This was written in 2011 but it summarizes Obama presidency pretty nicely, even today. Betrayer
in chief, the master of bait and switch. That is the essence of Obama legacy. On "Great Democratic betrayal"...
Obama always was a closet neoliberal and neocon. A stooge of neoliberal financial oligarchy, a puppet,
if you want politically incorrect term. He just masked it well during hist first election campaigning
as a progressive democrat... And he faced Romney in his second campaign, who was even worse, so after
betraying American people once, he was reelected and did it twice. Much like Bush II. He like
another former cocaine addict -- George W Bush has never any intention of helping American people, only
oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. ..."
"... We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues. ..."
"... These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power. ..."
"... Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back ..."
"... he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans. ..."
"... I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator. ..."
"... Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is. ..."
"... So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. ..."
"... I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans ..."
"... He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation. ..."
"... I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are. ..."
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans
were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost
their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even
the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment,
with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what
they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that
he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and
suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes,
was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This
was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated
with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated
regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And
it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods,
with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we
will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting
money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity
to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we
won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that
your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the
policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was
to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands.
That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given
Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans
and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement.
It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit
that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest
Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant
narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters,
but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut
themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share
for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of
his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his
first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had
happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president
had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building
the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis
out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden,
he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate
as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best
exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a
major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial
one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power
in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power
is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform
ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt
started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the
trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply,
and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill.
The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics
- in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness
and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for
at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait
for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking
with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police
dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or
a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his
true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic
inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack
Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the
people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that
decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind
it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story
of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them
for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem
other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer
confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked
the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his
temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration
that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
Bill Levine August 7, 2011
Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since
the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011
"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of
what they had just been through, what caused it,...
Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic
and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class;
and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly
push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican
and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would
be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social
Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in
the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this
road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!
Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President
Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying
not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly
why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant
and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will
we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric
of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well,
he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I
vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely
since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral
vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance
to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe
in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity
and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse
labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones
that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government
to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community,
opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed
the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at
GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to
lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum.
He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some
good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality,
where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all
Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our
national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem.
-->
I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a
person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a
centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA.
Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged
a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate
someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader
does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than
trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats
who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson,
have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed
are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not
the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic
about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see
anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure
of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this
column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures
to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins
of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans,
he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters
who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people.
That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who
acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible,
avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws
which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict
averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political
and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the
country as Republicans are.
"Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump"
Yeah, that seems like a clear statement, but when you consider that the vast majority of people
do not habitually read closely and interpret things literally, I can see how this would easily
be misinterpreted.
Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact.
It's not the same as "tampered with vote tallies" but an inattentive poll respondent might assume
the question was about the former. And most people are inattentive.
"Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact."
You are funny. Especially with your "well established fact" nonsense.
In such cases the only source of well established facts is a court of law or International
observers of the elections. All other agencies have their own interest in distorting the truth.
For example, to get additional funding.
And that list includes President Obama himself, as a player, because he clearly was a Hillary
supporter and as such can not be considered an impartial player and can politically benefit from
shifting the blame for fiasco to Russia.
Also historically, he never was very truthful with American people, was he? As in case of his
"Change we can believe in!" bait and switch trick.
There were several other important foreign players in the US elections: for example KAS and
Israel. Were their actions investigated? Especially in the area of financial support of candidates.
And then FYI there is a documented history of US tampering in Russian Presidential election
of 2011-2012 such as meetings of the US ambassador with the opposition leaders, financing of opposition
via NGO, putting pressure by publishing election pools produced by US financed non-profits, and
so on and so forth. All in the name of democracy, of course. Which cost Ambassador McFaul his
position; NED was kicked out of the country.
As far as I remember nobody went to jail in the USA for those activities. There was no investigation.
So it looks like the USA authorities considered this to be a pretty legal activity. Then why they
complain now?
And then there is the whole rich history of CIA subverting elections in Latin America.
So is not this a case of "the pot calling the kettle black"?
I don't know. But I would avoid your simplistic position. The case is too complex for this.
At least more complex that the narrative the neoliberal MSMs try to present us with. It might
be Russian influence was a factor, but it might be that it was negligible and other factors were
in play. There is also a pre-history and there are other suspects.
You probably need to see a wider context of the event.
"... Shorter Paul Krugman: nobody acted more irresponsibly in the last election than the New York Times. ..."
"... Looks like Putin recruited the NYT, the FBI and the DNC. ..."
"... Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which is a big shame. ..."
"... It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in the future. ..."
"... Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism. ..."
"... Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs, etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture. ..."
"... It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want. That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce optimal results. ..."
"... All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice -- incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people, "We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small 'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves. ..."
"... Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments today!?! ..."
"... Unless the Russians or someone else hacked the ballot box machines, it is our own damn fault. ..."
"... The ship of neo-liberal trade sailed in the mid-2000's. That you don't get that is sad. You can only milk that so far the cow had been milked. ..."
"... The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.) ..."
"... The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned, and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until he had no real chance. ..."
"... The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic elite and their apologists. ..."
"... The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought. For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion. ..."
"... Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the message. ..."
"... It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing? Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate to win this thing than we Democrats did. ..."
"... The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy much? ..."
[ I find it terrifying, simply terrifying, to refer to people as "useful idiots" after all
the personal destruction that has followed when the expression was specifically used in the past.
To me, using such an expression is an honored economist intent on becoming Joseph McCarthy.
]
To demean a person as though the person were a communist or a fool of communists or the like,
with all the personal harm that has historically brought in this country, is cruel beyond my understanding
or imagining.
Well, not really. For example he referred to "the close relationship between Wikileaks and Russian
intelligence." But Wikileaks is a channel. They don't seek out material. They rely on people to
bring material to them. They supposedly make an effort to verify that the material is not a forgery,
but aside from that what they release is what people bring to them. Incidentally, like so many
people you seem to not care whether the material is accurate or not -- Podesta and the DNC have
not claimed that any of the emails are different from what they sent.
ZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic experiment and
unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be
in danger....
Yup, like the other elections, the bases stayed solvent and current events factored into the turnout
and voting patterns which spurred the independent vote.
When people were claiming Clinton was going to win big, I thought no Republican and Democratic
voters are going to pull the lever like a trained monkey as usual. Only difference in this election
was Hillary's huge negatives due entirely by her and Bill Clinton's support for moving manufacturing
jobs to Mexico and China in the 90s.
To Understand Trump, Learn Russian http://nyti.ms/2hLcrB1
NYT - Andrew Rosenthal - December 15
The Russian language has two words for truth - a linguistic quirk that seems relevant to our
current political climate, especially because of all the disturbing ties between the newly elected
president and the Kremlin.
The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is "pravda" - the truth that seems evident
on the surface. It's subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called
their party newspaper "Pravda." Despots, autocrats and other cynical politicians are adept at
manipulating pravda to their own ends.
But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called "istina" in
Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can't change the istina.
For the Trump team, the pravda of the 2016 election is that not all Trump voters are explicitly
racist. But the istina of the 2016 campaign is that Trump's base was heavily dependent on racists
and xenophobes, Trump basked in and stoked their anger and hatred, and all those who voted for
him cast a ballot for a man they knew to be a racist, sexist xenophobe. That was an act of racism.
Trump's team took to Twitter with lightning speed recently to sneer at the conclusion by all
17 intelligence agencies that the Kremlin hacked Democratic Party emails for the specific purpose
of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton. Trump said the intelligence agencies got it wrong
about Iraq, and that someone else could have been responsible for the hack and that the Democrats
were just finding another excuse for losing.
The istina of this mess is that powerful evidence suggests that the Russians set out to interfere
in American politics, and that Trump, with his rejection of Western European alliances and embrace
of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was their chosen candidate.
The pravda of Trump's selection of Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil, as secretary of state
is that by choosing an oil baron who has made billions for his company by collaborating with Russia,
Trump will make American foreign policy beholden to American corporate interests.
That's bad enough, but the istina is far worse. For one thing, American foreign policy has
been in thrall to American corporate interests since, well, since there were American corporations.
Just look at the mess this country created in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and
the Middle East to serve American companies.
Yes, Tillerson has ignored American interests repeatedly, including in Russia and Iraq, and
has been trying to remove sanctions imposed after Russia's seizure of Crimea because they interfered
with one of his many business deals. But take him out of the equation in the Trump cabinet and
nothing changes. Trump has made it plain, with every action he takes, that he is going to put
every facet of policy, domestic and foreign, at the service of corporate America. The istina here
is that Tillerson is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
The pravda is that Trump was right in saying that the intelligence agencies got it wrong about
Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
But the istina is that Trump's contempt for the intelligence services is profound and dangerous.
He's not getting daily intelligence briefings anymore, apparently because they are just too dull
to hold his attention.
And now we know that Condoleezza Rice was instrumental in bringing Tillerson to Trump's attention.
As national security adviser and then secretary of state for president George W. Bush, Rice was
not just wrong about Iraq, she helped fabricate the story that Hussein had nuclear weapons.
Trump and Tillerson clearly think they are a match for the wily and infinitely dangerous Putin,
but as they move foward with their plan to collaborate with Russia instead of opposing its imperialist
tendencies, they might keep in mind another Russian saying, this one from Lenin.
"There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience," he wrote. "A scoundrel may be
of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."
Putin has that philosophy hard-wired into his political soul. When it comes to using scoundrels
to get what he wants, he is a professional, and Trump is only an amateur. That is the istina of
the matter.
If nothing else, Russia - with a notably un-free press - has shrewdly used our own 'free press'
against US.
RUSSIA'S UNFREE PRESS
The Boston Globe - Marshall Goldman - January 29, 2001
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DEBATES ITS POLICY TOWARD RUSSIA, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS SHOULD BE
ONE OF ITS MAJOR CONCERNS. UNDER PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN THE PRESS IS FREE ONLY AS LONG AS IT
DOES NOT CRITICIZE PUTIN OR HIS POLICIES. WHEN NTV, THE TELEVISION NETWORK OF THE MEDIA GIANT
MEDIA MOST, REFUSED TO PULL ITS PUNCHES, MEDIA MOST'S OWNER, VLADIMIR GUSINSKY, FOUND HIMSELF
IN JAIL, AND GAZPROM, A COMPANY DOMINATED BY THE STATE, BEGAN TO CALL IN LOANS TO MEDIA MOST.
Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people. They
crave a strong and forceful leader; his KGB past and conditioned KGB responses are just what they
seem to want after what many regard as the social, political, and economic chaos of the last decade.
But what to the Russians is law and order (the "dictatorship of the law," as Putin has so accurately
put it) looks more and more like an old Soviet clampdown to many Western observers.
There is no complaint about Putin's promises. He tells everyone he wants freedom of the press.
But in the context of his KGB heritage, his notion of freedom of the press is something very different.
In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he said that that press freedom excludes the
"hooliganism" or "uncivilized" reporting he has to deal with in Moscow. By that he means criticism,
especially of his conduct of the war in Chechnya, his belated response to the sinking of the Kursk,
and the heavy-handed way in which he has pushed aside candidates for governor in regional elections
if they are not to Putin's liking.
He does not take well to criticism. When asked by the relatives of those lost in the Kursk
why he seemed so unresponsive, Putin tried to shift the blame for the disaster onto the media
barons, or at least those who had criticized him. They were the ones, he insisted, who had pressed
for reduced funding for the Navy while they were building villas in Spain and France. As for their
criticism of his behavior, They lie! They lie! They lie!
Our Western press has provided good coverage of the dogged way Putin and his aides have tried
to muscle Gusinsky out of the Media Most press conglomerate he created. But those on the Putin
enemies list now include even Boris Berezovsky, originally one of Putin's most enthusiastic promoters
who after the sinking of the Kursk also became a critic and thus an opponent.
Gusinsky would have a hard time winning a merit badge for trustworthiness (Berezovsky shouldn't
even apply), but in the late Yeltsin and Putin years, Gusinsky has earned enormous credit for
his consistently objective news coverage, including a spotlight on malfeasance at the very top.
More than that, he has supported his programmers when they have subjected Yeltsin and now Putin
to bitter satire on Kukly, his Sunday evening prime-time puppet show.
What we hear less of, though, is what is happening to individual reporters, especially those
engaged in investigative work. Almost monthly now there are cases of violence and intimidation.
Among those brutalized since Putin assumed power are a reporter for Radio Liberty who dared to
write negative reports about the Russian Army's role in Chechnia and four reporters for Novaya
Gazeta. Two of them were investigating misdeeds by the FSB (today's equivalent of the KGB), including
the possibility that it rather than Chechins had blown up a series of apartment buildings. Another
was pursuing reports of money-laundering by Yeltsin family members and senior staff in Switzerland.
Although these journalists were very much in the public eye, they were all physically assaulted.
Those working for provincial papers labor under even more pressure with less visibility. There
are numerous instances where regional bosses such as the governor of Vladivostok operate as little
dictators, and as a growing number of journalists have discovered, challenges are met with threats,
physical intimidation, and, if need be, murder.
True, freedom of the press in Russia is still less than 15 years old, and not all the country's
journalists or their bosses have always used that freedom responsibly. During the 1996 election
campaign, for example, the media owners, including Gusinsky conspired to denigrate or ignore every
viable candidate other than Yeltsin. But attempts to muffle if not silence criticism have multiplied
since Putin and his fellow KGB veterans have come to power. Criticism from any source, be it an
individual journalist or a corporate entity, invites retaliation.
When Media Most persisted in its criticism, Putin sat by approvingly as his subordinates sent
in masked and armed tax police and prosecutors. When that didn't work, they jailed Gusinsky on
charges that were later dropped, although they are seeking to extradite and jail him again. along
with his treasurer, on a new set of charges. Yesterday the prosecutor general summoned Tatyana
Mitkova, the anchor of NTV's evening news program, for questioning. Putin's aides are also doing
all they can to prevent Gusinsky from refinancing his debt-ridden operation with Ted Turner or
anyone else in or outside of the country.
According to one report, Putin told one official, You deal with the shares, debts, and management
and I will deal with the journalists. His goal simply is to end to independent TV coverage in
Russia. ...
"Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people"
Exactly; the majority of people are so stupid and/or lazy that they cannot be bothered understanding
what is going on; and how their hard won democracy is being subjugated. But thank God that is
in Russia not here in the US - right?
"Pravda" is etymologically derived from "prav-" which means "right" (as opposed to "left", other
connotations are "proper", "correct", "rightful", also legal right). It designates the social-construct
aspect of "righteousness/truthfulness/correctness" as opposed to "objective reality" (conceptually
independent of social standards, in reality anything but). In formal logic, "istina" is used to
designate truth. Logical falsity is designated a "lie".
It is a feature common to most European languages that rightfulness, righteousness, correctness,
and legal rights are identified with the designation for the right side. "Sinister" is Latin for
"left".
If you believe 911 was a Zionist conspiracy, so where the Paris attacks of November 2015, when
Trump was failing in the polls as the race was moving toward as you would expect, toward other
candidates. After the Paris attacks, his numbers reaccelerated.
If "ZOG" created the "false flag" of the Paris attacks to start a anti-Muslim fervor, they
succeeded, much like 911. Bastille day attacks were likewise, a false flag. This is not new, this
goes back to when the aristocracy merged with the merchant caste, creating the "bourgeois". They
have been running a parallel government in the shadows to effect what is seen.
There used to be something called Usenet News, where at the protocol level reader software could
fetch meta data (headers containing author, (stated) origin, title, etc.) independently from comment
bodies. This was largely owed to limited download bandwidth. Basically all readers had "kill files"
i.e. filters where one could configure that comments with certain header parameters should not
be downloaded, or even hidden.
The main application was that the reader would download comments in the background when headers
were already shown, or on demand when you open a comment.
Now you get the whole thing (or in units of 100) by the megabyte.
A major problem is signal extraction out of the massive amounts of noise generated by the media,
social media, parties, and pundits.
It's easy enough to highlight this thread of information here, but in real time people are
being bombarded by so many other stories.
In particular, the Clinton Foundation was also regularly being highlighted for its questionable
ties to foreign influence. And HRC's extravagant ties to Wall St. And so much more.
The media's job was to sell Trump and denounce Clinton. The mistake a lot of people make is thinking
the global elite are the "status quo". They are not. They are generally the ones that break the
status quo more often than not.
The bulk of them wanted Trump/Republican President and made damn sure it was President. Buffering
the campaign against criticism while overly focusing on Clinton's "crap". It took away from the
issues which of course would have low key'd the election.
Not much bullying has to be applied when there are "economic incentives". The media attention
economy and ratings system thrive on controversy and emotional engagement. This was known a century
ago as "only bad news is good news". As long as I have lived, the non-commercial media not subject
(or not as much) to these dynamics have always been perceived as dry and boring.
I heard from a number of people that they followed the campaign "coverage" (in particular Trump)
as gossip/entertainment, and those were people who had no sympathies for him. And even media coverage
by outlets generally critical of Trump's unbelievable scandals and outrageous performances catered
to this sentiment.
First, let me disclose that I detest TRUMP and that the Russian meddling has me deeply concerned.
Yet...
We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence. We do not know whether
it likely had *material* influence that could have reasonably led to a swing state(s) going to
TRUMP that otherwise would have gone to HRC.
Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across
as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which
is a big shame.
It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little
information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this
was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy
beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians
exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign
governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated
means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in
the future.
It is quite clear that the Russians intervened on Trump's behalf and that this intervention had
an impact. The problem is that we cannot actually quantify that impact.
"We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence."
Any influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with
celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism.
Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first
place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs,
etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities
was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture.
But this is how influence is exerted - by using the dynamics of the adversary's/targets organization
as an amplifier. Hierarchical organizations are approached through their management or oversight
bodies, social networks through key influencers, etc.
I see this so much and it's so right wing cheap: I hate Trump, but assertions that Russia intervened
are unproven.
First, Trump openly invited Russia to hack DNC emails. That is on its face treason and sedition.
It's freaking on video. If HRC did that there would be calls of the right for her execution.
Second, a NYT story showed that the FBI knew about the hacking but did not alert the DNC properly
- they didn't even show up, they sent a note to a help desk.
This was a serious national security breach that was not addressed properly. This is criminal
negligence.
This was a hacked election by collusion of the FBI and the Russian hackers and it totally discredits
the FBI as it throwed out chum and then denied at the last minute. Now the CIA comes in and says
PUTIN, Trump's bff, was directly involved in manipulating the timetable that the hacked emails
were released in drip drip form to cater to the media - creating story after story about emails.
It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway.
"It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how
it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway."
It's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want.
That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce
optimal results.
All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice --
incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people,
"We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small
'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves.
Trump and his gang will be deeply grateful if the left follows Krugman's "wisdom", and clings
to his ever-changing excuses. (I thought it was the evil Greens who deprived Clinton of her due?)
Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a
flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments
today!?!
"On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a "useful idiot" serving Russian
interests." I think that is beyond the pale. Yes, I realize that Adolph Hitler was democratically
elected. I agree that Trump seems like a scary monster under the bed. That doesn't mean we have
too pee our pants, Paul. He's a bully, tough guy, maybe, the kind of kid that tortured you before
you kicked the shit out of them with your brilliance. That's not what is needed now.
What really is needed, is a watchdog, like Dean Baker, that alerts we dolts of pending bills and
their ramifications. The ship of neo-liberal trade bullshit has sailed. Hell, you don't believe
it yourself, you've said as much. Be gracious, and tell the truth. We can handle it.
The experience of voting for the Hill was painful, vs Donald Trump.
The Hill seemed like the least likely aristocrat, given two choices, to finish off all government
focus on the folks that actually built this society. Two Titans of Hubris, Hillary vs Donald,
each ridiculous in the concept of representing the interests of the common man.
At the end of the day. the American people decided that the struggle with the unknown monster
Donald was worth deposing the great deplorable, Clinton.
The real argument is whether the correct plan of action is the way of FDR, or the way of the industrialists,
the Waltons, the Kochs, the Trumps, the Bushes and the outright cowards like the Cheneys and the
Clintons, people that never spent a day defending this country in combat. What do they call it,
the Commander in Chief.
My father was awarded a silver and a bronze star for his efforts in battle during WW2. He was
shot in the face while driving a tank destroyer by a German sniper in a place called Schmitten
Germany.
He told me once, that he looked over at the guy next to him on the plane to the hospital in
England, and his intestines were splayed on his chest. It was awful.
What was he fighting for ? Freedom, America. Then the Republicans, Ronald Reagan, who spent the
war stateside began the real war, garnering the wealth of the nation to the entitled like him.
Ronald Reagan was a life guard.
Anthony Weiner
Podesta
Biden (for not running)
Tim Kaine (for accepting the nomination instead of deferring to a latino)
CNN and other TV news media (for giving trump so much coverage- even an empty podium)
Donna Brazile
etc.
The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the
Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused
to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.)
The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to
remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned,
and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until
he had no real chance.
The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing
to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic
elite and their apologists.
The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought.
For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody
else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion.
The wealthy brought this on. For 230 years they have, essentially run this country. They are
too stupid to be satisfied with enough, but always want more.
The economics profession brought this on, by excusing treasonous behavior as efficient, and
failing to understand the underlying principles of their profession, and the limits of their understanding.
(They don't even know what money is, or how a trade deficit destroys productive capacity, and
thus the very ability of a nation to pay back the debts it incurs.)
The people brought this on, by neglecting their duty to be informed, to be educated, and to
be thoughtful.
Anybody else care for their share of blame? I myself deserve some, but for reasons I cannot
say.
What amazes me now is, the bird having shown its feathers, there is no howl of outrage from
the people who voted for him. Do they imagine that the Plutocrats who will soon monopolize the
White House will take their interests to heart?
As far as I can tell, not one person of 'the people' has been appointed to his cabinet. Not
one. But the oppressed masses who turned to Mr Trump seem to be OK with this.
I can only wonder, how much crap will have to be rubbed in their faces, before they awaken to
the taste of what it is?
Eric377 : , -1
Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats
last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly
combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third
party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the
message.
It's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified
Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for
a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing?
Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the
heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate
to win this thing than we Democrats did.
The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer
but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility
for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy
much?
This has made me cynical. I used to think that at least *some* members of the US political
elite had the best interests of ordinary households in mind, but now I see that it's just ego
vs. ego, whatever the party.
As for democracy being on the edge: I believe Adam Smith over Krugman: "there is a lot of ruin
in a nation". It takes more than this to overturn an entrenched institution.
I think American democracy will survive a decade of authoritarianism, and if it does not, then
H. L. Mencken said it best: "The American people know what they want, and they deserve to get
it -- good and hard."
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives ..."
"... This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look at the man behind the curtain. ..."
"... Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone to look at the big giant head again fails. ..."
"... Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street, anti-working class political posture that loses elections. ..."
"... The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. ..."
"... The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR. ..."
"... The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply die politically. ..."
"... New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. ..."
December 12, 2016 by
Yves Smith By
Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of
economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with
New Economic Perspectives
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times
article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's the Economy First" that unintentionally
revealed that the Party's "centrist" leadership and the paper remain clueless about how to improve
the economy and why the "centrist" leadership needs to end its long war against the working class.
This is how the paper explained the five "centrist" leaders' framing of the problem.
It was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at the Washington home
of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration
about the missteps of the
Democratic Party .
To this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a fiasco: final proof
that its national party had grown indifferent to the rural, more conservative areas represented
by Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of
Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face difficult re-election races
in 2018.
This non-centrist group was a gathering of five New Democrats. President Obama self-identified
himself as a New Democrat. The Clintons and Al Gore are leaders of the New Democrats. The leadership
of the Democratic National Committee was, and remains, New Democrats. On economic issues such as
austerity, jobs, and full employment, the New Democrats are far more extreme than the (stated) views
of Donald Trump. The New Democrats are infamous for their close ties with Wall Street. This means
that the paper's description of the Chinese nosh is as clueless as the five New Democrats kvetching
about policy "missteps" that they championed for decades. Of course, neither the paper nor the non-centrists
mentioned that critical fact. The blindness of the non-centrists to the fact that it is their policies
that launched the long war by the New Democrats against the working class is matched by the blindness
of the paper.
The kvetching may have been "blunt," but it was also dishonest. The five New Democrats know that
they will likely be replaced in the 2018 elections by Republicans who share the New Democrats' anti-working
class dogmas. What was really going on was an extended cry of pain about the five senators' fear
of losing their jobs.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New
Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the grant of anonymity
so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five should have produced
some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by the New Democrats. Instead,
it produced mush. Focusing on the "economy" is the right general idea for any political party, but
it is so general a word that it is close to meaningless without identifying the specific policy changes
that the five New Democrats now support and oppose. The mushy reportage provides a thin gruel to
the reader.
Most of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion message about the
economy with appeal to all 50 states.
"Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr. Manchin said in
an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
And the "clarion message about the economy" that they proposed that the Democratic Party make
was? You would have thought that little detail would (a) be critical to the article and (b) would
be something that the five New Democrats would have been eager to publicize without any need for
anonymity. Conversely, if even after the disastrous election, from their perspective, the five New
Democrats could not compose that "clarion" call, then the real problem is that the New Democrats'
economic dogmas prevent them from supporting such a "clarion" pro-worker policy.
The second sentence of the quotation is equally embarrassing to the New Democrats. It purportedly
recounts "the tenor of the dinner conversation." The first obvious question is – how did each of
these five New Democrats answer that that question? That is what the readers would want to know.
Even with the grants of anonymity to multiple sources the paper inexplicably presents only the vaguest
hints as to the five Senators' explanation for why the New Democrats waged their long war on the
working class.
Notice also the unintentional humor of the five New Democrats finally asking themselves this existential
question in 2016 – after the election. The New Democrats began their long war on the working class
over 30 years ago. Tom Frank published his famous (initial) book warning that the New Democrats'
war on the working class would prove disastrous in 2004. The five New Democrats are shocked, shocked
that the working class, after 30 years of being abused by the New Democrats' anti-worker policies
and after being vilified for decades by the New Democrats, overwhelmingly voted against the Nation's
most prominent New Democrat, Hillary Clinton. None of the five New Democrats appears to have a clue,
even after the 2016 election, why this happened.
The article and the five New Democrats fail to discuss the anti-working class policies that they
have championed for decades. Job security is the paramount issue that drives voting by many members
of the working class. The New Democrats and the Old Republicans share a devotion to the two greatest
threats to working class job security – austerity and the faux free trade deals. This makes
it ironic that the paper sought out the Party faction leaders who have been so wrong for so long
as supposedly being the unique source of providing the right answers now. If the five New Democrats
had engaged in introspection and were prepared to discuss their disastrous, repeated policy failures
that would have been valuable, but the New Democrats admit to making zero errors in the article.
The paper's understanding of economics and jobs is so poor that it wrote this clunker.
But even liberals believe Democrats must work harder to compete for voters who lean to the
right, if only to shave a few points off the Republican Party's margin of victory in rural America.
In some cases, they said, that may mean embracing candidates who hold wildly different views from
the national party on certain core priorities.
First, the phrase and the implicit logic in the use of the phrase "even liberals" reverses reality.
It is progressives who have consistently called for the Democratic Party to return to its role as
a party that champions working people.
Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue.
Third, the paramount policy priority – jobs – is the same regardless of whether one focuses on
economic or political desirability. So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats
to discuss "jobs?" Given the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin
to lose their jobs within two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the
five New Democrats. The article, however, never even mentioned jobs or any of the related critical
concepts – austerity, the faux trade deals, or the refusal to provide full employment. Further,
the article did not comment on the failure of the New Democrats to even mention these any of these
four concepts.
"A Clarion Message about the Economy with Appeal to all 50 States"
Here is UMKC's economics department's long-standing proposal to every American political party:
Our party stands for full employment at all times. We will make the federal government the
guaranteed employer of last resort for every American able and wanting to work. We recognize that
the United States has a sovereign currency and can always afford to ensure full employment. We
recognize that austerity typically constitutes economic malpractice and is never a valid excuse
for rejecting full employment. The myth that we help our grandchildren by consigning their grandparents
and parents to unemployment is obscene. The opposite is true.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. Working class people overwhelmingly
want to work. Working class males who are unable to find secure, full time work often become depressed
and unmarriageable. If you want to encourage marriage and improve the quality of marriages, full
employment and job security are vital policies. There are collateral advantages to providing full
employment. Full employment can reduce greatly the "zero sum" fears about employment that can tear
a society apart. Each of these outcomes is overwhelmingly supported by Americans.
Good economics is not a "right" v. "left" issue. Austerity is terrible economics. The fact that
we have a sovereign currency is indisputable and there is broad agreement among finance professionals
that such a currency means that the federal government budget is nothing like a household. The major
party that first adopts the federal full employment guarantee will secure a critical political advantage
over its rivals. Sometimes, good economics is good politics.
It is critical that existing Democrat leadership goes into retirement. Finagling the Clintons
back into the WH, delays this by 4, 8 or more years. Besides generating immense animosity. This
could be easily accomplished if all Democrat leadership retires at 65 immediately, to live on
their Social Security and Medicare (if they think those are still important).
ah, but there was a "clarion message". It was "we care not even about the 1%, but the 0.01%.
The rest of you can piss off".
Which is why Dems got dumped.
I suspect this meeting was functionally similar to the ecclesiastic kvetching when folks began
to believe the world was a sphere some 600 years ago. I can imagine them thinking: unemployment
(as they measure it) is low, housing prices are jumping, and boy, look at that stock market –
how did our base constituency lose its way?
As long as the Democratic Party leadership thinks
this way, the party is useless and should be abandoned. I might suggest that Bill, Yves, Randy
Wray, and others get to work educating them, but like flat-earthers, these folks not only live
in willful ignorance, they would very much like to cast that crowd on the pyre of false-news purveyors
lest they lead even more of the faithful astray.
I have to fully agree with Prof. Black's assessment; thought this when they reelected Nancy
"my son works at Countrywide" Pelosi and doubled down on their identity politics. (David Harvey
disposes of identity politics in a single sentence in his latest book.)
But in this Lewis Carroll universe, "Work harder to compete for Republican votes" doesn't mean
steal Trump's jobs-related thunder but give in on things like fracking a la Madame Heitkamp, or
discover an enthusiasm for guns like Manchin, or run anti-abortion stalwarts like Donnelly. That's
why the reporter couldn't depart from the vague mush–the "centrists'" solution to the Democrats'
debacle is to become Republicans.
My folks are bible thumping, Fox News watching, prolife, and anti-gay marriage voters.
They were all set to vote for Bernie, not because they agreed with him on everything, but because
he was fighting for people like them and he was honest. They would have burned in H-E-double-hockey-sticks
before voting for Clinton though. Judging by the polls during the primaries and the eventual outcome,
they were far from alone in their assessment. Too bad the dimwit DC Dems can't be bothered to
actually talk to people like them.
They sort of do talk to people like your relatives, but partisanship is strong. Plenty of local
Democrats can diagnose and propose solutions caused by the GOP but will worship Trump if he had
a "D" next to his name. Claire McCaskill probably receives enough praise from partisan plebes
for no payment she assumes all the plebes should love her. For conservative types, Sanders not
being in the other tribe was a huge selling point.
The fundamental power diagram of politics is that groups of donors select groups of politicians
to fight for the interests of the donors. The complication in democracy is that the voters select
which politicians will rule. So the donors are like a client, the politicians like a lawyer and
the voters are like a jury. A talented politician is one who can cunningly convince voters to
set her guilty donors free.
So all these New Democrats are doing is suggesting ways to better plead to the jury. But they
are in no way questioning the donors or whether they should continue to push policies that only
serve the donors' best interests
One revolutionary feature of Donald Trump's campaign was that he was his own donor and so was
very free to directly appeal to what is in the best interests of the working class voters he targeted:
economic nationalism.
Conversely the most problematic feature of the Trump campaign was that he was running as the
head of a party that did have plenty of donors and he was openly contradicting plenty of these
donors' interests. But Trump correctly calculated that the only way to power in America was to
hijack one of the two legacy parties.
In some ways Bernie Sanders attempted a similar feat, although I remain skeptical about whether
he really was trying to win. If Sanders had become President, he would be facing the same problems
that Trump now faces; how to rule a party whose policies fundamentally diverge in many areas from
what you have promised to deliver.
And so until the Democrat change donors – specifically by announcing that as a party they will
only accept small donations and adopt some of the Trump tactics to reduce campaign spending –
nothing will change except the sound bites. Many working class people realized exactly how flawed
Trump was but they rolled the dice for one reason only – no one owned Trump. Or as
Henry Kissinger put it:
"This president-elect, it's the most unique that I have experienced in one respect. He has
absolutely no baggage," Kissinger told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "He has no obligation to
any particular group because he has become president on the basis of his own strategy."
Kissinger is smart so he makes these words sound blasé but I can assure you they strike fear
into the hearts of America's elite. But only when we hear these same elites expressing fear of
the entire Democratic party (like they did about Bernie Sanders) will we know something fundamental
has changed for the better.
Some very good insights. I would be curious to know your thoughts on when the repub/Trump split
comes, which way will FOX tilt? Right now FOX is all Trump, but after a year or two of insinuations
that Trump is a Pro Putin commie, I suspect the masterful propagandists that make so much of our
beliefs will either cause the actual downfall of Trump, or will more than neuter him.
Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. Trump is the GOP, and
Republican voters support their own. 41 called Reagan a practitoner of Voodoo economics. Yes,
this was an appeal to the Southern strategy. Attacks on Trump that say he's not a "true conservative"
will never work. Trump is a known clown. He can't embarrass himself, and I think it's important
to remember Iraq happened. What did the average Republican voter take from that? Putin Fear Fest
is very similar to the events of 2002.
Periodically, new tribal arrangements need to be made. Romney was given a chance. He failed,
so the GOP voters selected someone new. Republicans hate Democrats. Attacks levied by Democrats
will always be brushed off.
Videos could emerge of Trump swearing allegiance to Putin at an orgy, and Republican voters
wouldn't care.
This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look
at the man behind the curtain.
Yes Republicans stick together plus they think Trump is most likely to accomplish their "small
government" goals and so they support Trump (this is probably true, the establishment supported
Hillary, but many a Republican votes party line for one of their own).
Hillary did well with defense contract related Republicans, but they are clustered. The ones
in hideously over priced McMansions in Virginia and Maryland are terrified of spending being redirected.
They have mortgages to pay, and if Trump thinkers with defense spending whether through cutting
cutting or moving, Northern Virginia will become a land of white elephants. Northern Virginia
might have incomes, but outside of old town Alexandria, it's a dump of out of control suburban
sprawl.
No one sane would live there by choice. The costs are too high to relocate a corporate operation
or even grow one. Republicans in Wisconsin don't care.
Oh, I agree with your overall points. I was just wondering specifically about Murdoch and if
his contrariness will make FOX pro Russian ((in the face of overwhelming repub foreign policy
establishment against Trump)), or will FOX be the "repub" anti Russain brand. It will be interesting
when being "conservative" means you like Putin .
And I remember how many rabidly anti communists where having conniptions when Reagan met with
Gorbachev in Iceland. But Reagan was well ensconced in the establishment. Can Trump alone end
the red menace?
? – "Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. " Hannity and O'Reilly
segments this past cycle were one hour propaganda news feeds for Trump.
As far as Fox goes from what I understand they are currently split - with Kelly Megyn (I know),
Brit Hume, and Chris Wallace being anti-Trump while Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs are pro-Trump bigly.
This is a smart balancing of Fox's short term need for viewers versus their longer-term policy
requirements. But there can be no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is rabidly anti-Trump - he even gave
that raving NeverTrump lunatic Louise Mensch a website called HeatStreet.
From glancing at the National Review it seems the GOPe think they are being generous by admitting
defeat and magnanimously getting behind Trump's cultural agenda while insisting conservatives
stay in charge of economic and foreign policy. But this is no change at all since the Republicans
have always been offering the working classes empty cultural issues.
I imagine the Republicans see this as a Tour de France with them being the huge peloton while
Trump is a lone breakaway attacker who they will soon swallow back up and totally co-opt.
I don't think the MSM are that good at propaganda; if they were Trump wouldn't be President!.
For example now they have launched this Trump + Putin campaign but Trump responds by picking a
fight with China. But the MSM is aghast and totally support the Chinese position! So they accuse
Trump of carrying water for Russia put there's the entire MSM all lined up with buckets of Chinese
water on their heads!
I suppose at some point several top GOP Senators (McCain, Flake) and a bottom (Lindsey Graham)
will leave the party and caucus with the Democrats to ensure legislative gridlock. I believe if
Trump really tried he could get a House of Representatives that supports him. I don't see how
he herds the Senate though.
Propaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard
of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone
to look at the big giant head again fails.
The msm and the Democrats don't know how to function moving forward because building trust
will take years of effort, and many of the specific personalities are done. They can never be
attached to a competitive effort without undermining the effort. If they hope to retake their
spot, when FB seemed trendy and not a mom hangout, they need people to forget about the curtain,
but it's impossible. Instead they will whine about wicked witches of the North.
Even Trump won because the GOP misfits were sheepdogs for Jeb. Whatever else Trump was, he
wasn't part of Jeb's curtain. Shouting Trump is a fraud doesn't work as long as you then scream
"pay no mind to the strings on my back." I think Rufio could have made more noise if he wasn't
such an obvious beta as he attacked Jeb, but one could argue he betrayed Jeb. People don't like
that kind of thing.
Bernie proved that there is plenty of money for candidates with the right intent and policies.
What you say, that dems can't win without its moneyed donor class, is a notion that has been
used to bludgeon democrats into conservatism and passivity.
Bernie blasted your assertion about campaign finance to bits.
As to the dems "figuring something out," the dem leadership doesn't need to figure anything
out. They are perfectly happy serving the 1%. It's the rest of the democrats who need to figure
that out about their leadership and take action, whether it is tossing the leadership or starting
a new party.
According to an NYT article about his campaign, Sanders was not running to win until after
his popularity started to skyrocket. Initially he was still attending the Senate and was not campaigning
fulltime.
It was just an attempt to spread his liberal policy message nationwide. But how to control
the party as President when it's opposed to him on policy? That's what "political revolution"
meant. If Congress opposed Trump, he will have a rally of thousands in the district of any difficult
legislator blaming him or her for not letting Trump make America great again.
Similarly Sanders
can campaign to either get a Dem majority, it he hadn't got one in 2016, by 2018. Or to increase
it or make it more liberal. This is what he did when the city council opposed him in Burlington,
Vermont. Within a year he got one which was much more pliable. The progressives never got a majority
but he went from Obama-style gridlock to a working government.
One correction: Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. He is a democratic socialist. It's not a minor
point, particularly because liberals deliberately obfuscate the difference to con voters.
Liberals believe in hierarchy. I'm pretty confident Bernie Sanders is an egalitarian. That
matters, when it comes to policy and governance, as well as core values.
Putin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street,
anti-working class political posture that loses elections.
I agree - if the "old" parties act like the old neoliberal parties, they can't solve our current
predicament. While our predicament isn't a new one, just a new version of an old problem, retreading
the past 20 or 30 years isn't going to do the trick.
Gov't as employer as last resort is a huge leap from the goals of full employment and job security.
This is promoted here and elsewhere without any rationale. Someone will have to explain why this
is the only possible solution.
Plus the quality of the jobs in the private sector is often horrible (of course not all but
many). There is a reason everyone wants a government job. And unless the government sector forces
the private sector to improve the quality of their jobs (ie living wages and ACTUALLY enforce
overtime and safety and etc. not to mention all the contract work going on that isn't EVEN jobs)
it will remain so. Quality of jobs matters.
Not really, but try explaining the opposite. How can we have full employment without gov't
employment as last resort? Granted you can have "goals" all you want if you ignore them, but we'll
put that aside and assume you are not disingenuous.
Everything else has been tried and failed, miserably. Companies sit on piles of cash without significant
hiring. Tax incentives get gamed easily.
Offering employment is the simplest, most targeted solution that effectively cuts the rest of
the employers out of the hostage taking business.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income.
I rather like the term used here instead of jobs , people want a livelihood. In the
USA, that get's shortened into jobs, and then later short changed again into things like minimum
wage. One could have fully employment and terrible livelihood. Only the Japanese could put up
with 50+ years of being economic animals. Anyone who thinks full employment is going to solve
issues like income inequality has been eating mushrooms picked from the cow pasture.
I just don't even like the idea of "good jobs" - so limited and so American.
For example, Jobs won't save us from Climate Change, it's not just a money issue. Hence Livelihood,
as in lets make sure the bastards who made this mess die before we do, then we;ll have some justice
to make our miserable end more bearable.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-121216.html#comment-2725938
Full employment is the growth argument. Both would be beneficial but I would prefer the switch
to income/leisure. Shorter work week, more leisure activities, less consumption, less growth.
Ditto. Government doesn't need to provide jobs where people go to the office and get paid to
sit on their rear end all day – we already have enough of those in the public and private sectors.
I'd like to see a basic income guarantee with some sort of mandatory work required to get it.
Something like the draft where people are called up to work for a certain period of time on a
rotating basis but also giving them some say in what sort of job they get to do. One year you
work at job x for a period of time, train your replacement and then get a bunch of time off. The
next year you can try something different at job y.
Mandatory work everything is work. Yes, you can have call up for people who want to do a stint/internship
learning large scale community construction, infrastructure, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Still, there needs to be jobs where people sit on their back sides part of a day some prefer
working in offices and some are only able to work in offices.
But stretch the imagination: Community service runs the gamut: people to clean up streets,
keep gutters open, scrape up weeds, maintain plantings, paint, repair; assisting children, seniors
and animals; art etc. I am not a musician nor actor but would appreciate having free/low cost
local enrichment programs. Public schools (the ones left) could be used in the evening for free
classes: electronics, woodworking, engine/household repair, cooking, nutrition, etc.
And yes, there will be a need for people who sit on their rear ends to help organize and track
activities. :)
And don't get me wrong about the rear end sitting – I don't mean those types of jobs shouldn't
exist, I just mean that when you show up at the office you ought to have some actual work to do.
And going to meetings deciding what work others should be doing doesn't count. I've worked at
a few where I was required to be there for eight hours a day but only had four hours of work to
do, and not for lack of asking.
One can only read the whole internet so many times a day ;)
What nonsense it is to generalize what the working class as a whole wants (and really this
probably should include everyone who works for a living). Some want jobs, some income. If everyone
only wanted jobs no mothers would ever stay home to raise children etc..
Everything is work, everything is a job. If you take care of an elderly relative, it's duty
(unpaid labor), if you take care of an elderly stranger it's a job. If you raise your own children,
it's duty (unpaid labor), if raise others children, it's a job.
Elites are claiming more and more work is duty and of course it should be unpaid not to mention
volunteerism.
If there was an income guarantee, most would labor their days away as work contributes to social
connection and provides personal satisfaction.
If there was an income, I imagine social life would be richer as more people could be artists
(festivals!), performers (community theater!), work in schools (art, music, construction classes)
etc.
And, of course, it is the government that is the issuer of this sovereign currency that they
cannot run out of. Or are you suggesting that the government give the $$ to the private sector,
which will, of course, trickle it on down? We could call it, I don't know, how about 'quantitative
easing'?
Another reason to prefer the government (which, after all, is "us") to administer jobs-for-all
is providing jobs that do useful things for society which could not be provided on a for-profit
basis. Um, like daycare, medical care, public utilities, eldercare, voter registration, education,
making things that are repairable, and then repairing them when they need it, organic agriculture,
humane animal husbandry, saving the monarch butterflies, *manual* residential snow shoveling -
all those things that 'cost too much' for a for-profit business to do.
Exactly, HotFlash. And, notice that so many of these livelihoods, child and eldercare, teaching,
repair persons, garbage collectors, snow plow operators, have been relegated to the level of 'minimum
wage jobs,' and the people that perform these necessary services consigned to the ranks of 'too
dumb to be innovators or investment bankers.'
We have been conned into mumbling to our military, 'thank you for your service,' as they get
to board flights before us. Why not honor trash collectors and the women who clean the toilets
in our workplaces and the workers who are out on the county roads and interstates at 2am in a
blizzard, keeping the roads clear so we don't have to be inconveniences? Where would our society
be without them?
Douglas Adams was only being partially facetious when he had the an advanced civilization wiped
out because
they shipped out their phone cleaners on rocket-ships (ala the Marching Morons). It was his
subtle rebuke to both Kornbluth and the Ayn Randian/neo-conservative of that time, as well as
the general vapid consumerist society.
As to the military, I always favored the Coast Guard, they risk their lives to save other humans,
not help the MIC and Empire.
I think explaining govt-as-employer-of last-resort becomes easy once a few misconceptions are
corrected and a few realities sink in. But it's no small thing for the realities to sink in -
everything we've been taught, or encouraged to assume, is working against us. Conventional, responsible
wisdom is that the wealth one has that didn't come from the government is "earned" and any activity
that "earns" money is inherently productive and being productive is good - it makes one worthy.
People think of "money" as the stuff passed around in big green wads in the movies, that comes
into being through work an ingenuity (unless the govt commits the sin of "just printing it").
Distribution may not be "fair" but it at least follows certain intuitive laws or forces, that
have a vague sense of morality associated with them (e.g., money is earned through productivity
which means whoever has it by definition earned it, e.g. MH point on FIRE sector). It is a tautology
- but a powerful one. People don't think of money as the product of accounting, a two
sided coin created literally from a balance sheet - debits and credits, assets and liabilities
- and that commercial banks can conjure "money" - pump it into circulation - simply by marking
an asset in their ledger. People don't know that banks issue loans (create assets) out of nothing
all the time (i.e., loans without corresponding deposits or reserves, loaning what they don't
"have"). The asset becomes revenue-generating through interests and fees, which, if non-liquidating,
are the precise opposite of "productive."
It is so difficult for this to sink in because our society organizes itself as if this weren't
true. Speaking personally, it takes a persistent, systematic re-organization of how we process
facts and arguments. We hear something like a "sovereign currency can never run out" as a justification
for universal income or govt-as-employer-of-last-resort, and it triggers a deeply embedded sense
that somehow this would send the economy spinning of the rails. But once it sinks in that "money"
is just an asset/liability, and its entry into private circulation is purely a matter of public
policy (not private "productivity"), at least then you're asking the right question: how should
a sovereign inject currency into private circulation? Maybe no one answer is universally right
at all times and in all circumstances .. but at this point debt is outpacing actual productivity,
which means it must be written down (MH argument) and/or there needs to be an injection on the
debtor side to try to catch up (e.g., jobs program or universal income). Which is why it is so
nonsensical for the govt to "print money" in the form of transferring assets in the form of increasing
bank reserves, as if bank lending depends on reserves at all it's like trying to fill a pool
but flooding your sink). At least that's how I make sense of it still may botch the details,
but at least once you strip away the cultural/social/moral baggage, it becomes more of a matter
of simple economic logic that doesn't need a larger explanation. If you want to fill the pool,
fill the pool, not the sink. But the baggage is real - which is why it really does seem to be
a matter of letting the realities sink in.
The baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high
privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement
belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took
and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the
rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR.
This battle has been ongoing in American politics probably since way back before the Great
Depression, but that's as far back as some of us remember our parents telling us about. I love
Bill Black because he's the kind of Democrat I thought I was. This new crowd makes me sick. It's
appropriate that Obama's murder weapons are called drones. That's what the New Democrats are:
drones.
The New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters
will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply
die politically.
They care about staying a Senator. They care about themselves first and only, and will suck
up to and serve whoever provides the money that allows them to hold onto their seats.
Voters in these red states voted for change, above all else. They voted for a nut job because
they finally heard a candidate speaking to their issues and concerns, something their Senators,
apparently, have not done.
There will soon be so few democrats remaining that we should give some serious consideration
to a sequestration solution of giving them their own land, with no fossil fuel degradation, clean
water from the glaciers, a tiny house, a pouch of seeds, and a sustainable truck garden, no cars
trucks or bicycles, a fig tree in the middle of town. They could either pay taxes or not, as they
felt motivated, and provide their own services regardless as not to be a burden. We could gather
them up and have a long march to their new home; it would be hravenly! The rest of us could peacefully
proceed to hell.
This is mind blowing. Granted I didn't follow the link to the full story - but how on earth
is this even news , even under the pathetic standards of election post mortems? New dems
concoct self-admiring story, posture as the ones who "get it." Feed it to reporter, who agrees
to attribute anonymously of course (so it has the feel of insiders and not high schoolers). I'm
guessing what these courageous centrists really mean with the confused prescription to court voters
who "lean right" is to appeal on social/cultural issues. Scold "elitist identity politics" of
the national party as a distraction from the "economic message" (which of course will be the same
assault on decency it always has been). So "economy first" would mean attack/exploit social liberalism
and call it a "fight" for the economic plight of the every-man/woman. The beauty is you get to
sound angry on behalf of voters without an iota of accountability or reflection, without ever
having to answer for shallow, self-serving policies and abject failure.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as
the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources
that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over
Chinese food. . .
The five New Democrats were: Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill
of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, at a dinner held at the Washington
home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.
So, not anonymous at all.
Here is the key part to understanding the plight of the politician / narcissist that feels
the wrath of voters.
. . . All face difficult re-election races in 2018.
There is nothing worse than being ignored, but fail to understand that what they themselves
fear, being ignored with no jawb, the peasants have been living with for decades. Hypocrite is
the word and these are vacuous human beings that care only about themselves no matter what emotional
fakery they use.
Um . what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what
new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party
Um, noun (subject)-verb-object. what (noun) was identified as (verb) "missteps" and "'policies"
(objects) eg. the 5 did not identify the missteps or policies.
Comical. The first line in Bill's post gets the NYT headline wrong.
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's
the Economy First"
The actual headline is "Democrats Hone a New Message: It's the Economy Everyone ". A small
detail for sure, which implies from The NYT it's a purveyor of fake news, because honing implies
a refinement of a message already being said, and is contradicted within two words, by the word
"new". It is possible that the headlines keep changing and that Bill's was up when he quoted them,
which would solidify their reputation of fake news purveyors.
Getting back to the meat of Bill's post.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based
on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this
meeting over Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the
grant of anonymity so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five
should have produced some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by
the New Democrats. Instead, it produced mush . . .
Going to the NYT article here is the reference to anonymous sources, so I freely admit to being
wrong about Bill's anonymous Chinese food eating party (or wake) attendees being the fatuous five.
The party, these senators said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited
appeal to the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together,"
as flat and opaque, according to multiple people present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on
the condition of anonymity .
This is the NYT's only reference to anonymity and furthers it's reputation of a fake news purveyor
as the word "some" implies that some would go on record but either couldn't be found or weren't
asked.
The rest of the article segues into a pity party, from those that weren't there.
Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of urgency about honing a new economic message.
After a stinging loss to Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out
how to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016. Only by making pocketbook
issues the central focus, they say, can Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat
Mr. Trump in 2020.
"We need to double down and double down again on the importance of building an economy not
just for those at the top, but for everyone ," said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
a high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for Mr. Trump.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't realize that those at the top stole it from everyone else, and quadrupling
down on building an economy that works for those at the top won't work for those at the bottom
or anyone else except for those at the top.
Beyond that, they expect wide variance in how officeholders handle Mr. Trump and his agenda,
from moderates who seek out accommodation to blue-state leaders who pursue total war . Their emerging
message is likely to focus on protecting Medicare and Social Security, attacking income inequality
and political corruption , and blocking legislation that might restrict access to health care.
"Likely" and "might" are weasel words. How likely are those that live and breath corruption
to cut off their own supply?
The whole article is a mix of real and fake news and some days I like my comedy, black.
"So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats to discuss "jobs?" Given
the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin to lose their jobs within
two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the five New Democrats."
I'm still chuckling. It's sort of like five roosters in a chicken coop that only has room for
one, all vying to become Chanticleer.
We in the UK had thirteen years of ' New Labour ' which was Tony Blair's repositioning of the
old Labour Party to turn it into a right of centre Thatcherite, neoliberal, let's privatise everything
party, thus abandoning the working class in the process . Exactly as Bill Black describes re the
Democrats . The problem as I see it is hydra headed , but here are the headings as it were :
1. A political shift to the right is also a psychological one, separating the ' doing okays
' from the ' left behinds ' and in the process reducing ( if not eliminating ) empathy from the
' doing okays ' for the ' left behinds ' . So intentional or otherwise this is a ' divide and
rule ' policy, by government that has given rise to Global Trump_vs_deep_state. In the process the electability
of a left-wing candidate as a leader – Saunders, Corybyn – has been made impossible under the
present set up.
2. Automation. The power of labour hasn't just been weakened by this rightward shift . It has
been severely weakened by the onward march of capital embracing new technologies of every type
and as we all know none of the productivity gains from this have benefitted labour, nor will they
in the future.
3. Bill Black is right a government is not like a household, but the daily message that we
' tax in order to spend ' is a deeply rooted belief system and just trying ( as I do ) to explain
why this is not the case is, I imagine , like Copernicus trying to explain the actual motion of
the earth around the sun. They just don't get it. It goes against common sense .
The election of Trump is not the beginning of the end it is end of the beginning. This is not
a polite, dinner party conversation, it's going to turn ugly rather quickly and, just like the
Crash of 2008 no-one will have seen it coming.
Re automation: I know the CEOs are pushing replacing people with robots. But none of them can
give you an answer to this question: Which robots are going to buy your products? And the fact
that none of them can even think this far ahead means they are just as clueless as the New Dems.
Maybe they can't see it coming but plenty of us can. I keep telling my friends they better start
preparing for any and all emergencies because the future ain't gonna be pretty.
The Times writes: "Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr.
Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
This is the same Joe Manchin whose daughter, Heather Bresch, heads up Mylan of recent EpiPen
monopoly pricing fame.
Maybe Democratic voters are realizing that the elected Democrats are concerned about taking
care of their own well-connected class, but working people are a group ignored most of the time
and catered to, verbally, only 2/4/6 years.
Can we get a re-post on a previous BB primer on MMT? I studied (bachelors) econ, I have read
L. Randal Wray's MMT book but I find the concepts of a sovereign currency hard to explain to
outsiders who are mostly inundated with globalism, "free trade" etc.
Wray, whatever his importance to the MMT world as a theorist, is a terrible explainer. Cullen
Roche (who disagrees with the UMKC economists on the prescriptive points of the theory, such as
the job guarantee) does a far better job explaining it to the beginner on his site Pragmatic Capitalism.
Sometimes it does not matter how well you explain that a sovereign country need not raise taxes
before spending can take place because some people will never change their beliefs no matter how
well those beliefs are challenged. It is almost as difficult as trying to change someone's religious
beliefs.
U.S. level sovereign countries. Russia could do it. Brazil and Indonesia could, but most "sovereign"
countries would have problems with international trade if they tried this. Iran maybe could do
it.
I fear many people believe the U.S. is a higher character version of the UK or France, so when
you try to explain this, they don't quite grasp the U.S. is a continent spanning power and don't
grasp why the dollar has value. The U.S. isn't the indispensable nation. It's the nation that
can check out. Other nation states don't have this luxury. Despite the decline of industrial production,
the U.S. makes that or could easily. American exceptionalism isn't the moral garbage Obama pushes.
It's sovereignty in the modern world.
For people without a background in Econ I highly recommend theses youtube playlists. They are
filtered into different categories and are very good explainers.
The Dems are hoping that they'll be back in office as soon as the Repubs screw up. And it's
quite possible since people don't have a choice other that the duopoly. We have to start building
other parties to give ourselves a choice. But will we do it? How?
They didn't lose because more people voted rep.
They lost because 10mm that voted for big o in 2008 stayed home, didn't vote for anybody for pres,
or went 3rd party in other words, ABC, or anybody but Clinton.
A few will some day emulate Bernie, but this leap of faith means no banker money. Not many of
these senior dems
new blood, please!
I find the spectacle of these despicable excuses for Senators being deeply concerned for their
own job security quite heart-warming. Thanks, Prof Black, goes great with coffee.
But why, oh why, if they are that scared about their jobs, can't they get a clue? Are they
still afraid of Hillary? Afraid that they would have to do honest work? Or do they still truly
believe that the working class is just muttons?
There aren't corporate board jobs waiting for losers without years of direct labor on behalf
of corporate backers. Backbenchers who simply enjoy the celebrity of DC and follow corporate directives
aren't relevant once they lose.
Certain ones retire to avoid the stench of losing (Evan Bayh, now officially a loser) and can
manage decent jobs, but what does a loser bring to corporate pr especially when they are replaceable
faces? A retired astronaut will come cheaper and present far less chance of scandal.
And the Democrats already keep trying that same old trick of hating their base. Heidi Heitkamp
is about as far right as one can go. What's next? Resurrecting Pinochet to run in Florida?
I did click on the link, and the Krugman's first sentence was "The CIA, according to The
Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to
tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump."
At least Krugman didn't write, "According to reliable sources" as many people would not view
the CIA and WaPo as reliable sources.
The thrust of the Krugman op-ed is that Clinton lost by such a small margin in some states,
it could have been the alleged Russian influence that made the difference.
And it could have been because she was a lousy candidate with many concerns about her judgment
and ethics (Libya, Iraq, Clinton Foundation, 150K Wall Street speeches, possible selling of favors
during SOS, email evidence destruction, cheating on a debate with prior knowledge of debate questions
from Donna Brazile, for TPP then against it.).
Krugman should be taking the Democratic leadership to task for foisting their marginal candidate
on the electorate and the failure of the existing Democratic President to do much for the voters
in his eight years in office.
I remember going to a lecture/book signing by Paul Krugman about 12 years ago and he seemed
to be a decent and thoughtful academic.
Perhaps winning the Nobel branded economics prize was not good for him?
Or maybe there is something in the drinking water at the Times, that like the Shadow, has the
ability to "cloud men's minds"?
I view Krugman the same way I view the inquisitors of the Holy Roman Empire – they are the
"true" believers, and as such have a duty to defend the sacredness of the church (i.e., the democratic
party – it is INCAPABLE OF ERROR).
Krugman's indoctrination into the religion of economics would
put the indoctrination of Jesuits to shame. Krugman is simply incapable of examining his indoctrination
and in that respect can't even match Greenspan, who at least owned up to the flaw in his (Greenspan's)
ideology.
Democrats are perfect, ergo any critique of Obama, ACA, employment, droning, et al is racism and
any critique of Hillary is sexism – Krugman: ANY disagreement means your stupid.
"Working class people overwhelmingly want to work. Working class males who are unable to find
secure, full time work often become depressed and unmarriageable"
As always, Bill Black is spot-on, but the above sentence can be extended by eliminating the
words "working class." The reason Trump won is not only because of blue collar workers. White
collar workers in jeopardy of losing their job due to H-1B visas heard Trump's promise that he
would stop visa abuse.
And Democratic leaders still have not realized that a non-criminal candidate, e.g. Jim Webb,
would have trounced Trump due to his sheer normality. They were in too much of a hurry to crown
their queen. Joe "more of the same" Biden is not the answer.
The Democratic Party might disappear for the most part unless it dumps identity politics and
re-embraces workers and unions.
The problem can be stated quite simply: New Democrats pay close attention to the ministrations
of George Soros, AIPAC, and Wall Street. The policies flow from the dollars these entities provide.
It's the rationale solution. I believe even indirect elections would produce a better class
of Senators. The pomp of the Senate is corrupting. Each Senator fancies himself or herself President.
If Hillary could almost make it and an empty suit such as Obama could make it, the Senator from
the great state of (insert state) definitely could, so they need to keep the money spigots open
and not offend voters in other states.
Indirectly elected Senators would likely be former state house Speaker types or people who
have had more than back benching jobs and never felt the thrill of winning statewide. They wouldn't
entertain delusions of becoming President.
An added benefit is people would pay more attention to state house races. Fixing potholes would
not be sufficient for reelection.
Senate corruption is not about pomp as it is really about Citizens United. That senators have
weak malleable egos that money easily corrupts is disguised by the pomp of the Senate.
Anyone who has ever run for local or state public office knows that local races are treated
like the bush leagues and minor leagues of baseball where the campaign manager acts like a scout
for the party apparatus. Each party has their loyalists and, to borrow a great metaphor, Inquisition-era
Klugmans, who guard the gates and dole out monies to influence the local media and voters.
Thrown to the wayside are the actual beliefs of democracy; as the religion of money is the
only thing recognized. The rationale decision is to reconnect with the ideas of principal. It's
not going to be easy. As this article demonstrates, everyone involved in it is completely void
of any principal thought.
And yet I wonder. Bill Black's critique and commentators on this post provide evidence that
general principals are thought about. How then, could indirect elections tap into this vein and
eschew our vacuous and archaic Senator class?
The House Democrats re-elected Pelosi and company virtually unchallenged. I think they are
so used to losing that they view keeping majorities in the east and west coast states as victory.
HEY! THAT MEANS THAT ANY CATEGORY OF WORKERS DEFINED OUTSIDE THE FED SETUP IS ELIGIBLE FOR
SEPARATE STATE LABOR ORGANIZING SETUP!!!!!!!!!!!!
State labor setup could add something oh, so every day practicable. State NLRB substitute could
MANDATE certification elections upon a finding of union busting. States should also take union
busting as seriously in criminal law as fed takes taking a movie in the movies - that FBI warning
on your DVD comes alive and you are gone for couple of years if caught.
But mandating certification elections has so much more an everyday, natural businesslike feel
that it could sail relatively smoothly through state legislatures. Nota bene: Wisconsin mandates
re-certification of public employees unions annually (51% of membership required; not just voters)
- nothing too alien about mandating union elections.
State set up might ACTUALLY go the last practical mile and actually force employers to actually
bargain with certified unions - which refusal to bargain remains the last impassable barrier associated
with the fed no-enforcement mechanism. See Donald Trump in Vegas.
So I think one of the main issues out there is even understanding what middle-class means.
A key example of this can be found in this piece where the difficulties that Swiss watch makers
are facing is because of the struggling middle-class. Completely baffling I have never known anybody
in the "middle class" to even be thinking of buying a Rolex Oyster watch. There are many other
things that they would do with $5k before buying a watch.
I think the media and policy makers are mistaking the struggles of people who are making over
$250k a year (or local equivalent) as the struggles of the middle class.
I think this is an interesting column discussing whether or not economists should be focused
as much on income distribution as total income growth. I think what the Democratic party has completely
missed is that the period fo time that the Trump voters view as "When America Was Great" was a
period when GDP growth was high (3%-4%) but more importantly, a record percentage of it was being
allocated to the middle-class.
Trump's big challenge will be routing the current 3% GDP growth to his voters as he has promised
to. I have not seen or heard any concrete policy proposals that will accomplish this, so there
should be a yawning wide door for the Democrats to march through 2 and 4 years from now if they
can figure out how to turn on the light to discover where that door is. Right now the Democrats
are just fighting with the Republicans on how the money should be distributed among the top 10%
instead of looking at revisiting their policies form scratch.
Sanders was on the right track, but went to far on key things such as free university. I think
most Americans would agree that college should have some value that is paid for, but it should
be much less than $60k/year tuition. The rest of the developed world doesn't have massive student
debt issues because their colleges and universities are typically in the $3k to $20k/year tuition
and many professional programs (lawyers, doctors etc.) are structured as long undergraduate programs
instead of 4-year undergraduate program just being a weeding out process before you even get into
the professional program.
Free college is popular. Most people went to free public schools. Your argument against college
is the same argument against elementary school. If you want more STEM graduates as a society,
pay for it.
One small quibble: IMHO it is an issue of left vs. right. Unfortunately the US has no `left'
and the only options ever presented are right vs. even-further-right.
"Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should
have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left"
in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue."
Until Democrat Party leadership disavows their neoliberal, financial strip-mining, progressive
voters are challenged by identity politics. How can one remain a Democratic loyalist under those
circumstances?
The video begins with the March of Dimes funded development of the polio vaccine. Edward Murrow
asks Jonas Salk, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk famously answered, "The people, I'd
say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
The video ends with his Salk's son repeating what his father said to him: "What is more important?
The human value of the dollar or the dollar value of the human?"
These questions are not valid when corporate oligarchs control the puppet strings of both political
parties.
Presumably, that's because neoliberals have bought into the Chicago School theory of human
capital, "the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity,
embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
Since economic value is intended for the shareholder, neoclassical and neoliberal policies
are intended to achieve the same outcome: to decrease the dollar value of the human.
Prof Black says that Al Gore is "the [co]leader of the New Democrats." That was true in 1988-1992.
But some people sometimes learn a thing or two over a quarter-century. In Gore's case, he learned
something yuuuge: that global warming is the central issue of our time for *everyone*. Yet Prof.
Black, the Democrats new, old, and middleaged, every single commenter on this posting, not to
mention the Five coal-state Senators whining about "the economy," not a one of all of them had
a single word about the most important (perhaps the *only* important issue) of our times. Does
anyone doubt that, had the Democrats been forced to nominate him in the contested convention that
I had so hoped for, the campaign, its outcome, and our present discussion would be quite different?
I believe Gore was a less talented version of his father under the spell of Tipper who was
usually on a crusade against naughty language. Left to his own devices, Gore is alright, but it
takes him a while. He was garbage in 2000.
Wow! I respect Bill Black,so much so that if I was a billionaire respite with household name
recognition to promote my ascension to the big house, my cabinet would have hopefully been blessed
with his inclusion. I get the monetary sovereignty reality and am equally frustrated over the
disconnect most people have digesting the difference between public and private debt. Unfortunately
long standing cultural beliefs continually propogandized are hard to change, so without a very
established credentialed leader, like maybe some of those new democats, and a host of other well
respected influential cohorts supporting this counter intuitive reversal of perception, the reality
that our governments finances are nothing akin to a households will only be reckognized by a very
small group of open minded heterodox academics and truth seeking objective journalists, like the
folks here at Naked Capitalism. I assume some unsavory corporate benefactors of energy , banking,
and the sometimes comically nefarious cast of charachters running the various military industrial
enterprises, obviously dependent upon government accomodations, contracts, and unlimited revolving
door exposures, must have some inherent comprehension of the governments monetary sovereignty.
Though i am sure, just like justice and law, to them its two tier. Whether we want to admit it
or not, class is a big divider, and those benefitting from our current insanity stand on some
shaky shoulders. They need institutions that are self affirming and equally prescribed to regardless
of class. Religion helps the downtrodden with hope and morality; equally comforting to the plutocrats
that be are the multiple arenas upholding assumptions espousing limited federal government coffers,
conforming the masses to be humble and aquiescent, but more importantly incentivizes a hard working
competitive ethic that the powers that be easily exploit for ever more profits.
Now the divergence between me and Professor Black comes where he implores that people just want
to work, anotherwords have a secure job. What that job is and what it pays isnt the priority,
the idea they have a structured format to adhere to and anchor their societal existence is whats
paramount. I dont buy it! . I get it, here at Naked Capitalism isnt the place for anecdotal exploits,
so i dont want to bore anybody with my angry history. But experiences do correspond to attitudes
and policy persuasions. Briefly, I own a small business, I hate it, I simply have to continue
with it because otherwise I am in the street. The Great Recession gutted my savings, opportunities,
and networks, while age, personal obligations, and finances precludes any restructuring. Surely
many middle aged middle class americans share my frustrations, and the future isnt looking any
brighter. That being said, work for the sake of doing something integrated for a minimal pay check
to stay relevant and in the "system" isnt what's needed. Productive opportunities that engage
those that are idle and prone to self destructive behaviors might be socially responsible, and
obviously our federal government can provide funding for that, even though this cooperative idea
might sound too much like socialism. Young people surely need educational opportunities and structured
paths to engage in that will lead to either being productive or aid searching for better sustainable
ventures that balance our proclivity to turn nature into profits for the few. Point is, obviously
society is a growth in progress and each new generation needs guidance finding ways to spend time
assuring they and their societal members are continuing to build upon and improve the quality
of everybodies lives. Sometimes profit can be a great motivator for this, and other times not.
I am not sure if Prof. Black is expanding his definition of work. Maybe instead of getting into
debt for an education, vocational or academic, people should be paid a living wage to receive
an education at the beginning of their occupational lives, or like me, they need help restructuring
due to public policy that destroyed their economic and occupational existences.. Bernie tried
to introduce these concepts, but fear of deficits and lacking funds took center stage. Bernie,
who obviously knows the truth because of Stephanie Kelton, got cold feet with regards to attempting
an honest discusion, reverting instead to increased taxing to find funding. Sorry , until the
definition of "work" is broadened, i'm not in favor of collectively indoctrinating unfortunate
able bodied persons into a government work program that serves as a wage floor for some make for
work job. Something like the Orange Oompa Loompa's proposed border wall? The entire concept sounds
way too Orwelian for me.
New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back
their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader
is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. People are tired of being
screwed by Neoliberal policies. We need a new deal for the 99%. Those voters that were conned
by Trump are in for a rude awaking, and it won't take too long. American voters are very fickle.
Not long ago the republican party was portrayed as on life support. It didn't take long for that
to change. If democrats are smart they will quit living in the past and become more progressive.
They only need to support their base to make big changes happen.
"... "Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's friends. ..."
"... "He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the campaign." ..."
"... Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters and we want their voters.' ..."
"... The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was so tight that the party let it happen! ..."
Decent read from a democrat candidate in NC who ran for congress and got no help from DCCC. Makes
larger point about how they need to built out the organization with training, infrastructure for
campaigns. One remarkable bit is how there was a seat in TX district that hillary clinton won and
the party didn't even field a candidate!
A similar story about the final days of the SS Clintanic :
"Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept
saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's
friends.
"He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call
who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing
states in the closing days of the campaign."
"They spent far more time debating whether or not Clinton should visit Texas and Arizona, two
states they knew she had little chance of winning, in order to get good press," Thrush says. Just
a week before Election Day, Clinton made a campaign stop in Tempe, Arizona.
Who knows whether the NYT's ten months of daily fake news about "inevitable Hillary" misled the
campaign, or the campaign misled the NYT?
One is reminded of the old nautical story about an imperious captain sailing on into a wall of
clouds, as the worried navigator watches the barometer dropping to 28 inches of mercury.
The NYT's job is to inject more mercury - problem solved! (we thought)
Building on lambert's favorite quote from atrios "they had ONE job!". Anecdotes like this from
politico really emphasize how they literally stopped trying to elect other democrats. It was ALL
about clinton and little else mattered. There was NO plan B!
Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic
of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters
and we want their voters.'
The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't
even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was
so tight that the party let it happen!
Personally I would like to see the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs. They don't deserve
my time and effort when the elite go out of their way to stack the deck.
"... Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars. In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre, mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few. ..."
"... This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it 1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news ..."
"... Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political agendas. ..."
"... What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms. ..."
"... In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth" is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the Internet age. ..."
"... The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat ..."
"... According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons. ..."
"... Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat. ..."
"... The CIA whinging about a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might just be the greatest self-awareness fail ever! ..."
"... LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez! They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria. ..."
"... The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days. ..."
"... Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times. ..."
"... In fact, Trump's coalition looks remarkably similar to the one that Scott Walker put together in 2014. ..."
"... Obama in Spartanburg, SC in 2007: And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner. ..."
"... And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed. ..."
Meet the Democrats' proto-Trumps Politico. "In three major states with a governor's
mansion up for grabs in 2018, a big-name, politically active billionaire or multimillionaire
is taking steps toward a run - [Democrat] donors looking to take matters into their own
hands after 2016's gutting losses."
The Evidence to Prove the Russian Hack emptywheel. The headline is a bit off, since the
post's subject is really the evidence required to prove the Russian hack. Some of
which does exist. That said, this is an excellent summary of the state of play. I take issue
with one point:
Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending
someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake
site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong
is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.
First, CrowdStrike is a private security firm, so there's a high likelihood they're talking
their book, Beltway IT being what it is. Second, a result (DNC got phished) isn't "strong"
proof of a claim (GRU did the phishing). We live in a world where 12-year-olds know how to
do email phishing, and a world where professional phishing operations can camouflage themselves
as whoever they like. So color me skeptical absent some unpacking on this point. A second post
from emptywheel,
Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don't Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote , is also well worth
a read.
Greenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars.
In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about
everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling
and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre,
mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few.
They murder, torture, train hired mercenary proxies (who they are often pretending to oppose),
stage coups of democratically elected govt.'s, interfere with elections, topple regimes, install
ruthless puppet dictators, and generally enslave other nations to western corporate pirates.
They are a rogue band of pirates themselves.
This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering
rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would
take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it
1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news
Conclusion: It isn't the Russians that are interfering with U.S. kangaroo elections, it's
the professionals over at the CIA
Apparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will
be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent
Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue
embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm.
I've tried to point out on other blogs just how shaky that story in the Washington Post
is, and the response I get is something along the lines of, well, other outlets are also
reporting it, so it must be true. It does me no good to point out that this is the same tactic
used by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. People will believe what they
want to believe.
It may help to point to the history of CIA influence at WaPoo. Counterpunch had a short
piece reminding everyone of Operation Mockingbird (going from memory on that name) where CIA
had reporters on staff at the paper directly taking orders and simultaneously on CIA payroll.
If questioned about CIA's motivation for hating trump, my best guess is that it is because
trump is undermining their project to overthrow assad in syria using nusra rebels. And also
because trump wants to be nice to russia.
I think there's some people in the cia that think they played a major role in winning the
cold war through their support for mujahadeen rebels in afghanistan. I suspect they think they
can beat putin in syria the same way. This is absolutely nutty.
The upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we
are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political
agendas.
There's a large number of people that will see through the facade. Right now, Trump supporters
are getting a lesson in how much resistance there can be within the establishment. I'm no Trump
supporter, but I think seeing what these institutions are capable of is a useful exercise for
all involved.
Apologies if this analysis by Robert Parry has already been shared here:
"What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the
creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced
by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms.
In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth"
is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace
of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special
app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the
Internet age.
And then there's the possibility of more direct (and old-fashioned) government enforcement
by launching FBI investigations into media outlets that won't toe the official line. (All
of these "solutions" have been advocated in recent weeks.)
On the other hand, if you do toe the official line that comes from Stengel's public diplomacy
shop, you stand to get rewarded with government financial support. Stengel disclosed in
his interview with Ignatius that his office funds "investigative" journalism projects.
"How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth?" Ignatius
asks, adding: "Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting
and empower truth-tellers."
The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of
the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my
oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat techniques to preserve
truth– may turn ou to be overly pessimistic.
Keep in mind the basis of this capitalist economy is Federal debt. They have to spend it
on something. The government doesn't even budget, which is to list priorities and spend according
to need/ability. They put together these enormous bills, add enough to get the votes, which
don't come cheap and then the prez can only pass or veto.
If they wanted to actually budget, taking the old line item veto as a template, they could
break these bills into all their various items, have each legislator assign a percentage value
to each one, put them back together in order of preference and the prez would draw the line.
"The buck stops here."
That would keep powers separate, with congress prioritizing and the prez individually responsible
for deficit spending. It would also totally crash our current "Capitalist" system.
According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has
borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This
is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers
that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter
if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private
partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons.
Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than
we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat.
LOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez!
They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria.
There are so many eye-rolling ironies in all this I think my eyeballs might just pop out
of their sockets. And the liberals going out of their way to tout the virtues of the CIA the
very same organization that never shied from assassinating or overthrowing a leftwing president/prime
minister it galls. The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up
as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days.
Modern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports
club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised
they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times.
My guess is donors are annoyed after the 2014 debacle and are having a hard time rationalizing
a loss to a reality TV show host with a cameo in Home Alone 2.
And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and
collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes
myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.
Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.
And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed.
That ProPublica piece (
Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the U.S. Pro Publica)
is brutal. Not only do we have to be the shittest corrupt country in the world but we have
to be a safe haven for ever other corrupt politician in the world as long as they have $$.
Can someone just make it all end? Please. There needs to be a maximum wealth where anything
you earn past it just gets automatically redistributed to the poor.
Thanks for the link – really important and scary things are going in congress concerning
'fake news' and Russian propaganda and HR 6393 is particularly bad. The EU is also taking steps
to counter 'fake news' as well. Obama claimed that some form of curation is required – and
it is happening quickly. People are suggesting that propornot has been debunked. That does
not matter anymore. The Obama regime and the MSM don't care – that have gotten the message
out.
And the people behind this are really deranged – check out Adam Schiff calling Tucker Carlson
a Kremlin stooge for even suggesting that there is no certainty that Russia leaked the emails
to Wikileaks.
After all, the media went all in for Hillary and spent huge amounts of time explaining why
Trump is unfit. But they lost.
And now our efforts on behalf of al Queada are failing in Syria and more hysteria ensues.
See for example:
The email saga lost a provable set of sources a long time ago. Before the files were given
to Wikileaks it was already too late to determine which people did it. So-called forensic evidence
of these computers only tell us that investigators either found evidence of a past compromise
or that people want us to believe they did. Since the compromise was determined after the fact,
the people with access could have done anything to the computers, including leave a false trail.
The core problem is that since security for all of these machines, including the DNC's email
server and most likely many of those from Team R, was nearly non-existent nearly nothing useful
can be determined. The time to learn something about a remote attacker, when it's possible
at all, is while the machine is being attacked – assuming it has never been compromised before.
If the attacker's machine has also been compromised then you know pretty much nothing unless
you can get access to it.
As far as physical access protection goes. If the machine has been left on and unattended
or is not completely encrypted then the only thing that might help is a 24 hour surveillance
camera pointed at the machine.
Forensic evidence in compromised computers is significantly less reliable than DNA and hair
samples. It's much too easy for investigators to frame another party by twiddling some bits.
Anyone that thinks that even well intentioned physical crime investigators have never gotten
convictions with bad or manipulated evidence has been watching and believing way too many crime
oriented mysteries. "Blindspot" is not a documentary.
As for projecting behaviors on a country by calling it a "state action", Russia or otherwise,
implying that there is no difference between independent and government sponsored actions,
that is just silly.
"... What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her. ..."
"... This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism. ..."
"... I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see. ..."
"... The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. ..."
"... Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism. ..."
"... He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest). ..."
"... appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other. ..."
Dec 07, 2016 | http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/28/the-day-after-brexit/#comment-699954
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if
the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or
reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more white
non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I don't know
what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic
Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans.
This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks,
women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to
do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons
on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap. (Both
excellent podcasts, by the way.)
The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the
'90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as
an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto
ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously
long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style
fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological
hostage of the center.
Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back
from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely
decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship
to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal
centrism. (Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending
on the extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy decisions
that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it.
Another point US leftists have been making for many months now is that Trump himself isn't
actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which you treated as a novel discovery at
#79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal administration in practice will make neoliberal
Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which is absolutely incorrect.
He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done
them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception
of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious
private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in
some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care
about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which
he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest).
But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions
like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major
US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
I want to see a political decision to abandon the working class
NAFTA & TPP etc, big bank bailout no prosecutions, no mortgage relief, grossly inadequate structured
and targeted stimulus, low inflation low gov't spending with many gov't jobs cut, insurance and
provider friendly whirlpool of an expensive health care plan
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated
except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.
The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left
might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of
the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented
are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing
business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws,
in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work
and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier,
Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders
as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the
fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason
to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already
stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already
fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties
then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class,
or not.
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 4:00 pm There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more
white non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I
don't know what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating
back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the
Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate
Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities
for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege
except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs
to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what
to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in
a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap.
(Both excellent podcasts, by the way.) The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's
long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US
and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the
nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and
center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right"
party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a
shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. Both
Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have
been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to
remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a
"left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism.
(Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending on the
extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having
been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy
decisions that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist
response is obstinately ignoring it. Another point US leftists have been making for many months
now is that Trump himself isn't actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which
you treated as a novel discovery at #79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal
administration in practice will make neoliberal Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which
is absolutely incorrect. He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration
would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create
the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports
vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for
Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center
doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like
abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate
opportunistic interest). But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of
authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment
that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
"... If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call. ..."
"... I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That might be a good starting point. ..."
If I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate
the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they
indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call.
I mean, where do we start? No attempt at learning the history of neoliberalism, no attempt
at any serious research about how and why it fastened itself into the brains of people like Tony
Coelho and Al From, nothing, zilch.
If someone who did not know the history of the DLC read this piece, they would walk away thinking,
'wow, it was all happenstance, it all just happened, no one deliberately set off this run away
train'. Sometime in the 90s the 'Left' decided to just pursue identity politics. Amazing.
I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why
the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces
the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the
Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That
might be a good starting point.
"... Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain. While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with). ..."
"... I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic Party governance eviscerated those communities. ..."
"... This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence. Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story. ..."
Does anyone else get the overwhelming impression that the US is heading for an impending collapse
or serious decline at least, unless it puts a fight it against the status quo?
Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for
the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain.
While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives
and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with).
I find it amazing how tone deaf the Clinton campaign and Democratic Establishment are. Trump
and apparently his son in law, no matter what else, are political campaigning geniuses given their
accomplishments. For months people were criticizing their lack of experience in politics like
a fatal mistake..
I think that no real change is going to happen until someone authentically left wing takes
power or if the US collapses.
I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds
like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic
Party governance eviscerated those communities.
This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People
wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change
again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held
together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that
strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence.
Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story.
It is not clear to me what exactly a collapse entails. The US doesn't have obvious lines to
fracture across, like say the USSR did. (I suppose an argument could be made for "cultural regions"
like the South, Cascadia etc separating out, but it seems far less likely to happen, even in the
case of continuing extreme economic duress and breakdown of democracy/civil rights).
The US is and has been in a serious decline, and will probably continue.
The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of
the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.
The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director
of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
...
The news comes as Rogers is being considered by President-Elect Donald Trump to be his nominee for DNI, replacing Clapper as
the official who oversees all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers,
without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.
Adm. Michael S. Rogers recently claimed in
reference to the hack of the Democratic National Council emails that Wikileaks spreading them is "a conscious effort by a nation-state
to attempt to achieve a specific effect." He obviously meant Russia.
Compare that with his boss James Clapper who very recently
said
(again) that the "intelligence agencies don't have good insight on when or how Wikileaks obtained the hacked emails."
Emails of the DNC and of Clinton's consigliere John Podesta were hacked and leaked. Additionally emails from Clinton's private
email server were released. All these influenced the election in favor of Trump.
Wikileaks boss Assange
says he does not know where the emails come from but he does not think they came from Russia.
Clapper and Carter wanted Rogers fired because he was generally disliked at the NSA, because two big breaches in the most secret
Tailored Access Organization occurred on
his watch even after the Snowden case and because he blocked, with the help of Senator McCain, plans to split the NSA into a spying
and a cyber war unit.
Now let me spin this a bit.
Rogers obviously knew he was on the to-be-fired list and he had good relations with the Republicans.
Now follows some plausible speculation:
Some Rogers trusted dudes at the NSA (or in the Navy cyber arm which Rogers earlier led) hack into the DNC, Podesta emails
and the Clinton private email server. An easy job with the tools the NSA provides for its spies. Whoever hacked the emails then
pushes what they got to Wikileaks (and DCleaks , another "leak" outlet). Wikileaks
publishes what it gets because that is what it usually does. Assange also has various reasons to hate Clinton. She was always
very hostile to Wikileaks. She allegedly even
mused of killing Assange by a drone strike.
Rogers then accuses Russia of the breach even while the rest of the spying community finds no evidence for such a claim. That
is natural to do for a military man who grew up during the cold war and may wish that war (and its budgets) back. It is also a
red herring that will never be proven wrong or right unless the original culprit is somehow found.
Next we know - Trump offers Rogers the Clapper job. He would replace the boss that wanted him fired.
Rogers support for the new cold war will also gain him favor with the various weapon industries which will eventually beef
up his pension.
Some of the above is speculation. But it would make sense and explain the quite one-sided wave of leaks we saw during this
election cycle.
Even if it isn't true it would at least be a good script for a Hollywood movie on the nastiness of the inside fighting in Washington
DC.
Let me know how plausible you find the tale.
Posted by b on November 19, 2016 at 02:14 PM |
Permalink
Not sure about the speculation. There's justification for military spending beyond the cold war. Actually, the cold war
could be sacrificed in order to re-prioritize military spending.
In any case, Trump's proposed picks are interesting. I especially like the idea of Dana Rohrabacher as Secretary of State
if it comes to pass.
One thing for sure .... there's been so much 'fail' with the Obama years that there's an abundance of low-hanging fruit
for Trump to feather his cap with success early on, which will give him a template for future successes. That depends largely
on who his picks for key posts are, but there has seldom been so much opportunity for a new President as the one that greets
Trump.
It's there to be had. Let's hope that Trump doesn't blow it.
Sounds about right and this just means a new criminal class has taken over the beltway. That doesn't do anything for us citizens,
just more of the same.
Everything is on schedule and please there's nothing to see here.
I wonder if Rogers' statement appearing to implicate Russian government hackers in leaking DNC information to Wikileaks at
that link to Twitter was made after the Democratic National Convention itself accused Russia of hacking into its database.
In this instance, knowing when Rogers made his statement and when the DNC made its accusation makes all the difference.
If someone at the NSA had been leaking information to Wikileaks and Rogers knew of this, then the DNC blaming Russia for
the leaked information would have been a godsend. All Rogers had to do then would be to keep stumm and if questioned, just
say a "nation state" was responsible. People can interpret that however they want.
Any of the scenarios you mention could be right. The one thing that is certain - Russia was not the culprit. Not because Russians
would not be inclined to hack - I think it is plausible that everyone hacks everyone (as someone said) - but Russians would
not likely go to Wikileaks to publicize their prize. They'd keep it to themselves... in that way, they are probably like LBJ,
who knew that Nixon had sabotaged the end-of-war negotiations in Paris in 1968, but said nothing for fear of shocking the "system"
and the people's trust in it... (didn't work out too well in the end, though). Putin was right when he said (referring to the
2016 US election) that it all should somehow be ... more dignified.
Makes me wonder who populates the Anonymous group of loosely affiliated hackers and if they were used. The tale has probability;
it would be even more interesting if the motive could be framed within the hacker's fulfilling its oath of obligation to the
Constitution. Le Carre might be capable of weaving such a tale plausibly. But what about the Russia angle? IMO, Russia had
the biggest motive to insure HRC wouldn't become POTUS despite all its denials and impartiality statements. Quien Sabe? Maybe
it was Chavez's ghost who did all the hacking; it surely had an outstanding motive.
I'll add some color on Rogers in another post, but I just want to preface any remarks with one overriding aspect of the leaks.
From the details of most of these leaks, speculation on tech blogs (and as far as anyone knows for certain):
There are many parties that had great incentive to acquire and leak the emails, but I have to insist with the utmost conviction
(without a string of expletives) that a junior high school kid could have performed the same feat using hacking tools
easily found on the internet . There was absolutely nothing technically sophisticated or NSA-like in someone's ability
to get into the DNC server or grab Podesta's emails. It was a matter of opportunity and poor security. If anyone has a link
to any other reasoning, I would love to see it. The DNC and Hillary leaks (among other hacks) were due to damn amateurish security
practices. The reason you don't outsource or try to get by on the cheap for systems/network security is to reduce the risk
of this happening to an acceptable cost/benefit level.
So the presumption of Wikileaks source being (or needing to be) a state actor with incredibly sophisticated hacking tools
is utter nonsense. Yes, it could have been the Russian FSB or any one of the five-eyes intelligence agencies or the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency. But it could have just as plausibly been Bart Simpson
pwning the DNC from Springfield Elementary School and sending
everything to Wikileaks, "Cool, I just REKT the Clintons!"
WikiLeaks doesn't care if the leak comes from the head of a western intel agency or a bored teenager in New Jersey. It cares
that the material is authentic and carefully vets the content, not the source. At least until they kidnapped Assange and took
over WikiLeaks servers a couple of weeks ago, but that's for a different tin-foil hat thread.
Carol Davidek-Waller | Nov 19, 2016 3:18:02 PM |
7
Is Trump that much of a deep thinker? Rebellious teenager who chooses anyone that the last administration didn't like seems
more plausible to me. It doesn't matter who they are or what their record is. I don't think Trump plans to surrender any of
his undeserved power to anyone. He'll be running the whole show. They'll do what he wants or be shown the door.
rufus (aka "rufie") the MoA Hillbot uses a new persona - "Ron Showalter" - to attack Trump post-election. rufie/Ron conducts
a false flag attack on MoA (making comments that are pages long) so that his new persona can claim that his anti-Trump
views are being attacked by someone using his former persona.
I generally dislike "theories" that go too much into speculation, -- however this one sounds actually quite plausible!
As for "Russia did it", this was obvious bullshit right from the start, not least because of what GoraDiva #4 says: I think it is plausible that everyone hacks everyone (as someone said) - but Russians would not likely go to Wikileaks to
publicize their prize. They'd keep it to themselves
Allegations against Russia worked on confusing different levels: hacking -- leaking -- "rigging".
This picture encapsulates IMO the full absurdity this election campaign had come down to:
MSM constantly bashing Trump for "lies", "post-factual", "populist rage", "hate speech", -- while themselves engaging in the
same on an even larger level, in a completely irresponsible way that goes way beyond "bias", "preference" or even "propaganda".
I understand (and like) the vote for Trump mainly as a call to "stop this insanity!"
~~~
Some more on the issue:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/10/really-really-upset-foreign-office-security-services/ I left Julian [Assange] after midnight. He is fit, well, sharp and in good spirits. WikiLeaks never reveals or comments
upon its sources, but as I published before a fortnight ago, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is not any Russian
state actor or proxy that gave the Democratic National Committee and Podesta material to WikiLeaks.
The following week, two cybersecurity firms, Fidelis Cybersecurity and Mandiant, independently corroborated Crowdstrike's
assessment that Russian hackers infiltrated DNC networks, having found that the two groups that hacked into the DNC used malware
and methods identical to those used in other attacks attributed to the same Russian hacking groups.
But some of the most compelling evidence linking the DNC breach to Russia was found at the beginning of July by Thomas
Rid, a professor at King's College in London, who discovered an identical command-and-control address hardcoded into the DNC
malware that was also found on malware used to hack the German Parliament in 2015. According to German security officials,
the malware originated from Russian military intelligence. An identical SSL certificate was also found in both breaches.
Sooooo .... these "traces" all show known Russian methods (whether true or not). If they are known they can be faked and
used by someone else.
Now who is the no. 1 organisation, worldwide, in having and being capable to use such information?
@b, your speculation gets better and better the more one thinks about it.
I'm out of my depth on cyber forensics, but would the NSA, and thus Clapper, know who hacked and leaked these documents? Or
would the NSA be in the dark, as they suggest?
Just watched Oliver Stone's "Snowden". Awesome. Can't believe after seeing it that Clapper has survived all these years. Just
another Hoover.
thanks b.. i like the idea of it being an inside job.. makes a lot of sense too.
i like @3 jens question about the timing as a possible aid to understanding this better.
@4 gordiva comment - everyone hacks everyone comment..ditto. it's another form of warfare and a given in these times..
i agree with @6 paveway, and while it sounds trite, folks who don't look after their own health can blame all the doctors..
the responsibility for the e mail negligence rests with hillary and her coterie of bozos..
@7 carol. i agree.
@8 jr.. did you happen to notice a few posts missing from the thread from yesterday and who it was that's been removed?
hint : poster who made the comment "more popcorn" is no longer around. they have a new handle today..
@20 manne.. you can say whatever you want and be speculative too, but i don't share your view on assange knowing who leaked
it..
Except that you have to consider the targeting. I've suspected an insider all along, given the pre-packaged spin points coordinated
with the release vectors. Not that the Russies, Pakistanis, or Chinese wouldn't know more about the US than the US knows about
itself, but the overall nuance really hits the anti-elitist spurned sidekick chord. This clashes a bit with b's interagency
pissing match scenario, but, then again, you step on the wrong tail... Someone didn't get their piece of pie, or equally valid,
someone really really disapproves of the pie's magnitude and relative position on the table.
Curious how Weenergate led to the perfectly timed 650K emails on that remarkably overlooked personal device.
@20 Manne
Yes I think on this case Assange does know, if I remember correctly, he spoke to RT and said something to the effect of 'it's
not Russia, we don't reveal our sources but if the DNC found out who it was they would have "egg on their faces"' ...and easy
access, copy, paste, send job, my hunch it was the DNC staffer who was suicided.
Its what Assange himself says, do your homework, as someone else said here, Wikileaks wont reveal the source, that doesnt
mean they dont know who leaked it.
Is Trump that much of a deep thinker? Rebellious teenager who chooses anyone that the last administration didn't like seems
more plausible to me. It doesn't matter who they are or what their record is. I don't think Trump plans to surrender any of
his undeserved power to anyone. He'll be running the whole show. They'll do what he wants or be shown the door.
Posted by: Carol Davidek-Waller | Nov 19, 2016 3:18:02 PM | 7
I agree.
Trump's got charm and a good memory and doesn't need to be a deep thinker in order to network efficiently and listen carefully.
Nor does he need to be a mathematician to figure out that 1 + 1 = 2.
Has anyone else got the feeling that much of the panic inside Washington is due to the possibility that the crimes of the Obama
administration might be exposed?
One of the most uncanny moments I've experienced watching the Syria crisis unfold is seeing the "Assad gasses his people"
operation launched, fail miserably, then - mostly - interest is lost. I know: the lie, once asserted, has done most of its
work already, debunked or not. I also understand that the western press is so in the tank for the establishment, so "captured"
that it shouldn't surprise anyone that no follow up is offered. My point is, rather, that if you think back over just the Ukrainian
and Syrian debacle the amount of dirt that could be exposed by a truly anti-establishment figure in the White House is mind
boggling.
Just off the top of my head:
- the sabotage of the deal to save the Ukrainian constitutional order brokered by Putin, Merkel and Hollande c/o of the
excuisitely timed and staged sniper shootings (otherwise known as the "most obvious coup in history")
- the farce that is the MH17 inquiry (and the implication: another false flag operation with a cut-out that killed, what was
it, 279 innocents?)
- the Kherson pogrom and the Odessa massacre
- the targeting of both Libya and Syria with outright lies and with all the propaganda perfectly reflecting the adage that,
in dis- info operations, the key is to accuse your enemies of all the crimes you are committing or planning to
- highlights of the above might include: Robert Ford's emails scheming to create "paranoia" in Damascus while completely justifying
same; the "rat-lines" and Ghoutta gas operation; the farcically transparent White Helmets Psy-op *
And on and on...
If you or the institution that pays you had a closet full to bursting with skeletons like this and you were facing an incoming
administration that seems to relish and flaunt it's outsider status wouldn't you be freaking out?
To ice the cake the latest Freudian slip is the crusade against "fake news." Seriously, if I were in their shoes that's
the last phrase I would want people ruminating over. I think it was R. D. Laing who said "we always speak the truth." One way
or another.
* This comes with the delicious irony that the operation's own success offers proof of the adage that sometimes you can succeed
too well. The fact that the Omran photo was plastered across every paper in the west is good evidence of how completely "fake"
our news has become. My favourite is this farcical interview between Amanpour and Lavrov:
https://youtu.be/Tx8kiQyEkHc
@27 Oddlots
Most of those are pretty easy picking under a firm rule of law - plenty of underling rats willing to squeal with even gentle
pressure, I'm sure.
His legacy is horrific.
Obama taught constitutional law for 12 years... It would be sweet, sweet poetry to see him nailed... his 'white papers',
formed in secret courts that no one can see, no oversight in the light of day... phony legal documents that allowed him to
incinerate fellow humans via drone without charge, without trial...
95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated
obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This
is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo!
This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.
And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if
Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere,
torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did
the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get
the death penalty for treason.
Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the
Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern
of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".
That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.
Many of you here are extremely naďve regarding Trump.
James @21 I noticed the different handle but b hasn't commented on the attack. I assumed that this meant that b didn't know
for sure who did the attack.
As I wrote, rufus/Ron made himself the prime suspect when he described the attack as an attempt to shut down his anti-Trump
message. Some of us thought that it might be a lame attempt to discredit rufus but only "Ron" thought that the attack was related
to him.
If one doesn't believe - as I do - that Ron = rufus then you might be less convinced that rufus did the deed.
Yes, it is important to remember that Assange, though he did not state that he knew who provided the DNC emails, implied
that he did, and further implied--but did not state--that it was Seth Rich. Assange's statement came shortly after Rich's death
by shooting. Assange stated he specifically knew people had people had risked their lives uploading material, implying that
they had in fact lost them.
b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found
the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.
Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke
of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet.The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon
-unfriendly President was elected.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The
'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues
to fund security agencies and buy arms.
And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled.
Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the
"peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military
(note: every candidate was for a strong military) , the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel
or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?
The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:
>> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?
>> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions? An enormous cultural failure that
has produced a brittle social fabric.
>> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?
Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction
or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.
b said also.."Rogers support for the new cold war will also gain him favor with the various weapon industries which will
eventually beef up his pension."
That's the long game for most of the "Hawks" in DC. Perpetual war is most profitable.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest"
military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
Oh please! Trump is stacking his cabinet with Iran-obsessed Islam haters! Nominal enemy , my ass! And was every candidate
for spending a Trillion more on defense??? Did you even read Trump's plan to build up the military?
You do Netanyahu proud with your deflection. What? Nothing regarding Pompeo's blistering comments on Russia or Ed Snowden?
Why are you trying to diminish the threat to Iran with the hawks, Islam-haters, and Iran-obsessed team that Trump cobbled
together so far?
Trump's Israel adviser David Friedman is known to be more extreme than even Netanyahu.
No doubt Netanyahu has unleashed an army of IDF hasbara to crush criticism of Trump and his Iran-obsessed cabinet because
he must be elated with his choices and wants to make them palatable to the American sheeple.
Netanyahu is the first leader Trump spoke with on the phone. Trump praised Netanyahu from day one. PNAC and Clean Break
were war manifestos for rearranging the Middle East with the ultimate goal of toppling Iran.
Trump and his cabinet are all about tearing up the deal and assuming a much more hostile position with Iran. Tearing up
the deal is a precursor to a casus belli. What more proof is there that Trump is doing the bidding of Zionist Neocons??? Oh,
but you don't want more, do you?
As chipnik noted in a comment, Iran is one of the only countries that is yet to be under the control of private finance
(see my latest Open Thread comments, please)
I personally see all this as obfuscation covering for throwing Americans under the bus by the global plutocrats. The elite
can see, just like us, that the US empire's usefulness is beyond its "sold by" date and are acting accordingly. America and
its Reserve Currency status are about to crash and the elites are working to preserve their supra-national private finance
base of power/control while they let America devolve to who knows what level.
Too much heat and not enough light here...or if you prefer, the noise to signal ratio is highly skewed to noise.
Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person's
duty to another or to society in general.
Given the above Trump would not be allowed to immigrate to the US.....just saying...
the shadowbrokers say they have NSA malware/tools and to prove it after their auction was met with crickets riding tumbleweeds
they released some teaser info on NSA servers used for proxy attacks and recon. of course a few just happened to be "owned"
boxes in russia (and china and some other places for that matter). add their russian IP addresses to some (mostly useless)
sigantures associated with supposedly russian-designed malware and you've got some good circumstantial evidence.
also: an email address associated with one or more attacks is from a russian site/domain but whoever registered was directed
to the .com domain instead of the .ru one. this probably means someone got sloppy and didn't remember to check their DNS for
fail.
in general these hacks look less like russians and more like someone who wants to look like russians. the overpaid consultants
used by the DNC/clinton folks can put "bear" in the names and claim that a few bits of cyrillic are a "slam dunk" but all the
"evidence" is easily faked. not that anyone in the "deep state" would ever fake anything.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran.
I worry about it as well. Trump said he'll tear up nuclear agreement, and the people he is choosing also have rabid anti-Iranian
agenda.
Nice start for Trump:
Thursday US House voted to stop civilian aircraft sales to Iran by both Boeing and Airbus.
Few days before - US extending economic sanctions against Iran through 2026.
Of course Trump can block it, but will he? Even if he does, he might blackmail Iran for something in return, etc. Iran is
by no means off the hook for neocons and Israel, and I wouldnt be surprised if Trump follows the suit.
Trump will (or might) have better relations with Russia, but this cordiality doesnt extend to Iran. Or as Jackrabbit says,
US neocons will simply switch the targeted state and Iran may soon become "worse threat to humanity than ISIS", again.
I doubt separating the animosity towards Russia and Iran is even possible. Truth be told his comments towards Russia during
the election seemed more like he was woefully unaware of the reality of the Russo-American situation in the Mideast than about
being ready to negotiate major US power positions and accept Russia as anything more than enemy. Sounded very off the cuff
to me. Maybe he thought he'd 'get along great with Putin' at the time but after realizing later that means making nice with
Iran and giving up a large measure of US influence in the MENA he has reconsidered and taken the party line. It'd certainly
be understandable for a noncareer politician. I'd imagine he'd be more interested now in currying favour with the MIC and the
typical Republican party hawks than with Russia/Putin given his statements on military spending. Back when I saw him bow down
at the altar of AIPAC earlier in the season I had trouble reconciling that with how he hoped to improve relationships with
Russia at the same time given their radical differences wrt their allies. He's made a lot of those type of statements too,
it was hard to read where he stood on most any issue during election season.
I imagine as he's brought into the fold and really shown the reality of how US imperialist power projection he'll change
his mind considerably. I think we, as readers and amateur analysts of this type of material, take for granted how hard some
of this knowledge is to come by without looking for it directly. When we hear someone is going to make nice with Russia we
want to think "well he says that as he must surely recognize the insanity and destructive forces at work." Maybe it's more
of a case where the person speaking actually thinks we're in Syria to fight ISIS - that they have very little grasp of how
things really work over there.
In my eyes the names he's been considering are reason for much worry for those hoping Trump would be the one to usher in
a multipolar world and end the cold war. I never had much hope in that regard (but I'm still praying for the best).
Putin has been supporting right-wing movements across the West in order to weaken NATO
Care to back this statement with arguments, examples ar a link to an excellent article?
Looking at most of "New Europe", it's the other way around ... fascist states allied with Nazi Germany against communism,
participating in massacres of Jewish fellow citizens and functioning as a spearhead for US intelligence against communism after
the defeat of Nazi Germany – see Gladio. Now used by the CIA in the
coup d'état in Ukraine in Februari 2014.
Ahhh ... searched for it myself, a paper written earlier in 2016 ... how convenient!
Policy set by the Atlantic Council years ago:
make Russia a pariah state . Written
about it many times. BS and more western propaganda. The West has aligned itself with jihadists across the globe, Chechnya
included. Same as in Afghanistan, these terrorists were called "freedom fighters". See John McCain in northern Syria with same
cutthroats.
Absolutely outrageous! See her twitter account with followers/participants
Anne Applebaum and former and now discredited Poland's FM
Radoslaw Sikorski .
"Emails of the DNC and of Clinton's consigliere John Podesta were hacked and leaked. Additionally emails from Clinton's private
email server were released. All these influenced the election in favor of Trump."
Not necessarily so. An informal poll of people in blue collar flyover country about their voting intentions prior to the
election expressed 4 common concerns
i) The risk of war.
ii) The Obamacare disaster especially recent triple digit percent increase in fees.
iii) Bringing back jobs.
iv) Punishing the Democrat Party for being indistinguishable from the Republicans.
We shouldn't take Trump's bluster at face value. For example, Trump said that he'd eliminate Obamacare. Now he has backed
off that saying that some elements of Obamacare are worthwhile.
That the Israeli head of state is one of the first foreign leaders that any President-elect speaks to is no surprise. That
you harp on what is essentially nonsense is telling.
In my view Trump is not anti-Jewish. He is anti-neocon/anti-Zionist. As Bannon said, America has been getting f*cked.
To ice the cake the latest Freudian slip is the crusade against "fake news."
i see it more as another mindfucking meme than a Freudian slip. another paean to Discordia, the goddess of chaos. we've
lived with 'fake news,' heretofore advertised by reliable sources , since forever. baptizing this bastardized melange
only sinks us deeper into dissonant muck.
One would hope if that is true - Trump recognises this and fires him as well rather than promoting him.
However, if he were instrumental in getting Trump elected it is understandable if Trump decided to promote him.
It's well-known and clear Trump rewards those who have done him favours.
Let us hope it is not true.
The first thing Trump must do when elected is declassify all material related to MH17. This can be done in late January/
February as one of his first orders of business.
It's important to do this quickly - at least before the Dutch Elections in March 2017.
#MH17truth
If Trump does this he will do a number of things.
1 - Likely reveal that it was the Ukrainians who were involved in shooting down MH17. I say likely because it's possible
this goes deeper than just Ukraine - if that's the case - more the better.
2. He will destroy the liar Porky Poroshenko and his corrupt regime with him. He will destroy Ukraine's corrupt Government's
relationship with Europe.
3. He will destroy the sell-out traitor to his own people Mark Rutte of Netherlands. This will ensure an election win for
a key Trump ally - Geert Wilders.
If Rutte is discredited for using the deaths of 200 Dutch citizens for his own political gain - he is finished and might
end up in jail.
4. He will destroy Merkel utterly. Her chances of re-election (which she just announced she will stand!) will be utterly
destroyed.
5. He will restory Russia-USA relations in an instant.
Trump must also do this ASAP because this is the kind of thing that could get him killed if he doesn't do it ASAP when he's
inaugurated.
Of course - until then - he should keep his mouth shut about it - but the rest of us should be shouting it all around the
Internet.
And very well documented, too. Sort of like the theory that 9/11 was carried out by the Boy Scouts of America. After all,
the boost in jingoism and faux-patriotism gave the BSA a boost in revenue and membership, so that pretty well proves it, eh?
And if you dig deep enough I'm sure you'll find that on 9/10 the BSA shorted their stocks in United.
Totally agree Oddlots and that is why Trump must be on the front foot immediately.
Exposing MH17 and destroying Poroshenko, Rutte & Merkel - and Biden & Obama by the way and a bunch of others is absolutely
key.
Blow MH17 skyhigh and watch Russia-USA relations be restored in a nanosecond.
It will be especially sweet to watch the Dutch traitor to his own people Rutte destroyed in the midst of an election campaign
such that he might end up in jail charged with treason and replaced by Geert Wilders - the Dutch Donald Trump if ever there
was one - within a matter of weeks.
However, a word of caution, it is precisely because of these possibilities that there has to be a high chance Trump will
be assassinated.
Pence would not walk that line. Not at all.
There is no doubt Trump's life is in danger. I hope he has enough good people around him who will point the finger in the
right direction if and when it happens.
I think it's a bit of a stretch. First of all, there are other, deeper areas of investigative matters concerning previous governments
of the US, impeachable offenses and international crimes - remember when Nancy Pelosi took impeachment off the table? Not to
mention, what did happen in Benghazi and why? It wouldn't matter who did that hacking of those emails- it's a bit like the
exposure of the White House tapes in Nixon's presidency. We didn't worry about who revealed that - we went to the issues themselves.
I think that is what Trump is doing as he brings people to his home for conversations. It is the opposite of Obama's 'moving
forward, not looking back'. Trump is going to look back. It's not about reinstating the cold war; it's about gathering information.
I think Saudi Arabia are the ones who should be scared. Trump has implied before he knows who is responsible for September
11.
My guess is he wants to expose Saudi Arabia and the Bush Family.
Ever wondered why the Bushes hate and appear frightened of Trump? Because they understand he will expose their complicity
in September 11 and potentially have them locked up.
Or perhaps he'll let Dubya off claiming he didn't know in return for a favour and lock up Dick Cheney instead. Quite possible.
The Saudis will get thrown down the river and lose any assets they hold in US Dollars - a significant amount I believe!
Sucks to be a Saudi Royal right about now - they better liquidate their US assets ASAP if they have any brains.
Retired UK ambassador Craig Murray said on his Web site, after meeting with Assange and then traveling to Washington where
he met with former NSA officials, that he was 100 percent sure that Wikileaks's source was not the Russians and also suggested
that the leaks came from inside the U.S. government.
@24 jr.. i found the rs guy to be quite repugnant..rufus never came across quite the same way to me, but as always - i could
be wrong! i see pac is gone today and been replaced with another name, lol.. and the beat goes on.. b has deleted posts and
must be getting tired of them too.
@31 manne.. thanks.. does that rule out an insider with the nsa/cia as well?
@34 fecklessleft.. i agree with your last paragraph..
@36 yonatan.. i agree with that alternative take myself..
@40 jules.. would be nice to see happen, but most likely an exercise in wishful thinking.. sort of the same with your @44
too.. the saudis need to be taken down quite a few notches.. the usa/israel being in bed with the headchopper cult has all
the wrong optics for suggesting anything positive coming from usa/israel..
b says 'Next we [can speculate] - Trump offers Rogers the Clapper job. He would replace the boss that wanted him fired.' There,
fixed it.
There appears to be a growing canyon in the intelligence world with some wanting to rid the Office of the National Intelligence
agency altogether, while others are lobbying for it to remain.
Remember when Obama referred to the rise of the Islamic State as the 'JV team'? That nonchalant attitude by Obama towards
the growing threat of the head choppers in Iraq and Syria was squarely placed on senior management within the intelligence
community -
"Two senior analysts at CENTCOM signed a written complaint sent to the Defense Department inspector general in July alleging
that the reports, some of which were briefed to President Obama, portrayed the terror groups as weaker than the analysts
believe they are. The reports were changed by CENTCOM higher-ups to adhere to the administration's public line that the
U.S. is winning the battle against ISIS and al Nusra, al Qaeda's branch in Syria, the analysts claim."
Who knows, Rogers may very well have been one in senior management who encouraged these 50 analysts to come forward. Maybe
the IG investigation is wrapping up and at least internally, the senior management who made intel reports to Obama full of
'happy talk' have been identified and are now leaving on their own.
We shouldn't take Trump's bluster at face value. For example, Trump said that he'd eliminate Obamacare. Now he has backed
off that saying that some elements of Obamacare are worthwhile.
For crying out loud! I don't give a rat's ass about Obamacare when he outlined a plan to boost the military by a trillion
dollars and stacks his cabinet with crazy Iran-obsessed hawks who want to start a world war over effing Iran! And you're deflecting
this with freakin' Obamacare -- It's speaks volumes about your credibility!
Trump is anti-Zionist??? Ha! His adviser to Israel David Friedman is an extreme right-wing Zionist! Or do you just prefer
to completely ignore fact and reality???
And Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo can't stand Putin and their comments and record are there - FACT!
And Trump didn't only tell Hillary he was going to build up the military; he outlined it later in his plan with facts and
figures and it's going to cost about a Trillion dollars, so quit comparing it to a gradual phasing out of Obamacare!
Okay, you know what? I see right through your little game. Unless you have something cogent with factual backup; I don't
wanna read your responses based on pure fantasy and deflection. I look at the cold, hard facts and reality. I look at who Trump
is surrounding himself with rabid Islam-haters obsessed with going after Iran and extremist Zionist loons and hawks like Pompeo
and Pence making disturbing comments on Russia and Snowden and Trump's plan. So quit pretending you're not trying to obscure
fact with fiction meant to deceive!
"...and not a regular war where 300,000 people die..."
- Regular? So, you're calling an aggression on Syria just a 'Regular' war, on par with the course? The very least the Americans
have to do, including those given the 'Nobel Peace Prize' (a bloody joke if there ever was one)? And those regular wars are
needed to, what, regularly feed and the US MIC Beast? So... Obama and Hillary were just getting on with the inevitable?
Your other observations regarding Pompeo are more meaningful, but I think you underestimate the power of groupthink under
the Clinton-Bush-Obama continuous administration complex. Anyway, if Pompeo doesn't wish to get "reassigned", he might be better
off unmounting the neocon horse mindset and getting on better with the Tea Party dogma, where the enemies of thy enemies are
more likely to be seen as friends then frenemies.
#34 Feckless Left
In a sense you are right, he is not a career politician and he might be underestimating the depth of the abyss. Yet, he
has far more street cred than you seem to be giving him credit for. An honest, naive idealist, he is certainly not...
Circe, I have addressed your panic about Iran in another thread and you failed to reply so again:
"Even if true that the future administration would shift its focus against Iran, what can they accomplish militarily against
it? Nought. SAA & ISA would send militias to support Iran, nothing would prevent Russia from using Hamedan airbase just as
it uses Hmeimim and deploy S-400 et al systems to bolster Iran's already existing ones. Plus on what grounds politically could
they intervene? Nobody is buying Bibi's "Bomb" bs seriously anymore. Forget it, with Syria prevailing Iran is safe.."
Oddlots #21. insightful. you ignored the entire list on the financial side, but they are linked through the profound mutual
support between Israel and Wall Street.
I have been really surprised at the lack of discussion of BHO's impromptu post-election tour of Germany and Greece. It seems
to me Egypt flipped and it was met with silence, because WashDC must be secured before the neocons can respond. But the two
countries that are game-set-match are Germany and Greece. The Greek navy with German support is a great power in the Mediterranean.
How convenient to keep them at each other's throats for a decade. I think BHO was trying desperately to keep them onside. But
he would either have to promise them something that he can no longer deliver after Jan 20th...or he has to clue them in to
a different timeline than the one we think is playing out. Anyone have a idea why the Prez had to go and talk to Merkel and
Tsipras *without intermediaries?*
Having now founded a central bank in every nation of the world, the Khazars have defeated the Pope and the Caliphate. Only
Iran and North Korea don't have a Khazar central bank. And only Iran has the last stash of crown jewels and gold bullion that
the Khazars don't already control.
They want Iran as part of Greater Israel, and they hate Russia for driving them out after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Khazars control the American Union under a Red/Blue Star. Just talking ethnics, not race, religion or creed, since Hebrew
is a religion of pure commercial convenience for the Khazars.
US and IL are therefore aligned against IR and RU. Now we can get rid of all the race, religion or creed crap, and talk
New Math set theory: {US,IL} ≠ {IR,RU}
Who are {US,IL} sanctions against? {IR,RU}. In this new Trump' Administration: {TA} ⊆ {US,IL}, and {TA} ⊄ {IR,RU}. From
a chess perspective, Putin just got Kieningered, because the Khazars would have everyone believe that {TA} ❤ {RU}, when in
reality, {TA} ∩ {RU} = {Ř}.
I'm fully expecting a radical change in rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump and his new team, but little else. The REAL movers and
shakers who run the U$A have everything moving their direction right now, so why change? I expect "the Donald" to do as he's
told, like every other POTUS in modern history. They'll let him screw the workers, but, not the REAL owners of the U$A( 1%).
You don't know? Before he died, my father told me a trick. Once the bloom was off their marriage, his wife would deliberately
provoke his heavy-handed management of the family, by doing whatever he didn't want. So he learned to always 'go crazy' over
things, knowing that's exactly what she would do to spite him, ...and in that way, using 'reverse psychology', the Khazars
would have you believe that they hate Trump, and Trump loves Russia. They're just putting the Maidan gears into motion.
If Trump is considering Mitt Romney for SoS then you can bet his policy towards Russia will be hostile because the only reason
Trump would put someone between himself and Putin, who repeatedly called Russia, America's No. 1 enemy, is because he wants
a bad cop on Russia in the State Department, in spite of his supposed good cop remarks regarding Putin. In other words, he
wants someone who can put it straight to Putin so he himself can pretend to be the good cop. If Trump were being honest regarding
a softening in policy with Russia do you really believe he would ever consider someone like Romney for SoS??? Again, Mitt Romney
has made the most scathing comments of anyone against Putin, and then calling Russia the number one geopolitical enemy of
the U.S. . Many on the Democratic and even Republican side felt he went overboard and many have since called his comment
prophetic and today Romney feels vindicated.
Many analysts on the Democratic side and Republican side are calling Romney prophetic since he made that statement on Russia
before Russia messed with U.S. plans for Syria.
So, my point is this; it's possible, it's very possible that, Mike Pompeo, Trump's choice for CIA Director, who also has
a hostile position towards Russia asked Trump to consider Romney because he know doubt also believes that Romney proved good
foresight with that comment regarding Russia and urged Trump to give Romney a meeting.
My 2nd point is this: quit trying to make Trump into what he's not when he's spelling it all out for you in black and white!
It doesn't look good. This picture that's starting to develop is looking worse by the day. Look at who he's surrounding
himself with; look at his actions and forget about his words. This man has sold ice to the eskimos in his business dealings.
Look at the facts. Trump is not who you think he is and just because he made some comments favorable in Putin's regard doesn't
mean he's not going to turn around and stick it to Putin a year or maybe a few years down the line. Kissinger told Fareed Zakaria
today on GPS: One should not insist in nailing Trump to positions he took during the campaign.
I already wrote that I believe Trump is using this fake softer strategy to get Russia to look sideways on a coming Resolution
to invade Iran and then he's going to deal with Putin and Russia.
If Trump picks someone like Romney for State; he'll have 3 individuals in the most important cabinet positions dealing with
foreign policy and foreign enemies who will be hostile to Russia: VP, CIA Director and SoS. Therefore he would be sending his
bad cop to deal with Russia and sending a message to Putin like: Don't put your money on whatever I said during the campaign,
my positions are changing for the empire's benefit and strategic interests. And even if he doesn't choose Mitt, because on
Breitbart where his base convenes they're up in arms about this meeting, I would still be wary of his direction because of
the picks he's made already; the majority of his cabinet so far want war with Iran and his VP and CIA Director can't stand
Putin and then looking at who's advising him, rabid Neocon Zionists like James Woolsey and David Friedman.
Look at what Trump does, who he's meeting with, who he's choosing to surround himself with and quit hanging on what he said,
because talk is cheap, especially coming from someone who's now in the inner circle of American power.
@55
Please don't give me one measly Cohen tweet as fact! The entire Zionist Organization of America came to Bannon's defense
and he will be attending their gala! It's been made public everywhere; so quit obscuring the truth.
@54
Yes, Russia could come to Iran's defense considering Iran allowed for Russia's use of that air base for Syria and rescued
one of the two Russian pilots shot down by Turkey, and is fighting al-Nusra shoulder to shoulder with Russia, but the empire
has something up its sleeve to stop Russia from coming to the defense of Iran, should the U.S. and Israel decide to circumvent
the Security Council. Something stinks; Trump is top loading his cabinet with crazy, Iran-obsessed hawks and his VP and CIA
Direct also have no love for Putin. They're planning something against Iran and I know they're going to do something to tie
Putin's hands. Something's up and it's going to lead to war beyond Syria. Look the Russians are already depleting resources
in Syria; already that puts Russia in a weakened position. I don't know what they're planning but it's not good. The picture
unfolding with Trump's cabinet is very disturbing.
There's another aspect and maybe it's significant and maybe not that could influence a change in Trump's position on Russia
that would have also made him take the extreme step of meeting with Romney while considering the SoS position. Trump is getting
the highest level of security briefings now that he's President-elect. You wanna bet that Russia and Putin are mentioned in
over 50% of those briefings and ISIS, Iran and others get the other 50% collectively???
Hasbara hysteria to undermine Trump. Unrelenting bullshit and innuendo.
What was Bannon talking about when he said that America is getting f*cked? Globalism vs. Nationalism. Who equates nationalism
with nazism? Zionists. Who is butt-hurt over Trump Presidency? Zionists and neocons.
Yep, describes your weak deception to a T! ...like I'm going to hang on Bannon's word as gospel when he's going to be wining
and dining with Zionists at the ZOA gala.
Oh, and one more thing: Zionists, FYI, relate very well with nationalists and supremacists since they got their own nationalist,
supremacist operation in ISRAEL! So I'm only too sure they'll be commiserating and exchanging ideas on how best to secure their
nationalist, supremacist vision for the empire. There's a whole lot of common ground for them to cover during the gala, and
YOU CAN'T AND DIDN'T DENY THAT BANNON IS ATTENDING THE ZIONIST GALA! Did you???
So again, quit dogging me, quit presuming I'm some undercover hasbara, that maybe you are, and spare me the bullshit.
As if we didn't need anymore proof of where Trump is taking the U.S.: Trump tweeted a comment highly praising General James
Mattis after their meeting considering him for Secretary of Defense. This is a major, major red flag signalling a very troubling
direction in Trump's foreign policy.
Mattis served for two years as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Although, he served under Obama, he was against the Iran
deal and considers Iran more dangerous that ISIS!
Mattis is nicknamed "mad-dog mattis" for a reason: he is an extreme hawk and he is MIC incorporated.
But here's the kicker, Mattis like Pompeo, Pence and Romney has also made blistering comments against Russia, stating that
Putin wants to break up NATO, sent "dogs and thugs" into Georgia and has been very critical of Putin's actions in Ukraine and
Syria.
At the beginning of the primaries, Neocons wanted Mattis as a candidate for the Presidency on the Republican side. I like
how the following article describes just how much Neocon war hawks salivated over the thought of Mattis in the White House:
Well folks, Mattis, the darling of Neocons, will be in the White House next to Trump advising him on war strategy! And worst
of all this mad-dog Neocon war hawk is going to run the Pentagon, oversee a trillion-dollar military expansion and command
the next world war!
So are you convinced yet that Trump is perpetuating the Neocon PNAC/Clean Break plan or are you still totally blind???
@34 fl, 'In my eyes the names he's been considering are reason for much worry for those hoping Trump would be the one to usher
in a multipolar world and end the cold war. I never had much hope in that regard (but I'm still praying for the best).'
Trump is in it for Trump. He's a solipsist. We and our 'real world' doesn't exist for Trump. He lives in Trump Tower. The
only things he cares about are his personal interests. He'll put in people to 'run the government' who will insulate him and
his interests from the consequences of their actions and that'll keep him happy and them in their jobs, no matter the consequences
for our 'imaginary' real world. We're back to the mad Caesars. Our government has been steadily walking away from us since
Bush XLI. It's on the run now, we're up to Nero. We 'barbarians' need to take care of our real world in its absence, prepare
ourselves to pick up the pieces when it's become so unrecognizable that it's finally disappeared.
"... For one thing, many vested interests don't want the Democratic party to change. Most of the money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers, advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current arrangement. They naturally want to keep it. ..."
"... For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy, it only knows how to do what it has done for years. Its state and quadrennial national conventions are opportunities for insiders to meet old friends and for aspiring politicians to make contacts among the rich and powerful. Insiders and the rich aren't going to happily relinquish their power and perquisites, and hand them to outsiders and the non-rich. ..."
"... I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee will be. To tell you the truth, I haven't cared. And that's part of the problem. ..."
"... Finally, the party chairmanship has become a part-time sinecure for politicians on their way up or down, not a full-time position for a professional organizer. In 2011, Tim Kaine (who subsequently became Hillary Clinton's running mate in the 2016 election) left the chairmanship to run, successfully, for the Senate from Virginia. ..."
