Dobbs) which often generate really insightful comments from the
members of the "anti-Deep State" camp.
Still it would be beneficial if the flow of neoliberal spam is slightly curtailed.
Japan has a shrinking population. Can you explain to me why on the Earth they need
economic growth?
This preoccupation with "growth" (with narrow and false one dimensional and very
questionable measurements via GDP, which includes the FIRE sector) is a fallacy promoted by
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism proved to be quite sophisticated religions with its own set of True
Believers in Eric Hoffer's terminology.
A lot of current economic statistics suffer from "mathiness".
For example, the narrow definition of unemployment used in U3 is just a classic example of
pseudoscience in full bloom. It can be mentioned only if U6 mentioned first. Otherwise, this
is another "opium for the people" ;-) An attempt to hide the real situation in the neoliberal
"job market" in which has sustained real unemployment rate is always over 10% and which has a
disappearing pool of well-paying middle-class jobs. Which produced current narco-epidemics
(in 2018, 1400 people were shot in half a year in Chicago (
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-met-weekend-shooting-violence-20180709-story.html
); imagine that). While I doubt that people will hang Pelosi on the street post, her
successor might not be so lucky ;-)
Everything is fake in the current neoliberal discourse, be it political or economic, and
it is not that easy to understand how they are deceiving us. Lies that are so sophisticated
that often it is impossible to tell they are actually lies, not facts. The whole neoliberal
society is just big an Empire of Illusions, the kingdom of lies and distortions.
I would call it a new type of theocratic state if you wish.
And probably only one in ten, if not one in a hundred economists deserve to be called
scientists. Most are charlatans pushing fake papers on useless conferences.
It is simply amazing that the neoliberal society, which is based on "universal deception,"
can exist for so long.
"... Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression." ..."
"... That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro. ..."
"... When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .." ..."
"... As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery." ..."
"... The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging." ..."
"... The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more." ..."
"... By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community. ..."
"... But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy. ..."
"... Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders. ..."
"... "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996." ..."
"... Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals. ..."
When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee
declared that "the two mighty power blocs,
have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating
the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the
realization that "The Cold War is back."
In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international
system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity
wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?
The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian
lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian
blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also
a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the
history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.
But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.
The Hot War
Most histories of the cold war begin at the dawn of the post World War II period. But the history of U.S-U.S.S.R. animosity starts
long before that: it starts as soon as possible, and it was hot long before it turned cold.
The label "Red Scare" first appeared, not in the 1940s or 50s, but in 1919. Though it is a chapter seldom included in the history
of American-Russian relations, America actively and aggressively intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to push the Communists
back down. The United States cooperated with anti-Bolshevik forces: by mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had sent 13,000 American
troops to Soviet soil. They would remain there for two years, killing and injuring thousands. Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev would
later remind America of "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution." Churchill would record for history the admission
that the West "shot Soviet Russians on sight," that they were "invaders on Russian soil," that "[t]hey armed the enemies of the Soviet
government," that "[t]hey blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed for its downfall."
When the cause was lost, and the Bolsheviks secured power, most western countries refused to recognize the communist government.
However, realism prevailed, and within a few short years, by the mid 1920s, most countries had recognized the communist government
and restored diplomatic relations. All but the US It was not until several years later that Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized
the Soviet government in 1933.
The Cold War
It would be a very short time before the diplomatic relations that followed the hot war would be followed by a cold war. It might
even be possible to pin the beginning of the cold war down to a specific date. On April 22 and 23, President Truman told Soviet foreign
minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "Carry out his agreement" and establish a new, free, independent government in Poland as promised
at Yalta. Molotov was stunned. He was stunned because it was not he that was breaking the agreement because that was not what Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. The final wording of the Yalta agreement never mentioned replacing Soviet control of
Poland.
The agreement that Roosevelt revealed to congress and shared with the world – the one that still dominates the textbook accounts
and the media stories – is not the one he secretly shook on with Stalin. Roosevelt lied to congress and the American people. Then
he lied to Stalin.
In exchange for Soviet support for the creation of the United Nations, Roosevelt secretly agreed to Soviet predominance in Poland
and Eastern Europe. The cold war story that the Soviet Union marched into Eastern Europe and stole it for itself is a lie: Roosevelt
handed it to them.
So did Churchill. If Roosevelt's motivation was getting the UN, Churchill's was getting Greece. Fearing that the Soviet Union
would invade India and the oil fields of Iran, Churchill saw Greece as the geographical roadblock and determined to hold on to it
at all cost. The cost, it turned out, was Romania. Churchill would give Stalin Romania to protect his borders; Stalin would give
Churchill Greece to protect his empire's borders. The deal was sealed on October 9, 1944.
Churchill says that in their secret meeting, he asked Stalin, "how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in
Romania, for us to have ninety percent predominance in Greece? . . ." He then went on to offer a fifty-fifty power split in in Yugoslavia
and Hungary and to offer the Soviets seventy-five percent control of Bulgaria. The exact conversation may never have happened, according
to the political record, but Churchill's account captures the spirit and certainly captures the secret agreement.
Contrary to the official narrative, Stalin never betrayed the west and stole Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and the rest were
given to him in secret. Then Roosevelt lied to congress and to the world.
That American lie raised the curtain on the cold war.
The New Cold War
Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that
it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really
intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future
"Russian aggression."
At the close of the cold war, at a meeting held on February 9, 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, promised
Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany and Russia pulled its troops out of East Germany, NATO would not expand east of Germany and engulf
the former Soviet states. Gorbachev records in his memoirs that he agreed to Baker's terms "with the guarantee that NATO jurisdiction
or troops would not extend east of the current line." In Super-power Illusions , Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was the American
ambassador to Russia at the time and was present at the meeting, confirms Gorbachev's account, saying that it "coincides with my
notes of the conversation except that mine indicate that Baker added "not one inch." Matlock adds that Gorbachev was assured that
NATO would not move into Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact moved out, that "the understanding at Malta [was] that the United States
would not 'take advantage' of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe." At the February 9 meeting, Baker assured Gorbachev
that "neither the President or I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place."
But the promise was not made just once, and it was not made just by the United States. The promise was made on two consecutive
days: first by the Americans and then by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. According to West German foreign ministry documents,
on February 10, 1990, the day after James Baker's promise, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Soviet counterpart
Eduard Shevardnadze "'For us . . . one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.' And because the conversation revolved
mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: 'As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.'"
A few days earlier, on January 31, 1990, Genscher had said in a major speech that there would not be "an expansion of NATO territory
to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union."
Gorbachev says the promise was made not to expand NATO "as much as a thumb's width further to the east." Putin also says mourns
the broken promise, asking at a conference in Munich in February 2007, "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made
after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."
Putin went on to remind his audience of the assurances by pointing out that the existence of the NATO promise is not just the
perception of him and Gorbachev. It was also the view of the NATO General Secretary at the time: "But I will allow myself to remind
this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. [Manfred] Woerner in Brussels on 17 May
1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet
Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are those guarantees?"
Recent scholarship supports the Russian version of the story. Russian expert and Professor of Russian and European Politics at
the University of Kent, Richard Sakwa says that "[r]ecent studies demonstrate that the commitment not to enlarge NATO covered the
whole former Soviet bloc and not just East Germany." And Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and
of Russian Studies and History at New York University, adds that the National Security Archive has now published the actual
documents detailing what Gorbachev was promised. Published on December 12, 2017, the documents finally, and authoritatively,
reveal that "The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved
– the US, the UK, France, Germany itself – made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways."
That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American
President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia
and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro.
It was this shattered promise, this primal betrayal, this NATO expansion to Russia's borders that created the conditions and causes
of future conflicts and aggressions. When, in 2008, NATO promised Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership, Russia saw the threat
of NATO encroaching right to its borders. It is in Georgia and Ukraine that Russia felt it had to draw the line with NATO encroachment
into its core sphere of influence. Sakwa says that the war in Georgia was "the first war to stop NATO enlargement; Ukraine was the
second." What are often cited as acts of Russian aggression that helped maintain the new cold war are properly understood as acts
of Russian defense against US aggression that made a lie out of the promise that ended the Cold War.
When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy,
warned that NATO expansion would be
"the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected
to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .."
The broken promise restored the cold war. Though it is the most significant root of the new cold war, it was not the first. There
was a prior broken promise, and this time the man who betrayed Russia was President H.W. Bush.
The end of the Cold War resulted from negotiations and not from any sort of military victory. Stephen Cohen says that "Presidents
Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the
Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending 'with no losers, only winners.'"
The end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union occurred so closely chronologically that it permitted the American mythologizers
to conflate them in the public imagination and create the doctrinal history in which the US defeat of the Soviet Union ended the
cold war. But the US did not defeat the Soviet Union. Gorbachev brought about what Sakwa calls a "self-willed disintegration of the
Soviet bloc." The Soviet Union came to an end, not by external force or pressure, but out of Gorbachev's recognition of the Soviet
Union's own self interest. Matlock flatly states that "pressure from governments outside the Soviet Union, whether from America or
Europe or anywhere else, had nothing to do with [the Soviet collapse]." "Cohen demythologizes the history by reinstating the chronological
order: Gorbachev negotiated the end of the cold war "well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union." The Cold War officially
ended well before the end of the Soviet Union with Gorbachev's December 7, 1988 address to the UN
Matlock says that "Gorbachev is right when he says that we all won the Cold War." He says that President Reagan would write in
his notes, "Let there be no talk of winners and losers." When Gorbachev compelled the countries of the Warsaw Pact to adopt reforms
like his perestroika in the Soviet Union and warmed them that the Soviet army would no longer be there to keep their communist
regimes in power, Matlock points out in Superpower Illusions that "Bush assured Gorbachev that the United States would not
claim victory if the Eastern Europeans were allowed to replace the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them." Both the reality
and the promise were that there was no winner of the Cold War: it was a negotiated peace that was in the interest of both countries.
When in 1992, during his losing re-election campaign, President Bush arrogantly boasted that "We won the Cold War!" he broke his
own promise to Gorbachev and helped plant the roots of the new cold war. "In psychological and political terms," Matlock says, "President
Bush planted a landmine under the future U.S.-Russian relationship" when he broke his promise and made that claim.
Bush's broken promise had two significant effects. Psychologically, it created the appearance in the Russian psyche that Gorbachev
had been tricked by America: it eroded trust in America and in the new peace. Politically, it created in the American psyche the
false idea that Russia was a defeated country whose sphere of interest did not need to be considered. Both these perceptions contributed
to the new cold war.
Not only was the broken promise of NATO expansion not the first broken American promise, it was also not the last. In 1997, when
President Clinton made the decision to expand NATO much more than an inch to the east, he at least signed the
Russia-NATO Founding Act , which explicitly
promised that as NATO expanded east, there would be no "permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." This obliterated American
promise planted the third root of the new cold war.
Since that third promise, NATO has, in the words of Stephen Cohen, built up its "permanent land, sea and air power near Russian
territory, along with missile-defense installations." US and NATO weapons and troops have butted right up against Russia's borders,
while anti-missile installations have surrounded it, leading to the feeling of betrayal in Russia and the fear of aggression. Among
the earliest moves of the Trump administration were the moving of NATO troops into Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and nearby Norway.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who offered the West Russia and cooperation in place of the Soviet Union and Cold War, was rewarded with lies,
broken promises and betrayal. That was the sowing of the first seeds of the new cold war. The second planting happened during the
Yeltsin years that followed. During this stage, the Russian people were betrayed because their hopes for democracy and for an economic
system compatible with the West were both destroyed by American intervention.
The goal, Matlock too gently explains, "had to be a shift of the bulk of the economy to private ownership." What transpired was
what Naomi Klein called in The Shock Doctrine "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history."
The States allowed no gradual transition. Matlock says the "Western experts advised a clean break with the past and a transition
to private ownership without delay." But there was no legitimate private capital coming out of the communist system, so there was
no private money with which to privatize. So, there was only one place for the money to come. As Matlock explains, the urgent
transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could,
as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen,
"a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its
people into poverty and misery."
The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush
to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but
sometimes actually damaging."
Sometimes damaging? In the first year, millions lost their entire life savings. Subsidy cuts meant that many Russians didn't get
paid at all. Klein says that by 1992, Russians were consuming 40% less than they were the year before, and one third of them had
suddenly sunk below the poverty line. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international
development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending
the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration
of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty],
the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more."
By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions
of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community.
But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because
Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in,
and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy.
In late 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of special powers from the Russian Parliament: for
one year, he was to be, in effect, the dictator of Russia to facilitate the midwifery of the birth of a democratic Russia. In March
of 1992, under pressure from the, by now, impoverished, devastated and discontented population, parliament repealed the dictatorial
powers it had granted him. Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency, re-bestowing upon himself the repealed dictatorial
powers. Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin was acting outside the constitution. But the US sided – against the Russian
people and against the Russian Constitutional Court – with Yeltsin.
Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution
of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with
Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian
people's choice of leaders.
Yeltsin took the money and sent police officers and elite paratroopers to surround the parliament building. Clinton "praised the
Russian President has (sic) having done 'quite well' in managing the standoff with the Russian Parliament," as The New York Timesreported at the time.
Clinton added that he thought "the United States and the free world ought to hang in there" with their support of Yeltsin against
his people, their constitution and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be "on the right side of history."
On the right side of history and armed with machine guns and tanks, in October 1993, Yeltsin's troops opened fire on the crowd
of protesters, killing about 100 people before setting the Russian parliament building on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin's
troops had killed approximately 500 people and wounded nearly 1,000. Still, Clinton stood with Yeltsin. He provided
ludicrous cover for Yeltsin's
massacre , claiming that "I don't see that he had any choice . If such a thing happened in the United States, you would have
expected me to take tough action against it." Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, said that the US supported Yeltsin's
suspension of parliament in these "extraordinary times."
In 1996, elections were looming, and America's hegemonic dreams still needed Yeltsin in power. But it wasn't going to happen without
help. Yeltsin's popularity was nonexistent, and his approval rating was at about 6%. According to Cohen, Clinton's interference in
Russian politics, his "crusade" to "reform Russia," had by now become
official policy . And so, America
boldly interfered directly in Russian elections . Three American political consultants, receiving "direct assistance from Bill
Clinton's White House," secretly ran Yeltsin's reelection campaign.
As Time magazine
broke the story , "For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's
campaign."
"Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers,
drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996."
More incriminating still is that Richard Dresner, one of the three American consultants, maintained a direct line to Clinton's
Chief Strategist, Dick Morris. According to
reporting by Sean Guillory , in his book, Behind the Oval Office , Morris says that, with Clinton's approval, he received
weekly briefings from Dresner that he would give to Clinton. Based on those briefings, Clinton would then provide recommendations
to Dresner through Morris.
The US not only helped run Yeltsin's campaign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund
(IMF) loan for Russia, the second-biggest loan the IMF had ever given. The New York Timesreported
that the loan was "expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." The Times explained
that the loan was "a vote of confidence" for Yeltsin who "has been lagging well behind in opinion polls" and added that the US Treasury
Secretary "welcomed the fund's decision."
Yeltsin won the election by 13%, and Time magazine's cover declared: "Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American
advisers helped Yeltsin win". Cohen reports that the US ambassador to Russia boasted that "without our leadership we would see a
considerably different Russia today." That's a confession of election interference.
Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end
of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian
hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were
not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that
the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals.
Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
The question why the USA intelligence agencies were "unaware" about Epstein activities is an interesting one. Similar question can
be asked about Hillary "activities" related to "Clinton cash".
Actually the way the USA elite deal with scandals is to ostracize any whistleblower and silence any media that tryt to dig the story.
Open repression including physical elimination is seldom used those days as indirect methods are quite effective.
Notable quotes:
"... Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall. ..."
"... If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken." ..."
"... America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy. ..."
"... Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case. ..."
Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired
to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.
When you discover rot in an apparently sound structure, the first question is: how far has the rot penetrated? If the rot
has reached the foundation and turned it to mush, the structure is one wind-storm from collapse.
How deep has the rot of corruption, fraud, abuse of power, betrayal of the public trust, blatant criminality and insiders protecting
the guilty penetrated America's key public and private institutions? It's difficult to tell, as the law-enforcement and security
agencies are themselves hopelessly compromised.
If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom;
2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward;
3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell
and surroundings were "broken."
If this all strikes you as evidence that America's security and law-enforcement institutions are functioning at a level that's
above reproach, then 1) you're a well-paid shill who's protecting the guilty lest your own misdeeds come to light or 2) your
consumption of mind-bending meds is off the charts.
How deep has the rot gone in America's ruling elite? One way to measure the depth of the rot is to ask how whistleblowers
who've exposed the ugly realities of insider dealing, malfeasance, tax evasion, cover-ups, etc. have fared.
America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security)
and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy.
Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the
few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging
down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case.
The closer wrong-doing and wrong-doers are to protected power-elites, the less attention the mass media devotes to them.
... ... ...
Here are America's media, law enforcement/security agencies and "leadership" class: they speak no evil, see no evil and
hear no evil, in the misguided belief that their misdirection, self-service and protection of the guilty will make us buy the narrative
that America's ruling elite and all the core institutions they manage aren't rotten to the foundations.
Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired
to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
Thatcher was an English politico. It is not what she said, but what she did that counts. She is probably down in Dante's Inferno,
Ring 8, sub-rings 7-10. (Frauds and false councilors.) See, oh wayward sinners:
http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/circle8b.html
Ah, you think that Milton should be at the bottom, eh? Then, I hope that he knows how to ice skate. (He was the worst kind
of 'class traitor.' [His parents were small store owner/managers.])
Ring 8 of the Inferno is for 'frauds' of all sorts, sub-rings 7-10 are reserved for Thieves, Deceivers, Schismatics, and Falsifiers.
Maggie should feel right at home there.
While details on Epstein death are not interesting (he ended like a regular pimp) the corruption of high level officials his case
revealed in more troubling.
Notable quotes:
"... Epstein was released, and various lawsuits were filed against him and settled out of court, presumably in exchange for silence. The media was quiet or complimentary as Epstein worked his way back into high society. ..."
"... What would I do if I were Epstein? I'd try to get the President, the Attorney-General, or the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to shut down the investigation before it went public. I'd have all my friends and all my money try to pressure them. If it failed and I were arrested, it would be time for the backup plan -- the Deal. I'd try to minimize my prison time, and, just as important, to be put in one of the nicer federal prisons where I could associate with financial wizards and drug lords instead of serial killers, black nationalists, and people with bad breath. ..."
"... What about the powerful people Epstein would turn in to get his deal? They aren't as smart as Epstein, but they would know the Deal was coming -- that Epstein would be quite happy to sacrifice them in exchange for a prison with a slightly better golf course. What could they do? There's only one good option -- to kill Epstein, and do it quickly, before he could start giving information samples to the U. S. Attorney. ..."
"... Trying to kill informers is absolutely routine in the mafia, or indeed, for gangs of any kind. ..."
"... Famous politicians, unlike gangsters, don't have full-time professional hit men on their staffs, but that's just common sense -- politicians rarely need hit men, so it makes more sense to hire them on a piecework basis than as full-time employees. How would they find hit men? You or I wouldn't know how to start, but it would be easy for them. Rich powerful people have bodyguards. Bodyguards are for defense, but the guys who do defense know guys who do offense. And Epstein's friends are professional networkers. One reporter said of Ghislaine Maxwell, "Her Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else's I can think of -- probably even Rupert Murdoch's." They know people who know people. Maybe I'm six degrees of separation from a mafia hit man, but not Ghislaine Maxwell. I bet she knows at least one mafioso personally who knows more than one hit man. ..."
"... Or, if you can hire a New York Times reporter for $30,000 ( as Epstein famously did a couple of years ago), you can spend $200,000 on a competent hit man to make double sure. Government incompetence does not lend support to the suicide theory; quite the opposite. ..."
"... Statutory rape is not a federal crime ..."
"... At any time from 2008 to the present, Florida and New York prosecutors could have gone after Epstein and easily convicted him. The federal nonprosecution agreement did not bind them. And, of course, it is not just Epstein who should have been prosecuted. Other culprits such as Prince Andrew are still at large. ..."
"... Why isn't anybody but Ann Coulter talking about Barry Krischer and Ric Bradshaw, the Florida state prosecutor and sheriff who went easy on Epstein, or the New York City police who let him violate the sex offender regulations? ..."
"... Krischer refused to use the evidence the Palm Beach police gave him except to file a no-jail-time prostitution charge (they eventually went to Acosta, the federal prosecutor, instead, who got a guilty plea with an 18-month sentence). Bradshaw let him spend his days at home instead of at jail. ..."
"... In New York State, the county prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, fought to prevent Epstein from being classified as a Level III sex offender. Once he was, the police didn't enforce the rule that required him to check in every 90 days. ..."
"... Trafficking is a federal offense, so it would have to involve commerce across state lines. It also must involve sale and profit, not just personal pleasure. ..."
"... Here, the publicity and investigative lead is what is most important, because these are reputable and rich offenders for whom publicity is a bigger threat than losing in court. They have very good lawyers, and probably aren't guilty of federal crimes anyway, just state crimes, in corrupt states where they can use clout more effectively. Thus, killing potential informants before they tell the public is more important than killing informants to prevent their testimony at trial, a much more leisurely task. ..."
"... Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the only government official who is clearly trustworthy, because he could have stopped the 2019 Epstein indictment and he didn't. I don't think Attorney-General Barr could have blocked it, and I don't think President Trump could have except by firing Berman. ..."
"... "It was that heart-wrenching series that caught the attention of Congress. Ben Sasse, the Republican senator from Nebraska, joined with his Democratic colleagues and demanded to know how justice had been so miscarried. ..."
"... President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein. He is too canny to have gotten involved with him, and the press has been eagerly at work to find the slightest connection between him and Epstein and have come up dry as far as anything but acquaintanceship. But we must worry about a cover-up anyway, because rich and important people would be willing to pay Trump a lot in money or, more likely, in political support, if he does a cover-up. ..."
"... he sealing was completely illegal, as the appeals court politely but devastatingly noted in 2019, and the documents were released a day or two before Epstein died. Someone should check into Judge Sweet's finance and death. He was an ultra-Establishment figure -- a Yale man, alas, like me, and Taft School -- so he might just have been protecting what he considered good people, but his decision to seal the court records was grossly improper. ..."
"... Did Epstein have any dealings in sex, favors, or investments with any Republican except Wexner? ..."
"... Dershowitz, Mitchell, Clinton, Richardson, Dubin, George Stephanopolous, Lawrence Krauss, Katie Couric, Mortimer Zuckerman, Chelsea Handler, Cyrus Vance, and Woody Allen, are all Democrats. Did Epstein ever make use of Republicans? Don't count Trump, who has not been implicated despite the media's best efforts and was probably not even a Republican back in the 90's. Don't count Ken Starr– he's just one of Epstein's lawyers. Don't count scientists who just took money gifts from him. (By the way, Epstein made very little in the way of political contributions , though that little went mostly to Democrats ( $139,000 vs. $18,000 . I bet he extracted more from politicians than he gave to them. ..."
"... What role did Israeli politician Ehud Barak play in all this? ..."
"... Remember Marc Rich? He was a billionaire who fled the country to avoid a possible 300 years prison term, and was pardoned by Bill Clinton in 2001. Ehud Barak, one of Epstein's friends, was one of the people who asked for Rich to be pardoned . Epstein, his killers, and other rich people know that as a last resort they can flee the country and wait for someone like Clinton to come to office and pardon them. ..."
"... "intelligence" is also the kind of excuse people make up so they don't have to say "political pressure." ..."
"... James Patterson and John Connolly published Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him , and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein . Conchita Sarnoff published TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case. I never heard of these before 2019. Did the media bury them? ..."
"... There seems to have been an orchestrated attempt to divert attention to the issue of suicides in prison. Subtle differences in phrasing might help reveal who's been paid off. National Review had an article, "The Conspiracy Theories about Jeffrey Epstein's Death Don't Make Much Sense." The article contains no evidence or argument to support the headline's assertion, just bluster about "madness" and "conspiracy theories". Who else publishes stuff like this? ..."
"... The New York Times was, to its credit, willing to embarrass other publications by 2019. But the Times itself had been part of the cover-up in previous years . Who else was? ..."
"... Not one question involving Maurene Comey, then? She was one of the SDNY prosecutors assigned to this case, and her name has been significantly played down (if at all visible) in the reportage before or after Epstein's death. That she just "happened" to be on this case at all is quite an eyebrow raiser especially with her father under the ongoing "Spygate" investigation ..."
"... As important as it is to go on asking questions about the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein, I have to admit that personally I'm just not interested. I've always found people of his social class to be vaguely repulsive even without the sordid sex allegations. Just their demanding personalities, just the thought of them hanging around in their terrycloth jogging suits, sneering at the world with their irrefrangible arrogance, is enough to make me shudder. I want nothing of their nightmare world; and when they die, I couldn't care less. ..."
"... We are supposed to have faith in this rubbish? The cameras malfunctioned. He didn't have a cellmate. The guards were tired and forced to work overtime. ..."
"... One tiny mention of Jewish magnate Les Wexner but no mention how he & the Bronfmans founded the 'Mega Group' of ultra-Zionist billionaires regularly meeting as to how they could prop up the Jewish state by any & all means, Wexner being the source of many Epstein millions, the original buyer of the NYC mansion he transferred to Epstein etc the excellent Epstein series by Whitney Webb on Mint Press covering all this https://www.mintpressnews.com/author/whitney-webb/ ..."
"... ex-OSS father Donald Barr had written a 'fantasy novel' on sex slavery with scenes of rape of underage teens, 'Space Relations', written whilst Don Barr was headmaster of the Dalton school, which gave Epstein his first job, teaching teens ..."
The Jeffrey Epstein case is notable for the ups and downs in media coverage it's gotten over the years. Everybody, it seems, in
New York society knew by 2000 that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were corrupting teenage girls, but the press wouldn't cover
it. Articles by New York in 2002 and
Vanity Fair in 2003 alluded to it gently,
while probing Epstein's finances more closely. In 2005, the Palm Beach police investigated. The county prosecutor, Democrat Barry
Krischer, wouldn't prosecute for more than prostitution, so they went to the federal prosecutor, Republican Alexander Acosta, and
got the FBI involved. Acosta's office prepared an indictment, but before it was filed, he made a deal: Epstein agreed to plead guilty
to a state law felony and receive a prison term of 18 months. In exchange, the federal interstate sex trafficking charges would not
be prosecuted by Acosta's office. Epstein was officially at the county jail for 13 months, where the county officials under Democratic
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw gave him scandalously
easy treatment , letting him spend his days outside, and letting him serve a year of probation in place of the last 5 months
of his sentence. Acosta's office complained, but it was a county jail, not a federal jail, so he was powerless.
Epstein was released, and various lawsuits were filed against him and settled out of court, presumably in exchange for silence.
The media was quiet or complimentary as Epstein worked his way back into high society. Two books were written about the affair, and
fell flat. The FBI became interested again around 2011 (
a little known fact
) and maybe things were happening behind the scenes, but the next big event was in 2018 when the Miami Herald published a
series of investigative articles rehashing what had happened.
In 2019 federal prosecutors indicted Epstein, he was put in jail, and
he mysteriously died. Now, after much complaining in the press about how awful jails are and how many people commit suicide, things
are quiet again, at least until the Justice Department and
the State of Florida finish their
investigation a few years from now. (For details and more links, see " Investigation: Jeffrey Epstein
"at Medium.com and " Jeffrey Epstein " at Wikipedia
.)
I'm an expert in the field of "game theory", strategic thinking. What would I do if I were Epstein? I'd try to get the President,
the Attorney-General, or the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to shut down the investigation before it went public.
I'd have all my friends and all my money try to pressure them. If it failed and I were arrested, it would be time for the backup
plan -- the Deal. I'd try to minimize my prison time, and, just as important, to be put in one of the nicer federal prisons where
I could associate with financial wizards and drug lords instead of serial killers, black nationalists, and people with bad breath.
That's what Epstein would do. What about the powerful people Epstein would turn in to get his deal? They aren't as smart as Epstein,
but they would know the Deal was coming -- that Epstein would be quite happy to sacrifice them in exchange for a prison with a slightly
better golf course. What could they do? There's only one good option -- to kill Epstein, and do it quickly, before he could start
giving information samples to the U. S. Attorney.
Trying to kill informers is absolutely routine in the mafia, or indeed, for gangs of any kind. The reason people call such talk
"conspiracy theories" when it comes to Epstein is that his friends are WASPs and Jews, not Italians and Mexicans. But WASPs and Jews
are human too. They want to protect themselves. Famous politicians, unlike gangsters, don't have full-time professional hit men on
their staffs, but that's just common sense -- politicians rarely need hit men, so it makes more sense to hire them on a piecework
basis than as full-time employees. How would they find hit men? You or I wouldn't know how to start, but it would be easy for them.
Rich powerful people have bodyguards. Bodyguards are for defense, but the guys who do defense know guys who do offense. And Epstein's
friends are professional networkers.
One reporter said
of Ghislaine Maxwell, "Her Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else's I can think of -- probably even Rupert Murdoch's." They know
people who know people. Maybe I'm six degrees of separation from a mafia hit man, but not Ghislaine Maxwell. I bet she knows at least
one mafioso personally who knows more than one hit man.
In light of this, it would be very surprising if someone with a spare $50 million to spend to solve the Epstein problem didn't
give it a try. A lot of people can be bribed for $50 million. Thus, we should have expected to see bribery attempts. If none were
detected, it must have been because prison workers are not reporting they'd been approached.
Some
people say that government incompetence is always a better explanation than government malfeasance. That's obviously wrong --
when an undeserving business gets a contract, it's not always because the government official in charge was just not paying attention.
I can well believe that prisons often take prisoners off of suicide watch too soon, have guards who go to sleep and falsify records,
remove cellmates from prisoners at risk of suicide or murder, let the TV cameras watching their most important prisoners go on the
blink, and so forth. But that cuts both ways.
Remember, in the case of Epstein, we'd expect a murder attempt whether the warden of
the most important federal jail in the country is competent or not. If the warden is incompetent, we should expect that murder attempt
to succeed. Murder becomes all the more more plausible. Instead of spending $50 million to bribe 20 guards and the warden, you just
pay some thug $30,000 to walk in past the snoring guards, open the cell door, and strangle the sleeping prisoner, no fancy James
Bond necessary. Or, if you can hire a New York Times reporter for $30,000 (
as Epstein famously did a couple of years ago), you can spend $200,000 on a competent hit man to make double sure. Government
incompetence does not lend support to the suicide theory; quite the opposite.
Now to my questions.
Why is nobody blaming the Florida and New York state prosecutors for not prosecuting Epstein and others for statutory rape?
Statutory rape is not a federal crime, so it is not something the Justice Dept. is supposed to investigate or prosecute. They
are going after things like interstate sex trafficking. Interstate sex trafficking is generally much harder to prove than statutory
rape, which is very easy if the victims will testify.
At any time from 2008 to the present, Florida and New York prosecutors could have gone after Epstein and easily convicted him.
The federal nonprosecution agreement did not bind them. And, of course, it is not just Epstein who should have been prosecuted. Other
culprits such as Prince Andrew are still at large.
Note that if even if the evidence is just the girl's word against Ghislaine Maxwell's or Prince Andrew's, it's still quite possible
to get a jury to convict. After all, who would you believe, in a choice between Maxwell, Andrew, and Anyone Else in the World? For
an example of what can be done if the government is eager to convict, instead of eager to protect important people, see
the 2019 Cardinal
Pell case in Australia. He was convicted by the secret testimony of a former choirboy, the only complainant, who claimed Pell
had committed indecent acts during a chance encounter after Mass before Pell had even unrobed. Naturally, the only cardinal to be
convicted of anything in the Catholic Church scandals is also the one who's done the most to fight corruption. Where there's a will,
there's a way to prosecute. It's even easier to convict someone if he's actually guilty.
Why isn't anybody but Ann Coulter talking about Barry Krischer and Ric Bradshaw, the Florida state prosecutor and sheriff who went
easy on Epstein, or the New York City police who let him violate the sex offender regulations?
Krischer refused to use the evidence the Palm Beach police gave him except to file a no-jail-time prostitution charge (they eventually
went to Acosta, the federal prosecutor, instead, who got a guilty plea with an 18-month sentence). Bradshaw let him spend his days
at home instead of at jail.
In New York State, the county prosecutor, Cyrus Vance, fought to prevent Epstein from being classified
as a Level III sex offender. Once he was, the
police didn't enforce the
rule that required him to check in every 90 days.
How easy would it have been to prove in 2016 or 2019 that Epstein and his people were guilty of federal sex trafficking?
Not easy, I should think. It wouldn't be enough to prove that Epstein debauched teenagers. Trafficking is a federal offense, so
it would have to involve commerce across state lines. It also must involve sale and profit, not just personal pleasure.
The 2019 indictment
is weak on this. The "interstate commerce" looks like it's limited to Epstein making phone calls between Florida and New York. This
is why I am not completely skeptical when former U.S. Attorney Acosta says that the 2008 nonprosecution deal was reasonable. He had
strong evidence the Epstein violated Florida state law -- but that wasn't relevant. He had to prove violations of federal law.
Why didn't Epstein ask the Court, or the Justice Dept., for permission to have an unarmed guard share his cell with him?
Epstein had no chance at bail without bribing the judge, but this request would have been reasonable. That he didn't request a
guard is, I think, the strongest evidence that he wanted to die. If he didn't commit suicide himself, he was sure making it easy
for someone else to kill him.
Could Epstein have used the safeguard of leaving a trove of photos with a friend or lawyer to be published if he died an unnatural
death?
Well, think about it -- Epstein's lawyer was Alan Dershowitz. If he left photos with someone like Dershowitz, that someone could
earn a lot more by using the photos for blackmail himself than by dutifully carrying out his perverted customer's instructions. The
evidence is just too valuable, and Epstein was someone whose friends weren't the kind of people he could trust. Probably not even
his brother.
Who is in danger of dying next?
Prison workers from guard to warden should be told that if they took bribes, their lives are now in danger. Prison guards may
not be bright enough to realize this. Anybody who knows anything important about Epstein should be advised to publicize their information
immediately. That is the best way to stay alive.
This is not like a typical case where witnesses get killed so they won't testify.
It's not like with gangsters. Here, the publicity and investigative lead is what is most important, because these are reputable and
rich offenders for whom publicity is a bigger threat than losing in court. They have very good lawyers, and probably aren't guilty
of federal crimes anyway, just state crimes, in corrupt states where they can use clout more effectively. Thus, killing potential
informants before they tell the public is more important than killing informants to prevent their testimony at trial, a much more
leisurely task.
What happened to Epstein's body?
The Justice Dept. had better not have let Epstein's body be cremated. And they'd better give us convincing evidence that it's
his body. If I had $100 million to get out of jail with, acquiring a corpse and bribing a few people to switch fingerprints and DNA
wouldn't be hard. I find it worrying that the government has not released proof that Epstein is dead or a copy of the autopsy.
"Beyond its isolation, the wing is infested with rodents and cockroaches, and inmates often have to navigate standing water
-- as well as urine and fecal matter -- that spills from faulty plumbing, accounts from former inmates and lawyers said. One lawyer
said mice often eat his clients' papers."
" Often have to navigate standing water"? "Mice often eat his clients' papers?" Really? I'm skeptical. What do the
vermin eat -- do inmates leave Snickers bars open in their cells? Has anyone checked on what the prison conditions really like?
Is it just a coincidence that Epstein made a new will two days before he died?
I can answer this one. Yes, it is coincidence, though it's not a coincidence that he rewrote the will shortly after being denied
bail. The will leaves everything to a trust, and it is the trust document (which is confidential), not the will (which is public),
that determines who gets the money. Probably the only thing that Epstein changed in his will was the listing of assets, and he probably
changed that because he'd just updated his list of assets for the bail hearing anyway, so it was a convenient time to update the
will.
Did Epstein's veiled threat against DOJ officials in his bail filing backfire?
Epstein's lawyers wrote in his bail request,
"If the government is correct that the NPA does not, and never did, preclude a prosecution in this district, then the government
will likely have to explain why it purposefully delayed a prosecution of someone like Mr. Epstein, who registered as a sex offender
10 years ago and was certainly no stranger to law enforcement. There is no legitimate explanation for the delay."
I see this as a veiled threat. The threat is that Epstein would subpoena people and documents from the Justice Department relevant
to the question of why there was a ten-year delay before prosecution, to expose the illegitimate explanation for the delay. Somebody
is to blame for that delay, and court-ordered disclosure is a bigger threat than an internal federal investigation.
Who can we trust?
Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the only government official who is clearly trustworthy,
because he could have stopped the 2019 Epstein indictment and he didn't. I don't think Attorney-General Barr could have blocked it,
and I don't think President Trump could have except by firing Berman. I do trust Attorney-General Barr, however, from what I've
heard of him and because he instantly and publicly said he would have not just the FBI but the Justice Dept. Inspector-General investigate
Epstein's death, and he quickly fired the federal prison head honcho. The FBI is untrustworthy, but Inspector-Generals are often
honorable.
Someone else who may be a hero in this is Senator Ben Sasse.
Vicki Ward
writes in the Daily Beast :
"It was that heart-wrenching series that caught the attention of Congress. Ben Sasse, the Republican senator from Nebraska,
joined with his Democratic colleagues and demanded to know how justice had been so miscarried.
Given the political sentiment, it's unsurprising that the FBI should feel newly emboldened to investigate Epstein -- basing
some of their work on Brown's excellent reporting."
Will President Trump Cover Up Epstein's Death in Exchange for Political Leverage?
President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein. He is too canny to have gotten involved with him, and the
press has been eagerly at work to find the slightest connection between him and Epstein and have come up dry as far as anything but
acquaintanceship. But we must worry about a cover-up anyway, because rich and important people would be willing to pay Trump a lot
in money or, more likely, in political support, if he does a cover-up.
Why did Judge Sweet order Epstein documents sealed in 2017. Did he die naturally in 2019?
Judge Robert Sweet in 2017 ordered all documents in an Epstein-related case sealed. He died in May 2019 at age 96, at home in
Idaho. The sealing was completely illegal, as the appeals court politely but devastatingly noted in 2019, and the documents were
released a day or two before Epstein died. Someone should check into Judge Sweet's finance and death. He was an ultra-Establishment
figure -- a Yale man, alas, like me, and Taft School -- so he might just have been protecting what he considered good people, but
his decision to seal the court records was grossly improper.
Did Epstein have any dealings in sex, favors, or investments with any Republican except Wexner?
Dershowitz, Mitchell, Clinton, Richardson, Dubin, George Stephanopolous, Lawrence Krauss, Katie Couric, Mortimer Zuckerman,
Chelsea Handler, Cyrus Vance, and Woody Allen, are all Democrats. Did Epstein ever make use of Republicans? Don't count Trump, who
has not been implicated despite the media's best efforts and was probably not even a Republican back in the 90's. Don't count Ken
Starr– he's just one of Epstein's lawyers. Don't count scientists who just took money gifts from him. (By the way, Epstein made very
little in the way of
political contributions
, though that little went mostly to Democrats (
$139,000 vs. $18,000
. I bet he extracted more from politicians than he gave to them.
What role did Israeli politician Ehud Barak play in all this?
Remember Marc Rich? He was a billionaire who fled the country to avoid a possible 300 years prison term, and was pardoned
by Bill Clinton in 2001. Ehud Barak, one of Epstein's friends, was one of the people
who asked for Rich to be pardoned
. Epstein, his killers, and other rich people know that as a last resort they can flee the country and wait for someone like Clinton
to come to office and pardon them.
Acosta said that Washington Bush Administration people told him to go easy on Epstein because he was an intelligence source. That
is plausible. Epstein had info and blackmailing ability with people like Ehud Barak, leader of Israel's Labor Party. But "intelligence"
is also the kind of excuse people make up so they don't have to say "political pressure."
Why did nobody pay attention to the two 2016 books on Epstein?
James Patterson and John Connolly published Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him ,
and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein . Conchita Sarnoff published TrafficKing:
The Jeffrey Epstein Case. I never heard of these before 2019. Did the media bury them?
Which newspapers reported Epstein's death as "suicide" and which as "apparent suicide"?
More generally, which media outlets seem to be trying to brush Epstein's death under the rug? There seems to have been an
orchestrated attempt to divert attention to the issue of suicides in prison. Subtle differences in phrasing might help reveal who's
been paid off. National Review had an article,
"The Conspiracy
Theories about Jeffrey Epstein's Death Don't Make Much Sense." The article contains no evidence or argument to support the headline's
assertion, just bluster about "madness" and "conspiracy theories". Who else publishes stuff like this?
How much did Epstein corrupt the media from 2008 to 2019?
Even outlets that generally publish good articles must be suspected of corruption. Epstein made an effort to get good publicity.
The New York Times
wrote,
"The effort led to the publication of articles describing him as a selfless and forward-thinking philanthropist with an interest
in science on websites like Forbes, National Review and HuffPost .
All three articles have been removed from their sites in recent days, after inquiries from TheNew York Times .
The National Review piece, from the same year, called him "a smart businessman" with a "passion for cutting-edge science."
Ms. Galbraith was also a publicist for Mr. Epstein, according to several news releases promoting Mr. Epstein's foundations In
the article that appeared on the National Review site, she described him as having "given thoughtfully to countless organizations
that help educate underprivileged children."
"We took down the piece, and regret publishing it," Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review since 1997, said in an email.
He added that the publication had "had a process in place for a while now to weed out such commercially self-interested pieces from
lobbyists and PR flacks.""
Eric Rasmusen is an economist who has held an endowed chair at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and visiting
positions at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the Harvard Economics Department, Chicago's Booth School of Business, Nuffield
College/Oxford, and the University of Tokyo Economics Department. He is best known for his book Games and Information. He has published
extensively in law and economics, including recent articles on the burakumin outcastes in Japan, the use of game theory in jurisprudence,
and quasi-concave functions. The views expressed here are his personal views and are not intended to represent the views of the Kelley
School of Business or Indiana University. His vitae is at http://www.rasmusen.org/vita.htm
.
Not one question involving Maurene Comey, then? She was one of the SDNY prosecutors assigned to this case, and her name has
been significantly played down (if at all visible) in the reportage before or after Epstein's death. That she just "happened"
to be on this case at all is quite an eyebrow raiser especially with her father under the ongoing "Spygate" investigation
Apparently, there will always be many players on the field, and many ways to do damage control.
So the problem was finding a motivated prosecutor in case of Jewish predator with very likely links to intelligence services
of several countries. The motivation was obviously lacking.
Your "expertise" in game theory would be greatly improved if you let yourself consider the Jewish factor.
As important as it is to go on asking questions about the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein, I have to admit that personally
I'm just not interested. I've always found people of his social class to be vaguely repulsive even without the sordid sex allegations.
Just their demanding personalities, just the thought of them hanging around in their terrycloth jogging suits, sneering at the
world with their irrefrangible arrogance, is enough to make me shudder. I want nothing of their nightmare world; and when they
die, I couldn't care less.
More generally, which media outlets seem to be trying to brush Epstein's death under the rug?
Not the National Enquirer:
Jeffrey Epstein Murder Cover-up Exposed!
Death Scene Staged to Look Like Suicide
Billionaire's Screams Ignored by Guards!
Fatal Attack Caught on Jail Cameras!
Autopsy is Hiding the Truth!
I don't hold AG Barr in the high regard this piece does. While I'm not suggesting he had anything to do with Epstein's
death I do think he's corrupt. I doubt he will do anything that leads to the truth. As for him relieving the warden of
his duties, I would hope that was to be expected, wasn't it? I mean he only had two attempts on Epstein's life with the second
being a success. Apparently the first didn't jolt the warden into some kind of action as it appears he was guilty of a number
of sins including 'Sloth.'
As for the publications that don't like conspiracy theories –like the National Review
-- they are a hoot. We are supposed to have faith in this rubbish? The cameras malfunctioned. He didn't have a cellmate. The
guards were tired and forced to work overtime. There was no camera specifically in the cell with Epstein.
In the end I think Epstein probably was allowed to kill himself but I'm not confident in that scenario at all. And yes the media
should pressure Barr to hav e a look in the cell and see exactly how a suicide attempt might have succeeded or if it was a long-shot
at best, given the materiel and conditions.
19. Why is the non-prosecution agreement ambiguous ("globally" binding), when it was written by the best lawyers in the country
for a very wealthy client? Was the ambiguity bargained-for? If so, what are the implications?
20. With "globally" still being unresolved (to the bail judge's first-paragraph astonishment), why commit suicide now?
21. The "it was malfeasance" components are specified. For mere malfeasance to have been the cause, all of the components would
have to be true; it would be a multiplicative function of the several components. Is no one sufficiently quantitative to estimate
the magnitude?
22. What is the best single takeaway phrase that emerges from all of this? My nomination is: "In your face." The brazen, shameless,
unprecedented, turning-point, in-your-faceness of it.
ER the answer is easy to you list of questions .. there is no law in the world when violations are not prosecuted and fair open
for all to see trials are not held and judges do not deliver the appropriate penalties upon convictions. .. in cases involving
the CIA prosecution it is unheard of that a open for all to see trial takes place.
This is why we the governed masses need a parallel government..
such an oversight government would allow to pick out the negligent or wilful misconduct of persons in functional government
and prosecute such persons in the independent people's court.. Without a second government to oversee the first government there
is no democracy; democracy cannot stand and the governed masses will never see the light of a fair day .. unless the masses have
oversight authority on what is to be made into law, and are given without prejudice to their standing in America the right to
charge those associated to government with negligent or wilful misconduct.
There are big questions this article is not asking either
The words 'Mossad' seems not to appear above, and just a brief mention of 'Israel' with Ehud Barak
One tiny mention of Jewish magnate Les Wexner but no mention how he & the Bronfmans founded the 'Mega Group' of ultra-Zionist
billionaires regularly meeting as to how they could prop up the Jewish state by any & all means, Wexner being the source of many
Epstein millions, the original buyer of the NYC mansion he transferred to Epstein etc the excellent Epstein series by Whitney
Webb on Mint Press covering all this https://www.mintpressnews.com/author/whitney-webb/
Was escape to freedom & Israe,l the ultimate payoff for Epstein's decades of work for Mossad, grooming and abusing young teens,
filmed in flagrante delicto with prominent people for political blackmail?
Is it not likely this was a Mossad jailbreak covered by fake 'suicide', with Epstein alive now, with US gov now also in possession
of the assumed Epstein sexual blackmail video tapes?
We have the Epstein 'death in jail' under the US Attorney General Bill Barr, a former CIA officer 1973-77, the CIA supporting
him thru night law school, Bill Barr's later law firm Kirkland Ellis representing Epstein
Whose Jewish-born ex-OSS father Donald Barr had written a 'fantasy novel' on sex slavery with scenes of rape of underage
teens, 'Space Relations', written whilst Don Barr was headmaster of the Dalton school, which gave Epstein his first job, teaching
teens
So would a crypto-Jewish 'former' CIA officer who is now USA Attorney General, possibly help a Mossad political blackmailer
escape to Israel after a fake 'jail suicide'?
An intriguing 4chan post a few hours after Epstein's 'body was discovered', says Epstein was put in a wheelchair and driven
out of the jail in a van, accompanied by a man in a green military uniform – timestamp is USA Pacific on the screencap apparently,
so about 10:44 NYC time Sat.10 Aug
FWIW, drone video of Epstein's Little St James island from Friday 30 August, shows a man who could be Epstein himself, on the
left by one vehicle, talking to a black man sitting on a quad all-terrain unit
Close up of Epstein-like man between vehicles, from video note 'pale finger' match-up to archive photo Epstein
The thing that sticks out for me is that Epstein was caught, charged, and went to jail previously, but he didn't die .
The second time, it appears he was murdered. I strongly suspect that the person who murdered Epstein was someone who only met
Epstein after 2008, or was someone Epstein only procured for after 2008. Otherwise, this person would have killed Epstein
back when Epstein was charged by the cops the first time.
Either that, or the killer is someone who is an opponent of Trump, and this person was genuinely terrified that Trump would
pressure the Feds to avoid any deals and to squeeze all the important names out of Epstein and prosecute them, too.
The author professes himself "expert in the field of "game theory", strategic thinking," but he doesn't say how his 18 questions
were arrived at to the exclusion of hundreds of others. Instead, the column includes several casual assumptions and speculation.
For example:
"Probably the only thing that Epstein changed in his will was the listing of assets, and he probably changed that because
he'd just updated his list of assets for the bail hearing anyway, so it was a convenient time to update the will."
"President Trump didn't have anything personally to fear from Epstein."
"I do trust Attorney-General Barr, however, from what I've heard of him and because he instantly and publicly said he would
have not just the FBI but the Justice Dept. Inspector-General investigate Epstein's death, and he quickly fired the federal
prison head honcho. The FBI is untrustworthy, but Inspector-Generals are often honorable."
As to this last, isn't "quickly [firing] the federal prison head honcho" consistent with a failure-to-prevent-suicide deflection
strategy? And has Mr. Rasmusen not "heard" of the hiring of Mr. Epstein by Mr. Barr's father? Or of the father's own Establishment
background?
I hope to be wrong, but my own hunch is that these investigations, like the parallel investigations of the RussiaGate hoax,
will leave the elite unscathed. I also hope that in the meantime we see more rigorous columns here than this one.
...Also, subsequently, it should have been a top priority to arrest Ghislaine Maxwell but the government, justice and media
lack interest . Apparently, they don't know where she is, and they're not making any special efforts to find out.
"... A new opinion poll released by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last Sunday shows that 70% of Americans are "angry" because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power. Both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren have also reflected on this sentiment during their campaigns. Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else." ..."
A new opinion poll released by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal last Sunday shows that 70% of Americans are "angry" because
our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power. Both Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth
Warren have also reflected on this sentiment during their campaigns. Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system
designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks
dirt on everyone else."
A New York Times opinion article written by the political scientist Greg Weiner felt compelled to push back on this message, writing
a column with the title, The Shallow Cynicism of 'Everything Is Rigged'. In his column, Weiner basically makes the argument that
believing everything is corrupt and rigged is a cynical attitude with which it is possible to dismiss political opponents for being
a part of the corruption. In other words, the Sanders and Warren argument is a shortcut, according to Weiner, that avoids real political
debate.
Joining me now to discuss whether it makes sense to think of a political system as rigged and corrupt, and whether the cynical
attitude is justified, is someone who should know a thing or two about corruption: Bill Black. He is a white collar criminologist,
former financial regulator, and associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He's also the
author of the book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again, Bill.
BILL BLACK: Thank you.
GREG WILPERT: As I mentioned that the outset, it seems that Sanders and Warren are in effect taking an open door, at least when
it comes to the American public. That is, almost everyone already believes that our political and economic system is rigged. Would
you agree with that sentiment that the system is corrupt and rigged for the rich and against pretty much everyone else but especially
the poor? What do you think?
BILL BLACK: One of the principal things I study is elite fraud, corruption and predation. The World Bank sent me to India for
months as an anti-corruption alleged expert type. And as a financial regulator, this is what I dealt with. This is what I researched.
This is a huge chunk of my life. So I wouldn't use the word, if I was being formal in an academic system, "the system." What I would
talk about is specific systems that are rigged, and they most assuredly are rigged.
Let me give you an example. One of the most important things that has transformed the world and made it vastly more criminogenic,
much more corrupt, is modern executive compensation. This is not an unusual position. This is actually the normal position now, even
among very conservative scholars, including the person who was the intellectual godfather of modern executive compensation, Michael
Jensen. He has admitted that he spawned unintentionally a monster because CEOs have rigged the compensation system. How do they do
that? Well, it starts even before you get hired as a CEO. This is amazing stuff. The standard thing you do as a powerful CEO is you
hire this guy, and he specializes in negotiating great deals for CEOs. His first demand, which is almost always given into, is that
the corporation pay his fee, not the CEO. On the other side of the table is somebody that the CEO is going to be the boss of negotiating
the other side. How hard is he going to negotiate against the guy that's going to be his boss? That's totally rigged.
Then the compensation committee hires compensation specialists who–again, even the most conservative economists agree it is a
completely rigged system. Because the only way they get work is if they give this extraordinary compensation. Then, everybody in
economics admits that there's a clear way you should run performance pay. It should be really long term. You get the big bucks only
after like 10 years of success. In reality, they're always incredibly short term. Why? Because it's vastly easier for the CEO to
rig the short-term reported earnings. What's the result of this? Accounting profession, criminology profession, economics profession,
law profession. We've all done studies and all of them say this perverse system of compensation causes CEOs to (a) cheat and (b)
to be extraordinarily short term in their perspective because it's easier to rig the short-term reported results. Even the most conservative
economists agree that's terrible for the economy.
What I've just gone through is a whole bunch of academic literature from over 40-plus years from top scholars in four different
fields. That's not cynicism. That's just plain facts if you understand the system. People like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders,
they didn't, as you say, kick open an open door. They made the open door. It's not like Elizabeth Warren started talking about this
six months ago when she started being a potential candidate. She has been saying this and explaining in detail how individual systems
are rigged in favor of the wealthy for at least 30 years of work. Bernie Sanders has been doing it for 45 years. This is what the
right, including the author of this piece who is an ultra-far right guy, fear the most. It's precisely what they fear, that Bernie
and Elizabeth are good at explaining how particular systems are rigged. They explain it in appropriate detail, but they're also good
in making it human. They talk the way humans talk as opposed to academics.
That's what the right fear is more than anything, that people will basically get woke. In this, it's being woke to how individual
systems have been rigged by the wealthy and powerful to create a sure thing to enrich them, usually at our direct expense.
GREG WILPERT: I think those are some very good examples. They're mostly from the realm of economics. I want to look at one from
the realm of politics, which specifically Weiner makes. He cites Sanders, who says that the rich literally buy elections, and Weiner
counters this by saying that, "It is difficult to identify instances in American history of an electoral majority wanting something
specific that it has not eventually gotten." That's a pretty amazing statement actually, I think, for him to say when you look at
the actual polls of what people want and what people get. He then also adds, "That's not possible to dupe the majority with advertising
all of the time." What's your response to that argument?
BILL BLACK: Well, actually, that's where he's trying to play economist, and he's particularly bad at economics. He was even worse
at economics than he is at political science, where his pitch, by the way is–I'm not overstating this–corruption is good. The real
problem with Senator Sanders and Senator Warren is that they're against corruption.
Can you fool many people? Answer: Yes. We have good statistics from people who actually study this as opposed to write op-eds
of this kind. In the great financial crisis, one of the most notorious of the predators that targeted blacks and Latinos–we actually
have statistics from New Century. And here's a particular scam. The loan broker gets paid more money the worse the deal he gets you,
the customer, and he gets paid by the bank. If he can get you to pay more than the market rate of interest, then he gets a kickback,
a literal kickback. In almost exactly half of the cases, New Century was able to get substantially above market interest rates, again,
targeted at blacks and Latinos.
We know that this kind of predatory approach can succeed, and it can succeed brilliantly. Look at cigarettes. Cigarettes, if you
use them as intended, they make you sick and they kill you. It wasn't that very long ago until a huge effort by pushback that the
tobacco companies, through a whole series of fake science and incredible amounts of ads that basically tried to associate if you
were male, that if you smoked, you'd have a lot of sex type of thing. It was really that crude. It was enormously successful with
people in getting them to do things that almost immediately made them sick and often actually killed them.
He's simply wrong empirically. You can see it in US death rates. You can see it in Hell, I'm overweight considerably. Americans
are enormously overweight because of the way we eat, which has everything to do with how marketing works in the United States, and
it's actually gotten so bad that it's reducing life expectancy in a number of groups in America. That's how incredibly effective
predatory practices are in rigging the system. That's again, two Nobel Laureates in economics have recently written about this. George
Akerlof and Shiller, both Nobel Laureates in economics, have written about this predation in a book for a general audience. It's
called Phishing with a P-H.
GREG WILPERT: I want to turn to the last point that Weiner makes about cynicism. He says that calling the system rigged is actually
a form of cynicism. And that cynicism, the belief that everything and everyone is bad or corrupt avoids real political arguments
because it tires everyone you disagree with as being a part of that corruption. Would you say, is the belief that the system is rigged
a form of cynicism? And if it is, wouldn't Weiner be right that cynicism avoids political debate?
BILL BLACK: He creates a straw man. No one has said that everything and everyone is corrupt. No one has said that if you disagree
with me, you are automatically corrupt. What they have given in considerable detail, like I gave as the first example, was here is
exactly how the system is rigged. Here are the empirical results of that rigging. This produces vast transfers of wealth to the powerful
and wealthy, and it comes at the expense of nearly everybody else. That is factual and that needs to be said. It needs to be said
that politicians that support this, and Weiner explicitly does that, says, we need to go back to a system that is more openly corrupt
and that if we have that system, the world will be better. That has no empirical basis. It's exactly the opposite. Corruption kills.
Corruption ruins economies.
The last thing in the world you want to do is what Weiner calls for, which he says, "We've got to stop applying morality to this
form of crime." In essence, he is channeling the godfather. "Tell the Don it wasn't personal. It was just business." There's nothing
really immoral in his view about bribing people. I'm sorry. I'm a Midwesterner. It wasn't cynicism. It was morality. He says you
can't compromise with corruption. I hope not. Compromising with corruption is precisely why we're in this situation where growth
rates have been cut in half, why wage growth has been cut by four-fifths, why blacks and Latinos during the great financial crisis
lost 60% to 80% of their wealth in college-educated households. That's why 70% of the public is increasingly woke on this subject.
GREG WILPERT: Well, we're going to leave it there. I was speaking to Bill Black, associate professor of economics and law at the
University of Missouri, Kansas City. Thanks again, Bill, for having joined us today.
BILL BLACK: Thank you.
GREG WILPERT: And thank you for joining The Real News Network.
Well, Sanders certainly knows that elections are rigged. But he's not quite right when he says that money does the rigging.
It would be more accurate to say that powerful people are powerful because they're criminals, and they're rich because they're
criminals.
Money is a side effect, not the driver. Specific example: Hillary and Bernie are in the same category of net worth, but Bernie
isn't powerful. The difference is that Bernie ISN'T willing to commit murder and blackmail to gain power.
> Hillary and Bernie are in the same category of net worth
Clinton's net worth (says Google) is $45 million; Sanders $2.5 million. So, an order of magnitude difference. I guess that
puts Sanders in the 1% category, but Clinton is much closer to the 0.1% category than Sanders.
There's also a billion-dollar foundation in the mix.
We had our choice of two New York billionaires in the last presidential election. How is this not accounted for? It's like
the bond market, the sheer weight carries its own momentum.
Very similar to CEO's. I may not own a private jet, but if the company does, and I control the company, I have the benefit
of a private jet. I don't need to own the penthouse to live in it.
"We came, we saw, he died. Tee hee hee!"
"Did it have anything to do with your visit?"
"I'm sure it did."
From a non-legal perspective at least, that makes her an accessory to murder, doesn't it?
Is it fair to say the entire system is rigged when enough interconnected parts of it are rigged that no matter where one turns,
one finds evidence of corruption? Because like it or not, that's where we are as a country.
Yes. And it is also fair to say, and has been said by lots of cynics over the centuries, that both democracy and capitalism
sow the seeds of their own destruction.
Burns me to see yet another "water is not wet" argument being foisted by the NYT, hard to imagine another reason the editorial
board pushed for this line *except* to protect the current corrupt one percenters who call their shots. Once Liz The Marionette
gets appointed we might get some fluff but the rot will persist, eventually rot becomes putrefaction and the polity dies. Gore
Vidal called America and Christianity "death cults".
"Due to technical difficulties, comments are unavailable"
Pisses me off that I gave the propaganda rag of note a click and didn't even get the joy of the comments section. I'm sure
there's some cynical reason why
The other thing is that the NYT runs this pretty indefensible piece by a guy who is a visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. Just how often does NYT -- whose goal,
according to its
executive editor, "should be to understand different views" -- run a piece from anyone who is leftwing? What's the ratio of pro-establishment,
pro-Washington consensus pieces to those that are not? Glenn Greenwald
points out that the political spectrum at the NYT op-ed page "spans the small gap from establishment centrist Democrats
to establishment centrist Republicans." That, in itself, is consistent with the premise that the system is, indeed, rigged.
I think we have to drill down another level and ask ourselves a more fundamental question "why is cynicism necessarily bad
to begin with?" Black's response of parsing to individual systems as being corrupt is playing into the NYT authors trap, sort
to speak.
This NYT article is another version of the seemingly obligatory attribute of the american character; we must ultimately be
optimistic and have hope. Why is that useful? Or maybe more importantly, to whom is that useful? What is the point?
In my mind (and many a philosopher), cynicism is a very healthy, empowering response to a world whose institutional configuration
is such that it will to fuck you over whenever it is expedient to do so.
Furthermore, the act of voting lends legitimacy to an institution that is clearly not legitimate. The institution is very obviously
very corrupt. If you really want to change the "system" stop giving it legitimacy; i.e. be cynical, don't vote. The whole thing
is a ruse. Boycott it .
Some may say, in a desperate attempt to avoid being cynical, "well, the national level is corrupt but we need to increase engagement
at the community level via local elections ", or something like that. This is nothing more than rearranging the chairs on the
deck of the titanic. And collecting signature isn't going to help anymore than handing out buckets on the titanic would.
So, to answer my own rhetorical question above, "to whom is it useful to not be cynical?" It is useful to those who want things
to continue as they currently are.
So, be cynical. Don't vote. It is an empowering and healthy way to kinda say "fuck you" to the corrupt and not become corrupted
yourself by legitimizing it. The best part about it is that you don't have to do anything.
Viva la paz (Hows that for a non cynical salutation?)
Uh this sounds like the ultimate allowing things to continue as they currently are, do you really imagine the powers that be
are concerned about a low voting rate, and we have one, they don't care, they may even like it that way. Do you really imagine
they care about some phantom like perceived legitimacy? Where is the evidence of that?
Politicians do care about staying in office and will respond on some issues that will cost them enough votes to get booted
from office. But it has to be those particular issues in their own backyard; otherwise, they just kind of limp along with the
lip service collecting their paychecks.
IMO, it is sheer idiocy to not vote. If you are a voter, politicians will pay some attention to you at least. If you don't
vote, you don't even exist to them.
"I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress," said Ocasio-Cortez.
"At minimum there should be a long wait period."
"If you are a member of Congress + leave, you shouldn't be allowed to turn right around&leverage your service for a lobbyist check.
I don't think it should be legal at ALL to become a corporate lobbyist if you've served in Congress."
–AOC, as reported by NakedCapitalism on May 31, 2019
I try to be despairing, but I can't keep up.
Attributed to a generation or two after Lily Tomlin's quote about cynicism.
Out of curiosity, would it be cynical to question that political scientist's grant funding or other sources of income? These
days, I feel inclined to look at what I'll call the Sinclair Rule* , added to Betteridge's, Godwin's and all those other, ahem,
modifications to what used to be an expectation that communication was more or less honest.
* Sinclair Rule, where you add a interpretive filter based on Upton's famous quote: It is difficult to get a man to understand
something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
It's good to look at funding sources. But it's kind of a slander to those who must work for a living when assuming it's paychecks
(which we need to live in this system) that corrupt people.
If it's applied to the average working person, maybe it's often true, maybe it has a tendency to push in that direction, but
if you think there are no workers that realize the industry they are working in might be destructive, that they may be exploited
by such systems but have little choice etc. etc., come now there are working people who are politically aware and do see a larger
picture, they just don't have a lot of power to change it much of the time. Does the average working person's salary depend on
his not understanding though? No, of course not, it merely depends on him obeying. And obeying enough to keep a job, not always
understanding, is what a paycheck buys.
With all the evidence of everyday life (airplanes, drug prices, health insurance, Wall Street, CEO pay, the workforce changes
in the past 20 years if you've been working those years etc) this Greg better be careful as he might be seen as a Witch to be
hanged and burned in Salem, Ma a few hundred years ago.
It's cynical to say it's cynical to believe the system is corrupt.
Greg Weiner is cynic, and his is using his cynicism to dismiss the political arguments of people he disagrees with.
And just this week, I found out I couldn't even buy a car unless I'd be willing to sign a mandatory binding arbitration agreement.
I was ready to pay and sign all the paperwork, and they lay a document in front of me that reserves for the dealer the right to
seek any remedy against me if I harm the dealer (pay with bad check, become delinquent on loan, fail to provide clean title on
my trade); but forces me to accept mandatory binding arbitration, with damages limited to the value of the car, for anything the
dealer might do wrong.
It is not cynical at all when even car dealers now want a permission slip for any harm they might do to me.
Okay, a few more. We are literally facing the possibility of a mass extinction in large part because of dishonesty on the par
of oil companies, politicians, and people paid to make bad arguments.
"Assad (and by implication Assad's forces alone) killed 500,000 Syrians."
"Israel is just defending itself."
I can't squeeze the dishonesty about the war in Yemen into a short slogan, but I know from personal experience that getting
liberals to care when it was Obama's war was virtually impossible. Even under Trump it was hard, until Khashoggi's murder. On
the part of politicians and think tanks this was corruption by Saudi money. With ordinary people it was the usual partisan tribal
hypocrisy.
The motivator is "
Gap Psychology
," the human desire to distance oneself from those below (on any scale), and to come nearer to those above.
The rich are rich because the Gap below them is wide, and the wider the Gap, the richer they are .
And here is the important point: There are two ways the rich widen the Gap: Either gain more for themselves or make sure
those below have less.
That is why the rich promulgate the Big Lie that the federal government (and its agencies, Social Security and Medicare) is
running short of dollars. The rich want to make sure that those below them don't gain more, as that would narrow the Gap.
Negative sum game, where one wins but the other has to lose more so the party of the first part feels even better about winning.
There is an element of sadism, sociopathy and a few other behaviors that the current systems allow to be gamed even more profitably.
If you build it, or lobby to have it built, they will come multiple times.
A successful society should be responsive to both threats and opportunities. Any major problems to that society are assessed
and changes are made, usually begrudgingly, to adapt to the new situation. And this is where corruption comes into it. It short
circuits the signals that a society receives so that it ignores serious threats and elevates ones that are relatively minor but
which benefit a small segment of that society. If you want an example of this at work, back in 2016 you had about 40,000 Americans
dying to opioids each and every year which was considered only a background issue. But a major issue about that time was who gets
to use what toilets. Seriously. If it gets bad enough, a society gets overwhelmed by the problems that were ignored or were deferred
to a later time. And I regret to say that the UK is going to learn this lesson in spades.