"... The chair then went to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman who had co-chaired Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. This generated allegations in the 2016 race that the Democratic National Committee was siding with Clinton against Bernie Sanders – allegations substantiated by leaks of emails from the DNC. ..."
"... So what we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls, headed by a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing activism. ..."
For one thing, many vested interests don't want the Democratic party to change. Most of the
money it raises ends up in the pockets of political consultants, pollsters, strategists, lawyers,
advertising consultants and advertisers themselves, many of whom have become rich off the current
arrangement. They naturally want to keep it.
For another, the Democratic party apparatus is ingrown and entrenched. Like any old bureaucracy,
it only knows how to do what it has done for years. Its state and quadrennial national conventions
are opportunities for insiders to meet old friends and for aspiring politicians to make contacts
among the rich and powerful. Insiders and the rich aren't going to happily relinquish their power
and perquisites, and hand them to outsiders and the non-rich.
Most Americans who call themselves Democrats never hear from the Democratic party except when
it asks for money, typically through mass mailings and recorded telephone calls in the months leading
up to an election. The vast majority of Democrats don't know the name of the chair of the Democratic
National Committee or of their state committee. Almost no registered
Democrats have any idea
how to go about electing their state Democratic chair or vice-chair, and, hence, almost none have
any influence over whom the next chair of the Democratic National Committee may be.
I have been a Democrat for 50 years – I have even served in two Democratic administrations
in Washington, including a stint in the cabinet and have run for the Democratic nomination for governor
in one state – yet I have never voted for the chair or vice-chair of my state Democratic party. That
means I, too, have had absolutely no say over who the chair of the Democratic National Committee
will be. To tell you the truth, I haven't cared. And that's part of the problem.
Nor, for that matter, has Barack Obama cared. He basically ignored the Democratic National Committee
during his presidency, starting his own organization called Organizing for America. It was originally
intended to marshal grass-roots support for the major initiatives he sought to achieve during his
presidency, but morphed into a fund-raising machine of its own.
Finally, the party chairmanship has become a part-time sinecure for politicians on their way
up or down, not a full-time position for a professional organizer. In 2011, Tim Kaine (who subsequently
became Hillary Clinton's running mate in the 2016 election) left the chairmanship to run, successfully,
for the Senate from Virginia.
The chair then went to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a Florida congresswoman who had co-chaired
Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. This generated allegations in
the 2016 race that the Democratic National Committee was siding with Clinton against Bernie Sanders
– allegations substantiated by leaks of emails from the DNC.
So what we now have is a Democratic party that has been repudiated at the polls, headed by
a Democratic National Committee that has become irrelevant at best, run part-time by a series of
insider politicians. It has no deep or broad-based grass-roots, no capacity for mobilizing vast numbers
of people to take any action other than donate money, no visibility between elections, no ongoing
activism.
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do?
Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman
Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?
The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade
voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or
as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This
strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed...
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of
Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his
financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of
economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer
work."
By Michael Hudson
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
..................
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington." Otherwise the Democrats
will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move by appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's feigned embrace of Bernie's opposition to the TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people. This was the profit center
Obamacare offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to enlist Occupy Wall Street as part of the Democratic Party.
It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
"Reconstructed" might be a better term. But barging full steam ahead with the Wall Street-friendly
Chuck Schumer, as though nothing has happened, seems particularly obtuse on the part of the Democrats
to me.
There is now a growing movement among the Berniecrats to join the Democratic Socialists of America
and build it up into a much larger and more influential organization capable of exerting real political
pressure on the political process.
"without shutting out the wealthy, business interests, or US Corporations"
I should have been less opaque and simply added that America is a Capitalist based nation and
shutting out its Capitalists, who risk their capital for profit, is exactly like biting the hand
that feeds.
Obviously there are evil wealthy people such as that rich women who was caught asking Mitt Romney
about 'eliminating, reducing or cutting off benefits to the 47% who refuse to work and earn a living'
so her taxes would be cut. Obviously there are evil businesses that are predators and take and do
not give back. Obviously there are evil MNC corporations, Apple is in my sites, that refuse to pay
their fair share of taxes to run this nation.
But, as obviously there are super kind and nice wealthy people, businesses, and corporations that
go out of their way to give back to their communities and the vote for Democrats.
The wealthy, American businesses, and MNC corporations will always be lead, in most places on
earth, by those who want lower taxes and less regulation, that's built into the nature of having
more and the desire to control it rather than give it to a government. IT IS NOT EVIL.
Accept that concept and you know why I believe the Democrat Party must be a welcoming home for
the Capitalist Risk Takers, without any acrimony or embarrassment, but with open arms and respect
for what they've accomplished with their lives.
Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination
By Jonathan Chait
February 5, 2016
8:54 a.m.
The initial stupefaction and dismay with which liberals greeted Donald Trump's candidacy have
slowly given way to feelings of Schadenfreude- reveling in the suffering of others, in this case
the apoplectic members of the Republican Establishment. Are such feelings morally wrong? Or can liberals
enjoy the spectacle unleavened by guilt? As Republican voters start actually voting, is it okay to
be sad - alarmed, even - by the prospect that the Trump hostile takeover of the GOP may fail?
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically
support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose.
Trump's ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given
him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to
defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole,
he is massively - indeed, historically - unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around
60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities,
single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession
for him to win; even that might not be enough.
Second, a Trump nomination might upend his party. The GOP is a machine that harnesses ethno-nationalistic
fear - of communists, criminals, matrimonial gays, terrorists, snooty cultural elites - to win elections
and then, once in office, caters to its wealthy donor base. (This is why even a social firebrand
like Ted Cruz would privately assure the billionaire investor Paul Singer that he wasn't particularly
concerned about gay-marriage laws.) As its voting base has lost college-educated voters and gained
blue-collar whites, the fissure between the means by which Republicans attain power and the ends
they pursue once they have it has widened.
What has most horrified conservative activists about Trump's rise is how little he or his supporters
seem to care about their anti-government ideology. When presented with the candidate's previous support
for higher taxes on the rich or single-payer insurance, heresies of the highest order, Trump fans
merely shrug. During this campaign, Trump has mostly conformed to party doctrine, but without much
conviction. Trump does not mouth the rote conservative formulation that government is failing because
it can't work and that the solution is to cut it down to size. Instead, he says it is failing because
it is run by idiots and that the solution is for it to instead be run by Trump. About half of Republicans
favor higher taxes on the rich, a position that has zero representation among their party's leaders.
And those Republicans are the most likely to support Trump.
Trump's candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against
its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing
Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the
GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current
incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match.
The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably
wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly,
do some good.
The Trump campaign may feel like an off-the-grid surrealistic nightmare, The Man in the High Castle
meets Idiocracy. But something like it has happened before. Specifically, it happened in California,
a place where things often happen before they happen to the rest of us, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger
won the governorship. At the time, the prospect of Schwarzenegger governing America's largest state
struck many of us as just as ghastly as the idea of a Trump presidency seems now. Like Trump, Schwarzenegger
came directly to politics from the celebrity world without bothering to inform himself about public
policy. He campaigned as a vacuous Man of Action in opposition to the Politicians, breezing by all
the specifics as the petty obsessions of his inferiors.
I think the takeaway is that Republican politicians lie and lie and lie and lie even about recent
history. The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. I wasn't that impressed with Sanders ability to argue effectively
to be honest.
My mind goes back to the abortion question in the last debate. Trump's accusation that Clinton
wanted to rip babies out of mother's wombs at 9 months has no basis in medical science or actual
practice. However, despite being someone who should be an "expert" on women's issues could not articulate
accurately how medically preposterous this notion was or even the facts behind late term abortions
and why women need them at all. Surely a politician of Clinton's "skill" would at least have an anecdote
ready about a woman who had a late-term abortion.
" The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively
counter these lies with facts. "
Yes but the election isn't just about that. Hillary was the establishment candidate and the establishment
isn't delivering. Trump was the outsider - he took over the Republican party - and it didn't matter
that he lies or is obnoxious to a certain type of voter.
Obama is the establishment candidate. However, Obama has charisma and I think we need more politicians
like this. I'm past caring whether or not they are great at policy (apparently Hillary was and she
still couldn't argue effectively against Trump!) I want someone who can effectively argue the case
for progressive policies. We know progressive policies are the right ones we just need someone who
can fight for those policies. They need an encyclopedic knowledge of the shit Republicans have done,
why it is wrong and how progressive policies have worked for the betterment of the 99 percent.
The unheard winning and bold economic agenda
Findings from Roosevelt Institute's Election night survey
....................
Economic change election and the working class vote
Throughout this election cycle, polling conducted on behalf of the Roosevelt Institute and others
revealed the potential of a "rewrite the rules" narrative, message and bold policy agenda to win
broad and deep public support. It fit the times where voters wanted change and were tired of corporate
interests dominating politics at the expense of the middle class.
It was also appealing to swing groups including white college graduates and white working class
women. True, Trump always enjoyed big margins among the white working class men who identified with
him, and they turned out for him early and in growing numbers. But there were points where Clinton
was outperforming Obama with white working class women.
The data does not support that idea that the white working class was inevitably lost, as polls
showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped
talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience and
to continue on President Obama's progress. As we shall see, both the Democratic base and white working
class voters are struggling economically and would demand change in their own ways.
Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 Debunked
Posted on November 14, 2016
By Lambert Strether
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttal.
Clinton's responses to the charges about NAFTA were incredibly weak. This is strange considering
she must have known that topic was going to be raised - why was she so unprepared?
llary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.
Donald Trump's approval rating is 38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to 57 percent.
No amount of furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama -
and very probably Bernie Sanders* - wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.
So what gives?
Let me start by noting that the overall polls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a
Clinton victory by about about 3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably
close. Clinton is ahead by a bit less than 1 percent nationally, with many votes still to count.
What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan,
and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1,
0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages
showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively,
depending on who you ask.
Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them
relied heavily on gut-check analysis. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump
could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general
voting patterns. Michael Moore hypothesized something similar. Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the
same time that Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost
uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.
Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself
out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting
about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that;
and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging,
because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting - that would accept
any change, the bigger the better."
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is
the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin
at all between April and the election, and largely abandoned Obama's working-class message from 2012
in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.
They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals
of Clinton as some kind of wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely
deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine
was contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "mathiness" in economics,
where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages
to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way
to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply appear sophisticated while dismissing people
whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened
to the wonky election-simulator people.)
Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent
unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed
with the Clintons for 20 years to a frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse the
stories about Trump were. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and
secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair
compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some genuinely skeezy stuff
in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional
Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But
then again, she might have avoided the whole story by following the dang rules in the first place.
I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by
some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the
reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.
That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner
(by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very
obviously got the nomination because the party elite cleared the decks for her. Given how the party
has evolved, her political history was filled with devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities.
Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most
unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing
charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking millions of dollars for
secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not
a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing
elite institutions of all kinds.
Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the
political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we
ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.
And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?
This 1000 word article traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models
and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic models currently
used for policy decisions are based on assumptions which are profoundly at odds with what we know
about consumers and firms. More than seven different schools of macroeconomic thought contend with
each other, without coming to agreement on any fundamental issue. This bears a striking resemblance
to the post-Depression era when Keynes set out to resolve the "deep divergences of opinion between
fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic
theory."
Likewise, today, the inability of mainstream economists to predict, understand, explain, or find
remedies for the Global Financial Crisis, has deeply damaged the reputation of economists and economic
theories. Recently, World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer stated that for more than three decades,
macroeconomics has gone backwards. Since modern macroeconomics bears a strong resemblance to pre-Keynesian
theories, Keynesian theories have fresh relevance, as described below.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, economic misery was a major factor which led to the
Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler in Germany. Conventional economic theory held that market
forces would automatically and quickly correct the temporary disequilibrium of high unemployment
and low production in Europe and USA. Keynes argued that high unemployment could persist, and government
interventions in the form of active monetary and fiscal policy were required to correct the economic
problems. Many have suggested that Keynes rescued Capitalism by providing governments with rationale
to intervene on behalf of the workers, thereby preventing socialist or communist revolutions. There
is no doubt that strong and powerful labor movements in Europe and USA derived strength from the
economic misery of the masses, and also took inspiration from the pro-labor and anti-capitalist theories
of Marx. While it is hard to be sure whether Keynes saved capitalism, we can be very sure that Keynes
and Keynesian theories were extremely influential in shaping the economic landscapes of the 20th
Century.
Keynes actually met Roosevelt (FDR) to try to persuade him of the necessity of an aggressive fiscal
policy and of running budget deficits, in order to lift the US economy out of recession. He was only
partially successful. FDR, like nearly all political leaders as well as economists of the time, was
convinced of the necessity of balancing budgets: this is the same 'austerity' being touted today
as the cure for economic problems. Leading economists like Lionel Robinson and Friedrich Hayek argued
in favor of austerity, and said that Keynesian remedies were dangerously wrong. They held the view
that the Great Depression had been caused by excessively easy monetary policies in the pre-Depression
period, and Keynesian interventions in the form of further easy monetary and fiscal policies would
only prolong the agony.
FDR was not quite convinced by Keynes, but was politically savvy enough to announce that he would
not balance the budget on the backs of the American people. Accordingly, he did go against his personal
convictions, as well as his campaign promises of balancing the budget, which he believed to be a
sound and necessary economic policy. Keynes felt that the economic policies of FDR were timid and
hesitant, and prolonged the recession un-necessarily. In light of contemporary experience of the
tremendously aggressive expansionary monetary policy in the post-GFC era, we can see that bolder
steps by FDR would not have caused the harms that he was afraid of. In fact, after the economy recovered
somewhat, FDR went back to conventional wisdom and started reducing budget deficits in 1936. This
created a mini-recession which has been labelled the "Roosevelt Recession of 1937". Duly chastened,
FDR embraced Keynesian policies with greater conviction, and increased deficit spending right up
to the second World War. It was the effectiveness of Keynesian policies that led even arch-enemy
Friedman to state that "We are all Keynesians now," though he later recanted. Indeed, he master-minded
the Monetarist counter-revolution in the 1970's which eventually led to a rejection of Keynesian
insights, and a return to the pre-Keynesian ideas of austerity as a cure for recessions. Forgetting
the hard-learned lessons of Keynes led to a recurrence of problems very similar to those faced by
Keynes in the form of GFC 2007.
Following the GFC, there has been a resurgence of interest in Keynes and Keynesian Theories. In
the "Return of Depression Economics", Krugman argued for the continuing relevance of Keynes, and
stated that we could end the Great Recession immediately by implementing Keynesian policies. China
implemented Keynesian policies, and used a fiscal stimulus of $586 billion spread over two years,
to successfully combat the global recession created by the GFC. Unlike countries forced to implement
austerity, which further wrecked their economies, the Chinese economy was able to perform well in
the aftermath of the GFC. The Shanghai index had been falling sharply since the September 2008 bankruptcy
of Lehman Brothers, but the decline was halted when news of the planned stimulus leaked in late October.
The day after the stimulus was officially announced, the Shanghai index immediately rose by 7.3%,
followed by sustained growth. Speaking at the 2010 Summer Davos, Premier Wen Jiabao also credited
the Keynesian fiscal stimulus for good performance of the Chinese economy over the two years following
the GFC.
Meanwhile, even IMF acknowledged the failure of austerity, the anti-thesis of the Keynesian policy.
Massive damage was caused to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other economies which were forced to tighten
budgets in response to the recession. In the see-saw battle between Keynesians and Monetarists, after
three decades of darkness, the Keynesian star seems to be rising. Strange as it may seem, many fundamental
insights of Keynes were never actually absorbed by conventional economists. Keynes himself said that
he had the greatest difficulty in escaping the habits of thought created by an economics education.
Mainstream economists never made this escape. As a result, Keynesian theories remain an undiscovered
treasure offering deep insights into current economic conditions.
The Glaring Contradiction at the Heart of Donald Trump's
Economic Policy
http://nyti.ms/2eJFsw4
via @UpshotNYT
NYT - Neil Irwin - November 17
Campaign promises are easy. Governing is hard.
It is a truism that Donald J. Trump and his team will soon learn. And a fascinating example has
emerged since the election, courtesy of global currency markets. It is a study in the kind of complex
trade-offs that Mr. Trump rarely grappled with during his campaign but will face many times a day
in the Oval Office.
A centerpiece of Mr. Trump's campaign was the United States' trade deficits. He pledged to eliminate
them and create a resurgence in American manufacturing.
He has also pledged tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation. That set of policies has
led markets to expect speedier economic growth and thus higher interest rates in coming years. That,
in turn, is driving the value of the dollar higher on currency markets. Since Election Day, the dollar
is up 2.6 percent against an index of six other major currencies. The value of the Mexican peso has
fallen 10 percent against the dollar, a remarkable swing for the United States' third-largest trading
partner.
You don't need to be an economist to see what that means: A pricier dollar makes it harder for
American manufacturers to compete overseas; it gives an advantage to companies that locate operations
elsewhere; and it will, all else being equal, tend to make the trade deficit higher rather than lower.
This is not to suggest that the shift in the currency so far is a major disaster for American
manufacturers and other exporters (though those that ship their goods to Mexico will feel the brunt
of it). There was a bigger rise in the dollar in 2014 and 2015 that damaged export sectors even more.
Photo
A board displaying the exchange rate for the Mexican peso and the dollar in a bank in Mexico City
this week. Credit Henry Romero/Reuters
But let's imagine that Mr. Trump follows through on the policy mix he's hinted at so far: a combination
of loose fiscal policy (think more spending on defense and infrastructure, and tax cuts) and tighter
monetary policy (the Federal Reserve raising interest rates faster than
had seemed likely before the election). At that point, the dollar could move more decisively higher,
creating a tension that the president and his advisers would have to resolve one way or the other.
As a rule of thumb, said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International
Economics, a 10 percent rise in the dollar would be expected to increase the current account deficit
(a broader concept than trade deficit, but closely related) by 1 to 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in the
ensuing two to three years.
In that scenario, Mr. Trump's pledge to eliminate the $500 billion United States trade deficit
would have just become $180 billion to $270 billion harder.
This is the kind of dilemma presidents face all the time. The Oval Office debate might go something
like this: The Commerce Secretary complains, "Mr. President, this strong dollar is just killing our
manufacturers; they can't compete with this kind of appreciation." The Treasury Secretary, who is
in charge of the currency, responds, "It's a necessary evil, Mr. President; our economy is booming
so much that global investors just can't get enough of United States assets."
When there are these kinds of disputes, the president has to decide. And when a president tries
to find a solution that answers both concerns, there are always complex ripples. For example, "let's
appoint Fed officials who will cut interest rates" might temporarily let you have both a booming
domestic economy and a competitive export sector, but would mean an increase in inflation - which
will make both the bond market and many retired Americans living on fixed incomes unhappy.
The tension between currency policy and trade policy is just one example. Mr. Trump's promises
to repeal Obamacare while keeping some of its most popular features would be hard to carry out in
practice. Virtually every issue in tax policy, diplomacy and regulatory policy features similar complex
trade-offs.
None of this is to say that these tensions are unsolvable, or that Mr. Trump won't overcome his
lack of a policy background to arrive at good solutions. But he will almost certainly find out soon
that "Make America Great Again" is a slogan, not an answer.
So the post-mortem begins. Much electronic ink has already been spilled and predictable fault
lines have emerged. Debate rages in particular on the question of whether Trump's victory was driven
by economic factors. Like Duncan Weldon, I think Torsten Bell gets it about right – economics is
an essential part of the story even if the complete picture is more complex.
Neoliberalism is a word I usually try to avoid. It's often used by people on the left as an easy
catch-all to avoid engaging with difficult issues. Broadly speaking, however, it provides a short-hand
for the policy status quo over the last thirty years or so: free movement of goods, labour and capital,
fiscal conservatism, rules-based monetary policy, deregulated finance and a preference for supply-side
measures in the labour market.
Some will argue this consensus has nothing to with the rise of far-right populism. I disagree. Both
economics and economic policy have brought us here.
But to what extent has academic economics provided the basis for neoliberal policy? The question
had been in my mind even before the Trump and Brexit votes. A few months back, Duncan Weldon posed
the question, 'whatever happened to deficit bias?' In my view, the responses at the time missed the
mark. More recently, Ann Pettifor and Simon Wren Lewis have been discussing the relationship between
ideology, economics and fiscal austerity.
I have great respect for Simon – especially his efforts to combat the false media narratives around
austerity. But I don't think he gets it right on economics and ideology. His argument is that in
a standard model – a sticky-price DSGE system – fiscal policy should be used when nominal rates are
at the zero lower bound. Post-2008 austerity policies are therefore at odds with the academic consensus.
This is correct in simple terms, but I think misses the bigger picture of what academic economics
has been saying for the last 30 years. To explain, I need to recap some history.
Fiscal policy as a macroeconomic management tool is associated with the ideas of Keynes. Against
the academic consensus of his day, he argued that the economy could get stuck in periods of demand
deficiency characterised by persistent involuntary unemployment. The monetarist counter-attack was
led by Milton Friedman – who denied this possibility. In the long run, he argued, the economy has
a 'natural' rate of unemployment to which it will gravitate automatically (the mechanism still remains
to be explained). Any attempt to use activist fiscal or monetary policy to reduce unemployment below
this natural rate will only lead to higher inflation. This led to the bitter disputes of the 1960s
and 70s between Keynesians and Monetarists. The Monetarists emerged as victors – at least in the
eyes of the orthodoxy – with the inflationary crises of the 1970s. This marks the beginning of the
end for fiscal policy in the history of macroeconomics.
In Friedman's world, short-term macro policy could be justified in a deflationary situation as
a way to help the economy back to its 'natural' state. But, for Friedman, macro policy means monetary
policy. In line with the doctrine that the consumer always knows best, government spending was proscribed
as distortionary and inefficient. For Friedman, the correct policy response to deflation is a temporary
increase in the rate of growth of the money supply.
It's hard to view Milton Friedman's campaign against Keynes as disconnected from ideological influence.
Friedman's role in the Mont Pelerin society is well documented. This group of economic liberals,
led by Friedrich von Hayek, formed after World War II with the purpose of opposing the move towards
collectivism of which Keynes was a leading figure. For a time at least, the group adopted the term
'neoliberal' to describe their political philosophy. This was an international group of economists
whose express purpose was to influence politics and politicians – and they were successful.
Hayek's thesis – which acquires a certain irony in light of Trump's ascent – was that collectivism
inevitably leads to authoritarianism and fascism. Friedman's Chicago economics department formed
one point in a triangular alliance with Lionel Robbins' LSE in London, and Hayek's fellow Austrians
in Vienna. While in the 1930s, Friedman had expressed support for the New Deal, by the 1950s he had
swung sharply in the direction of economic liberalism. As Brad Delong puts it:
by the early 1950s, his respect for even the possibility of government action was gone. His grudging
approval of the New Deal was gone, too: Those elements that weren't positively destructive were ineffective,
diverting attention from what Friedman now believed would have cured the Great Depression, a substantial
expansion of the money supply. The New Deal, Friedman concluded, had been 'the wrong cure for the
wrong disease.'
While Friedman never produced a complete formal model to describe his macroeconomic vision, his
successor at Chicago, Robert Lucas did – the New Classical model. (He also successfully destroyed
the Keynesian structural econometric modelling tradition with his 'Lucas critique'.) Lucas' New Classical
colleagues followed in his footsteps, constructing an even more extreme version of the model: the
so-called Real Business Cycle model. This simply assumes a world in which all markets work perfectly
all of the time, and the single infinitely lived representative agent, on average, correctly predicts
the future.
This is the origin of the 'policy ineffectiveness hypothesis' – in such a world, government becomes
completely impotent. Any attempt at deficit spending will be exactly matched by a corresponding reduction
in private spending – the so-called Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. Fiscal policy has no effect
on output and employment. Even monetary policy becomes totally ineffective: if the central bank chooses
to loosen monetary policy, the representative agent instantly and correctly predicts higher inflation
and adjusts her behaviour accordingly.
This vision, emerging from a leading centre of conservative thought, is still regarded by the
academic economics community as a major scientific step forward. Simon describes it as `a progressive
research programme'.
What does all this have to with the current status quo? The answer is that this model – with one
single modification – is the 'standard model' which Simon and others point to when they argue that
economics has no ideological bias. The modification is that prices in the goods market are slow to
adjust to changes in demand. As a result, Milton Friedman's result that policy is effective in the
short run is restored. The only substantial difference to Friedman's model is that the policy tool
is the rate of interest, not the money supply. In a deflationary situation, the central bank should
cut the nominal interest rate to raise demand and assist the automatic but sluggish transition back
to the `natural' rate of unemployment.
So what of Duncan's question: what happened to deficit bias? – this refers to the assertion in
economics textbooks that there will always be a tendency for governments to allow deficits to increase.
The answer is that it was written out of the textbooks decades ago – because it is simply taken as
given that fiscal policy is not the correct tool.
To check this, I went to our university library and looked through a selection of macroeconomics
textbooks. Mankiw's 'Macroeconomics' is probably the mostly widely used. I examined the 2007 edition
– published just before the financial crisis. The chapter on 'Stabilisation Policy' dispenses with
fiscal policy in half a page – a case study of Romer's critique of Keynes is presented under the
heading 'Is the Stabilization of the Economy a Figment of the Data?' The rest of the chapter focuses
on monetary policy: time inconsistency, interest rate rules and central bank independence. The only
appearance of the liquidity trap and the zero lower bound is in another half-page box, but fiscal
policy doesn't get a mention.
The post-crisis twelfth edition of Robert Gordon's textbook does include a chapter on fiscal policy
– entitled `The Government Budget, the Government Debt and the Limitations of Fiscal Policy'. While
Gordon acknowledges that fiscal policy is an option during strongly deflationary periods when interest
rates are at the zero lower bound, most of the chapter is concerned with the crowding out of private
investment, the dangers of government debt and the conditions under which governments become insolvent.
Of the textbooks I examined, only Blanchard's contained anything resembling a balanced discussion
of fiscal policy.
So, in Duncan's words, governments are 'flying a two engined plane but choosing to use only one
motor' not just because of media bias, an ill-informed public and misguided politicians – Simon's
explanation – but because they are doing what the macro textbooks tell them to do.
The reason is that the standard New Keynesian model is not a Keynesian model at all – it is a
monetarist model. Aside from the mathematical sophistication, it is all but indistinguishable from
Milton Friedman's ideologically-driven description of the macroeconomy. In particular, Milton Friedman's
prohibition of fiscal policy is retained with – in more recent years – a caveat about the zero-lower
bound (Simon makes essentially the same point about fiscal policy here).
It's therefore odd that when Simon discusses the relationship between ideology and economics he
chooses to draw a dividing line between those who use a sticky-price New Keynesian DSGE model and
those who use a flexible-price New Classical version. The beliefs of the latter group are, Simon
suggests, ideological, while those of the former group are based on ideology-free science. This strikes
me as arbitrary. Simon's justification is that, despite the evidence, the RBC model denies the possibility
of involuntary unemployment. But the sticky-price version – which denies any role for inequality,
finance, money, banking, liquidity, default, long-run unemployment, the use of fiscal policy away
from the ZLB, supply-side hysteresis effects and plenty else besides – is acceptable. He even goes
so far as to say 'I have no problem seeing the RBC model as a flex-price NK model' – even the RBC
model is non-ideological so long as the hierarchical framing is right.
Even Simon's key distinction – the New Keynesian model allows for involuntary unemployment – is open
to question. Keynes' definition of involuntary unemployment is that there exist people willing and
able to work at the going wage who are unable to find employment. On this definition the New Keynesian
model falls short – in the face of a short-run demand shortage caused by sticky prices the representative
agent simply selects a new optimal labour supply. Workers are never off their labour supply curve.
In the Smets Wouters model – a very widely used New Keynesian DSGE model – the labour market is described
as follows: 'household j chooses hours worked Lt(j)'. It is hard to reconcile involuntary unemployment
with households choosing how much labour they supply.
What of the position taken by the profession in the wake of 2008? Reinhart and Rogoff's contribution
is by now infamous. Ann also draws attention to the 2010 letter signed by 20 top-ranking economists
– including Rogoff – demanding austerity in the UK. Simon argues that Ann overlooks the fact that
'58 equally notable economists signed a response arguing the 20 were wrong'.
It is difficult to agree that the signatories to the response letter, organised by Lord Skidelsky,
are 'equally notable'. Many are heterodox economists – critics of standard macroeconomics. Those
mainstream economists on the list hold positions at lower-ranking institutions than the 20. I know
many of the 58 personally – I know none of the 20. Simon notes:
Of course those that signed the first letter, and in particular Ken Rogoff, turned out to be a more
prominent voice in the subsequent debate, but that is because he supported what policymakers were
doing. He was mostly useful rather than influential.
For Simon, causality is unidirectional: policy-makers cherry-pick academic economics to fit their
purpose but economists have no influence on policy. This seems implausible. It is undoubtedly true
that pro-austerity economists provided useful cover for small-state ideologues like George Osborne.
But the parallels between policy and academia are too strong for the causality to be unidirectional.
Osborne's small state ideology is a descendent of Thatcherism – the point when neoliberalism first
replaced Keynesianism. Is it purely coincidence that the 1980s was also the high-point for extreme
free market Chicago economics such as Real Business Cycle models?
The parallel between policy and academia continues with the emergence of the sticky-price New Keynesian
version as the 'standard' model in the 90s alongside the shift to the third way of Blair and Clinton.
Blairism represents a modified, less extreme, version of Thatcherism. The all-out assault on workers
and the social safety net was replaced with 'workfare' and 'flexicurity'.
A similar story can be told for international trade, as laid out in this excellent piece by Martin
Sandbu. In the 1990s, just as the 'heyday of global trade integration was getting underway', economists
were busy making the case that globalisation had no negative implications for employment or inequality
in rich nations. To do this, they came up with the 'skill-biased technological change' (SBTC) hypothesis.
This states that as technology advances and the potential for automation grows, the demand for high-skilled
labour increases. This introduces the hitch that higher educational standards are required before
the gains from automation can be felt by those outside the top income percentiles. This leads to
a `race between education and technology' – a race which technology was winning, leading to weaker
demand for middle and low-skill workers and rising 'skill premiums' for high skilled workers as a
result.
Writing in the Financial Times shortly before the financial crisis, Jagdish Bagwati argued that those
who looked to globalisation as an explanation for increasing inequality were misguided:
The culprit is not globalization but labour-saving technical change that puts pressure on the wages
of the unskilled. Technical change prompts continual economies in the use of unskilled labour. Much
empirical argumentation and evidence exists on this. (FT, January 4, 2007, p. 11)
As Krugman put it:
The hypothesis that technological change, by raising the demand for skill, has led to growing inequality
is so widespread that at conferences economists often use the abbreviation SBTC – skill-biased technical
change – without explanation, assuming that their listeners know what they are talking about (p.
132)
Over the course of his 2007 book, Krugman sets out on a voyage of discovery – 'That, more or less,
is the story I believed when I began working on this book' (p. 6). He arrives at the astonishing
conclusion – '[i]t sounds like economic heresy' (p. 7) – that politics can influence inequality:
[I]nstitutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income
– and impersonal market forces matter less – than Economics 101 might lead you to believe (p. 8)
The idea that rising pay at the top of the scale mainly reflect social and political change,
strikes some people as too much at odds with Economics 101.
If a left-leaning Nobel prize-winning economist has trouble escaping from the confines of Economics
101, what hope for the less sophisticated mind?
As deindustrialisation rolled through the advanced economies, wiping out jobs and communities, economists
continued to deny any role for globalisation. As Martin Sandbu argues,
The blithe unconcern displayed by the economics profession and the political elites about whether
trade was causing deindustrialisation, social exclusion and rising inequality has begun to seem Pollyannish
at best, malicious at worst. Kevin O'Rourke, the Irish economist, and before him Lawrence Summers,
former US Treasury Secretary, have called this "the Davos lie."
For mainstream macroeconomists, inequality was not a subject of any real interest. While the explanation
for inequality lay in the microeconomics – the technical forms of production functions – and would
be solved by increasing educational attainment, in macroeconomic terms, the use of a representative
agent and an aggregate production function simply assumed the problem away. As Stiglitz puts it:
[I]f the distribution of income (say between labor and capital) matters, for example, for aggregate
demand and therefore for employment and output, then using an aggregate Cobb-Douglas production function
which, with competition, implies that the share of labor is fixed, is not going to be helpful. (p.596)
Robert Lucas summed up his position as follows: 'Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics,
the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.'
It is hard to view this statement as more strongly informed by science than ideology.
But while economists were busy assuming away inequality in their models, incomes continued to diverge
in most advanced economies. It was only with the publication of Piketty's book that the economics
profession belatedly began to turn its back on Lucas.
The extent to which economic insecurity in the US and the UK is driven by globalisation versus
policy is still under discussion – my answer would be that it is a combination of both – but the
skill-biased technical change hypothesis looks to be a dead end – and a costly one at that.
Similar stories can be told about the role of household debt, finance, monetary theory and labour
bargaining power and monopoly – why so much academic focus on 'structural reform' in the labour market
but none on anti-trust policy? Heterodox economists were warning about the connections between finance,
globalisation, current account imbalances, inequality, household debt and economic insecurity in
the decades before the crisis. These warnings were dismissed as unscientific – in favour of a model
which excluded all of these things by design.
Are economic factors – and economic policy – partly to blame for the Brexit and Trump votes? And
are academic economists, at least in part, to blame for these polices? The answer to both questions
is yes. To argue otherwise is to deny Keynes' dictum that 'the ideas of economists and political
philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly
understood.'
This quote, 'mounted and framed, takes pride of place in the entrance hall of the Institute for Economic
Affairs' – the think-tank founded, with Hayek's encouragement, by Anthony Fisher, as a way to promote
and promulgate the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society. The Institute was a success. Fisher was, in
the words of Milton Friedman, 'the single most important person in the development of Thatcherism'.
The rest, it seems, is history.
Obomber's new conference with Ms. Merkel. The peace prize winner who ordered 25000 bombing sorties
in 2015 against places US is not warring against.
Per Obomber Assad caused all that suffering in Syria, despite US arming al Qaeda since 2010 to
replace him with the kind of guys who rammed a bayonet through Qaddafi's rectum, and sending assassinated
Qaddafi's weaponry through Benghazi at the time Clinton got her envoy killed there.
The greater threat to American democracy is the bizarre world of the US fighting for the Sunnis
in the middle east. Also known as Obomber's Stalinist definitions of atrocities versus fictions about
fascists.
Why would one of Qadaffi's own
citizens do such a nasty deed on the
sadly misunderstood guy who brought down
Pan Am flight #103 over Lockerbie Scotland
killing 259 passenger & crew, previously
killing three people & injuring around
230 in La Belle discothčque in Berlin,
& why do you keep bringing this up?)
"President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers"
'Millions of voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely heroes'
by Joy-Ann Reid...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"I should probably get out of the predictions business, having so misjudged the country before
the recent election. But I will hazard two more. The first: Donald Trump will turn on his supporters.
The second: The Democrats will turn on theirs, too.
Trump got a head start this week, floating the names of Iraq war supporters and promoters of a
grand, global war with Islam like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani for the job of secretary of state.
Trump voters who claimed that Hillary Clinton would bring on World War III might be surprised by
some of the views of Clinton and John Kerry's likely successor (and Giuliani is a vigorous neocon,
too.)
Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall
to Vladimir Putin's Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people
surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a "Stalinesque
purge" of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant
to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he'll wind up assembling.
Meanwhile, to the extent that he is doing something other than trying to figure out what a president
does Trump-or rather the people around him who know how to take advantage of an opportunity-are preparing
to stack his team with Wall Street and big-business friendly insiders and establishment cronies poised
to raid the treasury on behalf of the one percent.
Working-class voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who
live in golden penthouses are rarely populists, and even more rarely heroic. Trump, who in his own
history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust
Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.
No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor
to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper
robots.) Even if he manages to slap massive tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the only outcome will
be much higher prices at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, anyone still wondering why Paul Ryan quietly slipped on his MAGA cap during the election
will soon understand. On the off chance Trump pulled off an improbable win, Ryan knew he would be
on track to enact his life's dream: turning Medicare into a voucher program and forcing future of
the most popular government program since Social Security into private insurance HMOs. According
to Josh Marshall, who cites Ryan's own website, the "phasing out" of Medicare begins in March.
Trump's tax plan will sock it to single mothers, by ending the ability to file as head of household
and thus raising taxes on unmarried filers. The tax hikes will be higher the more children you have.
Anyone who doesn't itemize deductions will likely get a onetime check for a few hundred dollars,
the way George W. Bush did his "middle class tax cut." Count that as bill money.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where
trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices. Trump's North
Dakota pipeline (in which he is personally financially invested) will flood more oil onto an already
glutted world market, further forcing down prices and putting both the Lone Star state in an unpleasant
economic position.
But not to worry, Republicans have a fix, to ensure there is no voter backlash against them.
They are already preparing to reverse their opposition to earmarks, with three red state Senators
(from Florida, Alabama and of course, Texas) pushing to revive the kind of spending that helps members
go back to their districts with something to show for their time in Washington, and which long greased
the skids of congress. You see, most in the GOP never really objected to government spending. They
just objected to government spending that might make their constituents look more favorably on Barack
Obama's tenure.
Also watch as the objections to raising the debt ceiling and to infrastructure spending-so vehement
during the Obama years-vanish into thin air. This will be a big spending administration, with the
full backing of congress. The small number of conservatives preparing to fight back are likely to
cave, eventually, in the interests of party unity and maintaining total Republican control.
All the while, Trump fans can maintain their euphoria over taking America back from the multiculturalists,
the politically correct, leftie Hollywood and Beyoncé, by purchasing clothing and jewelry from Ivanka
Trump's retail line, which she'll dutifully model during television appearances, after which her
staff will inform the media on where faithful followers can "shop the look." The Trump children,
armed with security clearances and still in charge of the family business and the ephemeral "foundation"
will be in a position to stuff the family coffers for four years, African dictator style, with the
possible aid of information marked "secret" and thus unavailable to their competitors. And if you
expect the fearsome House Republicans who hounded Hillary Clinton over her emails to lift a finger
to investigate what already look to be spiraling conflicts of interest, you don't understand the
Republican Party.
But it isn't just Trump who is poised to betray those who voted for him. Some Democrats and their
allies are already rushing to get their Trump tattoos, knowing that the coming spending boom helps
them too. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia excoriated Harry Reid, the out-going minority leader,
who alone came out forthrightly to defend the black and brown women, men, children, businesses and
even churches being brutalized by gleeful Trump supporters from the GOP's white supremacist wing,
in cities around the country. Reid, whose Nevada Democratic Party operation was actually successful
in the 2016 elections, including getting a Latina elected to his seat, has bravely called out the
white nationalists and anti-Semites of the alt-right and stood against the normalization of people
like soon-to-be Trump senior counselor Stephen Bannon. But Reid is a lonely voice standing athwart
anti-history yelling, "stop," while his party and the mainstream media fall into a swoon of presidential
succession pageantry.
Even Bernie Sanders couldn't rush fast enough to get on the Trump side of the line, declaring
himself a member of the white working class (his and his wife's three homes and high six-figure income
aside) and cautioning Democrats-who belong to a party of which he is still not a member-to start
focusing on these voters too. Sanders ran a campaign that echoed Trump's in many ways; appealing
to a majority white, populist audience that hated Hillary Clinton more than it disdained Republicans.
A majority of Black Americans were unimpressed, which is why he didn't become the nominee, and they
should be unsurprised that he is dropping them faster than he and his supporters wrote off "the South"
as insignificant during the primary campaign.
Bernie is not alone. Think pieces are already being written admonishing Dems to throw black and
brown, LGBT, Muslim and Hispanic voters and progressive women under the bus in favor of the never-ending
chase for the Pabst Blue Ribbon vote. Democrats continue to practice "identity politics" at their
peril, they say; demanding that issues around rape culture, Black Lives Matter and merciful immigration
policy be scotched in favor of bucking up men, dialing back blunt talk on race, policing and DREAMers,
and emphasizing things like border security. In other words, Democrats must learn to talk more like
Republicans and marginalized groups must learn to be quiet. The party has been here before, and ironically,
that kind of thinking is what produced Bill Clinton, whose surname, and wife, the very people hawking
this prescription loathe.
The message to African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBT people (well, mostly Trans folks, since
Trump has declared his movement can live with "the gays") and women, who stand in the crosshairs
of the coming "retail authoritarian" presidency, is that you're on your own. Your party will not
come to your aid. They'll be too busy trying to ride the Trump train, or to least avoid being tied
to the tracks and run over by it in the next election.
There are small green shoots of hope. The coming battle for DNC chair, which could come down to
two black candidates: Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and South Carolina Democratic Party chair
Jamie Harrison, is a proxy for whether the party will push a message of Sandersian working class
populism or press forward on the ongoing fight for racial justice, voting rights and the rights of
the poor. Perhaps one of these men can help the party find a way to do both.
And despite her immediate statement of conciliation to Trump, one can only hope Elizabeth Warren
will hold strong on issues concerning Wall Street, once Republicans begin the process of dismantling
restrictions on bankers' worst practices, restoring the robber baron era in lower Manhattan and on
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the "tea party movement" was born amid furious presumptions
that Obama would dare to help struggling homeowners instead of their mortgage note holders. We'll
just have to wait and see.
In the end, the lessons of American history, from Reconstruction to the Fusion movement of the
late 19th century; that an openness to the aspirations of racial, ethnic and religious minorities
will always produce a fierce backlash among the country's majority population and cost the party
dearly, have proven thrice true in the modern era-in the bloody political aftermath of Lyndon Johnson,
Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama. All three marched the country forward on race, culture and economics,
only to cede federal and state governmental power for years to the Republican right, which quickly
proceeded, each time, to reward the rich and the powerful on the backs of their working class supporters
who just wanted to feel like winners again.
In a sense, who can blame the Democrats for running away? But run they will. Count on it."
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
McDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locations
NEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the
ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been
testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People
in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their
food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
'Democrats on the Hill began soul searching this week-but the process appears to be longer for
some than others'
by Matt Laslo...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, but everyone on Capitol Hill seems to have a different
roadmap.
Democrats, still in shock over Hillary Clinton's surprise loss to president-elect Donald Trump,
are faced with a stark new reality: they are not only the minority party in all corners of Capitol
Hill and across the nation-but there are cracks in places where their foundation was thought to be
very strong.
The party is debating how it got here and whether it's time to tack left, in the Bernie Sanders'
vein of populism, or to go back to the middle, which is how they won in the nineties and regained
control of the House in 2006.
The change didn't come overnight. The party has been devastated in the past three election cycles,
losing more than 900 state legislative seats and 11 governorships since President Barack Obama took
office.
But it was Clinton's string of losses in the Rust Belt-Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio-that
caused the soul searching in the party.
"So you can't conclude anything else but that our message is wrong. Our values aren't wrong, but
our message is wrong," Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) told The Daily Beast. "The one thing we must commit
to is that whatever our message is going forward must be different than what we had in the past because
that one has failed."...
"Rep. Tom Price Reveals Republicans Eyeing Medicare Overhaul In 2017"
By Lauren Fox...November 17, 2016...12:13 PM EDT
"Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), the chairman of the budget committee, told reporters on Thursday that
Republicans are eyeing major changes to Medicare in 2017.
Price, who is being floated as a possible Health and Human Services Secretary in the next administration,
said that he expects Republican in the House to move on Medicare reforms "six to eight months" into
the Trump administration.
Privatization of Medicare has been a central feature of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's budget
proposal for years, and the House GOP has voted in favor of it multiple times. Ryan himself said
last week that Medicare would be on the table in the new Congress, signaling it could be taken up
early in the new year. Price's comments suggest privatization won't be part of the first round of
legislative initiatives rolled out by the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.
Price also noted that Republicans are eyeing using a tactic known as budget reconciliation to
make the change. That process allows Republicans to pass bills with a simple majority in the U.S.
Senate.
When asked by TPM about timing for changes to Medicare, Price said "I think that is probably in
the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the
first 6-8 months."
Republicans plan to tackle the Affordable Care Act in the first budget reconciliation process,
which could take place as early as January. Tackling Medicare reform and Obamacare repeal at the
same time could prove too high a risk for Republicans who have yet to reveal a clear plan to replace
Obamacare with.
During his weekly press conference House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained vague about the timing
for such reforms, saying only that those discussions are still underway."
Privatizing Medicare will be a disaster it can only end in the service being worse. I'm sure they
have plans to go after Social Security too. Getting rid of Obamacare won't hurt the white middle
class too bad but even there too most people will know someone with a preexisting condition who can't
get medical insurance. Good luck with all that Republicans!!
The 3 month Treasury interest rate is at 0.43%, the 2 year Treasury rate is 1.03%, the 5 year
rate is 1.72%, while the 10 year is 2.29%.
The Vanguard Aa rated short-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 3.2 years and
a duration of 2.6 years, has a yield of 1.63%. The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term investment
grade bond fund, with a maturity of 6.4 years and a duration of 5.5 years, is yielding 2.37%. The
Vanguard Aa rated long-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 23.0 years and a duration
of 13.6 years, is yielding 3.75%. *
The Vanguard Ba rated high yield corporate bond fund, with a maturity of 5.6 years and a duration
of 4.4 years, is yielding 5.40%.
The Vanguard unrated convertible corporate bond fund, with an indefinite maturity and a duration
of 4.1 years, is yielding 2.04%.
The Vanguard A rated high yield tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 6.8 years and a duration
of 6.4 years, is yielding 2.66%.
The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 5.4 years and
a duration of 4.8 years, is yielding 1.59%.
The Vanguard Government National Mortgage Association bond fund, with a maturity of 5.7 years
and a duration of 3.4 years, is yielding 2.05%.
The Vanguard inflation protected Treasury bond fund, with a maturity of 8.8 years and a duration
of 8.3 years, is yielding - 0.21%.
* Vanguard yields are after cost. Federal Funds rates are no more than 0.50%.
"Consumer prices show big increase on rising gasoline costs and rents"
Reuters...November 17, 2016...5:27 PM
'Consumer prices show big increase'
"Consumer prices recorded their biggest increase in six months in October on rising gasoline costs
and rents, suggesting a pickup in inflation that potentially clears the way for the Federal Reserve
to raise interest rates in December.
Prospects for a rate hike next month also got a boost from other data on Thursday showing first-time
applications for unemployment benefits tumbling to a 43-year low last week and housing starts surging
to a nine-year high in October.
The reports painted an upbeat picture of the economy early in the fourth quarter and came as Fed
Chair Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that the U.S. central bank could lift borrowing costs "relatively
soon."
The Labor Department said its consumer price index increased 0.4 percent last month after rising
0.3 percent in September. In the 12 months through October, the CPI advanced 1.6 percent, the biggest
year-on-year increase since October 2014. The CPI increased 1.5 percent in the year to September.
Underlying inflation continued to slow last month as health-care costs moderated after recent
hefty gains. But with rents pushing higher, that trend is unlikely to be sustained.
The so-called core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, climbed 0.1 percent last month
after a similar gain in September. That slowed the year-on-year increase in the core CPI to 2.1 percent
from a 2.2 percent rise in September.
The Fed has a 2 percent inflation target and tracks an inflation measure that is now at 1.7 percent.
In another report, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped
19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 for the week ended Nov. 12, the lowest level since November
1973.
Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold associated with a healthy labor market, for 89
straight weeks. That is the longest run since 1970, when the labor market was much smaller.
With the labor market firming and rents rising, housing is getting a lift. In a third report,
the Commerce Department said housing starts jumped 25.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual pace
of 1.32 million units last month, the highest level since August 2007."
"Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan"
by Chris Arnold...November 17, 2016...5:25 PM ET
"President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help
jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.
Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that
as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that
while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that's not
the case now.
"The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point," she said, "so in
contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed
to lower unemployment, we're no longer in that state."
Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and
then down the road the economy gets into trouble, "there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock
to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus."
In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever
the next economic downturn comes along.
Trump was harshly critical of Yellen during his campaign. But testifying before the Joint Economic
Committee, Yellen said she is not going to quit just because Trump won the election. Rep. Carolyn
Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Yellen, "Can you envision any circumstances where you would not serve out
your term as chair of the Federal Reserve?" "No, I cannot," answered Yellen, "It is fully my intention
to serve out that term." Yellen's appointment goes through January 2018.
Another target of Trump's during the campaign came up at the hearing: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street
Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, cited Trump's criticism that the Dodd-Frank
banking rules were stifling lending and stunting the economy. But Yellen gave her support to Dodd-Frank,
saying:
"We lived through a devastating financial crisis, and a high priority for all Americans should
be that we want to see put in place safeguards through supervision and regulation that result in
a safer and sounder financial system, and I think we have been doing that and our financial system
as a consequence is safer and sounder and many of the appropriate reforms are embodied in Dodd-Frank."
Yellen added, "We wouldn't want to go back to the mortgage lending standards that led to the financial
crisis."
She also said she thought banks were actually willing to lend to small businesses, but that sales
haven't been growing sufficiently fast to justify borrowing, suggesting the demand for loans was
the real problem.
As far as the ever-present question about when the Fed will raise interest rates, Yellen signaled
that she didn't see any reason to alter the Fed's prior guidance now that Trump has been elected
as the next president."
"Facebook fake-news writer: 'I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me'"
by Caitlin Dewey...The Washington Post
"What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common?
For starters, they're all make-believe - and invented by the same man.
Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off
viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he's British graffiti
artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. "South Park" lawsuit
last year.
But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political
and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey
Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared
as news on Google.
In light of concerns that stories like Horner's may have affected the presidential election, and
in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets,
The Washington Post called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news.
Q: You've been writing fake news for a while now - you're kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer.
Well, I'd call it hoaxing or fake news. You'd call it parody or satire. How is that scene different
now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating
the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
A: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks
anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people
believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because
they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
Q: You mentioned Trump, and you've probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news
somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?
A: My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House
because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything - they'll post everything, believe anything.
His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made
that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Q: Why? I mean - why would you even write that?
A: Just 'cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at
their rallies, and that's just insane. I've gone to Trump protests - trust me, no one needs to get
paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually
believed it.
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works:
Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump
supporters - they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White
House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels (bad).
Q: You think you personally helped elect Trump?
A: I don't know. I don't know if I did or not. I don't know. I don't know.
Q: I guess I'm curious, if you believed you might be having an unfair impact on the election -
especially if that impact went against your own political beliefs - why didn't you stop? Why keep
writing?
A: I didn't think it was possible for him to get elected president. I thought I was messing with
the campaign, maybe I wasn't messing them up as much as I wanted - but I never thought he'd actually
get elected. I didn't even think about it. In hindsight, everyone should've seen this coming - everyone
assumed Hillary (Clinton) would just get in. But she didn't, and Trump is president.
Q: Speaking of Clinton - did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary Johnson's, for that
matter? (Horner's Facebook picture shows him at a rally for Johnson.)
A: No. I hate Trump.
Q: Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing
Clinton and other figures, but that "no joke in doing this for six years, the people who clicked
ads the most, like it's the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans." That makes it sound like
you've found targeting conservatives is more profitable.
A: Yeah, it is. They don't fact-check.
Q: But a Trump presidency is good for you from a business perspective, right?
A: It's great for anybody who does anything with satire - there's nothing you can't write about
now that people won't believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe
it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff - like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims,
or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line - and people went along
with it!
Q: Facebook and Google recently announced that they'd no longer let fake-news sites use their
advertising platforms. I know you basically make your living from those services. How worried are
you about this?
A: This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of
my money from AdSense - like, you wouldn't believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make
like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
I know ways of getting hooked up under different names and sites. So probably if they cracked
down, I would try different things. I have at least 10 sites right now. If they crack down on a couple,
I'll just use others. They could shut down advertising on all my sites, and I think I'd be OK. Plus,
Facebook and AdSense make a lot of money from (advertising on fake news sites) for them to just get
rid of it. They'd lose a lot of money.
But if it did really go away, that would suck. I don't know what I would do.
Q: Thinking about this less selfishly, though - it might be good if Facebook and Google took action,
right? Because the effects you're describing are pretty scary.
A: Yeah, I mean - a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's
no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting
lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do - I spend more time
on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
So, yeah, I see a lot of the sites they're listing, and I'm like - good. There are so many horrible
sites out there. I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites.
Ellison is a dud, Bernie tweets support for Schumer "there's nobody I know better prepared
and more capable of leading our caucus than Chuck Schumer"!
Well there's a good chunder maker in that statement eh? Hope dashed!
There are no doubt many who are better informed, more progressive and principled, more remote
from Wall Street and oligarchic capture than Chuck Schumer and Ellison. So there you have it –
this is reform in the Democrats after a crushing defeat.
Vale democrats, and now the journey becomes arduous with these voices to smother hope. A new
party is urgently needed (I know how difficult that is) and these voices of the old machine need
to be ignored for the sake of sanity.
"... The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and disable
their dominance. ..."
"... It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the neoliberal
turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution of income
between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments. In Europe,
the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. ..."
"... When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features of
his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading money
center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New York Federal
Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury in the Obama Administration,
but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. The crisis served
to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political
power entirely into their hands as well. Simon Johnson called it a coup. ..."
"... Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980 drove
both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. ..."
"... It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility for
economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that just happened,
in a meteorological economics. ..."
"... This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could aid
the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting constraints.
..."
"... No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and draw
attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes the political
problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational clarity or
coherence. ..."
"... If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power,
Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional
critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected,
Obama isn't really trying. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because
it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
At the center of Great Depression politics was a political struggle over the distribution of
income, a struggle that was only decisively resolved during the War, by the Great Compression.
It was at center of farm policy where policymakers struggled to find ways to support farm incomes.
It was at the center of industrial relations politics, where rapidly expanding unions were seeking
higher industrial wages. It was at the center of banking policy, where predatory financial practices
were under attack. It was at the center of efforts to regulate electric utility rates and establish
public power projects. And, everywhere, the clear subtext was a struggle between rich and poor,
the economic royalists as FDR once called them and everyone else.
FDR, an unmistakeable patrician in manner and pedigree, was leading a not-quite-revolutionary
politics, which was nevertheless hostile to and suspicious of business elites, as a source of
economic pathology. The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek
to side-step and disable their dominance.
It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments.
In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle.
In retrospect, though the New Deal did use direct employment as a means of relief to good effect
economically and politically, it never undertook anything like a Keynesian stimulus on a Keynesian
scale - at least until the War.
Where the New Deal witnessed the institution of an elaborate system of financial repression,
accomplished in large part by imposing on the financial sector an explicitly mandated structure,
with types of firms and effective limits on firm size and scope, a series of regulatory reforms
and financial crises beginning with Carter and Reagan served to wipe this structure away.
When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New
York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five
banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well. Simon
Johnson called it a coup.
I don't know what considerations guided Obama in choosing the size of the stimulus or its composition
(as spending and tax cuts). Larry Summers was identified at the time as a voice of caution, not
"gambling", but not much is known about his detailed reasoning in severely trimming Christina
Romer's entirely conventional calculations. (One consideration might well have been worldwide
resource shortages, which had made themselves felt in 2007-8 as an inflationary spike in commodity
prices.) I do not see a case for connecting stimulus size policy to the health care reform. At
the time the stimulus was proposed, the Administration had also been considering whether various
big banks and other financial institutions should be nationalized, forced to insolvency or otherwise
restructured as part of a regulatory reform.
Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. Accelerating
the financialization of the economy from 1999 on made New York and Washington rich, but the same
economic policies and process were devastating the Rust Belt as de-industrialization. They were
two aspects of the same complex of economic trends and policies. The rise of China as a manufacturing
center was, in critical respects, a financial operation within the context of globalized trade
that made investment in new manufacturing plant in China, as part of globalized supply chains
and global brand management, (arguably artificially) low-risk and high-profit, while reinvestment
in manufacturing in the American mid-west became unattractive, except as a game of extracting
tax subsidies or ripping off workers.
It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that
just happened, in a meteorological economics.
It is conceding too many good intentions to the Obama Administration to tie an inadequate stimulus
to a Rube Goldberg health care reform as the origin story for the final debacle of Democratic
neoliberal politics. There was a delicate balancing act going on, but they were not balancing
the recovery of the economy in general so much as they were balancing the recovery from insolvency
of a highly inefficient and arguably predatory financial sector, which was also not incidentally
financing the institutional core of the Democratic Party and staffing many key positions in the
Administration and in the regulatory apparatus.
This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints.
No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus
indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen
spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again,
if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really
trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Great comment. Simply great. Hat tip to the author !
Notable quotes:
"… The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and
disable their dominance. …"
"… It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the
neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution
of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist
commitments. In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. …"
"… When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features
of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading
money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the
New York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury
in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan
Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top
five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well.
Simon Johnson called it a coup. … "
"… Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980
drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. …"
"… It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences
were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified
this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility
for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces"
that just happened, in a meteorological economics. …"
"… This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could
aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting
constraints. …"
"… No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and
draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization
of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes
the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational
clarity or coherence. …"
"… If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of
power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular
and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic
Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying. …"
"… Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
…"
"... a normal person might look at the slight thaw in Cold War 2.0 as an early positive indicator of the end of the Obama Era. ..."
"... Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) begs to differ. In a blistering statement he released today responding to the Trump/Putin telephone call, Sen. McCain condemned any efforts by President-elect Trump to find common ground with Putin. ..."
"... Interesting that Republican McCain has taken to using the Hillary Clinton campaign line (the one that lost her the election) that somehow the Russians were manipulating the US electoral process. The claim was never backed up by facts and Hillary's claim that some 17 US intelligence agencies agreed with her was shown to be a dangerous and foolish lie. ..."
"... What McCain doesn't say is that unlike US troops in Syria, the Russians are invited by the Syrian government and operate according to international law. Oh yes, and they are also fighting al-Qaeda and ISIS, which has sought to overthrow Assad for the past five years. ..."
"... Maybe McCain is just really sensitive after meeting with al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria? ..."
"... As rumors swirl from Washington about neocons sniffing out top jobs in the incoming administration, it would serve president-elect Trump well to reflect on he true nature of the neocon beast... ..."
Sit down. This is going to shock you. (Not). We
reported yesterday on the telephone call between US president-elect Trump and Russian president
Putin, where the current and future presidents discussed the need to set aside differences and look
to more constructive future relations.
With serious observers of this past year's increasing tensions between US and Russia openly
worrying about a nuclear war breaking out, with some 300,000 NATO troops placed on Russia's border,
with sanctions hurting average businesspersons on both sides, a normal person might look at the
slight thaw in Cold War 2.0 as an early positive indicator of the end of the Obama Era.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) begs to differ. In a blistering
statement he released today responding to the Trump/Putin telephone call, Sen. McCain condemned
any efforts by President-elect Trump to find common ground with Putin.
Any claim by Putin that he wants to improve relations with the US must be vigorously opposed,
writes McCain. He explains:
We should place as much faith in such statements as any other made by a former KGB agent who has
plunged his country into tyranny, murdered his political opponents, invaded his neighbors, threatened
America's allies, and attempted to undermine America's elections.
Interesting that Republican McCain has taken to using the Hillary Clinton campaign line (the
one that lost her the election) that somehow the Russians were manipulating the US electoral process.
The claim was never backed up by facts and Hillary's claim that some 17 US intelligence agencies
agreed with her was
shown to be a dangerous and foolish lie.
Why is Putin not to be trusted, according to McCain?
Vladimir Putin has rejoined Bashar Assad in his barbaric war against the Syrian people with the
resumption of large-scale Russian air and missile strikes in Idlib and Homs. Another brutal assault
on the city of Aleppo could soon follow.
What McCain doesn't say is that unlike US troops in Syria, the Russians are invited by the Syrian
government and operate according to international law. Oh yes, and they are also fighting al-Qaeda
and ISIS, which has sought to overthrow Assad for the past five years.
As rumors swirl from Washington about neocons sniffing out top jobs in the incoming administration,
it would serve president-elect Trump well to reflect on he true nature of the neocon beast...
"... "Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate, was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis. "I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little levity." ..."
"Welcome to the world of strategic analysis," Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the
Sixties, "where we program weapons that don't work to meet threats that don't exist." Selin, who
would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate,
was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis.
"I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that," he told me, reminiscing about
those days. "I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little
levity."
####
While I do have some quibbles with the piece (RuAF pilots are getting much more than 90 hours
a year flight time & equipment is overrated and unaffordable in any decent numbers), it is pretty
solid.
"... I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. ..."
"... I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ..."
"... Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000 emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever. ..."
"... These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill. ..."
"... Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 ..."
"... Chronicle for Higher Education: ..."
"... Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012 went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars. ..."
"... "Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income. ..."
"... Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000 to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains." ..."
"... There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do need it). ..."
"... It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't). That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign. ..."
"... The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization for whom Democrats have done little or nothing. ..."
"... The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are natural enemies. ..."
"... Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic party. ..."
"... Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. ..."
Eric places the blame for this loss squarely on economics, which, it seems to me, gets the analysis
exactly right. And the statistics back up his analysis, I believe.
It's disturbing and saddening to watch other left-wing websites ignore those statistics and
charge off the cliff into the abyss, screaming that this election was all about racism/misogyny/homophobia/[fill
in the blank with identity politics demonology of your choice]. First, the "it's all racism" analysis
conveniently lets the current Democratic leadership off the hook. They didn't do anything wrong,
it was those "deplorables" (half the country!) who are to blame. Second, the identity politics
blame-shifting completely overlooks and short-circuits any real action to fix the economy by Democratic
policymakers or Democratic politicians or the Democratic party leadership. That's particularly
convenient for the Democratic leadership because these top-four-percenter professionals "promise
anything and change nothing" while jetting between Davos and Martha's Vineyard, ignoring the peons
who don't make $100,000 or more a year because the peons all live in flyover country.
"Trump supporters were on average affluent, but they are always Republican and aren't numerous
enough to deliver the presidency (538 has changed their view in the wake of the election result).
Some point out that looking at support by income doesn't show much distinctive support for Trump
among the "poor", but that's beside the point too, as it submerges a regional phenomenon in a
national average, just as exit polls do. (..)
"When commentators like Michael Moore and Thomas Frank pointed out that there was possibility
for Trump in the Rust Belt they were mostly ignored or, even more improbably, accused of being
apologists for racism and misogyny. But that is what Trump did, and he won. Moreover, he won with
an amateurish campaign against a well-funded and politically sophisticated opponent simply because
he planted his flag where others wouldn't.
"Because of the obsession with exit polls, post-election analysis has not come to grips with
the regional nature of the Trump phenomenon. Exit polls divide the general electorate based on
individual attributes: race, gender, income, education, and so on, making regional distinctions
invisible. Moreover, America doesn't decide the presidential election that way. It decides it
based on the electoral college, which potentially makes the characteristics of individual states
decisive. We should be looking at maps, not exit polls for the explanation. Low black turnout
in California or high Latino turnout in Texas do not matter in the slightest in determining the
election, but exit polls don't help us see that. Exit polls deliver a bunch of non-explanatory
facts, in this election more than other recent ones." http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/
"Donald Trump performed best on Tuesday in places where the economy is in worse shape, and
especially in places where jobs are most at risk in the future.
"Trump, who in his campaign pledged to be a voice for `forgotten Americans,' beat Hillary Clinton
in counties with slower job growth and lower wages. And he far outperformed her in counties where
more jobs are threatened by automation or offshoring, a sign that he found support not just among
workers who are struggling now but among those concerned for their economic future."
Meanwhile, the neoliberal Democrats made claims about the economy that at best wildly oversold
the non-recovery from the 2009 global financial meltdown, and at worst flat-out misrepresented
the state of the U.S. economy. For example, president Obama in his June 1 2016 speech in Elkhart
Indiana, said:
"Now, one of the reasons we're told this has been an unusual election year is because people
are anxious and uncertain about the economy. And our politics are a natural place to channel
that frustration. So I wanted to come to the heartland, to the Midwest, back to close to my
hometown to talk about that anxiety, that economic anxiety, and what I think it means. (..)
America's economy is not just better than it was eight years ago - it is the strongest, most
durable economy in the world. (..) Unemployment in Elkhart has fallen to around 4 percent.
(Applause.) At the peak of the crisis, nearly one in 10 homeowners in the state of Indiana
were either behind on their mortgages or in foreclosure; today, it's one in 30. Back then,
only 75 percent of your kids graduated from high school; tomorrow, 90 percent of them will.
(Applause.) The auto industry just had its best year ever. (..) So that's progress.(..) We
decided to invest in job training so that folks who lost their jobs could retool. We decided
to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing and clean energy and infrastructure, so that
entrepreneurs wouldn't just bring back the jobs that we had lost, but create new and better
jobs By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the
beginning of my presidency. That's the truth. That's true. (Applause.) It's true. (Applause.)
Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs - that's
the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We've seen the
first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s."
None of this is true. Not is a substantive sense, not in the sense of being accurate, not in
the sense of reflecting the facts on the ground for real working people who don't fly their private
jets to Davos.
The claim that "America's economy is the strongest and most durable economy in the world" is
just plain false. China has a much higher growth rate, at 6.9% nearly triple the U.S.'s - and
America's GDP growth is trending to historic long-term lows, and still falling. Take a look at
this chart of the Federal Reserve board's projections of U.S. GDP growth since 2009 compared with
the real GDP growth rate:
"[In the survey] [t]he Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer:
47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling
something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who
knew?
"Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
" I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know
what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can
pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account
levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5-literally-while I wait for
a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.
I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new
bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell
my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether
something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters
because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ."
" Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000
emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after
the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever.
" These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less
than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty
coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill.
" Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a
year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 .
"`The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming,' said
Caroline Ratcliffe, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focusing on poverty and emergency savings
issues."
The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being dissimulations - unemployment
has dropped to 4 percent because so many people have stopped looking for work and moved into their
parents' basements that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer counts them as unemployed. Meanwhile,
the fraction of working-age adults who are not in the workforce has skyrocketed to an all-time
high. Few homeowners are now being foreclosed in 2016 compared to 2009 because the people in 2009
who were in financial trouble all lost their homes. Only rich people and well-off professionals
were able to keep their homes through the 2009 financial collapse. Since 2009, businesses did
indeed create 14 million new jobs - mostly low-wage junk jobs, part-time minimum-wage jobs that
don't pay a living wage.
"The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment
growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and
fast-food restaurants.
"In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones."
And the jobs market isn't much better for highly-educated workers:
New research released Monday says nearly half of the nation's recent college graduates work
jobs that don't require a degree.
The report, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, concludes that while
college-educated Americans are less likely to collect unemployment, many of the jobs they do have
aren't worth the price of their diplomas.
The data calls into question a national education platform that says higher education is better
in an economy that favors college graduates.
Don't believe it? Then try this article, from the Chronicle for Higher Education:
Approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to
2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants
have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our
nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a
bachelor's degree or more.
As for manufacturing, U.S. manufacturing lost 35,000 jobs in 2016, and manufacturing employment
remains 2.2% below what it was when Obama took office.
Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012
went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of
all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income
of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars.
"Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per
family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their
real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning
that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income.
Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like
stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According
to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100
to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000
to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains."
Does any of this sound like "the strongest, most durable economy in the world"? Does any of
this square with the claims by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that "By almost every economic
measure, America is better off "? The U.S. economy is only better off in 2016 by disingenuous
comparison with the stygian depths of the 2009 economic collapse.
Hillary Clinton tied herself to Barack Obama's economic legacy, and the brutal reality for
working class people remains that the economy today has barely improved for most workers to what
it was in 2009, and is in many ways worse. Since 2009, automation + outsourcing/offshoring has
destroyed whole classes of jobs, from taxi drivers (wiped out by Uber and Lyft) to warehoues stock
clerks (getting wiped out by robots) to paralegals and associates at law firms (replaced by databases
and legal search algorithms) to high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of
H1B via workers from India and China).
Yet vox.com continues to run article after article proclaiming "the 2016 election was all about
racism." And we have a non-stop stream of this stuff from people like Anne Laurie over at balloon-juice.com:
"While the more-Leftist-than-thou "progressives" - including their latest high-profile figurehead
- are high-fiving each other in happy anticipation of potential public-outrage gigs over the next
four years, at least some people are beginning to push back on the BUT WHITE WORKING CLASS HAS
ALL THE SADS!!! meme so beloved of Very Serious Pundits."
That's the ticket, Democrats double down on the identity politics, keep telling the pulverized
middle class how great the economy is. Because that worked so well for you this election.
= = = mclaren@9:52 am: The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being
dissimulations -[ ] Only rich people and well-off professionals were able to keep their homes
through the 2009 financial collapse. = = =
Some food for thought in your post, but you don't help your argument with statements such as
this one. Rich people and well-off professionals make up at most 10% of the population. US homeownership
rate in 2005 was 68.8%, in 2015 is 63.7. That's a big drop and unquestionably represents a lot
of people losing their houses involuntarily. Still, even assuming no "well-off professionals"
lost their houses in the recession that still leaves the vast majority of the houses owned by
the middle class. Which is consistent with foreclosure and sales stats in middle class areas from
2008-2014. Remember that even with 20% unemployment 80% of the population still has a job.
Similarly, I agree that the recession and job situation was qualitatively worse than the quantitative
stats depicted. Once you start adding in hidden factors not captured by the official stats, though,
where do you stop? How do you know the underground economy isn't doing far better than it was
in the boom years of the oughts, thus reducing actual unemployment? Etc.
Finally, you need to address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo),
how does destroying the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically
depressed areas? I got hit bad by the recession myself. Know what helped from 2010 forward? Knowing
that I could change jobs, keep my college-age children on my spouse's heath plan, not get hit
with pre-existing condition fraud, and that if worse came to worse in a couple years I would have
the plan exchange to fall back on. Kansas has tried the Ryan/Walker approach, seen it fail, doubled
down, and seen that fail 4x as badly. Now we're going to make it up on unit sales by trying the
Ryan plan nationally? How do you expect that to "work out for you"?
WLGR 11.16.16 at 4:11 pm
mclaren @ 7: "high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of H1B via workers
from India and China)"
I'm on board with the general thrust of what you're saying, but this is way, way over
the line separating socialism from barbarism. The fact that
it's not even true is beside the point, as is the (quite frankly) fascist metaphor of "flood"
to describe human fucking beings traveling in search of economic security, at least as long as
you show some self-awareness and contrition about your language. Some awareness about the insidious
administrative structure of the H1-B program would also be nice - the way it works is, an individual's
visa status more or less completely depends on remaining in the good graces of their employer,
meaning that by design these employees have no conceivable leverage in any negotiation
over pay or working conditions, and a program of unconditional residency without USCIS as a de
facto strikebreaker would have much less downward pressure on wages - but anti-immigration rhetoric
remaining oblivious to actual immigration law is par for the course.
No, the real point of departure here from what deserves to be called "socialism" is in the
very act of blithely combining effects of automation (i.e. traditional capitalist competition
for productive efficiency at the expense of workers' economic security) and effects of offshoring/outsourcing/immigration
(i.e. racialized fragmentation of the global working class by accident of birth into those who
"deserve" greater economic security and those who don't) into one and the same depiction of developed-world
economic crisis. In so many words, you're walking right down neoliberal capitalism's ideological
garden path: the idea that it's not possible to be anticapitalist without being an economic nationalist,
and that every conceivable alternative to some form of Hillary Clinton is ultimately reducible
to some form of Donald Trump. On the contrary, those of us on the socialism side of "socialism
or barbarism" don't object to capitalism because it's exploiting American workers , we
object because it's exploiting workers , and insisting on this crucial point against all
chauvinist pressure ("workers of all lands , unite!") is what fundamentally separates our
anticapitalism from the pseudo-anticapitalism of fascists.
Maclaren: I'm with you. I well remember Obama and his "pivot to deficit reduction" and "green
shoots" while I was screaming at the TV 'No!! Not Now!"
And then he tried for a "grand bargain" with the Reps over chained CPI adjustment for SS, and
he became my active enemy. I was a Democrat. Where did my party go?
Just chiming in here: The implicit deal between the elites and the hoi polloi was that the economy
would be run with minimal competence. Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with
the masses on that issue, and are being punished for it.
I'm less inclined to attach responsibility to Obama, Clinton or the Democratic Party than some.
If Democrats had their way, the economy would have been managed considerably more competently.
Always remember that the rejection of the elites wasn't just a rejection of Democrats. The
Republican elite also took it in the neck.
I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive in this election. Under different
circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather than Trump's, but Trump's coalition
is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism.
I find the discussions over identity politics so intensely frustrating. A lot of people
on the left have gone all-in on self-righteous anger
Identity politics (and to some extent probably the rhetorical style that goes with it) isn't
a 'left' thing, it's a liberal thing. It's a bęte noire for many on the left-see eg. Nancy Fraser's
work.
The Anglo/online genus what you get when you subtract class, socialism and real-world organisation
from politics and add in a lot of bored students and professionals with internet connections in
the context of a political culture (America's) that already valorises individual aggression to
a unique degree.
As polticalfoorball @15 says. The Democrats just didn't have the political muscle to deliver on
those things. There really is a dynamic thats been playing out: Democrats don't get enough governing
capacity because they did poorly in the election, which means their projects to improve the economy
are neutered or allowed through only in a very weakened form. Then the next election cycle the
neuterers use that failure as a weapon to take even more governing capacity away. Its not a failure
of will, its a failure to get on top of the political feedback loop.
@15 politicalfootball 11.16.16 at 5:27 pm
"Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with the masses on that issue, and are being
punished for it."
Could you specify some "elite" that has been punished?
'the economic theories and programs ascribed to John M. Keynes and his followers; specifically
: the advocacy of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending'
– and if it is done wisely – like in most European countries before 2000 it is one of the least
'braindead' things.
But with the introduction of the Euro – some governmental programs – lead (especially in Spain)
to horrendous self-destructive housing and building bubbles – which lead to the conclusion that
such programs – which allow 'gambling with houses' are pretty much 'braindead'.
Or shorter: The quality of Keynesianism depends on NOT doing it 'braindead'.
Cranky Observer in #11 makes some excellent points. Crucially, he asks: "Finally, you need to
address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo), how does destroying
the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically depressed
areas?"
There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't
think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters
seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and
no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't
afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll
never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think
they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do
need it).
It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that
it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job
but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't).
That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy
the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign.
As for 63.7% home ownership stats in 2016, vast numbers of those "owned" homes were snapped
up by giant banks and other financial entities like hedge funds which then rented those homes
out. So the home ownership stats in 2016 are extremely deceptive. Much of the home-buying since
the 2009 crash has been investment purchases. Foreclosure home purchases for rent is now a huge
thriving business, and it's fueling a second housing bubble. Particularly because in many ways
it repeats the financially frothy aspects of the early 2000s housing bubble - banks and investment
firms are issuing junks bonds based on rosy estimates of ever-escalating rents and housing prices,
they use those junk financial instruments (and others like CDOs) to buy houses which then get
rented out at inflated prices, the rental income gets used to fund more tranches of investment
which fuels more buy-to-rent home buying. Rents have already skyrocketed far beyond incomes on
the East and West Coast, so this can't continue. But home prices and rents keep rising. There
is no city in the United States today where a worker making minimum wage can afford to rent a
one-bedroom apartment and have money left over to eat and pay for a car, health insurance, etc.
If home ownership were really so robust, this couldn't possibly be the case. The fact that rents
keep skyrocketing even as undocumented hispanics return to Mexico in record numbers while post-9/11
ICE restrictions have hammered legal immigration numbers way, way down suggests that home ownership
is not nearly as robust as the deceptive numbers indicate.
Political football in #15 remarks: "I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive
in this election. Under different circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather
than Trump's, but Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism."
Race was important, but not the root cause of the Trump victory. How do we know this? Tump
himself is telling us. Look at Trump's first announced actions - deport 3 million undocumented
immigrants who have committed crimes, ram through vast tax cuts for the rich, and end the inheritance
tax.
If Trump's motivation (and his base's motivation) was pure racism, Trump's first announced
action would be something like passing laws that made it illegal to marry undocumented workers.
His first act would be to roll back the legalization of black/white marriage and re-instate segregation.
Trump isn't promising any of that.
Instead Trump's (bad) policies are based around enriching billionaires and shutting down immigration.
Bear in mind that 43% of all new jobs created since 2009 went to immigrants and you start to realize
that Trump's base is reacting to economic pressure by scapegoating immigrants, not racism by itself.
If it were pure racism we'd have Trump and Ryan proposing a bunch of new Nuremberg laws. Make
it illegal to have sex with muslims, federally fund segregated black schools and pass laws to
force black kids to get bussed to them, create apartheid-style zones where only blacks can live,
that sort of thing. Trump's first announced actions involve enriching the fantastically wealthy
and enacting dumb self-destructive protectionism via punitive immigration control. That's protectionism
+ class war of the rich against everyone else, not racism. The protectionist immigration-control
+ deportation part of Trump's program is sweet sweet music to the working class people in the
Rust Belt. They think the 43% of jobs taken by immigrants will come back. They don't realize that
those are mostly jobs no one wants to do anyway, and that most of those jobs are already in the
process of getting automated out of existence.
The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent
to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly
unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization
for whom Democrats have done little or nothing.
Here's an argument that may resonate: the first two groups in Trump's coalition are unreachable.
Liberal Democrats can't sweet-talk racists out of being racist and we certainly have nothing to
offer the plutocrats. So the only part of Trump's coalition that is really reachable by liberal
Democrats is the third group. Shouldn't we be concentrating on that third group, then?
The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are
natural enemies. Since the plutocrats are perceived as running giant corporations that import
large numbers of non-white immigrants to lower wages, the racists are not big fans of that group
either.
Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the
Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows
to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic
party.
Why? Because the stormfront types consider elite U.S. institutions like CitiBank as equally
culpable with Democrats in supposedly destroying white people in the U.S. According to Bannon's
twisted skinhead logic, Democrats are allegedly race traitors for cultural reasons, but big U.S.
corporations and elite institutions are supposedly equally guilty of economic race treason by
importing vast numbers of non-white immigrants via H1B visas, by offshoring jobs from mostly caucasian-populated
red states to non-white countries like India, Africa, China, and by using elite U.S. universities
to trawl the world for the best (often non-white) students, etc. Bannon's "great day of the rope"
includes the plutocrats as well as people of color.
These natural fractures in the Trump coalition are real, and Democrats can exploit them to
weaken and destroy Republicans. But we have to get away from condemning all Republicans as racists
because if we go down that route, we won't realize how fractured and unstable the Trump coalition
really is.
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is
a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so
it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed
thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending
on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the
stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying.
Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism,
because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
Ps. Should prob add that identity politics isn't the same thing as feminism, anti-racism, LGBT
politics, etc. They're all needed now more than ever.
What we don't need more of imo is a particular liberal/middle-class form of those things with
particular assumptions (meritocratic and individualist), epistemology (strongly subjectivist)
and rhetorical style (which often aims humiliating opponents from a position of relative knowledge/status
rather than verbal engagement).
I don't know why I'm even having to say this, as it's so obvious. The "leftists" (for want of
a better word) and feminists who I know are also against neoliberalism. They are against the selloff
of public assets to enterprises for private profit. They want to see a solution to the rapidly
shrinking job market as technology replaces jobs (no, it's not enough for the Heroic Workers to
Seize the Means of Production – the means of production are different now and the solution is
going to have to be more complex than just "bring back manufacturing" or "introduce tariffs".)
They want to roll back the tax cuts for the rich which have whittled down our revenue base this
century. They want corporations and the top 10% to pay their fair share, and concomitantly they
want pensioners, the unemployed and people caring for children to have a proper living wage.
They support a universal "single payer" health care system, which we social democratic squishy
types managed to actually introduce in the 1970s, but now we have to fight against right wing
governments trying to roll it back They support a better system of public education. They support
a science-based approach to climate change where it is taken seriously for the threat it is and
given priority in Government policy. They support spending less on the Military and getting out
of international disputes which we (Western nations) only seem to exacerbate.
This is not an exhaustive list.
Yet just because the same people say that the dominant Western countries (and my own) still
suffer from institutionalised racism and sexism, which is not some kind of cake icing but actually
ruin lives and kill people, we are "all about identity politics" and cannot possibly have enough
brain cells to think about the issues I described in para 1.
The slow recovery was only one factor. Wages have been stagnant since Reagan. And honestly,
if a white Republican president had stabilized the economy, killed Osama Bin Laden and got rid
of pre-existing condition issue with healthcare, the GOP would be BRAGGING all over it. Let's
remember that we have ONE party that has been devoted to racist appeals, lying and putting party
over country for decades.
Obama entered office as the economy crashed over a cliff. Instead of reforming the banks and
punishing the bankers who engaged in fraudulent activities, he waded into healthcare reform. Banks
are bigger today than they were in 2008. And tell me again, which bankers were punished for the
fraud? Not a one All that Repo 105 maneuvering, stuffing the retirement funds with toxic assets
– etc. and so on – all of that was perfectly legal? And if legal, all of that was totally bonusable?
Yes! In America, such failure is gifted with huge bonuses, thanks to the American taxpayer.
Meanwhile, homeowners saw huge drops the value of their homes. Some are still underwater with
the mortgage. It's a shame that politicians and reporters in DC don't get out much.
Concurrently, right before the election, ACA premiums skyrocketed. If you are self-insured,
ACA is NOT affordable. It doesn't matter that prior to ACA, premiums increased astronomically.
Obama promised AFFORDABLE healthcare. In my state, we have essentially a monopoly on health insurance,
and the costs are absurd. But that's in part because the state Republicans refused to expand Medicaid.
Don't underestimate HRC's serious issues. HRC had one speech for the bankers and another for
everyone else. Why didn't she release the GS transcripts? When did the Democrats become the party
of Wall Street?
She also made the same idiotic mistake that Romney did – disparage a large swathe of American
voters (basket of deplorables is this year's 47%.)
And then we had a nation of voters intent on the outsider. Bernie Sanders had an improbable
run at it – the Wikileaks emails showed that the DNC did what they could to get rid of him as
a threat.
Well America has done and gone elected themselves an outsider. Lucky us.
"... 'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns, and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it. ..."
"... 'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch. In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening to anything he said.' ..."
'Bill always campaigned as a guy who felt your pain, but Hillary came across as someone who was
pissed off at her enemy [Trump], not someone who was reaching out and trying to make life better
for the white working class.'
'Bill also said that many African Americans were deeply disappointed with the results of eight
years of Obama,' the source continued.
'Despite more and more government assistance, black weren't economically any better off, and black-on-black
crime was destroying their communities. He said Hillary should have gone into the South Side of Chicago
and condemned the out-of-control violence.'
'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign
by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired
hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns,
and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it.
'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch.
In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening
to anything he said.'
"... Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting working class voters in the Rust Belt. ..."
I read all of these points and conclude that Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump in the
general election. Sanders would have held all of the Democratic strongholds, and he would have
beaten Trump in the Midwest.
Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and
Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting
working class voters in the Rust Belt.
This is evidence that the elites in the Democrat Party would rather lose with a ' made ' candidate
than win with an outsider.
Talking Point: The Clinton Campaign Was Well-Managed
Here are two examples of the talking point. From the Washington Post (November 10, 2016):
At Brooklyn headquarters on Wednesday, Podesta expressed his gratitude and support for the
team, and for Mook. "We have the No. 1 campaign manager," he said, in a staffwide gathering
in the afternoon. "I've been doing this since 1968, and I've never seen a culture and a spirit
like we created in this campaign." On the conference call with thousands of staff across the
country, Clinton also called in [how kind] and thanked her team for their dedication.
Mook tried to end the campaign on a high note.
"What you've created is going to live on," he told his troops. "Leaders all over this country,
local networks around the nation, future candidates who are going to step forward. Someone
in this room is going to manage a presidential campaign one day."
Talking Point: The Clinton Defeat Had Nothing To Do With Economics
Here's an example of the talking point. From, naturally,
Amanda Marcotte (November 11, 2016):
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't retweet approvingly, you're a racist yourself,
and possibly a racist Trump supporter.) There are four reasons why this talking point is false.
... .... ...
To be fair, Clinton is correct that "there are lots of reasons," in an election this close. However,
to me, blaming Comey is like blaming the last pebble in an avalanche of #FAIL. Sanders asks the
right question.
Talking about the Comey letters
, Sanders said:
"It's not a question of what happens in the last week. The question is that she should have
won this election by 10 percentage points.
"... The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening. When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!" ..."
"... On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they acted exactly like us." ..."
"... I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities." ..."
"... And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above. ..."
Erm, atheist groups are known to target smaller Christian groups with lawsuits. A baker was sued
for refusing to bake a cake for a Gay Wedding. She was perfectly willing to serve the couple,
just not at the wedding. In California we had a lawsuit over a cross in a park. Atheists threatened
a lawsuit over a seal. Look, I get that there are people with no life out there, but why are they
bringing the rest of us into their insanity, with constant lawsuits. There's actually a concept
known as "Freedom from Religion" – what the heck? Can you imagine someone arguing about "Freedom
from Speech" in America? But it's ok to do it to religious folk! And yes, that includes Muslims,
who had to fight to build a Mosque in New York. They should've just said it was a Scientology
Center
The "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening.
When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger
for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if
she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!"
The problem with healthcare in the US deserves its own thread, but Obamacare did not fix it;
Obamacare made it worse, especially in the rural communities. The laws in schools are fundamentally
retarded. A kid was suspended for giving a friend Advil. Another kid suspended for bringing in
a paper gun. I could go on and on. A girl was expelled from college for trying to look gangsta
in a L'Oreal mask. How many examples do you need? Look at all of the new "child safety laws" which
force kids to leave in a bubble. And when they enter the Real World, they're fucked, so they pick
up the drugs. In cities it's crack, in farmvilles it's meth.
Hillary didn't win jack shit. She got a plurality of the popular vote. She didn't win it, since
winning implies getting the majority. How many Johnson votes would've gone to Trump if it was
based on popular vote, in a safe state? Of course the biggest issue is the attack on the way of
life, which is all too real. I encourage you to read this, in order to understand where they're
coming from:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully
unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind
of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and
avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd
barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and
doing an astounding $125 billion in damage. But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy
about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally
important. It matters. To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through
the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"
On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always
one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black
people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they
passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city,
winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned
alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they
acted exactly like us."
"They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city,
and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities,
but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has
utterly collapsed."
^ That, I'd say, is known as destroying their lives. Also this:
"In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical
degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts
aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town - aspiring to
that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the
job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of
mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks.
There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite
will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone
has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!"
Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away
white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit,
at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities."
And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight
racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism
and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part
of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above.
...In fact, the entire Democratic Party has mainly ceased to campaign on issues-choosing instead
to invest heavily in identity politics. The message to black voters is: vote for us because you are
black, not because of anything we are going to do. Ditto for Hispanics. And women. And the LGBT community.
And others. Hillary does have an agenda. More on that in a future post. But she didn't campaign on
it.
As for the mainstream media, I have never seen an election in which the media was so biased. And
not just biased. The media's entire view of the election was Hillary Clinton's view. Even on Fox
News, the entire focus on election night and in the days that followed was on identity politics.
How many blacks were voting? How many Hispanics? How many women?
As if demography were destiny.
Now, as it turns out, a greater percentage of blacks voted for Trump than voted for Romney. The
same thing is true of Hispanics. In fact, Trump did better among minorities than any Republican since
Ronald Reagan. He even got a majority of white female votes.
Why were all these people doing something they weren't supposed to do? On network television and
even on cable television, no one had an answer.
Putting the media aside for the moment, do you know what Hillary's position is on trade deals
with other countries? Of course, you don't. And neither does anyone else. When she spoke about the
issue at all, she said one thing behind closed doors and another in public. The reason this doesn't
matter on Wall Street (or to the editors of the New York Times ) is that they assume she
has no real convictions and that money and special interest influence will always win out.
What about Hillary's solution to the problem of illegal immigration? Do you know what that is?
How about her position on corporate tax reform? Or school choice? Or Obamacare? Or opportunities
for blacks in inner cities?
I bet you don't know her positions on any of these topics. But I bet you do know Donald Trump's.
Not in detail, of course. But I bet you know the general way in which he differs from Obama administration
policies.
"... Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders. ..."
"... "Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will. ..."
"... What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation, either. ..."
"... What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common with working class people anywhere? ..."
"... Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political power – because with power come blame. ..."
"... I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and made it happen (such as TPP). ..."
"... Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio. ..."
"... Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g. Privateers at SSA. ..."
"... My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor. ..."
"... The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know, hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah. ..."
"... The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips, a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part of the 1%). ..."
"... The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted. ..."
"... I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away. ..."
"... If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that. ..."
"... Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. ..."
"... The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. ..."
"... White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America ..."
"... Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own resources, and clung together for mutual assistance. ..."
"... White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not". ..."
"... "To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists " ..."
"... working class white women ..."
"... Obama is personally likeable ..."
"... History tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the activist class there are identity purity battles going on. ..."
"... Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen. ..."
"... Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again. ..."
Ultimately the Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The
only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility for what happened.
Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not
get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton
save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people
needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders
in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders.
Class trumps race, to make a pun. If the left doesn't take the Democratic Party back and clean
house, I expect that there is a high probability that 2020's election will look at lot like the
2004 elections.
I'd recommend someone like Sanders to run. Amongst the current crop, maybe Tulsi Gabbard or
Nina Turner seem like the best candidates.
"Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question
is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a
question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will.
What would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought
about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to
the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation,
either.
What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years
running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common
with working class people anywhere?
The same question applies to Hillary, to Trump and the remainder of our "representatives" in
Congress.
Without Unions, how are US Representatives from the working class elected?
What we are seeing is a shift in the US for the Republicans to become the populist party. They
already have the churches, and with Trump they can gain the working class – although I do not
underestimate the contempt help by our elected leaders for the Working Class and poor.
The have forgotten, if they ever believed: "There, but for the grace of God, go I".
Iron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political
power – because with power come blame.
I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point
to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and
made it happen (such as TPP).
We know that class and economic insecurity drove many white people to vote for Trump. That's
understandable. And now we are seeing a rise in hate incidents inspired by his victory. So obviously
there is a race component in his support as well. So, if you, white person, didn't vote for Trump
out of white supremacy, would you consider making a statement that disavows the acts of extremist
whites? Do you vow to stand up and help if you see people being victimized? Do you vow not to
stay silent when you encounter Trump supporters who ARE obviously in thrall to the white supremacist
siren call?
Agreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt
tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio.
And I wouldn't worry about it. When I worked at the at the USX Fairless works in Levittown
PA in 1988, I was befriended by one steelworker who was a clear raving white supremacist racist.
(Actually rather nonchalant about about it). However he was the only one I encountered who was
like this, and eventually I figured out that he befriended a "newbie" like me because he had no
friends among the other workers, including the whites. He was not popular at all.
I've always thought that Class, not Race, was the Third Rail of American Politics, and that
the US was fast-tracking to a more shiny, happy feudalism.
Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under
the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g.
Privateers at SSA.
My wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over
the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees
a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more
parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor.
She also makes it clear to me that the Somali/Syrian/Iraqi etc. immigrant kids are going to
do very well even though they come in without a word of English because they are working their
butts off and they have the full support of their parents and community. These people left bad
places and came to their future and they are determined to grab it with both hands. 40% of her
class this year is ENL (English as a non-native language). Since it is an inner city school, they
don't have teacher's aides in the class, so it is just one teacher in a class of 26-28 kids, of
which a dozen struggle to understand English. Surprisingly, the class typically falls short of
the "standards" that the state sets for the standardized exams. Yet many of the immigrant kids
end up going to university after high school through sheer effort.
Bullying and extreme misbehavior (teachers are actually getting injured by violent elementary
kids) is largely done by kids born in the US. The immigrant kids tend to be fairly well-behaved.
On a side note, the CSA at our local farmer's market said they couldn't find people to pick
the last of their fall crops (it is in a rural community so a car is needed to get there). So
the food bank was going out this week to pick produce like squash, onions etc. and we were told
we could come out and pick what we wanted. Full employment?
The problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and
in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know,
hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah.
The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich
a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips,
a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part
of the 1%).
The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted.
I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply
rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away.
I'm recalling (too lazy to find the link) a poll a couple years ago that showed the number
of American's identifying as "working class" increased, and the number as "middle class" decreased.
It is both. And it is a deliberate mechanism of class division to preserve power. Bill Cecil-Fronsman,
Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina identifies nine classes
in the class structure of a state that mixed modern capitalist practice (plantations), agrarian
YOYO independence (the non-slaveowning subsistence farms), town economies, and subsistence (farm
labor). Those classes were typed racially and had certain economic, power, and social relations
associated with them. For both credit and wages, few escaped the plantation economy and being
subservient to the planter capitalists locally.
Moreover, ethnic identity was embedded in the law as a class marker. This system was developed
independently or exported through imitation in various ways to the states outside North Carolina
and the slave-owning states. The abolition of slavery meant free labor in multiple senses and
the capitalist use of ethnic minorities and immigrants as scabs integrated them into an ethnic-class
system, where it was broad ethnicity and not just skin-color that defined classes. Other ethnic
groups, except Latinos and Muslim adherents, now have earned their "whiteness".
One suspects that every settler colonial society develops this combined ethnic-class structure
in which the indigenous ("Indians" in colonial law) occupy one group of classes and imported laborers
or slaves or intermixtures ("Indian", "Cape Colored" in South Africa) occupy another group of
classes available for employment in production. Once employed, the relationship is exactly that
of the slaveowner to the slave no matter how nicely the harsh labor management techniques of 17th
century Barbados and Jamaica have been made kinder and gentler. But outside the workplace (and
often still inside) the broader class structure applies even contrary to the laws trying to restrict
the relationship to boss and worker.
Blacks are not singling themselves out to police; police are shooting unarmed black people
without punishment. The race of the cop does not matter, but the institution of impunity makes
it open season on a certain class of victims.
It is complicated because every legal and often managerial attempt has been made to reduce
the class structure of previous economies to the pure capitalism demanded by current politics.
So when in a post Joe McCarthy, post-Cold War propaganda society, someone wants to protest
the domination of capitalism, attacking who they perceive as de facto scabs to their higher incomes
(true or not) is the chosen mode of political attack. Not standing up for the political rights
of the victims of ethnically-marked violence and discrimination allows the future depression of
wages and salaries by their selective use as a threat in firms. And at the individual firm and
interpersonal level even this gets complicated because in spite of the pressure to just be businesslike,
people do still care for each other.
This is a perennial mistake. In the 1930s Southern Textile Strike, some organizing was of both
black and white workers; the unions outside the South rarely stood in solidarity with those efforts
because they were excluding ethnic minorities from their unions; indeed, some locals were organized
by ethnicity. That attitude also carried over to solidarity with white workers in the textile
mills. And those white workers who went out on a limb to organize a union never forgot that failure
in their labor struggle. It is the former textile areas of the South that are most into Trump's
politics and not so much the now minority-majority plantation areas.
It still is race in the inner ring suburbs of ethnically diverse cities like St. Louis that
hold the political lock on a lot of states. Because Ferguson to them seems like an invasion of
the lower class. Class politics, of cultural status, based on ethnicity. Still called by that
19h century scientific racism terminology that now has been debunked - race - Caucasoid, Mongoloid,
Negroid. Indigenous, at least in the Americas, got stuck under Mongoloid.
You go organize the black, Latino, and white working class to form unions and gain power, and
it will happen. It is why Smithfield Foods in North Carolina had to negotiate a contract. Race
can be transcended in action.
Pretending the ethnic discrimination and even segregation does not exist and have its own problems
is political suicide in the emerging demographics. Might not be a majority, but it is an important
segment of the vote. Which is why the GOP suppressed minority voters through a variety of legal
and shady electoral techniques. Why Trump wants to deport up to 12 million potential US citizens
and some millions of already birthright minor citizens. And why we are likely to see the National
Labor Review Board gutted of what little power it retains from 70 years of attack. Interesting
what the now celebrated white working class was not offered in this election, likely because they
would vote it down quicker because, you know, socialism.
Your comment reminded me of an episode in Seattle's history.
Link . The
unions realized they were getting beat in their strikes, by scabs, who were black. The trick was
for the unions to bring the blacks into the union. This was a breakthrough, and it worked in Seattle,
in 1934. There is a cool mural the union commissioned by,
Pablo O'Higgins , to
celebrate the accomplishment.
Speaking of class, and class contempt , one must recall the infamous screed published
by National Review columnist Kevin Williamson early this year, writing about marginalised white
people here is a choice excerpt:
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my
own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and
alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with
all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't
Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from
Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine
or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very
little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor
white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to
life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the
factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap
theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory
towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your
goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American
underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used
heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
Now it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to state that Williamson's animus can
be replicated amongst many of the moneyed elite currently pushing and shoving their way into a
position within the incoming Trump Administration. The Trump campaign has openly and cynically
courted and won the votes of white people similar to those mentioned in Williamson's article,
and who – doubtlessly – will be stiffed by policies vigourously opposed to their welfare that
will be enacted during the Trump years. The truly intriguing aspect of the Trump election is:
what will be the consequences of further degradation of the "lower orders' " quality of life by
such actions? Wholesale retreat from electoral politics? Further embitterment and anger NOT toward
those in Washington responsible for their lot but directed against ethnic and racial minorities
"stealing their jawbs" and "getting welfare while we scrounge for a living"? I sincerely doubt
whether the current or a reconstructed Democratic Party can at all rally this large chunk of white
America by posing as their "champions" the class divide in the US is as profound as the racial
chasm, and neither major party – because of internal contradictions – can offer a credible answer.
[In addition to the growing inequality and concomitant wage stagnation for the middle and working
classes, 9/11 and its aftermath has certainly has contributed to it as well, as, making PEOPLE
LONG FOR the the Golden Age of Managerial Capitalism of the post-WWII era,]
Oh yeah, I noticed a big ol' hankerin' for that from the electorate. What definition could
the author be using for Managerial Capitalism that could make it the opposite of inequality? The
fight for power between administration and shareholders does not lead to equality for workers.
[So this gave force to the idea that the government was nothing but a viper's nest full of
crony capitalist enablers,]
I don't think it's an 'idea' that the govt is crony capitalists and enablers. Ds need to get
away from emotive descriptions. Being under/unemployed, houseless, homeless, unable to pay for
rent, utilities, food . aren't feelings/ideas. When that type of language is used, it comes across
as hand waving. There needs to be a shift of talking to rather than talking about.
If crony capitalism is an idea, it's simply a matter for Ds to identify a group (workers),
create a hierarchy (elite!) and come up with a propaganda campaign (celebrities and musicians
spending time in flyover country-think hanging out in coffee shops in a flannel shirt) to get
votes. Promise to toss them a couple of crumbs with transfer payments (retraining!) or a couple
of regulations (mandatory 3 week severance!) and bring out the obligatory D fall back- it would
be better than the Rs would give them. On the other hand, if it's factual, the cronies need to
be stripped of power and kicked out or the nature of the capitalist structure needs to be changed.
It's laughable to imagine liberals or progressives would be open to changing the power and nature
of the corporate charter (it makes me smile to think of the gasps).
The author admits that politicians lie and continue the march to the right yet uses the ACA,
a march to the right, as a connection to Obama's (bombing, spying, shrinking middle class) likability.
[[But emphasizing class-based policies, rather than gender or race-based solutions, will achieve
more for the broad swathe of voters, who comprehensively rejected the "neo-liberal lite" identity
politics]
Oops. I got a little lost with the neo-liberal lite identity politics. Financialized identity
politics? Privatized identity politics?
I believe women and poc have lost ground (economic and rights) so I would like examples of
successful gender and race-based (liberal identity politics) solutions that would demonstrate
that identity politics targeting is going to work on the working class.
If workers have lost power, to balance that structure, you give workers more power (I predict
that will fail as unions fall under the generic definition of corporatist and the power does not
rest with the members but with the CEOs of the unions – an example is a union that block the members
from voting to endorse a candidate, go against the member preference and endorse the corporatist
candidate), or you remove power from the corporation. Libs/progs can't merely propose something
like vesting more power with shareholders to remove executives as an ameliorating maneuver which
fails to address the power imbalance.
[This is likely only to accelerate the disintegration of the political system and economic
system until the elephant in the room – class – is honestly and comprehensively addressed.]
For a thorough exposition of lower-class white America from the inception of the Republic to
today, a must-read is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in
America . Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original
Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England
and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own
resources, and clung together for mutual assistance.
Thus became the economic and cultural subset of "crackers", "hillbillies", "rednecks", and
later, "Okies", a source of contempt and scorn by more economically and culturally endowed whites.
The anti-bellum white Southern aristocracy cynically used poor whites as cheap tenant farming,
all the while laying down race-based distinctions between them and black slaves – there is always
someone lower on the totem pole, and that distinction remains in place today. Post-Reconstruction,
the South maintained the cult of white superiority, all the while preserving the status of upper-class
whites, and, by race-based public policies, assured lower-class whites that such "superiority"
would be maintained by denying the black populations access to education, commerce, the vote,
etc. And today, "white trash", or "trailer trash", or poorer whites in general are ubiquitous
and as American as apple pie, in the North, the Midwest, and the West, not just the South. Let
me quote Isenberg's final paragraph of her book:
White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very
existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American
society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They
are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history,
whether we like it or not".
Presenting a plan for the future, which has a chance to be supported by the electorate, must
start with scrupulous, unwavering honesty and a willingness to acknowledge inconvenient facts.
The missing topic from the 2016 campaigns was declining energy surpluses and their pervasive,
negative impact on the prosperity to which we feel entitled. Because of the energy cost of producing
oil, a barrel today represents a declining fraction of a barrel in terms of net energy. This is
the major factor in sluggish economic performance. Failing to make this case and, at the same
time, offering glib and vacuous promises of growth and economic revival, are just cynical exercises
in pandering.
Our only option is to mange the coming decline in a way that does not descend into chaos and
anarchy. This can only be done with a clear vision of causes and effects and the wisdom and courage
to accept facts. The alternative is yet more delusions and wishful thinking, whose shelf life
is getting shorter.
To be fair to the article, Marshall did in fact say:
"To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists
"
IMO the point Marshall is making that race was not the primary reason #DJT
won. And I concur.
This is borne out by the vote tallies which show that the number of R voters from 2012 to 2016
was pretty much on the level (final counts pending):
2016 R Vote: 60,925,616
2012 R Vote: 60,934,407
(Source:
US Election Atlas )
Stop and think about this for a minute. Every hard core racist had their guy this
time around; and yet, the R's could barely muster the same amount of votes as Mittens
in 2012. This is huge, and supports the case that other things contributed far more than just
race.
Class played in several ways:
Indifference/apathy/fatigue: Lambert posted some data from Carl Beijer on this yesterday in his
Clinton Myths piece yesterday.
Anger: #HRC could not convince many people who voted for Bernie that she was interested in his
outreach to the working class. More importantly, #HRC could not convince working class white
women that she had anything other than her gender and Trump's boorishness as a counterpoint
to offer.
Outsider v Insider: Working class people skeptical of political insiders rejected #HRC.
If black workers were losing ground and white workers were gaining, one could indeed claim
that racism is a problem. However, both black and white workers are losing ground – racism simply
cannot be the major issue here. It's not racism, it's class war.
The fixation on race, the corporate funding of screaming 'black lives matter' agitators, the
crude attempts to tie Donald Trump to the KKK (really? really?) are just divide and conquer, all
over again.
Whatever his other faults, Donald Trump has been vigorous in trying to reach out to working
class blacks, even though he knew he wouldn't get much of their vote and he knew that the media
mostly would not cover it. Last I heard, he was continuing to try and reach out, despite the black
'leadership' class demanding that he is a racist. Because as was so well pointed out here, the
one thing the super-rich fear is a united working class.
Divide and conquer. It's an old trick, but a powerful one.
Suggestion: if (and it's a big if) Trump really does enact policies that help working class
blacks, and the Republicans peel away a significant fraction of the black vote, that would set
the elites' hair on fire. Because it would mean that the black vote would be in play, and the
Neoliberal Democrats couldn't just take their votes for granted. And wouldn't that be a thing.
that was good for 2016. I will look to see if he has stats for other years. i certainly agree
that poor whites are more likely to be shot; executions of homeless people by police are one example.
the kind of system that was imposed on the people of ferguson has often been imposed on poor whites,
too. i do object to the characterization of black lives matter protestors as "screaming agitators";
that's all too reminiscent of the meme of "outside agitators" riling up the local peaceful black
people to stand up for their rights that was characteristically used to smear the civil rights
movement in the 60's.
I might not have much in common at all with certain minorities, but it's highly likely that
we share class status.
That's why the status quo allows identity politics and suppresses class politics.
Having been around for sometime, I often wonder what The Guardian is going on about in the
UK as it is supposed to be our left wing broadsheet.
It isn't a left I even recognised, what was it?
I do read it to try and find out what nonsense it is these people think.
Having been confused for many a year, I think I have just understood this identity based politics
as it is about to disappear.
I now think it was a cunning ploy to split the electorate in a different way, to leave the
UK working class with no political outlet.
Being more traditional left I often commented on our privately educated elite and private schools
but the Guardian readership were firmly in favour of them.
How is this left?
Thank god this is now failing, get back to the old left, the working class and those lower
down the scale.
It was clever while it lasted in enabling neoliberalism and a neglect of the working class,
but clever in a cunning, nasty and underhand way.
Thinking about it, so many of these recent elections have been nearly 50% / 50% splits, has
there been a careful analysis of who neoliberalism disadvantages and what minorities need to be
bought into the fold to make it work in a democracy.
Women are not a minority, but obviously that is a big chunk if you can get them under your
wing. The black vote is another big group when split away and so on.
Brexit nearly 50/50; Austria nearly 50/50; US election nearly 50/50.
So, 85% of Blacks vote Hillary against Sanders (left) and 92% vote Hillary against Trump (right),
but is no race. It's the class issue that sends them to the Clintons. Kindly explain how.
Funny think about likeability, likeable people can be real sh*ts. So I started looking into
hanging out with less likeable people. I found that they can be considerably more appreciative
of friendship and loyalty, maybe because they don't have such easy access to it.
Entertainment media has cautiously explored some aspect so fthis, but in politics, "nice" is
still disproportionately values, and not appreciated as a possible flag.
Watch out buddy. They are onto you. I have seen some comments on democratic party sites claiming
the use of class to explain Hillary's loss is racist. The democratic party is a goner. History
tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the
activist class there are identity purity battles going on.
Watch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend
to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement
policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why
we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and
no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen.
Well it certainly won't happen by itself. People are going to have to make it happen. Here
in Michigan we have a tiny new party called Working Class Party running 3 people here and there.
I voted for two of them. If the Democrats run somebody no worse than Trump next time, I will be
free to vote Working Class Party to see what happens.
Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I
may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again.
"... We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God... ..."
"... The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." ..."
"... You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. ..."
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make
the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest
of us. The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam
and Eve, because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of
the flood, there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure,
their prosperity will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all
become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social
conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man;
and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have
much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the
time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups. ..."
"... Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered. ..."
"... On the bright side, these "trade" agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead. ..."
"... Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters' minds. ..."
"... Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. ..."
"... If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed. ..."
"... It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about their own job opportunities. ..."
"... The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics. ..."
"... This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work. ..."
"... The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary. ..."
"... Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). ..."
"... The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. ..."
In the week leading up to last Tuesday's election the press was busy writing obituaries for the Republican
Party. This continued even after Donald Trump's "surprising" victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud
crash, "nobody could have expected." The pretense is that Trump saw what no other politician saw:
that the economy has not recovered since 2008.
Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment
against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong
path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the
1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups.
Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered.
National Income and Federal Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent
of the population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising and high-salaried
staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction to this polarization. She and her
coterie ignored economic policy as soon as Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all
but told to join a third party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better
off than they were eight years ago. They knew better!
So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a maverick and shake up the Republican
Party. There seems to be a fight going on for Donald's soul – or at least the personnel he appoints
to his cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican leadership love-bombing
him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender
now and pass on the real work of government to the Republican apparatchiks?
The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain
on Thursday, setting a DJIA record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid
and Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are soaring, from oil and
gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S. environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump
as it was under Obama and his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring
to impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these "trade" agreements
to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at
large are now presumably dead.
For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this is that anyone who runs for president is
in it partly for applause. That was Carter's weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks
in 1974. It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and the Republican
lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn to them and break his campaign promises
in the way that Obama did in 2008. It would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of
the working class that was his image leading up to November 8.
The fight for the Democratic Party's future (dare I say "soul"?)
In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre request for young people (especially
young women) to become politically active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange
is that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage millennials from
running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running
as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines
itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary's DNC coterie the problem with
millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary.
The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats
raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic
candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania
asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The
election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic
issues paramount in most voters' minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff
of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership
really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn't learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis showed that FBI director
Comey's reports "rais[ing] doubts that were groundless, baseless," stopped her momentum. This was
on a par with the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability
of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn't admitted that here analysis was inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are
they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs-Citigroup
gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death
knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity
in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost,
not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies
has obviously failed.
It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted
for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned
about their own job opportunities.
The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted
for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years,
blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the
Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests
by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years
of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial
backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress.
Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight
to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can
Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin's gang. That is to save
the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship.
It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now . And
take Evan Bayh with them.
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses
its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration.
The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites.
As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class
is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every
revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution
has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington."
[1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not
been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC.
If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change
of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going
back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer
George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard
Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan
Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than
win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem
was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds
of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's
rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his
promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's pretended embrace of Bernie's opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not
racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had
lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting
Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss
of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third
Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance
monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply
to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed
by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that
"Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI
were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering
wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors.
Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit
center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to
capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was
defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic
Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters
and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let
"socialism" be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, "The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy," November 11,
2016.
Michael Hudson's new book,
Killing
the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by
Islet
. He can be reached via his website, [email protected]
Liberal democracy has always depended on its relationships with an illiberal Other of one
sort or another, and all too often "liberal progressivism" merely means responding to such
relationships in one's own society, the capitalist exploitation of a domestic proletariat,
by "outsourcing" our illiberal tendencies to consist largely of the imperial domination
and subjugation of foreigners.
(Which can even happen inside one's own borders, as long as it remains suitably "illegal";
notice how much less ideologically problematic it is to document the presence and labor of
the most brutally exploited migrant workers in e.g. China or the Gulf Arab states than in more
liberal societies like the US or EU.)
It's the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness for those who consider themselves
liberal progressives to then act surprised when the people charged with carrying out this domination
and subjugation on our behalf - our Colonel Jessups, if you will - demand that we stop hiding
our society's illiberal underbelly and acknowledge/celebrate it for what it is , a demand
that may be the single most authentic marker of the transition from liberalism to fascism.
In Pareto "elite rotation" terms, the election of Trump definitely means rotation of the US
neoliberal elite. "Status quo" faction of the elite was defeated due to backlash over globalization
and disappearance of meaningful well-paid jobs, with mass replacement of them by McJobs and temps/contractors.
Whether openness about domination and subjugation is an "authentic marker of the transition
from [neo]liberalism to fascism" remains to be seen, unless we assume that this transition (to
the National Security State) already happened long ego.
In a way illegal immigrants in the USA already represented stable and growing "new slaves"
class for decades. Their existence and contribution to the US economy was never denied or suppressed.
And even Greenspan acknowledged that Iraq war was about oil. So Trump put nothing new on the table
other then being slightly more blunt.
Neoliberalism and neo-imperialism show pretty much the contradictions of the older globalist
orders (late 19th c), they are just now distributed so as re-intensify the differences, the combined
etc, and concentrate the accumulation.
And elites are fighting over the spoils.
Yes, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism are much better and more precise terms, then fuzzy notions
like "liberal progressivism" . May be we should use Occam razor and discard the term "[neo]liberal
progressivism". The term "soft neoliberals" is IMHO good enough description of the same.
As for contradictions of the "older globalist orders (late 19th c)" the key difference is that
under neoliberalism armies play the role of "can opener" and after then the direct occupation were
by-and-large replaced with financial institutions and with indirect
"debt slavery". In many cases neoliberal subjugation is achieved via color revolution mechanism,
without direct military force involved.
Neo-colonialism creates higher level of concentration of risks due to the greed of financial
elite which was demonstrated in full glory in 2008. As such it looks less stable then old colonialism.
And it generates stronger backlash, which typically has elements of anti-Americanism, as we see in
Philippines now. Merkel days might also be numbered.
Also TBTF banks are now above the law as imposing judgments on them after the crisis can have
disastrous economic externalities. At the same time the corruption of regulators via revolving door
mechanisms blocks implementing meaningful preventive regulatory reforms.
In other words, like with Soviet nomenklatura, with the neoliberal elite we see the impossibility
of basic change, either toward taming the TBTF or toward modification of an aggressive
neocolonial foreign policy
with its rampant militarism.
"... The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by 11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent. ..."
"... Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation ..."
"... Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the working class, regardless of race or gender. ..."
The elections saw a massive shift in party support among the poorest and wealthiest voters. The share
of votes for the Republicans amongst the most impoverished section of workers, those with family
incomes under $30,000, increased by 10 percentage points from 2012. In several key Midwestern states,
the swing of the poorest voters toward Trump was even larger: Wisconsin (17-point swing), Iowa (20
points), Indiana (19 points) and Pennsylvania (18 points).
The swing to Republicans among the $30,000 to $50,000 family income range was 6 percentage points.
Those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 swung away from the Republicans compared to 2012
by 2 points.
The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the
Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited
from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by
11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased
from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent.
Clinton was unable to make up for the vote decline among women (2.1 million), African Americans
(3.2 million), and youth (1.2 million), who came overwhelmingly from the poor and working class,
with the increase among the rich (1.3 million).
Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance
of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle
class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.
Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses
of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade
unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the
working class, regardless of race or gender.
British diplomat John Glubb wrote a book called "The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival."
Glubb noted that the average age of empires since the time of ancient Assyria (859-612 B.C.)
is 250 years. Only the Mameluke Empire in Egypt and the Levant (1250-1517) made it as far as
267 years. America is 238 years old and is exhibiting signs of decline. All empires begin,
writes Glubb, with the age of pioneers, followed by ages of conquest, commerce, affluence,
intellect and decadence. America appears to have reached the age of decadence, which Glubb
defines as marked by "defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners,
the welfare state, [and] a weakening of religion."
The most important is probably the fact that the ideology of the current US empire -- neoliberalism
(called here "liberal progressivism") -- became discredited after 2008. What happened after the
collapse of the Marxist ideology with the USSR is well known. It took 46 years (if we assume that
the collapse started in 1945 as the result of victory in WWII, when the Soviet army has a chance
to see the standard of living in Western countries). Why the USA should be different ? Decline
of empires is very slow and can well take a half a century. Let's say it might take 50 years from
9/11 or October 2008.
One telling sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. One telling
sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. As Lupita hypothesized
here Trump might be the last desperate attempt to reverse this process.
Another, the deterioration of the standard of living of the USA population and declining infrastructure,
both typically are connected with the overextension of empire. In Fortune (
http://fortune.com/2015/07/20/united-states-decline-statistics-economic/
) Jill Coplan lists 12 signs of the decline.
Trump election is another sign of turmoil. The key message of his election is "The institutions
we once trusted deceived us" That includes the Democratic Party and all neoliberal MSM. Like was
the case with the USSR, the loss of influence of neoliberal propaganda machine is a definite sign
of the decline of empire.
Degeneration of the neoliberal political elite that is also clearly visible in the current set
of presidential candidates might be another sign. Hillary Clinton dragged to the car on 9/11 commemorative
event vividly reminds the state of health of a couple of members of Soviet Politburo .
"... Because the following talking points prevent a (vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons! ..."
"... Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin. ..."
"... These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump . ..."
"... The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total, but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.) ..."
"... And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me, I suppose, to sexism. ..."
"... These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's. ..."
"... pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same since his job at the factory went away" . ..."
"... So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move in opposite directions? ..."
"... First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair - college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale. ..."
"... Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories ..."
"... Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites. Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012. ..."
"... "No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear. *snark ..."
"... 'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets: ..."
"... 1) Blacks for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't tell me what to think.' ..."
"... Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture, pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted. So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of body and self. ..."
"... My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book. ..."
This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going
to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton
loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter,
entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially
egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttals.
How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states
Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states
[Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania] effectively decided the election.
Of course, America's first-past-the-post system and the electoral college amplify small margins
into decisive results. And it was the job of the Clinton campaign to find those 107,000 votes and
win them;
the Clinton operation turned out to be weaker than anyone would have imagined when
it counted . However, because Trump has what might be called an institutional mandate - both
the executive and legislative branches and soon, perhaps, the judicial - the narrowness of his margin
means he doesn't have a popular mandate. Trump has captured the state, but by no means civil society;
therefore, the opposition that seeks to delegitimize him is in a stronger position than it may realize.
Hence the necessity for reflection; seeking truth from facts, as the saying goes. Because
the following talking points prevent a
(vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is
then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons!
Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism
The subtext here is usually that if you don't chime in with vehement agreement, you're a racist
yourself, and possibly a racist Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is false.
First, voter caring levels dropped from 2012 to 2016, especially among black Democrats
.
Carl
Beijer :
From 2012 to 2016, both men and women went from caring about the outcome to not caring.
Among Democratic men and women, as well as Republican women, care levels dropped about 3-4
points; Republican men cared a little less too, but only by one point. Across the board, in
any case, the plurality of voters simply didn't care.
Beijer includes the following chart (based on Edison exit polling cross-referenced with total
population numbers from the US Census):
Beijer interprets:
White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn't care; most of that
apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less.
Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more,
by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was
driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats
with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support
among people of color.
Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated
voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these
groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they
did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012.
Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to
believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin.
Second, counties that voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 .
The Washington Post :
These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House,
a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump
.
The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many
of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped
states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total,
but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.)
Here's the chart:
And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the
black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me,
I suppose, to sexism.
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Sexism
Here's an article showing the talking point from
Newsweek :
This often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't join the consensus cluster, you're a sexist
yourself, and possibly a sexist Trump supporter). And if you only look at the averages this claim
might seem true :
On Election Day, women responded accordingly, as Clinton beat Trump among women 54 percent
to 42 percent. They were voting not so much for her as against him and what he brought to the
surface during his campaign: quotidian misogyny.
There are two reasons this talking point is not true. First, averages conceal, and what
they conceal is class . As you read further into the article, you can see it fall apart:
In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with
white women without college degrees going for [Trump]
two to one .
So, taking lack of a college degree as a proxy for being working class, for Newsweek's claim
to be true, you have to believe that working class women don't get a vote in their referendum,
and for the talking point to be true, you have to believe that working class women are sexist.
Which leads me to ask: Who died and left the bourgeois feminists in Clinton's base in charge of
the definition of sexism, or feminism? Class traitor
Tina Brown is worth repeating:
Here's my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played
in Hillary's demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate,
when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump's gross comments
with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an
occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's
unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer
who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's.
Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook's campaign
data nerds. They computed that America's women would all be as outraged as the ones they came
home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white
working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum.
They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers,
who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is
everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same
since his job at the factory went away" .
Second, Clinton in 2016 did no better than Obama in 2008 with women (although she did
better than Obama in 2012). From
the New York Times analysis of the exit polls, this chart...
So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased
the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move
in opposite directions?
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Stupidity
Here's an example of this talking point from
Foreign Policy , the heart of The Blob. The headline:
Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally
And the lead:
OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated,
low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton
was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the
election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election,
college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw
something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected
a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate.
The subtext here is usually that if you don't accept nod your head vigorously, you're stupid,
and possibly a stupid Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is not true.
First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with
education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care
system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented
the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial
heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair
- college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the
political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale.
Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories. From
The Week :
Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college
degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama
votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites.
Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012.
So, to believe this talking point, you have to believe that voters who were smart when they
voted for Obama suddenly became stupid when it came time to vote for Clinton. You also have to
believe that credentialed policy makers have an unblemished record of success, and that only they
are worth paying attention to.
By just about every metric imaginable, Hillary Clinton led one of the worst presidential campaigns
in modern history. It was a profoundly reactionary campaign, built entirely on rolling back the
horizons of the politically possible, fracturing left solidarity, undermining longstanding left
priorities like universal healthcare, pandering to Wall Street oligarchs, fomenting nationalism
against Denmark and Russia, and rehabilitating some of history's greatest monsters – from Bush
I to Kissinger. It was a grossly unprincipled campaign that belligerently violated FEC Super PAC
coordination rules and conspired with party officials on everything from political attacks to
debate questions. It was an obscenely stupid campaign that all but ignored Wisconsin during the
general election, that pitched Clinton to Latino voters as their abuela, that centered an entire
high-profile speech over the national menace of a few thousand anime nazis on Twitter, and that
repeatedly deployed Lena Dunham as a media surrogate.
Which is rather like running a David Letterman ad in a Pennsylvania steel town. It must have seemed
like a good idea in Brooklyn. After all, they had so many celebrities to choose from.
* * *
All three talking points oversimplify. I'm not saying racism is not powerful; of course it is.
I'm not saying that sexism is not powerful; of course it is. But monocausal explanations in an election
this close - and in a country this vast - are foolish. And narratives that ignore economics and erase
class are worse than foolish; buying into them will cause us to make the same mistakes over and over
and over again.[1] The trick will be to integrate multiple causes, and that's down to the left; identity
politics liberals don't merely not want to do this; they actively oppose it. Ditto their opposite
numbers in America's neoliberal fun house mirror, the conservatives.
NOTES
[1] For some, that's not a bug. It's a feature.
NOTE
You will have noticed that I haven't covered economics (class), or election fraud at all. More
myths are coming.
Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration
24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs
about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international
travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume "Lambert Strether" comes from Henry
James's The Ambassadors: "Live all you can. It's a mistake not to." You can follow him on Twitter
at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com
"No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be
important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear.
*snark
'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets:
1) Blacks
for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't
tell me what to think.'
2) Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture,
pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella
I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted.
So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of
body and self.
My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going
to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian
says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book.
"There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make the
rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us.
The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam and Eve,
because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of the flood,
there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity
will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...
We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become
so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience.
. . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it
cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it
is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time-
but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
"... "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working class. ..."