'Sanders has said that we live in a "corrupt political system designed to protect the wealthy and the powerful." Warren said
it's a "rigged system that props up the rich and powerful and kicks dirt on everyone else."'
Yet the rest of the article focuses almost entirely on internal US shenanigans. When it comes to protecting wealth and power,
George Kennan hit the nail on the head in 1948, with "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3 of its population.
This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the
object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity." This, which has underpinned US policy ever since, may not be corrupt in the sense of
illegal, but it certainly seems corrupt in the sense of morally repugnant to me.
About Kennan's comment. That's interesting because no one questioned the word "wealth". Even tho' we had only 6.3% of the world's
population we had 50% of the wealth. The point of that comment had to be that we should "spread the wealth" and we did do just
that. Until we polluted the entire planet. I'd like some MMT person to take a long look at that attitude because it is so simplistic.
And not like George Kennan at all who was sophisticated to the bone. But that's just more proof of a bred-in-the-bone ignorance
about what money really is. In this case Kennan was talking about money, not wealth. He never asked Nepal for advice on gross
national happiness, etc. Nor did he calculate the enormous debt burden we would incur for our unregulated use and abuse of the
environment. That debt most certainly offsets any "wealth" that happened.
Approaching from the opposite direction, if someone were to say "I sincerely believe that the USA has the most open & honest
political system and the fairest economic system in human history" would you not think that person to be incredibly naive (or,
cynically, a liar)?
There has been, for at least the last couple of decades. a determined effort to do away with corruption – by defining it away.
"Citizens United" is perhaps the most glaring example but the effort is ongoing; that Weiner op-ed is a good current example.
What is cynical is everyone's response when point out that the system is corrupt. They all say " always has been, always will be so just deal with it ".
Strawmannirg has got to be the most cynical behavior in the world. Weiner is the cynic. I think Liz's "the system is rigged
" comment invites discussion. It is not a closed door at all. It is a plea for good capitalism. Which most people assume is possible.
It's time to define just what kind of capitalism will work and what it needs to continue to be, or finally become, a useful economic
ideology. High time.
Another thing. Look how irrational the world, which is now awash in money, has become over lack of liquidity. There's a big
push now to achieve an optimum flow of money by speeding up transaction time. The Fed is in the midst of designing a new real-time
digital payments system. A speedy accounting and record of everything. Which sounds like a very good idea.
But the predators are
busy keeping pace – witness the frantic grab by Facebook with Libra. Libra is cynical. To say the least. The whole thing a few
days ago on the design of Libra was frightening because Libra has not slowed down; it has filed it's private corporation papers
in Switzerland and is working toward a goal of becoming a private currency – backed by sovereign money no less! Twisted. So there's
a good discussion begging to be heard: The legitimate Federal Reserve v. Libra. The reason we are not having this discussion is
because the elite are hard-core cynics.
Images removed. For full text the original source... test
Notable quotes:
"... Maxwell, who was a business partner of Mega Group co-founder Charles Bronfman, aided the successful Mossad plot to plant a trapdoor in U.S.-created software that was then sold to governments and companies throughout the world. That plot’s success was largely due to the role of a close associate of then-President Ronald Reagan and an American politician close to Maxwell, who later helped aid Reagan in the cover-up of the Iran Contra scandal. ..."
"... Years later, Maxwell’s daughter — Ghislaine Maxwell — would join Jeffrey Epstein’s “inner circle” at the same time Epstein was bankrolling a similar software program now being marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad ..."
"... Epstein appears to have ties to Israeli intelligence and has well-documented ties to influential Israeli politicians and the Mega Group. Yet, those entities are not isolated in and of themselves, as many also connect to the organized crime network and powerful alleged pedophiles discussed in previous installments of this series. ..."
"... Associated Press ..."
"... Lauder, then-ambassador to Austria for the Reagan administration, would have been well-positioned to acquire such a passport, particularly for the reason cited by Epstein’s attorneys that Jewish-Americans could be targeted during travel, and in light of Lauder’s very public concerns over threats Jews face from certain terror groups. Furthermore, the passport had been issued in 1987, when Lauder was still serving as an ambassador. ..."
"... Though Epstein’s defense attorney declined to reveal the identity of the “friend” who provided him with the fake Austrian passport, Lauder was both well-positioned to acquire it in Austria and also deeply connected to the Mega Group, which was co-founded by Epstein’s patron Leslie Wexner and to which Epstein has many connections. These connections to both the Austrian government and to Epstein’s mentor make Lauder the most likely person to have acquired the document on Epstein’s behalf. ..."
"... Furthermore, Lauder co-founded the Eastern European broadcasting network CETV with Mark Palmer, a former U.S. diplomat, Kissinger aide and Reagan speechwriter. Palmer is better known for co-founding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization often described as an accessory to U.S. intelligence, and one whose first president confessed to the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” A 2001 report in the Evening Standard noted that Epstein once claimed that during the 1980s he worked for the CIA, but Epstein later backed away from that assertion. ..."
"... The Mega Group — a secretive group of billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was formed in 1991 by Charles Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey Epstein. Media profiles of the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on “philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000 per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to organized crime. ..."
"... When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said , “Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.” Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL include Ronald Lauder , Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher . As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge. ..."
"... In addition, Mega Group members have also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group , known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s top donors. ..."
"... Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime, specifically Meyer Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a leader in Canada’s Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes. ..."
"... Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to 1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah. ..."
"... However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed, one of the group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets , where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel fence of choice and a major player in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son’s first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in finance. ..."
"... One surprise connection to Cohn involves Mega Group member, and former president of U.S. weapons firm General Dynamics, Lester Crown, whose brother-in-law is David Schine, Cohn’s confidant and alleged lover during the McCarthy hearings, whose relationship with Cohn helped bring about the downfall of McCarthyism. ..."
"... Leslie “Les” Wexner, the other Mega Group co-founder, also has ties to organized crime. Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have come under scrutiny following the latter’s recent arrest, as Wexner was the only publicly acknowledged client of Epstein’s suspicious hedge fund, the source of much of this wealth, and the previous owner of Epstein’s $56 million Manhattan townhouse, which Wexner transferred to an Epstein-controlled entity for free. ..."
"... The 1996 Times article also noted that, after Wexner bought the residence for $13.2 million in 1989, he spent millions more decorating and furnishing the home, including the addition of the electronic equipment in the “James Bond” bathroom, only to apparently never live in it. ..."
"... Farmer’s account strongly suggests that, given the behavior of his personal security staff at his mansion following Epstein’s alleged assault on Farmer, Wexner was well aware of Epstein’s predatory behavior towards young women. This is compounded by claims made by Alan Dershowitz — a former lawyer for and friend of Epstein’s, who has also been accused of raping underage girls — that Wexner has also been accused of raping underage girls exploited by Epstein on at least seven occasions. ..."
"... The report, titled “ Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis ,” names Leslie Wexner as linked “with associates reputed to be organized crime figures” and also lists the names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and Wexner associate Jerry Hammond, and former Columbus City Council member Les Wright as also being involved in Shapiro’s murder. ..."
"... As to Wexner’s alleged links to organized crime, the report focuses on the close business relationship between Wexner’s The Limited and Francis Walsh, whose trucking company “[had] done an excess of 90 percent of the Limited’s trucking business around the time of Shapiro’s murder,” according to the report. Walsh was named in a 1988 indictment as a “co-conspirator” of Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, whose long-time lawyer was Roy Cohn; and the Shapiro murder report stated that Walsh was “still considered associates of the Genovese/LaRocca crime family, and Walsh was still providing truck transportation for The Limited.” ..."
"... According to a source who viewed a copy of the NSA transcript of the conversation, the intelligence officer, speaking in Hebrew, said, ‘The ambassador wants me to go to Mega to get a copy of this letter.’ The source said the supervisor in Tel Aviv rejected the request, saying, ‘This is not something we use Mega for.’” ..."
"... Almost one year to the day after the “Mega” spy scandal broke, the Wall Street Journal was the first outlet to report on the existence of a little-known organization of billionaires that was “informally” called the Mega Group and had been founded years prior in 1991. The report made no mention of the spy scandal that had spread concerns of Israeli espionage in the U.S. only a year prior. However, the group’s distinctive “informal” name and the connections of its members to the Mossad and to high-ranking Israeli politicians, including prime ministers, raise the possibility that “Mega” was not an individual, as the FBI and NSA had believed, but a group. ..."
"... Netanyahu was close enough to Lauder that he personally enlisted Lauder and George Nader to serve as his peace envoys to Syria. ..."
"... Nader, who was connected to the Trump 2016 campaign and Trump ally and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, was recently hit with federal child sex trafficking charges last month, soon after Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested on similar charges. At the time Nader was picked to work with Lauder on Netanyahu’s behalf, he had already been caught possessing large amounts of child pornography on two separate occasions, first in 1984 and later in 1990. ..."
"... Maxwell was also a close associate and friend of Israeli “superspy” Rafi Eitan, who, as previously mentioned, was Jonathan Pollard’s handler and who had previously worked directly with Meyer Lansky. ..."
"... With Inslaw out of the way, Brian sold the software all over the world. Eitan later recruited Robert Maxwell to become another Promis salesman, which he did remarkably well, even succeeding in selling the software to Soviet intelligence and conspiring with Republican Texas Senator John Tower to have the software adopted by the U.S. government laboratory at Los Alamos. Dozens of countries used the software on their most carefully guarded computer systems, unaware that Mossad now had access to everything Promis touched. ..."
"... According to journalist Robert Fisk , Maxwell was also involved in the Mossad abduction of Israeli nuclear weapons whistleblower Vanunu Mordechai. Mordechai had attempted to provide the media with information on the extent of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which was eventually published by the Sunday Times of London . Yet, Mordechai had also contacted the Daily Mirror with the information, the Mirror being an outlet that was owned by Maxwell and whose foreign editor was a close Maxwell associate and alleged Mossad asset, Nicholas Davies. Journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Davies had also been involved in Israeli arms deals. ..."
"... Per Fisk, it was Maxwell who contacted the Israeli Embassy in London and told them of Mordechai’s activities. This led to Mordechai’s entrapment by a female Mossad agent who seduced him as part of a “honey trap” operation that led to his kidnapping and later imprisonment in Israel. Mordechai served an 18-year sentence, 12 years of which were in solitary confinement. ..."
"... According to authors Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Maxwell had sealed his own fate when he attempted to threaten top Mossad officials with the exposure of certain operations if they did not help him rescue his media empire from crippling debt and financial difficulties. Many of Maxwell’s creditors , who had grown increasingly displeased with the media mogul, were Israeli and several of them were alleged to be Mossad-connected themselves. ..."
"... Another attendee of the Maxwell yacht party was former Secretary of the Navy and former Henry Kissinger staffer Jon Lehman, who would go on to associate with the controversial neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century. Prior to being secretary of the Navy, Lehman had been president of the Abington Corporation, which hired arch-neocon Richard Perle to manage the portfolio of Israeli arms dealers Shlomo Zabludowicz and his son Chaim, who paid Ablington $10,000 month. A scandal arose when those payments continued after both Lehman and Perle joined the Reagan Department of Defense and while Perle was working to persuade the Pentagon to buy arms from companies linked to Zabludowicz. Perle had been part of the Reagan transition team along with Roy Cohn’s long-time friend and law partner Tom Bolan (another Maxwell yacht guest). ..."
"... Even though Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had ties to the Mossad, this series has revealed that the networks to which Epstein was connected were not Mossad-exclusive, as many of the individuals close to Epstein — Lesie Wexner, for instance — were part of a mob-connected class of oligarchs with deep ties to both the U.S. and Israel. ..."
"... Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations. ..."
A
s billionaire pedophile and alleged sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein sits in prison, reports
have continued to surface about his reported links to intelligence, his financial ties to
several companies and “charitable” foundations, and his friendships with the rich
and powerful as well as top politicians.
While Part
I and Part
II of this series, “The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail,” have focused
on the widespread nature of sexual blackmail operations in recent American history and their
ties to the heights of American political power and the U.S. intelligence community, one key
aspect of Epstein’s own sex-trafficking and blackmail operation that warrants examination
is Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence and his ties to the “informal”
pro-Israel philanthropist faction known as “the Mega Group.”
The Mega Group’s role in the Epstein case has garnered some attention, as
Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner, was a co-founder
of the group that unites several well-known businessmen with a penchant for pro-Israel and
ethno-philanthropy (i.e., philanthropy benefiting a single ethnic or ethno-religious group).
However, as this report will show, another uniting factor among Mega Group members is deep ties
to organized crime, specifically the organized crime network discussed in Part
I of this series, which was largely led by notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky.
By virtue of the role of many Mega Group members as major political donors in both the U.S.
and Israel, several of its most notable members have close ties to the governments of both
countries as well as their intelligence communities. As this report and a subsequent report
will show, the Mega Group also had close ties to two businessmen who worked for Israel’s
Mossad — Robert Maxwell and Marc Rich — as well as to top Israeli politicians,
including past and present prime ministers with deep ties to Israel’s intelligence
community.
One of those businessmen working for the Mossad, Robert Maxwell, will be discussed at length
in this report. Maxwell, who was a business partner of Mega Group co-founder Charles Bronfman,
aided the successful Mossad plot to plant a trapdoor in U.S.-created software that was then
sold to governments and companies throughout the world. That plot’s success was largely
due to the role of a close associate of then-President Ronald Reagan and an American politician
close to Maxwell, who later helped aid Reagan in the cover-up of the Iran Contra scandal.
Years later, Maxwell’s daughter — Ghislaine Maxwell — would join Jeffrey
Epstein’s “inner circle” at the same time Epstein was bankrolling a similar
software program now being marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and
abroad. That company has deep and troubling connections to Israeli military intelligence,
associates of the Trump administration, and the Mega Group.
Epstein appears to have ties to Israeli intelligence and has well-documented ties to
influential Israeli politicians and the Mega Group. Yet, those entities are not isolated in and
of themselves, as many also connect to the organized crime network and powerful alleged
pedophiles discussed in previous installments of this series.
Perhaps the best illustration of how the connections between many of these players often
meld together can be seen in Ronald Lauder: a Mega Group member, former member of the Reagan
administration, long-time donor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s
Likud Party, as well as a long-time friend of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn.
From cosmetics
heir to political player
One often overlooked yet famous client and friend of Roy Cohn is the billionaire heir to the
Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, Ronald Lauder. Lauder is often described in the press as a
“leading Jewish philanthropist” and is the president of the World Jewish Congress,
yet his many media profiles tend to leave out his highly political past.
In a
statement given by Lauder to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in 2018, the
cosmetics heir noted that he has known Trump for over 50 years, going back at least to the
early 1970s. According to Lauder, his relationship with Trump began when Trump was a student at
the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which Lauder also
attended.
Image deleted: President-elect Trump walks with Ronald Lauder after meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Dec. 28, 2016,
in Palm Beach, Fla. Evan Vucci | AP
Though the exact nature of their early friendship is unclear, it is evident that they shared
many of the same connections, including to the man who would later count them both as his
clients, Roy Cohn. While much has been said of the ties between Cohn and Trump, Cohn was
particularly close to Lauder’s mother, Estee Lauder (born Josephine Mentzer). Estee was
even counted among Cohn’s most high-profile friends in
his New York Times obituary .
A small window into the Lauder-Cohn relationship surfaced briefly in a
2016 article in Politico about a 1981 dinner party held at Cohn’s weekend home
in Greenwich, Connecticut. The party was attended by Ronald Lauder’s parents, Estee and
Joe, as well as Trump and his then-wife Ivana, who had
a weekend home just two miles away. That party was held soon after Cohn had helped Reagan
secure the presidency and had reached the height of his political influence. At the party, Cohn
offered toasts to Reagan and to then-Senator for New York Alfonse D’Amato, who
would later urge Ronald Lauder to run for political office.
Two years later, in 1983, Ronald Lauder — whose only professional experience at that
point was working for his parent’s cosmetics company — was appointed to serve as United
States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs. Soon after his
appointment, he served on the
Dinner Tribute Committee for a dinner hosted by the Jewish fraternal and strongly pro-Israel
organization B’nai B’rith, the parent organization of the controversial
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in Roy Cohn’s honor. Cohn’s influential father,
Albert Cohn, was the long-time
president of B’nai B’rith’s powerful New England-New York chapter and Roy
Cohn himself was a member of B’nai B’rith’s Banking and Finance Lodge.
The dinner specifically sought
to honor Cohn for his pro-Israel advocacy and his efforts to “fortify”
Israel’s economy, and its honorary chairmen included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Donald
Trump and then-head of Bear Stearns Alan Greenberg, all of whom are
connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
During his time as deputy assistant secretary of defense, Lauder was also very active in
Israeli politics and had already become an ally of the then-Israeli representative to the
United Nations and future prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Lauder would go on to
be one of the most important individuals in Netanyahu’s rise to power, particularly
during his upset victory in 1996, and a major financier of
Israel’s right-wing Likud Party.
In 1986, the year that Roy Cohn died, Lauder left his post at the Pentagon and became the
U.S. ambassador to Austria, where his tenure was shaped by
his confrontations with the then-Austrian president and former Nazi collaborator, Kurt
Waldheim. Lauder’s interest in Austrian politics has continued well into recent years,
culminating in accusations that he sought
to manipulate Austrian elections in 2012.
After leaving his ambassadorship, Lauder
founded the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in 1987 and later went on to run for Mayor of New
York against Rudy Giuliani in 1989. Lauder
was encouraged to run by then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who had close ties to Roy Cohn
and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan, who was
D’Amato’s adviser . At the aforementioned 1983 B’nai B’rith dinner
honoring Cohn, D’Amato was the featured speaker.
The likely reason was that Giuliani, though once an ally of the “Roy Cohn
machine,” was at the time
deeply disliked by the late Cohn’s associates for prosecuting Cohn’s former law
partner, Stanley Friedman, for racketeering, conspiracy and other charges. Giuliani also had a
history of bitter disagreements with D’Amato. Lauder’s primary campaign, though
unsuccessful, was noted for its viciousness and its cost, as it
burned through more than $13 million.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, Lauder would join a newly formed group that has long
evaded scrutiny from the media but has recently become of interest in connection with the
Jeffrey Epstein scandal: the Mega Group.
Lauder, Epstein and the mysterious Austrian
passport
Before getting to the Mega Group, it is worth noting one particular act apparently
undertaken by Lauder while he was U.S. ambassador to Austria that has recently come to light in
relation to the arrest in early July of Jeffrey Epstein, a finding first reported by journalist
Edward Szall. When police recently discovered an Austrian passport with Epstein’s picture
and a fake name after raiding his Manhattan residence, the source and purpose of the passport
came under media scrutiny.
According to the Associated Press ,
Epstein’s defense lawyers specifically argued that “a friend gave it to him
[Epstein] in the 1980s after some Jewish-Americans were informally advised to carry
identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally during a period when
hijackings were more common.” This claim appears to be related to concerns that followed
the hijacking
of Air France Flight 139 in 1976 when Israeli and Jewish hostages were separated from other
hostages based largely on the passports in their possession.
Given that Epstein was unable to meet the conventional qualifications for an Austrian
passport — including long-term residency in Austria (the passport lists him as a resident
of Saudi Arabia) and fluency in German — it appears that the only way to have acquired an
Austrian passport was by unconventional means, meaning assistance from a well-connected
Austrian official or foreign diplomat with clout in Austria.
Image deleted: Ronald Lauder, right, and Austrian Chancellor Viktor Klima pose with students from the
Lauder Chabad School in Vienna, Austria in 1999. Martin Gnedt | AP
Lauder, then-ambassador to Austria for the Reagan administration, would have been
well-positioned to acquire such a passport, particularly for the reason cited by
Epstein’s attorneys that Jewish-Americans could be targeted during travel, and in light
of Lauder’s very public concerns over threats Jews face from certain terror groups.
Furthermore, the passport had been issued in 1987, when Lauder was still serving as an
ambassador.
In addition, Lauder
was well-connected to Epstein’s former patron — former head of Bear Stearns
Alan Greenberg, who had hired Epstein in the late 1970s immediately after the latter was fired
from the Dalton School — and Donald Trump,
another friend of Lauder and Greenberg who began his friendship with Epstein in 1987, the
same year the fake Austrian passport was issued. In 1987, Epstein also began his relationship
with his principal financier, Leslie Wexner, who is also closely associated with Lauder (though
some sources claim that Epstein and Wexner first met in 1985 but that their strong business
relationship was not established until 1987).
Though Epstein’s defense attorney declined to reveal the identity of the
“friend” who provided him with the fake Austrian passport, Lauder was both
well-positioned to acquire it in Austria and also deeply connected to the Mega Group, which was
co-founded by Epstein’s patron Leslie Wexner and to which Epstein has many connections.
These connections to both the Austrian government and to Epstein’s mentor make Lauder the
most likely person to have acquired the document on Epstein’s behalf.
Furthermore, Epstein and the Mega Group’s ties to the Israeli intelligence agency,
Mossad, also suggest Lauder was involved in procuring the passport, in light of his close ties
to the Israeli government and the fact that Mossad
has a history of using ambassadors abroad to procure false, foreign passports for its
operatives.
Lauder himself has been alleged to have ties to Mossad, as he is a long-time funder of IDC
Herzliya, an Israeli university
closely associated with Mossad and their recruiters as well as Israeli military
intelligence. Lauder even founded IDC Herzliya’s
Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy.
Furthermore, Lauder co-founded the Eastern European broadcasting network CETV with Mark
Palmer, a former U.S. diplomat, Kissinger aide and Reagan speechwriter. Palmer is better known
for co-founding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization often described as
an accessory to U.S. intelligence, and one whose first president confessed to
the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years
ago by the CIA.” A 2001 report in the Evening Standard noted that Epstein
once
claimed that during the 1980s he worked for the CIA, but Epstein later backed away from
that assertion.
The origins of the Mega Group Mafia
The Mega Group — a secretive group of billionaires to which Lauder belongs — was
formed in 1991 by Charles Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received
considerable media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey Epstein.
Media profiles
of the group paint it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest
and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on “philanthropy and
Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000 per year. Yet several of its most
prominent members have ties to organized crime.
Mega Group members founded and/or are closely associated with some of the most well-known
pro-Israel organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt
formed
Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his motivation in helping to found the group was to
advance his own belief that devotion
to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as “a substitute for [Jewish]
theology.”
Other well-known groups associated with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress
— whose past president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are both
Mega Group members — and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off known as the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were major donors to the ADL, with Edgar
Bronfman serving as the
ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years.
Image deleted: Former Israeli president Shimon Peres, second from left, listens to Edgar Bronfman during a
1995 lunch thrown in Peres’ honor. From left are: Laurence Tisch, Chairman, President and
Chief executive officer of CBS; Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Itamar Rabinowitz and
Bronfman. David Karp | AP
When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said ,
“Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair of our New York
Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.” Other Mega Group members that are
donors and major supporters of the ADL include
Ronald Lauder ,
Michael Steinhardt and the late Max
Fisher . As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn’s father was a long-time leader of
B’nai B’rith’s influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was later a
celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge.
In addition, Mega Group members have also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the
United States. For instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group
founded the National Jewish Coalition, now
known as the Republican Jewish Coalition — the main pro-Israel
neoconservative political lobbying group , known for its support of hawkish policies, and
whose current chief patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s
top donors.
Though the Mega Group has officially existed only since 1991, the use of
“philanthropy” to provide cover for more unscrupulous lobbying or business
activities was pioneered decades earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members
Edgar and Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D. Rockefeller had
previously used philanthropic giving as a means of laundering their reputations,
Bronfman’s approach to philanthropy was unique because it was focused on giving
specifically to other members of his own ethno-religious background.
Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part
I of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime, specifically Meyer
Lanksy’s organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman’s private ambition, according to
those close to him, was to become a respected member of high society. As a consequence,
Bronfman worked hard to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public
reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a leader in Canada’s
Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he
was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a
philanthropist for Jewish causes.
Yet even some of Bronfman’s activism and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like
reputation he tried so hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the
illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to 1948, specifically as
a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that
smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah.
At the same time Bronfman was abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his
associates in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II, close aides of
David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime minister of Israel and was
instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit
relationships with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Mickey Cohen and
other Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to establish a vast
arms smuggling network between the United States and Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming
both the Haganah and the Irgun paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the
same time these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit paramilitaries, they were
strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence that had first been formally (though covertly)
established in World War II.
After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfman worked with future Israeli Prime Minister
Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the
bargain weapons purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by Bronfman and
his wife. Many years later, Peres would go on
to introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein.
The rest of the Bronfman family’s march on “the road to respectability”
was undertaken by Bronfman’s children, who married into aristocratic families such as
the
European Rothschilds and the Wall Street “royalty” of
the Lehmans and the Loebs .
The Bronfmans’ newfound respectability did not mean that their association with the
Lansky-led criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams dynasty
came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their
close association with Willie “Obie” Obront, a major figure in Canadian
organized crime, whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer Lansky
of Canada.
However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep
and long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed, one of the
group’s prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, opened up about his own
family ties to Lansky in his autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets ,
where he noted that his father, Sol “Red McGee” Steinhardt, was Lansky’s jewel
fence of choice and
a major player in New York’s criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his
son’s first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in finance.
The ties between the Mega Group and the National Crime Syndicate don’t stop there.
Another prominent member of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max
Fisher, who has been described as Wexner’s mentor and is also alleged
to have worked with Detroit’s “Purple Gang” during Prohibition and
beyond. The Purple Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada into
the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe Bernstein, was
a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a
key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to
Henry Kissinger.
Image removed: Max Fisher, center, and Henry Kissinger, right, meet with leaders of Jewish organizations
prior to Kissinger’s 1975 Middle East trip. Henry Burroughs | AP
In addition to Fisher, Mega Group member Ronald Lauder was connected to Roy Cohn and Tom
Bolan, both of whom were closely associated with this same Lansky-led crime network (see
Part
I and
Part
II ) and who regularly represented top Mafia figures in court. Furthermore, another member
of the Mega Group, director Steven Spielberg, is
a
well-known protege of Lew Wasserman, the mob-connected media mogul and long-time backer of
Ronald Reagan’s film and later political career, discussed in
Part
II of this series.
One surprise connection to Cohn involves Mega Group member, and former president of U.S.
weapons firm General Dynamics, Lester Crown, whose brother-in-law is David Schine, Cohn’s
confidant and alleged lover during the McCarthy hearings, whose
relationship with Cohn helped bring about the downfall of McCarthyism.
Another member of the Mega Group worth noting is Laurence Tisch, who owned CBS News
for several years and founded Loews Corporation. Tisch is notable for his work
for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, where Donald Barr,
who hired Epstein at the Dalton School, also served and which forged ties with Lansky’s
criminal empire during World War II.
Wexner’s mansions and the Shapiro murder
Leslie “Les” Wexner, the other Mega Group co-founder, also has ties to organized
crime. Wexner’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have come under scrutiny following the
latter’s recent arrest, as Wexner was the only publicly acknowledged client of
Epstein’s suspicious hedge fund, the source of much of this wealth, and the previous
owner of Epstein’s $56 million Manhattan townhouse, which Wexner transferred to an
Epstein-controlled entity for free.
Before Epstein received the townhouse, Wexner appears to have used the residence for some
unconventional purposes, noted in a 1996 New York
Times article on the then-Wexner-owned residence, which included “a bathroom
reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter
from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed
in a cabinet beneath the sink.” The Times article does not speculate as to the
purpose of this equipment, though the allusion to famous fictional superspy James Bond suggests
that it may have been used to snoop on guests or conduct electronic surveillance.
The 1996 Times article also noted that, after Wexner bought the residence for $13.2
million in 1989, he spent millions more decorating and furnishing the home, including the
addition of the electronic equipment in the “James Bond” bathroom, only to
apparently never live in it. The Times , which interviewed Epstein for the piece, quoted
him as saying that “Les never spent more than two months there.” Epstein told the
Times , which identified Epstein as Wexner’s “protege and one of his
financial advisers,” that the house, by that time, already belonged to him.
That same year, Epstein was commissioning artwork for Wexner’s Ohio mansion. A
recent
article from the Times noted that:
In the summer of 1996, Maria Farmer was working on an art project for Mr. Epstein in
Mr. Wexner’s Ohio mansion. While she was there, Mr. Epstein sexually assaulted her,
according to an affidavit Ms. Farmer filed earlier this year in federal court in Manhattan.
She said that she fled the room and called the police, but that Mr. Wexner’s security
staff refused to let her leave for 12 hours.”
Farmer’s account strongly suggests that, given the behavior of his personal security
staff at his mansion following Epstein’s alleged assault on Farmer, Wexner was well
aware of Epstein’s predatory behavior towards young women. This is compounded by claims
made by Alan Dershowitz — a former lawyer for and friend of Epstein’s, who has
also been accused of raping underage girls — that Wexner has also been accused of raping underage
girls exploited by Epstein on at least seven occasions.
The presence of the electronic equipment in his home’s bathroom, other oddities
related to the townhouse, and aspects of the links between Epstein and Wexner suggest there is
more to Wexner, who has rather successfully developed a public image of a respectable
businessman and philanthropist, much like other prominent members of the Mega
Group.
Image removed: Leslie Wexner and his wife Abigail tour the “Transfigurations” exhibit at the
Wexner Center for the Arts. Jay LaPrete | AP
However, bits and pieces of Wexner’s private secrets have occasionally bubbled up,
only to be subjected to rapid cover-ups amidst concerns of “libeling” the powerful
and well-connected billionaire “philanthropist.”
In 1985, Columbus (Ohio) lawyer Arthur Shapiro was murdered in broad daylight
at point-blank range in what was largely referred to as a “mob style murder.” The
homicide still remains unsolved, likely due to the fact that then-Columbus Police Chief James
Jackson ordered the destruction of key documents of his department’s investigation into
the murder.
Jackson’s ordering of the documents’ destruction came to light years later in
1996, when he was under investigation for corruption. According to the Columbus Dispatch ,
Jackson justified the destruction of one “ viable and valuable ” report
because he felt that it “was so filled with wild speculation about prominent business
leaders that it was potentially libelous.” The nature of this “wild
speculation” was that “millionaire businessmen in Columbus and Youngstown were
linked to the ‘mob-style murder.’”
Though Jackson’s efforts were meant to keep this “libelous” report far
from public view, it was eventually obtained by Bob Fitrakis —
attorney, journalist, and executive director of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary
Journalism — after he was “accidentally” sent a copy of the report in 1998 as
part of a public records request.
The report, titled “ Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and
Hypothesis ,” names Leslie Wexner as linked “with associates reputed to be
organized crime figures” and also lists the names of businessman Jack Kessler, former
Columbus City Council President and Wexner associate Jerry Hammond, and former Columbus City
Council member Les Wright as also being involved in Shapiro’s murder.
The report also noted that Arthur Shapiro’s law firm — Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm
& Warren — represented Wexner’s company, The Limited, and states that
“prior to his death, Arthur Shapiro managed this account [The Limited] for the law
firm.” It also noted that, at the time of his death, Shapiro “was the subject of an
investigation by the Internal Revenue Service because he had failed to file income tax returns
for some seven years prior to his death, and he had invested in some questionable tax
shelters.” It also stated that his death prevented Shapiro from his planned testimony at
a grand jury hearing about these “questionable tax shelters.”
As to Wexner’s alleged links to organized crime, the report focuses on the close
business relationship between Wexner’s The Limited and Francis Walsh, whose trucking
company “[had] done an excess of 90 percent of the Limited’s trucking business
around the time of Shapiro’s murder,” according to the report. Walsh was named in
a 1988 indictment as a “co-conspirator” of Genovese crime family boss Anthony
“Fat Tony” Salerno, whose long-time lawyer was Roy Cohn; and the Shapiro murder
report stated that Walsh was “still considered associates of the Genovese/LaRocca crime
family, and Walsh was still providing truck transportation for The Limited.”
Notably, the Genovese crime family has long formed a key part of the National Crime
Syndicate, as its former head, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, co-created the criminal organization
with his close friend Meyer Lansky. Upon Luciano’s imprisonment and subsequent
deportation from the United States, Lansky took over the syndicate’s U.S. operations and
his association with Luciano’s successors continued until Lansky’s death in
1983.
The “Mega” Mystery and the Mossad
In May 1997, the Washington Post broke
an explosive story — long since forgotten — based on an intercepted phone call
made between a Mossad official in the U.S. and his superior in Tel Aviv that discussed the
Mossad’s efforts to obtain a secret U.S. government document. According to the
Post, the Mossad official stated during the phone call that “Israeli Ambassador
Eliahu Ben Elissar had asked him whether he could obtain a copy of the letter given to
[Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat by [then-Secretary of State Warren] Christopher on Jan. 16,
the day after the Hebron accord was signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu.”
The Post article continued:
According to a source who viewed a copy of the NSA transcript of the conversation, the
intelligence officer, speaking in Hebrew, said, ‘The ambassador wants me to go to Mega
to get a copy of this letter.’ The source said the supervisor in Tel Aviv rejected the
request, saying, ‘This is not something we use Mega for.’”
The leaked communication led to an investigation that sought to identify an individual
code-named “Mega” that the Post said “may be someone in the U.S.
government who has provided information to the Israelis in the past,” a concern that
subsequently spawned a fruitless FBI investigation. The Mossad later claimed that
“Mega” was merely a codeword for the U.S.’ CIA, but the FBI and NSA were
unconvinced by that claim and
believed that it was a senior U.S. government official that had potentially once been
involved in working with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. naval intelligence analyst later
convicted of spying for the Mossad.
Almost one year to the day after the “Mega” spy scandal broke, the Wall
Street Journal was the first outlet to report on the
existence of a little-known organization of billionaires that was “informally”
called the Mega Group and had been founded years prior in 1991. The report made no mention of
the spy scandal that had spread concerns of Israeli espionage in the U.S. only a year prior.
However, the group’s distinctive “informal” name and the connections of its
members to the Mossad and to high-ranking Israeli politicians, including prime ministers, raise
the possibility that “Mega” was not an individual, as the FBI and NSA had believed,
but a group.
In 1997, when the “Mega” spy scandal broke, Netanyahu had recently become prime
minister of Israel after an upset victory, a victory that was
largely credited to one well-connected Netanyahu backer in particular, Ronald Lauder.
Beyond being a major donor, Lauder had brought Arthur Finklestein on to work for
Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign, whose strategies were credited for Netanyahu’s surprise
win. Netanyahu was close enough to Lauder that he personally enlisted Lauder and George Nader
to serve as his peace envoys to Syria.
Image removed: Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara with Ronald Lauder in 1997. Photo | Reuters
Nader, who was connected to the Trump 2016 campaign and Trump ally and Blackwater
founder Erik Prince, was
recently hit with federal child sex trafficking charges last month, soon after Jeffrey
Epstein had been arrested on similar charges. At the time Nader was picked to work with Lauder
on Netanyahu’s behalf, he had
already been caught possessing large amounts of child pornography on two separate
occasions, first in 1984 and later in 1990.
This strong connection between Netanyahu and Lauder during the time of the 1997
“Mega” spy scandal is important considering Mossad answers directly to
Israel’s prime minister.
Another possible connection between the Mega Group and the Mossad owes to the Mega
Group’s ties to Meyer Lansky’s criminal network. As was detailed in Part I, Lansky
had established deep ties to U.S. intelligence after World War II and was also connected to the
Mossad through Mossad official Tibor Rosenbaum, whose bank was frequently used by Lansky to
launder money. In addition, Lansky collaborated on at least one occasion with notorious Mossad
“superspy” Rafi Eitan, who he
helped acquire sensitive electronic equipment possessed only by the CIA but coveted by
Israeli intelligence. Eitan is best known in the U.S. for being the Mossad handler of Jonathan
Pollard.
Notably, Eitan was the main source of
claims that the code-word “Mega” used by the Mossad officials in 1997 referred to
the CIA and not to a potential source in the U.S. government once linked to Pollard’s
spying activities, making his claims as to the true meaning of the term somewhat dubious.
Given that the organized crime network tied to the Mega Group had ties to both U.S. and
Israeli intelligence, the “Mega” codeword could plausibly have referred to this
secretive group of billionaires. More supporting evidence for this theory comes from the fact
that prominent members of the Mega Group were business partners of Mossad agents, including
media mogul Robert Maxwell and commodities trader Marc Rich.
The mysterious Maxwells
The Maxwell family has become a source of renewed media interest following Jeffrey
Epstein’s arrest, as Ghislaine Maxwell, long described in the media as a British
“socialite,” was publicly cited as Epstein’s long-time “on and
off” girlfriend, and Epstein’s victims, as well as former wives of Epstein’s
friends, have claimed that she was Epstein’s “pimp” and procured underage
girls for his sexual blackmail operation. Ghislaine Maxwell is also alleged to have
engaged in the rape of the girls she procured for Epstein and to have used them to produce
child pornography.
Ghislaine was the favorite and youngest daughter of media mogul Robert Maxwell. Maxwell,
born Jan Ludvick Hoch, had joined the British Army in World War II. Afterwards, according to
authors John
Loftus and Mark Aarons , he greatly influenced the Czechoslovakian government’s
decision to arm Zionist paramilitaries during the 1948 war that resulted in Israel’s
creation as a state, and Maxwell himself was also involved in the smuggling of aircraft parts
to Israel.
Around this time, Maxwell was approached by British intelligence outfit MI6 and offered a
position that Maxwell ultimately declined. MI6 then classified
him as “Zionist — loyal only to Israel” and made him a person of interest. He
later became an agent of the Mossad, according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s
The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, and
Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon.
Mossad was financing many of its operations in Europe from money stolen from
Maxwell’s newspaper pension fund. They got their hands on the funds almost as soon as
Maxwell made the purchase of the Mirror Newspaper Group with money lent to him by
Mossad.”
In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during
his visits to Israel,
providing him with prostitutes, “the service maintained for blackmail
purposes.” It was later revealed that the hotel in which he stayed in Israel was bugged
with cameras, allowing the Mossad to acquire “a small library of video footage of Maxwell
in sexually compromising positions.” As with the CIA, the Mossad’s use of blackmail
against both friend and foe is well-documented
and known to be
extensive .
Maxwell was also a close associate and friend of Israeli “superspy” Rafi Eitan,
who, as previously mentioned, was Jonathan Pollard’s handler and who had previously
worked directly with Meyer Lansky. Eitan
had learned of a revolutionary new software being used by the U.S. government known as
“Promis” from Earl Brian, a long-time associate and aide to Ronald Reagan. Promis
is often considered the forerunner to the “Prism” software used by spy agencies
today and was developed by William Hamilton, who leased the software to the U.S. government
through his company, Inslaw, in 1982.
Image removed: Ariel Sharon (right)meets with Robert Maxwell in Jerusalem on Feb. 20, 1990. Photo | AP
According to author and former BBC investigative journalist Gordon Thomas, Brian
was angry that the U.S. Department of Justice was successfully using Promis to go after
organized crime and money-laundering activities and Eitan felt that the program could aid
Israel. At the time, Eitan was the director of the now defunct Israeli military intelligence
agency Lekem, which gathered scientific and technical intelligence abroad from both public and
covert sources, especially in relation to Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
A plan was hatched to
install a “trapdoor” into the software and then market Promis throughout the
world, providing the Mossad with invaluable intelligence on the operations of its enemies and
allies while also providing Eitan and Brian with copious amounts of cash. According to the
testimony of ex-Mossad official Ari Ben-Menashe, Brian
provided a copy of Promis to Israel’s military intelligence, which contacted an
Israeli American programmer living in California who then planted the “trapdoor” in
the software. The CIA was later said to have installed its own trapdoor in the software
but it is unknown if they did so with a version of the already bugged software and how widely
it was adopted relative to the version bugged by Israeli intelligence.
After the trapdoor was inserted, the problem became selling the bugged version of the
software to governments as well as private companies around the world, particularly in areas of
interest. Brian first attempted to buy out Inslaw and Promis and then use that same company to
sell the bugged version.
Unsuccessful, Brian turned to his close friend, then-Attorney General Ed Meese whose Justice
Department then abruptly refused to
make the payments to Inslaw that were stipulated by the contract, essentially using the
software for free, which Inslaw claimed to be theft. Some have speculated that Meese’s
role in that decision was shaped, not only by his friendship with Brian, but the fact that his
wife was a major investor in
Brian’s business ventures. Meese would later become an adviser to Donald Trump when he
was president-elect.
Inslaw was forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of Meese’s actions and sued the
Justice Department. The court later found that
the Meese-led department “took, converted, stole” the software through
“trickery, fraud and deceit.”
With Inslaw out of the way, Brian sold the software all over the world. Eitan later
recruited Robert Maxwell to become another Promis salesman, which he did remarkably well, even
succeeding in selling the software to Soviet intelligence and conspiring
with Republican Texas Senator John Tower to have the software adopted by the U.S.
government laboratory at Los Alamos. Dozens of countries used the software on their most
carefully guarded computer systems, unaware that Mossad now had access to everything Promis
touched.
Whereas the Mossad’s past reliance on gathering intelligence had relied on the same
tactics used by its equivalents in the U.S. and elsewhere, the widespread adoption of the
Promis software, largely through the actions of Earl Brian and Robert Maxwell, gave the Mossad
a way to gather not just troves of counterintelligence data, but also blackmail on other
intelligence agencies and powerful figures.
Indeed, Promis’ backdoor and adoption by intelligence agencies all over the world
essentially provided the Mossad with access to troves of blackmail that the CIA and FBI had
acquired on their friends and foes for over half a century. Strangely, in recent years, the FBI
has sought to
hide information related to Robert Maxwell’s connection to the Promis scandal.
According to journalist Robert
Fisk , Maxwell was also involved in the Mossad abduction of Israeli nuclear weapons
whistleblower Vanunu Mordechai. Mordechai had attempted to provide the media with information
on the extent of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which was eventually published by the
Sunday Times of London . Yet, Mordechai had also contacted the Daily Mirror with
the information, the Mirror being an outlet that was owned by Maxwell and whose foreign
editor was a close Maxwell associate and alleged Mossad asset, Nicholas Davies. Journalist
Seymour Hersh alleged that Davies had also been involved in Israeli arms deals.
Per Fisk, it was Maxwell who contacted the Israeli Embassy in London and told them of
Mordechai’s activities. This led to Mordechai’s entrapment by a female Mossad agent
who seduced him as part of a “honey trap” operation that led to his kidnapping and
later imprisonment in Israel. Mordechai served an 18-year sentence, 12 years of which were in
solitary confinement.
Then, there is the issue of Maxwell’s death, widely cited by mainstream and
independent media alike as suspicious
and a potential homicide . According to authors Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Maxwell
had sealed his own fate when he attempted to threaten top Mossad officials with the exposure of
certain operations if they did not help him rescue his media empire from crippling debt and
financial difficulties. Many of Maxwell’s
creditors , who had grown increasingly displeased with the media mogul, were Israeli and
several of them were alleged to be Mossad-connected themselves.
Thomas and Dillon argue in their
biography of Maxwell’s life that the Mossad felt that Maxwell had become more of a
liability than an asset and killed him on his yacht three months after he demanded the bailout.
On the other extreme are theories that suggest Maxwell committed suicide because of the
financial difficulties his empire faced.
Image removed: Ghislaine Maxwell, far right, Robert Maxwell’s daughter, looks on his casket is
unloaded from a plane in Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 1991. Heribert Proepper | AP
Some have taken Maxwell’s funeral held in Israel as the country’s
“official” confirmation of Maxwell’s service to the Mossad, as it was likened
to a state funeral and attended
by no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence. During his funeral
service in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized him and
stated : “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.” Other
eulogies were given by future Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert (then Health Minister) and Shimon
Peres, with the latter also praising
Maxwell’s “services” on behalf of Israel.
Swimming in the same
swamp
As he built his business empire — and even became a member of Parliament, Maxwell was
also doing work for Israeli intelligence, as several of the Israeli companies in which he
invested became fronts for the Mossad. In addition, as he became a media mogul, he developed a
bitter rivalry with Rupert Murdoch, a close friend of Roy Cohn and an influential figure in
American and British media.
Maxwell also partnered with the Bronfman brothers, Edgar and Charles — key figures in
the Mega Group. In 1989 Maxwell and Charles Bronfman
partnered up to bid on the Jerusalem Post newspaper and the Post described
the two men as “two of the world’s leading Jewish financiers” and their
interest in the venture as “developing The Jerusalem Post and expanding its
influence among world Jewry.” A year prior, Maxwell and Bronfman
had become top shareholders in the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva.
Maxwell also worked with Charles Bronfman’s brother Edgar in the late 1980s to
convince the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. Edgar’s efforts in
this regard
have received more attention , as it was a defining moment of his decades-long presidency
of the World Jewish Congress, of which Ronald Lauder is currently president. Yet, Maxwell had
also made considerable
use of his contacts in the Soviet government in this effort.
Maxwell also moved in the circles of the network previously described in Parts I and II in
this series. A key example of this is the May 1989
party Maxwell hosted on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine — named for his youngest
daughter and Epstein’s future “girlfriend.” Attendees of the party included
Roy Cohn’s protege Donald Trump and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan. A close friend
of Nancy Reagan was also present, journalist Mike Wallace, as was literary agent Mort Janklow,
who represented Ronald Reagan and two of Cohn’s closest friends: journalists William
Safire and Barbara Walters.
The CEO of what would soon become Time Warner, Steve Ross, was also invited to the exclusive
event. Ross’ presence is notable, as he had built his business empire largely through
his association with New York crime lords Manny Kimmel and Abner “Longy”
Zwillman. Zwillman was a close friend of Meyer Lansky, Michael Steinhardt’s father, and
Sam Bronfman, father of Edgar and Charles Bronfman.
Another attendee of the Maxwell yacht party was former Secretary of the Navy and former
Henry Kissinger staffer Jon Lehman, who would go on to associate with the controversial
neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century. Prior to being secretary of the
Navy, Lehman had been president of the Abington Corporation, which hired arch-neocon Richard
Perle to manage
the portfolio of Israeli arms dealers Shlomo Zabludowicz and his son Chaim, who paid
Ablington $10,000 month. A scandal arose when those
payments continued after both Lehman and Perle joined the Reagan Department of Defense and
while Perle was working to persuade the Pentagon to buy arms from companies linked to
Zabludowicz. Perle had been part of the Reagan transition team along with Roy Cohn’s
long-time friend and law partner Tom Bolan (another Maxwell yacht guest).
In addition to Lehman, another former Kissinger staffer, Thomas Pickering was present at
Maxwell’s yacht part. Pickering played a minor role in the Iran-Contra affair and, at the
time of the Maxwell yacht party, he was U.S. ambassador to Israel. Senator John Tower (R-TX),
who allegedly conspired with Maxwell in the Mossad-bugged Promis software at the Los Alamos
laboratories, was also present. Tower died just months before Maxwell in
a suspicious plane crash .
Ghislaine Maxwell was also at this rather notable event. After her father’s mysterious
death and alleged murder on the same yacht that bears her name in 1991, she quickly packed her
bags and moved to New York City. There, she soon made the acquaintance of Jeffrey Epstein and,
a few years later, developed close ties to the Clinton family, which will be discussed in the
next installment of this series.
Jeffrey Epstein and the new “Promis”
After it was revealed that Epstein had evaded stricter sentencing in 2008 due to his links
to “intelligence,” it was the Mossad ties of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father that
have led many to speculate that Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation was sharing
incriminating information with the Mossad. Former CBS executive producer and current
journalist for the media outlet Narativ , Zev Shalev, has since claimed that he
independently confirmed that Epstein was tied directly to the Mossad.
Image removed: Donald and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club,
Palm Beach, Florida in 2000. Photo | Davidoff Studios
Epstein was a long-time friend of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has
long-standing and deep ties to Israel’s intelligence community. Their decades-long
friendship has been the source of recent political attacks targeting Barak, who is running in
the Israeli elections against current Prime Minister Netanyahu later this year.
Barak is also close to Epstein’s chief patron and Mega Group member Leslie Wexner,
whose Wexner Foundation
gave Barak $2 million in 2004 for a still unspecified research program. According to Barak,
he was first introduced to Epstein by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eulogized
Robert Maxwell at his funeral and had decades-long ties with the Bronfman family going back to
the early 1950s. Peres was also a
frequent participant in programs funded by
Leslie Wexner in Israel and
worked closely with the Mossad for decades.
In 2015, a few years after Epstein’s release from prison following his conviction for
soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, Barak formed a company with Epstein with the chief purpose
of investing in an Israeli start-up then known as Reporty. That company, now called Carbyne,
sells its signature software to 911 call centers and emergency service providers and is also
available to consumers as an app that provides emergency services with access to a
caller’s camera and location and also runs any caller’s identity through any linked
government database. It has specifically been marketed by the company itself and the Israeli
press as a
solution to mass shootings in the
United States and is already being used by at least two U.S. counties.
Israeli media reported that Epstein and Barak were among the company’s largest
investors. Barak poured millions into the company and it was recently revealed by Haaretz
that a significant amount of Barak’s total investments in Carbyne was funded by Epstein,
making him a “ de facto partner” in the company. Barak is now Carbyne’s chairman .
The company’s executive team are all former members of different branches of Israeli
intelligence, including the elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, that is often likened
to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Carbyne’s
current CEO, Amir Elichai, served in Unit 8200 and tapped
former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris to serve as the
company’s director and on its board. In addition to Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder,
Lital Leshem , also
served in Unit 8200 and later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. Leshem now
works for a subsidiary of Erik Prince’s company Frontier Services Group, according to the
independent media outlet Narativ .
The company also includes several tie-ins to the Trump administration, including Palantir
founder and Trump ally Peter Thiel — an investor in Carbyne. In addition,
Carbyne’s board of advisers
includes former Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team,
as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
Trump donor and New York real-estate developer Eliot Tawill is also on Carbyne’s board , alongside Ehud Barak and
Pinchas Buchris.
Narativ , which wrote the first expose on Carbyne after Epstein’s arrest, noted
that the Chinese government uses a smartphone app very similar to Carbyne as part of its mass
surveillance apparatus, even though the original purpose of the app was for improved emergency
reporting. According to Narativ , the Chinese Carbyne-equivalent “monitors every
aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a
user’s movement.”
Given the history of Robert Maxwell — the father of Epstein’s long-time
“girlfriend” and young-girl-procuring madam, Ghislaine Maxwell — in promoting
the sale of Carbyne’s modified Promis software, which was also marketed as a tool to
improve government efficacy but was actually a tool of mass surveillance for the benefit of
Israeli intelligence, the overlap between Carbyne and Promis is troubling and warrants further
investigation.
It is also worth noting that Unit 8200-connected tech start-ups are being widely integrated
into U.S. companies and have developed close ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex, with
Carbyne being just one example of that trend.
As MintPress
previously reported , Unit 8200-linked outfits like Team8 have recently hired former
National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers as a senior advisor and gained prominent
Silicon Valley figures, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as key investors. Many
American technology companies, from Intel to Google to Microsoft,
have merged with several Unit 8200-connected start-ups in recent years and have been moving
many key jobs and operations to Israel with
backing from key Republican donors like Paul Singer . Many of those same companies,
particularly Google and Microsoft, are also major U.S. government contractors.
Who was
Epstein really working for?
Even though Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had ties to the Mossad, this series has revealed
that the networks to which Epstein was connected were not Mossad-exclusive, as many of the
individuals close to Epstein — Lesie Wexner, for instance — were part of a
mob-connected class of oligarchs with deep ties to both the U.S. and Israel. As was discussed
in Part I of this series, the sharing of “intelligence” (i.e., blackmail) between
intelligence agencies and the same organized crime network connected to the Mega Group goes
back decades. With Leslie Wexner of the Mega Group as Epstein’s chief patron, as opposed
to a financier with direct ties to the Mossad, a similar relationship is more than likely in
the case of the sexual blackmail operation that Epstein ran.
Given that intelligence agencies in both the U.S. and elsewhere often conduct covert
operations for the benefit of oligarchs and large corporations as opposed to “national
security interest,” Epstein’s ties to the Mega Group suggest that this group holds
a unique status and influence in both the governments of the U.S. and of Israel, as well as in
other countries (e.g., Russia) that were not explored in this report. This is by virtue of
their role as key political donors in both countries, as well as the fact that several of them
own powerful companies or financial institutions in both countries. Indeed, many members of the
Mega Group have deep ties to Israel’s political class, including to Netanyahu and Ehud
Barak as well as to now-deceased figures like Shimon Peres, and to members of the American
political class.
Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single intelligence
agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the
U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in
both nations.
Though this series has so far focused on the ties of this network to main Republican Party
affiliates, the next and final installment will reveal the ties developed between this web and
the Clintons. As will be revealed, despite the Clintons’ willingness to embrace corrupt
dealings during the span of their political careers, their mostly friendly relationship with
this network still saw them use the power of sexual blackmail to obtain certain policy
decisions that were favorable to their personal and financial interests but not to the
Clintons’ political reputation or agendas.
Editor’s note | The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Rafi
Eitan was interested in repurposing the American-made Promise software to restore his standing
in Israel’s intelligence community caused by the fall-out from the Pollard Affair. The
Pollard Affair occurred three years after Eitan had succeeded in repurposing the software and
MintPress has removed that incorrect information from the article and regrets the
error.
This article also originally neglected to mention that Eitan, at the time of his
collaboration with Earl Brian to repurpose the Promis software, was the director of the
now-defunct Israeli military intelligence agency Lekem at the time of those events and that
information has been added to the story.
Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to
several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute
and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and
is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in
Journalism.
Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review
of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :
Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have
been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways:
i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United
for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to
betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;
(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"
(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;
iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its
business party duopoly.
The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic
party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public
dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.
By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity"
and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction
of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing
the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.
I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre.
Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong.
Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.
Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than
happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no
further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist
path.
In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US
finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that
the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard
core imperialists who's time has reached its end.
This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.
"... That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows. ..."
"... *CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating Inside the U.S. ..."
"... That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is highly probable. ..."
"... For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties. ..."
"... Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects. ..."
"... Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told. ..."
"... As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over." ..."
"... The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death. ..."
"... Boy that Mueller has had a busy career hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he did or didn't do. ..."
"... Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone. ..."
"... In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe. ..."
"... Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something on them? ..."
"... Epstein is the destruction of the Deep State. ..."
"... That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one. ..."
"... The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution ring. ..."
"... Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103 bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being sued by his lead investigator in that case. ..."
"... Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite, the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the hip ..."
"... partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world. ..."
"... The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union, along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services. ..."
"... The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities run by the two main communications intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS. ..."
"... Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then, three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations. ..."
"... For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief, to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized. ..."
"... Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations. ..."
"... Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree. ..."
"... There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars." ..."
That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation
has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows.
The real question is, why did the FBI wait for more than a decade to bust Epstein and Maxwell?
Epstein and Maxwell came to the attention of the FBI in 1996, when, curiously, the Bureau never acted on an accusation that
they had together sexually abused a 15 year old girl in a bedroom inside Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. Documents in a recent
law suit filed by an alleged victim, Maria Farmer, show that the FBI had been aware of Epstein and Maxwell's child abuse activities
in New York for at least a dozen years before Epstein was finally charged in 2008 with much-reduced Florida state offenses.
https://www.yourtango.com/2019323698/who-maria-farmer-latest-woman-accus...
Farmer claims she reported her sexual assault to New York police and the FBI in 1996. "To my knowledge, I was the first
person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI," she wrote in her affidavit."
*CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating
Inside the U.S.
Previously, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had for many years been known to have been involved in high-level espionage
in the United States, as detailed in a 2003 publication of the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, The Intelligence Officer's
Bookshelf . Therein, the CIA reviewer of a biography by British author Gordon Thomas acknowledged about Maxwell:
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-pub...
That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is
highly probable.
For the deeper background to the Epstein-Maxwell multinational blackmail, coverup and kompromat operation, we have to
look at the events that led up to the 1991 death of Robert Maxwell. A summary of the Maxwell bio by its authors recounts:
British Publisher Robert Maxwell
Was Mossad Spy
By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon
The Mirror - UK
12-6-2002
[ . . .]
Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still
arouses intense interest.
Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991.
[ . . . ]
The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.
He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.
But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.
He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.
In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and
to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to
funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.
Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable
appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.
He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador
to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.
[ . . . ]
The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the
very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.
He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw
a way out of his problems.
He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.
Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist
Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB
chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters,
Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.
The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better
to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would
guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.
Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But
when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.
For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that,
for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.
Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he
was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally
unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.
The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm
to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.
Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands.
There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.
On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea.
[ . . . ]
As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."
The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading
forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these
reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.
Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson
Books.
The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked. The
answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its several
operators to let it all end too soon.
leap out at me as suggesting how Epstein connects to much bigger subjects. First is the assertion that Maxwell was
... teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around
the globe.
This area of trafficking and money laundering directly connects to Mueller and his essential exoneration of
HSBC .
The other quotation that suggests the importance of money laundering is here:
The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better
to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control.
The life's work of
Antony Sutton at Stanford's Hoover Institution shows that American industry was ALWAYS controlling communism as well as Soviet
industrial development, and that a trend toward social democracy, represented by Gorbachev, would have put an end to that control.
@Linda Wood his money laundering and blackmailing activities. While the review confirms that Robert Maxwell was for decades
a major Mossad agent actively setting up operations and cover in the United States and the UK, I can only surmise that the spreading
political influence of Eastern European organized crime networks and child honey traps are things that the Agency didn't want
to discuss publicly in 2003.
As for Mueller, let's not forget that he was FBI Director and before that the head of the Criminal Division at Main Justice
at the time that global "black finance" grew along with the catastrophic spread of multinational crime and terrorism. BCCI, Iran-Contra,
9/11, and the rise of transnational Oligarchs happened on his watch. As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer in the United States
at the time, it is hard to imagine anyone more responsibility for the ultimate consequences than Robert Mueller. There is perhaps
someone who bears ultimate responsibility, the President who appointed Mueller: George Herbert Walker Bush and his lesser son,
Shrub, who promoted him.
... wouldn't you assume that this entire affair is an ongoing Mossad operation, which may or may not have concluded? The US
IC is just another operative inside the envelope, but Mossad owns the assets and the intellectual property. I think we could assume
that some of this is automated and Mossad has ongoing leverage still in play.
The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked.
The answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its
several operators to let it all end too soon.
.
Mossad's legendary blackmail traps ensnared even high-level deep state authorities and made them pliable. The recent history
of United States foreign policy is an enigma that can only be solved when that assumption is inserted. Once the assumption is
in place, it opens like a Pandora's box. Don't you find that to be the case?
In a recent investigation I presented the case that British banking and financial giant HSBC conspired with banking institutions
with documented links to terrorist financing, including those responsible for helping bankroll the 9/11 attacks.
SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2012
Black Dossier: HSBC & Terrorist Finance
Moral equivalencies abound. After all, when American secret state agencies manage drug flows or direct terrorist proxies
to attack official enemies it's not quite the same as battling terror or crime.
Pounding home that point, a new report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused HSBC of exposing "the
U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money
laundering (AML) controls."
That 335-page report, "U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History," (large
pdf file available
here ) was issued after a year-long Senate investigation zeroed-in on the bank's U.S. affiliate, HSBC Bank USA, N.A., better
known as HBUS.
Drilling down, we learned that amongst the "services" offered by HSBC subsidiaries and correspondent banks were sweet deals
with financial entities with terrorist ties; the transportation of billions of dollars in cash by plane and armored car through
their London Banknotes division; the clearing of sequentially-numbered travelers checks through dodgy Cayman Islands accounts
for Mexican drug lords and Russian mafiosi.
From richly-appointed suites at Canary Wharf, London, the bank's "smartest guys in the room" handed some of the most violent
gangsters on earth the financial wherewithal to organize their respective industries: global crime.
A case in point. In 2008 alone the Senate revealed that the bank's Cayman Islands branch handled some 50,000 client accounts
(all without benefit of offices or staff on Grand Cayman, mind you), yet still managed to ship some $7 billion (£10.9bn) in
cash from Mexico into the U.S. Now that's creative accounting!...
@Linda Wood HSBC, huh--there must be some clever name for it, which deserves no research.
what an eloquent article you presented. Brief but right on target. It isn't just sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now it is drugs
- money -sexual perversion--and perhaps worse? Rumors are flying about what video on the Weiner laptop showed. It is strictly
heresay, but a core of folks seem to believe the suspicions are possible.
snoopydawg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 8:48pm
Boy that Mueller has had a busy career
hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his
cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia
cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he
did or didn't do.
Acosta is saying that if he hadn't made the plea deal then Epstein would never have served any time in
prison. Well he actually only slept there since he got to leave every day for work and then there's the massages he got after
his busy day at work. But there were more than 80 pages that the Feds wrote on his escapades so I think that story he told congress
is true. Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he
is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone.
In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin
and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something
on them?
Great information! The more I learn the more I need a shower.
is how I've been feeling all week from reading about this, just more and more demoralized when I think about the depravation
of our so-called "leadership." What is it that we're supposed to think of as the new normal after this behavior?
That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before
it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one.
The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the
National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before
he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution
ring.
Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103
bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.
Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.
The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being
sued by his lead investigator in that case.
Because researchers in our biological weapons labs went public with what they were doing, and where such research was being
done in the U.S., we learned the CIA was one of several outfits doing biological weapons research.
But Mueller exonerated all of them, including the CIA, with no explanation and only focused on a lone vaccine researcher at
the Army lab when journalists began to ask why no one had been indicted after seven years of investigation, at which point the
FBI attempted to harass the suspect into committing suicide.
Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite,
the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the
hip.
partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and
Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari
Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational
terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance
of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world.
This "dark alliance" assumed a political and economic life of its own beyond its original intent to counter communist movements.
By the Vietnam War, Agency operators were running most of the heroin trade in the world through proprietary airlines, banks and
logistics companies. In the mid-1970s, CIA Director Bush expanded privatization with Saudi funding in his Safari Club deal that
eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and ISIS.
The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks
that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union,
along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs
that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services.
Multinational honey trap operations such as Maxwell-Epstein & Co. are an inevitable and continuing part of this privatization
and criminalization of intelligence that stretches back to the days of Tom Braden and Cord Meyer handing out stacks of greenbacks
to Mafiosi on the Corsican Docks.
The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities
run by the two main communications intelligence agencies.
"Honey-trap; a great option. Very successful, when it works" (GCHQ, UK training program slide)
Without quoting the whole thing (which is worth a read):
Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course
and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just
buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because
they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS.
There's no need to invoke the Mafia/Russia/Mossad/CIA/etc, that's just needlessly overfitting.
Except such an operation would be quite attractive to intelligence services. Maybe they were in on the ground floor, maybe
they made Epstein an offer he couldn't refuse once they heard about it.
Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then,
three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations.
For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual
going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief,
to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized.
Steiber is considered the father of modern espionage. His methods were vastly influential, and he attracted students from London,
St. Petersburg to Tokyo. Each put their own national spin on the science of sexual blackmail. As for the Japanese, they are among
the most interesting and innovative in their use of a parallel network of privatized intelligence services incorporating underworld
Yakuzi groups alongside conventional military intelligence units. Using compromise, they gained and maintained control over Imperial
Japan and its Colonies: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/15/eastern-peril/
To realize these divinely inspired ambitions, Japan needed a modern espionage system. Adopting the German model, Japanese
officials were sent to study under Wilhelm Stieber in the mid-1870s. Over the next decade Japan built up separate army and
naval intelligence services, each with an accompanying branch of secret military police (Kempeitai for the army and Tokeitai
for the navy). These latter organizations also provided an excellent counter-espionage service. However, where the Japanese
were unique was in the use of spies belonging to unofficial secret societies working alongside or independently of the official
intelligence agencies. These shadowy institutions were ultra-nationalist by nature, drawing their membership from a cross-section
of Japanese society, including the military, politics, industry and Yakuza underworld. Under ruthless leadership, their henchmen
would spy on, subvert and corrupt Japan's Far East neighbours.
For more on Steiber and his superior, von Hinckeldey, methods of international counter-insurgency, espionage, and political
policing included deception and a forerunner of today's internet surveillance:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/29/275653/-
While armies are essential to the maintenance of autocracy, the preservation of dynastic rule and the prevention of democracy
requires an effective secret police. The suppression of its middle-class constitutionalists [during the 1840s] was followed
by the expansion of the Prussian political police under Karl Ludwig Friedrich von Hinckeldey.
Appointed police president of Berlin in late 1848, Hinckeldey was an innovator of many of the features of modern systematic
political policing. Among the tactics that he introduced with his new police system in Berlin was the "Litfass columns". Named
for Ernst Litfass, Frederick William's court printer, he had dozens of these large poles erected in strategic spots around
Berlin. The public posting of political notices was then banned. By application to a state office for a waiver, however, the
columns could be used to display messages. The police dutifully recorded the names of all who had applied. A. Richie, Faust's
Metropolis: A History of Berlin, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998 at p.134.
LEGACY OF THE LITFASS COLUMNS: A similar ploy was later adopted by the People's Republic of China. In the mid-1980s, the
Communist authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing
could post political writings, initially, without being arrested. Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities
in other Chinese cities. For this apparent opening to democracy, the Deng regime much applauded, particularly by some in the
Reagan-Bush Administration, eager to legitimize the regime and its growing commercial ties with U.S. corporations. Eventually,
many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of
hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters that followed the Tienamen Square massacre. The impression of anonymity and "freedom"
conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police to cast a wide net for identifying persons and
organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in the future.
Hinckeldey also founded the Police Union, the first recorded international network of counterrevolutionary police spies
in modern times. Primarily made up of police officers from Prussia and the German states, the Union operated throughout Europe,
Britain and in the United States. The Union was run by his deputy, the notorious police provocateur, Wilhelm Steiber, who would
later reorganize the Okhrana along similar lines. Internationally active from 1851-1866, the Police Union, according to Mathieu
Deflem, was "one of the first formal initiatives in industrial society to establish an organized police system across national
borders."13
I disagree with the Alternet view on this. See, this is the norm. A purely private sexual blackmail ring of any scale would
be the historical exception. It certainly wouldn't survive very long.
...authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing could
post political writings.... Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities in other Chinese cities. Eventually,
many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of
hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters....
The impression of anonymity and "freedom" conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police
to cast a wide net for identifying persons and organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in
the future.