"... How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people … but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people in this country. ..."
Sunday on CBS's "Face The Nation," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President-elect Donald Trump
won because "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working
class.
Sanders said, " How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think
what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people …
but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people
in this country. "
Lost control of the Senate
Lost control of the House of Representatives
Lost control of dozens of state legislatures and Governorships.
The Republicans control 36 States of America - One more and they could in theory amend the Constitution.
In Wisconsin (notionally Democrat) the Legislature and Governor are both Republican controlled.
And Clinton didn't even campaign there when it was pretty obvious the State was not trending towards
her.
"... So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous. ..."
"... The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption was no theme for the media. ..."
"... According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. ..."
"... the Clinton team stole the primary elections to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump. ..."
"... An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions. ..."
"... I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation. There exists a code of honor among thieves. ..."
"... Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. ..."
"... Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians ..."
"... And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and the entire Muslim world. ..."
"... Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties ..."
"... Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate" ..."
"... During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame". ..."
"... The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. ..."
So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing
their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame
for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment
of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers
of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the
rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous.
The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded
in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption
was no theme for the media.
According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John
Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. All of this was not considered worth reporting by
the media. Virtually all national media in the United States supported Clinton's candidacy. Instead
of reporting how the machinery of the Democratic Party and the Clinton team stole the primary elections
to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump.
I do not wish here to defend Donald Trump. He made numerous stupid, racist, sexist, and anti-Islamic
statements that were rightly criticized. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was treated with kid
gloves while her huge criminal political record was glossed over. Instead of coming to grips with
their abject failures, the liberals and their media continue in slandering Donald Trump. Trump's
first declarations show already that he has conquered new frontiers.
An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect
can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military
and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other
president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions.
I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building
a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating
into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation.
There exists a code of honor among thieves.
Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric
against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment
dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another
sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. Even his
positive statements about Vladimir Putin or his suggestion to discard NATO, will probably vanish.
But what I do hope is that he stands to his rejection of TPP and TTIP and his pragmatic view of Vladimir
Putin.
Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close
ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians. He sees Zionist colonization of the rest
of Palestine as no hindrance to peace. And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel
Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and
the entire Muslim world.
The German political and media class was not only surprised by the results of the US elections,
but did not even try to hide its revulsion against the choice of the American people. The entire
political class in Germany perceived and presented the Trump campaign in the same one-sided manner
as American media did. Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the
guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the
allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties:
"Germany and America are bound by common values - democracy, freedom, as well as respect for
the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color,
creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish
to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries' governments."
Other German politicians did not even attempt to hide their disdain for American voters by diplomatic
language. Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate", and Deputy Chancellor
Gabriel cartooned Trump as a
"trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement… [who wants] a rollback
to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at
best at the side table."
During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what
Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame".
The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals
and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should
rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. Ordinary
Americans are not as stupid as the Establishment wants us to believe. Established parties and media
would be well advised to give the new US President a chance to prove his worth. There will be, without
doubt, many occasions in the future for fact-based criticism.
"... Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected by the people of this country. ..."
"... It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious felonies. ..."
The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
… The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn't
just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling
the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of
the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must
own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked
giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school,
every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was
their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense
of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008,
only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people
who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed
anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral
College. These people didn't know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media
thought they did.
This is a grueling but necessarily treatise on how the Political Elite played God and got burned.
The essence here is wake up and fix the Democrat Party.
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly
or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory.
More than that and more importantly,
we also missed the story , after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense
of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great moral and intellectual failing:
its
unbearable smugness . Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in
the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate,
it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones
who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the
people who cover it.
Trump
knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering
him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances.
We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or
policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper
inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected
by the people of this country.
It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people
from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents
at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of
bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious
felonies.
The media over stated the drivers behind these views to propel their candidate to victory. They
were not reporting facts.
The last good perspective was from the Morning Joe show:
"... he Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton". A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate. ..."
"... Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut." ..."
"... NeverHillary turned out to be bigger than NeverTrump. Hillary got less than 6 million votes compared to Obama. Trump got nearly as much as Romney. ..."
"... A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate. ..."
"... When the Democrats unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible to openly identify with Trump. ..."
"... On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for enough reporters to actually talk to people. ..."
"... the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged" ..."
"... I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton for months before the election. ..."
"... The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour and have the polls match the result. ..."
"... i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use.. ..."
"... It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls. ..."
"... theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex. ..."
"... 1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence). TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%. Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004. ..."
"... This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired. ..."
"... A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically, the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted) based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic changes over the last 4 years. ..."
"... Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case, she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election. ..."
"... Are the polls done to discover "what's up", or are they done to project the view that one side is winning? ..."
"... I go with the second view. That's what the 'corrections' are all about. The 'corrections' need to be dropped completely ..."
"... This. There was a Wikiliks Podesta email in whdich Clinton operatives discussed oversampling certain groups to inflate the poll in her favor. ..."
"... Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth? ..."
"... I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary. ..."
"... This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election), which overestimated Clinton's support. ..."
"... So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7% lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll, so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin of the poll. ..."
"... You assume public polls are conducted by impartial actors who wish to inform and illuminate..... your assumption is incorrect. ..."
"... The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. ..."
"... According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory, a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said. ..."
"... It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although, if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle East. ..."
Today I discussed the U.S. election with a friend who studied and practices statistics. I asked
about the failure of the polls in this years presidential election. Her explanation: The polls are
looking at future events but are biased by the past. The various companies and institutions adjust
the polls they do by looking at their past prognoses and the real results of the past event. They
then develop correcting factors, measured from the past, and apply it to new polls. If that correcting
factor is wrong, possibly because of structural changes in the electorate, then the new polls will
be corrected with a wrong factor and thus miss the real results.
Polls predicting the last presidential election were probably off by 3 or 5 points towards the
Republican side. The pollsters then corrected the new polls for the Clinton-Trump race in favor of
the Democratic side by giving that side an additional 3-5 points. They thereby corrected the new
polls by the bias that was poll inherent during the last race.
But structural changes, which we seem to have had during this election, messed up the result.
Many people who usually vote for the Democratic ticket did not vote for Clinton. The "not Clinton"
progressives, the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" who voted Obama in the last election stayed home,
voted for a third party candidate or even for Trump. The pollsters did not anticipate such a deep
change. Thus their correction factor was wrong. Thus the Clinton side turned out to be favored in
polls but not in the relevant votes.
Real polling, which requires in depth-in person interviews with the participants, does not really
happen anymore. It is simply to expensive. Polling today is largely done by telephone with participants
selected by some database algorithm. It is skewed by many factors which require many corrections.
All these corrections have some biases that do miss structural changes in the underlying population.
The Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton".
A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done
and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables"
into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate.
If Sanders would have been the candidate the now wrong poll correction factor in favor of Democrats
would likely have been a correct one. The deep antipathy against Hillary Clinton in a decisive part
of the electorate was a factor that the pseudo-science of cheap telephone polls could not catch.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have
caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
There were some twenty to thirty different entities doing polls during this election cycle. Five
to ten polling entities, with better budgets and preparations, would probably have led to better
prognoses. Some media companies could probably join their poll budgets, split over multiple companies
today, to have a common one with a better analysis of its base population.One that would have anticipated
"not Hillary".
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt. What past bias is captured
in these predictions of the future? What are their structural assumptions and are these still correct?
What structural change might have happened?
Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often
a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my
friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut."
An equally interesting question about polls: what about the exit polls? If Greg Palast and others
are right, exit polls indicate that the voting was rigged. What does your statistics friend think
about that?
After the 1948 election, statisticians started to get rid of the quota sampling for electoral
polls. After this election, it's time to reassess Statistics.
A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton
tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did
Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate.
I suspect that the future of polling isn't as dire as you're painting it, b. There was huge anti-Trump
bias in the Jew-controlled Christian-West Media from the beginning of the campaign. You drew attention
to negative MSM bias yourself in the post which pointed out how consistently wrong the Punditocracy
had been in predicting the imminent failure of the Trump campaign - thereby rubbing their noses
in their own ineptitude and tomfoolery.
One factor which seemed important to me was occasionally hilighted at regular intervals by
commenters here at MoA... The (apparent) fact that Trump addressed more, and bigger, crowds than
Mrs Clinton. I accepted those claims as fact, and didn't bother to check their veracity. But nevertheless
crowd size and frequency seems to have played a pivotal role in the outcome (as one would expect
in a political campaign).
Exit polls have provided checks on the accuracy of the vote count -- but are liable to the same
problem as the opinion pols, people who don't admit to their real position.
I'm not surprised that the polls fail badly in this presidential election. When the Democrats
unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible
to openly identify with Trump. Even Trump was saying so through out the campaign.The Democrats
together with their media partners truly believed that Donald Trump's alleged character flaws
would be enough to win the election. Despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone without a
blinker on that the momentum was on the side of Trump all along. Obama's phenomenon of 08 was
nothing compared to Trump's phenomenon of this year, but because neither the MSM nor the Pollsters
liked him they transferred their biases to their jobs. In any case I'm sure happy that the result
of the election turned out different from the skewed prognosis.
On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with
the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate
how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and
other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for
enough reporters to actually talk to people.
Since statistics had worked so well, and were cheaper to deal with, they won the day. And lost
the battle.
Now, most people at this site seemed to base their decisions of whom to vote for based on stands
on issues and known actions of the various candidates. But, even so, we probably paid attention
to the polling results. I know I took into consideration that Hillary would win big in NJ, leaving
me free to vote for Jill Stein. Based on known actions of Trump I could not vote for him, even
tho' I hoped he would kill TPP and have better relations with Russia. I feared and still do fear
his nominations to the Supreme Court. (I am not religious, but if I were I would pray daily, perhaps
hourly, for the continued good health of the Justices Kennedy, GInsburg, and Breyer. I would hope
the other Dem appointed justices would take care to avoid, oh, small airplanes....
Would Hillary have adjusted her campaign if she could have seen the rising disappointment of
the working class Dems (even middle class to higher income Dems)? I don't know. I do know that
her husband ran his first campaign on the famous "It's the economy, stupid" reminder.
Somehow, I don't think it would have registered enough.
And Obama ran on Hope and Change, but was always the Corporatist Dem Wall Street wanted. What
a waste. And now we have four more years of doing essentially nothing aboug climate change. It
was have been a strategy to put off even regulatory actions to lessen CO2 emissions until near
the end of his second term, but, dang, it makes it easier for Trump to negate those efforts.
Again, what a waste. But I didn't vote for Obama for either term bcz I saw that his actions
as IL state senator and as US senator were always looking out for the Big Money, Big Corporations,
and seldom worked for anyone below the middle class, more the top of the middle class.
A long explanatory report which signifies nothing critical. "The polls were wrong??" No. The polls
reported by MSM were wrong.
Big time, including from those from Clinton loving CBC here in Canada, which for an extended
time was reporting Hillary with an 11% lead. That number was far beyond any minor adjustments,
for sure.
There were polls, such as Rasmussen, itself suspected of fiddling, which were reporting ups
and downs of 2%, and ended up tied election day.
So, please schemers, please do not try to cover up the MSM's deliberate attempt to influence
results by using garbage numbers. Figures can lie, and liars can sure figure.
the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the
link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed
for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged"
I disagree with your friend, b. I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton
for months before the election.
The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats
than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed
that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour
and have the polls match the result. I think that Trump crying foul so early got them worried
that they might be caught. Remember, voting machines in 14 states are run by companies affiliated
with Soros.
i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's
brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda
tool for use..
It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more
and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls.
I have a weird conspiracy hypothesis that I mainly made up on my own;
The last FBI "reopening" and the quick subsequent "close-down" felt all too counter-intuitive
and silly, when examined solely based on their face value.
However, what if there was more to this? What if this was a final threat from FBI to the Soros-Clinton
mafia to "quickly unrig the voting machines" OR we will arrest the lot of you? Which, once the
promises were made by "allow fair play", required FBI to pull back as their part of the deal?
This - admittedly conspiracy - theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged
to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen
in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex.
I find it interesting b that you and your friend didn't seem to talk at all about the polling
questions....at least that you shared with us. It is my experience and education that even with
a "beauty contest" that we just had, that the structure of the polling questions make all the
difference in how people being polled respond.
Polls are funded by parties with agendas and the questions, assumptions and biases are baked
in to the result......IMO, they are all worthless or worse than that because folks see them, like
the media as being something of an authority figure and therefore believable which we know is
total BS.
Polls are just another propaganda tool of those rich enough to use them in their quiver of
control.
Timid Trumpists is the major factor, I would think. A factor already well known in UK. People
who are going to vote for a non-PC solution hesitate to admit it to poll questions.
All of the above is true, but - in addition - polls are used to manipulate campaigns.
People sympathize with someone who is considered a winner and when someone is considered likely
to lose people lose interest.
To get the vote out polls have to be tight. In addition to that polls are used to motivate
donors. In the end there has to be a reason pollsters get paid.
But even if polls would be done for purely scientific reasons, this election was impossible
to poll. The correct question would have been "Do you hate/fear candidate x enough to motivate
you to queue for voting for canditate y, or are you too disgusted to bother at all"
In the end, it was not the wrong polls that sank Clinton but the strategy to leave the anti-elitist
populist stuff to Trump and - unsuccessfully concentrate on winning the elitist Republican anti
Trump vote. That way she lost more of the Democrat Sanders vote than she could gain right wing.
The other factor was her reliance on television ads and media ties (they all backed her), a
reluctance to talk to large audiences and an inability to communicate via social media.
It is possible though she never had a chance against a well established reality show brand.
The good news is that after this election campaigns will be done mainly low cost social media.
The bad news is that these campaigns will be more fact free than ever and that the age of independent
quality newspapers is over.
So, you're saying that the age of independent quality newspapers has just ended, like about
now. Interesting pov...
Somehow, the last few years of the MSM coverage of the NATO-Salafist War on Syria have had
me convinced that the "independent quality newspapers" have become a*rse-wipe material a long
time ago. Instead, we get the Sorosoid ZioTakfirism.
But, yeah, maybe it's all Trump's fault. Hey I also blame Hezbollah for kicking Yisrael's arse
north of Litani in 2006. If they didn't piss of the Yivrim this much, maybe they wouldn't have
punitively collapsed the faith in the Western Society from the inside.
Ultimately, it's all Putin's fault. He started it all by beating the pro-Saudi Chechens into
a pulp back in 1999, and started the NATOQAEDA self-destruction.
1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence).
TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%.
Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004.
Methodology
"Traditional Telephone method" includes cell –live interviews by Region; Age; Gender; Race;
Income; Education; Party; Ideology; Investor; Area Type; Parental Status; White – men, women;
Black/Hispanic; Women-single, married; Household description –Upper/Middle-Middle, Working, Lower;
Religion; Union Household; Intensity of Support.
This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program
the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired.
Is Newsweek embarrassed yet? They forgot some history. Truman-Dewey. Madam President! How appropriate.
Some of b's posts regarding US politics seems naive but I chalk that up to his not being American.
But this technocratic excuse for the polling is just wrong. b, what happened to your skeptical
view of Western media????
virgile @ 9: An excerpt: " It was about the union men who refused to sell out their futures and
vote for a Democrat who is an agent of the One Percent."
And now, I fear, they still have no future.
James @ 15 said.." polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for
them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use..
How true..
Trumps choices for his cabinet don't leave much room for positive change, for the millions
of disaffected voters who put him in office. We'll see!
A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically,
the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted)
based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different
groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of
the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic
changes over the last 4 years.
Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so
it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not
randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring
Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case,
she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election.
It is important to stress that the election results ended up within the margin of error
(+-4%). The polls were not wrong, it is the media and the analyst who over-interpreted the data
and gave Clinton the win where she did not have a statistically significant (<4%) lead. This is
why if Nate Silver at 538 was consistently writing that the polls in many of the swing states
were within the error margin, although favouring Clinton, and their election prediction still
gave Trump a ~30% chance of victory. Other analysts were more careless (hello Huffington Post)
and even made fun of 538 for giving Trump any chance of victory.
There is no way to make more accurate polling for the future elections as the accuracy of the
poll is tied in to poll weighing, which is guesswork (although somewhat educated by the historical
data). Short of forcing everyone to vote, election-to-election turnout will change and affect
the accuracy of the polls.
Instead of interpreting every single of those Polls as plausibly biased on one side, why don't
you take the entire population of Western MSM Polls, and see if their median predicted outcome
vs actual final outcome difference is statistically significant?
I'd say you'd find their entire population to be likely biased at least to six-sigma level.
(I have no time to show this myself, just proposing someone's hypothesis, as a research idea
for someone's M Sci thesis for example)
I have lived in the D.C. area for the past 22 years with a land line phone and am listed in the
White Pages. I have never been called by a pollster, although I am often called by political campaigns.
I do not know anyone who has been called by a pollster.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably
have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
No more 'adjustments' allowed. A desire to actually discover the lay of the land and to publish
it is what's required. Good luck on getting that from the political class and/or their captive
msm. Everything they do is a lie, calculated to keep themselves in power.
The polls were obviously blatantly skewed towards urban Blue zones, and did not include working
adults in Red zones, then were 'massaged' by reporting media in clearly a Rodham-paid PAC marketing
campaign to brand the sheeples 'Wear Rodham!'
Only Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight even came close, but he had to rely on those same skewed
polls. After all, since 1990, you can buy a CD set of American voting records by street address,
it's not rocket science to be able to 'algo' that into a 'poll' that skews whichever way the highest
bidder's (Rodham) quants tell you to. https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/videos/598130190359668/
As if on cue, or something. All of a sudden, S.U.R.P.R.I.S.E,… a litany of polls released today
show Donald Trump ahead in key battleground states (Ohio and Florida), and tied –or closer
than the margin of error– in new national polls…. […]
Remember what we stated on October 20th: […]
The real battle is the battle for your mind. The peak U.S. media false polling cycle is
thankfully in the rear-view mirror.
It was because I followed that right-wing blog that I ignored all polls other than the LA Times
tracking poll. (I didn't know about the IBD/TIPP poll until after the election.)
Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling
and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and
the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could
predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth?
I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned
a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary.
There were two big variables that the pollsters had to guess at. One was the voter turnout
numbers for those precincts that had many working class people with a high school or less education
level. As it turns out those people came out in higher numbers than they have in elections over
the past two decades. The other was voter turnout for many precincts that supported Obama in 2008
and 2012. What happened here was many of those voters who did turn out voted for Trump, instead
of the Democrat. There was a third uncertainty here that no on has yet figured out. That was those
people who would never admit to a stranger that they were going to vote for Trump and simply lied
to the pollster.
In any case those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really
picked up on.
This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election),
which overestimated Clinton's support. For example, the Rasmussen poll, which traditionally
weights more Republican, gave Clinton 1.7% lead, 44.8% to 43.1% (3% margin of error), so fairly
close to the election results (47.3% to 47.8%).
So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7%
lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll,
so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin
of the poll.
When you mention 6 sigma, you really don't really know what you are talking about. Typical
polling error is 3 - 4% and the election result was within this error for most polls in all of
the states. Standard deviation (sigma) that you mention is a random uncertainty associated with
a measurement and it does not apply here. As I tried to convey, the errors in polling tend to
be systematic, not random, because they are tied to weighting of the polls, not to the sample
of the population as this is mostly corrected by the weighting. So because most of the MSM polls
use similar weighting methodology based on the same historical data, they will all be off, there
will be no random distribution of some for Trump, some for Clinton. Weighing based on different
historical data skews the whole picture one way, it's not a random error. This is why pollster
slap a relatively large 3 - 4% error on their polls, it is meant to cover any systematic bias
of the weighting as well as random errors.
those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really picked
up on.
Have a loook at the
LA Times
tracking poll . It had Trump ahead by 3.2% on election day, which is close to the margin of
error. The graph there is interesting, because dates of various events, such as the debates are
marked. The poll figures moved in response to those events as one would expect.
Before the election, the people who do that poll said that they did best at predicting the
2012 election. Oh, in a
post about the
election's outcome, Alexander Dugin singled out that poll for praise.
I have a better idea--how about we stop the stupid polling altogether since there is only one
poll that really matters? Then the media would have to focus on the issues rather than the horserace.
Oh, the humanity!
Hypothesis A - that it's all explainable by random distribution of their samples.
If you use Hypotethesis A, and then disprove it in it's own game (be it 3, or 6 sigma), then
you have to suggest an alternative.
I don't know what the alternative is. I don't even claim I do. But you can more easily disprove
the veracity that the polls could have mostly been non-biased by showing that hypothesis is unlikely
to be RIGHT. That's where sigmas make absolute sense.
Furthermore, what you are proving here is that the POPULATION of ALL COMBINED polls has a mean
that must be different from the POPULATION of all actual voters, not of disproving the polls one
by one.
I think you've totally ignored my point, you keep looking at individual polls as trees, I am
looking at the poll forest and saying the entire forest is buggered if almost all polls erred
on one side, regardless of their individual margins of error.
The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story
to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. 'Hey, my editor needs someone to come
out and say something, can you say this...?' <-- Now, if that is standard practice in journalism
at 'the paper of record', then skewing polls to suit a common agenda is a given, again in my opinion.
This of course is great news for sites like MofA.
Also impossible to capture The Don's campaign playing the electoral college system like an
old mandolin, as it turns out. 306 Trump bts 232 Hillary it looks like in the wash up. That's
old school work rate doing the job. Fair play. Great to see all the student debt laden brainwashed
libtards out there doing there nut. They don't even know what a bullet they dodged + shite like
the TPP is now dead. Some gratitude.
Hopefully in 2020 there are some more scientific polls like the USC Dornslife/LA Times poll,
each having their own differing methodologies preferably. This should give the punters a better
'feel' for the electorate.
In other news...
Assange is being interviewed tomorrow by Swedush police (for the 2nd time I should add). There
are and were no charges laid. I suspect their will be no charges brought tomorrow.
...so what happened...? Did The Rule of Law just...magically appear...?
The most extraordinary thing I learned about polls is that exit polls are altered as soon as the
official election or primary vote is in-- to match it.
According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory
was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory,
a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said.
Ireland's government said the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, had a 10-minute call with Trump, and
was invited to visit the White House on St Patrick's Day.
Mexico's president, Enrique Peńa Nieto, has said he and Trump agreed in their call to meet
before Trump takes office, while Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was invited to
the White House.
Other leaders to have a chat with Trump so far include the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe – they
reportedly talked for 20 minutes and agreed to meet soon in New York – and South Korea's president,
Park Geun-hye.
Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was reported to have chatted with Trump about
security and trade in their call.
No surprises there.
It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although,
if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle
East.
Concur with all your points. And yes, the timing of the Swedes finally deciding to interview
Assange is funny.
I never thought that Hillary would become president, btw., from the moment she declared
for 2016. Which is not to say that I was not concerned that the demonization of Trump might throw
the election. We'll never know, but it is possible that Trump wouldn't have won without Wikileaks.
And the two sets of leaks were very well timed.
To return to polls. It's not just most media polls that were off. The Clinton campaign's internal
polls were off, too. They didn't have much doubt that they would win. (The same thing happened
with Romney of course, but in their case, their internal polls differed from the media polls.)
Apparently, they really did believe they have a firewall, with redundancies no less.
But Democrats had a simpler answer for why Clinton lost. As one Democratic strategist close to
Clinton told The Post, it all came down to "one word: Comey." Too bad for Democrats there are
zero electoral votes in the State of Denial. FBI Director James Comey didn't use a private e-mail
server to conduct official State Department business and put 110 classified e-mails on that unsecured
server. Comey didn't fail to turn over some 14,900 e-mails to the FBI after assuring Americans
that "I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over."
Comey didn't lie to the American people about Benghazi, publicly blaming the attacks on "inflammatory
material posted on the Internet." Comey didn't tell Democratic voters he was against free-trade
deals, but then tell Brazilian bankers that his dream was for "hemispheric . . . open trade and
open borders."
Comey didn't have a foundation that accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign
governments during his tenure as secretary of state. He didn't give, as I wrote last month, "special
treatment to Clinton Foundation donors after the Haiti quake, asking for them to be identified
as 'FOBs' (friends of Bill Clinton) or 'WJC VIPs' (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs)."
Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Not because of Comey. She lost because exit polls showed that
54 percent of voters believe she is "corrupt."
To the elites in Washington, her corruption was apparently no big deal, at least not compared
with their horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. But Americans correctly saw her corruption
as corrosive to our democracy.
This election was a popular repudiation of Clinton's corruption and deceit - and she owns that.
But there is one person besides herself whom she can blame: President Obama. Because while Clinton
may have lost to Donald Trump, it was Obama who created him.
"... Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run a very divisive
and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails
from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would
be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda. ..."
"... Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
..."
"... The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right."
Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should
be told to "take them seriously." ..."
"... The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions
that will hurt them in a general election." ..."
"... It was not Putin trying to rig the elections, it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field
as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her. "Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to
move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton then took the strategic position
saying "we don't want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates
who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party." ..."
"... "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and
tell the press to them seriously." ..."
"... This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be intentionally
divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the constitution and
the country. ..."
"... Any Democrat who is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the
roses. You just got what you deserve. ..."
"... It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment candidates
as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider. ..."
"... It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and independents
cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates & that this was absolutely
the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition at the top of the food chain
has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch. ..."
"... Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her. ..."
"... Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election. ..."
"... What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people. That's
the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of seeing it again
and again. ..."
"... from the tone of the leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
..."
"... This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards. (I
need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction. ..."
"... It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and they'd
have to play defense. ..."
"... Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore, her allies
could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and self confident that
they fucked up themselves. ..."
"... People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history! ..."
"... Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he will
be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One never can
win follow a defensive strategy! ..."
"... unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for bipartisan!
compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past. ..."
"... If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to hammer it again home
that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic turnaround then the conservatives
are GONE. We won't get another chance. ..."
Meanwhile, Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run
a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According
to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise
what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the
road to hide her agenda.
... ... ...
Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing
presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates.
This enlisted mainstream media who then focused to Trump and raise him above all others assuming
that would help Hillary for who would vote for Trump. This was a deliberate strategy all designed
to propel Hillary to the White House.
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called
for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the
right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media
outlets should be told to "take them seriously."
If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two
weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message
on straregy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate. They included this
attachment a "memo for the DNC discussion."
The memo was addressed to the Democratic National Committee and stated bluntly, "the strategy
and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican
presidential field." Here we find that the real conspiracy was Clinton manipulating the Republicans.
"Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is
intended to put those ideas to paper."
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same:
to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate."
The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate
Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative
positions that will hurt them in a general election."
It was not Putin trying to rig the elections,
it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her.
"Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to
the right." Clinton then took the strategic position saying "we don't want to marginalize the more
extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream
of the Republican Party."
Her manipulative strategy was to have the press build up Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell
the press to them seriously."
This conspiracy has emerged from the Podesta emails. It was Clinton conspiring with mainstream
media to elevate Trump and then tear him down. We have to now look at all the media who endorsed
Hillary as simply corrupt. Simultaneously, Hillary said that Bernie had to be ground down to the
pulp. Further leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Sanders' presidential
campaign. It was Hillary manipulating the entire media for her personal gain. She obviously did not
want a fair election because she was too corrupt.
What is very clear putting all the emails together, the rise of Donald Trump was orchestrated
by Hillary herself conspiring with mainstream media, and they they sought to burn him to the ground.
Their strategy backfired and now this is why she has not come out to to speak against the violence
she has manipulated and inspired.
This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be
intentionally divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the
constitution and the country. No wonder Hillary could not go to the stage to thank her supporters.
She never counted on them and saw the people as fools. The entire strategy was to take the White
House with a manipulation of the entire election process. Just unbelievable. Any Democrat who
is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the roses. You just got what
you deserve.
Notveryamused -> Charles Wilson •Nov 12, 2016 9:12 PM
It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit
should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment
candidates as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider.
It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and
independents cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates
& that this was absolutely the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition
at the top of the food chain has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch.
Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable"
republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans
for her.
Could there be a more fitting slap in the face to someone of such enormous hubris and arrogance?
jcaz -> Automatic Choke •Nov 12, 2016 9:47 PM
Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election.
What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people.
That's the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of
seeing it again and again.
MalteseFalcon -> espirit •Nov 12, 2016 10:47 PM
Hillary Rodent fashions herself as some kind of leader who is a Christian (Methodist) and loves
America ("Need to unify!!"). So let the Rodent get on TV and tell these bought and paid for rioters
to stop. "Not in my name" should be the Rodent's plea.
<crickets>
She's a fraud.
Joe Davola -> MalteseFalcon •Nov 12, 2016 11:44 PM
It truly was the worst campaign in history (topping Mondale 84). If only they'd put half the
effort into their campaign that they put into dirty tricks. Then again, from the tone of the
leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
They were so busy playing it like a parlor game, they forgot to actually provide real reasons
to vote for her - beyond it was her turn.
This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring)
and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards.
(I need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction.
FreedomGuy -> Joe Davola •Nov 13, 2016 12:44 AM
It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive
qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and
they'd have to play defense.
It is never about how good they are. It is about how bad you/the other side is.
caconhma -> jcaz •Nov 12, 2016 10:31 PM
War is war. The goal is to win by destroying an opponent. Therefore, any actions and any strategy
leading to a victory are totally justified!
Consequently, one cannot blame Hitlery for her actions. Hitlery has done the right things but
Jewish arrogance that guided and executed her election campaign negated and destroyed all advantages
she had. Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore,
her allies could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and
self confident that they fucked up themselves.
People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always
write the history!
Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he
will be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One
never can win follow a defensive strategy!
hardmedicine -> caconhma •Nov 13, 2016 3:46 AM
unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for
bipartisan! compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past.
If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to
hammer it again home that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic
turnaround then the conservatives are GONE. We won't get another chance.
Grosvenor Pkwy -> Chris Dakota •Nov 13, 2016 6:29 AM
Long-term drug and alcohol abuse slowly destroys the brain. She was definitely smarter 20 years
ago. "first we have to bring them to heel..."
"... Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably. ..."
"... Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." ..."
"... let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin. ..."
"... Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. ..."
"... You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. ..."
"... Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy" show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign - spins the election results tonight. ..."
Then there was ultraliberal Michael Moore, who in a
facebook post
urged to "Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same
bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey
like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off."
Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative
they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those
same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull
more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn't wake up this morning ready to fight, resist
and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years
must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness
and the madness that's about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that
you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair.
YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system
only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them
all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only
strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own
that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: "HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR
VOTE!" The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period.
Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority
of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because
of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll
continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want. You live in a country where a majority
of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid
the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries,
they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care
system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the "liberal"
position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
* * *
There were countless more such examples of prominent liberals accusing the press of bias and propaganda
long after the fact, even as the press itself refuses to admit any guilt, while itself blaming others,
and so the circle continues to turn, and nothing changes in a world in which nobody knows what happens
next now that the status quo has been crushed by the people.
Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy"
show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign
- spins the election results tonight.
"... The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable, and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats. ..."
"... Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. ..."
"... But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine. ..."
No shit, Sherlock. Sanders would have beaten Trump. We are living in extreme times, and in
extreme times centrism and political 'triangulation' doesn't work.
This result will be repeated next year in France with the National Front. Mark my words. And when
it does, France will vote to leave the EU and the house of cards will come crashing down.
You can thank the Democrats, a party that used to represent working people, for at least part
of that. Their billionaire backers picked Clinton because she'd ensure their wealth would remain
untouched. I wonder what they're feeling now?
Aaron Jackson -> NathAldridge 4d ago
How do you figure? Clinton won the Democratic primary by less than the margin of superdelegates.
She had a MASSIVE lead in funding, institutional support, and (at the least) insider bias--though
it was likely more than that, given that nearly every single election anomaly in that primary
bounced her way.
The DNC intentionally limited the debates and scheduled those they did have for off times to try
to limit the damage Sanders could do to Clinton, and big media refused to cover Bernie Sanders
except in the context of Clinton.
And even with all of that, Sanders pulled within 300 delegates of winning the Democratic Nomination
by working through a grassroots, positive campaign. The momentum was entirely on his side, too!
And national polls showed him performing MUCH better against Trump than Clinton. And, of course,
he had no scandals (real or imagined) to leverage.
The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided
it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable,
and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican
sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats.
NathAldridge 4d ago
The Guardian in a nutshell!
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as
strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from
the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's
enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three
times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white,
a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because
they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the
Republican candidate.
dynamic22 4d ago
"But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when
the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country
wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine."
You said everything really.
Watchman80 -> dynamic22 4d ago
Yup.
Also, see this. Note the date (and the imagined Trump speech)
Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness,
shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
I couldn't have put it better. I could have put it with more swear words in though.
BigBlue80 4d ago
Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After all, there was a reason that tens
of millions of good people voted for him yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high
regard for him.
If you assume that election victory (not even a majority as apparently Clinton will win the
popular vote) legitmises everything, you are right. But if you believe that there are western
values that should not be sacrificed than you are wrong. Eventually, this will be the end of democracy
- it will kill itself by electing a fascist. I happened before and it looks ever more likely.
The you US with ist overbearing nationalism, its leader-orientation and glorification of the military
was always close to fascism, but now it might have taken the final leap into the abyss.
atuocool 4d ago
"[Neo]Liberals" are a type of conservative who never convince me of the sincerity of their
"progressive" values. What was progressive about Hillary? What would she have actually done for
the poor? How would she have moved America away from being a corporate plutocracy? We all know
the answer is nothing. Trump is a nightmare, but he represents a bizarre, retrograde change while
Clinton represented a vacuous status quo.
with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to
feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station
Correct, it is censorship and suppression of contrary opinion and enormously biased towards "The
Chosen One"
Once again it proves that the Guardian is against the tide of History.
It is not bad to be contrarian or representing an alternative opinion or "voice" however provided
you still maintain some sense of integrity and journalistic professionalism, providing content,
news and information that is fair, balanced without indulging in gratuitous character assassination,
presenting controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is honest, equitable, and
balanced.
The Guardian during the American election as with Brexit and many other controversial issues
has consistently aligned itself with policies and opinion that many would consider left-wing or
liberal yet is neither as the viewpoints they support betrays the liberty and freedom of the ordinary
citizen.
As I said before the election regardless who win or lose the media has already lost by showing
its hand and exposed itself as not a true independent source of news and information, but pursuing
definite agendas and siding with corporate news media's opinions and politics.
According to the Guardian's own view liberalism will have to be remade in a post-liberal age.
It is their own peculiar set of values they believe that is important and not the very principles
the left originally defended. Pursuing a certain "metropolitan liberal creed".
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
Their brand of Liberalism has been the complete antithesis of allowing people to take control
of their lives. It has been a dictatorial imposition of the beliefs of the least liberal nature.
Equating the tendencies of so-called "social justice warriors" and so-called "identity politics"
and equating them somehow with liberalism you're a long way from the truth have little to do with
liberalism and no, that's not "left" either.
The establishment in the mainstream media believe they are economically liberals - though privately
they look more kindly on monopolies than old school liberals would have. Yet these "liberals"
want to happily embrace Brussels' legalistic regime of rules that range from the petty and impractical
to a punitive and autocratic dictatorship.
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil
liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes
economic freedom.
It is no secret what the problem is, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, people who feel they
have no future or rights in their own country anymore.
Ask yourself is what you identify with or support contributing towards a more peaceful, harmonious
society where all have a sense of having a place and a future in their own country where they
feel they fit in and contribute towards a more safe, secure and prosperous society?
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented,
more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters
and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
This is not a new problem. The social elites (self-appointed) of all political persuasions are
always bemoaning the stupidity of the plebs in not bowing to their superior understanding of all
things. That this unfounded hubris is an amazing exemplar of denial of reality (who just won this
election, for example) doesn't seem able to take root in the bubble of acceptable thought in their
minds. How could they possibly be talking out of their bottom when it comes to damn near everything?
(All evidence aside.)
We need the voice of the 'common people' to be heard, without being filtered by the elites. Fake
democracy is not going to work -- we'll end up with a bigger fiasco, such as Jamie Dimon vs Kim Kardashian
in the next US Presidential contest. Way past time for those in power to wake up to the fact that
they're not in control, and real change that involves the great unwashed in the process is necessary.
Trump is one dumb guy, but he has managed to figure out how to use this frustration to get his misogynist,
racist, backside into the chair in the Oval Office.
- Election of Trump is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
preclude the possibility of ascendance of someone like Trump.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to
eventually make possible the ascendance of someone like Trump.
- Sanders was right. That having had had been said, he would have still lost to Drumpf if he
were the D's nominee instead of HRC.
- That is because RealAmerica_a spoke more vocally this time around, overwhelming the voice
of RealAmerica_b.
- Judging by geographical size alone, RealAmerica_a is Real America.
- It is simply unimaginable that the enlightened citizenry will elect someone as destructive
and unqualified as Reagan in 1980. Such a possibility is not conceivable in any logical space,
and even fiction writers are wary to contemplate such an impossibility.
- Election of Reagan is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party
system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model
of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves
somewhere down the line.
- Trump's victory is a repeat of the interplay of the socioeconomic forces that made Dubya's
presidency possible in 2000. Eight more years of this worldview and we will have another Obama-type
candidacy afterwards to clean up the mess and make the world safe again for the staggering-but-still-dominant
neoliberal order.
- People will be just too exhausted after eight years of Trump's presidency, and they will
be so relieved after the election of the next Obama-type president as to retreat to their homes
and let the new savior continue cuddling the big economic players and attempting to reach a Grand
Bargain with the Republicans to further erode the threadbare social safety net holding up the
people, of course for the good of the people themselves and in the name of Serious Politics.
-The dominant position in our society will continue to be the generalization of Alan Grayson's
observation: Don't fall down, if you do disappear quickly.
- Setting aside the status quo status of Clinton's policy prescriptions (she a competent steward
of the Washington Consensus), Trump's victory also signals the provisional victory of the manly
men of RealAmerica_a (and the women who love them) over women (and minorities, and the LGBT, and
immigrants, and etc).
- The same way that most people don't know or care about the wavelengths associated with colors,
they don't know or care about the underlying forces affecting their lives as long as the politicians
put on a good Reality TV show and pull effectively at their heartstrings.
- In other words, F science, F reality.
- In other words, long live Realty TV, the rule of Kardashians, the Apprentice,
WWE/WWF , etc. Constant exposure
to these things matter.
- Constant exposure to these things don't matter.
- Tomorrow the Sun will come up as before, and the Earth will go around it at a steady pace
as before, and the already enfeebled welfare state will continue to fray as before, and millions
of US citizens will continue their steady fall into precariousness as before (especially Trump
supporters in RealAmerica_a), and millions will continue to lose steady jobs and be pushed into
the the gig economy, and the 1% will continue raking in the loot as before under the benevolent
gaze of their new leader.
- If HRC had won, all above would still occur, but probably at a lower rate (except for the
Sun and Earth thing).
I feel lots of parallels can be drawn with brexit, particularly the points made at the end. amazingly
people dont like being insulted and talked down to by party elites, the gop base has been totally
transformed by trumps campaign.
that said has anyone else noticed that trump supporters only ever say 'hes going to do so much
for us' and trump says we are going to reopen the mines/factories/get a better deal but never
said how. he has promised unicorns and rainbows to people dealt a shit hand by the economic changes
of the last 30 years.
The political class amongst US liberals are neo-liberals
Neoliberalism from Reagan to [Bill] Clinton .
written in 1998 the review of this book ends with
" Michael Meeropol's damning indictment of the economic direction of the Clinton presidency demonstrates
that nowhere is the need for a new movement more pressing than in the United States".
Well Bush & Obama & Hillary, had she been elected, were continuations of that economic direction.
If America has needed a new movement to win since 1999 then I guess they got really desperate
which is why they voted for something as bad as Trump. Yes , the liberals or more specifically
neo-liberals an be held responsible
Frank has been making exactly this point since 1997. Others worth reading on this issue include
Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
Unfortunately, in a lot of fora where this message sorely needs to be heard right now, this
article would be summarily dismissed on the basis that Frank used the word "shrill," which is
out of bounds in liberal discourse. Which of course just illustrates Frank's point.
The DNC put President Trump into the White House. The DNC, fixated on the anointed, untouchable
HRC, lost its moral compass and the good work of Bernie and Warren, now amounts to a big fat ZERO.
Laughable, how out of touch - meaningless motherhood cliches cannot pay the bills.
It is a case in point that the MSM have completely lost touch with a population that often relies
on the internet for its news. In the old days, the newspaper that was closest to your political
viewpoint was delivered to your door as your primary source of information, now every news outlet,
blog and forum in the world is delivered directly to your tablet.
The media, like the Government has considerably less influence than a decade or two ago.
Good article and, as one poster put it, encapsulates the Guardian's editorial line in a nutshell.
The FT seems to be to the left of this paper these days, forced to be more hard nosed about
the world. This from its columnist Wolfgang Munchenau some days ago:
"What led the centre-left on to such a self-destructive path? The answer is a combination
of the following: a false belief that elections are won from the centre; the lure of ministerial
limousines; an inferiority complex about not being able to run "responsible fiscal policies";
and a belief that voters of the left have nowhere else to go. .. The main issue is not
whether a Keynesian policy response would be economically correct. The more important point
is that if the centre-left does not offer it, the populists will. Unless the centre-left returns
to its Keynesian roots, I think there is a good chance that the politics of insurrection will
succeed."
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is
kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why
every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called
the middle class loves Trump. He is the human molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for.
The human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from
them.
the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda
station.
That's a very accurate summary. The first step to winning next time is to understand why you
lost this time. The establishment view was that people were going to get Hillary Clinton whether
they liked it or not. Next time try listening to people who are angry that their pay has fallen
in real terms for 10 years. Try listening to people whose views you disagree with rather than
'no platform' them lest your delicate sensibilities be offended.
The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely
short.
I often wonder is having a celebrity endourse you counter productive. I saw many celebs appear
on TV and social media telling people they shouldn't vote for Trump. Some went as far as to call
people who might vote for Trump idiots. How many people got fed up with rich, famous people telling
them how they should vote? If you're someone sitting in America's rust belt, no job or low paid
crap job, being told by someone you think probably owns a Hollywood mansion and does very little
work, would you not feel a little resentful being told by them how to vote? Wouldn't you take
a dislike to a candidate who appears on stage with these celebs and yet you feel ignores you?
Just a thought.
If you have the right to vote, the responsibility is to think through the implications of using
that vote for X or Y candidate, to work out for yourself what will happen to you, your family,
your community and your country if you vote for X or Y.
If you vote for Y because you feel "resentful" that someone is using their freedom of speech
to urge voting for X rather than Y - perhaps you shouldn't really be voting at all. Just a thought.
More than just an odd thought my friend. The sight of a procession of wealthy, smug and self entitled
celebs, often utter hypocrites, expecting to deliver their Facebook followers to a politician
is nauseating and angers more than a few. Few of these celebs are famous for their brains so being
called an idiot by a halfwit with money hardly endears them. But still society is in thrall to
the concept of celebrity following. It begs the question of what all these followers are actually
following. Perhaps Lady Gaga et al have confused the pathological need for an entertainment fix
with an adoration of their thoughts and outlook.
Killing off the neo-liberal virus in the Democratic Party would be a start, but won't be enough,
if the Democrats simply put the American equivalents of Jeremy Corbyn in its place. What's desperately
needed here are fresh ideas--something analogous to the Keynesian ideas that gave intellectual
underpinning to the New Deal.
The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent
professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone
who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether
there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status,
that turns people away.
I think this is a very succinct assessment and goes most of the way to explaining this result,
and the Brexit result too. People don't want to be lectured, they want to be listened to (yes,
even if you think they're wrong).
You see, their sneering attitude to the British working class, their name-calling, their bogus
judgements about the working class for not wanting any more of their rights and opportunities
taken away from them.
The 'liberals' are hated as much as the toffs. Brexit was a great example of the bile and hatred
the 'liberals' spew out at the disadvantaged working class.
It wasn't the 'liberals' housing and schools, communities and healthcare, employment rights
and opportunities that was being eroded though was it? No. But that didn't stop the 'liberals'
branding the working class as 'racists' and 'stupid' and 'blind' did it.
Maybe you now can see yourself, on this poxy 'liberal' website and see how YOU have created
a situation where the working class want ANYTHING other than more of your poison.
Look at the people bleating about Brexit: the 'liberals', the politicians, the bankers, big
business, the judges...my goodness, doesn't that tell a story of the haves and have nots. All
the bleaters are the scum that have never had the working class' best interests in mind and yet
you think we, the working class, should take heed of their fatuous, aquisitive, vile, whimpers?
Really?
Multi-Billionaire Media Barons controlling the news on both sides of the Atlantic (the same
Baron in the case of Murdoch) and they in turn backed by the Trillionaire old and true establishment
who are the exact same families as a hundred years ago and hundreds of years before that in many
cases.
Very well written and I agree to a large extent - the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood
Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant of the lives and problems of the working class than
the liberals? And are they likely to do anything about those problems unless they simultaneously
line their own pockets? If, and it's a very big if, the interests of the working class and the
interests of Trump et al align somehow then there is a silver lining. If not, then the best we
can hope for is that liberals start to reconnect with the people they purport to represent.
the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant
of the lives and problems of the working class than the liberals?
No. But maybe, just maybe, the 'left-wing' parties will wake and remember what they are supposed
to be for.
Here's the other thing. Clinton and her mates at the New York Times and the Guardian are always
lecturing us on the need to be compassionate and welcoming towards refugees from faraway places
who would like to come and live among us, but there's never a moment of compassion for the people
who are already here and suffering miserably on the margins of our already unequal societies -
the unemployed and badly employed, the badly housed and homeless, those working sixty hours a
week on the minimum wage for some crappy agency. So, guess what. That's why people are voting
for stuff like Brexit and Trump.
If you lot in the metropolitan elite can't see this then you are doomed to keep repeating the
same mistakes.
Just like Silvio Berlusconi, Trumps opponents were incapable to escape the trap of trying to sling
shit at a candidate made out of teflon.
The Clinton camp tried to fight a war in the trenches...but Trump feeds of negativity, they
should have learnt early that nothing was too outrageous or controversial to tarnish him.
The closest they got was the misogyny accusations and even they didn't stick. Just like Berlusconi,
Trump the lover of pageantry and beautiful women was being portrayed as a woman hater but he cleverly
made it sound like he was hater of feminists instead of women.
The problem with Clinton is that she tried to play the integrity card but that was easily debunked
by Trump with email gate.
The voice of sanity. Thank you, Mr. Frank.
The Democratic Establishment didn't give a hoot about what Bernie had to say, because his presidency
would not have served their ambitions. They're more interested in getting nice jobs at Goldman
Sachs than controlling the finance industry. And their sons and daughters will not fight in all
the wars Clinton&Co see as great business opportunity.
The Dem establishment has failed the people, and now we all reep the whirlwind.
I agree with Frank's analysis though not his use of the word 'liberal' which has confusingly different
meanings. I think the same analysis could be used to explain Brexit.
The problem is a political class which wishes to maintain the status quo of a neo-liberal,
globalised economy. For 35 years this economy has redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich
and massively damaged the environment. It has thus disadvantaged the great majority of the people
in the USA, the UK and indeed people across the world. People are quite reasonably fed up with
the lies behind this 'trickle-down' economics. They are angry and want something different. The
vacuum created by the failure of the left to recognise this, and come up with a new solution,
has resulted in Trump, UKIP, Marine LePen etc.
No. I really think liberals have been their own worst enemies during this election.
They have treated ordinary white Americans as if they are shit, spoken about them in ways that
should make them hang their heads in shame and behaved as if they are living in a oligarchy where
they can call the shots instead of a democracy and now they are paying the price.
You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns around and bites you.
I would also question the term"liberals" to describe people who are happy seeing jobs moved
offshore, causing unemployment at home and slave labour conditions abroad; encouraging mass immigration
to bring wages down and create a powerless and easily exploitable servant class and globalisation
that provides them with a luxury lifestyle on the cheap while making it harder for just about
everyone else.
The only "liberal" thing about these people is their attitudes towards trivial personal issues
like sexuality and lifestyle choices.
Wise words from Frank - I hope the Guardian opinionators are made to read it
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange
that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial
and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm
that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times
a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started
to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a
super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable
reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
Absolutely right. And I'm willing to wager the liberal response to this will be to double
down on the identity politics, double down on the victimhood narratives, double down on the march
toward globalism, and double down on the cries for open borders and ever-increasing levels of
immigration. They simply never learn.
It's very clear what happened this morning. Trump won because he picked up the white working
class vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, all of which had previously voted for Obama in
both 2008 and 2012. The people in these states didn't magically become racist over the past four
years. They saw a candidate (Clinton) who represented "business as usual", and they rejected her.
Excellent article. Summarises both Brexit as well as Trump's victory.
The stats are showing that Trump polled higher amongst African and Hispanic Americans. I am
not surprised. The Democrats, like the UK Labour party, like to think they OWN ethnic voters and
they are merely another 'special interest' group alongside women, gays, etc. They don't and us
ethnic voters have the same concerns as any other working or middle class voters. And NO ONE appreciates
being told they are wrong, racist and unintelligent.
This shows Social liberialism is dead and rotten. Well past its used by date, time to chuck
it out. It went off when supposed social justice warriors got into business with big business
and fickle finance.
The elites may be well educated but that they couldn't even bare to bring themselves to understand
the perspectives of another reveals how broadminded they really are - the journalists, academics
etc. They believed in democracy where only one way of thinking and the status quo could be permitted
to flourish. This is the most intelligent article to capture the social change that far too many
liberals are denying. How are they going deal with reality, ie. Are the majority of Americans
and British really racists? The greatest irony is this article is published within the vanguard
of what ordinary people are democratically retaliating against.
When you reach rock bottom the only way is to look up. The problem for the Liberalism of the Democratic
Party of the last three decades is that it has become a social scientific morality of the well
connected and completely unable to deal with the naked populism of Trump let alone the half baked
morass of crony capitalism of George Bush.
Lets be opportunistic. This gives it a chance to wipe the slate clean and at the very least rid
themselves of the influence of the Clintons who from the removal of Glass-Steagal Act demonstrated
their only concerns were with the needs of the Super Rich rather than the majority of the population.
Unfortunately you have that feeling that they are not even capable of doing that.
"Trump... a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound ..."
Har, har, har, the foolish and incompetent Trump is now president elect and you are a wise
and competent journalist who foresaw the future clearly.
Maybe you're the foolish incompetent, not Trump. Maybe you should examine the foolish certainty
which made you write your Guardian article headlined "With Trump certain to lose, you can forget
about a progressive Clinton" and many others based on foolish and incompetent assumptions, reasoning
and conclusions
Maybe you and all the rest of the useful idiots on the left should examine all of your convictions
about the world. You might discover how often you have been hoodwinked by your own folly into
believing trash like Trump will lose to Hillary, AGW is a real problem which can be corrected
by funneling trillions to crony capitalist alternative energy companies, fracking is dangerous
and the unlimited immigration of millions of young, able bodied, violent, low IQ men is a good
thing.
Trump will achieve nothing of what he's said he wants to do. Reversing the 'reverse colonisation'
of the white western world will fail, especially in the USA where, after all, the Afro-black population
didn't ask to move to in the first place (though I'll bet tend dollars dollars not a single Afro-black
American would opt for emigrating back to Africa, however much they complain about racial prejudice
in the USA - the financial advantages of living in the developed world are FAR too valuable for
that!).
As for the Hispanics, I doubt even a wall would stop them. The mass population of Central and
South America is far, far greater than that of 'white western America' and their third world economics
keep the USA and the developed world a desperate magnet for them (and I can't blame them - I'd
fight tooth and nail to get in to the rich west as well!)
Nope, the Trump victory is a sad, hopeless rearguard action against the triumph of twenty-first
century 'reverse colonisation' and that is that. The white western world is finished - the only
question is, can it 'westernise' the immigrant population in time to save the developed world,
or are we doomed to another Dark Ages of Global Third Worldism? (Maybe China will take over as
Islam did post Roman Empire, while Europe went savage...)
When you separate identity politics - race and gender - from inequality and class, which is what
Obama and Clinton both did, you end up with Donald Trump moving into the White House ......
The liberal argument has always been about the equality to exploit not an end to exploitation.
It was at the heart of New Labour as well as Obama/Clinton Democrats ...
For the last 30 odd years the liberal left have claimed class no longer mattered. Now the "white"
working class have twice given them a kicking in 2016. When you're at the bottom class really
matters!
And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness
to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each
of which Trump exploited to the fullest.
I really like Thomas Frank, but I wish in this diatribe that he wouldn't cheapen the countless
(because the Americans don't count them) who have paid the price for Hillary's 'fondness for war'
by referring to it like that, in passing, as if it was a fondness for muffins.
I wish that he had a bit more righteous fury about how the crazed neocon warmongers who effectively
rule America and for whom Hillary was the latest acceptable face, with her almost total sense
of entitlement, based on the fact that she was a woman, acted like she was heading for a coronation.
Yes it would be great if a woman had been elected president, I can think of at least two others
one running, and one not, but doesn't even the most basic tenet of critical thinking require us
to ask searching questions, about the specific woman ?
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring
to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a
purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party.
But did he really 'fracture' his own party? From the superficial point of view, one might have
thought so. Many Democrats hope so.
But I'll suggest this. Anybody who is holding out the faint hope that he will work badly with
the GOP in Congress is going to be very disappointed. He's going to put his signature to virtually
everything they want. They're going to have a lot of fun together.
Even stuff which directly contradicts what he ran on and which upset many in the Republican establishment.
I'm thinking foreign policy and trade agreements.
And those in movement conservatism who didn't like him, like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson?
Watch them do a 180 over the next six months.
Excellent article, about six months late, but hopefully not too late for liberals everywhere to
wake up to the idea that if you claim to want to help improve the lives of the working class you
better listen to them first, and connect with them second. I always thought laughing and sneering
at Trump and particularly his supporters was never going to work. And sure enough it didn't. Nobody
likes being patronised.
Sometimes you've got to have the courage to move beyond a rotting status quo and into a brave
new world. If you don't you leave the door open for something potentially much much worse to take
that opportunity.
How about doing a piece on how the press keep getting it wrong all the time, how you keep misjudging
the mood of the people, the zeitgeist, how afraid you are of change and how as a result you keep
siding with the establishment when the vast majority of people are fed up with its incessant inaction
and bullshit?
Youre letting the fascists in through the open door because youre too afraid to give up your priviledges
and go towards healthy change. You deserve what youre going to get because you spent too much
time on here waffling bullshit and not enough time on the streets listening to what people want.
Total cognitive dissonance. Social media is no good for assessing the mood of the people, its
for pussy cat photos and selfies.
The republicans feared change, but winning was more important to them. As incongruous as it may
seem, a billionaire businessman reached out to voters disenfranchised by some 30 years of partisan
parlour games. Maybe it'll dawn on the Democrats who they should be reaching out to and maybe
it'll dawn on the Republicans that there's more to being a politician than banging on about God
and being against abortion.
I don't like the guy and find some of his views abhorrent and would even have preferred HC,
but... but... this may be a wake up call for politics in America. Not sure it will be because
after Brexit, the finger was pointed at the London middle classes and older voters whereas the
strength of the vote came from the post-industrial heartland destroyed by Thatcher and virtually
ignored by both parties ever since. Still, we'll see.
"With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary
views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War
propaganda station. "
Spot on analysis.
Let the soul-searching amongst the mainstream journalistic elites begin.
People have rspecially started to notice the "with nuance and all contrary views deleted" part.
That is part of the problem and part of the reason Trump got elected as a sort of collective middle
finger to the establishment by ordinary people who are sick of being told what to think and how
to think by unelected elites whose job it is supposed to be to report the FACTS, and not to dictate
what people are allowed to say or think. Because as a great person once said "Facts are sacred."
And as JS Mill said in his famous essay 'On Liberty' - we should not censor unpopular views because
even though the unpopular view may be incorrect we may come to a better understanding of why our
own view is correct by seeing its collision with error. (Quite apart from the fact that the unpopular
view is not always correct and by suppressing it we may never know the truth.)
I hope the mainstream media learn from this disaster and start living up to the ideals of the
intellectual founders of our liberal democracies such as JS Mill who would no doubt be appalled
at the lerhaps well intentioned but counterproductive censorsgip of views which run counter to
that of the prevailing orthodoxy.
It's because they believe we are stupid. The intellectual snobbery of the oxbridge set, think
they are better than us. Little suspecting that most of us can't be arsed with that shite.
The thing that keeps coming back to me with this election, as with Brexit, was the established
candidates ignoring what people were saying. In Brexit, the remain side utterly ignored immigration,
whilst the leave side focused on it. I don't think the remain side realised that immigration wasn't
just conjured up by Daily Mail headlines but was a genuine issue for many people.
In the US, Trump spoke openly about jobs; bringing them back and preventing outsourcing. Looking
again at trade deals to make sure American jobs were protected. Clinton's team ignored this.
Take heed for the future, politicians. Listen to what people actually say, not just the bits
they say that you agree with.
Indeed, that's the problem, a narrow political elite expecting the population to vote as they
think, rather than as the population think. The disconnect between the consensus and the politicians
is wide, the left in particular withdraws to the safety of it's narrow agenda when threatened
leaving the centre wide open.
"Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws.
- She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women
and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren't real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
- If they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only
conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate."
Funny how all of these points were constantly touted in the Guardian... oh the ironny
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the
white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this
upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure
out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.
We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using
identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white
(and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as
though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days
of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you
seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on
and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.
Very interesting, and striking, parallels with Brexit. A disaffected majority, who don't believe
they are listened to, rally round people who speak their language, engage with their fears and
concerns and give them easy solutions to difficult problems.
Both decisions are tragically wrong, in my view, but its clear there is a huge disconnect between
those on the left (notional or otherwise) and their usual target voters.
Absolutely spot on. And broadly applicable right across the western world. It wasn't Hillary the
personality, or Hillary the crook, or Hillary the incompetent who lost the election.
It was the Hillary the archetypal representative of the smug 'n' shabby liberal stitch-up that's
done us all over, basking in its meritocratic delusions, and raising all the ladders (and greasing
the sides) to the lifeboats in which those delusions were acted out to delusional acclaim...
...even as it was busy handing the world over first (greedily) to transnational capitalism
and now (stupidly) to the marauding squads of pinhead fascists that'll be everywhere in the US
within weeks, maybe days. A couple of million George fucking pinhead Zimmermans.
"Socialism or Barbarism" (rings truer and truer!) is a choice that excludes liberalism only
because liberalism is too morally and aesthetically insubstantial to make the cut. Imagine the
choice in the form of a movie, and liberalism would be the twitching little grass who betrays
the hero for the price of a bottle of White Lighting.
(In real life it's not a bottle of cider, of course: it's more likely a nice old house in a
gentrified area that still holds on to the charming character of the people it displaced,
some of whom spend 5 hours a day on the bus to come back and work in the charming shops
and eateries, or as nannies and cleaners....).
This is a very good piece (as you'd expect from a cultural critic as smart as Frank is), but it
really needs to be read alongside Adolph L. Reed's
excoriating
article in Harper's from 2014, "Nothing Left: The Slow Surrender of American Liberals":
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have
no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed
group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source
of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the
Zapatistas; the urban "precariat"; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT "community"; the grassroots,
the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season's worthless Democrat; Occupy; a "Trotskyist"
software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability;
its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its
reflex is to "send messages" to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for
the oppressed.
We are in a very bad place right now, in terms of ideas and arguments. The opposition, in pretty
much every western hemisphere country, has been colonised by the same people: professional politicians,
upper-middle-class in social background, educated at the same small group of elite universities,
reflexively committed to meritocratic ideology. They're very good at expressing sympathy for the
marginalised, at saying the right words, at, as Reed says, "sending messages" and engaging in
representational politics. But all those gestures do nothing for the constituencies they supposedly
represent. They're ultimately selfish -- focussed on their own career advancement and the narrow
class interests of the meritocratic-professional elite itself. The opposition, as Frank himself
once said, "has ceased to oppose" in any economically meaningful sense. (Although they're very
good at symbolic forms of opposition on cultural and historical issues.)
And now their constituencies have noticed and have withdrawn their votes.
according to exit polls every section of white America, old, young, affluent, low-income, educated/not
voted Trump, all bar 'young college educated white females', older college educated white females
also voted Trump.
Same here with Brexit, voting patterns show the all white groups voted out, nothing to do with
education levels, income or age.
The pundits write about 'the crisis of liberalism',, hhmmm, I think it should more be 'the rejection
of illiberal openess'. When we say 'immigration needs to be reduced' the 'elites' reach for the
favourite fall back 'you're a white that's racist/fascist/backward/uneducated' etc etc etc response.
Well, turns out, the white part is right, the rest is just class based ignorance. Clinton was
the absolute embodiment of this type of ignorance and arrogance. That basket of deplorables thing
was disgusting, I felt personally insulted by it myself (i'm in the UK). Absolute standard 'elite'
arrogance and hatred of those that don't agree with you. She's just paid for that hate by alienating
absolutely EVERY SINGLE section of white America.
Trump's politics is a rejection of a globalism that has damaged the interests of so many, we're
all far far too open to the forces of the world coming in at us from all directions, Catholics
in Eastern Europe are not allowed their Christian values, are smeared as backward and ordered
by foreign 'elites' in Brussels to drop all that they hold dear or face fines. We've all watched
as the Remoaners showed to the world just exactly how 'tolerant' and 'accepting' they are of those
they don't agree with, erupting into a torrent of class based ignorance and venomous hatred.
Well, they've all been at all this for far too long, and we're all pushing back against it. Spew
race based hate at those that don't agree with you, BBC journalists shouting 'Nazi, fascist, racist'
at any slight tightening up of immigration, Hilary Clinton labelling most white working-class
a basket of fascist deployarables and hey presto, you lose to a repulsive cartoon like Trump.
They need to start thinking on about just exactly who it is in reality that's the race haters.
Most are on the Left.
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Given that Republicans have been opposed to intervention by Big Government at least since the
Great Depression if Trump gets the go ahead for some of his ideas it will be a case of 4 legs
good 2 legs better.
With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and
contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in
to a Cold War propaganda station.
Quite so. And now the elitist corporate media which got everything wrong, including their highly
confident predictions about the result, will now tell you in a highly confident manner all the
things that are going to happen as a result of the thing they said wouldn't happen. First to dash
off a thousand words of hyperventilating predictions?
Jonathan Freedland , so top marks to him for speed, if nothing else.
Interesting article, and in a way I sensed it coming unfortunately, at least in the meaning that
I have always felt that certain liberal and "progressive" thoughts are just too alien from basic
human nature, and are being forced to enter the mainstream a bit too fast, and that this is a
huge risk in the sense that when people decide they are not ready for these and it's time to reject
them properly, then all the valuable, truly liberating and forward-thinking ideas will be drained
along with them and that means dark times ahead indeed.
I am from Eastern-Europe, and, while I don't have a lot of personal memories of the communist
times myself, most of the liberal bits of my cultural heritage comes from the counter-culture,
a lot of the things we value today in my country were, albeit not necessarily all illegal as such,
certainly more of the taboo sort, than they would have been in the West. Now it looks like that
with all this Brexit and America, the West will have to learn to use the liberal thinking to serve
as meaningful criticism of the system that will be built in the future by these new people. It's
the Westerner's turn now, to learn to read between the lines and produce culture with purpose
other than entertainment (if there is any positive side to this, then it should be the rise of
new, creative movies and the end of the high-budget superhero era, and the birth of music with
lyrics worth listening to lol, that's what I keep telling myself as my silver lining for now at
least.)
It's obviously difficult to compare, nothing, in the entire world at the time was this commercialised
and business and technology and life and everything was obviously very different. And, crucially,
whilst the commies declared themselves to be ruling in the name of the common working people,
they had their own breed of intellectuals, at least in my country, there was an approved bunch
of scientists, artists etc, who could stretch it and provide some sense. So, worryingly enough,
from this point of view I wouldn't say they were comparable to the type of anti-intellectualist
mob rule seemingly putting these people into power, and that is my real fear, that these new rulers
will not even have their own bunch of approved scientists who might not approve the views of atheists
or feminists or whatever, but would at least be ready to provide these new governments with sound
advice on the environment, education, health, etc.
I'm not sure how avoidable this could have been in reality, but it should have been, because
we have no time for such ideological bullsh*t games (excuse my words), the damage we are doing
to our own, living planet is becoming irreparable, and we really, absolutely, from all backgrounds
and cultures must work together to basically stay alive.
The arrogance and snotty mindedness of the progressive liberal establishment has be dealt a righteous
slap in the face which they have been asking for, for decades. The Revolt of the Deplorables.
This was the winter of our discontent. Now it is our turn.
Time will tell whether this upset is the beginning of a much better era in the U.S.
I voted for Trump not because I like him (personally I find him repulsive) but because he was
a wrecking ball and a sledge hammer to be used against the liberal progressives that have been
running the U.S. into the ground for decades.
This the Moment of the Ticked Off Deplorables.
This is also a surprise. This is the most exciting time since Truman defeated Dewey.
Except it was the Republicans (not the "white collar liberals") who deregulated the Wall Street
banks. It was the Republicans who gave tax breaks to the wealthy 1% and it was the Republicans
who got rid of welfare. The biggest con of all? That the majority of uneducated Americans who
just voted Republican, think that the GOP represent thier interests and it's all the fault of
the "liberals". We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation,
tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began
in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule,
and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done
between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
Thomas Frank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
ank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent
business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
The silent majority,the ones who go to work pay their taxes and quietly get on with life have
spoken. Don't underestimate us. We're intelligent, humble and caring. We're entitled to a view.
We've had enough, we don't have to bully scream and shout to get our way, we go down to the polling
station and we put a cross in the box we feel passionately about and we go home back to our quiet
lives-job done.Well done the people of America,you have had the equivalent to our Brexit and now
let's get the world back to how it should be. One of the most satisfying parts is listening to
the Lefties,Luvvies and BBC crying their eyes out. The times they are a changing.
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its
own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.
Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!
Amen to that. Thank you, Thomas Frank, for articles such as this one. A lone voice of progressive
reason at the Guardian (neo)liberal circus.
We need to overhaul the DNC, as well as the Guardian and NYT editorial boards.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would
have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch.
Spot on. And this is exactly the misery that infects both wings of the Labour Party.
People in politics jostling for power and status, like it's a hobby for them, a kind of shoot-em
up where the consequences of policy affect only other people.
Cameron and Johnson and all the slime of the Tory party suffer from the same disease.
Why do you want to be prime minister, you spam faced Tefal foreheaded dilettante?
"Well, I think I'd be rather good at it."
Well, you weren't. You were awful at it, because you had no basic guiding principles, just
like all the other dilettantes from Eton and all the other posh boy Petri dishes where hubris
is cultivated.
Trump took what should have been democrats' issues. Clinton should simply have tried
to take all of Sanders positions, working with Sanders, and then position Trump as the faker who
was taking the dems positions. Alas, she did not.
Clinton made her usual lame, transparent attempts to co-opt Sanders' positions, but being
Clinton, few people **believe** her.
Sanders backers always said that Clinton was almost uniquely capable of losing to a fraud like
Trump, and here, apparently -- tragically -- we are.
And believing Dems will learn not one goddam thing. Expect the special pleading and blame-shifting
to amp up to jet engine levels. Already Saint Krugman has smeared the Greens for Clinton's loss
in Florida, which seems to mathematically impossible by an order of magnitude.
Clinton lost **Pennsylvania**, for Christ's sake! She seems to have lost Philly!! How does
an even semi-competent candidate pull that off?!?!?
...And Clintonians spent decades claiming neoliberalism was necessary to get moderate voters
who went for Reagan, and that liberalism is too unpopular to win an election. They stuck to that
script in post-Great Recession America, which is not post-Reagan America.
And they stuck with a candidate who has zero ability to get independent voters. Her leftward
moves in response to Sanders on college tuition and more funding for health clinics (which Sanders
said would achieve free primary care in the US) would have got out the vote, but she preferred
to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian puppet to get the patriotic vote.
"... but she preferred to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian
puppet to get the patriotic vote."
This, I think, is a valid criticism. Hillary and the older Dems were truly out of touch
on this issue and failed to understand how poorly it played with the electorate (which is sad,
because there are some real serious issues with Russia right now). Likewise, they failed to grasp
how desperate Millennials / Rural whites have gotten and thus how important fixing the economy
was for them.
Fix that on "we came, we saw, he died......" with a post up his you know where! Or the no fly
zone thing to give another country to the foundation donors' terrorists. You all missed the point!
All the people don't see what you want us to! You could fool enough of the people when you
needed to!
The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't be
surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage.
Dems never stopped to consider that
Any mention of foreign data leakage had to remind people of Clinton's FOIA-avoiding server
escapades, and
You can find lots of Dem "consultants" and "strategists" who themselves have lucrative
histories with sleazy overseas characters (Podesta, Biden's son, etc.).
"The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't
be surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage."
From a campaign prospective, right conclusion. Wrong reason. Pushing the Russia connection
damaged Hillary because it played up her "War Hawk" and "Military Industrial complex" ties for
the public, which in turn strengthened the corporocrat accusation.
Worse, to the informed it smelled like W's push for war, and thus reminded everyone of Hillary's
vote on Iraq. And those things hurt.
Clinton is with Bill unmitigated war mongering neoliberalNeocon/ The Clinton Iraq vote
was purely animus! Stepping away is prevarication. What went into Qaddafi was pure evil sent by
Obama and his SecState.
Clinton was more into Sunni/GCC money and influence peddling. The Russian/Putin thing was
fantasy! The main stream media [Stalinist] propaganda did not sell in the 5 key states that went
red from blue.
No, the point is the dems are crooked, Clinton was selected by the DNC (calling it crooked
is repeating myself). I am convinced the US dodged a very severe mistake by electing Trump!
I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street,
and instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans.
But more recently I figured that at least he got the Iran deal going, and that looked like a significant
gain for sanity. Now, if I understand Trump's ramblings on every other Tuesday, the deal is vulnerable.
You mean declare martial law and send the Marines into capture Wall Street, and ship them to
Gitmo? Or didn't you notice the Republicans legalizing financial fraud over the past 40 years?
If you like I can detail the dozen major steps beginning circa 1970 like the camel nose unto
the tent. Step one: retail money market funds as an alternative to bank savings accounts. They
were a big fraud: "safer than FDIC bank savings accounts".
Yes, totally agree with the point that Obama did not understand the strategic moment and
instead aligned himself in a way that legitimized the opposition's points.
Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working
people give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more. Strategists should
have been screaming that this was positioning the party in a way that was opposite to what the
party had stood for in opposition to the republican elite.
Of course, Clinton was the wrong candidate as she is a archetype, tied to Trade deals, Glass
Steagel and even the Iraq war.
I would like to see the democratic party stand fir work in the US.
"Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working people
give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more...."
Just wanted to say, good tactical analysis there.
srbarbour -> sglover... , -1
"I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street, and
instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans."
Hard to say, 2009 had a very different atmosphere and there was a very real desire in the electorate
to return to bipartisanship. Plus, bipartisanship was kind of a major Obama campaign promise.
That said, the only gain Dems got from that was a general fuzzy, awareness the Republican partisanship
is one-sided. A boon that is now tactically useless because the Republicans will control every
branch of the government. So in hindsight, pure fail. However, forgiveable in context.
Anybody but the brain dead could see HRC ran a lazy campaign focused on a non-issue. It's clear
she expected certain quarters of the population's loyalty in voting but offered them nothing.
One hopes these libs begin to wake up.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders, told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs." ..."
"... In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind the agents of a failed leadership." ..."
As Democrats reel in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning victory, a new storm is brewing inside
the party as competing factions begin to grapple for its leadership.
Howard Dean, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, announced on Thursday he
would again seek its top role. Soon after he announced, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his top allies
began pushing Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for the role.
But other politicos expressed interest in the job Friday. Former presidential candidate Martin
O'Malley announced that he is throwing his hat in the ring.
"Since the election, I have been approached by many Democrats who believe our party needs new leadership,"
said the former Maryland Governor. "I'm taking a hard look at DNC Chair because I know how badly
we need to reform our nominating process, articulate a bold progressive vision, recommit ourselves
to higher wages and a stronger middle class, and return to our roots as a nationwide, grassroots
party."
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman and DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley is exploring a run, according
to the Boston Globe.
... ... ...
Sanders -- a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats and fought a lengthy primary battle
for the party's nomination this year -- and top allies are touting Ellison for the job. The Muslim-American
congressman currently co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
... ... ...
On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders,
told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership
untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs."
In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy
must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind
the agents of a failed leadership."
The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor,
who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention.
Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other since-departed DNC officials discussing
ways to undermine Sanders' effort to oust Clinton in the primary.
DemoRats lost working class votes. may be forever (or as long as they stay neoliberal DemoRats).
This is an important defeats of Bill Clinton, who sold the party to wall Street.
Notable quotes:
"... But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president, instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency to benefit himself. ..."
The campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said in a statement Friday that "no one
anticipated" losing. She said many factors were at work, but she listed Comey as chief among them.
"We didn't blame everyone but ourselves," Palmieri said. "We acknowledged a lot of challenges we
faced, plenty of mistakes made along the way, some challenges we weren't able to overcome."
She added: "What changed in the last week that made his turn out go up and our's go down? The only
thing apparent was Comey. It was one thing too many. Could not overcome it."
Democrats close to Bill Clinton said Thursday that one mistake Clinton's top aides made was not listening
to the former president more when he urged the campaign to spend more time focusing on disaffected
white, working class voters.
Many in Clinton's campaign viewed these voters as Trump's base, people so committed to the Republican
nominee that no amount of visits or messaging could sway them. Clinton made no visits to Wisconsin
as the Democratic nominee, and only pushed a late charge in Michigan once internal polling showed
the race tightening.
Bill Clinton, advisers said, pushed the campaign early on to focus on these voters, many of whom
helped elected him twice to the White House. The former president, a Clinton aide said, would regularly
call Robby Mook to talk about strategy and offer advice.
But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president,
instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to
the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and
African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency
to benefit himself.
"... Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. ..."
"... Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience" to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history." ..."
"... Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done. ..."
The extraordinary repudiation -- partly based on Trump's rejection of basic US foreign policy
tenets, including support for close allies -- helped spark the hashtag #NeverTrump. Now, a source
familiar with transition planning says that hard wall of resistance is crumbling fast.
There are "boxes" of applications, the source said. "There are many more than people realize."
Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include
former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. "Mea
culpas" are being considered -- and in some cases being granted, the source said -- for people who
did not go a step further in attacking Trump personally.
... ... ...
Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk
our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience"
to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history."
Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might
encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has
refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done.
It remains to be seen what kind of team Trump will pull together, how many "NeverTrumpers" will apply
for positions and to what degree the President-elect will be willing to accept them.
There's a fight underway within the Trump transition team about whether to consider "never Trumpers"
for jobs, one official tells CNN. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is leading the transition
team, has been working to persuade Trump and other top officials to consider Republicans who openly
opposed his campaign. That has caused some friction with those who see no place for people who didn't
support their candidate.
"... At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want. ..."
"... Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money. ..."
"... Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. ..."
"... Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it. ..."
"... Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency. ..."
"... The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump. ..."
What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It
is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives,
and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country's biggest corporations,
their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks,
their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington;
and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.
At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and
Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of
these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced
political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump,
who made his fortune marketing office towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular
reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the
Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, but not enough of the states and
their electors secure a victory.
Hillary Clinton's defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump
campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign
had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also
many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the
top executives of America's largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW
Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible
and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular
wife. And, of course, she had her husband.
Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential
candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump's nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to
endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money
for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.
What happened?
There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries,
after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest
of candidates – a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist
and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those
primaries. Sanders' major theme was that the country's political and economic system was rigged in
favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
... ... ...
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do
the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining
real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party
has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused
instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from
upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years
had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class
wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements
without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new
ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class –
failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help
workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from
22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working
class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration –
has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would
mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I'm in agreement with RR, as far as he goes. He could have gone further, but it's probably not
the time or place for that, anyway, that road is depressing.
Trump's an opportunist, certainly, but a very, very, successful one indeed. He has, after all,
made an awful lot of money that way, so he's not that lacking in intelligence and ruthlessness.
If only Sanders had been more ruthless and willing to stick the knife into the Democratic Party
when he had the chance.
Trump, essentially ran as an independent. First he needed to defeat the Republican Party's
establishment, which he did, take over the party and only then was he ready to challenge the Democrats
and beat them down. He succeeded in his strategy, beating both of them, which is an astonishing
feat, historic in character.
It actually gets worse for liberals. Trump also took on the liberal media and despite their
best efforts to destroy him, brazenly supporting Clinton and ridiculing Trump and his supporters...
Trump didn't just survive the onslaught, but crushed the media as well. Vast swathes of the population
hate and despise the media as much as they loathe the political elite. People simply don't believe
the media anymore, so most of their attacks on Trump were useless and ineffective when they came.
And it really isn't Trump that's important here. It's the character of the wave he surfed
on and lifted him into the White House. But the media ignored the wave and have done for years
and years. Now, the fascist chickens have really come home to roost and much of the responsibility
lies with the incredible ignorance, arrogance and mind-numbing stupidity that characterizes so
much of the media.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more."
And they haven't since Bill Clinton had his way with the party in the 90s.
As much as the right enjoys calling the Clintons liberals, they're not.
They're neo-liberals, which is a whole different philosophy.
The Dems abandoned those who supported them for generations and we are all living in the ever-worsening
result of that betrayal.
So Robert Reich spent the past year enthusiastically encouraging us to vote for a candidate who
embodied every last bit of the formula that he now tells us was a sure loser. Should he perhaps
have warned his long-time good friend Hillary that she was on the wrong road? That being the servant
of Wall Street and promising the status quo with incremental progress was a recipe for failure?
As you say, sir:
"The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump."
This includes Obama's role as enabler.
Ironic, that Obama was a charismatic campaigner who failed entirely to become a charismatic president.
And he lost to a candidate who had another sort of charisma: That of a lying, sneering, insulting,
self-important clown.
Shows how bad things have become for a once hard-working & productive middle class now set adrift.
The same power structure that has for decades ignored the plight of millions in favour of it's
own elitist wealth building, little wonder this election result. The neo liberals by their arrogance
and lack of empathy have brought us to this setting us back decades. Clinton was definately does
not hold any sympathy for the downtrodden, she cannot, she's in another class, the billionaire
type. That is why we must never trust them or ever look again to people with this background to
help us. They are responsible for the descent towards fascism and the people are responsible for
their utter gullability in believing them in the first place.
Obama is the worst president and most divisive. he is the master race baiter as well.
Nov 11, 2016 | Pinterest
How the 2016 US election night unfolded
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't
take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely
content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better
off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most
Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor
do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant
or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers
without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile,
have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate
subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference
by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and
they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the
party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who
have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting
votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those
years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline
in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed
for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their
jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class
– failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them,
or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership
sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and
the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that
large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising
result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration
– has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft
the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his
presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself
off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that
would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I've known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for
her. In my view, she's the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now
have.
But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should
have, because he's leading a political movement for change.
The upcoming election isn't about detailed policy proposals. It's about power – whether
those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. [...]
Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation's
heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in
the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.
At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as
I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end "crony capitalism."
They detested "corporate welfare," such as the Wall Street bailout.
They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for
hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers.
End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. [...]
You don't care about the details of proposed policies and programs.
You just want a system that works for you.
If you click his name at the byline you'll see how many articles published in 2016. Now think
about the number of pieces published that pushed the pro-Clinton argument of more of the same.
"Third-Way" Democrats made an art form of triangulating a position between the old-line liberal
Democrats the positions made by the mainstream corporate Republican party. By tacking as far right
as possible, these corporate Democrats could scrape off enough of the business friendly, socially
progressive Independents and Republicans to stymie any sort of Republican Presidential bid. Corporate
America gave to both parties, but loves first and foremost to be on the side of the winner, where
its influence can manifest itself in business friendly legislation, politically friendly appointments,
no prosecutions for criminal behavior. no enforcement of labor or business legislation and no
break-ups of monopolies using the still existent anti-trust legislation.
One of the things that made Republicans furious during Bill Clinton's term was that he was skilled
in the extreme at taking issues the Republicans were pushing and getting out in front of them
and making the issue his own, making the result at least somewhat palpable to the old liberals
of the world.
The Democrats became the other war party, the other big business party, the other big banking
party, the other big agriculture party, the other big oil party, the other big communications
party, the other international exploitation party, the other anti-union party the other big medical
party, the other big pharmaceutical party, the other international trade deal party.
Bill Clinton sat down with Alan Greenspan and agreed to be the other austerity party. He supported
low tax rates on the billionaires and corporations and low tariffs. That led to lower services
for the public and small businesses and the tax burden being borne by the long suffering middle
class and working poor. The non-working poor suffered as well with no welfare, more stringent
unemployment benefits, and a stagnant job market for meaningful jobs. At the same time, law enforcement
was focusing on them, putting them in prison for extreme amounts of time for often trivial matters.
But Bill had an overall good economy because of the Computer Generation, so the economy grew and
he was able to deliver to George W. Bush a budget surplus, which, if maintained, would have entirely
paid off the national debt by now.
Unfortunately all those economic gains were being funneled to the top. Overall wages of working
people actually declined since Ronald Reagan came in to begin the austerity measures while the
wealth of the top 1% quadrupled. Working people were losing good paying jobs and having to have
both wage earners in a family work lesser jobs to make up for hemorrhaging income. These lesser
jobs not only had less wages, they had less benefits. Against an out of control health care industry,
banking industry, communications industry and investment industry they were being sucked dry well
before retirement. No amount of savings could stand up to catastrophic illness. People's 401K
plans were repeatedly slaughtered while the big guys who precipitated the mess ended up owning
more and more of the means of generating wealth in our country. Remember the absolutely sinful
Republican law that made student debt unforgivable at the same time that school costs were skyrocketing?
It was so unpopular, Republicans needed help from Joe Biden and other corporate Democrats to get
it passed.
Never mind the corporate media and Republican lies about Barack Obama being a "Liberal", he was,
in fact, another version of corporate Democrat. Since he was black, the racist Republicans could
do the unprecedented in America politics: they decided to block everything. For no good reason.
Other than he was black and no one would hold them accountable. He went along with the austerity
plan because he had no other option. Able enough manager, he was able to drastically reduce the
national deficit virtually on his own. But he kept up the wars. Hell, he and Hillary Clinton started
wars for oil and natural gas. Just like the Republicans. Along with the very expensive war and
secret intelligence budget and police state budget. He has restarted the nuclear weapons program,
never mind that we already have enough nukes to destroy the world 100 times over. He also longed
for hanging his hat on another record-breaking Trans Pacific Partnership international trade deal
encompassing 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. Like Bill Clinton/George HW Bush's NAFTA
on steroids. Jobs would be flowing out to low wage countries and waves of filthy international
profits would come flowing back in to: the top 1%, where presumably the fraud of trickle down
economics would waged on the American worker once again.
Yup the elites got hammered Tuesday. Even though they say they are for democracy, they aren't.
The elites want open borders and the people at the bottom of the wage scale are having to compete
against these low wage border jumpers.
How can the elites say they are for open borders and for raising wages. It isn't possible.
It is the law of supply and demand. Sure the government could pass minimum wage increases but
that will drive businesses to automate as much as possible. That ain't going to help these people
either!
Wikileaks proved that the Democrat party is the party of the ruling class elites, no question.
Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders? Give me a break, These two phonies are owned lock stock and
barrel by Wall Street and the Big Banks. Warren's Consumer Protection racket is like Dodd-Frank
- a Potemkin village of fake reforms designed to kill off any competition to the ruling class
oligarchs.
A better analysis than the hysterical white/kkk/racist/woman hater etc pieces that have been flooding
the pages lately.
Its "dont piss on my back and tell me its raining" stuff, Obamacare has stung those in work,
in some cases badly, and those out of work see no hope or change either.
No-one went to jail for screwing the world economy.
Even the government agencies who had oversight, and failed to see one single indicator of trouble
saw no-one demoted, just a call for more power.
And lastly importing more people to compete for low skilled jobs from overseas does keep downward
pressure on wages, and make jobs harder to find for the native born. Pretending otherwise in some
misguided sense of international "solidarity" is punishing your own people for outsiders advantage.
The roles of the two parties have been interchanged over the years, but they both ended up the
same way -- serving the Davos community.
Some have suggested the formation of a third party as a possible remedy. I don't think that
is the solution. As long as campaigns are financed through private contributions, the politicians
elected would be beholden to the rich, regardless of the number of parties involved. The voice
of the less privileged voters will not be heard. To have a truly representative body of elected
officials, private (including corporate) campaign contributions should be eliminated from politics.
Candidates should disseminate their message and platform in publicly funded campaigns. So I would
say don't worry about the number of parties. Just get rid of Citizens United and limit spending
for political campaigns to public funding.
The present Republican-controlled government will not do that. HRC had promised to get rid
of Citizens United. The only remedy now is to organize and try to give the House in 2 years to
whoever will do so.
If was the duffus you worked for Mr. Reich who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act ushering in the
tech bubble, the housing bubble and now the 'everything' bubble. A financialization of our economy
that has benefited only the top 10 to 15 percent of the population.
I don't usually agree w Sex Reich but he mostly right here. The Democratic Party has been corrupted
& a tool of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Big Banks, & Corrupt Democrat billionaires ...
Wall Street does care if the kill growth & jobs as long as they keep interest rates at Zero
& Print trillions to fuel the market & fill their pockets. Same w the banks.
The Democrats have Total comtempt for working Americans out here in what they call flyover land.
You know... IW WI MI OH. So Reich is right there but more Gov, more socialism is not the answers.
Economic growth & free Enterprise w sound monetary policy to crest jobs & raise incomes is what
we need & what Trump will provide.
There's definitely a failure of government to do its job: to ensure that the market economy works
to improve the lives of all people (they instead ensure that they get a job at a Goldman Sachs
or a Morgan Stanley once they leave government). Robert Reich points out in the article that the
government never steps in to prevent anti-monopoly practices. To his point, one has only to look
at the over-valued market capitalizations of the financial and pharmaceutical sectors to see that
these guys are getting a free ride. Since not everyone can be a Paul Volcker, one may have to
raise the pay grade of civil servants to attract the best talents.
Whether he's a Democrat or a Republican, the white voter is a bit lost, unable to find his
way in a world where the white man no longer dominates. This doesn't apply to the working or middle
class.
This said, it's not because we want change that we're going to cast our vote for a monster
like Trump. We know what happened in 1933 in Germany, in 1917 in Russia. Whether it's gas chambers
or the Goulag, these psychopaths (Hitler, Stalin) can go very far. The worst ones are the toned-down
versions: a Hitler Light. I sure won't vote for Marine Le Pen.
It's truly a worrying time for the intelligent citizen. Democrats fail the middle class, yet for
all my life there's only been one party who would throw their own mother on hot coals and walk
over her body to give a rich man a tax cut: the Republican Party. I hope it's true that Trump
represents their defeat just as much as the Democrats. They've sold out their base for decades
now, peddling condescending lies and culture war excuses for their greed and cronyism. Not a single
Republican used to be an expert scientist until reducing pollution was going to cost their donors
a few dollars, then all of sudden they all knew better than a PhD how the climate worked. Their
last President started a war and gave no-bid government contracts to his friends, and even tried
to privatize Social Security so business associates could skim off the top of that too, consequences
be damned. When neither side is either willing or able to save you, what can you do?
Mr. Reich, you can't see the forest for the trees. Hillary promised that AFTER you lost your job
to bad trade deals, she'd help you to retrain to become a 7-11 night clerk. In essence, she was
offering to bury your job in a fine casket. Donald offered to fight for your job and shake up
America's trade deals if he had to in order to level the playing field and keep our manufacturing
here. And oh yea, bring some jobs back home too. He also said he would protect them from cheap
labor pouring across the border legally and illegally. Illegal Latinos don't all work picking
lettuce - some drive trucks, do construction, are plumbers, carpenters, electricians, shipyard
workers, you know - jobs our own citizens want. It's not about whether you can strangle another
company with union demands, it's about the lack of jobs period. So in essence, Hillary wanted
open borders and all of our jobs going to Latinos. Donald wants the opposite.
Wonder what makes you Einsteins think the republicans are now suddenly for the working man? Republicans
have always been on the side of big money interests, and nothing has changed. Trump is just there
to placate the mid western rubes. 'Mericuns are so naive. (no tolerance for propaganda like the
Euros or Russians seem to have.) Trump is just a head fake. Its business as usual. He's just gonna
pick up where Obama and Shrub left off. Seen this trick before.
The Guardian needs to publish an editorial apologizing for being part of this problem. During
the Sanders-Clinton race, the Guardian was nothing but derisive towards Sanders, and elevated
Clinton as the responsible and adult choice to stop Donald Trump. They even compared Sanders to
Nader as a spoiler from 2000, not realizing that all the warning signs were there that Clinton
would play the role of John Kerry in 2004.
There were comments in the comment section with people saying "I still don't fully understand
the difference between Clinton and Sanders, can someone please explain it to me?" That was the
Guardian's job. For the record, here is the correct explanation.
For decades the Democratic Party has abandoned working people and embraced globalization at
their expense. Clinton was the candidate of continuity with that policy, Sanders was the candidate
of "Hey, that was actually a bad idea, our mistake, we'll start caring about your issues as well."
It was obvious that Clinton would be vulnerable in a general election against anyone who ran a
populist platform, which Trump was doing.
This train wreck was obvious from a mile away. The DNC and the media need to own this blunder.
You are correct. I would add that electing trump has ended the dlc Democratic party. Of course
my conjecture remains to be proved by events going forward. Still this rightwing shift has a real
chance now to remain in power like the collapsed dlc Clinton Obama clique for a considerable period
ahead. And besides that a restive U.S. working class is in motion with little obvious direction
to the left right now. I would expect though a left opposition is coming rather soon.
The US is a country with a lot of very angry and unhappy people. The nation is in decline and
the people are fearful; they know something is terribly wrong but they do not have the political
acumen to deal with the situation. The two political parties, co-opted if not largely owned by
the plutocracy-, offer no respite from the oppression of which, in fact, they are the instruments
being vassals of their plutocratic masters.
Unfortunately, the plutocracy and their subservient mass media have convinced about half of
the population to vote, to their own destruction, for continual transfer of wealth and power to
the corporations and plutocrats-. The Trumpers, arguably less educated, politically ignorant and
naive, easily manipulated, and riddled with fear fueled with bigotry, are the leading edge of
the discontent and fright. However, their blindness to reality is a severe obstacle to any possibility
of getting that nation back on the track. The plutocrats-, like all parasites, will drain the
nation of its lifeblood and then move on to another country to exploit.
As long as the Trumpeters and those of their ilk can be so easily duped and manipulated, it
is unlikely that there will be any common ground. In fact, common ground is not what is needed.
Rather, what is needed is an aggressively progressive agenda to restore democracy, economic recovery
and re-establishment of a rapidly disappearing middle class.
Politicians like Clinton and Obama give paid speeches behind closed doors on Wall St, whom they
bailed out at the expense of the people. They throw $10k-a-plate fundraisers with celebrities,
and cozy up to the profit-over-people industries like big pharmaceutical and big oil. They are
for hedge fund managers, payday lenders, defense contractors, and credit card companies. Then
they have the gall to send out "tweets" saying we must overturn Citizens United.
I realize the Republicans are no better, in fact, they're even worse, but everyone knows who
and what they are. They make no bones about it, they don't dress up in wolf's clothing and pretend
they are for the working man.
Democrats do. Democrats are like the Republicans from 30 years ago. Over the last 3 decades,
the left has moved to the right and the right has moved into an insane asylum. So now it's the
Democrats who do the red-baiting (see their treatment of Sanders) and the RNC are accusing neoliberal
centre-right politicians like Obama of being a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
You are forgetting to add in the "for profit' colleges. How much did Debbie Dearest get from *that*
lobby? How many millions did Bill get to sit on their boards? These political grifters got paid
big money by the very entities which were foreclosing on homes, suffocating kids with student
loan debt, and tanking the economy via Wall Street schemes. The Dems thought we weren't paying
attention?
Trump is offering a solution, that's all. Can he implement it, probably not, but no one else is
even talking about re negotiating NAFTA, penalizing China or anything else to bring back millions
of good paying factory jobs.
Our politicians are out of touch, and corrupted by the oceans of money thrown at them. The 58
million people who voted for Trump want anyone to talk to them about what has happened to their
lives and opportunities and address their problems.
Hillary may in fact be the most competent politician, but that is the problem. She never came
across as a leader who would lead us out of our problems. So we elected a lying misogynist who
is, at least, not a politician!
Reich debated Chris Hedges on democracynow before the election, Hedges pointed out
to him that under Ronald Ray-Gun the levers of power were given over to all the
corp's of the world, there isn't a DNC or a RNC, it's a less than one percent secure hold
on all power, Trump is just another puppet --
The last two paragraphs are absolutely dead on with what happened. You can't cater to minorities
and expect the majority to stick with you forever as they suffer. The Democrats are so blind they
didn't understand why Bernie surged or why Trump won but this writer has real clarity and speaks
the truth absolutely on it. If you ignore the majority, which is mostly working class or rural
citizens, you lose election after election with never ever holding total power for long. Trump
truly needs to be a Teddy Roosevelt up there and set the barn on fire to chase all of the rats
out and rebuild it.
That's what we need and at least there is the tiniest sliver of hope he will, whereas with
Hillary we would have received more establishment politics which always include purposeful half-truths
and omissions at the working class's expense. Seriously, Schumer and Pelosi need to be investigated
with Hillary Clinton because the way they act up there is exactly what made America a stagnant
decaying landscape.
I think it's time we get to the real issues the majority and minority citizens face together
and stop beating to death your four issues that are inconsequential to the other 90 % of us in
one way or another. That goes for both parties too. It makes me wonder if they ever talk to anyone
but the people who have money. It would seem so and it needs to change now because them people
live in a bubble and bubbles always burst. Drag the swamp Donald on both sides of the isle and
you will be my hero forever. Fail and you will be my most hated president yet.
And on a final note, thank god the Guardian has pulled back from the left some now and is being
a good news source again. Thank you for this article and a big thank you to this writer for telling
it like it
Once the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. The union member. Blue collar.
Trying to get higher wages for the working man.
The Republican Party was the party of capital. Bankers. Corporate types. Millionaires.
The Democrats abandoned the working man for the underclass.
Now it seems to becoming that the Republicans are the party of people who work for a living
at a private job, along with the business owners.
The Democrats represent those who either don't work, or those who work for the State: welfare
recipients, students, public union members, most every staffer in DC. Hollywood types. Millionaires,
especially dot com ones.
Despite calling it racist over and over, unfettered immigration holds wages down. Free trade
with China and Mexico guts unions and makes the proposed $15/hr minimum wage a joke when factories
have all moved to Mexico or China. It's a fine thing with Britain, Germany or Canada, but a big
loser with low wage countries. Especially with China who puts barriers in place for OUR exports.
It also didn't help when Katy Perry, Madonna and J.Lo endorsed Hillary. It sent more people
towards the Republicans looking for people who looked like them. Who got up in the morning to
go to work.
If U.S. Democrats have any sense, they'll kick the DNC leadership losers out and let Bernie and
Elizabeth Warren lead the Party. Then we'll have at least one party that represents the interests
of Workers.
Trump has two years to make the lives of his supporters substantially better. Looking
at the people around him, that's not likely to happen. I can't wait to see him make the case that
more tax cuts for Huuge corporations will somehow help Working People! If they try more of the
same, then the market crash will happen on their watch.
Good luck in 2018 then. Dems re-take House & Senate, with Bernie & Elizabeth Warren leading
the way...
We are living through the death of "growth", the death of capitalism. The 1% are using the 99%
as human shields to buffer themselves from the collapse of their religion and their Gawd, horded
wealth. Trump will sellout his Chumps worse than Obama... And the idea that the TwoParty will
ever move to meet the social needs of humanity is a pipe dream. The only way we will get this
is by Direct Democracy. The 99% votes policy. The government are employees who implement those
policies... or they are fired.
Nearly every single elected politician currently in office on both sides is bought and paid for
and works in the best interest of large corporations, not in the best interest of we the people.
A complete purge, a system flush is required if we are to take our country back.
It seams like a monumental task, it looks like an impossible mission when you look at the sheer
amount of money and power in play but it is actually simple and it's all on us, all we need to
do is stop voting for Repocrats and start voting for people of integrity outside of these two
establishment parties.
That is the only way to quickly affect real change and if everyone did that we'd have our country
back in no time. So stop bashing the people who are voting third party and independent, stop telling
them that their vote is wasted or a vote for the "other side", realize that there are no two sides
really and join them in voting the Repocrats out of everything and voting in the people who will
overturn Citizens United, outlaw lobbying and pass a new campaign finance law that will take the
money complete out of politics and allow us to elect the congress and the president that will
work for us, not the Wall Street or MIC.
Is Trump's election really a rejection of the "power structure"? How could that be since that
power structure, whether Democrat or Republican, remains intact decade after decade? I don't think
Trump's victory is a rejection of the power structure. The rejection of the power structure was
embodied, if anywhere, by the Sanders campaign, but it was defied by the Clinton's and by actors
like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and by the fraud employed by those actors during the primaries.
In a system of only two parties voting for one or the other can simply be a vote based in anger
about an excluded middle, or a non-existent "left". These frustrating complaints tell you more
about the result than does "the power structure" who could care less which party wins, so long
as their interests are served.
Some sanity at last amidst the demented ragings of the identity politics crowd that STILL does
not understand that it was them who put Trump in the White House. Not white male rage. Not the
shy white female vote. Not any other race/gender/sexuaity category that you wish to dream up.
What put Trump in the White House was a deeply dysfunctional political system. The fact that
the symbol of this deeply dysfunctional political system happened to be female is neither here
nor there. Understand this. Understand this and learn.
Ditch the identity politics. Become a real progressive, not a fake progressive deriving fatally
deluded ideas from exclusio
Reich has some points, but is ignoring several key circumstances, such as the 72K$ median income
among Trump supporters, but mainly hostile legislators blocking anything more than incremental
changes as to wealth redistribution such as the ACA. Neither Obama nor Clinton have supernatural
powers to get progressive measures passed through republican congress.
The Guardian once represented the working class. Not any more.
The next president had been decided. The elites, the lobbyists, the corporate bosses, and the
media all decided the next president. Only one thing missing. The voters. They weren't playing
ball! Those pesky working class voters! Now the media get to pretend they were with us all along!
"In an article out today at The Washington Post, Freddie DeBoer makes this case. He points
out that Sanders during the Democratic primary won in key states, like Michigan and Wisconsin,
that Clinton lost in the general, and that Sanders was able to attract independent voters. He
also notes Sanders's higher favorability and popularity ratings. Of course, such arguments are
entirely speculative. We don't know how Sanders would have fared under Republican attacks. And
we can't forget that Sanders lost the primary, by a not insignificant amount.
"But one of the biggest arguments made by Clinton and her supporters was that she was pragmatic
and electable-the safe candidate. Sanders's campaign, with its proposals for a $15 minimum wage
and universal health care, was derided as pie-in-the-sky, and the candidate himself painted his
platform as an electoral disaster. I suspect that more than a few Democrats went with their heads
instead of their hearts when casting their votes for Clinton. But we found out that playing a
safe and moderate campaign (i.e., picking Tim Kaine, the most forgettable man in existence) doesn't
necessarily translate into a winning one. Clinton failed to pick up moderate Republicans and white
women. And many of her supporters skated over her extreme unfavorability ratings and her inability
to generate excitement.
"There is no concrete evidence that Sanders would have won. But we were sold a candidate who
we were told was electable, when most of the signs pointed to the fact that she wasn't."
Democratic party turned into a party of identity politics painting by the numbers. Here is how
they assemble their base by pandering to each group specifically:
*women - check
*blacks - check
*latino - check
*lgbt -check
*millenials - check
*educated white collar progressives - check
But then it turns out these groups are not one-dimensional and their voting is not based on
just a single identity. They are complex people. And this is how the Democratic voting base splintered.
There was no message unifying them.
First Brexit, now Trump ... world politics are not going the way that Guardianistas envisaged!
So where has it all gone wrong for the left?
What Rubin says about the democrats abandoning the working class in the US could equally apply
to Labour in the UK.
Serves the Washington and London elites f***ing well right, you might say.
But whereas the Washington/New York democrats will just have to lump it, the London elites don't
want to accept Brexit because they didn't get the result they wanted, and they will try to do
anything to stop it.
If they do, and they might because they will stop at nothing, it will destroy any fleeting idea
of democracy in Britain.
And for what?
To remain a member of a corrupt and bankrupt euro project that is running off the rails?
The euro elite is as bent as they come. What they did and are doing to the greeks is unforgivable.
Yanis Varoufakis was against Brexit not because he supports the Brussels autocrats, but because
he thinks that the best way to combat the world's biggest threats - i.e., climate change - is
through combined efforts (not much point in one country trying to combat climate change on its
own if no one else bothers).
The euro project is doomed. The 28 or 30 countries can agree on nothing (response to refugee crisis?),
except to punish those that dissent
Trump & the GOP don't represent the working class [either]. All the misguided "uneducated, poor
white folk" will find that out soon enough when the new regime is allowed to ride roughshod over
all the gov't support programs they've relied on.
Think he served one year and resigned. He was too much of an idealist as came from educational
system and could not enough accomplished to justify himself being in that position as per what
I saw him say many years ago.
Yes Reich was a Clinton appointee. He wrote a book about his four years as Secretary of Labor.
It is an interesting read. My take from that book was how Bill gutted labor influence inside his
admin.
The Clintos and Obama watched as their fellow blue-class and middle class workers were gobbled
up by larger and larger corporations, and now they are surprised that they refuse to vote for
them? Trumps message to African Americans was simple and so painfully true: "Vote for me, what
do you have to lose?". In the end, most voters decided "what do I have to lose?"
Because four million people voted for someone even more right wing then trump. If you think Gary
Johnson is a supporter of expanded government services, then you're entirely unfamiliar with his
career as new mexico's governor.
Thomas Ferguson granted an interview this morning. In it he said,
(in a paper from 2014 he predicted that) "Hillary Clinton would have a lot of trouble putting
together the old coalition of effectively Wall Street and if you'll allow me to speak quickly
and directly for the sake of communication, identity politics. They're really interesting to study.
You can see for example in the white college age women that Hillary only got 6% more of those
than Trump did which is sort of unbelievable. But let me come to what I think is probably the
heart of the matter. I think we really are at the end of the classical democratic formula of the
Clinton period which was Wall Street plus identity politics. I think this is it. You're never
going to be able to put that humpty dumpty back together again. If the democrats want to win they're
going to actually have to make a strong appeal to working class Americans. Now you know the problem
this is going to create. There's a ton of money in the democratic party. It is not going to sit
there and tolerate candidates like Sanders. They just really despised and hated Sanders. So we're
now going to have a very interesting situation where you've got a top heavy party with cash at
the top and no mass at the base at all, or very little."
The interesting thing about Ferguson is he doesn't speak or write that often as he dislikes
arguing, but when he does come to a conclusion he is willing to share he is seldom wrong.
I think you, Reich and Ferguson are spot on. It is very hard to argue against "identity" politics
since it is basically arguing that minorities (racial, sexual, religious, whatever) have rights.
Unfortunately these "identity" groupings somehow left out the working class. So the Democratic
Party ended up representing a coalition that involved Wall Street (at its center) and many other
small minority groups. What was left out of this coalition was any voice for the working class.
Now that is a classical example of divide and conquer. And yes this is a case of the big money
of capitalism dividing America's workers.
Fifty years ago organized labor unions had a seat at the table who could speak for American
workers (whatever small group the individual worker may have belonged to). Today that is gone.
Hopefully in the coming years the Democratic Party can restore its roots and begin to represent
that class of Americans who actually work for a living. These workers can be divided into hundreds
of different groups -- white, black, male, female, straight,gay, wonks, blue collar, hispanic,
many others. But together they can have a voice in the national dialogue. If electing Trump is
the way to educate the Democratic Party honchos on what is required then perhaps Trump's win will
serve a useful purpose.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right. Although rejected by the GOP (racism) Obama
continued that move. Hillary could have easily won the election by reaching out to the millions
disenfranchised for more than 30 years, but failed to do so. What and who made her stick to a
campaign of 'Not Trump' and elitism is puzzling but not an enigma.
My guess is Bill and Wall Street created the plan, and it went down in a blaze.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more".
A good article which explains the route the Democrats have taken over the years. Faced with
the Republican victories of Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989 the democrats chose to move to the right,
the party having a previous lineage with ordinary workers back to FDR and further. Bill Clinton
in 1992 took onboard the third way calling itself the New Democrats. In the UK Tony Blair copied
this following on after the tories Margaret Thatcher and John Major with his New Labour transformation
of the party into a virtual copy of the tories.
Just like the 2010 election in the UK with Labour, many people who would have voted Democrat
simply did not turn out for Hilary Clinton and did not vote at all. With complete establishment
backing including Wall Street and the MSM she lost to Donald Trump. Many would have voted for
him anyway but a sizeable percentage must have used him as an anti Clinton vote. Jill Stein called
Hilary Clinton corrupt. Clinton is a war hawk she supported the Iraq war and doesn't appear to
have learnt from the disaster as she was mainly responsible for the catastrophy in Libya. She
loves to boast, we came, we saw, he died, meaning Col. Gaddafi she is more reserved about the
later deaths of the ambassador Christopher Stevens and some of his colleagues in the Libyan embassy
as a direct result of supporting the jihadis. While still secretary of state she said that she
would arm anyone fighting against President Assad thats turned out well. She supported the coup
in Honduras and was instrumental in laying the ground out for the coup in Ukraine. The recent
wikileaks indicated she knew the Saudis were financing ISIS but she said nothing as they were
contributing to the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton Lies About Attending Bilderberg While In Denver
An excellent analysis. Clinton was an awful candidate. She represents the establishment in every
possible way; the same establishment that has stood shamelessly by while the US working and middle
classes have been abandoned.
She offered precisely nothing other than not being Donald Trump. Her campaign resembled a coronation.
This sheer hubris and arrogance cost the Democrats the presidency. Forget the tiresome shrieks
of racism and fascism for a minute: Trump won because Clinton failed to get support among the
masses of underemployed and unemployed industrial working class in the Rust Belt; because she
offered nothing new, no answers other than more of the same.
They failed to address the very real concerns and fears of everyday Americans. They have no
one to blame but themselves for this disaster.
Nonsense.The article nails it. A failure to address the Economic Vampirism that Clinton champions.Sure,
there are plenty of racists and misogynists in the GOP, but willfull ignorance couched in identity
rhetoric is how the party lost so much.until establishment dems realize that, things will continue
to get bleaker for them.
This is a very good article, but it doesn't pay enough attention to the human, emotional aspect
of political leadership. The really sad thing is that the Democrats had somebody in Bernie Sanders
who could have beaten Trump, as all polls earlier this year indicated, but the determination of
Hillary to be President combined with the vast web of Clinton connections led to the result we
have. Everybody knew about her problems going into the primary campaign, but the attraction of
electing a female President combined with unease with Sanders' roots and radicalism (actually,
not such big difficulties) led to her rock-solid "super-delegate" support and sufficient voter
support in the primaries. I doubt the DNC "dirty tricks" were quite enough to cause Sanders' defeat,
but the Party establishment support no doubt swayed some voters, too. Unfortunately, Sanders will
be too old to carry the torch, as is Elizabeth Warren; they should now lead the battle in the
Senate and write the books so needed to shape American progressive thought in the coming years.
The Democrats need to completely rebuild, so that in eight years they can be ready again for executive
power, with the essential support of Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. It's not
worth their while winning the Presidency without control of Congress. It means building a real
party, a social movement and organization, not just a label, with leaders who can connect emotionally
with citizens.
"Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations..."?
What about the landslide shift of power to corporations, lobbyists, and the rich under the
Bush and Reagan regimes?
I always agree with you, Mr Reich, and gain insight from your writings/columns, but I think
you're really missed the boat here. A demagogue told the big lie to people, and many bought it!
For all the Democrats' (many shortcomings), the BLAME for the sad state of the middle-class,
working class, and non-1% is on the Republicans' heads!
And the war on unions is one of the right-wing's key rallying points
Clinton is at least partly responsible for Brexit.
1) She led the US into invading Libya. Persuaded Obama, who was initially against it, and now
calls it his biggest mistake as president.
2) As Gaddafi predicted, his regime was the "cork in the bottle of Africa" (Assange's words)
since Libya was patrolling the region. Removing him opened the first front of the European migrant
crisis.
3) Destabilizing Libya provided a base for ISIS and other factions, which helped destabilize
Syria, opening the second front of the European migrant crisis.
4) The European migrant crisis was one of the primary drivers of Brexit.
Well regular Joe Blow has been mocked and ignored for years. Joe Blow might not live in a trailer
park, he might have some nice house but he and Jane Blow are working double shifts to pay for
it. Joe and Jane have long given up on politics because 'it does not change a thing anyways',
they have never seen a politician outside the election phase to descend to their rather unremarkable
town in the middle of nowhere. Unions are nowhere to be seen, no one actually gives a damn about
them and no one listens to their concerns.
But they understand. They do not have a college degree so those people from NY or Detroit might
be right that they do not understand the big picture, watching the news they see that their elected
officials have much more important things to take care of. Gender neutral bathrooms, organizing
community hours to paint the safe space at the nearby college, giving debt and tax reliefs to
the same banks threatening the two of them to foreclose their house, apparently they are really
busy.
But now, after years, someone is coming around and listens. He might not really care and only
pretend to but he DOES listen. For the first time ever.
And we really wonder about the outcome of this election?!
Reich's article pretty much nails it. The Democratic bigwigs preferred the company of corporate
fat cats, facilitated their greed and lost touch with their base....
This is one of the few articles that provides any insight into the 2016 presidential election.
The reality is that Americans don't like either political party and don't trust politicians. American
voters identify with political parties far less than voters in other countries, and most Americans
assume that politicians are crooks. That's just the way it is.
Presidential candidates hire consultants to provide marketing expertise to their political
campaigns. Trump, by contrast, is himself a marketing expert. As a young man in his twenties,
he had the insight that he could increasing the value of real estate by branding it, just as luxury
automobiles are branded.
The people who have been mocking Donald Trump for being a real estate magnate and reality show
TV impresario fail to realize that those are pursuits where it is impossible to succeed without
understanding what the consuming public wants. Many people find Trump to be outrageously offensive,
but that is part of a persona he has developed over decades in his property development and TV
enterprises in order to attract large numbers of people to his golf courses and hotels, and to
attract viewers to The Apprentice.
In politics, Trump's persona translated into a vicious political style that led his opponents
to focus on his persona rather than his message. The message was that the increasing deemphasis
on national borders (in the form of globalized trade, illegal immigration, and arguably even international
terrorism) should be dialed back because it is changing America for the worse. That message resonated
with a large number of people and resulted in his election.
Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump's opponents failed to address his message and focused
instead on his persona. Every opponent who tried to take out Trump by attacking his outrageous
and offensive persona was destroyed in the process. During the Republican primary, candidates
were talking about Donald Trump so much that they were defining themselves in terms of Donald
Trump. Hillary Clinton made the same mistake the 16 unsuccessful Republican primary candidates
made. Her campaign was a social message that used Donald Trump as a bogeyman.
The appeal to social interest groups did not address the objective and important issues that
Trump was (arguably inarticulately) articulating, which are the issues that really attracted voters
to him attracted voters to him. Like Britain, America has a lot of towns where the local economy
has been destroyed by the closing of, for example, a steel mill. Trump knew how to address the
voters in those towns, and that's how he got elected.
The missing piece from your comment is Trumps use of media that was relatively new compared to
prior presidential elections. In Trump's case this was Twitter and Twitter bot accounts re-tweeting
messages to smartphones. Obama did well harnessing social media, just as Reagan used taped video
feeds appearing to be live (have to remember how primitive color transmissions were not that long
ago), Kennedy used television, and earlier presidents won harnessing radio.
That is true, as well. Trump's campaign was arguably the American equivalent of the Twitter revolutions
that swept North Africa and the Ukraine a few years ago. One question is whether that use of social
media is why Trump won or whether it is more narrowly why his win was not predicted by pollsters.
This may also be relevant to the unexpectedness of the results of the Brexit referendum.
It's also a reminder to those who shout "power to the people" in the expectation that empowered
people will return a particular result. With Trump, and with Brexit, the people appear to have
repudiated those who see themselves as empowerers of the people. It's worth some reflection.
This is an excellent article. In a perverse way it was those zealously anti Trump wailers who
unwittingly made him the 45th president of the USA.
Words of wisdom for those disappointed by the result: Understand why those who voted for Trump
did. Don't just write them all of as racist/xenophobic. The majority are not. They are angry because
politicians, including and especially those Democrats who were supposed to be on their side, sold
their souls to the devil - globalisation, big corporations etc.
In fact one may argue that Bill Clinton signing the NAFTA free trade agreement back in 1994
sowed the seeds for this current situation. Think about it
Exactly! These people are suffering, and instead of getting help from the Democratic Party they
were just all labeled as a bunch of racists, xenophobes. homophobes, etc. Most people who voted
for Trump didn't vote for the man. They voted for the hope that they could take their country
back from a bunch of elitist, corporatists, and rich bankers who have stolen it from them. You
aren't going to win them back by denigrating them further.
Yet the mainstream media will persist in explaining the Trump disaster in terms of race or gender
issues, never in terms of economic class.
This is how they keep us divided.
Yes. I live in rural Missouri, and I absolutely agree with this analysis. The bit that worries
me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall, the deportations, the
repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less well-off less well-off
in every way. Does anyone really believe, for example, that lowering the tax on business will
induce any businessman with any sense to rebuild an old factory in a small, crumbling midwestern
town with an uneducated workforce? Let alone allow a union to form, provide decent salaries, pensions
and healthcare like their grandfathers had from companies like Ford, General Motors, Caterpillar,
John Deere etc? Of course, there's always a war as a last resort: that used to get the economy
going, using up lots of materials and lots of surplus young men, didn't it? But I'm afraid the
Chinese don't want to fight us, they want to buy us. There's still so much useable, badly-tended
space in the middle of America ...
"The bit that worries me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall,
the deportations, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less
well-off less well-off in every way."
Actually, GETTING ELECTED was the best thing he could have done. At least it's a CHANCE for
the Democratic Party to wake the **** up and see the working class (not the WHITE working class,
the WHOLE working class) has been slipping away from them and at an accelerating rate. And they
are FURIOUS at getting the shaft while their union "leaders" ORDER them to "vote blue no matter
who" and are bullied and browbeaten if they so much as DARE to ask what happened to all those
empty promises from last campaign season that have been DOWNGRADED yet again into something even
smaller and less ambitious, only to be silenced with "the other guys will be the apocalypse so
don't you dare ask any questions you dirty racists!"
My husband and two friends and I traveled from SF to Philly to protest the DNC convention.
The protestors - most of whom were under 35 - were corralled in FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT PARK.
The delegates lounged in WELLS FARGO CENTER. They even shut down the subway station used by both
groups so that only delegates could use it. They did this even though at the end of the day a
torrential electrical storm was drenching the protesters. Nope, folks. That PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
IS FOR THE DNC ONLY.
Did Hillary really think we didn't NOTICE?? Did she think that making FIVE TIMES the average
annual income of Americans for a 45 minutes speech to Gold In Sacks would be ignored? That we
didn't care that she and Bill RENEGED on the deal with Russia that Bush One made re NATO is pushing
Europe to the brink of war? That she loves loves loves the TPP?
Just how fucking stupid did Hillary think we were NOT to notice her Wall Street/MIC worshiping
history and positions?
Trump is a domestic disaster. We'll have to deal with that. But I am at least slightly comforted
that he wants to stop this war machine (bon chance) and does not support the treasonous, sovereignty-killing
TPP - which Hillary SUPPORTED.
The only one who got Trump elected was HILLARY CLINTON and her arrogant followers.
i hope mr reich can help to clear out the faux liberal power elites from the democratic
party ... the wall street apparatchiks and senior officials that preside over the various electoral
'plantations' for the clintons: millenials, blacks, lgbt/trans and hispanics
this type of politics is regressive because it provides cover for vested interests (that
derive their wealth through ownership of capital) to colonise democracy against the vast majority
of people that depend upon wages for a living
the power structure at the top of the democratic party is corrupt and corrupting ... the way
this organisation has sought and cultivated minority votes (not in the pursuit of some higher
class goal) but to enhance the career prospects of an 'out of touch' political class on capitol
hill is the ultimate form of betrayal
in particular, the way impoverished black communities across america have been used by a 'praetorian
guard' of senior black democratic leaders to support the dynastic ambitions of the clinton family
must come to an end
it is down to enlightened thinkers like mr reich to ensure that the democratic party transitions
from being the 'last plantation owner in america' (and trader in chief of minority votes) towards
a champion of working people and their class interests
this would be a good start: i would fire most senior black leaders in the democratic party
... (you know, the likes of donna brazile!) for activities incompatible with representing the
class interests of working americans - period
One problem the left has to overcome is the sheer seductiveness of the argument that the Farages
and Trumps of this world put forward - they tell those who have not fared well under capitalism
that the fault is not their own, that the real problem is immigrants - it is a cynical but effective
lie that those who feel left behind find hard to resist.
In truth the problem is that the system they - Trump and Farage - actually favour is utterly
dependent on workers who will work for very little whether they are immigrants or not. The tragic
irony is that the right has absolutely no intention of improving the lot of the poor fools who
vote for them.
In a multi party parliamentary system the US labor unions and the US' left-leaning social justice
voters would not be represented by the same party.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking labor in the US is a left-wing movement. It hasn't
been for decades. US labor unions don't fight for workers rights, they fight for their workers
pocketbooks and nothing else.
In 1972 labor abandoned the Democrats when they chose a too-progressive candidate for president.
Since that time the relationship between progressives and the working class has been a nothing
but a marriage of convenience. That marriage seems to have broken up.
17% of American indusrtry is union. There wasn't much of a marriage to break up. Factory mechanization
was accompanied by moving out of the rust belt into anti-union Southern states. Later, they left
for China.
The value of unions to Democrats has little to do with the voters in their ranks. Unions have
long been the Democrat's counterbalance against Republican wealth - they can't buy as many ads
but they can provide nearly unlimited free labor to the Democrats canvassing and telephone campaigns.
WIthout unions the Democrats would have even fewer seats in the House and Senate and Woodrow Wilson
would probably have been their last president.
No, the democrats no longer represent the working classes in the US . As the Labour party here
no longer does. I listened to Ed Miliband this morning on the radio and when asked whether he
supported Brexit he said he was worried about coloured people, Muslims, transgender and almost
everyone else, but he didn't mention the working class at all.
This is why the Tories can get away with doing whatever they want, because Labour is finished
in most working class areas. They became a party for minorities and encouraged mass immigration.
Now they mean less than nothing to most ordinary, indigenous people in this country!
We don't need a Trump, we've got the Tories and UKIP instead!
That would be because the classical working class is an 1860s-1970s phenomenon. It's not describing
any meaningful "class" of people anymore. Some people may "feel" working class, but the truth
of the matter is that for everyone who feels that way, there's someone with similar living conditions
who doesn't.
While I find much to agree with in analyses like Reich's and Frank's, I find that they tend to
romanticize the white working class and ignore the elephants in the room, those being racism,
xenophobia, homophobia, and the rest. I feel I can say this because I come from a white working-class
background in small-town Arkansas (Bill Clinton's hometown and mine were thirty-five miles apart).
Believe me, Robert, there is a virulent strain of racism among many of those folks, and It's something
that needs to be better addressed by analyses such as yours and Tom Frank's. It's not just something
that GOP fear mongering conjured out of thin air. It has deep historical roots and cannot be brushed
easily aside by discussions based solely on economic arguments. (See, for example, Stacy Patton's
article:
http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men .)
My GF comes from a similar background. I posted this earlier on this thread.
I know the "working classes" in the USA, especially the midwestern variety. Dumb, ill informed,
incurious. Obsessed with macho posturing, weapons, military exploits.
Rampant racism, misogyny, extreme religiosity. Birtherism, creationism, paranoia, you name
it. You have to read the anti-Obama and Clinton vitriol from people lke that to believe it.
From people who do not have a pot to piss in.
My GF hails from some dot in the middle of nowhere in IA. She describes being raised there
as living in a cult. She had to come to Long Island to realise that there actually were still
jews alive today. She more or less thought they were like the Hittites and the Sumerians, something
you read about in the bible. To this day she loves to watch documentaries on TV because the
education she received in school was so poor and narrow minded.
A lot of that rascism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is born out of the frustration that the working
class find themselves in. Many believe, rightly or wrongly, that foreigners, the LGBTQ community,
Arfrican Americans, Latino's, Asians and so on, are given special treatment. These groups have
jumped to the front of the cue to reach the American Dream, while the working class have been
stuck in line at the back for years and they have become frustrated and angry. It doesn't excuse
those views, but if you look at it from their perspective you can see why they hit out.
Additionally, these views are held right across the demographic makeup of the US, not just
the Working Class.
hopefully once the dust has died down this is the sort of considered writing that we will see
in the Guardian - not the ludicrous outpourings of bile we have seen in the past few days.
I listened to the live radio account from the BBC and noted the evident discomfiture as the
result differed from the script. At the end of a presidential election the assembled studio experts
should have more to say about a candidate than bewailing perceived racism, perceived misogyny
(I doubt that Trump is a true misogynist!) and Mexican walls yet listening to the BBC since then
it's as if the programme presenters are working to a script. Likewise. I'm afraid, The Guardian.
What I find truly remarkable is the analogous positions of Trump and Corbyn: both outsider
candidates who relied on votes from outside their respective Establishments to win through. Trump
had little to do with the Republicans in the past. Corbyn was best known for voting against his
party. Both have been reviled by their own party elites (and by the Guardian). Corbyn has faced
a coup rumoured to have been organised from outside the PLP. Leading Republicans wore the fact
that they had not voted for their own candidate as a badge of honour. Of course this was solely
intended to save their political necks, but in the event did no harm whatsoever to Trump or Corbyn
- indeed it may have positively assisted them. Had Corbyn been positively endorsed by say, Harriet
Harman, he would possibly never have survived.
The US and UK political elites set great store by their acceptance of other faiths and ethnicities
yet seem curiously intolerant to the outsiders in their own milieu.
Clinton, Blair and Schroeder came up with the third way. Snake oil salesmen that all profited
from sucking up to the corporations and selling their influence. Schroeder signed a deal with
the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream the company set up to do so. As for
Clinton and Blair the list is long a sto how they have lined their pockets. The third way has
never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany in real terms for years
as they havent in the US. In the UK easy credit has masked the real situation and now peple are
suffering.
What Robert Reich has written has hit the nail on the head.
Schroeder signed a deal with the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream
the company set up to do so.
Except he merely served on the supervisory board.
The third way has never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany
in real terms for years as they havent in the US.
"The working man" is waffling. Contrary to propaganda, Schroeder's reforms have contributed
massively to Germany not being hit as hard by the financial crisis as others - and contrary to
legends, it has improved the situation of the poor. It's the people peddling those legends, devoid
of any understanding how the situation was before, who contribute to the unemployed feeling outcast.
It's the 21st century. Wake up. Waffling about the "Working Man" is the same as waffling about
Cowboys and believing cattle farming is still being done like in 1850.
Guardian columnists such as Hadley Freeman, Lucia Graves, Wolff, Abramson, Freedland and company
should be forced to read this article. These columnists very rarely if ever talk about the Gilded
Age style inequality levels in the West, and the USA in particular. Instead it is all about identity
politics for them. Can these individuals start writing about the disastrous chasm between the
very rich and the rest please?
Definitely. Identity politics has been coopted by the neoliberal technocracy to divert attention
from wealth inequalities, the operation of big corporations in politics and the general lack of
democratic accountability in governance.
Thank you Mr Reich. Best article I have read for months.
The vote for Trump was a protest vote. It was a non violent revolution. A significant part
of the US electorate were angry. They saw their quality of life eroded. They saw little change
of their children having a chance of a better life. Trump was the perfect outsider. He was not
part of the "corrupt system". If you are living on your knees why not vote for someone who might
bring the whole corrupt rotting edifice crashing down?
THe usual media suspects have been trying to explain what happen in their normal closeted,
university educated, urban, smug, condesending manner. But when people are angry, when they are
protesting they want action, they want change , they don't want the status quo. During the French
revolution the mobs didn't ask "whats your policy on gender based minorities?"...they just shouted
"off with their heads"
Until the media, the politicians, the policy makers, the wealthy elite start properly listening
to the people left behind, then we will continue to see more Trumps and Brexits.
Excellent analysis . Mr Reich was Labour secretary under Clinton and so she shares the responsibility
of his policies. Of note is media complicity including so called liberal progressive media no
heavy weights. It seems that 'generating ' money / growth/ markets etc etc seem to be the all
important factors . Citizens' solidarity and the needs of the most vulnerable are at the bottom
of the checklist if it is ther at all. These progressives have fallen or perhaps fallen into the
trap of believing that talking about 'progressive' topics e.g. misogyny and gender etc is enough
to earn the badge of 'progressives and liberals '.
It is very strange indeed in the midst of all this ther is no mention of JC and McDonnel and
co and their ' old 'foolish' 'defunct' types of policies that no one wants to vote for because
.......
Finally it is curious to note that many US citizens voted for Trump because of the disillusionment
with political establishment. The odd thing is that ' those in the know ' did not know about their
anger -- To complicate matters further and using this an example does US and the West really know
what ordinary citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of ME Asia and Africa really think about
the ruinous roles of the West in making their lives and their children's lives and their countries
and their future a waste . Just because ther are strategic and national security and economic
interests of West and their local reps. Do we have to believe the stories and features of the
natives and their 'backgrward ' oppressors or just believe ( as US election showed ) what we want
to believe that the natives, want , deserve and should get --
And yes we are in 21 st century and using all the powers of Internet and modern society to
be acquainted with the outside world -- Doh --
This article and simon Jenkins article on trump are the best two articles I've read in the guardian
for a long time! Spot on .keep reminding people that gw bush supported h. Clinton ,bush whose
personal vendetta against Saddam cost thousands of lives ,Iraqi ,us ,UK ,etc! And how million
american workers were put on the dole by bill clinton !ill
The Clintons also helped corrupt the Democratic party to deny Bernie Sanders the opportunity
to put many of these popular views to the test on Tuesday.
That also meant denying the voters the chance of having someone like Tulsi Gabbard as vice-president:
Exactly. Messrs Thatcher/Major/Blair/Cameron followed the same path here and that is why we have
decided that we , the people , want to take back control and showed it by voting to recover our
sovereignty by leaving the EU .
Remember, Trump used to be a Democrat. The fact that he has led the Republicans to peers suggests
very little difference between establishment parties, as in the U.K. Trump is a savvy enough schemer
to play to the fears and feelings of the dispossed. Let's see what he can deliver. I doubt much.
All I can hope is that he recruits right wing Us Supreme Court justices in the vein of Scalia.
Mr Justice Scalia, by his verdict in the Citizens United case, sold US politics to the highest
bidder. He and his devout followers have done more harm to their country than any other supreme
Court Justice. A man who supposedly believed in the 10 commandments, but who lacked the integrity
to hear any death penalty cases. A hypocrite.
Glass-Steagall, which was used to protect ordinary savers from high risk investment banking, was
removed by Clinton, not GWB. Sure, Congress and House were dominated by Republicans, but the Democrats
had Bill Clinton and could have filibustered (see how effective the Republicans have been since).
Instead, Gramm-Leach-Biley passed with bipartisan support. And let's not even talk about
NAFTA.
The Socialist bread van resprayed in a liberalism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political
correctness, globalism and liberal interventionism pretty colour by the Blairites, the Clintonites
and EU political elites, was still the same old failed product under the bonnet.
Guaranteed whenever it is taken out on the roads to breakdown and take a Nation or Federal
Superstate to the brink of bankruptcy before the passengers(electorate) see it for what it really
is - they had been sold a clapped out old banger with a new coat of paint!
UK Socialists, memorably described by Margaret Thatcher as people who when in power always
run out of other peoples money, are mostly a well meaning lot, but their bread van which crashed
spectacularly in the 1970's and got taken to the scrap yard as beyond repair, was years later
deviously bought(hijacked) as a 'damaged repairable', by a small group of liberal metropolitan
elite scam artists who had quietly infiltrated the Labour Party.
After a little tinkering under the bonnet(parachuting their own candidates into Labour heartland
seats) and a new touchy feely PR paint job, they relaunched it onto the streets as a New Model
'Green' Socialist vehicle, when in reality it just a bunch of second hand car dealers in sharp
suits operating an industrial scale 'cut and shut' job scam of Madoff proportions on hoodwinked
buyers(the electorate).
Working hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and big business, they made themselves extremely rich
but now have a lot to answer for, as they're responsible for the rise of the left and right wing
populist genie out of the bottle. Once out, like the inflation genie it is a devilishly difficult
task to put back in.
As evidenced by the latest utterances of a beaming Nigel Farage, aka Mr Brexit, following the
Trump Presidential winning campaign:
"Brexit, and now Trump, and now the wagons roll on to the rest of Europe for all the elections
next year," Farage said, smiling like a cheshire cat. "This is a really exciting time. As someone
who has now become a demolitions expert I'm thoroughly enjoying what's going on."
With bold, brash, crass, in your face characters like Trump and Farage at the forefront of
the political stage, the next few years, like a fairground ride could be rather wild and bumpy,
but never dull.
What so you're saying Trump and Farage lied? ....They're not going to protect our lifestyles and
western living standards using left wing socialist protectionism? ....who woulda thunk it?
It may be a repudiation of the American power structure, or the result of building certain perceptions
in the American public over the years by the mainstream media that Trump pounced upon and crudely
exploited to the hilt. The US media couldn't steer the beast it had created when it wanted to.
Think it's wishful thinking that we're not in for a period of great upheaval, possibly tragedy.
We saw what happened during the Bush presidency, an ugly war with a tally of tens of thousands
of lives and global financial meltdown. This time it could be much, much worse.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Change "Democratic" for "Labour", "Washington" for "Westminster", "Wall Street" for "the City",
and it still rings true. Corbyn and the swing to the left isn't the cause of the crisis, it's
a response. What happens with Sanders and his base next will be pivotal.
Compulsory reading for all who formed & remain part of what is described with forensic precision,
including many contributing journalist to this paper. To be taken seriously, not immediately denounced,
Robert Reich could only put pen to paper with confidence after Trump won so decisively, & why
we are still reeling from reality about to unfold from success of the Brexit campaign. Fundamental
change in reactionary maverick hands.
Both Trump & UKIP/Farage/ Tory right engaged willingly, without shame, in a campaign of authoritarian
demagoguery, with elevation of racist, xenophobic sentiments to being new national virtue of saying
it as it is.
Existing power structures with their intricate connections, web of back rubbing fundraising, &
legislation to enable profit accumulation to continue unhindered by challenges from 'shopfloor'
labour groups, failed to see what was under their noses. Insulated, blinkered privileged they
dismissed as unelectable what was coming down on them like a ton of bricks.
Great piece, well worth reading more than once.
It is more an indictment of the mainstream political parties than the electorates that politicians
like Trump, Farage, Le Pen and all the other hate preachers are attracting so much support. It
is equally an indictment of the leftist media that they cling to the discredited leaders of the
so called centre left parties. But then they have personally done very nicely out of the cozy
relationships they have with leaders who are held in as much contempt by the ordinary voters as
the misnamed liberal media holds them.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades
the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters
who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives
and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
That is the most relevant paragraph I've seen here in recent months. exactly the same for the
UK Labour party, Nobody with any real prospect of power represents the working class. The only
shadows left are the unrealistic promises of Trump, or Brexit that we know will be ignored once
the vote is cast. But what else is there?
The "lumpenproletariat" that brought the social democratic parties in europe to power and made
the european communist political parties a force to reckon with no longer exist. The old working
classes have been superseded by an underclass who do the truly unskilled work, and a middle class,
the successful children of the former workingclass who now are nurses, administrators, middle
managers, etc.
Steel, mining, ship building, car manufacturing, etc, used to employ thousands or even tens of
thousands of people in a single plant. Those days are over. Everywhere. To exclusively focus on
the 20% of the population that are truly left behind is political suicide. And why a guy like
Corbyn will never see an electoral win.
And then one needs to keep in mind that the American working class are much more right leaning
than their european counterparts.
First past the post does have benefits e.g., stable governments that last 4-5 years, manifesto's
printed up-front rather than debated behind closed doors, prevention of extremist parties achieving
influence via balance of power.
UK, USA main two parties are actually 'large tents/broad churches' where multiple views exist
rather than narrow dogma.
Democracy is not perfect - but the peaceful transfer of power - in the UK, US is to be commended
and not taken for granted.
(ps I agree with gerrymandering in US but that's a result of the States vs Federal system. Also
one more thing - FPTP is the only way to choose a President whether by Electoral College or popular
vote).
Stable governments that don't represent voter's views or needs. Manifestos that are manifestly
ignored at the earliest convenience, policies that were never announced or publicised, pursued
in the interests of political lobbyists, donors or corporations. Politicians whose default position
is to lie if it serves them better than the truth and the electorate offered the only opportunity
to dismiss them at the next election, when they can reliably expect to be rewarded with a seat
in the Lords or any number of sinecures in the form of directorships and consultancies.
The system is not fit for purpose and that's just the way our political class likes it.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Secy. Reich. I cannot say enough!
Yes, Sir no one can fool all the people all the time. The Clintons were masters at this game
and believed they could get the people to believe that 2+2=5 assisted with their unlimited corporate
money, Wall St. influence, and the dissemination of misinformation aided by the media.
There would not have been any need for organizations like Wikileaks, if journalists had a modicum
of integrity.
As for the Guardian, it had to have their favorite, and the most corrupt, candidate defeated
at the elections resoundingly in order to have voices, the like that of Secy. Reich express his
views in this otherwise skewed newspaper. With the increase in corruption in public office, journalistic
integrity followed that same path.
The frustration of the people with establishment politics rose to such a level where they did
not care even if the opposing non-establishment candidate was Donald Trump or Donald Duck who
groped other ducklings.
The Guardian was one of Clinton's loudest barking dogs, following the Goldman Sachs playlist to
the letter. Adverse comments BTL about her or the Guardian's election coverage were deleted.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not anymore "
Republicans never represented the working class but the working classes continued to vote them
into office.
The destruction of the trade union movement has always been one of the highest priorities for
Conservatives – the success they have had in large part due to the concerted efforts of Ronnie
and Maggie (who are now engaged in a torrid posthumous affair).
In the UK there is a sinister parallel between zero hour contracts and workers during the depression
standing in the streets hoping to pick up a day's work.
Apparently "job security" is a threat to the prosperity of the nation and so it goes on.
Now that the unions have been dealt with the Tories in the UK have set their sights on dismantling
the NHS (by incrementally starving it to death) and there is presently nothing to stop them.
Trump clearly tailored his message to reach the disenfranchised but unfortunately there
doesn't appear to be any evidence that (a) he really cares about them and (b) anything substantial
is about to improve their lot.
Its quite ironic that right-wing, neo-lib ideology, created what we have now, and at the same
time its the right and far right that are getting all the gains. The popularity of Trump. Farage
and this movement tells you how utterly and totally the left and liberals in general have failed
in connecting with the working classes and offer something different.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations.
It was this that created an opening for Donald Trump
Sums things up succintly. If you're concentrating on stealing their clothes, they can steal
yours, especially when you only wave them about listlessly yet refuse to wear them.
That's been happening since Reagan. I get the blame on Clinton & Obama in the context of "Dems
played the same game as GOP", but not in a more open context. This has been happening for 35 years
with trickle down economy. It also happens to "coincide" with the widening of wealth gap...
It was a repudiation of President Barack Obama and his leftist [neoliberal] policies that decimated
middle class jobs, health insurance and the respect for the rule of law.
Obama just nailed the whole working class with a massive Obamacare rate hike. What did they expect
was going to happen? You cannot provide free healthcare to the poor on the backs of the working
class while the upper mids and wealthy pay nothing. The upper mids already have employer insurance,
people, and they do not get an opinion. OCare is hitting me for $400 a month for insurance with
a $13,000 deductible! That is fraud! I am a working class liberal- Obama broke every campaign
promise he ever made to us, and Clinton has done nothing to shed her 'corrupt DNC insider' image
or distance herself from Obama's treacherous policies. ALL of the reasons the Trump people are
giving for voting for Trump are VALID and we can blame this one on THE DNC. BERNIE WOULD HAVE
WON.
I find it poetic that the Guardian, which seemed this past year to be competing with the other
US majors in the grotesque sidelining and marginalizing of Bernie Sanders, is now On their hands
and knees with their contribution drive. I will never give a dime to these hacks. What's funny
is that had they stuck to their principles of fearless reporting I have no doubt a huuuge number
of readers would have jumped at the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution. Like the DNC,
they had a clear thoroughbred in the stable and they drowned it in the backyard. i have no sympathy
for this rag. I have contempt for it.
Just as after Brexit, this paper is flooded with articles claiming how 'minority' groups, BMEs,
LGBTQ...s, and even women, are now being attacked in numbers and how vulnerable they feel.
I follow the MSM and have seen nothing of substance that backs this up.
Nor do I feel that Trump is going to mount major campaigns against such groups.
Interestingly I believe it true that 29% of the 'Hispanic' minority actually voted for Trump.
Similarly was the figure for white women not c.50% ?
Many fewer blacks did, but should Trump's economics actually bring back jobs for the 'working
class' why would blacks in this group of both (all ?) sexes not benefit also and if that is the
case watch how their voting patterns change next time.
Thankfully there are articles like this.
Media other than Guardian who don't care to give this thought the time of the day, slip into irrelevance.
I mean the MSMs here who all embody Trotzkism.
Trotzkism dictates that the livelihoods of people ought to be taken away to make them pliable.
China bought US-TBs (for US government aggrandizement) upon US shipping jobs over there. Feeding
the hungry? With the Fed going into overdrive. Banks together with govt concocted the financial
crisis to profit off bear strategies that mortals can't do. In following years, the elite coined
high-flying ideals such as globalization, which is good for them because they sit in govt, teach
in universities or are detached ueber-owners of businesses. Joe Blow was screamed at when he would
ask: How am I gonna pay for stuff that the big wigs have now manufactured overseas, when we now
make, or get as welfare, $10 instead of $25 an hour?
Hard to reverse the destruction, but worth a try.
I never thought I would be in agreement with Robert Reich but I am today. Every election cycle
the Democratic Party spouts happy talk about being the people's party and the worker's party (in
contrast to the supposedly blue blooded, monied Republican Party.) While that may once have been
a somewhat accurate portrayal, it has long since become a sham of an image.
Today's Democratic Party is the party of the corporate billionaires, the tech titans, and the
globalist elitists who don't want a simplistic notion like that of national borders to get in
the way of their profit seeking. Naturally, the entertainment and media stars gravitate toward
their corporate masters and shill for the Democrats. Throw in a fixation on divisive identity
politics and the Democratic establishment and its less loud and proud Republican counterpart thought
that the authentic voice of the American people could forever be drowned out. The success of Bernie
Sanders (done in by the rigged Democratic Party rules) and Donald Trump demonstrates that the
people will no longer be silenced.
Hey GUARDIAN, where is that 99% chance of Hillary winning???
I personally know three people that didnt vote because they thought she had a win in the bank.
Shame on the Guardian.
Those pollsters along with GUARDIAN should be summarily FIRED.
And don't let the door hit them in the a$$.
Thank you for your voice of intelligence & grounded wisdom. As I read elsewhere, the treaties
that Mr. Clinton & Obama have backed have unravelled the middle class. And let's not forget Mr.
Reagan who reversed high tax rates on the wealthy and broke the back of unions. Neither party
represents working people anymore. Certainly Mr. Trump does not. And playing to that disenfranchisement
won him the election---but I fear that he has no interest in redeeming the middle class. He was
interested in getting elected and telling people anything they want to hear.
The western first world dominance is coming to an end. People in the west like to think they are
the top of the food chain but reality is the second world of Asia and the far east is rapidly
stepping into their shoes. Capitalism dictates that maximum profits are returned for minimum outlay
so if you can make a product for minimal cost i.e. wages, and sell for the maximum price then
you have a successful business model. Protectionism has been tried before and Trump's version
trying to roll back globalisation will be no more successful. ..same applies to brexit. It'll
get even worse as robotics take over more and more, the only solution will be social control mechanisms
to ensure that suppliers have consumers to sell their products to. It's going to take a while
for this realism to sink in...but it's unavoidable.
Sense at last in a Guardian article.
But still not enough sense to say clearly what a weak campaigner and what a poor choice of candidate
Hillary Clinton was.
Oh well... maybe the Guardian will use the period between now and January 20 to reflect on
how they cheer-led for a candidate who didn't have what it takes to win an election.
Or maybe not. Maybe they will continue to print and post stories that are tinged with hurt surprise
that democracy means one -and only one- vote for every citizen who cares to cast it. How can
democracy function if all those white unemployed and immiserated vote against the candidates
that the rich have prepared for them?
As is usual Mr. Reich hits the nail squarely on the head.
The working class had long been the backbone of the Democratic Party electorate. They no longer
are because the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. The banks, the upscale
suburban liberals, minorities and specific issue oriented groups are the people that matter most
to the Democratic Party. The working class support has been taken for granted for far too long
by the Dems. I can't remember how many times I have heard said, or seen written, by Democratic
insiders "where else do they have to go (for candidates to support)?"
The working class has to be a part, and an important part, of the left's coalition going forward
or risk seeing more shock election results like this. Their lots have not improved in this brand
new global economy championed by both parties. And while their numbers aren't as large as when
Reagan was elected (and before) there are more than enough of them to be an election decider.
It also will be helpful to choose candidates who will not to insult them like who, for example,
call them all a "basketful of deplorables".
the biggest factor in the Trump victory,and in the Brexit mayhem,is quite simply Globalization.
it is Globalization that has exported jobs,and skills out of the western world. it is responsible
for ghost towns in the industrial and manufacturing heartlands. western governments have had no
strategy for regeneration on anything like a great enough scale. unless the consequences of globalization
are addressed and reversed, the West faces ever falling living standards and huge unrest.
Yes, what we call "globalization" is quite simply the universalizing of a certain set of relations
between capital and labor -- it's clear that if the process is allowed to proceed without proper
safeguards, capital will be greatly favored, while labor will be reduced to the lowest possible
level. Marx pointed out a long time ago that the tendency of capitalism is to squeeze the greatest
amount of "surplus value" out of the workforce while granting them only as much money as necessary
for them to scrape by from day to day. Essentially, under capitalism, he wrote, people exist to
produce things and are less important than the things they produce. Marx may have been wrong about
the viability of "scientific socialism," but he was often spot-on as an analyst of the way capitalism
works and who it really benefits.
Trade is wonderful, but only when it doesn't proceed by reducing us all to wage slaves. Maybe
Dems who keep supporting bullshit neoliberal trade deals need to go read some of old Uncle Karl's
delightfully sarcastic works. Capital, Vol. 1 would be a fine start: see in particular
the chapter, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof." It's a masterpiece.
Can anyone turn back the tide of globalisation and power of the corporations? What is the role
of MSM? Are they all part of the problem? Interesting times. Maybe Trump will be force for good.
We certainly need stronger leadership from our politicians, on both sides of the pond.
Yes, I think of lot of that sort of stuff is misplaced. True, there are some despicable people
supporting Trump -- the Klan, neo-Nazi types, and so forth. But most people who voted for him
aren't like that. It's probably more the case that they put aside considerable disdain for Trump's
wretched behavior and voted for him based on his promise to "unforget" the working class. Personally,
I think he's a brazen demagogue who doesn't give any more of a rat's bottom about the poor and
the working class than Hitler did in Germany, what with all his "national socialist" promises
of "two chickens in every pot." But it isn't hard to understand the appeal of such populist rhetoric
when people are suffering and insecure. The American Left needs to rediscover its proper role
as a moderator of the harsher side of capitalism -- it has forgotten that role, and the bill for
that forgetfulness just came due. I don't blame Hillary personally -- Secretary Reich is right
to frame the problem in much broader terms, i.e. as having to do with the Democratic leadership
as a whole.
The business of government has morphed into the government for businesses.
Take a hint from what President Xi of China is doing, in managing the PRC. A good yardstick of
good governance comes from the analects of Confucius.
For instance, once upon a time in Germany, social democrats represented the working class.
Not anymore. People couldn't care less about Germany's wonderful economic growth either, as most
of the surplus goes to the top.*
The "social democrat" Schröder demolished the welfare state and introduced a new low wage sector,
much beloved by his corporate buddies. Thanks to his and Angela Merkel's efforts, numbers of working
poor and food banks are increasing. So is the wealth gap.* Thanks to an ongoing media hate campaign
against the meritocratic losers, most people suffered in silence. And now everyone acts shocked
and confused that a right-winged populist party is on the rise.
Well, thank you Angela Merkel, these are the fruits of your beloved austerity. The next vote
in Germany is going to be interesting. And just for the record: austerity was employed by Brüning
to boot. And that turned out so well, didn't it?
Capitalism is the best economic system we have but it becomes increasingly self destructive and
unstable if it is not managed properly. The moderate left and right would both agree on this normally
but the left would prioritise the interests of workers and the right the interests of capitalists.
However both, self interestedly, would support policies and institutions that kept the system
stable and growing.
Unfortunately hubris and market fundamentalism has turned the right's head and allowed the
rich and greedy to destructively run rampant. This is in no-one's longer term interest as the
impoverishment of the middle class and destruction of a prosperous mas market will eventually
undermine even most of the wealthy. The economic elite need to be dragged back under control.
Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts in the 20s and Franklin brought in the New Deal in the
Great Depression. It has been done before. It needs to be done again.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners
as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism
will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years
they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost
jobs and lower wages.
Exactly, and the parallels with the Brexit vote and against an EU corporate bureaucracy set
up to benefit the wealthy are stark. You could apply the same phrasing here in the UK:
Now British voters have rebelled by supporting a campaign that wants to fortify the UK against
foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Brexit's
isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most British workers couldn't care less about growth
because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens
in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The Democrats have more or less sold out the working class to the rich and powerful. They are,
in large part, the rich and powerful as this article points out. If the left wants to counter
right wing populists such as Trump it will need to address the growing anger of the white working
class towards policies that have put them in a position where they will be a minority in their
own country where they have historically been a large majority. It will also have to look after
the unemployed, working and middle classes at the expense of Wall Street, big tech and big business
generally. Ironically the right needs to do exactly the same thing. And both need to do these
things while protecting the well-being of minorities. Will these mainstream politicians be able
to escape the orbit of the rich? It is difficult to be optimistic.
Maybe so, but the only solution offered here is more Unions... if you think that's a solution
to the stagnating earnings of the bottom half of the population then I'm afraid you are way off
the mark.
The problem, and it's one that Trump will utterly fail to address and strikes at the heart
of our beliefs, is that a modern economy has little use (and places little economic value) on
low and unskilled labour. There is not a thing that can't be done cheaper by foreign factories
and machines (computers/robots/automation). This is deeply unpalatable and I do not like it, but
without a solution to how we ensure fair treatment of people who are, day by day, becoming less
economically valuable to the modern economy, this issue will not go away. Trump is a reaction,
but he is not the solution but he will set out to blame every minority, foreign government, trade
agreement he can because he can't or won't address this issue, and that will be very bad for everyone.
Its much worse than that. The modern economy places no real value on labour at all. Over the coming
years about 1/3 of all jobs are considered at risk of automation, including doctors, lawyers (already
happening), journalists (already happening) etc. The liberal elite in some of these jobs are like
lobsters in a slowly heating pot - they are too busy congratulating themselves on how toasty warm
their situation is to realise what is going on, and so all too happy to applaud the status quo.
Certainly it's a rising tide that threatens to wash away at everyone, though the higher skilled
the safer you are likely to be, at least for now.
I think the challenges are ultimately going to affect everyone, the question is going to be
who benefits politically. The left (which is where my political sympathies lie) is currently in
a real funk and lacks meaningful answers, the right is reducing it's message to 'blame the others,
they take your job, benefit at your expense etc'. No real answers.
P.S. I think your reference to the 'liberal elite' is misplaced, I'm not sure if the local
GP or bloke who writes wills in the local high street really count as an elite, just ordinary
people doing relatively well for themselves. The risk in this kind of language is that the tendency
is to think they are some kind of other who are to blame for all this, when what's happening is
actually far more wide ranging and fundamental.
And the liberal elite are by definition to blame for this because they are the ones whose privilege
got them the managerial and leadership positions they hold yet whose ideology and political views
have meant they have carried out these roles so badly.
I agree that neither side has the answers because both sides are in effect faces of the same
coin, cut from the same metal, imbued with the same flaws. Corbyn no more has answers than Trump.
What Trump has done is prove that no politician can go forward ignoring the questions. Hillary
firmly expected to.
Mirrored exactly with the new labour. Billionaires and celebrities rubbing shoulders with the
political elite, little wonder why we became disillusioned with them. For years now, the government
neglected the working class. Industries and jobs vanished ever since replaced with ZHC jobs and
low pay, keeping the broken system going on the back of a 'trickle-down effect' lie.
The Democrats had their party, Perry turned up, endorsed by lines of celebrities, we are looking
back with perplexed bemused expressions. If we elect her, it would be more of the same. The free
market shite started off a few decades ago, heavily entrenched by corporations and billionaires,
the scandal of offshore trust funds, we are dumped and forgotten.
What struck me as a tourist to San Francisco in 2014 were the sheer numbers of very visible homeless
on the streets, begging or just looking beaten . Yet all around them there were mass preparations
for the annual Gay Pride celebration. Obviously I am not decrying Gay Pride but the sense of priorities
seemed strange and I was forced to think that America is a pretty insane place. It is going the
same way here, a lot easier to celebrate identity than to tackle systemic injustice. That used
to be Governments` job but they have largely abandoned their historic responsibilities. Time for
Labour to bring those fundamental responsibilities back --
All told, San Francisco spends close to three quarters of a Billion dollars every year on "homeless"
of which close to $200 million is a specific department and budget item. As such, many flock to
San Francisco, which is also well known for lack of enforcement of many laws. Many of the beggars
are already housed at taxpayer expense and prefer to generate additional income outdoors on a
schedule of their choice, which is where they also purchase and consume items never sold in stores.
The working classes have been stripped of their dignity, whole communities have become wastelands
and virtual ghettos. The working class don't trust the left to sort things out for them and that
is why and how a figure like Trump can come along and say 'I will save you all' and become President.
Meanwhile, the socialist left sit around scratching their heads, unable to work out what has happened
and squabble about the spirit of socialism and ideology that in all honesty, most working class
people don't give a toss about. They just want jobs that pay a decent wage, a nice house to own,
nice food on the table, two cars and nice holidays. They want to be middle class in other words.
But democrats are not left. They right wing too. If Americans think that Democrats are left, they
don´t know what left is at all. And what socialist goverment has USA had. I see Americans saying
tthat Democrats are socialists, really?.Hillary left and socialist?. Trump and Hillary are both
right wing, only that Trump is more extreme.
A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with
the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than
they've been in years."
The political elite of *both* parties are completely out of touch with the citizenry. The economy
has been restructured over the last 20-30 years to completely de-value labor and prioritize the
rich and corporations.
Having said that, I believe people just want to be heard. Voting for Trump was seen as voting
against the status quo, and voting for Hillary was voting for the big establishment. Much like
Brexit, I don't think voters were thinking through the long-term consequences of their decision.
Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst kind. That the Democrats have lost the white working
class is obvious. But to blame the Democrats, such as Hillary, is misplaced. It is the Dems who
have attempted to help the working poor and propose improvements in health care and child care
and tax redistribution. It is not a lack of concern that is the issue. What Reich ignores is that
voters are voting an ideology and not self-interest. They have bought into the notion that getting
rid of immigrants and taking care of the rich will solve all problems.
The voters had a clear choice and they chose the demagogue peddling a non-solution. They wanted
to believe that they are wonderful people and problems can be solved by a wealthy idiot who promises
to turn the clock back. In Democracy sometimes it is the voters who get it wrong.
The analysis is correct more of less , the issue here is class , the Republicans and Democrats
are the two wings of the same party. The party of property and money and the powerful , the vote
for Trump is one of those events that happens much like Obama being elected twice after the Republicans
stole the two previous elections via the supreme court and election fraud. It can happen but the
system remains the same , there is no serious challenge to the supremacy of the ruling class.
The one analysis you will not hear in the media is a class one and if it is then it will be
howled down lest it gain currency and the wage slaves realise they have been conned yet again
, Trump is not unusual in his attitudes or views , it's just that the campaign gave them wide
publicity.
In the UK the same kind of thing has happened to Labour , they lost Scotland and the 2010 election
and the remain vote because ordinary working people are tired just as they are in the US of seeing
the rich get every richer and their own living standards fall and nothing in the future but more
pain and misery. They vote UKIP/SNP here as a cry in the wilderness and they voted for Trump for
the same reason because they aren't what they've had before , the real problem will come when
the right wing populists have been in power for a while and nothing has really improved.
For the last thirty years, there has been no left or right wing governments - not economically
or fiscally. Third way centrism (liberal progressiveness) embraced the primacy of unfettered market
capitalism and corporate globalism, and focused exclusively on using political power as a tool
to win the culture war instead. That's fine if you've done materially very well out of unfettered
market capitalism and corporate globalism, and all that therefore matters to you is social justice
issues. But if you were once in a secure job with a decent income and decent prospects for your
children, and all of that has been ripped away from you by unfettered market capitalism and corporate
globalism, and the people responsible for preventing that - or at least fixing it when it happens
- are more concerned with policing the language you use to express your fears and pain, and demonstrating
their compassion by trying to improve the life chances of people on other continents, then social
justice issues become a source of burning resentment, not enlightenment. There has been a crushing
rejection of globalism and corporate plutocracy by Western electorates. The Western progressive
left will only survive if it has the courage to recognise that, and prioritises the fight for
economic and fiscal policies that promote the interests and prospects of its own poor and middle
class, over and above the cultural issues that have defined it for a quarter of a century. We
should always remain vigilant, but the truth is that the culture war is won. It would be tragic
beyond words if that victory was reversed by an explosion of resentment caused by the left's determination
to guard old battle fields, while ignoring the reality that its thinkers and activists are needed
to right new injustices. Trump's success doesn't represent the victory of hate over hope, it just
represents the loss of hope. The left has to see that or its finished.
It's not quite as simple as that. Some things like clothes are certainly still made by people
(in horrific conditions for terrible pay) but more and more factories are automated with a bare
skeleton staff running the show. The BBC series 'Inside the Factory' was an eye opener for me.
The UK food manufacturing industry for example is heading toward almost full automation - I'd
imagine the US industry is even further down the automated road. This is why the UK and US have
moved to services and these areas are the vast bulk of unskilled jobs now.
The Democratic party once represented the working class
Now it sneers at them as a "basket of deplorables". The same has happened in the UK; only this
morning Owen Jones was asking the left to reach out to the working class, and in the very same
article labelled them as racist, misogynist homophobes.
The consequences of this disdain are entirely predictable
Re: "basket of deplorables" -- if you care about accuracy, she didn't sneer at them as a basket
of deplorables; she sneered at *half* of them as a basket of deplorables. In the same paragraph,
she described the other half as having legitimate concerns that weren't being addressed.
As far as her criticisms of half of Trump's voting base -- politically, stupid as hell. But
valid? Well, what do carefully-taken public opinion polls from the 15 months before the election
tell us? 2/3 of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim who was born in another country. 63%
want to amend the Constitution to eliminate citizenship for people born in the U.S. 40% consider
African-Americans lazier than white people. A third of Trump supporters believe that the internment
of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was a good thing. 31% believe in banning homosexuals from entering
the United States. A quarter of them believe that Antonin Scalia was murdered in a conspiracy.
A quarter believe that vaccines cause autism. 16% believe that whites are a superior race, and
another 14% just aren't sure.
I don't see a very strong case that she was wrong.
It's the same problem the UK had with brexit. People feel squeezed, invariably because of neoliberalist
policies that benefit the wealthy, and the rising wage and wealth gap drives resentment because
of it.
Suddenly, you get populists who spring up with "solutions" to such problems, but rather than
being actual solutions seem to scapegoat totally unrelated factors, such as immigration, free
trade, power blocs, specific groups of people who may be out of favour at the moment, rather than
the actual correct causes in the first place.
Your post actually chimes with what I've been saying. There was a big moment for the left, that
came in 2008 in the USA. A mixed race opponent of the Iraq War, sounding plausibly leftish leaning,
praised public healthcare, accused relentlessly by the right of being a communist/socialist, of
being a muslim, of not born in the USA. And he won. So only 8 years ago, there was a moment where
American electorate shifted left, it'd seem. But instead Obama brought back Rubin, Summers, Geithner,
same old 1990's wall street cabal. FDR he was not.
There'll be a moment within a decade for things to move left, who will head 'the left' (Clinton
and Blair types?) will tell whether things actually do move in that direction.
"... Specifically, she adduced the Clinton Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death panels. ..."
I talked to an elated Trump voter today. She had little to say about Trump, other than "Give
him a chance." No, her elation was at the defeat of Hillary, and the attendant possibility that
opened up to get rid of the corruption in Washington. Specifically, she adduced the Clinton
Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi
Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death
panels.
HClinton outspent (campaign + SuperPACs) Trump by 45% ($534M to $367M per the election Wiki
page, given preliminary FEC reports currently available) in the election, yet lost. Perhaps the
most clear sign as to what a horrible candidate HClinton was, both in policies & campaign tactics.
When was the last Pres election the top fundraiser did NOT win? How many times has this happen,
say since the 1980 Reagan election or since the 1948 post-WW2 election? IIRC, Thomas Ferguson
with his Investment Theory of Politics shows that in the vast majority (90%+ ?) of US elections
(Fed/State/Local), the biggest fundraiser wins.
"... "Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the apparent
value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the
ways he's blabbing." ..."
"... "But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after all,
they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject what
feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example,
when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree." ..."
bob mcmanus 11.10.16 at 1:45 pm I thought someone above talked about Trump's rhetoric
1) Tom Ferguson at Real News Network post at Naked Capitalism says (and said in 2014) that the
Democratic coalition of Wall Street (Silicon Valley) + Identity Politics is imploding, because it
can't deliver populist goodies without losing part of it's core base.
Noted no for that, but for my equation of Neoliberalism (or Post-Capitalism) = Wall Street + Identity
Politics generated by the dematerialization of Capital. CDO's are nothing but words on paper or bytes
in the stream; and identity politics has much less to do with the Body than the culture and language.
Trumpists were interpellated as White by the Democrats and became ideological. Capital is Language.
2) Consider the above an intro to
Lauren
Berlant at the New Inquiry "Trump or Political Emotions" which I think is smart. Just a phrase
cloud that stood out for me. All following from Berlant, except parenthetical
It is a scene where structural antagonisms - genuinely conflicting interests - are described in
rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.
People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their
aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social
relations
( Safe Space defined as the site where being nasty to those not inside is admired and approved.
We all have them, we all want them, we create our communities and identities for this purpose.)
"Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness.
Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad.
Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the
apparent value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief
against the ways he's blabbing."
(Wonderful, and a comprehension of New Media I rarely see. Cybernetics? Does noise increase the
value of signal? The grammatically correct tight argument crowd will not get this. A problem I have
with CT's new policy)
"You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and
you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. "
(If "civil speech" is socially approved signal, then noise = freedom and feeling. Every two year
old and teenage guitarist understands)
"But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort,
but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after
all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject
what feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs,
for example, when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree."
The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free. Being ok with one's internal
noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter. Internal Noise Matters. " …my emp
Noise again. Berlant worth reading, and thinking about.
I watched one of Trump's last speeches before the election. In it, he said, "Tomorrow, the
working class takes back this country." I was struck. No contemporary Democratic politician would
(or could, credibly) say those words. Afraid of scaring off their donors or being red-baited,
most Democrats won't even utter the phrase "working class"-preferring the capacious and increasingly
meaningless "middle class" or, at best, "working families."
But Trump said it. His rural and exurban white supporters have a class consciousness of
sorts. They despise elites. They feel that the system is rigged. But that antipathy is entirely
entangled with their fear of a black president, of eroding racial and gender hierarchies, and
their perception that multi-cultural elites are helping minorities at their expense. Trump can
say "working class" because everyone in his audience hears the unsaid word "white" preceding it.
It is, as it has ever been, the left's task to build a mass political movement where there are
no words silently preceding the term "working class." It's not hyperbole to say that everything
depends on it.
I'm going to be as diplomatic as I can about the lack of gravitas clearly displayed in the comments
here as I can, whilst at the same timing reviewing some of the data that many clearly missed.
One of the key reasons I remained confident that Hillary would lose irrespective of what the
FBI did, or did not do, if you're interested, is that I was keenly interested in the attitudes
of African-American voters from the outset of this election. As I've said throughout, I do not
regard Trump as a 'Republican' in anything like the conventional sense of the word, but rather
see him as a New York celebrity vulgarian with liberal inclinations. Trump from the outset had
a clear plan to appeal to African-American voters, even it was far from fleshed-out. And given
the 'of course, African-American voters will support the Democrat' attitude of practically every
white supporter of Hillary, I was confident Trump wouldn't need much of a plan beyond saying:
'vote for me, what have you got to lose?' to do fairly well no matter how badly he was smeared.
Turns out I was right. Low black turn-out numbers in key states, such as Michigan, NC, and
Florida came as no surprise to me because I watched Leslie Wimes one week before the election
explain that it was 'already over' for Hillary in Florida.
Not one to mince words, Ms. Wimes, who voted early for Clinton, reports that she warned the
Clinton campaign and the DNC as early as September that black voters in Florida were not, repeat
not, going to be turning out in sufficient numbers to permit Hillary to carry this critical state.
But nobody wanted to hear. Funny, that.
Layman 11.11.16 at 11:13 am
266
mclaren: "No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire
were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders."
You're abusing the term 'the electorate'. 'The electorate' in a primary (or a caucus!) is a different
thing than 'the electorate' in a general election, and results in one don't translate into results
in another. The point of the Obama Idaho 2008 example is this: Obama beat Clinton by 60 points in
that caucus, but this did not mean he was going to win Idaho in a general election, and in fact he
got trounced there in the general election. This is because, again, 'the electorate' is a different
thing in those two contests. No one knows if Sanders would have done better in this general election,
and primary results don't provide an answer to that question.
Sorry, but I do not see in this thread any attempt to discuss Hillary extreme militarism and jingoism
as well as attempt to make Russophobia a part of the platform of the Democratic Party, effectively
positioning it as yet another War Party.
In some areas of foreign policy Hillary looks like John McCain in the pantsuit. There is no military
intervention that she did not like, and she was always prone to the most hawkish positions on any
war related issues, trying to outdid her male counterparts in jingoism, as if overcompensating her
hidden sense of inferiority.
That might be another negative factor affecting the elections results. Few people outside military
industrial complex lobbyists are exited about the possibility of unleashing WWIII (for example via
enforcing "no fly zone" in Syria) even with conventional weapons. And a lot of people, especially
among more educated part of electorate, still remember her role in the destruction of Iraq, Libya
and Syria. Especially the latter (
moonofalabama.org)
The people loyal to the Syrian government are happy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election:
At the passport counter, a Syrian officer's face lit up when he saw an American traveler.
"Congratulations on your new president!" he exclaimed, giving an energetic thumbs up. Mr. Trump,
he said, would be "good for Syria."
The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices.
Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts
to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position:
Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster
but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without
knowing who they were.
The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian
Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly
known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training
and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the
CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves.
The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times.
The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. secretary of State Kerry who promised
to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely
accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within
the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans.
continued its nefarious plans.
likbez 11.12.16 at 3:20 am
289
Another interesting question that needs to be discussed is the "cleansing" of DNC from Clinton
loyalists (the word "super delegate" smells of corruption) and thus weakening the dominant neoliberal
wing of the party:
"You can't tell working people you're on their side while at the same time you're raising money
from Wall Street and the billionaire class," Sanders said. "The Democratic Party has to be focused
on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties."
Sanders acknowledged the need for the party to continue its function as a fundraising vehicle
but suggested a model akin to his presidential campaign, which raised much of its money from small-dollar
donors.
… … …
Leaders of several progressive groups, who had been courting Clinton as a potential ally on many
of their causes, have expressed anger in the aftermath of the election, arguing that the result
was a repudiation of a campaign driven by the Democratic establishment.
"The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election," said Stephanie Taylor,
co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "It's time for new leadership of the
Democratic Party - younger, more diverse and more ideological - that is hungry to do things differently,
like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls."
… … …
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America, said Ellison would be "a
potentially phenomenal choice" as DNC chairman, but said the organization was open to other choices,
provided they weren't part of the party establishment.
"I think Tuesday night was a tremendous loss that must sit at the feet of the political establishment
of a Democratic Party that preordained the primary process from the very beginning," said Sroka,
whose group backed Sanders in the primaries. "The folks that enabled the loss need to step back
and let the grass roots lead it."
In a sign of tension at the DNC, a staff meeting there was interrupted Thursday by a staff
member who stood up and blamed Trump's win on Brazile, the Huffington Post reported.
One telling comment:
PackersFanWisconsin
The Democrats abandoned Midwestern working voters and now they want us back??? Dream on! My
town voted Dem for years, they used to care about us, then they want all bonkers social justice
white people are all bad and sent all our jobs overseas. We will never vote Democrat again, Democrats
betrayed us and they had the nerve to think we wouldn't notice!
Suzanne 11.11.16 at 4:24 pm
284
Agreeing with everything said by LFC in#280. Certainly many people are still not in a good place
after eight years of slow recovery; in this respect Clinton's defeat can also be seen as a partial
rejection of her boss, since traditionally putting the heir in power has been a marker for a popular
presidency.
Also, @246, don't forget that some of us where also whingeing about sexism.
@239: Clinton is a decent Democrat who ran to the left of Obama. She is not and never has been
the superstar he was. The Democratic Party has a perennial issue with getting portions of their base
out when it's an off-year election and also when the presidential candidate is okay but doesn't send
a thrill up their leg.
What we need to focus on now is the obvious question: what the hell went wrong? What species
of cluelessness guided our Democratic leaders as they went about losing what they told us was
the most important election of our lifetimes?
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the point
I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts are
about Clinton, not Trump:
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the
point I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts
are about Clinton, not Trump:
There are vast rural, small-town or post-industrial areas of the country where Barack Hussein
Obama will have greatly outperformed Clinton
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
The left-behind places are making themselves heard, bigly
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades
offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party's lean years, shifted
to Mr. Trump's Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to
Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.
– Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment , Matt
Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, yesterday
Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability
and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country
surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem-addressing
anger about a rigged economy and government-and that Clinton already never authentically could.
Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections
made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.
So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change
the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted
to live in. It wasn't enough.
Using Trump as a foil and a focus, she hit on a voice and an argument for why she should actually
be president that perhaps only she could have, and that she'd struggled for so long to find on
her own. That wasn't enough either.
Meanwhile, her staff harnessed all the money and support they could to out organize, first
in the primaries and then in the general, grinding out victories while her opponents had movements.
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another
candidate. She couldn't escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
Interviews over the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign with members of Clinton's innermost
circle, close advisers and other aides reveal a deep frustration with their failure to make a
dent, a consuming sense that their candidate's persecution paranoia might actually be right, and
a devastating belief that they might never persuade Americans to vote for her.
"There was no way to generate momentum," one top adviser said.
Any positive storyline from Clinton "was always fragile," admitted that adviser, and issues
related to the emails inevitably stripped away any uptick in Clinton's favorable ratings.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.' , Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico, yesterday
To several top aides, the best day of this whole campaign was a year ago, before the Sanders
headache or the Trump threat really materialized, when the House of Representatives hauled Clinton
and her emails in with the single aim of destroying her candidacy over Benghazi. …
She delivered tirelessly [that day], knocking back the Republicans one by one, complete with
facial expressions that have launched GIFs that have been all over Democrats' Facebook and Twitter
feeds ever since. She renewed her shaken team's faith that she was the leader they wanted to follow
into what was already shaping up to be a dejecting primary battle.
"It reminded people of everything they like about her," said one of her senior advisers. "It's
toughness, but also a calm, adult presence of someone you can actually see being president of
the United States."
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
Bill Clinton had his own problems, but never that one [his gender], and neither did Trump,
who openly disparaged women throughout his campaign and still prevailed. The result was at once
unfathomably difficult for the Clintons and yet not entirely surprising to Bill. He saw the signs
all along the way of this campaign. He knew the people who were voting for Trump, and also the
people who during the primaries were voting not for his wife but for Bernie Sanders. He saw the
anger and the feelings of disconnection, but he did not know how he, or his wife's campaign, could
connect to it effectively without resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something Hillary
was not good at even if she was disposed to try.
– The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well , David
Maraniss, Washington Post, today
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St.
Patrick's Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential
candidates had jumped on. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and
former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton's campaign refused,
explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time
reaching out to.
As it became clear on Tuesday night that Mrs. Clinton would lose to Donald J. Trump, supporters
cast blame on everything from the news media to the F.B.I. director's dogged pursuit of Mrs. Clinton
over her personal emails, and to a deep discomfort with electing a woman as president.
But as the dust settled, Democrats recognized two central problems of Mrs. Clinton's flawed
candidacy: Her decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions
left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment and anti-Wall Street rage. And she ceded the
white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992.
Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides
do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump's support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that
she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters
who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support
her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
– Hillary Clinton's Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps , Amy Chozick,
New York Times, yesterday
And then there is this:
Clinton picked Mook, instead of promoting a campaign manager out of loyalty from her own inner
circle. She persuaded Podesta, who had kept his distance in 2008 because he didn't get along with
polarizing top strategist Mark Penn, to join as the guiding hand and the buffer for all the "friends
of" who streamed in with advice and second-guessing.
But that didn't mean there weren't serious problems. Bill Clinton complained throughout that
Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without
a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of
strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space. Longtime consultant Mandy
Grunwald and Palmieri grappled at points over message control as Palmieri worked her way into
the inner circle. Mook and strategist Joel Benenson barely spoke to each other for the month of
April, battling over their roles.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her
team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
And here it is, in summation of all of the above:
Whoever takes over what's left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal
to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans
can't win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty
far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn't erode
the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If
only there were a model for this. [Link in original. Do click it.]
The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here
or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn't show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage
of Clinton's emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral
College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for
decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue "wall."
They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we'll be fine.
Don't listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.
– The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished , Jim Newell, Slate, yesterday
Among all the email exchanges leaked from Podesta's hacked email account-the ones I read; I read
a couple of articles quoting from each group of releases-the most revealing, in my opinion, were
two sets of exchanges released about a week before the Comey outrage. Both were from early 2015,
a few weeks before Clinton was scheduled, finally, to announce her candidacy in mid-April.
One shows newly hired campaign manager Robby Mook asking for John Podesta's and Huma Abedin's
help in persuading Clinton to ask her husband to cancel a $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley scheduled
for a few days after her announcement and while she was scheduled to be in Iowa on her inaugural
campaign trip.
The difficulty wasn't resistance from Bill; it was resistance from Hillary, at whose instance
the speech had been arranged. The email exchanges indicate that Hillary could not be persuaded to
all the cancellation, because it had been arranged personally by her and Tom Nides, a top aide to
Clinton at the State Dept. and by then a top executive at Morgan Stanley.
Finally it was decided that Abedin would get Bill to agree to cancel the speech, and she would
tell Hillary that Bill (who apparently did have qualms about the speech) was the one who decided
to cancel it. Abedin reported back to Podesta and Mook that Clinton was angry about it for a couple
of days but then moved on.
The other one is from about the same time and is somewhat similar. This series of exchanges was
among Mook, Abedin, Podesta and Neera Tanden, and concerned Hillary's appearance in early May, shortly
after her campaign announcement, at a massive Clinton Global Initiative gala in Morocco paid for
by the king of Morocco, a friend of Clinton's, who all told would donate $12 million to the foundation.
This, too, had been arranged by Hillary, and was not strongly supported by Bill or anyone else at
the foundation.
Abedin's emails suggest (without saying outright) that she and perhaps others had tried to dissuade
Clinton from arranging this, and then, once Clinton had set the date of mid-April for her campaign
announcement, tried to persuade Clinton to cancel it. But by the time of this email exchange with
Mook and Podesta, Abedin said it was so late and Clinton had had earlier opportunities to cancel
but instead had assured her presence there, that it will break a lot of glass" (or some such phrase)
for Clinton to cancel. Mook did manage to get Clinton's agreement to have Bill attend instead of
her.
These instances illustrate what was a constant throughout: Mook and two or three others, including
Podesta, having to put on a full court press to stop Clinton from acting as though she weren't a
candidate for president. Or a candidate for anything. Both Podesta and Tanden complained about Clinton's
"instincts," a euphemism for "I'm completely unaware of the overarching mood of the public in this
election cycle. Or, I don't give a damn about the overarching mood of the public in this election
cycle. And I certainly don't give a damn about down-ballot Dems. Or about Dems. Or about anything
other than what I want to do."
Clinton arranged to clear the Democratic field of anyone thought in early 2015 to have chance
against her in the primaries. She just wasn't willing to swear off anything else she wanted, besides
the presidency, in order to reduce the chance that she would lose the general election.
This wasn't Lent, after all. And anyway, Clinton isn't Catholic.
Had Mook not killed that $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley by Bill Clinton in April 2015, Bernie
Sanders-whom Clinton could not clear the field of until June 6, 2016-would have won the nomination
and would be president-elect now, accompanied by a newly elected Senate, and maybe House, Democratic
majority. That fee would have been identified in the Clintons' tax returns, filed presumably in last
April and (presumably) released shortly afterward.
In early 2015, when Hillary was arranging for Bill to give that speech-undoubtedly arrangements
made shortly after Elizabeth Warren removed any doubt that she would run-Clinton looked to be free
of any challenge from the left. So it didn't bother her one whit that this would be revealed during
the primary season.
Nor, since she expected her general election opponent to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, did it concern
her that this would be known during the general election campaign. It wasn't as if Bush wasn't a
wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Or Rubio owned by other highly unpretty financial interests.
And even if it did, well, it was worth the risk. After all, after the general election, the gravy
train for both her and her husband would stop. And it wasn't blue collar workers in the Rust Belt
who were her target votes, so it wasn't all that big a risk anyway.
So we were saddled with a Democratic presidential nominee whose decades in Washington and the
paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment
and anti-Wall Street rage. Someone who had to cede the white working-class voters who backed Barack
Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, because the only way someone who'd taken so very much money from
Wall Street as personal income for doing so very little-someone who was selling her anticipated presidency
to Wall Street-had no avenue with which to connect effectively with working class Rust Belters without
resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something she was not good at even if she was disposed
to try.
The answer then was to highlight her high status and the importance she placed on connections
with celebrities and the pillars of the establishment in various venues, by campaigning hardly at
all, by spending August secluded in the Hamptons, by parading with entertainment celebrities at the
few rallies she had.
And by incessantly rolling out ever more names of the most elite establishment people to endorse
her or at least make clear that they, too, recognized that her opponent is unfit to hold the office
of the presidency. Because even though the targeted audience has access to the same information on
that the elite establishment did, and were reminded by Clinton and her ad campaign of these lowlights
so often that they lost their resonance, there might be a few people whose decision would turn on
the opinion of these elites.
They just weren't the people the blue collar Rust Belters who, it seemed clear all along would
play an outsize role in the outcome of the election. As they had in 2008 and 2012.
Nor, apparently, did she have any avenue to point out whom Trump's financial campaign backers
actually were, who was writing his budget and regulatory proposals, who was selecting his court and
agency-head nominees, his SEC, FTC and NLRB member nominees, and why. They're not people with labor
union backing, nor do they have the interests of blue collar folks at heart. Their interests are
diametrically opposite those of blue collar workers. And Trump wasted not so much as a day in handing
over to them the entire panoply of powers of the federal government.
But having sold her avenue for informing people of this, to Wall Street and any other huge-money
interest waiving a mega-check around in exchange for a 45-minute-long speech by or question-and-answer
session with, the likely president she was limited to reminding voters of what they themselves saw,
and assuring them that elites viewed him just as they did. Which may be why her campaign manager,
Mook, wasn't as focused on messaging as Bill Clinton wished. Normally, a candidate has one.
This candidate had foreclosed to herself the message she needed to have, and had nothing much filling
in for it. That wasn't Mook's fault.
Trump wasn't going to co-opt Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were
going to co-opt Trump. All the indications were that that is what would happen. And that, Trump has
made unabashedly clear now, is what will happen. Our nominee couldn't-or at least wouldn't campaign
on this anything resembling consistency.
The way to contain this is for high-profile Democrats to make clear to the public what is happening.
And to threaten massive campaigns on this in none other than the Rust Belt, in the 2018 election
cycle. And to start very, very soon. People who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 aren't Donald Trump's
base. Most of them would have flocked to Sanders or to Elizabeth Warren in this election.
The latter should be shoved in anyone's face who starts blathering about sexism hurting Clinton
among the hoi polloi . The former should answer the question about whether racism was
part of the appeal to the voters who put Trump over the top, by one per cent, in Michigan, Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania, and came within barely more than a point of doing son in New Hampshire and, of
all states, Minnesota. All states went comfortably for Obama, and all except Pennsylvania went for
Sanders in the primary, as did Indiana. And had Warren instead of Sanders been Clinton's primary
challenger, she like Sanders would have voted for her.
People who claim otherwise on either point don't know the region. It is not the South and it is
not the Southwest. Trump's racism and xenophobia did not win those states for Trump. Nor did Clinton's
gender.
The first step is to appoint a strong Sanders backer in charge of the DNC. Jeff Weaver, maybe.
Or Jim Dean. No war for the soul of the party. That ship sailed on Tuesday.
Recognize that.
And join me in wishing Hillary and Bill Clinton a happy jaunt in their retirement as they luxuriate
in the massive wealth that, while possibly still not quite enough to sate them, we are about to pay
very dearly for.
People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity. This result is the scream
of an America desperate for radical change
They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and
WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find
ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine
– is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed
our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies
of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined
precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net
that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than
their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of
banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood
celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they
were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly
connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most
of all – these losses are unbearable.
Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of
the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote
economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade
Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour,
vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because
neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of
the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.
Trump's message was: "All is hell." Clinton answered: "All is well." But it's not well – far from
it.
Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what
we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk
of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table.
An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green
new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed
resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers
to be retrained and fully included in this future.
It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate
change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous
people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.
People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger
where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
Bernie Sanders' amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and
demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure
in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused
by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential.
Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.
That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni
who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive
leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are "leaderful", as many in the Movement for
Black Lives say.
So let's get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a
genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let's set aside whatever
is keeping us apart and start right now.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously.
You forgot to mention identity politics. Neoliberalism and identity politics go hand in
hand. I don't think it's a surprise that after the 50's and the Second Red Scare, HUAC, McCarthyism
and the John Birch Society the socialist, communist and other left-wingers were gone from the
US and identity politics became ascendant.
We don't see SJW being dragged in front of Congress and them losing their jobs, nor
do we see the National Guard coming in to break up Slut Walks. Instead, we see them in the highest
positions of power and with governments and corporations embracing their ideas. The reason is
simple; identity politics and SJWs are no threat to people in power.
Keep people divided into ever smaller identities and they can't fight back. Keep demonizing
people for objecting, calling them sexist and racist for speaking up, and you muzzle the opposition.
If someone wants to take on neoliberalism then they need to abandon identity politics.
Glass-Steagal was repealed, Wall St. stole itself rich, people wanted change (Yes we can!). But
not a single bankster megathief was even investigated and in the rust belt and elsewhere millions
suffered. They were told that they needed to shut up because they were evil privileged white males
who needed to be HRC's blue wall because she owned them. Refusal to comply meant they were racist
misogynists.
So now they are racist misogynists and proud of it.
And why all this? Because Hillary's ego is so large that it bumps into the edges of the universe.
She calls that her class ceiling.
Thanks Hillary. You brought us Trump. You and that bunch of privileged DNC-ers that are in
bed with Wall Street.
The left's reflections are getting closer, but we're still not quite there it seems.
... ... ...
The visible, real-life consequences of globalisation and modern capitalism are those targets
picked out (hardly by coincidence) by Trump and Farage. The most obvious sign of globalisation
is not a billionaire's yacht, but that when you call to sort out being overcharged or crappy service,
you finally get through to an outsourced offshored call centre. And when the right attacks them
and the left inevitably and correctly defends them - that immigrants do contribute to the economy,
but are still disadvantaged economically, that women are paid less for the same work, that muslims
face discrimination every day - we're infact subliminally reinforcing Trump/Farage's blunter message:
that the left's priority constituents are immigrants, people of colour, muslims and women.
And then we criticise a 50 year old white unemployed or zero-hour-contract man for being "selfish"
and "stupid" when he votes for the only candidate who *appears* to put him first, when we seem
to ask him to put everyone else first.
The left is losing the argument because our answers to modern problems are removed from everyday
experience. Correct, but complex. Trump and Farage understand KISS. If we think the solution is
to just keep saying the same thing louder, like an English tourist abroad, we'll carry on losing.
"It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump"
Yes indeed, I have seen this coming since the mid nineties, when the -fairly high tech- Company,
where I worked for at the time, became a victim of globalization, 120 people got fired, a.o. me.
Gladly I was able to still find a job at 50, a hell of a lot of others did not.
Besides, I have been active in International business since the early 1960's until recently,
so I know what I am talking about.
We are spoiling 200 years of social economic improvement to the short term interests of capital
at supersonic speed. (modern communication and transport, the free movement of capital)
Both the republicans and the democrats made that happen (as their followers did in Europe)
The Globalizing, Outsourcing, Monetary, Laissez-Faire, Supply side economy.
That is the one thing that I was in agreement with, with Trump, for the rest, by the way he
is talking now, it looks very much as if we will be having to deal with a liar. (and a cheat?)
After all he did say a lot of different things while selling himself in the campaign from the
image that he seems to depict now..
The worst things are in my opinion his wish to destroy the livelyhood of lots of people world
wide by not accepting the human influences on the climate, this besides lots of others things
is in my opinion extremely selfish, especially seen the fact that a green economy can be -at least-
as profitable (in work and money) as the fossil one was.
And of course the repeal of Obamacare, one of the few successes that Obama could materialize
in his mainly obstructed time in office.
What is 'Neoliberalism'
Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic
factors to the private sector from the public sector. It takes from the basic principles of
neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax
law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open
markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit
private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.
Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations
and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire
approach to economic development.
"It's a belief that the human social system works best if there's almost no government, and
almost everything is done through markets... and also it says there should be no trade unions,
no tariffs, remove all the controls and the economy will work better.
Now that's only true of a system if it is inherently stabilizing, it's like saying 'this ship
will go a lot faster if you take off all the stuff that's there to stabilize it.' Yeah it will
but it'll go upside down at some point and sink."
From the British perspective this is true here as well. After a number of high powered meetings
over a fifteen year period, the Labour Party embraced NeoLiberalism and paid when it failed. Those
meetings where pretty big and millions turned up. Those meetings took place in 19779, 983, 1987
and the final one was in 1992. The general public announced that no one would elect anyone who
did not support wholesale privatisation, free markets at every turn with a special emphasis on
labour market laws. Any devience, under any circumstances from Tory ideology was punished at the
ballot box. Labour was forced to drop clause four as a sop to get elected.
And when this neo liberal wet dream started to crumble in the form of crippling PFI schemes,
light touch banking, zero hour agency work and possibly bigger than the light touch banking collapse,
the free movement of Labour for the biggest companies in the UK. Who did the public blame for
these Tory driven Liberalism? The Tories? Themselves for forcing the Labour Party to adopt these
flawed policies? The Newspapers who condemned anything other than free market ideology? Nope,
the blamed the very people who had been campaigning against Tory policies all along. The people
who got blamed for the banking collapse was not the people who DEMANDEDbanks be deregulated, not
the Party who carried out the deregulation, but the poor saps in power when it blew up.
Who gets blamed for the importing of labour? The political ideology that people had supported
for thirty years? Nope, again the Party that bent over backwards to accommodate the Tesco, ASDA
and sports direct et al.
And guess what? After punishing anything to the Left of Reagan or questioning free trade at
the ballot box, and dismissing it as 'Socailism' it turns out they voted for a protectionist who
is opposed to free trade and multi Nationals. The Party who are opposed to free trade, multinationals
and 'What is good for GM is good for America'? The protector of jobs and regulated labour markets?
Why the GOP of course. The Party whose DNA has all this time been at the heart of protecting jobs
who shun free trade agreements and are at the very heart of the socialist movement are the Republican
movement. And nobody even said anything. We all just moved into a parallel universe where the
Republican movement have been campaigning against free trade for two hundred years.
"The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades,
have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security
of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade,
Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the
poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims
of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much - when they caused a ruckus
- and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious,
global game of meritocracy."
"Neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade..." Are you
sure those are neoliberal policies? They sound exactly like conservative Republican mainstays
to me. Didn't Trump run on these very things?
Exactly, they are virtually the same, with the difference being that the GOP adds "nostalgic nationalism
and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade
agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants
and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women".
In difficult times, people want relief as fast as possible and they want to blame *anyone*
for their plight. This is what a demagogue offers; it's why Trump is in the White House. Prepare
yourselves, and never give in to Trump's cynicism.
Warren sold Sanders out. Sanders sold his supporters out for Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who incidentally
was reelected. Hillary was forced on the ticket by the oligarchy. Change will not come from Trudeau,
or Obama, or Trump, or Sanders or Warren. These people have betrayed what they said. Where do
we go from here? Which is the way that's clear? Dunno, but all of the above have shown to be frauds.
Whose next?
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu
clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest
of the world.
As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting
against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
"...a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring
badly needed resources and opportunities to communities ... and insist that polluters should pay
for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future."
That is, at least, the only positive suggestion that's been made. I think it's a good one the
needs to be developed. I'm far from an economist but perhaps we need also to start thinking about
blended economic systems rather than just one type as well.
What I don't agree with is the continuation of identity politics. It's suffering badly from
overuse and also from its juxtaposition with the application of economic pain to those who are
also consistently abused with every vile epithet known to man. In brief, people have been operant
conditioned to either worship at its feet or loathe it with most or all of their being. It's past
its use-by date and needs to grow into the real expression of its stated aims.
As an example, Merkel is quoted as saying, ""Germany and America are connected by values of
democracy, freedom, and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin
colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views."
The words are just positive framing. We all know now that 'democracy' (defined by the UN as
extreme terrorism to be fought and eliminated when iit involves public voting) refers to voting
by an elite group. For the rest of it, Junckers right hand man was quoted this week as saying
it's to be achieved by 'elimination of all national, cultural, ethnic, and faith identity'.
There is a unbridgable gulf between those two concepts, and the first one is simply dishonest.
But journalists never explain that.
The way forward is to treat all people with dignity and respect, as long as they're not harassing
or killing each other, and stop trying to brainwash them. If someone is a racist and content to
keep that to themselves, leave them alone. Likewise with all the other -isms and -obias. The law
and institutions need to treat people equally indeed. No negative and no positive discrimination.
'Indigenous peoples' could have a special role- but not to dispossess, sponge off, or lord it
over others. Religious holidays need to be observed for all religions, not for none. I can hear
the business howls now but the reality is we need to be decreasing industrial pollution and having
less 'stuff', not increasing it.
I wanted Trump to win but if I saw someone(including him) harassing someone else racially,
homophobically, or any other -ism or -obia, I would defend the victim to the death as long as
they were in my presence. That includes male victims of domestic violence. Everything has its
day and identity politics is in that category.
We need a new way and it needs to honour the reality described in the fraudelent rhetoric of
the recent past globalist, multiculturalsit, and liberalist concepts. We need a completely new
economic system or blend of the old which serves the needs of all the people, al the time. And
we need democratic systems which empower constant feedback from those people on how far its succeeding.
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal
policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards
have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much
of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their
kids even worse than their precarious present.
Agree 100% with this, but am at an utter loss to grasp why this is chalked up to the hip new lingo
of "neoliberalism." Bullshit. It's as pure a distillation of conservatism as has ever been penned.
This obsession with renaming things for the sake of confusion serves no one well. This is prime
Trickle Down and the Conservative Manifesto through and through.
I am afraid the author is correct in describing the problem as Neo Liberalism - It is not Conservatism
or Capitalism.
This is Neo Liberalism - You are the CEO of a plant employs 5,000 people that makes widgets.
You don't know how to make a better widget but you want to increase profits so you decide to close
down your plant and outsource 4,000 of the jobs to a low wage economy where workers don't have
the same rights (remember China doesn't have democracy or freedom of speech).
Now your making widgets cheaper but you still aren't making enough money so you offshore the
tax liability to a tax haven - There goes schools, roads, hospitals.
Now your making so much more money for the company what do you do? You give yourself a pay
rise. Not any old pay rise. You pay yourself five or ten times as much.
And then you buy shares because the share price goes way up.
And then you donate to politicians and they tell the great unwashed (that's you and me) this
wheeze is FREE TRADE, or conservatism or capitalism or trickle down.
It isn't its Neo Liberalism and both left and right in most of Europe and the USA has embraced
it to the detriment of its citizens.
Naomi Klein: The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate
neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned.
It starts by having the DNC follow its own rules. The superdelegates were dutifully counted
as Hillary supporters from Day One of the primaries. Something like 507 to begin with! When Sanders
won successive states, more and more superdelegates mysteriously appeared supporting Hillary.
People understand what a rigged game means. This was Thumb-On-The-Scale tactics and people saw
through it. The Party chose Hillary and that was that. That's not democracy. The Democratic Party
needs a complete transformation from root to branch.
But yes, the bigger picture must be a focus on institutional reform. Not just for America but
everywhere.
I agree with Klein's take on neoliberalism, its Panglossian economic model, as a cause of much
angst in the world, but the remedy is simple in the US -- regulation. Break up the big banks,
end monopolies based on third-party payments, licensing and credentialing (health care, the universities,
etc.), and levy higher taxes on the wealthy. I truly believe that race relations among Americans
have never been better, and that most "problems" have largely been manufactured. What America
is crying out for is good, pragmatic government.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
And people have been saying that for decades but no one has been listening, least of all the
trendy neoliberals who thought they had found the final economic solution.
You cannot strip away a person's identity, life and loves, without them losing their dignity
-totally. You must prepare and assist every one of them for change over realistic time scales
dealing with every consequence as it happened. None of that was done because all of what has happened
is the product of opportunism - cash today think about it tomorrow.
These trendy neoliberals have cheated us all, not once, not twice, but all the time, and they
show no guild, no guilt at all. They will continue to pay the price until they listen to us and
change.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers
with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has
past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people
with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right
now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.
It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist
logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please-
what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you
so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing
the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All
they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they
trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good.
That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs
(I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists
in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid
ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.
You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
Perfect. Thank you, Naomi, for the best column on the 2016 election. Democrats are proving to
be sore losers but they can come around if they all or most read your take on the outcome of our
presidential election. Neoliberal has been our downfall but still most Americans are not aware
of even the word. Times to get explanation of the ideology and the negative effect on the world.
It has been so cruel and so horrible since Jimmy Carter who started this whole thing but the Clintons
were the cruelest of all. I am so glad Hillary did not win. I could not vote for Trump so voted
for Jill Stein.
It was also their (and the left in general's) embrace of identity politics. Welcoming the whiny
'social justice warrior' attitude that puts everyone into little groups and puts those groups
into little lanes, and no one can ever leave their group or lane. Calling people racist or bigoted,
not for actual racism or bigotry, but for merely expressing a different opinion. White privilege-
trying to shut down the opinions of white people. Cultural appropriation- witch-hunting people
for wearing a certain hairstyle or costume. Safe spaces- creating echo chambers and segregating
people from even hearing opposing opinions or ideas. Microagressions- claiming offense over perceived
slights and insults in harmless remarks. not to mention trying to police, ban, and control speech.
I'm a liberal, I lean left, my ideals and values and principles and what I stand for are more
in line with left-wing ideology, but if they want to be taken seriously and have a chance at winning
again, the left needs to let identity politics die.
An ideology that believes that if you give rich people absolutely unfettered ability to make
even more money, they'll magically look after everyone else.
The center left's shameful, braindead acceptance of Thatcher-Reaga, Dumbonomics has been a
worldwide plague.
The EU, supposedly a bulwark of common sense, is still officially austerian and neoliberal,
even though some hard thinking is going on.
Anger-fuelled adoption of far right policies and economics is a further lurch in the same direction:
deregulation, unchecked corporate power, quashing of workers' rights.
A bad time for the disenfranchised all over the world, now being used as electoral cannon fodder
by their owners.
As an English woman who lived in America for some years, it was perfectly clear to me that voters
there have a choice between cuddly-right and hard-right.
There is no "left" in America, and there is none in the UK either in any meaningful, workable
sense. All we have is the soft-right and an unreconstructed 70s Trot. Brilliant.
Nice as it might seem, " The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace
Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions" sounds like yet another
loose coalition of pressure groups with no cohesive platform or plan. Same old, same old.
Absolutely spot on. I remember, as a rare liberal working at a GOP-run Enron, how disheartened
I was watching Bill Clinton pander to the GOP elites and shove NAFTA through a GOP-run Congress
while the majority of Democrats voted against it. He also sought, for political expediency, many
neoliberal solutions that doomed the working class to subsistence. The GOP crowed that Reagan
won the Cold War when actually it was the shift of wealth from the West to the 3rd world as a
bribe that ultimately brought us to the globalized mess we find ourselves in. This was during
Clinton's presidency. Unfortunately Obama did a u-turn and continued GW's disastrous tenure in
what really matters: wars, globalization, abandonment of the working class. Why didn't the Democratic
elite not remind voters that the GOP was behind globalization and the shift of wealth from the
middle class to overseas?
A Message from the Rust Belt: It's the NAFTA, Stupid
The road to President Trump began with the enactment of NAFTA, a heinous betrayal by the Democratic
Party of its blue collar base and of it's most basic principles, taking it from the party of the
New Deal to the party of the Brave New Global World Order Deal, screwing it's most loyal constituents
in favor of Wall Street.
The next step on the road to the Trump House was the Clinton's reckless deregulation, culminating
in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, yet again in the name of a bigger, more profitable, more
powerful Wall Street at the peril of Main Street.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in sending blue collar rust belt America into the arms
of an orange-haired demon is what happened when they put their faith, heart and souls into electing
Barack Obama, a man who ran as a progressive, promising hope and change, but who then immediately
governed as a neo-lib.
I know what some of you are saying right now, that given the fierce opposition he was up against,
he accomplished what he could; but that's a bunch of bull, as we say in the Midwest.
No one forced him to appoint, immediately upon taking office, Wall Street insiders to his cabinet
and make Larry Summers (the architect of deregulation, neo-lib style) his chief economic adviser.
No one forced him to appoint corporate toady, Common Core loving, privatization loving (through
charter schools) Arne "teach to the test" Duncan to Secretary of Education.
No one forced him to immediately abandon, in the fight for Obamacare, the public option.
No one forced him to ultimately come up with a health care plan, that at its base, is of by
and big Pharma and the insurance industry, one that lowers costs not by controlling them but by
rationing care (that's what those huge deductibles and co-pays are for and they're working--working
Americans, even while insured, don't dare visit the doctor, except when at death's door, for fear
the doctor will order tests they can't afford to pay.)
Most now use their insurance as catastrophic policies to be used only in emergencies. This
is why Obamacare is so hated in America--not because it's socialist, but because it isn't. (Remember,
they voted for hope and change)
No Republican cabal forced Obama to embrace TPP, NAFTA on steroids and so univerally hated
here in the heartland.
Ah, but you say, Hillary has come out against it. But only after praising it and only in cagey
language, about not approving it in its present form (and she has yet to comment on the viscerally
hated NAFTA forever linked to the Clintons and the Democrats).
Much is made (and rightly so) of Trump's threats to constitutionality and the rule of law.
Yet Democrats seem blissfully unaware of their own full-frontal assaults on the Constitution.
For elected officials who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United
States, supporting NAFTA and TPP, which sign over US sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable (corporate
controlled) international tribunals, giving them the power to, in essence, overturn any US, state
or federal, is nothing less than an act of treason. You might as well just take the Constitution,
rip it to shreds, and throw it up in the air like confetti.
(It's so easy to see Trump's threats to the Constitution, so difficult for Democratic elites
to see their own obliteration of it.)
Why is the hatred of NAFTA, of TPP (and of the Clintons) so visceral in rust-belt America?
I know people who watched the plants they worked in dismantled piece by piece and shipped off
to Mexico. I've spoken to people who've had the humiliating experience of going to Mexico to train
their replacements. I've talked to union members who've reported that employers, at the bargaining
table, have demanded huge cuts in pay and benefits, saying that unless they concede, they're moving
to Mexico.
It's personal.
It's not like blue collar, rust-belt America hasn't given the Democrats chance after chance.
They've been voting Democratic since 1992.
They gave Obama two chances, believing his promises of hope and change, only to witness his
championing of TPP.
Time and again, the Clintonian Democrats have deceived and betrayed their blue collar, rust-belt
base. Time and again rust-belt blue collar America has supported them, nonetheless, hoping, like
Charlie Brown, that this time they wouldn't have the football pulled away.
But the accumulating decay, the devastation of the great recession (and the feeble, corporate
oriented Democratic response) have left them with no hope left. The vote for Donald is a howl
of rage and desperation. He was the only way left for them to vent their rage (after the Democratic
elites dispensed with Bernie Sanders).
The next four years are going to be hell. But for heartland rust-belt America, the last thirty-five
years have been hell (and they have nothing left to lose).
On the one hand you don't want immigrants in your mist because they undercut local workers.
And in the other hand you don't want those same people to get good jobs in their own country,
because they undercut your own workers.
You think you have a God given right to jobs for which you aren't productive enough.
In other words you don't want to compete.
You want to sell us your stuff allright ( NAFTA slaughtered the Mexican farming sector, specially
subsistence farming) but you would rather don't buy Mexican stuff, unless it is raw materials
so you can add value and sell it back to us.
NAFTA has made countless articles cheaper to all of you, and has slowed down illegal immigration
which has been in the decline for a while.
But you want it all, no matter how unrealistic.
Having you cake and eat it. While riding an unicorn please.
Why Klein doesn't mention Jews in her list of targets of this right wing hate and reaction is
surprising. In defining the reason neo-liberalism failed so many people, she states "At the same
time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and
tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities
who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not
invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected
to their growing debts and powerlessness." And this paragraph directly applies to how the Trumpettes,
the KKK, who endorsed him, the Alt-right who he played a major role of normalizing, sees JEWS.
Central to the ideology of the extreme right is their hatred of Jews. How Klein missed that is
really baffling.
Naive comment. The "lefts" criticism of Israel is largely unrelated to the growing right's hostility
to Jews. It's the latter you need to be concerned about.
What right's hostility in the US? Where are they. There isn't a single Republican member of Congress
who is hostile to Israel. David Duke ran for senate in Lousiana and got 3% of the vote.
Naomi: "But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we
now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism."
Is this completely correct, leaving out as it does something that has grown since at least
the last days of WWII and throughout the Cold War, something that some call the "Deep State?"
Here's one view of it, written by a former Republican congressional staffer but in an essay
found on the Bill Moyers and Company's website (Bill Moyers is definitely neither a Republican
nor a conservative):
"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of
Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according
to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by,
the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of
a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and
its operators mainly act in the light of day."
Lofgren's description is not exhaustive, not really focusing on the darkest heart within the
"military industrial complex" that is intimately associated with the deep state, namely the covert,
classified areas of the intelligence and security components. (I find the fact that the present
president recently renewed the illegal and unconstitutional 9/11 State of Emergency Act for the
eighth year in a row, just as his predecessor did every year he was in office after
the Act was first signed in September, 2001, telling.)
Still, it's good starting point.
It looks to me that this huge beast is more about empire than Neoliberalism (or even NeoConservatism
-- it encompasses both; it's not necessarily "left" or "right" as most use the terms, not truly
Democrat or Republican).
Hillary has promised to be a president for everyone…that is, everyone who contributes to 'The
Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation'.
According to the Foundation's website, it is a 'non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.'
The easiest way to make an organisation non-profit is to pay out all earnings - seven-figure director
fees, first class travel, Fifth Avenue offices…oh how you can spend your way to a luxurious non-profit
outcome! And whatever is left over after your personal indulgences have been satisfied, you can
spend on a few pet projects.
The Clintons are seen as money grubbers who'd sell their own family members for the right price.
Hillary is a despised person.
Trump is no better. The only difference between him and Hillary is that he is openly corrupt.
Whereas Hillary hides her corruption behind a cloak of establishment respectability.
The dumbest thing about the response to this is is how everyone is just shoehorning their own
narrative into this. If this was just about neoliberalism, nobody would have voted for the Republican
party. Trump won for a variety of factors. It wasn't that he was against globalisation, it's that
he lied that he could change it. These people believed his "we'll bring back all the jobs" over
concrete plans.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner
of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from
Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
I hang around in liberal circles in Toronto and even there, Black Lives Matter is hardly popular.
I know socialists see the result and think that they can be next, but they won't be.
The political class assiduously serves the needs of the wealthy, while the working people fend
for themselves. The banks get a bailout, the bankers get a bonus, and the consumer gets his house
foreclosed on. The oil companies and hedge funds get loopholes built into the tax code, and the
middle class hears that they might not be able to draw their Social Security until they're seventy.
It's not hard to see why people are unhappy, and Trump was unafraid to call the system rigged
and the players corrupt. You can analyze the results of this election until you're blue in the
face, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is that the working people have been thrown
under the bus in favor of corporate profit for far too long.
True enough, but Trump's "solutions" will just make it worse for the same group of people and
continue to support corporations and the wealthy. Sadly yet again the voters have been duped.
Probably. The only hope I have is that Trump is a vanity candidate, so I expect he really will
try to do the best job he can for as many people as he can. He genuinely has no love for the political
class and our campaign finance or lobbying systems. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that
something half decent might yet come of his election. Probably not any of the big issues, and
it's a shame about the environment and the Supreme Court, but you never know... Or so I'll keep
telling myself.
1] Since the Eighties the powerless left have been saying that the solutions are on the left
... while the voters kept moving right. Repeating the same thing but louder doesn't make it work
any better.
2] Since the Eighties every faction of the left has been calling unto the other flavours of left
to 'unite' ... whereas as what they usually meant was 'join us'. Even now I see no evidence that
the left is capable of running a 'united-self' ... let alone capable of uniting and healing the
deep rift in the society of Trumpian-US or Brexit-UK.
This ship has sailed! The Modern Left has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every bit
as much as 'Old Left' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's and 'Older Left' failed to
withstand the nationalist fervor of '14-'18. No, I am afraid that, as in all previous episode,
this fascism must be fought. We better start preparing while we still can.
But the problem with your story is that the left were defeated some time back. What we've had
since are liberals (i.e. the neo-liberal right) tacking ever-rightward, constantly insisting that's
the only way to avert the hard populist right. The result has been complete failure, as all that
right-ward movement by liberals has achieved is to further create the conditions that lead to
the rise of the right.
Its pretty much the same thing that happened in Russia post-communism. Neo-liberalism/liberalism
(they are, in fact, the same thing) led to the rise of watered-down kind of fascism.
The modern pro-capitalist/non-populist right has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every
bit as much as 'Old Right' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's...
This article is spot on. Neoliberalism creates its own hierarchy which has no place for the peole
who voted for Trump. Two quotes from US voters (with acknowledgements to Sky News).
1. A black man who voted for Trump...'most blacks have more in common with white woeking class
families trying to make ends meet than they do with the democrats'
2. A well heeled white democrat man in shock....'trying to come to terms with an election which
has shown me a side of America I was unaware of...'
Shock horror....Trump was elected by ordinary people.
It was interesting to see that nearly each and every newspaper in the US and the UK and everywhere
else and nearly all the TV channels started a barrage of anti-Trump rhetoric always repeating
his sexual escapades and his racist and sexist comments. Only a few alternative blogs or news
channels dared to criticise Hillary or question her integrity.
Now that Trump has won has shocked all these news channels and everybody is asking who voted for
him ? All those "deplorable" people as mentioned by Hillary or all those sexist, racist or uneducated
whites ? Were they angry ? If so, why ? Was it a protest vote ? Why ?
It is interesting to read Charles Hugh Smith's writing "The source of our rage" below and wonder
why all these "expert" commentators got it wrong -- https://goo.gl/VuEGZy
Turn on your television or pick up a paper. Listen to a radio or read the online news. There's
always someone telling us how we should think, and what we should do.
The belief that they know better - that they are superior to the rest of us - permeates every
corner of our lives. Those that disagree with and challenge the 'consensus' are considered ignorant
or uneducated.
This is the argument that's been trotted out since Brexit. The poor old folks didn't know what
they were doing. That somehow, those who grew up under the black cloud shadowing post-Second World
War Britain couldn't comprehend the implications of seeking to regain control of their economy
and borders.
That's the way society has gone - the megaphone minority blasting away in our ear. The elites
who believe their values and opinions are the only ones that matter. Pity the poor taxpayer who
picks up the tab.
The international 'specialist' who flies in for a couple of days to lecture us on what they
think we're doing wrong. From how farmers should manage their land, the type of energy we should
use, through to how to control our borders. How these self-appointed experts love to enlighten
the great unwashed. It happens at the local level as well. It could be the council dictating something
as simple as the colour a homeowner is allowed to paint their fence.
There's the local action group. After moving into an area and setting themselves up as they
see fit, they seek to restrict who can join them, and what their fellow residents can do.
A paddock that once held a herd of sheep has been subdivided, and then subdivided again. Yet the
new owner places a placard on their new fence protesting against any future developments.
The events of yesterday in the US have turned the world on its head. World leaders are struggling
to know how to respond, to Trump's victory.
While so much of the commentary and analysis by the experts has been about the two personalities
involved, the US election results reflect something much more basic than that.
It's that the ones who do the lifting - that is, those who set their alarms early and go off
to work - are tired of subsidising those that are the recipients of the public purse. They've
had enough of paying for the lifestyles of those who look down on them. This includes the political
class who lecture them, and everyone else.
The commentariat are putting their spin on the US election result. Much like Brexit, they're
arguing that the poor uneducated folks didn't know what they were doing. The result is a two-fingered
salute to the political elite who sign off on trade agreements with little regard for those that
will lose their jobs. It's a protest against those elected to represent the voters' interests
but rarely, if ever, visit the factory floor.
But it's not only the political class who left the majority behind. The result also reflects
the great chasm that continues to grow between the wealthy elite - Wall Street - and those on
the other side where wages have gone nowhere for years.
The post-GFC world has only pumped more money into the top few percent, while everybody else
has been left a long way behind. While the Dow Jones Industrial Index has increased more than
two-and-a-half times since the lows of 2009, real wages have barely increased a dime.
Nobody knows how the Trump presidency will play out. I doubt he even knows himself. And as
the elites predict, it might turn out to be one of the US' great follies.
Some are calling the result a swing back to conservatism. But the result illustrates ever so strongly
how the so-called 'silent majority' are deciding to reclaim the way their lives are governed.
It's a major blow to elitism, and is a trend that will only grow.
Perhaps if The Guardian and every other major left media site would have been understanding this
the past few years instead of ignoring Bernie, plugging for Clinton, and pushing the SJW stuff
there wouldn't have been a Trump presidency. Everyone shares a bit of blame for his win. Hopefully
we can not get so obsessed with blind Dem support and identity politics going forward.
Ya think? Finally someone says something sensible. Neo-liberal economic policy and neo-con foreign
policy I might add. There is a German blogger who is a polyglot. He speaks German, French, Italian,
English and Russian. He reads the romance languages at least I don't know about Russian. He monitors
how different news events are spun to the various populations. Which facts are presented, which
omitted, obfuscations, lies and who's controlling the narrative. Because of the time difference
he went to bed before the election results were known and woke up after. The opening sentence
on his piece that morning was, "So I just woke up and found that the world has changed. World
War III was called off."
Which in my estimation is accurate. Perhaps not WWIII but certainly another major war. And
what's the result over here in America? It's the Hillary supporters who are behaving violently.
Rioting, destroying property, assaults, interfering with transportation etc. Not covered in your
press of course because it is the republicans who were supposed to be the violent monsters and
it doesn't fit the narrative.
First, neo-con warring, an essential subcomponent of neoliberalism, for when CIA manipulation
of political strife isn't possible. Indonesia versus Iraq, for example.
Second, Hillary supporters rebelling is in the news this morning, though they aren't a) airing
it as an alarming event, nor b) having the same paramilitary police response to it.
Third, R has been pushing for warring and I've no idea where you'd (they'd?) come up with an all
R Washington isn't going to jump right in. Particularly, post election, when congress refuels
the "campaign donation" money laundering machine, defense contractors (Northrop, etc.) and infrastructure
(Parsons Brinckerhoff, etc.), with the gifting of federal contracts, which will no doubt run way
over budget as cost plus contracts.
There's a whole lot of less than Whole Truth used to manipulate. Some intentional, some due to
ignorance.
Long ago I asked, what is the difference between ignorance and arrogance, and about the only thing
I can come up with is ignorance is unintentional while arrogance is confident ignorance.
And people like Trump never went to Davos? Republicans don't do that? Yes, a lot of people are
in economic pain, and the Democrats and Clinton share that blame. I agree that the Democratic
party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be
abandoned, but Trump's victory is not just about economic pain. It's also about fear of the diverse
country we are becoming. You want to know who is to blame for the election of Donald Trump? The
people who voted for him. They are the ones who fell for the con that he was their solution.
What you say is correct, but the point is that it is expected that the GOP will protect business
interests and profit at the expense of people. That is why they exist. The Democrats have historically
been the party that protects the working class. As the author points out, they have abandoned
that role during the last 40 years, leaving the working class without protection from the concentration
of corporate wealth, power and influence. Working class whites, Latinos and blacks should be allies,
not competitors for the scraps left after the Davos party. The conservative right in America is
successful because they have successfully pitted these natural allies against each other, but
they have been aided the the embrace of corporate neoliberalism by the Democratic party leadership.
Bill Clinton gave us Bush the Younger thanks to having the self control of an adolescent chimpanzee.
Now the Democrat establishment aided by another Clinton gave us Trump. When are we going to stop
buying into the neo-liberal bullshit. They have played us like suckers since the revolution the
French won for us. Speaking of the French, their revolution scared the shit out of the "founding
fathers" especially the parts about equality and fraternity. I saw Trump coming a long time ago,
but I thought someone would stand up. It wasn't as if we weren't warned. Instead all the talking
fucking heads are telling us it's time to heal to work together. Right, like the way the Republicans
worked with Obama. Are we going to work together, are we going to fight? Nah. We"ll find someone
new to bomb in the name of liberty and some new shinny thing will come along and we'll just stay
bent over. But never forget, we are the greatest and the most exceptional.
Good post. But it was also Obama who recently led us here. He didn't do anything. Sure he was
stymied by the Republican congress. But he didn't even use the bully pulpit.
He seemed to me to want to work for the rest of the world more than he did the U.S. He couldn't
even see that the trade agreements are a problem for our citizens. And I supported him more than
any previous presidential candidate, because I thought he cared.
Generally speaking, American and British media supports neoconservative foreign policy (regime
change in Libya and Syria, military confrontation with Russia and China, expanded funding for
NATO, the Iraq War WMD lies, etc.). At the same time, it tends to support neoliberal trade policies
(free flow of capital, offshoring manufacturing to sweatshop zones) that enrich billionaires while
impoverishing the middle class.
The only real difference between "conservative" and "liberal" media outlets is in their take
on identity politics; this is why people view media as propaganda that tries to point people away
from the more important issues of global war and wealth inequality. It's a distraction tactic.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras,
Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel).
In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in
2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced
by the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of
a joke. He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for
a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard
by the banks. As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student
loan debt; that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything
on that front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like
Dakota Access. He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary
Clinton would have done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in
Feb 2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to
pick losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are
unpopular with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously
have beaten Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic
Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for
Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who
crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never
voted for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
"They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will
blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They
will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn,
and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry."
And in the Guardian, of course, they'll work out some way to blame Jeremy Corbyn...
We need to ask why the polling was wrong. People who normally vote did not, and people who
normally don't vote did. Clinton really did rig the election as proven by Wikileaks, and lots
of Bernie supporters could not bring ourselves to vote for her ; and Clinton called Trump's
redneck base "a basket of deplorables", and many of those folks who would have watched the election
from a bar stool got up to kick her ass. Naturally the same persons who pretended that Clinton
did not rig the election want to continue to pretend. But Naomi, she really did.
I too believe Clinton and the DNC sealed their own fate. But the "bucket of losers" accusation has
proved to be false, the product of a spoof Podesta email.
So in other words Naomi Klein admits that "rampant insecurity and inequality exist" and that something
is required to be done to correct this - which I think many of us realise is a balancing of the needs
of national autonomy and globalisation, but then Naomi has the audacity to attribute these "responses
" to "neo fascists" So suffer on you poor under privileged unwashed. but should you rise up then
we ( the enlightened) know that you are being prodded by neo fascists !! A totally ridiculous idea
which can only be explained as the last desperate gasp of the politically correct whose credibility
is not only on the line but is now clearly beyond the pale
Beautifully said. Eight years of neo-liberal acting/progressive talking Barack Obama and the prospect
of more of the same from the deeply flawed Hillary Clinton was enough to hand the presidency to the
grotesque Donald Trump. The Democratic party is smoldering and needs to be rebuilt as Naomi says
by and for the 99%.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive
wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the
Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti,
Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition,
she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were
never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.
Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly
abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass
surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced by
the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of a joke.
He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for a massive
taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard by the banks.
As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student loan debt;
that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything on that
front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like Dakota Access.
He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary Clinton would have
done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary
if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton?
26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in Feb
2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing
last-minute party registration for independent voters.
That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to pick
losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are unpopular
with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously have beaten
Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust
legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently
owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary
of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi
Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed
the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."
Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never voted
for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
While I'm troubled by many of the implications of this electoral result, I think the main story is
that the Democrats have bled so many votes that an extremely unpopular Republican candidate was able
to win simply by holding on to most of the votes that Romney managed to get 4 years ago and flipping
a few swing voters. When the final tally comes in, Hillary Clinton will likely have received over
8 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008 and nearly 5 million less than he got in 2012. Trump got
fewer still, and he'll now be president because he managed to sway just enough voters in the rust
belt to win several of those states.
It could not be clearer that Sanders' approach would have been the better one for this election
by far. He spoke to the anger at the economic hollowing out of so much of this country while offering
prescriptions that were in the best interests of the vast majority of people and framed the discussion
in a way that made it clear race was not at the center, that the unchecked pursuit of the class interests
of the wealthy & well-connected was responsible for so much of the human devastation that can easily
be observed in so many parts of the country.
Anyone who zealously advocated for this view was derided as a "Bernie bro" or mocked with sneering
suggestions that Bernie was only a viable candidate in white states. (Nevermind that being
absolute bunkum) Clinton supporters and other DNC hacks falsely equated working class white people
in states like Wisconsin and Ohio supporting a more left-leaning economic program that placed a lesser
emphasis on racial & identity issues to engaging in some sort of insidious white male identity politics-
and they did so deliberately, to muddy the waters.
They forced a widely reviled, ethically challenged, evasive servant of the establishment who deemed
TPP "the gold standard" of trade agreements, supported the Iraq war, was content to let the financial
sector completely off the hook for the last financial meltdown and engineered the disastrous Libya
intervention down everyone's throat on the premise that Americans didn't have a choice. Anyone who
expressed their fear that this would result in a loss to Trump, much less voiced a slight preference
for Trump over Clinton (even if absolutely de minimis), was vilified to such a degree that I am confident
that it stifled some of the public discussion about how to electorally confront Trump. The only acceptable
answer was voting for Hillary Clinton without reservation, even accepting that many criticisms of
her were valid was tantamount to enabling fascism.
Look where we are now. There's a lesson in this: you cannot rely on progressive issues on a few
social positions as a fig leaf to cover up a massive failure to challenge the systemic rot of our
economy, our governmental institutions and our legal system. Standing up for a person's right to
peace, security and opportunity irrespective of race, ethnicity or creed is absolutely the right
thing to do. Same goes for women's right to make family planning decisions or the rights of gay people
to marry and live free of discrimination. None of these can begin to mask massive system-wide failures,
that we are seemingly hopelessly chained to an economic paradigm that is grossly indifferent- even
actively hostile- to the welfare of the majority of our citizens.
I think Sanders' response to Trump's election is entirely appropriate. If Trump does follow through
on some of his challenges to globalization, lobbyists or modernizing and improving our infrastructure,
we should offer our qualified support. If he attempts to push through massive deregulation, lopsided
tax cuts for the wealthy, stripping of environmental protections, or anything to stoke the flames
of bigotry and division we should unite in principled, civil opposition.
Excellent and intelligent post. I especially agree with your last sentence. Trump may have saved
us from an insane war with Russia. But mass resistance is called for if he and the blood-red Congress
try to turn us into Christo-fascist serfs.
Absolutely on target, thanks Naomi! The DLC (Democratic Leadership?? Council) won this for Trump.
They may have taken a couple of presidencies--mostly on false promises--but their wishywashy presidents
did nothing for real people and worked solely for the rich oligarchs and imperialists. The "Leadership"
was only toward the Right. This election was the Revolt of the Rustbelt and the Dead Small Towns.
But Drumpf will do nothing for them except postpone, then forget, and finally turn against any who
dare complain.
And just think--if not for the DLC stuffed shirts and Wall Street bootlickers who held power in
the Dem establishment, we might be happy that Bernie & Jane Sanders--AUTHENTIC feminists and genuine
reformers--were going to the White House. I'm 80 years old, may not be around to see the young people's
victory, so I get sick thinking of how much we almost gained, but was lost by the DLC Beltway minds
and the GOP (Greedy Oil Party) solipsists. We lost more than Trump can guess, until his Miami properties
are all swallowed by the sea. It takes a heavy knock on his orange noggin to get that egomaniac's
attention.
I firmly believe that we must bring down BOTH of our over-age, limping, idiot-led political parties,
or reform them from the grassroots up! (If they can be saved, which I doubt.) It's time to revive
the LaFollette Progressive Republicans and the New Deal Democrats, but under different names--and
this time NOT just for privileged, "entitled" white males. Yes, I know Bob LaFollette tried to be
inclusive, but the time is way past when our children and grandchildren must support and empathize
with the entire HUMAN race, not just the paleface branch who've grabbed all the goodies.
As for the macho white males, offer the cowboys a chance to put their he-man cravings to work
at the top of wind-powered electric generators 200 feet tall out in the deep ocean, or avoiding glass
slashes from large solar trombe wall collectors or even small glass solar cells, or staying alive
around unexpected flares of methane, or getting caught in the ebb of a massive tidal bore and swept
out to sea. All of these are renewable energy generating systems, safe for the planet but requiring
daredevils who would marvel at how comparably un-scary mining and lumberjacking were back in the
Olden Days.
Trump was born into the 1% and has stayed there; inherited wealth don't ya know. His policies and
those of the Republican hierarchy include : union busting, lower taxes at the top, austerity at the
bottom, financial deregulation below 2008 levels, and privatization of government services. Democratic
policies are the complete opposite in each of these cases.
Trump doesn't stand for less neoliberalism but more.
"People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity."
That's about the only part that's correct. Globalisation and the threat of open borders is what
does that. Everyone wants to feel secure in their home, individually or collectively, without the
threat that anyone who likes your home better than theirs can invite themselves over and redecorate.
Canada's elite smugly refuse to recognize that its seeming imperviousness to "ethnophobic nationalism"
is precisely because it has secure borders and an immigration policy that selects immigrants.
Obama was elected twice in very recent history. If the country consisted mostly
of bigots, that would have never happened. To chalk this up to bigotry is
exactly the wrong thing to do - it makes one feel all smug and superior without
bothering to engage with the real issues, like the ones that Klein is discussing.
The Democrats have failed as a party of the middle and working classes. They
are the party of Wall Street bankers and the MIC and the Hollywood elite, who
are more concerned with eating organic arugula and with the bathroom rights of
transgender people than they are with the economic plight of the majority of
people in this country. And they nominated the one person who almost perfectly
embodies this establishment: Clinton - a war mongering, corrupt establishment neoconservative who
revels in Hollywood fund raisers with $50,000/person
tickets, gets paid a quarter of million dollars by Goldman Sachs for an 1-hour
speech, and salivates at the prospect of starting more wars in the middle east
and poking Putin in the eye. That's why the lost, not because of bigotry.
This piece is exactly right. The infiltration of the neoliberals has poisoned mainstream politics
and hijacked the left. It is given form by the Washington Consensus:
1. Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward
broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health
care and infrastructure investment;
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of
quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively
uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except
for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight
of financial institutions;
10. Legal security for property rights.
Trump is planning to tear up a lot of this, and he is quite right to do it, even if for the wrong
reasons. Globalisation has screwed working people in the developed world and enabled multinationals
to form an unholy alliance with the chinese communists to exploit the chinese people to make bigger
profits, whilst the old manufacturing base in the developed economies has been hollowed out and sent
to China.
The Democratic Party changed fundamentally under Carter/Clinton in the 1980s/1990s. Very much like
Labour in the UK changed during the same period under Blair. During that period, both parties morphed
from domestic worker's parties into global capitalist parties with (somewhat) progressive social
agendas. In both instances, the move away from core left economic values was justified by electability.
The sweeping elections of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s won the argument and relegated
the original base of the parties (workers) to the periphery.
Now that neoliberals are no longer electable, what's the justification for their continued existence?
No one on the left is happy with their core policies (deregulation, privatization, free trade, unfettered
immigration, coziness with corporations/banks, etc.). If they aren't advancing progressive social
issues y winning elections, why should we continue putting up with the neolibs co-opting our economic
policies?
Ideally, Democrats would use this opportunity to revert back into being a domestic worker's party
with genuine progressive/leftist values (much like Labour did in the UK by electing Corbyn). It almost
happened with Sanders. Given the enthusiasm/turnout he generated, that's clearly the way forward.
Sadly, if I were betting, I'd imagine the Democratic establishment will do exactly what the Labour
establishment did in the UK post Brexit...circle the wagons and double down. And with the anger being
directed at Trump rather than the Democratic establishment's malpractice in this botched election,
they may get away with it (unlike the Blairites in the UK).
The New Democrats (neoliberals) have been circuling the wagons for awhile now. They have tried to
shoot down progressive candidates running in primaries for office and support the neoliberal ones.
The guy who lost to Rubio was a former republican who became a New Democrat while the party shut
down any progressives.
It will take alot of battles to change the party back to their New Deal roots. The party saw the
reaction to the true son of the New Deal, Bernie Sanders. Instead of taking lessons from that and
what the democratic voters craved, they did everything to undermine him and shut him down.
It will take very heavy equipment to remove the entrenched neoliberals from the party and put true
democrats in their rightful place
It's strange to watch...the UK seems to be about half an election cycle ahead of us in its rejection
of neoliberalism. Everything happening in UK politics is echoed over here about 6 month's later.
Down to the fact that, in both countries, wealthy orange haired baboons somehow managed to speak
to the disaffected working class. If Gove hadn't snaked Boris Johnson at the death, both countries
would currently be led by said orange haired baboons. I mean, what are the odds?
Granted, it is the Year of the Monkey per the Chinese calendar...so there might be something in
that after all.
Relatedly, I cannot wait until the UK's new Secretary of State has a photo op with our President
elect. Which one is the doppelganger?
This is a very decent article, indeed the mainstream left made a deal with the devil and now he's
getting his due. But on the other hand I think it's terribly optimistic to assume everything boils
down to kick starting a new democratic-socialist movement, raking in all those votes that have just
been waiting for it to happen(and only voted for a right wing populist because it didn't yet, sure)
and fixing everybody's problems forever.
For one, the neoliberals managed to singlehandedly to make the left look like even more of a villain
in the eyes of those who already eschewed it, alienate those who believed in a left solution but
were not diehard about it, and fracture the remaining group into niches who refuse to engage in dialogue
or even in recognize each other as fellow lefties. Managing to form a stable coalition is a beginning
but it only deals with the latter problem, the left still has a huge public image problem to solve
before it can make a return.
And for another, the very idea of safety nets and benefits seems to have fallen out of fashion with
the electorate: the "I had to climb the hill both ways to get here, so nobody dare cut a tunnel through
it" mentality has been on the rise lately. It seems the neoliberals' failures somehow managed to
make us all even more individualist, if only a bit more tribal too. Thus, for a new left to rise
it wouldn't be enough to restore trust among all the isolated left groups, but also among society
as a whole.
But, when you have people homeless, starving, falling through society's cracks you have a rise in
crime.
Many who are suffering are not shiftless. Many are working but, don't make enough to pay bills and
put food on the table.
Many do not have access to healthcare.
Children go to bed without food.
When society is uncaring, mean and causes undue suffering, society falls apart and into haves and
have nots.
All the money that went to help people is the same money that now lines the pockets of the uber wealthy.
Our schools cannot teach with rats and cockroaches, ceillings falling in and no heat. When children
cannot get a lunch anymore, how do they learn?
When we cannot pay teachers or even support them, you end up with the bottom of the barrel teaching
the upcoming generation inadequately.
You can tell the strength of a society from how it cares for its poor and in need.
Ours is a 'i got mine' selfish shallow society now.
And it is violent and people are filled with hate.
Maybe because we have stopped caring and making sure people have opportunities and jobs and education
and help when they fall on hard times.
Agreed, except for the major actors who started this globalization's depression ofN. American and
European workers-- the Reagan and the Bush corporate supporters and puppet masters. Clintons and
other neolibs have followed suit because they wrongly believed that they could beat them by joining
them yet still do a bit of good for their voters. Wrong. But yes, the Revolution continues. Whether
it can save the planet -- the environment, however, is doubtful, and nothing matters nearly as much.
For years on is far to late.
Yes it was the Democrats promotion of neo-liberalsim aided by such claptrap as this opinion from
another Guardian scribbler.
"Centrism has failed these and many other voters. Clinton was not handpicked by the Democratic
party's elite: she defeated an unexpectedly successful challenge by self-described socialist Bernie
Sanders, partly because of his failure to inspire African Americans. "
That a closet Clinton supporter should have the temerity to write something like this to explain
Clintons defeat is beyond belief, when we know from Wikileaks e-mails that the DNC actively opposed
Sanders.
The reality is that all politics is dominated by the golden rule: he who has the gold rules.
Well meaning scribblers like Naomi can scribble all they want it will never change the situation.
Even revolution will not change the situation for the simple facts are "the oppressed are potential
oppressors".
The achievement of dominance and superiority seems to be built into human genes, and why not it is
so in the rest of the animal world.
Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary. Think of the
cooperative bonobo and the symbiosis of insects and field flowers. On the other hand, where resources
are scare, competition begins and we have social structures like the baboons and leafy trees that
kill competitive seedlings by their own shade.
However, throughout evolution cooperation outweighs competition. If it didn't we'd still be solitary
single-celled amoebae. As things are, our own bodies are well-furnished with microscopic critters
from RNA through viruses and bacteria, many of whom run the shop in the background. Cooperation,
whether vestigial, symbiotic or by choice, is the way that leads to life. Competition is the way
of violence and death. That's not Marxism. It's nature.
"Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species
exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary."
There is a plentiful supply of food for the human species.
So how can you explain the general situation that exists on the planet whereby governing elites control
and enjoy the major part of all that human labour creates to the detriment of over 50% of the human
population ?
"Neo-fascist responses"? Get over yourself Klein. Trump won because the Clinton's "own" the Democrat
Party and they and Goldman Sachs were confident she would be the nominee and millions of gullible
Americans would vote for Hillary.
By far the best candidate was Bernie Sanders but the Clintons had him run off the road by "Super
Delegates". Oh and by the way is it not odd that the Democrats did not change the electoral system
when they were in power?
House of Cards comes close to showing us just how ruthless the Clintons really are.
Well, that it is worthwhile reading. At the beginning I thought: good that someone pointed that out.
People haven't forgotten NAFTA and Hillary's speeches in closed wall street circles and so on. I
just wanted to remark that it was probably a multitude of reasons that explain the Democratic loss.
Comey's interference and other stuff that is outright dismissed by the author also played a role.
However, as I read on I couldn't help but realize that there seems to be another person who wasn't
even aware that Bernie and Elizabeth supported Hillary and wasn't aware of their arguments or the
Democratic platform Bernie Sanders fought so hard for. The last two paragraphs speak volumes of Ms.
Klein's realism or rather the lack thereof.
And how clear does it have to be that "the Network" is and has been purely supra and post-national?
How many trillions in dark loot in shadow banks and other asset dumps which the Panama Papers only
show a fraction of?
These Fokkers and Fuggers, what drives them? How much is enough? There's always been this cadre
of people who figure out how to scam and manipulate and "transcend boundaries," but to the extent
that exists today? With the habitability of the planet in question?
But then I have to remember that these people are into self-pleasing on a gargantuan scale, are
what we call sociopaths, who have been with the species since "we" figured out how to grow grains
and build granaries and walls to protect the granaries and warriors to man the walls and attack the
neighbors and take their stuff, and artisans to make the weapons and "improvements," and kings to
issue the orders, and priests to justify it all as the Hand and Will of God -- what we call "civilization."
And the people at the top have known since forever that if they insulate themselves adequately from
the rabble, they face no consequences for their predations, and can live out their lives of looting
and indulgence and die comfortably, cared for by loving nurses and doctors who will ease their passing
(unlike what the rest of us now face). Because as they have known since forever, "Apres ils le deluge,"
"IBG-YBG,"
http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html ,
And what are the rest of us going to do when they have passed on, or fled like the Nazis with
the gold from the teeth of millions and the art treasures and other portable wealth of demolished
and decimated nations, to live out their lives as CIA "assets" or in comfortable temperate South
American and African places? Dig up their corpses and desecrate them, or try to find their "cremains"
and burn them again? They do not care what happens to their children, even.
I wish us ordinary people all the luck in the world trying to create and maintain a different
order that will let everyone eat only to their honest hunger and drink only to their reasonable thirst...
Couldn't agree more. The neo-liberalism orthodoxy instead of suddenly knocking at the door has come
silently home to roost. The Democrats in America and Labor in UK were hand in glove with elites in
the greatest robbery the history has ever seen. The concentration of wealth in one percent which
was rationalized as panacea of all economic ills has turned out to be an opening of mythical Pandora's
box unleashing evils of racism, xenophobia, misogyny etc. The abhorrent echo of "too big to fail"
is still heard by the those who were let down by the same oligarchs. I have yet to find an answer
to the vexing question as to why enormous benefits of human knowledge and scientific advances be
exclusively extracted by one percenters.
Guardian commentators use identity politics and cries of "racism, sexism and xenophobia" to try and
distract the working class from noticing how internationalism, globalization and immigration has
stagnated their wages, moved meaningful jobs oversees and stoked up asset prices allowing a homeowner
in London to earn more by twiddling their thumbs than their Polish cleaner gets paid in a year.
No matter how shrill the likes of Owen, Jonathan, Paul, Polly and Hadley try and distract us with
their daily dribble of identity politics, we increasingly see them as just another faded facet of
the corporatist, internationalist status quo.
The union excesses (which have largely been killed off and the union and former and would-be union
workers looted and impoverished along with the rest of the "lower orders) are just part of the disease
-- which is corruption, and self-pleasing at the expense of everyone else. Union "leaders," absent
disinterested "regulation" by government (which has been mostly corrupted too) and thanks to cooptation
by "capitalists," definitely screwed the ordinary people (who one must acknowledge included quite
a few rank-and-file that aspired to leadership so they could join the looting).
There probably is stuff that needs to be built and manufactured (not the 7,000 pound SUVs and
big Dodge and GMC and Ford F-series and "TUNDRA" trucks) to try to keep the species and culture alive.
But killing the ability of ordinary people to organize, essentially making unions illegal except
in tiny niches, just makes the end-game even worse. And continuing to punch down on working people
on account of some 1962 wages (NOT "salaries," these were hourly payrolls, with "benefits" that in
may cases like pension funds were subsequently looted by "private equity" vampire-squids and captured-government
actions) just makes it harder for ordinary people to come together AS A CLASS and fight the 0.01%
for a decent future.
my post on Facebook that mirrors Naomi:
My thoughts about last night:
Bill Clinton's New Democrats were incinerated last night...arrogant, ivy league, sleeping with Wall
Street, multinational corporations, insurance companies... and thinking that if they wrap themselves
in the social issues from abortion to gay marriage that wage starved workers with enormous bills
and debts, evaporating opportunities, disappearing pensions, shit schools and deteriorating infrastructure
wouldn't notice they were overlooked and forgotten. This election underscores that Economic injustice
is color blind
What I want to know though is that, given the reality of what you are saying, did none of this
occur to the Democratic party prior t the election?
If they knew all this why did they not respond to it instead of continuing to plough the same
old furrow regardless of the likely consequences for ordinary voters?
Why? Because the Dem Elites knew that with Hillary their perks, access, power, etc. was secure. They
wanted status quo and, just as they have behaved the past years, failed to listen to their constituencies,
ignored them. They should have known just by seeing Bernie's exceptional campaign and the enthusiasm
that fueled it, giving him more money than what Hillary often raised from her wealthy donors each
month, that no one was excited about more of the same. Arrogantly, they chose to ignore and minimize
what was before their eyes.
The most cogent analysis I have read so far. Bravo Ms. Klein. In a year where the country was screaming
for populist change, the Democratic party establishment who had their own highly effective populist
candidate, CHOSE to offer up possibly the most "establishment" candidate in history. Fly-over America
responded with a sharply erect, if ignorantly self-destructive middle finger.
Spot on diagnosis. People are angry that neolibralism has failed them and does not given a damn about
them. Clinton offered nothing but the same to too many people. Trump was a molotov cocktail, warts
and all, that they got to throw into Washington.
I don't buy the racist argument. People that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012, but Trump in 2016
are not racist. At the same time I acknowledge that all the KKK people did vote Trump.
Question is, does the left have an answer that is palatable to the people? It would be good if
it did, but I'm not holding my breath. Corbyn isn't it, that you can be certain of.
Clinton was a comically bad choice that made no sense whatsoever. The left often gets told that it
has to endlessly suffer centrist/neo-liberal "lesser evil" candidates in order to defeat the right
as they're more electable, which is an argument that at least makes some logical sense under some
circumstances, even if I disagree with it. But in the case of this election, everyone has known
for years that Clinton is wildly unpopular, and there was a radical alternative to her available
who consistently out-polled her against Trump in the form of Sanders.
Now her backers, such as Hadley Freedman on here today, rather than admitting their massive and
obvious mistake in supporting her against Sanders and generally backing the "centrist" policies that
brought us to this point, are suggesting nonsense such as the idea that those who voted for Trump
should be "held responsible." What does that even mean? What are you going to do, elect a new people?
You could have had a radical candidate who unlike Clinton could have brought about real change, and
unlike Clinton would have attracted many of Trump's blue collar supporters and, you know, won
.
All that lesser evil neoliberal politics gives us is a lack of change that allows the right to
make even more radical changes during the periods they're in power and eventually leads to the rise
of people like Trump, and it's particularly stupid when it throws up deeply unpopular and unelectable
people like Clinton, Miliband or the various empty suits lined up against Corbyn. It's time this
paper decisively turned its back on the concept.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the prospect of political ideologies forged in the Industrial
Age - "left", "right", "conservative", liberal" - being able to meet the challenges of this post-Industrial
age and the future beyond.
Western societies are fracturing into ever-smaller social groups defined by different, complex
combinations of social/economic/national/ethnic/topographical/sexual/religious factors which mushrooming
sub-groups all create their own realities based on the unregulated information they they select from
divisive, self-reflexive social media sources rather than inclusive "mainstream" news media which
have become increasingly corrupted and not trusted.
Fragmentation, disintegration of societies - these lead to paranoia and aggression aimed at the
"other" - and we can see this on both the "left" and the "right" in the blame-games that have followed
Brexit and Trump's victory. The 19th century liberals and conservative who provided the foundations
for the institutions of Western Democracy didn't foresee the emergence of global corporations and
banks with interests that could defy "the national good" or disrupt the moderately equitable distribution
of wealth and replace it with a massive diversion of wealth to a tiny global elite (So long affluent
workers! Goodbye aspiring middle-class!) - while placating most of the population with a consumerist,
material lifestyle mostly funded by debt. The old system is broken.
In both the Brexit referendum and the US election the most striking split was between the old
- the over-50s, clinging to the past - and young people, disconnected in their social media silos,
wanting a different future but, as a generation, not able to organize and politically express their
unhappiness and their hopes for the future because inadequate conventional Left/Right political thinking
doesn't chime with the reality of their lives.
Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist or a misogynist. Not everyone who voted for
Hillary Clinton has no sympathy with an unemployed factory worker in a mid-west town whose future
has been written off. However, everywhere you look - people are anxious and fearful that "the others"
are trying to stop them getting what they solipsistically feel they deserve.
Donald Trump won't be able to get Apple of Walmart to switch their product sourcing from China
to the US, nor will he be able to halt the long-term economic decline of the US any more than Theresa
May will be able to prevent post-Brexit economic decline in the UK: the challenges our dysfunctional
political institutions face are too complex for politicians who are strong on rhetoric and promises
but intellectually feeble and cowardly when it comes to decision-making and execution.
We need education, public-service-based information, new political ideas and new political parties
that can cut through the destructive white noise of Twitter and Facebook and focus on values that
bring people together and counter the greed of the supra-national elites - something more powerful
than divisive, out-dated concepts like Left and Right.
What a lot of words to say bugger all.
Why do people with no answers always say we need more education ?
We have to get rid of this notion that we US and UK are post industrial.
We have made a huge mistake offshoring our industry and must relocate the more essential parts. We
cannot be a service economy without making things.
Bashing metal turning wood molding plastics must be part of our future.
We cannot be a nation of management consultants and hairdressers.
The boom in population during the Boom didn't help. We are overpopulated, and our current economic
structure cannot support the material lifestyles and the narratives of freedom that we grew up living
with or dreaming about. That's the education that's needed.
Until we accept our current situation, we cannot understand or construct new political ideas,
parties, or narratives.
Neoliberal globalization is the worst kind of socialism, whether or not it is actually socialism.
It's what we're going to get if young people don't become collectively more informed and quickly.
There is an attitude of entitlement among young people that drives towards a socialist mentality
and the left has picked up the scent. They're going to chase that vote and those disaffected voters
are going to chase that lie right down the rabbit hole eventually. If Hillary and Obama have their
way, the riots that are being orchestrated right now will start the process immediately.
A very confused article. Neo liberalism is unfettered Global Capitalism given a nice sounding name.
It is an invention of the right. To think that the most extreme Republican President ever, will improve
the lot of the common man is quite simply bizzare.
A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive
agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use
the money for a green new deal
Particularly as Trump himself is a member of that billionaire class and clearly has no interest
in redistributing wealth away from himself, or in doing anything to overhaul the economic system
that has made him very rich.
Trump was elected US President by riding the same wave of anger & disaffection that fuelled Brexit.
Many of those who were disappointed by the result were quick to console themselves with the (wishful)
thought that he will not attempt to implement his more radical proposals, or that, if he tries, he
will be thwarted by the Republicans (who now hold majorities in both the House and the Senate). It
is important to bear in mind however, that any who dare oppose him will know that they do so at the
risk of their seats.
The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the politics of Donald Trump has much in common with movements like
Attack and Occupy Wall Street, and hence with Naomi Klein. They both want to stop, or put a break
on, international trade. Donald Trump wants to revive local production through protectionism. Klein
sees international trade as a source of both environmental and social degradation.
Naomi, thus, carries some responsibility for Donald's success.
The combined Trump/Klein policies would see the old rust belt workers boarding self driven electrical
buses to go to work in the new windmill factories. These windmills, normally, would be both more
expensive and less effective than if the business was subject to international competition, hence
the electricity they produced would be more expensive, giving domestic business a disadvantage.
The new environmental businesses would require support from the public purse (if not, we would
already have had them). The taxpayers seem in no mood for such grand scale subsidies.
History does not repeat itself, but in the 1930s the industrial nations raised barriers to trade
in order to protect their work forces. As a result, everybody got poorer and reacted by electing
extremist politicians.
Michael Moore outlines his post-election strategy. Point 1 is Take over the Democratic Party and
return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
Exactly the same as what is happening in the Labour Party. But in that case The Guardian supports
neoliberalism and seeks to undermine the ones who are trying to change things.
Sadly I think the electorate in some western societies are in danger of becoming just as ineffective
as 'the proles' in 1984, while the vice like grip of the military/industrial complex is just as tenacious
as that exerted by Big Brother and the party.
Since the entire political class, or least those with any clout all sing from the same hymn sheet
while moderate, or leftist figures, like Corbyn, or Sanders, are bound to be shredded by their own
party and by the media, then what hope, eh, unless that hope is something new and outside of party
politics?
Thank you, thank you, thank you Naomi. Even after an unbelievable defeat, the neoliberals still don't
get it. Blame game articles are starting already but no self reflection.
The role of the media (The Guardian included big time) have a responsibility and offended people's
intelligence and sensitivity about democracy, elites etc. Now they are running for cover. Today,
Hadley Freeman writes "Misogyny won the US election – let's stop indulging angry white men". Disgrace,
offensive and arrogant. Also, Hadley Freeman with "The US has elected its most dangerous leader"...No
remorse, no responsibility, blaming American people for being angry, for swallowing the same medicine
again...
Compare the Guardian and AP (recall who called California early and rigged the pre-selection against
Sanders?) and Waleed Aly here: (
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/us-election-2016-its-not-about-racism-or-sexism-its-about-class-warfare-20161109-gslxzs.html)...What
options did the "forgotten", vast majority, the "insignificant other", the disadvantaged, the
powerless have? When one is drowning, the relatively privileged onlooker has a duty to help rather
than blame the one drowning for "pulling our hair". Of course the future looks terribly bleak for
democracy, gender/racial relations etc...
Seriously, could Clinton be an answer for the family that struggles to pay rent, the homeless,
the unemployed, those scared of terrorism or a WWIII, the working poor, those in debt due to college
fees, those who lost their house and jobs for the sake of "free trade"...These are many, many people
folks...real people with flesh, dreams and humanity...
Understanding their pain and their lack of options (thanks to NDC & the Media) does not mean one
identifies with Trump and the ugly fascist monsters creeping behind him...It's not about us or one's
dream about equality, freedom...It's about survival & human dignity for millions of US people...
Did the demonizing of many working people send them straight to Trump land? Waleed Aly: "progressives
have treated the working class largely as a source of xenophobia ... ignore it at our peril" --
Excellent article much of which could have been written during the past thirty years.
We all know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I was puzzled as to why Mrs Clinton seemed to
cold shoulder Bernie Sanders. He had already connected with many of the 'left behind' by putting
a Social Democratic view opposite to Mr Trump's views. Both had identified the problems that the
Chicago economists and neoliberalism had caused, but not having Mr Sanders involved or even accepting
that his views would be part of her next administration, Mrs Clinton left the field open to her opponent.
If only she had remembered her husband's slogan 'Its the economy, stupid', it may have turned fire
on Trump's campaign.
There is an irony that although it was right wing politicians who bought in the neo liberal policies
which have impoverished working people, it is the social democratic parties on both sides of the
Atlantic who have suffered by trying to make neoliberalism work. They could not demonstrate however
how 'trickledown' benefitted the poorest and the image left was of rich people sucking up more wealth
and more influence over politicians as Ms Klein points out.
On our side of the Atlantic Mrs Thatcher ensured that the right have a strong supportive press
due to her ownership reforms and the right is gradually weakening our BBC so that any opposition
views will be stifled. Mr Corbyn has already been character assassinated. It remains to be seen if
Mr Trump carries out his threats to the American press supporters of Mrs Clinton to reinforce only
right wing views.
The smell of authoritarian regimes is now appearing in many places.
There was an almost dynastic arrogance in the Clinton's assumption that they would carry the day.