But why should one avoid the thought? If the situation looks like the people are going to lose the war for their minds, and
are unwilling to back a publisher like Assange who has given his all to try to empower them, why should anyone put themselves
at risk by expressing their opinions? It's a honeypot of our own making, just as Facebook is where people go to write their own
dossiers for the Authorities.
@Pluto's Republic an enemy of the status quo, you raise the calculated costs of the eventual crackdown, pushing back the
day of reckoning. Keep it up! Visible rebellion is the only defense of the people.
...from which to leverage access to the elite, Harvard University would be a top choice.
Jeffery Epstein actually entered the social salons of the elite through many doors. He was, of course, a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations. One would have to be to rub shoulders with the political elite. From there he matriculated to the Trilateral
Commission becoming friendly with Harvard President, Larry Summers. **
Becoming a surprise mystery philanthropist at Harvard, with Summers help, was a booster rocket for Epstein. In the Havard Crimson , in
June 2003, Epstein's involvement with Harvard was celebrated.
People in the News: Jeffrey E. Epstein
Elusive financier Jeffrey E. Epstein donated $30 million this year to Harvard for the founding of a mathematical biology
and evolutionary dynamics program.
While the mathematics teacher turned magnate remained unknown to most people until he flew President Clinton, Kevin
Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development facing the region, Epstein
has been a familiar face to many at Harvard for years.
Networking with the University's leading intellectuals, Epstein has spurred research through both discussions with and dollars
contributed to various faculty members.
Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn, former Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky and Frankfurter Professor
of Law Alan M. Dershowitz are among Epstein's bevy of eminent friends that includes princes, presidents and Nobel
Prize winners.
Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral
Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations.
Epstein's collection of high-profile friends also includes newly-recruited professor Martin A. Nowak, who will run Harvard's
mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program.
Like Kosslyn, Rosovsky and Dershowitz, Nowak praises Epstein's numerous relationships within the scientific community.
"I am amazed by the connections he has in the scientific world," Nowak says. "He knows an amazing number of scientists.
He knows everyone you can imagine."
Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing
the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree.
Yet, friends and beneficiaries say they do not see Epstein merely as a man with deep pockets, but as an intellectual equal.
Dershowitz says Epstein is "brilliant" and Kosslyn calls Epstein "one of the brightest people I've ever known."
Epstein's beneficiaries say they are particularly appreciative of the no-strings-attached approach Epstein takes with his
donations.
"He is one of the most pleasant philanthropists," Nowak says. "Unlike many people who support science, he supports science
without any conditions. There are not any disadvantages to associating with him."
Friends and associates say Harvard stands to benefit from its evolving relationship with Epstein.
"I hope that he will, over time, become one of the leading supporters of science at Harvard," Rosovsky writes in an e-mail.
__________________________________________
** A footnote on Larry Summers seems important here:
Harvard-trained economists have been running the US economy for a very long time, and continue to do so. Summers began his ascent
as a professor of economics at Harvard University, leaving shortly before Bill Clinton won the Presidency. He was clearly the
Neoliberal seed planted for the New American Century.
In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury
under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political
mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.
While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic
crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard
Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and
in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
At This Point the Ball is Passed to the Bush Team Republicans, while the Democrats Sit Back and Wait for 2008.
There's now a Treasury surplus to transfer to the wealthy, and the necessary deregulation for Wall Street empowerment is in
place. The Soviet era had ended and Russia is ended forever. The world is finally primed to be seized by the One Exceptional Power.
It's 2001, and we are standing on the threshold of the New American Century . Time to throw a flash-bang of chaos onto the world
stage and trigger the booming War Economy that will carry us directly to global control.
There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with
his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars."
Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006.
Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part
from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer,
and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a
"different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon
political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016:
Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large
part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with
Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering
There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who
resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society
that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of
ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.
After his departure from Harvard, Summers cooled his jets on Wall Street, positioning himself to be called back into the game
when it was Team Democrat's turn in 2008.
Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a freelance speaker at other financial institutions,
including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during
the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President
Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's
response to the Great Recession.
Jeffery Epstein continued to weave himself into the fabric of government like a good psychopath would. He was by no means the
only one.
That bill alone makes Warren a viable candidate again, despite all her previous blunders. She is a courageous woman, that
Warren. And she might wipe the floor with the completely subservant to Israel lobby Trump. Who betrayed his electorate
in all major promises.
Notable quotes:
"... Not only would Warren's legislation prohibit some of the most destructive private equity activities, but it would end their ability to act as traditional asset managers, taking fees and incurring close to no risk if their investments go belly up. The bill takes the explicit and radical view that: ..."
"... Private funds should have a stake in the outcome of their investments, enjoying returns if those investments are successful but ab-1sorbing losses if those investments fail. ..."
"... Critics will say that Warren's bill has no chance of passing, which is currently true but misses the point. ..."
"... firms would share responsibility for the liabilities of companies under their control, including debt, legal judgments, and pension obligations to "better align the incentives of private equity firms and the companies they own." The bill, if enacted, would end the tax subsidy for excessive leverage and closes the carried interest loophole. ..."
"... The bill also seeks to ban dividends to investors for two years after a firm is acquired. Worker pay would be prioritized in the bankruptcy process, with guidelines intended to ensure affected employees are more likely to receive severance pay and pensions. It would also clarify gift cards are consumer deposits, ensuring their priority in bankruptcy proceedings. If enacted, private equity managers will be required to disclose fees, returns, and political expenditures. ..."
"... This is a bold set of proposals that targets abuses that hurt workers and investors. Most readers may not appreciate the significance of the two-year restriction on dividends. One return-goosing strategy that often leaves companies crippled or bankrupt in its wake is the "dividend recap" in which the acquired company takes on yet more debt for the purpose of paying a special dividend to its investors. Another strategy that Appelbaum and Batt have discussed at length is the "op co/prop co." Here the new owners take real estate owned by the company, sell it to a new entity with the former owner leasing it. The leases are typically set high so as to allow for the "prop co" to be sold at a richer price. This strategy is often a direct contributor to the death of businesses, since ones that own their real estate usually do so because they are in cyclical industries, and not having lease payments enables the to ride out bad times. The proceeds of sale of the real estate is usually dividended out to the investors, hence the dividend restriction would also pour cold water on this approach. ..."
"... However, there is precedent in private equity for recognizing joint and several liability of an investment fund for the obligations of its portfolio companies. In a case that winded its way through the federal courts until last year ( Sun Capital Partners III, LP v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Indus. Pension Fund ), the federal court held that Sun Capital Partners III was liable under ERISA, the federal pension law, for the unfunded pension obligations of Scott Brass, a portfolio company of that fund. The court's key finding was that Sun Capital played an active management role in Scott Brass and that its claim of passive investor status therefore should not be respected. ..."
"... Needless to say, private equity firms have worked hard to minimize their exposure to the Sun Capital decision, for example by avoiding purchasing companies with defined benefit pension plans. The Warren bill, however, is so broad in the sweep of liability it imposes that PE firms would be unlikely to be able to structure around it. It is hard to imagine the investors in private equity funds accepting liability for what could be enormous sums of unfunded pension liabilities ultimately flowing onto them. Either they would have to set up shell companies to fund their PE investments that could absorb the potential liability, or they would have to give up on the asset class. Either way, it would mean big changes to the industry and potentially a major contraction of it. ..."
"... I am surprised that Warren sought to make private equity funds responsible for the portfolio company debts by "joint and several liability". You can get to economically pretty much the same end by requiring the general partner and potentially also key employees to guarantee the debt and by preventing them from assigning or buying insurance to protect the guarantor from being liable. There is ample precedent for that for entrepreneurs. Small business corporate credit cards and nearly all small business loans require a personal guarantee. ..."
"... Warren's bill also has strong pro-investor provisions. It takes on the biggest feature of the ongoing investor scamming, which is the failure of PE managers to disclose to the investors all of the fees they receive from portfolio companies. The solution proposed by the bill to this problem is exceedingly straightforward, basically proclaiming, "Oh yeah, now you will have to disclose that." The bill also abolishes the ability of private equity managers to claim long term capital gains treatment on the 20 percent of fund profits that they receive, which is unrelated to the return on any capital that the private equity managers may happen to invest in a fund. ..."
"... We need a reparations movement for all those workers harmed by private equity. Seriously. ..."
"... It's so nice to see someone taking steps to protect the rights and compensation of the people actually doing the work at the companies and putting their interests first in case of bankruptcy. That those who worked hardest to make the company succeed were somehow the ones who took it in the shorts the worst has always struck me as a glaring inequity bordering on cruelty. ..."
Elizabeth Warren's
Stop Wall Street Looting Act , which is co-sponsored by Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal, seeks to
fundamentally alter the way private equity firms operate. While the likely impetus for Warren's bill was the spate of private-equity-induced
retail bankruptcies, with Toys 'R' Us particularly prominent, the bill addresses all the areas targeted by critics of private equity:
how it hurts workers and investors and short-changes the tax man, thus burdening taxpayers generally.
Looks like Warren weakness is her inability to distinguish between key issues and periferal
issues.
While her program is good and is the only one that calls for "structural change" (which is
really needed as neoliberalism outlived its usefulness) it mixes apple and oranges. One thing
is to stop neoliberal transformation of the society and the other is restitution for black
slaves. In the latter case why not to Indians ?
I'd argue that Warren's newly tight and coherent story, in which her life's arc tracks the
country's, is contributing to her rise, in part because it protects her against other stories
-- the nasty ones told by her opponents, first, and then echoed by the media doubters
influenced by her opponents. Her big national-stage debut came when she
tangled with Barack Obama's administration over bank bailouts, then set up the powerhouse
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). But she was dismissed as too polarizing, even by
some Democrats, and was passed over to run it. In 2012, Massachusetts's Scott Brown mocked Warren as
"the Professor," a know-it-all Harvard schoolmarm, before she beat him to take his Senate seat.
After that, Donald Trump began
trashing her as "Pocahontas" in the wake of a controversy on the campaign trail about her
mother's rumored Native American roots. And Warren scored an own goal with a video that announced
she had "confirmed" her Native heritage with a DNA test, a claim that ignored the brutal
history of blood-quantum requirements and genetic pseudoscience in the construction of
race.
When she announced her presidential run this year, some national political reporters
raised
questions about her likability
, finding new ways to compare
her to Hillary Clinton, another female candidate widely dismissed as unlikable. A month into
Warren's campaign, it seemed the media was poised to Clintonize her off the primary stage. But
it turned out she had a plan for that, too.
I n the tale that is captivating crowds on the campaign trail, Warren is not a professor or
a political star but a hardscrabble Oklahoma "late-in-life baby" or, as her mother called her,
"the surprise." Her elder brothers had joined the military; she was the last one at home, just
a middle-schooler when her father had the massive heart attack that would cost him his job. "I
remember the day we lost the station wagon," she tells crowds, lowering her voice. "I learned
the words 'mortgage' and 'foreclosure' " listening to her parents talk when they thought
she was asleep, she recalls. One day she walked in on her mother in her bedroom, crying and
saying over and over, " 'We are not going to lose this house.' She was 50 years old,"
Warren adds, "had never worked outside the home, and she was terrified."
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This part of the story has been a Warren staple for years: Her mother put on her best dress
and her high heels and walked down to a Sears, where she got a minimum-wage job. Warren got a
private lesson from her mother's sacrifice -- "You do what you have to to take care of those
you love" -- and a political one, too. "That minimum-wage job saved our house, and it saved our
family." In the 1960s, she says, "a minimum-wage job could support a family of three. Now the
minimum wage can't keep a momma and a baby out of poverty."
That's Act I of Warren's story and of the disappearing American middle class whose
collective story her family's arc symbolizes. In Act II, she walks the crowd through her early
career, including some personal choices that turned her path rockier: early marriage, dropping
out of college. But her focus now is on what made it possible for her to rise from the working
class. Warren tells us how she went back to school and got her teaching certificate at a public
university, then went to law school at another public university. Both cost only a few hundred
dollars in tuition a year. She always ends with a crowd-pleaser: "My daddy ended up as a
janitor, but his baby daughter got the opportunity to become a public-school teacher, a law
professor, a US senator, and run for president!"
Warren has honed this story since her 2012 Senate campaign. Remember her "Nobody in this
country got rich on his own" speech ? It was an explanation of how the
elite amassed wealth thanks to government investments in roads, schools, energy, and police
protection, which drew more than 1 million views on YouTube. Over the years, she has become the
best explainer of the way the US government, sometime around 1980, flipped from building the
middle class to protecting the wealthy. Her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance , explains how
Warren (once a Republican, like two of her brothers) saw her own family's struggle in the
stories of those families whose bankruptcies she studied as a lawyer -- families she once
thought might have been slackers. Starting in 1989, with a book she cowrote on bankruptcy and
consumer credit, her writing has charted the way government policies turned against the middle
class and toward corporations. That research got her tapped by then–Senate majority
leader Harry Reid to oversee
the Troubled Assets Relief Program after the 2008 financial crash and made her a
favorite on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart . Starting in the mid-2000s, she
publicly clashed with prominent Democrats,
including Biden , a senator at the time, over bankruptcy reforms, and later with
then–Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner over the bank bailouts.
Sanders, of course, has a story too, about a government that works for the "millionaires and
billionaires." But he has a hard time connecting his family's stories of struggle to his
policies. After his first few campaign events, he ditched the details about growing up poor in
Brooklyn. In early June, he returned to his personal story in a New York Timesop-ed .
W arren preaches the need for "big structural change" so often that a crowd chanted the
phrase back at her during a speech in San Francisco the first weekend in June. Then she gets
specific. In Act III of her stump speech, she lays out her dizzying array of plans. But by then
they're not dizzying, because she has anchored them to her life and the lives of her listeners.
The rapport she develops with her audience, sharing her tragedies and disappointments --
questionable choices and all -- makes her bold policy pitches feel believable. She starts with
her proposed wealth tax: two cents on every dollar of your worth after $50 million, which she
says would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. (She has also proposed a 7 percent surtax on
corporate profits above $100 million.)
Warren sells the tax with a vivid, effective comparison. "How many of you own a home?" she
asks. At most of her stops in Iowa, it was roughly half the crowd. "Well, you already pay a
wealth tax on your major asset. You pay a property tax, right?" People start nodding. "I just
want to make sure we're also taxing the diamonds, the Rembrandts, the yachts, and the stock
portfolios." Nobody in those Iowa crowds seemed to have a problem with that.
Then she lays out the shocking fact that
people in the top 1 percent pay roughly 3.2 percent of their wealth in taxes, while the bottom
99 percent pay 7.4 percent.
That "big structural change" would pay for the items on Warren's agenda -- the programs that
would rebuild the opportunity ladder to the middle class -- that have become her signature:
free technical school or two- or four-year public college; at least partial loan forgiveness
for 95 percent of those with student debt; universal child care and prekindergarten, with costs
capped at 7 percent of family income; and a pay hike for child-care workers.
"Big structural change" would also include strengthening unions and giving workers 40
percent of the seats on corporate boards. Warren promises to break up Big Tech and Big Finance.
She calls for a constitutional amendment to protect the right to vote and vows to push to
overturn Citizens United . To those who say it's too much, she ends every public event
the same way: "What do you think they said to the abolitionists? 'Too hard!' To the suffragists
fighting to get women the right to vote? 'Too hard!' To the foot soldiers of the civil-rights
movement, to the activists who wanted equal marriage? 'Give up now!' " But none of them
gave up, she adds, and she won't either. Closing that way, she got a standing ovation at every
event I attended.
R ecently, Warren has incorporated into her pitch the stark differences between what
mid-20th-century government offered to black and white Americans. This wasn't always the case.
After a speech she
delivered at the Roosevelt Institute in 2015, I heard black audience members complain about her
whitewashed version of the era when government built the (white) middle class. Many black
workers were ineligible for Social Security; the GI Bill didn't prohibit racial
discrimination ; and federal loan guarantees systematically excluded black home buyers and
black neighborhoods. "I love Elizabeth, but those stories about the '50s drive me crazy," one
black progressive said.
The critiques must have made their way to Warren. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently
toldThe New Yorker that after his influential Atlanticessay
"The Case for Reparations" appeared five years ago, the Massachusetts senator asked to meet
with him. "She had read it. She was deeply serious, and she had questions." Now, when Warren
talks about the New Deal, she is quick to mention the ways African Americans were shut out. Her
fortunes on the campaign trail brightened after April's She the People forum in Houston, where she joined eight
other candidates in talking to what the group's founder, Aimee Allison, calls "the real
Democratic base": women of color, many from the South. California's Kamala Harris, only the
second African-American woman ever elected to the US Senate, might have had the edge coming in,
but Warren surprised the crowd. "She walked in to polite applause and walked out to a standing
ovation," Allison said, after the candidate impressed the crowd with policies to address black
maternal-health disparities, the black-white wealth gap, pay inequity, and more.
G Jutson says:
July 4, 2019 at 1:00 pm
Well here we are in the circular firing squad Obama warned us about. Sander's fan boys vs.
Warren women. Sanders has been our voice in DC on the issues for a generation. He has changed
the debate. Thank you Bernie. Now a Capitalist that wants to really reform it can be a viable
candidate. Warren is that person. We supported Sanders last time to help us get to this
stage. Time to pass the baton to someone that can beat Trump. After the Sept. debates I
expect The Nation to endorse Warren and to still hear grumbling from those that think moving
on from candidate Bernie somehow means unfaithfulness to his/our message .
Kenneth Viste says: June 27, 2019 at 5:52 am
I would like to hear her talk about free college as an investment in people rather than an
expense. Educated people earn more and therefore pay more taxes than uneducated so it pays to
educate the populous to the highest level possible.
Jim Dickinson says: June 26, 2019 at 7:11 pm
Warren gets it and IMO is probably the best Democratic candidate of the bunch. Biden does
not get it and I get depressed seeing him poll above Warren with his tired corporate ideas
from the past.
I have a different take on her not being progressive enough. Her progressive politics are
grounded in reality and not in the pie in the sky dreams of Sanders, et al. The US is a
massively regressive nation and proposing doing everything at once, including a total revamp
of our healthcare system is simply unrealistic.
That was my problem with Sanders, who's ideas I agree with. There is no way in hell to
make the US into a progressive dream in one election - NONE.
I too dream of a progressive US that most likely goes well beyond what most people
envision. But I also have watched those dreams collapse many, many times in the past when we
reach too far. I hope that we can make important but obtainable changes which might make the
great unwashed masses see who cares about them and who does not.
I hope that she does well because she has a plan for many of the ills of this nation. The
US could certainly use some coherent plans after the chaos and insanity of the Trump years.
Arguing about who was the best Democratic candidate in 2016 helped put this schmuck in office
and I hope that we don't go down that path again.
Caleb Melamed says: June 26, 2019 at 2:13 pm
I had a misunderstanding about one key aspect of Warren's political history. I had always
thought that she was neutral in 2016 between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. On CNN this
morning, a news clip showed that Warren in fact endorsed Hillary Clinton publicly, shouting
"I'm with her," BEFORE Sanders withdrew from the race. This action had the effect of
weakening Sanders' bargaining position vis a vis Clinton once he actually withdrew. Clinton
proceeded to treat Sanders and his movement like a dish rag. I am now less ready to support
Warren in any way.
Robert Andrews says: June 26, 2019 at 12:17 pm
I have three main reasons I do not want Senator Warren nominate which are:
Not going all out for a single payer healthcare system. This is a massive problem with
Warren. With her starting out by moving certain groups to Medicare is sketchy at best. Which
groups would be graced first? I am sure whoever is left behind will be thrilled. Is Warren
going to expand Medicare so that supplemental coverages will not be needed anymore? Crying
about going too far too fast is a losing attitude. You go after the most powerful lobby in
the country full bore if you want any kind of real and lasting changes.
With Warren's positions and actions with foreign policy this statement is striking, "Once
Warren's foreign policy record is scrutinized, her status as a progressive champion starts to
wither. While Warren is not on the far right of Democratic politics on war and peace, she
also is not a progressive -- nor a leader -- and has failed to use her powerful position on
the Senate Armed Services Committee to challenge the status quo" - Sarah Lazare. She is the
web editor at In These Times. She comes from a background in independent journalism for
publications including The Intercept, The Nation, and Tom Dispatch. She tweets at
@sarahlazare.
Lastly, the stench with selling off her integrity with receiving corporate donations again
if nominated is overpowering.
For reference, she was a registered Republican until the mid 1990's.
Joan Walsh, why don't you give congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard any presence with your
articles? Her level of integrity out shines any other female candidate and Gabbard's
positions and actions are progressive. I don't want to hear that she isn't a major player,
because you have included Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Gabbard's media blackout has been
dramatic, thank you for your contribution with it also.
Robert Andrews says: June 27, 2019 at 8:29 am
I was impressed with Warren on the debate, especially since she finally opened her arms to
a single payer healthcare system.
Caleb Melamed says: June 26, 2019 at 2:35 pm
Gabbard is playing a very important role in this race, whatever her numbers (which are
probably higher than those being reported and are sure to go up after tonight). In some ways,
her position in 2020 resembles that of Sanders in 2016--the progressive outlier, specifically
on issues relating to the U.S. policy of endless war. Gabbard makes Sanders look more
mainstream by comparison on this issue (though their difference is more one of emphasis than
substance), making it much harder for the DNC establishment to demonize and ostracize
Sanders. (Third Way really, really wants to stop Sanders--they have called him an
"existential threat.") Gabbard's important role in this respect is one reason the DNC and its
factotums are expending such effort on sliming her.
By the way, Nation, you have now reprinted my first comment to this article five (5)
times!
Clark Shanahan says: June 26, 2019 at 1:19 pm
Tulsi,
Our most eloquent anti-military-interventionism candidate, hands down.
Richard Phelps says: June 26, 2019 at 1:29 pm
Unfortunately EW doesn't beat Trump past the margin of error in all the polls I have seen.
Bernie does in most. The other scary factor is how so many neoliberals are now talking nice
about her. They want anyone but the true, consistent progressive, Bernie. And her backing
away from putting us on a human path on health care, like so many other countries, is
foreboding of a sellout to the health insurance companies, a group focused on profits over
health care for our citizens. A group with no redeeming social value. 40,000+ people die each
year due to lack of medical care, so the company executives can have their 8 figure salaries
and golden parachutes when they retire. Also don't forget they are adamantly anti union.
Where is Warren's fervor to ride our country of this leach on society? PS I donated $250 to
her last Senate campaign. I like her. She is just not what we need to stop the final stages
of oligarchic take over, where so much of our resources are wasted on the Pentagon and
unnecessary wars and black opps. It is not Bernie or bust, it is Bernie or oligarchy!!!
Walter Pewen says: June 27, 2019 at 10:52 am
Frankly, having family from Oklahoma I'd say Warren IS a progressive. Start reading
backwards and you will find out.
Clark Shanahan says: June 26, 2019 at 1:24 pm
You certainly shall never see her call out AIPAC.
She has since tried to shift her posture.. but, her original take was lamentable.
You really need to give Hillary responsibility for her loss, Andy
Also, to Obama, who sold control of the DNC over to Clinton Inc in Sept, 2015.
I'll vote for Warren, of course.
Sadly, with our endless wars and our rogue state Israel, Ms Warren is way too deferential;
seemingly hopeless.
Walter Pewen says: June 28, 2019 at 11:22 am
I don't want to vote for Biden. And if he gets the nomination I probably won't. And I've
voted the ticket since 1976. I DO NOT like Joe Biden. Contrary to the media mind fuck we are
getting in this era. And I'll wager a LOT of people don't like him. He is a dick.
Karin Eckvall says: June 26, 2019 at 10:50 am
Well-done article Ms. Walsh. Walter, I want to vote for her but can't because although she
has plans to deal with the waste and corruption at the Pentagon, she has not renounced our
endless militarism, our establishment-endorsed mission to police the world and to change
regimes whenever we feel like it.
The problem here is that the US population is too brainwashing with jingoism and Exceptionalism to value Tulsi message. The
US army is mercenary army and unlike situation with the draft people generally do not care much when mercenaries die. That makes
any anti-war candidate vulnerable to "Russiagate" smear.
He/she need to have a strong domestic program to appeal to voters, So far Warren is in better position in this area then
Tulsi.
Notable quotes:
"... The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate. ..."
"... On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense." ..."
"... In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable." ..."
"... Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end." ..."
"... Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging ..."
"... In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. ..."
"... And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. ..."
"... Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. ..."
"... She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently. ..."
"... To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. ..."
Last Wednesday’s debate among half of the announced Democratic Party candidates to become their party’s nominee for
president in 2020 was notable for its lack of drama. Many of those called on to speak had little to say apart from the usual
liberal bromides about health care, jobs, education and how the United States is a country of immigrants. On the following
day the mainstream media anointed Elizabeth Warren as the winner based on the coherency of her message even though she said
little that differed from what was being presented by most of the others on the stage. She just said it better, more
articulately.
The New York Times’
coverage was typical, praising Warren for her grasp of the issues and her ability to present the same
clearly and concisely, and citing a comment "They could teach
classes in how Warren talks about a problem and weaves in answers into a story. She's not just
wonk and stats." It then went on to lump most of the other candidates together, describing
their performances as "ha[ving] one or two strong answers, but none of them had the electric,
campaign-launching moment they were hoping for."
Inevitably, however, there was some disagreement on who had actually done best based on
viewer reactions as well as the perceptions of some of the media that might not exactly be
described as mainstream. The Drudge Report website
had
its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of
Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing
paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search
engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the
debate.
On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced
an
article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by
Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot
to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of
Defense."
Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates,
confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously
avoided. In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has
to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had
been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers
who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will
tell you that answer is unacceptable."
At another point she expanded on her thinking about America's wars, saying "Let's deal with
the situation where we are, where this president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the
brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war
that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms' lives. The American people need to
understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything
that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee
crisis. And it wouldn't be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war.
This is why it's so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say no
war with Iran."
Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment,
saying
that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after
the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned
tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end."
Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to
"defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is
clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging. So why was there
such a difference between what ordinary Americans and the Establishment punditry were seeing on
their television screens? The difference was not so much in perception as in the desire to see
a certain outcome. Anti-war takes away a lot of people's rice bowls, be they directly employed
on "defense" or part of the vast army of lobbyists and think tank parasites that keep the money
flowing out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics,
Boeing and Lockheed Martin like a perpetual motion machine.
In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her
must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out
undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the
Vietnam War back in 1968. McCarthy was right and Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the Democratic
Party were wrong. More recently, Congressman Ron Paul tried twice to bring some sanity to the
Republican Party. He too was marginalized deliberately by the GOP party apparatus working
hand-in-hand with the media, to include the final insult of his being denied any opportunity to
speak or have his delegates recognized at the 2012 nominating convention.
And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National
Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be
marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating
from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be
at war with Russia and possibly also with China.
Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be
difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities,
leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past
twenty years. To qualify for the second round of debates she has to gain a couple of points in
her approval rating or bring in more donations, either of which is definitely possible based on
her performance. It is to be hoped that that will occur and that there will be no Debbie
Wasserman Schultz hiding somewhere in the process who will finagle the polling results.
Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is
not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal
Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also
breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning,
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren,
who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss
Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu
and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her
view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups,
but she has moderated her views recently.
To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the
mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine
antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. It is essential
that we Americans who are concerned about the future of our country should listen to what she
has to say very carefully and to respond accordingly.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a
501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more
interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is [email protected]
"... The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers ..."
"... It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States ..."
"... American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose." ..."
"... The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president ..."
"... Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America. ..."
"... The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems ..."
"... The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss ..."
"... Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style. ..."
"... When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. ..."
"... Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products. ..."
"... Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. ..."
"... This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism. ..."
"... The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland ..."
"... The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution. ..."
"... America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other. ..."
"... You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. ..."
"... This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight. ..."
"... Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors. ..."
"... But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". ..."
"The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose
tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute,
or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries
play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing
and loss of life by soldiers."
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness
. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend,
a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
His most recent books include " and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance
to the Jubilee Year "; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy , and J Is for
Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
, among many other books.
We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson's seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire
, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on
food imperialism.
... ... ...
Bonnie Faulkner : In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ,
you write: "The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset." When was the World Bank set up and
by whom?
Michael Hudson : It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent
on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not
dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this
veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got
to lose."
The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant
Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60).
McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick
was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.
Bonnie Faulkner : What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is
there a difference?
Michael Hudson : Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development.
"Development" was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness
– opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system
on the dollar.
The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering
firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports
and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation
of European colonialism.
In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on "Imperialism in Africa" pointing out the fiasco of European railroad
investment in Africa: "Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must
open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions
of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry."
That is why, James explained "only governments can afford to operate them," while being burdened with heavy interest obligations.
[1] What was "developed" was Africa's
mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of "development" lending without
apology.
The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to
protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate
for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in
their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on
the domestic economy – while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client
oligarchies from loss.
The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes
its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring
on a depression – austerity – and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as "rationalizing labor markets." The rationalizing
is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim – and effect – is to prevent countries from essentially following
the line of development that had made the United States rich – by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public
subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting
and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding
heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there
were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?
MICHAEL HUDSON : When I went to work on Wall Street in the '60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan,
and we used the IMF's monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country's statistics would
be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market,
and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital
flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat
in Latin America.
The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital
outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments
problems.
The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency
to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out
of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a "stabilization" program. It is never effective
in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public
infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators
have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.
When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have
to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We're talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic
currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts – basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize
capital flight when that policy "fails" to achieve its pretended objective of growth.
All hyperinflations of Latin America – Chile early on, like Germany after World War I – come from trying to pay foreign debts
beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange
rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.
A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: "Okay, banks
and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can't pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic
development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we're going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid."
That's what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States
stemming from World War I.
Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within
the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries.
So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don't approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency
if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its
diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression
of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.
BONNIE FAULKNER : How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you're a millionaire, and you see that your
country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos,
escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the
dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.
This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the
Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a "sovereign high-yield
fund"). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45
percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos .
Scudders' salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy
it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third
World bonds and couldn't see how these countries could pay.
Merrill Lynch was the fund's underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments
in Scudder's these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy
it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized
that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges.
In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other
Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated
in hard dollars.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they
were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Well, countries don't pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn't want
to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told
that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.
Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor's wages. Other elements of
exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary
system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.
According to the IMF's ideological models, there's no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive
in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest
creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor
needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So you're saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt
, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism . These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously
anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.
BONNIE FAULKNER : With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity
MICHAEL HUDSON : They weren't junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren't
really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest.
Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, "You banks and the IMF have
made bad loans, and you've made them under false pretenses – a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity.
We're not going to pay." They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were
a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.
The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires
holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the "Legarde List." But the IMF said, in effect that its
loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the
bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and
wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF
so vicious an institution.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren't junk, because
they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?
MICHAEL HUDSON : The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of
these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds.
No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy
overrode democratic choice.
Investors didn't believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries
that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in
their own national interest. They didn't believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.
They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped
up by the United States. That's why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming
to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along
the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and
the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you
should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I've put together to ask
you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn't be written down.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their
not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would
only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.
The terms are being written down because it's obvious that Puerto Rico can't pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population
to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don't want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece
when their industry and economy was shut down, then you're going to have to provide stability or else you're going to have half
of Puerto Rico living in Florida.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?
MICHAEL HUDSON : A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It's
the antithesis of democracy, so it's never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United
States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous
waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: "We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American
war and you're an occupied country, and we're going to keep you that way." Obviously this is causing a political resentment.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You've already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary
of defense?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of
a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the
World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry,
agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic
game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.
In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages
in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia's President Putin said
that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia's population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is
the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land
to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?
MICHAEL HUDSON : One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports
and food exports. The aim is to buttress America's agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is
not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export
crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become
dependent on American farmers – and political sanctions.
In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain
export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export
controls and helped feed China.
The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and
other tropical products, and they won't feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy
does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from
its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it
from growing its own grain or food crops. It's completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper,
guano and other natural resources.
The idea is to create interdependency – one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being
self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, "We're going to starve
you by not feeding you." Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can't say, "We're going to let you freeze in the dark by
not sending you oil," because America's independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze
in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.
So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country
control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.
There's a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: "Don't do as we do. Do as we say." The only way it can
enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right
wing. For instance, when Hillary's State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed
the Hondurans, she said: "This person has to go." That's why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now,
because they can't live in their own country.
The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under
the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you're saying that they wouldn't,
and that's why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a concise way of putting it Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which
it is lending?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country
can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there's no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in
these foreign currencies.
Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its
own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called
back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system's interconnections
to stop payments from being made.
After America installed the Shah's dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under
the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came
due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense
Department, I don't know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was
in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah's puppet government had signed. America
simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest
under the agreement of 2016.
America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do
the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system
to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other.
This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans
to de-dollarize.
BONNIE FAULKNER : I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country's domestic currency be preferable to the country
taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you've explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would
be able to repay it.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes. You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if
U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis
in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap
in Korea and other Asian countries.
This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital
controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.
But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it's denominated
in dollars, Americans don't own most of this debt. It's their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin
America – to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad
to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting
it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You say that: "While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at
its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud." How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar
global system?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops
so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring
new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity
in American agriculture from the 1930s to '50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.
But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade
and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's
called "grandfathering". The Americans said: "We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country
can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops
and growing crops that we can't grow in the United States." That's what's so evil about the World Bank's development plan.
BONNIE FAULKNER : According to your book: "Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension
services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive." Why can't infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy's
overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you're a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you're doing business in domestic currency. It doesn't
help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent
countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they're not able to give price supports or provide government marketing
services for their agriculture.
America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists
that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the
economy. So it's a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are
called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.
This is what the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency
in food, realizing that if you're going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That's why the United
States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If a country takes out an IMF loan, they're obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can't they
take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?
MICHAEL HUDSON : You don't need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency.
There's no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don't these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Their leaders don't want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of
foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It's the mentality of foreign
central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that's
how to get ahead. Essentially, they're opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won't have socialist
central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So we're back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and
the power structure in these countries so that they don't rebel.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive,
this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I've talked to people
at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: "We simply buy
them off. They do it for the money." So you don't need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist
enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that "by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail." What
is food blackmail?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you pursue a foreign policy that we don't like -- for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we're
trying to smash up to grab its oil -- we'll impose financial sanctions against you. We won't sell you food, and you can starve.
And because you've followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you're dependent on us, the
United States and our Free World Ó allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States,
as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that: "World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency
above all on the United States as food supplier." Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other
reasons as well?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I'm not sure at what point this became
thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result.
They believed the free-trade junk economics that's taught in the schools' economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.
When we're dealing with economic planners, we're dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its
unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There's something autistic about most economists, which is
why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what
it's best at – not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we're in a real world of economic
and military warfare.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to
feed the peoples of developing countries?
MICHAEL HUDSON : World poverty is viewed as solution , not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced
labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World
Bank and IMF is an economic solution that's built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought
out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential
plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?
MICHAEL HUDSON : No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you
had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash
Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase
Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American.
That killed any alternative to the World Bank.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what
is the effect?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are
natural monopolies – the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them
with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business
in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and
its European allies.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow
from the World Bank?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank – to make
sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed
to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn't make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own
currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay
by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their
infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.
This is what John Perkins' book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was
to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required
breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF
encourage.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets,
so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren't.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. They'll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You've
dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution – the mining slag and
what Marx called the excrements of production.
This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally,
they call their "Development," but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank's client countries.
BONNIE FAULKNER : When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in
1972, how was it received?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from
the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have
me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid
per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.
I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said
I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the
White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.
The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise,
it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese.
He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was
received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish,
and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book
has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn't understand how
their own system worked?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went
by, you had an organization called "Fifty Years Is Enough." And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz
became the World Bank's chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find
that indeed it didn't work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If
he didn't understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get
through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive
the system is.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Michael Hudson, thank you very much.
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's always good to be here, Bonnie. I'm glad you ask questions like these.
I've been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr.
Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall
Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972
book, Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies
through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today's broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com.
He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson
acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at
gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join
our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at
[email protected]. Follow us
on Twitter at #gandbradio.
Wealthy politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption in their native lands are fleeing to a safe haven where their wealth
and influence shields them from arrest.
They have entered this country on a variety of visas, including one designed to encourage investment. Some have applied for asylum,
which is intended to protect people fleeing oppression and political persecution.
The increasingly popular destination for people avoiding criminal charges is no pariah nation.
It's the United States.
An investigation by ProPublica, in conjunction with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, has
found that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, South Korea, Bolivia and Panama have found refuge for themselves and
their wealth in this country, taking advantage of lax enforcement of U.S. laws and gaps in immigration and financial regulations.
Many have concealed their assets and real-estate purchases by creating trusts and limited liability companies in the names of lawyers
and relatives.
American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges.
But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.
One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after
his country's Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school
lunch program.
Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department's radar since he was elected in 2009.
That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began
sending diplomatic cables warning
about the president's "dark side," including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.
Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in
the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country's Supreme Court.
On Jan. 28, 2015,
just hours before
the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a
meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium
on Miami's swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.
The State Department declined to comment on Martinelli's case, saying visa records are confidential and it is the U.S. Customs
and Border Protection that decides who is allowed to enter the country. CBP said privacy regulations prevent the agency from commenting
on Martinelli.
Efforts to reach Martinelli, including a registered letter sent to his Miami address, were unsuccessful.
In September this year, Panama asked to extradite Martinelli, but the former president is fighting that request, arguing there
are no legal grounds to bring him back to his home country where the investigation has broadened to include insider trading, corruption
and abuse of authority. Last December, Panama's high court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he used public funds to
spy on over 150 political opponents. If found guilty, he could face up to 21 years in jail.
Rogelio Cruz, who is defending Martinelli in Panama's Supreme Court, said that the former president "will return to Panama once
adequate conditions exist with respect to due process, where there are independent judges -- which there aren't."
The United States has explicit policies that bar issuing visas to foreign officials facing criminal charges in their homelands.
In 2004, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation
designed to keep the United States from becoming a haven for corrupt officials. Proclamation 7750, which has the force and effect
of law, directed the State Department to ban officials who have accepted bribes or misappropriated public funds when their actions
have "serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States."
Under the rules implementing Bush's order, consular officers do not need a conviction or even formal charges to justify denying
a visa. They can stamp "denied" based on information from unofficial, or informal sources, including newspaper articles, according
to diplomats and State Department officials interviewed for this report.
The State Department declined to provide the number of times Proclamation 7750 has been invoked, but insisted that it has been
used "robustly."
But numerous other foreign government officials, including former presidents and cabinet ministers, have slipped through the cracks,
according to court documents, diplomatic cables and interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in the United States and abroad.
The charges involved a wide range of misconduct, from stealing public funds to accepting bribes.
Six months before Martinelli entered the United States, a former Colombian agriculture minister and onetime presidential candidate,
Andres Felipe Arias, fled to Miami three weeks before he was convicted of funneling $12.5 million to wealthy political supporters
from a subsidy program that was intended to reduce inequality in rural areas and protect farmers from the effects of globalization.
The U.S. embassy in Bogota had been following Arias' trial closely and
reporting on the scandal in cables to Washington.
The trial
featured documents and witnesses saying that under Arias' watch, the agriculture ministry had doled out millions in subsidies
to affluent families, some of whom, according to media reports, had donated to Arias' political allies or his presidential campaign.
Subsidies went to relatives of congressmen, companies owned by the richest man in Colombia, and a former beauty queen. One powerful
family and its associates received over $2.5 million, according to records released by prosecutors. Another family, which included
relatives of a former senator, received $1.3 million. Both families had supported Arias' chief political ally, former Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe, with campaign contributions.
The law that
established the program did not ban wealthy landowners from getting grants, but some elite families had received multiple subsidies
for the same farm. They gamed the system by submitting multiple proposals in the names of different family members and by subdividing
their land so they could apply for grants for each parcel, court records indicate.
Yet, in November 2013, while the trial was going on, the U.S. embassy in Bogota renewed Arias' visitor visa. The State Department
refused to discuss the case, saying that visa records are confidential. But a
recent filing in federal court
showed that the U.S. embassy had flagged Arias' application, and asked him to provide documents to support his request to leave the
country while charges were pending. Arias submitted documents from the Colombian court, including a judicial order that allowed him
to travel. In the end, the embassy issued a visa because he had not yet been convicted.
Andres Felipe Arias, a former Colombian agriculture minister, who fled to the United States before he could be convicted
of funneling money from a subsidy program (GDA via AP Images)
On the night of June 13, 2014, three weeks before the judges convicted him of embezzlement by appropriation, a Colombian law that
penalizes the unauthorized use of public funds to benefit private entities, Arias packed his bags and boarded a plane. The following
month, the U.S. embassy in Bogota revoked the visa. But Arias hired an immigration attorney and applied for asylum.
"If you looked up 'politically motivated charges' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Andres Arias next to it," said
David Oscar Markus, Arias' lead attorney. "The case [against him] is absurd and not even one that is recognized in the United States."
Over the next two years, Arias built a new life in South Florida with his wife and two children, opening a small consulting company
and renting a house in Weston.
On August 24, he was
arrested by U.S.
authorities in response to an extradition request from Colombia. He spent several months in a detention facility until his release
on bail in mid-November. Arias argues that the United States cannot extradite him because it has no active extradition treaty with
Colombia, but the U.S. Attorney's Office disagrees. A plea for asylum does not shield defendants from extradition if they are charged
in Colombia with a crime covered by the treaty between the two countries.
The agency that administers the program, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has adopted regulations designed to prevent
fraud, including requiring foreign investors to submit evidence, such as tax returns and bank statements, to prove they obtained
their money legally.
But these safeguards did not stop the daughter-in-law and grandsons of former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan from using Chun's
ill-gotten gains to get U.S. permanent residency.
In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of receiving more than $200 million in bribes while in office in the 1980s, from companies
such as Samsung and Hyundai. He was ordered to return the bribes, but refused.
Part of Chun's fortune was funneled into the United States through his son, who purchased a $2.2 million house in Newport Beach,
California, according to South Korean prosecutors and real-estate records.
Millions of dollars from Chun's bribery proceeds were hidden in bearer bonds, which are notoriously difficult to trace. Unlike
regular bonds, which belong to registered owners, there is no record kept about the ownership or transfer of bearer bonds. The bonds
can be cashed out by whoever has them.
Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan addresses the press at the White House in 1985. Chun's relatives later gained
permanent residency in the United States by using money Chun obtained through bribes. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
In 2008, Chun's daughter-in-law, a South Korean actress named Park Sang-ah, applied for an immigrant investor visa. Park listed
her husband's bearer bonds as the source of her funds without mentioning that the money had been initially provided to him by Chun.
Eight months later, Park and her children received their conditional U.S. permanent residency cards in the mail.
In 2013, at the request of South Korean prosecutors, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Chun family's
wealth in the United States and subsequently
seized $1.2 million of the family's U.S. assets in the United States. The money was returned to South Korea. Despite that, Chun's
family members have retained their residency status.
Chun's relatives obtained their permanent residency by investing in an EB-5 project managed by the Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation, a nonprofit company. The PIDC pooled Chun's $500,000 with money from 200 other foreign investors to finance an expansion
of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.
The same project in Philadelphia also helped to secure permanent residency for Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese government official accused
of embezzling more than $40 million from a state-owned grain storehouse, according to reports in the People's Daily, the Chinese
Communist Party's newspaper. Qiao had divorced his wife, Shilan Zhao, in China in 2001, a fact he did not disclose to U.S. immigration
authorities. When Zhao applied for an EB-5 visa, Qiao qualified for U.S. permanent residency as an applicant's spouse.
The Justice Department launched an investigation only when it was tipped off by Chinese authorities. In January 2014,
a federal grand jury indicted Zhao and her ex-husband, Qiao, for immigration fraud, money laundering and internationally transporting
stolen funds. Zhao was arrested and released on bail. Federal authorities are pursuing Qiao, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
A trial has been set for February 2017. U.S. government attorneys have filed asset forfeiture cases to recover real estate linked
to Qiao and Zhao in Flushing, New York, and Monterey Park, California.
In April 2015, Qiao appeared on the Chinese
government's list of 100 "most wanted" officials who fled abroad after being accused of crimes such as bribery and corruption.
He and 39 other government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders on the list allegedly fled to the United States.
The list, called "Operation Skynet," is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has vowed to take
down what Chinese officials describe as corrupt "tigers" and "flies" within the country's ruling Communist Party.
Fengxian Hu was another fugitive on China's list. A former army singer and radio broadcaster, Hu headed the state-owned broadcasting
company that had a joint venture with Pepsi to distribute soft drinks in Sichuan province. In 2002, The Washington Post and The Wall
Street Journal
reported that Pepsi had accused Hu of looting the joint venture and using company funds to buy fancy cars and go on European
tours.
The same year, in a widely publicized move, Pepsi filed a case with international arbitrators in Stockholm, asking that the joint
venture be dissolved. Despite this, Hu was given a visa that allowed him to fly regularly to Las Vegas, where he was a VIP client
at the MGM casino.
In January 2010, Chinese authorities investigated Hu for corruption. But the month before, Hu had entered the United States on
a B1 visitor visa, joining his wife, a U.S. citizen living in New York.
Hu tried to obtain a green card through his wife, but the petition was rejected by U.S. immigration authorities. He applied for
asylum instead.
Meanwhile, he had gotten into trouble in the United States for losing millions in a Las Vegas casino and failing to pay a $12
million gambling debt. In 2012, he was indicted in a Nevada court on two counts of theft and one count of intentionally passing a
check without sufficient funds.
Hu pled not guilty to the charges; his lawyers claimed that his checks bounced because his bank account had been closed by Chinese
authorities. The charges against him in the U.S. were considered an aggravated felony, which is a common basis for deportation. Hu,
however, had a pending asylum case and so could not be deported.
In August 2015, a New York immigration judge denied the asylum claim. But Hu's lawyers argued that he would be tortured if he
returned to China and invoked the United Nations Convention
Against Torture , which says that an alien may not be sent to a country where he is likely to be tortured. In the end, the immigration
court suspended Hu's removal order, allowing him to remain in the United States and work here indefinitely. He will not, however,
be given permanent residency or be allowed to travel outside the country.
The absence of an extradition treaty -- coupled with a high standard of living -- makes the United States a favored destination
for Chinese officials and businessmen fleeing corruption charges.
In April 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security , made a 48-hour trip to Beijing. The visit
was intended to pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit in September 2015, according to a memorandum Johnson wrote,
which was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the memo, Johnson said the Chinese government is seeking 132 people it said have fled to the United States to avoid prosecution.
This represents a greater number of fugitives than Chinese authorities have publicly acknowledged.
"I'm told that in prior discussions, the Chinese have been frustrated by the lack of any information from us about the 132 fugitives,"
Johnson wrote.
The Chinese request for assistance posed a dilemma for the United States. American officials are concerned about a lack of fairness
in China's criminal justice system. Human rights groups say that China continues to use torture to extract false confessions from
suspected criminals. Torture has also been documented to be part of shuanggui -- a secretive discipline process reserved for
members of the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts see the crackdown on corrupt officials as part of a purge aimed at the current regime's political rivals and ideological
enemies. U.S. officials say this makes returning corrupt officials to China a delicate issue for the United States.
In 2003, headlines around the world reported
widespread
street protests in Bolivia that led to security forces killing 58 people, most of them members of indigenous groups. Not long
afterward, as protesters massed up on the streets of La Paz demanding his resignation, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
resigned and fled his country along with his defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.
The two men flew to the United States, where they continue to reside. In 2006, Berzain applied for political asylum, which he
was granted in 2007. On
his application, when the form asked, "Have you or your family members ever been accused, charged, arrested, detained, interrogated,
convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned in any country other than the United States?" Berzain checked the box "no," even though by
then he and de Lozada had been formally accused of
genocide by Bolivia's attorney
general. The indictment was approved
by Bolivia's Supreme Court in 2007. Berzain also stated on his application that the State Department had arranged for his travel
to the United States.
The de Lozada administration was vocally pro-American. Before it was ousted, officials had announced they would facilitate gas
exports to the United States.
After their departure, Bolivia's attorney general
publicly stated
that the administration had embezzled millions from government coffers, but did not formally file charges. He said de Lozada
had taken some $22 million from the country's reserve funds before fleeing.
De Lozada and members of his administration have dismissed the allegations as part of a politically motivated smear campaign,
but there is evidence to suggest irregularities may have occurred in the handling of the reserve funds. The former president signed
a decree shortly before leaving office authorizing the interior and finance ministers to withdraw money from Bolivia's reserve funds
without going through the normal approval process. De Lozada's former interior minister
pleaded guilty in 2004 to embezzlement after $270,000 in cash was found in an associate's home.
De Lozada, a mining mogul before he became president, moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. He
now lives in a two-story brick house bought for $1.4 million by Macalester Limited, a limited liability company that was formed in
the British Virgin Islands and lists a post office box in the Bahamas as its principal address.
De Lozada's immigration status is unclear. He said in a sworn deposition in 2015 that he was not a U.S. citizen. His son-in-law,
who spoke to ProPublica on his behalf, would not say whether de Lozada had applied for asylum.
Berzain, meanwhile, settled in South Florida. Records show that he and his brother-in-law personally own or are listed as officers
or members of business entities that together control around $9 million worth of Miami real estate.
Some of the purchases were made in the names of entities that appear to list different variations of Berzain's name in business
records.
In addition, in the purchase of two properties, Berzain's name was added to business records only after the deal had gone through.
Berzain's brother-in-law incorporated a company called Warren USA Corp in October 2010, for example, and the company purchased a
$1.4 million residential property the following month. Three weeks after Warren USA Corp became the owner of an elegant Spanish-style
villa in Key Biscayne, Berzain was added as the company's secretary.
The following year, in May 2011, Berzain's brother-in-law created Galen KB Corp and registered as the company's president. A month
later, Galen KB Corp purchased a $250,000 condo. In August, Berzain replaced his brother-in-law as the company's president, according
to business records. Berzain is no longer listed as a company officer in either company.
During an interview in January, Berzain told ProPublica "I don't have any companies." When asked about several of the companies
associated with his name or address in public records, the former defense minister said he had a consulting firm that helped clients
set up companies and that he was sometimes added to the board of directors. Efforts to reach Berzain's brother-in-law, a wealthy
businessman and the owner of a bus company in Bolivia, were unsuccessful. Berzain's brother-in-law has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The practice of purchasing real estate in the name of a business entity like a limited liability company, or LLC, is a common
and legal practice in high-end real-estate markets, and one that enables celebrities and other wealthy individuals to protect their
privacy.
But the practice also allows foreign officials to hide ill-gotten gains. U.S. regulations allow individuals to form business entities
like LLCs without disclosing the beneficial owner. The LLCs can be registered in the names of lawyers, accountants or other associates
-- or even anonymously in some states -- and used to purchase real estate, making it nearly impossible to determine the actual owner
of a property.
Government investigators and lawmakers have pointed out persistent gaps in U.S. policy that have enabled corrupt officials to
evade justice and hide their assets in this country. But little has changed.
Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation
said it can be "difficult" for immigration officials to identify the true source of an immigrant investor's funds. Immigration
officials told the government auditors that EB-5 applicants with ties to corruption, the drug trade, human trafficking and other
criminal activities have a strong incentive to omit key details about their financial histories or lie on their applications.
"It's very easy to get lost in the noise if you're a bad person," said Seto Bagdoyan, the accountability office's director of
forensic audits, who co-authored the GAO report.
Immigration officials, he added, have an "almost nonexistent" ability to thoroughly evaluate investors' backgrounds and trace
their assets.
Despite such weaknesses, Congress has continually
extended the EB-5
program with minor changes. The program is backed by
real-estate lobbyists who argue that it is a crucial source of financing for luxury condos and hotels. The program is
expected to thrive in a
Trump presidency because the president-elect is a developer and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received $50 million in EB-5 funds to
build a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey.
In 2010, a Senate report described how powerful foreign officials and their relatives moved millions of dollars in suspect funds
into the United States. The report said investors bypassed anti-money laundering regulations with help from U.S. lawyers, real-estate
agents, and banking institutions. Last year, ABC News
reported that lobbyists for real estate and other business groups spent $30 million in 2015 in an effort to protect the EB-5
program.
Senate investigators proposed legislation that would require companies to disclose their beneficial owners and make it easier
for authorities to restrict entry, deny visas and deport corrupt foreign officials.
A few of the proposals have been adopted, but they have not made much difference. Banks have stepped up their efforts to identify
corrupt officials and monitor their accounts. Professional groups such as the American Bar Association have issued non-binding guidelines
for their members on compliance with anti-money-laundering controls. The U.S. government has also worked with the
Financial Action Task Force , an international body set up
to fight money laundering, to bring its anti-corruption controls in accordance with the body's guidelines.
In May, the Treasury Department enacted a new rule that will take full effect in 2018 and will require financial institutions
to identify the beneficial owners of shell companies. Some advocates see the rule as a step backward. The new rule allows shell companies
to designate the manager of the account as the beneficial owner, concealing the identity of the person ultimately exercising control.
The State Department declined to say what progress, if any, it has made on the Senate subcommittee's recommendation to more aggressively
deny visas through Proclamation 7750. "The Department takes seriously congressional recommendations and devotes resources to addressing
corruption worldwide," a State Department official wrote in response to questions.
In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The small unit, which has grown
to include 16 attorneys, aims to recover assets in the United States that are tied to foreign corruption and return the money to
the looted countries.
Over the past six years, the unit has filed around two dozen civil asset forfeiture cases in an attempt to seize money, real estate
and other assets tied to government officials from 16 countries. Assets have ranged from a lone diamond-encrusted glove worn by Michael
Jackson that was purchased by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President, Teodoro Obiang, to a $1 billion fund tied to Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak.
Yet most of the money the Department of Justice has pursued remains in limbo. The case involving Chun, the former president of
South Korea, is one of only two instances in which corrupt gains have been returned to the home country through the Justice Department's
efforts. The other arose when Justice Department officials
returned $1.5 million to Taiwan from property bought with bribes paid to the family of Chun Shui Bian, the former president of
Taiwan.
The agency faces myriad challenges when attempting to seize and return assets acquired by corrupt foreign officials, including
a lack of witnesses, said Kendall Day, head of the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. These officials
often shield their transactions through shell companies, offshore companies or a network of associates.
"The mission of the Kleptocracy Initiative is really to target what we call grand foreign corruption that impacts the U.S. financial
system," Day said, citing the Chun case as an example.
The 2012 Magnitsky Act gives the government power to deny visas and freeze the assets of Russian nationals accused of corruption
or human rights violations. The Global Magnitsky Act would extend the same sanctions to the rest of the world, but it has yet to
be passed by Congress. Unlike Proclamation 7750, the Magnitsky laws require the government to publish a list of foreign government
officials who are barred from the United States.
In addition, the Treasury Department imposed regulations this year that aim to crack down on the use of shell companies to purchase
real estate in places like Miami and Manhattan. Title insurance companies are now required to identify the real owners of companies
purchasing high-end real estate without a mortgage. These regulations, however, are temporary.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
In itself, criminal justice reform for non-violent offenders is not anathema to Trump's libertarian supporters (check).
For what it symbolizes in the broader political context, however, the passing of the
First Step Act -- as the criminal justice reform bill is called -- is a bit of an abomination.
Good or bad, the First Step Act is Jared Kushner's baby. And Kushner, Trump's liberal son-in-law, should not be having legislative
coups!
Yes, Jared and Ivanka are on a tear. The midterm congressional elections of President Trump's first-term have culminated in a
legislative victory for an anemic man, who provides a perfect peg on which to hang the forceful first daughter's ambition.
In no time at all have Jared and Ivanka Trump moved to consolidate power. This, as intellects like the Steven Bannon and Stephen
Miller were either fired, or confined to the basement, so to speak.
Today, Bannon is just a flinty glint in Ivanka's eyes. But by January, 2017, the president's former White House chief strategist
had already "assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in the first 100 days. The very first EO, in his view, had
to be a crackdown on immigration. After all, it was one of Trump's core campaign promises." So said Bannon to Michael Wolff, author
of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House .
Many a pundit has suggested that Trump give a kick-ass rah-rah address to explain immigration to the nation.
Nonsense on stilts. The Make America Great Again (S.O.S.) agenda needed to be explained daily and repetitively by someone with
a brain. It should have been MAGA every morning with Steve Miller, or Gen. John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen. Instead, we got stumblebum
Sarah Huckabee issuing a meek, meandering daily apologia.
About that promise to put in place only "the best of people": Ice princess Kirstjen Nielsen is super smart with a cool temperament
and looks to match. Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen had been brought into the Trump Administration by retired United States Marine
Corps Gen. John Kelly, formerly White House chief of staff. Nielsen might not be optimal in her current position. But she
would've made a great MAGA mouthpiece.
It's quite clear that President Trump's promise to hire only "the best" ought to have begun with firing The Family. Instead, Mr.
Kushner's national security portfolio has expanded in a manner incommensurate with his skills. It now includes, I believe, China,
Mexico, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The same can be said of Ivanka, who was soon briefing the South Korean president on sanctions against North Korea. That Ivanka
lacked a permanent security clearance was the least of the country's worries, given Steve Bannon's assessment of her cerebral acuity:
"as dumb as a
brick" .
Alas, political connections ensured that two branding experts beat Braveheart Bannon of the mighty Breitbart.com! "'The Trump
presidency that we fought for, and won, is over," he lamented, in August of 2017.
If
Breitbart.com is to be believed -- and it should -- Ivanka was the one to give Bannon the boot (or, rather, the
Choo ): "Trump's daughter Ivanka pushed Bannon out because of his
'far-right views' clashing with her [recently acquired] Jewish faith." (Funny that, because my own rightist views clash not at all
with my Jewish faith.)
"Jarvanka" (the Jared-Ivanka organism) were also said to have orchestrated the ousting of the last of the old MAGA Guard, John
Kelly, aforementioned, a most excellent man. Kelly took his role as chief of staff seriously. He was a hardliner who limited Ivanka's
access to Pater.
One of Trump's superb personnel choices, Kelly's fate, however, was sealed when he stated how sick-and-tired he was of the first
daughter "playing
government." The Goldman-Sachs wing of the White House, commandeered by the Kushners, had always wished him away. So, Kelly got
the Choo , too.
Of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, archconservative Heather Mac Donald
observed the following: Sessions was "the only member of the Trump administration who was absolutely staunch in speaking up for
the right of Americans to determine what the character of their country should be."
It takes a strong woman (Mac Donald) to recognize a scheming one. Mac Donald
has recently expressed "'no confidence' that the president will stop being advised by his daughter, Ivanka Trump, on the issue
of immigration."
It so happened that Ayers chose not to play. A trial balloon was quickly floated, but was punctured just as fast. The idea that
Jared would be chief of staff was just too preposterous. But oh, the audacity of that fleeting experiment!
So, here we are. The promised land (America) is without the promised Wall. But, liberal legislation in hand, the "Honorable" Kushners
(
so listed ) are off to hobnob at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in
January of 2019 .
First Lady Melania has been shoved aside, or ceremonially shivved, to use prison parlance. The first couple in-waiting will get
to press flesh with local and global elites, while flashing their liberal credentials: criminal justice reform.
Oh how fun it is to schmooze the gilded globalists, rather than to woo Trump voters.
The thought occurred to me, what if Trump did this as a "give them enough rope to hang themselves"
maneuver, where he "finds out" the chemical attack intelligence was false, and then goes after everyone
who pushed it, "you're fired", as well as the each media that beat the celebratory war drums, as
a showcase of "fake news" examples. That would sure catch them off guard, ha. But I don't think Trump
is that Machiavellian, more like a real estate salesperson than a chess master. But that idea, if
applied, might save Trump from the trap he is in, and turn things around, no?
Trump's man could visit Moscow and say, yeah it looked bad but we did it to get the hawks feeding
the president false intelligence to out themselves so we could fire them using the fabricated intelligence
as the reason, and also to identify the honest brokers who held firm. Surely a good way to find out
who your friends are vs who works for the Machine. But again, i don't see it likely unless someone
suggested to Trump, and even then very unlikely to pan out when Trump is so surrounded by folks of
the opposite persuasion.
The dog wiggles not through his tale. I'm also getting more and more the impression Trump is done
for. He is now a doll, and the Handlers will fully unleash it onto the World, in the fashion .now
let's see what happens if we turn this knob fully counter clockwise what will our nice little
rag doll do
That's exactly what I'm "concentrating" on being the "probable outcome" of all this
Really keeping fingers crossed like a fool but sometimes dreams come true.
Give them some rope to see how far they will go then, hang them "you're fired" with their own
decisions and false news.
Standing with all of you folks
Trump theatrically sends a 59-missile tweet, and four "beautiful babies" in Syria become "collateral
damage". ***
Several billion people take a sharp intake of breath and say: WTF?
A trillion collective hours are spent analysing, deconstructing, psychoanalysing: WHYdid he do this, and why now?
Now we know.
Ivanka.
Ivanka got upset watching a piece of Wag the Dog nonsense and begged daddy to blow up the
"bad guys".
Good to know, now that the world is standing at the very precipice of thermo-nuclear war, it's
because Daddy's princess couldn't determine the difference between a Disneyesque cartoon and the
diabolical mass-death a real "sarin" attack would precipitate.
****to paraphrase (and contort) Orwell, all "beautiful babies" are equal, but some beautiful
babies just have to die if they are obstructing American "interests"
But sophistication of intelligence agencies now reached very high level. Russiage was pretty dirty but pretty slick operation. British
thre letter againces were even more devious, if we view Skripals poisoning as MI5/Mi6 "witness protection" operation due to possible
Skripal role in creating Steele dossier. So let's keep wanting the evnet. The election 2020 might be event more interesting the Elections
of 2016. Who would suggest in 2015 that he/she elects man candidate from Israel lobby instead of a woman candidate from the same lobby?
Notable quotes:
"... The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an attack on them. ..."
"... Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared him perfectly for his present role. ..."
"... the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any intrinsic superiority. ..."
"... The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds. ..."
"... Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. ..."
"... Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged. ..."
"... Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. ..."
One might object that Trump, a billionaire TV star, does not resemble his followers. But this misses the powerful intimacy that he
establishes with them, at rallies, on TV and on Twitter. Part of his malicious genius lies in his ability to forge a bond with people
who are otherwise excluded from the world to which he belongs. Even as he cast Hillary Clinton as the tool of international finance,
he said:
I do deals – big deals – all the time. I know and work with all the toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance.
These are hard-driving, vicious cut-throat financial killers, the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table
and fight to the bitter end to gain maximum advantage.
With these words he brought his followers into the boardroom with him and encouraged them to take part in a shared, cynical exposure
of the soiled motives and practices that lie behind wealth. His role in the Birther movement, the prelude to his successful presidential
campaign, was not only racist, but also showed that he was at home with the most ignorant, benighted, prejudiced people in America.
Who else but a complete loser would engage in Birtherism, so far from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Harvard aura that elevated
Obama, but also distanced him from the masses?
The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the resistance fired up, but
it is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an
attack on them. 'The fascist leader's startling symptoms of inferiority', Adorno wrote, 'his resemblance to ham actors and asocial
psychopaths', facilitates the identification, which is the basis of the ideal. On the Access Hollywood tape, which was widely assumed
would finish him, Trump was giving voice to a common enough daydream, but with 'greater force' and greater 'freedom of libido' than
his followers allow themselves. And he was bolstering the narcissism of the women who support him, too, by describing himself as
helpless in the grip of his desires for them.
Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far
more familiar figure than may at first appear. The demagogue's appeals, Adorno wrote, 'have been standardised, similarly to the advertising
slogans which proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business'. Trump's background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared
him perfectly for his present role. According to Adorno,
the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them
psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than
by any intrinsic superiority.
To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader
simply turns his own unconscious outward Experience has taught him consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use
of his irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist who knows how to sell their sensitivity.
All he has to do in order to make the sale, to get his TV audience to click, or to arouse a campaign rally, is exploit his own
psychology.
Using old-fashioned but still illuminating language, Adorno continued:
The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous
spell they exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality: language itself, devoid of its rational significance,
functions in a magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce individuals to members of crowds.
Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well
as strength. The agitators' boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness, often merged with claims of strength. This was
particularly striking, Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. As with the Birther movement or Access
Hollywood, Trump's self-debasement – pretending to sell steaks on the campaign trail – forges a bond that secures his idealised status.
Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the
neglect by neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic
Party has to reorient its politics from the idea that 'a few get rich first' to protection for the least advantaged.
Yet no one who lived through the civil rights and feminist rebellions of recent decades can believe that an economic programme
per se is a sufficient basis for a Democratic-led politics.
This holds as well when it comes to trying to reach out to Trump's supporters. Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent
approval ratings, half say they 'strongly approve' and are probably lost to the Democrats. But if we understand the personal
level at which pro-Trump strivings operate, we may better appeal to the other half, and in that way forestall the coming emergency.
"... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
"... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
"... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
"... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
"... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
"... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
"... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy
that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump
president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who
bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful
wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact
that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth
bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people
did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment
stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump
in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to
conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every
component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence
agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to
remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of
amounts to an attempted soft coup.
It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was
nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once
again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White
House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be
clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be
barred from public office or the media forever.
As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary,
they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry.
Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid
Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!
sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you
have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.
i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally
distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.
I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly
declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the
Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could
watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends).
No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that
be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him
walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve
counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for
Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM |
link
@dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that
Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No
presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)
Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts
with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)
"very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this
moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".
I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by
the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit
(about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing
is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is
chanting "give me more, give me more...".
The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.
However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million
but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC,
EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up
crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a
cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles
to Brooklyn.
The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and
political circles.
The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop
their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.
b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele
dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the
dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation
when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia
investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking
with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with
Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and
the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was
briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing
this.
I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the
coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around
Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.
One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme
never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a
deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the
attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis,
etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of
preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM |
link
The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they
brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they
had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from
their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In
this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit
the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this
train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped
Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon
fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier,
moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead
proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because
the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least
some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they
took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This
time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this
time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no
longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.
Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are
designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole,
are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions
for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.
Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions
have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their
institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the
Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a
constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason
of the highest order.
Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number
international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color
Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first
time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved.
None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved.
Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually
societal collapse.
In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to
Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:
- The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent
737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry,
in an industry where reputation is everything.
- The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the
rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result
was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover
from that crisis.
- This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is
systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions,
(the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and
the ability to maintain peace.
The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the
damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears,
and societal decline sets in.
It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of
many indicators.
Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning
and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is
factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of
the BBC news, we're in information control territory.
But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has
good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.
In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media.
Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has
just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the
shifting currents within that political elite.
So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think.
In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing
and what they intend to do.
The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on
substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty,
supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow
they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their
daily fodder for conversation...
renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."
Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues
the
American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never
delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an
infrastructure
plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.
The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to
distract, and they've done it well.
The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same
ilk.
Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...
I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's
collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from
doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.
2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary
for over 25 years.
3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was
never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal
even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.
When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary
repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that
she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card
industry.
4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead
she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her
campaign.
5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't
support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a
speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters
activist; and she called whites "deplorables".
Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The
Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.
6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and
Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.
IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the
election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any
dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:
> hiring Manafort;
> calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;
> talking about Putin in a admiring way.
And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:
> served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;
> distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;
> served as a device for settling scores:
- Assange isolated
(Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");
- Michael Flynn forced to resign
(because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).
hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM |
link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen
buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice
and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's
presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired
by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases.
This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal
server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 -
2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and
the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and
conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.
The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been
written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation
with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster
the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.
As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and
head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund
Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or
Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was
employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor
Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.
thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath
@2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a
nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article
from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today
like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."
the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this
sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in
tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance..
instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if
any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so
long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is
still on track...
@19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..
What Difference Does it Make?
They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers
make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy
weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to
move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their
deals for civilian projects in the Med.
Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes
about Trump, Russia.
Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!
Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!
During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does
everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen.
Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her
associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in
court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.
Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM |
link
The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people
anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.
Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be
in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room
yelling that the house is on fire.
Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of
steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact
merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?
Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing
happend:
If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media
malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being
wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves
defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity.
Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.
The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to
our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being
wrong.
Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to
acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already
know.
It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing
it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.
And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.
The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by
inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the
American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives,
getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote
this story on a daily basis for nearly three years
Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4
You people don't get it do you?
'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell
swoop....
Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel)
and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations
with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas
administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.
That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in
which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want
something covered up? Put Mueller on it.
To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and
pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont
believe. Lol
Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as
Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China
trademarks .
The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing
negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal
like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR
protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in
which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.
The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how
far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is
an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The
Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions
overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it
onto cable tv?
It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After
years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown
restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will
become true after all.
"Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.
When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight,
you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar,
one with a great deal of blood on her hands.
My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new
credibility.
The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people
with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely
arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.
And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American
foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.
Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will
deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.
No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they
lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.
It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.
So funny.
Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate
Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his
Administration.
Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.
The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate.
Lets just blame it all on Hillary.
Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever
of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily
die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily
recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The
dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have
succumbed.
As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."
Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment,
then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!
It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money
from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited
from it", highly likely!
Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort
has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of
Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly
likely.
There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger
Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most
certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against
defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of
Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct
conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely
different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win
because the DNC threw all its weight against him.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the
spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the
American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race
theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one:
if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the
bits you want.
I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it
exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than
before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for
that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment"
acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American
people (or a signficant part of it).
But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.
It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it
had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between
Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term
enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most
of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and
can be balkanized.
There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new
bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new
information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only
spun onto new hysteria.
As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been
wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to
simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of
evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of
Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort
to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless
wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and
Republicans.
"...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."
Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two
positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.
Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.
A case of divide and conquer against the population
This time it was a fabricated scandal.
Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection
and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements,
wearing down relations.
The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims
concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like
that).
Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove
anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on
towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry
and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.
Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other
distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and
effort.
Management by crisis
The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other
manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through
spam.
Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.
Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter
suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.
I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was
(mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .
My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the
Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
Jackrabbit @18
So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do
nationalist.
I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her
turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of
personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier
during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up
to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration,
the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is
that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's
that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him
and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax
returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the
press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns). Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate,
meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like
open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the
Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character
issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other
examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's
well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer
Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make")
and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find
that even a little bit strange?
We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby
inside.
Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the
bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?
If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have
disputed the primaries against Hillary.
Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?
Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told
Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's
typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?
The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and
Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.
Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns.
Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press
asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of
returns) . Bernie refused.
Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie
Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things
for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.
What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless
astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders.
These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and
another 4 years for Trump.
Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and
to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie
refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to
squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk
about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the
overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").
And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that
even a little bit strange?
mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not
voters.
Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western
states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a
thin margin.
Gosh and Blimey!
Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned
the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...
From Xymphora March 21, 2019.
"Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):
"Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent
were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually
estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34
percent from gentiles.
Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50
donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from
Jewish givers.
So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about
the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about
it: 76 percent is a lot."
Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and
involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state.
And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in
2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is
not confronting Putin"...
Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow,
troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.
I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's
terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so
distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.
I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the
popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing
side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too
many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the
people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say
she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other
problems, but it still wasn't enough.
I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her
elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and
the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.
Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough
to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has
helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller
to prove.
It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that
Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the
"national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify
the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.
It is time to build
cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony.
Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it.
The truth will work better.
Human society is way to complex for alpha males to succeed unconditionally... Quite a different set of traits is often needed.
Notable quotes:
"... Superficially, Hemingway was correct. But on a deeper level, he missed the reality of the heightened sense of entitlement that the very rich possess, as well as the deference that so many people automatically show to them. ..."
"... Hemingway is saying: take away all that money and the behavior would change as well. It's the money (or the power in your example) that makes the difference. ..."
"... I feel Fitzgerald got the basic idea right ..."
"... Apparently Fitzgerald was referring specifically to the attitudes of those who are born rich, attitudes that Fitzgerald thought remained unaltered by events, including the loss of economic status. ..."
"... "They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different." ..."
"... "He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him." ..."
Superficially, Hemingway was correct. But on a deeper level, he missed the reality of the heightened sense of
entitlement that the very rich possess, as well as the deference that so many people automatically show to them. The rich
shouldn't be different in this way, but they are. In some other societies, such entitlement and deference would accrue to
senior party members, senior clergymen, or hereditary nobility (who might not have much money at all).
"Go with the winner." That is how it works for the alpha male (a chimp, an ape, or a gorilla) for most followers anyway. Some will challenge. If victorious, followers will line up (more go-with-the-winner). If defeated, an outcast.
Without a doubt Hemingway had a rather catty attitude toward his literary rival, but in this instance I think the debunking
is merited. It's quite possible that rich people act the way we would act if we were rich, and that Fitzgerald's tiresome obsession
with rich people didn't cut very deep. Hemingway is saying: take away all that money and the behavior would change as well. It's
the money (or the power in your example) that makes the difference.
In my opinion, the fact that if they had less money would change the way they think, does not change the fact that, while they
have more money, they think differently, and different rules apply to them.
Addendum: The fact that an Alpha Chimp would act differently if someone else was the Alpha Chimp does not change the fact that
an Alpha Chimp has fundamentally different behavior than the rest of the group.
"Hemingway is responsible for a famous misquotation of Fitzgerald's. According to Hemingway, a conversation between him and
Fitzgerald went:
Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me. Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.
This never actually happened; it is a retelling of an actual encounter between Hemingway and Mary Colum, which went as follows:
Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich.
Colum: I think you'll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money."
Just want to point out that that quote of Hemingways wasn't about Fitzgerald and wasn't even by Hemingway. Anyway I was more
attacking the "rich have more money" thing than I was trying to defend Fitzgerald, but I feel Fitzgerald got the basic idea
right
Apparently Fitzgerald was referring specifically to the attitudes of those who are born rich, attitudes that Fitzgerald
thought remained unaltered by events, including the loss of economic status.
"They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations
and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are
better than we are. They are different."
Hemingway suggested that Fitzgerald had once been especially enamored of the rich, seeing them as a "special glamorous race"
but ultimately became disillusioned.
"He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing
that wrecked him."
"... Warren could have easily gone either way, succumbing to the emotive demands of the Never Trump mob. She instead opted to stick to the traditional progressive position on undeclared war, even if it meant siding with the president. ..."
"... Bravo Congressman Khanna. And to those progs who share his sympathies with those of us who have consistently opposed US military adventurism. Howard Dean's comments that American troops should take a bullet in support of "women's rights" in Afghanistan (!) only underscores why he serves as comic relief and really should consider wearing tassels and bells. ..."
"... Trump – and Bernie – put their fingers on the electoral zeitgeist in 2016: the oligarchy is out of control, its servants in Washington have turned their backs on the middle class, and we need to stop getting into stupid, needless wars. ..."
"... "Principles", LOL? What principles? When have Democrats ever not campaigned on a "bring them home, no torture, etc" peace platform and then governed on a deep state neocon foreign policy, with entitlements to drone anyone on earth in Obama's case? At least horrible neocon Republicans are honest enough to say what they believe when they run. ..."
"... Hillary was full hawk. It was Trump who said he was less hawkish. Yeah, he hasn't lived up to that either. But Democrats can't go hawkish in response. They already were the hawks. ..."
When President Donald Trump announced in December that he wanted an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, there was
more silence and opposition from the Left than approval. The 2016 election's highest-profile progressive, Senator Bernie Sanders,
said virtually nothing at the time. The 2018 midterm election's Left celeb, former congressman Beto O'Rourke, kept mum too. The 2004
liberal hero, Howard Dean, came out against troop withdrawals,
saying they would damage women's rights
in Afghanistan.
The liberal news outlet on which Warren made her statement, MSNBC, which had already been sounding more like Fox News circa 2003,
warned that withdrawal from Syria could hurt national security. The left-leaning news channel has even made common cause with Bill
Kristol and other neoconservatives in its shared opposition to all things Trump.
Maddow herself has not only vocally opposed the president's decision, but has become arguably more popular than ever with liberal
viewers by peddling
wild-eyed anti-Trump conspiracy theories worthy of Alex Jones. Reacting to one of her cockamamie theories, progressive journalist
Glenn Greenwald tweeted , "She is Glenn Beck
standing at the chalkboard. Liberals celebrate her (relatively) high ratings as proof that she's right, but Beck himself proved that
nothing produces higher cable ratings than feeding deranged partisans unhinged conspiracy theories that flatter their beliefs."
The Trump derangement that has so enveloped the Left on everything, including foreign policy, is precisely what makes Democratic
presidential candidate Warren's Syria withdrawal position so noteworthy. One can safely assume that Sanders, O'Rourke, Dean, MSNBC,
Maddow, and many of their fellow progressive travelers' silence on or resistance to troop withdrawal is simply them gauging what
their liberal audiences currently want or will accept.
Warren could have easily gone either way, succumbing to the emotive demands of the Never Trump mob. She instead opted to stick
to the traditional progressive position on undeclared war, even if it meant siding with the president.
... ... ...
Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with
Senator Rand Paul.
The antiwar movement is not a "liberal" movement. Hundreds of mainly your people addressed the San Francisco board of supervisors
asking them to condemn an Israeli full-fledged attack on Gaza. When they were finished, without objection from one single supervisor,
the issued was tabled and let sink permanently in the Bay, never to be heard of again. Had the situation been reversed and Israel
under attack there most probably would have been a resolution in nanoseconds. Maybe even half the board volunteering to join the
IDF? People believed Trump would act more objectively. That is why he got a lot of peace votes. What AIPAC wants there is a high
probability our liberal politicians will oblige quickly and willingly. Who really represents America remains a mystery?
"That abiding hatred will continue to play an outsized and often illogical role in determining what most Democrats believe about
foreign policy."
True, but the prowar tendency with mainstream liberals ( think Clintonites) is older than that. The antiwar movement among
mainstream liberals died the instant Obama entered the White House. And even before that Clinton and Kerry and others supported
the Iraq War. I think this goes all the way back to Gulf War I, and possibly further. Democrats were still mostly antiwar to some
degree after Vietnam and they also opposed Reagan's proxy wars in Central America and Angola. Some opposed the Gulf War, but it
seemed a big success at the time and so it became centrist and smart to kick the Vietnam War syndrome and be prowar. Bill Clinton
has his little war in Serbia, which was seen as a success and so being prowar became the centrist Dem position. Obama was careful
to say he wasn't antiwar, just against dumb wars. Gore opposed going into Iraq, but on technocratic grounds.
And in popular culture, in the West Wing the liberal fantasy President was bombing an imaginary Mideast terrorist country.
Showed he was a tough guy, but measured, unlike some of the even more warlike fictitious Republicans in that show. I remember
Toby Ziegler, one of the main characters, ranting to his pro diplomacy wife that we needed to go in and civilize those crazy Muslims.
So it isn't just an illogical overreaction to Trump, though that is part of it.
Won't happen. Gabbard is solid and sincere but she's not Hillary so she won't be the candidate. Hillary is the candidate forever.
If Hillary is too drunk to stand up, or too obviously dead, Kamala will serve as Hillary's regent.
The problem isn't THAT Trump is pulling the troops out of Syria. The problem is HOW Trump is pulling the troops out of Syria.
The Left isn't fighting about 'keeping troops indefinitely in Syria' vs pulling troops out of Syria'. Its a fight over 'pulling
troops out in a way that makes it so that we don't have to go back in like Obama and Iraq' vs 'backing the reckless pull out Trump
is going to do'.
For Democrats, everything depends on what the polls say, which issues seem important to get elected. They will say anything,
no matter how irrational & outrageously insane if the polls say Democrat voters like them. If American involvement in Syria, Iraq,
Afghanistan are less important according to the polls, Democratic 2020 hopefuls will not bother to focus on it.
For True Christian conservatives, everything depends on how issues line up to God's laws. Polls do not change what is morally
right, & what is morally evil.
"I am glad Donald Trump is withdrawing troops from Syria. Congress never authorized the intervention."
Bravo Congressman Khanna. And to those progs who share his sympathies with those of us who have consistently opposed US
military adventurism. Howard Dean's comments that American troops should take a bullet in support of "women's rights" in Afghanistan
(!) only underscores why he serves as comic relief and really should consider wearing tassels and bells.
Kasoy: "For True Christian conservatives, everything depends on how issues line up to God's laws. Polls do not change what is
morally right, & what is morally evil."
I think that needs the trademark symbol, i.e True Christians™
The Second Coming of Jack Hunter. Given his well-documented views on race, it's no surprise he's all in on Trump. That surely
outweighs Trump's massive spending and corruption that most true libertarians oppose.
Trump – and Bernie – put their fingers on the electoral zeitgeist in 2016: the oligarchy is out of control, its servants in
Washington have turned their backs on the middle class, and we need to stop getting into stupid, needless wars.
Of course, the left would come out against puppies and sunshine if Trump came out for those things.
But if they are smart, they'd recognize that on war, or his lack of interest in starting new wars, even the broken Trump clock
has been right twice a day.
The flip side of this phenomenon is that so many Republican voters supported Trump's withdrawal from Syria. Had it been Obama
withdrawing the troops, I suspect 80-90% of Republicans would have opposed the withdrawal.
This does show that Republicans are listening to Trump more than Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio on foreign policy. But once
Trump leaves office, I fear the party will swing back towards the neocons.
"Principles", LOL? What principles? When have Democrats ever not campaigned on a "bring them home, no torture, etc" peace
platform and then governed on a deep state neocon foreign policy, with entitlements to drone anyone on earth in Obama's case?
At least horrible neocon Republicans are honest enough to say what they believe when they run.
Dopey Trump campaigned on something different and has now surrounded himself with GOP hawks, probably because he's lazy and
doesn't know any better.
Bernie, much like Ron Paul was, 180 degrees away, is the only one who might do different if he got into office, and the rate
the left is going he may very well be the nominee.
Hillary was full hawk. It was Trump who said he was less hawkish. Yeah, he hasn't lived up to that either. But Democrats can't
go hawkish in response. They already were the hawks.
The least bad comment on Democrats is that everyone in DC is a hawk, not just them.
"... Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet censorship. ..."
"The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing
but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society ." -- Karl
Marx, The Class Struggles in France
What Marx described, in his analysis of the corruption of the bourgeoisie in France
leading up to the 1848 revolution, applies with even greater force to the United States of
2019, where the bourgeoisie faces its own rendezvous with social upheaval and explosive class
battles.
That is how a Marxist understands the spectacle of Wednesday's hearing before the House
Oversight Committee, in which Michael Cohen, the former attorney and "fixer" for Donald Trump
for more than a decade, testified for six hours about how he and his boss worked to defraud
business partners and tax collectors, intimidate critics and suppress opposition to Trump's
acitvities in real estate, casino gambling, reality television and, eventually, electoral
politics.
What Cohen described was a seedier version of an operation that most Americans would
recognize from viewing films like The Godfather: Trump as the capo di tutti capi, the
unquestioned authority who must be consulted on every decision ; the children, Donald Jr.,
Ivanka and Eric, each now playing significant roles in the ongoing family criminal enterprise;
Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization, the consigliere in charge of finance,
mentioned by Cohen more than 20 times in the course of six hours of testimony as the man who
facilitated Trump's schemes to evade taxes, deceive banks or stiff business partners.
Cohen himself was an enforcer. By his own account, he threatened people on Trump's behalf at
least 500 times in a ten-year period, including business associates, politicians, journalists
and anyone seeking to file complaints or gain reimbursement after being defrauded by one or
another Trump venture. The now-disbarred lawyer admitted to tape recording clients -- including
Trump among many others -- more than 100 times during this period.
The incidents recounted by Cohen range from the farcical (Trump browbeating colleges and
even his military prep school not to release his grades or test scores), to the shabby (Trump
having his own "charitable" foundation buy a portrait of himself for $60,000), to the brazenly
criminal (deliberately inflating the value of properties when applying for bank loans while
deflating the value of the same properties as much as twenty-fold in order to evade
taxation).
One of the most remarkable revelations was Cohen's flat assertion that Trump himself did
not enter the presidential race with the expectation that he could win either the Republican
nomination or the presidency. Instead, the billionaire reality television "star" regularly told
his closest aides, the campaign would be the "greatest infomercial in political history," good
for promoting his brand and opening up business opportunities in previously closed
markets.
These unflattering details filled the pages of the daily newspapers Thursday and occupied
many hours on the cable television news. But in all that vast volume of reporting and
commentary, one would look in vain for any serious assessment of what it means, in terms of the
historical development and future trajectory of American society, that a family like the Trumps
now occupies the highest rung in the US political system.
The World Socialist Web Site rejects efforts by the Democrats and the corporate media
to dismiss Trump as an aberration, an accidental figure whose unexpected elevation to the
presidency in 2016 will be "corrected" through impeachment, forced resignation or electoral
defeat in 2020. We insist that the Trump administration is a manifestation of a protracted
crisis and breakdown of American democracy, whose course can be traced back at least two
decades to the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-99, followed by the stolen
presidential election of 2000.
The US political system, always dominated by the interests of the capitalist ruling class
that controls both of the major parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, is breaking
down under the burden of mounting social tensions, driven above all by skyrocketing economic
inequality. It is impossible to sustain the pretense that elections at two-year and four-year
intervals provide genuine popular influence over the functioning of a government so completely
subordinated to the financial aristocracy.
The figures are familiar but require restating: over the past three decades, virtually all
the increase in wealth in American society has gone to a tiny layer at the top. Three
mega-billionaires -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates -- now control more wealth than
half the American population. This process of social polarization is global: according to the
most recent Oxfam report, 26 billionaires control more wealth than the poorer half of the human
race.
These billionaires did not accumulate their riches by devising new technologies or making
new scientific discoveries that increased the wealth and happiness of humanity as a whole. On
the contrary, their enrichment has come at the expense of society. Bezos has become the world's
richest man through the emergence of Amazon as the greatest sweatshop enterprise in history,
where every possible second of labor power is extracted from a brutally exploited
workforce.
The class of billionaires as a whole, having precipitated the global financial collapse of
2008 through reckless speculation and swindling in the sale of derivatives and other obscure
financial "products," was bailed out, first by the Republican Bush, then by the Democrat Obama,
to the tune of trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, the jobs, living standards and social
conditions for the great mass of working people sharply declined.
As for Donald Trump, the real estate swindler, casino con man and reality television mogul
is a living demonstration of the truth of Balzac's aphorism: "Behind every great fortune is a
great crime."
Trump toyed with running for president on the ultra-right Reform Party ticket in 2000 after
a long stint as a registered Democrat and donor to both capitalist parties. When he decided to
run for president as a Republican in 2016, however, he had shifted drastically to the right.
His candidacy marked the emergence of a distinctly fascistic movement, as he spewed
anti-immigrant prejudice and racism more generally, while making a right-wing populist appeal
to working people, particularly in de-industrialized areas in the Midwest and Appalachia, on
the basis of economic nationalism.
As World Socialist Web Site editorial board Chairman David North explained even
before the 2016 elections:
The Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States did not emerge from an
American version of a Munich beer hall. Donald Trump is a billionaire, who made his money in
Manhattan real estate swindles, the semi-criminal operations of casino gambling, and the
bizarre world of "reality television," which entertains and stupefies its audience by
manufacturing absurd, disgusting and essentially fictional "real life" situations. The
candidacy of Donald Trump could be described as the transfer of the techniques of reality
television to politics.
The main development in the two years since Trump entered the White House is the emergence
of the American working class into major struggles, beginning with the wave of teachers'
strikes in 2018, initiated by the rank and file in defiance of the bureaucratic unions. The
reaction in the American ruling elite is a panic-stricken turn to authoritarian methods of
rule.
The billionaire in the White House is now engaged in a systematic assault on the foundations
of American democracy. He has declared a national emergency in order to bypass Congress, which
holds the constitutional "power of the purse," and divert funds from the military and other
federal departments to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.
Whether or not he is immediately successful in this effort, it is clear that Trump is
moving towards the establishment of an authoritarian regime, with or without the sanction of
the ballot box. As Cohen observed in his closing statement -- in remarks generally downplayed
by the media and ignored by the Democrats -- he is worried that if Trump loses the 2020
election, "there will never be a peaceful transition of power."
Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They
have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while
portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of
Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet
censorship.
The defense of democratic rights and genuine resistance to Trump's drive toward
authoritarian rule must come through the development of an independent political movement of
the working class, directed against both big business parties, the Democrats as much as the
Republicans, and against the profit system which they both defend.
'We have a system that is fundamentally broken.' -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is
explaining just how f*cked campaign finance laws really are.
" Subscribe to NowThis:
http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe
In the latest liberal news and political news, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made
headlines at a recent congressional hearing on money in politics by explaining and inquiring
about political corruption. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, aka AOC, went into the issues of
lobbyists and Super PACs and how the political establishment, including Donald Trump, uses big
money to their advantage, to hide and obfuscate, and push crooked agendas. Alexandria Ocasio
Cortez is a rising star in the Democratic Party and House of Representatives.
NowThis is your premier news outlet providing you with all the videos you need to stay up to
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Love this feisty congresswoman. I can see why AOC is dislike by the right and even many
democrats. She's in DC to work for the American ppl and not enrich herself or special
interest. Love the 2018 class and hope they make changes and clean up DC.
AOC is amazing, pointing out all the fundamental wrongs in our political system. I hope
she stays in Congress as long as possible to spread her influence.
AOC is speaking out when no one else will about the corruption in Washington. She is
disliked because she is actually fighting for people. This makes me want to move to New York
just so I can vote for her. Keep it up the pressure.
She is going to be needing extra security. She's poised to take them down and we know how
these things have been handled in the past. I'm loving her fearlessness but worry for her
safety. May she be protected and blessed. SMIB
This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all
key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena:
might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump
does not even bother.
In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs
of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016,
Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who
"oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
Notable quotes:
"... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
"... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
"... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
"... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
"... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
"... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
"... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
"... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
"... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
"... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
"... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
"... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
"... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
"... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
"... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right
wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro
was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.
Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international
actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the
same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives
and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using
Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor
overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).
Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés
and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.
Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist,
and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide
-- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal
globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries,
senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.
However, when he delivered his inaugural address
on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the
government's back on a long-standing policy of
cultural imperialism
, stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill
with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations
to put their own interests first".
Russia
Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office
-- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy
conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.
Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism
toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency,
Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear,
Trump has done precisely nothing
to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".
His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia,
have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of
trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary,
it has degraded " and his spokesman called
the relations " deplorable ".)
Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin
a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has
developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated
the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American
officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The
only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of
total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international
affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.
WikiLeaks
Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from
wars for regime change, Trump sold out again.
"I love WikiLeaks --
" -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.
After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches,
and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks
to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years
under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work,
call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange,
and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may
file arrest charges against Assange
. Mike Pompeo ,
chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself
cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared
WikiLeaks to be a "
non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.
Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one
that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit.
The backtracking is so obvious in this
interview
Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:
AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on
Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with
the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?
TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying
is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC,
but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack
both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said,
"Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."
AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?
TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .
AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to
arrest Julian Assange?
TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision,
but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.
First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to
hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others
decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.
Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt
for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship)
or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are
those of expedience and greed (he admits that much).
This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6
NAFTA
On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising
to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be
awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peña
Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.
While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US,
witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support
for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to
them.
This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when
Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity
is part of the NAFTA agreement.
Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction.
Wisconsin alone has more
dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada.
Overall,
the US has a net surplus in the trade in
goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he
weakens his own criticisms of immigration.
Since NAFTA was implemented,
migration from Mexico to
the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately
drove them away from agriculture.
As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact,
per capita GDP is nearly a flat
line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures
that have been implemented, the
US leads the world .
To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims
he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only
when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.
His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at
the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core
of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing
about TISA and TTIP.
Mexico
Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any
evidence of production
in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should
also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC,
ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.
China
Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions
of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according
to Wilbur Ross, the "
after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not
because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on
selling out citizens' interests , and
particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating
North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade
issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical
neoliberals.
North Korea
Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a "
crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing
to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than
any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near
North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the
US Air Force publicly boasted of having
"nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly
60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and
sign a peace treaty
. Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in
addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly
provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: "
I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a
major, major conflict with North
Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you
can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure,
the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being
asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools
of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.
Syria
Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions
of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign,
he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the
US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared
to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute --
Trump made the point himself :
"I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go
the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that
attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching
it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will
tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last
few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".
Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories,
Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and
media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his
pursuit
of
public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist
culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical
merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above.
According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He
would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language
typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an "
animal ," who would
have
to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would
Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed
with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded
organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her
approval of even more drastic
action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap
on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest
opposition
, however, came from Trump's
own base , with a number of articles
featuring criticism from Trump's
supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a "
weakling
and a political ingrate ".
Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials
saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials
promising more if there
were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in
existence on Afghanistan); some said that
regime change was not the goal,
and then others made it clear that was the ultimate
goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed.
We're not going into Syria " -- even
though
Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least
protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation
that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a
renewal of neocon policy .
We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First,
Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius ,
a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the
neoconservative agenda and its hit list of
states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the
attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and
the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term
of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely
dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting
the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies.
His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters
of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless
in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil
liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.
Venezuela
It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead
up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest
regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of
Exxon
and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut
member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the
State
Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating
on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless
continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time
and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued
a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself
is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days
before the election, to a couple of weeks
after his inauguration, he has sent explicit
messages of support for anti-government
forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump
imposed sanctions on Venezuela's
Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.
NATO
Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding
reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: "
I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as
Ivanka Trump was about to represent
his government at a meeting of globalist women, the
W20 . NATO has served as
the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political
members of the TCC. 7
Saving Neoliberalism?
Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are
we still in the dying days of liberalism
? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents,
to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight
back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist
in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take
the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided
to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have
no way of knowing if it could be true.
Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist
media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that
their vision had been vindicated.
However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking.
If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US
and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.
Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?
Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a
left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it
did not originate with the
left , and that it has a long and distinguished history
in the US itself , then we can move
toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users,
is that one of the
significantreasons
why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for
example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and
no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America
anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial
thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against
globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity,
and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended
to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and
especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures
such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It
could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades,
essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders,
neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.
As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son --
then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8
On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism,
which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now
contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced.
In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption
of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining
economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily
caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking
about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power"
is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also
render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated,
and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward
various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart
of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.
As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism
. Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.
As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power
of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation
of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.
Free market is possible only under strict government regulation. Without government regulation free market quickly
deteriorates into the law of jungles. Such a paradox ;-)
And if financial oligarchy gets to power as they got via coup d'état in the USA in late 7th, it is only a matter of time before
the society collapses. They are very destructive to the society at large. Probably more so then organized crime. But wait. They
actually can be viewed as special type of organized prime as is "The best way to rob the bank is to own it".
Notable quotes:
"... Idiots on here are always going on about how we don't got capitalism, if we only had capitalism, we don't got free markets, if only we had free markets, then everything would be hunky-dory. Without any proof, of course, because there never was and never will be a "free" "market." The US has plenty capitalism. And everything sucks. And they want more. Confused, stupid, disingenuous liars. ..."
"... Free markets are crookedness factories. As a PhD from Chicago Business School told me, "Free markets?! What free markets?! There is no free market! It's all crooked!" ..."
Idiots on here are always going on about how we don't got capitalism, if we only had
capitalism, we don't got free markets, if only we had free markets, then everything would be
hunky-dory. Without any proof, of course, because there never was and never will be a "free"
"market." The US has plenty capitalism. And everything sucks. And they want more. Confused,
stupid, disingenuous liars.
Look, what you call "capitalism" and "free markets" just means scams to make rich people
richer. You read some simple-minded description of some pie-in-the-sky theory of some perfect
world where rational actors make the best possible decisions in their own interest without
any outside interference, and you actually think you are reading a description of something
real.
I'll tell you what's real. Crookedness. Free markets are crookedness factories. As a
PhD from Chicago Business School told me, "Free markets?! What free markets?! There is no
free market! It's all crooked!"
After Democratic party was co-opted by neoliberals there is no way back. And since Obama the trend of Democratic Party is
toward strengthening the wing of CIA-democratic notthe wing of the party friendly to workers. Bought by Wall Street leadership is
uncable of intruting any change that undermine thier current neoliberal platform. that's why they criminally derailed Sanders.
Notable quotes:
"... When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism. ..."
"... To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!" ..."
"... "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad." ..."
"... "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party." ..."
"... "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats ..."
"... It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class. ..."
"... First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious! ..."
"... from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/... ..."
they literally ripped this out of the 2016 Green Party platform. Jill Stein spoke repeatedly
about the same exact kind of Green New Deal, a full-employment, transition-to-100%-renewables
program that would supposedly solve all the world's problems.
When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address
the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism,
would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non
threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism.
In 2016, when the Greens made
this their central economic policy proposal, the Democrats responded by calling that platform
irresponsible and dangerous ("even if it's a good idea, you can't actually vote for a
non-two-party candidate!"). Why would they suddenly find a green new deal appealing now
except for its true purpose: left cover for the very system destroying the planet.
To quote
Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!"
"Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to
everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions
currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad."
Their political position not only lacks seriousness, unserious is their political
position.
"It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent
upon the Democratic Party."
For subjective-idealists, what you want to believe, think and feel is just so much more
convincing than objective reality. Especially when it covers over single-minded class
interests at play.
"And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical
policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and
exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth
face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of
world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting
the Democrats
It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically
fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient
facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of
establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with
delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of
their class.
First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the
Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back
into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious!
Only an International Socialist program led by Workers can truly lead a "green revolution" by
expropriating the billionaire oil barons of their capital and redirecting that wealth into
the socialist reconstruction of the entire economy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is a nice laugh. Really, it sure is funny hearing
these lies given any credence at all. This showmanship belongs in a fantasy book, not in real
life. The Democratic Party as a force for good social change Now that's a laugh!
Lies, empty promises, meaningless tautologies and morality plays, qualified and conditional
declarations to be backpedalled pending appropriate political expediencies, devoid any
practical content that is what AOC, card carrying member of DSA, and in fact young energetic
political apparatchik of calcified political body of Dems establishment, duty engulfs. And
working for socialist revolution is no one of them.
What kind of socialist would reject socialist revolution, class struggle and class
emancipation and choose, as a suppose socialist path, accommodation with oligarchic ruling
elite via political, not revolutionary process that would have necessarily overthrown ruling
elite.
What socialist would acquiesce to legalized exploitation of people for profit, legalized
greed and inequality and would negotiate away fundamental principle of egalitarianism and
working people self rule?
Only National Socialist would; and that is exactly what AOC campaign turned out to be all
about.
National Socialism with imperial flavor is her affiliation and what her praises for
Pelosi, wife of a billionaire and dead warmonger McCain proved.
Now she is peddling magical thinking about global change and plunge herself into falacy of
entrepreneurship, Market solution to the very problem that the market solutions were designed
to create and aggravate namely horrific inequality that is robbing people from their own
opportunities to mitigate devastating effects of global change.
The insidiousness of phony socialists expresses itself in the fact that they lie that any
social problem can be fixed by current of future technical means, namely via so called
technological revolution instead by socialist revolution they deem unnecessary or
detrimental.
The technical means for achieving socialism has existed since the late 19th century, with the
telegraph, the coal-powered factory, and modern fertilizer. The improvements since then have
only made socialism even more streamlined and efficient, if such technologies could only be
liberated from capital! The idea that "we need a new technological revolution just to achieve
socialism" reflects the indoctrination in capitalism by many "socialist" theorists because it
is only in capitalism where "technological growth" is essential simply to maintain the
system. It is only in capitalism (especially America, the most advanced capitalist nation,
and thus, the one where capitalism is actually closest towards total crisis) where the dogma
of a technological savior is most entrenched because America cannot offer any other kind of
palliative to the more literate and productive sections of its population. Religion will not
convince most and any attempt at a sociological or economic understanding would inevitably
prove the truth of socialism.
"... The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the permanent bureaucracy looking to always expand itself, and the various ethnic and sexual minorities whose needs and grievances are serviced by that bureaucracy. It's the last group that has become the party's most public face while the party's other activities – many of them sinister -- remain at least partially concealed. ..."
"... the Republicans are being forced to engage on some real issues, such as the need for a coherent and effective immigration policy and the need to redefine formal trade relations. (Other issues like the insane system of medical racketeering and the deadly racket of the college loan industry just skate along on thin ice. And then, of course, there's the national debt and all its grotesque outgrowths.) ..."
"... Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of bad ideas and bad faith, starting with the position that "diversity and inclusion" means shutting down free speech, an unforgivable transgression against common sense and common decency. It's a party that lies even more systematically than Mr. Trump, and does so knowingly (as when Google execs say they "Do no Evil"). Its dirty secret is that it relishes coercion, it likes pushing people around, telling them what to think and how to act. Its idea of "social justice" is a campus kangaroo court, where due process of law is suspended. And it is deeply corrupt, with good old-fashioned grift, new-fashioned gross political misconduct in federal law enforcement, and utter intellectual depravity in higher education. ..."
"... I hope that the party is shoved into an existential crisis and is forced to confront its astounding dishonesty. I hope that the process prompts them to purge their leadership across the board. ..."
Back in the last century, when this was a different country, the Democrats were the "smart"
party and the Republicans were the "stupid" party.
How did that work?
Well, back then the Democrats represented a broad middle class, with a base of factory
workers, many of them unionized, and the party had to be smart, especially in the courts, to
overcome the natural advantages of the owner class.
In contrast, the Republicans looked like a claque of country club drunks who staggered
home at night to sleep on their moneybags. Bad optics, as we say nowadays.
The Democrats also occupied the moral high ground as the champion of the little guy. If not
for the Dems, factory workers would be laboring twelve hours a day and children would still be
maimed in the machinery. Once the relationship between business and labor was settled in the
1950s, the party moved on to a new crusade on even loftier moral high ground: civil rights,
aiming to correct arrant and long-lived injustices against downtrodden black Americans. That
was a natural move, considering America's self-proclaimed post-war status as the world's Beacon
of Liberty. It had to be done and a political consensus that included Republicans got it done.
Consensus was still possible.
The Dems built their fortress on that high ground and fifty years later they find themselves
prisoners in it. The factory jobs all vamoosed overseas. The middle class has been pounded into
penury and addiction.
The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons
seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the
permanent bureaucracy looking to always expand itself, and the various ethnic and sexual
minorities whose needs and grievances are serviced by that bureaucracy. It's the last group
that has become the party's most public face while the party's other activities – many of
them sinister -- remain at least partially concealed.
The Republican Party has, at least, sobered up some after getting blindsided by Trump and
Trumpism. Like a drunk out of rehab, it's attempting to get a life. Two years in, the party
marvels at Mr. Trump's audacity, despite his obvious lack of savoir faire. And despite a
longstanding lack of political will to face the country's problems,the Republicans are being
forced to engage on some real issues, such as the need for a coherent and effective immigration
policy and the need to redefine formal trade relations. (Other issues like the insane system of
medical racketeering and the deadly racket of the college loan industry just skate along on
thin ice. And then, of course, there's the national debt and all its grotesque outgrowths.)
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of bad ideas and bad faith, starting
with the position that "diversity and inclusion" means shutting down free speech, an
unforgivable transgression against common sense and common decency. It's a party that lies even
more systematically than Mr. Trump, and does so knowingly (as when Google execs say they "Do no
Evil"). Its dirty secret is that it relishes coercion, it likes pushing people around, telling
them what to think and how to act. Its idea of "social justice" is a campus kangaroo court,
where due process of law is suspended. And it is deeply corrupt, with good old-fashioned grift,
new-fashioned gross political misconduct in federal law enforcement, and utter intellectual
depravity in higher education.
I hope that Democrats lose as many congressional and senate seats as possible.I hope that
the party is shoved into an existential crisis and is forced to confront its astounding
dishonesty. I hope that the process prompts them to purge their leadership across the board. If
there is anything to salvage in this organization, I hope it discovers aims and principles that
are unrecognizable from its current agenda of perpetual hysteria. But if the party actually
blows up and disappears, as the Whigs did a hundred and fifty years ago, I will be content. Out
of the terrible turbulence, maybe something better will be born.
Or, there's the possibility that the dregs of a defeated Democratic Party will just go
batshit crazy and use the last of its mojo to incite actual sedition. Of course, there's also a
distinct possibility that the Dems will take over congress, in which case they'll ramp up an
even more horrific three-ring-circus of political hysteria and persecution that will make the
Spanish Inquisition look like a backyard barbeque. That will happen as the US enters the most
punishing financial train wreck in our history, an interesting recipe for epic political
upheaval.
An interesting hypothesis. CIA definitly became a powerful political force in the USA -- a rogue political force which starting from JFK assasination tries to control who is elected to important offices. But in truth Cavanaugh is a pro-CIA candidate so to speak. So why CIA would try to derail him.
Notable quotes:
"... I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments. ..."
"... An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
"... So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped. ..."
"... Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized. ..."
"... She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office. ..."
I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim
that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family
homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments.
Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with
attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment
There's a unit It's a stove 2 ft counter space and sink. The stoves electric and plugs into an ordinary household electricity.
It's backed against the bathroom wall. Break through the wall, connect the pipes running water for the sink. Add an outside door
and it's a small apartment.
Assume they didn't want to make it an apartment just a master bedroom. Usually the contractor pulls the permits routinely.
But an outside bedroom door is complicated. The permits will cost more. It might require an exemption and a hearing They night
need a lawyer. And they might not get the permit.
So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to
counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife
makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could
have escaped.
Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college
found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school
and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized.
She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts.
And she runs a CIA recruitment office.
"... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
"... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
"... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
"... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
"... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
"... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
"... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
"... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
"... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
"... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
"... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
"... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
"... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
"... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
"... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
"... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
"... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
"... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
"... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
"... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
"... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
"... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though,
"Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear
that the Russians were coming.
That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989,
followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed
that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was
triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.
With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of
others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was
comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing
Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).
It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became
clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War
anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.
However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew
that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.
Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and
nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of
the Russian state.
For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain
the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.
That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin,
Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard
to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.
But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain
in remission forever. The need for them was too great.
In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era
name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war
regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only
endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.
The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded,
fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed
far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.
This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its
largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the
story.
However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to
the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long
been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.
When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean
War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However,
unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.
Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and
many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to
make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol
– of this aspiration.
And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed
over a quarter century ago.
***
As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian
intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections
looming, they are at it again.
This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a
justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on
earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.
But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of
their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that
all that luck will hold.
Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is
still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional
wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting
the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts
in the UK and other allied nations.
Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the
American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and
that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is
comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.
How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News
demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who
are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!
Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been
unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016
election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself,
is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their
media flacks don't seem to mind that either.
They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared
to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and
gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.
Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can
therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with
which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.
Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet
republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse
American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American
"democracy" can plausibly allege.
Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about
has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with
free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so
long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.
Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is
that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees
fit.
When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering
for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is
merciless towards nations that rebel.
With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to
withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky –
especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of
"democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan
"socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted,
homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.
This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil
market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could
nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could
actually win.
Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and
in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is
Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.
Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons,
liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State
– that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's
Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the
Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently
anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian
speaking Ukrainians in the east.
But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international
law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they
were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.
Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since
the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a
huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.
The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian
aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading
Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other
insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.
Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has
designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is
actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders
of international law.
Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the
American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States.
This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations
shamelessly.
Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill
Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo
away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.
The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic
systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist
centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one
that emerged after World War II.
However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War
revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism,
suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had
little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with
maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a
demonstrably aggressive "free world."
George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be
radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his
co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by
getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in
Vietnam.
That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they"
are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America
and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that
ensued.
The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago
never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's
Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."
However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to
say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.
Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But
this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply
cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.
It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of
corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being
taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.
However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done;
and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.
From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward
off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at
blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails
in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and
abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.
However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to
advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for
meddling, but for meddling stupidly.
No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two
years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That
problem's name is Donald Trump.
Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified.
But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be
even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a
vote for catastrophe.
Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my
friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.
For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between
them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very
relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm,
Russia.
It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as
hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.
If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have
realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be
of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for
America and its allies but for Russia too.
Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be
ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for
overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out
as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a
perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never
quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.
"... OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. ..."
"... the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret, doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth... ..."
"... It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the municipal Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten. ..."
"... The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE. ..."
"... Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women, children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender. ..."
German journalist and editor Udo Ulfkotte says he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, adding
that noncompliance ran the risk of being fired. Ulfkotte made the revelations during interviews with RT and Russia Insider.
OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD - Operation Mockingbird was (IS) a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank
Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help
present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also
worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition
to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National
Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts
were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine
Graham and her Washington Post Empire.
the secret societies, the banks, the oil families and other super rich powerful groups of people all call the shots in secret,
doesn't matter who the "elected" president is, they are going to do what they want to do, unless, people know the truth...
Being of German decent my sympathies are with the people of Germany. Not to say that the Russian people haven't had a bad deal, of
course they have under the Bolshevik Jews who nearly destroyed Russia for the sake of Zionist ideology.
The people of Germany
deserve better than this. They need to overthrow American control of their government and their media and replace it with pro
German people who will serve the interests of Germany, not that of the vicious prostitute Washington and their pimps. Not that
of the corrupt child molesting swine in Belgium who control the E.U.
They need to do something about it now and decisively take
back control of their own country. Germany must stop being a puppet controlled by the worst criminal element in the world....
the CIA. Freedom for Germany!
The EU pawns are ruled by the US lords! and The EU has Imposed the sanctions on Russia and thanks to that destroys the European
economies because it is good for the US economy!
The US has weaken the EU companies so the Americans have weak competitors in
Europe and on the agreement between the European Union and the United States the American companies and economy will gain but
European companies and farms will lost and many Europeans will lost their jobs for the sake of US welfare!
The US manufacturers
will earning and developing but the Europeans will go bankrupt and lost their jobs!
It wouldn't surprise me if this also applied on Swedish media. For decades our journalism was very neutral showing two sides
of the story, but nowdays, last 7-8 years, things have changed. Swedish media has to a high degree become incredible one-sided
in the writing of world politics... I started to notice the change some 7-8 years ago. Of course I find expectations like the
municipal
Television station SVT that still seems two-sided, but most written press in Sweden have become rotten, very rotten.
Good for you, coming clean about Germany's role in all this. Germany pretending to be innocent since WW2 but they're just as
involved as any of the other usual suspects. And when I say Germany, I don't mean ordinary citizens but the intelligence media
and political establishment.
I wouldn't mind if America was controlling the world if they had any moral integrity. The country was born through the genocide
of the natives and the re population of the country with slaves. Covertly funding and supporting dictators tyrants and terrorists
since the end of the second world war as part of their foreign policy. Training illiterate Afghan farmers in terrorist tactics
to fight the Russians in a proxy war encouraging Jihad to get more Muslims to fight the Russians creating what we call today modern
radical extremism. Funny how it became immoral when American blood was shed. Funny how all of Saddam's transgressions were ignored
while he was at war with Iran and how stopping the war with Iran suddenly made these actions unacceptable to America(how did Saddam
gain power again?).
The really astounding thing to me is how the American public seem to have this idea of being the bastion of freedom and democracy.
But then Again everyone in my country seems to be similarly ignorant about our own foreign policy and atrocities committed in
the name of Empire.
We killed more than Hitler did and were a lot worse. Just most of our victims were brown or black so don't seem to matter.
You are only really evil if you commit Genocide against white European Jews. Non whites don't seem to matter.
Brave man. Corporate news is what we get in the western world. I did not know Europe did not have a free press also. Russia
has government news, which is more free than our military industrial complex and corporate news. The big military industries want
wars and endless wars. Our government is a puppet on their strings. I would rather have a government in control rather than a
government under the control of military industries which creates endless wars to feed this military corporate monster.
This is
a small planet. We are all inter connected. This nonsense of creating and making enemies on this little planet has to stop. We
have to learn to get all along.
The US's MIC has to find other ways to make money. This MIC could spend money on developing outer
space programs, go the depths of the oceans, and study the fauna and flora on the earth. This nonsense of creating and making
enemies on earth has to stop. The world is too small for this NONSENSE.
Herr Ulfkotte is a man of courage, but when he says that the BND was formed by the CIA, he doesn't mention that the CIA has
roots in the Gehlen Spy network of the 3rd Reich after WW2.
Who has built the first concentration camp? It was the British Empire during the war against the Boers. The British put women,
children and old people in these camps to make the Boers surrender.
The same is true for the Americans in WW2 in regard to German
and Japanese civilians. (Just two examples of many!) These f*** Anglo-Saxons killed millions of people just for the heck of it
-- in Dresden, Hiroshima, many smaller places all around the world... -- and they keep doing it in several Arabian countries these
days. Of course, other empires, like the Russian, or the German, did evil deeds in their history but they took the responsibility.
I hope that the Anglo-Saxons once will have their own 'Nuremberg'.
"... My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so. ..."
"... Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive ..."
"... Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence. ..."
"... The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition. ..."
"... The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries. ..."
"... To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own . ..."
The rather obvious suppression of the English version of what was a "best seller" in Germany suggests that the Western system
of thought manipulation and consent manufacture sees itself as weaker and more vulnerable than one might at first imagine.
We can see from a year+ of "Russiagate" that Western media is a clown-show, much of so called "alternative media" included.
My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate."
Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright
by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution
to free thought and free speech to do so.
Just like "200 years together" by Solzhenitsyn which was never officially published in English despite Andrei having authored
many works which were big sellers. Just an example of other private business and corporations are often fully responsible
for pro-establishment censorship.
The treatment of the book aroused suspicion because of its content – ie supine news outlets forever dancing to the tune of western
military imperatives.
Ongoing support for illegal wars tell us that the MSM has hardly been at the forefront of informing readers why war criminals
like Hilary and Obama keep getting away with it. In fact Obama, just like Kissinger was awarded a peace prize – so obviously something
has gone very wrong somewhere.
It may be, although it seems unlikely that the mis-handling of an important theme like this is simply due to oversight by the
publisher (as Matt claims) but neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that somebody has had a word with someone in the
publishing world, perhaps because they are not overly keen on the fact Udo Ulfkotte has deviated from the media's mono-narrative
about why it is necessary for the US to destabilise countries and kill so many of their citizens.
Lets face it – it would be harder for the pattern to be maintained if the MSM was not so afraid of telling the truth, or at
least be more willing to hold to account politicians as the consequences of their disastrous policies unfold for all to see.
Maybe you want to have a go at answering the obvious question begged by such self evident truths – why are the MSM usually
lying?
Somebody said banning books is the modern form of book burning, and like Heinrich Heine said two centuries ago, "Where they burn
books, in the end, they start burning people."
Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent
the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people
what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive. If enough water sources are lost to fracking, and enough food sources
lost through poisoned seas and forest fires, many people will go to their camps as refuge but few will survive them. This ecological
destruction is for future population reduction.
In the US they use newspeak to say what the Nazis described with more honesty. Their master race became the indispensable nation,
their world domination became full spectrum dominance, and Totalerkrieg became the global war on terror. There will be others.
Farzad Basoft anyone ? Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations
have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence.
Maybe I am taking what you wrote out of context but I don't find it strange at all .It is just that someone, Udo, on the inside
has become a whistle blower , and confirmed what most suspected .The establishment can't have that.
As the economy growth has this so-called invisible hand, journalism also has an 'invisible pen'. One of the questions that
need an answer: how come feminists are so anti-Putin and anti-Russia? Easy to connect to dots?
The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance
newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and
paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of
credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition.
Those days
are gone: none of the newspapers make financial profits, they now exist because they have patrons. They always did, of course,
but now they have nothing else- the advertisers have left and circulation is diminishing rapidly.
The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom,
nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries.
As to competition that is restricted to publishers competing to demonstrate their loyalty to the government and their ingenuity
in candy coating its propaganda.
Anyone doubt that Luke Harding will be in the running for a Pulitzer? Or perhaps even the Nobel Prize for Literature?
For what it's worth, I skimmed through this very long link by Matt, and could find no mention of poison gas -- certainly no denunciation
-- just horrific conventional arms : Der Spiegel 1984:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13508659.html
Also for what it's worth, the German publisher's blurb which I got Google to translate above, says there is much more to the
book than old Soddem: the author names names and points to organizations.
Now, without any evidence, based only on my faulty memory and highly biased interpretation of events strung together on a timeline,
here is my conspiracy story about a very nice country called Iraq and a very nasty Iraqi called Saddam who came to a very nasty
end at the hands of his much more nasty friends, who first gave him a boost and then put in the boot.
1914 Great Britain invades Iraq and BP takes over the Iraqi oilfields.
1968 Iraqi govt member under Yaya wants to nationalize the oil. CIA coup replaces Yaya with Saddam as a safe pair of hands.
1970 Saddam the dirty dog does the dirty on the friends who put him in power; he nationalizes Iraqi oil. And nationalizes Iraqi
banks. From now on Saddam is a dead man walking. Like Mossadeq in Iran whom the US-UK replaced with the Shah
1978 But in Iran the Shah is replaced by the Islamic Socialist Republic -- who again nationalize Iranian oil. Saddam's
friends now face a dilemma: kill him first, or kill the Ayatollah's first? They decide to first go for the Ayatollahs -- with
Saddam's help.
1980 Saddam invades Iran with help from US and Germany -- including, strangely enough, generous supplies of poison gas.
1984-1989 Saddam's invasion of Iran flops. Reports about use of poison gas by Saddam begin to emerge, first in German newspapers
then even debated US govt.
1990 Saddam thinks he has restored credit with the US & Germany by using their weapons against Iran, and now has the green
light to invade another country. Finds out his mistake in the Gulf War. He is once again, a dead man walking. So is his country.
2001 Saddam is accused of harbouring Islamic terrorists who knocked down 3 skyscrapers by flying 2 passenger planes into
them. The idea of Secular Baathist Saddam in league with religious fanatics is ridiculous, but what the heck it's a story.
2003 Saddam hanged for, inter alia, use of chemical weapons; likewise his minister whom the MSM have a field day comically
calling "Chemical" Ali.
2017 Who's next? The Ayatollahs, of course. And anyone else who dares to nationalize "our" oil. Or "our" banks.
That is more than plausible. Unfortunately. Hard not to sympathize with the Iraqis and feel shame for what has been done in the
name of the US and UK. Rotten to the core, and sanctimonious to boot.
To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists
and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever
there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they
serve only their own .
The Guardian sells space to lobbyists too. Not ad space – article space. It's literally hiring itself out to whomever wants to
buy the right to publish an article under its name.
Well one things stands out in bold and that is the fear that such a revelation is associated with. 'Broad spectrum dominance'
of a central intelligent agency is a reversal of the wholeness of being expressing through all its parts.
Fake intelligence
is basically made up to serve a believed goal. The terrorism of fear generates the goal of a self-protection that sells true relationship
to 'save itself'.
This goes deep into what we take to be our mind. The mind that thinks it is in control by controlling what it thinks.
If I can observe this in myself at will, is it any surprise I can see it in our world?
What is the fear that most deeply motivates or drives the human agenda?
I do not ask this of our superficial thinking, but of a core self-honesty that cannot be 'killed' but only covered over with a
thinking-complex.
And is it insane or unreal to be moved by love?
We are creatures of choice and beneath all masking, we are also the creator of choice.
But the true creative is not framed into a choosing between, but feeling one call as the movement of it.
When the 'intelligence' of a masking narrative no longer serves, be the willingness for what you no longer claim to have, and
open to being moved from within.
I am so tired of the simmering fury that lives inside me. This bubbling cauldron brim full of egregious truths, images and accounts
accumulated over nearly 40 years of looking behind the headlines. I disagree that the usurpation of journalists and media organisations
is in any way a recent phenomena. It certainly predates my emergent mind. And even the most lauded of anti-establishment hacks
and film makers self-censored to some degree. True, the blatant in your face propaganda and thought control agenda has accelerated,
but it was always there. I do not believe Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Pilger and their like could have done much more than they have,
that is to guide us in a direction counter to the official narrative. And to insinuate they are gatekeepers, when our heads never
stretch above the parapet, is really just a reflection of our own frustration that despite their work the only change remains
for the worse.
Yet I fear worse is to come. Our safe bitching in glorious anonymity has been all that we have had as solace to the angst that
pervades us, the other 1%. But the the thumbscrew is tightening. We may be as little as months away from any dissent being entirely
removed from the internet by AI algorithms. I have already been receiving warnings on several sites anyone here would call legitimate
that have had their security certificates removed and the statement that the site may contain malicious code etc. How prepared
are we for blackout?
A foundation should be set up in remembrance of Udo and sponsored by all true journalists and truth seekers. Maybe some day there
will be a Udo Ulfkotte award to the bravest journalist of the year .Wouldn't that be something .Udo's work would not have been
in vain . That would throw a monkey wrench into orgs like the Guardian and their ilk .Just dreaming out loud maybe , but with
good intentions.
Thank you Alun for the link to the German edition, which I have managed to download (naughty me!) I think the suggestion of retranslating
important sections and dressing these in some commentary for (presumably legitimate) publication on e.g. Off-G would be a good
idea. I'm quite fluent in German and would be glad to help.
Mods: do you see any legal pitfalls?
That depends on who holds the rights to the English language version and the original and whether they would want to take issue.
If it's Ulfkotte's family they may be happy to see his work get some sort of airing in English. If it's his publishers we can
imagine they will see things differently – as indeed would whoever it is that seems to want the book buried.
I heard it is blocked in many western countries, as the site is well known for its disregard for copyright. Fortunately not the
case where I am (NZ). If you're technically inclined, a VPN or anonymising application may help, although a VPN that 'exits' in
a western area won't get you any further ahead.
One hopes. I also hold out hope for F. William Engdahl's "Geheimakte NGOs." Here's a Dissident Voice article in which Engdahl
discusses the role of NGOs in aiding and abetting the US regime change program:
Yes, it has also been interesting to note that in 2015 the Guardian published a review of Richard Sakwa's book 'Frontline Ukraine'
in which the author was critical of both NATO and the EU, in fomenting this crisis. The 2014 'coup' which was carried out in February
2014 was, according to the independent geopolitical publication, Strator, 'the most blatant in history.' The appraisal which was
carried out by Guardian journalist Jonathon Steele was generally favourably disposed to Sakwa's record of events; however, Mr
Steele now rarely publishes anything in the Guardian. Read into this what you like.
As to Sakwa's latest book,'' Russia Against the Rest'', – nothing, not a peep, it doesn't exist, it never existed, it never
will exist. It would appear to be the case that the Guardian is now fully integrated into the military/surveillance/media-propaganda
apparatus. The liberal gatekeeper as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Its function is pure to serve the interests of the
powerful, in much the same way as the church did in the middle ages. The media doesn't just serve the interests power it is also
part of the same structure of dominance, albeit the liberal wing of the ruling coalition.
During the British war against the Boers in South Africa, at the turn of the 19/20 century, the then Manchester Guardian took
a brave and critical stand against the UK government. This lead to its offices in Manchester being attacked by jingoistic mobs,
as was the home of the then editor C.P.Scott, whose family needed police protection. In those days 'Facts were Sacred', unlike
the present where opposing views are increasingly ignored or suppressed.
Having just watched the documentary film tribute to I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie", I was struck by the fact that no-one mentioned
Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone journalist (who outed General McChrystal, but whose Mercedes went mysteriously out of control,
hit a tree and exploded, throwing the engine 200 yards clear of the wreck ). Here was a film about control and self-censorship,
yet no-one even breathed the acronyms C.I.A. or FBI. Matt Taibbi referred to a silent coup, but none dared to mention the assassinations
of JFK, MLK and RFK. These doyens of Truth included the thoroughly dodgy Noam Chomsky. Finally, the Spartacus website suggests
that the saintly I.F. Stone was in the pay of the CIA. Other terms unspoken were CIA Operation Mockingbird or Operation Northwoods.
There was a clip of 9/11, but zero attempt to join up all the dots.
RIP Udo Ulfkotte. CIA long ago developed a dart to induce all the signs of a heart attack, so one is naturally somewhat suspicious.
Lies and assassinations are two sides of the same coin.
The only thing harder to find than Udo Ulfkotte's book is a Guardian review of it.
I daresay any mention of this book, BTL, would immediately be moderated (i.e censored) followed by a yellow or red card for
the cheeky commentator.
The level of pretence on this forum has now reached epic proportions, and seems to cuts both ways, ie. commentators pretending
that there are not several subjects which are virtually impossible to discuss in any depth (such as media censorship), and moderators
pretending that 'community standards' is not simply a crude device to control conversational discourse, especially when a commentators
point of view stray beyond narrow, Guardian approved borders.
Books, such as 'Bought Journalists' (which expose the corruption at the heart of western media) are especially inconvenient
for the risible 'fake news' agenda currently being rammed down the readerships throat – some of these people at the Guardian have
either absolutely no insight, or no shame.
Ulfkotte and Ganser in their ways are both telling a similar story – NATO, i.e an arm of the US military industrial complex
are mass murderers and sufficiently intimidating to have most western journalists singing from the same hymn sheet.
Since the Guardian follows the party line it is only possible to send coded or cryptic messages (BTL) should commentators wish
to deviate from the approved narrative.
For example, I was 'pre-moderated' for having doubts about the veracity of the so called 'Parsons Green tube bomb', especially
the nature of the injuries inflicted on a young model who looked like she was suffering from toothache.
https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.628812:1505494262/wo16-web-parsons-green.JPG?f=16×9&w=1024&$p$f$w=e135eda
Been there, done that. What ordinarily happens if the submission is proper and cannot be censored on the basis of impropriety
or foulmouthedness or any other good reason, but exposes a Guardian sacred cow in an embarrassing light, is that it is said to
be off topic. Now this is really unaccountable, and truly subjective.
The community in community standards is "them" and has close ties to the 1%, if I hazard a guess.
"... Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose their efforts at global domination, is full of crap. ..."
"... How many CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? ..."
"... The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing. ..."
"... The news is always given a pro American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU is also revealed to be equally corrupt . ..."
"... German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. ..."
"... This situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you! ..."
"... The collusion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress and disappear unacceptable reporting. ..."
"... I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality on the ground. ..."
No, I haven't read the book, because it is priced completely out of my reach. I am giving
it five stars anyway because of what I've read *about* it, as I've followed its author's saga
-- the blackout by German media of the original German edition Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought
Journalists) for a couple of years now, raids by German police on the author's house, his
noting how he feared for his life, and his finally being found dead on January 13 of this
year "from a heart attack" (he was only 56, and because it is possible to kill someone in
ways that look like a heart attack, some people believe he was murdered).
The fate of a whistleblower against one of the world's most powerful organizations in a
controlled society being passed off as a democracy?
Two things are abundantly clear:
(1) The English translation of this book has been
"privished." There are a couple of good recent discussions of what it means to "privish" a
book, but Amazon will not allow me to link to them. So let's just say: the purpose of
"privishing" is make a book with an unwanted message disappear without a trace by limiting
information about it, destroying its marketability by printing too few copies, and refusing
reprint rights, so that the copies available are too expensive for readers of ordinary means
(which is nearly all of us).
(2) Anyone who claims there are no conspiracies, that there are
no behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful people to suppress information that would expose
their efforts at global domination, is full of crap.
XXX, September 30, 2017 Format: Paperback
Sell this book so we can buy it!
Amazon, you are a tool of the State. This book is available in English at a market
competitive price. Why do you refuse to make it available to your customers?
How many
CIA-paid journalists do you have on staff at the Washington Post? To the reviewer who asked
how much money the author will see from the exhorbotant price of the book, he won't see any
because he is dead.
He died of hearth issues shortly after the publication of the book. He
did have a history of heart ailments so I am not implying a sinister act. You can find an
good interview with him on YouTube if they haven't removed it.
XXX, November 11, 2017 Format: Paperback
Dynamite
Have read this book in German but as far as I know it is no longer available in bookshops
in Germany either. The author who was a deputy editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and
worked there for 17 years turns whistleblower and spills the beans on the corruption of
German media by US lobby agencies which have CIA backing.
The news is always given a pro
American slant and journalists can look forward to rewards for their efforts. Should they not
collude then their career is over. Corrupted German journalists are named and shamed. The EU
is also revealed to be equally corrupt .
German journalists assigned to EU reporting have to
sign a document stating that they will never write anything negative about the EU. The level
of manipulation by the EU is also frightening. The author himself was part of the set up and
even received a prestigious reward for his pro America efforts but eventually became
disgusted by the system and his collusion in it.
I pre ordered the book last year in English
on Amazon as my son wanted to read it but I kept receiving emails from Amazon changing
publication dates and eventually they informed me that they were unable to access the book.
There is no doubt that the book is dynamite and has been suppressed because of this.
XXX, July 31, 2017 Format: Hardcover
Tyranny in America Writ Large In A Super-Large Price
Somebody has set the price of this book -- available in English though it is -- so high as
to make it unavailable. I wonder, if some rich or extremely extravagant person were to bye
this book at the $1300 price it's offered at, would the author ever see a dime of that?
This
situation reeks of Stasi or Asian plutocratic realms. We want our freedom back! What are you
people (including colluding Amazon) trying to cover up? Shame on you!
XXX, August 16, 2017 Format: Paperback
Second book I've wanted that's been banned
Second book I've wanted that's been banned by Amazon. Shame on you, Mr. Bezos.
Unfortunately for you, more people are waking up to this. The cracks are starting to
show.
The suppression of the English language version of this book is censorship of the most
Orwellian kind.
I have been awaiting the English version of this book for several years now, watching with
interest while the publishing date was delayed multiple times. As a best seller in Germany
one had to wonder why it would take years to translate the book to English unless there were
forces working against publication. Well, low and behold it is finally set to publish in May
2017 when it again doesn't and finally disappears from sight. The obvious suppression of this
book is censorship of the press and of course speaks volumes about Western "freedom of the
press" as a fantasy.
The collusion of corporate media and Western intelligence is a taboo
subject one must surmise. It suggests that our power structure realizes it has a rather
fragile hold on the popular mind when the CIA morphs into the former KGB to simply suppress
and disappear unacceptable reporting.
I would suggest that the absolute silence by MSM about
this book and its censorship validates the authors contentions that much of MSM reporting is
right out of the Western intelligence agencies and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality
on the ground.
Somewhere in the great beyond Orwell is smiling and thinking "I told you
so."
1) You pay your taxes
2) You pay your employees
3) There will be no asset stripping
Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame) broke all these rules while pillaging Russia. From
1995–2006 his company, Hermitage Capital Management, siphoned untold billions of
dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts while paying no taxes and cheating workers of
wages and pensions.
Putin put an end to US and UK backed shysters stealing Russia blind. Is it any wonder the
western oligarchs hate him with such a passion?
I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton
campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn't hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked. If you follow the money a
lot of what happened during the election and afterwards in regards to Russia and Trump start to make sense. Could it be that we
are finally witnessing the removal the last layers of the center of the onion?
"... I guess the CIA couldn't credibly stop AMLO from winning the election by popular vote and that major mass-media confidently plans to set on fire: paper bag after bag of ca-ca, on the front steps of Los Pinos whilst cooking-up virulent "anti-corruption" impeachment against the new president, a la Lula in Brazil. ..."
"... "Corruption Allegations" are one of the tools in the toolbox. It's how that evil Harper came to power in Canada. He's still lurking among the other nefarious vampires intent on destroying the commons. ..."
I wonder why it appears that the USA did not sufficiently meddle in the Mex. election. Typically the US heavily involves
itself to ensure a compliant austerity type is elected.
Lopez Obredor was robbed of the Presidency in 2006; there was a prolonged organized popular protest.
I guess the CIA couldn't credibly stop AMLO from winning the election by popular vote and that major mass-media confidently
plans to set on fire: paper bag after bag of ca-ca, on the front steps of Los Pinos whilst cooking-up virulent "anti-corruption"
impeachment against the new president, a la Lula in Brazil.
I remember that now. Same Obredor of 2006 who was expected to win at that time. There were USA instigated riots and a USA instigated
vote recount too, IIRC.
Yes, I suppose they intend to Lula him - Which will begin very soon.
"Corruption Allegations" are one of the tools in the toolbox. It's how that evil Harper came to power in Canada. He's still
lurking among the other nefarious vampires intent on destroying the commons.
Paul Craig Roberts is right about dominance of neoliberal economics in Russia. But what is the alternative?