I have often been impressed with Bill's eloquence and Hillary's tough fight for a rational health
and insurance system, but have never heard a word of self-criticism about the dire effects of deregulation
and the financial crisis. The democrats missed their chance for radical measures when they had control
of Congress just after Lehman Bros.
Still, for international affairs, climate change, any sane kind of approach Trump is an unmitigated
disaster. Hillary has much experience in international affairs, but her opportunism in the wake of
9/11 had led her to support the intervention in Iraq. Of course we were all opposed to Saddam's régime,
but not with those means and in that kind of way, made much worse of course by Bush jr. Islamic State
is a direct consequence of the chaos and unemployment in Iraq created under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld
administration.
"Neo-fascist responses"
"Trump-style extremism"
"they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women"
You call my right to vote the way I choose "stupid".
You just don't get it. Millions of Americans voted exactly this way. A big middle finger to the establishment,
media, Wall Street, "experts", and yes moral posturing know-it-alls is a great way to use your vote.
You completely misunderstand Trump. He is far more for the working man than Clinton. The poor
voted for him in droves. And for good reason.
I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it.
I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.
On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded
interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks
that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.
I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly
recreating an aggressive Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for
the US racist colonial assumption that the world and its resources belongs to it in its sense of
itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage that belongs
to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.
And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself.
And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern
unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!
Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes
how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they
relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny
in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic
machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared
to face up to company executives.
What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable
contempt for 10s of millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity
and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those 43 years.
What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated
by Republican/Democrat bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?
What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one
of the family? A president whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators
in the Arab Spring?
A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need
all the scented oils of Arabia. Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.
Great article, but Hilary was hardly responsible for privatization and austerity in the USA. She
only had 2 terms in the senate (and was only one of 450+ in congress). She was in fact mildly center-left
and at least nominally and aginst the TPPA. She could have led a progressive congress (as in the
Johnson year) if her coattails were long enough.
I have never in my long life ever seen a politician so demonized... not by the mainstream media,
but by the new media run mostly by the alt-right and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers. It
worked.
The climate accord is now finished ..any movement towards single payer or paid parental leave,
minimum wage increase ...gone. - military spending is now going up, and Trump is proposing tolls
on all roads -all to be privatized to pay for tax cuts for the top earners. and this is tip of the
iceberg...and not including the racist upswing.
That said, the DNC has a lot to answer for with its undemocratic superdelegates and documented
undemining of Sanders...as did the media who either ignored him or unfairly lambasted him. The RealClearPolitics
average from May 6-June 5 had Sanders at 49.7% to Trump's 39.3%, a 10.4-point cushion...polling that
included independents. In that same time frame, Trump was polling close to Clinton and was even ahead
in multiple polls. Most people were well aware of Sander's so-called "socialist" label since October
the previous year, so I'm unclear if that would have been a factor in the general election.
An analysis of the media is long over due : It was remarkable to see the media, including American
media, go into shock mode and scramble to reorganise the script and the thinking to run a perspective
on what was happening on the night the votes were counted. The media had conditioned themselves to
a Clinton win. Clearly the editors and the reporters were not out on the streets and in the hustings
getting all the messages. The Guardian is in shock mode after the British Referendum and the American
Presidential Election. The most politically dangerous person is a discontented voter with a ballot
paper. How could the media have not spotted in advance what was happening ? I do not buy the lazy
perspective that the voters deceived the media into their voting intentions. Personally, I think
the media have got fat and lazy and need to come out from behind their editorial desks.
Naomi, has omitted one very important detail: automation, i.e. the use of AI to replace
jobs.
This absolutely requires us to restructure society to provide security and purpose to each every
one of us who is not part of the super rich owners.
For example we will see driving jobs rapidly disappearing within the next five to ten years.
I also notice that where the worst effects of rampant capitalism are ameliorated there appear
to be fewer issues. I'm thinking of many Western European nations where the issues do not yet seem
to have the over fifty percent traction that they have in the US and the UK. If Australia were suffering
a similar economic slow down it may well join the US and UK. But what's happening in Canada and New
Zealand?
The problem with centre left parties throughout the western world is that they sold out to corporate
capitalism, which forced people who rejected neoliberalism to go to the extremes to protest. The
question is, once someone's loyalty has been broken, it is that much more difficult to win loyalty
back, if it is possible at all.
And you're right - the neoliberal capture of centre-left legacy parties from the Democrats to
the German SPD and French Socialist Party has created an exceptionally unpromising landscape and
public mood. Trust has been broken. Responsibilities betrayed. Intellectual traditions traduced,
distorted, or simply cast aside.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be reflection
and a willingness to return to first principles as well as evolving new strategies and insights appropriate
to the present.
Economic realities shape cultural and social relations. The left should always listen to the experiences
of people and build a consensus based on solidarity between groups and not the alienated support
of different self-interested demographics. Exploitation is the corner-stone of capitalism when it
is left to run unchecked. Without regulation, capitalism tends towards monopolies that end up subverting
democracy itself.
These are the issues Bernie Sanders raised and the enthusiasm with which it was greeted is testimony
to the fact that there are white working class voters hungry for a politics of positive, radical
social change. Intoning with robotic piety that the people have never had it so good despite overwhelming
evidence to the contrary is a form of deceit; when it comes from the mouths of corporate Democrats,
it is political obscenity.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be
reflection and a willingness to return to first principles
I think what I've realised from the Brexit and Trump results is how desperate people are for something
to believe in. What used to be called 'the vision thing'.
For decades we've had to choose between different forms of managerialism and variations on a theme
of 'there is no alternative to rule by the market'. We just had to put up and shut up, there was
nothing to get excited about. Nobody's ever jumped up and down shouting "What do want? Trickle-down
economics! When do we want it? Now!"
The thing about demagogues is they offer that emotional release. What we need is principled political
movements that also enable it.
Absolutely right. One of the by-products of There Is No Alternative, though, is that managerialism
and wonkiness have been fetishised. Hillary Clinton's devastatingly uninspiring offer to the American
people was hailed by some as a mark of her "maturity", "experience", and "competence". Bernie Sanders,
by contrast, was attacked for firing people up, for inspiring them to believe change was possible
- by implication, of course, such attacks rest on the belief that change is in fact not possible
at all. It is a bleak nihilism that states the best that can be hoped or organised for is a slightly
better management of existing structures.
There is a hypocrisy, too, when someone like Clinton derides Trump's economic plans as "Trumped-up
trickle-down". In reality, they were arguing simply over who would offer the *bigger* tax cuts. The
notion that there were alternative visions on the economy, on climate change, on racial equality
or healthcare and education, not to mention foreign policies, was almost completely absent.
This is why I wrote that in some ways Hillary Clinton was the greater evil in this election. It
is one thing to hark backwards to a mythical past, as Donald Trump did. It is quite another to put
such tight constraints on the entire notion of what is possible in the future. Trump offered nostalgia.
Clinton offered the tyranny of low expectations - forever.
But that is all in the past now - for the future, I agree with you that there needs to be a willingness
to offer radical, inspirational and visionary alternatives to a system that has simply not worked
for the majority of people who through no fault of their own find their quality of life, possibilities
and security in decline while wealth flows ceaselessly upwards and into the pockets of those already
insulated from the harm their favoured politicians unleash.
Bernie showed what can be done - he also showed that people are willing to finance such campaigns
and thus liberate the political process from the death-grip of corporate donations. Personally, I
am sceptical of whether the Democratic Party is an appropriate vehicle for such politics (I know
that Bernie doesn't agree with me!) Regardless, his campaign should provide somewhat of a model for
what can be done - and likewise his statement from today. Amidst the headlong rush - in this paper
as well - to denigrate and smear voters for failing to advance bourgeois liberal interests, it is
imperative that deprived, working class voters of all races are listened to properly and not labelled
racists and bigots. A few no doubt are. But these are, in many instances, the same people that helped
elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They are crying out for something to organise around. Hillary
Clinton failed because she was not and never has been a person capable of, even interested in, offering
that.
This is a great article. Alas, I fear it is all too late.
Everyone knew what was wrong with Clinton and the whole rotten DNC operation, but they supported
her anyway. When her flaws were pointed out, people kept saying 'but she's a woman.' As if that even
mattered.
Fundamentally the left has to abandon its obsession with identity politics, embrace national identity
and individual liberty. Then it will be able to get over its economic message and win the day.
The Donald's victory is on the Dem estab who rigged the primaries. It's on the MSM who acted as Hillary's surrogate and cheerleader
and who slandered Sanders' voters at every opportunity. And they're STILL slandering Sanders' voters. More important for the Dem
estab to keep control of the party than to win against the GOP. Bernie would'a beat Trump, imo.
But not "respectable" coat tails. Remember, the Democratic Party is the "respectable" left, not those hooligan socialists that
want to make bosses and workmen peers (ew).
Ironically, "respectability" is an intrinsically far-right notion in the first place.
sou812
3h ago
0
1
The Democrats abandoned the only people that are paying
the bills in this country - period! And the working class
sent a message loud and clear. The arrogance and ignorance
of he left is astounding: focused on the novelty of
getting a woman elected to the presidency even though she
was the worst of choices. An arrogant, dishonest, bought
and paid for Wall Street elitist like her husband, they
thought that her experience was enough to seal her
success. Ta!
The Dem's have lost it all and it will take two decades to
recover, if ever.
After 8 years of "no change" Obama, a president totally owned by the corporations, banks, big
money etc. and the man who failed to do anything about that huge and ever widening wealth gap
the Democrats were obviously out of favour with the poor working class. But the voters seem to
have forgotten than Trump still stands for the Republicans and thats where he will enrol his
cabinet from, he can not act alone. Those same weak, ineffective ultra right loonies that
stood against Trump and made him look special will now stand with him in government. Its still
money politics.
Mutinous DNC Staffers Rage At Donna Brazile: "You Are Part Of The Problem... You Let This Happen"
Tyler Durden Nov 11, 2016 2:55 PM 0 SHARES Liar, cheat, and fired CNN contributor Donna Brazile faced
an angry crowd on Thursday night ... as Democratic Party officials held their first staff meeting since Hillary Clinton was crushed
by the "least qualified candidate for President ever."
As The Huffington Post reports, Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one
attendee described as "a rip-roaring speech" to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when
a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.
"Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?" he asked, according to two people in the room. "You backed a
flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain
and yourself."
Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.
"You are part of the problem," he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump's victory by siding with Clinton
early on . "You and your friends will die of old age and I'm going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this
happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy."
Zach gathered his things and began to walk out. When Brazile called after him, asking where he was going, he told her to
go outside and "tell people there" why she should be leading the party.
Two DNC staffers confirmed the exchange, and Brazile appeared to confirm the exchange also...
"As you can imagine, the individual involved is a member of the staff and I personally do not wish to discuss our internal
meetings."
Brazile could move to stay on as chair after March, but Thursday's meeting shows at least some party officials want fresh blood
at the top.
"The party is at a crossroads. They have been using the same playbook for decades, and now, they won't let anyone else come
in and change it up," said one former longtime DNC staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely.
"The fact that Democrats just sat through a devastating defeat and now have to trust the leadership that not only contributed
to Clinton's loss, but the crushing 2014 midterm losses, well, what do they expect?"
Mutiny at the DNC? And where does Brazile go now? No TV network will hire a proven liar and cheat. There's no Democratic campaign
for her to jump to like Wasserman-Schultz... So Brazile will probably find herself worling at The Clinton Foundation.
In the wreckage of Hillary Clinton's unexpected loss, liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul
of the Democratic National Committee, with the aim of using the staid organization to reconnect the party with working-class voters
it lost to President-elect Donald Trump.
Much of the talk since Tuesday's election has focused on selecting a new chairman, with the most frequently mentioned successor
being Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who backed the primary bid of Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.).
On Thursday afternoon, former Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) offered his service for a second tenure as DNC chairman, saying
on Twitter: "The dems need organization and focus on the the young. Need a fifty State strategy and tech rehab. I am in for chairman
again."
Evil Incarnate1956
I think the Republicans should get down on their knees and give thanks to God for Barack Obama. I'm serious.
He did great at getting himself elected, and he had some coattails when he was on the ballot. When he wasn't on the ballot,
the Dems' election performance has been one unmitigated disaster after another- midterm epic-fails in 2010 and 2014, and Tuesday's
election the frosting on the cake.
Where is the Democrats' bench strength? Where is their future? Besides Barack Obama, the face of their party today is Hillary
Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Steny Hoyer.
Obama, by cramming Obamacare down people's throats against their will, and his executive order overreach, has taken a wrecking
ball to the Democrat Party.
I hope the Democrats will adopt a strategy to continue the trend.
NewbieWaDoobie
Neat trick.....if you were to take the overtones of the media at large and the messaging coming from the HRC camp you can easily
see why she lost the rust belt. I worked as a carpenter in South Bend, IN from about 2002-2008 and she was never going to win
those people without a MESSAGE....when did she ELEVATE AND STUMP HARD for income equality and the platform....NEVER!!!! It
was against her principles and the interests of the people who surrounded her and the DNC.....FOOLS!!!!!
Neoliberalism is DEAD....even the IMF, published a report on this back in June 2016....take a look at Glen Greenwald's piece
while you're at it.
The GOP has the White House, the Senate and the House, the 33 state Governerships and, for the next 30 years, the US Supreme Court
(once Trump picks the next 3 Justices).
What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times,
truly didn't understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in
the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound,
so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had
become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people - white people,
living mainly in rural areas - who don't share at all our idea of what America is about. For them,
it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many
other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to
vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don't know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly
possible.
"... If one "fact" is known to be false then one is inclined to think those "facts" one is unfamiliar with are also false. I'll always think of Clinton's behavior on hearing of Gadaffi's death. That's the thing you want running the most powerful corporation on earth. ..."
"... I don't remember Krugman saying that Bush Sr. spent his days at the CIA so he trained as a professional assassin. ..."
If one "fact" is known to be false then one is inclined to think those "facts" one is unfamiliar
with are also false. I'll always think of Clinton's behavior on hearing of Gadaffi's death. That's
the thing you want running the most powerful corporation on earth.
The election was rigged by Russian intelligence, which was almost surely behind the hacking of
Democratic emails, which WikiLeaks then released with great fanfare. Nothing truly scandalous
emerged, but the Russians judged, correctly, that the news media would hype the revelation that
major party figures are human beings, and that politicians engage in politics, as somehow damning....
-- Paul Krugman
[ A wildly speculative, purposely inflaming even dangerous passage. And in keeping with previously
expressed, inflaming Krugman stereotypes.
I know, I know, the Russians are going to eat our children for breakfast but I am in no mood
for another era of Cold War McCarthyism. Children for what? OMG. ]
OMG, the Russians not being satisfied with eating the children of Cleveland are also going to
eat the Baltics and we all know that Baltics are already endangered (climate change and all).
Who knew?
"Save the Baltics from hungry Russians," must be the cry through the land. Save the Baltics,
I am ready.
I'm hearing is simply a recognition that Putin is a problem and that his agents are trying to
influence the election, which they sure appear to be doing and have done in many other cases in
many countries. It's SOP for this guy....
[ I know, I have no idea how to portray this as absurd as it actually is. Remember though,
I am always ready to go to the Baltics when called to battle. ]
What is important and saddening is the wild Cold War prejudice, a prejudice that extends to China
and would readily descend to name-naming. I get this, fortunately I get the prejudice.
No matter, when called as I have made clear I will be naming-names from A to Z, but I get this.
This neocon propagandists (or more correctly neocon provocateur) got all major facts wrong. And
who unleashed Flame and
Stuxnet I would like to ask him.
Was it Russians? And who invented the concept of "color revolution" in which influencing of election
was the major part of strategy ? And which nation instituted the program of covert access to email boxes
of all major webmail providers? He should study the history of malware and the USA covert operations
before writing this propagandist/provocateur opus to look a little bit more credible...
Notable quotes:
"... Email, a main conduit of communication for two decades, now appears so vulnerable that the nation seems to be wondering whether its bursting inboxes can ever be safe. ..."
The 2016 presidential race will be remembered for many ugly moments, but the most lasting historical
marker may be one that neither voters nor American intelligence agencies saw coming: It is the first
time that a foreign power has unleashed cyberweapons to disrupt, or perhaps influence, a United States
election.
And there is a foreboding sense that, in elections to come, there is no turning back.
The steady drumbeat of allegations of Russian troublemaking - leaks from stolen emails and probes
of election-system defenses - has continued through the campaign's last days. These intrusions, current
and former administration officials agree, will embolden other American adversaries, which have been
given a vivid demonstration that, when used with some subtlety, their growing digital arsenals can
be particularly damaging in the frenzy of a democratic election.
"Most of the biggest stories of this election cycle have had a cybercomponent to them - or the
use of information warfare techniques that the Russians, in particular, honed over decades," said
David Rothkopf, the chief executive and editor of Foreign Policy, who has written two histories of
the National Security Council. "From stolen emails, to WikiLeaks, to the hacking of the N.S.A.'s
tools, and even the debate about how much of this the Russians are responsible for, it's dominated
in a way that we haven't seen in any prior election."
The magnitude of this shift has gone largely unrecognized in the cacophony of a campaign dominated
by charges of groping and pay-for-play access. Yet the lessons have ranged from the intensely personal
to the geostrategic.
Email, a main conduit of communication for two decades, now appears so vulnerable that the
nation seems to be wondering whether its bursting inboxes can ever be safe. Election systems,
the underpinning of democracy, seem to be at such risk that it is unimaginable that the United States
will go into another national election without treating them as "critical infrastructure."
But President Obama has been oddly quiet on these issues. He delivered a private warning to President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during their final face-to-face encounter two months ago, aides say.
Still, Mr. Obama has barely spoken publicly about the implications of foreign meddling in the election.
His instincts, those who have worked with him on cyberissues say, are to deal with the problem by
developing new norms of international behavior or authorizing covert action rather than direct confrontation.
After a series of debates in the Situation Room, Mr. Obama and his aides concluded that any public
retaliation should be postponed until after the election - to avoid the appearance that politics
influenced his decision and to avoid provoking Russian counterstrikes while voting is underway. It
remains unclear whether Mr. Obama will act after Tuesday, as his aides hint, or leave the decision
about a "proportional response" to his successor.
Cybersleuths, historians and strategists will debate for years whether Russia's actions reflected
a grand campaign of interference or mere opportunism on the part of Mr. Putin. While the administration
has warned for years about the possibility of catastrophic attacks, what has happened in the past
six months has been far more subtle.
Russia has used the techniques - what they call "hybrid war," mixing new technologies with old-fashioned
propaganda, misinformation and disruption - for years in former Soviet states and elsewhere in Europe.
The only surprise was that Mr. Putin, as he intensified confrontations with Washington as part of
a nationalist campaign to solidify his own power amid a deteriorating economy, was willing to take
them to American shores.
The most common theory is that while the Russian leader would prefer the election of Donald J.
Trump - in part because Mr. Trump has suggested that NATO is irrelevant and that the United States
should pull its troops back to American shores - his primary motive is to undercut what he views
as a smug American sense of superiority about its democratic processes.
Madeleine K. Albright, a former secretary of state who is vigorously supporting Hillary Clinton,
wrote recently that Mr. Putin's goal was "to create doubt about the validity of the U.S. election
results, and to make us seem hypocritical when we question the conduct of elections in other countries."
If so, this is a very different use of power than what the Obama administration has long prepared
the nation for.
Four years ago, Leon E. Panetta, the defense secretary at the time, warned of an impending "cyber
Pearl Harbor" in which enemies could "contaminate the water supply in major cities or shut down the
power grid across large parts of the country," perhaps in conjunction with a conventional attack.
After all, Clinton is not going to make it into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of
those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.
Clinton's camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they
have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication of one's
misogyny . But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has
stated that she is not going to "vote with my vagina". As she notes, if the issue is simply about
proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier candidate for president who also happens
to be female: Jill Stein, of the Green Party.
Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath of voters excluded by
the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:
I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things
that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I'm worried about fracking. I'm worrying
about the environment. No matter who gets in they don't address these things because money has
taken over our system.
Given that both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money – and big money only – Clinton's
supporters have been forced to find another stick. And that has been the "lesser evil" argument.
Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein
– who has no hope of winning – would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate,
triumphs. Therefore, there is a moral obligation on progressive voters to back Clinton, however bad
her track record as a senator and as secretary of state.
There is nothing new about this argument. It had been around for decades, and has been corralling
progressives into voting for Democratic presidents who have still advanced US neoconservative policy
goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.
America's pseudo-democracy
So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine
those "policy differences" with Trump.
On the negative side, Trump's platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted,
"blame the immigrants" style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways.
Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his
inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the façade of democratic discourse in the US – a development
not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy,
but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation
of political violence and intimidation.
On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again,
the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his
instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are likely to be
an overall good for the world's population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is
going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise
Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear
confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics
– not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty of political experience.
The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as
the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.
Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter
of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally,
as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led
to an outcome – one that was entirely foreseeable – of Libya's reinvention as a failed state, with
jihadists of every stripe sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi's arsenal followed
the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and
heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including
by imposing a no-fly zone – or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone – that would thrust the US into
a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.
In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be:
vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics
(assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried
about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices.
(Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate
change.)
So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton's supporters, Clinton might not be the winner
in a lesser-evil presidential contest.
Mounting disillusion
But there is a second, more important reason to reject the lesser-evil argument as grounds for
voting for Clinton.
Trump's popularity is a direct consequence of several decades of American progressives voting
for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans have never heard of Jill Stein, or the other three
candidates who are not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates
have received no mainstream media coverage – or the chance to appear in the candidate debates – because
their share of the vote is so minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have
spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives
keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out
at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.
Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was "stolen from them", to use a popular
slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become
a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to
articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.
Two opposed antidotes for the mounting disillusionment with "normal politics" emerged during the
presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold
the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger
away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants. As we now know from Wikileaks' release
of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries
to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were
overwhelmed by the insurrection within their own party.
The wave of disaffection Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President
Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only
fuel the disenchantment. The fixing of the Democratic primaries did not strengthen Clinton's moral
authority, it fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump's accusations
of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not merely figments of his imagination;
they are rooted in the realities of US politics.
Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too close aligned to those
of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful changes.
Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time – unless ordinary Americans
are exposed to a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather regressive,
remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a
progressive challenge to "politics as normal" has to be sustained and extended if Trump and his ilk
are not to triumph eventually.
The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil
candidate will emerge from nowhere to fix this rotten system. It won't happen of its own. Unless
progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the
Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders
– in different colours and different sexes – to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to
rule the world.
"... Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. ..."
"... It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. ..."
"... Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies. ..."
"... The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory. ..."
"... remember whatever happens the world will go on and one US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries. ..."
"... Unless Hillary and the gung-ho neocons decide that we really should see just how far Putin can be pushed. ..."
"... I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude. ..."
"... We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state…. ..."
"... "I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." ..."
"... "It is not my job to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves." ..."
"... I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah Palin). Never again. It just encourages more crapification. ..."
"... I've read exactly one compelling argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south. ..."
Best pro-Trump piece I've seen: "The GOP's 'Ungrateful Bastard' Caucus" [
American Greatness ].
Best pro-Clinton piece remains: "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It's Important" [
Common Dreams ].
The best reasons I can think of to vote for each candidate (as opposed to against the
other candidates). In no particular order:
Trump: A realist foreign policy Clinton: More of the same Stein: Break the two-party duopoloy
Johnson: Sanity on marijuna legalization
These reasons are, of course, entirely incommensurate.
"The American Conservative Presidential Symposium" [
The American Conservative ]. Michael Tracey: "Trump might be better than Hillary on foreign
policy (my top issue), but he's far too volatile to conclude that with any certainty, and he may
well end up being catastrophically worse. The Clintons' outrageous stoking of a war fervor over
Russia is quite simply depraved and should disqualify them from reentering the White House…. Democrats
deserve punishment for nominating a candidate with such severe legal problems, stifling a genuine
populist insurgent in the most craven possible fashion (I supported Bernie Sanders but find his
recent hectoring pro-Clinton conduct highly off-putting). Their shambolic, 'rigged' primary process
can't be countenanced, nor can the 2016 electoral debacle as a whole, so I'll do my small part
in rejecting this horror show by declining to vote."
Realignment
"America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired" [
Of Two Minds ]. "The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World
War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education,
the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can
be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued
by these failed systems." Tellingly, the author omits the FIRE sector. So I would say their definition
of elite is odd.
"[E]ducation levels are a more significant factor this year. Obama won a majority of those
with a high school diploma (or less) in 2012, while Romney won college-educated voters. This year
the numbers are reversed. Among white voters with only a high school education, Trump leads by
over 25 points. Among whites with a college degree, Clinton leads by about 10 percent. This is
the first time since serious polling began in 1952 that this has happened [
RealClearPoltiics ]. And when I ask myself who sent the United States heading toward Third
World status, it's not those without college degrees. In fact, it's Clinton's base.
[M]illions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs
at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction. The crisis hasn't hit yet, but those members of
the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will
turn out en masse to keep today's apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have,
as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel
in the armed forces, who are the US government's ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come
from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system. The one
significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game
is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the
USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system
collapsed of its own weight…
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I'd suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri
Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running
mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail
Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don't seriously expect
the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely
as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in
political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that
the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction
among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly
take place is just another factor making it more likely.
"Why Trump Is Different-and Must Be Repelled" [Adam Gopnik,
The New Yorker ].
For the past months, and into this final week, as for much of the past year, many New Yorkers
have been in a position that recalls parents with a colicky baby: you put the baby down at
last, it seems safely asleep, grateful and unbelievably exhausted you return to bed-only to
hear the small tell-tale cough or sob that guarantees another crying jag is on the way. The
parents in this case, to fill in the metaphorical blanks, are liberal-minded folk; the baby's
cries are any indicators that Donald Trump may not be out of the race for President-as he seemed
to be even as recently as last week-and may actually have a real chance at being elected. Disbelief
crowds exhaustion: this can't be happening. If the colicky baby is a metaphor too sweet for
so infantile a figure as the orange menace, then let us think instead, perhaps, of the killer
in a teen horror movie of the vintage kind: every time Freddy seemed dispatched and buried,
there he was leaping up again, as the teens caught their breath and returned, too soon, to
their teendom.
Of course, Gopnik - who should really stick to writing sweetly atmospheric pieces about Paris
- is both passive-aggressive and infuriatingly smug. To "fill in the metaphorical blanks," but
for realz, both the "colicky baby" and the teen horror movie villain are infantilized and
displaced versions of a working class Other: The Trump voter that Eurostar-rider Gopnik hates
and fears, because he's afraid they're going to come and kill him and take his stuff. In short,
he has the guilty conscience of a classic liberal.
Democrat Email Hairball
"Dow surges 300 points as FBI clears Clinton on eve of election" [
USA Today ]. Hmm. Insiders go to HappyVille!
Our Famously Free Press
"Vox Scams Readers Into Thinking Prescient World Series Tweet Was A Scam [Update]" [
DeadSpin ].
Guillotine Watch
"Too Smug to Jail" [Matt Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable
rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal."
[T]his is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing-long
chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage
individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly
prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the
Lieutenant Calley defense , i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were
ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there's no such thing
as an individual crime in a corporate context.
Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear
as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets.
It involves moving power from
public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated
financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies.
Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or
Amazon.
Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism
is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.
"Uncovering Credit Disparities among Low- and Moderate-Income Areas" [
Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis ]. "Eggleston found that LMI [lower abd middle-income] neighborhoods
with relatively better credit tend to be in metros with a larger percentage of white residents, and
they are typically found in the East, West and parts of the upper Midwest. They also tend to be in
metros that have lower poverty rates."
Look at reddit r/politics. Did Hillary/Brock stop paying to downvote all anti-Hill posts/comments?
Reaction to the Daily Beast telling readers "YOU MUST VOTE HILLARY" was at 11,000. Maybe, Hillary
and Co are trying to get a handle on real voter sentiment?
Or they don't care now that it is in the bag.
LOL I was going to post (well, I guess I am doing so) that the finger I am counting down on
is my middle finger, which I shall extend to the DNC, the RNC, the MSM, and the rest of the corrupt
US oligarchy that brought us here. Especially the MSM - and note of course that it was Bill Clinton
who deregulated the media so it went from one hundred or so to the SIX corporate behemoths that
control 90%+ of the news that the average American consumes.
FU!
The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given
the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed
the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the
liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory.
My humble advice for tomorrow: have a case of beer, wine, whiskey, or green tea at hand, relax,
play some good music, ignore the MSM, and remember whatever happens the world will go on and one
US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries.
Oh yeah, I will extend my own middle finger right back at them tomorrow. Voting for Stein will
at least give me the inner peace and comfort of knowing that I did not vote for the "lesser evil"
represented by Madame Secretary. I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us
in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and
hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude.
I apologize if these concluding thoughts on an exhausting electoral season, by Chris Hedges,
have already been posted:
"We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political
theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules.
Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state….
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence.
[This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed.
Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective
strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment
of the system's downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience."
Sounds too much like the Demos fighting for the people but never winning. Also a bit narcissistic.
And is Hedges a foe of, say, the government insurance of privately created deposits – a fascist
invention if ever there was?
Thanks for Correcting the Record! Glad that we can lump anyone who questions your narrative into four neat categories. There's
no possible way someone could have an original thought.
You only need to buy a plane etc. to hand out as favors, buy 4 or 5 dozen media personalities
at mainstream outlets (a network is a must), get your sycophants in elections offices all over
the country to purge your rival's voters and raise a billion dollars. Easy peasy.
Your assuming we don't get about a dozen Florida Hanging-chad scandals. If Trump wins the wrong
states – this will land in court, and all end in tears.
That Reed column, "Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger; it's important, has always struck
me badly. His point that those who voted for a Democrat for President since '92 have done as badly
or worse than they would in voting for Clinton is just false. No one in my memory has so slavishly
supported finance capital and foreign wars. No one has made going to war with China, Russia or
Iran a central plank in their candidacy.
I, personally, can't get over that. Republicans will do what they will do, it is not my job
to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves.
I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah
Palin).
Never again. It just encourages more crapification.
I've read exactly
one compelling
argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for
the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south.
I'd be more inclined to value that possibility if it wasn't clear that the Executive Branch
can now launch wars of choice at will. I have a draft age daughter.
It's not a reference to Doing your Bit turning in family/friends/neighbors/coworkers who you
"know" to be abusing the system, and thus Causing the Problem??
First violence is not the answer. Still that does make one want to find a way to march the
people who came up with that along with the top management of Cigna to the stocks for some quality
communing time with their customers. That there should also be a huge pile of rotten produce near
the stocks would be merely coincidence.
LOL and tomorrow a majority of Americans will vote back in the crowd that brought this down
upon them. Wait til you see what they are gearing up to do to SocSec.
Maybe it's a deep-seated Calvinist/Protestant self-loathing? Catholic self-flaggelation? Stockholm
Syndrome?
Joe Bageant wrote about the curious phenomenon of the Republican base voting year in and year
out for candidates who acted in direct opposition to their own economic interests…maybe that's
both "sides" of politics now?
Ha! Nope. Bought a house in 2009 and thought it was appropriate, and have been using it on
finance / political forums ever since. Worked out OK for us, though.
" But lots of other states use electronic machines in some capacity" [Wired]. "
Much depends on exactly how. For an example, Oregon uses paper ballots marked by the voter,
but, at least in my county, electronic counters. But the paper ballots are audited and stored
for years, so it's easy to check up. Everything happens at the courthouse, so there's no transmission
from precincts, and transmission to the SOS is probably in person by phone, followed up by email.
I'm confident in this system, not least because Oregon is a "clean" state. One county official
has been caught cheating by filling in unvoted lines for Republicans, but went to jail. I can
think of other ways for insiders to cheat, but it would be dangerous and pretty easy to catch.
I'm not concerned about the electronic counters as long as they aren't connected to the internet
– no reason for them to be – and the results are properly audited, the biggest if. I wonder a
bit about very small rural counties, where everybody knows everybody else's business and there
isn't much money for safeguards.
In any case, from a national point of view Oregon's results are not in doubt. Now I have to
do some campaign work for our Ranked Choice Voting initiative, and I look forward to finding out
how it did in Maine.
Trump had big mo, maybe until yesterday…
Today's Ibd puts T ahead by 2, best for some time… Plus generally favorable LATimes…
And blacks not turning out nearly as 08/12.
And Brexit and MI primary polls were far off because ungrateful deplorables.
Regardless, FL is must win for T. If he gets that, then the following swings might fall into place:
OH, NV, NC, IA, NM, (270), and maybe NH bonus.
If he misses FL he would need PA plus CO, likely hopeless.
I guess we deserve what we've got here… Vastly corrupt warmonger running for Obomber's third
term vs loose racist/sexist cannon, albeit apparently the latter likes Putin and avoidsWWIII.
Does seem harsh.
Of course, if Hillary wins the bubble wins. Everyone with a 401k thinks they hit a triple,
but they were walked to third. They won't make it to "home" (comfy retirement).
Meanwhile, Trump is of the 80s heyday of corporate raids…letting it fall and buying up cheap.
Wall St knows.
Hillary wins – ride the bubble and pray you know when to dump (and you can't trust the MSM
info – otherwise suckers would have seen 2008 coming).
The election will continue until the correct result is obtained.
That could happen tomorrow; it could just as well drag into January if the EC is tied or, say,
the "Russians" interfere and we have to have a cyberwar or something. Wouldn't it be interesting
if the House of Rs had to pick the prez? Maybe if the Supremes hadn't lawlessly intervened in
the 2000 election, we wouldn't be in this pickle now. But they did. And we are.
The "correct result" one assumes is Hillary; one has assumed so since this morbid campaign
began. As appealing as Bernie could be at times, there was no chance he would be allowed to stand
as the Democratic nominee. And if the indications of chicanery are correct, he was actively prevented
from becoming the nominee regardless of the "vote."
At no time did those who rule us ever consider Trump for the Big Chair. He's just too open
and uncouth, don'tchaknow. Can't have that. Might give the game away. But he's a sop to the so-called
populists, and man does he run a masterful con. All the slick and perfumed members of his class
only wish they had his skill at suckering the rubes. Whoa. Dude.
Meanwhile, it's good to learn that there can be no corruption unless its name is Clinton (er,
correction: "Clintoon") or can be linked somehow, if only tangentially, to the Clintoon Crime
Syndicate, or it arises politically from the Democratic (er, correction: "Democrat") Party which
is the ultimate source of all corruption, even that of the Clintoons.
Nothing the Democrat Party or the Clintoons do is defensible; defenses for Trump, on the other
hand, well. "It's just business." Or my favorite: "At least he hasn't killed anybody (sotto voce:
yet… that we know of ") So let's give him a chance!
Our Rulers are close to panicking because no matter who is ultimately selected, they fear there
will be blood in the streets, and the unrest might get close to their compounds, lead to unpleasantness
in their high-rises, interfere, perhaps, with some of their looting and destruction for pleasure.
This election has, for once, discommoded the comfortable.
I voted for Stein, the completely incorrect candidate, though I toyed with leaving the topline
blank. Many people I know did that. But no, some of us feel the need to show solidarity with our
leftish comrades. So few though, in the end.
Also, if people are writing in a candidate to make a statement or as an act of personal conscience,
that's their choice, but if they want the vote counted the rules vary by state. In most states,
including Maine, the candidate has to file paperwork.
What's your prediction of how many votes Stein will get nationwide? The Wiki god of knowledge
says she got 470K in 2012. I'm going to say 3M in 2016 or about 2.5%.
One need only track the past month's series of outrages, each quickly receding into the
distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous
election would have been, quaint word, "disqualifying."
I don't know if it would ever occur to Gopnik, but perhaps people are tired of idiotic gaffes
and meaningless scandals sinking candidates. Maybe, for a sizable portion of the country,
the sex scandal has been overused as some kind of indicator for someone's ability to govern, or,
even though Gopnik doesn't understand this, it isn't a reflection on their ability to speak about
policies that mean something to them.
Talking with Trump supporters I know, they are all very much influenced by: 1) his embracing
of nationalism, 2) rejection of trade deals, 3) ideas about reforming government finance. Of course,
their distrust for Hillary is just as strong.
I haven't met any trump supporters saying, "Gee, I really think his misogyny lets me free my
own inherent sexism." But then again, when identity politics is what you rely on to make your
vote, anyone opposed to your candidate is part of a vast linked chain of ignorant brains and invisible
connections that only they can see or appreciate.
Also loved his closing line:
For, as Shakespeare would have grasped at once, there is no explaining Trump.
Isn't that your job, Adam? Put your keyboard down if you're unable to do it and spare us the
columns.
The slightest bit of self-discipline on Trump's part, and Clinton is suddenly in the race
of her life. Shows her extreme weakness as a candidate, and the decadence of the Democrat nomenklatura
that forced her nomination through, not to mention the decadence of the political class…
If Clinton wins by any margin that doesn't keep her up all night, will not be surprised if
she and Team Blue will act as if this is the most awesome-est triumph ever because they are the
most awesome-est ever. First women first couple both being Presidents etc etc. They don't seem
to have any sense of just how weak and disliked she/they are, and why. They will arrogantly proceed
to govern as if they received a powerful mandate and not give an inch anywhere on policy, confident
that the methods they used to get elected will work again in 4 years. It will be their way or
the highway.
A cynic might also view another first in this election: the first time that a "charitable"
foundation has been elected to the office! But perhaps I am being somewhat unfair in questioning
the esteemed institution's charity, as it has indeed been charitable towards some.
Taxable Donations to the Clinton Foundation could pay off the national debt – says Charles
Ortel, should a Trump administration request a grand jury to assess the many many deficiencies
and out and out crimes of that sham charity.
That is the spit and glue that binds the never Trump coalition. There are billions and billions
at stake. Wall St, foreign governments, world leaders and the Gates Foundation, Bezos, Slim, Geithner,
Paulson - all the big boys. Ortel does a splendid job on you tube explaining how strict the rules
are for charitable foundations.
The FBI has the goods on the Clinton's and their phony baloney "foundation".
All they need is a courageous and honest Atty General – state or federal – willing to literally
risk life, limb, children, dogs, cats and extended family members should they file charges on
the Royals and fail.
"The onus is on the charity" – says Ortel, to prove their innocence, once charges are filed.
And the Clinton Foundation has never EVER filed the proper paper work to do ANY of their activities.
AGAIN, the rules state you may not raise money for AIDS, unless your charter was filed to do so.
the Clintons have never filed the necessary paperwork. There is a 19 page expose on their failure
to file or provide the necessary forms.
Hundreds of billions in taxable penalties and interest will be due, should Trump prevail and
ask for a grand jury. He doesn't have to threaten them. THEY KNOW
When you see George Will, LInsay Graham, Bill Kristol and the Bush crime family pulling out
all the stops to end this revolution – it's because of EXPOSURE.
The Clinton Foundation is the GOLD MINE. Watch and listen.
Hillary Clinton's planned celebratory election night fireworks display over the Hudson River
has been canceled, it was revealed Monday.
"They do have a permit for fireworks, but at this point we believe the fireworks is canceled,"
NYPD chief of intelligence Tommy Galati said at a city press conference on Election Day security
with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
When asked by a reporter why the fireworks were canceled, Galati responded, "I cannot tell
you that."
Clinton was planning aerial detonations for her potential victory that would last for two
minutes starting as early at 9:30 p.m. - a half-hour after the polls close in New York.
Since Latino Turnout has been up and AA down Trumps best shot is hoping that the Philly transit
strike and Rain in Detroit and most of PA on tuesday suppress less enthusiastic Clinton voters.
Both have low early voting. Then he has to cross his fingers for NC and NH. http://www.270towin.com/maps/EXyOo
crud. Well maybe the rainstorm will blow in a little sooner then it is predicted, even then
it will only hit Pittsburgh though. But it will hit Detroit all day.
Gallup US Consumer Spending Measure, October 2016: " In October, Americans' daily self-reports
of spending averaged $93, similar to September's $91 average. However, it is among the highest
for the month of October in the survey's nine-year trend" [Econoday] - Was it too much to
hope for an economists-trying-to-sound-smart subtitle along the lines of "Economists cite effect
of Halloween falling in October this year" on this?
(And I wonder how that yuuge $2 rise compares to the error bars on the survey. Also whether
any portion can be attributed to all those new improved health insurance rates showering their
blessings on the country.)
What about the idea that if we elect Trump, Americans' anger will be diffused and most people
will be happy?
If Clinton gets it, everyone, except her financiers will be unhappy, sooner or later.
Four years of Hillary, continuing economic stagnation and more wars may usher in and elect
a candidate in 2020 who will make Trump look like a meek-mannered gentleman.
Will it really be worth it to the elite to elect Hillary and end up having to live behind locked
gates and only venture out in public with a cadre of bodyguards? Will the wealthy see their Teslas
and luxury cars stoned and trashed when they park them in public?
Or, should they just live with Trump and like it? If I were an elite, I'd vote for Trump for
that very reason.
Electing Trump will not defuse the anger–it will just mean that for a little while at least
the half of the population who owns most of the guns will be happier. That will give us a year
or so until they realize that he was never serious about helping them, and lacks the political
skills or even attention span to do so. By 2018, we'd be right back to the starting point–just
in time to start the whole stupid cycle all over again.
No, a lot of things would change. Clinton winning would be seen as validation of the status
quo. Trump winning would be destabilizing. To pretend that the two outcomes are the same is wrongheaded.
Trump winning would break the hold of the Clintons on the Democratic party, and since they've
made the party overly concerned with the Presidency, at the expense of building a bench or capturing
down-ticket races (all down the list, Congress, governorships, important state level posts), the
damage to the party would be profound. They were already expected to lose the Senate in 2018 even
if they recover it tomorrow.
Trump winning would also throw a wrench into the Republicans, although not to quite as profound
a degree, since him getting this far has already put them in disarray. It would put the orthodox
corporate types and many of the evangelicals in a tizzy. The lineup that Trump wants to bring
in as his team are either outsiders or not well like by the mainstream of the party. So you can
expect Trump to have to fight with much of his own party, as well as the Dems keen to re-establish
themselves in the face of their loss.
If nothing else, Trump can do a lot on the trade front without Congress, based on the analyses
I've seen so far. How far he would get in trying to wind down our over-involvement in the Middle
East is questionable, but it does appear that he would at least stop further escalation with Russia.
He also appears to have the ability to get INS rules enforced more strictly (Obama has deported
more people than is widely acknowledged).
In other words, the President has a fair bit of power to act unilaterally. That does not require
"political skills" since you don't need to get Congress to go along. I agree Trump would have
little success with Congress, based on the precedent of Jimmy Carter, who had been a governor
and had a House and Senate that were both solidly Democratic, and thus in theory should have gotten
some cooperation, but brought in a team of outsiders and acted as if being post-Watergate meant
he could do things differently.
I'm probably voting for Trump only because of TPP. Thanks to the trade traitors, fast track
passage made it much easier to pass TPP with a simple majority during the lame duck session. Clinton
will let it ride, but Trump will probably kill it, or at least try to.
If DARPA's robotics program will only come up with some cool enough robots we might send a
bot or two to closes down the flow of gated sewer lines or stop the flow of gated water - or add
a little something.
I never never even made these suggestions - a Russian spy working for PUTIN took over my keyboard.
I have absolutely no evidence that there's any manipulating of the polling data going on, or
how that would work if it were, but it seems to me that this down to the wire close and flip-flopping
polling data is hugely in the media's $$ interest. Gazillion$$ are being dumped into late media
buys especially for senate races. I can't see how they could manipulate it but if the media could
it's certainly in their $$ interest to do so.
I raised this yesterday as a comment, but would like to re-phrase as a question. Bearing in
mind that the Clinton 'team' had possession of all of her e-mails for 2 years prior to the original
request for the records re the Benghazi investigation, and that the Admin was kind enough to allow
Clinton's lawyers to be the ones who determined which e-mails were 'work-related' and which 'personal',
and further bearing in mind that the focus has been on whether or not any of the 'personal' e-mails
were classified or not, I'd like to ask everyone this:
Did the FBI audit all of the e-mails that Clinton lawyers put in the 'work-related' basket?
Given State is full of Clinton 'friendlies' would it not be possible that incriminating 'personal'
e-mails were improperly slotted as 'work-related' to hide them with State until it all blows over?
Alternately, was the FBI granted access to all Clinton's State Department '.gov' account messages,
and those on the systems often referenced by Clinton and others that was used for all important,
classified, secret stuff? Further, did FBI have access to all Clinton's (or others') communications
using State Department (or other Government) systems that may have been sent to the Foundation,
or to any of her usual suspects (Podesta, Mills, Abedin, Clinton lawyers, etc.)?
Two years is a long time for someone to think about what to do with a pile of incriminating
stuff – something a bit more selective than Podesta's 'dump it'.
Truly terrible NPR coverage of the start of the Dylann Roof trial in Charlestown on
both the
morning and
evening shows.
No mention of the fact that a charismatic black state senator, Clementa Pinckney, was assassinated.
Pinckney is referred to, and not by name, only as the pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.
No breathless speculations or leaks from anonymous LE sources about how Roof was radicalized
or who else might have been involved in the plot.
No use of the phrase `domestic terrorism', which apparently is off limits in such cases.
Hillary Loses the Left
| 06 Nov 2016 | While Donald Trump has been
consolidating his base of support, the opposite appears to be happening for Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton, who seems to be hemorrhaging supporters from her progressive
base...[I]n the closing days of the 2016 campaign, the rift has been laid bare through a
combination of WikiLeaks revelations, a series of high-profile endorsements for Green
Party presidential nominee Jill Stein from progressives like Marc Lamont Hill, Cornel
West, and Susan Sarandon, as well as polling data that suggests Trump's broad populist
messaging is resonating with Democrat-leaning voters. v Contrary to the narrative
perpetuated by corporate media, many prominent liberals are now expressing their belief
that installing Hillary Clinton, a "
corporatist
hawk
," in the White House is "
the
true danger
" and would be "
more
dangerous
" for progressive values, the well-being of the nation, and the stability
of the world than would four years of a Donald Trump presidency.
"... WikiLeaks series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of
the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother
Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank. ..."
"... if President Obama signs this terrible legislation that blatantly validates Bernie's entire campaign message about Wall Street
running our government, this will give Bernie a huge boost and 10,000 -20,000 outraged citizens (who WILL turn up because they will
be so angry at the President for preemption vt) will be marching on the Mall with Bernie as their keynote speaker. " ..."
"... But Hirshberg does not stop here. In order to persuade Podesta about the seriousness of the matter, he claims that " It will
be terrible to hand Sanders this advantage at such a fragile time when we really need to save our $$$ for the Trump fight. " ..."
WikiLeaks series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the
Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also owns the Podesta Group with his brother
Tony, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank.
Hirshberg writes to a familiar person, as he was mentioned at the time as a possible 2008 Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate,
requesting Obama should not pass the Roberts bill because " if President Obama signs this terrible legislation that blatantly
validates Bernie's entire campaign message about Wall Street running our government, this will give Bernie a huge boost and 10,000
-20,000 outraged citizens (who WILL turn up because they will be so angry at the President for preemption vt) will be marching on
the Mall with Bernie as their keynote speaker. "
But Hirshberg does not stop here. In order to persuade Podesta about the seriousness of the matter, he claims that " It will
be terrible to hand Sanders this advantage at such a fragile time when we really need to save our $$$ for the Trump fight. "
Actress Susan Sarandon on Thursday tore into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), calling it "completely corrupt." "After
my experience in the primary, it's very clear to me the DNC is gone," she
told CNN's Carol Costello .
"Every superdelegate is a lobbyist. The way that the system is set up in terms of trying of having superdelegates - you could
win a state and not get the delegates. It's crazy."
"Look, Bernie has said 'don't ever listen to me if I tell you how to vote,' " she said.
"What [Sanders] did is show people that they counted. He brought them hope. He's supporting a lot of candidates. It's very important
to go and vote down the ticket."
"I think we've been voting the lesser of two evils for too long. The good news is everybody's so frustrated that at least we're
awake."
Sarandon on Monday
endorsed Green
Party nominee Jill Stein.
"It's clear a third-party is necessary and viable at this time," she said in a letter posted on Stein's campaign website. "And
this is the first step in accomplishing that end."
"... The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter
are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. ..."
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter
are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta. They
are last week's scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they
are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes
road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the
ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn't have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this
class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national
media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just
about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at
all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Vladimir Putin in particular, and Russia in general, have been the focus of an intensive high-drama
propaganda campaign of late. Are you buying it? For the time being, Russophobia has replaced Islamophobia
as the driving force behind the lies. Various US officials have been frantically warning Americans
that the Russians are behind everything: hacking the DNC, controlling Trump, influencing the election
and breaking the Syrian ceasefire agreement. They might as well add making your girlfriend break
up with you, making your toast get burnt and making your car run out of fuel for all the evidence
they have presented. Many of these totally unfounded allegations stem from (naturally) the Clinton
campaign, home to career criminals
Bill and
Hillary
Clinton , who are desperately seeking to find something to gain some sort of shred of popularity
or advantage over Trump, who fills up arenas with 1000s of people more easily than Clinton can fill
a high school gym with 50. Many US officials and war hawks are trying to get in on the action; CIA
man Mike Morell indicated
it would be a good idea to covertly kill Russians to make them "pay a price" ;
Hillary Clinton called
Vladimir Putin the "grand godfather of extreme nationalism" and blamed him for the rising
popularity of right-wing leaders; and even standing VP
Joe Biden came out and
said that, "We're sending a message to Putin it will be at the time of our choosing and under
the circumstances that have the greatest impact" . It seems there is no depth to which some US
leaders won't stoop in order to gain some political advantage, even it means lying, demonizing and
destroying geopolitical partnerships in order to garner a few brownie points.
Vladimir Putin: It's All About Distraction During Election Season
You would think Russian President Vladimir President would be agitated by all of this mud-slinging.
At times he has been, for instance when he
issued a warning a few months ago about an impending WW3 due to NATO's constant aggression and
advancement towards Russian borders. However, judging by his own words and mostly calm demeanor,
he has seen through the agenda and understands what is going on. Putin spells out how it's all inflamed
rhetoric before an election season, an old trick used by politicians to distract when they have no
meaningful solutions for internal and domestic problems.
"You can expect anything from our American friends the only novelty is that for the first
time, on the highest level, the United States has admitted involvement in these activities, and
to some extent threatened [us] – which of course does not meet the standards of international
communication. As if we didn't know that US Government bodies snoop on and wiretap anyone? Everyone
knows this
Apparently, they are nervous. The question is why. I think there is a reason. You know,
in an election campaign, the current government carefully crafts a pre-election strategy, and
any government, especially when seeking re-election, always has unresolved issues. They need to
show, to explain to the voters why they remain unresolved. In the US, there are many such problems
for example, the massive public debt is a time bomb for the US economy and global financial
system more examples can be cited in foreign policy in these conditions, many choose to resort
to the usual tactics of distracting voters from their problems try to create an enemy and rally
the nation against that enemy
Iran and the Iranian threat did not work well for that. Russia is a more interesting story."
And that's exactly what this whole thing is: a giant story. However, as Voltaire once said, if
you can make someone believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities. Let's see what else
Vladimir Putin has to say on other topics of interest.
Russian Hacking: A Laughable Claim so the Clintons and DNC Can Try to Avoid Culpability
Let's face it: the whole Russophobia affair is about avoiding blame, dodging responsibility and
evading liability. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Project Veritas and many other sources, we know the entire
Hillary Clinton campaign has been rigged beyond belief. Fake primaries, fake speeches, fake images,
fake videos, fake crowds, fake supporters and fake debates. There is seemingly no depth of criminality
to which that woman won't sink. She's selling out the presidency before she even gets there, such
as the stunt of trying to promise future presidential executive orders to mega donors. There is not
a shred of evidence that Russia is affiliated with WikiLeaks or behind any of the DNC hacks. As this
Zero Hedge article
NSA Whistleblower: US Intelligence Worker Likely Behind DNC Leaks, Not Russia states:
"On "Judge Napolitano Chambers," the Judge said that while the DNC, government officials,
and the Clinton campaign all accuse the Russians of hacking into the DNC servers, "the Russians
had nothing to do with it." Napolitano then mentioned Binney, arguing the NSA veteran and whistleblower
who "developed the software that the NSA now uses, which allows it to capture not just metadata
but content of every telephone call, text message, email in the United States of every person
in [the country]" knew the NSA had hacked the DNC - not the Russians.
If Judge Napolitano and Binney are right and the NSA did hack the DNC, what was the motive?
According to the Judge, "members of the intelligence community simply do not want [Clinton]
to be president of the United States."
"She doesn't know how to handle state secrets," Napolitano continued. And since "some of
the state secrets that she revealed used the proper true names of American intelligence agents
operating undercover in the Middle East," some of these agents were allegedly captured and killed,
prompting NSA agents to feel compelled to act. Whether NSA agents hacked the DNC or not, one thing
is clear: there's no real evidence linking the DNC and Arizona and Illinois voting system hacks
to the Russian government."
The Mythical "Russian Threat"
Vladimir Putin directly addressed another mythical story, that of the so-called Russian threat
and Russian aggression , at the recent Valdai forum in Sochi from October 24-27, 2016:
"There is another mechanism to ensure the transatlantic security, European security, the
OC security and their attempt at turning this organization (NATO) into an instrument of someone's
political interests. So what the OC is doing is simply void. Mythical threats are devised like
the so-called Russian military threat. Certainly this can be (used to) gain some advantage, get
new budgets, make your allies comply with your demands, make NATO deploy the equipment and troops
closer to our border Russia is not trying to attack anyone. That would be ridiculous The population
of Europe is 300 million and the population of the US is 300 million, while the population of
Russia is 140 million, yet such menaces are served as a pretext. Hysteria has been fueled in the
US with regard to Russia's alleged influence with the current presidential election.
Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Russia can influence the choice of the American
people? Is the US a banana republic? The US is a great power. If I'm wrong please correct me."
Here's what he had to say about who the real aggressor is when it comes to the US (around and
Russia:
"Is it known to you that Russia, in the 90s, completely halted (as did the USSR) any strategic
aviation in the further afield regions of patrol, i.e. not in the closer abroad. We halted such
activity completely. US geostrategic aviation however, with nuclear weapons on board. They continued
to encircle us! What for? Who are you concerned about? Or why are you threatening us? We continued
with the non-patrol year after year. It is only since about 3 years ago that we restarted aviation
patrol further abroad.
Which party is the provocateur here? Is it us?
We have only 2 military bases abroad. They are known areas of terrorism dangers US bases
on the other hand are all over the world. And you are telling me that I am the aggressor? Have
you any common sense?
What are US forces doing in Europe, including nuclear weaponry? What business have they
got there? Listen to me. Our military budget, while increased slightly from last year, in the
dollar equivalent, is about US$50 billion. The military budget of the Pentagon is almost 10 times
that amount. $575 billion, I think Congress singed off on. And you're telling me I'm the aggressor
here? Have you no common sense at all? Is it us putting our forces on the border of the US? Or
other states? Is it NATo, or who, that is moving their bases closer to us? Military infrastructure!
It's not us. Does anyone even listen to us? Or try to have some kind of dialogue with us? The
repeated answer we get is 'mind your own business' and 'each country can choose its own security
measures'. Very well, so will we
And finally, on the antiballistic missile defense system, who was it that exited from the
treaty which was vital to the entire system of international security? Was it us? No. It was the
States. In a one-sided way, they simply withdrew from the treaty. Now they are threatening us,
turning their missiles towards us, not only from Alaska, but also from Europe too
We want to develop normal relations in the sphere of security, in the fight against terrorism,
in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. We want to work together with you so long as you
want that too."
US Repeatedly Broke Its Promises to Russia and Destroyed Trust
The Western MSM is so one-sided in its coverage of geopolitical events like Ukraine and Syria.
Anyone not toeing the line with US-UK-NATO interests is painted in a bad light. In point of fact,
it has actually been the US who has been breaking agreements with Russia since the end of the Cold
War. US leaders lied to Russian leaders at the time, by promising that NATO would not extend any
further eastward, and possibly even hinting that Russia could join NATO. As Eric Zuesse explains
in his article
America Trashes NATO Founding Act; Rushes Weapons to Russia's Borders :
"The NATO
Founding
Act was agreed to between the US and Russia in 1997 in order to provide to Russia's leader
Boris Yeltsin some modicum of assurance that America wouldn't invade his country. When his predecessor
Mikhail Gorbachev had ended the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991, the
representatives of US President GHW Bush told him that NATO wouldn't move "one inch to the east"
(toward Russia), but as soon as Gorbachev committed himself to end the Cold War, Bush
told his agents, regarding what they had all promised to Gorbachev (Bush's promise which had
been conveyed through them), "To hell with that! We prevailed, they didn't". In other words: Bush's
prior instructions to them were merely his lies to Gorbachev, his lies to say that the US wouldn't
try to conquer Russia (move its forces eastward to Russia's borders); but, now, since Gorbachev
was committed and had already agreed that East Germany was to be reunited with and an extension
of West Germany (and the process for doing that had begun), Bush pulled that rug of lies out from
under the end of the Cold War "
Bill Clinton carried on the great American legacy of exceptionalism (that is, excepting themselves
from obeying international law) spearheaded by Daddy Bush of surrounding and dominating Russia by
allowing NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. Russia got shafted by trusting the US
numerous times after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here's Vladimir Putin once again on America's
broken promises (in April
2016):
"In the early 2000s, we agreed with the Americans to destroy weapons-grade plutonium, on
both sides. We were talking about the excessive amounts that were manufactured by both the US
and Russia. This is the enriched uranium from which nuclear weapons are made. 34000 tonnes, from
both sides. We signed an agreement, and decided that this material would be destroyed in a specific
manner. It would be destroyed in an industrial way – for which special plants needed to be built.
We fulfilled our obligations – we built the necessary plant. Our American partners did not. Moreover,
recently they announced that rather than destroy the enriched material in the manner that we agreed,
and signed an international agreement on, that they would dilute it and store it in a holding
capacity. This means they retain the potential to bring it back
Surely our American partners must understand that, jokes are one thing, such as creating
smear campaigns against Russia, but questions of nuclear security are another thing entirely they
must learn to fulfill their promises.
They once said they would close down Guantanamo. And? Is it closed? No."
Incidentally, this is the exact same plutonium agreement which made the news last month, when
as reported on October 3rd, 216,
Russia suspended
their deal with the US on disposal of plutonium from decommissioned nuclear warheads. A decree
signed by Vladimir Putin lists " the radical change in the environment, a threat to strategic
stability posed by the hostile actions of the US against Russia, and the inability of the US to deliver
on the obligation to dispose of excessive weapons plutonium under international treaties, as well
as the need to take swift action to defend Russian security" as the reasons for why Russia chose
to suspend the deal.
Conclusion: Wake up and Smell the Russophobia
Expect Vladimir Putin and Russia to keep being demonized by the Clintons – and more importantly
the NWO manipulators who so desperately want them in power. Although the Clintons are a powerful
modern American mafia family, replete with a long body count behind them, it's important to remember
they are lackeys for far greater and more pervasive powers (check out some of
Hillary's lovey-dovey letters to Lynn Forester de Rothschild here ). There's a lot at stake here.
Right now, Vladimir Putin and Russia are being used with the sole purpose of getting Clinton elected.
Although Putin is not perfect and has his own dark side, he deserves respect for standing his ground
and refusing to become another US puppet. If we are to believe his own words, he has no qualm with
Americans or even America itself, but rather the selfish, imperialistic and murderous agenda of the
NWO agents running the USA:
"We have a great deal of respect and love for the United States, and especially for the
American people [however] the expansion of jurisdiction by one nation beyond the territory of
its borders, to the rest of the world, is unacceptable and destructive for international relations."
It's up to the American public to switch off CNN (Clinton News Network) and all the other duplicitous
MSM channels and get truly informed. Vladimir Putin is reaching out his hand to America, in the hope
that enough Americans can reclaim their country and work together with other nations in peace. On
the issue of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the MSM is not just one-sided, it's outright lying.
Presenting...the Clinton IT Department! This has not been an especially ennobling election.
Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining. Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and
grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
This has not been an especially ennobling election. Or a rewarding one. Or even entertaining.
Pretty much everything about 2016 has been boorish and grotesque. But finally it is time to laugh.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Clinton IT department.
Over the weekend we finally found out how Clinton campaign honcho John Podesta's emails were hacked.
But first a couple disclaimers:
1) Yes, it's unpleasant to munch on the fruit of the poisoned tree. But this isn't a court of
law and you can't just ignore information that's dragged into the public domain.
2) We're all vulnerable to hackers. Even if you're a security nut who uses VPNs and special email
encryption protocols, you can be hacked. The only real security is the anonymity of the herd. Once
a hacker targets you, specifically, you're toast.
I'm a pretty tech-savvy guy and if the Chinese decided to hack my emails tonight, you'd have everything
I've ever written posted to Wikileaks before the sun was up tomorrow.
But that is … not John Podesta's situation.
What happened was this: On March 19, Podesta got what looked--kind of, sort of--like an email
from Google's Gmail team. The email claimed that someone from the Ukraine had tried to hack into
Podesta's Gmail account and that he needed to change his password immediately.
This is what's called a "phishing" scam, where hackers send legitimate-looking emails that, when
you click on the links inside them, actually take you someplace dangerous. In Podesta's case, there
was a link that the email told him to click in order to change his password.
This was not an especially good bit of phishing.
Go have a look yourself. The email calls Podesta by his first name. It uses bit.ly as a link
shortener. Heck, the subject line is the preposterous "*someone has your password*". Why would Google
say "someone has your password?" They wouldn't. They'd say that there had been log-in attempts that
failed two-step authentication, maybe. Or that the account had been compromised, perhaps. If you've
spent any time using email over the last decade, you know exactly how these account security emails
are worded.
And what's more, you know that you never click on the link in the email. If you get a notice from
your email provider or your bank or anyone who holds sensitive information of yours saying that your
account has been compromised, you leave the email, open your web browser, type in the URL of the
website, and then manually open your account information. Again, let me emphasize: You never click
on the link in the email!
But what makes this story so priceless isn't that John Podesta got fooled by an fourth-rate phishing
scam. After all, he's just the guy who's going to be running Hillary Clinton's administration. What
does he know about tech? And Podesta, to his credit, knew what he didn't know: He emailed the Clinton
IT help desk and said, Hey, is this email legit?
And the Clinton tech team's response was: Hell yes!
No, really. Here's what they said: One member of the team responded to Podesta by saying "The
gmail one is REAL." Another answered by saying "This is a legitimate email. John needs to change
his password immediately."
It's like the Clinton IT department is run by 90-year-old grandmothers. I half-expect the next
Wikileaks dump to have an email from one Clinton techie to another asking for help setting their
VCR clock.
As the other guy likes to say, "only the best people."
"... The outcome of the election remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels. ..."
"... The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class candidate triumph as we normally do. ..."
"... The constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated. ..."
"... electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to dominate US policymaking. ..."
Corey does deserve credit for all the reasons jh notes. The outcome of the election
remains in doubt despite one candidate's collapsing support. There are a number here who have
been making similar arguments about the inefficacy of left-right labels.
... ... ...
The prospect of a gutting of the Democratic party seems far more likely to me, if Brent
Baier is to be believed, and that is a big 'if,' I concede. We should see the donor class
candidate triumph as we normally do. My basic read has not changed, however. The
constituency that supports Trump is utterly indifferent to the Frums of the world, and even
the Limbaughs. They are pissed-off, non-ideological, and highly-motivated.
Frum still hasn't figured out that he's just as likely to find himself the target of their
hostility as any Dem. And right now Trump supporters outnumber the Frums of the world by far
from inconsequential numbers.
I still say Trump edges it.
DMC 11.03.16 at 7:27 pm
There's just too many people in this country for whom "more of the same and harder" is a
deal breaker. They'll go with the guy who tells them "one more throw of the dice" and who
apparently scares the snot out of the Establishment types.
The ruder he is, the more they like it. The more the "grown-ups" say this is going to be
bad for the country, the better it sounds to people picking up cans off the road to make ends
meet. Its utterly hateful that electoral politics in this country has come to such a pass
but the Left (or what passes for it in the US) is as much to blame as the Right in that they
haven't offered real substantive alternatives to the NeoLib/NeoCon orthodoxy that seems to
dominate US policymaking.
"... Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now. ..."
"... If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed to run the DNC again ..."
Recall this warning to the Democratic Party after Bernie Sander's landslide win in New Hampshire?
Shockingly, all the superdelegates went over to Hillary Clinton:
Holding on to the White House in 2016 is extremely important. We can't afford to let party
elites jeopardize that by ignoring the will of the voters. Join me and DFA in telling superdelegates
to pledge to support the popularly-elected winner of the nomination now.
If Trump wins, all the Democratic party elites should be given their pink slips and never allowed
to run the DNC again.
...they felt that mainstream America had left them and had gone by, didn't see
them, didn't recognize who they were and neither political party spoke to their
feelings and interests. In this sense, they felt like strangers in their own
land.
I'll give you an example of that.
One woman I spoke to said, "I'm
really glad you've come to interview us, because we are the fly-over-state and
people think of the South that we're ignorant, backward, that we have
old-fashioned attitudes, that we're pro-family, pro-life and that many people
think we're racist when we're not, and so they write us off, they call us
rednecks, so thanks for coming to see who we really are."
You've said that, "The conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or
liberal today" in the US. Can you elaborate on this move to the right in
American politics?
In 1968, Barry Goldwater was the first really
radical anti-government national candidate for the Republican presidency. His
wife was a founder of Planned Parenthood. Today, Republicans and the Tea Party
want to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers contraception, abortion, cancer
screening and other very important things.
Again, former Republican President Richard Nixon brought us the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act,
and now Republicans are calling for the end of the EPA.
Yet again, former Republican President Eisenhower called for a minimum
wage; now Republicans oppose this. Eisenhower called for investments in public
infrastructure, now it's opposed. Today, the Republicans of the '50s, '60s,
'70s and '80s look liberal. That's how far right we've become.
REPORTERS RSVP (28) 1. ABC – Liz Kreutz 2. AP – Julie Pace 3. AP - Ken Thomas 4. AP - Lisa Lerer 5. Bloomberg - Jennifer Epstein
6. Buzzfeed - Ruby Cramer 7. CBS – Steve Chagaris 8. CNBC - John Harwood 9. CNN - Dan Merica 10. Huffington Post - Amanda Terkel
11. LAT - Evan Handler 12. McClatchy - Anita Kumar 13. MSNBC - Alex Seitz-Wald 14. National Journal - Emily Schultheis 15. NBC
– Mark Murray 16. NPR - Mara Liassion 17. NPR – Tamara Keith 18. NYT - Amy Chozik 19. NYT - Maggie Haberman 20. Politico - Annie
Karni 21. Politico - Gabe Debenedetti 22. Politico - Glenn Thrush 23. Reuters - Amanda Becker 24. Washington Post - Anne Gearan
25. Washington Post – Phil Rucker 26. WSJ - Colleen McCain Nelson 27. WSJ - Laura Meckler 28. WSJ - Peter Nicholas
Pigeon •Nov 3, 2016 9:49 AM
It bothers me these stories are constantly prefaced with the idea that Wikileaks is saving Trump's bacon. Hillary wouldn't
even be close if the press weren't in the tank for her. How about Wikileaks evening the playing field with REAL STORIES AND
FACTS?
"... progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering...... "Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder. Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing. ..."
"... The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence. ..."
"... Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing. ..."
"... They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another 100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA. ..."
"... It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge. ..."
War hysteria in a country with imperial nostalgia, one-man rule and a weak economy cannot be
taken lightly.
Michael Khodarkovsky is a professor of history at Loyola University.
[ The fostering of fear of and disdain for Russia is continual now and however false the characterizations
of Russia are, and they are indeed false, the fear and disdain will influence and be self-defeating
for American foreign policy from here till a dramatic change comes from another administration.
I unfortunately find no such change in the offing. ]
progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering......
"Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder.
Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans
send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing.
The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence.
ilsm -> anne... , -1
Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing.
They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another
100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA.
It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge.
With the "defenses available" to Syria they could enforce no fly zones on GCC and their blood
thirsty allies as as might US over Raqqa.
Trump mirrors resentment with the current political culture. Unfortunately very few readers in this
forum understand that the emergence of Trump as a viable candidate in the current race, the candidate
who withstand 24x7 air bombarment by corrupt neoliberabl MSM (like Guardian ;-) signify deep crisis
of neoliberalsm and neoliberal globalization.
Notable quotes:
"... "What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size." ..."
"... That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power. ..."
"... Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so." ..."
"... Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes, one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters. ..."
"... Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan was basically 'I am not a politician'. ..."
"... The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of election rigging has now become an exact science. ..."
"... Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades. ..."
"... In 2010, Chomsky wrote : ..."
"... The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. ..."
"... Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve ..."
"... The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror. ..."
"... He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. ..."
"... I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting awareness. ..."
"... Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances. ..."
"... Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause. ..."
"... Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3. ..."
"... It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious reputational issues. ..."
"... Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes finally toppling her, it's not going to happen... ..."
"... The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal ..."
"... And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich. ..."
"... One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left. ..."
"... When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even if he is part of how it got that way. ..."
"... People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating moral superiority complex. ..."
"... he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics ..."
"... 'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.' ..."
"... Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result, many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics of the world. ..."
"... There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration. They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology. ..."
"... I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world. ..."
"... Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964 all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater. ..."
"... As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump is good for world peace. ..."
"... I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is not the answer ..."
"... His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery, Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia? remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy) Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman. ..."
"... Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor. ..."
"... Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? ..."
"... When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin, he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria) and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS. ..."
"... Clinton the war hawk, and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we can feel good about ourselves by hating the other. ..."
"... It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations. ..."
"... Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars in America and no one would buy them. ..."
"... What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels! There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the Pentagon and NATO. ..."
"... USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people . Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno . Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked by all the vested interests should make you take another look. And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot less power than most people imagine. ..."
"... Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized, conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed? ..."
"... I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us. ..."
"... Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project ..."
"... The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem. ..."
"... They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid, better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars and the American empire. ..."
"... The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. ..."
"... Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have to wait till after November 8. ..."
"... And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches -- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware. They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode of 'Rule by Plutocracy'. ..."
"... The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party. ..."
"... In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness. ..."
"... Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming force. ..."
"... "Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age." ..."
"... Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given up our power to do anything about it. ..."
"... It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during campaigns. The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000. They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers. ..."
"... Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this country in the ground. ..."
"... We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is the Pentagon. ..."
"... Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships' 4-1/2 acre flight deck. ..."
"... There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and large swaths of the Indian subcontinent. ..."
"... And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings with drones than feed our own children. ..."
"... I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying them. There is no real enthusiasm. ..."
"... The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves. Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling fibs. ..."
"... Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have usually succeeded. ..."
"... In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers. These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives. ..."
"... Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves part of some elite. ..."
"... It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years ago. ..."
"... Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team. ..."
"... One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two. ..."
"... Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign? If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different by the MSM and the political establishment? ..."
"... Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption. ..."
"... Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tab5vvo0TJw ..."
"... "I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this. ..."
"... Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states. ..."
"... Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist. ..."
"... One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back', it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about. ..."
"... Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger, which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so. ..."
"... Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying a fraction of what they are legally obliged to). ..."
"... Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them *everything* they want. ..."
"... Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime? ..."
"... Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc. Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem "Women are the primary victims of war". ..."
"... Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet. ..."
"... Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders. He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person or the other. ..."
"... When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke, corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's conspiracy and what's reality? ..."
"... Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda? ..."
"... Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be ..."
"... Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the 1 per cent ..."
"... The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can continue the game ..."
"... we near the end of the neoliberal model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all. ..."
"... This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't closely follow politics is being misinformed. ..."
"... The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed. All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law. ..."
"... Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly what they are 'alleged'. ..."
"... The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. ..."
"... The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies, the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton. ..."
"... Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the low-paid workers. ..."
"... The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled by them, the truth is never revealed. ..."
America's fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation
tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued
that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or "pure" democracies, as
the greater number of citizens would make it "more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise
with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried". A large electorate would
protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would
be more likely to select people of "enlightened views and virtuous sentiments".
Instead, the US – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a
large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared,
by "the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority", they are beholden to the not-so-secret
wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent
to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate
an entire nation, regardless of its size.
For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence,
there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the supreme court decided
that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before,
candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of
help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You
can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics
is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he
exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging.
It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere
near casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he's
right. The only problem is that he is the system.
The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered
by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other
words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of
the wealthy.
greatapedescendant 26 Oct 2016 4:11
A good read thanks. Nothing I really disagree with there. Just a few things to add and restate.
"What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign
finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless
of its size."
That's it – finance and sophisticated lobbying. And you can add to that mass brainwashing
at election campaigns by means of choice language and orchestration as advised by cognitive scientists
who are expressly recruited for this purpose. Voters remain largely unaware of the mind control
they are undergoing. And of course the essential prerequisite for all of this is financial power.
Now read again in this light Gore Vidal's famous pronouncement… "Any American who is prepared
to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."
Which recalls Madison over 200 years before… "The truth is that all men having power ought
to be mistrusted."
What the US has is in effect is not a democracy but a plutocracy run by a polyarchy. Which
conserves some democratic elements. To which the US president is largely an obedient and subservient
puppet. And which openly fails to consider the needs of the average US citizen.
Worse still, the political spectrum runs from right to right. To all intents and purposes,
one single party, the US Neoliberal party, with 2 factions catering for power and privilege. Anything
to the left of that is simply not an available choice for voters.
Americans have wakened up to the fact that they badly need a government which caters for
the needs of the average citizen. In their desperation some will still vote for Trump warts and
all. This for the same sorts of reasons that Italians voted for Berlusconi, whose winning slogan
was basically 'I am not a politician'. Though that didn't work out too well. No longer able
to stomach more of the same, voters reach the stage of being willing to back anyone who might
bring about a break with the status quo. Even Trump.
The right choice was Bernie Sanders. Sadly, not powerful enough. So Americans missed the
boat there. But at least there was a boat to miss this time around. You can be sure that similar
future boats will be sunk well in advance. Corporate power has learnt its lesson and the art of
election rigging has now become an exact science.
UltraLightBeam 26 Oct 2016 4:11
Donald Trump, Brexit and Le Pen are all in their separate ways rejections of the dogma
of liberalism, social and economic, that has dominated the West for the past three decades.
The Guardian, among others, laments the loss of 'tolerance' and 'openness' as defining qualities
of our societies. But what's always left unsaid is: tolerance of what? Openness to what? Anything?
Everything?
Is it beyond the pale to critically assess some of the values brought by immigration, and to
reject them? Will only limitless, unthinking 'tolerance' and 'openness' do?
Once self-described 'progressives' engage with this topic, then maybe we'll see a reversal
in the momentum that Trump and the rest of the right wing demagogues have built up.
The United States is extremely lucky.....if somebody comes along who is charismatic
and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the
justified anger and the absence of any coherent response.
Dangerous times. The beauty of democracy is we get what we deserve.
DiscoveredJoys -> morelightlessheat 26 Oct 2016 6:11
The most telling part for me was:
The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he's the man in the mirror.
Except that instead of
He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire.
I thought that he is the mirror image, the reverse, of the current liberal consensus. A consensus
driven by worthy ideals but driven too far, gradually losing acceptance and with no self correcting
awareness.
Trump is awful - but by speaking freely he challenges the excesses of those who would limit
free speech. Trump is awful - but by demonising minorities he challenges those who would excuse
minorities of all responsibility. Trump is awful - but by flaunting his wealth he challenges those
who keep their connections and wealth hidden for the sake of appearances.
Trump is awful because the system is out of balance. He is a consequence, not a cause.
Gman13 26 Oct 2016 4:25
Voting for Trump is voting for peace. Voting for Clinton is voting for WW3.
These events will unfold if Hillary wins:
1. No fly zone imposed in Syria to help "moderate opposition" on pretence of protecting civilians.
2. Syrian government nonetheless continues defending their country as terrorists shell Western
Aleppo.
3. Hillary's planes attack Syrian government planes and the Russians.
4. Russia and Syria respond as the war escalates. America intensifies arming of "moderate opposition"
and Saudis.
5. America arms "rebels" in various Russian regions who "fight for democracy" but this struggle
is somehow hijacked by terrorists, only they are not called terrorists but "opposition"
6. Ukranian government is encouraged to restart the war.
7. Iran enters the war openly against Saudi Arabia
8. Israel bombs Iran
9. Cornered Russia targets mainland US with nuclear weapons
10. Etc.
snakebrain -> Andthenandthen 26 Oct 2016 6:54
It's quite clearly because Hillary as President is an utterly terrifying prospect. When
half the population would rather have Trump than her, it must be conceded that she has some serious
reputational issues.
If Hillary and the DNC hadn't fixed the primaries, we'd now be looking at a Sanders-Trump race,
and a certain Democrat victory. As it is, it's on a knife edge as to whether we get Trump or Hillary.
Personally, I'd take Trump over Hillary if I was a US citizen. He may be a buffoon but
she is profoundly dangerous, probably a genuine psychopath and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near
the Presidency. Sanders is the man America needs now, though, barring one of Hillary's many crimes
finally toppling her, it's not going to happen...
jessthecrip 26 Oct 2016 4:29
Well said George.
The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal
And the shame is we seem to be becoming desensitized to scandal. We cannot be said to live
in democracies when our political class are so obviously bought by the vastly rich.
Remko1 -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 7:43
You're mixing up your powers. legislative, executive and judicial are the powers of law. Money
and business are some of the keys to stay in command of a country. (there's also military, electorate,
bureaucracy etc.)
And if money is not on your side, it's against you, which gets quite nasty if your main tv-stations
are not state-run.
For example if the EU would (theoretically of course) set rules that make corruption more difficult
you would see that commercial media all over the EU and notoriously corrupted politicians would
start making propaganda to leave the EU. ;)
yamialwaysright chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 4:38
One of the things it says is that people are so sick of Identity Politics from the Left
and believe the Left are not very true to the ideals of what should be the Left.
When the people who are supposed to care about the poor and working joes and janes prefer
to care about the minorities whose vote they can rely on, the poor and the working joes and janes
will show their frustration by supporting someone who will come along and tell it as it is, even
if he is part of how it got that way.
People throughout the world have awoken to the Left being Right Light but with a more nauseating
moral superiority complex.
Danny Sheahan -> chilledoutbeardie 26 Oct 2016 5:25
That many people are so desperate for change that even being a billionaire but someone outside
the political elite is going to appeal to them.
Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 4:32
I find this line of thinking unjust and repulsive: the implication that Trump is a product
of the political establishment, and not an outsider, is to tar the entire Republican party and
its supporters with a great big flag marked 'racist'. That is a gross over simplification and
a total distortion.
UnevenSurface -> Tom1Wright 26 Oct 2016 5:05
But that's not what the article said at all: I quote:
he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs
the global economy and governs our politics
No mention of the GOP.
Tom1Wright -> UnevenSurface 26 Oct 2016 5:14
and I quote
'Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum
assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving
in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their
stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the
party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.'
HindsightMe 26 Oct 2016 4:33
the truth is there is an anti establishment movement and trump just got caught up in the ride.
He didnt start the movement but latched on to it. While we are still fixated on character flaws
the undercurrent of dissatisfaction by the public is still there. Hillary is going to have a tough
time in trying to bring together a divided nation
leadale 26 Oct 2016 4:37
Many years ago in the British Military, those with the right connections and enough money
could buy an officer's commission and rise up the system to be an incompetent General. As a result,
many battles were mismanaged and many lives wasted due to the incompetent (wealthy privileged
few) buying their way to the top. American politics today works on exactly the same system of
wealthy patronage and privilege for the incompetent, read Clinton and Trump. Until the best candidates
are able to rise up through the political system without buying their way there then the whole
corrupt farce will continue and we will be no different to the all the other tin pot republics
of the world.
arkley leadale 26 Oct 2016 5:48
As Wellington once said on reading the list of officers being sent out to him,
"My hope is that when the enemy reads these names he trembles as I do"
Some would argue however that the British system of bought commissions actually made the army
more effective in part because many competent officers had to stay in the field roles of platoon
and company commanders rather than get staff jobs and through the fact that promotion on merit
did exist for non-commissioned officers but there was a block on rising above sergeant.
Some would argue that the British class system ensured that during the Industrial Revolution
charge hands and foremen were appointed from the best workers but there was no way forward from
that, the result being that the best practices were applied through having the best practitioners
in charge at the sharp end.
rodmclaughlin 26 Oct 2016 4:37
"he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global
economy and governs our politics."
Obviously, Donald Trump is not an "outsider" in the economic
sense. Trump definitely belongs to the ruling "caste", or rather, "class". But he is by no means
the perfect representative of it. "The global economy", or rather, "capitalism", thrives better
with the free movement of (cheap) labour than without it. Economically, poor Americans would be
better off with more immigration control.
And there's more too it than economics. There's the "culture wars" aspect. Many people
don't like being told they are "deplorable" for opposing illegal (or even legal) immigration.
They don't like being called "racist" for disagreeing with an ideology.
I like the phrase Monbiot ends with - "He is our system, stripped of its pretences" - it
reminds me of a phrase in the Communist Manifesto - but I don't think it's true. "Our" system
is more than capitalism, it's culture. And Clinton is a far more "perfect representation" of the
increasingly censorious, narrow [neo]liberal culture which dominates the Western world.
Finally, Monbiot misses the chance to contrast Clinton's and Trump's apparent differences
with regard to confronting nuclear-armed Russia over the skies of Syria. It could be like 1964
all over again - except in this election, the Democrat is the nearest thing to Barry Goldwater.
nishville 26 Oct 2016 4:40
As a life-long despiser of all things Trump, I cannot believe that I am saying this: Trump
is good for world peace. He might be crap for everything else but I for one will sleep much
better if he is elected POTUS.
dylan37 26 Oct 2016 4:40
Agree, for once, with a piece by George. Trump is nothing new - we've seen his kind of faux-outsider
thing before, but he's amplifying it with the skills of a carnival barker and the "what me?" shrug
of the everyman - when we all know he's not. The election result can't be rigged because the game
is fixed from the start. A potential president needs millions of dollars behind them to even think
about running, and then needs to repay those bought favours once in office. Trump may just win
this one though - despite the polls, poor human qualities and negative press - simply because
he's possibly tapped into a rich seam of anti-politics and a growing desire for anything different,
even if it's distasteful and deplorable. It's that difference that might make the difference,
even when it's actually just more of the same. It's all in the packaging.
greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:41
Donald Trump is a clumsy, nasty opportunist who has got one thing right - people don't want globalisation.
What people want, is clean, high-tech industries in their own countries, that automate the
processes we are currently offshoring. They would rather their clothes were made by robots in
Rochdale than a sweat-shop in India.
Same goes for energy imports: we want clean, local renewables.
What people don't want is large, unpleasant multinational corporations negotiating themselves
tax cuts and "free trade" with corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton.
Just my opinion, of course...
TheSandbag -> greenwichite 26 Oct 2016 4:50
Your right about globalisation, but I think wrong about the automation bit. People want Jobs because
its the only way to survive currently and they see them being shipped to the country with the
easiest to exploit workforce. I don't think many of them realize that those jobs are never coming
back. The socioeconomic system we exist in doesn't work for 90% of the population who are surplus
to requirements for sustaining the other 10%.
Shadenfraude 26 Oct 2016 4:43
I fully agree with Monbiot, American democracy is a sham - the lobby system has embedded corruption
right in the heart of its body politic. Lets be clear here though, whatever is the problem with
American democracy can in theory at least be fixed, but Trump simply can not and moreover he is
not the answer.
... ... ...
oddballs 26 Oct 2016 5:24
Trump threatened Ford that if they closed down US car plants and moved them to Mexico he would
put huge import tariffs on their products making them to expensive.
Export of jobs to low wage countries, how do you think Americans feel when they buy 'sports
wear, sweater, t-shirts shoes that cost say 3 $ to import into the US and then get sold for20
or 50 times as much, by the same US companies that moved production out of the country.
The anger many Americans feel how their lively-hoods have been outsourced, is the lake of discontent
Trump is fishing for votes.
His opponent, war child and Wall Street darling can count her lucky stars that the media
leaves her alone (with husband Bill, hands firmly in his pockets, nodding approvingly) and concentrates
on their feeding frenzy attacking Trump on sexual allegations of abusing women, giving Hillery,
Yes, likely to tell lies, ( mendacious, remember when she claimed to be under enemy fire in Bosnia?
remember how evasive she was on the Benghazi attack on the embassy)
Yes Trump is a dangerous man running against an also extremely dangerous woman.
onepieceman 26 Oct 2016 5:31
Extremely interesting reference to the Madison paper, but the issue is less about the size
of the electorate, and more about the power that the election provides to the victor.
One positive outcome that I hope will come of all of this is that people might think a little
more carefully about how much power an incoming president (or any politician) should be given.
The complacent assumption about a permanently benign government is overdue for a shakeup.
peccadillo -> Dean Alexander 26 Oct 2016 5:43
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy.
You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure
of politics is corrupt?
Having missed that bit, I wonder if you actually read the article.
tater 26 Oct 2016 5:46
The sad thing is that the victims of the corrupt economic and political processes are the small
town folk who try to see Trump as their saviour. The globalisation that the US promoted to expand
its hegemony had no safeguards to protect local economies from mega retail and finance corporations
that were left at liberty to strip wealth from localities. The Federal transfer payments that
might have helped compensate have been too small and were either corrupted pork barrel payments
or shameful social security payments. For a culture that prides itself on independent initiative
and self sufficiency this was always painful and that has made it all the easier for the lobbyists
to argue against increased transfer payments and the federal taxes they require. So more money
for the Trumps of this world.
And to the future. The US is facing the serious risk of a military take over. Already its foreign
policy emanates from the military and the corruption brings it ever closer to the corporations.
If the people don't demand better the coup will come.
MrMopp 26 Oct 2016 6:12
There's a reason turnout for presidential elections is barely above 50%.
Wised up, fed up Americans have long known their only choice is between a Coke or Pepsi President.
Well, this time they've got a Dr. Pepper candidate but they still know their democracy is just
a commodity to be bought and sold, traded and paraded; their elections an almost perpetual presidential
circus.
That a grotesque like Trump can emerge and still be within touching distance of the Whitehouse
isn't entirely down to the Democrats disastrous decision to market New Clinton Coke. Although
that's helped.
The unpalatable truth is, like Brexit, many Americans simply want to shake things up and shake
them up bigly, even if it means a very messy, sticky outcome.
Anyone with Netflix can watch the classic film, "Network" at the moment. And it is a film of
the moment.
"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression.
Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks
are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street
and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the
air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local
newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if
that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is
going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living
in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.
Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave
us alone.'
Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don't want you to protest. I
don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know
what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting]
You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!'
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to
get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD
AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out
and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!' Things have got to change.
But first, you've gotta get mad!...You've got to say, I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO
TAKE THIS ANYMORE! Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and
the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and
yell, and say it: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
And that was in 1976. A whole lot of shit has happened since then but essentially, Coke is
still Coke and Pepsi is still Pepsi.
Forty years later, millions are going to get out of their chairs. They are going to vote. For
millions of Americans of every stripe, Trump is the "I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE
THIS ANYMORE", candidate.
And he's in with a shout.
André De Koning 26 Oct 2016 6:13
Trump is indeed the embodiment of our collective Shadow (As Jung called this unconscious side
of our Self). It does reflect the degeneration of the culture we live in where politics has turned
into a travesty; where all projections of this side are on the Other, the usual other who we can
collectively dislike. All the wars initiated by the US have started with a huge propaganda programme
to hate and project our own Shadow on to this other. Often these were first friends, whether in
Iran or Iraq, Libya: as soon as the oil was not for ""us" , they were depicted as monsters who
needed action: regime change through direct invasion and enormous numbers of war crimes or through
CIA programmed regime change, it all went according to shady plans and manipulation and lies lapped
up by the masses.
When you look at speeches and conversations and debates with the so-called bogeyman, Putin,
he is not at all in a league as low and vile as portrayed and says many more sensible things than
anybody cares to listen to, because we're all brainwashed. We are complicit in wars (now in Syria)
and cannot see why we have to connive with terrorists, tens of thousands of them, and they get
supported by the war machine and friends like Saudis and Turkey which traded for years with ISIS.
The Western culture has become more vile than we could have imagined and slowly, like the frog
in increasingly hot water, we have become used to neglecting most of the population of Syria and
focusing on the rebel held areas, totally unaware of what has happened to the many thousands who
have lived under the occupation by terrorists who come from abroad ad fight the proxy war for
the US (and Saudi and the EU). Trump dares to embody all this, as does Clinton the war hawk,
and shows us we are only capable of seeing one side and project all nastiness outward while we
can feel good about ourselves by hating the other.
It fits the Decline of an Empire image as it did in other Falls of Civilizations.
tashe222 26 Oct 2016 6:28
Lots of virtue signalling from Mr. M.
Trump spoke to the executives at Ford like no one before ever has. He told them if they
moved production to Mexico (as they plan to do) that he would slap huge tariffs on their cars
in America and no one would buy them.
Trump has said many stupid things in this campaign, but he has some independence and is not
totally beholden to vested interests, and so there is at least a 'glimmer' of hope for the future
with him as Potus.
Yes, when the Archdruid first posted that it helped me understand some of the forces that were
driving Trump's successes. I disagree with the idea that voting for Trump is a good idea because
it will bring change to a moribund system. Change is not a panacea and the type of change he is
likely to bring is not going to be pleasant.
Hanwell123 -> ArseButter 26 Oct 2016 6:59
What happens in Syria could be important to us all. Clinton doesn't hide her ambition to
drive Assad from power and give Russia a kicking. It's actually very unpopular although the media
doesn't like to say so; it prefers to lambast Spain for re-fueling Russian war ships off to fight
the crazed Jihadists as if we supported the religious fanatics that want to slaughter all Infidels!
There is an enormous gulf between what ordinary people want and the power crazy Generals in the
Pentagon and NATO.
unsubscriber 26 Oct 2016 6:43
George always writes so beautifully and so tellingly. My favourite sentence from this column is:
Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic
norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have
turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.
Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 6:51
Trump is not a misogynist, look the word up. He may be crude but that's not the same thing. He
also represents a lot more people than a tiny faction. He is also advocating coming down on lobbying,
which is good. He may be a climate change denier but that's because a lot of his supporters are,
he'd probably change if they did. The way to deal with it is with rational argument, character
assassination is counterproductive even if he himself does it. Although he seems to do it as a
reaction rather than as an attack. He probably has a lot higher chance of winning than most people
think since a lot of people outside the polls will feel represented by him and a lot of those
included in the polls may not vote for Hilary.
ID4755061 26 Oct 2016 6:52
George Monbiot is right. Trump is a conduit for primal stuff that has always been there and never
gone away. All the work that has been done to try to change values and attitudes, to make societies
more tolerant and accepting and sharing, to get rid of xenophobia and racism and the rest, has
merely supressed all these things. Also, while times were good (that hasn't been so for a long
time) most of this subterranean stuff got glossed over most of the time by some kind of feel good
factor and hope for a better future.
But once the protections have gone, if there is nothing to feel good about or there is little
hope left, the primitive fear of other and strange and different kicks back in. It's a basic survival
instinct from a time when everything around the human species was a threat and it is a fundamental
part of us and Trump and Palin at al before him have got this, even if they don't articulate it
this way, and it works and it will always work. It's a pure emotional response to threat that
we can't avoid, the only way out of it, whihc many of use use, is to use our intellects to challenge
the kick of emotion and see it for what it is and to understand the consequences of giving it
free reign. It's this last bit that Trump, Palin, Farage and their ilk just don't get and never
will, we aill always be fighting this fight.
PotholeKid 26 Oct 2016 6:56
Political culture includes the Clintons and Bushes, the Democratic party and Republican party.
exploring that culture using the DNC and Podesta leaks as reference, paints a much better picture
of the depth of depravity this culture represents..Trump is a symptom and no matter how much the
press focuses on maligning his character. The Clintons share a huge responsibility for the corruption
of the system. Mr. Monbiot would serve us well by looking at solutions for cleaning up the mess,
what Trumps likes to call "Draining the swamp"
lonelysoul72 26 Oct 2016 6:59
Trump for me , he is horrendous but Clinton is worse.
nooriginalthought 26 Oct 2016 7:06
"Democracy in the U.S. is so corrupted by money it is no longer recognisable as democracy."
Sounds like a quote from Frank Underwood. To catch a thief sometimes you need the services of
a thief. With a fair degree of certainty we can be sure a Clinton administration will offer us
continuity .
If that is what you think the world needs fine.
If you believe globalization to be of benefit only to the few .
If you believe Russia has no rights to a sphere of influence on its boarders.
If you believe America's self appointed role as world policemen a disaster.
If you believe trade agreements a backdoor to corporate control.
If your just pissed off with politicians .
Your probably going to vote Trump. Looking forward to a long list of articles here in November
prophecies of Armageddon a la brexit. You liberal lefties , you'll never learn. If you want to
know what people are thinking , you got to get out of the echochamber.
nooriginalthought -> aurlius 26 Oct 2016 7:45
Sorry , hate having to explain myself to the dim witted.
USA has got itself in an unholy mess . It's politicians no longer work for the people .
Their paymasters care not if life in Idaho resembles Dantes inferno .
Trump has many faults but being "not Hilary" is not one of them. The very fact he is disliked
by all the vested interests should make you take another look.
And remember , the American constitution has many checks and balances , a President has a lot
less power than most people imagine.
Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 7:21
While it is impossible to credibly disagree with the general thrust of this, some of Monbiot's
assumptions exemplify problems with left-wing thinking at the moment.
But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his
caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped
of its pretences.
Like many on the right, the left have unthinkingly accepted a narrative of an organized,
conspiratorial system run by an elite of politicians and plutocrats. The problem with this narrative
is it suggests politics and politicians are inherently nefarious, in turn suggesting there are
no political solutions to be sought to problems, or anything people can do to challenge a global
system of power. As Monbiot asks: "You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what
do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt?" Well, what indeed?
I think Monbiot a principled, intelligent left-wing commentator, but at the same time he epitomises
a left-wing retreat into pessimism in the face of a putatively global network of power and inevitable
environmental catastrophe. In reality, while there is no shortage of perfidious, corrupt corporate
interests dominating global economies, there is no organized system or shadowy establishment -
only a chaotic mess rooted in complex political problems. Once you accept that reality, then it
becomes possible to imagine political solutions to the quandaries confronting us. Rather than
just railing against realities, you can envision a new world to replace them. And a new kind of
world is something you very rarely get from the left these days. Unlike the utopian socialists
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is little optimism or imagination - just anger,
pessimism and online echo chambers of 'clictivists'.
Like the documentarian Adam Curtis says, once you conclude that all politics is corrupt then
all you can do is sit there impotently and say: 'Oh dear'.
deltajones -> Pinkie123 26 Oct 2016 8:12
I don't think you need to believe in an organised conspiracy and I don't see any real evidence
that George Monbiot does. The trouble is that the corporate and political interests align in a
way that absorbs any attempt to challenge them and the narrative has been written that of course
politics is all about economics and of course we need mighty corporations to sustain us.
Even the left has largely taken on that narrative and it's seen as common sense. Challenging
this belief system is the toughest job that there is and we see that in the howling indignation
hurled at Jeremy Corbyn if he makes the slightest suggestion of nationalisation of the railways,
for instance.
ianfraser3 26 Oct 2016 7:29
Not long after the start of the presidential campaign I began to reflect that in Trump
we are seeing materializing before us the logical result of the neoliberal project, the ultimate
shopping spree, buy an election.
furiouspurpose -> IllusionOfFairness 26 Oct 2016 8:08
The Republican party essentially offered their base nothing – that was the problem.
They couldn't offer all the things that ordinary Americans want – better and wider Medicaid,
better and wider social security, tax increases on the rich, an end to pointless foreign wars
and the American empire. None of these things were acceptable to their funders so that only
left emotional issues – anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-god, pro-gun. And all of the emotional issues
are on the wrong side of history as the US naturally grows more politically progressive. So the
Republican party couldn't even deliver on the emotionally driven agenda. I think their base realised
that they were being offered nothing – and that's why they turned to Trump. Perhaps a fascist
blowhard could bulldoze the system to deliver on the emotional side of the offer. That's why Trump
broke through
The Democrats have largely the same funding base, but they at least deliver crumbs – at
least a nod to the needs of ordinary people through half-hearted social programmes. In the
end the African Americans decided that Hillary could be relied upon to deliver some crumbs – so
they settled for that. That's why Sanders couldn't break through.
fairleft 26 Oct 2016 7:55
Trump is imperfect because he wants normal relations rather than war with Russia. No, Hillary
Clinton is the ultimate representation of the system that is abusing us. What will occur when
Goldman Sachs and the military-industrial complex coalition get their, what is it, 5th term in
office would be a great subject of many Guardian opinion pieces, actually. But that will have
to wait till after November 8.
Such commentary would be greatly aided the Podesta emails, which enlighten us as to the mind
and 'zeitgeist' of the HIllary team. And, of course, we also have Hillary's Wall Street speeches
-- thanks to Wikileaks we have the complete transcripts, in case Guardian readers are unaware.
They expose the real thinking and 'private positions' of the central character in the next episode
of 'Rule by Plutocracy'.
But, of course, opinion columns and think pieces on the Real Hillary and the Podesta emails
will have to wait ... forever.
toffee1 26 Oct 2016 7:58
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the truth.
If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the business class,
why not. The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that they somehow representing
the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies and hypocrisy and manipulating
the working class everyday through their power over the media. Their function is to appease the
working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for the working class historically has
always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
Kikinaskald Cadmium 26 Oct 2016 8:39
In fact presidents don't usually have much affect, they're prey to their advisors. Generally true.
But Obama was able to show that he was able to distance himself up to a certain point from what
was around him. He was aware of the power of the establishment and of their bias. So, when the
wave against Iran was as strong as never before, he made a deal with Iran. He also didn't want
to intervene more actively in Syria and even in what concerns Russia, he seems to have moderate
positions.
In what concerns foreign politics, Trump some times seems more reasonable than Clinton
and the establishment. Clinton is the best coached politician of all times. She doesn't know that
she's coached. She just followed the most radical groups and isn't able to question anything at
all. The only thing that the coaches didn't fix until now is her laughing which is considered
even by her coaches as a sign of weirdness.
Kikinaskald -> J.K. Stevens 26 Oct 2016 9:09
She is considered to be highly aggressive, she pushed for the bombing of a few countries and
intervening everywhere..
Unfortunately all politics in the west is based on a similar model with our own domestic landscape
perhaps most closely resembling that in the US. We've always been peddled convenient lies of course,
but perhaps as society itself becomes more polarised [in terms of distribution of wealth and the
social consequences of that], the dissonance with the manufactured version of reality becomes
ever sharper. It is deeply problematic because traditional popular media is dominated by the wealthy
elite and the reality it depicts is as much a reflection of the consensual outlook of that elite
as it is deliberate, organised mendacity [although there's plenty of that too].
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless multinational,
it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult to see a future
in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national economies face
ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face an easier path in
simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the margins [and potentially
reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle and resist an overwhelming
force.
Meanwhile the electorate is become increasingly disaffected by this mainstream of politics
who they [rightly] sense is no longer truly representative of their interests in any substantive
way. To this backdrop the media has made notable blunders in securing the status quo. It has revealed
the corruption and self-seeking of many in politics and promoted the widespread distrust of mainstream
politicians for a variety of reasons. While the corruption is real and endemic, howls of protest
against political 'outsiders' from this same press is met with with the view that the political
establishment cannot be trusted engendered by the same sources.
The narrative for Brexit is somewhat similar. For many years the EU was the whipping boy for
all our ills and the idea that it is fundamentally undemocratic in contrast to our own system,
so unchallenged that it is taken for fact, even by the reasonably educated. Whilst I'm personally
deflated and not a little worried by our exit, it comes as little surprise that a distorted perspective
on the EU has led to a revolt against it.
There are of course now very many alternative narratives to those which are the preserve of
monied media magnates, but they're disparate, fractured and unfocused.
Only the malaise has any sort of consistency about it and it is bitterly ironic that figures
like Trump and Farage can so effectively plug into that in the guise of outsiders, to offer spurious
alternatives to that which is so desperately needed. It's gloomy stuff.
Western economies are now so beholden to the patronage of the essentially stateless
multinational, it has become a political imperative to appease their interests - it's difficult
to see a future in which an administration might resist this force, because at its whim, national
economies face ruination. In light of such helplessness our political representatives face
an easier path in simply accepting their lot as mere administrators who will tinker at the
margins [and potentially reap the rewards of a good servant], rather than hold to principle
and resist an overwhelming force.
I have been an advocate of this point for a long time.There is a saying in politics in America
that'' the only difference between a Democrat and a Republican is the speed at which they drop
to their knees when big business walks into the room''.
How it is going to be stopped or indeed if there is the will to do so,I do not know. The proponents
and those who have most to lose have been incredibly successful in propagating the myth that 'you
to can have what I have'and have convinced a sizeable minority that there is no alternative.
Until that changes and is exposed for the illusion that it is ,we are I fear heading for something
far worse than we have now.
"Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects
to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image
in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous
consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant
narratives of our age."
Because this is who we are and this is how we role. We got on rickety ships and braved the
cowardly waters to reach these shores, with tremendous realworld uncertainty and absolute religious
zeal. We are the manly men and womanly women who manifested our destiny, endured the cruel nature
naturing, and civilized the wild wild west, at the same time preserving our own wildness and rugged
individualism. Why should we go all soft and namby-pamby with this social safety nonsense? Let
the roadkills expire with dignified indignity on the margins of the social order. We will bequeath
a glorious legacy to the Randian ubermenschen who will inherit this land from us. They will live
in Thielian compounds wearing the trendiest Lululemons. They will regularly admonish their worses
with chants of: "Do you want to live? Pay, pal". If we go soft, if we falter, how will we ever
be able to look in the eye the ghosts of John Wayne, Marion Morrison, Curtis LeMay, Chuck Heston,
Chuck Norris, and the Great Great Ronnie Himself? Gut-check time folks, suck it up and get on
with the program.
"The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation
tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal."
The Founders had a wicked sense of humor. They set up the structure of various branches so
as to allow for the possibility of a future take-over by the Funders. That leaves room for the
exorbitant influence of corporations and wealthy individuals and the rise of the Trumps, leading
to the eventual fall into a Mad Max world.
"Yes, [Trump] is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits
ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that
runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences."
It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys walking
around naked now that it has absolute power.
'It is irrelevant if everyone sees the emperor/system has no clothes, it quite enjoys
walking around naked now that it has absolute power.'
Yes, they don't care any more if we see the full extent of their corruption as we've given
up our power to do anything about it.
chiefwiley -> Luftwaffe 26 Oct 2016 9:31
It was once very common to see Democratic politicians as neighbors attending every community
event. They were Teamsters, pipe fitters, and electricians. And they were coaches and ushers and
pallbearers. Now they are academics and lawyers and NGO employees and managers who pop up during
campaigns.
The typical income of the elected Democrats outside their government check is north of $100,000.
They don't live in, or even wander through, the poorer neighborhoods. So they are essentially
clueless that government services like busses are run to suit government and not actual customers.
It's sort of nice to have somebody looking after our interests in theory, but it would
be at least polite if they deemed to ask us what we think our best interests are. Notice the nasty
names and attributes being hurled at political "dissidents," especially around here, and there
should be little wonder why many think the benevolent and somewhat single minded and authoritarian
left is at least part of their problems.
ghstwrtrx7 -> allblues 26 Oct 2016 14:02
Yea, 15 years of constant wars of empire with no end in sight has pretty much ran this
country in the ground.
We all talk about how much money is wasted by the federal government on unimportant endeavors
like human services and education, but don't even bat an eye about the sieve of money that is
the Pentagon.
Half a trillion dollars for aircraft carriers we don't need and are already obsolete. China
is on the verge of developing wickedly effective anti-ship missiles designed specifically to target
these Gerald R. Ford-class vessels. You might as well paint a huge bull's-eye on these ships'
4-1/2 acre flight deck.
And then there there's the most egregious waste of money our historically over-bloated defense
budget has ever seen: The Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter. Quite a mouthful,
isn't? When you hear how much this boondoggle costs the American taxpayer, you'll choke: $1.5
Trillion, with a t. What's even more retching is that aside from already being obsolete, it doesn't
even work.
There are plenty more examples of this crap and this doesn't even include the nearly TWO
trillion dollars we've spent this past decade-and-a-half on stomping flat the Middle East and
large swaths of the Indian subcontinent.
And all this time, our nation's infrastructure is crumbling literally right out from underneath
us and millions upon millions of children and their families experience a daily struggle just
to eat. Eat?! In the "greatest," wealthiest nation on earth and we prefer to kill people at weddings
with drones than feed our own children.
I can't speak for anyone else other than myself, but that, boys and girls, has a decided miasma
of evil about it.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 9:49
I'd like to read an unbiased piece about why the media narrative doesn't match the reality
of the Trump phenomenon. He is getting enormous crowds attend his rallies but hardly any coverage
of that in the filtered news outlets. Hillary, is struggling to get anyone turn up without paying
them. There is no real enthusiasm.
If Hillary doesn't win by a major landslide (and I mean BIGLY) as the MSM would lead us to
believe she is going to, it could be curtains for the media, as what little credibility that is
not already swirling around the plughole will disappear down it once and for all.
The buzzwords and tired old catch phrases and cliches used by the left to suppress any
alternative discussion, and divert from their own misdemeanors are fooling no one but themselves.
Trump supporters simply don't care any more how Hillary supporters explain that she lied about
dodging sniper fire. Or the numerous other times she and her cohorts have been caught out telling
fibs.
leftofstalin 26 Oct 2016 10:06
Sorry George YOU and the chattering classes you represent are the reason for the rise of the
far right blinded by the false promises of new labour and it's ilk the working classes have been
demonized as striking troublemakers benefit frauds racists uneducated bigots etc etc and going
by the comments on these threads from remainders you STILL don't understand the psyche of the
working class
Gary Ruddock 26 Oct 2016 10:07
When Obama humiliated Trump at that dinner back in 2011 he may have set a course for his own
destruction. Lately, Obama does not appear anywhere near as confident as he once did.
Perhaps Trump has seen the light, seen the error of his ways, maybe he realizes if he doesn't
stand up against the system, then no one will.
transplendent 26 Oct 2016 10:38
Trump's only crime, is he buys into the idea of national identity and statehood (along with
every other nation state in the world mind you), and Hillary wants to kick down the doors and
hand over the US to Saudi Arabia and any international vested interest who can drop a few dollars
into the foundation coffers. I can't see Saudi Arabia throwing open the doors any day soon, unless
it is onto a one way street.
N.B. The Russians are not behind it.
gjjwatson 26 Oct 2016 11:10
Very true. Throughout history the rich, the powerful, the landed, ennobled interest and
their friends in the Law and money changing houses have sought to control governments and have
usually succeeded.
In the Media today the rich are fawned over by sycophantic journalists and programme makers.
These are the people who make the political weather and create the prevailing narratives.
I remember when President Reagan railed against government whilst he was in office, he said
the worst words a citizen could hear were "I`m from the government, I`m here to help you".
Working class people fancied themselves to above the common herd and thought themselves
part of some elite.
All of this chimes of course with American history and it`s constitution written by slave owning
colonists who proclaimed that "all men are created equal".
bonhiver 26 Oct 2016 12:10
It's quite disturbing the lengths this paper will go to in order to slur and discredit
Trump, labelling him dangerous and alluding to the sexual assault allegations. This even goes
so far to a very lengthy article regarding Trumps lack of knowledge on the Rumbelows Cup 25 years
ago.
Whereas very little examination is made into Hillary Clinton's background which includes
serious allegation of fraud and involvement in assisting in covering up her husband's alleged
series of rapes. There are also issues in the wikileaks emails that merit analysis as well as
undercover tapes of seioau issues with her campaign team.
Whereas it is fair to criticise Trump for a lot of stuff it does appear that there is no attempt
at balance as Clinton's faults appear to get covered up om this paper.
Whereas I can not vote in the US elections and therefore the partisan reporting has no substantive
effect on how I may vote or act it is troubling that a UK newspaper does not provide the reader
with an objective as possible reporting on the presidential race.
It suggests biased reporting elsewhere.
thevisitor2015 26 Oct 2016 12:46
One of the most important characteristics of the so-called neoliberalism is its negative
selection. While mostly successfully camouflaged, that negative selection is more than obvious
this time, in two US presidential candidates. It's hard to imagine lower than those two.
seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:37
Well, OK George. Tell me: if Trump's such an establishment candidate, then why does the
whole of the establishment unanimously reject him? Is it normal for Republicans (such as the Bushes
and the neocons) to endorse Democrats? Why does even the Speaker of the House (a Republican) and
even, on occasion, Trump's own Vice-Presidential nominee seem to be trying to undermine his campaign?
If Trump is really just more of the same as all that came before, why is he being treated different
by the MSM and the political establishment?
Obviously, there's something flawed about your assumption.
CharlesPDXOr -> seamuspadraig 26 Oct 2016 13:58
I think the answer to your question is in the article: because Trump has brought the truth
of the monied class into the open. He is a perfect example of all that class is and tries to pretend
it is not. And when the commoners see this in front of them, a whole lot of them are disgusted
by it. That doesn't sit well back in the country club and the boardroom, where they work so hard
to keep all of that behind closed doors. They hate him because he is one of them and is spilling
the beans on all of them.
bill9651 26 Oct 2016 13:01
Trump has exposed the corruption of the political system and the media and has promised to
put a stop to it. By contrast, Clinton is financed by the very banks, corporates and financial
elites who are responsible for the corruption. This Trump speech is explicit on what we all suspected
is going on. Everybody should watch it, irrespective of whether they support him or not!
Michael Moore explaining why a lot of people like him
"I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don't necessarily
agree with him. They're not racist or redneck, they're actually pretty decent people and so after
talking to a number of them I wanted to write this.
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives
and said "if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico,
I'm going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy
them." It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything
like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - the "Brexit" states.
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind
of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every beaten-down,
nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves
Trump. He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they've been waiting for; the human hand grande that
they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8, although
they lost their jobs, although they've been foreclose on by the bank, next came the divorce and
now the wife and kids are gone, the car's been repoed, they haven't had a real vacation in years,
they're stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan where you can't even get a fucking percocet,
they've essentially lost everything they had except one thing - the one thing that doesn't cost
them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.
They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn't
matter, because it's equalized on that day - a millionaire has the same number of votes as the
person without a job: one. And there's more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire
class. So on November 8 the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot,
close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the
box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined
their lives: Donald J Trump.
They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall
Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved
him and created him, and now hate. Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I'm voting for
on November 8.
Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go
and blow up the whole goddamn system because it's your right. Trump's election is going to be
the biggest fuck you ever recorded in human history and it will feel good."
Michael Moore
Debreceni 26 Oct 2016 14:15
Mrs Clinton is also the product of our political culture. A feminist who owes everything
to her husband and men in the Democratic Party. A Democrat who started her political career as
a Republican; a civil right activist who worked for Gerry Goldwater, one of last openly racist/segregationist
politicians. A Secretary of State who has no clue about, or training in, foreign policy, and who
received her position as compensation for losing the election. A pacifist, who has never had a
gun in her hands, but supported every war in the last twenty years. A humanist who rejoiced over
Qaddafi's death ("we came, we won, he is dead!") like a sadist.
Both candidates have serious weaknesses. Yet Trump is very much an American character, his
vices and weaknesses are either overlooked, or widely shared, secretively respected and even admired
(even by those who vote against him). Clinton's arrogance, elitism and hypocrisy, coupled with
her lack of talent, charisma and personality, make her an aberration in American politics.
BabylonianSheDevil03 26 Oct 2016 15:26
One thing that far right politics offers the ordinary white disaffected voter is 'pay back',
it is a promised revenge-fest, putting up walls, getting rid of foreigners, punishing employers
of foreigners, etc., etc. All the stuff that far right groups have wet dreams about.
Farage used the same tactics in the UK. Le Pen is the same.
Because neoliberal politics has left a hell of a lot of people feeling pissed off, the
far right capitalizes on this, whilst belonging to the same neoliberal dystopia so ultimately
not being able to make good on their promises. Their promises address a lot of people's anger,
which of course isn't really about foreigners at all, that is simply the decoy, but cutting through
all the crap to make that clear is no easy task, not really sure how it can be done, certainly
no political leader in the western hemisphere has the ability to do so.
ProseBeforeHos 26 Oct 2016 15:45
"But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste,
the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics."
Wrong as always. Trump *is* an outsider. He's an unabashed nationalist who's set him up
against the *actual* caste that governs our politics: Neo-liberal internationalists with socially
trendy left-liberal politics (but not so left that they don't hire good tax lawyers to avoid paying
a fraction of what they are legally obliged to).
Best represented in the Goldman Sachs executives who are donating millions to Hillary Clinton
because they are worried about Trump's opposition to free trade, and they know she will give them
*everything* they want.
Trumps the closest thing we're gotten to a genuine threat to the system in a long, long
time, so of course George Monbiot and the rest of the Guardian writers has set themselves against
him, because if you're gonna be wrong about the EU, wrong about New Labour, wrong about social
liberalism, wrong about immigration, why change the habit of a lifetime?
aofeia1224 26 Oct 2016 16:09
"What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny?
The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes?"
Lies: Emails, policy changes based on polls showing a complete lack of conviction, corporate
collusion, Bosnia, Clinton Foundation, war mongering, etc.
Racist stereotypes: Super predators. Misogyny: Aside from her laughing away her pedophile case
and allegedly threatening the women who came out against Bill, you've also got this sexist gem
"Women are the primary victims of war".
Alleged gropings: Well she's killed people by texting. So unless your moral compass is
so out of whack that somehow a man JOKING about his player status in private is worse than Clinton's
actions throughout her political career, then I guess you could make the case that Clinton at
least doesn't have this skeleton in her closet.
Refusal to accept democratic outcomes: No. He's speaking out against the media's collusion
with the democratic party favoring Clinton over every other nominee, including Bernie Sanders.
He's talking about what was revealed in the DNC leaks and the O'Keefe tapes that show how dirty
the tactics have been in order to legally persuade the voting public into electing one person
or the other.
Besides that, who cares about his "refusal" to accept the outcome? The American people protested
when Bush won in 2000 saying it was rigged. Same goes with Obama saying the same "anti democratic"
shit back in 2008 in regards to the Bush Administration.
Pot call kettle black
caravanserai 26 Oct 2016 16:16
Republicans are crazy and their policies make little sense. Neo-conservatism? Trickle down
economics? Getting the poor to pay for the mess created by the bankers in 2008? Trump knows what
sells to his party's base. He throws them red meat. However, the Democrats are not much better.
They started to sell out when Bill Clinton was president. They pretend to still be the party of
the New Deal, but they don't want to offend Wall Street. US democracy is in trouble.
rooolf 26 Oct 2016 16:24
When do the conspiracy theories about the criminality of his opponent no longer count as
conspiracies? When we have a plethora of emails confirming there is indeed fire next to that smoke,
corruption fire, collusion fire, fire of contempt for the electorate. When we have emails confirming
the Saudi Arabians are actually funding terrorist schools across the globe, emails where Hilary
herself admits it, but will not say anything publicly about terrorism and Saudi Arabia, what's
conspiracy and what's reality?
Is it because Saudi Arabia funded her foundation with $23 million, or because it doesn't
fit with her great 'internationalists' global agenda?
Either way there seems to be some conspiring of some sort
When is it no longer theory? And where does the guardian fit into this corrupted corporate
media idea?
Yep trump is a buffoon, but the failure of all media to deliver serious debate means the
US is about to elect someone probably more dangerous than trump, how the hell can that be
What the author overlooks is the media's own complicity in allowing this to develop
Unfortunately the corruption of the system is so entrenched it takes an abnormality like trump
to challenge it
Hard to believe, but trump is a once in a lifetime opportunity to shake shit up, not a pleasant
one, in fact a damn ugly opportunity, but the media shut him down, got all caught up in self preservation
and missed the opportunity
it what comes next that is scary
BScHons -> rooolf 26 Oct 2016 17:09
Nothing wrong with a liberal internationalist utopia, it sounds rather good and worth striving
for. It's just that what they've been pushing is actually a neoliberal globalist nirvana for the
1 per cent
rooolf BScHons 26 Oct 2016 17:17
Totally agree
The problem is the left this paper represents were bought off with the small change by
neoliberalism, and they expect the rest of us to suck it up so the elites from both sides can
continue the game
Talking about the environment and diversity doesn't cut it
mrjonno 26 Oct 2016 17:02
Well said as ever George. Humanity is in a total mess as we near the end of the neoliberal
model. That the USA has a choice between two 'demopublicans' is no choice at all.
I would go further in your analysis - media controlled by these sociopaths has ensured that our
society shares the same values - we are a bankrupt species as is.
As long as you are here to provide sensible analysis, along with Peter Joseph, I have hope
that we can pull out of the nosedive that we are currently on a trajectory for.
Thank you for your sane input into an otherwise insane world. Thank you Mr Monbiot.
annedemontmorency 26 Oct 2016 19:08
We'll ignore the part about the inability to accept democratic outcomes since that afflicts
so many people and organisations - Brexit , anyone?
More to the point is how the summit of US politics produces candidates like Trump and Clinton.
Clinton is suffering the same damage the LibDems received during their coalition with the Tories
.Proximity to power exposed their inadequacies and hypocrisy in both cases.
Trump - unbelievably - remains a viable candidate but only because Hillary Clinton reeks of
graft and self interest.
The obvious media campaign against Trump could also backfire - voters know a hatchet job when
they see one - they watch House of Cards.
But politics is odd around the whole world.
The Guardian is running a piece about the Pirate party in Iceland.
Why go so far? - the most remarkable coup in recent politics was UKIP forcing a vote on the
EU which it not only won it did so in spite of only ever having ONE MP out of 630.
Trump may be America's UKIP - he resembles them in so many ways.
ID6209069 26 Oct 2016 20:35
It's possible that something like this was inevitable, in a nation which is populated by "consumers"
rather than as citizens. There are "valuable demographics" versus those that aren't worthy of
the attention of the constant bombardment of advertising. I jokingly said last year that as I
was turning 55 last year, I am no longer in the 'coveted 29-54 demo'. My worth as a consumer has
been changed merely by reaching a certain age, so I now see fewer ads about cars and electronics
and more about prescription medicines. The product of our media is eyeballs, not programs or articles.
The advertising is the money maker, the content merely a means of luring people in for a sales
pitch, not to educate or inform. If that structure sells us a hideous caricature of a successful
person and gives him political power, as long as the ad dollars keep rolling in.
GreyBags 26 Oct 2016 21:19
This is the culmination of living in a post-truth political world. Lies and smears, ably
supported by the corporate media and Murdoch in particular means that the average person who doesn't
closely follow politics is being misinformed.
The complete failure of right wing economic 'theories' means they only have lies, smears
and the old 'divide and conquer' left in their arsenal. 'Free speech' is their attempt to get
lies and smears equal billing with the truth. All truth on the other hand must be suppressed.
All experts and scientists who don't regurgitate the meaningless slogans of the right will be
ignored, traduced, defunded, disbanded or silenced by law.
We see the same corrupted philosophy in Australia as well.
JamesCameron 7d ago
Yet Trump, the "misogynist, racist and bigot"' has more women in executive and managerial positions
than any comparable company, pays these women the same or more than their male counterparts and
fought the West Palm Beach City Council to be allowed to open his newly purchased club to blacks
and Jews who had been banned until then. I suspect his views do chime with Americans fed up with
political correctness gone mad as well as the venality of the administration of Barak Obama, a
machine politician with dodgy bagmen from Chicago – the historically corrupt city in Illinois,
the most corrupt state in the Union. Finally, unlike The Hilary, he has actually held down a job,
worked hard and achieved success and perhaps they are more offended by what she does than what
he says.
aucourant 7d ago
Not so much an article about Trump as much as a rant. George Monbiot writes with the utter
conviction of one who mistakenly believes that his readers share his bigotry. When he talks about
the 'alleged gropings' or the 'alleged refusal to accept democratic outcomes', that is exactly
what they are 'alleged'.
The Democratic Party has been dredging up porn-stars and wannabe models who now make claims
that Trump tried to 'kiss them without asking'. This has become the nightly fare of the mainstream
media in the USA. At the same time the media ignores the destruction of Clinton's emails, the
bribing of top FBI officials who are investigating the destroyed tapes and the giving of immunity
to all those who aided Clinton in hiding and destroying subpoenaed evidence.
The press also ignored the tapes of the DNC paying thugs to cause violence at Trump rallies,
the bribes paid to the Clintons for political favours and the stealing of the election from Bernie
Sanders. Trump is quite right to think the 'democratic outcome' is being fixed. Not only were
the votes for Sanders manipulated, but Al Gore's votes were also altered and manipulated to ensure
a win for Bush in the 2000 presidential election. The same interests who engineered the 2000 election
have switched from supporting the Republican Party to supporting Clinton.
Anomander64 6d ago
Great article. The neoliberals have been able to control the narrative and in doing so
have managed to scapegoat all manner of minority groups, building anger among those disaffected
with modern politics. Easy targets - minorities, immigrants, the poor, the disadvantaged and the
low-paid workers.
The real enemy here are those sitting atop the corporate tree, but with the media controlled
by them, the truth is never revealed.
mochilero7687 5d ago
Perhaps next week George will write in detail about all the scandals Hildabeast has caused
and been involved in over the past 40 years - which have cost the US govt tens of millions of
dollars and millions of man hours - but I won't be holding my breath.
Trump shows the true face of the ruling class with no hypocrisy. He is telling us the
truth. If we have a democracy, we should have a party representing the interests of the
business class, why not.
The democrats is the party practicing hypocrisy, pretending that
they somehow representing the interest of the working class. They are the ones spreading lies
and hypocrisy and manipulating the working class everyday through their power over the media.
Their function is to appease the working class. The real obstacle for improving conditions for
the working class historically has always been the Democratic party, not the Republican party.
"Jen you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he
saw it in the news we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov"
"How is that not classified?" Huma Abedin to FBI when shown email between Clinton & Obama using his pseudonym. Abedin then
expressed her amazement at the president's use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email."