Notable quotes:
"... If the neoconservatives had self-restraint, they would sit back and let America's Fifth Column -- Neoliberal Economics -- finish off Russia for them. Russia is doomed, because the country's economists were brainwashed during the Yeltsin years by American neoliberal economists. It was easy enough for the Americans to do. Communist economics had come to naught, the Russian economy was broken, Russians were experiencing widespread hardship, and successful America was there with a helping hand. ..."
"... For example, neoliberal economics exposes Russia's currency to speculation, manipulation, and destabilization. Capital inflows can be used to drive up the value of the ruble, and then at the opportune time, the capital can be pulled out, dropping the ruble's value and driving up domestic inflation with higher import prices, delivering a hit to Russian living standards. Washington has always used these kind of manipulations to destabilize governments. ..."
"... Neo-liberal economics has also brainwashed the Russian central bank with the belief that Russian economic development depends on foreign investment in Russia. This erroneous belief threatens the very sovereignty of Russia. The Russian central bank could easily finance all internal economic development by creating money, but the brainwashed central bank does not realize this. The bank thinks that if the bank finances internal development the result would be inflation and depreciation of the ruble. So the central bank is guided by American neoliberal economics to borrow abroad money it does not need in order to burden Russia with foreign debt that requires a diversion of Russian resources into interest payments to the West. ..."
"... As Michael Hudson and I explained to the Russians two years ago, when Russia borrows from the West, the US for example, and in flow the dollars, what happens to the dollars? Russia cannot spend them domestically to finance development projects, so where do the dollars go? They go into Russia's foreign exchange holdings and accrue interest for the lender. The central bank then creates the ruble equivalent of the borrowed and idle dollars and finances the project. So why borrow the dollars? The only possible reason is so the US can use the dollar debt to exercise control over Russian decision making. In other words, Russia delivers herself into the hands of her enemies. ..."
"... Putin is struggling to have Russia integrated into the Western economic system while retaining Russia's sovereignty (an unrealistic goal), because Putin has been convinced by the element in the Russian elite, which had rather be Western than Russian, that Russia's economic development depends on being integrated into the Western economy. As the neoliberal economic elite control Russia's economic and financial policy, Putin believes that he has to accept Western provocations or forfeit his hopes for Russian economic development. ..."
This is the lecture I would have given if I had been able to accept the invitation to
address the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia this weekend.
Executive Summary:
From the standpoint of Russia's dilemma, this is an important column.
Putin's partial impotence via-a-vis Washington is due to the grip that neoliberal economics
exercises over the Russian government. Putin cannot break with the West, because he believes
that Russian economic development is dependent on Russia's integration within the Western
economy. That is what neoliberal economics tells the Russian economic and financial
establishment.
Everyone should understand that I am not a pro-Russian anti-American. I am anti-war,
especially nuclear war. My concern is that the inability of the Russian government to put its
foot down is due to its belief that Russian development, despite all the talk about the
Eurasian partnership and the Silk Road, is dependent on being integrated with the West. This
totally erroneous belief prevents the Russian government from any decisive break with the West.
Consequently, Putin continues to accept provocations in order to avoid a decisive break that
would cut Russia off from the West. In Washington and the UK this is interpreted as a lack of
resolve on Putin's part and encourages an escalation in provocations that will intensify until
Russia's only option is surrender or war.
If the Russian government did not believe that it needed the West, the government could
give stronger responses to provocations that would make clear that there are limits to what
Russia will tolerate. It would also make Europe aware that its existence hangs in the balance.
The combination of Trump abusing Europe and Europe's recognition of the threat to its own
existence of its alignment with an aggressive Washington would break the Western alliance and
NATO. But Putin cannot bring this about because he erroneously believes that Russia needs the
West.
If the neoconservatives had self-restraint, they would sit back and let America's Fifth
Column -- Neoliberal Economics -- finish off Russia for them. Russia is doomed, because the
country's economists were brainwashed during the Yeltsin years by American neoliberal
economists. It was easy enough for the Americans to do. Communist economics had come to naught,
the Russian economy was broken, Russians were experiencing widespread hardship, and successful
America was there with a helping hand.
In reality the helping hand was a grasping hand. The hand grasped Russian resources through
privatization and gave control to American-friendly oligarchs. Russian economists had no clue
about how financial capitalism in its neoliberal guise strips economies of their assets while
loading them up with debt.
But worse happened. Russia's economists were brainwashed into an economic way of thinking
that serves Western imperialism.
For example, neoliberal economics exposes Russia's currency to speculation, manipulation,
and destabilization. Capital inflows can be used to drive up the value of the ruble, and then
at the opportune time, the capital can be pulled out, dropping the ruble's value and driving up
domestic inflation with higher import prices, delivering a hit to Russian living standards.
Washington has always used these kind of manipulations to destabilize governments.
Neo-liberal economics has also brainwashed the Russian central bank with the belief that
Russian economic development depends on foreign investment in Russia. This erroneous belief
threatens the very sovereignty of Russia. The Russian central bank could easily finance all
internal economic development by creating money, but the brainwashed central bank does not
realize this. The bank thinks that if the bank finances internal development the result would
be inflation and depreciation of the ruble. So the central bank is guided by American
neoliberal economics to borrow abroad money it does not need in order to burden Russia with
foreign debt that requires a diversion of Russian resources into interest payments to the
West.
As Michael Hudson and I explained to the Russians two years ago, when Russia borrows from
the West, the US for example, and in flow the dollars, what happens to the dollars? Russia
cannot spend them domestically to finance development projects, so where do the dollars go?
They go into Russia's foreign exchange holdings and accrue interest for the lender. The central
bank then creates the ruble equivalent of the borrowed and idle dollars and finances the
project. So why borrow the dollars? The only possible reason is so the US can use the dollar
debt to exercise control over Russian decision making. In other words, Russia delivers herself
into the hands of her enemies.
Indeed, it is the Russian government's mistaken belief that Russian economic development is
dependent on Russia being included as part of the West that has caused Putin to accept the
provocations and humiliations that the West has heaped upon Russia. The lack of response to
these provocations will eventually cause the Russian government to lose the support of the
nationalist elements in Russia.
Putin is struggling to have Russia integrated into the Western economic system while
retaining Russia's sovereignty (an unrealistic goal), because Putin has been convinced by the
element in the Russian elite, which had rather be Western than Russian, that Russia's economic
development depends on being integrated into the Western economy. As the neoliberal economic
elite control Russia's economic and financial policy, Putin believes that he has to accept
Western provocations or forfeit his hopes for Russian economic development.
Russian economists are so indoctrinated with neoliberal economics that they cannot even look
to America to see how a once great economy has been completely destroyed by neoliberal
economics.
The US has the largest public debt of any country in history. The US has the largest trade
and budget deficits of any country in history. The US has 22 percent unemployment, which it
hides by not counting among the unemployed millions of discouraged workers who, unable to find
jobs, ceased looking for jobs and are arbitrarily excluded from the measure of unemployment.
The US has a retired class that has been stripped of any interest payment on their savings for
a decade, because it was more important to the Federal Reserve to bail out the bad loans of a
handful of "banks too big to fail," banks that became too big to fail because of the
deregulation fostered by neoliberal economics. By misrepresenting "free trade" and "globalism,"
neoliberal economics sent America's manufacturing and tradeable professional skill jobs abroad
where wages were lower, thus boosting the incomes of owners at the expense of the incomes of US
wage-earners, leaving Americans with the lowly paid domestic service jobs of a Third World
country. Real median family income in the US has been stagnant for decades. The Federal Reserve
recently reported that Americans are so poor that 41 percent of the population cannot raise
$400 without selling personal possessions.
Young Americans, if they have university educations, begin life as debt slaves. Currently
there are 44,200,000 Americans with student loan debt totalling $1,048,000,000,000 -- $1.48
trillion! https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/
In the US all 50 states have publicly supported universities where tuition is supposed to be
nominal in order to encourage education. When I went to Georgia Tech, a premier engineering
school, my annual tuition was less than $500. Loans were not needed and did not exist.
What happened? Financial capitalism discovered how to turn university students into
indentured servants, and the university administrations cooperated. Tuitions rose and rose and
were increasingly allocated to administration, the cost of which exploded. Today many
university administrations absorb 75% of the annual budget, leaving little for professors' pay
and student aid. An obedient Congress created a loan program that ensnares young American men
and women into huge debt in order to acquire an university education. With so many of the
well-paying jobs moved offshore by neoliberal economics, the jobs available cannot service the
student loan debts. A large percentage of Americans aged 24-34 live at home with parents,
because their jobs do not pay enough to service their student loan debt and pay an apartment
rent. Debt prevents them from living an independent existence.
In America the indebtedness of the population produced by neoliberal economics -- privatize,
privatize, deregulate, deregulate, indebt, indebt -- prevents any economic growth as the
American public has no discretionary income after debt service to drive the economy. In America
the way cars, trucks, and SUVs are sold is via zero downpayment and seven years of loans. From
the minute a vehicle is purchased, the loan obligation exceeds the value of the vehicle.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Mike Meru, a dentist earning $225,000 annually, has
$1,060,945.42 in student loan debt. He pays $1,589.97 monthly, which is not enough to cover the
interest, much less reduce the principal. Consequently, his debt from seven years at the
University of Southern California grows by $130 per day. In two decades, his loan balance will
be $2 million.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-student-loans-how-did-that-happen-1527252975
If neoliberal economics does not work for America, why will it work for Russia? Neoliberal
economics only works for oligarchs and their institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, who are
bankrolled by the central bank to keep the economy partially afloat. Washington will agree to
Russia being integrated into the Western system when Putin agrees to resurrect the Yeltsin-era
practice of permitting Western financial institutions to strip Russia of her assets while
loading her up with debt.
I could continue at length about the junk economics, to use Michael Hudson's term, that is
neoliberal economics. The United States is failing because of it, and so will Russia.
John Bolton and the neocons should just relax. Neoliberal economics, which has the Russian
financial interests, the Russian government and apparently Putin himself in its grip, will
destroy Russia without war.
The dramatic rise fo the number of CIA-democrats as candidates from Democratic Party is not assedental. As regular clintonites
are discredited those guys can still appeal to patriotism to get elected.
Notable quotes:
"... Bernie continuously forcing Hillary to appear apologetic about her campaign funding from big financial interests. She tries hard to persuade the public that she will not serve specific interests. Her anxiety can be identified in many cases and it was very clear at the moment when she accused Bernie of attacking her, concerning this funding. Hillary was forced to respond with a deeply irrational argument: anyone who takes money from big interests doesn't mean that he/she will vote for policies in favor of these interests! ..."
"... Bernie drives the discussion towards fundamental ideological issues. He forced Hillary to defend her "progressiveness". She was forced to speak even about economic interests by names. A few years ago, this would be nearly a taboo in any debate between any primaries. ..."
"... After the disastrous defeat by Trump in 2016 election, the corporate Democrats realized that the progressive movement, supported mostly by the American youth, would not retreat and vanish. On the contrary, Bernie Sanders' popularity still goes up and there is a wave of progressive candidates who appear to be a real threat to the DNC establishment and the Clintonian empire. ..."
"... It seems that the empire has upgraded its dirty tactics beyond Hillary's false relocation to the Left. Seeing the big threat from the real progressives, the empire seeks to "plant" its own agents, masked as progressives, inside the electoral process, to disorientate voters and steal the popular vote. ..."
"... This is a Master's class in blatant historical revisionism and outright dishonesty. Beals was not a soldier unwillingly drafted into service, but an intelligence officer who voluntarily accepted an influential and critically important post for the Bush Administration in its ever-expanding crime against humanity in Iraq. ..."
During the 2016 Democratic party primaries we wrote that
what Bernie achieved, is to bring back the real political discussion in America, at least concerning the Democratic camp. Bernie
smartly "drags" his primary rival, Hillary Clinton, into the heart of the politics. Up until a few years ago, you could not observe
too much difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, who were just following the pro-establishment "politics as usual",
probably with a few, occasional exceptions. The "politics as usual" so far, was "you can't touch the Wall Street", for example.
Bernie continuously forcing Hillary to appear apologetic about her campaign funding from big financial interests. She tries hard
to persuade the public that she will not serve specific interests. Her anxiety can be identified in many cases and it was very clear
at the moment when she accused Bernie of attacking her, concerning this funding. Hillary was forced to respond with a deeply irrational
argument: anyone who takes money from big interests doesn't mean that he/she will vote for policies in favor of these interests!
Bernie drives the discussion towards fundamental ideological issues. He forced Hillary to defend her "progressiveness". She was
forced to speak even about economic interests by names. A few years ago, this would be nearly a taboo in any debate between any primaries.
After the disastrous defeat by Trump in 2016 election, the corporate Democrats realized that the progressive movement, supported
mostly by the American youth, would not retreat and vanish. On the contrary, Bernie Sanders' popularity still goes up and there is
a wave of progressive candidates who appear to be a real threat to the DNC establishment and the Clintonian empire.
It seems that the empire has upgraded its dirty tactics beyond Hillary's false relocation to the Left. Seeing the big threat from
the real progressives, the empire seeks to "plant" its own agents, masked as progressives, inside the electoral process, to disorientate
voters and steal the popular vote.
Eric Draitser gives us valuable information for such a type of candidate. Key points:
One candidate currently generating some buzz in the race is Jeff Beals, a self-identified "Bernie democrat" whose campaign website
homepage describes him as a " local teacher and former U.S. diplomat endorsed by the national organization of former Bernie Sanders
staffers, the Justice Democrats. " And indeed, Beals centers his progressive bona fides to brand himself as one of the inheritors
of the progressive torch lit by Sanders in 2016. A smart political move, to be sure. But is it true?
Beals describes himself as a "former U.S. diplomat," touting his expertise on international issues born of his experience overseas.
In an email interview with CounterPunch, Beals describes his campaign as a " movement for diplomacy and peace in foreign affairs
and an end to militarism my experience as a U.S. diplomat is what drives it and gives this movement such force. " OK, sounds
good, a very progressive sounding answer. But what did Beals actually do during his time overseas?
By his own admission, Beals' overseas career began as an intelligence officer with the CIA. His fluency in Arabic and knowledge
of the region made him an obvious choice to be an intelligence spook during the latter stages of the Clinton Administration.
Beals shrewdly attempts to portray himself as an opponent of neocon imperialism in Iraq. In his interview with CounterPunch, Beals
argued that " The State Department was sidelined as the Bush administration and a neoconservative cabal plunged America into the
tragic Iraq War. As a U.S. diplomat fluent in Arabic and posted in Jerusalem at the time, I was called over a year into the war to
help our country find a way out. "
This is a Master's class in blatant historical revisionism and outright dishonesty. Beals was not a soldier unwillingly drafted
into service, but an intelligence officer who voluntarily accepted an influential and critically important post for the Bush Administration
in its ever-expanding crime against humanity in Iraq.
Moreover, no one who knows anything about the Iraq War could possibly swallow the tripe that CIA/State Department officials in
Iraq were " looking to help our country find a way out " a year into the war. A year into the war, the bloodletting was only
just beginning, and Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the other corporate vultures had yet to fully exploit the country and make billions
off it. So, unfortunately for Beals, the historical memory of the anti-war Left is not that short.
It is self-evident that Beals has a laundry list of things in his past that he must answer for. For those of us, especially Millennials,
who cut our activist teeth demonstrating and organizing against the Iraq War, Beals' distortions about his role in Iraq go down like
hemlock tea. But it is the associations Beals maintains today that really should give any progressive serious pause.
When asked by CounterPunch whether he has any connections to either Bernie Sanders and his surrogates or Hillary Clinton and hers,
Beals responded by stating: " I am endorsed by Justice Democrats, a group of former Bernie Sanders staffers who are pledged to
electing progressives nationwide. I am also endorsed for the Greene County chapter of the New York Progressive Action Network, formerly
the Bernie Sanders network. My first hire was a former Sanders field coordinator who worked here in NY-19. "
However, conveniently missing from that response is the fact that Beals' campaign has been, and continues to be, directly managed
in nearly every respect by Bennett Ratcliff, a longtime friend and ally of Hillary Clinton. Ratcliff is not mentioned in any publicly
available documents as a campaign manager, though the most recent FEC filings show that as of April 1, 2018, Ratcliff was still on
the payroll of the Beals campaign. And in the video of Beals' campaign kickoff rally, Ratcliff introduces Beals, while only being
described as a member of the Onteora School Board in Ulster County . This is sort of like referring to Donald Trump as an avid
golfer.
Beals has studiously, and rather intelligently, avoided mentioning Ratcliff, or the presence of Clinton's inner circle on his
campaign. However, according to internal campaign documents and emails obtained by CounterPunch, Ratcliff manages nearly every aspect
of the campaign, acting as a sort of éminence grise behind the artifice of a progressive campaign fronted by a highly educated and
photogenic political novice.
By his own admission, Ratcliff's role on the campaign is strategy, message, and management. Sounds like a rather textbook description
of a campaign manager. Indeed, Ratcliff has been intimately involved in "guiding" Beals on nearly every important campaign decision,
especially those involving fundraising .
And it is in the realm of fundraising that Ratcliff really shines, but not in the way one would traditionally think. Rather than
focusing on large donations and powerful interests, Ratcliff is using the Beals campaign as a laboratory for his strategy of winning
elections without raising millions of dollars.
In fact, leaked campaign documents show that Ratcliff has explicitly instructed Beals and his staffers not to spend money on
food, decorations, and other standard campaign expenses in hopes of presenting the illusion of a grassroots, people-powered campaign
with no connections to big time donors or financial elites .
It seems that Ratcliff is the wizard behind the curtain, leveraging his decades of contact building and close ties to the Democratic
Party establishment while at the same time manufacturing an astroturfed progressive campaign using a front man in Beals .
One of Ratcliff's most infamous, and indefensible, acts of fealty to the Clinton machine came in 2009 when he and longtime Clinton
attorney and lobbyist, Lanny Davis, stumped around Washington to garner support for the illegal right-wing coup in Honduras, which
ousted the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in favor of the right-wing oligarchs who control the country today. Although
the UN, and even U.S. diplomats on the ground in Honduras, openly stated that the coup was illegal, Clinton was adamant to actively
keep Zelaya out.
Essentially then, Ratcliff is a chief architect of the right-wing government in Honduras – the same government assassinating feminist
and indigenous activists like Berta Cáceres, Margarita Murillo, and others, and forcibly displacing and ethnically cleansing Afro-indigenous
communities to make way for Carribbean resorts and golf courses.
And this Washington insider lobbyist and apologist for war criminals and crimes against humanity is the guy who's on a crusade
to reform campaign finance and fix Washington? This is the guy masquerading as a progressive? This is the guy working to elect an
"anti-war progressive"?
In a twisted way it makes sense. Ratcliff has the blood of tens of thousands of Hondurans (among others) on his hands, while Beals
is a creature of Langley, a CIA boy whose exceptional work in the service of Bush and Clinton administration war criminals is touted
as some kind of merit badge on his resume.
What also becomes clear after establishing the Ratcliff-Beals connection is the fact that Ratcliff's purported concern with
campaign financing and "taking back the Republic" is really just a pretext for attempting to provide a "proof of concept," as it
were, that neoliberal Democrats shouldn't fear and subvert the progressive wing of the party, but rather that they should co-opt
it with a phony grassroots facade all while maintaining links to U.S. intelligence, Wall Street, and the power brokers of the Democratic
Party .
"... Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said ."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created." ..."
"... The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served . ..."
"... What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with taking such major liberties with the law. ..."
"... None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to win. ..."
"... Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the polls." ..."
"... The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very tall body that houses an outsized ego. ..."
"... "Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law, but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either. ..."
"... there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign. ..."
"... We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out ..."
"... The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep state. ..."
"... Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor. Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails. ..."
"... I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought up the so-called "dossier" ..."
"... Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his cups. ..."
"... Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.) ..."
"... Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed bin-Talal's bagman. ..."
Wednesday's criminal referral by 11 House Republicans of former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton as well as several former and serving top FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials
is a giant step toward a Constitutional crisis.
Named in the referral to the DOJ for possible violations of federal law are: Clinton, former
FBI Director James Comey; former Attorney General Loretta Lynch; former Acting FBI Director
Andrew McCabe; FBI Agent Peter Strzok; FBI Counsel Lisa Page; and those DOJ and FBI personnel
"connected to" work on the "Steele Dossier," including former Acting Attorney General Sally
Yates and former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente.
With no attention from corporate media, the referral was sent to Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah John Huber.
Sessions appointed Huber months ago to assist DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz. By
most accounts, Horowitz is doing a thoroughly professional job. As IG, however, Horowitz lacks
the authority to prosecute; he needs a U.S. Attorney for that. And this has to be disturbing to
the alleged perps.
This is no law-school case-study exercise, no arcane disputation over the fine points of
this or that law. Rather, as we say in the inner-city, "It has now hit the fan." Criminal
referrals can lead to serious jail time. Granted, the upper-crust luminaries criminally
"referred" enjoy very powerful support. And that will come especially from the mainstream
media, which will find it hard to retool and switch from Russia-gate to the much more delicate
and much less welcome "FBI-gate."
As of this writing, a full day has gone by since the letter/referral was reported, with
total silence so far from T he New York Times and The Washington Post and other
big media as they grapple with how to spin this major development. News of the criminal
referral also slipped by Amy Goodman's non-mainstream DemocracyNow!, as well as many
alternative websites.
The 11 House members chose to include the following egalitarian observation in the first
paragraph of the
letter conveying the criminal referral: "Because we believe that those in positions of high
authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the
potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately." If this uncommon attitude
is allowed to prevail at DOJ, it would, in effect, revoke the de facto "David Petraeus
exemption" for the be-riboned, be-medaled, and well-heeled.
Stonewalling
Meanwhile, the patience of the chairmen of House committees investigating abuses at DOJ and
the FBI is wearing thin at the slow-rolling they are encountering in response to requests for
key documents from the FBI. This in-your-face intransigence is all the more odd, since several
committee members have already had access to the documents in question, and are hardly likely
to forget the content of those they know about. (Moreover, there seems to be a good chance that
a patriotic whistleblower or two will tip them off to key documents being withheld.)
The DOJ IG, whose purview includes the FBI, has been cooperative in responding to committee
requests for information, but those requests can hardly include documents of which the
committees are unaware.
Putting aside his partisan motivations, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes
(R-CA) was unusually blunt two months ago in warning of legal consequences for officials who
misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to enable surveillance on Trump and
his associates. Nunes's words are likely to have sent chills down the spine of those with lots
to hide: "If they need to be put on trial, we will put them on trial," he said
."The reason Congress exists is to oversee these agencies that we created."
Whether the House will succeed in overcoming the resistance of those criminally referred and
their many accomplices and will prove able to exercise its Constitutional prerogative of
oversight is, of course, another matter -- a matter that matters.
And Nothing Matters More Than the Media
The media will be key to whether this Constitutional issue is resolved. Largely because of
Trump's own well earned reputation for lying, most Americans are susceptible to slanted
headlines like this recent one -- "Trump escalates attacks on FBI " -- from an
article in The Washington Post , commiserating with the treatment accorded
fired-before-retired prevaricator McCabe and the FBI he ( dis)served
.
Nor is the Post above issuing transparently clever warnings -- like this one in a
lead
article on March 17: "Some Trump allies say they worry he is playing with fire by taunting
the FBI. 'This is open, all-out war. And guess what? The FBI's going to win,' said one ally,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. 'You can't fight the FBI. They're going
to torch him.'" [sic]
Mind-Boggling Criminal Activity
What motivated the characters now criminally "referred" is clear enough from a wide variety
of sources, including the text messages exchange between Strzok and Page. Many, however, have
been unable to understand how these law enforcement officials thought they could get away with
taking such major liberties with the law.
None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, "opposition research," or other activities
directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind
that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which
point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not
prison. The activities were hardly considered high-risk, because candidate Clinton was sure to
win.
But she lost.
Comey himself gives this away in the embarrassingly puerile book he has been hawking, "A
Higher Loyalty" -- which
amounts to a pre-emptive move motivated mostly by loyalty-to-self, in order to obtain a
Stay-Out-of-Jail card. Hat tip to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone for a key observation, in his
recent article
, "James Comey, the Would-Be J. Edgar Hoover," about what Taibbi deems the book's most damning
passage, where Comey discusses his decision to make public the re-opening of the Hillary
Clinton email investigation.
Comey admits, "It is entirely possible that, because I was making decisions in an
environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president, my concern about making
her an illegitimate president by concealing the re-started investigation bore greater weight
than it would have if the election appeared closer or if Donald Trump were ahead in the
polls."
The key point is not Comey's tortured reasoning, but rather that Clinton was "sure to be the
next president." This would, of course, confer automatic immunity on those now criminally
referred to the Department of Justice. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men -- even very
tall men. One wag claimed that the "Higher" in "A Higher Loyalty" refers simply to the very
tall body that houses an outsized ego.
I think it can be said that readers of Consortiumnews.com may be unusually well equipped to
understand the anatomy of FBI-gate as well as Russia-gate. Listed below chronologically are
several links that might be viewed as a kind of "whiteboard" to refresh memories. You may wish
to refer them to any friends who may still be confused.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and
then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years. In retirement, he co-created Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
A weird country, the USA.
Reading the article I'm reminded of the 1946 Senate investigation into Pearl Harbour, where,
in my opinion, the truth was unearthed.
At the same time, this truth hardly ever reached the wider public, no articles, the book, ed.
Harry Elmer Barnes, never reviewed.
Will McCabe wind up in jail? Will Comey? Will Hillary face justice? Fingers crossed!
The short answer is NO. McCabe might, but not Comey and the Killer Queen, they've both served Satan, uh I mean the
Deep State too long and too well.Satan and the banksters–who really run the show–take care of their own and
apex predators like Hillary won't go to jail. But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and
plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.
"Hope springs eternal" would be the cynical folk wisdom. FYI we haven't had a functioning
constitution since the National Security Act of 1947 brought this nation under color of law,
but the IC types wouldn't have you know that. Too tough to square the idea you'd never have
had your CIA career in a world where the FISA court couldn't exist either.
Consortium News many sops tossed to 'realpolitik' where false narrative is attacked with
alternative false narrative, example given, drunk Ukrainian soldiers supposedly downing MH 17
with a BUK as opposed to Kiev's Interior Ministry behind the Ukrainian combat jet that
actually brought down MH 17, poisons everything (trust issues) spewed from that news
service.
The realpolitik 'face saving' exit/offer implied in the Consortium News narrative where
Russia doesn't have to confront the West with Ukraine's (and by implication the western
intelligence agencies) premeditated murder of 300 innocents does truth no favors.
Time to grow up and face reality. Realpolitik is dead; the caliber of 'statesman' required
for these finessed geopolitical lies to function no longer exist on the Western side, and the
Russians (I believe) are beginning to understand there is no agreement can be made behind
closed doors that will hold up; as opposed to experiencing a backstabbing (like NATO not
moving east.)
Back on topic; the National Security Act of 1947 and the USA's constitution are mutually
exclusive concepts, where you have a Chief Justice appoints members of our FISA Court, er,
nix that, let's call a spade a spade, it's a Star Chamber. There is no constitution to
uphold, no matter well intended self deceits. There will be no constitutional crisis, only a
workaround to pretend a constitution still exists:
To comprehend the internal machinations s of US politics one needs a mind capable of high
level yoga or of squaring a circle.
On the one hand there is a multimillion, full throttle investigation into – at best
– nebulus, inconsequential links between trump/ his campaign & Russia.
On the other there is concrete evidence that the Democratic party/Clinton manipulated the
primaries to destroy Clinton's challanger. That the DOJ, FBI & other alphabet agencies
conspired with Clinton to equally, destroy Trump's campaign.
Naturally, its this 2nd conspiracy which is retarded.
Imagine, a mere agency of a dept, the FBI, is widely considered untouchable by The President
! Indeed, they will "torch" him. AND the "the third estate" ie: the msm will support them the
whole way!
As a script the "The Twilight Zone" would have rejected all this as too ludicrous, too
psychotic for even its broad minded viewers.
And that will come especially from the mainstream media
I quit reading right there. Use of that term indicates mental laziness at best. What's mainstream about it? Please
refer to corporate media in proper terms, such as PCR's "presstitute" media. Speaking of PCR, it's too bad he doesn't allow comments.
The MSM is controlled by Zionists as is the U.S. gov and the banks, so it is no surprise that
the MSM protects the ones destroying America, this is what they do. Nothing of consequence will be done to any of the ones involved, it will all be covered
up, as usual.
What utter nonsense. These people are ALL actors, no one will go to jail, because everything
they do is contrived, no consequence for doing as your Zionist owners command.
There is no there there. This is nothing but another distraction, something o feed the
dual narratives, that Clinton and her ilk are out to get Trump, and the "liberal media" will
cover it up. This narrative feeds very nicely into the primary goal of driving
Republicans/conservatives to support Trump, even as Trump does everything they elected him
NOT TO DO!
We saw the same nonsense with Obama, the "peace president". Obama a man who never saw a
Muslim he did not want to bomb or a Jew he did not want to bail out
Yet even while Obama did the work of the Zionist money machine, the media played up the
fake battle between those who thought he was not born in America, "birthers" and his blind
supporters.
Nothing came of any of it, just like Monica Lewinsky, nothing but theater, fill the air
waves, divide the people, while America is driven insane.
The best thing about this referral is that it also demands deputy AG Rod Rosenstein the
weasel to recluse himself from this case. Rosenstein is the pinnacle of corruption by the deep
state. It's seriously way pass time for Jeff Sessions to grow a pair, put on his big boy
pants, unrecuse himself from the Russian collusion bullshit case, fire Rosenstein and Mueller
and end the case once and for all. These two traitors are in danger of completely derailing
the Trump agenda and toppling the Republican majority in November, yet Jeff Sessions is still
busy arresting people for marijuana, talk about missing the forest for the trees.
As far as where this referral will go from here, my guess is, nowhere. Not as long as Jeff
Sessions the pussy is the AG. It's good to hear that Giuliani has now been recruited by Trump
to be on his legal team. What Trump really needs to do is replace Jeff Sessions with
Giuliani, or even Chris Christie, and let them do what a real AG should be doing, which is
clean house in the DOJ, and prosecute the Clintons for their pay-to-play scheme with their
foundation. Not only is the Clinton corruption case the biggest corruption case in US
history, but this might be the only way to save the GOP from losing their majority in
November.
But it does keep the rubes entertained while the banksters continue to loot, pillage and
plunder and Israel keeps getting Congress to fight their wars.
Sadly I think you're right. Things might be different if we had a real AG, but Jeff
Sessions is not the man I thought he was. He's been swallowed by the deep state just like
Trump. At least Trump is putting up a fight, Sessions just threw in the towel and recused
himself from Day 1. Truly pathetic. Some patriot he is.
" He's ferreted out more than a few and probably has a lot better idea who his friends are
he certainly knows the enemies by now."
He failed to ferret out Haley, Pompeo, or Sessions and he just recently appointed John
Bolton, so I don't agree with your assessment. If his friends include those three, that says
enough about Trump to make any of his earlier supporters drop him.
Anyway, not having a ready made team, or at least a solid short list of key appointees
shows that he was just too clueless to have even been a serious candidate. It looks more as
though Trump is doing now what he intended to do all along. That means he was bullshitting
everybody during his campaign.
So, maybe the neocons really have been his friends all along.
" America is a very crooked country, nothing suprises me".
Every country on this insane planet is "crooked" to a greater or lesser degree, when to a
lesser degree, this is simply because they, the PTB, have not yet figured out how to
accelerate, how to increase their corruption and thereby how to increase their unearned
monetary holdings.
Money is the most potent singular factor which causes humans to lose their minds, and all
of their ethics and decency.
And within the confines of a "socialist" system, "money" is replaced by rubber-stamps, which
then wield, exactly in the manner of "wealth", the power of life or death, over the unwashed
masses.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz
musician.
BTW Jeff Sessions is a fraternal brother of Pence (a member of the same club, same
[recently deceased] guru) and is no friend of Trump.
That would explain why Sessions reclused himself from the start, and refused to appoint a
special council to investigate the Clintons. He's in on this with Pence.
Just as it looks like the Comey memos will further exonerate Trump, we now have this farce
extended by the DNC with this latest lawsuit on the "Trump campaign". The Democrats are now
the most pathetic sore losers in history, they are hell bent on dragging the whole country
down the pit of hell just because they can't handle a loss.
Wishful thinking that anything will come of this, just like when the Nunes memo was released.
Nothing will happen as long as Jeff Sessions is AG. Trump needs to fire either Sessions or
Rosenstein ASAP, before he gets dragged down by this whole Russian collusion bullshit case.
Former CIA Director John Brennan is the prime mover behind the ongoing coup attempt against
Trump. He gathered his deep state allies at DOJ and the FBI to join him in this endeavor.
Brennan's allies -- McCabe, Lynch, Strzok, Yates, ect., may or may not be aware of Brennan's
true motive behind creating all the noise and distraction since the 2016 election. It could
be they're just partisan hacks; or they're on board with Brennan to keep secret what was
revealed in the hack of the Podesta emails.
John Podesta, in addition to being a top Democrat/DC lobbyist and a criminal deviant, is
also a long-time CIA asset running a blackmail/influence operation that utilized his
deviancy: the sexual exploitation of children.
What kind of "physical proof" could Assange have? A thumb drive that was provably
American, or something? Rohrabacher only got Red Pilled on Russia because he had one very
determined (and well heeled) constituent. But he did cosponsor one of Tulsi Gabbard's "Stop
Funding Terrorists" bills, which he figured out on his own. Nevertheless, a bit of a loose
cannon and an eff'd up hawk on Iran He's probably an 'ISIS now, Assad later' on Syria.
I noticed Comey tried to pull a J Edgar-style subtle blackmail on Trump by the way he brought
up the so-called "dossier". Anyone could see it was absurd but he played his hand with it,
pretending it was being looked at. I would say Trump could see through this sleazy game Comey
was trying to play and sized him up. Comey is about as slimy as they get even as he parades
around trying to look noble. What a corrupt bunch.
"The culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain "
[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Robert Mueller's Questionable Past
that appeared yesterday on the American Free Press website:]
During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H W Bush, Mueller
supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan
Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored
the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs
Volume: Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy. Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations
that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links
Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain.
Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when US
intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American
freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to
have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am
flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress
upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.
There has been some former high flyers going to jail recently. Sarkozy is facing a hard
time at the moment. If it can happen to a former president of France it can happen to
Hillary.
Am I a Christian? Well, no. I had some exposure to Christianity but it never took hold. On
the other hand, I do believe there was a historical Jesus that was a remarkable man, but
there is a world (or universe) of difference between the man and the mythology. Here's some
of my thoughts on the matter:
Nothing uncanny about it. There's a frenetic Democratic cottage industry inferring magical
emotional charisma powers that explain the outsized influence of those three. The fact is
very simple. All three are CIA nomenklatura.
(1.) Bill Clinton got recruited into CIA by Cord Meyer, who bragged of it himself in his
cups.
(2.) Hillary cut her teeth on CIA's Watergate purge of Nixon. (If it's news to anyone that
the Watergate cast of characters was straight out of CIA central casting, Russ Baker has
conclusively tied the elaborate ratfeck to the intelligence community.)
(3.) Obama was son of spooks, grandson of spooks, greased in to Harvard by Alwaleed
bin-Talal's bagman. While he was vocationally wet behind the ears he not only got into
Pakistan, no mean feat at the time, but he went to a falconry outing with the future acting
president of Pakistan. And is there anyone alive who wasn't flabbergasted at the instant
universal acclaim for some empty suit who made a speech at the convention? Like Bill Clinton,
successor to DCI Bush, Obama was blatantly, derisively installed in the president slot of the
CIA org chart.
Excellent post and quite accurate information, however my point being that the irrational
fear harbored by the individuals who could actually begin to rope these scumbags in, is just
that : Irrational, as they seem to think or have been lead/brainwashed to believe that these
dissolute turds are somehow endowed with supernatural, otherworldy powers and options, and
that they are capable of unholy , merciless vengeance : VF, SR, etc.
And the truth is as soon as they finally start to go after them they, they will fall apart at
the seams, such as with all cowards, and this is the bottom line : They, the BC/HC/BO clique,
they are nothing more than consumate cowards, who can only operate in such perfidious manners
when left unchallenged.
Authenticjazzman "Mensa" qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz
artist.
"... Running against what she (wrongly) perceived (along with most election prognosticators) as a doomed and feckless opponent and as the clear preferred candidate of Wall Street and the intimately related U.S foreign policy elite , including many leading Neoconservatives put off by Trump's isolationist and anti-interventionist rhetoric, the "lying neoliberal warmonger" Hillary Clinton arrogantly figured that she could garner enough votes to win without having to ruffle any ruling-class feathers. ..."
"... Smart Wall Street and K Street Democratic Party bankrollers have long understood that Democratic candidates have to cloak their dollar-drenched corporatism in the deceptive campaign discourse of progressive- and even populist-sounding policy promise to win elections. ..."
"... Trump trailed well behind Clinton in contributions from defense and aerospace – a lack of support extraordinary for a Republican presidential hopeful late in the race. ..."
"... one fateful consequence of trying to appeal to so many conservative business interests was strategic silence about most important matters of public policy. Given the candidate's steady lead in the polls, there seemed to be no point to rocking the boat with any more policy pronouncements than necessary ..."
"... Misgivings of major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign sought to capitalize on the angst within business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate ..."
"... Of course, Bill and Hillary helped trail-blaze that plutocratic "New Democrat" turn in Arkansas during the late 1970s and 1980s. The rest, as they say, was history – an ugly corporate-neoliberal, imperial, and racist history that I and others have written about at great length. ..."
"... My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency ..."
"... Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton ..."
"... The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America ..."
"... Still, Trump's success was no less tied to big money than was Hillary's failure. Candidate Trump ran strangely outside the longstanding neoliberal Washington Consensus, as an economic nationalist and isolationist. His raucous rallies were laced with dripping denunciations of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, and globalization, mockery of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, rejection of the New Cold War with Russia, and pledges of allegiance to the "forgotten" American "working-class." He was no normal Republican One Percent candidate. ..."
"... Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache ..."
"... "In a frontal assault on the American establishment, the Republican standard bearer proclaimed 'America First.' Mocking the Bush administration's appeal to 'weapons of mass destruction' as a pretext for invading Iraq, he broke dramatically with two generations of GOP orthodoxy and spoke out in favor of more cooperation with Russia . He even criticized the 'carried interest' tax break beloved by high finance" (emphasis added). ..."
"... "What happened in the final weeks of the campaign was extraordinary. Firstly, a giant wave of dark money poured into Trump's own campaign – one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney's munificently financed 2012 effort – to say nothing of any Russian Facebook experiments [Then] another gigantic wave of money flowed in from alarmed business interests, including the Kochs and their allies Officially the money was for Senate races, but late-stage campaigning for down-ballot offices often spills over on to candidates for the party at large." ..."
"... "In a harbinger of things to come, additional money came from firms and industries that appear to have been attracted by Trump's talk of tariffs, including steel and companies making machinery of various types [a] vast wave of new money flowed into the campaign from some of America's biggest businesses and most famous investors. Sheldon Adelson and many others in the casino industry delivered in grand style for its old colleague. Adelson now delivered more than $11 million in his own name, while his wife and other employees of his Las Vegas Sands casino gave another $20 million. ..."
"... Peter Theil contributed more than a million dollars, while large sums also rolled in from other parts of Silicon Valley, including almost two million dollars from executives at Microsoft and just over two million from executives at Cisco Systems. ..."
"... Among those were Nelson Peltz and Carl Icahn (who had both contributed to Trump before, but now made much bigger new contributions). In the end, along with oil, chemicals, mining and a handful of other industries, large private equity firms would become one of the few segments of American business – and the only part of Wall Street – where support for Trump was truly heavy the sudden influx of money from private equity and hedge funds clearly began with the Convention but turned into a torrent " ..."
"... The critical late wave came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its direction over to the clever, class-attuned, far-right white- and economic- nationalist "populist" and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, who advocated what proved to be a winning, Koch brothers-approved "populist" strategy: appeal to economically and culturally frustrated working- and middle-class whites in key battleground states, where the bloodless neoliberal and professional class centrism and snooty metropolitan multiculturalism of the Obama presidency and Clinton campaign was certain to depress the Democratic "base" vote ..."
"... Neither turnout nor the partisan division of the vote at any level looks all that different from other recent elections 2016's alterations in voting behavior are so minute that the pattern is only barely differentiated from 2012." ..."
"... An interesting part of FJC's study (no quick or easy read) takes a close look at the pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Internet activism that the Democrats and their many corporate media allies are so insistently eager to blame on Russia and for Hillary's defeat. FJC find that Russian Internet interventions were of tiny significance compared to those of homegrown U.S. corporate and right-wing cyber forces: ..."
"... By 2016, the Republican right had developed internet outreach and political advertising into a fine art and on a massive scale quite on its own. ..."
"... Breitbart and other organizations were in fact going global, opening offices abroad and establishing contacts with like-minded groups elsewhere. Whatever the Russians were up to, they could hardly hope to add much value to the vast Made in America bombardment already underway. Nobody sows chaos like Breitbart or the Drudge Report ." ..."
"... no support from Big Business ..."
"... Sanders pushed Hillary the Goldman candidate to the wall, calling out the Democrats' capture by Wall Street, forcing her to rely on a rigged party, convention, and primary system to defeat him. The small-donor "socialist" Sanders challenge represented something Ferguson and his colleagues describe as "without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero ." ..."
"... American Oligarchy ..."
"... teleSur English ..."
"... we had no great electoral democracy to subvert in 2016 ..."
"... Only candidates and positions that can be financed can be presented to voters. As a result, in countries like the US and, increasingly, Western Europe, political parties are first of all bank accounts . With certain qualifications, one must pay to play. Understanding any given election, therefore, requires a financial X-ray of the power blocs that dominate the major parties, with both inter- and intra- industrial analysis of their constituent elements." ..."
"... Elections alone are no guarantee of democracy, as U.S. policymakers and pundits know very well when they rip on rigged elections (often fixed with the assistance of U.S. government and private-sector agents and firms) in countries they don't like ..."
"... Majority opinion is regularly trumped by a deadly complex of forces in the U.S. ..."
"... Trump is a bit of an anomaly – a sign of an elections and party system in crisis and an empire in decline. He wasn't pre-approved or vetted by the usual U.S. " deep state " corporate, financial, and imperial gatekeepers. The ruling-class had been trying to figure out what the Hell to do with him ever since he shocked even himself (though not Steve Bannon) by pre-empting the coronation of the "Queen of Chaos." ..."
"... His lethally racist, sexist, nativist, nuclear-weapons-brandishing, and (last but not at all least) eco-cidal rise to the nominal CEO position atop the U.S.-imperial oligarchy is no less a reflection of the dominant role of big U.S. capitalist money and homegrown plutocracy in U.S. politics than a more classically establishment Hillary ascendancy would have been. It's got little to do with Russia, Russia, Russia – the great diversion that fills U.S. political airwaves and newsprint as the world careens ever closer to oligarchy-imposed geocide and to a thermonuclear conflagration that the RussiaGate gambit is recklessly encouraging. ..."
On the Friday after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series and prior to the Tuesday on which
the vicious racist and sexist Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Bernie
Sanders spoke to a surprisingly small crowd in Iowa City on behalf of Hillary Clinton. As I
learned months later, Sanders told one of his Iowa City friends that day that Mrs. Clinton was
in trouble. The reason, Sanders reported, was that Hillary wasn't discussing issues or
advancing real solutions. "She doesn't have any policy positions," Sanders said.
The first time I heard this, I found it hard to believe. How, I wondered, could anyone run
seriously for the presidency without putting issues and policy front and center? Wouldn't any
serious campaign want a strong set of issue and policy positions to attract voters and fall
back on in case and times of adversity?
Sanders wasn't lying. As the esteemed political scientist and money-politics expert Thomas
Ferguson and his colleagues Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen note in an important study released by
the Institute for New Economic Thinking two months ago, the Clinton campaign "emphasized
candidate and personal issues and avoided policy discussions to a degree without precedent in
any previous election for which measurements exist .it stressed candidate qualifications [and]
deliberately deemphasized issues in favor of concentrating on what the campaign regarded as
[Donald] Trump's obvious personal weaknesses as a candidate."
Strange as it might have seemed, the reality television star and presidential pre-apprentice
Donald Trump had a lot more to say about policy than the former First Lady, U.S. Senator, and
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a wonkish Yale Law graduate.
"Courting the Undecideds in Business, not in the Electorate"
What was that about? My first suspicion was that Hillary's policy silence was about the
money. It must have reflected her success in building a Wall Street-filled campaign funding
war-chest so daunting that she saw little reason to raise capitalist election investor concerns
by giving voice to the standard fake-progressive "hope" and "change" campaign and policy
rhetoric Democratic presidential contenders typically deploy against their One Percent
Republican opponents. Running against what she (wrongly) perceived (along with most election
prognosticators) as a doomed and feckless opponent and as the clear preferred candidate of
Wall
Street and the intimately related U.S foreign policy elite , including many leading
Neoconservatives put off by Trump's isolationist and anti-interventionist rhetoric, the
"lying
neoliberal warmonger" Hillary Clinton arrogantly figured that she could garner enough votes
to win without having to ruffle any ruling-class feathers. She would cruise into the White
House with no hurt plutocrat feelings simply by playing up the ill-prepared awfulness of her
Republican opponent.
If Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen (hereafter "JFC") are right, I was on to something but not
the whole money and politics story. Smart Wall Street and K Street Democratic Party bankrollers
have long understood that Democratic candidates have to cloak their dollar-drenched corporatism
in the deceptive campaign discourse of progressive- and even populist-sounding policy promise
to win elections. Sophisticated funders get it that the Democratic candidates' need to
manipulate the electorate with phony pledges of democratic transformation. The big
money backers know it's "just politics" on the part of candidates who can be trusted to
serve elite interests (like Bill
Clinton 1993-2001 and Barack
Obama 2009-2017 ) after they gain office.
What stopped Hillary from playing the usual game – the "manipulation of populism by
elitism" that Christopher
Hitchens once called "the essence of American politics" – in 2016, a year when the
electorate was in a particularly angry and populist mood? FJC's study is titled "
Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games : Donald Trump and the
2016 Presidential Election." It performs heroic empirical work with difficult campaign finance
data to show that Hillary's campaign funding success went beyond her party's usual corporate
and financial backers to include normally Republican-affiliated capitalist sectors less
disposed than their more liberal counterparts to abide the standard progressive-sounding policy
rhetoric of Democratic Party candidates. FJC hypothesize that (along with the determination
that Trump was too weak to be taken all that seriously) Hillary's desire get and keep on board
normally Republican election investors led her to keep quiet on issues and policy concerns that
mattered to everyday people. As FJC note:
"Trump trailed well behind Clinton in contributions from defense and aerospace – a
lack of support extraordinary for a Republican presidential hopeful late in the race. For
Clinton's campaign the temptation was irresistible: Over time it slipped into a variant of
the strategy [Democrat] Lyndon Johnson pursued in 1964 in the face of another [Republican]
candidate [Barry Goldwater] who seemed too far out of the mainstream to win: Go for a grand
coalition with most of big business . one fateful consequence of trying to appeal to so
many conservative business interests was strategic silence about most important matters of
public policy. Given the candidate's steady lead in the polls, there seemed to be no point to
rocking the boat with any more policy pronouncements than necessary . Misgivings of
major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for
ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign sought to capitalize on the angst within
business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate
" (emphasis added). Hillary
Happened
FJC may well be right that a wish not to antagonize off right-wing campaign funders is what
led Hillary to muzzle herself on important policy matters, but who really knows? An alternative
theory I would not rule out is that Mrs. Clinton's own deep inner conservatism was sufficient
to spark her to gladly dispense with the usual progressive-sounding campaign boilerplate. Since
FJC bring up the Johnson-Goldwater election, it is perhaps worth mentioning that 18-year old
Hillary was a "Goldwater Girl" who worked for the arch-reactionary Republican presidential
candidate in 1964. Asked about that episode on National
Public Radio (NPR) in 1996 , then First Lady Hillary said "That's right. And I feel like my
political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don't recognize this
new brand of Republicanism that is afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not
conservative in many respects. I am very proud that I was a Goldwater girl."
It was a revealing reflection. The right-wing Democrat Hillary acknowledged that her
ideological world view was still rooted in the conservatism of her family of origin. Her
problem with the reactionary Republicanism afoot in the U.S. during the middle 1990s was that
it was "not conservative in many respects." Her problem with the far-right Republican
Congressional leaders Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay was that they were betraying true
conservatism – "the conservatism [Hillary] was raised with." This was worse even than the
language of the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) – the right-wing Eisenhower
Republican (at leftmost) tendency that worked to push the Democratic Party further to the Big
Business-friendly right and away from its working-class and progressive base.
What happened? Horrid corporate Hillary happened. And she's still happening. The "lying
neoliberal warmonger" recently went to India to double down on her
"progressive neoliberal" contempt for the "basket of deplorables" (more on that phrase
below) that considers poor stupid and backwards middle America to be by
saying this : "If you look at the map of the United States, there's all that red in the
middle where Trump won. I win the coasts. But what the map doesn't show you is that I won the
places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product (GDP). So I won the places
that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward" (emphasis added).
That was Hillary Goldman Sachs-Council on Foreign Relations-Clinton saying "go to Hell" to
working- and middle-class people in Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri,
Indiana, and West Virginia. It was a raised middle and oligarchic finger from a super-wealthy
arch-global-corporatist to all the supposedly pessimistic, slow-witted, and retrograde losers
stuck between those glorious enclaves (led by Wall Street, Yale, and Harvard on the East coast
and Silicon Valley and Hollywood on the West coast) of human progress and variety (and GDP!) on
the imperial shorelines. Senate Minority Leader Dick
Durbin had to go on television to say that Hillary was "wrong" to write off most of the
nation as a festering cesspool of pathetic, ass-backwards, lottery-playing, and opioid-addicted
white-trash has-beens. It's hard for the Inauthentic Opposition Party (as the late Sheldon Wolin reasonably called
the Democrats ) to pose as an authentic opposition party when its' last big-money
presidential candidate goes off-fake-progressive script with an openly elitist rant like
that.
Historic Mistakes
Whatever the source of her strange policy silence in the 2016 campaign, that hush was "a
miscalculation of historic proportion" (FJC). It was a critical mistake given what Ferguson and
his colleagues call the "Hunger Games" misery and insecurity imposed on tens of millions of
ordinary working- and middle-class middle-Americans by decades of neoliberal capitalist
austerity , deeply exacerbated by the Wall Street-instigated Great Recession and the weak
Obama recovery. The electorate was in a populist, anti-establishment mood – hardly a
state of mind favorable to a wooden, richly globalist, Goldman-gilded candidate, a long-time
Washington-Wall Street establishment ("swamp") creature like Hillary Clinton.
In the end, FJC note, the billionaire Trump's ironic, fake-populist "outreach to blue collar
workers" would help him win "more than half of all voters with a high school education or less
(including 61% of white women with no college), almost two thirds of those who believed life
for the next generation of Americans would be worse than now, and seventy-seven percent of
voters who reported their personal financial situation had worsened since four years ago."
Trump's popularity with "heartland" rural and working-class whites even provoked Hillary
into a major campaign mistake: getting caught on video telling elite Manhattan election
investors that half of Trump's supporters were a "basket
of deplorables." There was a hauntingly strong parallel between Wall Street Hillary's
"deplorables" blooper and the super-rich Republican candidate Mitt Romney's
infamous 2012 gaffe : telling his own affluent backers saying that 47% of the population
were a bunch of lazy welfare cheats. This time, though, it was the Democrat – with a
campaign finance profile closer to Romney's than Obama's in 2012 – and not the Republican
making the ugly plutocratic and establishment faux pas .
"A Frontal Assault on the American Establishment"
Still, Trump's success was no less tied to big money than was Hillary's failure. Candidate
Trump ran strangely outside the longstanding neoliberal Washington Consensus, as an economic
nationalist and isolationist. His raucous rallies were laced with dripping denunciations of
Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, and globalization, mockery of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq,
rejection of the New Cold War with Russia, and pledges of allegiance to the "forgotten"
American "working-class." He was no normal Republican One Percent candidate. As FJC
explain:
"In 2016 the Republicans nominated yet another super-rich candidate – indeed,
someone on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. Like legions of conservative
Republicans before him, he trash-talked Hispanics, immigrants, and women virtually non-stop,
though with a verve uniquely his own. He laced his campaign with barely coded racial appeals
and in the final days, ran an ad widely denounced as subtly anti-Semitic. But in striking
contrast to every other Republican presidential nominee since 1936, he attacked
globalization, free trade, international financiers, Wall Street, and even Goldman Sachs. '
Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it
has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache . When
subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the
politicians do nothing. For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our
communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment.'"
"In a frontal assault on the American establishment, the Republican standard bearer
proclaimed 'America First.' Mocking the Bush administration's appeal to 'weapons of mass
destruction' as a pretext for invading Iraq, he broke dramatically with two generations of GOP
orthodoxy and spoke out in favor of more cooperation with Russia . He even criticized
the 'carried interest' tax break beloved by high finance" (emphasis added).
Big Dark Money and Trump: His Own and Others'
This cost Trump much of the corporate and Wall Street financial support that Republican
presidential candidates usually get. The thing was, however, that much of Trump's "populist"
rhetoric was popular with a big part of the Republican electorate, thanks to the "Hunger Games"
insecurity of the transparently bipartisan New Gilded Age. And Trump's personal fortune
permitted him to tap that popular anger while leaping insultingly over the heads of his less
wealthy if corporate and Wall Street-backed competitors ("low energy" Jeb Bush and "little
Marco" Rubio most notably) in the crowded Republican primary race.
A Republican candidate
dependent on the usual elite bankrollers would never have been able to get away with Trump's
crowd-pleasing (and CNN and FOX News rating-boosting) antics. Thanks to his own wealth, the
faux-populist anti-establishment Trump was ironically inoculated against pre-emption in the
Republican primaries by the American campaign finance "wealth
primary," which renders electorally unviable candidates who lack vast financial resources
or access to them.
Things were different after Trump won the Republican nomination, however. He could no longer
go it alone after the primaries. During the Republican National Convention and "then again in
the late summer of 2016," FJC show, Trump's "solo campaign had to be rescued by major
industries plainly hoping for tariff relief, waves of other billionaires from the far, far
right of the already far right Republican Party, and the most disruption-exalting corners of
Wall Street." By FJC's account:
"What happened in the final weeks of the campaign was extraordinary. Firstly, a giant wave
of dark money poured into Trump's own campaign – one that towered over anything in 2016
or even Mitt Romney's munificently financed 2012 effort – to say nothing of any Russian
Facebook experiments [Then] another gigantic wave of money flowed in from alarmed business
interests, including the Kochs and their allies Officially the money was for Senate races,
but late-stage campaigning for down-ballot offices often spills over on to candidates for the
party at large."
"The run up to the Convention brought in substantial new money, including, for the first
time, significant contributions from big business. Mining, especially coal mining; Big Pharma
(which was certainly worried by tough talk from the Democrats, including Hillary Clinton,
about regulating drug prices); tobacco, chemical companies, and oil (including substantial
sums from executives at Chevron, Exxon, and many medium sized firms); and telecommunications
(notably AT&T, which had a major merge merger pending) all weighed in. Money from
executives at the big banks also began streaming in, including Bank of America, J. P. Morgan
Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Parts of Silicon Valley also started coming in from
the cold."
"In a harbinger of things to come, additional money came from firms and industries that
appear to have been attracted by Trump's talk of tariffs, including steel and companies
making machinery of various types [a] vast wave of new money flowed into the campaign from
some of America's biggest businesses and most famous investors. Sheldon Adelson and many
others in the casino industry delivered in grand style for its old colleague. Adelson now
delivered more than $11 million in his own name, while his wife and other employees of his
Las Vegas Sands casino gave another $20 million.
Peter Theil contributed more than a million
dollars, while large sums also rolled in from other parts of Silicon Valley, including almost
two million dollars from executives at Microsoft and just over two million from executives at
Cisco Systems. A wave of new money swept in from large private equity firms, the part of Wall
Street which had long championed hostile takeovers as a way of disciplining what they mocked
as bloated and inefficient 'big business.' Virtual pariahs to main-line firms in the Business
Roundtable and the rest of Wall Street, some of these figures had actually gotten their start
working with Drexel Burnham Lambert and that firm's dominant partner, Michael Milkin.
Among
those were Nelson Peltz and Carl Icahn (who had both contributed to Trump before, but now
made much bigger new contributions). In the end, along with oil, chemicals, mining and a
handful of other industries, large private equity firms would become one of the few segments
of American business – and the only part of Wall Street – where support for Trump
was truly heavy the sudden influx of money from private equity and hedge funds clearly began
with the Convention but turned into a torrent "
The critical late wave came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its
direction over to the clever, class-attuned, far-right white- and economic- nationalist
"populist" and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, who advocated what proved to be a winning,
Koch brothers-approved "populist" strategy: appeal to economically and culturally frustrated
working- and middle-class whites in key battleground states, where the bloodless neoliberal and
professional class centrism and snooty metropolitan multiculturalism of the Obama presidency
and Clinton campaign was certain to depress the
Democratic "base" vote. Along with the racist voter suppression carried out by Republican
state governments (JFC rightly chide Russia-obsessed political reporters and commentators for
absurdly ignoring this important factor) and (JFC intriguingly suggest) major anti-union
offensives conducted by employers in some battleground states, this major late-season influx of
big right-wing political money tilted the election Trump's way.
The Myth of Potent Russian Cyber-Subversion
As FJC show, there is little empirical evidence to support the Clinton and corporate
Democrats' self-interested and diversionary efforts to explain Mrs. Clinton's epic fail and
Trump's jaw-dropping upset victory as the result of (i) Russian interference, (ii), then FBI
Director James Comey's October Surprise revelation that his agency was not done investigating
Hillary's emails, and/or (iii) some imagined big wave of white working-class racism, nativism,
and sexism brought to the surface by the noxious Orange Hulk. The impacts of both (i) and (ii)
were infinitesimal in comparison to the role that big campaign money played both in silencing
Hillary and funding Trump.
The blame-the-deplorable-racist-white-working-class narrative is
belied by basic underlying continuities in white working class voting patterns. As FJC note: "
Neither turnout nor the partisan division of the vote at any level looks all that different
from other recent elections 2016's alterations in voting behavior are so minute that the
pattern is only barely differentiated from 2012." It was about the money – the big
establishment money that the Clinton campaign took (as FJC at least plausibly argue) to
recommend policy silence and the different, right-wing big money that approved Trump's
comparative right-populist policy boisterousness.
An interesting part of FJC's study (no quick or easy read) takes a close look at the
pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Internet activism that the Democrats and their many corporate media
allies are so insistently eager to blame on Russia and for Hillary's defeat. FJC find that
Russian Internet interventions were of tiny significance compared to those of homegrown U.S.
corporate and right-wing cyber forces:
"The real masters of these black arts are American or Anglo-American firms. These compete
directly with Silicon Valley and leading advertising firms for programmers and personnel.
They rely almost entirely on data purchased from Google, Facebook, or other suppliers,
not Russia . American regulators do next to nothing to protect the privacy of voters
and citizens, and, as we have shown in several studies, leading telecom firms are major
political actors and giant political contributors. As a result, data on the habits and
preferences of individual internet users are commercially available in astounding detail and
quantities for relatively modest prices – even details of individual credit card
purchases. The American giants for sure harbor abundant data on the constellation of bots,
I.P. addresses, and messages that streamed to the electorate "
" stories hyping 'the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and
infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups
already wary of one another by the Russians miss the mark.' By 2016, the Republican right had
developed internet outreach and political advertising into a fine art and on a massive scale
quite on its own. Large numbers of conservative websites, including many that that tolerated
or actively encouraged white supremacy and contempt for immigrants, African-Americans,
Hispanics, Jews, or the aspirations of women had been hard at work for years stoking up
'tensions between groups already wary of one another.' Breitbart and other organizations were
in fact going global, opening offices abroad and establishing contacts with like-minded
groups elsewhere. Whatever the Russians were up to, they could hardly hope to add much value
to the vast Made in America bombardment already underway. Nobody sows chaos like Breitbart or
the Drudge Report ."
" the evidence revealed thus far does not support strong claims about the likely success
of Russian efforts, though of course the public outrage at outside meddling is easy to
understand. The speculative character of many accounts even in the mainstream media is
obvious. Several, such as widely circulated declaration by the Department of Homeland
Security that 21 state election systems had been hacked during the election, have collapsed
within days of being put forward when state electoral officials strongly disputed them,
though some mainstream press accounts continue to repeat them. Other tales about Macedonian
troll factories churning out stories at the instigation of the Kremlin, are clearly
exaggerated."
The Sanders Tease: "He Couldn't Have Done a Thing"
Perhaps the most remarkable finding in FJC's study is that Sanders came tantalizingly close
to winning the Democratic presidential nomination against the corporately super-funded Clinton
campaign with no support from Big Business . Running explicitly against the "Hunger
Games" economy and the corporate-financial plutocracy that created it, Sanders pushed Hillary
the Goldman candidate to the wall, calling out the Democrats' capture by Wall Street, forcing
her to rely on a rigged party, convention, and primary system to defeat him. The small-donor
"socialist" Sanders challenge represented something Ferguson and his colleagues describe as
"without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the
whole of American history a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly
competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero ."
Sanders pulled this off, FJC might have added, by running in (imagine) accord with
majority-progressive left-of-center U.S. public opinion. But for the Clintons' corrupt advance-
control of the Democratic National Committee and convention delegates, Ferguson et al might
further have noted, Sanders might well have been the Democratic presidential nominee, curiously
enough in the arch-state-capitalist and oligarchic United States
Could Sanders have defeated the billionaire and right-wing billionaire-backed Trump in the
general election? There's no way to know, of course. Sanders consistently out-performed Hillary
Clinton in one-on-one match -up polls vis a vis Donald Trump during the primary season, but
much of the big money (and, perhaps much of the corporate media) that backed Hillary would have
gone over to Trump had the supposedly
"radical" Sanders been the Democratic nominee.
Even if Sanders has been elected president, moreover, Noam Chomsky is certainly correct in
his recent judgement that Sanders would have been able to achieve very little in the White
House. As Chomsky told Lynn Parramore two weeks ago, in
an interview conducted for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the same think-tank
that published FJC's remarkable study:
"His campaign [was] a break with over a century of American political history. No
corporate support, no financial wealth, he was unknown, no media support. The media simply
either ignored or denigrated him. And he came pretty close -- he probably could have won the
nomination, maybe the election. But suppose he'd been elected? He couldn't have done a thing.
Nobody in Congress, no governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which
have an enormous effect on policy. All opposed to him. In order for him to do anything, he
would have to have a substantial, functioning party apparatus, which would have to grow from
the grass roots. It would have to be locally organized, it would have to operate at local
levels, state levels, Congress, the bureaucracy -- you have to build the whole system from
the bottom."
As Chomsky might have added, Sanders oligarchy-imposed "failures" would have been great
fodder for the disparagement and smearing of "socialism" and progressive, majority-backed
policy change. "See? We tried all that and it was a disaster!"
I would note further that the Sanders phenomenon's policy promise was plagued by its
standard bearer's persistent loyalty to the giant and absurdly expensive U.S.-imperial Pentagon
System, which each year eats up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars required to implement
the progressive, majority-supported policy agenda that Bernie F-35 Sanders ran
on.
"A Very Destructive Ideology"
The Sanders challenge was equally afflicted by its candidate-centered electoralism. This
diverted energy away from the real and more urgent politics of building people's movements
– grassroots power to shake the society to its foundations and change policy from the
bottom up (Dr. Martin Luther King's preferred strategy at the end of his life just barely short
of 50 years ago, on April 4 th , 1968) – and into the narrow, rigidly
time-staggered grooves of a party and spectacle-elections crafted by and for the wealthy Few
and the American
Oligarchy 's "permanent political class" (historian Ron Formisano). As Chomsky explained on the eve of the 2004
elections:
"Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the
political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge
propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial
extravaganzas and to think, 'That's politics.' But it isn't. It's only a small part of
politics The urgency is for popular progressive groups to grow and become strong enough so
that centers of power can't ignore them. Forces for change that have come up from the grass
roots and shaken the society to its core include the labor movement, the civil rights
movement, the peace movement, the women's movement and others, cultivated by steady,
dedicated work at all levels, every day, not just once every four years sensible [electoral]
choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action."
"The only thing that's going to ever bring about any meaningful change," Chomsky told Abby Martin on teleSur
English in the fall of 2015, "is ongoing, dedicated, popular movements that don't pay
attention to the election cycle." Under the American religion of voting,
Chomsky told Dan Falcone and Saul Isaacson in the spring of 2016, "Citizenship means every
four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It's a
very destructive ideology basically, a way of making people passive, submissive objects [we]
ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics."
For all his talk of standing atop a great "movement" for "revolution," Sanders was and
remains all about this stunted and crippling definition of citizenship and politics as making
some marks on ballots and then returning to our domiciles while rich people and their
agents (not just any "other guys") "run [ruin?-P.S.] the world [into the ground-P.S.]."
It will take much more in the way of Dr. King's politics of "who' sitting in the streets,"
not "who's sitting in the White House" (to use Howard Zinn's
excellent dichotomy ), to get us an elections and party system worthy of passionate citizen
engagement. We don't have such a system in the U.S. today, which is why the number of eligible
voters who passively boycotted the 2016 presidential election is larger than both the number
who voted for big money Hillary and the number who voted for big money Trump.
(If U.S. progressives really want to consider undertaking the epic lift involved in passing
a U.S. Constitutional Amendment, they might want to focus on this instead of calling for a
repeal of the Second Amendment. I'd recommend starting with a positive Democracy Amendment that
fundamentally overhauls the nation's political and elections set-up in accord with elementary
principles and practices of popular sovereignty. Clauses would include but not be limited to
full public financing of elections and the introduction of proportional representation for
legislative races – not to mention the abolition of the Electoral College, Senate
apportionment on the basis of total state population, and the outlawing of gerrymandering.)
Ecocide Trumped by Russia
Meanwhile, back in real history, we have the remarkable continuation of a bizarre
right-wing, pre-fascist presidency not in normal ruling-class hands, subject to the weird whims
and tweets of a malignant narcissist who doesn't read memorandums or intelligence briefings.
Wild policy zig-zags and record-setting White House personnel turnover are par for the course
under the dodgy reign of the orange-tinted beast's latest brain spasms. Orange Caligula spends
his mornings getting his information from FOX News and his evenings complaining to and seeking
advice from a small club of right-wing American oligarchs.
Trump poses grave environmental and nuclear risks to human survival. A consistent Trump
belief is that climate change is not a problem and that it's perfectly fine – "great" and
"amazing," in fact – for the White House to do everything it can to escalate the
Greenhouse Gassing-to-Death of Life on Earth. The nuclear threat is rising now that he has
appointed a frothing right-wing uber-warmonger – a longtime advocate of bombing Iran and
North Korea who led the charge for the arch-criminal U.S. invasion of Iraq – as his top
"National Security" adviser and as he been convinced to expel dozens of Russian diplomats.
Thanks, liberal and other Democratic Party RussiaGaters!
The Clinton-Obama neoliberal Democrats have spent more than a year running with the
preposterous narrative that Trump is a Kremlin puppet who owes his presence in the White House
to Russia's subversion of our democratic elections. The climate crisis holds little
for the Trump and Russia-obsessed corporate media. The fact that the world stands at the eve of
the ecological self-destruction, with the Trump White House in the lead, elicits barely a
whisper in the reigning commercial news media. Unlike Stormy Daniels, for example, that little
story – the biggest issue of our or any time – is not good for television ratings
and newspaper sales.
Sanders, by the way, is curiously invisible in the dominant commercial media, despite his
quiet survey status as the nation's "most popular politician." That is precisely what you would
expect in a corporate and financial oligarchy buttressed by a powerful corporate, so-called
"mainstream" media oligopoly.
Political Parties as "Bank Accounts"
One of the many problems with the obsessive Blame-Russia narrative that a fair portion of
the dominant U.S. media is running with is that we had no great electoral democracy to
subvert in 2016 . Saying that Russia has "undermined [U.S.-] American democracy" is like
me – middle-aged, five-foot nine, and unblessed with jumping ability – saying that
the Brooklyn Nets' Russian-born center Timofy Mozgof subverted my career as a starting player
in the National Basketball Association. In state-capitalist societies marked by the toxic and
interrelated combination of weak popular organization, expensive politics, and highly
concentrated wealth – all highly evident in the New Gilded Age United States –
electoral contests and outcomes boil down above all and in the end to big investor class cash.
As Thomas Ferguson and his colleagues explain:
"Where investment and organization by average citizens is weak, however, power passes by
default to major investor groups, which can far more easily bear the costs of contending for
control of the state. In most modern market-dominated societies (those celebrated recently as
enjoying the 'end of History'), levels of effective popular organization are generally low,
while the costs of political action, in terms of both information and transactional
obstacles, are high. The result is that conflicts within the business community normally
dominate contests within and between political parties – the exact opposite of what
many earlier social theorists expected, who imagined 'business' and 'labor' confronting each
other in separate parties Only candidates and positions that can be financed can be presented
to voters. As a result, in countries like the US and, increasingly, Western Europe, political parties are first of all bank accounts . With certain qualifications, one
must pay to play. Understanding any given election, therefore, requires a financial X-ray of
the power blocs that dominate the major parties, with both inter- and intra- industrial
analysis of their constituent elements."
Here Ferguson might have said "corporate-dominated" instead of "market-dominated" for the
modern managerial corporations emerged as the "visible hand" master of the "free market" more
than a century ago.
We get to vote? Big deal.
People get to vote in Rwanda, Russia, the Congo and countless
other autocratic states as well. Elections alone are no guarantee of democracy, as U.S.
policymakers and pundits know very well when they rip on rigged elections (often fixed with the
assistance of U.S. government and private-sector agents and firms) in countries they don't
like, which includes any country that dares to "question the basic principle that the United
States effectively owns the world by right and is by definition a force for good" ( Chomsky,
2016 ).
Majority opinion is regularly trumped by a deadly complex of forces in the U.S. The
list of interrelated and mutually reinforcing culprits behind this oligarchic defeat of popular
sentiment in the U.S. is extensive. It includes but is not limited to: the campaign finance,
candidate-selection, lobbying, and policy agenda-setting power of wealthy individuals,
corporations, and interest groups; the special primary election influence of full-time party
activists; the disproportionately affluent, white, and older composition of the active (voting)
electorate; the manipulation of voter turnout; the widespread dissemination of false,
confusing, distracting, and misleading information; absurdly and explicitly unrepresentative
political institutions like the Electoral College, the unelected Supreme Court, the
over-representation of the predominantly white rural population in the U.S. Senate; one-party
rule in the House of "Representatives"; the fragmentation of authority in government; and
corporate ownership of the reigning media, which frames current events in accord with the
wishes and world view of the nation's real owners.
Yes, we get to vote. Super. Big deal. Mammon reigns nonetheless in the United States, where,
as the leading liberal
political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens find , "government policy reflects the
wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out
every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office."
Trump is a bit of an anomaly – a sign of an elections and party system in crisis and an
empire in decline. He wasn't pre-approved or vetted by the usual U.S. "
deep state " corporate, financial, and imperial gatekeepers. The ruling-class had been
trying to figure out what the Hell to do with him ever since he shocked even himself
(though not Steve Bannon) by pre-empting the coronation of the "Queen of Chaos."
He is a
homegrown capitalist oligarch nonetheless, a real estate mogul of vast and parasitic wealth who
is no more likely to fulfill his populist-sounding campaign pledges than any previous POTUS of
the neoliberal era.
His lethally racist, sexist, nativist, nuclear-weapons-brandishing, and
(last but not at all least) eco-cidal rise to the nominal CEO position atop the U.S.-imperial
oligarchy is no less a reflection of the dominant role of big U.S. capitalist money and
homegrown plutocracy in U.S. politics than a more classically establishment Hillary ascendancy
would have been. It's got little to do with Russia, Russia, Russia – the great diversion
that fills U.S. political airwaves and newsprint as the world careens ever closer to
oligarchy-imposed geocide and to a thermonuclear conflagration that the RussiaGate gambit is
recklessly encouraging.
Like many high demand cults neoliberalism is a trap, from which it is very difficult to escape...
Notable quotes:
"... A large, open-border global free market would be left, not subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent. And the whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism. ..."
"... Globalists, as neoliberal capitalists are often called, also understood that democracy, defined by a smattering of individual rights and a voting booth, was the ideal vehicle to usher neoliberalism into the emerging world. Namely because democracy, as commonly practiced, makes no demands in the economic sphere. Socialism does. Communism does. These models directly address ownership of the means of production. Not so democratic capitalism. This permits the globalists to continue to own the means of production while proclaiming human rights triumphant in nations where interventions are staged. ..."
"... The enduring lie is that there is no democracy without economic democracy. ..."
This 'Washington Consensus' is the false promise promoted by the West. The reality is quite
different. The crux of neoliberalism is to eliminate democratic government by downsizing,
privatizing, and deregulating it. Proponents of neoliberalism recognize that the state is the
last bulwark of protection for the common people against the predations of capital. Remove the
state and they'll be left defenseless .
Think about it. Deregulation eliminates the laws. Downsizing eliminates departments and their
funding. Privatizing eliminates the very purpose of the state by having the private sector take
over its traditional responsibilities.
Ultimately, nation-states would dissolve except perhaps for armies and tax systems. A large, open-border global free
market would be left, not subject to popular control but managed by a globally dispersed, transnational one percent. And the
whole process of making this happen would be camouflaged beneath the altruistic stylings of a benign humanitarianism.
Globalists, as neoliberal capitalists are often called, also understood that democracy, defined
by a smattering of individual rights and a voting booth, was the ideal vehicle to usher
neoliberalism into the emerging world. Namely because democracy, as commonly practiced, makes
no demands in the economic sphere. Socialism does. Communism does. These models directly
address ownership of the means of production. Not so democratic capitalism. This permits the
globalists to continue to own the means of production while proclaiming human rights triumphant
in nations where interventions are staged.
The enduring lie is that there is no democracy
without economic democracy.
What matters to the one percent and the media conglomerates that disseminate their worldview is
that the official definitions are accepted by the masses. The real effects need never be known.
The neoliberal ideology (theory) thus conceals the neoliberal reality (practice). And for the
masses to accept it, it must be mass produced. Then it becomes more or less invisible by virtue
of its universality.
From Yeltsin to Putin: Chubais, Liberal Pathology, and Harvard's Criminal Record
Matthew Raphael Johnson
Johnstown, PAWhen the USSR collapsed in 1990-1991, Gorbachev was
incapable of handling thesituation. Boris Yeltsin came to power both bureaucratically and
popularly. He was named theChief of the Presidium, but in June of 1991, he was elected in a
popular election where heearned 57% of the popular vote.
With a small army of American advisers, Yeltsin began selling off Soviet era assets.The
problem was that the process had nothing to do with markets. Privatization of assets wentto a
handful of well-connected politicians and bureaucrats who came to control the economyas a
whole.1 They had amassed a huge number of shares by 1995, and hence, the post-Sovietoligarchy
was born. The fact is that the work of 70 years of Soviet labor went to the pocketsof two or
three dozen people.2
The rising oligarchs could easily manipulate the court system and tax police, sincethere was
no real law governing private enterprise. Russia was led to the brink of anarchy. By1998,
according to a paper by Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky, the oligarchs comprisedabout 700
individuals that completely controlled Russia's economic assets.3
The Western Elites and the Ivy League as a Criminal Syndicate
In NS Leonov's book
(only in Russian), The Way of the Cross: Russia from 1991-2000, he states, as the first
"reform" of Yeltsin's government :
Government "reforms" that began Gaidar's privatization scam was the seizure of the savings
of the people. These were taken by force, though not directly. Inflation and economic collapse
made the transfer of funds easy. State control was removed from prices and the "free market"
would ensure the enrichment of corruption. This was the level of cynicism the new democracy had
reached, while simultaneously preaching the sanctity of private property. What did not melt
away in the deliberate fleecing of the people was taken by other means. An estimate of the
total taken thisway is about 300 billion rubles, and it had the proper effect: without money,
rebellion was difficult. They cried out in frustration.4
Nothing was done according to democratic norms, which is odd since democracy was the
buzzword that made these economic decisions seem political. At almost no time in the history of
the USSR did one man, Chubais and his allies, have such total and irresponsible control over
the Russian economy. When the voucher program was introduced in 1992, massive inflation
resulted. Soon, each 10,000 ruble voucher was worth very little. It was rendered null
regardless, since the state refused to consider the vouchers as legal tender.
1 Hoffman, D. The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia. Public Affairs Books, 2011
(cf esp ch12).
2 Kotz, D.M. Russia's Financial Crisis: The Failure of Neoliberalism? Z Magazine, (1998),
28-32
4 Leonov, NS. The Way of the Cross: Russia from 1991-2000. Moscow: Russia House, 2002 (All
citations aremy translations from the Russian.
Making the entire scam even more blatant, Chubais inserted a rider to the law stating that
the value of the voucher would only exist until late 1993. In 1992, Yeltsin's popularity went
from 50% in January to 30% in August, and from there to single digits.
By July of 1992, Chubais was hated. This led Yeltsin to limit the power of parliament,
increase his executive power and totally dominate the regions. This was done with western
backing and was a far greater centralization of power than Putin was later to be condemned for.
He had already banned the Communist Party, helping to break his main opposition and prevent
their imminent reelection in Parliament. The fraud of democracy was clearly open.
Soon Chubais and his crew stated that there was no benchmark value for any sold property.
The institution in charge of this, the Russian Federal Property Fund and related agencies,
therefore, began from arbitrary benchmarks. Ultimately, major firms were being sold for 1-5% of
their value. Worse, some of these were defense plants, bought up by shallcompanies operates by
the CIA – this was Hay's job. Therefore, scientific advances of the USSR were now
entirely in American hands.
In 1992, Yeltsin did fairly well in a referendum, receiving about 50% approval, but at this
date, privatization had just begun. Elections a bit later were to belie this vote. Yeltsin
himself clearly had no confidence in this referendum. Having no confidence in that vote,
Yeltsin then, again with western backing, banned all opposition protests in Moscow. Then,
making matters worse, he signed order 1400 in September of 1993 which stripped the Congress of
People's Deputies of all power. For the upcoming elections, Yeltsin passed a law saying that
only 25% of voters needed to show for it to be valid. This was a means of making sure that
opposition boycotts could not win. Yeltsin soon after banned the main opposition newspaper.
Russia's privatization scam was created, directed and imposed by Harvard University and
carried out by two "professors" whose incompetence is rivaled only by their lack of
accountability. Anatoly Chubais, probably the most hated man in Russia, was an old friend of
Harvard "economist" Andrei Shleifer, who was also working with Harvard don Jonathan Hay (who
according to the FSB, is CIA). Chubais, functioning as a Russian dictator since Yeltsin was not
functional at the time, put the privatization scheme into Harvard's hands. Apparently having no
workable knowledge of Russian life, the Harvard elite, believing themselves infallible, quickly
proved their theories not only false, but directly responsible for ruining thelives of
millions.5
1994-1995 was the period of the solidification of the oligarchic clans, their connection
with the United States, and the complete collapse of the state. Oligarchic clans, created by
Chubais, filled the vacuum with private armies, political machines and newspapers. In the US,
conservative and liberal alike called this the "free market" and democracy. Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, of Jewish origin and endlessly changing political positions, became the
government's ace in the hole: whenever the US questioned the increasingly obvious destruction
of Russia, Yeltsin would trot this clown out to make some typically outrageous statement. In
1995, it was clear that Zhirinovsky both "loved Hitler" and was "proud" of Russia's victory in
the Great Patriotic War. Clearly in the pocket of Yeltsin, Zhirinovsky a)kept US aid money
coming into his efforts, b) siphoned off serious criticism, c) easily associated nationalist
views with this kind of rhetorical nonsense.
Chubais continued to hang onto power. Not being a Russian citizen (and yet having all that
power), he clearly equated the oligarchic clans as "democracy." In Davos, 1996, he met with the
heads of all the clans including Guzinsky, Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Friedman, Potanin and many
others, and formed a political movement designed to keep nationalist and communists out of
power.
This move shows that Chubais backed the oligarchs, did not consider them "unintended
consequences" and sought their assistance to stay in power: All in the name of democracy.
Yeltsin, now at 3% (with the same margin of error) began to implement populist measures, but
now was isolated. Winning a strangely high 33% of the vote in the 1996 elections, it can only
be attributed to a) electoral fraud, or b) the fact that Gen. Alexander Lebed had been talked
into entering a sort of coalition with Yeltsin. If they won, then Lebed's rival Pavel Grachev,
would be history. Yeltsin won the second round with just over 50%, as the oligarchs and Chubais
personally spend a small fortune bribing artists, journalists, writers and, making an even
worse mockery of democracy, busing thousands of urban youth into Moscow to ensure their
support.
Harvard's Sinister Role
Harvard University spent quite a bit of its money to
restructure Russia. The US government sued some of them, specifically, Andrei Shleifer, for
breach of contract. Many economists from Harvard worked for the State Department so as to be
able to control Russia for the better. The fraud of the Russian economy was in part blamed on
these advisers, whowere forced to pay more than $31 million to the US government for
"conspiracy to defraud."
Harvard had authored the plan that Gorbachev had requested to turn Russia into a capitalist
state. This was the plan that was enacted. The Harvard Institute for International Development
in Russia was the group created at Harvard and sponsored by the US government. This is what was
sued over. The US government argued that the reform program was a failure, and the planners,
living in America, knew it was a failure and continued to defend it – with taxpayer
money. Even worse, as it turns out, Shleifer was rigging some of the auctions himself,
investing his own money in firms that he knew would turn a profit, even if overseas.
The US Justice Department in 2000 sued, among others, Shleifer and Hay for defrauding the US
government. The Justice Department stated:
The United States alleges that Defendants' actions undercut the fundamental purpose of the
United States' program in Russia -- the creation of trust and confidence in the emerging
Russian financial markets and the promotion of openness, transparency, the rule of law, and
fair play in the development of theRussian economy and laws.6
Since they were using $40 million in taxpayer money, the cold-blooded desolation of Russia
implicated the US. The civil lawsuit argued, to simplify, that Harvard's economists, especially
Shleifer (and his wife), was investing taxpayer money in Russian companies about which they
were giving financial advice. Harvard admitted guilt in the form of a $25 million settlement.
How much of this assisted their victims in Russia is not known.7
In response to the suit, lawyers for Shleifer and his co-conspirator, Jonathan Hay, sneered
to the press: "We are confident that, as the civil case unfolds, the court will confirm that
the Harvard program significantly fostered Russian reform and that the government received its
money's worth." As it turns out, even their lawyers did not believe this, since their defense
rested, not on the denial that conflict of interest existed, but that they were never bound by
such ethical rules.8
6 "United States of America, Plaintiff v. the President and Fellows of Harvard College,
Andrei Shleifer, Jonathan Hay, Nancy Zimmerman, and Elizabeth Hebert, Defendants" (2000)
7 His crimes and the full nature of the lawsuit and evidence can be found here: Wedel, J.
Who Taught CronyCapitalism to Russia? How Harvard and the 'U.S. Government's Aid Agency
became part of the RussianProblem. The Wall Street Journal Europe, March 19, 2001
In 2005, a federal judge found Shleifer guilty of professional fraud. The disgraced
"professor" paid the US government $2 million, and his wife, operating yet another scam,
settled out of court for $1.5 million. Harvard paid about $10 million in legal fees to defend
their role in the starvation of Russia.9
For all that, Shleifer remains a celebrated professor at Harvard and the toast of academia
worldwide. His academic stock has not suffered in theleast from this. Just as puzzling, Harvard
suffered no diminution in prestige. This is especially puzzling in that ivy league scandals
erupt seemingly on a daily basis. This Teflon world exists partly due to the protection of
former Harvard President, World Bank economist and Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, also a
pivotal figure in the Russian fiasco.10
Summers is partly to blame for the American sub-prime mortgage disaster since hewas pivotal
in removing many of the regulatory barriers that forbade predatory lendingpractices. Therefore,
the execrable Summers is the co-author of not one but two national meltdowns. Summers,
after being forced to resign from Harvard based on an unrelated set of sins,11 was quickly
rehired as a "professor" by the government. Then, Summers became a leading figure in Obama's
economic brain trust, was soon after appointed as part of the "oversight"panel for the UN's
economic programs and became a member of the Group of 30, a highlyelite and secretive
organization created by the Rockefeller family.
Like Summers and Shleifer, Chubais was also handsomely rewarded for his direct role in the
Russian cataclysm. He was soon placed on the board of JP Morgan, and, to no one's surprise, was
granted a seat on the ultra-elite Council on Foreign Relations, another powerful conclave
within the Rockefeller cult.12
Summer's career, his almost comic legacy of failure and ignorance, and the criminal
impoverishment of Russia (not to mention the 2007 US meltdown) wholly destroy the "elitestatus"
of places like Harvard.13 This set of scandals, largely unknown to a bewildered and exhausted
American public, shows the profound and pervasive putrescence of academia, especially in the
Ivy leagues. It brought into question academic tenure, unearned salaries, and the famed
academic insulation from consequences arising from their theories. The Harvard civil suit and
all it entails demonstrates the incompetence of those paid to implement policy and their
ability to get their hands on taxpayer money. It shows a reprehensible and reckless disregard
for the welfare of others that is rewarded with academic posts, social prestige, ostentatious
wealth and immense power.
It might be worth mentioning that the behavior patters of Chubais conforms almost perfectly
to the Triarchic diagnostic model of psychopathy as developed by Skeem, et al in 2011. First,
it is typified by a pathological arrogance. The victim has full confidence that he is above the
law, or that the law only applies to others. Second, the victim shows an impulsive and
anti-social temper that focuses only on short term gratification based on the lowest motives.
Because of these two symptoms, the victim either does not perceive or does not have any
restraints on his destructive behavior. Finally, and most significantly, the victim feels no
remorse for the consequences of his actions. Other criteria related to these includeparasitic
behavior, superficial charm, grandiosity, ingenious criminal ideas, and assertive narcissism.14
Yeltsin, quoted in Leonov's book, called Chubais "an absolute Bolshevik by temperament and
mentality." The basic consensus about Chubais' behavior is that he cared little for
construction, and only for destruction.
8 Seward, Z. Harvard To Pay $26.5 Million in HIID Settlement. Crimson, July 20059 The
guilty verdict and settlement issues are summarized in the Crimson article above.
10 Finucane, M "Feds Sue Harvard over Russia Advisers." ABD News; also see Wedel, Janine
R. The HarvardBoys Do Russia. The Nation, 2008; and "Larry Summers, Robert Rubin: Will The
Harvard Shadow EliteBankrupt The University And The Country?" The Huffington Post, Jan 2010:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-r-lewis/larry-summers-robert-rubi_b_419224.html
11 These had something to do with comments about intellectual differences between men and
women. That this contrived controversy erupted just as Harvard was paying off the federal
government is no coincidence.
12 Levy, Ari. Summers Joins Andreessen Horowitz as a Part-Time Adviser to Entrepreneurs.
Bloomberg, June2011 and Greenwald, Glenn. Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's
ownership of government.Salon, 2009
13 As far as ivy league fraud and incompetence go, this is just one scandal out of
hundreds.
The political lesson of this is unfortunate: the diagnostic criteria for criminal
psychopathy are precisely the qualities required for success in big business and government.
Even the best intentioned politician or businessman must display some combination of thesevices
in order to successfully compete in these fields. What passes as virtue in libera lcapitalism
is actually an undisguised form of mental illness.
Leonov speaks in more detail about his pathology:
Evil lurks in Chubais' colorless eyes. He arrogantly uses his supporters in public.
Assertiveness and phony composure is his cynical way. Yeltsin was seen by him as merely
manageable. Yeltsin was easy to manipulate due to his unpopularity. He did not have the
intellectual wherewithal to fight back. He was compliant and signed anything on cue. He saw
the Duma as mere formalism that can be bypassed. In reality, he just relied on Presidential
decrees.
Of course, all of this in the name of democracy. Rather than deal with the fallout for the
sins of others, Yeltsin did one excellent thing for Russia – appointed Vladimir Putin
astemporary president on new year's eve, 1999. As was proper, Putin guaranteed Yeltsin immunity
from prosecution, which meant he could no longer be used as a scapegoat. Putin, to make a long
story very short, brought Russia from a GDP that was 98th in the world to 2014,where it is 8th.
For the period 1991-1997, the transfer of wealth from Russia to the oligarchs was roughly $1.75
trillion. This was not "lost" to Russia, since wealth is not "lost." It merely changed hands.
Under Chubais and Harvard, the economic contracted by almost 90%.
For all that, Yeltsin's party received 15% of the vote. With instructions from the US,
Yeltsin, after this humiliation, created the idea of a "consensus document." The point is to
create the illusion of agreement. Several western NGOs designed a position paper which
supported "free market" reforms. Representatives of the new rich in Russia signed this
document, which was then trumpeted as proof of social cohesion around Yeltsin.
Bernard Black et al, writing in 2009, described the devastation of this shock treatment
for Russia and Ukraine in 1994:Russia's mass privatization. . . permitted insiders (managers
and controlling shareholders) to engage in extensive "self" or "inside" dealing. . . which
the government did nothing to control. Later privatization "auctions" were a massive giveaway
of Russia's most important companies at bargain prices to a handful of well-connected
"kleptocrats". . . Medium-term prospects are grim; the Russian ruble has plunged; the Russian
government has defaulted on both its dollar denominated and ruble-denominated debt; most
banks are bankrupt; corruption is rampant; tax revenues have collapsed; capital flight is
pervasive; and the government (whomever the Prime Minister happens to be at the moment) seems
clueless about what to do next.15
14 Skeem, JL, Polaschek, DLL, Patrick, CJ, and S Lilienfeld. Psychopathic Personality:
Bridging the GapBetween Scientific Evidence and Public Policy. Psychological Science in the
Public Interest 12 (3): 95–1622011
15 Black, et al, 1
This scheme represents one of the most luridly thoroughgoing, colossal and overwhelming
failures in economic history. The role of the US government, international financial agencies
and elite academia in this monumental disaster is well known. During the well publicized
destruction and starvation of Russia, the British journal Euromoney named Chubais the
"Worlds Greatest Finance Minister," as yet another means of displaying theelite's lack of
accountability. In the Financial Times of 2004, A. Ostrovsky states "Chubais makes no
excuses and feels no remorse over the most controversial privatization of all - the
'loans-for-shares' deal, in which he handed control of Russia's largest and most valuable
assets to the group of tycoons [sic] in return for loans and support in the 1996 election for
the then ailing Yeltsin."16
Once this became plain, the architects of the plan backed off, blaming everyone else for the
issues. He writes in Foreign Affairs that the "Russian people" must vote for "democracy" in the
2000 elections. At the time, his own popularity was running about 2-3%. Hence, he did not mean
"democracy" in the normal sense of the word. The real change was between 1994-1996. Here, the
oligarchs were openly ruling with Yeltsin, who was often drunk and would disappear for weeks on
end. It didn't matter. The oligarchs bought up most of the banks, then issued licenses to trade
internationally that only they could have. As the government got desperate, the oligarchs
stepped in and loaned Moscow the money to continue to function. Russian was not a "government"
in any sense of the word. About 700 major families controlled almost the entire Russian economy
and hence, the state as well.
The Results of the Scam
Government revenues went down by over 50% in this same
time. Wages went down by about 75% by 1998. In 1992, the inflation rate was almost 1000%. Light
industry, that is, the consumer sector, lost about 90% of its capital, the hardest hit sector
of all. Machinery of all kinds fell by about 75%, meaning that 75% of the machines useful in
the Russian economy had been liquidated (or were just not used) by 1998. The only thing that
kept Russiaafloat was the black market.17
The state could no longer enforce its laws, and hence, men started not showing up for the
draft. Republic after republics declared independence, to be immediately recognized by the US.
So, what can we conclude here? Very few deny that Yeltsin was a failure, but a failure of the
worst kind. This kind of economic destruction has never been seen before outside of warfare.
Government revenues and expenditures collapsed, hence, an already bad infrastructure was made
far worse. Believe it or not, from 1992-1999, the Russian government collected about $6 billion
all told. Hence, the state did not function.
Interest rates were high, about 300% in 1994, so credit was available only to the very rich,
who controlled the (now private) central bank in the first place. Nearly everyoligarchical bank
was connected with organized crime. In fact, there is no substantial difference between the
oligarchs and organized crime.18
Under the oligarchs, tax collection collapsed. Industrial production went down by 25% in
just a few years. By 1997, Russia had defaulted on its debts. Between 1991 and 1998,Russian GDP
fell by almost 40%. Life expectancy went down from 68 to 56 years. Russians became
impoverished. Money was so scarce that, by 1996, most trade was done through barter.
Importantly, these oligarchs became a state within a state. Tax collection had collapsed, and
the new Russia was completely broke. With the Asian meltdown in 1998, interest rates for
Russian borrowing went to 300%. 19
16 Arkady Ostrovsky, Father to the Oligarchs. Financial Times, 2004.
17 Graham, Thomas. From Oligarchy to Oligarchy: The Structure of Russia's Ruling Elite.
Demokratizatsiya7(3), (1997) 325-340
18 ibid
Yeltsin's popularity by 1998 went to about zero. Since then, pro-western (that is, pro
freemarket) parties have polled no more than 5-7% of the vote combined. Yeltsin resigned the
Presidency in 1999 and appointed Vladimir Putin as president.
A man of immense mental and physical strength, he sought to discipline the oligarchs,
rebuild Russia and create a modern economy. As soon as Putin took office, he went after the
media monopoly of Vladimir Guzinsky. Soon, numerous oil firms and banks were investigated for
tax fraud. Some oligarchs fled the country, others like Mikhail Khordokovsky, ended up in
prison. Attempting to split the oligarchs, playing one fraction against another, Putin's
popularity soared, and Russian economic growth recovered.20 Since the meltdown in 1998, the
Russian economy has gone from $1 trillion to $2.5 trillion by 2011. Growth rates remain high,
and Russia enjoys both a trade and budget surplus. In the first eight years of Putin's
presidency, the Russian GDP increased by over 75%.
Near the end of 1993, about 18-20 billion rubles had fled the country. As 1994 dawned, the
population was impoverished. Malnutrition was becoming a problem, and alcoholism was
increasing, as was suicide and all manner of social pathology. By 1994, thedeputy interior
minister, Vladimir Kozlov, stated that about 40% of the economy is nowcriminalized. Leonov
writes,
V. Polevanov [deputy prime minister at the time] notes that the total nominal valueof the
voucher fund (about $1.5 trillion rubles) was 20 times less than the cost fixed assets
industry, fired up for auction. One Moscow, where privatization was notcarried out on the
residual and by market value, gained 20% of the enterprises 1.8 trillion rubles, while income
from the rest of Russia in the first two years of privatization amounted to only $1 trillion
rubles.
The above argument is abstract. In this section, a case study will be analyzed in detail to
show how these forces come to be, how they operate, and how they attempt to insulate themselves
from its consequences. Traumatic economic events do not occur due to abstract or impersonal
forces. People, very powerful people, create the conditions that destroy entire economies.
Economic self-interest is the engine of these irrational policies. Economics depicts social
actors and institutions as calculating machines with no identity or purpose. The result is that
economics is always treated in the passive voice, which is a fundamental mystification.
The Second Half of the 1990s
Showing Chubais complete rejection of supporting
Russian interests, Leonov writes,
Soon, it became clear that Chubais committed his sins only because he was controlled by
others. The real owners of Russia. In 1998, Russia was continuing to disaster, that is, total
bankruptcy. At this point, even after the default, American investors finally got the message
and moved their cash out of Russian securities. This strengthened the effect of the default. As
he became CEO of RAO (etc), he sold to foreigners a 32% chunk of Russian energy concerns, which
violated all Russian laws. This meant, of course, that foreigners now could block Russian
energy policy.
Chubais and his Harvard friends did not believe in their own rhetoric. Their had quickly
moved into the most luxurious apartments and appointed to themselves very high salaries.
Nothing about their world was based on the market principles they hypocriticallyadvocated.
While advocating the rule of law, the oligarchical firms allied with Chubais werenot paying
taxes; but it just so happens that the criminal code recently passed did not considerthis a
crime. In 1997, there was no question that Chubais was evading taxes as well.
19 Ibid, cf esp 330-332
20 Sakwa, R. Putin and the Oligarchs. New Political Economy, 13(2) (2008): 185-191
Admitting his guilt, he paid about 500 million rubles, which was just a small amount of what
he owed. His power did not diminish, but it remains a fact that no dictator in Russian history
had the power that Chubais had. In the name of market reform and the rule of law,Chubais was
receiving millions from shall companies for non existent services. Alexander Lebed remained the
sole source of opposition to Chubais once Yeltsin sought treatment for heart illness. Chubais,
realizing the general's recent spike in popularity for negotiating successfully with Chechen
rebels, invented a slew of charges that the general conspired with these same militants.
Chubais had become so powerful that he was no longer required to be creative. Lebed was
dismissed from his post, proving that Chubais was, in fact, a dictator.21
In the name of the rule of law, Chubais made mafia gangster Boris Berezovsky "deputy
director of the security council." Potanin, another underworld billionaire, was named "Deputy
Prime Minister." Chubais was rubbing Russia's face in his power, typical of thepsychotic. Soon,
all major television channels were in the hands of two mafia dons, Berezovsky and Guzinsky.
Leonov writes:
By 1996, all the financial power was concentrated in the hands of a small group of
businessmen almost exclusively Jewish. It consisted of Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky,
Alexander Smolensky, Pyotr Aven, Boris Chait, and Vitaly Malkin. Major bankers also included
gentiles Potanin and Vinogradov, the only two.
Since the state had collapsed, these oligarchs acted as the state treasury and profited from
it. Billions continued to be looted and wound up in banks in Israel, Britain and the US. Yet,
elections were coming up. An ailing Yeltsin dismissed Chernomyrdin's "government," which
included Chubais. Boris Berezovsky began, in his words, to rally all the "democraticand
reformist forces in Russia" to prevent his own possible dispossession.
Typical of the psychotic, these men knew no limits. They began issuing high yield junk
bonds, eventually promising to pay out, in some cases, 180%. Foreigners were buying these bonds
to the point where almost 30% of all marketable securities of the Russian "state"were owned by
outsiders. It was another scam, and the bankers refused to pay anypercentage, and even more,
demanded the return of Chubais to government. Chubais quicklyflew to Washington, warning of a
communist-nationalist resurgence. $6 billion was quickly given, which was never seen again.
Forming a shadow government, Russia's bankers dictated terms to Yeltsin. In their
generosity, they agreed to not demand immediate debt payment from the Russian taxpayer. Yet, to
punish Yeltsin, this oligarchy declared that it will reduce the sale of foreign currency.
Putting downward pressure on the ruble, the oligarchs got their revenge for the tepid rebellion
of Yeltsin. This is what drove the junk bonds as high as 180%; the ruble was suddenly worth
nothing. In fear, Yeltsin put the banker's friend, Chernomyrdin, back in power in late summer,
1998.22
21 Ostrovsky, Arkady. Father to the Oligarchs. Financial Times, 2004
22 Russian Federation: Selected Issues 2012 International Monetary Fund IMF Country Report
No. 12/218http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12218.pdf and Oliker, O, and T.
Paley. Assessing Russia's
As typical of capitalist democracies, the political clique took the fall for the private
sector. Yeltsin was blamed for the disaster, though his power was nil. That winter, Russia
froze with millions unable to buy fuel. The perfect man was chosen for the prime ministership,
Yevgeny Primakov, with no apparent beliefs of any kind. Quickly, Primakov demanded the return
of Chubais and others who caused the mess, in order to repair it.
The default that August destroyed any bank not immediately under the oligarchs. GDPfell by
200-300 billion rubles. Industry was devastated. In one month, September of 1998, the average
Russian income fell by over 30%. The Federation Council, too late, officially declared Chubais
and crew as "negligent and incompetent." At the same time, the banking oligarchy was
speculating in currency markets, making a profit estimated at the time of 5.5billion rubles in
1997.
Bill Clinton at the time cared only about the possibility of the Lebed coup. Primakov,
however, began to strengthen the state as the only possibly solution to the total dissolution
of Russia as a political entity. Soon, the dependable Zhirnovsky was again trotted out, with
the occasional spray painted swastika to re-direct attention and create the "extremist" threat.
More political groups, heretofore unknown, showed up in Moscow with strange uniforms and
rallies. Gaidar was quick to link them with the communists, creating a convenient, single group
for the masses to visualize.
In the midst of the meltdown, the system took advantage of the perfectly timed murder of
Galina Starovoitova, a westernizing politician. 15,000 members of the opposition were rounded
up and the "democratic forces" demanded emergency powers. The westenizers even created their
own "nationalist" political group, "Fatherland" in order to siphon off opposition activists. In
a display showing excellent acting, Yeltsin, in December of 1998, disbanded the group as a
"threat" to "democracy." Of course, western Russia experts breathed a sigh of relief that
"fascism" was not coming to Russia.
Solzhenitsyn refused to be a part of the charade, refusing to accept the Medal of St. Andrei
from Yeltsin. A long time nationalist, Solzhenitsyn realized that in giving this award, Yeltsin
was currying favor. Another misdirection was the attempted impeachment of Yeltsin in 1998, as
if he was in charge of the disaster he only vaguely understood. Like the Clinton impeachment,
it was an absurdity, deliberately designed to protect those with actual power (that is, the
private sector) who created the disaster. The Commission decided that Yeltsin had "exceeded his
power" as president, as if this is the reason why Muscovites just froze the previous winter.
Using political figures to cover for the banking cartel is as old as the Medicis in Florence.
Then, in another mockery of Russia, Yeltsin was blamed 100% for the disaster ofthe previous
decade.23
Given all this, you are now ready to understand Putin. He came to power as Premier under
Yeltsin when the latter resigned in 1999. Yeltsin's popularity rating was between 3-5%. All aid
from the IMF was stolen and funneled into the hands of the oligarchs. Oil and gas firms had
their profits pocketed in the same way, tax free. As Yeltsin retired, he gave many of his
friends immunity from prosecution.
Putin as the Restorer of Sanity
Putin's leadership restored confidence in the
currency, the state and the law. Oligarchystill exists in Russia (as elsewhere), but the
monopoly position they used to wield is no more.Russian oil firms have come under the control,
though not the ownership, of the state, sinceoligarchs were planning on selling assets to
Exxon-Mobil, which led to the "KhordokovskyDecline. The Rand Corporation,
2002http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2007/MR1442.pdf23 Guriev, S.
and Andrei Rachinsky (2005). The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism. Journal of
EconomicPerspectives, 19(1), (2005) 131-150
http://pages.nes.ru/sguriev/papers/GurievRachinsky.pdfaffair." Mikhail Khordokovshy was an
oligarch who controlled YUKOS, one of Russia's mostpowerful oil firms. In the interest of
national security, Putin placed Khordokovsky under arrest. He was indeed guilty of tax evasion,
but his plans to see Russian strategic assets to Americans was too much for Putin to stomach.
The more oligarchs Putin put in jail, the more popular he becomes.
Putin's policy has been to tread softly, taking on only the most powerful and obnoxious of
the oligarchs. He has made strategic alliances with some in order to intimidate others While
Russia has been rebuilt and the state became powerful, the oligarchs still have fight left in
them, and Putin acts cautiously. Putin's basic approach has been to guide investment and
control the flow of investment funds so they benefit Russia, not the oligarchy. The state does
not own the economy, but it does oversee it. The oligarchy gave Putin no other choice.
The oligarchs financed all of Yeltsin's election campaigns and public image in Russia at the
time. The point was to keep Yeltsin in power long enough so that the oligarchs could get their
cash out of the country. They knew that eventually, a popular government would punish them.
Putin, to a great extent, was this punishment.
Putin created an entirely new Russian government, when local districts under his control.
Needless to say, the regional governments had been bought, and Putin could have no dealings
with them. Some of them even had their own foreign policy! All those sent to govern the regions
were from the security services or the army. This was no accident. Putin restructured the Upper
House (the Federation Council) so as to permit his government to have a say in who gets
appointed to it. 24
Putin insisted that local law must be consistent with federal law. This is because local
leaders were creating their own countries, and this could not stand. Putin then permitted
oligarchs and their puppets to be tried as violators of the constitution. Let me give you one
example. In 2003, the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky had taken over the Russian oil giant Yukos.
Now, Putin got intelligence that Khodorkovsky was planning on entering intobusiness with
Exxon-Mobil, permitting their penetration into the Russian market. Realizing this was a
security threat (which it was, since it would mean that Exxon would control much of Russia's
oil), he had Khodorkovsky arrested. Is list of crimes was well known, but the stategot him on
taxes, which was a no-brainier. Putin was immediately attacked or "authoritarianism" by the
press in the west.
So why does the west heap abuse on this man?
He reformed the tax code, putting in place a 13% flat tax on all income and investments.
About half of regional prosecutors were removed from their positions due toe xtreme corruption.
All Russians knew that already. He quickly ended the war in Chechnya, making sure a Chechen,
pro-Russian government was put in charge.
He brought together the top 13 oligarchical families to a conference he organized. He told
them that their rule was over. He forced them to pay millions in back taxes to the state, and
to create several important charitable funds with their stolen money.
He was going to use the state to pressure their media into being more objective, pro-Russian
and pro-state. Since the oligarchs controlled the press, it made sense that this had to be
fought. To call this "assaulting press freedom" is absurd.
He realized that the political opposition in Russia was created by the oligarchy. Hence,
there was no actual party development. Few parties had an agenda (except the communists, who
did well), and these were mostly personal vehicles for their founders.
Putin also shifted investment away from oil and towards higher end items. This was needed to
diversify the economy. The judiciary is independent. Today, about 70% of people who sue the
state for various reasons win. Putin also introduced the jury.25
24 Sakwa, R. Putin and the Oligarchs. New Political Economy, 13(2), (2008), 185-191
It's tough to argue with Putin's success:
Labor productivity grew 49 percent 1995-2005, ranging from a 23 percent improvement in
retailing to a 73 percent rise in construction. Total factor productivity grew by 5.8 percent
per year, and the World Bank estimates that only one third of that increase came from increased
capacity utilization. Firm turnover (i.e. the exit of inefficient firms and the entry of new
ones) accounts for half the total improvement. Stock market capitalization rose to 44 percent
of GDP by 2005, while the RTS index went from 300 in 2000 to 2,360 in December 2007.
In September 2006 the market capitalization of the 200 biggest firms was $833 billion (one
third of which was Gazprom). The percent of the population living in poverty fell from 38
percent in 19998 to 9.5 percent in 2004, and the share of family budgets spent on food fell
from 73% in 1992to 54% in 2004.
The only macroeconomic indicator that gives cause for concern is inflation, which dropped
from 20 percent in 2000 to 9 percent in2006, before creeping back up to 11-12 percent
level.26
Now, "market capitalization" and other such elite measures are not the whole story. They can
exist with an economy failing in other respects. However, before wealth can b eredistributed,
it has to exist. Accumulating what can then be redistributed are what these numbers are telling
us. Given all this, however, it should come as no surprise that those who are condemning Putin
today backed the privatization deals 20 years ago.
W. Thompson, writing in the Guardian in the Summer of 2003, states:
Fiscal consolidation has probably contributed more than any other single factor to
restoring the authority and legitimacy of the formerly bankrupt state. Exceptionally
favorable economic circumstances account for much of this improvement, but so also do better
expenditure management, the reform of tax legislation and more efficient administration. The
state's rule-making capacity has also grown markedly.
Unlike Yeltsin, Putin has a compliant parliament and presides over a government that, for
all its internal divisions, is not riven by the factional conflicts that marked the 1990s.
The result has been a flood of new legislation, much of it directly concerned with state
reconstruction.27
Thompson speaks the truth. "Exceptionally favorable economic circumstances "can not cause
national success. They do not in Ukraine, much of Africa or Detroit. They must be identified
and utilized with substantial skill. Circumstances, of themselves, tell us nothing. The
"compliant parliament" exists because of Putin's popularity, though Thomas seems to suggest
that such legislative cooperation is required in times of emergency. Worried about bureaucratic
corruption, Putin passed several laws limiting the discretionary power of federal agencies.
Reform has reduced corruption, endemic at onepoint. Business is much easier to accomplish.
Putin's reelection numbers roughly mirror his popularity in the country, and his opposition,
backed by the US, has no agenda whatsoever.
25 Lavelle, P Putin's "Authoritarianism" vs. the "Commentariat". Commentary,
2004ahttp://www.futurebrief.com/peterlavelle004.asp and Lavelle, P Russia's Economic Future.
Commentary,2004 http://www.futurebrief.com/peterlavelle.asp
26 Rutland, P. Putin's Economic Record. Wesleyan University, CT, 2008
As of January 1 of this 2013, Russia's anti-bribery legislation is the toughest in the
world. In Russia, about 92% of American businesses think that Russian investment is a good
thing, and that Russia is a decent place to do business. The IMF has stated that part of
Putin's success is is utilization of capital that was left idle. Utilization of the country's
resources has increased from about 50% in 2000 to over 76% today. But in order to do this, he
needed to destroy the power of the oligarchs at the regional level.
Conclusion
The simple fact is that Putin's authoritarianism was forced upon him.
He did use a heavy hand, but not nearly as heavy as Yeltsin. He realized that it was either a
strong hand or chaos. As the state has been rebuilt, so have oversight bodies empowered to
check it'sbehavior. Putin launched a bunch of commissions to look into corruption in different
areas o the country, knowing full well that his popularity is based on that, plus economic
growth.Putin needed to increase the potential of the state before the state itself could grow.
Hence,the reformation of all police agencies gave them a direct line to the Kremlin, but, by
2002,crime was still rife. Now, all that has changed.
It makes sense to call Putin a reaction to Yeltsin, chaos and oligarchy. His policies make
no sense without the background. Things appear differently when contrasted with the free-fall
collapse of the Yeltsin years.
Putin then did two things: first, to build up the rudiments of a new state, one that can
permit business to thrive and destroy oligarchy. He needed a new law code, more centralized
structures and an end to regional independence. Second, he was to create a new macroeconomic
structure, with strong fiscal and oversight measures. Russia now runs a trade and budget
deficit. He then stabilized the currency.
Once economic growth took off, he tried to get as much money out of foreign banks as
possible. He first backed big business (for the sake of growth), then shifted more recently to
backing smaller business. He then engaged in education and pension reform. He turned Russia to
the east, allying with China to cooperate in their tremendous economic growth.
It is easy to forget that all that Putin is "blamed" for was suggested by western elites for
Yeltsin. Liberal democracy in the eastern bloc has, without exception, merely been a cover for
the most cynical sort of exploitation. In the name of "democracy" the eastern bloc melted into
the bank accounts of both foreign and local elites. Warlords developed with private armies
that, in the 1990s, were the subject of some journalistic treatment. A Russia in collapse is
far more dangerous for the west than anything Putin has dreamed about.
Rationally, the enforced, rehearsed and studied contempt of Putin can only exist because the
west had other plans for Russia, as a hinterland for cheap, educated labor and resources.
Western collapse is assured precisely because Russia is not prostrate and under the thumb of
Exxon-Mobil. Putin will have the last laugh, which, when the smoke clears, is the only real
cause of the west's irrational hatred.
"... Not only large elements of the American and British intelligence services, but the 'Borgistas' in both countries, now including large elements of the academic/research apparatus and most of the MSM, really are joined at the hip. ..."
"... A relevant element of such collusion has to do with the creation of the Yeltsin-era Russian oligarchy. On this, a crucial source are interviews given by Christian Michel and Christopher Samuelson, who used to run a company called 'Valmet', to Catherine Belton, then with the 'Moscow Times', later with the 'Financial Times', in the days leading up to the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in May 2005. ..."
"... On the subject of the competence of MI6, what seems to me a total apposite judgement was provided by the man whom Steele and his associates framed over the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi. ..."
"... 'Litvinenko used to say: They are total retards in the UK, they believe everything we are telling them about Russia.' ..."
"... Throughout life, I have repeatedly come across a game played on certain kinds of élite Westerners, which, in honor of Kipling, who gave brilliant depictions of it, I call 'fool the stupid Sahib.' Both people from other societies, and their own, often play this game, and the underlying mentality not infrequently involves a combination of a sense of inferiority and contempt for the gullibility of people who are thought of -- commonly with justice -- as not knowing how the world really works, and thus being open to manipulation if one tells them what they want to hear. ..."
"... Irrespective of whether Lugovoi was accurately reporting what Litvinenko said, however, a mass of 'open source' evidence testifies to the extreme credulity with which officials and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic treat claims made by members of the 'StratCom' groups created by the oligarchs whose initial training was done by Valmet. ..."
"... (One good example is provided by the way that Sir Robert Owen and his team took what the surviving members of the Berezovsky group told them on trust. Another is the extraordinary way MSM figures continue to claim made by Khodorkovsky and his associates seriously.) ..."
"... When I discover that John Sipher is a 'former member of the CIA's Clandestine Service', who also worked 'on Russian espionage issues overseas, and in support of FBI counterintelligence investigations domestically,' then his apologetics for Steele seem not only to suggest he may be another 'total retard' -- but to point towards how the Anglo-American collaboration actually worked. (See https://www.politico.eu/article/devin-nunes-donald-trump-the-smearing-of-christopher-steele/ .) ..."
"... Another characteristic of these 'retards' is that they seem unable to get their story straight. In his piece last September defending the dossier, Sipher wrote that 'While in London he worked as the personal handler of the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko.' Apparently he didn't know that the 'party line' had changed -- that when Steele emerged from hiding in May, his mouthpiece, Luke Harding of the 'Guardian', had explained: 'As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium poisoning, quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his case officer, friends said.' ..."
"... The whole situation with Russia, of which, be it her economy, history, military, culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people populating this bubble. ..."
"... Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry scientific language it is called a "confirmation bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian "sources" because those "sources" reiterate to them what they want to hear to start with, thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced. ..."
1. Not only large elements of the American and British intelligence services, but the 'Borgistas' in both countries, now
including large elements of the academic/research apparatus and most of the MSM, really are joined at the hip.
It is thus an open question how far it is useful to speak of British intelligence intervening in the American election, rather
than the American section of the 'Borg' and their partners in crime 'across the pond' colluding in an attempt to mount such an
intervention with a greater appearance of 'plausible deniability.'
2. A relevant element of such collusion has to do with the creation of the Yeltsin-era Russian oligarchy. On this, a crucial
source are interviews given by Christian Michel and Christopher Samuelson, who used to run a company called 'Valmet', to Catherine
Belton, then with the 'Moscow Times', later with the 'Financial Times', in the days leading up to the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky
in May 2005.
This describes the education in 'Western banking practices' given to him and his Menatep associates by Michel and Samuelson,
starting as early as 1989, and also their crucial involvement with Berezovsky.
We are told by Belton that: 'With the help of British government connections, Valmet had already built up a wealthy clientele
that included the ruling family of Dubai.' As to large ambitions which Michel and Samuelson had, she tells us: 'Used to dealing
with the riches of Arab leaders, they found Menatep, by comparison still relatively small fry. By 1994, however, Menatep had started
moving into all kinds of industries, from chemicals to textiles to metallurgy. But for Valmet, which by that time had already
partnered up with one of the oldest banks in the United States, Riggs Bank, and for Menatep, the real prize was oil.'
Try Googling 'Riggs Bank' -- a lot of interesting information emerges, on matters such as their involvement with Prince Bandar.
So, what we are dealing with is a joint Anglo-American attempt to create a 'comprador' oligarchy who could loot Russia's raw materials
resources.
3. On the subject of the competence of MI6, what seems to me a total apposite judgement was provided by the man whom Steele
and his associates framed over the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi.
In the press conference in May 2007 where he responded to the request for his extradition submitted by the Crown Prosecution
Service, he claimed that: 'Litvinenko used to say: They are total retards in the UK, they believe everything we are telling them
about Russia.'
It seems to me quite likely, although obviously not certain, that this did indeed represent the view of many of the 'StratCom'
operators around Berezovsky of people like Steele.
Throughout life, I have repeatedly come across a game played on certain kinds of élite Westerners, which, in honor of
Kipling, who gave brilliant depictions of it, I call 'fool the stupid Sahib.' Both people from other societies, and their own,
often play this game, and the underlying mentality not infrequently involves a combination of a sense of inferiority and contempt
for the gullibility of people who are thought of -- commonly with justice -- as not knowing how the world really works, and thus
being open to manipulation if one tells them what they want to hear.
Some fragments of a mass of evidence that this was precisely what Litvinenko did were presented by me in a previous post.
Irrespective of whether Lugovoi was accurately reporting what Litvinenko said, however, a mass of 'open source' evidence
testifies to the extreme credulity with which officials and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic treat claims made by members
of the 'StratCom' groups created by the oligarchs whose initial training was done by Valmet.
(One good example is provided by
the way that Sir Robert Owen and his team took what the surviving members of the Berezovsky group told them on trust. Another
is the extraordinary way MSM figures continue to claim made by Khodorkovsky and his associates seriously.)
Accordingly, when I read of anyone treating practically anything that Steele claims as plausible, I try to work out how much
of a 'retard' they must be, starting with a baseline of about 50%.
4. In the light of the way that the reliance on the dossier in the FISA applications absent meaningful corroboration is being
defended by Comey and others on the basis that Steele was 'considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau', the question
is how many people in the FBI must be considered to have a 'retard' rating somewhere over 90%.
When I discover that John Sipher is a 'former member of the CIA's Clandestine Service', who also worked 'on Russian espionage
issues overseas, and in support of FBI counterintelligence investigations domestically,' then his apologetics for Steele seem
not only to suggest he may be another 'total retard' -- but to point towards how the Anglo-American collaboration actually worked.
(See https://www.politico.eu/article/devin-nunes-donald-trump-the-smearing-of-christopher-steele/
.)
5. Another characteristic of these 'retards' is that they seem unable to get their story straight. In his piece last September
defending the dossier, Sipher wrote that 'While in London he worked as the personal handler of the Russian defector Alexander
Litvinenko.' Apparently he didn't know that the 'party line' had changed -- that when Steele emerged from hiding in May, his mouthpiece,
Luke Harding of the 'Guardian', had explained: 'As head of MI6's Russia desk, Steele led the inquiry into Litvinenko's polonium
poisoning, quickly concluding that this was a Russian state plot. He did not meet Litvinenko and was not his case officer, friends
said.'
6. In his attempts to defend the credibility of the dossier, Sipher also explains that its -- supposed -- author was President
of the Cambridge Union. Here, two profiles of Steele on the 'MailOnline' site are of interest.
In one a contemporary is quoted:
"'When you took part in politics at the Cambridge Union, it was very spiteful and full of people spreading rumours," he said.
"Steele fitted right in. He was very ambitious, ruthless and frankly not a very nice guy."
The other tells us that he born in Aden in 1964, and that his father was in the military, before going on to say that contemporaries
recall an 'avowedly Left-wing student with CND credentials', while a book on the Union's history says he was a 'confirmed socialist'.
From my own -- undistinguished and mildly irreverent -- Cambridge career, I can testify that there was indeed a certain kind
of student politician, whom, if I may mix metaphors, fellow-students were perfectly well aware were going to arse-lick their way
up some greasy pole or other in later life.
It was a world with which I came back in contact when, after living abroad and a protracted apprenticeship in print journalism,
I accidentally found employment with what was then one of the principal television current affairs programmes in Britain. In the
early 'Eighties I overlapped with Peter -- now Lord -- Mandelson, who became one of the principal architects of 'New Labour.'
7. Given that at this time British intelligence agencies were somewhat paranoid about CND, there is a small puzzle as to why
on his graduation in 1986 Steele should have been recruited by MI6. In more paranoid moments I wonder whether he did not already
have intelligence contacts through his father, and served as a 'stool pigeon' as a student.
But then, people like Sir John Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove may simply have concluded that someone with 'form' in smearing
rivals at the Union was ideally suited for the kind of organisation they wanted to run.
8. From experience with Mandelson, and others, there are however other relevant things about this type. One is that they commonly
love Machiavellian intrigue, and are very good at it, within the worlds they know and understand.
If however they have to try to cope with alien environments, where they do not know the people and where such intrigues are
played much more ruthlessly, they are liable to find themselves hopelessly outclassed. (This can happen not simply with the politics
of the post-Soviet space and the Middle East, but with some of the murkier undergrowths of local politics in London.)
Another limitation on their understanding is that the last thing they are interested in his how the world outside the bubbles
they prefer to inhabit operates, and they commonly have absolutely contempt for 'deplorables', be they Russian, British or American.
This can lead to political misjudgements.
9. So it is not really so surprising that, when Berezovsky's 'StratCom' people told them that the Putin 'sistema' really was
the 'return of Karla', people like Steele believed everything they said, precisely as Lugovoi brought out.
There is I think every reason to believe that, from first to last, the intrigues in which he has been involved have involved
close collusion between them and elements in American intelligence -- including the FBI. As a result, a lot of people on both
sides of the Atlantic have repeatedly got into complex undercover contests in the post-Soviet space which ran right out of control,
creating a desperate need for cover-ups. A similar pattern applies in relation to the activities of such people in the Middle
East.
Another limitation on their understanding is that the last thing they are interested in his how the world outside the bubbles
they prefer to inhabit operates, and they commonly have absolutely contempt for 'deplorables', be they Russian, British or American.
This can lead to political misjudgements.
It is not just "can" it very often does. The whole situation with Russia, of which, be it her economy, history, military,
culture etc., is not known to those people, is a monstrous empirical evidence of a complete professional inadequacy of most people
populating this bubble.
Most of those people are badly educated (I am not talking about worthless formal degrees they hold) and cultured. In dry
scientific language it is called a "confirmation bias", in a simple human one it is called being ignorant snobs, that is why this
IC-academic-political-media "environment" in case of Russia prefers openly anti-Russian "sources" because those "sources" reiterate
to them what they want to hear to start with, thus Chalabi Moment is being continuously reproduced.
In case of Iraq, as an example, it is a tragedy but at least the world is relatively safe. With Russia, as I stated many times
for years--they simply have no idea what they are dealing with. None. It is expected from people who are briefed by "sources"
such as Russian fugitive London Oligarchy or ultra-liberal and fringe urban Russian "tusovka". Again, the level of "Russian Studies"
in Anglophone world is appalling. In fact, it is clear and present danger since removes or misinterprets crucial information about
the only nation in the world which can annihilate the United States completely in such a light that it creates a real danger even
for a disastrous military confrontation. I would go on a limb here and say that US military on average is much better aware of
Russia and not only in purely military terms. In some sense--it is an exception. But even there, there are some trends (and they
are not new) which are very worrisome.
"Institutionally, the Democratic Party Is Not Democratic"
Very apt characterization "the Democratic Party is nothing more
than a layer of indirection between the donor class and the Democratic consultants and the
campaigns they run;" ... " after all, the Democratic Party -- in its current incarnation -- has important roles to play
in not expanding its "own" electorate through voter registration, in the care and feeding of the intelligence community, in
warmongering, in the continual buffing and polishing of neoliberal ideology, and in general keeping the Overton Window firmly
nailed in place against policies that would convey universal concrete material benefits, especially to the working class"
Notable quotes:
"... That said, the revivification of the DNC lawsuit serves as a story hook for me to try to advance the story on the nature of political parties as such, the Democratic Party as an institution, and the function that the Democratic Party serves. I will meander through those three topics, then, and conclude. ..."
"... What sort of legal entity is ..."
"... Political parties were purely private organizations from the 1790s until the Civil War. Thus, "it was no more illegal to commit fraud in the party caucus or primary than it would be to do so in the election of officers of a drinking club." However, due to the efforts of Robert La Follette and the Progressives, states began to treat political parties as "public agencies" during the early 1890s and 1900s; by the 1920s "most states had adopted a succession of mandatory statutes regulating every major aspect of the parties' structures and operations. ..."
"... While 1787 delegates disagreed on when corruption might occur, they brought a general shared understanding of what political corruption meant. To the delegates, political corruption referred to self-serving use of public power for private ends, including, without limitation, bribery, public decisions to serve private wealth made because of dependent relationships, public decisions to serve executive power made because of dependent relationships, and use by public officials of their positions of power to become wealthy. ..."
"... Two features of the definitional framework of corruption at the time deserve special attention, because they are not frequently articulated by all modern academics or judges. The first feature is that corruption was defined in terms of an attitude toward public service, not in relation to a set of criminal laws. The second feature is that citizenship was understood to be a public office. The delegates believed that non-elected citizens wielding or attempting to influence public power can be corrupt and that elite corruption is a serious threat to a polity. ..."
"... You can see how a political party -- a strange, amphibious creature, public one moment, private the next -- is virtually optimized to create a phishing equilibrium for corruption. However, I didn't really answer my question, did I? I still don't know what sort of legal entity the Democratic Party is. However, I can say what the Democratic Party is not ..."
"... So the purpose of superdelegates is to veto a popular choice, if they decide the popular choice "can't govern." But this is circular. Do you think for a moment that the Clintonites would have tried to make sure President Sanders couldn't have governed? You bet they would have, and from Day One. ..."
"... More importantly, you can bet that the number of superdelegates retained is enough for the superdelegates, as a class, to maintain their death grip on the party. ..."
"... could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. ..."
"... That's exactly ..."
"... Functionally, the Democratic Party Is a Money Trough for Self-Dealing Consultants. Here once again is Nomiki Konst's amazing video, before the DNC: https://www.youtube.com/embed/EAvblBnXV-w Those millions! That's real money! ..."
"... Today, it is openly acknowledged by many members that the DNC and the Clinton campaign were running an operation together. In fact, it doesn't take much research beyond FEC filings to see that six of the top major consulting firms had simultaneous contracts with the DNC and HRC -- collectively earning over $335 million since 2015 [this figure balloons in Konst's video because she got a look at the actual budget]. (This does not include SuperPACs.) ..."
"... One firm, GMMB earned $236.3 million from HFA and $5.3 from the DNC in 2016. Joel Benenson, a pollster and strategist who frequents cable news, collected $4.1m from HFA while simultaneously earning $3.3 million from the DNC. Perkins Coie law firm collected $3.8 million from the DNC, $481,979 from the Convention fund and $1.8 million from HFA in 2016. ..."
"... It gets worse. Not only do the DNC's favored consultants pick sides in the primaries, they serve on the DNC boards so they can give themselves donor money. ..."
"... These campaign consultants make a lot more money off of TV and mail than they do off of field efforts. Field efforts are long-term, labor-intensive, high overhead expenditures that do not have big margins from which the consultants can draw their payouts. They also don't allow the consultants to make money off of multiple campaigns all in the same cycle, while media and mail campaigns can be done from their DC office for dozens of clients all at the same time. They get paid whether campaigns win or lose, so effectiveness is irrelevant to them. ..."
"... the Democratic Party is nothing more than a layer of indirection between the donor class and the Democratic consultants and the campaigns they run; ..."
"... the Democratic Party -- in its current incarnation -- has important roles to play in not expanding its "own" electorate through voter registration, in the care and feeding of the intelligence community, in warmongering, in the continual buffing and polishing of neoliberal ideology, and in general keeping the Overton Window firmly nailed in place against policies that would convey universal concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. ..."
"... the bottom line is that if Democratic Party controls ballot access for the forseeable future, they have to be gone through ..."
"... In retrospect, despite Sanders evident appeal and the power of his list, I think it would have been best if their faction's pushback had been much stronger ..."
An alert reader who is a representative of the class that's suing the DNC Services
Corporation for fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary -- WILDING et al. v. DNC SERVICES
CORPORATION et al., a.k.a. the "DNC lawsuit" -- threw some interesting mail over the transom;
it's from Elizabeth Beck of Beck & Lee, the firm that brought the case on behalf of the
(putatively) defrauded class (and hence their lawyer). Beck's letter reads in relevant
part:
"... I got to thinking today about how neocon and neoliberal are becoming interchangeable terms. ..."
"... As neoconservatism developed, that is with Iraq and Afghanistan, the neocons even came to embrace nation building which had always been anathema to traditional conservatism. Neocons sold this primarily by casting nation building in military terms, the creation and training of police and security forces in the target country. ..."
"... 9/11 too was critical. It vastly increased the scope of the neocon project in spawning the Global War on Terror. It increased the stage of neocon operations to the entire planet. ..."
"... Politically, neoconservatism has become the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Democrats are every bit as neocon in their views as Republicans. Only a few libertarians on the right and progressives on the left reject it. ..."
"... The roots of neoliberalism are the roots of kleptocracy. Both begin under Carter. Neoliberalism also known at various times and places as the Washington Consensus (under Clinton) and the Chicago School is the political expression for public consumption of the kleptocratic economic philosophy, just as libertarian and neoclassical economics (both fresh and salt water varieties) are its academic and governmental face. The central tenets of neoliberalism are deregulation, free markets, and free trade. If neoliberalism had a prophet or a patron saint, it was Milton Friedman. ..."
"... Again just as neoconservatism and kleptocracy or bipartisan so too is neoliberalism. There really is no daylight between Reaganism/supply side economics/trickledown on the Republican side and Clinton's Washington Consensus or Team Obama on the other. ..."
"... The distinctions between neoconservatism and neoliberalism are being increasingly lost, perhaps because most of our political classes are practitioners of both. ..."
"... At the same time, neoliberalism went from domestic to global, and here I am not just thinking about neoliberal experiments, like Pinochet's Chile or post-Soviet Russia, but the financialization of the world economy and the adoption of kleptocracy as the world economic model. ..."
"... I'm now under the opinion that you can't talk about any of the "neo-isms" without talking about the corporate state. ..."
"... With neocons, it manifests itself through the military-industrial complex (Boeing, Raytheon, etc.), and with neolibs it manifests itself through finance and industrial policy. ..."
"... But each leg has two components, a statist component and a corporate component. ..."
"... It also explains why economic/financial interests (neolib) are now considered national security interests (neocon). The viability of the state is now tied to the viability of the corporation. ..."
"... Corporate/statist (not sure "corporate" captures the looting/rentier aspect though). We see it everywhere, for example in the revolving door. ..."
"... I think you could also make the argument that Obama is perhaps the most ideal combination of neolib & neocon. ..."
"... A reading of the classical liberal economists puts some breaks on the markets, corporations, etc. Neoliberalism goes to the illogical extremes of market theory and iirc, has some influence from the Austrian school ... which gives up on any pretense of scientific exposition of economics or rationality at the micro level, assuming that irrationality will magically become rational behavior in aggregate. ..."
"... Therefore, US conservatives post Eisenhower but especially post Reagan are almost certainly economic neoliberals. Since Clinton, liberals/Democrats have been too (at least the elected ones). You nailed neoconservative and both parties are in foreign policy since at least Clinton ... though here lets not forget to go back as far as JFK and his extreme anti-Communism that led to all sorts of covert operations, The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember, the Soviets put the missiles in Cuba because we put missiles in Turkey and they backed down from Cuba because we agreed to remove the missiles from Turkey; Nikita was nice enough not to talk about that so that Kennedy didn't lose face. ..."
"... Perhaps it should be pointed out that the Clintons became fabulously wealthy just after Bill left office, mostly on the strength of his speaking engagements for the financial sector that he'd just deregulated. ..."
"... The unfortunate fact of the matter is that at that level of politics, the levers of money and power work equally well on both party's nomenklatura. They flock to it like moths to porch light. ..."
"... "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ..."
I got to thinking today about how neocon and neoliberal are becoming interchangeable terms. They did not start out that
way. My understanding is they are ways of rationalizing breaks with traditional conservatism and liberalism. Standard conservatism
was fairly isolationist. Conservatism's embrace of the Cold War put it at odds with this tendency. This was partially resolved by
accepting the Cold War as a military necessity despite its international commitments but limiting civilian programs like foreign
aid outside this context and rejecting the concept of nation building altogether.
With the end of the Cold War conservative internationalism needed a new rationale, and this was supplied by the neoconservatives.
They advocated the adoption of conservatism's Cold War military centered internationalism as the model for America's post-Cold War
international relations. After all, why drop a winning strategy? America had won the Cold War against a much more formidable opponent
than any left on the planet. What could go wrong?