I can't state how huge this is, it's a cover up involving the President of the United States. There are a lot of emails implying
this, but this email states it very clearly so anyone can understand. The email proves obstruction of justice and shows how they
lied to the FBI, and likely perjury of Congress. This at the very least proves intent by her Chief of Staff.
Obama used executive privilege on their correspondence. Cheryl Mills (who was given immunity) states they need to "clean up"
the Clinton/Obama e-mails because they lacked state.gov.
Additionally, Obama on video publicly denied knowing
about the server. He also claimed on video that he learned
about the secret server through the news like everyone else. The corruption goes all the way to the top! Obama is lying to the
American public.
Hillary Clinton set up her private server to hide her pay to play deals discovered throughout these leaks, and to prevent FOIA
(Freedom of Information Act) requests.
Paul Combetta was hired to modify the email headers that referred to a VERY VERY VIP individual, i.e. change the name of who
it was from. If you
read Stonetear/Combetta
story , it's easy to see this is exactly what he was attempting. He wanted to change header information on already sent mail
to show "state.gov" instead of Hillary's private email address. Multiple people informed him of the infeasibility (and illegality)
of it, so somewhere in the next 6 days it was decided that simply eradicating them was the only option left.
The FBI said they could not find intent of trying to break the law, therefore no recommendation of prosecution. This email
proves, in plain language, that there was intention, and knowingly broke the law.
Ask yourselves: why would they both be communicating on a secret server to each other? Why not through normal proper channels?
What were they hiding? We may soon find out
(Source: The Top 100 Most
Damaging WikiLeaks )
_ _ _
For the uninitiated this breakdown essentially says that President Barack Obama is stone-cold guilty of crimes and cover-ups that
would make Watergate look like a walk in the park .
In fact, Obama is so deeply involved with the criminal workings of State that he had no choice but to lie about his knowledge
of Clinton's private server and personal email account. This is why Emailgate is so HUGE- it's a massive cover-up of the greatest
crimes EVER committed by the US Government . And Obama lied his way all through the never-ending conspiratorial saga. As follows:
Jill Stein to win over the hearts of some progressives and jump start her far-left "
people-powered
" movement.
"This is Jill Stein's moment," said longtime Democratic pollster and Fox News contributor Pat
Caddell.
"There are many Clinton voters who would rather vote their conscience than vote for a major party.
According to the latest Breitbart/Gravis poll, when given the choice of whether you should vote for
a major party candidate or vote your conscience, 44% of Clinton voters said you should vote your
conscience," Caddell explained.
Even before the FBI director's dramatic announcement on Friday, the ABC News/Washington Post
tracking poll
indicated that "loosely affiliated or reluctant Clinton supporters"- which includes white women
and young voters under the age of 30- seem to be floating off and "look less likely to vote."
Caddell explained that the polling data suggests "there are many people who are ambivalent
about Clinton who don't want to vote for Trump. Given these new revelations from WikiLeaks and the
re-intensity of the concern regarding the corruption of her emails, these ambivalent voters need
a place to go and Jill Stein-being not only a progressive woman, but an honest progressive woman-is
the obvious choice for so many of these voters, particularly for those who supported Bernie Sanders."
Indeed, nearly 60 percent of voters- including 43 percent of Democrats- believe America needs
a third major political party,
according to a Gallup poll released late last month.
As one former Bernie Sanders supporter told Breitbart News, "It's come to this: voting for
Hillary Clinton is voting for the lesser of two evils. But voting for the lesser of two evils is
still voting for evil, and I'm tired of voting for evil. That's why I'm voting for Jill Stein.
"
This sentiment has been echoed by Stein herself who has argued, "it's time to reject the lesser
of two evils and stand up for the greater good."
Stein seems ready to capitalize on the FBI's announcement as well as the steady stream of WikiLeaks
revelations that have exposed, what Stein has characterized as, the Clinton camp's "hostility" to
progressives.
"The FBI has re-opened the Clinton investigation. Will the American people rise up and vote for
honest change?" Stein asked on Friday, via Twitter.
... ... ...
Clinton's strained relationship with progressives has been well documented and could
present Stein– who has demonstrated a remarkable ability to articulately prosecute the progressive
case against Clinton– with an opening, especially as polling reveals a significant chunk of Clinton
voters believe voting their conscience ought to trump voting for a major political party.
As Politico reported in a piece
titled "WikiLeaks poisons Hillary's relationship with left" :
Some of the left's most influential voices and groups are taking offense at the way they
and their causes were discussed behind their backs by Clinton and some of her closest advisers
in the emails, which swipe liberal heroes and causes as "puritanical," "pompous", "naive", "radical"
and "dumb," calling some "freaks," who need to "get a life." […] among progressive operatives,
goodwill for Clinton - and confidence in key advisers featured in the emails including John Podesta,
Neera Tanden and Jake Sullivan - is eroding…
Even before the FBI's announcement, many noted that it was becoming increasingly difficult
to view a vote for Clinton as anything other than a vote to continue the worst aspects of political
corruption.
As columnist Kim Strassel recently
wrote , the
one thing in this election of which one can be certain is that "a Hillary Clinton presidency will
be built, from the ground up, on self-dealing, crony favors, and an utter disregard for the law."
As such, "anyone who pulls the lever for Mrs. Clinton takes responsibility for setting up the
nation for all the blatant corruption that will follow," Strassel
concludes
. "She just doesn't have a whole lot of integrity,"
said far-left progressive Cornel West.
West
endorsed Stein over Clinton explaining Stein is "the only progressive woman in the race."
"The Clinton train- [of] Wall Street, security surveillance, militaristic- is not going in
the same direction I'm going," West
told Bill Maher earlier this year.
She's a neoliberal… [I] believe neoliberalism is a disaster when it comes to poor people
and when it comes to people in other parts of the world dealing with U.S. foreign policy and militarism.
Oh, absolutely. Ask the people in Libya about that. Ask the people in the West Bank about that.
West has separately
explained that Clinton's "militarism makes the world a less safe place" and that her globalist
agenda created the "right-wing populism" that has fueled Trump's rise.
Clinton policies of the 1990s generated inequality, mass incarceration, privatization of schools
and Wall Street domination. There is also a sense that the Clinton policies helped produce the
right-wing populism that we're seeing now in the country. And we think she's going to come to
the rescue? That's not going to happen.
"It's too easy to view him [Trump] as an isolated individual and bash him," West
told Maher. "He's speaking to the pain in the country because white, working class brothers have
been overlooked by globalization, by these trade deals"– trade deals which Stein also opposes.
Stein has railed against the passage of TPP, which she and her party have described as "NAFTA
on steroids" that would "enrich wealthy corporations by exporting jobs and pushing down wages." They
have argued that the deal essentially amounts to a "global corporate coup" that "would give corporations
more power than nations" by letting them "challenge our laws".
Stein is
against the "massive expanding wars," "the meltdown of the climate," "the massive Wall Street
bailouts," and "the offshoring of our jobs."
Pointing to Clinton's "dangerous and immoral" militarism, Stein has
warned that "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war" and has explained how under a Clinton
presidency, "we could very quickly slide into nuclear war" or could start an air-war with Russia.
"No matter how her staff tries to rebrand her" Clinton is "not a progressive," Stein has
said -rather Clinton is a "corporatist hawk" that "
surrounds
herself with people who are hostile progressives" such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz "after she sabotaged
Bernie [Sanders]." Stein has warned progressives that the role of corporate Democrats like Clinton
is to "prevent progressives from defying corporate rule."
Stein has made a point to
highlight the fact that "we're now seeing many Republican leaders join Hillary Clinton in a neoliberal
uni-party that will fuel right-wing extremism," by continuing to push its "neoliberal agenda [of]
globalization, privatization, deregulation, [and] austerity for the rest of us."
In contrast to Clinton's corporatist "uni-party", Stein and her party have explained that their
campaign represents a "people's party with a populist progressive agenda" that-unlike Democrats and
Republicans- is not "funded by big corporate interests including Wall St. Banks, fossil fuel giants,
& war profiteer."
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician,
who became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein already holds the record for the most votes ever received by a
female candidate for president in a general election.
In Jill Stein, her party writes, "progressives have a peace candidate not beholden to the billionaire
class."
"... "…the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other
radical Sunni groups in the region." ..."
"... "Clintons should know better than to raise money from folks whose primary concern has been supporting the NIAC, a notorious
supporter of the Radical Islamic Mullahs. "The Clinton's have thrown principle out the window in exchange for cold hard cash…putting
money ahead of principle." ..."
"... If these revelations don't completely terminate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, certainly four straight years of Congressional
Emailgate hearings will, should she outright steal the election from Donald Trump on November 8th, or shortly thereafter. ..."
"…the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and
other radical Sunni groups in the region."
"Clintons should know better than to raise money from folks whose primary concern has been supporting the NIAC, a notorious
supporter of the Radical Islamic Mullahs. "The Clinton's have thrown principle out the window in exchange for cold hard cash…putting
money ahead of principle."
Hillary's Chief of Staff admits in the 2nd link that foreign interests sway Hillary to do what they want her to do (money for
mandatory appearances). She also admits that the "Friend of Hillary" list is available and rentable to people who want to influence,
but that it's too sensitive to talk in email.
This leak shows Hillary knows Saudis and Qatar are funding ISIS, which is an enemy of the state. After knowing this, Hillary
accepted tens of millions in donations from these terrorist-funding governments (of course they are getting something back in
return). She also supported arms deals to them.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar commit horrible acts under Sharia law, including throwing gay people off of buildings, persecuting Christians,
Jews, and atheists, and making it legal to rape and beat women. They are the
leading funders of Hillary and her campaign through the Clinton Foundation.
If these revelations don't completely terminate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, certainly four straight years of Congressional
Emailgate hearings will, should she outright steal the election from Donald Trump on November 8th, or shortly thereafter.
Trump was commenting on the revelation by Wikileaks on Monday that CNN commentator Donna Brazile, who is now the chair of the Democratic
National Committee, had been caught again passing debate questions from the network to the Clinton campaign during the Democratic
primary.
Brazile had been exposed earlier doing the same - passing a question to the Clinton campaign in advance of a town hall debate
against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
At the time, Brazile was not yet DNC chair, but was a regular CNN contributor.
CNN
fired Brazile on Monday, releasing a statement: ""We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions
with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."
Why thousands of emails were forwarded to unsecured computer shared by Abedin with her husband?
How they were forwarded, were they forwarded individually or as a batch operation ?
How many of them are those 30K deleted by Hillary "private" emails ?
Does this batch contains any of previously discovered classified emails?
What was the purpose of forwarding those emails to home computer.
Notable quotes:
"... Somebody at the F.B.I. must have picked up on the fact that the "FIX" was exposed hence on Friday an announcement was made by the F.B.I. that they had found further e-mails, I suspect that all the e-mails will have to be re-examined in the light of the lenient views taken by some F.B. I. Officers taken at the first pass or some more deletions will of necessity have to take place. ..."
"... Meanwhile Clinton is shouting and screaming at the F.B.I. because she now knows that a new fix will be very difficult or impossible in the light of the revealed information and her "charity donations" of over $800,000 have not only been wasted but have exposed her flank! ..."
"... ...the agents discovered the existence of tens of thousands of emails, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other Clinton aides, according to senior law enforcement officials ..."
"... Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? I don't think it can be a batch operation, they must have been forwarded individually. And what of the 30,000 destroyed (by Clinton) emails? ..."
"... "We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that's where we are..." ..."
The other day I was reading an article which was talking about two "charity donations" given to the wife of an F.B.I. Officer
involved in the e-mail investigation by "friends of the Clinton's".
The article was very low key it's author briefly wondered if the officer concerned should have excused himself from the investigation.
I also thought it strange that the officers interest had not been declared. Some time later I was reading about details concerning
the e-mails sent from Clinton's staff to members of the F.B.I. ,basically what was happening was that the security rating of the
information contained in non deleted mails was being talked down, at which point for me at least alarm bells were ringing loud
and clear but I did not expect there to be any reaction. O.K. So I'm that cynical.
Somebody at the F.B.I. must have picked up on the fact that the "FIX" was exposed hence on Friday an announcement was made
by the F.B.I. that they had found further e-mails, I suspect that all the e-mails will have to be re-examined in the light of
the lenient views taken by some F.B. I. Officers taken at the first pass or some more deletions will of necessity have to take
place.
Meanwhile Clinton is shouting and screaming at the F.B.I. because she now knows that a new fix will be very difficult or
impossible in the light of the revealed information and her "charity donations" of over $800,000 have not only been wasted but
have exposed her flank!
My Fellow Americans - Here is what the NYT is reporting in contrast to the WaPost's email count of more than 1,000, in terms of
an actual number of emails to be reviewed:
"...the agents discovered the existence of tens of thousands of emails, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other
Clinton aides, according to senior law enforcement officials."
Subsequently, that could change what the initial investigation by the Bureau had to look at this summer, and the understanding
that all of the parties acknowledge that about 30k emails were deleted. So the "tens of thousands" may be duplicates or perhaps
copies of the "thumb-drive" that one of HRC's lawyers was said to have been given?
At any rate, this must bring into play at least 18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally - and raise
the question about whether conflicting DOJ internal "policy" has any affect on any of the Administration's current or former appointees,
in terms of their "oath of office" or moving forward. And that would bring 5 U.S. Code § 3331 - Oath of office - into play as
well as the 5-year statute of limitations.
We're likely still "Doomed" - so don't get too happy just yet, because EPA could still disallow "draining" anything as a result
of the Clean Water Act, as amended.
CanardNoir 2:41 PM EDT
And here's the Sec. 2071 reason "why":
(b) "Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and
unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United
States..."
[Edited] Lynch had to recuse herself after meeting with Bill Clinton. Had there not been information showing intent to violate
espionage laws, Comey would have never acted. The fact is she is a criminal and cannot be elected . Image an elected Hillary who
is impeached. The USA deserves better than a this and must turn the Clintons out to pasture forever.
The FBI used to be a respected agency. Now, not so much. Working for, and in collusion with Obama, Loretta Lynch, the Clinton's
and the media makes their "investigation" suspect, to say the least.
Hillary "will say anything and do anything" (Obama's words, not mine) to get elected. Trying to blame her malfeasance on the
FBI is simply stupid. She is so obsessed with money and power that she openly states "I have spent my life helping children and
women". Right. Like when she was an 8 year Senator who only introduced 3 bills naming a couple highways and a bank. Her followers
are dupes and dunces and we can only hope they don't outnumber rationally thinking people.
To think that Weiner and who knows who else had access to U.S. National Security information on the Weiner/Abedin computer.
Sure sounds like the FBI is after Abedin not Clinton.
Dems loved Comey when he slapped Clinton on the wrist for playing loose with U.S. National Security on her email server. Now
those same Dems want to burn Comey at the stake.
Let's not forget how Comey has come to be such a respected official http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced,
sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength
to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's
presence in the room, turned and left.
ad_icon
The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that,
according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller
and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several
weeks without Justice approval, wheresthechow
2:27 AM EST The Clinton's are just so amazing in their cavalier above-the-law attitude that they can't even renovate their
house without breaking the law.
Mr. Weiner has not aged well.....and it is not over....avoid park benches do not visit remote areas.....People you and I know
may have a Boat moored in a slip at a Dock or a Yacht club that's Normal Americana....Yet A.G.Loretta Lynch was waiting on the
Tarmac in her Jet Plane as Bill Clinton leaves His Jet Plane to chat with Loretta ....this is an area of privilege far above yacht
club status....and this meeting broke several laws very quickly...so the A.G. has no authority to comment on what the head of
F.B.I. has done regarding The Weiner Email discovery and whatever Bill had swindled for future favors or past I.O.U's has now
become a waste of AA jet fuel for the,"IN", crowd.....Hillary is starting to look a little like Mr.Weiner; facial tension ,gaunt,hollow
cheeks,terse lips,Bill was supposed to take care of all this....right?Now Mr. Comey had taken the J. Edgar Hoover pledge to Serve
and protect and that would have been us under all other circumstances.....but he has to be loyal to his associates for they are
the top 2% of the entire population and they deserve to be treated as the most important the bureau has....what transpired on
the first pass left them in Mayberry P.D. limbo and will never happen could someone help Loretta Lynch to see the light or the
exit sign ....Please
711810943 10/29/2016 10:56 PM EST
Yep, we're definitely talking about the battle of the twin dumpster fires here...
Celebrity gossip trumps policy, if you'll forgive the expression. But what can you expect in a country that can name three
Kardashian sisters, but not one foreign head of state.
Hmmm... Those deck chairs need rearranging... See ya...
Laptop or PC is property of US once claissified info discovered. 18USC 798, right? Who says a warrant is needed to seize, protect?
No so. And, for sure, they will read, use of which may or may not be impeded thereby. Still, there is allot to investigate, incl.
numerous apparent violations of ethics in govt. act, etc, failures to disclose gifts / income, etc.
The Clintons run a morally corrupt RICO that holds itself above the law. With Obama's support, the Justice Dept., IRS, FBI,
State Dept. have aided and abetted the Clinton corruption of our government. This illustrates Hayek's point in The Road To Serfdom
that when very powerful government institutions are created, "the worst rise to the top". Public power and money attract the least
scrupulous, least honest, most power hungry, and most determined. Though Clinton's cabal publicly poses themselves as humanitarian
progressives, the Doug Band statement of operations among Teneo, CGI, the Foundation, and the Clintons presents the underlying
purpose of selling influence and the crony capital structure devised to split the proceeds. The Clinton Foundation operates outside
the law. So where's the MSM, the IRS, the FBI, Justice...what justice?
To think that Weiner and who knows who else had access to U.S. National Security information on the Weiner/Abedin computer.
Sure sounds like the FBI is after Abedin not Clinton.
Dems loved Comey when he slapped Clinton on the wrist for playing loose with U.S. National Security on her email server. Now
those same Dems want to burn Comey at the stake.
Let's not forget how Comey has come to be such a respected official http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic...
In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced,
sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength
to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey's
presence in the room, turned and left.
ad_icon
The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that,
according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller
and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several
weeks without Justice approval, he said.
"I was angry," Comey testified. "I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have
the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."
[Edited] In a previous release of information as a result of a Freedom of Information suit, it became known that Huma Abedin
had forwarded emails from Clinton's private email server, to Ms. Abedin's personal yahoo email account.
The new bit of news today, is that the FBI found TENS OF THOUSANDS of Clinton related emails on Weiner's (shared with Abedin?)
laptop. I understand that Mrs. Clinton was SOS for four years.
Nevertheless, how do you forward tens of thousands of emails? I don't think it can be a batch operation, they must have
been forwarded individually. And what of the 30,000 destroyed (by Clinton) emails?
The only thing that makes sense, is that the newly discovered emails include some of the missing emails. As Carl Bernstein
(one of the two original Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, which led to Nixon's resignation) said yesterday:
"We don't know what this means yet except that it's a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the
FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is
more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring
serious investigation. So that's where we are..."
Briefly, it seems Podesta received an email "You need to change your password", asked for professional advice from his
staff if it was legit, was told "Yes, you DO need to change your password", but then clicked on the link in the original email,
which was sent him with malicious intent, as he suspected at first and then was inappropriately reassured about - rather than
on the link sent him by the IT staffer.
Result - the "phishing" email got his password info, and the world now gets to see all his emails.
Personally, my hope is that Huma and HRC will be pardoned for all their crimes, by Obama, before he leaves office.
Then I hope that Huma's divorce will go through, and that once Hillary is sworn in she will at last be courageous enough to
divorce Bill (who actually performed the Huma-Anthony Weiner nuptials - you don't have to make these things up).
Then it could happen that the first same-sex marriage will be performed in the White House, probably by the minister of DC's
Foundry United Methodist Church, which has a policy of LBGQT equality. Or maybe Hillary, cautious and middle-of-the-road as usual,
will go to Foundry UMC sanctuary for the ceremony, recognizing that some Americans' sensibilities would be offended by having
the rite in the White House.
As Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan wrote, "Love is all there is, it makes the world go round, love and only love, it can't be denied.
No matter what you think about it, you just can't live without it, take a tip from one who's tried."
"... So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman that is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for POTUS. ..."
WASHINGTON - Senior Justice Department officials warned the FBI that Director James B. Comey's
decision to notify Congress about renewing the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private
email server was not consistent with long-standing practices of the department, according to
officials familiar with the discussions.
"Comely went off the farm all on his own and must answer for his actions. Simple as that."
IMHO that's extremely naďve. Such a "career limiting move"(CLM) in Washington-speak almost
never done "on his own". Exception are whistleblowers like William Binney, who already decided
for themselves that "this is the last stand" and are ready to face consequences.
Few Washington bureaucrats want to became outcasts within the administration, even the lame
duck administration. Bureaucracy, at the end, is just another flavor of a political coalition
and they tend to cling to power by whatever means possible including criminal.
Moreover, Comey so far was viewed as an "Obama man" who abruptly squashed the "emailgate"
investigation instead of expanding it investigating Bill Clinton for his "accidental" meeting
with Loretta Lynch and possibly putting the old fogey on the bench for the obstruction of justice.
And who at the end granted immunity to all key members of Clinton entourage including Huma Abedin
who proved to be, security wise, not the sharpest tool in the shed.
The only plausible explanation that I see is that Comey action reflects a deep split within
the USA elite including internal cracks and pressure within FBI brass (possibly from rank-and-file
investigators, who understand what's going on) as for viability Hillary as the next POTUS.
I would ask you a very simple question: do you really want a POTUS that has, say, 80% probability
to be impeached by the House during the first year of his/her administration?
And any security specialist will tell you that Hillary creation of "shadow IT" within the
State Department is a crime. The behavior that would never be tolerated not only in super-secretive
State Department (which recently assumed some functions previously performed by CIA), but in any
large corporation.
It also might well be that there are new highly compromising evidence (not necessary from
Wiener case) which changed the "grand calculation".
Wikileaks needs to get this out (I have not verified the info sent to me last night):
So here's the REAL story.
Amb. Stevens was sent to Benghazi post haste in order to retrieve US made Stinger
missiles supplied to Ansar al Sharia without Congressional oversight or permission.
Hillary brokered the deal through Stevens and a private arms dealer named Marc Turi.
Then some of the shoulder fired missiles ended up in Afghanistan used against our own military.
It was July 25th, 2012 when a Chinook helicopter was taken down by one of our own Stingers,
but the idiot Taliban didn't arm the missile and the Chinook didn't explode, but had to
land anyway.
An ordnance team recovered the serial number off the missile which led back to a cache
of Stingers being kept in Qatar by the CIA
Obama and Hillary were now in full panic mode and Stevens was sent in to retrieve the
rest of the Stingers. This was a "do-or-die" mission, which explains the stand down orders
given to multiple commando teams.
It was the State Dept, not the CIA that supplied them to our sworn enemies, because Petraeus
wouldn't supply these deadly weapons due to their potential use on commercial aircraft.
Then, Obama threw Gen. Petraeus under the bus after he refused to testify that he OK'd the
BS talking points about a spontaneous uprising due to a Youtube video.
Obama and Hillary committed treason...and THIS is what the investigation is all about,
why she had a private server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and why Obama,
two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was because of a Youtube video,
even though everyone knew it was not.
Further...the Taliban knew that this administration aided and abetted the enemy without
Congressional approval when Boehner created the Select Cmte, and the Taliban began pushing
the Obama Administration for the release of 5 Taliban Generals. Bowe Bergdahl was just a
pawn...everyone KNEW he was a traitor.
So we have a traitor as POTUS that is not only corrupt, but compromised...and a woman
that is a serial liar, perjured herself multiple times at the Hearing whom is running for
POTUS.
Only the Dems, with their hands out, palms up, will support her. Perhaps this is why
no military aircraft was called in because the administration knew our enemies had Stingers.
"... FBI agents looking at Weiners weiner on his laptop, sees tons of Huma emails and Clinton emails, turn and tell their boss they are disgusted with all this and he needs to disrupt her winning office or they are going public. That's what happened! ..."
"... I think you are spot on with that observation. Comey was forced to tell Congress the Clinton e-mail investigation was being reopened. If he did not then sure as hell the existence of those e-mails on the Weiner computer would be leaked. ..."
"... I agree, it is all puppet theatre with some humor added. The more outrageous the more believable, right? ..."
"... It achieves some "unity" around Trump when there wasn't enough going down the home stretch, it became OBVIOUS she's not a winner, which anyone with half a brain has known since she announced? So maybe they are pulling the plug and she's been beat officially? Which leaves the question is Trump for real? ..."
"... I must say, fake or not he fought hard? I like Trump. I hope he realizes if he did decide to do GOOD, he could become very powerful. Why these leaders get to these positions and give it all up for a little greed is beyond me? They could be 10 times more powerful by just being GOOD? You've got the money Trump, if your GOOD, you'll obtain the power? Trump has some political capital and makes him more attractive to the establishment. My guess is, im being too optimistic for good things to happen? I hope Im wrong. ..."
"... The Clintons are a great success story. They never set out to be legal, only not to get sent to jail. By this standard they have succeeded. They have wealth and power and are 2 of the most admired people on earth. Lawyers and fines are just businesses expenses. ..."
"... I want to share my intentions with my fellow ZH Bloggers and Patriots, beginning today, I am going to be sending a series of communications directly to Paul Ryan by using his WEBSITE found at the following URL: http://www.speaker.gov/contact ..."
"... I plan to both encourage and challenge the Speaker. I know many on ZH look at Paul Ryan as a hypocrite. I understand why you may hold this position. I too am very disappointed with recent REPUBLICAN positions and communications. However, now is the time to unite as "WE THE PEOPLE". All of the data is suggesting that leadership within US Government Agencies is corrupted by special interests and their own fleshly nature. We see evidence of TREASON everywhere. But I believe brighter days lie ahead for America at least in the short term. ..."
"... AMERICA has lost her way and this needs to be corrected. ..."
FBI agents looking at Weiners weiner on his laptop, sees tons of Huma emails and Clinton emails, turn and tell their boss
they are disgusted with all this and he needs to disrupt her winning office or they are going public. That's what happened!
I think you are spot on with that observation. Comey was forced to tell Congress the Clinton e-mail investigation was being
reopened. If he did not then sure as hell the existence of those e-mails on the Weiner computer would be leaked.
I agree, it is all puppet theatre with some humor added. The more outrageous the more believable, right?
It achieves some "unity" around Trump when there wasn't enough going down the home stretch, it became OBVIOUS she's not
a winner, which anyone with half a brain has known since she announced? So maybe they are pulling the plug and she's been beat
officially? Which leaves the question is Trump for real?
I must say, fake or not he fought hard? I like Trump. I hope he realizes if he did decide to do GOOD, he could become very
powerful. Why these leaders get to these positions and give it all up for a little greed is beyond me? They could be 10 times
more powerful by just being GOOD? You've got the money Trump, if your GOOD, you'll obtain the power? Trump has some political
capital and makes him more attractive to the establishment. My guess is, im being too optimistic for good things to happen? I
hope Im wrong.
I've been burned so many times by BIG GOV. both DEM & REP? I just cant trust anyone that is near it?
They take lots of ideas from ZH these days, and its not good..... ZH offers them the ideas, the power, and the creativity of
the crowd. They use it against us, a very powerful tool.
The Clintons are a great success story. They never set out to be legal, only not to get sent to jail. By this standard they
have succeeded. They have wealth and power and are 2 of the most admired people on earth. Lawyers and fines are just businesses
expenses.
I want to share my intentions with my fellow ZH Bloggers and Patriots, beginning today, I am going to be sending a series
of communications directly to Paul Ryan by using his WEBSITE found at the following URL:
http://www.speaker.gov/contact
I plan to both encourage and challenge the Speaker. I know many on ZH look at Paul Ryan as a hypocrite. I understand why
you may hold this position. I too am very disappointed with recent REPUBLICAN positions and communications. However, now is the
time to unite as "WE THE PEOPLE". All of the data is suggesting that leadership within US Government Agencies is corrupted by
special interests and their own fleshly nature. We see evidence of TREASON everywhere. But I believe brighter days lie ahead for
America at least in the short term.
AMERICA has lost her way and this needs to be corrected.
I encourage everyone who reads this message to send a note to the SPEAKER encouraging him to do four things:
Get on board the TRUMP/PENCE train no matter what it takes which includes eating "HUMBLE PIE".
Go after Hillary R. Clinton and press for swift and immediate justice.
Enforce existing laws for TREASON that are on the books.
Do whatever it takes to ensure the integrity of the American POTUS Election process. MAKE OUR VOTE COUNT.
I plan to do this today and will be sending the speaker notes and comments from ZH.
If everyone contacts the SPEAKER, he will get the POINT.
GOD's SPEED in whatever you decide to do as a CITIZEN of these UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
In the aftermath of one of the most memorable (c)october shocks in presidential campaign history, Wikileaks continues its ongoing
broadside attack against the Clinton campaign with the relentless Podesta dump, by unveiling another 596 emails in the latest Part
22 of its Podesta release, bringing the total emails released so far to exactly 36,190, leaving less than 30% of the total dump left
to go.
As usual we will go parse through the disclosure and bring you some of the more notable ones.
* * *
In a February 2012 email from Chelsea Clinton's
NYU alias, [email protected], to Podesta and Mills, Bill and Hillary's frustrated
daughter once again points out the "frustration and confusion" among Clinton Foundation clients in the aftermath of the previously
noted scandals plaguing the Clinton consultancy, Teneo:
Over the past few days a few people from the Foundation have reached out to me frustrated or upset about _____ (fill in the
blank largely derived meetings Friday or Monday). I've responded to all w/ essentially the following (ie disintermediating myself,
again, emphatically) below. I also called my Dad last night to tell him of my explicit non-involvement and pushing all back to
you both and to him as I think that is indeed the right answer. Thanks
Sample: Please share any and all concerns, with examples, without pulling punches, with John and Cheryl as appropriate and
also if you feel very strongly with my Dad directly. Transitions are always challenging and to get to the right answer its critical
that voices are heard and understood, and in the most direct way - ie to them without intermediation. Particularly in an effort
to move more toward a professionalism and efficiency at the Foundation and for my father - and they're the decision-makers, my
Dad most of all
I have moved all the sussman money from unity '09 to cap and am reviewing the others . I will assess it and keep you informed
Something else for the DOJ to look into after the elections, perhaps?
* * *
And then there is this email from August 2015
in which German politician Michael Werz advises John Podesta that Turkish president Erdogan "is making substantial investments in
U.S. to counter opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers" and the US Government.
John, heard this second hand but more than once. Seems Erdogan faction is making substantial investments in U.S. to counter
opposition (CHP, Kurds, Gulenists etc.) outreach to policymakers and USG. Am told that the Erdogan crew also tries to make inroads
via donations to Democratic candidates, including yours. Two names that you should be aware of are *Mehmet Celebi* and *Ali Cinar*.
Happy to elaborate on the phone, provided you are not shopping at the liquor store.
This should perhaps explain why the US has so far done absolutely nothing to halt Erdogan's unprecedented crackdown on "coup plotters"
which has seen as many as 100,000 workers lose their jobs, be arrested, or otherwise removed from Erdogan's political opposition.
when bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur schulzburger and asked
for coffee. He made the case that they were treating him like a billionaire dilettante instead
of Third term mayor. It changed the coverage moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom
so people were more conscious of it. But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he's not going to do
a lot more than that.
Hillary would have to be the one to call.
He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social
media. So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent , to
defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw - I pushed pir to do this a yr ago.
I'm guessing Harvard graduate Matt Yglesias is thrilled to find out that Clintonland views
his usefulness primary through the prism of his skin color, particularly given that his family
background not actually all that "brown."
President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused American politicians of whipping up hysteria about a
mythical Russian threat as a ploy to distract voters from their own failings in the run-up to the
U.S. presidential election.
Putin, addressing an audience of foreign policy experts gathered in southern Russia, repeatedly
lashed out at the Obama administration, saying it did not keep its word on Syria, did not honour
deals, and had falsely accused Moscow of all manner of sins.
The U.S. government has formally accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic
Party organisations, while Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has accused Republican rival Donald
Trump of being a Putin "puppet".
Putin said he found it hard to believe that anyone seriously thought Moscow was capable of influencing
the Nov. 8 election.
"Hysteria has been whipped up," said Putin.
He said that was a ruse to cover up for the fact that the U.S. political elite had nothing to
say about serious issues such as the country's national debt or gun control.
War hysteria in a country with imperial nostalgia, one-man rule and a weak economy cannot
be taken lightly.
Michael Khodarkovsky is a professor of history at Loyola University.
[ The fostering of fear of and disdain for Russia is continual now and however false the
characterizations of Russia are, and they are indeed false, the fear and disdain will influence
and be self-defeating for American foreign policy from here till a dramatic change comes from
another administration. I unfortunately find no such change in the offing. ]
progressivism & humanitarianism in war profiteering aka mongering......
"Civilian protective operations" panders a neocon excuse for organized state run murder.
Bill went after the Tsar as soon as his closet neocon found out they could have the Germans
send a mechanized brigade of Warsaw Pact armaments to the Croats and Yeltsin did nothing.
The Russian version of Chamberlain and Munich was Croatian independence.
ilsm -> anne... , -1
Most career military pilots I knew were terrified by the thought of no more perpetual bombing.
They would think Clinton and the neocons can keep a low boil going in the PNAC for another
100 years without tripping into a real war, or bankrupting the USA.
It is a signifier of the moral bankruptcy that the exceptional carry as a badge.
With the "defenses available" to Syria they could enforce no fly zones on GCC and their
blood thirsty allies as as might US over Raqqa.
"... If you say so. For now I'll leave any decisions or actions taken on these outcomes to Russian citizens. I would, however, kindly tell Victoria Nuland and her ilk to fuck off with their senile Cold War fantasies, morally bankrupt, third-rate Great Game machinations, and total spectrum dominance sociopathy. ..."
"... "Personally, I don't believe that Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of Russians do." ..."
"... There's definitely some of 'em hanging about, but yeah it mostly seems to be a motley assortment of oligarchs, gangsters, and grifters tied into international neoliberal capital and money flows. No doubt Russian believe a lot things. I find Americans tend to believe a lot things as well. ..."
"So democratic structures have to be robust and transparent before we care about them?"
No.
My point was it's very misleading. Misleading to set the parameters of discussion on U.S. posture
toward Russia in such a way as to assume that Putin's actions against a purported Russian "democracy"
have anything at all to do with USian antagonism of Russia. I'm sure you'll note current U.S.
military cooperation with that boisterous hotbed of democratic activity, Saudi Arabia, in Yemen.
Our allies in the house of Saud require help in defending their democratic way of life against
the totalitarianism of Yemeni tribes, you see. The U.S. opposes anti-democratic forces whenever
and where ever it can, especially in the Middle East. I guess that explains USian antipathy to
Russia.
"I'd give a pretty high value to an independent press and contested elections."
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what the U.S. looked like with those dynamics in place.
"Those have been slowly crushed in Russia. The results for transparency have not been
great."
If you say so. For now I'll leave any decisions or actions taken on these outcomes to Russian
citizens. I would, however, kindly tell Victoria Nuland and her ilk to fuck off with their senile
Cold War fantasies, morally bankrupt, third-rate Great Game machinations, and total spectrum dominance
sociopathy.
"Personally, I don't believe that Ukraine is governed by fascists, or that Ukraine shot
down that jetliner, but I'm sure a lot of Russians do."
There's definitely some of 'em hanging about, but yeah it mostly seems to be a motley assortment
of oligarchs, gangsters, and grifters tied into international neoliberal capital and money flows.
No doubt Russian believe a lot things. I find Americans tend to believe a lot things as well.
"... The simplest explanation is usually best. All the indicators, especially the support of the donor class, elites of all kinds
etc. points towards a Democratic victory, perhaps a very strong victory if the poll numbers last weekend translate into electoral college
numbers. ..."
I stopped by to check if my comment had cleared moderation. What follows is a more thorough examination (not my own, entirely)
on Corey's point 1, and some data that may point towards a much narrower race than we're led to believe.
The leaked emails from one Democratic super-pac, the over-sampling I cited at zerohedge (@13o) is part of a two-step process
involving over-sampling of Democrats in polls combined with high frequency polling. The point being to encourage media
to promote the idea that the race is already over. We saw quite a bit of this last weekend. Let's say the leaked emails are reliable.
This suggests to me two things: first – the obvious, the race is much closer than the polls indicated, certainly the poll cited
by Corey in the OP. Corey questioned the validity of this poll, at least obliquely. Second, at least one super-pac working with
the campaign sees the need to depress Trump turn-out. The first point is the clearest and the most important – the polls, some
at least, are intentionally tilted to support a 'Hillary wins easily' narrative. The second allows for some possibly useful speculation
regarding the Clinton campaigns confidence in their own GOTV success.
The simplest explanation is usually best. All the indicators, especially the support of the donor class, elites of all
kinds etc. points towards a Democratic victory, perhaps a very strong victory if the poll numbers last weekend translate into
electoral college numbers.
That's a big if. I suggest Hillary continues to lead but by much smaller margins in key states. It's also useful to
point out that Trump's support in traditionally GOP states may well be equally shaky.
And that really is it from me on this topic barring a double digit swing to Hillary in the LA Times poll that has the race
at dead even.
Layman 10.25.16 at 11:31 am
kidneystones:
"The leaked emails from one Democratic super-pac, the over-sampling I cited at zerohedge (@13o) is part of a two-step
process involving over-sampling of Democrats in polls combined with high frequency polling."
Excellent analysis, only the email in question is eight years old. And it refers to a request for internal polling done by
the campaign. And it suggests over-sampling of particular demographics so the campaign could better assess attitudes among those
demographics.
And this is a completely normal practice which has nothing to do with the polling carried out by independent third parties
(e.g. Gallup, Ipsos, etc) for the purposes of gauging and reporting to the public the state of the race.
And when pollsters to over-sample, the over-sampling is used for analysis but is not reflected in the top-line poll results.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed
the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political
organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and
WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations
of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the
US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow-the Russians have used similar tactics
and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We
believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most
officials could have authorized these activities.
First of all the fact that intelligence community issue a statement on such a matter is
very strange. There is executive branch and three letter agencies should generally keep their
mouth shut and allow others to voice the concerns, etc.
This might be a sigh of complete disorganization of executive branch with intelligence agencies
becoming a power players. Kind of "Deep State" morphing into "surface state".
There are might be also multiple valid reasons for disclosing such a sensitive information:
1. I want your money stupid Pinocchio.
2. Smoke screen to hide their own nefarious activities and/or blunders within the USA. Actually
existence of Hillary private server is somewhat incompatible with the existence of NSA.
This is one thing when Podesta using gmail. It's quite another when the Secretary of state
uses "bathroom server" with incompetent or semi-competent tech staff and completely clueless
entourage.
3. Pre-emptive strike reflecting some internal struggle within US Intelligence community
itself with a neocon faction going "all in" to force the viewpoint, and more aggressive toward
Russia stance, which might not be shared by others.
Please note that CIA and DOD are fighting each other in Iraq and Syria to a certain extent.
4. Increase Anti-Russian hysteria, which helps Hillary as a candidate of neocon establishment.
5. Russians might recently uncover some nefarious activities (I heard FSB did discover compromised
computers in some ministries) and this is the preparation for the blowback.
The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and
by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed
efforts....
-- Joint Statement from the Department of Homeland Security
and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security
[ "Consistent with the methods and motivations..." is a shocking supposition to be made
public, but we have been subject to such suppositions, seemingly with increasing frequency,
for these last 15 years. ]
Weapons of Mass Destruction! We have irrefutable evidence! Yellowcake!
Keith B. Alexander:"Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds
of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false From my perspective, this is absolute
nonsense."
...
Senator Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of
millions of Americans?"
DNI Clapper"No, sir."
Senator Wyden: "It does not?"
DNI Clapper:"Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect,
but not wittingly."
The [IN]operative word there was "collect" which in NSAspeak does not mean... collect.
Not shocking at all unless you are ignorant about tracing and analyzing hacks. The traces and
approaches are like fingerprints. Nobody in the business have any doubts that the Russians
did this - but they will never give you the details of how they got to that conclusion, because
this is a public website and the hacking wars are like the missile wars, if the other side
knows what you got they can counter it and make your job harder.
likbez -> DeDude... , -1
You might be a little bit naďve as for traces.
The first rule of such activities on state level is to pretend that you are somebody else
deliberately leaving false clues (IP space, keyboard layout, etc), everything that you call
traces.
Historically it was the USA that started cyberwar and who developed the most advanced capabilities
in this space. Remember the worm which tried to subvert functionality of Iranian centrifuges
electronics using specially designed malware and Trojans like Flame?
Using botnets essentially gives anybody substantial freedom about what IP space you want
to use. You can pretend to be Russian if you want to and use computers from Russian IP space.
More "paranoid claptrap" (or should that be Clappertrap?):
Edward Snowden: "...the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. Seeing that really meant for me there was
no going back."
That's not untrue, but it seems to me to be getting worse.
Or at least, we had been making progress, but now we are seeing a massive regression. There
have always been racists and misogynists but they used to be hidden under rocks, and the GOP
used to take pains to make their dog whistles to them subtle.
Trump really has brought them out and given the gen a sense of validation and community.
Though my working theory is that he merely hopped on to an existing trend, driven by the
way digital media allows people to create their own comfortable ideological bubbles and find
community for whatever spiteful, paranoid or asinine beliefs people have. This includes left
and right, though pretty obviously the wingnuts on the right dominate their party and have
more numbers and power.
Speaking as someone who grew up under segregation in Oklahoma in the 50s and 60s, it has been
getting progressively worse since the 1980s (it did did significantly better from 1968- the
early 80s). Nixon started this with his "Southern Strategy" and Reagan dialed it up with his
"Welfare Queens" and "strapping young bucks." All Trump did was replace the dog whistles with
a bullhorn.
"That's not untrue, but it seems to me to be getting worse."
Because of economic stagnation and anxiety among lower class Republicans.
Trump blames immigration and trade unlike traditional elite Republicans. These are economic
issues.
Trump supporters no longer believe or trust the Republican elite who they see as corrupt
which is partly true.
They've been backing Nixon, Reagan, Bush etc and things are just getting worse. They've
been played.
Granted it's complicated and partly they see their side as losing and so are doubling down
on the conservatism, racism, sexism etc.
But Trump *brags* that he was against the Iraq war. That's not an elite Republican opinion.
likbez -> DrDick... , -1
My impression is that Trump_vs_deep_state is more about dissatisfaction of the Republican base with the
Republican brass (which fully endorsed neoliberal globalization), the phenomenon somewhat similar
to Sanders.
Working class and lower middle class essentially abandoned DemoRats (Clinton democrats)
after so many years of betrayal and "they have nowhere to go" attitude.
Looks like they have found were to go this election cycle and this loss of the base is probably
was the biggest surprise for neoliberal Democrats.
Now they try to forge the alliance of highly paid professionals who benefitted from globalization("creative
class"), financial speculators and minorities. Which does not look like a stable coalition
to me.
Some data suggest that among unions which endorsed Hillary 3 out of 4 members will vote against
her. And that are data from union brass. Lower middle class might also demonstrate the same
pattern this election cycle.
In other words both Parties are now split and have two mini-parties inside. I am not sure
that Sanders part of Democratic party would support Hillary. The wounds caused by DNC betrayal
and double dealing are still too fresh.
We have something like what Marxists call "revolutionary situation" when the elite loses
control of "peons". And existence of Internet made MSM propaganda far less effective that it
would be otherwise.
Last week, Jame O'keefe and Project Veritas Action potentially
altered the course of the U.S. election, or at a minimum raised serious doubts about the practices of the Clinton campaign and
the DNC, after releasing two undercover videos that revealed efforts of democrat operatives to incite violence at republican rallies
and commit "mass voter fraud." While democrats have vehemently denied the authenticity of the videos, two democratic operatives,
Robert Creamer and Scott Foval, have both been forced to resign over the allegations.
Many democrats made the rounds on various mainstream media outlets over the weekend in an attempt to debunk the Project Veritas
videos. Unfortunately for them, O'Keefe fired back with warnings that part 3 of his multi-part series was forthcoming and would
implicate Hillary Clinton directly.
Anything happens to me, there's a deadman's switch on Part III, which will be released Monday.
@HillaryClinton and
@donnabrazile implicated.
Now, we have the 3rd installment of O'Keefe's videos which does seemingly reveal direct coordination between Hillary Clinton,
Donna Brazile, Robert Creamer and Scott Foval to organize a smear campaign over Trump's failure to release his tax returns. Per
Project Veritas :
Part III of the undercover Project Veritas Action investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic
politics. It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton's campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization
Americans United for Change. And, it's all disguised as a duck. In this video, several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists
catch Democracy Partners founder directly implicating Hillary Clinton in FEC violations. " In the end, it was the candidate,
Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground," says Creamer in one of several
exchanges. "So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground." It is made clear that high-level DNC operative Creamer realized
that this direct coordination between Democracy Partners and the campaign would be damning when he said: "Don't repeat that
to anybody."
Within the video both Clinton and Brazile are directly implicated by Creamer during the following exchange:
"The duck has to be an Americans United for Change entity. This had to do only with some problem between Donna Brazile and
ABC, which is owned by Disney, because they were worried about a trademark issue. That's why. It's really silly.
We originally launched this duck because Hillary Clinton wants the duck .
In any case, so she really wanted this duck figure out there doing this stuff, so that was fine. So, we put all these ducks
out there and got a lot of coverage. And Trump taxes. And then ABC/Disney went crazy because they thought our original slogan
was 'Donald ducks his taxes, releasing his tax returns."
They said it was a trademark issue. It's not, but anyway, Donna Brazile had a connection with them and she didn't want to
get sued. So we switched the ownership of the duck to Americans United for Change and now our signs say 'Trump ducks releasing
his tax returns.' And we haven't had anymore trouble."
As Project Veritas points out, this direct coordination between Clinton, Brazile and Americans United For Change is a violation
of federal election laws:
"The ducks on the ground are likely 'public communications' for purposes of the law. It's political activity opposing Trump,
paid for by Americans United For Change funds but controlled by Clinton/her campaign."
"As Project Veritas points out, this direct coordination between Clinton, Brazile and Americans United For Change is a violation
of federal election laws "
Yeah, you pretty much got the head shot there. Unfortunately, no gun to shoot it from. The enforcement authorities all work
FOR the Democrat party.
Full spectrum dominance. It's a bitch. Even if you catch them red-haned there's no "authorities" to report it to that will
listen to you.
Remember what happened to Planned Parenthood when they were caught red-handed selling human tissue for profit (which is also
illegal)? That's right. Nothing. Same thing here.
The problem is that the MSM isn't reporting on any of this stuff about Hillary. And, the Republicans in office aren't on the news
at all to talk about any of this. So, the only place it is reported is on the Trump campaign trail where just a few thousand hear
about.
If the media won't report it and the Republicans won't talk about it, Hillary gets a pass. The audience for sites like ZH and
Drudge are just preaching to the chior and not reaching the people who could change their minds or haven't made up their minds.
froze25 -> ImGumbydmmt •Oct 24, 2016 3:40 PM
What this video is, is evidence of collusion between a campaign and a SuperPac. That is illegal in a criminal court. This is enough
to open an investigation, problem is nothing will be done by Nov 8th. All we can do is share it non-stop.
Bastiat d Haus-Targaryen •Oct 24, 2016 2:11 PM
Don't discount the Enquirer: remember who took down Gary Hart and John Edwards:
Hillary Clinton's shady Mr. Fix It will tell all on TV tonight, just days after his explosive confession in The National ENQUIRER
hit the stands.
The man who's rocked Washington, D.C., will join Sean Hannity on tonight's episode of "Hannity" - airing on the FOX News Channel
at 10 p.m. EST - to reveal his true identity at last.
"... Yes if next week motherland security and other 3 letter govt. are crying they need more cash to fight this then just maybe they did to themselves. ..."
"... Internet hacks - it's this election cycle's white power in an envelope! ..."
"... I would laugh so hard if a selection of sites [that] were shut down. ..."
"... We so need to officially declare this whole bloody mess a parody: ..."
I would laugh so hard if a selection of sites [that] were shut down. Waaah! Assange won't shut up!
So Twitter, WL.org, Reddit, where else would make good spots to shut down discussion in these
last days before the election. WL thought they had a good marketing gimmick going with the drip,
drip and who knows maybe a special event for C's birthday? or creating a November surprise (I
really liked that idea as it reflects how quickly info moves)
The petty back and forth between C and WL on top is a sight.
"... Submitted by Darius Shahtamasebi via TheAntiMedia.org, ..."
"... Consider the source. Biden is a blowhard and an embarassment. He said it for domestic consumption. Obama knows the Russians are not responsible and he will do nothing. ..."
"... > ... "... Joe Biden's statement that the White House was preparing to send Vladimir Putin a "message" ..." ..."
"... Absolutely. If the US and Russia got together - talk about a SUPERPOWER. The NeoCons are way too stupid to realize what a win-win this could be ..."
"... "Americans marvel at the level and effectiveness of brainwashing in North Korea, and express shock that North Koreans revere Kim Jung-un as god, but the truth is that Americans are every bit as brainwashed and just as effectively. The god most Americans worship today is materialism." ..."
"... the patriot VA state Senator who knows the truth as well https://www.sott.net/article/318592-Virginia-State-Senator-Richard-Black... ..."
This past week, America's oldest continuously published weekly magazine, the Nation, asked the
question : has the White House declared war on Russia?
As the two nuclear powers sabre-rattle over conflicts within Syria, and to some extent, over the
Ukrainian crisis, asking these questions to determine who will pull the trigger first has become
more paramount than it was at the peak of the Cold War.
The Nation's contributing editor, Stephen F. Cohen, reported Vice President Joe Biden's statement
that the White House was preparing to send Vladimir Putin a "message" - most likely in the form of
a cyber attack - amounted to a virtual "American declaration of war on Russia" in Russia's eyes.
Biden's threat is reportedly in response to allegations that Russia hacked Democratic Party offices
in order to disrupt the presidential election.
Chuck Todd, host of the "Meet the Press" on NBC,
asked Joe Biden: "Why haven't we sent a message yet to Putin?"
Biden responded, "We are sending a message [to Putin] We have a capacity to do it, and "
"He'll know it?" Todd interrupted.
"He'll know it. It will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will
have the greatest impact," the U.S. vice president replied.
What are the effects of this kind of rhetoric when dealing with international relations? Western
media decided to pay little attention to Biden's statements, yet his words have stunned Moscow. As
reported by the Nation:
" Biden's statement, which clearly had been planned by the White House, could scarcely have
been more dangerous or reckless - especially considering that there is no actual evidence or logic
for the two allegations against Russia that seem to have prompted it."
The statements will not come without any measured response from Russia. According to presidential
spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Russia's
response
is well underway:
"The fact is, US unpredictability and aggression keep growing, and such threats against Moscow
and our country's leadership are unprecedented, because the threat is being announced at the level
of the US Vice President. Of course, given such an aggressive, unpredictable line, we have to
take measures to protect our interests, somehow hedge the risks."
The fact that our media refuses to pay attention to the dangers of our own establishment in sending
warnings to adverse nuclear powers based on unasserted allegations shows our media is playing a very
dangerous game with us - the people. This attempt to pull the wool over our eyes and prepare us for
a direct confrontation with Russia can be seen clearly in the battle for Aleppo, Syria.
As the Nation astutely noted:
"Only a few weeks ago, President Obama had agreed with Putin on a joint US-Russian military
campaign against 'terrorists' in Aleppo. That agreement collapsed primarily because of an
attack by US warplanes
on Syrian forces. Russia and its Syrian allies continued their air assault on east Aleppo now,
according to Washington and the mainstream media, against anti-Assad 'rebels.' Where, asks Cohen,
have the jihad terrorists gone? They had been deleted from the US narrative, which now accused
Russia of 'war crimes' in Aleppo for the same military campaign in which Washington was to have
been a full partner."
So where is this conflict headed? A top U.S. general, Marine General Joseph Dunford,
told the
Senate Armed Services Committee in September of this year that the enforcement of a "no-fly zone"
in Syria would mean a U.S. war with both Syria and Russia. Hillary Clinton is well aware of the repercussions
of this war, as she acknowledged in a
secret
speech to Goldman Sachs (recently released by Wikileaks):
"To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located
in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our
pilots at risk - you're going to kill a lot of Syrians So all of a sudden this intervention that
people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians."
This is the same establishment that has been calling out Russia for allegedly committing war crimes
in Aleppo even though Clinton's proposal would result in far more civilian deaths and likely lead
to a direct war with Russia.
As the war against Syria transitions into a much wider global conflict that could include nuclear
powers Russia and China, our own media is deceiving us by dishonestly reporting on the events leading
up to the
activation of the doomsday clock.
History doesn't occur in a vacuum; when the U.S. and Russia confront each other directly, it won't
be because of a mere incident occurring in Syrian airspace.
It will be because the two nuclear powers have been confronting each other with little resistance
from the corporate media, which keeps us well entertained and preoccupied with political
charades
, celebrity gossip
, and outright
propaganda .
Zacktly. It's the NSA who is leaking the crooked DNC emails. Not Vlad.
MalteseFalcon d 847328_3527 •Oct 23, 2016 8:50 PM
"What are the effects of this kind of rhetoric when dealing with international relations?
"
Consider the source. Biden is a blowhard and an embarassment. He said it for domestic consumption.
Obama knows the Russians are not responsible and he will do nothing.
... "... Several US, Turkish, Saudi, Qatari and British officers were
also killed along with the Israeli officers. The foreign officers who were killed in
the Aleppo operations room were directing the terrorists' attacks in Aleppo and Idlib. ..."
This is why Israhell is furious with this Prez. And why they are seen in the Podesta emails
making sure that none of 'those two-state solution' people get into key foreign/defense posts
under Her Fury.
It's going to be all war, all the time, boys, according to Israeli timetables and objectives.
Unless We The People say NO on Nov. 8 and make it stick.
Interesting that you bring up the "two-state solution" speculation along those lines goes like
this. Clinton & Rabin were working on a two-state solution Rabin was assinated and Clinton was
trolled by a modern day "Esther" to ensnare Clinton and destroy the two-state solution. You heard
it here first on ZH my friend
Anti-colonial agenda. Plus, Barry was bottom bitch to his Paki lover back in the day.
Mandel Bot -> jmack •Oct 23, 2016 8:33 PM
Absolutely. If the US and Russia got together - talk about a SUPERPOWER. The NeoCons are
way too stupid to realize what a win-win this could be.
ebworthen •Oct 23, 2016 7:59 PM
Hitlary and the M.I.C. (and Wall Street/D.C. Imperial City) have no idea how much at risk they
put themselves and the rest of us.
Russia has been here and where America never has been, and they have defeated many, many, a
foe. Abject stupidity to poke the Russian bear and disrespect our agreements post WWII and Cold
War.
Shameful, absolutely shameful! Rot in HELL you D.C. Vichy!
RawPawg •Oct 23, 2016 7:59 PM
Meanwhile...in 'Merica. Sunday afternoon Football stands are Full. very surreal given the times
we live in,eh?
Lost in translation -> RawPawg •Oct 23, 2016 8:23 PM
After I explained that Americans don't care about the Podesta emails as long as the NFL is
on, and have no idea what WikiLeaks is but can tell you everything about the NLCS, Mrs. Lost said...
"Americans marvel at the level and effectiveness of brainwashing in North Korea, and express
shock that North Koreans revere Kim Jung-un as god, but the truth is that Americans are every
bit as brainwashed and just as effectively. The god most Americans worship today is materialism."
The native Orthodox Christian Russian people took back their nation when they collapsed the
Soviet Union and drove the mass murdering Bolsheviks out, many of whom came to the US & EU nations
""You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They
hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred, they tortured and slaughtered
millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated, Bolshevism
committed the greatest slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and
uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators"""
Agreed. Just because we have a mad president, please don't think that we Americans are mad
(in the British sense of the word). We wish the Russian people no harm. In fact, many of us, myself
included, cheer your efforts in Syria to wipe out the rabid dogs of ISIS.
Please keep bombing the living shit out of them. And this is important, so please listen carefully...
"... I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite. ..."
"... But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid. ..."
"... In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to governance of such a huge country crook. ..."
The key problems with Democratic Party and Hillary is that they lost working class and middle
class voters, becoming another party of highly paid professionals and Wall Street speculators
(let's say top 10%, not just 1%), the party of neoliberal elite.
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time. I think it will not. Even upper middle class is very resentful
of Democrats and Hillary. So many votes will be not "for" but "against". This is the scenario
Democratic strategists fear the most, but they can do nothing about it.
She overplayed "identity politics" card. Her "identity politics" and her fake feminism are
completely insincere. She is completely numb to human suffering and interests of females and minorities.
Looks like she has a total lack of empathy for other people.
"What scares me is my knowledge of her career-long investment in trying to convince the
generals and the admirals that she is a 'tough bitch', ala Margaret Thatcher, who will not
hesitate to pull the trigger. An illuminating article in the NY Times (
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-a-hawk.html ) revealed
that she always advocates the most muscular and reckless dispositions of U.S. military forces
whenever her opinion is solicited. "
Usually people are resentful about Party which betrayed them so many times. It would be interesting
to see how this will play this time.
Beverly Mann October 23, 2016 12:00 pm
It will be interesting to see if yet another attempt to "bait and switch" working class and
lower middle class works this time?
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand over
to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC, the FCC,
the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including the Antitrust
Division)-to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
And then there's the incessant push to privatize Social Security and Medicare. It ain't the
Dems that are pushing that.
You're drinking wayyy too much Kool Aid, likbez. Or maybe just reading too much Ayn Rand, at
Paul Ryan's recommendation.
beene October 23, 2016 10:31 am
I would suggest despite most of the elite in both parties supporting Hillary, and saying
she has the election in the bag is premature. In my opinion the fact that Trump rallies still
has large attendance; where Hillary's rallies would have trouble filling up a large room is a
better indication that Trump will win.
Even democrats are not voting democratic this time to be ignored till election again.
likbez October 23, 2016 12:56 pm
Beverly,
=== quote ===
Yup. The Republicans definitely have the interests of the working class and lower middle class
at heart when they give, and propose, ever deeper tax cuts for the wealthy, the repeal of the
estate tax that by now applies only to estates of more than $5 million, complete deregulation
of the finance industry, industry capture of every federal regulatory agency and cabinet department
and commission or board, from the SEC, to the EPA, to the Interior Dept. (in order to hand
over to the oil, gas and timber industries vast parts of federal lands), the FDA, the FTC,
the FCC, the NLRB, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Justice Dept. (including
the Antitrust Division) -- to name only some.
And OF COURSE it's to serve the interests of the working class and lower middle class that
they concertedly appoint Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges that are unabashed
proxies of big business.
=== end of quote ===
This is all true. But Trump essentially running not as a Republican but as an independent on
(mostly) populist platform (with elements of nativism). That's why a large part of Republican
brass explicitly abandoned him. That does not exclude that he easily will be co-opted after the
election, if he wins.
And I would not be surprised one bit if Dick Cheney, Victoria Nuland, Paul Wolfowitz and Perle
vote for Hillary. Robert Kagan and papa Bush already declared such an intention. She is a neocon.
A wolf in sheep clothing, if we are talking about real anti-war democrats, not the USA brand of
DemoRats. She is crazy warmonger, no question about it, trying to compensate a complete lack of
diplomatic skills with jingoism and saber rattling.
The problem here might be that you implicitly idealize Hillary and demonize Trump.
I would agree that Trump is horrible candidate. The candidate who (like Hillary) suggests
complete degeneration of the US neoliberal elite.
But the problem is that Hillary is even worse. Much worse and more dangerous because in
addition to being a closet Republican she is also a warmonger. In foreign policy area she is John
McCain in pantsuit. And if you believe that after one hour in White House she does not abandon
all her election promises and start behaving like a far-right republican in foreign policy and
a moderate republican in domestic policy, it's you who drunk too much Cool Aid.
That's what classic neoliberal DemoRats "bait and switch" maneuver (previously executed
by Obama two times) means. And that's why working class now abandoned Democratic Party. Even unions
members of unions which endorses Clinton are expected to vote 3:1 against her. Serial betrayal
of interests of working class (and lower middle class) after 25 years gets on nerve. Not that
their choice is wise, but they made a choice. This is "What's the matter with Kansas" all over
again.
It reminds me the situation when Stalin was asked whether right revisionism of Marxism (social
democrats) or left (Trotskyites with their dream of World revolution) is better. He answered "both
are worse" :-).
In other words, the USA [workers and middle class] now is in the political position that
in chess is called Zugzwang: we face a choice between the compulsive liar, unrepentant, extremely
dangerous and unstable warmonger with failing health vs. a bombastic, completely unprepared to
governance of such a huge country crook.
Of course, we need also remember about existence of "deep state" which make each of
them mostly a figurehead, but still the power of "deep state" is not absolute and this is a very
sad situation.
Beverly Mann, October 23, 2016 1:57 pm
Good grace.
Two points: First, you apparently are unaware of Trump's proposed tax plan, written by Heritage
Foundation economists and political-think-tank types. It's literally more regressively extreme
evn than Paul Ryan's. It gives tax cuts to the wealthy that are exponentially more generous percentage-wise
than G.W. Bush's two tax cuts together were, it eliminates the estate tax, and it gives massive
tax cuts to corporations, including yuge ones.
Two billionaire Hamptons-based hedge funders, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, have
been funding a super PAC for Trump and since late spring have met with Trump and handed him policy
proposals and suggestions for administrative agency heads and judicial appointments. Other yuge
funders are members of the Ricketts family, including Thomas Ricketts, CEO of TD Ameritrade and
a son of its founder.
Two other billionaires funding Trump: Forrest Lucas, founder of Lucas Oil and reportedly Trump's
choice for Interior Secretary if you and the working class and lower middle class folks whose
interests Trump has at heart get their way.
And then there's Texas oil billionaire Harold Hamm, Trump's very first billionaire mega-donor.
One of my recurring pet peeves about Clinton and her campaign is her failure to tell the public
that these billionaires are contributing mega-bucks to help fund Trump's campaign, and to tell
the public who exactly they are. As well as her failure to make a concerted effort to educate
the public about the the specifics of Trump's fiscal and deregulatory agenda as he has published
it.
As for your belief that I idealize Clinton, you obviously are very new to Angry Bear. I was
a virulent Sanders supporter throughout the primaries, to the very end. In 2008 I originally supported
John Edwards during the primaries and then, when it became clear that it was a two-candidate race,
supported Obama. My reason? I really, really, REALLY did not want to see another triangulation
Democratic administration. That's largely what we got during Obama's first term, though, and I
was not happy about it.
Bottom line: I'm not the gullible one here. You are.
likbez, October 23, 2016 2:37 pm
You demonstrate complete inability to weight the gravity of two dismal, but unequal in their
gravity options.
All your arguments about Supreme Court justices, taxes, inheritance and other similar things
make sense if and only if the country continues to exist.
Which is not given due to the craziness and the level of degeneration of neoliberal elite and
specifically Hillary ("no fly zone in Syria" is one example of her craziness). Playing chickens
with a nuclear power for the sake of proving imperial dominance in Middle East is a crazy policy.
Neocons rule the roost in both parties, which essentially became a single War Party with two
wings. Trump looks like the only chance somewhat to limit their influence and reach some détente
with Russia.
Looks like you organically unable to understand that your choice in this particular case is
between the decimation of the last remnants of the New Deal and a real chance of WWIII.
This is not "pick your poison" situation. Those are two events of completely difference magnitude:
one is reversible (and please note that Trump is bound by very controversial obligations to his
electorate and faces hostile Congress), the other is not.
We all should do our best to prevent the unleashing WWIII even if that means temporary decimation
of the remnants of New Deal.
Neoliberalism after 2008 entered zombie state, so while it is still strong, aggressive and
bloodthirsty it might not last for long. And in such case the defeat of democratic forces on domestic
front is temporary.
So what are people's sense of Clinton re Russia? Is it hubris, stupidity, or conspiracy, or
some combination of the three? I ask because her Wall Street speeches and foreshadowed Grand Bargain
are clearly conspiratorial; while her nonchalant violation of every security protocol seems pure
hubris; I guess I don't see how war with Russia could really benefit her that much, unless she
thinks it's the one thing that can keep her from being impeached; is that it, or is it something
else that's driving this, or just stupidity?
All the very serious people know the Russians are gonna cave. Who would fight a nuclear war
for Syria/ukraine? They can't match the US conventionally so we can just bleed them till they
let go.
It's been pointed out here that wargame scenarios of Russia vs NATO usually come out with Russia
winning. Why wouldn't that apply to other areas as well?
The War on Terra is getting tiresome and as pointed out above doesn't justify the really big
hardware, aircraft carriers, tanks etc.
They need a bigger enemy to keep the $$$ flowing from the chump taxpayer's pockets to billionaire
Raytheon shareholders' accounts in Panama. She serves Money and Death, and does a really good
job of it. You'd even say she's an expert.
And one point: GE owns NBC, and GE makes billions from war machines. Can't have a president
who might slow down the revenue stream, better yet to get a woman to put a friendly face on WW
III and why we need it so badly. Kinda like getting a young African American to sell health care
extraction and bank crimes and how they're really good, if just more young people would sign up
and if people would just stop "peddling fiction" about how awesome the economy is.
Oops! Good news then, I guess we really do have a diverse and unbiased press with no interest
is furthering the prospects of one candidate over another.
WJ wrote about Clinton on Russia: " Is it hubris, stupidity, or conspiracy, or some combination
of the three?"
Or is it that she thinks that the USA can fight a war against Russia, and win?
I suspect that a lot of the US foreign policy establishment are feeling bullish about their
BMD systems. They feel sure that they have finally escaped the toils of MAD. In other words, they
feel convinced, if it comes down to it, the USA can affordably prevail over Russia in a war at
any level of escalation, even though that would demand that the USA launch first strike.
If you want to see arrogance, just wait to see how that US elite behaves after they
win a major war, and come to enjoy truly unchecked power.
I'm sure. Luckily odds are most of us will be dead before that happens. Because it will either
be a long long time from now OR most of the country will be destroyed before victory can be declared
long enough to gloat.
If it weren't for the fact that it is a such a godawful idea for everyone BUT the elites, I'd
almost like to see the latter possibility which includes the loss of a whole lot of very expensive
"toys". But there are still humans attached to those toys, it will take a lot for them to get
they aren't winning, and even then they won't take responsibility for the massive amounts of damage
their hubris and sociopathy have caused – see Clinton in re either Honduras or Libya or both.
I'm pretty sure the Pentagon does NOT believe that our BMD systems can protect against a full
scale Russian ICBM attack on the US mainland. I would hope if any foreign policy types believed
so, they would be quickly garroted from behind with piano wire.
Then again, maybe they did go ahead and convert a bunch of West Virginia coal mines to luxury
condos, like Dr. Strangelove suggested.
Russia has re-stated their policy not to strike first. By contrast, in 2012 Obama reversed
America's long-standing commitment not to do so.
That we are even discussing this shows just how far the War Party and their money pig-men have
descended into true clinical mental illness territory, Dr. Strangelove has nothing on the levels
of reality-bending criminal insanity of our Dear Leaders.
No idea if this is accurate or not, but Wikipedia states that BMD systems are not effective
against ICBMs, which can now travel at hypersonic (Mach 5-6) speeds delivering up to eight separate
warheads (!) with pinpoint accuracy. So that's something to look forward to.
I do like the piano wire remedy :-{). There are a bunch of people in the State Department that
signed a memo recently that clearly fit the requisite description for its use.
"In the run up to the Iraq War when false intelligence abounded and dominated the discussion,"
The problem is that you see everything through a Donkey vs Elephant prism in stark Manichean terms.
People see the elite lying over the Iraq war - which Trump brags he opposed - and then they see
the elite Hillary and DNC using Russia interference as a way to distract for the content of the leaked
emails.
They don't see Hillary as their champion, just another lying elite.
Obama's NSA chief blatantly lied to the American people and said they weren't spying on us en
masse.
Why should we trust them about anything?
If (when) Hillary is elected I'm sure she'll make Russia pay if it's behind these hacks. Otherwise
Russia is an excuse not to discuss the hacked email.
Maybe Putin is that stupid and he feels threatened over the way Hillary championed the democratic
opposition in a recent election, but it seems to me to be colossally stupid for Russia to pick a
fight with the U.S.
You don't think Hillary is going to push back if (when) she's elected? Given that she's a hawk
and was courting the support of hawks like Paul Wolfowitz during the election she was probably going
to push Russia anyway no matter the hacking.
I think many Americans are deeply skeptical by now of the competence, aims and basic good will
of much of the US foreign policy establishment. Faced with a choice between the Putin approach
to global security and stability, and that represented by the zealot, neocon-tilting HRC wing
of the US establishment, it's a tough call.
Clinton has had abundant opportunity to attempt to distance herself from the many Iraq-era
neocons who are embracing her campaign. She hasn't. That is telling and worrisome.
The crazily prejudiced disdain * that folks at the Economist have for Russia by the way extends
to China. The Economist reflects perfectly the British regret that China is no longer part of
what was a sun-never-sets empire. As for Russia, the prejudiced disdain that has been fostered
by the foreign policy establishment is blinding.
What was the position of the economist on invading Iraq? Right.
Someone who a few months ago told me "no one is stupid enough to want war with Russia", just
this week changed that to "no one wants a hot war" and "we don't have the troops for a hot war"
because well it turns out that Clinton knows the no fly zone will mean war with Russia.
Sadly this is one of the many who think that Clinton is the sane one.
Everything tells me that whatever the real goal (and no it is not obvious what that is) Hillary
Rodham Clinton is stupid enough to not care about war with Russia, doesn't understand that we
don't have the troops for a hot war, and frankly is perfectly willing to play chicken with a nuclear
power killing this country in the process. So far, Putin has been far saner than Hillary Clinton
has ever been, but I'm pretty damn sure his patience is wearing out. I can only hope that Europe
begins to wake up and realize that America following the wishes of SA and Israel are causing their
refugee problems NOT Russia. And sanely decide that following America further down the rat hole
is a loser for them and the world, because that might be the only thing that wakes them up from
their fevered dream.
Luckily (for the planet) I suspect Putin is content to play the long game - increase the alliance
(especially economic) with China, build up relationships with e.g. Iran and Turkey (and now cf
Philippines), and most of all court the EU states who are most terrified of increased sabre-rattling
by the US.
It is so bizarre that in such an unstable world with such critical issues - global warming,
horrific global debt and faltering bubble-based economies, Mideast chaos - HRC and her cronies
think it is a good idea to stir up trouble with Russia! Talk about "opportunity cost" at the very
least.
The War on Terror has never really been profitable enough for the military-industrial complex,
and anyway may be approaching its sell-by date. The MIC wanted a return to big-platform - aircraft
carriers, big ships, enormously expensive new planes, and missile systems, big artillery - programs
and spending.
For big-platform spending you need a big-platform enemy to justify it. Hence, the Russkies.
Patrick Cockburn is good on this.
Not incidentally, the arms industry of the early 20th century was a big reason for WWI; probably
including in July 1914 being behind the assassination of Jean Jaurčs, a top French socialist,
who was blocking it.
The fun one to watch today is the US Army versus the CIA (Milo Minderbinder would be thrilled).
In Iraq the US Army is supporting the government against al-Qaeda in Mosul. In Syria of course
the CIA is backing al-Qaeda in Aleppo against the government.
So the breathless press coverage of the son et lumiere of the Mosul push is turning
into a dud. Why? Because al-Qaeda is slinking away out of Mosul. But where are they going? Oh,
look, the US is helpfully providing buses to take 6000 of them to the fight in Syria, once they
cross that imaginary line known as "the border" they magically turn into good guys again.
Cue John McCain high-fiving! And cue Lurch our Secretary of State, telling
the UN and the world that Russia is the one that is guilty of war crimes. LOLOLOLOL
For months she had only intimated it, or delegated the real dirty work to her surrogates and campaign
staff, but at the final televised debate this week Hillary Clinton finally let loose: Donald Trump
is "a puppet" of the Kremlin, she declared.
It's worth pausing to consider just how extreme and incendiary that allegation is. For Trump
to be a "puppet" of a hostile foreign power-especially Russia, arguably America's oldest continuous
adversary-would be an event of earth-shaking magnitude, unrivaled in all U.S. history. It would
mean that by some nefarious combination of subterfuge and collusion, the sinister Russian leader
Vladimir Putin had managed to infiltrate our political system at its very core, executing a
Manchurian Candidate -style scheme that would've been dismissed as outlandish in even the
most hyperbolic 1960s-era espionage movie script.
Trump is often accused of violating the "norms" that typically govern the tenor of U.S. presidential
campaigns. And these accusations very often have validity: at the same debate, he declined to
preemptively endorse the legitimacy of the election outcome, which appears to be without precedent.
As everyone is now keenly aware, he's unleashed a constant torrent of brash histrionics that defy
discursive standards and violate "norms" of many kinds-You're rigged! I'm rigged! We're all rigged!
But Hillary too violated a longstanding norm this week with her "puppet" screed, which was
the culmination of her campaign's months-long effort to tarnish Trump as a secret Russian lackey
using the kind of retrograde nomenclature ("Puppet"? Really?) that would've made even the most
hardened old-time Cold Warrior blush. Because of Hillary's barb, there will henceforth be a precedent
for accusing a rival major-party nominee of being a stealth agent of a fearsome foreign power,
based on only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.
Extrapolating from Trump's stated belief that cooperation, rather than antagonism, with nuclear-armed
Russia is desirable, Hillary's boosters have long surmised that he must therefore be under the
spell of a devious foreign spymaster: it can't be that he genuinely prefers to be friendly with
Russia and forge an alliance with their military. The only tenable explanation by their lights
is this harebrained mind-control conspiracy theory.
One central irony to all this is that Trump basically has the same position vis-ŕ-vis
Russia as Barack Obama. As Trump pointed out in the Wednesday night debate, Obama attempted
to broker a military alliance with Putin's Russia only a few weeks ago; it fell through after
American forces in Syria bombed soldiers loyal to Assad in direct contravention of the terms of
the agreement. But it was an instance of deal-making nevertheless, so if Trump is guilty of accommodating
the dastardly Russian menace, Obama must be similarly guilty.
Hillary's increasingly hostile rhetoric on the homefront also likely contributed to "nuking"
the accord with Russia, as she's repeatedly accused Putin of subverting the American electoral
process by way of hacks, as well as lambasting him as the
"grand godfather'' of global extremist movements-including the U.S. "alt-right."
It would be one thing if these fantastic claims were ever substantiated with ample evidence,
but they're just not. At the debate, Hillary attributed her theory regarding the Russian orchestration
of recent hacks on her campaign and the Democratic National Committee to unnamed "intelligence
professionals." These unspecified individuals have also failed to produce tangible evidence linking
Russia to Trump, or Russia to the hacks. They are also the same sorts of people whose proclamations
about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were uncritically parroted by media allies.
She launched into the "puppet" rant after moderator Chris Wallace quoted an excerpt from one
of her speeches delivered to a foreign bank, which had been published by WikiLeaks. It should
be reiterated that Hillary had actively concealed these speech transcripts over the course of
the entire presidential campaign, and the only reason the American public can now view them is
thanks to WikiLeaks. But in an effort to change the subject from her newly revealed (and damning)
comments before admiring cadres of financial elites, Hillary accused the rogue publishing organization
of being party to a Russian plot. "This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government,
clearly, from Putin himself," Hillary proclaimed.
What evidence has been furnished that demonstrates "Putin himself" directed such efforts? Absolutely
none that we are yet aware of. One could feasibly posit that such a blithe willingness to launch
baseless attacks against foreign leaders is indicative of a poor temperament on Hillary's part;
it's exactly the kind of bluster that could escalate into hot conflict, and will likely sour the
U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship for years to come under a prospective Clinton Administration.
In addition to accusing Putin of hacking the U.S. election, Hillary again announced her staunch
support for a "no-fly zone" in Syria, which would necessitate the deployment of thousands more
U.S. ground troops to the war-torn country and provoke direct, hostile confrontation with Russia,
which is sustaining its client Assad. When asked by Wallace if she would authorize the shoot-down
of Russian warplanes, Hillary evaded the question. (A simple "no" would've been nice.)
It's long been known that Hillary is a hawk; she is supported by
many of the same neoconservatives who once gravitated to George W. Bush. But her bellicosity
toward Russia, which climaxed with the "puppet" diatribe, demonstrates that her hawkish tendencies
are far from conventional; they are extreme. Hillary seems to be at her most animated (and one
might say, perhaps even crazed) when she is aiming ire at supposed foreign adversaries, which
of late has almost entirely been Russia, Russia, Russia. (Russia was the number-one topic broached
at all this year's debates,
according
to a tally by Adam Johnson of the media-watchdog organization FAIR.)
The tenor of the international situation has gotten exceptionally dire. Last Friday it was
reported that the CIA is preparing to launch an "unprecedented" cyberattack on Russia; relations
between the two states are at a dangerous nadir not seen in decades, to the point that former
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that a nuclear exchange is perilously likely.
Trump, for all his faults, has long advocated a sort of détente .
So why aren't these developments front-and-center in media coverage of the campaign? Instead,
it's still a relentless focus on Trump's many foibles, notwithstanding what appears to be Hillary's
steady sleepwalk into a potentially catastrophic war.
Michael Tracey is a journalist based in New York City.
"... Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the mishandling of classified information." ..."
Speaking Monday on Fox News with host Neil Cavuto, former Democratic presidential candidate
and United States House of Representatives Member from Ohio Dennis Kucinich opined that, from
early on, the US government's investigation of Hillary Clinton for mishandling confidential
information while she was Secretary of State was fixed in her favor.
Instead of the investigative process being focused on achieving justice, Kucinich says it
was "a very political process" that had "everything to do with the 2016 presidential election" in
which Clinton is the Democratic nominee. Kucinich elaborates that "the executive branch of
government made an early determination that no matter what came up that there was no way that
Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law for anything dealing with the
mishandling of classified information."
"... criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs' candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump's lewd comments with Billy Bush about sexually attractive women. ..."
"... why is lewd talk about women more important than military conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth? ..."
"... For Killary-Hillary the Russian issue is the unsupported and false allegation that the Russian government, in league with Donald Trump, hacked her emails and released them to WikiLeaks. The purpose of this absurd claim is to focus voters' attention away from the damning content of the emails. ..."
"... The real issue is that the idiots in Washington have convinced the Russian government that Russia is going to be the target of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Once a nation is convinced of this, it is unlikely that they will just sit there waiting, especially a powerful nuclear power like Russia, which appears to have a strategic alliance with another major nuclear power-China. ..."
Russia's very able Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova,
said that
the US presidential campaign is "simply some sort of a global shame" unworthy of the American people.
She certainly hit the nail on the head.
Hitlery's criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs'
candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia
and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump's lewd comments with Billy
Bush about sexually attractive women.
I mean really. Men's talk about women is like their fish and hunting stories. It has to be taken
with a grain of salt. But this aside, why is lewd talk about women more important than military
conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth?
Trump has declared that he sees no point in conflict with Russia and that he sees no point in
NATO a quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union.
Is Trump's lewd talk about women worse than Hitlery's provocative talk about Russian President
Vladimir Putin, whom Hitlery calls "the new Hitler"? What kind of utter fool would throw gratuitous
insults at the President of a country that can wipe the US and all of Western Europe off of the face
of the earth in a few minutes?
Would you rather face a situation in which a few women were groped, or be vaporized in nuclear
war? If you don't know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive.
Are the American women really going to elect Hillary as a rebuff to Trump's lewd talk? If so,
they will confirm that it was a mistake to give women the vote, although there will be no one left
alive to record the mistake in the history books.
Hitlery, with the aid of the presstitutes-the whores who lie for a living and who constitute the
American print and TV media-have succeeded in focusing America's election of a president on issues
irrelevant to the dangerous situation with which Hitlery and her neoconservative colleagues confront
the world.
For Killary-Hillary the Russian issue is the unsupported and false allegation that the Russian
government, in league with Donald Trump, hacked her emails and released them to WikiLeaks. The purpose
of this absurd claim is to focus voters' attention away from the damning content of the emails.
The real issue is that the idiots in Washington have convinced the Russian government that
Russia is going to be the target of a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Once a nation is convinced of this,
it is unlikely that they will just sit there waiting, especially a powerful nuclear power like Russia,
which appears to have a strategic alliance with another major nuclear power-China.
A vote for the crazed killer bitch Hitlery is a vote for the end of life on earth.
"... Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for rhetorical focus), ..."
"... but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging, and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table. ..."
"... The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example). ..."
"... the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan" and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties. ..."
"... I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. ..."
"... That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play... and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate democracy. ..."
"... But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy. ..."
Point being that not only would The Clintons have the Democratic Party machine to rely on
for potential vote rigging in this stage of the process (distinguishing vs. primaries simply for
rhetorical focus),
but with the clear reality of the Republican Party elite also backing her, she can rely
on at least some of the Republican Party machine also being available for potential vote rigging,
and who have their experience in Florida, Ohio, etc to bring to the table.
The longer term issue is the Imperial Oligarchy has now taken off the mask, they have abandoned
the pretense of 2 party competition to unite behind the defender of status quo interests, with
WikiLeaks detailing the gory bits of their corruption and malfeasance. And everybody in the system
is tainted by that, both parties, media, etc. It has overtly collapsed to the reality of a single
Party of Power (per the term Oligarch media like to use re: Russia for example).
And the craziest thing of course is not that this all happened by accident because some "scary
clown" appeared, but that this was nearly exactly planned BY The Clinton faction themselves (promoting
Trump in order to win vs. "scary clown"). Most notably, not simply as a seizure of power by Democratic
Party "against" Republicans... They are very clear the Clinton faction is 100% "bi-partisan"
and about confluence of both Oligarchic parties.
I would say the Democratic primary was even a mirror of this, I would guess that Clinton
had hoped to win more easily vs Sanders without rigging etc... essentially between Sanders and
Trump turning anything but "radical status quo" into boogymen. Only surprise was how well
Sanders did, necessitating fraud etc, with polls in fact showing Sanders was BETTER placed to
defeat Trump than Clinton.
That just reveals how close to the line the Imperial Oligarchy feels compelled to play...
and, I suppose, how confident they are in the full spectrum of tools at their disposal to manipulate
democracy.
But that is also shown merely by the situation we are in, with the collapse of the two
party system in order to maintain the strength of Imperial Oligarchy.
Washington forgot his role in color revolutions in Ukraine, Russia, Serbia and other countries,
when Washington controlled neoliberal media served as air support for local fifth column. Now
boomerang returned...
On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador confirmed WikiLeaks' charge that Ecuador itself
had ordered the severing of Assange's Internet connection under pressure from the US government.
In a statement, the ministry said that WikiLeaks had "published a wealth of documents impacting
on the US election campaign," adding that the government of Ecuador "respects the principle of
non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states" and "does not interfere in external
electoral processes." On that grounds, the statement claimed, the Ecuadorian government decided
to "restrict access" to the communications network at its London embassy.
"... Clinton also says that the no-fly zone bombing in Syria she is arguing for "would kill a lot of Syrians" - all for humanitarian reasons of course. ..."
"... While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia , which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region. ..."
"... Not new - the 2012 DIA analysis provided as much , and more, - but these email's prove that Clinton was and is well aware that U.S. allies are financing the radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq. ..."
Quotes from the Wikileaks stash of Hillary
Clinton speeches and emails
from her campaign chair John Podesta.
Clinton in a 2013 speech to the Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner (via
The Intercept ):
[Arming moderates has] been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large
amounts of weapons-and pretty indiscriminately-not at all targeted toward the people that we think
would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future, ...
Clinton also says that the no-fly zone bombing in Syria she is arguing for "would kill a lot
of Syrians" - all for humanitarian reasons of course.
The following was written by Podesta, a well connected former White House Chief of Staff, in an
2014 email to Clinton.
As introduction Podesta notes: "Sources include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources
in the region.":
While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic
and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi
Arabia , which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical
Sunni groups in the region.
Not new - the 2012 DIA analysis
provided as much , and more, - but these email's prove that Clinton was and is well aware that
U.S. allies are financing the radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
"... President Obama acknowledged that danger at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting in Washington early this month. He warned of the potential for "ramping up new and more deadly and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race." ... ..."
"... United States' first 'smart' nuclear bomb signals new arms race with China and Russia: analysts South China Morning Post - August 18 ..."
"... Washington's green light for a new generation of steerable and smart tactical nuclear weapons may signal the start of a new US nuclear arms race with China and Russia, military analysts say. ..."
"... Russia and China are believed to have been developing similar weapons for decades, but Chinese experts are apparently keen to learn the lessons of the former Soviet Union's failed attempt to keep up with the United States in the cold war. ..."
"... Tactical nuclear weapons, known as non-strategic nuclear weapons, are designed to support naval, land and air forces in areas close to friendly forces and perhaps even on contested friendly territory. ..."
"... The new US weapon, the B61-12, is America's first guided, or "smart" nuclear bomb. It weighs 350kg and can penetrate fortified structures several metres underground. ..."
"... These nuclear happenings are why I think Hillary Clinton's labeling of Donald Trump as 'Putin's Puppet' is the more important takeaway for last night's debate, much more so than Trump's refusal to go on record as accepting the results of the election. ..."
"... The American Voting Public has 19 days to discover the loss of detente, the three way nuclear weapon build up ..."
By Paul Sonne & Julian E. Barnes & Gordon Lubold...Oct 19, 2016...5:47 p.m. ET
"The U.S. has summoned Russia to a mandatory meeting before a special treaty commission to answer
accusations that Moscow has violated a Cold War-era pact that bans the production, maintenance or
testing of medium-range missiles, according to U.S. and Western officials.
The U.S. for years has alleged that Russia is breaching the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty, or INF Treaty, an agreement Washington and Moscow signed in 1987 to eliminate land-based
nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, as well as their launchers.
Russia, in turn, has accused the U.S. of violating the pact.
Now the U.S. is convening the treaty's so-called Special Verification Commission to press its
case against Russia, triggering the compliance body's first meeting in 16 years, according to the
U.S. and Western officials. They said the SVC meeting would take place in the coming weeks."
Putin is one of the few sane politicians left in Europe. I would not object importing him and
putting him as a POTUS here instead of one psychically debilitated neocon warmonger (who is definitely
in the pocket of Wall Street, if not Russians, due to the amount of "compromat" on her and Bill
floating around) and another bombastic know-nothing billionaire who is unable to neither clearly
articulate, no capitalize on his winning anti-globalization position against such a compromised,
widely hated opponent.
Especially after the dirty details of her sinking Sanders became known. Why on the Earth he
can't just de-legitimize her by stressing that she obtained her position as the candidate from
Democratic Party by proven fraud by DNC is beyond me.
Looks like you might not understand that and the fact that neocons have had driven the US into
another useless war in Syria to protect not so much our own but Israeli and Saudi interests (the
key idea is partitioning of Syria and establishing a Sunni state as the counterweight the loss
of Iraq to Shiites, which means Iran) .
Race for Latest Class of Nuclear Arms Threatens
to Revive Cold War http://nyti.ms/268HJT6
NYT - WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER - APRIL 16, 2016
The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller,
less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and
unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more
than a half-century.
It is, in large measure, an old dynamic playing out in new form as an economically declining
Russia, a rising China and an uncertain United States resume their one-upmanship.
American officials largely blame the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, saying his intransigence
has stymied efforts to build on a 2010 arms control treaty and further shrink the arsenals of
the two largest nuclear powers. Some blame the Chinese, who are looking for a technological edge
to keep the United States at bay. And some blame the United States itself for speeding ahead with
a nuclear "modernization" that, in the name of improving safety and reliability, risks throwing
fuel on the fire.
President Obama acknowledged that danger at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting
in Washington early this month. He warned of the potential for "ramping up new and more deadly
and more effective systems that end up leading to a whole new escalation of the arms race." ...
---
United States' first 'smart' nuclear bomb signals new arms race with China and Russia:
analysts South China Morning Post - August 18
Washington's green light for a new generation of steerable and smart tactical nuclear weapons
may signal the start of a new US nuclear arms race with China and Russia, military analysts say.
Russia and China are believed to have been developing similar weapons for decades, but
Chinese experts are apparently keen to learn the lessons of the former Soviet Union's failed attempt
to keep up with the United States in the cold war.
Tactical nuclear weapons, known as non-strategic nuclear weapons, are designed to support
naval, land and air forces in areas close to friendly forces and perhaps even on contested friendly
territory.
The new US weapon, the B61-12, is America's first guided, or "smart" nuclear bomb. It weighs
350kg and can penetrate fortified structures several metres underground.
Unlike banned weapons of mass destruction, the B61-12 is designed to be carried by high-speed
stealth fighter jets to hit targets precisely with limited damage to structures and lives nearby.
...
im1dc -> im1dc... , -1
These nuclear happenings are why I think Hillary Clinton's labeling of Donald Trump as 'Putin's
Puppet' is the more important takeaway for last night's debate, much more so than Trump's refusal
to go on record as accepting the results of the election.
The American Voting Public has 19 days to discover the loss of detente, the three way nuclear
weapon build up , and connect Trump to Putin as Putin's Puppet.
This is far more important going forward than Trump being seen as a whiner and sore loser.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said she believes the US presidential campaign
is not worthy of the nation's people, calling it a "catastrophe" and "simply some sort of a global
shame" during a meeting with students on Tuesday.
Commenting on the heated 2016 presidential race in the US, Zakharova lamented that by accusing
Moscow of mounting cyber-attacks with an alleged aim of meddling in American politics, Washington
has turned Russia into a "real, serious factor of pre-election rhetoric."
They are constantly saying that Russia is carrying out cyber-attacks on certain US facilities,"
she said. Zakharova stressed that the US side provided no proof or any other data on the alleged
hackers' links to Moscow, which she says makes the allegations appear to be a "smokescreen" to cover
up serious domestic issues.
According to the spokeswoman, this "public bickering on Russia"as well as "locker-room jokes"
are "unworthy of a great power, [and] great people" of America.
"I simply believe that this campaign is not worthy of their people. As a person who was engaged
in information technologies when studying at the university, I believe that this is a catastrophic
campaign. May the colleagues of all kinds and countries forgive me, but I believe that this is simply
some sort of a global shame," Zakharova said at a meeting with students at the Moscow Aviation Institute,
Life.ru reported.
Earlier in October, the US government claimed it was "confident" that Russia was behind the hacking
attacks on US officials and organizations, alleging that revelations by WikiLeaks, DCLeaks and Guccifer
2.0. were directly authorized by the Russian government with the intention to "interfere with the
US election process."
"We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most
officials could have authorized these activities," read the report, published by the Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper. The accusations were based on the fact that attacks "in most
cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company."
Moscow, for its part, completely dismissed the allegations, denying any involvement in the attacks.
Commenting on the report, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov labeled the accusations "yet
another fit of nonsense,"adding that while many cyber-attacks Russia faces on a daily basis can be
traced back to US services, Russia refrains from calling US government responsible for cybercrimes.
This crazy warmonger Hillary Insists Putin Wants a 'Puppet' as US President. The truth is that with
the amount of "compromat" against her she is a puppet.
It didn't take long for the
final presidential debate in the US to be shifted to the Clinton campaign's favorite topic: accusing
the Trump campaign of being involved in a Russian plot to hack the US election to his benefit. Indeed,
it didn't even wait until the brief foreign policy segment.
During questions about immigration, the moderator asked a question of Hillary Clinton regarding
her comments at a closed-door speech to a Brazilian bank about open borders. Clinton quickly and
dramatically changed focus, noting that the quote came from WikiLeaks and declaring "what's really
important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans."
She went on to declare that it was "clearly" Russian President Vladimir Putin behind the WikiLeaks
releases, and insisted that the entire intelligence community had confirmed Putin was doing so "to
influence our election." She then demanded Republican nominee Donald Trump "admit" to it.
When Trump noted that Clinton has "no idea" who was behind the hacks, and that he'd never even
met Putin, Clinton declared that Putin wanted Trump elected to be his puppet as US president. Trump
insisted it was Clinton, by contrast, who was the puppet.
Trump went on to say he'd condemn any foreign interference in the US election, no matter who it
was, but did say that he thought if the US and Russia got along it "wouldn't be so bad." Clinton
accused him of spouting "the Putin line."
The Clinton campaign has been accusing Russia of trying to hack the election since their summer
convention, blaming them for materially every leak that proved embarrassing to her campaign. Since
then, the allegations have gone hand-in-hand with claims that Trump is in on the matter. Russia denies
any involvement in the hacking, and has noted there is no public evidence to support the claims.
Beyond continuing to advance these allegations, the debate touched on foreign policy in a limited
fashion, with Clinton reiterating promises to impose a no fly zone in Syria to "gain some leverage
on the Russians." When asked about the possibility of that starting a war with Russia, she shifted
focus again to her confidence the no-fly zone would "save lives."
"... The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted. ..."
I watched that yesterday. Funny and a complete take down of Jill Stein. How come a British comedian
knows more about our issues than one of our candidates for the White House? Oh wait - even Jill
Stein knows more than Donald Trump. If it were not for that Constitutional matter, I'd say Oliver
for President.
Fred C. Dobbs -> pgl... , -1
All politics is 'wacky',
the third-party kind is
the wackiest of all.
Maybe the UK does it best.
The Official Monster Raving Loony Party is a registered political party established in
the United Kingdom in 1983 by the musician David Sutch, better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch,
3rd Earl of Harrow" or simply "Screaming Lord Sutch". It is notable for its deliberately bizarre
policies and it effectively exists to satirise British politics, and to offer itself as an poignant
alternative for protest voters, especially in constituencies where the party holding the seat
is unlikely to lose it and everyone else's vote would be quietly wasted.
(Wikipedia)
"... As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word for
maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing,
price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval
feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines of wealth and governs
the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes--all
of which benefit the financiers and political grifters. ..."
"... The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the privileged
ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry ) and political
influence. ..."
"... If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
..."
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies
ultimately rule with the consent, however grudging, of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed. This reality is being masked by
the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the ruling class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
The "great divide" in American politics is between left and right, Democrat/Republican
The ruling Elite has delivered "prosperity" not just to the privileged few but to the unprivileged
many they govern.
Both of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America is between the ruling Elite and
the governed that the Elite has stripmined. The ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed
are unprivileged and unprotected. That's the divide that counts and the divide that is finally becoming
visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of debt-serfs.
The "prosperity" of the 21st century has flowed solely to the ruling Elite and its army of technocrat
toadies, factotums, flunkies, apparatchiks and apologists. The Elite's army of technocrats and its
media apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up phony statistics (the
super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the illusion of "growth" and "prosperity" that benefit
everyone rather than just the top 5%. The media is 100% committed to promoting these two false narratives
because the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality that the ruling Elite has been stripmining
them for decades.
As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal (the code word
for maximizing private gain by any means available, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, political
fixing, price-fixing, and so on)--it is neofeudal , meaning that it is structurally an updated
version of Medieval feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines
of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student loans, auto loans, credit
cards, mortgages and taxes--all of which benefit the financiers and political grifters.
The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the decision of the century is between
unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton and financier-cowboy Donald Trump. Both belong to the
privileged ruling Elite: both have access to cheap credit, insider information ( information asymmetry
) and political influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social contract by skimming the income/wealth
of the unprivileged. The fake-"progressive" pandering apologists of the ruling Elite--Robert Reich,
Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists--turn a blind eye to the suppression of
dissent and the looting the bottom 95% because they have cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty
(or equivalent). They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the marginalized
rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems that enrich the privileged Elite
by stripmining the unprivileged:
healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare because sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable),
higher education
Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its partner the privately owned Military-Industrial
Complex).
While the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare premiums and co-pays soar year after
year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels skim off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and
stock options. The system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you get a 30% increase
in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services--the system is broken.
If you're skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the provost for student services (or equivalent)
plus gold-plated benefits, higher education is working great. If you're a student burdened with tens
of thousands of dollars in student loan debt who is receiving a low-quality, essentially worthless
"education" from poorly paid graduate students ("adjuncts") and a handful of online courses that
you could get for free or for a low cost outside the university cartel--the system is broken.
If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial rank with a fat pension and
lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the next day by a private "defense" contractor--the
famous revolving door between a bloated state and a bloated defense industry--the system works great.
If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and served at the point of the spear somewhere
in the Imperial Project--your perspective may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged enablers and apologists, they have
already lost the consent of the governed.
They have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of
political legitimacy and "the rising tide raises all boats" has cracked wide open, and the machinery
of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn't being paid to cover their
eyes. Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and mainstream media cannot believe
they have lost the consent of the governed. The disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this
epochal shift of the tides yet, either. They are aware of their own disillusionment and their own
declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that they have, beneath the surface of everyday
life, already withdrawn their consent from a self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and ultimately
self-destructive ruling Elite.
In the latest, 13th daily Podesta email release,
one particular email sticks out : on February 2, 2016 Neera Tanden, a close confidante of Hillary Clinton and according to many
one of the key organizers of her presidential campaign asks John Podesta a question which may be interpreted that banker money received
by Hillary can be deemed equivalent to a bribe.
Specifically, Tanden asks Podesta that " speaking at the banks... don't shoot me but if we lose badly maybe she should
just return the money ." To which she then adds "say she gets the anger and moves on. Feels a little like an open wound."
The exchange may be one of the more clear indications of a tentative "quid-pro-quo" arrangement, in which cash is provided in
exchange for 'services' which naturally would not be rendered if Hillary were to "lose badly."
Luckily for Tanden and Podesta, not to mention Hillary, at least according to the latest scientific polls, losing badly is not
a contingency that should be a major consideration, at least not as of this moment.
Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, "So
if I blew it, they blew it, too."
But agents say Comey tied investigators' hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for
Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation.
"In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews," said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first
chief of the FBI's computer investigations unit.
Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed
immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.
What's more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a "voluntary" witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief
of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation.
Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: "Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization."
Comey made the 25 agents who worked on the case sign nondisclosure agreements. But others say morale has sunk inside the bureau.
"The director is giving the bureau a bad rap with all the gaps in the investigation," one agent in the Washington field office
said. "There's a perception that the FBI has been politicized and let down the country."
While the above article focused on the opinions of retired agents, today's article zeros in on the growing frustrations of current
agency employees.
FBI agents say the bureau is alarmed over Director James Comey deciding not to suggest that the Justice Department prosecute
Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information.
According to an interview transcript given to The Daily Caller, provided by an intermediary who spoke to two federal agents
with the bureau last Friday, agents are frustrated by Comey's leadership.
"This is a textbook case where a grand jury should have convened but was not. That is appalling," an FBI special agent who
has worked public corruption and criminal cases said of the decision. "We talk about it in the office and don't know how Comey
can keep going."
Another special agent for the bureau that worked counter-terrorism and criminal cases said he is offended by Comey's saying:
"we" and "I've been an investigator."
After graduating from law school, Comey became a law clerk to a U.S. District Judge in Manhattan and later became an associate
in a law firm in the city. After becoming a U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Comey's career moved through the
U.S. Attorney's Office until he became Deputy Attorney General during the George W. Bush administration.
After Bush left office, Comey entered the private sector and became general counsel and Senior Vice President for Lockheed
Martin, among other private sector posts. President Barack Obama appointed him to FBI director in 2013 replacing out going-director
Robert Mueller.
"Comey was never an investigator or special agent. The special agents are trained investigators and they are insulted that
Comey included them in 'collective we' statements in his testimony to imply that the SAs agreed that there was nothing there to
prosecute," the second agent said. "All the trained investigators agree that there is a lot to prosecuted but he stood in the
way."
In light of the latest revelations that the
NSA is spying on the communications of millions of Verizon customers courtesy of information provided by the FBI, it probably
makes sense to know a little more about Obama's nominee to head that Bureau. That man is James Comey, and he was a top Department
of Justice attorney under John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush Administration (since then he has worked at Lockheed Martin
and at the enormous Connecticut hedge fund Bridgewater Associates). This guy defines the revolving door cancer ruining these United
States.
Now back to The Daily Caller.
According to Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova, more FBI agents will be talking about the problems at bureau and specifically
the handling of the Clinton case by Comey when Congress comes back into session and decides to force them to testify by subpoena.
DiGenova told WMAL radio's
Drive at Five last week, "People are starting to talk. They're calling their former friends outside the bureau asking for
help. We were asked to day to provide legal representation to people inside the bureau and agreed to do so and to former agents
who want to come forward and talk. Comey thought this was going to go away."
He explained, "It's not. People inside the bureau are furious. They are embarrassed. They feel like they are being led by a
hack but more than that that they think he's a crook. They think he's fundamentally dishonest. They have no confidence in him.
The bureau inside right now is a mess."
He added, "The most important thing of all is that the agents have decided that they are going to talk."
Corruption in the USA has now reached the level where it starts destroying the entire fabric of society itself. This is a very
dangerous moment.
It's already been done. After the Boston Marathon false flag, a number of FBI agents were assigned to the case. Two in particular
probably got too close to the hoax because suddenly they were sent on a naval training assignment. The FBI on a naval training
assignment in the middle of an investigation?
Excellent post pods. These agents are using the Nazi excuse of "just following orders". We'll, a corrupt order is corrupt.....and
so are you if you blindly follow it.
The NDAs were obviously procured through fraud thereby nullifying their binding nature. Dirty hands all over the Washington D.C.
cesspool. Are we ready to clean house yet?
The FBI has lost total street cred first after failing to indict Crooked Hillary, and then granting immunity to her co-conspirators.
the icing on the cake was Comey blaming other FBI.
When I was wanering thru the sports store yesterday, the feeling of animosity toward the FBI was very high. Once they were
highly respected...Comey has trashed that agency badly...People like John Malone 9who once heade the NYC FBI office), Tompkins
in the louisville area, etc would be revolted by Crooked Comey.
... I'm not implying that those 900(?) FBI files of prominent Americans given by the FBI to the Klinton Krime Kartel were being
used for blackmail ... and perhaps the reason why the dynamic duo keeps getting "get-out-of-jail-free" cards whenever they need
it ...
@hedgeless horseman: The FBI did not release the "Dancing Israelis." It was Judge Michael Chertoff. He was in charge of the Criminal
Division in the Justice Department on 9/11. Essentially responsible for the 9/11 non-investigation. He let hundreds of Israeli
spies who were arrested prior to and on 9/11 go back home to Israel. He was also a prosecuting judge in the first terrorist attack
on the WTC in 1993. Chertoff purportedly holds dual citizenship with the US and Israel. His family is one of the founding families
of the state of Israel and his mother was one of the first ever agents of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency. His father and uncle
are ordained rabbis and teachers of the Talmud.
He was subsequently named head of the Dept of Homeland Security. His company arranged for placement of Rapascan nude scanners
in American airports. Who says crime doesn't pay?
..... Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, "So if I blew it, they blew it, too."
...... agents say Comey tied investigators' hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers
for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation.
...... In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews," said retired agent Dennis V.
Hughes, the first chief of the FBI's computer investigations unit.
Time for Comey, Bill, Hillary, Lynch, Obama, MSM Media, and on, and on, to ALL
DANCE ON THE FUCKING AIR !!!
(Method of neck suspension, NOT rope.....piano wire..)
I get a kick out of these career FBI agents worrying that Comey has sullied the reputation of the FBI (he has). Here is a fucking
news flash for you assholes, if Clinton gets elected there is an almost certain chance that she starts a fucking thermo nuclear
war with Russia. You, your families and the precious FBI won't exist 30 minutes after that starts seeing that you are sitting
at ground zero. Does that do anything to get you off your asses and perhaps do your fucking jobs?
There is now about 30 minutes of video that proves the Clinton campaign conspired to incite violence at Trump rallys. How about
you fuckers get off your ass and start investigating this and the "pay to play" shit the Podesta tapes came out with? Or, how
about the email that indicates POTUS illegally influenced the Supreme Court Justice on ACA??? Christ, it's a target rich environment
for felony convictions out there and you guys are doing what????
Allegedly, there was a much larger contingent of Mossad agents that were detained immediately after 9/11. An additional 100 or
so were in the States "studying art" and similar cover stories when in fact they were carefully casing various buildings including
banks and Federal sites. For reasons never made public, the FBI let them all go back to Israel. Without waterboarding Dick Cheney,
the public will never know the truth.
" Sorry, intentions are one thing actions another at least among adults."
Actually, it can also be part of the game. Eisenhower is well known for his MIC warning on TV just as he was leaving office.
However, if you look at what he did, and what he allowed Allen Dulles to do, he was part of it. Making fake apologies after the
fact provides some balm but doesnt undo the damage.
I'm tellin ya.... rank-and-file aren't sitting around giggling that this fucking cunt is walking on water on shit they would be
hung out to dry for. The Podesta leaks are NSA standard intercepts. Anyone could have grabbed them from a standard intercept.
Tja, that's the problem when you go hooovering up the entire internet. Pretty fucking hard to compartmentalize collection efforts
on that scale.
We applaud and support the members of our armed forces and intelligence community who take their oath of office seriously and
refuse to let these murderous internationalists tear down our country without a fucking fight.
When Hillary gets in there all these old FBI white boyz will be shown the door and replaced with pussylesbo power. These are the
good old days,be afraid.
"... The news was released that Hillarnazi had lesbian lovers, paid for sexual encounters, has had memory issues so severe going
back to 2009 that her own people aren't sure if she knows what planet she is on, can't walk without getting massively fatigued, a new
rape victim came forward, the Clinton Foundation stole over $2 billion in Haitian relief funds, the Clinton Foundation has a pay gap
between men and women of $190,000 and she referred to blacks repeatedly as the dreaded "n" word . ..."
"... Again, that is from YESTERDAY Yet there has been no movement in the polls. She is the most criminal and unethical candidate
in the history of America, and is likely to win. There is no greater indictment about our citizens than her candidacy. if thise was
1920, she would be in front of a firing squad. ..."
"... But we have 2016. This is not breaking news at the main media outlets. Only people actively digging know this. All this pales
in comparison with the fact of bussing people around different states to vote. If elections can be rigged then nothing else actually
matters. Nothing will change because the only tool to repair the country is the election. ..."
"... The ballot box is not the last remedy to fix things. Just saying. Voting is more to bring you into the system than you changing
the system. What better way to keep you happy inside the system than to give you the ability to "vote the bums out" at the next (s)election?
..."
"... Europe is also facing the problem of not enough breeding to keep up the exponential expansion of their currency (debt issued
with interest) so they import people to keep the ponzi going. Not going to work as the people you bring in are not going to be expanding
it at the rate that someone born into that system is going to. ..."
"... Sucks to be them - the humillatiion and embarrassment of the cockroaches as they all scurry for cover. Not to mention the career
nose-dives en masse for all the selfsame scum floating around the turd herself. I'm surprised Hillary hasn't told Podesta to eat a bullet
(or nail-gun) yet, given the damage he has caused by being hacked. Err...rewind, eh Hillary? Because it is not as if you are an angel
in this respect, you dumb fucking senile cunt. ..."
"... Neocons are IT illiterate, and this must be their primary weakness, given how fucking useless they are at securing their insidious
evil shit (now in the public domain - eh, Poddy, old chum, you evil CUNT). It must be a fucking disease given how utterly bereft of
intelligence with respect to IT security they collectively are. ..."
"... It definitely sucks to be Hillary when even the help knows you're crooked. It sucks to be the help too. HILLARY FOR PRISON
2017!!!! ..."
"... As if. Former Lousiana Governor Edwin Edwards in 1983 said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with
either a dead girl or a live boy." In 2016, neither of those conditions is a bar to election to the presidency. ..."
"... Evidently the rats have been assured the ship isn't sinking. Besides it's insured if crossing is successful. ..."
"... Americans have the attention span of a gnat these days. The hypocrisy is stunning and has no bounds. ..."
"... The best part of waking up is realizing that TPTB had been pissing in our cup while we weren't looking. ..."
"... Another body to add to the Clinton Death List, this time the doctor who treated her for a concussion and knew about her glioma.
A devout Hindu, this doctor supposedly committed suicide after threatening to reveal Hillary medical information if prosecutors continued
to go after him for bogus criminal charges. http://www.govtslaves.info/clinton-doctor-who-confirmed-hillarys-brain-t... ..."
"... Neera Tanden must be suicidal by now. She probably doesn't even realise it yet. ..."
"... I was thinking the same thing. With so many on the "team" having such critical positions on their own "leader", why the fuck
are they supporting her, and why do they still have jobs? ..."
"... Power. Money. The belief that they will be able to run things themselves once she goes full brain clot. One thing I do know,
Hillary would be very unwise to let any of them pick her nursing home for her. ..."
"... Neera Tanden: "It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment." https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/18353
..."
"... I imagine cankle's inner circle are gobling a lot off drugs about now. Their paranoia is no doubt palpable. I hope they devour
one another. ..."
"... It ain't just the US where free press is extinct. Had Wiki dropped the lot, it would simply have sunk without a trace with
respect to the MSM reporting it to the sheeple, as we have seen in the last 12 days. ..."
"... Free Shit and open borders and speaking well while lying. The stupidity of the average person, particularly those who only
get their news from the corporate controlled media, is fuckin' amazing. Only a military coup could hunt down and arrest the Deep State...
The Kagans and Powers and Jarretts and every cunt who has given HRC money. ..."
"... Short of a coup, massive desertion would be very helpful. ..."
"... you hit the nail on the head - "speaking well while lying". Middle class English people speak very well - appear attractive
to Americans - when in fact they have zero monopoly on honesty, brains or ability ..."
"... just because someone speaks well does not mean they are legal, decent, honest and truthful - in fact clinton fails on all four
of these positives and is illegal, indecent, crooked and a liar ..."
"... The no fly zone doesn't like questions not preprogrammed. I hope his brother gets a chance to rip Obama a new asshole. ..."
"... rule by criminals REQUIRES deep knowledge and primary experience with criminal exploits. She is the ONLY candidate who is qualified
to run Gov-Co. ..."
"... Comey is a Dirty Cop – Former US Attorney. How Crooked Clinton Got Off. ..."
"... Juan Williams email to John Podesta found here: https://twitter.com/hashtag/DrainTheSwamp?src=hash ..."
"... How does it feel working for a total scumbag just to get a paycheck? ..."
The latest WikiLeaks dump reveals yet another bombshell from the outspoken, an likely soon to be unemployed, Neera Tanden.
The email chain comes from March of this year and begins when Neera distributes a memo on proposals for reform policies
relative to bribery and corruption of public officials . That said, apparently the folks within the Hillary campaign were
aware that this was a very dicey topic for their chosen candidate as even Tanden admits " she may be so tainted she's really
vulnerable. "
Meanwhile, Hillary advisor Jake Sullivan provided his thoughts that he really liked the following proposal on strengthening bribery
laws...
"Strengthen bribery laws to ensure that politicians don' change legislation for political donations."
...but subsequently admits that it might be problematic given Hillary's history.
"The second idea is a favorite of mine, as you know, but REALLY dicey territory for HRC, right?"
Even a month before these internal campaign discussions, Stan Greenberg, a democrat strategist of Democracy Corps, wrote to Podesta
highlighting that "reform of money and politics is where she is taking the biggest hit." That said, Stan was quick
to assure Podesta that there was no reason for concern as a specially crafted message and a little help from the media could make
the whole problem go away.
"We are also going to test some messages that include acknowledgement of being part of the system , and know how much
has to change. "
Finally, perhaps no one has better summarized why the Clinton camp may be worried about corruption charges than Obama:
The news was released that Hillarnazi had lesbian lovers, paid for sexual encounters, has had memory issues so severe going
back to 2009 that her own people aren't sure if she knows what planet she is on, can't walk without getting massively fatigued,
a new rape victim came forward, the Clinton Foundation stole over $2 billion in Haitian relief funds, the Clinton Foundation has
a
pay gap between men and women of $190,000 and
she referred to blacks repeatedly as the dreaded "n" word .
Again, that is from YESTERDAY Yet there has been no movement in the polls. She is the most criminal and unethical candidate
in the history of America, and is likely to win. There is no greater indictment about our citizens than her candidacy. if thise
was 1920, she would be in front of a firing squad.
But we have 2016. This is not breaking news at the main media outlets. Only people actively digging know this. All this pales
in comparison with the fact of bussing people around different states to vote. If elections can be rigged then nothing else actually
matters. Nothing will change because the only tool to repair the country is the election.
The ballot box is not the last remedy to fix things. Just saying. Voting is more to bring you into the system than you changing
the system. What better way to keep you happy inside the system than to give you the ability to "vote the bums out" at the next
(s)election?
Europe is also facing the problem of not enough breeding to keep up the exponential expansion of their currency (debt issued
with interest) so they import people to keep the ponzi going. Not going to work as the people you bring in are not going to be
expanding it at the rate that someone born into that system is going to.
But, it is a plausible explanation for why they are trying it. The moneychangers have their very lives depending on keeping
this going, so they have to try it.
All I know is, most the cunts behind the curtain have been completely compromised pre-election.
Sucks to be them - the humillatiion and embarrassment of the cockroaches as they all scurry for cover. Not to mention the
career nose-dives en masse for all the selfsame scum floating around the turd herself. I'm surprised Hillary hasn't told Podesta
to eat a bullet (or nail-gun) yet, given the damage he has caused by being hacked. Err...rewind, eh Hillary? Because it is not
as if you are an angel in this respect, you dumb fucking senile cunt.
The fucking irony is palpable.
Neocons are IT illiterate, and this must be their primary weakness, given how fucking useless they are at securing their
insidious evil shit (now in the public domain - eh, Poddy, old chum, you evil CUNT). It must be a fucking disease given how utterly
bereft of intelligence with respect to IT security they collectively are.
As if. Former Lousiana Governor Edwin Edwards in 1983 said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed
with either a dead girl or a live boy." In 2016, neither of those conditions is a bar to election to the presidency.
Another body to add to the Clinton Death List, this time the doctor who treated her for a concussion and knew about her glioma.
A devout Hindu, this doctor supposedly committed suicide after threatening to reveal Hillary medical information if prosecutors
continued to go after him for bogus criminal charges.
http://www.govtslaves.info/clinton-doctor-who-confirmed-hillarys-brain-t...
I was thinking the same thing. With so many on the "team" having such critical positions on their own "leader", why the fuck
are they supporting her, and why do they still have jobs?
Power. Money. The belief that they will be able to run things themselves once she goes full brain clot. One thing I do
know, Hillary would be very unwise to let any of them pick her nursing home for her.
Assange has played a blinder, and all those who bitched about him "not dropping everything at once" give some thought to the fact
that even in the UK barely one reference to the deluge of shit landing on Hillary thus far has been reported in the MSM. They
have killed virtually everything, and are mainlining Trump the mad man (for insinuating election fraud) shit.
It ain't just the US where free press is extinct. Had Wiki dropped the lot, it would simply have sunk without a trace with
respect to the MSM reporting it to the sheeple, as we have seen in the last 12 days.
Better a death by a thousand cuts to build up momentum, and give EVERYONE the chance to absorb the full criminallity of this
fundamentally evil bitch and her cohorts. There is way too much to take in one hit.
sadly, most Americans are going to vote based on which candidate they think is least 'offensive' to them, and ISMism prevails
in the corporate MSM and Regressive Left:
For secure borders and controlled immigration: RACIST
Against set asides for women or think rosie o'donnell could lose a few: MISOGYNIST.
But voting for a banker owned duplicitous warmonger who is the crooked politician par excellance of this millenium, one
who will pursue more neocon/zionist wars and involve arming and aiding Al Qaeda and worse.... : 'PROGRESSIVE'.
Why?
Free Shit and open borders and speaking well while lying. The stupidity of the average person, particularly those who only
get their news from the corporate controlled media, is fuckin' amazing. Only a military coup could hunt down and arrest the Deep
State... The Kagans and Powers and Jarretts and every cunt who has given HRC money.
Short of a coup, massive desertion would be very helpful.
you hit the nail on the head - "speaking well while lying". Middle class English people speak very well - appear attractive
to Americans - when in fact they have zero monopoly on honesty, brains or ability
just because someone speaks well does not mean they are legal, decent, honest and truthful - in fact clinton fails on all
four of these positives and is illegal, indecent, crooked and a liar
Authoritarian rule by criminals REQUIRES deep knowledge and primary experience with criminal exploits. She is the ONLY candidate
who is qualified to run Gov-Co.
Is this from "The Onion"? Seriously, these people are so fucking tone deaf and out of touch it's amazing. Throw 'em all in prison.
How does it feel working for a total scumbag just to get a paycheck?
"... Among the initial emails to stand out is this extensive exchange showing just how intimiately the narrative of Hillary's server
had been coached. The following September 2015 email exchange between Podesta and Nick Merrill, framed the "core language" to be used
in response to questions Clinton could be asked about her email server, and the decision to "bleach" emails from it. The emails contain
long and short versions of responses for Clinton. ..."
The daily dump continues. In the now traditional daily routine, one which forces the Clinton campaign to resort to ever more stark
sexual scandals involving Trump to provide a media distraction, moments ago Wikileaks released yet another 1,803 emails in Part 12
of its ongoing Podesta Email dump, which brings the total number of released emails to 18,953.
As a reminder among the most recent revelations we got further insights into Hillary's desire to see Obamacare "
unravel" , her contempt
for "doofus" Bernie Sanders, staff exchanges on handling media queries about Clinton "flip-flopping" on gay marriage, galvanizing
Latino support and locking down Clinton's healthcare policy. Just as notable has been the ongoing revelation of just how "captured"
the so-called independent press has been in its "off the record" discussions with John Podesta which got the head Politico correspondent,
Glenn Thrush, to admit he is a "hack" for allowing Podesta to dictate the content of his article.
The release comes on the day of the third and final presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and as a result
we are confident it will be scrutinized especially carefully for any last minute clues that would allow Trump to lob a much needed
Hail Mary to boost his standing in the polls.
As there is a total of 50,000 emails, Wikileaks will keep the media busy over the next three weeks until the elections with another
30,000 emails still expected to be released.
* * *
Among the initial emails to stand out is this extensive exchange showing just how intimiately the narrative of Hillary's server
had been coached. The following September 2015 email
exchange between Podesta and Nick Merrill, framed the "core language" to be used in response to questions Clinton could be asked
about her email server, and the decision to "bleach" emails from it. The emails contain long and short versions of responses for
Clinton.
"Because the government already had everything that was work-related, and my personal emails were just that – personal – I
didn't see a reason to keep them so I asked that they be deleted, and that's what the company that managed my server did. And
we notified Congress of that back in March"
She was then presented with the following hypothetical scenario:
* "Why won't you say whether you wiped it?"
"After we went through the process to determine what was work related and what was not and provided the work related
emails to State, I decided not to keep the personal ones."
"We saved the work-related ones on a thumb drive that is now with the Department of Justice. And as I said in March, I chose
not to keep the personal ones. I asked that they be deleted, how that happened was up to the company that managed the server.
And they are cooperating fully with anyone that has questions."
* * *
Another notable email reveals the close
relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Ukraine billionaire Victor Pinchuk, a
prominent
donor to the Clinton Foundation , in which we see the latter's attempt to get a meeting with Bill Clinton to show support for
Ukraine:
From: Tina Flournoy < [email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2015 9:58:55 AM
To: Amitabh Desai
Cc: Jon Davidson; Margaret Steenburg; Jake Sullivan; Dan Schwerin; Huma Abedin; John Podesta
Subject: Re: Victor Pinchuk
Team HRC - we'll get back to you on this
> On Mar 30, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Amitabh Desai < [email protected]> wrote:
>
> Victor Pinchuk is relentlessly following up (including this morning) about a meeting with WJC in London or anywhere in Europe.
Ideally he wants to bring together a few western leaders to show support for Ukraine, with WJC probably their most important participant.
If that's not palatable for us, then he'd like a bilat with WJC.
>
> If it's not next week, that's fine, but he wants a date. I keep saying we have no Europe plans, although we do have those events
in London in June. Are folks comfortable offering Victor a private meeting on one of those dates? At this point I get
the impression that although I keep saying WJC cares about Ukraine, Pinchuk feels like WJC hasn't taken enough action to demonstrate
that, particularly during this existential moment for the county and for him.
>
> I sense this is so important because Pinchuk is under Putin's heel right now, feeling a great degree of pressure and pain for
his many years of nurturing stronger ties with the West.
>
> I get all the downsides and share the concerns. I am happy to go back and say no. It would just be good to
know what WJC (and HRC and you all) would like to do, because this will likely impact the future of this relationship, and slow
walking our reply will only reinforce his growing angst.
>
> Thanks, and sorry for the glum note on a Monday morning...
Sure. Sorry for the delay I was on a plane.
On Apr 30, 2015 9:44 AM, "Glenn Thrush" < [email protected]> wrote:
> Can I send u a couple of grafs, OTR, to make sure I'm not fucking
> anything up?
* * *
Another notable moment emerges in the emails, involving Hillary Clinton's selective memory. Clinton's description of herself as
a moderate Democrat at a September 2015 event in Ohio caused an uproar amongst her team. In a
mail from Clinton advisor Neera Tanden to Podesta
in the days following the comment she asks why she said this.
"I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn't remember saying it. Not sure I believe her," Podesta replies.
Tanden insists that the comment has made her job more difficult after "telling every reporter I know she's actually progressive".
" It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment ," she adds.
* * *
We also get additional insight into Clinton courting the Latino minority. A November 2008
email from Federico Peńa , who was on the Obama-Biden
transition team, called for a "Latino media person" to be added to the list of staff to appeal to Latino voters. Federico de Jesus
or Vince Casillas are seen as ideal candidates, both of whom were working in the Chicago operations.
"More importantly, it would helpful (sic) to Barack to do pro-active outreach to Latino media across the country to get our
positive message out before people start spreading negative rumors," Peńa writes.
* * *
Another email between Clinton's foreign policy adviser
Jake Sullivan and Tanden from March 2016 discussed how it was "REALLY dicey territory" for Clinton to comment on strengthening
"bribery laws to ensure that politicians don't change legislation for political donations." Tanden agrees with Sullivan:
" She may be so tainted she's really vulnerable - if so, maybe a message of I've seen how this sausage is
made, it needs to stop, I'm going to stop it will actually work."