America's ability not simply to project but its willingness to use military power was equated with its power more generally. If
America did not do this, it was weak and in decline. However, the frequent use of military power showed that America was great and
remained the world's hegemon. In particular, the neocons focused on the Middle East. This sales pitch gained them the backing of
both supporters of Israel (because neoconservatism was unabashedly pro-Israel) and the oil companies. The military industrial complex
was also on board because the neocon agenda effectively countered calls to reduce military spending. But neoconservatism was not
just confined to these groups. It appealed to both believers in American exceptionalism and backers of humanitarian interventions
(of which I once was one).
As neoconservatism developed, that is with Iraq and Afghanistan, the neocons even came to embrace nation building which had always
been anathema to traditional conservatism. Neocons sold this primarily by casting nation building in military terms, the creation
and training of police and security forces in the target country.
9/11 too was critical. It vastly increased the scope of the neocon project in spawning the Global War on Terror. It increased
the stage of neocon operations to the entire planet. It effectively erased the distinction between the use of military force against
countries and individuals. Individuals more than countries became targets for military, not police, action. And unlike traditional
wars or the Cold War itself, this one would never be over. Neoconservatism now had a permanent raison d'être.
Politically, neoconservatism has become the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Democrats are every bit as neocon in their views
as Republicans. Only a few libertarians on the right and progressives on the left reject it.
Neoliberalism, for its part, came about to address the concern of liberals, especially Democrats, that they were too anti-business
and too pro-union, and that this was hurting them at the polls. It was sold to the rubiat as pragmatism.
The roots of neoliberalism are the roots of kleptocracy. Both begin under Carter. Neoliberalism also known at various times and
places as the Washington Consensus (under Clinton) and the Chicago School is the political expression for public consumption of the
kleptocratic economic philosophy, just as libertarian and neoclassical economics (both fresh and salt water varieties) are its academic
and governmental face. The central tenets of neoliberalism are deregulation, free markets, and free trade. If neoliberalism had a
prophet or a patron saint, it was Milton Friedman.
Again just as neoconservatism and kleptocracy or bipartisan so too is neoliberalism. There really is no daylight between Reaganism/supply
side economics/trickledown on the Republican side and Clinton's Washington Consensus or Team Obama on the other.
And just as we saw with neoconservatism, neoliberalism expanded from its core premises and effortlessly transitioned into globalization,
which can also be understood as global kleptocracy.
The distinctions between neoconservatism and neoliberalism are being increasingly lost, perhaps because most of our political
classes are practitioners of both. But initially at least neoconservatism was focused on foreign policy and neoliberalism on
domestic economic policy. As the War on Terror expanded, however, neoconservatism came back home with the creation and expansion
of the surveillance state.
At the same time, neoliberalism went from domestic to global, and here I am not just thinking about neoliberal experiments,
like Pinochet's Chile or post-Soviet Russia, but the financialization of the world economy and the adoption of kleptocracy as the
world economic model.
jest on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 5:55am
I'm now under the opinion that you can't talk about any of the "neo-isms" without talking about the corporate state.
That's really the tie that binds the two things you are speaking of.
With neocons, it manifests itself through the military-industrial complex (Boeing, Raytheon, etc.), and with neolibs it
manifests itself through finance and industrial policy.
For example, you need the US gov't to bomb Iraq (Raytheon) in order to secure oil (Halliburton), which is priced & financed
in US dollars (Goldman Sachs). It's like a 3-legged stool; if you remove one of these legs, the whole thing comes down. But
each leg has two components, a statist component and a corporate component.
The entity that enables all of this is the corporate state.
It also explains why economic/financial interests (neolib) are now considered national security interests (neocon). The viability
of the state is now tied to the viability of the corporation.
lambert on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 9:18am
Corporate/statist (not sure "corporate" captures the looting/rentier aspect though). We see it everywhere, for example in the
revolving door.
I think the stool has more legs and is also more dynamic; more like Ikea furniture. For example, the press is surely critical
in organizing the war.
But the yin/yang of neo-lib/neo-con is nice: It's as if the neo-cons handle the kinetic aspects (guns, torture) and the neo-libs
handle the mental aspects (money, mindfuckery) but both merge (like Negronponte being on the board of Americans Select) over time
as margins fall and decorative aspects like democratic institutions and academic freedom get stripped away. The state and the
corporation have always been tied to each other but now the ties are open and visible (for example, fines are just a cost of doing
business, a rent on open corruption.)
And then there's the concept of "human resource," that abstracts all aspects of humanity away except those that are exploitable.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
jest on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 1:37pm
I like the term much better than Fascist, as it is 1) more accurate, 2) avoids the Godwin's law issue, and 3) makes them sound
totalitarianist.
Yes, I would agree that additional legs make sense. The media aspect is essential, as it neutralizes the freedom of the press,
without changing the constitution. It dovetails pretty well with the notion of Inverted Totalitarianism.
I think you could also make the argument that Obama is perhaps the most ideal combination of neolib & neocon. The
two sides of him flow together so seamlessly, no one seems to notice. But that's in part because he is so corporate.
Lex on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 8:28am
Actually, neoliberalism is an economic term. An economic liberal in the UK and EU is for open markets, capitalism, etc. You're
right that neoliberalism comes heavily from the University of Chicago, but it has little to do with American political liberalism.
A reading of the classical liberal economists puts some breaks on the markets, corporations, etc. Neoliberalism goes to the
illogical extremes of market theory and iirc, has some influence from the Austrian school ... which gives up on any pretense of
scientific exposition of economics or rationality at the micro level, assuming that irrationality will magically become rational
behavior in aggregate.
Therefore, US conservatives post Eisenhower but especially post Reagan are almost certainly economic neoliberals. Since Clinton,
liberals/Democrats have been too (at least the elected ones). You nailed neoconservative and both parties are in foreign policy
since at least Clinton ... though here lets not forget to go back as far as JFK and his extreme anti-Communism that led to all
sorts of covert operations, The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Remember, the Soviets put the missiles in
Cuba because we put missiles in Turkey and they backed down from Cuba because we agreed to remove the missiles from Turkey; Nikita
was nice enough not to talk about that so that Kennedy didn't lose face.
"Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Hugh on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 3:57pm
I agree that neoconservatism and neoliberalism are two facets of corporatism/kleptocracy. I like the kinetic vs. white collar
distinction.
The roots of neoliberalism go back to the 1940s and the Austrians, but in the US it really only comes into currency with Clinton
as a deliberate shift of the Democratic/liberal platform away from labor and ordinary Americans to make it more accommodating
to big business and big money. I had never heard of neoliberalism before Bill Clinton but it is easy to see how those tendencies
were at work under Carter, but not under Johnson.
This was a rough and ready sketch. I guess I should also have mentioned PNAC or the Project to Find a New Mission for the MIC.
Hugh on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 10:44pm
I have never understood this love of Clinton that some Democrats have just as I have never understood the attraction of Reagan
for Republicans. There is no Clinton faction. There is no Obama faction. Hillary Clinton is Obama's frigging Secretary of State.
Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both of whom served as Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, were Obama's top financial and economic
advisors. Timothy Geithner was their protégé. Leon Panetta Obama's Director of the CIA and current Secretary of Defense was Clinton's
Director of OMB and then Chief of Staff.
The Democrats as a party are neoconservative and neoliberal as are Obama and the Clintons. As are Republicans.
What does corporations need regulation mean? It is rather like saying that the best way to deal with cancer is to find a cure
for it. Sounds nice but there is no content to it. Worse in the real world, the rich own the corporations, the politicians, and
the regulators. So even if you come up with good ideas for regulation they aren't going to happen.
What you are suggesting looks a whole lot another iteration of lesser evilism meets Einstein's definition of insanity. How
is it any different from any other instance of Democratic tribalism?
Lex on Mon, 08/20/2012 - 11:49pm
Perhaps it should be pointed out that the Clintons became fabulously wealthy just after Bill left office, mostly on the strength
of his speaking engagements for the financial sector that he'd just deregulated. Both he and Hillary hew to a pretty damned neoconservative
foreign policy ... with that dash of "humanitarian interventionism" that makes war palatable to liberals.
But your deeper point is that there isn't enough of a difference between Obama and Bill Clinton to really draw a distinction,
not in terms of ideology. What a theoretical Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked like is irrelevant, because both Bill
and Obama talked a lot different than they walked. Any projection of a Hillary Clinton administration is just that and requires
arguing that it would have been different than Bill's administration and policies.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that at that level of politics, the levers of money and power work equally well on
both party's nomenklatura. They flock to it like moths to porch light.
That the money chose Obama over Clinton doesn't say all that much, because there's no evidence suggesting that the money didn't
like Clinton or that it would have chosen McCain over Clinton. It's not as if Clinton's campaign was driven into the ground by
lack of funds.
Regardless, that to be a Democrat i would kind of have to chose between two factions that are utterly distasteful to me just
proves that i have no business being a Democrat. And since i wouldn't vote for either of those names, i guess i'll just stick
to third parties and exit the political tribalism loop for good.
"Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Looks like Browder was connected to MI6. That means that intellignece agances participated in economic rape of Russia That's explains a lot, including his change of citizenship from US to UK. He wanted better
protection.
Notable quotes:
"... The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S. Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called the first shot in the New Cold War. ..."
"... Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale. ..."
"... Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky – rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme. ..."
"... Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part, brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy. ..."
"... That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along. ..."
"... By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump Tower with Trump's son. ..."
"... But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post. ..."
"... There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past. ..."
"... Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams, the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen." ..."
"... So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War. ..."
"... Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about "Russian propaganda" and "fake news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false." ..."
"... First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue. ..."
"... From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was. I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available. ..."
"... Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you. ..."
"... Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the Russian financial crisis. ..."
"... Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes. ..."
"... Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it. ..."
"... I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and 1984 not so distant. ..."
"... Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews. I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into accurately reporting it. ..."
"... Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars. The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial, at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years. ..."
"... Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary film product. ..."
"... "[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row? ..."
"... "The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement. ..."
"... "The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic. The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD. ..."
"... Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern about Canada following the Cold War without examination. ..."
"... Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution (in name yes, but in fact not). ..."
"... I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could (with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a stop to them. ..."
"... backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All the plunder flowed into the Western Countries. ..."
"... I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of the crooks looting Russia. ..."
"... I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart. I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it up. ..."
"... The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators: https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/ ..."
Exclusive: A documentary debunking the Magnitsky myth, which was an opening salvo in the New Cold War, was largely blocked from
viewing in the West but has now become a factor in Russia-gate, reports Robert Parry.
Near the center of the current furor over Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 is a documentary that
almost no one in the West has been allowed to see, a film that flips the script on the story of the late Sergei Magnitsky and his
employer, hedge-fund operator William Browder.
The Russian lawyer, Natalie Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump Jr. and other advisers to Donald Trump Sr.'s campaign, represented
a company that had run afoul of a U.S. investigation into money-laundering allegedly connected to the Magnitsky case and his death
in a Russian prison in 2009. His death sparked a campaign spearheaded by Browder, who used his wealth and clout to lobby the U.S.
Congress in 2012 to enact the Magnitsky Act to punish alleged human rights abusers in Russia. The law became what might be called
the first shot in the New Cold War.
According to Browder's narrative, companies ostensibly under his control had been hijacked by corrupt Russian officials in furtherance
of a $230 million tax-fraud scheme; he then dispatched his "lawyer" Magnitsky to investigate and – after supposedly uncovering evidence
of the fraud – Magnitsky blew the whistle only to be arrested by the same corrupt officials who then had him locked up in prison
where he died of heart failure from physical abuse.
Despite Russian denials – and the "dog ate my homework" quality of Browder's self-serving narrative – the dramatic tale became
a cause celebre in the West. The story eventually attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a known critic of
President Vladimir Putin. Nekrasov decided to produce a docu-drama that would present Browder's narrative to a wider public. Nekrasov
even said he hoped that he might recruit Browder as the narrator of the tale.
However, the project took an unexpected
turn when Nekrasov's research kept turning up contradictions to Browder's storyline, which began to look more and more like a
corporate cover story. Nekrasov discovered that a woman working in Browder's company was the actual whistleblower and that Magnitsky
– rather than a crusading lawyer – was an accountant who was implicated in the scheme.
So, the planned docudrama suddenly was transformed into a documentary with a dramatic reversal as Nekrasov struggles with what
he knows will be a dangerous decision to confront Browder with what appear to be deceptions. In the film, you see Browder go from
a friendly collaborator into an angry adversary who tries to bully Nekrasov into backing down.
Blocked Premiere
Ultimately, Nekrasov completes his extraordinary film – entitled "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes" – and it was set for
a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016. However, at the last moment – faced with Browder's legal threats
– the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States, a situation that, in part,
brought Natalie Veselnitskaya into this controversy.
Film director Andrei Nekrasov, who produced "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."
As a lawyer defending Prevezon, a real-estate company registered in Cyprus, on a money-laundering charge, she
was dealing with U.S. prosecutors in New York City and, in that role, became an advocate for lifting the U.S. sanctions, The
Washington Post reported.
That was when she turned to promoter Rob Goldstone to set up a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. To secure the
sit-down on June 9, 2016, Goldstone dangled the prospect that Veselnitskaya had some derogatory financial information from the Russian
government about Russians supporting the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr. jumped at the possibility and brought senior Trump
campaign advisers, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, along.
By all accounts, Veselnitskaya had little or nothing to offer about the DNC and turned the conversation instead to the Magnitsky
Act and Putin's retaliatory measure to the sanctions, canceling a program in which American parents adopted Russian children. One
source told me that Veselnitskaya also wanted to enhance her stature in Russia with the boast that she had taken a meeting at Trump
Tower with Trump's son.
But another goal of Veselnitskaya's U.S. trip was to participate in an effort to give Americans a chance to see Nekrasov's
blacklisted documentary. She traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post.
There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the
Newseum near Capitol Hill. Browder's lawyers. who had successfully intimidated the European Parliament, also tried to strong arm
the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations
in the past.
Their stand wasn't exactly a profile in courage. "We're not going to allow them not to show the film," said Scott Williams,
the chief operating officer of the Newseum. "We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen."
In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times
added that "A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides." Heaven
forbid!
One-Time Showing
So, Nekrasov's documentary got a one-time showing with Veselnitskaya reportedly in attendance and with a follow-up discussion
moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially
shielded from the documentary's discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment
of the New Cold War.
Financier William Browder (right) with Magnitsky's widow and son, along with European parliamentarians.
After the Newseum presentation,
a Washington Post editorial branded Nekrasov's documentary Russian "agit-prop" and sought to discredit Nekrasov without addressing
his many documented examples of Browder's misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov
of using "facts highly selectively" and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin's "campaign to discredit Mr. Browder
and the Magnitsky Act."
The Post also misrepresented the structure of the film by noting that it mixed fictional scenes with real-life interviews and
action, a point that was technically true but willfully misleading because the fictional scenes were from Nekrasov's original idea
for a docu-drama that he shows as part of explaining his evolution from a believer in Browder's self-exculpatory story to a skeptic.
But the Post's deception is something that almost no American would realize because almost no one got to see the film.
The Post concluded smugly: "The film won't grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin's increasingly
sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television
networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky's family.
"We don't worry that Mr. Nekrasov's film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully
exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions."
The Post's gleeful editorial had the feel of something you
might read in a totalitarian
society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for
saying something that almost no one heard.
New Paradigm
The Post's satisfaction that Nekrasov's documentary would not draw a large audience represents what is becoming a new paradigm
in U.S. mainstream journalism, the idea that it is the media's duty to protect the American people from seeing divergent narratives
on sensitive geopolitical issues.
Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about
"Russian propaganda" and "fake
news" with The New York Times and other major news outlets
eagerly awaiting algorithms
that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google's First Draft Coalition deem "false."
First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such
as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft's job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of
Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue.
In the meantime, there is the ad hoc approach that was applied to Nekrasov's documentary. Having missed the Newseum showing, I
was only able to view the film because I was given a special password to an online version.
From searches that I did on Wednesday, Nekrasov's film was not available on Amazon although a pro-Magnitsky documentary was.
I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
But the Post's editors were right in their expectation that "The film won't grab a wide audience." Instead, it has become a good
example of how political and legal pressure can effectively black out what we used to call "the other side of the story." The film
now, however, has unexpectedly become a factor in the larger drama of Russia-gate and the drive to remove Donald Trump Sr. from the
White House.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.
You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in
print here or as an e-book
(from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Why are so many people–corporate executives, governments, journalists, politicians–afraid of William Browder? Why isn't
Andrei Nekrasov's film available via digital versatile disk, for sale on line? Mr. Parry, why can't you find it? Oh, wait: You
did! Heaven forbid we, your readers, should screen it. Since you, too, are helping keep that film a big fat secret at least give
us a few clues as to where we can find it. Throw us a bone! Thank you.
Rob Roy , July 13, 2017 at 2:45 pm
Parry isn't keeping the film viewing a secret. He was given a private password and perhaps can get permission to let the readers
here have it. It isn't up to Parry himself but rather to the person(s) who have the rights to the password. I've come across this
problem before.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 4:01 pm
Parry wrote: I did find a streaming service that appeared to have the film available.
Any link?? I am willing to buy it.
Lisa , July 13, 2017 at 6:28 pm
This may not be of much help, as the film is dubbed in Russian. If you want to look for the Russian versions on the internet,
search for: "????? ?????? ????????? "????? ???????????. ?? ????????"
Hysterical agit-prop troll insists that world trembles in fear of "genuine American hero" William Browder. John McCain
in 2012 was too busy trembling to notice that Browder had given up his US citizenship in 1998 in order to better profit from the
Russian financial crisis.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Abe – and to escape U.S. taxes.
incontinent reader , July 13, 2017 at 6:24 pm
Well stated.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 2:38 pm
Mr. Parry,
Excellent report and analysis. Thanks for timely reminder regarding the Magitsky story and the fascinating background regarding
Andrei Nekrasov's film, in particular its metamorphosis and subsequent aggressive suppression. Both of those factors render the
film a particular credibility and wish on my part to view it.
Is there any chance you can share information regarding a means of accessing the forbidden film?
I am beginning to feel more and more like the citizens of the old USSR, who, were to my recollection and understanding
back in the 50's and 60's:. Longing to read and hear facts suppressed by the communist state, dependent upon the Voice of America
and underground news sources within the Soviet Union for the truth. RU, Consortium news, et. al. seem somewhat a parallel, and
1984 not so distant.
Last night, After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson, i was inspired to watch episode 2 of The Putin Interviews.
I felt enlightened. If only the Establishment Media could turn from promoting its agenda of shaping and suppressing the news into
accurately reporting it.
Media corruption is not so new. Yellow journalism around the turn of the 19th century, took us into a progression of wars.
The War to End All Wars didn't. Blame the munitions makers and the Military Industrial Complex if you will, but a corrupt medial,
at the very least enabled a progression of wars over the last 120 or so years.
Demonizing other countries is bad enough, but wilfully ignoring the potential for a nuclear war to end not only war, but life
as we know it, is appalling.
"After watching Max Boot self destruct on Tucker Carlson "
Am I the only one who thinks that Max Boot should have been institutionalized for some time already? He is not well.
Vincent Castigliola , July 13, 2017 at 9:41 pm
Anna,
Perhaps Max can share a suite with John McCain. Sadly, the illness is widespread and sometimes seems to be in the majority. Neo
con/lib both are adamant in finding enemies and imposing punishment.
Finding splinters, ignoring beams. Changing regimes everywhere. Making the world safe for Democracy. Unless a man they don't
like get elected
Max Boot parents are Russain Jews who seemingly instilled in him a rabid hatred for everything Russian. The same is with Aperovitch,
the CrowdStrike fraudster. The first Soviet (Bolshevik) government was 85% Jewish. Considering what happened to Russia under Bolsheviks,
it seems that Russians are supremely tolerant people.
Anna, Anti-Semitism will get you NOWHERE, and you should be ashamed of yourself for injecting such HATRED into the rational
discussion here.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:03 pm
Dear orwell
re Anna
Its not anti Semitic if its true .and its true he is a Russian Jew and its very obvious he hates Russia–as does the whole Jewish
Zionist crowd in the US.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:02 am
orwell, I wonder why the truth always turns out to be so anti-semitic!?
Taras77 , July 13, 2017 at 11:17 pm
I hope you caught the preceding tucker interview with Ralph Peters, who says he is a retired us army LTC. He came off as completely
deranged and hysterical. The two interviews back to back struck me as neo con desperation and panic. My respect for Tucker
just went up for taking on these two wackos.
Zachary Smith , July 13, 2017 at 2:51 pm
The fact that the film is being suppressed by everybody is significant to me. I don't know a thing about the "facts" of the
Magnitsky case, and a quick look at the results of a Google search suggests this film isn't going to be available to me unless
I shell out some unknown amount of money.
If the producers want the film to be seen, perhaps they ought to release it for download to any interested parties for a nominal
sum. This will mean they won't make any profit, but on the other hand they will be able to spit in the eyes of the censors.
Dan Mason , July 13, 2017 at 6:42 pm
I went searching the net for access to this film and found that I was blocked at every turn. I did find a few links which all
seemed to go to the same destination which claimed to provide access once I registered with their site. I decided to avoid that
route. I don't really have that much interest in the Magnitsky affair, but I do wonder why we are being denied access to information.
Who has this kind of influence, and why are they so fearful. I'm really afraid that we already live in a largely hidden Orwellian
world. Now where did I put that tin foil hat?
The Orwellian World is NOT HIDDEN, it is clearly visible.
Drew Hunkins , July 13, 2017 at 2:53 pm
Nekrasov, though he's a Putin critic, is a genuine hero in this instance. He ulitimately put his preconceptions aside and
took the story where it truly led him. Nekrasov deserves boatloads of praise for his handling of Browder and his final documentary
film product.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 3:30 pm
Drew – good comment. It's very hard to "turn", isn't it? I wonder if many people appreciate what it takes to do this. Easier
to justify, turn a blind eye, but to actually stop, question, think, and then follow where the story leads you takes courage and
strength.
Especially when your bucking an aggressive billionaire.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:49 am
BannanaBoat – that too!
Zim , July 13, 2017 at 3:11 pm
This is interesting:
"In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hillary Clinton opposed the Magnitsky Act while serving as secretary
of state. Her opposition coincided with Bill Clinton giving a speech in Moscow for Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank!
for which he was paid $500,000.
"Mr. Clinton also received a substantial payout in 2010 from Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank whose executives
were at risk of being hurt by possible U.S. sanctions tied to a complex and controversial case of alleged corruption in Russia.
Members of Congress wrote to Mrs. Clinton in 2010 seeking to deny visas to people who had been implicated by Russian accountant
Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed and died in prison after he uncovered evidence of a large tax-refund fraud. William Browder,
a foreign investor in Russia who had hired Mr. Magnitsky, alleged that the accountant had turned up evidence that Renaissance
officials, among others, participated in the fraud."
The State Department opposed the sanctions bill at the time, as did the Russian government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov pushed Hillary Clinton to oppose the legislation during a meeting in St. Petersburg in June 2012, citing that U.S.-Russia
relations would suffer as a result."
"[Veselnitskaya] traveled to Washington in the days after her Trump Tower meeting and attended a House Foreign Affairs
Committee hearing, according to The Washington Post." The other day I saw photos of her sitting right behind Amb. McFaul in some
past hearing. How did she get a seat on the front row?
Now I remember that Post editorial. I was one of only 20 commenters before they shut down comments. It was some heavy pearl
clutching.
afterthought couldn't the film be shown on RT America?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:11 am
Would that not enable Bowder's employees online to claim that this documentary is Russian state propaganda, which it obviously
is not because it would have been made available for free everywhere already just like RT. I believe that Nekrasov does not like
RT and RT probably still does not like Nekrasov. The point of RT has never been the truth then the alternative point of view,
as they advertised: Audi alteram partem.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 3:41 pm
"The approach taken by Brennan's task force in assessing Russia and its president seems eerily reminiscent of the analytical
blinders that hampered the U.S. intelligence community when it came to assessing the objectives and intent of Saddam Hussein
and his inner leadership regarding weapons of mass destruction. The Russia NIA notes, 'Many of the key judgments rely on a
body of reporting from multiple sources that are consistent with our understanding of Russian behavior.' There is no better
indication of a tendency toward 'group think' than that statement.
Moreover, when one reflects on the fact much of this 'body of reporting' was shoehorned after the fact into an analytical
premise predicated on a single source of foreign-provided intelligence, that statement suddenly loses much of its impact.
"The acknowledged deficit on the part of the U.S. intelligence community of fact-driven insight into the specifics of
Russian presidential decision-making, and the nature of Vladimir Putin as an individual in general, likewise seems problematic.
The U.S. intelligence community was hard wired into pre-conceived notions about how and what Saddam Hussein would think and
decide, and as such remained blind to the fact that he would order the totality of his weapons of mass destruction to be destroyed
in the summer of 1991, or that he could be telling the truth when later declaring that Iraq was free of WMD.
'President Putin has repeatedly and vociferously denied any Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Those
who cite the findings of the Russia NIA as indisputable proof to the contrary, however, dismiss this denial out of hand. And yet
nowhere in the Russia NIA is there any evidence that those who prepared it conducted anything remotely resembling the kind of
'analysis of alternatives' mandated by the ODNI when it comes to analytic standards used to prepare intelligence community assessments
and estimates. Nor is there any evidence that the CIA's vaunted 'Red Cell' was approached to provide counterintuitive assessments
of premises such as 'What if President Putin is telling the truth?'
'Throughout its history, the NIC has dealt with sources of information that far exceeded any sensitivity that might attach
to Brennan's foreign intelligence source. The NIC had two experts that it could have turned to oversee a project like the Russia
NIA!the NIO for Cyber Issues, and the Mission Manager of the Russian and Eurasia Mission Center; logic dictates that both should
have been called upon, given the subject matter overlap between cyber intrusion and Russian intent.
'The excuse that Brennan's source was simply too sensitive to be shared with these individuals, and the analysts assigned to
them, is ludicrous!both the NIO for cyber issues and the CIA's mission manager for Russia and Eurasia are cleared to receive the
most highly classified intelligence and, moreover, are specifically mandated to oversee projects such as an investigation into
Russian meddling in the American electoral process.
'President Trump has come under repeated criticism for his perceived slighting of the U.S. intelligence community in repeatedly
citing the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence failure when downplaying intelligence reports, including the Russia
NIA, about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Adding insult to injury, the president's most recent comments were made
on foreign soil (Poland), on the eve of his first meeting with President Putin, at the G-20 Conference in Hamburg, Germany, where
the issue of Russian meddling was the first topic on the agenda.
"The politics of the wisdom of the timing and location of such observations aside, the specific content of the president's
statements appear factually sound."
Thanks Abe once again, for providing us with news which will never be printed or aired in our MSM. Brennan may ignore the NIC,
as Congress and the Executive Branch constantly avoid paying attention to the GAO. Why even have these agencies, if our leaders
aren't going to listen them?
Virginia , July 13, 2017 at 6:16 pm
Abe, I'm always amazed at how much you know. Thank you for sharing. If you have your comments in article form or on a site
where they can be shared, I'd really like to know about it. I've tried, but I garble the many points you make when trying to explain
historical events you've told us about.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 9:08 am
Thanks Abe. You are a real asset to us here at CN.
John V. Walsh , July 13, 2017 at 3:54 pm
Very good article! The entire Magnitsky saga has become so convoluted and mired in controversy and propaganda that it is very
hard to understand. I remember vaguely the controversy surrounding the showing of the film at the Newseum. it is especially impressive
that Nekrasov changed his opinion as fcts unfolded.
I will now try to get the docudrama and watch it.
If anyone has suggestions on how to do this, please let me know via a response. here.
Thanks.
A 'Magnitsky Act' in Canada was approved by the (appointed) Senate several months ago and is now undergoing fine tuning in
the House of Commons prior to a third and final vote of approval. The proposed law has the unanimous support of the parties in
Parliament.
A column in today's Globe and Mail daily by the newspaper's 'chief political writer' tiptoes around the Magnitsky story, never
once daring to admit that a contrary narrative exists to that of Bill Browder.
Magnitsky Act in Canada has been based on made-up `facts` as Globe & Mail reporting proves. Not news, but deepens my concern
about Canada following the Cold War without examination.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 5:56 pm
Roger Annis – just little lemmings following the leader. Disgusting. I hope you posted a comment at the Globe and Mail, Roger,
with a link to this article.
Britton , July 13, 2017 at 4:05 pm
Browder is a Communist Jew, his father has a Communist past according to his background so I know I can't trust anything he
says. Hes just one of many shady interests undermining Putin I've seen over the years. His book Red Notice is just as shady. Good
reporting Consortium News. Fox News promotes Browder like crazy every chance they get especially Fox Business channel.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:06 pm
"Browder is a Communist " Hedge Fund managers are hardly Communist – that's an oxymoron.
ToivoS , July 13, 2017 at 6:02 pm
Bill Browder's grandfather was Earl Browder, leader of the CPUSA from the the late 30s to late 40s. His father was also
a communist. Bill jr parlayed those connections with the Soviet apparatchiks to gain a foothold in looting Russia of its state
assets during the 1990s. No he was not a communist but neither were the leaders of the Soviet Union at the time of its dissolution
(in name yes, but in fact not).
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 6:34 pm
ToivoS,
thank you for this background information.
My main intention had been to straighten out the blurring of calling a hedge fund manager communist. Nowadays everything gets
blurred by people misrepresenting political concepts. Either the people have been dumbed-down by misinformation or misrepresenting
is done in order to keep neo-liberalism the dominant economical model. On many occasions I had read comments of people seemingly
believing that Nationalsocialism had been some variant of socialism. Even the ideas of Bernie Sanders had been misrepresented
as socialist instead of social democratic ones.
backwardsevolution , July 13, 2017 at 6:21 pm
Joe Average – Dave P. mentioned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" the other day. I've been
reading a long synopsis of this book. What Britton says appears to be quite true. I don't know about Browder, but from what I've
read the Jews were instrumental in the communist party, in the deaths of so many Russians. It wasn't just the Jews, but they played
a big part. It's no wonder Solzhenitsyn's book has been "lost in translation", at least into English, for so many years.
I've also heard that it was the Jewish commissars who, when the USSR fell apart, rushed off to grab everything they could
(with the help of outside Jewish money) and became the Russian oligarchs we hear about today. This is probably what Britton is
getting at: "His father has a communist past." You go from running the government to owning it. Anti-Putin because Putin put a
stop to them.
Dave P. , July 13, 2017 at 7:37 pm
backwardsevolution: I worked with a Soviet emigre engineer – Jewish – on the same project in an Engineering design and
construction company during early 1990's. He immigrated with his family around 1991. In Soviet Union, there being no private financial
institutions or lawyers so to speak , many Jews went into science and engineering. A very interesting person, we were close work
place friends. His elder brother had stayed behind back in Russia. His brother was in Moscow and involved in this plunder going
on there. He used to tell me all these hair raising first hand stories about what was going on in Russia during that time. All
the plunder flowed into the Western Countries.
In recent history, no country went through this kind of plunder on a scale Russia went through during ten or fifteen years
starting in 1992. Russia was a very badly ravaged country when Putin took over. Means of production, finance, all came to halt,
and society itself had completely broken down. It appears that the West has all the intentions to do it again.
I have read all the comments up to yours you have told it like it was in Russia in those years. Browder was the king of
the crooks looting Russia. Then he got to John McCain with all his lies and bullshit and was responsible for the sanctions
on Russia. All the comments aboutBrowders grandfather andCommunist party are all true but hardly important. Except that it probably
was how Browder was able to get his fingers on the pie in Russia. And he sure did get his fingers in the pie BIG TIME.
I am a Canadian and am aware of Maginsky Act in Canada. Our Minister Chrystal Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a
few months ago both of these two you could say are not fans of Putin, I certainly don't know what they spoke about but other than
lies from Browder there is no reason she should have been talking with him. I have made comments on other forums regarding these
two meeting. Read Browders book and hopefully see the documentary that this article is about. When I read his book I knew instantly
that he was a crook a charloten and a liar. Just the kind of folk John McCain and a lot of other folks in US politics love. You
all have a nice Peacefull day
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:38 am
Joe Average – "I guess that this book puts blame for Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further
rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's."
No, it doesn't put the blame entirely on the Jews; it just spells out that they did play a large part. As one Jewish scholar
said, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was too much of an academic, too intelligent to ever put the blame entirely on one group. But something
like 40 – 60 million died – shot, taken out on boats with rocks around their necks and thrown overboard, starved, gassed in rail
cars, poisoned, worked to death, froze, you name it. Every other human slaughter pales in comparison. Good old man, so civilized
(sarc)!
But someone(s) has been instrumental in keeping this book from being translated into English (or so I've read many places online).
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" and his other books have been translated, but not this one. (Although I just found one site
that has almost all of the chapters translated, but not all). Several people ordered the book off Amazon, only to find out that
it was in the Russian language. LOL
Solzhenitsyn does say at one point in the book: "Communist rebellions in Germany post-WWI was a big reason for the revival
of anti-Semitism (as there was no serious anti-Semitism in the imperial [Kaiser] Germany of 1870 – 1918)."
Lots of Jewish people made it into the upper levels of the Soviet government, academia, etc. (and lots of them were murdered
too). I might skip reading these types of books until I get older. Too bleak. Hard enough reading about the day-to-day stuff here
without going back in time for more fun!
I remember reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine," but I just could not get through the chapter on the USSR falling apart.
I started reading it, but I didn't want to finish it (and I didn't) because it just made me angry. The West was too unfair! Russia
was asking for help, but instead the West just looted. I'd say that Russia was very lucky to have someone like Putin clean it
up.
Keep smiling, Joe.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:58 am
Dave P. – I told you, you are a wealth of information, a walking encyclopedia. Interesting about your co-worker. Sounds like
it was a free-for-all in Russia. Yes, I totally agree that Putin has done and is doing all he can to bring his country back up.
Very difficult job he is doing, and I hope he is successful at keeping the West out as much as he can, at least until Russia is
strong and sure enough to invite them in on their own terms.
Now go and tell your wife what I said about you being a "walking encyclopedia". She'll probably have a good laugh. (Not that
you're not, but you know what she'll say: "Okay, smartie, now go and do the dishes.")
Chucky LeRoi , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 am
Just some small scale, local color kind of stuff, but living in the USA, west coast specifically, it was quite noticeable in
the mid to late '90's how many Russians with money were suddenly appearing. No apparent skills or 'jobs', but seemingly able to
pay for stuff. Expensive stuff.
A neighbor invited us to her 'place in the mountains', which turned out to be where a lumber company had almost terra-formed
an area and was selling off the results. Her advice: When you go to the lake (i.e., the low area now gathering runoff, paddle
boats rentals, concession stand) you will see a lot of men with huge stomachs and tiny Speedos. They will be very rude, pushy,
confrontational. Ignore them, DO NOT comment on their rudeness or try to deal with their manners. They are Russians, and the amount
of trouble it will stir up – and probable repercussions – are simply not worth it.
Back in town, the anecdotes start piling up quickly. I am talking crowbars through windows (for a perceived insult). A beating
where the victim – who was probably trying something shady – was so pulped the emergency room staff couldn't tell if the implement
used was a 2X4 or a baseball bat. When found he had with $3k in his pocket: robbery was not the motive. More traffic accidents
involving guys with very nice cars and serious attitude problems. I could go on. More and more often somewhere in the relating
of these incidents the phrase " this Russian guy " would come up. It was the increased use of this phrase that was so noticeable.
And now the disclaimer.
Before anybody goes off, I am not anti-Russian, Russo-phobic, what have you. I studied the Russian language in high school
and college (admittedly decades ago). My tax guy is Russian. I love him. My day to day interactions have led me to this pop psychology
observation: the extreme conditions that produced that people and culture produced extremes. When they are of the good, loving
, caring, cultured, helpful sort, you could ask for no better friends. The generosity can be embarrassing. When they are of the
materialistic, evil, self-centered don't f**k with me I am THE BADDEST ASS ON THE PLANET sort, the level of mania and self-importance
is impossible to deal with, just get as far away as possible. It's worked for me.
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 8:10 pm
backwardsevolution,
thanks for the info. I'll add the book to the list of books onto my to-read list. As far as I know a Kibbutz could be described
as a Communist microcosm. The whole idea of Communism itself is based on Marx (a Jew by birth). A while ago I had started reading
"Mein Kampf". I've got to finish the book, in order to see if my assumption is correct. I guess that this book puts blame for
Communism entirely on the Jewish people and that this gave even further rise to antisemitism in the Germany of the 1930's.
The most known Russian Oligarchs that I've heard of are mainly of Jewish origin, but as far as I know they had been too young
to be commissars at the time of the demise of the USSR. At least one aspect I've read of many times is that a lot of them built
their fortunes with the help of quite shady business dealings.
With regard to President Putin I've read that he made a deal with the oligarchs: they should pay their taxes, keep/invest their
money in Russia and keep out of politics. In return he wouldn't dig too deep into their past. Right at the moment everybody in
the West is against President Putin, because he stopped the looting of his country and its citizens and that's something our Western
oligarchs and financial institutions don't like.
On a side note: Several years ago I had started to read several volumes about German history. Back then I didn't notice an
important aspect that should attract my attention a few years later when reading about the rise of John D. Rockefeller. Charlemagne
(Charles the Great) took over power from the Merovingians. Prior to becoming King of the Franks he had been Hausmeier (Mayor of
the Palace) for the Merovingians. Mayor of the Palace was the title of the manager of the household, which seems to be similar
to a procurator and/or accountant (bookkeeper). The similarity of the beginnings of both careers struck me. John D. Rockefeller
started as a bookkeeper. If you look at Bill Gates you'll realize that he was smart enough to buy an operating system for a few
dollars, improved it and sold it to IBM on a large scale. The widely celebrated Steve Jobs was basically the marketing guy, whilst
the real brain behind (the product) Apple had been Steve Wozniak.
Another side note: If we're going down the path of neo-liberalism it will lead us straight back to feudalism – at least if
the economy doesn't blow up (PCR, Michael Hudson, Mike Whitney, Mike Maloney, Jim Rogers, Richard D. Wolff, and many more economists
make excellent points that our present Western economy can't go on forever and is kept alive artificially).
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 12:50 am
Joe Average – somehow my reply to you ended up above your post. What? How did that happen? You can find it there. Thanks for
the interesting info about John D. Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs and Wozniak. Some are good managers, others good at sales, while others
are the creative inventors.
Yes, Joe, I totally agree that we are headed back to feudalism. I don't think we'll have much choice as the oil is running
out. We'll probably be okay, but our children? I worry about them. They'll notice a big change in their lifetimes. The discovery
and capture of oil pulled forward a large population. As we scale back, we could be in trouble, food-wise. Or at least it looks
that way.
Thanks, Joe.
Miranda Keefe , July 14, 2017 at 5:48 am
Charlemagne did not take over from the Merovingians. The Mayor of the Palace was not an accountant.
During the 7th Century the Mayor of the Place more and more became the actual ruler of the Franks. The office had existed for
over a century and was basically the "prime minister" to the king. By the time Pepin of Herstal, a scion of a powerful Frankish
family, took the position in 680, the king was ceremonial leader doing ritual and the Mayor ruled- like the relationship of the
Emperor and the Shogun in Japan. In 687 Pepin's Austrasia conquered Neustria and Burgundy and he added "Duke of the Franks" to
his titles. The office became hereditary.
When Pepin died in 714 there was some unrest as nobles from various parts of the joint kingdoms attempted to get different
ones of his heirs in the office until his son Charles Martel took the reins in 718. This is the famous Charles Martel who defeated
the Moors at Tours in 732. But that was not his only accomplishment as he basically extended the Frankish kingdom to include Saxony.
Charles not only ruled but when the king died he picked which possible heir would become king. Finally near the end of his reign
he didn't even bother replacing the king and the throne was empty.
When Charles Martel died in 741 he followed Frankish custom and divided his kingdom among his sons. By 747 his younger son,
Pepin the Short, had consolidated his rule and with the support of the Pope, deposed the last Merovingian King and became the
first Carolingian King in 751- the dynasty taking its name from Charles Martel. Thus Pepin reunited the two aspects of the Frankish
ruler, combining the rule of the Mayor with the ceremonial reign of the King into the new Kingship.
Pepin expanded the kingdom beyond the Frankish lands even more and his son, Charlemagne, continued that. Charlemagne was 8
when his father took the title of King. Charlemagne never was the Mayor of the Palace, but grew up as the prince. He became King
of the Franks in 768 ruling with his brother, sole King in 781, and then started becoming King of other countries until he united
it all in 800 as the restored Western Roman Emperor.
When he died in 814 the Empire was divided into three Kingdoms and they never reunited again. The western one evolved into
France. The eastern one evolved in the Holy Roman Empire and eventually Germany. The middle one never solidified but became the
Low Countries, Switzerland, and the Italian states.
The Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland met with William Brawder in Davos a few months ago " -- Birds of a feather flock
together. Mrs. Chrystal Freeland has a very interesting background for which she is very proud of: her granddad was a Ukrainian
Nazi collaborator denounced by Jewish investigators:
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/02/27/a-nazi-skeleton-in-the-family-closet/
Since the inti-Russian tenor of the Canadian Minister Chrysta Freeland is in accord with the US ziocons anti-Russian policies
(never mind all this fuss about WWII Jewish mass graves in Ukraine), "Chrysta" is totally approved by the US government.
Joe Average , July 14, 2017 at 11:32 pm
I'll reply to myself in order to send a response to backwardsevolution and Miranda Keefe.
For a change I'll be so bold to ignore gentleman style and reply in the order of the posts – instead of Ladies first.
backwardsevolution,
in my first paragraph I failed to make a clear distinction. I started with the remark that I'm adding the book "Two Hundred
Years Together" to my to-read list and then mentioned that I'm right now reading "Mein Kampf". All remarks after mentioning the
latter book are directed at this one – and not the one of Solzhenitsyn.
Miranda Keefe,
I'm aware that accountant isn't an exact characterization of the concept of a Mayor of the Palace. As a precaution I had added
the phrase "seems to be similar". You're correct with the statement that Charlemagne was descendant Karl Martel. At first I intended
to write that Karolinger (Carolings) took over from Merowinger (Merovingians), because those details are irrelevant to the point
that I wanted to make. It would've been an information overload. My main point was the power of accountants and related fields
such as sales and marketing. Neither John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs actually created their products from scratch.
Many of those who are listed as billionaires haven't been creators / inventors themselves. Completely decoupled from actual
production is banking. Warren Buffet is started as an investment salesman, later stock broker and investor. Oversimplified you
could describe this activity as accounting or sales. It's the same with George Soros and Carl Icahn. Without proper supervision
money managers (or accountants) had and still do screw those who had hired them. One of those victims is former billionaire heiress
Madeleine Schickedanz ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Schickedanz
). Generalized you could also say that BlackRock is your money manager accountant. If you've got some investment (that dates
back before 2008), which promises you a higher interest rate after a term of lets say 20 years, the company with which you have
the contract with may have invested your money with BlackRock. The financial crisis of 2008 has shown that finance (accountants
/ money managers) are taking over. Aren't investment bankers the ones who get paid large bonuses in case of success and don't
face hardly any consequences in case of failure? Well, whatever turn future might take, one thing is for sure: whenever SHTF even
the most colorful printed pieces of paper will not taste very well.
Cal , July 13, 2017 at 10:13 pm
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks on
History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks . EVER SINCE THE Emperor Constantine established the legal
position of the church in the
Many Bolsheviks fled to Germany , taking with them some loot that enabled them to get established in Germany. Lots of invaluable
art work also.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 am
Cal – read about "History's Greatest Heist" on Amazon. Sounds interesting. Was one of the main reasons for the Czar's overthrow
to steal and then flee? It's got to have been on some minds. A lot of people got killed, and they would have had wedding rings,
gold, etc. That doesn't even include the wealth that could be stolen from the Czar. Was the theft just one of those things that
happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow in the first place, get some dough and run with
it?
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:22 pm
@ backwards
" Was the theft just one of those things that happened through opportunism, or was it one of the main reasons for the overthrow"'
imo some of both. I am sure when they were selling off Russian valuables to finance their revolution a lot of them set aside
some loot for themselves.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:09 pm
Cal – thank you. Good books like this get us closer and closer to the truth. Thank goodness for these people.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 11:45 am
An autocratic oligarch would probably be a better description. He probably believes like other Synarchist financiers that they
should rightfully rule the World, and see democratic processes as heresy against "The Natural Order for human society", or some
such belief.
Brad Owen , July 14, 2017 at 12:13 pm
Looking up "A short definition of Synarchism (a Post-Napoleonic social phenomenon) by Lyndon LaRouche" would give much insight
into what's going on. People from the intelligence community made sure a copy of a 1940 army intelligence dossier labelled something
like "Synarchism:NAZI/Communist" got into Lyndon's hands. It speaks of the the Synarchist method of attacking a targeted society
from both extreme (Right-Left) ends of the political spectrum. I guess this is dialectics? I suppose the existence of the one
extreme legitimizes the harsh, anti-democratic/anti-human measures taken to exterminate it by the other extreme, actually destroying
the targeted society in the process. America, USSR, and (Sun Yat Sen's old Republic of) China were the targeted societies in the
pre-WWII/WWII yearsfor their "sins" of championing We The People against Oligarchy. FDR knew the Synarchist threat and sided with
Russia and China against Germany and Japan. He knew that, after dealing with the battlefield NAZIs, the "Boardroom" NAZIs would
have to be dealt with Post-War. That all changed with his death.The Synarchists are still at it today, hence all the rabid Russo-phobia,
the Pacific Pivot, and the drive towards war. This is all being foiled with Trump's friendly, cooperative approach towards Russia
and China.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 4:11 pm
Big Brother at work – always protecting us from upsetting information. How nice of him to insure our comfort. No need for us
to bother with all of this confusing stuff, he can do all that for us. The mainstream media will tell us all we need to know ..
(Virginia – please notice my use of irony.)
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Do you remember mike K when porn was censored, and there were two sides to every issue as compromise was always on the table?
Now porn is accessible on cable TV, and there is only one side to every issue, and that's I'm right about everything and your
not, what compromise with you?
Don't get me wrong, I don't really care how we deal with porn, but I am very concerned to why censorship is showing up whereas
we can't see certain things, for certain reasons we know nothing about. Also, I find it unnerving that we as a society continue
to stay so undivided. Sure, we can't all see the same things the same way, but maybe it's me, and I'm getting older by the minute,
but where is our cooperation to at least try and work with each other?
Always like reading your comments mike K Joe
Joe Average , July 13, 2017 at 5:09 pm
Joe,
when it comes to the choice of watching porn and bodies torn apart (real war pictures), I prefer the first one, although we
in the West should be confronted with the horrible pictures of what we're assisting/doing.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 5:27 pm
This is where the Two Joe's are alike.
mike k , July 13, 2017 at 6:07 pm
I do remember those days Joe. I am 86 now, so a lot has changed since 1931. With the 'greed is good' philosophy in vogue now,
those who seek compromise are seen as suckers for the more single minded to take advantage of. Respect for rules of decency is
just about gone, especially at the top of the wealth pyramid.
Distraction from critical thinking, excellent observation ( please forget the NeoCon Demos they are responsible for half of
the nightmare USA society has become.
ranney , July 13, 2017 at 4:37 pm
Wow Robert, what a fascinating article! And how complicated things become "when first we practice to deceive".
Abe thank you for the link to Ritter's article; that's a really good one too!
John , July 13, 2017 at 4:40 pm
If we get into a shooting war with Russia and the human race somehow survives it Robert Parry' s name will one day appear in
the history books as the person who most thoroughly documented the events leading up to that war. He will be considered to be
a top historian as well as a top journalist.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:01 pm
"Browder, who abjured his American citizenship in 1998 to become a British subject, reveals more about his own selective advocacy
of democratic principles than about the film itself. He might recall that in his former homeland freedom of the press remains
a cherished value."
Abe – "never driven by the money". No, he would never be that type of guy (sarc)!
"It's hard to know what Browder will do next. He rules out any government ambitions, instead saying he can achieve more by
lobbying it.
This summer, he says he met "big Hollywood players" in a bid to turn his book into a major film.
"The most important next step in the campaign is to adapt the book into a Hollywood feature film," he says. "I have been approached
by many film-makers and spent part of the summer in LA meeting with screenwriters, producers and directors to figure out what
the best constellation of players will be on this.
"There are a lot of people looking at it. It's still difficult to say who we will end up choosing. There are many interesting
options, but I'm not going to name any names."
What the ..? I can see it now, George Clooney in the lead role, Mr. White Helmets himself, with his twins in tow.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 1:56 am
Is it not impressive how money buys out reality in the modern world? This is why one can safely assume that whatever is told
in the MSM is completely opposite to the truth. Would MSM have to push it if it were the truth? You may call this Kiza's Law if
you like (modestly): " The truth is always opposite to what MSM say! " The 0.1% of situations where this is not the case
is the margin of error.
Abe , July 13, 2017 at 7:39 pm
"no figure in this saga has a more tangled family relationship with the Kremlin than the London-based hedge fund manager Bill
Browder [ ]
"there's a reticence in his Jewish narrative. One of his first jobs in London is with the investment operation of the publishing
billionaire Robert Maxwell. As it happens, Maxwell was originally a Czech Jewish Holocaust survivor who fled and became a decorated
British soldier, then helped in 1948 to set up the secret arms supply line to newly independent Israel from communist Czechoslovakia.
He was also rumored to be a longtime Mossad agent. But you learn none of that from Browder's memoir.
"The silence is particularly striking because when Browder launches his own fund, he hires a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel,
to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection
come about? Was it through Maxwell? Wherever it started, the origin would add to the story. Why not tell it?
"When Browder sets up his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management -- named for the famed czarist-era St. Petersburg art museum,
though that's not explained either -- his first investor is Beny Steinmetz, the Israeli diamond billionaire. Browder tells how
Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a
partner but also a mentor and friend.
"Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel's Shas party,
the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York's Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University,
the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it's surprising
that none of it gets mentioned.
"It's possible that Browder's reticence about his Jewish connections is simply another instance of the inarticulateness that
seizes so many American Jews when they try to address their Jewishness."
Abe – what a web. Money makes money, doesn't it? It's often what club you belong to and who you know. I remember a millionaire
in my area long ago who went bankrupt. The wealthy simply chipped in, gave him some start-up money, and he was off to the races
again. Simple as that. And I would think that the Jews are an even tighter group who invest with each other, are privy to inside
information, get laws changed in favor of each other, pay people off when one gets in trouble. Browder seems a shifty sort. As
the article says, he leaves a lot out.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 11:37 pm
In 1988, Stanton Wheeler (Yale University – Law School), David L. Weisburd (Hebrew University of Jerusalem; George Mason University
– The Department of Criminology, Law & Society; Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Faculty of Law). Elin Waring (Yale University
– Law School), and Nancy Bode (Government of the State of Minnesota) published a major study on white collar crime in America.
Part of a larger program of research on white-collar crime supported by a grant from the United States Department of Justice's
National Institute of Justice, the study included "the more special forms associated with the abuse of political power [ ] or
abuse of financial power". The study was also published as a Hebrew University of Jerusalem Legal Research Paper
The research team noted that Jews were over-represented relative to their share of the U.S. population:
"With respect to religion, there is one clear finding. Although many in both white collar and common crime categories do not
claim a particular religious faith [ ] It would be a fair summary of our. data to say that, demographically speaking, white collar
offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews."
In 1991, David L. Weisburd published his study of Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts,
Weisburd found that although Jews comprised only around 2% of the United States population, they contributed at least 9% of lower
category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15% of moderate category white-collar crimes
(mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33% of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud).
Weisburg showed greater frequency of Jewish offenders at the top of the hierarchy of white collar crime. In Weisbug's sample of
financial crime in America, Jews were responsible for 23.9%.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:26 am
What I find most interesting is how Putin handles the Jews.
It is obvious that he is the one who saved the country of Russia from the looting of the 90s by the Russian-American Jewish
mafia. This is the most direct explanation for his demonisation in the West, his feat will never be forgiven, not even in history
books (a demon forever). Even to this day, for example in Syria, Putin's main confrontation is not against US then against the
Zionist Jews, whose principal tool is US. Yet, there is not a single anti-Semitic sentence that Putin ever uttered. Also, Putin
let the Jewish oligarchs who plundered Russia keep their money if they accepted the authority of the Russian state, kept employing
Russians and paying Russian taxes. But he openly confronted those who refused (Berezovsky, Khodorovsky etc). Furthermore, Putin
lets Israel bomb Syria under his protection to abandon. Finally, Putin is known in Russia as a great supporter of Jews and Israel,
almost a good friend of Nutty Yahoo.
Therefore, it appears to me that the Putin's principal strategy is to appeal to the honest Jewish majority to restrain the
criminal Jewish minority (including the criminally insane), to divide them instead of confronting them all as a group, which is
what the anti-Semitic Europeans have traditionally been doing. His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews.
I still do not know if his strategy will succeed in the long run, but it certainly is an interesting new approach (unless I do
not know history enough) to an ancient problem. It is almost funny how so many US people think that the problem with the nefarious
Jewish money power started with US, if they are even aware of it.
Cal , July 16, 2017 at 5:41 am
" His judo-technique is in using Jewish power to restrain the Jews. "
The Jews have no power without their uber Jew money men, most of whom are ardent Zionist.
And because they get some benefits from the lobbying heft of the Zionist control of congress they arent going to go against them.
In this 2015 tirade, Browder declared "Someone has to punch Putin in the nose" and urged "supplying arms to the Ukrainians
and putting troops, NATO troops, in all of the surrounding countries".
The choice of Mozgovaya as interviewer was significant to promote Browder with the Russian Jewish community abroad.
Born in the Soviet Union in 1979, Mozgovaya immigrated to Israel with her family in 1990. She became a correspondent for the
Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth in 2000. Although working most of the time in Hebrew, her reports in Russian appeared in various
publications in Russia.
Mozgovaya covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, including interviews with President Victor Yushenko and his partner-rival
Yulia Timoshenko, as well as the Russian Mafia and Russian oligarchs. During the presidency of Vladimir Putin, Mozgovaya gave
one of the last interviews with the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She interviewed Garry Kasparov, Edward Limonov, Boris
Berezovsky, Chechen exiles such as Ahmed Zakaev, and the widow of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
In 2008, Mozgovaya left Yedioth Ahronoth to become the Washington Bureau Chief for Haaretz newspaper in Washington, D.C.. She
was a frequent lecturer on Israel and Middle Eastern affairs at U.S. think-tanks. In 2013, Mozgovaya started working at the Voice
of America.
HIDE BEHIND , July 13, 2017 at 7:43 pm
Gramps was decended from an old Irish New England Yankee lineage and in my youth he always dragged me along when the town meetings
were held, so my ideas of American DEmocracy stem from that background, one of open participation.
The local newspapers had more social chit chat than political news of international or for that mstter State or Federal shenanigansbut
everu member in that far flung settled communit read them from front to back; ss a child I got to read the funny and sports pages
until Gramps got finidhed reading the "News Section, always the news first yhen the lesser BS when time allowed,this habit instilled
in me the sence of
priority.
Aftrr I had read his dection of paper he would talk with me,even being a yonker, in a serious but opinionated manner, of the Editorial
section which had local commentary letterd to the editor as large as somtimes too pages.
I wonder today at which section of papersf at all, is read by american public, and at how manyadults discuss importsn news worthy
tppics with their children.
At advent of TV we still had trustworthy journalist to finally be seen after years of but reading their columns or listening on
radios,almost tottaly all males but men of honesty and character, and worthy of trust.
They wrre a part of all social stratas, had lived real lives and yes most eere well educated but not the elitist thinking jrrks
who are no more than parrots repeating whatevrr a teleprompter or bias of their employers say to write.
Wrll back to Gramps and hid home spun wisdom: He alwsys ,and shoeed by example at those old and somrtimes boistrous town Halls,
that first you askef a question, thought about the answer, and then questioned the answer.
This made the one being question responsible for the words he spoke.
So those who have doubts by a presumed independent journalist, damn right they should question his motives, which in reality begin
to answer our unspoken questions we can no longer ask those boobs for bombs and political sychophants and their paymasters of
popular media outlets.
As one who likes effeciency in prodution one monitors data to spot trends and sny aberations bring questions so yes I note this
journalist deviation from the norms as well.
I can only question the why, by looking at data from surrounding trends in order to later be able to question his answers.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:07 am
Hide Behind – sounds like you had a smart grandpa, and someone who cared enough about you to talk things over with you (even
though he was opinionated). I try to talk things over with my kids, sometimes too much. They're known on occasion to say, "Okay,
enough. We're full." I wait a few days, and then fill them up some more! Ha.
Joe Tedesky , July 13, 2017 at 10:53 pm
Here's a thought; will letting go of Trump Jr's infraction cancel out a guilty verdict of Hillary Clinton's transgressions?
I keep hearing Hillary references while people defend Donald Trump Jr over his meeting with Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya.
My thinking started over how I keep hearing pundits speak to Trump Jr's 'intent'. Didn't Comey find Hillary impossible to prosecute
due to her lack of 'intent'? Actually I always thought that to be prosecuted under espionage charges, the law didn't need to prove
intent, but then again we are talking about Hillary here.
The more I keep hearing Trump defenders make mention of Hillary's deliberate mistakes, and the more I keep hearing Democrates
point to Donald Jr's opportunistic failures, the more similarity I see between the two rivals, and the more I see an agreed upon
truce ending up in a tie. Remember we live in a one party system with two wings.
Am I going down the wrong road here, or could forgiving Trump Jr allow Hillary to get a free get out of jail card?
F. G. Sanford , July 14, 2017 at 12:42 am
I've been saying all along, our government is just a big can of worms, and neither side can expose the other without opening
it. But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers like it's a game of chicken. My guess is, everybody is gonna get
a free pass. I read somewhere that Preet Bharara had the goods on a whole bunch of bankers, but he sat on it clear up to the election.
Then, he got fired. So much for draining the swamp. If they prosecute Hillary, it looks like a grudge match. If they prosecute
Junior, it looks like revenge. If they prosecute Lynch, it looks like racism. When you deal with a government this corrupt, everybody
looks innocent by comparison. I'm still betting nobody goes to jail, as long as the "deep state" thinks they have Trump under
control.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 1:29 am
It's like we are sitting on the top of a hill looking down at a bunch of little armies attacking each other, or something.
I'm really screwy, I have contemplated to if Petraues dropped a dime on himself for having a extra martial affair, just to
get out of the Benghazi mess. Just thought I'd tell you that for full disclosure.
When it comes to Hillary, does anyone remember how in the beginning of her email investigation she pointed to Colin Powell
setting precedent to use a private computer? That little snitch Hillary is always the one when caught to start pointing the finger
.she would never have lasted in the Mafia, but she's smart enough to know what works best in Washington DC.
I'm just starting to see the magic; get the goods on Trump Jr then make a deal with the new FBI director.
Okay go ahead and laugh, but before you do pass the popcorn, and let's see how this all plays out.
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
Joe
Lisa , July 14, 2017 at 4:22 am
"Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see."
Joe, where does this quote originate? Or is it a paraphrase?
I once had an American lecturer (political science) at the university, and he stressed the idea that we should not believe anything
we read or hear and only half of what we see. This was l-o-o-ng ago, in the 60's.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 10:59 am
The first time I ever heard that line, 'believe nothing of what you see', was a friend of mine said it after we watched Roberto
Clemente throw a third base runner out going towards home plate, as Robert threw the ball without a bounce to the catcher who
was standing up, from the deep right field corner of the field .oh those were the days.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 9:12 pm
JT,
Clemente had an unbelievable arm! The consummate baseball player I have family in western PA, an uncle your age in fact who remembers
Clemente well. Roberto also happened to be a great human being.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 9:56 pm
I got loss at Forbes Field. I was seven years old, it was 1957. I got separated from my older cousin, we got in for 50 cents
to sit in the left field bleachers. Like I said I loss my older cousin so I walked, and walked, and just about the time I wanted
my mum the most I saw daylight. I followed the daylight out of the big garage door, and I was standing within a foot of this long
white foul line. All of a sudden this Black guy started yelling at me in somekind of broken English to, 'get off the field, get
out of here'. Then I felt a field ushers hand grab my shoulder, and as I turned I saw my cousin standing on the fan side of the
right field side of the field. The usher picked me up and threw me over to my cousin, with a warning for him to keep his eye on
me. That Black baseball player was a young rookie who was recently just drafted from the then Brooklyn Dodgers .#21 Roberto Clemente.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:12 pm
You were a charmed boy and now you are a charmed man. Great story life is a Field of Dreams sometimes.
Zachary Smith , July 15, 2017 at 9:00 pm
Believe half of what you hear, and nothing of what you see.
My introduction to this had the wording the other way around:
"Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."
This was because the workplace was saturated with rumors, and unfortunately there was a practice of management and union representatives
"play-acting" for their audience. So what you "saw" was as likely as not a little theatrical production with no real meaning whatever.
The two fellows shouting at each other might well be laughing about it over a cup of coffee an hour later.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 am
Sanford – "But insiders on both sides are flashing their can openers " That's funny writing.
Gregory Herr , July 14, 2017 at 10:20 pm
yessir, love it
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:41 am
Absolutely, one of the best political metaphors ever (unfortunately works in English language only).
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:19 pm
BTW, they are flashing at each other not only can openers then also jail cells and grassy knolls these days. But the can openers
would still be most scary.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 2:13 am
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries, like binary options,
have been allowed to flourish here.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Despite his service as a useful idiot propagating the Magnitsky Myth, Bharara discovered that for Russian Jewish oligarchs,
criminals and scam artists, the motto is "Nikogda ne zabyt'!" Perhaps more recognizable by the German phrase: "Niemals vergessen!"
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 3:00 am
Abe – wow, what a story. I guess it's lucrative to "never forget"! Bandits.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
NCJRS Abstract
The document referenced below is part of the NCJRS Library collection. To conduct further searches of the collection, visit the
NCJRS Abstracts Database. See the Obtain Documents page for direction on how to access resources online, via mail, through interlibrary
loans, or in a local library.
NCJ Number: NCJ 006180
Title: CRIMINALITY AMONG JEWS – AN OVERVIEW
United States of America
Journal: ISSUES IN CRIMINOLOGY Volume:6 Issue:2 Dated:(SUMMER 1971) Pages:1-39
Date Published: 1971
Page Count: 15
.
Abstract: THE CONCLUSION OF MOST STUDIES IS THAT JEWS HAVE A LOW CRIME RATE. IT IS LOWER THAN THAT OF NON-JEWS TAKEN AS A WHOLE,
LOWER THAN THAT OF OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS,
HOWEVER, THE JEWISH CRIME RATE TENDS TO BE HIGHER THAN THAT OF NONJEWS AND OTHER RELIGIOUS GROUPS FOR WHITE-COLLAR OFFENSES,
THAT IS, COMMERCIAL OR COMMERCIALLY RELATED CRIMES, SUCH AS FRAUD, FRAUDULENT BANKRUPTCY, AND EMBEZZLEMENT.
Index Term(s): Behavioral and Social Sciences ; Adult offenders ; Minorities ; Behavioral science research ; Offender classification
Country: United States of America
Language: English
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 4:21 pm
Cal – that does not surprise me at all. Of course they would be where the money is, and once you have money, you get nothing
but the best defense. "I've got time and money on my side. Go ahead and take me to court. I'll string this thing along and it'll
cost you a fortune. So let's deal. I'm good with a fine."
A rap on the knuckles, a fine, and no court case, no discovery of the truth that the people can see. Of course they'd be there.
That IS the only place to be if you want to be a true criminal.
Skip Scott , July 15, 2017 at 1:57 pm
Thanks again Abe, you are a wealth of information. I think you have to allow for anyone to make a mistake, and Bharara has
done a lot of good.
Longtime Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz and his team have directed their grievance at Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and senior
White House adviser.
Citing a person familiar with Trump's legal team, The Times said Kasowitz has bristled at Kushner's "whispering in the president's
ear" about stories on the Russia investigation without telling Kasowitz and his team.
The Times' source said the attorneys, who were hired as private counsel to Trump in light of the Russia investigation, view Kushner
"as an obstacle and a freelancer" motivated to protect himself over over Trump. The lawyers reportedly told colleagues the work
environment among Trump's inner circle was untenable, The Times said, suggesting Kasowitz could resign
Second
Who thinks Jared works for Trump? I don't.
Jared works for his father Charles Kushner, the former jail bird who hired prostitutes to blackmail his brother in law into not
testifying against him. Jared spent every weekend his father was in prison visiting him.,,they are inseparable.
Third
So what is Jared doing in his WH position to help his father and his failing RE empire?
Trying to get loans from China, Russia, Qatar,Qatar
And why Is Robert Mueller Probing Jared Kushner's Finances?
Because of this no doubt:..seeking a loan for the Kushners from a Russian bank.
The White House and the bank have offered differing accounts of the Kushner-Gorkov sit-down. While the White House said Kushner
met Gorkov and other foreign representatives as a transition official to "help advance the president's foreign policy goals."
Vnesheconombank, also known as VEB, said it was part of talks with business leaders about the bank's development strategy.
It said Kushner was representing Kushner companies, his family real estate empire.
Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before http://www.independent.co.uk › News › World › Americas › US politics
2 days ago –
Jared Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500m loan from one of Qatar's richest businessmen, before pushing his father-in-law
to toe a hard line with the country, it has been alleged. This intersection between Mr Kushner's real estate dealings and his
father-in-law's
The Kushners are about to lose their shirts..unless one of those foreign country's banks gives them the money.
At Kushners' Flagship Building, Mounting Debt and a Foundered Deal https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/nyregion/kushner-companies-666-fifth-avenue.html
The Fifth Avenue skyscraper was supposed to be the Kushner Companies' flagship in the heart of Manhattan -- a record-setting $1.8
billion souvenir proclaiming that the New Jersey developers Charles Kushner and his son Jared were playing in the big leagues.
And while it has been a visible symbol of their status, it has also it has also been a financial headache almost from the start.
On Wednesday, the Kushners announced that talks had broken off with a Chinese financial conglomerate for a deal worth billions
to redevelop the 41-story tower, at 666 Fifth Avenue, into a flashy 80-story ultraluxury skyscraper comprising a chic retail mall,
a hotel and high-priced condominiums"
Get these cockroaches out of the WH please.,,,Jared and his sister are running around the world trying to get money in exchange
for giving them something from the Trump WH.