* * *
One email suggested, sarcastically, to kneecap
bernie Sanders : Clinton's team issued advise regarding her tactics for the "make or break" Democratic presidential debate with
Sanders in Milwaukee on February 11, 2016. The mail to Podesta came from Philip Munger, a Democratic Party donor. He sent the mail
using an encrypted anonymous email service.
"She's going to have to kneecap him. She is going to have to take him down from his morally superior perch. She has done so
tentatively. She must go further," he says.
Clearly, the desire to get Sanders' supporters was a key imperative for the Clinton campaign. In a
September 2015 email to Podesta , Hill columnist
Brent Budowsky criticized the campaign for allegedly giving Clinton surrogates talking points to attack Bernie Sanders. "I cannot
think of anything more stupid and self-destructive for a campaign to do," he says. "Especially for a candidate who has dangerously
low levels of public trust," and in light of Sanders' campaign being based on "cleaning up politics."
Budowsky warns voters would be "disgusted" by attacks against Sanders and says he wouldn't discourage Podesta from sharing the
note with Clinton because "if she wants to become president she needs to understand the point I am making with crystal clarity."
"Make love to Bernie and his idealistic supporters, and co-opt as many of his progressive issues as possible."
Budowsky then adds that he was at a Washington university where " not one student gave enough of a damn for Hillary to
open a booth, or even wear a Hillary button. "
* * *
One email focused on how to address with the
topic of the TPP. National Policy Director for Hillary for America Amanda Renteria explains, "The goal here was to minimize our vulnerability
to the authenticity attack and not piss off the WH any more than necessary."
Democratic pollster Joel Benenson says, "the reality is HRC is more pro trade than anti and trying to turn her into something
she is not could reinforce our negative [sic] around authenticity. This is an agreement that she pushed for and largely advocated
for."
* * *
While claiming she is part of the people, an email exposes Hillary as being "
part of the system ." Clinton's team acknowledges
she is "part of the system" in an email regarding her strategies. As Stan Greenberg told Podesta:
" We are also going to test some messages that include acknowledgement of being part of the system, and know how much
has to change ,"
* * *
Some more on the topic of Hillary being extensively coached and all her words rehearsed, we find an email which reveals that
Clinton's words have to be tightly managed by her
team who are wary of what she might say. After the Iowa Democratic Party's presidential debate in November 2015 adviser Ron Klain
mails Podesta to say, "If she says something three times as an aside during practice (Wall Street supports me due to 9/11), we need
to assume she will say it in the debate, and tell her not to do so." Klain's mail reveals Sanders was their biggest fear in the debate.
"The only thing that would have been awful – a Sanders break out – didn't happen. So all in all, we were fine," he says.
The mail also reveals Klain's role in securing his daughter Hannah a position on Clinton's team. "I'm not asking anyone to make
a job, or put her in some place where she isn't wanted – it just needs a nudge over the finish line," Klain says. Hannah Klain worked
on Clinton's Surrogates team for nine months commencing in the month after her father's mail to Podesta, according to her Linkedin.
I love this...Assange is incommunicado, yet the data dumps keep coming!
Horse face looks like such a fool to the world as a result; & due to John Kerry's stupidity which is drawing major attention to
the whole matter; Americans are finally beginning to wake up & pay attention to this shit!
Looks like the Hitlery for Prez ship is starting to take on MASSIVE amounts of water!
I believe they are beyond the point where any more news of 'pussy grabbing' will save them from themselves (and Mr. Assange)!
The new lowered expectations federal government just expects to get lucre + bennies for sitting on their asses and holding
the door for gangsters. Traitors. Spies. Enemies foreign and domestic. Amphisbaegenic pot boiling.
With Creamer's tricks effective in Obama's re-election, it now makes sense why Obama was so confident when he said Trump would
never be president.
Trump is still ahead in the only poll I track. But i conduct my own personal poll on a daily basis and loads of Trump supporters
are in the closet and won't come out until they pull the lever for Trump on election day.
The DailyKos put out a report on Oct. 17 that WikiLeaks describes
as a "smear campaign plot to falsely accuse Julian Assange of pedophilia."
"An unknown entity posing as an internet dating agency prepared an elaborate plot to falsely claim that Julian Assange received
US$1M from the Russian government and a second plot to frame him sexually molesting an eight year old girl," WikiLeaks said in
a
press release Tuesday.
The press release went on: "The second plot includes the filing of a fabricated criminal complaint in the Bahamas, a court
complaint in the UK and laundering part of the attack through the United Nations. The plot happened durring WikiLeaks' Hillary
Clinton related publications, but the plot may have its first genesis in Mr. Assange's 16 months litigation against the UK in
the UN system, which concluded February 5 (Assange won. UK and Sweden lost & US State Dept tried to pressure the WGAD according
to its former Chair, Prof. Mads Andenas)."
The DailyKos reported that a Canadian family holidaying in the Bahamas reported to the police that their 8-year-old daughter
was "sexually molested online" by Assange on Toddandclare.com.
Julian Assange's legal team provided a timeline in the press release which showed that the self-claimed dating agency ToddAndClare.com
contacted WikiLeaks' defense team offering one million dollars for Assange to appear in a video advertisement for the "dating
agency".
Assange's defense wrote back, stating that the proposal appeared to be an "elaborate scam designed to entrap Mr. Assange's
reputation into unwanted and unwarranted publicity."
WikiLeaks was able to trace down the address of the front, posting an image on twitter of what appears to be a warehouse or
garage.
Here is the "headquarters" of the front (PAC?) behind the Assange "took US$1M from Russia" plot
Internet sleuths from Reddit were able to dig up some information about the dating service pushing the attacks on Assange,
finding that the company shares the address with a private intelligence corporation named Premise Data Corporation.
Here is the Reddit post that lays out the findings:
As other Redditors point out, the Center for American Progress was founded by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and
was funded by billionaire and pro-Clintonite George Soros.
As one Redditor so laughably put it, "If this was merely a coincidence, then I'm the queen of England."
As
we reported yesterday , Fox News had told its audience Tuesday morning that Assange would be arrested "maybe in a matter of
hours," leading to the speculation that there could have been a plot to arrest Assange over the pedophilia accusations.
But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. - more
so than ever - and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them
worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents
that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions
or opposes those leaders is
a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission
on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow.
To see how extreme and damaging this behavior has become,
let's just quickly examine two utterly false claims that Democrats over the past four days - led
by party-loyal journalists - have disseminated and induced thousands of people, if not more, to believe.
On Friday, WikiLeaks published its first installment of emails obtained from the account of Clinton
campaign chair John Podesta. Despite WikiLeaks' perfect, long-standing record of only publishing
authentic documents,
MSNBC's favorite ex-intelligence official, Malcolm Nance, within hours of the archive's release,
posted a tweet claiming - with zero evidence and without citation to a single document in the WikiLeaks
archive - that it was compromised with fakes:
As you can see, more than 4,000 people have re-tweeted this "Official Warning." That includes
not only random Clinton fans but also
high-profileClinton-supporting
journalists, who by spreading it around gave this claim their stamp of approval, intentionally
leading huge numbers of people to assume the WikiLeaks archive must be full of fakes, and its contents
should therefore simply be ignored. Clinton's campaign officials spent the day
fueling these
insinuations, strongly implying that the documents were unreliable and should thus be ignored.
Poof: Just like that, unpleasant facts about Hillary Clinton disappeared, like a fairy protecting
frightened children by waving her magic wand and sprinkling her dust over a demon, causing it to
scatter away.
Except the only fraud here was Nance's claim, not any of the documents published by WikiLeaks.
Those were all real. Indeed, at Sunday night's debate, when asked directly about the excerpts of
her Wall Street speeches found in the release, Clinton herself confirmed their authenticity. And
news outlets such as the New York Times and AP reported - and
continue to report - on their contents without any caveat that they may be frauds. No real print
journalists or actual newsrooms (as opposed to campaign operatives masquerading as journalists) fell
for this scam, so this tactic did not prevent reporting from being done.
But it did signal to Clinton's most devoted followers to simply ignore the contents of the release.
Anyone writing articles about what these documents revealed was instantly barraged with claims from
Democrats that they were fakes, by people often pointing to
"articles" like this one.
That article was shared almost 22,000 times on Facebook alone. In Nance's defense, it is true that
some unknown, random person posted a doctored email on the internet and claimed it was real, but
that did not come from the WikiLeaks archive and has nothing to do with assessing the reliability
of the archive (any more than
fake NYT stories on the internet impugn the reliability of articles in that paper). Not one person
has identified even a single email or document released by WikiLeaks of questionable authenticity
- that includes all of the Clinton officials whose names are listed as their authors and recipients
- yet these journalists and "experts" deliberately convinced who knows how many people to believe
a fairy tale: that WikiLeaks' archive is pervaded with forgeries.
More insidious and subtle,
but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night.
What happened - in reality, in the world of facts - was extremely trivial.
One of the emails
in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive - posted yesterday - was from Sidney Blumenthal
to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal's email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald's endless
series of Clinton-exonerating articles,
this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the
link and the full contents of the article. Although the purpose of Eichenwald's article (like everything
he says and does) was to defend Clinton, one paragraph in the middle acknowledged that one minor
criticism of Clinton on Benghazi was possibly rational.
Once WikiLeaks announced that this second email batch was online, many news organizations (including
The Intercept, along with the NYT and AP) began combing through them to find relevant information
and then published articles about them. One such story was published by Sputnik, the Russian government's
international outlet similar to RT, which highlighted that Blumenthal email. But the Sputnik story
inaccurately attributed the text of the Newsweek article to Blumenthal, thus suggesting that one
of Clinton's closest advisers had expressed criticism of her on Benghazi. Sputnik quickly removed
the article once Eichenwald pointed out that the words were his, not Blumenthal's. Then, in his campaign
speech last night, Trump made reference to the Sputnik article (hours after it was published and
spread on social media), claiming (obviously inaccurately) that even Blumenthal had criticized Clinton
on Benghazi.
That's all that happened. There is zero suggestion in the article, let alone evidence, that
any WikiLeaks email was doctored: It wasn't. It was just Sputnik misreporting the email. Once
Sputnik realized that its article misattributed the text to Blumenthal, it took it down. It's not
hard to imagine how a rushed, careless Sputnik staffer could glance at that email and fail to realize
that Blumenthal was forwarding Eichenwald's article rather than writing it himself. And while nobody
knows how this erroneous Sputnik story made its way to Trump for him to reference in his speech,
it's very easy to imagine how a Trump staffer on a shoddy, inept campaign - which has previously
cited InfoWars and white supremacist sites, among others - would have stumbled into
a widely shared
Sputnik story that had been published hours earlier on the internet and then passed it along
to Trump for him to highlight, without realizing the reasons to be skeptical.
In any event, based on the available evidence, this is a small embarrassment for Trump: He cited
an erroneous story from a non-credible Russian outlet, so it's worth noting. But that's not what
happened. Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted
no fewer than
three dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved.
By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof
that: 1) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; 2) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks
archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online;
4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian
government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald's words to Blumenthal.
In fact, Eichenwald literally has zero evidence for any of that. The point is not that his evidence
for these propositions is inconclusive or unpersuasive; the point is that there is zero evidence
for any of it. It's all just conspiracy theorizing and speculation that he invented. Worse, the article,
while hinting at these claims and encouraging readers to believe them, does not even expressly claim
any of those things. Instead, Eichenwald's increasingly unhinged tweets repeatedly inflated his insignificant
story from what it was - a misattribution of an email by Sputnik that Trump repeated - into a five-alarm
warning that an insidious Russian plot to subvert U.S. elections had been proven, with Trump and
fake WikiLeaks documents at the center.
By itself, this is not so notable: All journalists are tempted to hype their stories. But
Eichenwald went way, way beyond that, including - as demonstrated below - demonstrable lies.
But what makes it so significant is how many reasoned, perfectly smart journalists - just as they
did with Nance's "Official Warning" - started falling prey to the dual hysteria of Twitter group
dynamics and election blinders, to the point where CNN featured Eichenwald this morning to highlight
his major scoop linking Putin, Trump, and WikiLeaks in the plot to feed Americans heaps of Russian
disinformation.
Just watch how this warped narrative played out in a very short period of time, with nobody wanting
to get in the way of the speeding train for fear of being castigated as a Trump supporter or Putin
stooge (accusations that are - yet again - inevitably on their way as a result of this article):
To call all this overwrought deceit is to understate the case. In particular, the repeated claim
that his story has anything to do with, let alone demonstrates, that "wikileaks is working w/Putin"
or "wikileaks is compromised" is an outright fraud. The assertion in the second tweet - that "only
those two [Trump and Russia] knew" about the article - is an outright lie, since by the time Trump
cited it, it had been published hours earlier on the internet and shared widely on social media.
Moreover, none of the documents released by WikiLeaks have yet to be identified as anything but completely
authentic.
But look at his tweets: Each has been re-tweeted by close to 1,000 people, and in the case of
the most sensationalistic ones, many more. And they were quickly hyped by people who should know
better because anyone supporting Hillary Clinton wants to believe that this is true:
Russsia leaked hacked emails but created forgeries first plagiarizing a
reporter. Only Russian news posted the lie. Yet,
@realDonaldTrumphttps://t.co/mGizfPpHWF
Literally none of that happened. Or at least there is zero evidence that it did. These are smart,
rational people falling for a scam. Why? It's in part because Twitter fosters this group-think and
lack of critical thought - you just click a button and, with little effort, you've spread whatever
you want people to believe - but it's also because they're so convinced of the righteousness of their
cause (electing Clinton/defeating Trump) that they have cast all limits and constraints to the side,
believing that any narrative or accusation or smear, no matter how false or conspiratorial, is justified
in pursuit of it.
But while Donald Trump's candidacy poses grave dangers, so does group-think righteousness, particularly
when it engulfs those with the greatest influence. The problem is that none of this is going to vanish
after the election. This election-year machine that has been constructed based on elite unity in
support of Clinton - casually dismissing inconvenient facts as fraudulent to make them disappear,
branding critics and adversaries as tools or agents of an Enemy Power bent on destroying America
- is a powerful one. As is seen here, it is capable of implanting any narrative, no matter how false;
demonizing any critic, no matter how baseless; and riling up people to believe they're under attack.
For a long time, liberals heralded themselves as part of the "reality-based community" and derided
conservatives as faith-based victims of "epistemic closure." The dynamics seen here are anything
but byproducts of reason.
The decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook for mishandling classified information has roiled the FBI and Department of Justice,
with one person closely involved in the year-long probe telling FoxNews.com that career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously
believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.
The source, who spoke to FoxNews.com on the condition of anonymity, said Obama appointee FBI Director James Comey's dramatic July
5 announcement that he would not recommend to the Attorney General's office that the former secretary of state be charged left members
of the investigative team dismayed and disgusted. More than 100 FBI agents and analysts worked around the clock with six attorneys
from the DOJ's National Security Division, Counter Espionage Section, to investigate the case.
"No trial level attorney agreed, no agent working the case agreed, with the decision not to prosecute - it was a top-down decision,"
said the source, whose identity and role in the case has been verified by FoxNews.com.
A high-ranking FBI official told Fox News that while it might not have been a unanimous decision, "It was unanimous that we all
wanted her [Clinton's] security clearance yanked."
"It is safe to say the vast majority felt she should be prosecuted," the senior FBI official told Fox News. "We were floored while
listening to the FBI briefing because Comey laid it all out, and then said 'but we are doing nothing,' which made no sense to us."
The FBI declined to comment directly, but instead referred Fox News to multiple public statements Comey has made in which he has
thrown water on the idea that politics played a role in the agency's decision not to recommend charges.
WOW! Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is on fire! After previously blasting Hillary
Clinton, accusing her of basically being a scary psychopath who "would start World War 3 with
Russia", Jill is now warning liberal progressives not to throw away their vote by supporting
corporatist Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton because she is a "two faced public and private
position, corporatist who takes Wall Street special interest big donor money, traitor who would
betray you, a crook who controls the media, a monster and your votes would be wasted on her" in
what is basically a summary of what Jill Stein said.
"Don't waste your vote on corporate Democrats. #InvestYourVote," Stein wrote on Twitter on
Wednesday:
"If Trump's campaign is flailing, does a "spoiler" vote even exist anymore? Don't waste your vote
on corporate Democrats."
Stein then retweeted a statement from the Green Party's official Twitter account which read,
"It's time to #InvestYourVote in building a people's party – not waste your vote on corporate
party candidates that continue to betray you."
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our 'public' and 'private' positions," Stein added in a separate tweet, referring to the
recent WikiLeaks revelation that Hillary Clinton said that politicians need to have "both a
public and private position" on every issue:
"Unlike the Democrats and Republicans, we don't cuddle up to Wall Street and special interests
with our "public" and "private" positions."
she's right the Republicans are in the same boat! People like Paul Ryan, John McCain, there's
no doubt about it, they are just as corrupt as the Democrats. Its only Donald Trump himself who
is not bound to any Wall Street special interests and who doesn't accept donations from big
banks, but other Republicans are just as corrupt as your average Democrats. That's why GOP elites
are not endorsing Trump. Trump himself is also at war with the GOP establishment.
Stein observed that "corporations were originally chartered to serve the public good, but they've
become monsters that dominate our government."
Stein has previously explained that the liberal progressive agenda–on health care, crime, climate
change, trade, etc.– cannot be accomplished under a corporatist like Hillary Clinton. Stein
argued that a Clinton presidency will simply be the continuation of the policies supported by
Washington's "uniparty," which is controlled by special interest donors–and will not in any way
advance the goals of liberal progressives.
Seeming to borrow Trump's moniker for Clinton, Stein also attacked DNC chair Donna Brazile for
her "crooked" behavior– providing Clinton's campaign with a question in advance for a town hall
as Clinton was trying to defeat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary:
"Invest your vote in a movement party, not in more crooked behavior from the Democrats!
PodestaEmails4 http://thehill.com/media/300427-emails-donna-brazile-gave-town-hall-questions-to-clinton-camp-in-advance
"
Stein is a Harvard Medical School graduate, a mother to two sons, and a practicing physician, who
became an environmental-health activist and organizer in the late 1990s. As the Green Party's
2012 presidential candidate, Stein holds the record for the most votes ever received by a female
candidate for president in a general election.
While third party Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has received quite a bit of media attention
throughout this election, Stein said that she has experienced a virtual media blackout. Stein
urged supporters to help her "#BreakTheBlackout from corporate media."
Stein suggested that the reason for the media blackout stems is because she is an effective
messenger against Washington's "uniparty."
"I debated @MittRomney in 2002 and was declared the winner by viewers. After that they locked me
out of the debates," Stein tweeted. "The Democratic and Republican candidates + @GovGaryJohnson
refuse to debate me because they're scared. #OccupyTheDebate":
"Help us #BreakTheBlackout from corporate media – go to http://Jill2016.com and sign up to join
our team! #GreenTownHall"
WOW! Her anti-Hillary rants have been really strong lately! Its nice to finally see someone else
take on the crooked Democrats with such anger. Seeing Trump doing all the ranting all by himself
is really nice but now its even better. Perhaps the two should meet and discuss some sort of
alliance. Jill Stein could be an effective messenger to the Bernie voters. Perhaps Trump could
make her the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency or something, since she's
Green.
In exchange Jill should of course drop out and ask her 2% voter base to vote Trump. She should
also keep bashing the Democrats and target Bernie Sanders's people to vote Trump. Wouldn't be
such a bad idea, wouldn't it??
Clinton is converting Democratic Party into party of war with Russia...
Hillary was the Secretary of State when the USA tried to implement color revolution in Russia in
2011-2012.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Clinton told a press conference Monday there were now "credible reports about Russian interference in our elections," adding, "I want everyone-Democrat, Republican, Independent-to understand the real threat that this represents." ..."
"... Clinton's suggestion of a Trump-Putin axis was followed up Tuesday in a speech in North Carolina by her vice-presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, which was billed as a "major national security address" by the Democratic campaign. ..."
"... Clinton appeared Monday at several Labor Day rallies, but she chose to focus her attack on Trump on national security issues, where she has consistently attacked the billionaire real estate speculator from the right. ..."
"... Asked by a reporter if the alleged Russian actions amounted to a cyberwar, Clinton replied, "I'm not comfortable using the word 'war'." This demurral was only to disguise her intentions from the American people. However, in a speech last week to the American Legion convention, Clinton declared that cyberattacks on the United States should be answered by military force. ..."
"... Clinton claimed that Putin had all but confirmed Russia's role in the hacking of the DNC-a flat-out lie-adding, "The team around him certainly believe that there is some benefit to them to doing this." She then declared that the prospect of additional hacking into the state government systems used to conduct the November 8 elections represented "a threat from an adversarial foreign power." ..."
"... The Democratic candidate also criticized the role of the Russian government in Syria, in backing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against Islamist forces armed and financed by the United States and the Gulf monarchies. She denounced "the refusal of the Russians and the Iranians to put the kind of pressure on Assad that is necessary " ..."
"... The article published Monday by the Washington Post ..."
"... As in previous reports by the Post ..."
"... Meanwhile, the claims of Russian hacking are being used to whip up a crisis atmosphere about the administration of the election itself. Earlier this summer the FBI issued a "flash" alert to election officials in all 50 states over the threat of cyber intrusions. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested that the entire US election system, including 9,000 polling places and 50 separate state election authorities, should be declared "critical infrastructure" subject to the same counterterrorism efforts as nuclear power plants and electrical power grids. ..."
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this week publicly accused the Russian government
of intervening in the American election on behalf of her Republican opponent Donald Trump.
She cited an investigation by US intelligence agencies, first reported Monday night by the
Washington Post , into alleged Russian government hacking into the computer systems of the state
election officials in the United States.
Clinton told a press conference Monday there were now "credible reports about Russian interference
in our elections," adding, "I want everyone-Democrat, Republican, Independent-to understand the real
threat that this represents."
Clinton referred both to the Post report about hacking into state government computers
in Arizona and Illinois, and to the alleged Russian hacking of the emails of the Democratic National
Committee (DNC), which revealed backroom efforts by top DNC officials to ensure Clinton's victory.
Clinton's suggestion of a Trump-Putin axis was followed up Tuesday in a speech in North Carolina
by her vice-presidential running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, which was billed as a "major national security
address" by the Democratic campaign.
Kaine contrasted Clinton's going "toe-to-toe with Putin" as US secretary of state, to Trump's
suggestion that NATO was outmoded and that he could negotiate more successfully with Russia. He then
raised the question "why Trump seems to support Russian interests at the expense of American ones,"
suggesting that the billionaire real estate speculator was keeping his tax returns secret because
they might shed light on his financial ties to Russia. He concluded by citing the claim of former
acting CIA Director Michael Morell that Trump is an "unwitting agent" of the Russian intelligence
services.
Clinton appeared Monday at several Labor Day rallies, but she chose to focus her attack on
Trump on national security issues, where she has consistently attacked the billionaire real estate
speculator from the right.
Asked by a reporter if the alleged Russian actions amounted to a cyberwar, Clinton replied,
"I'm not comfortable using the word 'war'." This demurral was only to disguise her intentions from
the American people. However, in a speech last week to the American Legion convention, Clinton declared
that cyberattacks on the United States should be answered by military force.
Clinton claimed that Putin had all but confirmed Russia's role in the hacking of the DNC-a
flat-out lie-adding, "The team around him certainly believe that there is some benefit to them to
doing this." She then declared that the prospect of additional hacking into the state government
systems used to conduct the November 8 elections represented "a threat from an adversarial foreign
power."
The Democratic candidate also criticized the role of the Russian government in Syria, in backing
the regime of President Bashar al-Assad against Islamist forces armed and financed by the United
States and the Gulf monarchies. She denounced "the refusal of the Russians and the Iranians to put
the kind of pressure on Assad that is necessary "
Clinton reiterated her support for imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria held by the US-backed
"rebels," which would require US air strikes against Syrian anti-aircraft positions and could lead
to confrontations between Russian and American warplanes, which both conduct air strikes in the country.
"I think we need leverage," she said. "I've always believed that if that were on the table and
it were clear we were going to pursue it, that would give us the leverage we don't have now." Coming
just after the well-publicized failure of talks last weekend between Obama and Putin at the G20 summit
in China, Clinton was clearly seeking to stake out a more aggressive position on Syria than that
of the Obama administration.
The Democrat's claim to have discovered a Trump-Putin axis has two purposes: first, to cement
Clinton's standing as the consensus choice of the US military-intelligence apparatus; and second,
to integrate the election campaign itself into the war preparations by US imperialism, both in the
Middle East and against Russia (as well as China).
If Clinton wins the November 8 election over Trump, she will claim this to be a mandate for the
escalation of US military operations in Iraq and Syria, as well as the continued NATO military buildup
throughout Eastern Europe, openly aimed at preparing for war with Russia, a country with the world's
second-largest nuclear arsenal.
In her complaints about Russian interference in the US elections, Clinton is joining in the campaign
waged by the Pentagon and CIA to prepare US public opinion for such a conflict.
The article published Monday by the Washington Post is little more than a handout
from the intelligence agencies. It reports that the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and Department
of Homeland Security have started an investigation, led by Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper, into a "broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the
upcoming presidential election and in US political institutions."
In addition to discrediting the election among the American people-hardly necessary given that
the entire political system is deeply despised and the two main candidates hated-Russian officials
allegedly seek to "provide propaganda fodder to attack US democracy-building policies around the
world," the Post claimed.
As in previous reports by the Post and the New York Times about alleged
Russian hacking of the DNC, no evidence of any kind is cited in the article, only the unsupported
claims of intelligence officials, who even the Post reporters admit lack "definitive proof"
of either cyberattacks or even plans for cyberattacks.
Apparently the public is expected to treat such claims as the gospel, despite the decades of lying
by these agencies to cover up assassinations, coup plots and other conspiracies abroad, and the systematic
violation of the democratic rights of the American people at home.
Meanwhile, the claims of Russian hacking are being used to whip up a crisis atmosphere about
the administration of the election itself. Earlier this summer the FBI issued a "flash" alert to
election officials in all 50 states over the threat of cyber intrusions. Homeland Security Secretary
Jeh Johnson suggested that the entire US election system, including 9,000 polling places and 50 separate
state election authorities, should be declared "critical infrastructure" subject to the same counterterrorism
efforts as nuclear power plants and electrical power grids.
"... Can you imagine the reaction if Russian ambassador invited Trump and Sanders to the embassy and offered full and unconditional support for their noble cause of dislodging the corrupt neoliberal regime that exists in Washington. With cash injections to breitbart.com, similar sites, and especially organizations that conduct polls after that. ..."
"... Why Russia can't have something similar to help struggling American people to have more honest elections despite all the blatantly undemocratic mechanisms of "first to the post", primaries, state based counting of votes, and the United States Electoral College ? ..."
"... It would be really funny if Russians really resorted to color revolution tricks in the current presidential elections :-) ..."
"... Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sharply criticized what she called "troubling practices" before and during the vote in Russia. "The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted," she said in Bonn, Germany. ..."
In a way Hillary laments about Russia interference are what is typically called "The pot calling
the kettle black" as she is exactly the specialist in this area. BTW there is a documented history
of the US interference into Russian elections of 2011-2012.
In which Hillary (via ambassador McFaul and the net of NGOs) was trying to stage a "color revolution"
(nicknamed "white revolution") in Russia and prevent the re-election of Putin. The main instrument
was claiming the fraud in ballot counting.
Can you imagine the reaction if Russian ambassador invited Trump and Sanders to the embassy
and offered full and unconditional support for their noble cause of dislodging the corrupt neoliberal
regime that exists in Washington. With cash injections to breitbart.com, similar sites, and especially
organizations that conduct polls after that.
And RT covered staged revelations of "Hillary campaign corruption" 24 x 7. As was done by Western
MSM in regard to Alexei Navalny web site and him personally as the savior of Russia from entrenched
corruption ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Navalny
)
Actually the USA has several organizations explicitly oriented on interference in foreign elections
and promotion of "color revolutions", with functions that partially displaced old functions of
CIA (as in Italian elections of 1948). For example, NED.
Why Russia can't have something similar to help struggling American people to have more
honest elections despite all the blatantly undemocratic mechanisms of "first to the post", primaries,
state based counting of votes, and the United States Electoral College ?
It would be really funny if Russians really resorted to color revolution tricks in the
current presidential elections :-)
Here is a quote that can navigate them in right direction (note the irony of her words after
DNC throw Sanders under the bus ;-)
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sharply criticized what she called "troubling
practices" before and during the vote in Russia. "The Russian people, like people everywhere,
deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted," she said in Bonn, Germany.
With 99.9 percent of ballots processed, election officials said that United Russia had won
238 seats in Parliament, or about 53 percent, from 315 seats or 70 percent now. The Communist
Party won 92 seats; Just Russia, a social democratic party, won 64 seats and the national Liberal
Democratic Party won 56 seats.
Donald Trump's solid core of support comes from white working-class America. As the
blue-collar voter has become central to the political conversation, a clear picture of who we're
talking about has emerged: He's likely male and disillusioned with the economy and loss of
industry. He's a coal miner that's been
laid off in Hazard, Kentucky, and is scraping by off his wife's income; a machinists' union
member in a Pennsylvania steel town who
says "a guy like Donald Trump, he's pushing for change." Through the campaign, we've seen
endless portraits of Trump support in the heart of
Appalachian coal country, and a recent spate of books documents
white working-class alienation and the history of the
white underclass in America. Trump's iron grip on the support of blue-collar white Americans
has been one of the most striking threads of his unprecedented campaign.
... ... ...
...Thomas Frank, who recently published
Listen, Liberal, about the Democratic Party's abandonment of the working class and
Robert Reich, public policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former
secretary of labor in the Clinton administration. They
both have outlined a
series of Democratic moves to elevate free trade and an inability to defend unions as proof that
Democrats created a platform that left no room for the white working class.
Marginalized for years without working-class candidates or elected officials, "the white
working class found their voice in Trump," says Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy
at George Mason University and author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an
Age of Immigration and Inequality. "He speaks directly to conspiracy, frustration and a sense
of powerlessness, and they're grateful he speaks to them." Trump, too, has worked hard to burnish
his working-class cred,
telling a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that he considers himself "in a certain way to be
a blue-collar worker."
...In terms of the economy, white working-class women also differ from their male
counterparts. While manufacturing concerns and the white working class may be linked in our
cultural narrative (especially in Trump's campaign), the women were focused on different economic
concerns-in particular, the cost of higher education and preschooling.
.... Single women tend to lean to the left,and in recent years white working-class
marriage rates have fallen more sharply than those of their more educated and affluent
counterparts, who are more likely to delay marriage than not get married at all, according to
FiveThirtyEight's
analysis of
Census data. (Roughly 45 percent of white working-class women are unmarried, according to
GQRR's Nancy Zdunkewicz). In a June/July national survey by GQRR, white working-class womenput Trump 23 points ahead of Clinton in a three-way ballot, but when you looked at only
unmarried white non-college-educated women, that gap was only 11 percent-a preview, if current
trends continue, of a gap likely to grow in the future.
..For Democrats hoping to capitalize on this group, it's not obvious they can just
swoop in and grab alienated women. For one thing, white working-class women don't necessarily
trust Hillary Clinton any more than men do.
,,,For now, though, if Democrats continue bleeding white working-class men and women, the
party's white base will be mostly highly educated and white collar, a perhaps uncomfortable shift
for the so-called party of the people
Julia Sonenshein is California-born writer and editor living in New York City. Her work
focuses on social-political issues like reproductive rights, American gun culture and
intersectional feminism.
still no mention of the clincher - that proves the entire democrat party has no respect for the office of president - or any other
government office for that matter..
stay on target!!!
(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully
and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be
disqualified from holding any office under the United States .
Now that the most terrifyingly potent word in the English language, "PUSSY"
has been rediscovered and resurrected by the Democrat Digital Archaeologists, it is time
for reflection. "Pussy" has been detonated over the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton will be elected.
Nuclear War with Russia and China now seems likely.
War may break out after Hillary's election but before she takes office (think June 22, 1941)
I am recommending downloading and securely storing as many recipes and photos of meals as possible!
Also war movies and series (Band of Brothers etc). Digital survivalists, the new reality.
Also, we MUST organize battalions of Social Justice Warriors
to pull the dead and dying from the smoking rubble, rebuild the electricity grid, maintain social
order and establish food supplies.
Most likely, the "deplorables" and the "irredeemables" will be otherwise occupied in their
own communities (that probably were not directly targeted)
Podesta's twitter account and i-devices were hacked yesterday using a password found in the
emails.
See here .
That is pretty good evidence that the emails are authentic, unless you believe the hackers
managed to guess his password by an astronomically lucky coincidence.
I think this is also evidence that the hacks were not carried out by an elite team of state-sponsored
cyber experts. Podesta was emailing his password in plain text, using a simple password, using
that password across multiple accounts. Further, he didn't bother to change his password despite
his mailbox being hacked and the contents spreading all over the internet!
This man is a dingbat on computer security matters. Literally anyone could have hacked him
using very simple techniques. That password (Hunter4567) could have been brute forced quickly
using tools available to everyone.
Have to go with Occam's razor and say this was probably not a massive Russian plot to influence
the election and install Trump, just an incompetent person getting caught with their pants down
by someone poking around.
Unlike Reuters' political "reporters" , it seems the hacker collective
"Anonymous" is less impressed by Hillary Clinton's awesomeness.
Following Wikileaks' recent release of leaks, Anonymous reminds Americans of the 'career criminal' in a video containing
a well researched list of wrong-doings, exposing the actions of Hillary over her career .
This includes things like:
fraud investigations
conflicts of interest
political corruption
wrongful pardons
campaign and finance law violations
business & political scandals
This is only a small list of what is explored in the video below...
With so much exposed already, why do we continue to follow, allow, and accept people like Hillary and Trump as potentials
to be country leaders? Truly think about it. Can we even take a system that puts these two so high up in the ranks seriously?
Is this not the perfect storm to allow us to wake up to the reality of our current state? We should be thankful
that this is going on so we can help wake up the world and begin a conversation about what we can legitimately do next.
This isn't about Trump vs Clinton. That is merely the illusion we are being invited to believe. This is about
awakening to the fact that our system is absurd and that it's time to do something different. What is the answer? That is what we
must discuss instead of playing this broken political game of dividing and choosing who to "vote" for.
Occident Mortal
Kidbuck
Oct 12, 2016 3:41 AM Any journalist should feel enormous professional humilation and deep personal shame at the fact a bunch
of teenagers are offering more scrutiny on this presidential candidate than the entire press industry.
Guided and also manufactured to a great degree by an MSM-fabricated matrix of misinformation at the behest of the fuckers pulling
the strings. The disinterest in the morals of policy and action and their effect on millions of people both at home and abroad is
quite jaw-dropping, and a sad reflection on how low society (not just in the US) has fallen.
However Brexit proved all hope is not lost and sheeple can develop an awareness (probaly as a result of the intimidating bullshit
they were being fed).
I wish you could say that was happening. I just don't see it at all. I see things getting worse, and it's this "business" mentality
that is sucking the rest of us all down beneath the waves to drown.
I tend to agree.
Though just personal anecdote, in my career, I've seen this 'business mentality' at work, and it can be ugly.
For instance, I was in the room, to hear the CFO and COO discuss how to 'reach the numbers' so that the COO would get his bonus.
The decision in this case was to rid 100+ employees, many with decades of experience and accumulated skillsets, to reduce costs,
hit the 'correct' bottom line for a quarter or two, and voila! Company 'hit the numbers' and COO gets his bonus...in addition to
the already lucrative salary, well beyond what most would 'need'. Within a week of the bonus, he drives up in a flashy, new, red
sportscar. Should have witnessed the rage many of the remaining, spared employees that had watched their friends/coworkers get axed
and still remain unemployed; there were literally conversations about lighting that car on fire in the parking lot.
There were similar decisions to gobble up local and other national competitor shops. Some were immediately shut down and everyone
axed, but some with more glowing numbers that could be used to pad forecasts, were kept on for a short while. After saddling the
company with immense debt to cover the acquisitions, boosting the sales and forecast figures 'on paper' for the foreseeable near
future, he penned himself a nice, shiny résumé about 'increasing sales 4x in just a year' landed himself a different COO job in California
and left. Soon thereafter, when the weight of everything crashed down (scarce employees, with little skill left to efficiently accomplish
a quality product...both measures suffering/declining), those acquisitions were shut down and the original company is now scarcely
a shadow of what it was, thereby causing more layoffs and terminations. Now the $150 million +/year company, with 900 employees,
is a $10 million/year company, with 200 employees.
But that COO? He's living it up in CA, several companies later, and my periodic checkup on the 'net shows he's done similarly
a few more times, yet entrenched in the network of corporate boards/COOs that still perpetuate this scheme. Contrary to 'building'
anything, they construct a false narrative and tear everyone down in the process. But he and his cohorts get rich.
No, not everyone at that level does this, but the incentives are such that it is very tempting to follow suit and a review of
corporate history in this nation shows it is/was quite typical over many decades...because it works for those that engage this behavior.
Sound familiar to U.S. policy abroad? michelp
luckylongshot
Oct 12, 2016 10:37 AM "The answer is to start studying what it takes to apply power productively and use the findings to select
and train appropriate leaders."
Sorry but! In the currupt USA run by zio and war machines any 'appropriate leader' is DOA (Dead on Arrival.)
Donald J. Trump
tbd108
Oct 12, 2016 3:58 AM As I'm sure there are some that put Ttump on a high horse, I think most Trump supporters are supporting
him because of the exact reason they are fed up with system as aanonymous says. Trump is a big middle finger to the status quo of
Washington politics. I for one hope he does as he says he will do to hopefully right the ship of the US. He may even sink the ship
but it's going down already, he's our only chance to right it. What he's done takes a certain level of celebrity, balls, and money,
and I can't think of another person who could do what he has done. As great a cure Trump may be for our country, there are some side
effects so talk to your doctor to see if Trump is right for you. Dial 1(844)LIB-TARD or (855)LIB-TARD for a free sample of Trump.
Btw- those phone numbers are available if someone could actually make a good use for it. I'm also interested if the other exchanges
that are already taken have anything to with libtards.
I am surprised that Trump is not making the Podesta Wikileaks into a major story. Perhaps Trump
is not earnestly trying to actually win, or Trump is a Bush43/Palin level low IQ person.
Trump & his media spokeshacks could repeat "Podesta Wikileaks show HClinton's actual 'private
position' is cut SS & MC, & pro-TPP. Trump will not cut SS & MC, & will veto TPP. Vote for Trump".
Even if Trump is lying, Trump could "pull an 0bama 2008 on NAFTA" & privately tell PRyan/Trump
BigFunders/Owners Trump's actual plan.
IMHO Trump could possibly win if he took such an approach. Why isn't he doing so?
"... Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails." ..."
"... "Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there." ..."
"... And the other point is that Hillary, according to an article published by the Observer in March of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails. ..."
"... GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). ..."
Binney also proclaimed that the NSA has all of Clinton's deleted emails, and the FBI could gain access to them if they so wished.
No need for Trump to ask the Russians for those emails, he can just call on the FBI or NSA to hand them over.
Binney referenced
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke
of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases "to track down known and suspected terrorists."
Stated Binney: "Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown
of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA
Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those
emails."
"So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now," he stated of Clinton's
emails as well as DNC emails.
Asked point blank if he believed the NSA has copies of "all" of Clinton's emails, including the deleted correspondence, Binney
replied in the affirmative.
"Yes," he responded. "That would be my point. They have them all and the FBI can get them right there."
Binney surmised that the hack of the DNC could have been coordinated by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community angry
over Clinton's compromise of national security data with her email use.
And the other point is that Hillary, according to an
article published by the Observer in March
of this year, has a problem with NSA because she compromised Gamma material. Now that is the most sensitive material at NSA. And
so there were a number of NSA officials complaining to the press or to the people who wrote the article that she did that. She
lifted the material that was in her emails directly out of Gamma reporting. That is a direct compromise of the most sensitive
material at the NSA. So she's got a real problem there. So there are many people who have problems with what she has done in the
past. So I don't necessarily look at the Russians as the only one(s) who got into those emails.
The Observer defined the GAMMA classification:
GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance,
decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was).
Over a year before Edward Snowden shocked the world in the summer of 2013 with revelations that have since changed everything
from domestic to foreign US policy but most of all, provided everyone a glimpse into just what the NSA truly does on a daily basis,
a former NSA staffer, and now famous whistleblower, William Binney, gave excruciating detail to Wired magazine about all that
Snowden would substantiate the following summer.
We covered it in a 2012 post titled "
We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" – Big Brother Goes Live September 2013." Not surprisingly, Binney received
little attention in 2012 – his suggestions at the time were seen as preposterous and ridiculously conspiratorial. Only after the
fact, did it become obvious that he was right. More importantly, in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, what Binney
has to say has become gospel.
Binney was an architect of the NSA's surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31,
2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March
2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI's ability to access various secretive databases
"to track down known and suspected terrorists."
"... Lavrov: Well, I don't know whether this would ... English is not my mother's tongue and I don't know whether - I don't know - whether I would sound - I mean - decent. There are so many pussies around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not to comment. ..."
"... Reflecting different national usages, cunt is described as "an unpleasant or stupid person" in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, whereas Merriam-Webster indicates that it is a "usually disparaging and obscene" term for a woman[1] or an "offensive way to refer to a woman" in the United States. ..."
"... So Lavrov's not only a diplomat, he knows a little comedy too. :) He's one of the most interesting people in government today. ..."
The Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov
in a recent interview with CNN's Amanpour:
Amanpour: Russia had its own Pussy Riot moment. What do you think of Donald Trump's pussy riot
moment?
Lavrov: Well, I don't know whether this would ... English is not my mother's tongue and
I don't know whether - I don't know - whether I would sound - I mean - decent. There are so many
pussies around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not to comment.
CitizenKane123 | Oct 12, 2016 12:02:27 PM | 4
Pussies are soft, warms and comfortable. I think what Lavrov really meant was:
There are so many cunts around your presidential campaigns on both sides that I prefer not
to comment.
It should be noted that British English and American English have different definitions for the
C word, and I suspect Lavrov understands that. From Wikipedia:
Reflecting different national usages, cunt is described as "an unpleasant or stupid person"
in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, whereas Merriam-Webster indicates that it is a "usually
disparaging and obscene" term for a woman[1] or an "offensive way to refer to a woman" in the
United States.
Although I would suggest that the OED does understate the strength of the word somewhat.
Podesta - what a clown! Is there some rulebook about Presidents having to be protestant, while
all the shady puppetmasters are zionist catholics or zionist zionists?
(Busy with nurturing some illness, please bear with me.)
Quotes from the Wikileaks stash of Hillary
Clinton speeches and
emails from her campaign chair John Podesta.
Clinton in a 2013 speech to the Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner (via
The Intercept ):
[Arming moderates has] been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons-and pretty
indiscriminately-not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems
in the future, ...
Clinton also says that the no-fly zone bombing in Syria she is arguing for "would kill a lot of Syrians" - all for humanitarian
reasons of course.
The following was written by Podesta, a well connected former White House Chief of Staff, in an 2014
email to Clinton. As introduction Podesta notes:"Sources
include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region.":
While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence
assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia , which are providing clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.
Not new - the 2012 DIA analysis
provided as much , and more, - but these email's prove that Clinton was and is well aware that U.S. allies are financing the
radical Islamists in Syria and Iraq.
"... "You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement
so will not be raising money for your campaign." ..."
"... "How DARE you not give our Crown Princess the respect she deserves!" ..."
"... financially squeeze those not with status quo… guess they object to woman patriots that want to serve "all the people"??…..telling
..."
"For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments, doesn't fall in
line with what we previously thought of you. Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support
the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton."
"You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your
judgement so will not be raising money for your campaign."
I sort of enjoy the typo in Podesta's intro to the forward, if not the sentiment aka gloating that a couple of CAA agents decided
to punish Gabbard for supporting the better candidate. I mean they are clearly a couple of pigs.
"... For example, IMO now that we have in writing that Hillary has 2 positions on issues (a public and private position) it is 100%
fair that debate moderators and the media ask Clinton aggressively which position she is giving in her responses – her public or private
position? ..."
"... If the media won't focus on the public/private position issue (and Obama did the same in 2008 regarding NAFTA, I recall), then
Trump can force them to by putting that front and center in the debate. ..."
Not surprised, no. But IMO has definite implications.
For example, IMO now that we have in writing that Hillary has 2 positions on issues (a public and private position) it
is 100% fair that debate moderators and the media ask Clinton aggressively which position she is giving in her responses – her
public or private position?
Won't happen with our media, but IMO this should now be standard operating procedure for the media with regard to Hillary and
would be completely fair, prudent, and necessary to inform the public and voters.
The debate is setting up to be the mother of all debates.
If the media won't focus on the public/private position issue (and Obama did the same in 2008 regarding NAFTA, I recall),
then Trump can force them to by putting that front and center in the debate.
"... It's an election for and among the ruling class. ..."
"... Scott Adams who has been right so far says Trump still has a clear path to victory. The media is just trying to blackpill everyone. Why should we believe them? They are saying Trump can't win because they said he can't win. ..."
"... Somehow Clinton bragging about getting a pedophile off the hook is OK? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCDzRtZLUkc CLinton will start WW III. Trump may do so. What a choice. ..."
"... For nearly a generation now there have been decent candidates for US president who would, to a greater or lesser degree, have opposed our increasingly corrupt and violent oligarchy. Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Jill Stein, Rick Santorum ... and many more you haven't heard of. The elites have perfected a system of taking them down, with no messy assassination. Ridicule them in the press, don't cover their positions, just their style, find a flaw or mis-statement and hammer hammer hammer until people believe that they are ridiculous, then ban them from the media. ..."
"... now the establishment is doubling down on the only thing it knows how to do. They are 'reporting' that Trump is finished. ..."
"... Donald Trump has said unfortunate off-the-cuff things. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, has actually DONE some things so crazy that if I wrote her up as a character in a work of fiction my editor would reject it as unbelievable. ..."
"... The Podesta e-mails show Killary in her true colors (see b.) The few I read though were unsurprising and boring, because she is mentally challenged, as is her staff, they are in a bubble. The leaks re. her speeches to Banksters ditto, and anyway the speeches are immaterial, they are just empty, fakelorum, performances carried out to legitimise bribery in a completely corrupt circuit. ..."
"... I concur with the very first post...it will be a Trump landslide. The silent majority- the plurality of voters who are neither D nor R. We have no voice in politics and no voice in the media. We already see through the lies and the hypocracy. That is Trumps target audience. Even if it is just a show at least Trump talks about policies ..."
"... Trump and his supporters must henceforth be more vigilant and pull no punches in exposing the Clintons' perfidy. ..."
"... And on other fronts - the Vice News vid I just watched was titled 'the US/Russia Proxy War in Ukraine'. I was shocked. Their prior coverage was 200% neocon blather. (Aka Simon Otrovsky IIRc) Could it be a beginning of a revolt by the MSM? If CNN begins to refer to Syria and Ukraine as proxy wars, it means the Empire's control of MSM is slipping. And that would spell the end for them. ..."
"... "This is a very dangerous game given that Russia, being in Syria at the invitation of the legitimate government of this country and having two bases there, has got air defense systems there to protect its assets," Lavrov said, according to Reuters. ..."
"... IMO Sanders is worst among all the POTUS hopefuls. He lied repeatedly, In a debate with Hillary on Edward Snowden "He broke the law … but what he did [exposing the NSA surveillance] should be taken into consideration," Edward Snowden wanna fair trial, but can he get it? Dun Forget Assange afraid of assassinated, to speak from Ecuador embassy balcony to exposed Hillary. Can you trust Obomo's Justice Dept. or anyone in his administration? ..."
"... Outrage Can No Longer Be Ignored. The elections methods enterprise consists of an imposing compilation of distracting, unworkable feints, erroneously purported to constitute viable election methods. Get strategic hedge simple score voting. No More Two-Party!!! No more!!! ..."
"... The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the age of nations states, which was born with the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War, and which we all take for granted, is now over. Nation States made decisions through politics and then used power to implement their wishes. Now, however, power no longer resides with the state, but instead is in the hands of international entities -- corporations, banks, criminal enterprises -- that are above, beyond and indifferent to any nation's political decisions. ..."
"... Although American presidents, the congress, the courts still pretend otherwise, it's pretty clear they know they have no real power, and so go through charades of legislating meaningless issues. Allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia, for example, when there's not the slightest chance of pinning 911 on the Saudis. ..."
"... The election is a circus meant to distract and entertain a powerless public. Might as well enjoy it. The Dems and Repugs like to strut and posture, rake in dollars and enjoy prestige, and try to make us believe they can still shape the future, but really it out of their control. ..."
"... Of course the U.S. has tremendous military power, but the "elected" government has no control over it, how it is used or where. JFK's murder ended that era, ..."
"... Many here think the U.S., and hence the U.S. military, is controlled by Israel, but Israel too is a nation state, and supra-national institutions ($$$$) seem to be running it as well, ..."
"... My take as an outsider. Use Trump to take down the elite. His foreign policy basics are consistent and solid - non intervention, pull back of US military to the US, protection of local manufacturing. ..."
"... US involvement in Libya began at Hillary's urging shortly after Hillary received this advice from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Note that the advice that the overthrow of Qaddafi needed to be connected with "an identifiable rebellion" in Syria means that it needs to be connected with civil war in Syria. US involvement in Libya was, of course, coordinated out of Benghazi, as the advice to Hillary suggested. ..."
"... Once the fall of Qaddafi was a fait accompli, Hillary's State Department advocated the overthrow of Bashar Assad as a critical component for calming Israel so that President Barrack Obama could accomplish his legacy nuclear pact with Iran without Israel blowing Iran up before the deal was sealed. ..."
"... No. Planning for overthrow of Assad - and use of extremists as a weapon of State - was begun in earnest in 2006; as described by Seymour Hersh in "The Redirection". ..."
"... Anyone else notice that Hillary couldn't remember what she did while in office? Major mistake. ..."
"... Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton's term ended. ..."
The tape of Trump talking dirty was released just in time to sidetrack from the release of more
of Clinton's dirty secrets by Wikileaks. Trump's talk was juvenile and sexist bragging in front of
other "boys". Surprising it was not. There will more releases like that, all timed to run cover for
Clinton.
The just released emails of
her campaign chairman John Podesta about Clinton's talk to Wall Street and other Clinton related
issues are indeed revealing. She
is the sell-out you
would expect her to be:
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON POLICY*
Clinton: "But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals,
you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a
private position."
It is funny how the U.S. electorate has a deeper
"very negative" view of Trump (-44%) and Clinton (-41%) than of the much vilified Russian President
Putin (-38%).
When Trump will come back in the polls (not "if"), it will be a devious fight with daily "leaks"
followed by counter leaks and a lot of dirty laundry washed in front of the public. Good.
Many of the people who will vote will vote against a candidate, not for the one
that they will mark on their ballot. I expect a very low turn out election, barely giving a mandate,
to whomever may win or get selected to have won. Elwood | Oct 9, 2016 9:26:03 AM |
1
Uh no. The silent majority that swept Reagan into office will speak again this year.
Please stick to geo-politics and quit embarrassing yourself re: domestic US politics. Trump is
done and the longer it takes for you and the rest of the fake-left - both domestically and abroad
- to get their heads around that fact, the longer the rest of us have to witness the frightfully
shameful mental contortions your Trump-love takes.
Please stop. It's one thing to have to deal with shallow and inaccurate fake-left analysis
without a healthy dose of butt-hurt b/c Hillary will be POTUS.
Grow up and quit being a victim of the US propaganda arsenal.
In other words, I shall lie to the "Deplorables" to keep you safe from regulation and incarceration.
Give me money. I am a corrupt and experienced liar.
I had a home inspector come to my place last week, intelligent and skilled working class guy,
who didn't even know who Trump was. He knew Clinton was running and hates her. But had zero clue
who her opponent was. And he's never voted before. There are very few election signs on yards.
It's an election for and among the ruling class.
BURN. IT. DOWN. That was the WHOLE point of Trump voters from the get-go. And his slide toward
zionist scumbags was a HUUUGE problem. To me at least. Now he SEES. And he won't be shut down
by the fukwits. And regardless of what happens. He is likely carefully considering having his
son-in-law fall down a VERY deep hole. His daughter and grandchildren will thank him one day.
Et tu Brutus?
Here's what the Deplorables will be doing. On election day. 1) Bring black sharpie. 2) Demand
PAPER ballot. 3) Vote Trump. 4) Vote I or D down-ballot. 5) Fill in all blanks.
And by-the-way. To #2 Ron. We do this for Syria. And Yemen. And all the OTHER people the USG,
MIC, MSM ZIOthugs have been murdering and enslaving for the past 50+ years. Not just for ourselves
and our children. It's the absolute LEAST we can do. But its a start.
Scott Adams who has been right so far says Trump still has a clear path to victory. The media
is just trying to blackpill everyone. Why should we believe them? They are saying Trump can't
win because they said he can't win.
Ron is obviously a Clinton groupie.
Btw, how is what Trump said sexist? It's just real dude talk with the lads. Plenty of people
say that behind closed doors.
@2. I happen to think Trump is another wolf in a sheep's clothe and won't deliver any significant
part of his promises, so like you, I am baffled that someone like b could actually buy into this.
However unlike you, I don't think the election is predictable, I think it actually bodes well
for Trump, why? It seems clear from the polls, that Hillary isn't a preferred choice for majority
of the voters. If he was, she should be polling close to the 50 point mark by now, yet she's in
the low 40s, someone with her resume running against a political light weight like Trump should
be doing much better. So what does that mean? It means (at lest to me) voters have rejected Hillary
as a firs choice, she may be second or third but she's definitely not most voters first choice.
So Trump has a chance, although he's working his darnes to ruin it, Imagine if it was someone
else had Trumps message without the baggage?
The polls wouldn't be close, I think the undecided (who don't have Hillary has their first
choice) will decide this election at the last minute, if Trump has more recordings leaked (not
about his tryst) but for instance the NYT interview where he supposedly said he's not going to
build a wall? ( I think that will be leaked soon if the polls don't move in Hillary's favor, the
establishment clearly has their preference). If there are no more damages to Trump, he may very
well win this thing, but I suspect the empire has more leaks coming.
I for one thinks a third party candidate is where its at, but what do I know?
Want to read some original observations? (1) The Pence-Is-So-Presidential vp debate win was a
complete set-up, with the DNC complicit in instructing Tim Kaine to play the obvious heavy, a
movie caricature villian, complete with raised eyebrows, crazy expressions, and interrupting 70+
times. Made Pence a new hero. Reason? (2) GOP Rinos and DNC have been co-ordinating for months
on "perfect time" to release Trump's Naughty Audio Tape (sharp ears can also detect it was edited),
and this was reported by DC Whispers and journalists Mr/Mrs Bill & Beth Still in a recent video.
(3) Media had their 'talking points' to conclude with NBC's Chuck Todd yesterday: "The election
is over. Hillary has won." (4) GOP Paul Ryan did high-profile dis-invitation of Trump to Wisconsin;
and then Pence substitution at event (vetoed by Trump) was to support GOP Establishment plot to
replace Trump with Pence on the ticket, which they will still try to do when the DNC floats false
pedophile charges against Trump w/o Oct. 9 (DNC whistleblowers gave full plan to Alex Jones because
even there, some people are too disgusted with all this dirt to 'carry on camping'). Pence was
in on the conspiracy from the very beginning. Another smiling choirboy.
For nearly a generation now there have been decent candidates for US president who would, to a
greater or lesser degree, have opposed our increasingly corrupt and violent oligarchy. Ross Perot,
Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, Jill Stein, Rick Santorum ... and many more you haven't
heard of. The elites have perfected a system of taking them down, with no messy assassination.
Ridicule them in the press, don't cover their positions, just their style, find a flaw or mis-statement
and hammer hammer hammer until people believe that they are ridiculous, then ban them from the
media.
Trump's big mouth and complete lack of shame has, for now, made him relatively immune to this
treatment. So now the establishment is doubling down on the only thing it knows how to do. They
are 'reporting' that Trump is finished. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But it would be wise to remember
that the corporate press doesn't report the news any more, it is attempting to create the news,
out of whole cloth. Remember how many times they said that Trump was 'finished' during the primary?
I mean, how come what Trump said ten years ago in a private conversation, is headline news,
while Hillary Clinton's decision to ALLY THE UNITED STATES WITH AL QAEDA AND RISK WAR WITH RUSSIA
TO DEFEND THEM is somehow a minor detail? It's crazy when you think about it.
Donald Trump has said unfortunate off-the-cuff things. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State,
has actually DONE some things so crazy that if I wrote her up as a character in a work of fiction
my editor would reject it as unbelievable.
So I am voting for Trump even if the New York Times says he is doomed. We don't really know
what he will do as president, but in the business world he has proven the ability to actually
get along with disparate people in a constructive way. Hillary Clinton is a bona fide monster
who should scare any sane person. We know exactly what she will do as president, and attacking
Russian forces in Syria will be just the start...
Better a chance on a wildcard, then certain doom. IMHO.
The Podesta e-mails show Killary in her true colors (see b.) The few I read though were unsurprising
and boring, because she is mentally challenged, as is her staff, they are in a bubble. The leaks
re. her speeches to Banksters ditto, and anyway the speeches are immaterial, they are just empty,
fakelorum, performances carried out to legitimise bribery in a completely corrupt circuit.
One e-mail (idk who wrote it and can't find it back): a campaign manager who had his head screwed
on stated that most likely one needs to add 10 points to Trump re. polls. Details were a bit bizarre
and convoluted...no matter...
It reminded me that in France all the 'official' polls use an 'algorithm' based on 'hunches
dressed up in fancy pyscho-babble verbiage' that add between 2 and 5% to NF votes (depending on
election, region, first/second round, etc.) Necessary for maintaining their credibility, to come
closer to what the real results will show.
As for Trump's locker-room bragaddacio, not one single Trump supporter will flip, and undecideds
etc. may switch to Trump, finding such an 'attack' illegit, frivolous, etc. It throws light on
the fact that what Killary is being accused of - e-mails, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, pay to
play, etc. - is extremely serious, whereas smutty chat is part-o-life.
Imho the underlying aim of the release (first, serving to create buzzz! to cover over the leaks
natch) was to furnish a reason for segments of the PTB establishment base, nominally
Repubs., to come forward and support HRC, after they were subjected to pressure, arm-twisting,
possibly even blackmail.
I concur with the very first post...it will be a Trump landslide. The silent majority- the plurality
of voters who are neither D nor R. We have no voice in politics and no voice in the media. We
already see through the lies and the hypocracy. That is Trumps target audience. Even if it is
just a show at least Trump talks about policies
Trump is still going to "win" the election. I put the win in quotations because that will not
mean that he would be declared winner. The plan to rig the election has always been part of the
plan, what this leak provides is a way to persuade the gullible people that the tape cost Trump
the election. The oligarchs in both parties and all over the Western world are truly terrified
of a Trump presidency but equally terrified of the reaction of the masses, should the election
be brazenly rigged with no plausible reasons. They have tried to manipulate the polls and it is
not succeeding. But now they can go back to their pseudo pollsters and start dishing out dubious
polls until the election. That would appear credible to the credulous voters who by and large
are, frankly, dim. The two parties and the global oligarchs and their media shoeshine crew have
now found a convenient talking point to prepare the ground for an eventual rigging of the election.
Trump and his supporters must henceforth be more vigilant and pull no punches in exposing the
Clintons' perfidy.
#22 I'd say "war criminals who rule us" is Hillary's job title to a T. So many Hillary supporters
are giving off the scent of mixed rage and panic these days.
And on other fronts - the Vice News vid I just watched was titled 'the US/Russia Proxy War in
Ukraine'. I was shocked. Their prior coverage was 200% neocon blather. (Aka Simon Otrovsky IIRc)
Could it be a beginning of a revolt by the MSM? If CNN begins to refer to Syria and Ukraine as
proxy wars, it means the Empire's control of MSM is slipping. And that would spell the end for
them.
To 31. Nah. It's not the end of 'em. Just controlled opposition. Cuz thru all this miasma. LOTS
of decent folks are hip to what's happening in Yemen and Syria. The muppets are rubbing sleep
from their tired little eyes. And SEE what the MSM has been neglecting to tell them. The MSM aren't
stupid. They hope feeding the muppets some bit of truthiness, we'll fall back into an MSM-stupor.
Sadly. The MSM has lost too many muppets. Gone for good. This CIVIL WAR won't be fought carnally.
But it will be just as bloody. Cuz metaphysical warfare is something for which they are NOT prepared
to battle.
I think the term used here refers to any form of modern mass release of bombs or missiles.
Each B-52 which of course can refuel so fly from anywhere, & is ponderously slow, can release
about 24 cruise missiles, serially, from a rotary dispenser inside, from standoff distances.
So the problem becomes "How many 'rounds' do the russians have for each & every one of their
missile batteries there?"
Except that he didn't inherit or steal his money, he demonstrated he's nearly perfect example
of the 1% when he mocked any voter who has a opinion about anything except for his own opinion
that estate taxes are theft (though so would be Trump's inflation-based tax -- thereby demonstrating
Mr. Scott 1%-er Adams is less informed than he is rich) and that (according to Scott Adams himself)
is far and away the issue that matters to Scott Adams in this election.
Who gave you or the Democrats the right to demand changes after the Primaries? .....believe
Gallup's polls and anyone who happen to disagree with you a troll?
IMO Sanders is worst among all the POTUS hopefuls. He lied repeatedly, In a debate with Hillary
on Edward Snowden "He broke the law … but what he did [exposing the NSA surveillance] should be
taken into consideration," Edward Snowden wanna fair trial, but can he get it? Dun Forget Assange
afraid of assassinated, to speak from Ecuador embassy balcony to exposed Hillary. Can you trust
Obomo's Justice Dept. or anyone in his administration?
Sanders said "Well, as somebody who spent many months of my life when I was a kid in Israel,
who has family in Israel, of course Israel has a right not only to defend themselves, but to live
in peace and security without fear of terrorist attack." Did you look at Google's Palestine
map (taken down after protests)?
You have, perhaps, heard me mention "strategic hedge simple score voting" here before. Here are
two short pieces I have posted at the website "The Center for Election Science", at: https://electology.org/forums/theory
/~~~~~~~~~~
They tend to fall back on a Google+ Groups "site" which I do not use since I refuse to join (corporate)
"social media" at: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/electionscience
Outrage Can No Longer Be Ignored. The elections methods enterprise consists of an imposing
compilation of distracting, unworkable feints, erroneously purported to constitute viable election
methods. Get strategic hedge simple score voting. No More Two-Party!!! No more!!!
Giving Americans a choice of candidates no one wants is a way of humiliating them, of showing
them they have no say in how they are ruled. It's much like Caligula appointing his horse to the
Roman Senate to show his power and his contempt for the senators who might still have thought
they had a say in running Rome.
The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman argues that the age of nations states, which was born with
the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War, and which we all take for granted, is now over. Nation
States made decisions through politics and then used power to implement their wishes. Now, however,
power no longer resides with the state, but instead is in the hands of international entities
-- corporations, banks, criminal enterprises -- that are above, beyond and indifferent to any
nation's political decisions.
Although American presidents, the congress, the courts still pretend otherwise, it's pretty
clear they know they have no real power, and so go through charades of legislating meaningless
issues. Allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia, for example, when there's not the slightest chance
of pinning 911 on the Saudis.
If WW3 or anything else is in the cards it will happen no matter who is elected, Clinton, Trump
or someone else.
The election is a circus meant to distract and entertain a powerless public. Might as well
enjoy it. The Dems and Repugs like to strut and posture, rake in dollars and enjoy prestige, and
try to make us believe they can still shape the future, but really it out of their control.
Indeed, according to Bauman, things may be spinning out of anyone's control. That's everywhere,
not just in the U.S.
Of course the U.S. has tremendous military power, but the "elected" government has no control
over it, how it is used or where. JFK's murder ended that era,
Many here think the U.S., and hence the U.S. military, is controlled by Israel, but Israel
too is a nation state, and supra-national institutions ($$$$) seem to be running it as well,
Recently there have been plenty of posts here pointing out the contradictions and inexplicable
behavior of American leaders concerning Syria -- is the military opposing the State Department?
Is the "CIA" opposing both and calling the shots? I think Bauman would agree (?) that in the final
analysis, none of them are running things. Americans, including their supposed leaders, have lost
control of their destiny and can only do as they are told.
I'm not qualified to judge Bauman's assertion. I'm only suggesting it gives a plausible explanation
for the current insanity we're living through. "The State of Crisis" (2014). A great work (only
150 pages) that you'll be glad to read if you haven't already read it.
My take as an outsider. Use Trump to take down the elite. His foreign policy basics are consistent
and solid - non intervention, pull back of US military to the US, protection of local manufacturing.
These are the two best policies to break the globalised elite, US would go through some hard times
for a bit re-adjusting, then take off again as part of this world rather than wannabe ruler of
this world.
Trump's line about Gens. Macarthur and Patton rolling over in their graves was masterful. Telling
Hil that she doesn't know who Isis is. Declaring Aleppo lost. Scored some points. The Trump of
yesterday's news is not the Trump in the debate. I find this strangely reassuring. Got her on
the 3:00AM phone call in res Benghazi. Whoever ran Trump's prep gets a free drink on me.
US involvement in Libya began at Hillary's urging shortly after Hillary received this advice
from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Note that the advice that the overthrow of Qaddafi needed
to be connected with "an identifiable rebellion" in Syria means that it needs to be connected
with civil war in Syria. US involvement in Libya was, of course, coordinated out of Benghazi,
as the advice to Hillary suggested.
Once the fall of Qaddafi was a fait accompli, Hillary's State Department advocated the overthrow
of Bashar Assad as a critical component for calming Israel.
No. Planning for overthrow of Assad - and use of extremists as a weapon of State - was begun in
earnest in 2006; as described by Seymour Hersh in "The Redirection".
Anyone else notice that Hillary couldn't remember what she did while in office? Major mistake.
Trump recalled that Clinton was secretary of state when President Barack Obama drew his now-infamous
rhetorical 'red line' in Syria, ineffectively warning Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons
against insurgents and civilians.
Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama
dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton's term ended.
She can't even remain standing during a presidential debate, and can't remember what she did,
either.
@ 31 Vice "news" is a bad joke. All their Syria and Libya coverage is 200% pro al-Qaeda/DoS policy.
They even had a "journalist" embedded with al-Nusra in Aleppo in 2014 and portrayed them in a
favourable light. It doesn't surprise me that their Ukraine coverage follows a similar pattern.
"... the DNC is handling the public v. private comments of one Hillary Clinton is to declare all the leaked material suspect because it's "postmarked Russia," according to Donna Brazile, whom I just watched on This Week – so she says she hasn't read them, and is advising that no one read them. If you don't read them, that ends the discussion, which obviously was her goal. ..."
"... And it worked, as near as I can tell. Brazile hammered the public remarks only, so there you have it: just like the DNC hack that showed the games being played with the Sanders candidacy, the Wikileaks release on the paid speeches is delegitimized with one word: Russia. ..."
Well, and just so you know, the way the DNC is handling the public v. private comments
of one Hillary Clinton is to declare all the leaked material suspect because it's "postmarked
Russia," according to Donna Brazile, whom I just watched on This Week – so she says she hasn't
read them, and is advising that no one read them. If you don't read them, that ends the discussion,
which obviously was her goal.
And it worked, as near as I can tell. Brazile hammered the public remarks only, so there
you have it: just like the DNC hack that showed the games being played with the Sanders candidacy,
the Wikileaks release on the paid speeches is delegitimized with one word: Russia.
Not that Stephanopolous seemed all that reluctant to let her off the hook – he can say he brought
it up, but we all know today isn't about Clinton, it's once again about Trump.
I will say this: the town hall debate could be pretty interesting.
Following the first
official accusation lobbed at Russia on Friday by the Department of Homeland Security and Director
of National Intelligence on Election Security, in which US intelligence services formally stated
they were "confident" that the Russian government "directed the recent compromises of emails from
US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations", today Russia responded to
this latest diplomatic escalation by saying that U.S. accusations that Russia was responsible for
cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations lack any proof and are an attempt by Washington
to fan "unprecedented anti-Russian hysteria", the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said.
After late on Friday the Kremlin called the U.S. allegations "nonsense", on Saturday Russia's
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov,
cited by Reuters , said on the ministry's website that "this whipping up of emotions regarding
'Russian hackers' is used in the U.S. election campaign, and the current U.S. administration, taking
part in this fight, is not averse to using dirty tricks."
"There is no proof whatsoever for such grave accusations," Ryabkov said. "(They are) ...fabricated
by those who are now serving an obvious political order in Washington, continuing to whip up unprecedented
anti-Russian hysteria."
Ryabkov reiterated an offer to Washington, first made last year, to hold consultations on fighting
cyber crime together, but he also criticized John Kerry after the U.S. Secretary of State said late
on Friday that Russian and Syrian actions in the Syrian civil war, including bombings of hospitals,
"beg for" a war crimes investigation.
Such remarks are unacceptable and Moscow is disappointed to hear "new typically U.S. claims for
being a global judge", Ryabkov said in comments to Interfax news agency published on Saturday.
As Reuters adds, referring to a resolution on Syria proposed by France for debate at the United
Security Council later on Saturday, he said: "Unfortunately, we see less and less common sense in
the actions of Washington and Paris". The draft resolution demands an end to air strikes and military
flights over Aleppo. Moscow has already said this draft is unacceptable.
So with hopes of any joint Syrian action in tatters, and the US formally accusing Russia of being
a state sponsor of cyber attacks against the US, with the chairman of the US senate cyber hacking
subcommittee going so far as introducing a bill imposing sanctions on Russia after the political
hacking allegations, which Russia has duly denied, the ball is now again in Obama's court, where
the next step is most likely to be even more diplomatic tensions, and military escalations.
pods: Oct 8, 2016 11:00 AM
US policy: "When did you stop beating your wife?"
jcaz -> RagaMuffin: Oct 8, 2016 11:14 AM
Don't sweat it, Vlad- real America knows what this is about, and who did what.....
Ha, the article actually uses 'the Putin', as in ' featuring the Putin dressed in a suit in
front of the Russian flag with the word "Peacemaker" in capital letters' paging the late
Sen. Joe McCarthy, we have a fifth-column crisis! I blame the Donald for mollycoddling evil commies
like the Putin.
Update on the "banner day for the Putin" – Russian friend notes similar banner was hung in
Dresden, and the occasion is the Putin's birthday, 64th years young today.
Hillary: Huma dear, pour me another double Stoli & tonic, stat!
Huma: What if the schlubs hear you drink Stoli, maybe we should switch to Skyy?
Hillary: It's what Blankfein serves, only the best.
Huma: Maybe we should reconsider first strike, considering the caviar situation. Some VIP donors
will be sucking their thumbs.
Hillary: Memo to Blumenthal, we need a strategic caviar stockpile to last until the rubble is
sorted out.
The WikiLeaks material is highly relevant to how Clinton would
actually govern, as opposed to how she says she will govern. Because of
the oddly timed release of the Trump hot mike tape, this story seems to
be getting buried, so I'll go into it in some detail. First some links:
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION ON
POLICY*
*Clinton: "But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back
Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little
Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private
Position."*
(The email is a compilation of quotes from Clinton's paid speeches,
not otherwise available. It begins: "Attached are the flags from HRC's
paid speeches we have from HWA." The asterisked material is how the
Clinton campaign staffer "flagged" the quotes they considered dangerous.)
Since these quotes are from paid speeches, we can expect Clinton's
private position - expect, that is, if we assume that Clinton isn't
cheating her clients by failing to deliver value for money in terms of
services to be rendered - to be a more accurate representation of her
views than her public one. In other words, we're looking at a pitch to
the donor class, when Clinton was laying the groundwork for her campaign.
In an
oligarchy
, this would be natural.
I believe I've mentioned to readers that my vision of the first 100
days of a Clinton administration includes a Grand Bargain, the passage of
TPP, and a new war. So you can read the following as confirmation bias,
if you will.
But Simpson-Bowles - and I know you heard from Erskine earlier
today - put forth the right framework. Namely, we have to
restrain spending
, we have to have adequate revenues, and we
have to incentivize growth. It's a three-part formula. The specifics
can be negotiated depending upon whether we're acting in good faith or
not [!!].
Readers will of course be aware that the fiscal views intrinsic to
Simpson-Bowles have been the perennial justification for Social Security
cuts (
"the
progressive give-up formula"
) and austerity generally. And if you
think Democrat orthodoxy on SImpson Bowles has changed, see Robert Rubin
today (below). If you buy Simpson-Bowles, you buy Social Security cuts.
The policy is bad enough, but "depending upon whether we're acting in
good faith or not" is, to me, the real mind-boggler.
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With
Open Trade And Open Markets. *"My dream is a hemispheric common
market, with
open trade and open borders
, some time in the
future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it,
powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."
On "green," see Clinton below on climate change. On trade, anybody
with a "dream" like that will not surrender TPP lightly.
Hillary Clinton Said One Of The Problems With A No Fly Zone Would
Be The Need To Take Out Syria's Air Defense, And "You're Going To Kill
A Lot Of Syrians." "So we're not as good as we used to be, but we
still-we can still deliver, and we should have in my view been trying
to do that so we would have better insight. But the idea that we would
have like a no fly zone-Syria, of course, did have when it started the
fourth biggest Army in the world. It had very sophisticated air
defense systems. They're getting more sophisticated thanks to Russian
imports. To have
a no fly zone
you have to take out all of
the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our
missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we're not putting our
pilots at risk-you're going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a
sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an
American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians." [
Speech to Goldman Sachs, 2013 IBD Ceo Annual Conference, 6/4/13]
And speaking of beating the war drums, there's this gobsmacking quote
on
climate change
(tinePublic, 2014):
Clinton Talked About "Phony Environmental Groups" Funded By The
Russians To Stand Against Pipelines And Fracking. "We were up against
Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media. We were even up
against phony environmental groups, and I'm a big environmentalist,
but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, oh
that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,
and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from
Russia." [Remarks at tinePublic, 6/18/14]
With the media exclusively attuned to every new, or 11-year-old as the case may be, twist in the
Trump "sex tape" saga, it appeared that everyone forgot that a little over 24 hours ago, Wikileaks
exposed the real reason why Hillary was keeping her Wall Street speech transcripts - which we now
know had always been within easy reach for her campaign - secret.
In her own words : "if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the
deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and
a private position." In other words, you have to lie to the general public while promising those
who just paid you $250,000 for an hour of your speaking time something entirely different, which
is precisely what those accusing Hillary of hiding her WS transcripts had done; and as yesterday's
hacked documents revealed, they were right.
The Clinton campaign
refused to disavow the hacked excerpts, although it quickly tired to pin the blame again on Russia:
"We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by Julian Assange, who
has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton," spokesman Glen Caplin said in a prepared
statement. Previous releases have "Guccifer 2.0 has already proven the warnings of top national security
officials that documents can be faked as part of a sophisticated Russian misinformation campaign."
Ironically, it was literally minutes before the Wikileaks release of the "Podesta Files" that
the US formally accused Russia of waging a hacking cyber attack on the US political establishment,
almost as if it knew Wikileaks was about to make the major disclosure, and sought to minimize its
impact by scapegoating Vladimir Putin.
And while the Trump campaign tried to slam the leak, with spokesman saying "now we finally get
confirmation of Clinton's catastrophic plans for completely open borders and diminishing America's
influence in the world. There is a reason Clinton gave these high-paid speeches in secret behind
closed doors - her real intentions will destroy American sovereignty as we know it, further illustrating
why Hillary Clinton is simply unfit to be president", Trump's campaign had its own raging inferno
to deal with.
So, courtesy of what Trump said about some woman 11 years ago, in all the din over the oddly coincident
Trump Tape leak, most of the noise created by the Hillary speeches was lost.
But not all.
According to
Reuters , supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday "
seethed ", and "expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton
to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade
and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street. "
Clinton,
who last it emerged had slammed Bernie supporters as "basement dwellers" in a February fundraiser,
with virtually no media coverage, needs Sanders' coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel
her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and
takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street , both positions she later backed away from
in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders' attacks on trade deals and powerful banks.
Needless to say, there was no actualy "backing away", and instead Hillary did what he truly excels
in better than most: she told the public what they wanted to hear, and will promptly reneg on once
she becomes president.
Only now, this is increasingly obvious to America's jilted youth: " this is a very clear
illustration of why there is a fundamental lack of trust from progressives for Hillary Clinton,"
said Tobita Chow, chair of the People's Lobby in Chicago, which endorsed Sanders in the
primary election.
" The progressive movement needs to make a call to Secretary Clinton to clarify where
she stands really on these issues and that's got to involve very clear renunciations of the positions
that are revealed in these transcripts," Chow said.
Good luck that, or even getting a response, even though Hillary was largely spared from providing
one: as Reuters correctly observes, the revelations were immediately overshadowed by the release
of an 11-year-old recording of Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, making lewd comments
about women. In fact, the revelations were almost entirely ignored by the same prime time TV that
has been glued to the Trump slow-motion trainwreck over the past 24 hours.
Still, the hacked speeches could lead to further erosion in support from the so very critical
to her successful candidacy, young American voter.
Clinton has worked hard to build trust with so-called progressives, adopting several of Sanders'
positions after she bested him in the primary race. The U.S. senator from Vermont now supports
his former rival in the Nov. 8 general election against Trump. Still, Clinton has struggled to
win support from young "millennials" who were crucial to Sanders' success, and some Democrats
expressed concern that the leaks would discourage those supporters from showing up to vote.
"That is a big concern and this certainly doesn't help," said Larry Cohen, chair
of the board of Our Revolution, a progressive organization formed in the wake of Sanders' bid for
the presidency, which aims to keep pushing the former candidate's ideas at a grassroots level. "It
matters in terms of turnout, energy, volunteering, all those things."
Still, despite the Trump media onslaught, the message appeared to filter through to those who
would be most impacted by Hillary selling out her voters if she were to win the presidency.
"Bernie was right about Hillary," wrote Facebook user Grace Tilly cited by Rueters, "she's a tool
for Wall Street."
"Clinton is the politicians' politician - exactly the Wall Street insider Bernie described," wrote
Facebook user Brian Leach.
Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf said progressive voters would still choose the former first
lady, even with misgivings. "I'd like to meet the Bernie Sanders supporter who is going to say, 'Well
I'm a little worried about her on international trade, so I'm going to vote for Donald Trump'," he
said.
He just may meet a few, especially if Bernie's supporters ask themselves why Bernie's support
for Hillary remained so unwavering despite a leak confirming that Hillary was indeed all he had previously
railed against.
In a statement earlier, Sanders responded to the leak by saying that despite Hillary's paid speeches
to Wall Street in which she expressed an agenda diametrically opposite to that espoused by the Vermont
socialist, he reiterated his his support for the Democratic Party platform.
"Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said behind closed doors on Wall Street, I am
determined to implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform which was agreed upon by her
campaign," he said in a statement.
"Among other things, that agenda calls for breaking up the largest financial institutions
in this country, re-establishing Glass-Steagall and prosecuting those many Wall Street CEOs who engaged
in illegal behavior. "
In retrospect we find it fascinating that in the aftermath of October's two big surprises served
up on Friday, Sanders actually believes any of that having read through Hillary's
Wall Street speeches, certainly far more fascinating than the staged disgust with Trump who, the
media is suddenly stunned to find, was no more politically correct 11 year ago than he is today.
Yesterday
we pointed out the many amazing one-liners offered up by Hillary as she was out collecting millions of dollars for her "Wall
Street speeches." Here is an expanded sample:
Hillary Clinton: "I'm Kind Of Far Removed" From The Struggles Of The Middle Class "Because The Life I've Lived And
The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That My Husband And I Now Enjoy." "And I am not taking a position on any policy, but
I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never
had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to
complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had
accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn't believe in
mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know,
fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven't forgotten it." [Hillary Clinton Remarks at Goldman-Black Rock, 2/4/14]
Hillary Clinton Said There Was "A Bias Against People Who Have Led Successful And/Or Complicated Lives," Citing The
Need To Divese Of Assets, Positions, And Stocks. "SECRETARY CLINTON: Yeah. Well, you know what Bob Rubin said about that.
He said, you know, when he came to Washington, he had a fortune. And when he left Washington, he had a small -- MR. BLANKFEIN:
That's how you have a small fortune, is you go to Washington. SECRETARY CLINTON: You go to Washington. Right. But, you know, part
of the problem with the political situation, too, is that there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated
lives. You know, the divestment of assets, the stripping of all kinds of positions, the sale of stocks. It just becomes very onerous
and unnecessary." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
Hillary Clinton Noted President Clinton Had Spoken At The Same Goldman Summit Last Year, And Blankfein Joked "He Increased
Our Budget." "SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, thanks for having me here and giving me a chance to know a little bit more
about the builders and the innovators who you've gathered. Some of you might have been here last year, and my husband was, I guess,
in this very same position. And he came back and was just thrilled by- MR. BLANKFEIN: He increased our budget. SECRETARY CLINTON:
Did he? MR. BLANKFEIN: Yes. That's why we -- SECRETARY CLINTON: Good. I think he-I think he encouraged you to grow it a little,
too. But it really was a tremendous experience for him, so I've been looking forward to it and hope we have a chance to talk about
a lot of things." [Goldman Sachs Builders And Innovators Summit, 10/29/13]
Clinton Said When She Got To State, Employees "Were Not Mostly Permitted To Have Handheld Devices." "You know,
when Colin Powell showed up as Secretary of State in 2001, most State Department employees still didn't even have computers on
their desks. When I got there they were not mostly permitted to have handheld devices. I mean, so you're thinking how do we operate
in this new environment dominated by technology, globalizing forces? We have to change, and I can't expect people to change if
I don't try to model it and lead it." [Clinton Speech For General Electric's Global Leadership Meeting – Boca Raton, FL, 1/6/14]
Clinton Joked It's "Risky" For Her To Speak To A Group Committed To Futures Markets Given Her Past Whitewater
Scandal. "Now, it's always a little bit risky for me to come speak to a group that is committed to the futures markets because
-- there's a few knowing laughs -- many years ago, I actually traded in the futures markets. I mean, this was so long ago, it
was before computers were invented, I think. And I worked with a group of like-minded friends and associates who traded in pork
bellies and cotton and other such things, and I did pretty well. I invested about a thousand dollars and traded up to about a
hundred thousand. And then my daughter was born, and I just didn't think I had enough time or mental space to figure out anything
having to do with trading other than trading time with my daughter for time with the rest of my life. So I got out, and I thought
that would be the end of it." [Remarks to CME Group, 11/18/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Jordan Was Threatened Because "They Can't Possibly Vet All Those Refugees So They Don't Know If,
You Know, Jihadists Are Coming In Along With Legitimate Refugees." "So I think you're right to have gone to the places
that you visited because there's a discussion going on now across the region to try to see where there might be common ground
to deal with the threat posed by extremism and particularly with Syria which has everyone quite worried, Jordan because it's on
their border and they have hundreds of thousands of refugees and they can't possibly vet all those refugees so they don't know
if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees. Turkey for the same reason." [Jewish United Fund Of Metropolitan
Chicago Vanguard Luncheon, 10/28/13]
Hillary Clinton Said The Saudis Opposed The Muslim Brotherhood, "Which Is Kind Of Ironic Since The Saudis Have Exported
More Extreme Ideology Than Any Other Place On Earth Over The Course Of The Last 30 Years." "And they are getting a lot
of help from the Saudis to the Emiratis-to go back to our original discussion-because the Saudis and the Emiratis see the Muslim
Brotherhood as threatening to them, which is kind of ironic since the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other
place on earth over the course of the last 30 years." [2014 Jewish United Fund Advance & Major Gifts Dinner, 10/28/13]
Hillary Clinton Said Her Dream Is A Hemispheric Common Market, With Open Trade And Open Markets. "My dream is a hemispheric
common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can
get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." [05162013 Remarks to Banco Itau.doc, p.
28]
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other great email exchanges as well.
The following exchange comes from the President of the Soros-funded "
Open Society Foundation " (we previously wrote about
the society's plan to "Enlarge electorate by at least 10 million voters"
here ) who offers some advice on "police reform." The email points Podesta to an article previously written
by the
Open
Society Foundation , ironically titled "
Get
the Politics Out of Policing ." Surprisingly, Stone points out that the problem isn't a lack of independence
by police but by politicians:
The problem is not a lack of independence just from the police , but independence from city politics.
Since 2007, Chicago has had an agency separate from the police to investigate officer-involved shootings, but the "independent"
agency (the Independent Police Review Authority, or IPRA) is still under the mayor, and generally retreats from any investigation
that might lead to criminal charges. Until we get investigations of cases like this out of the hands of politicians, even
the best policies a police chief can impose won't change the culture.
Well that seemed to backfire. To summarize, Stone says don't do exactly what the FBI did in its investigation of Hillary's
email scandal.
Barry and the spooks make it official today –
Putin did it!
re: the DNC email leaks.
But as you note, the Dems are not coming off as particularly trustworthy.
Checking the comments of that article, the dogs aren't eating the dogfood
and seem to have noticed the claims are still based on absolutely no
evidence whatsoever.
"Wikileaks' Julian Assange to release 'significant' documents on US election, Google, arms trading over next 10 weeks" [
International Business Times ]. Oh, not the next 31 days?
Complete with a copy of everything problematic in her wall street spaces. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/927#efmAIuAMKAViAXv
THEY ARE BAD
"But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little Nervous,
To Say The Least. So, You Need Both A Public And A Private Position ."
-100% pro trade
-Shits on single payer
-Wall Street should regulate itself… sigh.
Don't worry, the CTR shills are already on Reddit and social media framing this as another "nothing burger," or that it is
actually good for her. The campaign's pals in the MSM are sure to follow, especially considering the reprehensible recording of
Trump that was released earlier today (granted, as a man, I have heard many men say things as bad or worse than Trump has said
at various stages in my life) gives them a foil to wrap this hot potato in.
"... "Progress for USA Political Action Committee" ..."
"... "time bomb" ..."
"... "We lost to the losing party, a unique case in history," ..."
"... "tyrant." ..."
"... The arguments presented are as light-weight as the production is heavy-handed. The Clinton side claims that Trump made millions selling Russian rights for Miss Universe. That may be true, but Trump owned the organization for 19 years and sold entitlements in dozens of other countries, holding the actual event in Russia only once during that time. ..."
"... "Russian language promotional video (which) attracted people to buy Condos in Florida." ..."
"... Then Mike Morrell appears and declares that someone who doesn't want to pursue an aggressive military policy toward Russia is an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
Sometimes it is downright stunning to witness American election campaigners creating, and promoting,
websites like " PutinTrump.org ." Paid for by
the pro-Clinton "Progress for USA Political Action Committee" it collates media stories
which connect the Republican candidate and the Russian president. That could be dismissed as merely
slightly odd behavior, until you see the logo, which is drumroll a hammer and sickle!
Yes, that eternally recognizable communist symbol. Reds in the Bed
In case Team Clinton is reading this: it looks like it might be time for a bit of a world history
refresher. Any person even moderately informed about Russian affairs can tell you that Putin's government
is far from communist. Hell, most decently educated school children can tell you the same. The Russian
government has promoted a pro-business agenda for well over a decade and has long maintained a flat
income tax rate of 13 percent.
Indeed, only this year, the Russian president has
denounced socialist hero Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik government for their brutal repression
and accused him of having placed a "time bomb" under the state. He also admonished the Bolsheviks
for making Russia suffer defeat at the hands of Germany in the First World War. "We lost to the
losing party, a unique case in history," the President said. Furthermore, Putin is no big fan
of Stalin either. While recognizing his contribution to defeating the Nazis, he also
described him as a "tyrant."
It's just as doubtful that Trump – a man who just boasted about not paying any federal taxes!
– is a fan of Karl Marx's theories. The idea of distributing wealth to labor, from financiers, is
surely alien to a man who has essentially admitted to not paying people he has hired because he wasn't
happy with their work.
Put plainly, these commie associations are absurd. But of course, Team Clinton knows this. That's
the big reveal. The idea is to conflate the fading memory of the 'Red Menace' of Soviet communism
with modern Russia. The purpose of this is pretty obvious too: to instill fear of the 'Big Bad' Putin
in vulnerable American hearts and minds.
The Green Logo Menace
You need to go no further for proof than Clinton campaign's official messaging. Take a look at
this video, where Hillary's team flings Russia slanders like they going out of fashion.
Cue the foreboding music - you could ask why they didn't just license the tunes from 'Jaws' and
have done with it – multiple RT logos and, no joke, Russian mafia references. You know the clichés
that Bond films have dropped for being too crude.
The arguments presented are as light-weight as the production is heavy-handed. The Clinton
side claims that Trump made millions selling Russian rights for Miss Universe. That may be true,
but Trump owned the organization for 19 years and sold entitlements in dozens of other countries,
holding the actual event in Russia only once during that time.
The video also implies that Trump is bad because he produced a "Russian language promotional
video (which) attracted people to buy Condos in Florida." Hold on here, what is so unusual about
that? During the oil boom of the mid-to late 00's, Russians were well known for buying property all
over the world. Indeed, if you walk around hot spots like London, Nice or Dubai, you will still see
Russian language signs outside many high-end estate offices. Probably all homes for the sleeper agents,
huh.
Then Mike Morrell appears and declares that someone who doesn't want to pursue an aggressive
military policy toward Russia is an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." And at
this point, we probably reach peak preposterous. Essentially the message is that if you don't want
to saber rattle with Moscow, you are working for it.
"... "There's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we've done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something that they deeply feel," ..."
"... "I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there. Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is – I don't want to overpromise," said Clinton, who has customarily eschewed political spectrum labels. ..."
"... "understanding" ..."
"... "Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future," ..."
"... "If you're feeling like you're consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn't pay a lot, and doesn't have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing." ..."
"... "listening to the concerns" of "the most diverse, open-minded generation in history." ..."
"... People who have the TV on all day and watch the news from the mainstream media are naturally going to get hoodwinked. They aren't the brightest, but they're also distracted and mislead. ..."
"... She is the definition of implicit bias. ..."
"... After all, they are the deplorables. HRC is truly the most despicable, scandal ridden, lying war monger to ever grace American politics. ..."
"... Shame on Sanders for supporting that Nazi witch. ..."
"... Millions of people were adversely harmed by her misguided policies and her "pay-to-play" operations involving favors in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. ..."
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made forthright remarks about Bernie Sanders'
supporters during a private meeting with fundraisers, an audio from which has been leaked following
an email hack.
"There's just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that
what we've done hasn't gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know,
Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don't know what that means, but it's something
that they deeply feel," Clinton said during a Q&A with potential donors in McLean in Virginia,
in February, when she was still in a close primary race with Sanders.
The frontrunner to become the next US President said that herself and other election observers
had been "bewildered" by the rise of the "populist, nationalist, xenophobic, discriminatory"
Republican candidates, presumably Donald Trump, on the one side, and the radical left-wing idealists
on the other.
Clinton painted herself as a moderate and realistic contrast to the groundswell.
"I am occupying from the center-left to the center-right. And I don't have much company there.
Because it is difficult when you're running to be president, and you understand how hard the job
is – I don't want to overpromise," said Clinton, who has customarily eschewed political spectrum
labels.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, which posted the audio of Clinton's remarks, the recording
was attached to an email sent out by a campaign staffer, which has been hacked. It is unclear if
the leak is the work of the same hackers who got hold of a trove of Democratic National Committee
(DNC) emails in July.
... ... ...
In the session, Clinton called for an "understanding" of the motives of Sanders' younger
backers, while describing them in terms that fluctuate between patronizing and unflattering.
"Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are
living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available
to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future,"
said Clinton, who obtained the support of about 2,800 delegates, compared to approximately 1,900
for Sanders, when the results were tallied in July.
"If you're feeling like you're consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some
other job that doesn't pay a lot, and doesn't have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it,
then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing."
Despite well-publicized tensions, particularly between the more vocal backers, Sanders endorsed
Clinton at the Democratic National Convention two months ago, and the two politicians have campaigned
together this week, sharing the stage.
Following the leak, the Clinton campaign has not apologized for the audio, insisting that it shows
that the nominee and is "listening to the concerns" of "the most diverse, open-minded generation
in history."
"As Hillary Clinton said in those remarks , she wants young people to be idealistic and set big
goals," said her spokesman Glen Caplin. "She is fighting for exactly millennial generation cares
more about – a fairer, more equal, just world."
In other parts of the 50-minute recording, Clinton spoke about US capacity to "retaliate"
against foreign hackers that would serve as a "deterrence" and said she would be "inclined"
to mothball the costly upgrade of the Long Range Standoff (LRSO) missile program.
The more she runs her mouth the more support she loses.
Gold Carrot -> Olive Sailboat 6m
Well if somebody is supported by Soros, Warren Buffet, Walmart family, Gates, Moskowitz, Pritzker,
Saban and Session what do you expect. Give me 8 names of other Americans who can top their money
worth. And even so called financial supporters of Republican party like Whitman and Koch brothers
are not supporting Trump. Whitman actually donate to Clinton. In fact most of the donation for
Trump campaign is coming from people who donate at average less than 200 dollars. Clinton represent
BIG MONEY that... See more
GA 2h
Clinton has a supremacist problem, she considers all americans under deserving people, she
thinks she is a pharaoh and we are little people. Reply Share 15
Red Ducky -> GA 23m
you think trump is different? ask yourself this question: Why do Rich people spend hundreds
of millions of dollars for a job that only pays $400K a year?
Rabid Rotty -> Red Ducky 9m
And Trump has stated several times that he will not take the Presidential Salary
pHiL SwEeT -> Rabid Rotty 8m
Uh, yah, Red Ducky just explained how it's not about the money, they're already rich. It's
about power, status, control and legacy.
Green Weights 2h
if Clinton sends her followers and their families to concentration camps, they'll still continue
supporting her. yes, that's how stupid they really are.
Olive Basketball -> Green Weights 55m
People who have the TV on all day and watch the news from the mainstream media are naturally
going to get hoodwinked. They aren't the brightest, but they're also distracted and mislead.
Cyan Beer 2h
She is the definition of implicit bias.
Norm de Plume
Sure enough. The real Americans. Not people, like her, who have dedicated their lives to
aggrandizing
themselves living effectively tax-free at the people's expense.
Seve141 7m
After all, they are the deplorables. HRC is truly the most despicable, scandal ridden, lying war
monger to ever grace American politics.
Tornado_Doom 12m
Shame on Sanders for supporting that Nazi witch.
Green Band Aid -> Tornado_Doom 12m
Sanders will be getting paid. All he does is for money.
Tornado_Doom -> Green Band Aid 11m
Does an old rich man like him need money?
Green Leaf 43m
Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State during Barack Obama's first term was an unmitigated
disaster for many nations around the world. The media has never adequately described how a
number of countries around the world suffered horribly from HC's foreign policy decisions.
Millions of people were adversely harmed by her misguided policies and her "pay-to-play" operations
involving favors in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.
Countries adversely impacted by HC's foreign policy decisions include Abkhazia, Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Central African Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti,
Honduras, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Malaysia, Palestine, Paraguay, South Sudan, Syria, Thailand,
Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Western Sahara, Yemen - one would think they had
a visit from the anti-Christ instead of HC. Or is HC the anti-Christ in disguise?
Green Leaf 45m
The majority of American's will vote Trump for 3 primary reasons.
1. National Security: They
trust him when it comes to protecting national security and to stop illegal aliens from entering
US boarders along with stopping the mass importation of un-vetted refugees from the middle
east.
2. Economy: They know he knows how to get things done under budget and ahead of schedule..
and he knows how to make money. They want a successful businessman in office, not another political
who is out to enrich his or herself at their expense. In addition he knows how to create jobs
and he has a major plan to cut taxes to help the poor - no tax for anyone earning less then
$50,000 and
3. Hillary's severe covered-up health problems: With all of the problems that the
US is experience they don't want someone who passes out from a seizure in the middle of the
day running the country. This is a severely ill woman is, evidently, of the rare kind that
requires a permanent traveling physician and a "mystery man" who rushes to her side whenever
she has one of her frequent and uncontrollable seizure "episodes" (or otherwise freezes up
with a brain "short-circuit" during a speech). She has Parkinson's. The pneumonia was just
a symptom for something much more serious. She even had a mini seizure during the debate for
those with a medical background to see.
"... Forget the Bernie hack, this one shows David Brock (Hilary Super-PAC) in action. Apparently they got access to FoxAcid, the top secret NSA software Snowden exposed. ..."
"... Honey for the conspiracy bears but this does smell right, and if it's real it's a bombshell: ..."
Forget the Bernie hack, this one shows David Brock (Hilary Super-PAC) in action. Apparently
they got access to FoxAcid, the top secret NSA software Snowden exposed.
Honey for the conspiracy bears but this does smell right, and if it's real it's a bombshell:
"... Only three references to Comey as a "Treas-Weasel" appear in a Google search. ..."
"... Are there no longer any "deep throats" left at the FBI? Because now would be an excellent opportunity for one of them to start making phone calls – but to who? Greenwald maybe? He seems to be the only investigative journalist left but he doesn't even live in this country .. ..."
"I knew there were going to be all kinds of rocks thrown, but this organization and the people who did this are honest,
independent people."
Well Comey, it is not that we do not trust the agents, we do not trust the leadership. If any of the
underground reports I have seen are indications, the agents were trying and struggling to do their jobs.
Are there no longer any "deep throats" left at the FBI? Because now would be an excellent opportunity for one of them to start
making phone calls – but to who? Greenwald maybe? He seems to be the only investigative journalist left but he doesn't even live
in this country ..
"... GOP lawmakers focused in particular on the Justice Department's decision to give a form of immunity to Clinton lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to obtain computers containing emails related to the case. ..."
"... Republicans also questioned why Mills and Samuelson were allowed to attend Clinton's July 2 interview at FBI headquarters as her attorneys, given that they had been interviewed as witnesses in the email probe. ..."
"... "I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two immunized witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the room with the FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a former U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to prosecute Clinton was already made when she sat down for the interview. ..."
"... Ratcliffe said Clinton and the others should have been called to a grand jury, where no one is allowed to accompany the witness. ..."
"You can call us wrong, but don't call us weasels. We are not weasels," Comey declared
Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. "We are honest people and whether or not you
agree with the result, this was done the way you want it to be done."
... ... ...
"I would be in big trouble, and I should be in big trouble, if I did something like that,"
said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.). "There seems to be different strokes for different folks.
I think there's a heavy hand coming from someplace else."
Comey insisted there is no double standard, though he said there would be serious consequences -
short of criminal prosecution - if FBI personnel handled classified information as Clinton and
her aides did.
... ... ...
Republicans suggested there were numerous potential targets of prosecution in the case and
repeatedly questioned prosecutors' decisions to grant forms of immunity to at least five people
in connection with the probe.
"You cleaned the slate before you even knew. You gave immunity to people that you were going to
need to make a case if a case was to be made," said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).
GOP lawmakers focused in particular on the Justice Department's decision to give a form of
immunity to Clinton lawyers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson to obtain computers containing
emails related to the case.
"Laptops don't go to the Bureau of Prisons," Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said. "The immunity was
not for the laptop, it was for Cheryl Mills."
The FBI director repeated an explanation he gave for the first time at a Senate hearing Tuesday,
that the deal to get the laptops was wise because subpoenaing computers from an attorney would be
complex and time consuming.
"Anytime you know you're subpoenaing a laptop from a lawyer that involved a lawyer's practice
of law, you know you're getting into a big megillah," Comey said.
Republicans also questioned why Mills and Samuelson were allowed to attend Clinton's July 2
interview at FBI headquarters as her attorneys, given that they had been interviewed as witnesses
in the email probe.
"I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two immunized
witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the room with the
FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a former
U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to prosecute Clinton
was already made when she sat down for the interview.
"I don't think there's any reasonable prosecutor out there who would have allowed two
immunized witnesses central to the prosecution and proving the case against her to sit in the
room with the FBI interview of the subject of that investigation," said Rep. John Ratcliffe
(R-Texas), a former U.S. attorney. He said those circumstances signaled that the decision not to
prosecute Clinton was already made when she sat down for the interview.
"If colleagues of ours believe I am lying about when I made this decision, please urge them to
contact me privately so we can have a conversation about this," Comey said. "The decision was
made after that because I didn't know what was going to happen during the interview. She would
maybe lie in the interview in a way we could prove."
Comey also said it wasn't the FBI's role to dictate who could or couldn't act as Clinton's
lawyers. "I would also urge you to tell me what tools we have as prosecutors and investigators to
kick out of the interview someone that the subject says is their lawyer," the FBI chief said,
while acknowledging he'd never encountered such a situation before.
Ratcliffe said Clinton and the others should have been called to a grand jury, where no one
is allowed to accompany the witness.
Comey did say there was no chance of charges against Mills or Samuelson by the time of the
Clinton interview.
"... I can give you a list of things that I can't stand about Clinton – a long one – but given the likelihood that my state will be solidly in the tank for Clinton, I won't have to vote for her to save the world from President Trump. But where I am coming to is that, if that's what it came down to, I don't think I could participate in anything that aided his election. ..."
"... Funny, I can think of at few things that make Trump more attractive to me in comparison to Clinton. One being his lack of interest in war with Russia, and his ability to understand that 'regime change' has been a loser for American interests, and the other being that he gets that our current trade policy has been a 'loser'. ..."
"... That said, both are disastrous choices, it may be for different reasons, but both are despicable. Neither one of them should be allowed to enter the White House in a tour group, much less live there. And I for one do not want to participate in anything that elects Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald Trump to dog catcher, much less President. I'm going to vote my conscience and let the chips fall where they may. I would be doing it no matter where I live. See, there is a point where you figure out that you are going to lose out no matter what. There are no softer landings available. ..."
"... One being his lack of interest in war with Russia ..."
"... In contrast with the (admittedly horrific) Trump, HRC has surrounded herself with anti-Russia, neocon advisors. ..."
"... I recognize that voting for him would be a knee jerk reaction. However, I do understand why I have that knee jerk reaction. For years now, average Americans, like myself, have seen the media collude with the DC insiders and watched as we've seen our standard of living decline. We've watched our children struggle with unaffordable college. We've watched our parents struggle with unaffordable health care. We've watched our neighbors struggle to afford housing. We've watched our work weeks increase to 60 hours to pay for basics and heard them tell us that we need to work from cradle to grave(and let's be clear for lower middle class and middle class 70 is until grave) with little to no respite(we don't even have a mandatory vacation or sick policy in this country.) With that in mind, why should I want their standard bearer of status quo to win? I DON'T. I want Hillary Clinton to lose, not because I like Trump, but because I hate what these people have done and will continue to do to this country if allowed to remain in power. That's his case. ..."
"... I can't think of a single thing that would make Clinton appear more attractive, compared to pretty much anyone. ..."
"... I find it ironic that the HRC supporters are now desperately pleading with third-party supporters to vote Hillary BECAUSE TRUMP. Let's not forget it was Hillary herself who tweeted to all "Vote your conscience". ..."
Yes, the media and the DC insiders are all begging us to drag HRC across the finish line in
an effort to defeat TRUMP. Normally, a candidate might inspire and give voters reasons to go the
polls, but we've been asked to do all the work and heavy lifting this year to prevent TRUMP.
The funny thing is because of WHO is asking, it makes Trump appear more attractive and almost
makes me want to vote for the guy out of spite.
After all, what exactly have the media or the DC insiders done for the American people? Ignored
issues and blatantly supported policies that have harmed Americans? It's rather audacious of them
to even bother asking most of us when most of us don't see the answer to the question of what
has been done for us as a net positive. Most from the left and the right might even go so far
as to say media and DC insiders have lined their pockets on the backs of average Americans' pain.
Beg us to do something for them? They deserve to be kicked in the teeth in the same manner they've
been doing it to average Americans for years.
Yes. As indicated by the telling finish of the quote above:
" We need to think about information policies - including media literacy programs - that can
offer urgently needed counterweights to the echo chambers and conspiracy factories of the internet."
Gutless, hackneyed drivel topped off with an urgent plea to the policy-making class to up their
propaganda game.
I can't think of a single thing that would make Trump appear more attractive, outside of seeing
the back of him slowly disappearing from view – forever. Yes, I get that it's totally galling
to be inundated with begging pleas from the likes of Hillary Clinton and some of her cronies –
I routinely mail back to her every last shred of paper she sends me, in the postage-paid envelope,
so I know that teeth-clenching, migraine-inducing rush of ire that she can induce.
I can give you a list of things that I can't stand about Clinton – a long one – but given
the likelihood that my state will be solidly in the tank for Clinton, I won't have to vote for
her to save the world from President Trump. But where I am coming to is that, if that's what it
came down to, I don't think I could participate in anything that aided his election.
I came away from that debate wanting to stick needles in my eyes. Trump is a thin-skinned,
prevaricating, floridly egotistical, vindictive, bigoted, misogynistic bully whose flaws will
only expand and possibly explode if he is elected.
There is nothing even remotely attractive about Trump – I can't even contemplate just how bad
Clinton would need to be to make him look like the better choice.
Funny, I can think of at few things that make Trump more attractive to me in comparison
to Clinton. One being his lack of interest in war with Russia, and his ability to understand that
'regime change' has been a loser for American interests, and the other being that he gets that
our current trade policy has been a 'loser'.
That said, both are disastrous choices, it may be for different reasons, but both are despicable.
Neither one of them should be allowed to enter the White House in a tour group, much less live
there. And I for one do not want to participate in anything that elects Hillary Rodham Clinton
or Donald Trump to dog catcher, much less President. I'm going to vote my conscience and let the
chips fall where they may. I would be doing it no matter where I live. See, there is a point where
you figure out that you are going to lose out no matter what. There are no softer landings available.
In contrast with the (admittedly horrific) Trump, HRC has surrounded herself with anti-Russia,
neocon advisors.
Needless to say, Putin isn't perfect, but how does further upgrading the conflict and risking
WW3 and global destruction help matters? The NATO exercises on the Russian border and Syrian escalations
are truly scary.
Trump isn't attractive to me either. However, defeating the DC insiders and media that have
brought us to this point in history where my choices are bad and worse is attractive to me
I recognize that voting for him would be a knee jerk reaction. However, I do understand
why I have that knee jerk reaction. For years now, average Americans, like myself, have seen the
media collude with the DC insiders and watched as we've seen our standard of living decline. We've
watched our children struggle with unaffordable college. We've watched our parents struggle with
unaffordable health care. We've watched our neighbors struggle to afford housing. We've watched
our work weeks increase to 60 hours to pay for basics and heard them tell us that we need to work
from cradle to grave(and let's be clear for lower middle class and middle class 70 is until grave)
with little to no respite(we don't even have a mandatory vacation or sick policy in this country.)
With that in mind, why should I want their standard bearer of status quo to win? I DON'T. I want
Hillary Clinton to lose, not because I like Trump, but because I hate what these people have done
and will continue to do to this country if allowed to remain in power. That's his case.
I live in a swing state and I'll be voting for Stein. Screw the pundits and their *begging*.
They deserve this loss.
I can't think of a single thing that would make Clinton appear more attractive, compared
to pretty much anyone. I'll be voting Stein, the only remaining candidate who aligns with
my views and reflects my interests. If she hadn't made it onto the ballot here in Georgia, I would
not be voting in the presidential election for the first time since I became eligible to vote
in 1980. Neither of the two ruling-party sociopaths is at all palatable.
I find it ironic that the HRC supporters are now desperately pleading with third-party
supporters to vote Hillary BECAUSE TRUMP. Let's not forget it was Hillary herself who tweeted
to all "Vote your conscience".
Jill Stein is anti-war, anti-greed, pro-environment. Rather the opposite of HRC.
It was a cover up operation. No questions about that. Such instruction by a person under any investigation clearly mean tha attempt
of cover up...
Notable quotes:
"... There was a document dump on Friday, that we learned from the FBI that an IT contractor managing Hillary Clinton's private email server made reference to the "Hillary coverup operation" in a work ticket. He used those words after a senior Clinton aide asked him to automatically delete emails after 60 days. This IT worker certainly sounded like he was covering something up, no? ..."
"... The FBI dumped another 189 pages of documents pertaining to Clinton's use of an unsecured private server during her time as Secretary of State online Friday, with one note about a "coverup" raising eyebrows: ..."
"... After reviewing an email dated December 11, 2014 with the subject line 'RE: 2 items for IT support,' and a December 12, 2014 work ticket referencing email retention changes and archive/email cleanup, [redacted] stated his reference in the email to ' the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation ' was probably due to the requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke. ..."
"... "The fact an IT staffer maintaining Clinton's secret server called a new retention policy designed to delete emails after 60 days a 'Hillary coverup operation' suggests there was a concerted effort to systematically destroy potentially incriminating information. It's no wonder that at least five individuals tied to the email scandal, including Clinton's top State Department aide and attorney Cheryl Mills, secured immunity deals from the Obama Justice Department to avoid prosecution," said Trump spokesman Jason Miller in a statement on Friday. ..."
"... Comey told the House Oversight Committee on July 7 that the FBI "did not find evidence sufficient to establish that she knew she was sending classified information beyond a reasonable doubt to meet that - the intent standard" while claiming that prosecuting Clinton for gross negligence would perpetuate a "double standard." ..."
CNN anchor Jake Tapper confronted
Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook Sunday over an IT worker handling her private email server joking in a 2014 email about
a "Hillary coverup operation," with Mook dodging the question and blaming Republicans for "selectively leaking documents."
TAPPER:There was a document dump on Friday, that we learned from the FBI that an IT contractor managing Hillary
Clinton's private email server made reference to the "Hillary coverup operation" in a work ticket. He used those words after a
senior Clinton aide asked him to automatically delete emails after 60 days. This IT worker certainly sounded like he was covering
something up, no?
MOOK: Look, Jake, I'm - first of all I'm glad you asked that question. A lot of this stuff is swirling around in the
ether. It's important to pull back and look at the facts here. The FBI did a comprehensive and deep investigation into this. And
at the conclusion of that, FBI Director Comey came out and said to the world that there was no case here, that they have no evidence
of wrongdoing on Hillary's part.
TAPPER: So what's the "Hillary coverup operation" that the IT worker was referring to?
MOOK: Well, well, but this is - but this is - this is the perfect example of what's going on here. Republicans on the
House side are selectively leaking documents for the purpose of making Hillary look bad. We've asked the FBI to release all information
that they've shared with Republicans so they can get the full picture. But again, I would trust the career professionals at the
FBI and the Justice Department who looked into this matter, concluded that was no case, than I would Republicans who are selectively
leaking information.
The FBI dumped another 189 pages of documents pertaining to Clinton's use of an unsecured private server during her time as Secretary
of State online Friday,
with one
note about a "coverup" raising eyebrows:
After reviewing an email dated December 11, 2014 with the subject line 'RE: 2 items for IT support,' and a December 12,
2014 work ticket referencing email retention changes and archive/email cleanup, [redacted] stated his reference in the email to
' the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation ' was probably due to the requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the
comment was a joke.
The Trump campaign quickly leapt on the FBI's findings.
"The fact an IT staffer maintaining Clinton's secret server called a new retention policy designed to delete emails after
60 days a 'Hillary coverup operation' suggests there was a concerted effort to systematically destroy potentially incriminating information.
It's no wonder that at least five individuals tied to the email scandal, including Clinton's top State Department aide and attorney
Cheryl Mills, secured immunity deals from the Obama Justice Department to avoid prosecution," said Trump spokesman Jason Miller in
a statement on Friday.
Comey
told the House Oversight Committee on July 7 that the FBI "did not find evidence sufficient to establish that she knew she was
sending classified information beyond a reasonable doubt to meet that - the intent standard" while claiming that prosecuting Clinton
for gross negligence would perpetuate a "double standard."
"... Were I advising Trump I would have him cite the two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue..... by title and section. The rest of the questioning is inconsequential in relation to the huge favor the FBI gave Mrs. Clinton. ..."
"... Might be a wrong advice. This would be more directed at Obama, then Hillary. It was Obama who pardoned Hillary by exerting pressure on FBI. ..."
Were I advising Trump I would have him cite the two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue..... by title and section.
The rest of the questioning is inconsequential in relation to the huge favor the FBI gave Mrs. Clinton.
likbez -> ilsm... , -1
ilsm,
"...two criminal codes the FBI decided not to pursue....."
Might be a wrong advice. This would be more directed at Obama, then Hillary. It was Obama who pardoned Hillary by exerting
pressure on FBI.
"... Right there Clinton proves that she has absolutely no idea how basic diplomacy or negotiation (what the democrats like to call "compromise") works. You start from your best possible outcome (without treating your partner as a subhuman piece of trash or calling them by 3rd grade slanderous names) and work your way down to an agreement. You don't start from the worst possible outcome and work your way up like some crazy sadist. No wonder her judgement is so terrible. Her "success" measure is set just above " complete and utter failure, destruction". ..."
"... "Get Russia to the table"? Why would Putin want to "get to the table" when he knows very well the menu consists solely of a sh*t sandwich and the dinner host is calling you "Hitler"? ..."
"I'm trying to figure out what leverage we have to get Russia to the table. You know, diplomacy
is not about getting to the perfect solution. It's about how you balance the risks."
Right there Clinton proves that she has absolutely no idea how basic diplomacy or negotiation
(what the democrats like to call "compromise") works. You start from your best possible outcome
(without treating your partner as a subhuman piece of trash or calling them by 3rd grade slanderous
names) and work your way down to an agreement. You don't start from the worst possible outcome
and work your way up like some crazy sadist. No wonder her judgement is so terrible. Her "success"
measure is set just above " complete and utter failure, destruction".
"Get Russia to the table"? Why would Putin want to "get to the table" when he knows very
well the menu consists solely of a sh*t sandwich and the dinner host is calling you "Hitler"?
Zero Hedge
Earlier this week, a twitter user named " Katica " seemingly proved
the "intent" of the Hillary campaign to destroy and/or tamper with federal records by revealing the
Reddit thread of Paul Combetta (aka the "Oh Shit" guy; aka "stonetear"). But
what's most crazy about this story is that "Katica" was able to discover the greatest "bombshell" of the entire Hillary email
scandal with just a couple of internet searches while the FBI, with unlimited access to government records, spent
months "investigating" this case and missed it all . The only question now is whether the FBI "missed" this evidence because
of gross incompetence or because of other motivating factors ?
Now, courtesy of an opinion piece posted on
The Daily Caller
, we know exactly how "Katica" pieced her "bombshell" discovery together... the folks at the FBI may want to take some notes.
Per the twitter discussion below with @RepStevenSmith , "Katica"
discovered Combetta's Reddit thread on September 16th. But while she suspected that Paul Combetta and the Reddit user known
as "stonetear" were, in fact, the same person, she had to prove it...
"... When Samuelson described the sorting process in her FBI interview , she said that her first step was to find all the emails to or from Clinton and the people she regularly worked with in the State Department, and put all of those emails in the "work-related" category. ..."
"... But from the Abedin emails released so far, about 200 are previously unreleased emails between her and Clinton . Anyone who looks at these can see that the vast majority, if not all, of them are work-related. ..."
"... The Abedin emails released so far are only a small percentage of all her emails that are going to be released on a monthly basis well into 2017 . It is likely that Clinton's supposed 31,000 "personal" emails contain thousands of work-related emails to and from Abedin alone. Consider that only about 15% of the 30,000 Clinton emails released so far were between her and Abedin. ..."
"... It is further worth noting that these emails were not handed over with the rest of Clinton's 30,000 work-related emails, despite clearly being work-related, but were somehow uncovered by the State Department inspector general 's office. Those very emails are good examples of the kind of material Clinton may have tried to keep secret by controlling the sorting process. ..."
"... How many more headlines like that would there be if all 31,000 deleted emails became public before the November 2016 presidential election? It's easy to imagine a political motive for Clinton wanting to keep some work-related emails secret. ..."
"... on or around December 2014 or January 2015 , Mills and Samuelson requested that [Platte River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta] remove from their laptops all of the emails from the July and September 2014 exports. [Combetta] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email-related files so they could not be recovered." ..."
"... With the emails of Mills and Samuelson wiped clean, and the old version of the server wiped clean, that left just two known copies of the emails: one on the new server, and one on the back-up Datto SIRIS device connected to the new server. ..."
"... Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 . She claimed that in December 2014 , Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days . Note that this came not long after the State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails, on October 28, 2014 . Mills told the FBI that she instructed Combetta to modify the email retention policy on Clinton's clintonemail.com email account to reflect this change. Emails older than 60 days would then be overwritten several times, wiping them just as effectively as BleachBit. ..."
"... So although the retention policy change sounds like a mere technicality, in fact, Clinton passed the message through Mills that she wanted all her emails from when she was secretary of state to be permanently wiped. ..."
"... Think about Clinton wanting to delete all her old "personal" emails. As a politician with a wide network of contributors and supporters, the information in them could be highly valuable for her. For instance, if a major donor contacted her, she probably would want to review their past correspondence before responding. She'd preserved these emails for nearly two years, but just when investigators started to demand to see them, she decided she didn't want ANY of them, and all traces of them should be permanently wiped. And yet we're supposed to believe the timing is just a coincidence? ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... According to what Combetta later told the FBI, at some point between these two calls, he had an "Oh shit!" moment and remembered that he'd forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December . So, even though he told the FBI that he was aware of the emails from Mills mentioning the Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton's emails, he took action. ..."
"... the Datto backups of the server were also manually deleted during this timeframe ." ..."
"... Already, Combetta's behavior is damning. He didn't just change the data retention policy, as Mills had asked him to do, causing them to be permanently deleted 60 days later. He immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails and then wiped them for good measure, and almost certainly deleted them from the Datto back-up device too. ..."
"... To make matters worse for Combetta, on March 20, 2015 , the House Benghazi Committee sent a letter to Clinton's lawyer Kendall , asking Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral third party so it could be examined to see if any work-related emails were still on it. This was reported in the New York Times ..."
"... However, despite all these clear signs that the emails should be preserved, not only did Combetta confess in an FBI interview that "at the time he made the deletions in March 2015 , he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the [server]," he said that " he did not receive guidance from other PRN personnel, PRN's legal counsel or others regarding the meaning of the preservation request." So he confessed to obstruction of justice and other possible crimes, all to the apparent benefit of Clinton instead of himself! ..."
"... The FBI interviewed PRN's staff in September 2015. This almost certainly included Combetta and Bill Thornton, because they were the only two PRN employees actively managing Clinton's server. ..."
"... The fact that the FBI falsely claimed Combetta was only interviewed twice grows in importance given a recent New York Times ..."
"... Then, in May 2016 , he completely changed his story. He said that in fact he did make the deletions in late March 2015 after all, plus he'd wiped her emails with BleachBit, as described earlier. He also confessed to being aware of the Mills email with the preservation request. ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... For the FBI to give Combetta an immunity deal and then still not learn if he had been told to delete the emails by anyone working for Clinton due to a completely legally indefensible "attorney-client privilege" excuse is beyond belief. It would make sense, however, if the FBI was actually trying to protect Clinton from prosecution instead of trying to find evidence to prosecute her. ..."
"... In one Reddit post , he asked other server managers: "I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a .pst file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?" ..."
"... Recall how Clinton allegedly claimed she didn't want to keep any of her deleted emails. It looks like that wasn't true after all. It sounds exactly as if Mills or someone else working for Clinton told him to make it look like all the "personal" emails were permanently deleted due to the 60 day policy change, while actually keeping copies of emails they still wanted. ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... First off, it's interesting that he said he did "a bunch" of "email filters and cleanup," because what has been reported by the FBI is that he only made a copy of all of Clinton's email and sent them off to be sorted in late July 2014 . That fits with his July 2014 Reddit post where he was trying to modify somebody's email address. ..."
"... For now, let us turn back to events in the fall of 2015 . In mid-August 2015 , Senator Ron Johnson (R) asked for and got a staff-level briefing from PRN about the management of Clinton's server, as part of Republican Congressional oversight of the FBI's investigation. It seems very likely that Combetta was a part of that briefing, or at least his knowledge heavily informed the briefing, because again only two PRN employees actively managed her server, and he was one of them. ..."
"... The dishonesty or ignorance of PRN in this time period can be clearly seen due to a September 12, 2015 Washington Post ..."
"... Datto expressed a willingness to cooperate. But because Datto had been subcontracted by PRN to help manage Clinton's server, they needed PRN's permission to share any information relating to that account. When PRN was first asked in early October 2015 , they gave permission. But about a week later, they changed their mind , forcing Datto to stay quiet. ..."
"... But more importantly, consider what was mentioned in an NBC News ..."
"... In an August 18, 2015 email, Combetta expressed concern that CESC, the Clinton family company, had directed PRN to reduce the length of time backups, and PRN wanted proof of this so they wouldn't be blamed. But he said in the email, "this was all phone comms [communications]." ..."
"... On September 2, 2016 , the FBI's final report of their Clinton email investigation was released (along with a summary of Clinton's FBI interview). This report revealed the late March 2015 deletions for the first time. Combetta's name was redacted, but his role, as well as his immunity deal, was revealed in the New York Times ..."
"... Chaffetz also wants an explanation from PRN how Combetta could refuse to talk to the FBI about the conference calls if the only lawyers involved in the call were Clinton's. ..."
"... PRN employees Combetta and Thornton were also given subpoenas on September 8 , ordering them to testify at a Congressional hearing on September 13, 2016 . Both of them showed up with their lawyers, but both of them pled the Fifth , leaving many questions unanswered. ..."
"... In a Senate speech on September 12, 2016 , Senator Charles Grassley (R) accused the FBI of manipulating which information about the Clinton email investigation becomes public . He said that although the FBI has taken the unusual step of releasing the FBI's final report, "its summary is misleading or inaccurate in some key details and leaves out other important facts altogether." He pointed in particular to Combetta's deletions, saying: "[T]here is key information related to that issue that is still being kept secret, even though it is unclassified. If I honor the FBI's 'instruction' not to disclose the unclassified information it provided to Congress, I cannot explain why." ..."
"... Regarding the FBI's failure to inform Congressional oversight committees of Combetta's immunity deal, Representative Trey Gowdy (R) recently commented, "If there is a reason to withhold the immunity agreement from Congress-and by extension, the people we represent-I cannot think of what it would be." ..."
"... The behavior of the FBI is even stranger. Comey was a registered Republican most of his life, and it is well known that most FBI agents are politically conservative. Be that as it may, if Comey made a decision beforehand based on some political calculation to avoid indicting Clinton no matter what the actual evidence was, that the FBI's peculiar behavior specifically relating to the Combetta deletions make much more sense. It would be an unprecedented and bold move to recommend indicting someone with Hillary Clinton's power right in the middle of her presidential election campaign. ..."