The NYC skyline displays 666 in really really really HUGE !!!! numbers. Perhaps the USA government as Cheney announced has
gone to the very very very DARK side.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 2:16 pm
Yea 666 probably isn't a coincidence .lol
Chris Kinder , July 14, 2017 at 12:15 am
What I think most comments overlook here is the following: the US is the primary imperialist aggressor in the world today,
and Russia, though it is an imperialist competitor, is much weaker and is generally losing ground. Early on, the US promised that
NATO would not be extended into Eastern Europe, but now look at what's happened: not only does the US have NATO allies and and
missiles in Eastern Europe, but it also engineered a coup against a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine, and is now trying to drive
Russia out of Eastern Ukraine, as in Crimea and the Donbass and other areas of Eastern Ukraine, which are basically Russian going
back more than a century. Putin is pretty mild compered to the US' aggressive stance. That's number one.
Number two is that the current anti-Russian hysteria in the US is all about maintaining the same war-mongering stance against
Russia that existed in the cold war, and also about washing clean the Democratic Party leadership's crimes in the last election.
Did the Russians hack the election? Maybe they tried, but the point is that what was exposed–the emails etc–were true information!
They show that the DNC worked to deprive Bernie Sanders of the nomination, and hide crimes of the Clintons'! These exposures,
not any Russian connection to the exposures, are what really lost Hillary the election.
So, what is going on here? The Democrats are trying to hide their many transgressions behind an anti-Russian scare, why? Because
it is working, and because it fits in with US imperialist anti-Russian aims which span the entire post-war period, and continue
today. And because it might help get Trump impeached. I would not mind that result one bit, but the Democrats are no alternative:
that has been shown to be true over and over again.
This is all part of the US attempt to be the dominant imperialist power in the world–something which it has pursued since the
end of the last world war, and something which both Democrats and Republicans–ie, the US ruling class behind them–are committed
to. Revolutionaries say: the main enemy is at home, and that is what I say now. That is no endorsement of Russian imperialism,
but a rejection of all imperialism and the capitalist exploitative system that gives rise to it.
Thanks for your attention -- Chris Kinder
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:58 am
Chris – good post. Thanks.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 11:35 am
Chris, I think most commenters here are aware of everything you summarized above, but we just don't put all that in each individual
post.
Paranam Kid , July 14, 2017 at 6:40 am
It is ironic that Browder on his website describes himself as running a battle against corporate corruption in Russia, and
there is a quote by Walter Isaacson: "Bill Browder is an amazing moral crusader".
http://www.billbrowder.com/bio
HIDE BEHIND , July 14, 2017 at 10:02 am
One cannot talk of Russian monry laundering in US without exposing the Jewish Israeli and many AIPAC connections.
I studied not so much the Jewish Orthodoxy but mainly the evolution of noth their outlook upon G.. but also how those who do not
believe in a G.. and still keep their cultural cohesiveness
The largest money laundering group in US is
both Jewish and Israeli, and while helping those of their cultural similarities, their ecpertise goes. Very deep in Eastern U.S.
politics and especially strong in all commercial real estate, funding, setting up bribes to permitting officials,contractors and
owners of construvtion firms.
Financials some quite large are within this Jew/Israel connections, as all they who offshore need those proper connections to
do so. take bribes need the funding cleaned and
flow out through very large tax free Jewish Charity Orgd, the largest ones are those of Orthodox.
GOV Christie years ago headed the largest sting operation to try and uproot what at that time he believed was just statewide tax
fraud and laundering operations, many odd cash flows into political party hacks running for evrry gov position electefd or appointed.
Catchng a member of one of the most influential Orthofox familys mrmbers, that member rolled on many many indivifuals of his own
culture.
It was only when Vhristies investigative team began turning up far larger cases of laundering and political donations thst msinly
centered in NY Stste and City, fid he then find out howuch power this grouping had.
Soon darn near every AIPAC aided elected politico from city state and rspecially Congress was warning him to end investigation.
Which he did.
His reward was for his fat ass to be funded for a run towards US Presidency, without any visibly open opposition by that cultural
grouping.
No it is not odd for Jewery to charge goyim usury or to aid in political schemes that advance their groups aims.
One thing to remenber by the Bible thumpers who delay any talks of Israel ; Christian Zionist, is that to be of their culture
one does not have to believe in G.
There are a few excellent books written about early days Jewish immigrant Pre Irish andblre Sicilian mafias.
The Jewish one remainst to this day but are as well orgNized as the untold history of what is known as "The Southern mafia.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 1:55 pm
Hide Behind – fascinating! I guess if we ever knew half of what goes on behind the scenes, we'd be shocked. We only ever know
things like this exist when people like you enlighten us, or when there's a blockbuster movie about it. Thanks.
Deborah Andrew , July 14, 2017 at 10:03 am
With great respect and appreciation for your writing about the current unsubstantiated conversations/writing about 'Russia-gate'
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts. Analysis and opinions,
that include the facts, may differ. However, it is the readers who will evaluate the varied analysis and opinions when they include
all the facts known. I raise this question, as it seems to me that we have a binary approach to our thinking and decision making.
Something is either good or bad, this or that. Sides are taken. Labels are added (such as conservative and progressive). Would
we not be wiser and would our decision making not be wiser if it were based on a set of principles? My own preference: the precautionary
principle and the principle of do no harm. I am suggesting that we abandon the phrase and notion of the 'other side of the story'
and replace it with: based on the facts now known, or, based on all the facts revealed to date or, until more facts are revealed
it appears
I would ask if 'the other side of a story' is really what we want or, is it that we want all the facts.
Replying to a question with another question isn't really good form, but given my knowledge level of this case I can see no
alternative.
How do you propose to determine the "facts" when virtually none of the characters involved in the affair appear trustworthy?
Also, there is a lot of evidence (displayed by Mr. Parry) that another set of "characters" we call the Mainstream Media are
extremely biased and one-sided with their coverage of the story.
Again – Where am I going to find those "facts" you speak of?
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 2:52 am
Spot on.
backwardsevolution , July 14, 2017 at 2:02 pm
Deborah Andrew – good comment, but the problem is that we never seem to get "the other side of the story" from the MSM. You
are right in pointing out that "the other side of the story" probably isn't ALL there is (as nothing is completely black and white),
but at least it's something. The only way we can ever get to the truth is to put the facts together and question them, but how
are you going to do that when the facts are kept away from us?
It can be very frustrating, can't it, Deborah? Cheers.
Cal , July 14, 2017 at 8:52 pm
Nice comment.
None of us can know the exact truth of anything we ourselves haven't seen or been involved in. The best we can do is try to
find trusted sources, be objective, analytical and compare different stories and known the backgrounds and possible agendas of
the people involved in a issue or story.
We can use some clues to help us cull thru what we hear and read.
Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of
the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players,
or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up.
1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public
figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues.
2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the
topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors
and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially
well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can
associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which
can have no basis in fact.
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself
look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the
opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy
them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real
issues.
5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though
other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal',
'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and
so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before
an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments
where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning -- simply make an accusation
or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint.
7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal
agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive.
8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon'
and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely
why or citing sources.
9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have
any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for
maximum effect.
10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man -- usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility,
someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with – a kind of investment for the future should
the matter not be so easily contained.) Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt
with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can
usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues
-- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source.
11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the 'high road' and 'confess'
with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it
all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, 'just isn't so.' Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later,
and even publicly 'call for an end to the nonsense' because you have already 'done the right thing.' Done properly, this can garner
sympathy and respect for 'coming clean' and 'owning up' to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues.
12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players
and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to lose
interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues.
13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which
forbears any actual material fact.
14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which
works best with issues qualifying for rule 10.
15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions
in place.
16. Vanish evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue.
17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion
with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well
with companions who can 'argue' with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more
key issues.
18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them
into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat
less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses
the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what
material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for
the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed
or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically
deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made
by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance.
20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations
-- as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies
for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications.
21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and
effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to
be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful
evidence and that the evidence is sealed and unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the
matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be
used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim.
22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to
forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you
must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.
23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted
media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.
24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution
so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction
of theircharacter by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging
their health.
25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to
avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen. .
Note: There are other ways to attack truth, but these listed are the most common, and others are likely derivatives of these.
In the end, you can usually spot the professional disinfo players by one or more of seven (now 8) distinct traits:
Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
by H. Michael Sweeney
copyright (c) 1997, 2000 All rights reserved
(Revised April 2000 – formerly SEVEN Traits)
1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references
or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their
authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility.
2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators
supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. .
3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior
record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the
topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.
4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally
in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved.
Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute
opponent presentation strength.
5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe
JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a
single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone
on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain.Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior
motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do.
6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and
persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment,
ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will
deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms
of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek
to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.
7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really
knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep
within.
8) BONUS TRAIT: Time Constant. Wth respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen
to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation:
1) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players
can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFO IN A NG ONLY WORKS IF THE
READER SEES IT – FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth.
2) When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR – there will usually be a minimum
of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get
permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command.
3) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay
– the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important
with respect to potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin.
Michael Kenny , July 14, 2017 at 11:22 am
I don't really see Mr Parry's point. The banning of Nekrasov's film isn't proof of the accuracy of its contents and even less
does it prove that anything that runs counter to Nekrasov's argument is false. Nor does proving that a mainstream meida story
is false prove that an internet story saying the opposite is true. "A calls B a liar. B proves that A is a liar. That proves that
B is truthful." Not very logical! What seems to be established is that the lawyer in question represents a Russian-owned company,
a money-laundering prosecution against which was settled last May on the basis of what the company called a "surprise" offer from
prosecutors that was "too good to refuse". This "Russian government attorney" (dixit Goldstone) had information concerning illegal
campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Trump Jr jumped at it and it makes no difference whether he was tricked
or even whether he actually got anything, his intent was clear. In addition DNC "dirt" did indeed appear on the internet via Wikileaks,
just as "dirt" appeared in the French election. MacronLeaks proves Russiagate and "Juniorgate" confirms MacronLeaks. The question
now is did Trump, as president, intervene to bring about this "too good to refuse" offer? That question cannot just be written
off with the "no evidence" argument.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 1:40 pm
God, you are persistent if nothing else. Keep repeating the same lie until it is taken as true, just like the MSM. You say
that Russia-gate, Macron leaks, etc can't be written off with the "no evidence" argument (how is that logical?), and then you
trash a film you haven't even seen because it doesn't fit your narrative. Maybe some evidence is provided in the film, did you
consider that possibility? That fact that Nekrasov started out to make a pro Broder film, and then switched sides, leads me to
believe he found some disturbing evidence. And if you look into Nekrasov you will find that he is no fan of Putin, so one has
to wonder what his motive is if he is lying.
I am wondering if you ever look back at previous posts, because you never reply to a rebuttal. If you did, you would see that
you are almost universally seen by the commenters here as a troll. If you are being paid, I suppose it might not matter much to
you. However, your employer should look for someone with more intelligent arguments. He is wasting his money on you.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 9:27 pm
Propaganda trolls attempt to trash the information space by dismissing, distracting, diverting, denying, deceiving and distorting
the facts.
The trolls aim at confusing rather than convincing the audience.
The tag team troll performance of "Michael Kenny" and "David" is accompanied by loud declarations that they have "logic" on
their side and "evidence" somewhere. Then they shriek that they're being "censored".
Propaganda trolls target the comments section of independent investigative journalism sites like Consortium News, typically
showing up when articles discuss the West's "regime change" wars and deception operations.
Pro-Israel Hasbara propaganda trolls also strive to discredit websites, articles, and videos critical of Israel and Zionism.
Hasbara smear tactics have intensified due to increasing Israeli threats of military aggression, Israeli collusion with the United
States in "regime change" projects from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and Israeli links to international organized crime
and terrorism in Syria.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:04 am
Gee Abe, you are a magician (and I thought that you only quote excellent articles). Short and sharp.
Abe , July 15, 2017 at 4:15 pm
When they have a hard time selling that they're being "censored" (after more than a dozen comments), trolls complain that they're
being "dismissed" and "invalidated" by "hostile voices".
exiled off mainstreet , July 14, 2017 at 1:54 pm
Aaron Kesel, in Activistpost documents the links between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the company engaged by the Clintons
to prepare the defamatory Christopher Steele Dossier against Trump later used by Comey to help gin up the Russian influence conspiracy
theory. In the article, it is true the GPS connection may have involved her lobbying efforts to overturn the Magnitsky law, not
the dossier, but it is also interesting that she is on record as anti-Trump and having associations with Clinton democrats. Though
it may have been part of the beginnings of a conspiracy, the conspiracy may have developed later and the meeting became something
they related back to to bolster this fraudulent dangerous initiative.
mike k , July 14, 2017 at 2:01 pm
I think as you say Skip that most on this blog have seen through Michael Kenny's stuff. Nobody's buying it. He's harmless.
If he's here on his own dime, if we don't feed him, he will get bored and go away. If he's being payed, he may persist, but so
what. Sometimes I check the MSM just to see what the propaganda line is. Kenny is like that; his shallow arguments tell me what
we must counter to wake people up.
Skip Scott , July 14, 2017 at 5:51 pm
Yeah mike k, I know you're right. I don't know why I let the guy get under my skin. Perhaps it's because he never responds
to a rebuttal.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 3:14 am
Then you would have to waste more time rebutting the (equally empty) rebuttal.
The second thing is that many trolls suffer from DID, that is the Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka sock puppetry. There
is a bit of similarity in argument between David and Michael and HAWKINS, only one of them rebuts quite often.
Another excellent article! I wrote a very detailed
blog post
in which I methodically take apart the latest "revelation" about Donald Trump Jr.'s emails. I talk a lot about the Magnitsky
Act, which is very relevant to this whole story.
Joe Tedesky , July 14, 2017 at 4:43 pm
I always like reading your articles Philippe, you have a real talent. Maybe read what I wrote above, but I'm sensing this Trump
Jr affair will help Hillary more than anything, to give her a reprieve from any further FBI investigations. I mean somehow, I'm
sure by Hillary's standards and desires, that this whole crazy investigation thing has to end. So, would it not seem reasonable
to believe that by allowing Donald Jr to be taken off the hook, that Hillary likewise will enjoy the taste of forgiveness?
Tell me if you think this Donald Trump Jr scandal could lead to this Joe
PS if so this could be a good next article to write there I go telling the band what to play, but seriously if this Russian
conclusion episode goes on much longer, could you not see a grand bargain and a deal being made?
Thanks for the compliment, I'm glad you like the blog. I wasn't under the impression that Clinton was under any particular
danger from the Justice Department, but even if she was, she doesn't have the power to stop this Trump/Russia collusion nonsense
because it's pushed by a lot of people that have nothing to do with her except for the fact that they would have preferred her
to win.
Abe , July 14, 2017 at 6:48 pm
Excellent summary and analysis, Philippe. Key observation:
"as even the New York Times admits, there is no evidence that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr., Jared
Kushner and Paul Manafort for 20-30 minutes on 9 June 2016, provided any such information during that meeting. Donald Trump Jr.
said that, although he asked her about it, she didn't give them anything on Clinton, but talked to him about the Magnitsky Act
and Russia's decision to block adoption by American couples in retaliation. Of course, if we just had his word, we'd have no particularly
good reason to believe him. But the fact remains that no documents of the sort described in Goldstone's ridiculous email ever
surfaced during the campaign, which makes what he is saying about how the meeting went down pretty convincing, at least on this
specific point. It should be noted that Donald Trump Jr. has offered to testify under oath about anything related to this meeting.
Moreover, he also said during the interview he gave to Sean Hannity that there was no follow-up to this meeting, which is unlikely
to be a lie since he must know that, given the hysteria about this meeting, it would come out. He may not be the brightest guy
in the world, but surely he or at least the people who advised him before that interview are not that stupid."
Your own necpluribus article was one of the best I've seen summarising the whole controversy, and your exhaustive responses
to the pro-deep state critics was edifying. I am now convinced that your view of Veselnitskaya's role in the affair and the nature
her connections to the dossier drafting company GPS being based on their unrelated work on the magnitsky law is accurate.
"Bill Browder, born into a notable Jewish family in Chicago, is the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist
Party USA,[2] and the son of Eva (Tislowitz) and Felix Browder, a mathematician. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and attended
the University of Chicago where he studied economics. He received an MBA from Stanford Business School[3] in 1989 where his classmates
included Gary Kremen and Rich Kelley. In 1998, Browder gave up his US citizenship and became a British citizen.[4] Prior to setting
up Hermitage, Browder worked in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group[5] in London and managed the Russian
proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.[6]"
Rake , July 15, 2017 at 9:13 am
Successfully keeping a salient argument from being heard is scary, given the social media and alternative media players who
are all ripe to uncover a bombshell. Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks.
"Sy Hersh needs to convince Nekrasov to get his documentary to WkiLeaks."
Agree.
P. Clark , July 15, 2017 at 12:01 pm
When Trump suggested that a Mexican-American judge might be biased because of this ethnicity the media said this was racist.
Yet these same outlets like the New York Times are now routinely questioning Russian-American loyalty because of their ethnicity.
As usual a ridiculous double standard. Basically the assumption is all Russians are bad. We didn't even have this during the cold
war.
Cal , July 15, 2017 at 8:10 pm
Yes indeed P. Clark .that kind or hypocrisy makes my head explode!
MichaelAngeloRaphaelo , July 15, 2017 at 12:17 pm
Enough's Enough
STOP DNC/DEMs
#CryBabyFakeNewsBS
Support Duly ELECTED
@POTUS @realDonaldTrump
#BoycottFakeNewsSponsors
#DrainTheSwamp
#MAGA
Wow, I just learned via this article that in US Nekrasov is labeled as "pro-Kremlin" by WaPo. That's just too funny. He's in
a relationship with a Finnish MEP Heidi Hautala, who is very well known for her anti-Russia mentality. Nekrasov is defenetly anti-Kremlin
if something. He was supposed to make an anti-Kremlin documentary, but the facts turned out to be different than he thought, but
still finished his documentary.
The lengths to which the Neo Conservative War Cabal will go to destroy freedom of speech and access to alternative news sources
underscores that the United States is becoming an Orwellian agitation-propaganda police state equally dedicated to igniting World
War III for Netanyahu, the Central Banks, our Wahhabic Petrodollar Partners, and a pipeline consortium or two. The Old American
Republic is dead.
Roy G Biv , July 15, 2017 at 4:38 pm
Interesting to note that each and everyone of David's comments were bleached from this page. Looks like he was right about
the censorship. Sad.
Duly noted Abe. But you should adhere to the first part of the statement that you somehow forgot to include:
From Editor Robert Parry: At Consortiumnews, we welcome substantive comments about our articles, but comments should avoid
abusive language toward other commenters or our writers, racial or religious slurs (including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia),
and allegations that are unsupported by facts.
Kiza , July 15, 2017 at 6:06 pm
My favorite was David's claim that he contributed to this zine whilst it was publishing articles not to his liking (/sarc).
I kindly reminded him that people pay much more money to have publishing the way they like it – for example how much Bezos paid
for Washington Post, or Omidyar to establish The Intercept.
Except for such funny component, David's comments were totally substance free and useless. Nothing lost with bleaching.
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:44 am
You're practicing disinformation. He actually said he contributed early on and had problems with the recent course of the CN
trajectory. Censorship is cowardly.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 1:53 pm
Consortium News welcomes substantive comments.
"David" was presenting allegations unsupported by facts and disrupting on-topic discussion.
Violations of CN comment policy are taken down by the moderator. Period. It has nothing to do with "censorship".
Stop practicing disinformation and spin, "Roy G Biv".
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:57 pm
I stopped contributing after the unintellectual dismissal of scientific 911 truthers. And it's easy for you to paint over my
comments as they have been scrubbed. There was plenty of useful substance, it just ran against the tide. Sorry you didn't appreciate
it the contrary viewpoint or have the curiosity to read the backstory.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 5:02 pm
The cowardly claim of "censorship".
The typical troll whine is that their "contrary viewpoint" was "dismissed" merely because it "ran against the tide".
No. Your allegations were unsupported by facts. They still are.
Martyrdom is just another troll tactic.
dub , July 15, 2017 at 9:44 pm
torrent for the film?
Roy G Biv , July 16, 2017 at 5:56 am
Here is the pdf of the legal brief about the Magnitsky film submitted by Senator Grassly to Homeland Security Chief. Interesting
read and casts doubt on the claims made in the film, refutes several claims actually. Skip past Chuck Grassly's first two page
intro to get to the meat of it. If you are serious about a debate on the merits of the case, this is essential reading.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the brief.
But forget the spin from "Roy G Biv" because the brief actually refutes nothing about Andrei Nekrasov's film.
It simply notes that the Russian government was understandably concerned about "unscrupulous swindler" and "sleazy crook" William
Browder.
After your finished reading the brief, try to remember any time when Congress dared to examine a lobbying campaign undertaken
on behalf of Israeli (which is to say, predominantly Russian Jewish) interests, the circumstances surrounding a pro-Israel lobbying
effort and the potential FARA violations involved. or the background of a Jewish "Russian immigrant".
Note on page 3 of the cover letter the CC to The Honorable Dianne Feinstein, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on the
Judiciary. Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco, to Betty (née Rosenburg), a former model, and Leon Goldman,
a surgeon. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her maternal grandparents, the Rosenburg family,
were from Saint Petersburg, Russia. While they were of German-Jewish ancestry, they practiced the Russian Orthodox faith as was
required for Jews residing in Saint Petersburg.
In 1980, Feinstein married Richard C. Blum, an investment banker. In 2003, Feinstein was ranked the fifth-wealthiest senator,
with an estimated net worth of US$26 million. By 2005 her net worth had increased to between US$43 million and US$99 million.
Like the rest of Congress, Feinstein knows the "right way" to vote.
David , July 16, 2017 at 1:50 pm
So you're saying because a Jew Senator was CC'd it invalidates the information? Read the first page again. The Chairman of
the Senate Judiciary Committee is obligated to CC these submissions to the ranking member of the Committee, Jew heritage or not.
Misinformation and disinformation from you Abe, or generously, maybe lazy reading. The italicized unscrupulous swindler and sleazy
crook comments were quoting the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Washington screening of Nekrasov's film and demonstrating
Russia's intentions to discredit Browder. You are practiced at the art of deception. Hopefully readers will simply look for themselves.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm
Ah, comrade "David". We see you're back muttering about "disinformation" using your "own name".
My statements about Senator Feinstein are entirely supported by facts. You really should look into that.
Also, please note that quotation marks are not italics.
And please note that the Russian Foreign Minister is legally authorized to present the view of the Russian government.
Browder is pretty effective at discrediting himself. He simply has to open his mouth.
I encourage readers to look for themselves, and not simply take the word of one Browder's sockpuppets.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:55 pm
It won't last papushka. Every post and pended moderated post was scrubbed yesterday, to the cheers of you and your mean spirited
friends. But truth is truth and should be defended. So to the point, I reread the Judiciary Committee linked document, and the
items you specified are in italics, because the report is quoting Lavrov's comments to a Moscow news paper and "another paper"
as evidence of Russia's efforts to undermine the credibility and standing of Browder. This is hardly obscure. It's plain as day
if you just read it.
David , July 16, 2017 at 2:59 pm
Also Abe, before I get deleted again, I don't question any of you geneological description of Feinstein. I merely pointed out
that she is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and it is normal for the Chairman of the Committee (Republican)
to CC the ranking member. Unless of course it is Devin Nunes, then fairness and tradition goes out the window.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:01 pm
It's plain as day, "David" or whatever other name you're trolling under, that you're here to loudly "defend" the "credibility"
and "standing" of William Browder.
Sorry, but you're going to have to "defend" Browder with something other than your usual innuendo, blather about 9-11, and
slurs against RP.
Otherwise it will be recognized for what it is, repeated violation of CN comment policy, and taken down by the moderator again.
Good luck to any troll who wants to "defend" Browder's record.
But you're gonna have to earn your pay with something other than your signature unsupported allegations, 9-11 diversions, and
the "non-Jewish Russian haters gonna hate" propaganda shtick.
David , July 16, 2017 at 5:07 pm
I wish you would stop with the name calling. I am not a troll. I have been trying to make simple rational points. You respond
by calling me names and wholly ignoring and/or misrepresenting and obfuscating easily verifiable facts. I suspect you are the
moderator of this page, and if so am surprised by your consistent negative references to Jews. I'm not Jewish but you're really
over the top. Of course you have many friends here so you get little push back, but I really hope you are not Bob or Sam.
Anonymous , July 16, 2017 at 10:26 am
We can see that it was what can be considered to be a Complex situation, where it was said that someone had Dirt on Hillary
Clinton, but there was No collusion and there was No attempted collusion, but there was Patriotism and Concern for Others during
a Perplexing situation.
This is because of what is Known as Arkancide, and which is associated with some People who say they have Dirt on the Clintons.
The Obvious and Humane thing to do was to arrange to meet the Russian Lawyer, who it was Alleged to have Dirt on Hillary Clinton,
regardless of any possible Alleged Electoral advantage against Hillary Clinton, and until further information, there may have
been some National Security Concerns, because it was Known that Hillary Clinton committed Espionage with Top Secret Information
on her Unauthorized, Clandestine, Secret Email Server, and the Obvious cover up by the Department of Justice and the FBI, and
so it was with this background that this Complex situation had to be dealt with.
This is because there is Greater Protection for a Person who has Dirt or Alleged Dirt on the Clintons, if that Information
is share with other People.
This is because it is a Complete Waste of time to go to the Authorities, because they will Not do anything against Clinton
Crimes, and a former Haitian Government Official was found dead only days before he was to give Testimony regarding the Clinton
Foundation.
We saw this with Seth Rich, where the Police Videos has been withheld, and we have seen the Obstruction in investigating that
Crime.
The message to Leakers is that Seth Rich was taken to hospital and Treated and was on his way to Fully Recovering, but he died
in hospital, and those who were thinking of Leaking Understood the message from that.
There was Also concern for Rob Goldstone, who Alleged that the Russian Lawyer had Dirt on the Clintons.
We Know that is is said Goldstone that he did Not want to hear what was said at the meeting.
This is because Goldstone wanted associates of Candidate Donald Trump to Know that he did Not know what was said at that meeting.
We now Know that the meeting was a set up to Improperly obtain a FISA Warrant, which was Requested in June of 2016, and that
is same the month and the year as the meeting that the Russian Lawyer attended.
There was what was an Unusual granting of a Special Visa so that the Russian Lawyer could attend that set up, which was Improperly
Used to Request a FISA Warrant in order to Improperly Spy on an Opposition Political Candidate in order to Improperly gain an
Electoral advantage in an Undemocratic manner, because if anything wrong was intended by Associates of Candidate Donald Trump,
then there were enough People in that meeting who were the Equivalent of Establishment Democrats and Establishment Republicans,
because we Know that after that meeting, that the husband of the former Florida chair of the Trump campaign obtained a front row
seat to a June 2016 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing for the Russian Lawyer.
There are Americans who consider that the 2 Major Political Party Tyranny has Betrayed the Constitution and the Principles
of Democracy, because they oppose President Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission, because they think that the Establishment
Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupted Puppets of the Shadow Regime.
We Know from Senator Sanders, that if Americans want a Political Revolution, then they will need their own Political Party.
There are Americans who think that a Group of Democratic Party Voters and Republican Party Voters who have No association with
the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and that they may be named The Guardians of American Democracy.
These Guardians of American Democracy would be a numerous Group of People, and they would ask Republican Voters to Vote for
the Democratic Party Representative instead of the Republican who is in Congress and who is seeking Reelection, in exchange for
Democratic Party Voters to Vote for the Republican Party Candidate instead of the Democrat who is in Congress and who is seeking
Reelection, and the same can be done for the Senate, because the American People have to Decide if it is they the Shadow Regime,
or if it is We the People, and the Establishment Republicans and the Establishment Democrats are the Bribed and Corrupt Puppets
of the Shadow Regime, and there would be equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats replaced in this manner, and so it will Not
affect their numbers in the Congress or the Senate.
There could be People who think that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was Unacceptability Biased and Unacceptability Corrupt during
the Democratic Party Primaries, and that if she wants a Democratic Party Candidate to be Elected in her Congressional District,
then she Should announce that she will Not be contesting the next Election, and there could be People who think that Speaker Paul
Ryan was Unacceptability Disloyal by insufficiently endorse the Republican Presidential nominee, and with other matters, and that
if he wants a Republican Party Candidate to be Elected in his Congressional District, then he Should announce that he will Not
be contesting the next Election, and then the Guardians of American Democracy can look at other Dinos and Rinos, including those
in the Senate, because the Constitution says the words: We the People.
There are Many Americans who have Noticed that Criminal Elites escape Justice, and Corruption is the norm in American Politics.
There are those who Supported Senator Sanders who Realize that Senator Sanders would have been Impeached had he become President,
and they Know that they Need President Donald Trump to prepare the Political Landscape so that someone like Senator Sanders could
be President, without a Coup attempt that is being attempted on President Donald Trump, and while these People may not Vote for
the Republicans, they can Refuse to Vote for the Democratic Party, until the conditions are there for a Constitutional Republic
and a Constitutional Democracy, and they want the Illegal Mueller Team to recuse themselves from this pile of Vile and Putrid
McCarthyist Lies Invented by their Shadow Regime Puppet Masters,
There are Many Americans who want Voter Identification and Paper Ballots for Elections, and they have seen how several States
are Opposed to President Donald Trump's Commission on Election Integrity, because they want to Rig their Elections, and this is
Why there are Many Americans who want America to be a Constitutional Republic and a Constitutional Democracy.
MillyBloom54 , July 16, 2017 at 12:31 pm
I just read this article in the Washington Monthly, and wish to read informed comments about this issue. There are suggestions
that organized crime from Russian was heavily involved. This is a complicated mess of money, greed, etc.
Yes, very interesting read. By all means, examine the article, which concludes:
"So, let's please stay focused on why this matters.
"And why was Preet Bharara fired again?"
Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries have been allowed to
flourish in Israel.
A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that "many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish
members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country."
The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had "laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings."
In 2009, then Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged 17 managers and employees of the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims for defrauding Germany 42.5 million dollars by creating thousands of false benefit applications for people who had not
suffered in the Holocaust.
The scam operated by creating phony applications with false birth dates and invented histories of persecution to process compensation
claims. In some cases the recipients were born after World War II and at least one person was not even Jewish.
Among those charged was Semyon Domnitser, a former director of the conference. Many of the applicants were recruited from Brooklyn's
Russian community. All those charged hail from Brooklyn.
When a phony applicant got a check, the scammers were given a cut, Bharara said. The fraud which has been going on for 16 years
was related to the 400 million dollars which Germany pays out each year to Holocaust survivors.
Later, in November 2015, Bharara's office charged three Israeli men in a 23-count indictment that alleged that they ran a extensive
computer hacking and fraud scheme that targeted JPMorgan Chase, The Wall Street Journal, and ten other companies.
According to prosecutors, the Israeli's operation generated "hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit" and exposed
the personal information of more than 100 million people.
Why was Bharara fired?
Any real investigation of Russia-Gate will draw international attention towards Russian Jewish corruption in the FIRE (Finance,
Insurance, and Real Estate) sectors, and lead back to Israel.
Ain't gonna happen.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:22 pm
Remember Milly that essentially one of the first things Trump did when he came into office was fire Preet, and just days before
the long awaited trial. Then, Jeff Sessions settled the case for 6 million without any testimony on a 230 million dollar case,
days after. Spectacular and brazen, and structured to hide the identities of which properties were bought by which investors.
Hmmmm.
David , July 16, 2017 at 3:33 pm
By the way Milly, great summary article you have linked and one that everyone who is championing the Nekrasov film should read.
Abe , July 16, 2017 at 4:37 pm
The "great" article was not written by a journalist. It's an opinion piece written by Martin Longman, a blogger and Democratic
Party political consultant.
From 2012 to 2013, Longman worked for Democracy for America (DFA) a political action committee, headquartered in South Burlington,
Vermont, founded by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.
Since March 2014, political animal Longman has managed the The Washington Monthly website and online magazine.
Although it claims to be "an independent voice", the Washington Monthly is funded by the Ford Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation,
and well-heeled corporate entities http://washingtonmonthly.com/about/
Longman's credentials as a "progressive" alarmist are well established. Since 2005, he has been the publisher of Booman Tribune.
Longman admits that BooMan is related to the 'bogey man' (aka, bogy man, boogeyman), an evil imaginary character who harms children.
Vladimir Putin is the latest bogey man of the Democratic Party and its equally pro-Israel "opposition".
Neither party wants the conversation to involve Jewish Russian organized crime, because that leads to Israel and the pro-Israel
AIPAC lobby that funds both the Republican and Democratic parties.
"... My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers, teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades. For much of the twentieth century this class was in some tension with corporations, and used their skills at influencing government policy to help develop and protect the welfare state, since they needed the working class as a counterweight to the natural influence of corporate money and power. However, somewhere around 1970 I think this tension collapsed, since corporate managers and professionals realized that they shared the same education, background and interests. ..."
"... This "peace treaty" between former rivals allowed the whole newly enlarged New Class to swing to the right, since they really didn't particularly need the working class politically anymore. And since it is the hallmark of this class to seek prestige, power and money while transferring risk away from themselves, the middle class and blue collar community has been the natural recipient. Free trade (well, for non-professionals, anyway), neoliberalism, ruthless private equity job cutting, etc., etc. all followed very naturally. The re-alignment of the Democratic Party towards the right was a natural part of this evolution. ..."
"... They also sense that organized politics in this country – being chiefly the province of the New Class – has left them with little leverage to change any of this. ..."
"... the New Class has very strong internal solidarity – and since somebody has to pay for these little mistakes, everyone outside that class is "fair game." ..."
"... So in that sense–to the extent that you define liberal as the ideology of the New Class (neoliberal, financial-capitalistic, big corporate-friendly but opposed to non-meritocratic biases like racism, sexism, etc.) is "liberalism", I think it is reasonable to say that it has bred resistance and anger among the "losers." As far as having "failed", well, we'll see: the New Class still controls almost all the levers of power. It has many strategies for channeling lower-class anger and I think under Trump we'll see those rolled out. ..."
"... Perhaps some evolution in "the means of production" or in how governments are influenced will ultimately develop to divide or downgrade the New Class, and break its lock on the corridors of power, but I don't see it on the horizon just yet. If anyone else does, I'd love to hear more about it. ..."
"... A little puzzled by the inclusion of teachers, alongside financiers and the like, in William Meyer's list of the New Class rulers. Enablers of those rulers, no doubt, but not visibly calling the shots. But then I'm probably just another liberal elitist failing to recognize my own hegemony, like Chris. ..."
"... I assume he meant certain professors [of economics]. Actually on @4, there's a good chapter on the topic in a Thomas Franks latest. ..."
Obviously Mr. Deerin is, on its face, utilizing a very disputable definition
of "liberal."
However, I think a stronger case could be made for something like Mr.
Deerin's argument, although it doesn't necessarily get to the same conclusion.
My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers,
teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades. For
much of the twentieth century this class was in some tension with corporations,
and used their skills at influencing government policy to help develop and
protect the welfare state, since they needed the working class as a counterweight
to the natural influence of corporate money and power. However, somewhere
around 1970 I think this tension collapsed, since corporate managers and
professionals realized that they shared the same education, background and
interests.
Vive la meritocracy. This "peace treaty" between former rivals allowed
the whole newly enlarged New Class to swing to the right, since they really
didn't particularly need the working class politically anymore. And since
it is the hallmark of this class to seek prestige, power and money while
transferring risk away from themselves, the middle class and blue collar
community has been the natural recipient. Free trade (well, for non-professionals,
anyway), neoliberalism, ruthless private equity job cutting, etc., etc.
all followed very naturally. The re-alignment of the Democratic Party towards
the right was a natural part of this evolution.
I think the 90% or so of the community who are not included in this class
are confused and bewildered and of course rather angry about it. They
also sense that organized politics in this country – being chiefly the province
of the New Class – has left them with little leverage to change any of this.
Watching the bailouts and lack of prosecutions during the GFC made
them dimly realize that the New Class has very strong internal solidarity
– and since somebody has to pay for these little mistakes, everyone outside
that class is "fair game."
So in that sense–to the extent that you define liberal as the ideology
of the New Class (neoliberal, financial-capitalistic, big corporate-friendly
but opposed to non-meritocratic biases like racism, sexism, etc.) is "liberalism",
I think it is reasonable to say that it has bred resistance and anger among
the "losers." As far as having "failed", well, we'll see: the New Class
still controls almost all the levers of power. It has many strategies for
channeling lower-class anger and I think under Trump we'll see those rolled
out.
Let me be clear, I'm not saying Donald Trump is leading an insurgency
against the New Class – but I think he tapped into something like one and
is riding it for all he can, while not really having the slightest idea
what he's doing.
Perhaps some evolution in "the means of production" or in how governments
are influenced will ultimately develop to divide or downgrade the New Class,
and break its lock on the corridors of power, but I don't see it on the
horizon just yet. If anyone else does, I'd love to hear more about it.
A little puzzled by the inclusion of teachers, alongside financiers
and the like, in William Meyer's list of the New Class rulers. Enablers
of those rulers, no doubt, but not visibly calling the shots. But then I'm
probably just another liberal elitist failing to recognize my own hegemony,
like Chris.
"... My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers, teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades. For much of the twentieth century this class was in some tension with corporations, and used their skills at influencing government policy to help develop and protect the welfare state, since they needed the working class as a counterweight to the natural influence of corporate money and power. However, somewhere around 1970 I think this tension collapsed, since corporate managers and professionals realized that they shared the same education, background and interests. ..."
"... This "peace treaty" between former rivals allowed the whole newly enlarged New Class to swing to the right, since they really didn't particularly need the working class politically anymore. And since it is the hallmark of this class to seek prestige, power and money while transferring risk away from themselves, the middle class and blue collar community has been the natural recipient. Free trade (well, for non-professionals, anyway), neoliberalism, ruthless private equity job cutting, etc., etc. all followed very naturally. The re-alignment of the Democratic Party towards the right was a natural part of this evolution. ..."
"... They also sense that organized politics in this country – being chiefly the province of the New Class – has left them with little leverage to change any of this. ..."
"... the New Class has very strong internal solidarity – and since somebody has to pay for these little mistakes, everyone outside that class is "fair game." ..."
"... So in that sense–to the extent that you define liberal as the ideology of the New Class (neoliberal, financial-capitalistic, big corporate-friendly but opposed to non-meritocratic biases like racism, sexism, etc.) is "liberalism", I think it is reasonable to say that it has bred resistance and anger among the "losers." As far as having "failed", well, we'll see: the New Class still controls almost all the levers of power. It has many strategies for channeling lower-class anger and I think under Trump we'll see those rolled out. ..."
"... Perhaps some evolution in "the means of production" or in how governments are influenced will ultimately develop to divide or downgrade the New Class, and break its lock on the corridors of power, but I don't see it on the horizon just yet. If anyone else does, I'd love to hear more about it. ..."
"... A little puzzled by the inclusion of teachers, alongside financiers and the like, in William Meyer's list of the New Class rulers. Enablers of those rulers, no doubt, but not visibly calling the shots. But then I'm probably just another liberal elitist failing to recognize my own hegemony, like Chris. ..."
"... I assume he meant certain professors [of economics]. Actually on @4, there's a good chapter on the topic in a Thomas Franks latest. ..."
Obviously Mr. Deerin is, on its face, utilizing a very disputable definition
of "liberal."
However, I think a stronger case could be made for something like Mr.
Deerin's argument, although it doesn't necessarily get to the same conclusion.
My observation is that the New Class (professionals, lobbyists, financiers,
teachers, engineers, etc.) have ruled the country in recent decades. For
much of the twentieth century this class was in some tension with corporations,
and used their skills at influencing government policy to help develop and
protect the welfare state, since they needed the working class as a counterweight
to the natural influence of corporate money and power. However, somewhere
around 1970 I think this tension collapsed, since corporate managers and
professionals realized that they shared the same education, background and
interests.
Vive la meritocracy. This "peace treaty" between former rivals allowed
the whole newly enlarged New Class to swing to the right, since they really
didn't particularly need the working class politically anymore. And since
it is the hallmark of this class to seek prestige, power and money while
transferring risk away from themselves, the middle class and blue collar
community has been the natural recipient. Free trade (well, for non-professionals,
anyway), neoliberalism, ruthless private equity job cutting, etc., etc.
all followed very naturally. The re-alignment of the Democratic Party towards
the right was a natural part of this evolution.
I think the 90% or so of the community who are not included in this class
are confused and bewildered and of course rather angry about it. They
also sense that organized politics in this country – being chiefly the province
of the New Class – has left them with little leverage to change any of this.
Watching the bailouts and lack of prosecutions during the GFC made
them dimly realize that the New Class has very strong internal solidarity
– and since somebody has to pay for these little mistakes, everyone outside
that class is "fair game."
So in that sense–to the extent that you define liberal as the ideology
of the New Class (neoliberal, financial-capitalistic, big corporate-friendly
but opposed to non-meritocratic biases like racism, sexism, etc.) is "liberalism",
I think it is reasonable to say that it has bred resistance and anger among
the "losers." As far as having "failed", well, we'll see: the New Class
still controls almost all the levers of power. It has many strategies for
channeling lower-class anger and I think under Trump we'll see those rolled
out.
Let me be clear, I'm not saying Donald Trump is leading an insurgency
against the New Class – but I think he tapped into something like one and
is riding it for all he can, while not really having the slightest idea
what he's doing.
Perhaps some evolution in "the means of production" or in how governments
are influenced will ultimately develop to divide or downgrade the New Class,
and break its lock on the corridors of power, but I don't see it on the
horizon just yet. If anyone else does, I'd love to hear more about it.
A little puzzled by the inclusion of teachers, alongside financiers
and the like, in William Meyer's list of the New Class rulers. Enablers
of those rulers, no doubt, but not visibly calling the shots. But then I'm
probably just another liberal elitist failing to recognize my own hegemony,
like Chris.
"... "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" ..."
"... Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: " Russia intervened and decided the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate of 'Deploralandia'. ..."
"... Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI, and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger or footprints. ..."
"... Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million more! ..."
"... Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen! ..."
"... Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph. There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with progressives to bolt the party. ..."
"... This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary. ..."
"... Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.) ..."
"... Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then he travels to Europe for more paid speeches. ..."
"... They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering in full flower throughout his second term. ..."
"... Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act ..."
Over the past quarter century progressive writers, activists and academics have followed a trajectory
from left to right – with each presidential campaign seeming to move them further to the right. Beginning
in the 1990's progressives mobilized millions in opposition to wars, voicing demands for the transformation
of the US's corporate for-profit medical system into a national 'Medicare For All' public
program. They condemned the notorious Wall Street swindlers and denounced police state legislation
and violence. But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who
pursued the exact opposite agenda.
Over time this political contrast between program and practice led to the transformation of the
Progressives. And what we see today are US progressives embracing and promoting the politics of the
far right.
To understand this transformation we will begin by identifying who and what the progressives are
and describe their historical role. We will then proceed to identify their trajectory over the recent
decades.
We will outline the contours of recent Presidential campaigns where Progressives were deeply
involved.
We will focus on the dynamics of political regression: From resistance to submission, from
retreat to surrender.
We will conclude by discussing the end result: The Progressives' large-scale, long-term embrace
of far-right ideology and practice.
Progressives by Name and Posture
Progressives purport to embrace 'progress', the growth of the economy, the enrichment of society
and freedom from arbitrary government. Central to the Progressive agenda was the end of elite corruption
and good governance, based on democratic procedures.
Progressives prided themselves as appealing to 'reason, diplomacy and conciliation', not brute
force and wars. They upheld the sovereignty of other nations and eschewed militarism and armed intervention.
Progressives proposed a vision of their fellow citizens pursuing incremental evolution toward
the 'good society', free from the foreign entanglements, which had entrapped the people in unjust
wars.
Progressives in Historical Perspective
In the early part of the 20th century, progressives favored political equality while opposing
extra-parliamentary social transformations. They supported gender equality and environmental preservation
while failing to give prominence to the struggles of workers and African Americans.
They denounced militarism 'in general' but supported a series of 'wars to end all wars'
. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home
and bloody imperial wars overseas. By the middle of the 20th century, different strands emerged
under the progressive umbrella. Progressives split between traditional good government advocates
and modernists who backed socio-economic reforms, civil liberties and rights.
Progressives supported legislation to regulate monopolies, encouraged collective bargaining and
defended the Bill of Rights.
Progressives opposed wars and militarism in theory until their government went to war.
Lacking an effective third political party, progressives came to see themselves as the 'left
wing' of the Democratic Party, allies of labor and civil rights movements and defenders of civil
liberties.
Progressives joined civil rights leaders in marches, but mostly relied on legal and
electoral means to advance African American rights.
Progressives played a pivotal role in fighting McCarthyism, though ultimately it was the Secretary
of the Army and the military high command that brought Senator McCarthy to his knees.
Progressives provided legal defense when the social movements disrupted the House UnAmerican Activities
Committee.
They popularized the legislative arguments that eventually outlawed segregation, but it was courageous
Afro-American leaders heading mass movements that won the struggle for integration and civil rights.
In many ways the Progressives complemented the mass struggles, but their limits were defined by
the constraints of their membership in the Democratic Party.
The alliance between Progressives and social movements peaked in the late sixties to mid-1970's
when the Progressives followed the lead of dynamic and advancing social movements and community organizers
especially in opposition to the wars in Indochina and the military draft.
The Retreat of the Progressives
By the late 1970's the Progressives had cut their anchor to the social movements, as the anti-war,
civil rights and labor movements lost their impetus (and direction).
The numbers of progressives within the left wing of the Democratic Party increased through recruitment
from earlier social movements. Paradoxically, while their 'numbers' were up, their caliber had declined,
as they sought to 'fit in' with the pro-business, pro-war agenda of their President's party.
Without the pressure of the 'populist street' the 'Progressives-turned-Democrats' adapted
to the corporate culture in the Party. The Progressives signed off on a fatal compromise: The corporate
elite secured the electoral party while the Progressives were allowed to write enlightened manifestos
about the candidates and their programs . . . which were quickly dismissed once the Democrats took
office. Yet the ability to influence the 'electoral rhetoric' was seen by the Progressives as a sufficient
justification for remaining inside the Democratic Party.
Moreover the Progressives argued that by strengthening their presence in the Democratic Party,
(their self-proclaimed 'boring from within' strategy), they would capture the party membership,
neutralize the pro-corporation, militarist elements that nominated the president and peacefully transform
the party into a 'vehicle for progressive changes'.
Upon their successful 'deep penetration' the Progressives, now cut off from the increasingly disorganized
mass social movements, coopted and bought out many prominent black, labor and civil liberty activists
and leaders, while collaborating with what they dubbed the more malleable 'centrist' Democrats.
These mythical creatures were really pro-corporate Democrats who condescended to occasionally converse
with the Progressives while working for the Wall Street and Pentagon elite.
The Retreat of the Progressives: The Clinton Decade
Progressives adapted the 'crab strategy': Moving side-ways and then backwards but never forward.
Progressives mounted candidates in the Presidential primaries, which were predictably defeated
by the corporate Party apparatus, and then submitted immediately to the outcome. The election of
President 'Bill' Clinton launched a period of unrestrained financial plunder, major wars of aggression
in Europe (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East (Iraq), a military intervention in Somalia and secured
Israel's victory over any remnant of a secular Palestinian leadership as well as its destruction
of Lebanon!
Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party bent
over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act, thereby opening
the floodgates for massive speculation on Wall Street through the previously regulated banking sector.
When President Clinton gutted welfare programs, forcing single mothers to take minimum-wage jobs
without provision for safe childcare, millions of poor white and minority women were forced to abandon
their children to dangerous makeshift arrangements in order to retain any residual public support
and access to minimal health care. Progressives looked the other way.
Progressives followed Clinton's deep throated thrust toward the far right, as he outsourced manufacturing
jobs to Mexico (NAFTA) and re-appointed Federal Reserve's free market, Ayn Rand-fanatic, Alan Greenspan.
Progressives repeatedly kneeled before President Clinton marking their submission to the Democrats'
'hard right' policies.
The election of Republican President G. W. Bush (2001-2009) permitted Progressive's to temporarily
trot out and burnish their anti-war, anti-Wall Street credentials. Out in the street, they protested
Bush's savage invasion of Iraq (but not the destruction of Afghanistan). They protested the media
reports of torture in Abu Ghraib under Bush, but not the massive bombing and starvation of millions
of Iraqis that had occurred under Clinton. Progressives protested the expulsion of immigrants from
Mexico and Central America, but were silent over the brutal uprooting of refugees resulting from
US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the systematic destruction of their nations' infrastructure.
Progressives embraced Israel's bombing, jailing and torture of Palestinians by voting unanimously
in favor of increasing the annual $3 billion dollar military handouts to the brutal Jewish State.
They supported Israel's bombing and slaughter in Lebanon.
Progressives were in retreat, but retained a muffled voice and inconsequential vote in favor of
peace, justice and civil liberties. They kept a certain distance from the worst of the police state
decrees by the Republican Administration.
Progressives and Obama: From Retreat to Surrender
While Progressives maintained their tepid commitment to civil liberties, and their highly 'leveraged'
hopes for peace in the Middle East, they jumped uncritically into the highly choreographed Democratic
Party campaign for Barack Obama, 'Wall Street's First Black President'.
Progressives had given up their quest to 'realign' the Democratic Party 'from within':
they turned from serious tourism to permanent residency. Progressives provided the foot soldiers
for the election and re-election of the warmongering 'Peace Candidate' Obama. After the election,
Progressives rushed to join the lower echelons of his Administration. Black and white politicos joined
hands in their heroic struggle to erase the last vestiges of the Progressives' historical legacy.
Obama increased the number of Bush-era imperial wars to attacking seven weak nations under American's
'First Black' President's bombardment, while the Progressives ensured that the streets were quiet
and empty.
When Obama provided trillions of dollars of public money to rescue Wall Street and the bankers,
while sacrificing two million poor and middle class mortgage holders, the Progressives only criticized
the bankers who received the bailout, but not Obama's Presidential decision to protect and reward
the mega-swindlers.
Under the Obama regime social inequalities within the United States grew at an unprecedented rate.
The Police State Patriot Act was massively extended to give President Obama the power to order the
assassination of US citizens abroad without judicial process. The Progressives did not resign when
Obama's 'kill orders' extended to the 'mistaken' murder of his target's children and other family
member, as well as unidentified bystanders. The icon carriers still paraded their banner of the
'first black American President' when tens of thousands of black Libyans and immigrant workers
were slaughtered in his regime-change war against President Gadhafi.
Obama surpassed the record of all previous Republican office holders in terms of the massive numbers
of immigrant workers arrested and expelled – 2 million. Progressives applauded the Latino protestors
while supporting the policies of their 'first black President'.
Progressive accepted that multiple wars, Wall Street bailouts and the extended police state were
now the price they would pay to remain part of the "Democratic coalition' (sic).
The deeper the Progressives swilled at the Democratic Party trough, the more they embraced the
Obama's free market agenda and the more they ignored the increasing impoverishment, exploitation
and medical industry-led opioid addiction of American workers that was shortening their lives. Under
Obama, the Progressives totally abandoned the historic American working class, accepting their degradation
into what Madam Hillary Clinton curtly dismissed as the 'deplorables'.
With the Obama Presidency, the Progressive retreat turned into a rout, surrendering with one flaccid
caveat: the Democratic Party 'Socialist' Bernie Sanders, who had voted 90% of the time with the Corporate
Party, had revived a bastardized military-welfare state agenda.
Sander's Progressive demagogy shouted and rasped on the campaign trail, beguiling the young electorate.
The 'Bernie' eventually 'sheep-dogged' his supporters into the pro-war Democratic Party corral.
Sanders revived an illusion of the pre-1990 progressive agenda, promising resistance while demanding
voter submission to Wall Street warlord Hillary Clinton. After Sanders' round up of the motley progressive
herd, he staked them tightly to the far-right Wall Street war mongering Hillary Clinton. The Progressives
not only embraced Madame Secretary Clinton's nuclear option and virulent anti-working class agenda,
they embellished it by focusing on Republican billionaire Trump's demagogic, nationalist, working
class rhetoric which was designed to agitate 'the deplorables'. They even turned on the working
class voters, dismissing them as 'irredeemable' racists and illiterates or 'white trash' when
they turned to support Trump in massive numbers in the 'fly-over' states of the central US.
Progressives, allied with the police state, the mass media and the war machine worked to defeat
and impeach Trump. Progressives surrendered completely to the Democratic Party and started to advocate
its far right agenda. Hysterical McCarthyism against anyone who questioned the Democrats' promotion
of war with Russia, mass media lies and manipulation of street protest against Republican elected
officials became the centerpieces of the Progressive agenda. The working class and farmers had disappeared
from their bastardized 'identity-centered' ideology.
Guilt by association spread throughout Progressive politics. Progressives embraced J. Edgar Hoover's
FBI tactics: "Have you ever met or talked to any Russian official or relative of any Russian
banker, or any Russian or even read Gogol, now or in the past?" For progressives, 'Russia-gate'
defined the real focus of contemporary political struggle in this huge, complex, nuclear-armed superpower.
Progressives joined the FBI/CIA's 'Russian Bear' conspiracy: "Russia intervened and decided
the Presidential election" – no matter that millions of workers and rural Americans had voted
against Hillary Clinton, Wall Street's candidate and no matter that no evidence of direct interference
was ever presented. Progressives could not accept that 'their constituents', the masses, had rejected
Madame Clinton and preferred 'the Donald'. They attacked a shifty-eyed caricature of the repeatedly
elected Russian President Putin as a subterfuge for attacking the disobedient 'white trash' electorate
of 'Deploralandia'.
Progressive demagogues embraced the coifed and manicured former 'Director Comey' of the FBI,
and the Mr. Potato-headed Capo of the CIA and their forty thugs in making accusations without finger
or footprints.
The Progressives' far right - turn earned them hours and space on the mass media as long
as they breathlessly savaged and insulted President Trump and his family members. When they managed
to provoke him into a blind rage . . . they added the newly invented charge of 'psychologically
unfit to lead' – presenting cheap psychobabble as grounds for impeachment. Finally! American
Progressives were on their way to achieving their first and only political transformation: a Presidential
coup d'état on behalf of the Far Right!
Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement
and betrayal!
In return, President Trump began to 'out-militarize' the Progressives by escalating US involvement
in the Middle East and South China Sea. They swooned with joy when Trump ordered a missile strike
against the Syrian government as Damascus engaged in a life and death struggle against mercenary
terrorists. They dubbed the petulant release of Patriot missiles 'Presidential'.
Then Progressives turned increasingly Orwellian: Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over
2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump for promising to eventually expel 5 million
more!
Progressives, under Obama, supported seven brutal illegal wars and pressed for more, but complained
when Trump continued the same wars and proposed adding a few new ones. At the same time, progressives
out-militarized Trump by accusing him of being 'weak' on Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. They
chided him for his lack support for Israel's suppression of the Palestinians. They lauded Trump's
embrace of the Saudi war against Yemen as a stepping-stone for an assault against Iran, even as millions
of destitute Yemenis were exposed to cholera. The Progressives had finally embraced a biological
weapon of mass destruction, when US-supplied missiles destroyed the water systems of Yemen!
Conclusion
Progressives turned full circle from supporting welfare to embracing Wall Street; from preaching
peaceful co-existence to demanding a dozen wars; from recognizing the humanity and rights of undocumented
immigrants to their expulsion under their 'First Black' President; from thoughtful mass media critics
to servile media megaphones; from defenders of civil liberties to boosters for the police state;
from staunch opponents of J. Edgar Hoover and his 'dirty tricks' to camp followers for the 'intelligence
community' in its deep state campaign to overturn a national election.
Progressives moved from fighting and resisting the Right to submitting and retreating; from retreating
to surrendering and finally embracing the far right.
Doing all that and more within the Democratic Party, Progressives retain and deepen their ties
with the mass media, the security apparatus and the military machine, while occasionally digging
up some Bernie Sanders-type demagogue to arouse an army of voters away from effective resistance
to mindless collaboration.
But in the end, they always voted for Democratic Party Presidential candidates who pursued
the exact opposite agenda.
Thank you for putting your finger on the main problem right there in the first paragraph.
There were exceptions of course. I supported Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic Primary that gave
us the first black etc. But I never voted for Obama. Throughout the Cheney Admin I pleaded with
progressives to bolt the party.
This piece accurately traces the path from Progressive to Maoist. It's a pity the Republican
Party is also a piece of shit. I think it was Sara Palin who said "We have two parties. Pick one."
This should be our collective epitaph.
This is an excellent summary of the evolution of "progressives" into modern militarist
fascists who tolerate identity politics diversity. There is little to add to Mr. Petras' commentary.
"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as
appeasement and betrayal!"
Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats)
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee.
The great Jimmy Dore is a big thorn for the Democrats. From my blog:
Apr 29, 2017 – Obama is Scum!
Barak Obama is America's biggest con man who accomplished nothing "progressive" during
eight years at the top, and didn't even try. (Obamacare is an insurance industry idea supported
by most Republicans, which is why it recently survived.) Anyone who still likes Obama should read
about his actions since he left office. Obama quickly signed a $65 million "book deal", which
can only be a kickback since there is no way the publisher can sell enough books about his meaningless
presidency to justify that sum. Obama doesn't get royalties based on sales, but gets the money
up front for a book he has yet to write, and will have someone do that for him. (Book deals and
speaking fees are legal forms of bribery in the USA.)
Then Obama embarked on 100 days of ultra expensive foreign vacations with taxpayers covering
the Secret Service protection costs. He didn't appear at charity fundraisers, didn't campaign
for Democrats, and didn't help build homes for the poor like Jimmy Carter. He returns from vacation
this week and his first speech will be at a Wall Street firm that will pay him $400,000, then
he travels to Europe for more paid speeches.
Obama gets over $200,000 a year in retirement, just got a $65 million deal, so doesn't need
more money. Why would a multi-millionaire ex-president fly around the globe collecting huge speaking
fees from world corporations just after his political party was devastated in elections because
Americans think the Democratic party represents Wall Street? The great Jimmy Dore expressed his
outrage at Obama and the corrupt Democratic party in this great video.
Left in the good old days meant socialist, socialist meant that governments had the duty of
redistributing income from rich to poor. Alas in Europe, after 'socialists' became pro EU and
pro globalisation, they in fact became neoliberal. Both in France and the Netherlands 'socialist'
parties virtually disappeared.
So what nowadays is left, does anyone know ?
Then the word 'progressive'. The word suggests improvement, but what is improvement, improvement
for whom ? There are those who see the possibility for euthanasia as an improvement, there are
thos who see euthanasia as a great sin.
Discussions about left and progressive are meaningless without properly defining the concepts.
They chose power over principles. Nobel War Prize winner Obomber was a particularly egregious
chameleon, hiding his sociopathy through two elections before unleashing his racist warmongering
in full flower throughout his second term. But, hey, the brother now has five mansions, collects
half a mill per speech to the Chosen People on Wall Street, and parties for months at a time at
exclusive resorts for billionaires only.
Obviously, he's got the world by the tail and you don't. Hope he comes to the same end as Gaddaffi
and Ceaușescu. Maybe the survivors of nuclear Armageddon can hold a double necktie party with
Killary as the second honored guest that day.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied the dual policies of promoting peace at home
and bloody imperial wars overseas.
You left out the other Roosevelt.
Like a huge collective 'Monica Lewinsky' robot, the Progressives in the Democratic Party
bent over and swallowed Clinton's vicious 1999 savaging of the venerable Glass Steagall Act
Hilarious!
Ignoring Obama's actual expulsion of over 2 million immigrant workers, they condemned Trump
for promising to eventually expel 5 million more!
so it's not just conservative conspiracy theory stuff as some might argue.
Still, the overall point of this essay isn't affected all that much. Open borders is still
a "right wing" (in the sense this author uses the term) policy–pro-Wall Street, pro-Big Business.
So Obama was still doing the bidding of the donor class in their quest for cheap labor.
I've seen pro-immigration types try to use the Obama-deportation thing to argue that we don't
need more hardcore policies. After all, even the progressive Democrat Obama was on the ball when
it came to policing our borders, right?! Who needed Trump?
@Carlton Meyer If Jimmy keeps up these attacks on Wall Street, the Banksters, and rent-seekers
he is going to get run out of the Progressive movement for dog-whistling virulent Anti-Semitism.
Look at how the media screams at Trump every time he mentions Wall Street and the banks.
Mr. Petra has penned an excellent and very astute piece. Allow me a little satire on our progressive
friends, entitled "The path to hell is paved with good intentions".
The early socialist/progressive travellers were well-intentioned but naïve in their understanding
of human nature and fanatical about their agenda. To move the human herd forward, they had no
compulsions about resorting to harsher and harsher prodding and whipping. They felt entitled to
employ these means because, so they were convinced, man has to be pushed to move forward and they,
the "progressives", were the best qualified to lead the herd. Scoundrels, psychopaths, moral defectives,
and sundry other rascals then joined in the whipping game, some out of the sheer joy of wielding
the whip, others to better line their pockets.
So the "progressive" journey degenerates into a forced march. The march becomes the progress,
becoming both the means and the end at the same time. Look at the so-called "progressive" today
and you will see the fanatic and the whip-wielder, steadfast about the correctness of his beliefs.
Tell him/her/it that you are a man or a woman and he retorts "No, you are free to choose, you
are genderless". What if you decline such freedom? "Well, then you are a bigot, we will thrash
you out of your bigotry", replies the progressive. "May I, dear Sir/Madam/Whatever, keep my hard-earned
money in my pocket for my and my family's use" you ask. "No, you first have to pay for our peace-making
wars, then pay for the upkeep of refugees, besides which you owe a lot of back taxes that are
necessary to run this wonderful Big Government of ours that is leading you towards greener and
greener pastures", shouts back the progressive.
Fed up, disgusted, and a little scared, you desperately seek a way out of this progress. "No
way", scream the march leaders. "We will be forever in your ears, sometimes whispering, sometimes
screaming; we will take over your brain to improve your mind; we will saturate you with images
on the box 24/7 and employ all sorts of imagery to make you progress. And if it all fails, we
will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables and forget about you at election
time."
Knowing who is "progressive" and know who is "far-right" is like knowing who is "fascist" and
who is not. For obvious historical reasons, the Russian like to throw the "fascist" slogan against
anyone who is a non-Russian nationalist. However, I accept the eminent historian Carroll Quigley's
definition of fascism as the incorporation of society and the state onto single entity on a permanent
war footing. The state controls everything in a radically authoritarian social structure. As Quigley
states, the Soviet Union was the most complete embodiment of fascism in WWII. In WWII Germany,
on the other hand, industry retained its independence and in WWII Italy fascism was no more than
an empty slogan.
Same for "progressives". Everyone wants to be "progressive", right? Who wants to be "anti-progressive"?
However, at the end of the day, "progressive" through verbal slights of hand has been nothing
more than a euphemism for "socialist" or, in the extreme, "communist" the verbal slight-of-hand
because we don't tend to use the latter terms in American political discourse.
"Progressives" morphing into a new "far-right" in America is no more mysterious than the Soviet
Union morphing from Leninism to Stalinism or, the Jewish (Trotskyite) globalists fleeing Stalinist
nationalism and then morphing into, first, "Scoop" Jackson Democrats and then into Bushite Republicans.
As you might notice, the real issue is the authoritarian vs. the non-authoritarian state. In
this context, an authoritarian government and social order (as in communism and neoconservatism)
are practical pre-requisites necessity to force humanity to transition to their New World Order.
Again, the defining characteristic of fascism is the unitary state enforced via an authoritarian
political and social structure. Ideological rigor is enforced via the police powers of the state
along with judicial activism and political correctness. Ring a bell?
In the ongoing contest between Trump and the remnants of the American "progressive" movement,
who are the populists and who the authoritarians? Who are the democrats and who are the fascists?
I would say that who lands where in this dichotomy is obvious.
@Alfa158 Is Jimmy Dore really a "Progressive?" (and what does that mean, anyway?) Isn't Jimmy's
show hosted by the Young Turks Network, which is unabashedly Libertarian?
Anyway, what's so great about "the Progressive movement?" Seems to me, they're just pathetic
sheepdogs for the war-crazed Dems. Jimmy should be supporting the #UNRIG movement ("Beyond Trump
& Sanders") for ALL Americans:
On 1 May 2017 Cynthia McKinney, Ellen Brown, and Robert Steele launched
Petras, for some reason, low balls the number of people ejected from assets when the mafia
came to seize real estate in the name of the ruling class and their expensive wars, morality,
the Constitution or whatever shit they could make up to fuck huge numbers of people over. Undoubtedly
just like 9/11, the whole thing was planned in advance. Political whores are clearly useless when
the system is at such extremes.
Banks like Capital One specialize in getting a signature and "giving" a car loan to someone
they know won't be able to pay, but is simply being used, shaken down and repossessed for corporate
gain. " No one held a gun to their head! " Get ready, the police state will in fact put a gun
to your head.
Depending on the time period in question, which might be the case here, more than 20 million
people were put out of homes and/or bankrupted with more to come. Clearly a bipartisan effort
featuring widespread criminal conduct across the country – an attack on the population to sustain
militarism.
If I may add:
"and you also have to dearly pay for you being white male heterosexual for oppressing all colored,
all the women and all the sexually different through the history".
"And if it all fails, we will simply pack you and others like you in a basket of deplorables
and forget about you at election time. If we see that you still don't get with the program we
will reeducate you. Should you resist that in any way we'll incarcerate you. And, no, normal legal
procedure does not work with racists/bigots/haters/whatever we don't like".
"Progressives loudly condemned Trump's overtures for peace with Russia, denouncing it as appeasement
and betrayal!"
Perhaps the spirit of Senator Joseph McCarthy is joyously gloating as progressives (and democrats)
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House UnAmerican
Activities Committee.
take their place as his heirs and successors and the 21st century incarnation of the House
UnAmerican Activities Committee
which itself was a progressive invention. There was no "right wing" anywhere in sight when
it was estsblished in 1938.
Eric Zuesse
December 8, 2020 © Photo: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
Outgoing US President Donald Trump has delivered his "parting gift" to the Moscow-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, with newly announced sanctions targeting a pipe-laying vessel and companies involved in the multinational project.
'Journalists desperate to not know': Glenn Greenwald blasts media coverage of Hunter Biden
scandal in piece the Intercept censored