"... In this scenario, the FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making a secret immunity deal with him is a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. Note that Combetta's confession about making the deletions came in his May 2016 FBI interview, which came after Mills' April 2016 interview in which she claimed she'd never heard of any deletions. Thus, the only way to have Combetta take the fall for the deletions without Mills getting caught clearly lying to the FBI is by dodging the issue of what was said in the March 31, 2015 conference with a nonsensical claim of "attorney-client privilege." ..."
"... I believe that criminal behavior needs to be properly investigated and prosecuted, regardless of political persuasion and regardless of the election calendar. Combetta clearly committed a crime and he even confessed to do so, given what he admitted in his last FBI interview. If he got a limited immunity deal instead of blanket immunity, which is highly likely, it still would be possible to indict and convict him based on evidence outside of his interviews. That would help explain why he recently pled the Fifth, because he's still in legal danger. ..."
"... But more importantly, who else is guilty with him? Logic and the available evidence strongly suggest that Clinton's lawyer Cheryl Mills at least knew about the deletions at the time they happened. Combetta has already confessed to criminal behavior-and yet somehow hasn't even been fired by PRN. If he didn't at least tell Mills and the others in the conference call about the deletions, there would be no logical reason to assert attorney-client privilege in the first place. Only the nonsensical assertion of this privilege is preventing the evidence coming out that should lead to Mills being charged with lying to the FBI at a minimum. And if Mills knew, can anyone seriously believe that Clinton didn't know too? ..."
Fast forward to the middle of 2014 . The
House Benghazi Committee was formed to investigate the US government's actions surrounding the 2012 terrorist
attack in Benghazi, Libya , and
soon a handful of emails were discovered relating to this attack involving Clinton's [email protected]
email address. At this point, nobody outside of Clinton's inner circle of associates knew she had exclusively used that private email
account for all her email communications while she was secretary of state, or that she'd hosted it on her own private email server.
It was decided that over 30,000 emails were work-related, and those were
turned over to the State Department on December 5, 2014 . These have all since been publicly released, though
with redactions. Another over 31,000 emails were
deemed personal , and Clinton kept those. They were later deleted in controversial circumstances that this essay explores in
detail.
It has become increasingly clear in recent months that this sorting process was highly flawed. Clinton has said any emails that
were borderline cases were given to the State Department, just to be on the safe side. But in fact,
the FBI later recovered about 17,500 of Clinton's "personal" emails . It is probable no government agency has yet gone through
all of these to officially determine which ones were work-related and which ones were not, but FBI Director
James Comey has said that "
thousands " were work-related.
We can get a glimpse of just how flawed the sorting process was because hundreds of emails from
Huma Abedin have been released in recent months, as
part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit . Abedin was Clinton's deputy chief of staff and still is one of her closest
aides.
When
Samuelson described the sorting process in her FBI interview , she said that her first step was to find all the emails to or
from Clinton and the people she regularly worked with in the State Department, and put all of those emails in the "work-related"
category.
But from the Abedin emails released so far,
about 200 are previously unreleased emails between her and Clinton . Anyone who looks at these can see that the vast majority,
if not all, of them are work-related. Many involve Abedin's state.gov government address, not her clintonemail.com
private address, so how on Earth did Samuelson's sorting process miss those? It has even come to light recently that a small
number of emails mentioning "Benghazi" have been found in the 17,500 recovered by the FBI, but
Samuelson told the FBI she had specifically searched for all emails using that word.
A sample of an email between Clinton and Abedin using her state.gov address. (Credit: public domain)
The
Abedin emails released so far are only a small percentage of all her emails that are going to be released on a monthly basis
well into 2017 . It is likely that Clinton's supposed 31,000 "personal" emails contain thousands of work-related
emails to and from Abedin alone. Consider that only about 15% of the 30,000 Clinton emails released so far were between her and Abedin.
If the rest of her deleted emails follow the same pattern as the Abedin ones, it is highly likely that the majority, and maybe
even the vast majority, of Clinton's deleted "personal" emails in fact are work-related.
... ... ...
FBI Director Comey has said he trusts that Clinton had made a sincere sorting effort, but the sheer number of
work-related emails that keep getting discovered suggests otherwise. Furthermore, logic and other evidence also suggest otherwise.
For instance,
in home
video footage from a private fundraiser in 2000 , Clinton talked about how she had deliberately avoided using
email so she wouldn't leave a paper trail: "As much as I've been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I? I don't even
want Why would I ever want to do email? Can you imagine?"
Practical considerations forced her to start using email a few years later. But what if her exclusive use of a private email address
on her own private server was not done out of "
convenience " as she claims, but so she could retain control of them, only turning over emails to FOIA requests and later government
investigators that she wanted to?
Note also that in a November 2010 email exchange between Clinton and Abedin, Abedin suggested that Clinton might
want to use a State Department email account due because the department computer system kept flagging emails from her private email
account as spam. Clinton replied that she was open to some kind of change, but "
I don't want any risk of the personal being accessible ." It is further worth noting that these emails were not handed over
with the rest of Clinton's 30,000 work-related emails, despite clearly being work-related, but were somehow uncovered by the
State Department inspector
general 's office. Those very emails are good examples of the kind of material Clinton may have tried to keep secret by controlling
the sorting process.
This essay will explore this possibility more later. But if it is the case that she wanted to keep those 31,000 "personal" emails
out of the public eye, she had obstacles to overcome. In 2014 , PRN had managerial control of both Clinton's new
and old server. Thus,
in July 2014 and
again in September 2014 , PRN employee Combetta had to send copies of all the emails to the laptop of Clinton
lawyer Cheryl Mills, and another copy to the laptop of Clinton lawyer Heather Samuelson, to be used for the sorting process.
With the sorting done, if Clinton didn't want the public to ever see her deleted emails, you would expect all these copies of
those emails to be permanently deleted, and that's exactly what happened. According to a later FBI report, "
on or around December 2014 or January 2015 , Mills and Samuelson requested that [Platte
River Networks (PRN) employee Paul Combetta] remove from their laptops all of the emails from the July and September 2014 exports.
[Combetta] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email-related files so they could not be recovered."
The FBI report explained, "BleachBit is open source software that allows users to 'shred' files, clear Internet history, delete
system and temporary files, and wipe free space on a hard drive. Free space is the area of the hard drive that can contain data that
has been deleted. BleachBit's 'shred files' function claims to securely erase files by overwriting data to make the data unrecoverable."
BleachBit advertises that it can "shred" files so they can never be recovered again.
With the emails of Mills and Samuelson wiped clean, and the old version of the server wiped clean, that left just two known
copies of the emails: one on the new server, and one on the back-up Datto SIRIS device connected to the new server.
Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 . She claimed that in December 2014 ,
Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days . Note that this came not long after the
State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails,
on October 28, 2014 . Mills told the FBI that she instructed Combetta to modify the email retention policy on
Clinton's clintonemail.com email account to reflect this change. Emails older than 60 days would then be overwritten several times,
wiping them just as effectively as BleachBit.
Clinton essentially said the same thing as Mills
when she was interviewed by the FBI . Clinton also was interviewed by the FBI. According to the FBI summary of the interview,
she claimed that after her staff sent the 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department on December 5, 2014
, "she was asked what she wanted to do with her remaining [31,000] personal emails.
Clinton instructed her staff she no longer needed the emails."
So although the retention policy change sounds like a mere technicality, in fact, Clinton passed the message through Mills
that she wanted all her emails from when she was secretary of state to be permanently wiped.
Think about Clinton wanting to delete all her old "personal" emails. As a politician with a wide network of contributors and
supporters, the information in them could be highly valuable for her. For instance, if a major donor contacted her, she probably
would want to review their past correspondence before responding. She'd preserved these emails for nearly two years, but just when
investigators started to demand to see them, she decided she didn't want ANY of them, and all traces of them should be permanently
wiped. And yet we're supposed to believe the timing is just a coincidence?
But there was a problem with deleting them. Combetta later claimed that he simply forgot to make this change.
Then, on March 2, 2015 ,
the headline on the front page of the New York Times was a story revealing that while Clinton was secretary of state,
she had exclusively used a private email address hosted on her private server, thus keeping all of her email communications secret.
This became THE big story of the month, and the start of a high-profile controversy that continues until today.
Then, a day after that, on March 4, 2015 ,
the committee issued two subpoenas to her . One subpoena ordered her to turn over all emails relating to the Benghazi attack.
The committee had already
received about 300 such emails from the State Department in February 2015 , but after the Times story,
the committee worried that the department might not have some of her relevant emails. (That would later prove to be the case, given
the small number of Benghazi emails eventually recovered by the FBI.) The second subpoena ordered her to turn over documents it requested
in November 2014 but still has not received from the State Department, relating to communications between Clinton
and ten senior department officials.
Cheryl Mills (Credit: Twitter)
If Clinton had already deleted her emails to keep them from future investigators, these requests shouldn't have been a problem.
On March 9, 2015 ,
Mills sent an email to PRN employees , including Combetta, to make sure they were aware of the committee's request that all of
Clinton's emails be preserved. One can see this as a CYA ("cover your ass") move, since Mills would have believed all copies of Clinton's
"personal" emails had been permanently deleted and wiped by this time. The Times story and the requests for copies of Clinton's
emails that followed had seemingly come too late.
But that wasn't actually the case, since Combetta had forgotten to make the deletions!
Combetta deletes everything that is left
Sitting behind Combetta is co-founder of Platte River Brent Allshouse (left) and PRN attorney, Ken Eichner. (Credit: CSpan)
According to a later Combetta FBI interview, he claimed that on March 25, 2015,
there was a conference call between PRN employees , including himself, and some members of Bill Clinton's staff. (Hillary Clinton's
private server hosted the emails of Bill Clinton's staff too, and one unnamed staffer hired PRN back in 2013 .)
There was another conference call between PRN and Clinton staffers on March 31, 2015 , with at least Combetta,
Mills, and Clinton lawyer David Kendall taking part in that later call.
According to what Combetta later told the FBI, at some point between these two calls, he had an "Oh shit!" moment and remembered
that he'd forgotten to make the requested retention policy change back in December . So, even though he told the
FBI that he was aware of the emails from Mills mentioning the Congressional request to preserve all of Clinton's emails, he took
action. Instead of simply making the retention policy change, which would have preserved the emails for another two months,
he immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails from her server. Then he used BleachBit to permanently wipe them.
The Datto SIRIS S2000 was used for back-up services. (Credit: Datto, Inc.)
However, recall that there was a Datto SIRIS back-up device connected to the server and periodically making copies of all the
data on the server. Apparently, Combetta didn't mention this to the FBI, but the FBI found "evidence of these [server] deletions
and determined the Datto backups of the server were
also manually deleted during this timeframe ." The Datto device sent a records log back to the Datto company whenever any
changes were made, and according to a letter from Datto to the FBI that later became public, the deletions on the device were made
around noon on March 31, 2015 , the same date as the second conference call. (Although the server and Datto device
were in New Jersey and Combetta was working remotely from Rhode Island, he could make changes remotely, as he or other PRN employees
did on other occasions.)
A recent Congressional committee letter mentioned that the other deletions were also made on or around March 31, 2015
. So it's probable they were all done at the same time by the same person: Combetta.
Already, Combetta's behavior is damning. He didn't just change the data retention policy, as Mills had asked him to do, causing
them to be permanently deleted 60 days later. He immediately deleted all of Clinton's emails and then wiped them for good measure,
and almost certainly deleted them from the Datto back-up device too.
To make matters worse for Combetta, on March 20, 2015 ,
the House Benghazi Committee sent a letter to Clinton's lawyer Kendall , asking Clinton to turn her server over to a neutral
third party so it could be examined to see if any work-related emails were still on it. This was reported in the New York Times
and other media outlets.
Then, on March 27, 2015 ,
Kendall replied to the committee in a letter that also was reported on by the Times and others that same day. Kendall
wrote, "There is no basis to support the proposed third-party review of the server To avoid prolonging a discussion that would be
academic, I have confirmed with the secretary's IT [information technology] support that no emails for the time period January
21, 2009 through February 1, 2013 reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server."
David Kendall (Credit: Above the Law)
When Kendall mentioned Clinton's IT support, that had to have been a reference to PRN. So what actually happened? Did Kendall
or someone else working for Clinton ask Combetta and/or other PRN employees if there were any emails still on the server in the
March 25, 2015 conference call, just two days before he sent his letter? Did Combetta lie in that
call and say they were already deleted and then rush to delete them afterwards to cover up his mistake? Or did someone working for
Clinton tell or hint that he should delete them now if they hadn't been deleted already? We don't know, because the FBI has revealed
nothing about what was said in that conference call or the one that took place a week later.
However, despite all these clear signs that the emails should be preserved, not only did Combetta confess in an FBI interview
that "at the time he made the deletions in March 2015 , he was aware of the existence of the preservation request
and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the [server]," he said that "
he did not receive guidance from other PRN personnel, PRN's legal counsel or others regarding the meaning of the preservation
request." So he confessed to obstruction of justice and other possible crimes, all to the apparent benefit of Clinton instead of
himself!
Investigations and cover-ups
This is perplexing enough already, but it gets stranger still, if we continue to follow the behavior of Combetta and PRN as a
whole.
An inside look at the Equinix facility in Secaucus, NJ. (Credit: Chang W. Lee / New York Time)
By August 2015 , the FBI's Clinton investigation was in full swing, and they began interviewing witnesses and
confiscating equipment for analysis. Because the FBI never empanelled a grand jury, it didn't have subpoena power, so it had to ask
Clinton for permission to seize her server.
She gave that permission on August 11, 2015 , and the server was
picked up from the data center in New Jersey the next day . But remember that there actually were two servers
there, an old one and a new one. All the data had been wiped from the old one and moved to the new one, so the new one was the more
important one to analyze. But the FBI only picked up the old one.
According to the FBI's final report, "At the time of the FBI's acquisition of the [server], Williams & Connolly [the law firm
of Clinton's personal lawyer David Kendall] did not advise the US government of the existence of the additional equipment associated
with the [old server], or that Clinton's clintonemail.com emails had been migrated to the successor [server] remaining at [the] Equinix
[data center]. The FBI's subsequent investigation identified this additional equipment and revealed the email migration." As a result,
the
FBI finally picked up the new server on October 3, 2015 .
A snippet from the invoice published by Complete Colorado on October 19, 2015. (Credit: Todd Shepherd / Complete Colorado) (Used
with express permission from CompleteColorado.com. Do not duplicate or republish.)
It's particularly important to know if Combetta was interviewed at this time. The FBI's final report clearly stated that
he was interviewed twice, in February 2016 and May 2016 , and repeatedly referred to what was
said in his "first interview" and "second interview." However, we luckily know that he was interviewed in September 2015
as well, because of a PRN invoice billed to Clinton Executive Service Corp. (CESC), a Clinton family company, that was made
public later in 2015 . The invoice made clear that Combetta, who was working remotely from Rhode Island, flew to
Colorado on September 14, 2015, and then "federal interviews" took place on September 15 . Combetta's
rental car, hotel, and return airfare costs were itemized as well. As this essay later makes clear, PRN was refusing to cooperate
with anyone else in the US government but the FBI by this time, so "federal interviews" can only mean the FBI.
One other person in the investigation, Bryan Pagliano, was given immunity as well. But his immunity deal was leaked to the media
and
had been widely reported on since March 2016 . By contrast, Combetta's immunity wasn't even mentioned in the
FBI's final report, and members of Congress were upset to first read about it in the Times , because they had never been
told about it either.
The mystery of this situation deepens when one looks at the FBI report regarding what Combetta said in his February 2016
and May 2016 interviews.
In February 2016 , he claimed that he remembered in late March 2015 that he forgot to make
the change to the email retention policy on Clinton's server, but that was it. He claimed he never did make any deletions. He also
claimed that he was unaware of the March 9, 2015 email from Mills warning of the Congressional request to preserve
all of Clinton's emails.
Paul Combetta (Credit: public domain)
Then, in May 2016 , he completely changed his story. He said that in fact he did make the deletions in
late March 2015 after all, plus he'd wiped her emails with BleachBit, as described earlier. He also confessed to
being aware of the Mills email with the preservation request.
It still hasn't been reported when Combetta's immunity deal was made. However, it seems probable that this took place between
his February 2016 and May 2016 interviews, causing the drastic change in his account. Yet, it looks
that he still hasn't been fully honest or forthcoming. Note that he didn't confess to the deletion of data on the Datto back-up device,
even though it took place at the same time as the other deletions. The FBI learned that on their own by analyzing the device.
Attorney-client privilege?!
More crucially, we know that Combetta has not revealed what took place in the second conference call between PRN and Clinton employees.
Here is all the FBI's final report has to say about that: "Investigation identified a PRN work ticket, which referenced a conference
call among PRN, Kendall, and Mills on March 31, 2015. PRN's attorney advised [Combetta] not to comment on the conversation with Kendall,
based upon the assertion of the attorney-client privilege ."
Sitting behind Paul Combetta at the House Oversight Committee hearing on September 13, 2016, is Platte River Networks attorney
Ken Eichner. (Credit: CSpan)
This is extremely bizarre. What "attorney-client privilege"?! That would only apply for communications between Combetta and his
lawyer or lawyers. It's clear that Combetta's lawyer isn't Mills or Kendall. The New York Times article about the immunity
deal made a passing reference to his lawyer, and, when Combetta showed up for a Congressional hearing on September 12
, he was accompanied by a lawyer who photographs from the hearing make clear is Ken Eichner, who has been the legal counsel
for PRN as a whole regarding Clinton's server.
Even if Combetta's lawyer Eichner was participating in the call, there is no way that should protect Combetta from having to tell
what he said to Clinton employees like Mills or Kendall. If that's how the law works, criminals could simply always travel with a
lawyer and then claim anything they do or say with the lawyer present is inadmissible as evidence due to attorney-client privilege.
It's absurd.
For the FBI to give Combetta an immunity deal and then still not learn if he had been told to delete the emails by anyone
working for Clinton due to a completely legally indefensible "attorney-client privilege" excuse is beyond belief. It would make sense,
however, if the FBI was actually trying to protect Clinton from prosecution instead of trying to find evidence to prosecute her.
Combetta's Reddit posts
A photo comparison of Combetta at the House Oversight Committee hearing (left) and a captured shot of Combetta as stonetear (right).
(Credit: CSpan and public domain)
Furthermore, how much can Combetta be trusted, even in an FBI interview? It has recently come to light that he made Reddit posts
under the username "stonetear." There can be no doubt this was him, because the details match perfectly, including him signing a
post "Paul," having another social media account for a Paul Combetta with the username "stonetear," having a combetta.com website
mentioning his "stonetear" alias, and even posting a photo of "stonetear" that matches other known photos of Combetta.
In one Reddit post , he asked other server managers: "I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip
out a VIP's (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a .pst
file. Basically, they don't want the VIP's email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the
email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. Does anyone have experience with something like this,
and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?"
The date of the post- July 24, 2014 -is very significant, because that was just one day after
Combetta sent CESE (the Clinton family company) DVDs containing some of Clinton's emails , so Clinton's lawyers could start the
sorting process. Also on July 23, 2014 , an unnamed PRN employee sent Samuelson and Mills the same emails electronically
directly to their laptops.
A response captured in the Reddit chat warning stonetear aka Combetta that what he wants to do could result in major legal issues.
(Credit: Reddit)
Popular software made by companies like Microsoft have tried to make it impossible for people to change email records, so people
facing legal trouble can't tamper with emails after they've been sent. Thus, when Combetta posed his problem at Reddit, other Reddit
users told him that what he wanted to do "could result in major legal issues." But that didn't deter him, and he kept asking for
various ways to get it accomplished anyway.
It isn't clear why Clinton would have wanted her email address removed from all her emails, since her exact address had already
been exposed in the media back in March 2013 by the hacker known as Guccifer. One Gawker reporter even used it to
email Clinton on March 20, 2013 : "[W] ere your emails to and from the [email protected] account archived according
to the provisions of the President Records Act and Freedom of Information Act?" (Clinton never replied, maybe because it's clear
in hindsight that an honest answer would have been "no.") But the fact that Combetta was willing to at least try to do this raises
questions, especially his seeming willingness to do something illegal for his "VIP" customer Hillary Clinton.
Combetta made another important Reddit post a few months later:
"Hello- I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these
users to have a 'Save Folder' in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than
the 60 day window. All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar
or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?"
Another question was captured of 'stonetear' aka Combetta asking Reddit users for technical help. (Credit: Reddit)
A captured shot of Combetta's 'stonetear' Gmail account with picture included. (Credit: public domain)
Recall how Clinton allegedly claimed she didn't want to keep any of her deleted emails. It looks like that wasn't true after
all. It sounds exactly as if Mills or someone else working for Clinton told him to make it look like all the "personal" emails were
permanently deleted due to the 60 day policy change, while actually keeping copies of emails they still wanted.
Looking at Combetta's two Reddit posts detailed above, there are only two possibilities. One is that Combetta failed to disclose
crucial information to the FBI, despite his immunity deal. The second is that he did, but the FBI didn't mention it in its final
report. Either way, it's already clear that the FBI has failed to present the full story of Combetta's actions to the public. And
how much of what Combetta has said can be trusted, even in his most recent and supposedly most forthcoming FBI interview?
David DeCamillis (Credit: Twitter)
Remarkably, there is a hint that Combetta was being dishonest even before his late March 2015 deletions. On
March 3, 2015 , one day after the front-page New York Times story revealing Clinton's use of a private
server, PRN's vice president of sales David DeCamillis sent an email to some or all of the other PRN employees. The email has only
been paraphrased in news reports so far, but he was already
wondering what Clinton emails the company might be asked to turn over .
Combetta replied to the email , "I've done quite a bit already in the last few months related to this. Her [Clinton's] team had
me do a bunch of exports and email filters and cleanup to provide a .pst [personal storage file] of all of HRC's [Hillary Rodham
Clinton's] emails to/from any .gov addresses. I billed probably close to 10 hours in on-call tickets with CESC related to it :)."
First off, it's interesting that he said he did "a bunch" of "email filters and cleanup," because what has been reported by
the FBI is that he only made a copy of all of Clinton's email and sent them off to be sorted in late July 2014 .
That fits with his July 2014 Reddit post where he was trying to modify somebody's email address.
But also, assuming that there aren't important parts to his email that haven't been mentioned by the media, consider what he didn't
say. The topic was possibly turning over Clinton's emails, and yet by this time Combetta had already deleted and wiped all of Clinton's
emails from the laptops of two Clinton lawyers and been asked to change the email retention policy on Clinton's server so that all
her emails would be permanently deleted there too, and yet he didn't bother to mention this to anyone else at PRN. Why?
We can only speculate based on the limited amount of information made public so far. But it seems as if Combetta was covering
up for Clinton and/or the people working for her even BEFORE he made his late March 2015 deletions!
Who knows about the deletions, and how?
Senator Ron Johnson (Credit: John Shinkle / Politico)
For now, let us turn back to events in the fall of 2015 . In mid-August 2015 ,
Senator Ron Johnson (R) asked for and got a staff-level briefing from PRN about the management of Clinton's server, as part of
Republican Congressional oversight of the FBI's investigation. It seems very likely that Combetta was a part of that briefing, or
at least his knowledge heavily informed the briefing, because again only two PRN employees actively managed her server, and he was
one of them.
Regardless of whether he was there or not, it is clear that PRN was not honest in the briefing. Almost nothing is publicly known
about the briefing except that it took place. However, from questions Johnson asked PRN in later letters, one can see that he knew
nothing about the March 2015 deletions by Combetta. In fact, just like the FBI, there is no indication he knew anything
about the transfer of the data from the old server to the new in that time period, which would be a basic fact in any such briefing.
Andy Boian (Credit: public domain)
The dishonesty or ignorance of PRN in this time period can be clearly seen due to a September 12, 2015 Washington Post article. In it, PRN spokesperson Andy Boian said, "
Platte River has no knowledge of the server being wiped ." He added, "All the information we have is that the server wasn't wiped."
We now know that not only was this untrue, but a PRN employee did the wiping!
This leads to two possibilities. One is that Combetta lied to his PRN bosses, so in September 2015 nobody else
in PRN knew about the deletions he'd made. The other is that additional people at PRN knew, but they joined in a cover-up.
At this point, it's impossible to know which of these is true, but one of them must be. PRN employees created work tickets and
other documentary evidence of the work they made, so one would think the company leadership would have quickly learned about the
deletions if they did any examination of their managerial actions to prepare for investigative briefings and interviews.
But either way, PRN as a whole began acting as if there was something to hide. Although the company agreed to the briefing of
Congressional staffers in mid-August 2015 , when
Senator Johnson wanted to follow this up with interviews of individual PRN employees in early September, PRN said no . When Congressional
committees began asking PRN for documents, they also said no, and kept saying no. Recently, as we shall see later, they've even defied
a Congressional subpoena for documents.
Austin McChord, founder and CEO of Datto, Inc. (Credit: Erik Traufmann / Hearst Connecticut Media)
At the same time Congressional committees began asking PRN for documents and interviews, they made those requests to Datto as
well.
Datto expressed a willingness to cooperate. But because Datto had been subcontracted by PRN to help manage Clinton's server,
they needed PRN's permission to share any information relating to that account. When PRN was first asked in early October
2015 , they gave permission.
But about a week later, they changed their mind , forcing Datto to stay quiet.
To make matters worse, in early November 2015 , PRN spokesperson Andy Boian gave a completely bogus public excuse
about this, saying that PRN and Datto had mutually agreed it was more convenient for investigators to deal with just one company.
Datto immediately complained in a letter sent to PRN and Senator Johnson that no such discussion or agreement between PRN and
Datto had ever taken place.
What is PRN hiding?
The Datto cloud mystery
There is another strange twist to Datto's involvement. Back in June 2013 when Datto was first subcontracted to
help with backing up the server data,
the Clinton family company CESC made explicit that they didn't want any of the data to be stored remotely . But due to some snafu
or miscommunication, it turns out that in addition to local back-ups being stored on the Datto device connected to the server, Datto
had been making periodic copies of the server data the whole time in the "cloud!" That means back-up copies of the data were being
transferred over the Internet and stored remotely, probably on other servers controlled by Datto.
Co-founders of PRN are Brent Allshouse (left) and Treve Suazo (right) (Credit: PRN)
PRN only
discovered this in early August 2015 , around the time the roles of PRN and Datto had with the server began
to be made public. PRN contacted Datto, told them to stop doing this, put all the data on a thumb drive, send it to them, and then
permanently wipe their remote copies of the server data.
It is unclear what happened after that. The FBI's final report
mentions a Datto back-up made on June 29, 2013 , just after all the data had been moved from the old server
to the new sever with the back-up, had been useful to investigators and allowed them to find some Clinton emails dating all the way
back to the first two months of her secretary of state tenure. However, it isn't clear if this is due to the local Datto SIRIS device
or the accidental Datto cloud back-up. Congressional committee letters show that they don't know either and have been trying to find
out.
Adding to the mystery, one would think that if Datto was making periodic back-ups either or both ways, the FBI would have been
able to recover all of Clinton's over 31,000 deleted emails and not just 17,000 of them. Consider that when PRN employees sent Clinton's
lawyers all of Clinton's emails to be sorted in July and September 2014 , they simply copied what
was on the server at the time, which presumably was the same amount of emails from years earlier than had been there in June
2013 , and thus backed up by Datto many times.
It's likely there are more twists to the cloud back-up story that have yet to be revealed.
What did Clinton and her aides know about the deletions?
Meanwhile, let's consider what Clinton and her aides may have known and when they knew it. When
Mills was interviewed by the FBI in April 2016 , according to the FBI, "Mills stated she was unaware that [Combetta]
had conducted these deletions and modifications in March 2015 ." Then,
when Clinton was interviewed by the FBI in July 2016 , "Clinton stated she was unaware of the March 2015 email
deletions by PRN."
This is pretty hard to believe. Mills was and still is one of Clinton's lawyers, and even attended Clinton's FBI interview. So
why wouldn't she have mentioned the deletions to Clinton between April and July 2016 , after she learned about them
from the FBI's questions to her? One would think Clinton would have been extremely curious to know anything about the FBI's possible
recovery of her deleted emails.
Clinton making a joking wipe gesture while speaking at a town hall on August 18, 2015, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Credit: John Locher
/ The Associated Press)
But more importantly, consider what was mentioned in an NBC News report on August 19, 2015 . Clinton's
campaign acknowledged "that
there was an attempt to wipe [Clinton's] server before it was turned over last week to the FBI. But two sources with direct knowledge
of the investigation told NBC News that the [FBI] may be able to recover at least some data."
Is it plausible that people within Clinton's campaign knew this, and yet neither Mills nor Clinton did? How could that be? Note
that just one day before the NBC News report, Clinton had been directly asked if her server had been wiped.
She dodged the question by making the joke , " What-like with a cloth, or something?" Then she said she didn't "know how it works
digitally at all." Despite the controversy at the time about the cloth joke, her spokesperson claimed one month later, "I don't know
what 'wiped' means."
It's highly likely the issue had to have been discussed with Clinton at the time, but there was a conscious effort not to have
her admit to knowing anything, due to the on-going FBI investigation.
But more crucially, how could anyone at all working for Clinton know about the deletions as far back as August 2015
? Recall that this was within days of PRN giving a briefing to Congressional staffers and not telling them, and several
weeks prior to a PRN public comment that there was no evidence the server had been wiped.
Moreover, we have no evidence that the FBI knew about the deletions yet. Datto conducted an analysis of its device that had been
attached to Clinton's new server, and in an October 23, 2015 email,
told the FBI for the first time that deletions had taken place on that device on March 31, 2015 . Keep in mind
that even in his February 2016 FBI interview, Combetta claimed that no deletions had taken place in that time frame.
Does it make sense that he would have said that if he had reason to believe that PRN had been talking to Clinton's staff about it
in the months before? (None of the interviews in the FBI"s investigations were done under oath, but lying to the FBI is a felony
with a maximum five-year prison sentence.)
A sample of the email sent to the FBI by Datto attorney, Steven Cash on October 23, 2015. (Credit: House Science Committee)
So, again, how could Clinton's campaign know about the wiping in August 2015 ? The logical answer is that it
had been discussed in the conference call on March 31, 2015 , that took place within hours of the deletions.
Paul Combetta (Credit: public domain)
Perhaps Mills, Kendall, or someone else working for Clinton told Combetta to make the deletions, possibly during the first conference
call on March 25, 2015 . If that is the case, there should be obstruction of justice charges brought against anyone
involved. Or maybe Combetta did that on his own to cover his earlier mistake and then mentioned what he'd done in the second conference
call. If either scenario is true, Mills should be charged with lying to the FBI for claiming in her FBI interview that she knew nothing
about any of this. Clinton might be charged for the same if it could be proved what she knew and when.
Just as the email retention policy on the Clinton server was changed on the orders of people working for Clinton, so was the retention
policy on the Datto device connected to the server, in the same time period.
In an August 18, 2015 email, Combetta expressed concern that CESC, the Clinton family company, had directed
PRN to reduce the length of time backups, and PRN wanted proof of this so they wouldn't be blamed. But he said in the email, "this
was all phone comms [communications]."
Paul Combetta (left) Bill Thornton (right) (Credit: The Associated Press)
The next day , there was another email,
this one written by Thornton to Combetta and possibly others in PRN . The email has the subject heading "CESC Datto." Thornton
wrote: "Any chance you found an old email with their directive to cut the backup back in Oct-Feb. I know they had you cut it once
in Oct-Nov, then again to 30 days in Feb-ish." (Presumably this refers to October 2014 through February
2015 .)
Thornton continued: "If we had that email, then we're golden. [ ] Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking
them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records. Starting to think this whole thing really is
covering up some shady shit. I just think if we have it in writing that they [CESC] told us to cut the backups, and we can go public
with our statement saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE
LOT better."
Combetta replied: "I'll look again, but I'm almost positive we don't have anything about the 60 day cut. [ ] It's up to lawyer
crap now, so just sit back and enjoy the silly headlines."
As an aside, it's curious that Combetta made some unsolicited additional comments in that same email that was supportive of Clinton's
position in the email controversy: "It wasn't the law to be required to use government email servers at the State Department, believe
it or not. Colin Powell used an AOL address for communicating with his staff, believe it or not."
If we take this email exchange at face value, then it appears that Clinton employees requested an email retention policy change
that would result in more deletion of data on the Datto back-up device in the October to November 2014 time range.
Keep in mind that the
State Department formally asked Clinton for all of her work-related emails , on October 28, 2014 , after informally
asking starting in July 2014 . Then, around February 2015 , Clinton employees asked for another
change that would have resulted in more deletions. Plus, they did this on the phone, leaving no paper trail. Is it any wonder that
Thornton wrote, "Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shady shit?"
News about PRN went quiet for the first half of 2016 . Congressional committees kept asking PRN and Datto for
more information (including another request for interviews in January 2016 ), and PRN kept saying no as well as
not giving Datto permission to respond.
James Comey (Credit: Fox News)
Then, on July 5, 2016 , FBI Director James Comey gave a surprise public speech in which
he announced he wouldn't recommend any criminal charges against Clinton or anyone else in the investigation. In the course of
his speech, he said it was "likely" that some emails may have disappeared forever because Clinton's lawyers "deleted all emails they
did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery." But he said
that after interviews and technical examination, "we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence
there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort."
Two days later, on July 7, 2016 , Comey had to explain his decision in front of a Congressional committee. During
that hearing, he was asked by Representative Trey Gowdy (R), "Secretary Clinton said neither she nor anyone else deleted work-related
emails from her personal account. Was that true?"
Comey replied: "That's a harder one to answer. We found traces of work-related emails in-on devices or in slack space. Whether
they were deleted or whether when the server was changed out, something happened to them. There's no doubt that the work-related
emails were removed electronically from the email system."
Consider that response. By the time Comey made those comments, the FBI's final report had already been finished, the report that
detailed Combetta's confession of deliberately deleting and then wiping all of Clinton's emails from her server. Comey was explicitly
asked if "anyone" had made such deletions, and yet he said he wasn't sure. Comey should be investigated for lying to Congress! Had
he revealed even the rough outlines of Combetta's late March 2015 deletions in his July 5, 2016
public speech or his Congressional testimony two days later , it would have significantly changed the public perception
of the results of the FBI investigation. That also would have allowed Congressional committees to start focusing on this
two months earlier than they did, enabling them to uncover more in the limited time before the November
presidential election.
The SECNAP Logo (Credit: SECNAP)
Despite the fact that the Combetta deletions were still unknown, Congressional committees began putting increasing pressure on
PRN anyway.
On July 12, 2016 , two committees jointly wrote a letter to PRN , threatening subpoenas if they still refused
to cooperate. The letter listed seven PRN employees they wanted to interview, including Combetta and Thornton. Similar letters went
out to Datto and SECNAP. (SECNAP was subcontracted by PRN to carry out threat monitoring of the network connected to Clinton's server.)
On August 22, 2016 , after all three companies still refused to cooperate, Representative Lamar Smith (R), chair
of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology,
issued subpoenas for PRN, Datto, and SECNAP .
On September 2, 2016 ,
the FBI's final report of their Clinton email investigation was released (along with a summary of Clinton's FBI interview). This
report revealed the late March 2015 deletions for the first time. Combetta's name was redacted, but his role, as
well as his immunity deal, was revealed in the New York Times article published a few days later.
Congressional investigators fight back
Channing Phillips (Credit: public domain)
Since the report has been released, Congressional Republicans have stepped up their efforts to get answers about the Combetta
mystery, using the powers of the committees they control. On September 6, 2016 , Representative Jason Chaffetz (R),
chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,
wrote a letter to Channing Phillips , the US attorney for the District of Columbia. He asked the Justice Department to "investigate
and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records,
obstruction of congressional inquiries, and concealment or cover up of evidence material to a congressional investigation." Clearly,
this relates to the Combetta deletions.
Representative Jason Chaffetz. (Credit: Cliff Owen / The Associated Press)
On the same day ,
Chaffetz sent a letter to PRN warning that Combetta could face federal charges for deleting and wiping Clinton's emails in
late March 2015 , due to the Congressional request to preserve them earlier in the month that he admitted he was
aware of. Chaffetz also wants an explanation from PRN how Combetta could refuse to talk to the FBI about the conference calls
if the only lawyers involved in the call were Clinton's.
Chaffetz serves the FBI a subpoena during a House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee hearing on September 9, 2016. (Credit:
ABC News)
On September 9 ,
Chaffetz served the FBI a subpoena for all the unredacted interviews from the FBI's Clinton investigation, especially those of
Combetta and the other PRN employees. This came after an FBI official testifying at a hearing remarkably suggested that Chaffetz
should file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get the documents, just like any private citizen can.
On September 8, 2016 ,
Congressional committees served the subpoenas they'd threatened in August. PRN, Datto, and SECNAP were given until the end of
September 12 to finally turn over the documents the committees had been requesting for year. Datto complied and
turned over the documents in time. However, PRN and SECNAP did not.
Representative Lamar Smith (Credit: public domain)
The next day, September 13 , Representative Lamar Smith (R) said , "just this morning SECNAP's [legal] counsel
confirmed to my staff that the Clinton's private LLC [Clinton Executive Service Corp.] is actively engaged in directing their obstructionist
responses to Congressional subpoenas."
PRN employees Combetta and Thornton were also given subpoenas on September 8 , ordering them to testify at
a Congressional hearing on September 13, 2016 . Both of them showed up with their lawyers, but
both of them pled the Fifth , leaving many questions unanswered.
An FBI cover-up?
In a Senate speech on September 12, 2016 , Senator Charles Grassley (R)
accused the FBI of manipulating which information about the Clinton email investigation becomes public . He said that although
the FBI has taken the unusual step of releasing the FBI's final report, "its summary is misleading or inaccurate in some key details
and leaves out other important facts altogether." He pointed in particular to Combetta's deletions, saying: "[T]here is key information
related to that issue that is still being kept secret, even though it is unclassified. If I honor the FBI's 'instruction' not to
disclose the unclassified information it provided to Congress, I cannot explain why."
Senator Charles Grassley takes to the Senate floor on September 12, 2016. (Credit: CSpan)
He also said there are dozens of completely unclassified witness reports, but even some of his Congressional staffers can't see
them "because the FBI improperly bundled [them] with a small amount of classified information, and told the Senate to treat it all
as if it were classified." The normal procedure is for documents to have the classified portions marked. Then the unclassified portions
can be released. But in defiance of regulations and a clear executive order on how such material should be handled, "the FBI has
'instructed' the Senate office that handles classified information not to separate the unclassified information." As a result, Grassley
claims: "Inaccuracies are spreading because of the FBI's selective release. For example, the FBI's recently released summary memo
may be contradicted by other unclassified interview summaries that are being kept locked away from the public."
He said he has been fighting the FBI on this, but without success so far, as the FBI isn't even replying to his letters.
Thus, it seems that Comey failing to mention anything about the Combetta deletions in the July 7, 2016 Congressional
hearing, even when directly asked about it, was no accident. Having the FBI report claim that Combetta was only interviewed twice
when there is clear evidence of three interviews also fits a pattern of concealment related to the deletions.
James Comey testifies to the House Benghazi Committee on July 7, 2016. (Credit: Jack Gruber / USA Today)
Regarding the FBI's failure to inform Congressional oversight committees of Combetta's immunity deal, Representative Trey
Gowdy (R) recently commented, "If there is a reason to withhold the immunity agreement from Congress-and by extension, the people
we represent-I cannot think of what it would be."
Gowdy, who is a former federal prosecutor, also
said on September 9 that there are two types of immunity Combetta could have received : use and transactional.
"If the FBI and the Department of Justice gave this witness transactional immunity, it is tantamount to giving the triggerman immunity
in a robbery case." He added that he is "stunned" because "It looks like they gave immunity to the very person you would most want
to prosecute."
This is as much as we know so far, but surely the story won't stop there. PRN has been served a new subpoena. It is likely the
requested documents will be seized from them soon if they continue to resist.
Taking the fall and running out the clock
But why does PRN resist so much? Computer companies often resist sharing information with the government so their reputation with
their clients won't be harmed. But defying a subpoena when there clearly are legitimate questions to be answered goes way beyond
what companies normally do and threatens PRN's reputation in a different way. Could it be that PRN-an inexplicable choice to manage
Clinton's server-was chosen precisely because whatever Clinton aide hired them had reason to believe they would be loyal if a problem
like this arose?
David DeCamillis (Credit: public domain)
There is some anecdotal evidence to support this. It has been
reported that PRN has ties to prominent Democrats . For instance, the company's vice president of sales David DeCamillis is said
to be a prominent supporter of Democratic politicians, and once offered to let Senator Joe Biden (D) stay in his house in
2008 , not long before Biden became Obama's vice president. The company also has done work for John Hickenlooper, the Democratic
governor of Colorado. And recall the email in which Combetta brought up points to defend Clinton in her email controversy, even though
the email exchange was on a different topic.
The behavior of the FBI is even stranger. Comey was a registered Republican most of his life, and it is well known that most
FBI agents are politically conservative. Be that as it may, if Comey made a decision beforehand based on some political calculation
to avoid indicting Clinton no matter what the actual evidence was, that the FBI's peculiar behavior specifically relating to the
Combetta deletions make much more sense. It would be an unprecedented and bold move to recommend indicting someone with Hillary Clinton's
power right in the middle of her presidential election campaign.
It's naive to think that political factors don't play a role, on both sides. Consider that virtually every Democratic politician
has been supportive of Clinton in her email controversy, or at least silent about it, while virtually every Republican has been critical
of her about it or silent. Comey was appointed by Obama, and if the odds makers are right and Clinton wins in November
, Comey will continue to be the FBI director under President Clinton. (Comey was appointed to a ten-year term, but Congress
needs to vote to reappoint him after the election.) How could that not affect his thinking?
Comey could be trying to run out the clock, first delaying the revelations of the Combetta's deletions as much as possible, then
releasing only selected facts to diminish the attention on the story.
In this scenario, the FBI having Combetta take the fall for the deletions while making a secret immunity deal with him is
a particularly clever move to prevent anyone from being indicted. Note that Combetta's confession about making the deletions came
in his May 2016 FBI interview, which came after Mills' April 2016 interview in which she claimed
she'd never heard of any deletions. Thus, the only way to have Combetta take the fall for the deletions without Mills getting caught
clearly lying to the FBI is by dodging the issue of what was said in the March 31, 2015 conference with a nonsensical
claim of "attorney-client privilege."
Unfortunately, if that is Comey's plan, it looks like it's working. Since the FBI's final report came out on September
2, 2016 , the mainstream media has largely failed to grasp the significance of Combetta and his deletions, focusing on far
less important matters instead, such as the destruction of a couple of Clinton's BlackBerry devices with hammers-which actually was
better than not destroying them and possibly letting them fall into the wrong hands.
The House Benghazi Committee in session in 2015. (Credit: C-SPAN3)
What happens next appears to largely be in the hands of Congressional Republicans, who no doubt will keep pushing to find out
more, if only to politically hurt Clinton before the election. But it's also in the hands of you, the members of the general public.
If enough people pay attention, then it will be impossible to sweep this controversy under the rug.
I believe that criminal behavior needs to be properly investigated and prosecuted, regardless of political persuasion and
regardless of the election calendar. Combetta clearly committed a crime and he even confessed to do so, given what he admitted in
his last FBI interview. If he got a limited immunity deal instead of blanket immunity, which is highly likely, it still would be
possible to indict and convict him based on evidence outside of his interviews. That would help explain why he recently pled the
Fifth, because he's still in legal danger.
Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton plead the Fifth on September 13, 2016. (Credit: CSpan)
But more importantly, who else is guilty with him? Logic and the available evidence strongly suggest that Clinton's lawyer
Cheryl Mills at least knew about the deletions at the time they happened. Combetta has already confessed to criminal behavior-and
yet somehow hasn't even been fired by PRN. If he didn't at least tell Mills and the others in the conference call about the deletions,
there would be no logical reason to assert attorney-client privilege in the first place. Only the nonsensical assertion of this privilege
is preventing the evidence coming out that should lead to Mills being charged with lying to the FBI at a minimum. And if Mills knew,
can anyone seriously believe that Clinton didn't know too?
As the saying goes, "it's not the crime, it's the cover up." This is an important story, and not just election season mudslinging.
The public needs to know what really happened.
Guccifer 2.0
's latest release of DNC documents is generally described as:
In total, the latest dump contains more than 600 megabytes of documents.
It is the first Guccifer 2.0 release to not come from the hacker's WordPress
account. Instead, it was given out via a link to the small group of security
experts attending the London conference.
Guccifer 2.0 drops more DNC docs by Cory Bennett.
The "600 megabytes of documents" is an attention grabber, but how much of
that 600 megabytes is useful and/or interesting?
The answer turns out to be, not a lot.
Here's an overview of the directories and files:
/CIR
Financial investment data.
/CNBC
Financial investment data.
/DNC
Redistricting documents.
/DNCBSUser
One file with fields of VANDatabaseCode StateID VanID cons_id?
/documentation
A large amount of documentation for "IQ8," apparently address cleaning software.
Possibly useful if you want to know address cleaning rules from eight years
ago.
/DonorAnalysis
Sound promising but is summary data based on media markets.
/early
Early voting analysis.
/eday
Typical election voting analysis, from 2002 to 2008.
/FEC
Duplicates to FEC filings. Checking the .csv file, data from
2008. BTW, you can find this date (2008) and later data of the same type at:
http://fec.gov .
/finance
More duplicates to FEC filings. 11-26-08 NFC Members Raised.xlsx (no credit
cards) – Dated but 453 names with contacts, amounts raised, etc.
September 14th, 2016
Guccifer 2.0 dropped
a new bundle of DNC documents on September 13, 2016! Like most dumps, there
was no accompanying guide to make use of that dump easier.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
As a starting point to make your use of that dump a little easier, I am posting
an ls -lR listing of all the files in that dump, post extraction
with 7z and unrar .
Guccifer2.0-13Sept2016-filelist.txt .
I'm working on a list of the files most likely to be of interest. Look for
that tomorrow.
I can advise that no credit card numbers were included in this dump.
While selling public offices surprises some authors, whose names I omitted
out of courtesy to their families, selling offices is a regularized activity
in the United States.
Every four years, just after the Presidential election, " United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions " is published. It is commonly known as the "Plum Book" and is
alternately published between the House and Senate.
The Plum Book is a listing of over 9,000 civil service leadership and
support positions (filled and vacant) in the Legislative and Executive branches
of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointments,
or in other words by direct appointment.
These "plum" positions include agency heads and their immediate subordinates,
policy executives and advisors, and aides who report to these officials.
Many positions have duties which support Administration policies and programs.
The people holding these positions usually have a close and confidential
relationship with the agency head or other key officials.
Even though the 2012 "plum" book is currently on sale for $19.00 (usual price
is $38.00), given that a new one will appear later this year, consider using
the free online version at:
Plum Book 2012
.
The online interface is nothing to brag on. You have to select filters and
then find to obtain further information on positions. Very poor UI.
However, if under title you select "Chief of Mission, Monaco" and then select
"find," the resulting screen looks something like this:
To your far right there is a small arrow that if selected, takes you to the
details:
If you were teaching a high school civics class, the question would be:
How much did Charles Rivkin have to donate to obtain the position of Chief
of Mission, Monaco?
Monaco, bordering France on the Mediterranean coast, is a popular resort,
attracting tourists to its casino and pleasant climate. The principality
also is a banking center and has successfully sought to diversify into services
and small, high-value-added, nonpolluting industries.
Entering the name Rivkin, Charles and select "Get Listing."
Rivkin's contributions are broken into categories and helpfully summed to
assist you in finding the total.
Contributions to All Other Political Committees Except Joint Fundraising
Committees – $72399.00
Joint Fundraising Contributions – $22300.00
Recipient of Joint Fundraiser Contributions – $36052.00
Caution: There is an anomalous Rivkin in that last category, contributing
$40 to Donald Trump. For present discussions, I would subtract that from the
grand total of:
$130,711 to be the Chief of Mission, Monaco.
Realize that this was not a lump sum payment but a steady stream of contributions
starting in the year 2000.
Jane Hartley paid DNC $605,000 and then was nominated by Obama to serve
concurrently as the U.S. Ambassador to the French Republic and the Principality
of Monaco.
Contributions to Super PACs, Hybrid PACs and Historical Soft Money Party
Accounts – $5000.00
Contributions to All Other Political Committees Except Joint Fundraising
Committees – $516609.71
Joint Fundraising Contributions – $116000.00
Grand total: $637,609.71.
So, $637,609.71, not $605,000.00 but also as a series of contributions starting
in 1997, not one lump sum .
You don't have to search discarded hard drives to get pay-to-play appointment
pricing. It's all a matter of public record.
PS: I'm not sure how accurate or complete
Nominations & Appointments (White House) may be, but its an easier starting
place for current appointees than the online Plum book.
PPS: Estimated pricing for "Plum" book positions could be made more transparent.
Not a freebie. Let me know if you are interested.
"... Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying - all captured on live nationally broadcast television. ..."
"... According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material. ..."
"... Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials? ..."
"... What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law - a pillar of American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War - mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath their protection, and no one is above ..."
It is hard to believe that the FBI was free to do its work, and it is probably true that the FBI was restrained by the White House
early on. There were numerous aberrations in the investigation. There was no grand jury; no subpoenas were issued; no search warrants
were served. Two people claimed to have received immunity, yet the statutory prerequisite for immunity - giving testimony before
a grand or trial jury - was never present.
Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full
FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined
to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service
of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying -
all captured on live nationally broadcast television.
Now the FBI, which usually serves subpoenas and executes search warrants, is left with the alternative of complying with this
unwanted subpoena by producing its entire file or arguing to a federal judge why it should not be compelled to do so.
On the Senate side, matters are even more out of hand. There, in response to a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the
FBI sent both classified and unclassified materials to the Senate safe room. The Senate safe room is a secure location that is available
only to senators and their senior staff, all of whom must surrender their mobile devices and writing materials and swear in writing
not to reveal whatever they see while in the room before they are permitted to enter.
According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified
and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material.
Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the
FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials?
Who cares about this? Everyone who believes that the government works for us should care because we have a right to know what
the government - here the FBI - has done in our names. Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI
unclassified records, it would be of profound interest to American voters.
What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law - a pillar of
American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War - mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath
their protection, and no one is above
Short Squeeze •Sep 16, 2016 12:12 PM
My theory is that when Comey stated "no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute", he already knew of her health issues. Would
a prosecutor go after someone with 6 months to live?
saloonsf •Sep 16, 2016 12:03 PM
That's not FBI's responsibilities-exposing the elites cupabilities. The FBI primary objective is to protect the elites and
the system that benefit them.
Atomizer •Sep 16, 2016 12:10 PM
The wagons are circling around the Clinton Foundation. Chelsea's husband is going to get nicked.
withglee •Sep 16, 2016 12:25 PM
Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI unclassified records, it would be of
profound interest to American voters.
So what's keeping Grassley from asking that those unclassified documents be taken from the room and laid on his desk. He is
not allowed to talk about what he saw in the room. But for sure he is allowed to talk about unclassified documents laid upon his
desk ... even if they were once in the room. If that wasn't the case, the government would just run every document through the
room ... to give it official immunity from inspection and exposure.
"... The State Deptartment had been using Blackberries since 2006, and diplomats overseas had been using them for just as long. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton didn't need to use a fancy NSA-approved smartphone to access classified data. Whenever she went overseas, she had a team of IT specialists who was able to provide her with ClassNet access, and they're able to do so without any technical support from a US Embassy. ..."
"... The Exchange and BES software were likely purchased by Hillary '08, and properly licensed for that usage. But as far as after that.... ..."
"... In a country where a standing governer running as VP could be found explicitly and intentionally using Yahoo email for the express purpose of avoiding FOIA on relevant government business, and there be no investigation whatsoever well. Let's just say there's an exceedingly strong whiff of double standards in the air. ..."
"... Most interesting to me was confirmation that the server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times. From your link, an individual email account on the server was breached. ..."
"... This happens all the time, for varying reasons, mostly due to a phishing compromise of the account, and occasionally due to password re-use and related vectors of compromise. While it's bad for the individual account's contents, it's absolutely irrelevant beyond that. ..."
"... If that's the worst they can find then personally I'm actually impressed. I was expecting that the server(s) had been root/fully compromised at least once, given how they get perennially described. If that turns out to not be the case, then they've actually been run better and more securely than the State Department's [at least non-classified] servers, from all reports. ..."
"... A 'breach' of an account is not a breach of the server. The account being access via TOR implies the user credentials were acquired through some means. Was this 'breached' account a classified account? ..."
"... "multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server that was breached, it was 1 person's email. ..."
Hillary Clinton didn't need to use her own Blackberry. The State
Deptartment had been using Blackberries since 2006, and diplomats overseas
had been using them for just as long.
Hillary Clinton didn't need to use a fancy NSA-approved smartphone
to access classified data. Whenever she went overseas, she had a team of
IT specialists who was able to provide her with ClassNet access, and they're
able to do so without any technical support from a US Embassy.
Quote: First, the Clintons had requested, according to a
PRN employee interviewed by the FBI, that the contents of the server be
encrypted so that only mail recipients could read the content. This was
not done, largely so that PRN technicians could "troubleshoot problems occurring
within user accounts," the FBI memo reports.
Also, while the Clintons had requested only local backups, the Datto
appliance initially also used Datto's secure cloud backup service until
August of 2015. \
Sounds like some of the problem was the contractor not following the
procedures established by the client.
Just to clarify, the move to a hosted solution - with requested encryption
- was initiated after Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State (January 21,
2009 – February 1, 2013) was completed in February, 2013, and FOIA requests
were no longer applicable as she was no longer a government employee.
I think that would depend on the scope of the migration. Did they migrate
all of the history over to the hosted solution? i.e. Did they migrate the
OS, Exchange and BES servers into PRN's datacenter? Or, did they start from
scratch with a clean slate, fresh install and no data migration. If it's
the former and not the latter, I'd be pretty damned certain it'd still be
subject to FOIA requests.
In a country where a standing governer running as VP could be
found explicitly and intentionally using Yahoo email for the express
purpose of avoiding FOIA on relevant government business, and there
be no investigation whatsoever well. Let's just say there's an exceedingly
strong whiff of double standards in the air.
I'm not fond of this private server crap. I think it's bullshit and
it never should have been allowed in the first place. She should have
simply been told that it's not permissible, whatsoever. But I also think
the classified email issues are red herrings in the context of the use
of private servers, as they would have been just as much an issue on
State Department non classified servers.
And I think that it's been made abundantly clear that the tools to
do business over email and modern mobile computing were extremely lacking,
outside of a solution like this, and what tools were available were
purposefully withheld over what sounds like ridiculous political fighting
under the guise of bureaucracy.
None of this means what she did was ok, but it's also hard to not
look askance at the relentless witchhunting when it's placed in that
broader context.
Personally I've reached a point where I'm done caring on the topic.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of smoking gun, just a lot of hemming
and hawing. Normally I would care about this, but honestly I'm a bit
inured at this point. Where is the show of her using these specifically
to avoid FOIA on work material actually relevant to FOIA?
That's really the only true relevant question when it comes to moving
to private servers. Classified material isn't supposed to be on unclassified
government servers either, so the attempt to focus on that (mostly with
retroactive or improperly labeled material and a few other issues) really
seems awkward when we're supposed to care about the private servers
as if they're damning.
Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times.
From your link, an individual email account on the server was breached.
This happens all the time, for varying reasons, mostly due to a phishing
compromise of the account, and occasionally due to password re-use and related
vectors of compromise. While it's bad for the individual account's contents,
it's absolutely irrelevant beyond that.
If that's the worst they can find then personally I'm actually impressed.
I was expecting that the server(s) had been root/fully compromised at least
once, given how they get perennially described. If that turns out to not
be the case, then they've actually been run better and more securely than
the State Department's [at least non-classified] servers, from all reports.
Look, getting all up in arms over crap like that link is why people like
me are no longer convinced there's anything here worth paying attention
to. I'm actually willing to listen if there's some kind of smoking gun,
but that's some petty bullshit right there.
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Do you say that "google's servers got breached" every time an individual
email account on them is compromised?
What he said is factually incorrect. The server was not breached. An
individual email account was accessed. They're not the same thing. Not even
an OS user level account. An email account.
Rommel102 wrote: Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple
times.
"multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server that
was breached, it was 1 person's email.
Even if this person was clinton herself, we already know there was not
much damaging information stored on this server. And considering this seems
more like someone used a weak password or was phished, this is a vulnerability
no matter what email provider you're using.
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Probably because we know DOJ email servers have also been breached. He's
implying that her servers were less secure and somehow put information in
harms way. History seems to show us that it wasn't at any more risk.
I didn't imply that at all. Here we have fairly solid evidence that a
breach of Hillary's server happened. That seems to contradict the FBI's
stance, Comey's statement and testimony, and is a first as far as I know.
And in comparison, the DOJs non-classified email systems were hacked.
There is no evidence that the classified system ever was.
A 'breach' of an account is not a breach of the server. The account
being access via TOR implies the user credentials were acquired through
some means. Was this 'breached' account a classified account?
I could be wrong, but I think that all classified emails from DoD and
State have to go through SIPRNet.
If this was strictly respected, then Clinton's server should contain
no classified information. In real-life, we saw that a few classified things
went through her personal email system, so it wasn't fully respected, or
some of the info was not yet classified.
Story Author Popular
omniron wrote:
Rommel102 wrote: Most interesting to me was confirmation that the
server was breached. Unknown parties accessed it from TOR multiple times.
"multiple times" is 3 times in this case, and it wasn't the server
that was breached, it was 1 person's email.
Even if this person was clinton herself, we already know there was not
much damaging information stored on this server. And considering this seems
more like someone used a weak password or was phished, this is a vulnerability
no matter what email provider you're using.
We're going to get into this in a story I'm currently writing (probably
for next week, so it's not a Friday newsdumpster move). But it's worth noting
THE ENTIRETY OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S UNCLAS EMAIL SYSTEM WAS PWNED FOR
OVER A YEAR. I'm sorry, did I type that in all-caps? Also, between Chelsea
Manning/ Wikileaks and the repeated hacks of State, the White House, etc
between 2009 and 2014, it is highly likely that everything short of the
TS/SAP stuff (and even some of that) that Clinton touched was already breached.
This does not excuse Clinton and her staff's-I'm looking at you, Jake
Sullivan-for the extreme error of passing Top Secret/ Special Access Program
classified data back and forth over Blackberries and a non-governmental
e-mail system. I would expect that Sullivan, at a minimum, will have his
clearance revoked and he will not be getting a job as a national security
adviser if Clinton wins the election. Or at least, I think that's a reasonable
expectation.
LordDaMan Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
reply
Sep 2, 2016 7:24 PM
arcite wrote: She wanted to use her Blackberry, and she wanted all her
accounts in one easy to access place. The solution was sloppy, but there
was no ill-intent.
Except she used multiple devices. She also ignored the repeated comments
towards her to not to have a private server. The server was deliberately
wiped violating the various laws about data retention. She used an alias
to send e-mails to her daughter. She, despite being first lady. many years
in congress, and sec. of state somehow didn't understand what classified
material is or how even without marking some info is "born" classified.
She lied multiple times under oath about all of this.
In an enterprise environment? 50/50. For some "side work" from an IT
guy in the government? Id almost guarantee either CALs were missing, or
the entire thing was running on images Pagliano "got" from his day job.
Doubly so when the client is buying used servers and networking gear.
Ok so that will be $2,900 for hardware, and it looks like it will be
right around 9,000 for software licenses.
Pfff, here is 3,000, just make it work and keep the change for yourself
Not sure why you are being down voted on newly revealed information that
seems to confirm that one of the servers email accounts was breached.
If you're down voting him, perhaps an explanation as to why?
Probably because we know DOJ email servers have also been breached. He's
implying that her servers were less secure and somehow put information in
harms way. History seems to show us that it wasn't at any more risk.
Yeah, but the FBI is saying there was no evidence that the server was
hacked.
And then we find out that one of the email accounts was accessed over the
TOR network and the user of the email account had never heard of TOR much
less used it to access email.
That seems like yet another skewing of the finding to put them in the
best possible light. (EDIT: not saying she was or was not, but I would say
that there was indicators that it was possibly compromised)
DOJ, OPM, Pentagon, doesnt have any relevance on if she was irresponsible
for having this whole set up. That same article states they werent even
able to confirm if TLS was ever enabled. And Why? Because Clinton/IT took
steps to make sure it couldnt be found out before turning over the equipment.
You know, this level of twisting is why you and Rommel are not credible
on the topic. You just come off sounding like a conspiracy nut when you
can go from the article linked to "her servers got hacked."
Let's be clear: if there had been a full breach, there would have been
no need to be accessing an individual account over Exchange via TOR. You
could just grab the whole thing directly, instead. This is, if anything,
evidence of a lack of a full breach, at least by whatever actor was accessing
the particular account in question.
But, you know, why don't you two just keep shooting yourselves in the
kneecaps over this. It's not like your hyperbolic approach to this is hurting
your credibility at all. We can either assume you're both excessively biased
or incompetent on the topic from how you're running with that story.
Not that I'm calling you technically incompetent, mind. Unless you actually
believe there's not a distinction between an email account being individually
compromised and a "server being hacked." I expect you're just intentionally
twisting what you're saying. But hey, maybe you don't actually know better?
The way you two are trying to play this is why you have so many people
turning away in disgust-not at Hillary, but at the ongoing digging for gold
and related hyperbole and even outright lies in what is more and more clearly
a dustbowl, with the only apparent motivation being a smear campaign rather
than anything to do with actual justice or a real care about security.
A perfectly valid reason for accessing Exchange via Tor is exactly to
prevent the intrusion from being detected. Create yourself a valid account,
access it as any other normal user would and your hack will look like normal
user traffic.
'grabbing the whole thing directly' has only a fleeting value; taking
exchange offline to copy the mailboxes as you describe will certainly alert
someone to your presence and encourage them to mediate the intrusion.
Now, lets pretend you are Russia, and you have persistent access to her
and other email systems.
.
Now when you need to claim some new land in Georgia or Ukraine.. we get
reliable information about what the world police will actually do about
it. Not merely what they say they will do.
Sep 2, 2016 10:11 PM Popular
Rommel102 wrote: if one random person was able to get into the server
via TOR, that implies that the server was known to the hacking community.
You're making it sound much more dramatic than reality.
The one random person didn't "get into the server" in any meaningful
way. They accessed an email account.
As for the server being "known to the hacking community", DNS records
are public, so in reality the server was "known" to the entire world. As
are billions of others.
For practical purposes, every device on the internet is "known" to everybody.
Either DNS records point to it, or you can just scan IP address ranges to
find it.
RAH Seniorius Lurkius
reply
Sep 2, 2016 10:18 PM New Poster Popular A missing piece of this whole
conversation is what IT would be in place for the Secretary of State instead
of personal email servers. Government servers that have been known to be
all too easily hacked? And, just which department has the responsibility
for government security? As with all bureaucracies, the responsibility is
spread among many departments, including the FBI.
It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for the heads of
departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly asked
for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting cost.
The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security found
within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable security.
Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State.
John Kerry's mobile systems (now that they finally have them) were updated
just weeks ago, and if you look at what he now has, you will find that those
systems are five years behind the times.
I am much more concerned about IT security within all departments of
the federal government than I am what Clinton did or did not do.
The question is whether there was any intention to skirt the legal requirements
for security and confidentiality. I don't believe Hillary had the technical
savvy to even begin to think about that.
Also, despite Comey's caustic remarks to Congress about recklessness,
etc., let's remember that he's not exactly credible, either, when it comes
to technology. I mean, he's the same guy who thinks the government should
have a backdoor into what would otherwise be secure private systems.
Red Foreman Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
reply
Sep 3, 2016 12:32 AM
RAH wrote: ...It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for
the heads of departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly
asked for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting
cost. The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security
found within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable
security. Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State...
BREAKING NEWS: NSA Rejected Hillary Clinton's request for a Blackberry
That's the headline I keep reading. And it looks like you've read it
too. What they don't tell us is that instead they wanted her to use a General
Dynamics Sectéra Edge. Which while NSA approved for mobile SCIF classified
communication, it wasn't cool enough for Hillary.
It's a breach of protocol. She mishandled classified information she
otherwise had clearance to see. It's about equivalent to discussing state
secrets over an unsecured phone line in a seedy motel, or leaving top secret
information lying out on your kitchen table while you have your friends
over for a BBQ. It was incredibly stupid of her, and she's lucky there's
only theoretical evidence of a possibility of a leak, but it's not criminal.
I agree with Comey's conclusion on the matter. It's something any "regular"
person would've been fired over, probably blackballed from any sensitive
government position for life, though it's nothing anyone would go to jail
over.
Last edited by
Renzatic on Sat Sep 03, 2016 12:01 am
symphony3 Ars Centurion
reply
Sep 3, 2016 3:18 AM
RAH wrote: A missing piece of this whole conversation is what IT would
be in place for the Secretary of State instead of personal email servers.
Government servers that have been known to be all too easily hacked? And,
just which department has the responsibility for government security? As
with all bureaucracies, the responsibility is spread among many departments,
including the FBI.
It is NSA's responsibility to provide communications for the heads of
departments, including the Secretary of State. Clinton supposedly asked
for a secure Blackberry like Obama's, but the NSA refused, siting cost.
The NSA seems to think the Secretary of State only needs the security found
within the SCIF in the State Department offices, and not portable security.
Really? No one travels more than the Secretary of State.
John Kerry's mobile systems (now that they finally have them) were updated
just weeks ago, and if you look at what he now has, you will find that those
systems are five years behind the times.
I am much more concerned about IT security within all departments of
the federal government than I am what Clinton did or did not do.
I'm concerned about IT security, which makes me very concerned about
finally funding IT so it can succeed. Every government organization I've
worked with, even with top level universities, fund their landscaping better
than their IT. And that means the buck stops with whatever boss determines
funding.
Please don't tell me this is about the taxpayer deciding funding for
IT, because we know that Social Security was better prepared for Y2K than
almost any other government department. If the unknown director of Social
Security could wrangle a decent IT budget (past tense on that), then it
can still be done by much bigger names & departments. (Not singling out
one department, too many hacks to choose from)
None of this means what she did was ok, but it's also hard to not look
askance at the relentless witchhunting when it's placed in that broader
context.
...
My personal evolution on this issue has gone from "having a privately
controlled email server sounds really really bad, and was probably done
to avoid monitoring! I'm really upset about this!" to "wow, these allegations
sound extremely serious!" to "oh, those allegations were not really true
at all" to "yikes, this again? how much more whining and knashing of the
the teeth am I going to have to put up with?" If this had been any other
politican, like, literally any other politician would we have heard more
than a week or two about it? Would we have the FBI releasing their investigation
documents to the public? Would all of Clinton's emails been open to the
public like this? The amount of transparency, the lack of smoking guns,
and the irrationally emotional anger have made me completely turn around
on this issue.
The reason it keeps coming back is that each new revelation seems to
reveal more lies and more proof of lies by Hillary Clinton. You suggest
if it was any other politician it would be instantly forgotten. Not exactly.
Not if they stood a very good chance of being the next president of the
United States. And certainly not if they had the same background of corruption,
lying, and disastrous job performance as Clinton does (getting Americans
killed in Benghazi and then lying to their families about it, her lies about
being under sniper attack on the tarmac in the Balkans years ago, etc etc).
Nixon was forced to resign for far less dishonesty than this woman has been
caught in. So yes, it is a big deal, and it should be. Not only did she
take the classified workflow outside of the secure state department infrastructure,
she did it to avoid accountability and just exactly the kind of scandal
that would ensue if it was ever found out, which it obviously was. She put
national security at risk for her own political gain, and then lied about
it repeatedly on many occasions and in all kinds of settings. Not only did
she commit crimes and SHOULD have been charged by DOJ (her hubby's little
illicit chit-chat w/ Lynch on the Phoenix tarmac notwithstanding), but she
demonstrated by all she has done she doesn't have the one thing a real president
needs: good judgement. Plenty of other things as well, honesty, etc, should
also be requirements, but generally aren't, lately. But having better judgement
than a 2 year old is crucial, and she's proven she hasn't got that.
A recap ( Comey's testimony) of just some of the lies told by Clinton,
to both the public, Congress, and the FBI, about her emails, server, etc
:
ArchieG Smack-Fu Master, in training
reply
Sep 3, 2016 6:37 AM Quote: The reason it keeps coming back is
that each new revelation seems to reveal more lies and more proof of lies
by Hillary Clinton. You suggest if it was any other politician it would
be instantly forgotten. Not exactly. Not if they stood a very good chance
of being the next president of the United States. And certainly not if they
had the same background of corruption, lying, and disastrous job performance
as Clinton does (getting Americans killed in Benghazi and then lying to
their families about it, her lies about being under sniper attack on the
tarmac in the Balkans years ago, etc etc). Nixon was forced to resign for
far less dishonesty than this woman has been caught in. So yes, it is a
big deal, and it should be. Not only did she take the classified workflow
outside of the secure state department infrastructure, she did it to avoid
accountability and just exactly the kind of scandal that would ensue if
it was ever found out, which it obviously was. She put national security
at risk for her own political gain, and then lied about it repeatedly on
many occasions and in all kinds of settings. Not only did she commit crimes
and SHOULD have been charged by DOJ (her hubby's little illicit chit-chat
w/ Lynch on the Phoenix tarmac notwithstanding), but she demonstrated by
all she has done she doesn't have the one thing a real president needs:
good judgement. Plenty of other things as well, honesty, etc, should also
be requirements, but generally aren't, lately. But having better judgement
than a 2 year old is crucial, and she's proven she hasn't got that.
Could you at least break your thoughts into paragraphs? Also, back up
your whining with actual facts. Yeah, that would be nice.
bthylafh Ars Praefectus
reply
Sep 3, 2016 8:54 AM
mat735 wrote: Wow. Not only is this article misleading and poorly composed,
it is factually incorrect (pic being one example). At the time this happened
was it uncommon for a company to manage their own email servers/hardware?
What were BlackBerry recommendations on hosting? Who actually ordered the
hardware? Who is PRN and what other clients do they represent?
This is the point anyone who cares about the country should be making,
and I really wish Hillary had raised it early on. Federal IT is bad not
because of the usual right-wing tropes about government workers but because
there are too many barriers enshrined in federal law and policy. Things
like procurement, hiring, and even the simple ability to deploy an application
have slow, expensive processes full of counter-productive incentives. The
pay-scale for federal staff tops out well below the private sector, there's
been a couple decades of Congress trying to encourage outsourcing (I'm sure
it's just a coincidence that large contracting companies can make campaign
donations), and a lot of senior management and policy have tried to treat
IT as a purchase rather than a skill to be developed, all of which means
that the federal workforce is aging and the best people are routinely asking
themselves whether they believe in their agency's mission enough to keep
turning down a hefty pay raise. GitHub's Ben Balter, a former Presidential
Innovation Fellow, has written a lot about this – see
What's next for federal IT policy, IMHO ,
Three things you learn going from the most bureaucratic organization in
the world to the least ,
Want to innovate government? Focus on culture , etc.
This has already been a big deal during the Obama administration and
I think it's going to become critical for the next president as both our
dependencies on IT continue to increase – remember that due to decades of
budget cuts, many agencies are still relatively early in the migration to
fully electronic processes – and the demands increase, both for general
worker productivity and especially for across-the-board security improvements
as the sophistication of attacks has gone up. Security is one of the hardest
parts of IT because it's not a commodity which you can purchase, requires
broader skills and constant adjustment, and the field is full of hucksters
peddling purchases or bureaucratic process as easy solutions. The low federal
pay-scale is especially bad since there's so much private sector demand,
which means that it's hard to keep skilled practitioners on staff and that
reduces the pool of qualified people getting hired into management.
This is the kind of thing people should be asking the candidates to talk
about but due to the prolonged bad-faith attempts to trump up scandals from
things like these emails it's really hard to see any sort of honest policy
discussion breaking out. Every citizen should care about changing that dynamic
since in addition to the areas where the failures are themselves major crises
everywhere else they're behind the scenes making projects more expensive
and less successful across the board.
Sep 3, 2016 11:01 AM
roman wrote:
mat735 wrote: Wow. Not only is this article misleading and poorly composed,
it is factually incorrect (pic being one example). At the time this happened
was it uncommon for a company to manage their own email servers/hardware?
What were BlackBerry recommendations on hosting? Who actually ordered the
hardware? Who is PRN and what other clients do they represent?
During the "growing" age of the Internet but before cloud computing (I'd
say early 1990's to mid 2000's) it was very easy/common to run your own
servers. All you needed was a constant internet connection and a static
IP addr.
This was especially common among non-IT centric businesses in my experience
– doctors, lawyers, non-profits, etc. would pay a consultant to set something
up and give their front-office staff instructions about changing backup
tapes, etc. but they didn't want to have to deal with the complexity and
expense of a real data center operation, hiring staff, etc. You probably
wanted a business cable/DSL connection anyway, buy a copy of
Windows Small business Server or
OS X
Server depending on your tastes and you have everything "done" for a
fixed up-front cost. A lot of consultants made good livings doing the same
setup for a bunch of clients which weren't quite big enough to have IT staffing
or balked at paying someone above desktop-support level.
The biggest things which killed that market were security and disaster
recovery, as maintaining an email server became a full-time job and stories
about someone losing everything in a hack / fire / flood / etc. became fairly
common, coupled with the availability of high-quality services (
Google Apps for Your Domain launched in 2006 ) at prices which were
much less than you could match for things like spam filtering, user interface
quality, and performance at a scale of less than hundreds of users. Things
like PCI or HIPAA accelerated that process by telling entire fields it was
no longer a good area to skimp.
By now it's assumed most small operations will use a cloud provider but
it took years to establish that the service quality and pricing would stick.
By the time Hillary took office, however, that was still in transition.
It doesn't surprise me at all that someone – especially someone mid-career
or older – would go back to what was familiar when their boss asked them
to get something done in a hurry. It's the same process you can find all
over the business world where someone has a "mission critical" Access database,
Excel file, PHP app on a shared host, etc. because they were told to get
it done ASAP and didn't have time to learn something new, especially if
this wasn't a core part of their job. It'll just be a temporary fix until
we do things the right way
gbjbaanb Ars Scholae Palatinae
reply
Sep 3, 2016 2:11 PM Well it does get a little more interesting every
day. Today the news is of a missing laptop and thumbdrive containing an
archive of emails that were not handed over to the FBI (apparently they
were forgotten).
Quote: In early 2014, Hanley located the laptop at her home and
tried to transfer the email archive to an IT company, apparently without
success. It appears the emails were then transferred to an unnamed person's
personal Gmail account and there were problems around Apple software not
being compatible with that of Microsoft.
"Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts
of the archive laptop or thumb drive containing the archive, and the FBI
does not have either item in its possession."
One thing, regardless of the political affiliation of the commenters
and voters here, this is all sloppy IT work that should never be allowed
to go unchallenged. If you're going to do this kind of thing, at least get
someone who knows what they're doing to do it properly. As an IT professional,
this kind of lackadaisical attitude to IT administration offends me.
That doesn't make it OK and he should be under investigation as well.
haven't you heard the law doesn't apply to republicans.
They were no laws broken by clinton than we can tell, it's just a weird
thing. Powell clearly used private email to skirt records requests (and
IIRC the Bush admin lost millions of emails). But Clinton seemed aware information
is public record no matter how it's sent.
And if we compare the number of times this server was breached to government
breaches, i don't know if this makes the idea of using your own server look
like a bad idea. most intrusions are via social engineering, and there's
probably a lot more weak points in the staff of gov email than this private
one.
What i find strange is that Clinton was secretary of state, and was probably
handling classified information constantly. How is it after the FBI has
reviewed 45,000 of the 60,0000 emails there are so few classified emails
being sent around (only 1 was sent BY clinton). Does the government just
not send classified information through email at all? I'm more interested,
from a technological perspective, in how this is handled.
She violated quite a few laws the press is willfully ignoring
As someone who has gone through the hassle of trying to get a Security Clearance
AND clearance to work on classified networks we were clearly told of the
laws and penalties to be incurred for misuse of the resources
Hillary went above and beyond to try and keep knowingly and marked classified
documents out of the "secure" White House network, there is the violations
of the laws. You notice how they handled the acquisition of the hardware?
She and her minions KNEW what they were doing and purposely used Bills staff
to hide it and keep the supplier in the dark to keep their illegal behavior
as secret as possible
But no, she didn't do anything wrong and definitely didn't violate a
dozen or so laws, nope, just another "right wing conspiracy" she swears
is always going on
And it's the Democratic party, not the Democrat party.
And she's not the Commander-in-Chief so I don't even know how you got
the notion that she's responsible for American citizens getting killed.
If we put government officials in jail according to how many people died
under their watch, George W Bush would be in prison for hundreds and hundreds
of years for all the dead in the 911 attack, the thousands of military service
personnel that died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the millions of
innocent civilian lives that were lost because of his stupidity, not to
mention all the lies that were told to justify the war in the first place.
Take your partisan bullshit somewhere else.
Lol....she violated the espionage act! And she had every intent in doing
so. If that's not illegal then I don't know what is.
And yes, she may well be responsible for getting Americans killed. If
her server was hacked then no doubt she put American lives at risk.
Clearly, Crooked Hillary was more concerned about protecting her own
secrets and the Clinton Foundation's secrets more than she was about protecting
America's secrets.
She's not fit for any government job, let alone president.
JaxMac Smack-Fu Master, in training
et Subscriptor
reply
Sep 3, 2016 7:45 PM New Poster The Power Mac G4 was sold prior to the
release of OS X. Thus it's operating system was the Classical Mac OS. The
Classical Mac OS had no command line, thus it was practically unhackable
remotely. I believe that this was also true of the Power Mac G5.
If the Clinton email had been maintained on either of these two Macs
there would be no questions about infiltration by anyone.
Andrew Norton Ars Scholae Palatinae
reply
Sep 3, 2016 11:42 PM
davecadron wrote: Did everyone miss the part where hillary decided to
wipe the server after foia requests were made and after records were subpoenaed
by Congress?
Obstruction of justice is a felony.
Everything you say may be true.
However the first paragraph has absolutely zero relevance to the last (separate)
line.
The stuff up top might get you 'contempt of congress', or violation of
a court order that doesn't actually exist.
Obstruction of justice is a whole 'nother matter and has nothing to do
with FOIA's or congressional subpoenas.
Obstruction of justice is a felony.
Everything you say may be true.
However the first paragraph has absolutely zero relevance to the last (separate)
line.
The stuff up top might get you 'contempt of congress', or violation of
a court order that doesn't actually exist.
Obstruction of justice is a whole 'nother matter and has nothing to do
with FOIA's or congressional subpoenas.
As always seems to be the case the coverup is worse then the crime, certainly
so with the Clintons given their history. If any the obstruction of justice
hasn't been their attempting to conceal their public records from being
properly archived, as required by law and thus being open to being disclosed
under FOIA.
Rather it's their efforts after the fact. And that would be potentially
lying under oath to investigators and or destruction of/concealing of evidence,
in an attempt to explain away the email scandal, and of course try to publicly
cast it in the light of just another illegitimate "vast right-wing conspiracy"
to get them. Because that's what the Clintons always do when they're backed
into a corner.
Red Foreman Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
reply
Sep 4, 2016 10:07 PM
Renzatic wrote:
Red Foreman wrote: The Clinton email saga with it's oh-so-typical Clinton-esque
coverup that's far worse then the original fuck-up isn't a non-story. And
it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
I've said this elsewhere, but I feel it bears repeating here.
For roughly 30 years now, Hillary Clinton has been dogged by a party
made up primarily of lawyers, judges, DAs, and others in the legal profession,
with millions of dollars and all the institutions of government at their
fingertips.
In all this time, with all this knowledge, power and influence at their
disposal, what have they discovered? That the Clintons tend to bend the
rules if it benefits them, and like to scratch the backs of people who can
and will scratch theirs. For all their efforts, they haven't discovered
evidence of anything truly heinous or illegal. Rather, they've merely uncovered
the fact they're a little seedy.
...so how are they any different than any other politician in Washington?
How is it any different? This one it running for President of the United
States at the moment. As such scrutinizing her dealings is fair game. After
all, as you said the Clintons are a little seedy, tend to bend the rules
if it benefits themselves, and like to scratch the backs of people who can
and will scratch theirs.
Speaking of which...
Bill, Hillary, Loretta Lynch, James Comey and the emails
Corruption in plain sight
Tuesday, June 28: Former President Bill Clinton suddenly appears to Attorney
General Loretta Lynch in the cabin of her airplane parked on the tarmac
in Phoenix, Arizona. Secret Service agents deny access to news photos and
videos of the visit. They visit for 30 minutes.
Thursday, June 29: Lynch denies that any discussion with Bill Clinton
of the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's email scandal took place,
and states that she expects to accept the recommendation of the FBI as to
further actions in the Clinton case. She does not, however, recuse herself
or appoint a Special Prosecutor. The FBI also announces that the Clinton
interview will take place on this coming Saturday, during the holiday weekend.
Friday, June 30: Hillary Clinton campaign leaks that Loretta Lynch may
be retained in her present job under a Hillary Clinton administration.
Saturday, July 1: Hillary Clinton's long-delayed interview with the FBI
takes place. It lasts 3 1/2 hours. Clinton not under oath. FBI Director
Comey does not attend, will not reveal who was in attendance.
Tuesday, July 5: FBI Director Comey conducts a press conference without
questions. Details a long list of Clinton's violations, but concludes that
he met with prosecutors and decided not to make a criminal referral for
either convening a Grand Jury or an indictment because she didn't mean to
do anything bad. He cited "reasonable prosecutors" (presumably the ones
he consulted) who would not want to prosecute the case.
Tuesday, July 5: While Comey was making his announcement, President Barack
Obama, in a previously scheduled appearance, was campaigning in North Carolina
with Hillary Clinton.
Wednesday, July 6: Attorney General Lynch announces that she accepts
the recommendation of Comey and will not review the evidence herself.
What really happened appears to be that Bill Clinton successfully conveyed
to Loretta Lynch that she would keep her job if Hillary is elected. Lynch
then successfully conveyed to Comey that she expected a clean referral from
the FBI. Finally, Comey undertook a nearly unprecedented step by publicly
announcing all the reasons for a criminal referral, then refusing to follow
his own logic. In the meantime, Obama, boss of Lynch and Comey, obviously
knew well in advance what the outcome of this charade would be and scheduled
accordingly."
"... What about the large number of donors who, immediately after their hefty donations, received cushy ambassadorships? ..."
"... You gotta remember, [neo]liberals love to justify bad behavior, by pointing to (often unrelated) ... bad behavior. ..."
"... Remember, when someone like David Duke endorses Donald Trump and Trump says, "Who is David Duke, and why should I care?" this proves Trump is a racist. When Hillary Clinton talks about how Robert Byrd was her "friend and mentor" this also proves that Trump is a racist. See how easy that is? ..."
"... So it's okay to give money to a private political organization in order to get favors from the government? Why don't we just auction off ambassadorships then? ..."
"... The last set of documents showed that the DNC broke campaign finance laws and yet absolutely nothing was done about it. Since any damning evidence in documents from democrats will be ignored, why do they even try? It won't make any difference. ..."
"... Under Obama's administration political considerations trump the law every time. ..."
For the past several months, the hacker who calls himself "Guccifer 2.0"
has been releasing documents about the Democratic National Committee. Today,
he has released a new hoard of documents. Politico reports: The hacker persona
Guccifer 2.0 has released a new trove of documents that allegedly reveal more
information about the Democratic National Committee's finances and personal
information on Democratic donors, as well as details about the DNC's network
infrastructure. The cache also includes purported memos on tech initiatives
from Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine's time as governor of Virginia,
and some years-old missives on redistricting efforts and DNC donor outreach
strategy. Most notable among Tuesday's documents may be the detailed spreadsheets
allegedly about DNC fundraising efforts, including lists of DNC donors with
names, addresses, emails, phone numbers and other sensitive details. Tuesday's
documents regarding the DNC's information technology setup include several reports
from 2010 purporting to show that the committee's network passed multiple security
scans.
In total, the latest dump contains more than 600 megabytes of documents.
It is the first Guccifer 2.0 release to not come from the hacker's WordPress
account. Instead, it was given out via a link to the small group of security
experts attending [a London cybersecurity conference].
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:09AM (#52885111)
Journal
Summary missing important piece... (Score:5, Informative)
What about the large number of donors who, immediately after their
hefty donations, received cushy ambassadorships?
Iconoc ( 2646179 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:12AM (#52885127)
Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:40AM
(#52885673) Journal
You gotta remember, [neo]liberals love to justify bad behavior, by
pointing to (often unrelated) ... bad behavior.
It is as if they are four year olds getting in trouble, and saying "but
Billy's Mom lets him drink beer/smoke dope". The problem is, nobody calls
it "childish" behavior (which it is), because that is insulting to children.
Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @04:28PM (#52888579)
Journal
Re:Summary missing important piece... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, when someone like David Duke endorses Donald Trump and
Trump says, "Who is David Duke, and why should I care?" this proves Trump
is a racist. When Hillary Clinton talks about how Robert Byrd was her "friend
and mentor" this also proves that Trump is a racist. See how easy that is?
Ambassadorships to friendly countries, the UK in particular, have always
been given as rewards to political friends. You could count the number of
people who became UK ambassador on merit on one hand which had been run
through a wood chipper.
The reason you didn't know about this before is because it never became
an issue. Tuttle made a bit of a kerfuffle a decade ago, but it takes a
lot to start a diplomatic incident with a close ally and being ambassador
to the UK or France or Australia really requires no great skill as a peacemaker.
If you were being particularly charitable, you could even say that fundraisers
and diplomats have a lot in common.
Everyone has plenty of dirty laundry, including you and me. 'Innocent
until proven guilty' is an excellent attitude in criminal court, but the
attitude 'innocent until doxxed' skews our perceptions and gives power to
doxxers. Honestly I'm a bit surprised these leaks haven't found more than
'omg, politics at political party!'
Remember, parties are not obligated to be democratic or unbiased. Legally
and constitutionally there's only one vote, the general election in November.
Anyone* can be nominated as a candidate for that election, and if both parties
decided to nominate whomever they pleased they might be breaking their own
rules but not the law. Everything up to and including the conventions is
just meant to give supporters a feel of involvement and to remove unpopular
candidates without invoking the wrath of their supporters. But the parties
want to win, and if one candidate seems more 'electable' you can bet the
party will give then a leg up on the rest.
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:28AM (#52886055)
Journal
So it's okay to give money to a private political organization in
order to get favors from the government? Why don't we just auction off ambassadorships
then?
meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @02:02PM (#52887279)
Journal
There's been plenty of interesting stuff in previous releases of Hillary's
particular emails. I would say the most amazing was acknowledgment that
the reason we backed the moderate beheaders in Syria against Assad was so
the Israelis would feel better about a nuclear Iran without a stable Syria
as a base of operations for Hezbollah. The 400,000 war dead, the creation
of ISIS, the blowback attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Nice,
Orlando, and the refugee crisis that threatens to destabilize all of western
Europe...no problem for Hillary and her supporters. It's unreal. But here
we are.
Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @09:38AM (#52885273)
The last set showed laws broken by DNC (Score:5, Informative)
The last set of documents showed that the DNC broke campaign finance
laws and yet absolutely nothing was done about it. Since any damning evidence
in documents from democrats will be ignored, why do they even try? It won't
make any difference.
Now, if a similar trove of documents from the RNC was dumped, you can
bet the DOJ would be all over it. Under Obama's administration political
considerations trump the law every time.
"... Nevertheless, the ludicrous Washington Post, beloved rag of the neocons who have now flocked to Clinton's campaign, have seen fit to run the story above, which has even less evidential backing than the typical Enquirer or Prison Planet piece. ..."
"... I don't care about Clinton's swoon and its various medical causes. ..."
"... What I do care about is that the Washington Post is publishing crackpot paranoid conspiracy theories with potentially dangerous foreign policy consequences. ..."
Yesterday, I sardonically commented here that I was surprised the Putin-paranoid Clintonites had
not tried blaming Putin for Hillary Clinton's pneumonia.
Little did I know that Putimonia theory
was already out there!
The sad, sad, sad continuing decline of the American mind.
Dan Kervick said in reply to pgl...
It was 80 degrees. There have been many far hotter days here in the northeast this summer.
Clinton didn't pass out because it was hot and humid. She passed out because she has pneumonia.
It happens; people get sick.
Nevertheless, the ludicrous Washington Post, beloved rag of the neocons who have now flocked
to Clinton's campaign, have seen fit to run the story above, which has even less evidential backing
than the typical Enquirer or Prison Planet piece.
America has jumped the shark. You fools will have to launch WW III on the strength of your
own votes, since you won't have mine.
Dan Kervick -> DeDude...
I don't care about Clinton's swoon and its various medical causes.
What I do care about is that the Washington Post is publishing crackpot paranoid conspiracy
theories with potentially dangerous foreign policy consequences.
Hmmmmm - are we a little overheated this morning? May I suggest sitting down and drinking some
gatorade.
Dan Kervick said in reply to DeDude...
It is indeed dangerous when one of the most prominent newspapers in America floats a cuckoo
conspiracy theory - without even a tiny shred of evidence - to the effect that a prominent foreign
leader might have poisoned a presidential candidate.
Democrats are now plunging en masse down these various rabbit holes because they see a short-term
political edge in them, and because their anxiety.
Partisanship is a terrible mental illness. It makes previously sane people lose their bearings.
DeDude said in reply to Dan Kervick...
Omalu was previously sane???? Must have been before my time. Seriously Dan - Gatorade!!!
Dan Kervick said in reply to DeDude...
I'm talking about you people. Also, the editors of the Washington Post.
If you think that Omalu is not sane then don't you agree it is irresponsible to publish his
ravings?
According to a front-page
story in the Washington Post , U.S. agencies are investigating what they perceive as
"a broad covert Russian operation in the United States to sow public distrust in the upcoming presidential
election and in U.S. political institutions". The story is vague and short on details.
... ... ...
One of several unfortunate truths regarding the weakening integrity of American democracy involves
the destruction of campaign finance laws and making electoral outcomes reflect the wallets of a few
at least as much as the minds of many. Another unattractive and undemocratic element is the extensive
gerrymandering in which both major parties indulge, thereby subordinating popular will to the crude
power of incumbency. Even more of an affront to democracy in the last few years has been the blatant
use of legislative power at the state level by members of one party to impede the ability of followers
of the other party to exercise their right to vote, with the rationale for this power play being
prevention of a form of voter fraud that has been so rare as to be almost nonexistent. American democracy
is looking less and less distinct from the rickety versions of democracy in much of the less developed
world, in which the bending of rules by incumbents to frustrate challenges to their rule is common.
Most recently we have the presidential nominee of one major party, Donald Trump, declaring preemptively
that if he loses it will be because the process was rigged. This also sounds a lot like many of those
unstable political systems that purport to be democracies, and in which non-acceptance of electoral
results is common. (See Gabon for
a recent example .)
American democracy is less of a shining, distinctive exemplar of political fairness and popular
sovereignty than it once was...
Meanwhile, Norman Birnbaum has good advice for Hillary Clinton in urging her "to shelve her devotion
to extending democracy to the rest of the world to concentrate on rescuing it for ourselves."
"... Some of the other – possible – position purchases were a little disturbing, though, such as Julius Genachowski's FCC Chairmanship or Tony West's appointment as Deputy Attorney General. If true that donations were the clincher, then it does smell a little like corruption. ..."
"... In addition to Jim Haygood's report above I would flag Lee Fang's Twitter bulletin, which includes emails (you click on the actual emails imaged in the tweet to read the original) that reveal Colin Powell and Jeffrey Leeds discussing how much the Clintons hate Obama ("that man"), and how questionable Hillary's health is. This appears to be from a separate DNC Leaks hack of Powell's emails unrelated to the Guccifer 2.0 release. ..."
"... But the quote of the evening so far is from a Colin Powell email complaining about how Hillary is responsible for the whole email debacle at State and was trying to scapegoat him for her mess despite his protestations. Boy, was Powell pissed off, and to the point: " Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris. " ..."
I saw that too, earlier today and at first I thought "another example!".
Then I stepped back and realized that other than an inflation gauge,
so what? That has been a perk for donors in this country (and many other
I assume) for over 200 years… at least as far as the ambassadorships are
concerned.
Some of the other – possible – position purchases were a little disturbing,
though, such as Julius Genachowski's FCC Chairmanship or Tony West's appointment
as Deputy Attorney General. If true that donations were the clincher, then
it does smell a little like corruption.
I was away from the computer for a few hours and all leak-hell has broken
loose. Unfortunately, the actual dumps are not being made as easy to access
directly as in prior releases - the Guccifer 2.0 release requires a "torrent"
download and DNCLeaks.org seems to have been vaporized. And there's a lot
of it, so we're having to rely on piecemeal, secondhand reports at the moment.
In addition to Jim Haygood's report above I would flag Lee Fang's
Twitter bulletin, which includes emails (you click on the actual emails
imaged in the tweet to read the original) that reveal Colin Powell and Jeffrey
Leeds discussing how much the Clintons hate Obama ("that man"), and how
questionable Hillary's health is. This appears to be from a separate DNC
Leaks hack of Powell's emails unrelated to the Guccifer 2.0 release.
But the quote of the evening so far is from a Colin Powell email
complaining about how Hillary is responsible for the whole email debacle
at State and was trying to scapegoat him for her mess despite his protestations.
Boy, was Powell pissed off, and to the point: " Everything HRC touches
she kind of screws up with hubris. "
"... Rile the masses up against the Commie Threat, as it worked so well in the 50's - 60's. Save us the expense of rewriting the playbook. Sure. Duck and cover. ..."
"... But the first place I would look is inside the DNC, if I were in charge. Russian intel releasing to wikileaks? Not much profit in that. ..."
"... By the way, whatever became of dearest FBI frontman Comey? ..."
"It might have well been an insider who copied the material and handed them to Wikileaks for publication"
Why this idea gets no traction, obviously -- without an admission of authenticity from DNC,
they have it both ways, the ability to ascribe guilt to Russia, and plausible deniability vis
a vis Sanders. Let's not rule out a purposeful leak as a gloating advertisement for DNC sponsors/donors,
or just as likely as a forgery using wikileaks as conduit for disinformation by anti-DNC ops.
The Guccifer blip is just as believable valid as any of these theories, upo.
Rile the masses up against the Commie Threat, as it worked so well in the 50's - 60's.
Save us the expense of rewriting the playbook. Sure. Duck and cover.
But the first place I would look is inside the DNC, if I were in charge. Russian intel
releasing to wikileaks? Not much profit in that.
By the way, whatever became of dearest FBI frontman Comey?
"... Look over there! Putin is all over the place these days, he is doing Brexit, supporting Trump, and Corbyn I think, he is hacking Hillary, wow. ..."
Look over there! Putin is all over the place these days, he is doing Brexit, supporting Trump,
and Corbyn I think, he is hacking Hillary, wow. And he still has time to ride horses and
play with tigers and invade Europe. I see why he is popular.
But it's nice to be Russian, I like Russia, it's a beautiful country. Until now the Bernie
people were all sexists, racists, privileged homeless idiots who lived in basements, but now we
are Russians. Much better. See that's the Hillary outreach to the bros.
Now in view of recent Hillary health problems actions of Wasserman Schultz need
to be revisited. She somehow avoided criminal prosecution for interfering with the
election process under Obama administration. That's clearly wrong. The court
should investigate and determine the level of her guilt.
Moor did his duty, moor can go. This is fully applicable to Wasserman Schultz.
BTW it was king of "bait and switch" Obama who installed her in this position. And
after that some try to say that Obama is not a neocon. Essentially leaks mean is
that Sander's run was defeated by the Democratic Party's establishment dirty tricks
and Hillary is not a legitimate candidate. It's Mission Accomplished, once again.
"Clinton is a life-long Republican. She grew up in an all-white Republican suburb,
she supported Goldwater, and she supported Wall Street banking, then became a DINO
dildo to ride her husband's coattails to WH, until the NYC Mob traded her a NY Senator
seat for her husband's perfidy. She never said one word about re-regulating the
banks."
How could this anti-Russian hysteria/bashing go on in a normal country -- the
level of paranoia and disinformation about Russia and Putin is plain crazy even
for proto-fascist regimes.
Notable quotes:
"... Wasserman Schultz reluctantly agreed to relinquish her speaking role at the convention here, a sign of her politically fragile standing. ..."
"... Democratic leaders are scrambling to keep the party united, but two officials familiar with the discussions said Wasserman Schultz was digging in and not eager to vacate her post after the November elections. ..."
"... Sanders on Sunday told CNN's Jake Tapper the release of DNC emails that show its staffers working against him underscore the position he's held for months: Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to go. ..."
"... "I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that," Sanders told Tapper ..."
"... But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me." ..."
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will not
have a major speaking role or preside over daily convention proceedings this
week, a decision reached by party officials Saturday after emails surfaced raising
questions about the committee's impartiality during the Democratic primary.
The DNC Rules Committee on Saturday named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent
chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session
to order and will gavel each session closed.
"She's been quarantined," another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz,
following a meeting Saturday night. Wasserman Schultz faced intense pressure
Sunday to resign her post as head of the Democratic National Committee, several
party leaders told CNN, urging her to quell a growing controversy threatening
to disrupt Hillary Clinton's nominating convention.
Wasserman Schultz reluctantly agreed to relinquish her speaking role
at the convention here, a sign of her politically fragile standing. But
party leaders are now urging the Florida congresswoman to vacate her position
as head of the party entirely in the wake of leaked emails suggesting the DNC
favored Clinton during the primary and tried to take down Bernie Sanders by
questioning his religion. Democratic leaders are scrambling to keep the
party united, but two officials familiar with the discussions said Wasserman
Schultz was digging in and not eager to vacate her post after the November elections.
... ... ...
One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Bernie
Sanders' faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to
depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Hillary Clinton against
an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising
agreement.
Sanders on Sunday told CNN's Jake Tapper the release of DNC emails that
show its staffers working against him underscore the position he's held for
months: Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to go.
"I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC not only for
these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because
we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't
think her leadership style is doing that," Sanders told Tapper on "State
of the Union," on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
"I am not an atheist," he said. "But aside from all of that, it is an outrage
and sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying
to undermine my campaign. It goes without saying, the function of the DNC is
to represent all of the candidates -- to be fair and even-minded."
He added: "But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this
show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me."
... ... ...
Several Democratic sources told CNN that the leaked emails are a big source
of contention and may incite tensions between the Clinton and Sanders camps
heading into the Democratic convention's Rules Committee meeting this weekend.
"It could threaten their agreement," one Democrat said, referring to the
deal reached between Clinton and Sanders about the convention, delegates and
the DNC. The party had agreed to include more progressive principles in its
official platform, and as part of the agreement, Sanders dropped his fight to
contest Wasserman Schultz as the head of the DNC.
"It's gas meets flame," the Democrat said.
Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, had no comment Friday.
The issue surfaced on Saturday at Clinton's first campaign event with Tim
Kaine as her running mate, when a protester was escorted out of Florida International
University in Miami. The protester shouted "DNC leaks" soon after Clinton thanked
Wasserman Schultz for her leadership at the DNC.
In view of the recent events the old question arise again: Was Hillary Clinton already on warafin when she suffered her latest fall?
Notable quotes:
"... Secretary Clinton was started on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces - though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot. ..."
"... This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every patient to make with their physician. ..."
"... This does not include the possibility of an intracranial bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal. ..."
"... There is a non-trivial possibility that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. ..."
"... Vamsi Aribindi is a medical student who blogs at the Medical Intellectual . ..."
Her
medical history includes two deep vein thromboses (DVTs) in 1998 and 2009,
as well as a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis in 2012. A thromboses is a clot;
basically, the formation of a solid plug inside a vein, a misfire of the body's
ability to plug holes and stop bleeding. While I could not find news articles
discussing the 2009 incident in further detail, the
1998 incident was a proximal DVT - one that had ascended into the popliteal
vein - an especially dangerous form of DVT that is most likely to cause a condition
called pulmonary embolus which can be fatal. A cerebral venous sinus thrombosis
is also a deadly condition, with a mortality of
approximately
10 percent and negative cognitive effects, though survivors make a good
recovery.
When anyone has multiple unprovoked clots, meaning there was no obvious reason
for the body to misfire it's clot formation system such as surgery or active
cancer, and especially when someone has a clot in an unusual location such as
the brain, an extensive workup is indicated to look for causes. Some such causes
include previously undetected cancers, inherited or random genetic disorders,
and autoimmune disorders. That workup was negative in Secretary Clinton's case,
per her doctor's letter. This is not unusual; there are many disorders that
we have not yet discovered, and in all likelihood Secretary Clinton's particular
clotting disorder happens to be one that has not yet been discovered.
When someone has such a clotting disorder, as a precaution patients are often
started on a medication to prevent the formation of clots. These medications
are known as anticoagulants or blood thinners. Secretary Clinton was started
on Coumadin, also known as warfarin. This medication significantly reduces -
though it does not eliminate - the chance of a future blood clot.
What is the side effect of blood thinners? A greater chance of bleeding and
greater difficulty stopping a bleed once it happens. An elderly patient on blood
thinners who is subsequently injured in a car crash is a nightmare for a trauma
team. This extends to other facets of life; a simple fall that would be
shook off by anyone else can give a patient on blood thinners a lethal brain
bleed. The risks and benefits of anticoagulation must be weighed against the
risk of a stroke if one does not use blood thinners; and is a choice for every
patient to make with their physician.
In Secretary Clinton's case, what is her risk of bleeding? Secretary Clinton
is over 65, and she has had multiple falls (in
2005, 2009, and 2011, and 2012); the 2009 fall resulting in a broken elbow
and the last one resulting in a concussion. According to
guidelines
put out by the American College of Chest Physicians, two risk factors puts her
in the category of high-risk patients, meaning her risk of bleeding while on
long-term anticoagulation is 6.5 percent per year. The mortality from a major
bleed is
approximately
10 percent. This does not include the possibility of an intracranial
bleed, which could cause major cognitive disabilities without being lethal.
What is Secretary Clinton's precise risk? It is difficult to say. She does
receive excellent medical care, and presumably has her dose of warfarin closely
monitored by many professionals. In addition, she may soon switch to newer anticoagulants
which are easier to take and dose than warfarin, though it is unclear if they
are truly any safer.
Ultimately, all that can be said is this: There is a non-trivial possibility
that Secretary Clinton will suffer a major bleed of some kind. The worst
possible scenario? Trump and Clinton are nominated, and Clinton suddenly suffers
a devastating bleed in the middle of the campaign, leaving a likely underqualified
vice presidential pick to try and fight Donald Trump. However, the risk of this
is likely small; and it is not as if 74-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders is free
of health risks either. Patients and doctors both hate uncertainty, and yet
we deal with it every day. I don't believe Secretary Clinton's increased risks
are anything that should disqualify her from the presidency, but they are certainly
something to ponder.
DNC is just a cesspool of neocon sharks. No decency whatsoever. What a bottom
feeders. Will Sanders supporters walk out ?
Notable quotes:
"... They made Craigslist posts on fake Trump jobs talking about women needing to be hot for the job and "maintain hotness" https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/12803 ..."
"... DNC and Hillary moles inside the Bernie campaign https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4776 ..."
"Hey Josh, since the Sanders camp keeps pushing stories about the money
laundering, we're prepping a Medium post from either our CFO or our CEO
we want to run by you. It will sharply state that the criticisms are wrong,
etc.. basically our talking points in a Medium post format with some extra
detail."
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/4091
DWS on Bernie staying in the race in April: "Spoken like someone who
has never been a member of the Democratic Party and has no understanding
of what to do"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/5477 )
Calling someone a Bernie Bro for wanting to interview DWS about money
laundering, which they call "a shit topic". Asks for an interview next week
on another topic.
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/13319
Media Collaboration
"I think the best reporter to give the news to ahead of time is Greg
Sargent at the Washington Post. But, the specific reporter is not as important
as getting it to an outlet before the news breaks so we can help control
the narrative on the front"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11242
More media collusion (Politico) "Vogel gave me his story ahead of time/before
it goes to his editors as long as I didn't share it. Let me know if you
see anything that's missing and I'll push back." Thanks to
/u/PM_ME_OR_PM_ME
"-- Last night, Hillary attended two high-dollar fundraisers in New
York City. The first, from 6:15 p.m. to 7:45 p.m., was at the home of Maureen
White and Steven Rattner. Approximately 15 attendees contributed $100,000+
to attend. Then, from 8:15 p.m. to 9:45 p.m., she went to the home of Lynn
Forester de Rothschild. Another 15 people ponied up more than 100K to attend."
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/1238
"less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by that effort has stayed
in the state parties' coffers, according to a POLITICO analysis of the latest
Federal Election Commission filing"
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/1724
Targeting Wall Street donors. Thanks
/u/Cygnus_X
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/998
More info: "One big Clinton donor on Wall Street said that Bush donors
are prime targets and that 'we're a big tent.' Potential sources of support
for Clinton could include people like Jack Oliver, who also served as a
top fundraiser for Jeb Bush. Both Johnson and Oliver did not respond to
requests for comment.The race for Wall Street cash will be intense."-
/u/Cygnus_X
Personal note: honestly this feels like browsing a bunch of high school
girls' emails. "Is there a fuck you emoji", "bahahaha", someone links to
round of applause by lady gaga.
Tons of media manipulation.
Also, kinda feel bad for Bernie supporters now. The system, like trump
mentioned in his speech, was against you completely.
The real question is whether the email are authentic or not. They are.
Neoliberal propaganda honchos just decided to use a smoke screen to conceal this
fact using Russia as a bogeyman.
Russian might be guilty of many things, but in no way it is
responsible for corruption of DNC and this subversive actions/covert operations
used for installing Hillary Clinton as a candidate from the Democratic Party. .
Notable quotes:
"... Is it OK to cheat, lie and deceive - as Clintons and DNC did - and then defend themselves by saying that "nobody would know, if it wasn't for those damn Russians"? Even the idea is preposterous: how we find out about this corruption is irrelevant, the point is there was corruption and cheating. ..."
"... So the DNC is trying to Blame Russia for their own corrupt actions. ..."
"... [Under Clintons] democracy has become conspiracy ..."
"... Are you constipated? Blame it on Russia. ..."
"... Oh and blaming Russia for revealing the truth. The truth was not attacked, but who revealed the truth is suddenly the bad guy. So desperate and out of sorts. :) ..."
"... There's no proof, besides an unsourced article in the Washington Post form 'security experts', that Russia had anything to do with this. What we do know is that immediately after the leaks became public various news outlets produced obviously planted hit pieces claiming some kind of collusion between the Trump campaign and Putin, and again with precisely zero evidence as back up. It's gob smacking that the Clinton campaign would risk an international incident with a nuclear power to cover for their shitty behaviour, but then again it's Hillary Clinton so perhaps not. ..."
"... It may indeed be Russian hackers who gained access to the emails which confirm the DNC was all along in the tank for Clinton, and was actively placing a thumb on the scale from day one in the primary process. ..."
"... But the bottom line here is that if the DNC had not so conspired, there would be no emails to leak, now would there? For Mook and others to now be placing blame on the hackers, rather than on those who produced the embarrassing material that the hackers exposed, is diversionary and inexcusable. ..."
"... The funniest thing is, they don't even deny the authenticity of the emails. Basically, DNC says that someone is guilty of revealing the truth. You can hardly stoop any lower. Blaming Russia is just a cherry on the cake. ..."
"... How nice to have an eternal scapegoat: TheRussiansAreComing!TheRussiansAreComing! This will obviously be RodHam's theme as President. Perhaps to the point of annihilation. Neo-Conne! ..."
"... My biggest issue with Hillary from the start has been her continued nonchalance when it comes to matters of national security. She acts as if she is above the need to keep sensitive information safe from potential enemies, both foreign and domestic. That's a pretty scary attitude coming from someone who is likely to be this nation's next leader. ..."
"... It's amazing. Caught red handed and still deflecting. Take responsibility for Christ sak ..."
"... ".....Several of the emails released indicate that the officials, including Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, grew increasingly agitated with Clinton's rival, Bernie Sanders, and his campaign as the primary season advanced, in one instance even floating bringing up Sanders' religion to try and minimize his support. ..."
"... The more interesting part is that this blame is just a distraction from the larger issue, that the entire political system is corrupted and broken. This is just business as usual, only this instance was revealed. ..."
I honestly can't wait for when the pro-clinron commentors arrive. I can
see it now "this doesn't matter if you vote 3rd party you're voting for
trump." It won't matter that this is all the fault of the DNC, it will be
on us. I'm calling it now ;)
Is it OK to cheat, lie and deceive - as Clintons and DNC did - and then
defend themselves by saying that "nobody would know, if it wasn't for those
damn Russians"? Even the idea is preposterous: how we find out about this
corruption is irrelevant, the point is there was corruption and cheating.
Interestingly, this is a favorite defense of all authoritarians. They
always claim that if it benefits the "enemy", it is ok to suppress it. Stalin
had a concept of "objectively aiding the enemy" - it meant that maybe the
person was not a conscious traitor, but his/her actions helped the enemy
- and that was enough. Is Guardian and Clintons now marching down this road
of extreme "us versus them" ideology?
What's is next? Will Clintons ban Bernie from speaking because it would
"aid Trump"? (and by extension in their paranoid thinking, it would aid
Russia).
"Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling
us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and
are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
So the DNC is trying to Blame Russia for their own corrupt actions.
Another reason on the list as to why I won't be voting for Hillary. Why
did DNC act very anti-democratic?
A vote for Hillary is a vote for continued corruption.
Rather than blaming they ought to be taking responsibility for their own
words. But they'd have to be adults with integrity to do that. The tragedy
and travesty of it is the willful, routine, nonchalant effort to subvert
the Constitution and the will of the people. These kinds of machinations
have always gone on within both parties and should always be exposed. The
SuperPACS, the dark money, the secret maneuverings, the totally broken primary
system, all designed to stop our having our say. People elsewhere often
wonder about "our" choices for the White House. Now they can see how much
of that free choice has been wrested away over time, and how imperative
it is that we ordinary people start working on positive change within the
elective system. In my opinion all the DNC participants should lose their
jobs and be made to cool their heels in jail a while, because without consequences
we may as well just burn the Constitution and Bill of Rights right now and
be done with it, for all the respect these documents are given by our politicians.
What a revolting mess it all is on both sides, with ordinary people the
losers, as always.
Oh and blaming Russia for revealing the truth. The truth was not attacked,
but who revealed the truth is suddenly the bad guy. So desperate and out
of sorts. :)
There's no proof, besides an unsourced article in the Washington Post form
'security experts', that Russia had anything to do with this. What we do
know is that immediately after the leaks became public various news outlets
produced obviously planted hit pieces claiming some kind of collusion between
the Trump campaign and Putin, and again with precisely zero evidence as
back up. It's gob smacking that the Clinton campaign would risk an international
incident with a nuclear power to cover for their shitty behaviour, but then
again it's Hillary Clinton so perhaps not.
A big part of the problem is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) is still
in her position. If the Democratic Party place a value on performance, she
should have been fired after the 2014 mid-terms.
Part of the problem is that the DNC is too closely aligned with the interests
of one political family. Competence and other considerations count for a
lot less than loyalty. DWS kept her position because of the ties to Clinton
and Clintons donors, not because she did a good job and grew the party.
The opposite has happened.
Frankly, Obama bears some degree of responsibility for this because he's
the one who canned Howard Dean, who actually had a track record of success
at winning elections and growing the party through two election cycles.
Instead Obama replaced him with a guy like Tim Kaine, who wasn't up to the
task either. Dean also did a good job of navigating the very difficult 2008
election. Kaine and DWS did poorly in the capacity as DNC Chair.
As president, Obama has done a lot right. But his neglect of the DNC
is part of his legacy, and it isn't a good one.
That's nice that those damn Russians 'stole' their email. However, those
damn Russians didn't write them. I dislike and distrust Hillary and DWS
more now that I did a week ago, and that takes some doing. Hillary is Nixon.
Paranoid. Dishonest. Devious.
how in the name of god can the overly compensated chairwoman of the democratic
party conspire against a candidate supported by nearly half of democratic
primary voters ???
Kaine is in the same boat as Clinton on the TPP - the Good Ship Hypocrite.
Both hope like hell that TPP gets passed in the lame duck so they can make
a show of being against it to gain some progressive cred. If Obama and his
colleagues Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan can't get TPP done before his term
ends, Clinton and Kaine's reservations re TPP will disappear faster than
a snowflake in July. It's like Clinton's about face on the Keystone pipeline
- she got a heads up from Obama that he wasn't going to approve it anyway,
so she came out against it.
I love the irony of the comment from the Clinton Campaign..... '' This is
further evidence the Russian Government is trying to influence the outcome
of an election ''.
Heavens forbid that the USA would ever stoop so low as to try and influence
the outcome of other Countries elections !!!
It of course being totally above Americians to indulge such devious behaviour
.
Very true, and Hillary was happy to support the violent Honduras coup of
an elected government and still very much supports that new violent regime.
And the new regime is very friendly to western big corporate 'interests'.
Of course. Hillary is old-school.
Doesn't matter who did it, the Russians, Anonymous, Edward Snowden. The
point is that the DNC is revealed as partisan and rigged. In addition to
minimizing her role at the convention, I believe Wasserman Schultz should
be dumped from any position of leadership, along with other DNC leaders.
No wonder people are fed up with politics as usual.
"Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling
us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and
are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
And Mook is the expert who whispered that lie in his own ear.
Great photo, Mook the Spook, her lover, a few bigtime aids. They got
caught like Nixon's plumbers at Watergate. So they would like to blame the
Russians for their writing calumnies and antiSemitic slanders against Sanders.
They look pretty stupid!
Mook said on Sunday that "experts are telling us that Russian state
actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and are] releasing these
emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."
It may indeed be Russian hackers who gained access to the emails which confirm
the DNC was all along in the tank for Clinton, and was actively placing
a thumb on the scale from day one in the primary process.
Sanders knew it, and we as his supporters also knew it and made reference
to that very issue repeatedly in countless comment threads here at the Guardian
and elsewhere.
But the bottom line here is that if the DNC had not so conspired,
there would be no emails to leak, now would there?
For Mook and others to now be placing blame on the hackers, rather than
on those who produced the embarrassing material that the hackers exposed,
is diversionary and inexcusable.
The Clinton campaign is moving closer and closer to blowing this election
completely and allowing the most dangerous candidacy I've ever seen in my
lifetime actually win this thing.
They've already selected a VP pick which effectively thumbs their nose
at the very progressives whose enthusiasm they will need at the voting booths,
and now here they are trying to deflect blame for unconscionable skullduggery
in the primary process onto foreign actors.
Debbie Wassermann Schultz should have been fired long ago, so blatant and
obvious were her shenanigans.
This kind of tone-deaf ineptitude could see all of us paying an unimaginable
price in November. All it will take at this point is a few more mass shootings
(at which we here in the US have a particular talent) to feed into Trump's
narrative and we'll all be waking up in January in a country we don't even
recognize.
The funniest thing is, they don't even deny the authenticity of the
emails. Basically, DNC says that someone is guilty of revealing the truth.
You can hardly stoop any lower. Blaming Russia is just a cherry on the cake.
Just saw Bernie on CNN basically saying the Nr1 priority is to defeat D.
Trump, then keep fighting the good fight from within the Democratic Party
trying to reform it from within.
A big thing he misses here that the top honcho Mrs Hillary Clinton is one
of the main reasons of what the Democratic Party has become. She will be
a huge obstruction to anything resembling reform. You might as well pack
up and go 3rd party and show the Dems that way what American voters want.
4 years of Trump might actually be a lot better to shake up the corrupt
DNC then 4-8 years of Hillary and who knows how many years of Republicans
2 follow (and believe me, Hillary will do a lot of damage to the democratic
brand!)
Clinton is desperate to lurk voters by anything, then let it be those Russians
that hacked her mail. A Russian proverb to the point - "A bad dancer always
blames his balls that hamper him".
If they'd backed off, allowed their MSM protectors to bury the story, this
whole thing would have died down in a week. A few angry Bernie Bros notwithstanding
there's nothing in the emails that we didn't know already. Yes the DNC and
the Hillary Clinton campaign were one and the same....shock! Yes sections
of the corporate owned media are colluding with the Democratic Party....wowsers!!
But no, they couldn't help themselves. Now we've got the Democratic nominee
for the Presidency alleging, with zero proof, that her opponent is engaged
in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts with a foreign power! Seriously
who thought this was a good idea?
How nice to have an eternal scapegoat: TheRussiansAreComing!TheRussiansAreComing!
This will obviously be RodHam's theme as President. Perhaps to the point
of annihilation. Neo-Conne!
My biggest issue with Hillary from the start has been her continued nonchalance
when it comes to matters of national security. She acts as if she is above
the need to keep sensitive information safe from potential enemies, both
foreign and domestic. That's a pretty scary attitude coming from someone
who is likely to be this nation's next leader.
Putin ate my homework (TM). What Debbie and the gang did is worse, much worse than this sorry article
tries to portray. For example, what sort of Democratic Party tries to use Bearnie's religion
agsinst him ?!?
".....Several of the emails released indicate that the officials, including
Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, grew increasingly agitated with Clinton's
rival, Bernie Sanders, and his campaign as the primary season advanced,
in one instance even floating bringing up Sanders' religion to try and minimize
his support.
****"It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WA can we get someone
to ask his belief," Brad Marshall, CFO of DNC, wrote in an email on May
5, 2016. "Does he believe in God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish
heritage.
I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with
my peeps. My southern baptist peeps woudl draw a big difference between
a Jew and an atheist."****
"Amy Dacey, CEO of the DNC, subsequently responded "AMEN," according
to the email"
The more interesting part is that this blame is just a distraction from
the larger issue, that the entire political system is corrupted and broken.
This is just business as usual, only this instance was revealed.
Has anyone here worked, I mean truly worked in the pre-election process,
behind the scenes, witnessing the dirty business that is gathering electoral
votes during caucuses and primaries? It is a total sham. It is where under-the-table
deals are made for promised loyalties to certain candidates, where those
that have the most, bribe others to vote a certain way, where quid pro quo
rules over democracy or a candidates stance on issues and/or policies. It
is where future cabinet positions are secured, based on allegiance to party
hierarchy and strong-arming. Your vote means nothing, only a small select
group determines candidates, and ultimately the president.
DNC Chair Wasserman is just one cog in a massive political machine, one
run rampantly out of control. And this happens on both sides, among both
parties. It is where the personal selfish love of money, power, and fame
outstrip the will of the people.
Long live hackers for keeping a check on an obviously corrupted system.
The mainstream media isn't doing their jobs anymore, someone has to. The
media have merely become the pretorian band for the super class, those elite
that truly control this country from behind the scenes, pulling the puppet
strings attached to the soulless politicians.
We are again presented with two candidates whom have each proven their
desire to negate the will of the nation, for purely selfish reasons. Neither
is truly qualified for this office.
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought
to trust no [hu]man living with the power to endanger the public liberty".
-John Adams-
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more
corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters"
-Ben Franklin-
"... Cybersecurity company FireEye first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. "We suspect the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data it steals. because of evidence from FireEye." ..."
"... FireEye is also interesting as it, along with the US Department of Defense, funds the CEPA (publishers of Ed Lucas's and Pomerantsev's screed on fighting Kremlin influence): ..."
"... I recall the FireEye story well – they used the exact same logic; the code was written on Cyrillic-keyboard machines and during Moscow working hours. Their conclusion was "It just looks so much like something the Russians would do that it must be them". No allowance for the possibility that someone else did it who wanted the USA to arrive at exactly that conclusion. Someone who has done it before, lots of times, and who makes a science out of picking fights on Uncle Sam's behalf. ..."
"... Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear? Is there proof that they actually exist? I mean real proof, not WADA proof. ..."
"... They are just code names given by a particular security outfit. Different outfits will use different names for the same entities, much in the same way that a given virus/trojan/etc will be given different names by different AV corporations. The names reflect observable characteristics such as threat type, coding style, code structure, distribution network, similar earlier threats, etc rather than a specific single person. ..."
"On June 14, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, under contract with the DNC, announced in a
blog post that two separate Russian intelligence groups had gained access to the DNC network.
One group, FANCY BEAR or APT 28, gained access in April. The other, COZY BEAR, (also called Cozy
Duke and APT 29) first breached the network in the summer of 2015. Cybersecurity company FireEye
first discovered APT 29 in 2014 and was quick to point out a clear Kremlin connection. "We suspect
the Russian government sponsors the group because of the organizations it targets and the data
it steals. because of evidence from FireEye."
Crowdstrike – their Co-Founder, Alperovitch, is an Atlantic Council fellow. The other firm,
FireEye, has the CIA as a stakeholder:
Should give pause to thought that the intelligence services are interfering in US democracy?
No?
FireEye is also interesting as it, along with the US Department of Defense, funds the CEPA
(publishers of Ed Lucas's and Pomerantsev's screed on fighting Kremlin influence):
I recall the FireEye story well – they used the exact same logic; the code was written on
Cyrillic-keyboard machines and during Moscow working hours. Their conclusion was "It just looks
so much like something the Russians would do that it must be them". No allowance for the possibility
that someone else did it who wanted the USA to arrive at exactly that conclusion. Someone who
has done it before, lots of times, and who makes a science out of picking fights on Uncle Sam's
behalf.
In the case of both FireEye and Crowdstrike, they would stop looking as soon as they arrived
upon a conclusion which suited them anyway.
They are just code names given by a particular security outfit. Different outfits will use
different names for the same entities, much in the same way that a given virus/trojan/etc will
be given different names by different AV corporations. The names reflect observable characteristics
such as threat type, coding style, code structure, distribution network, similar earlier threats,
etc rather than a specific single person.
Everything, absolutely everything demonstrates really terrifying level of incompetence: the transfer of emails to Apple laptop,
to Gmail account, then transfer back to window system, handing of USB drive. Amazing level of incompetence. This is really devastating
level of incompetence for the organization that took over a lot of CIA functions. Essentially Hillary kept the position which is close
to the role of the director of CIA What a tragedy for the country...
Notable quotes:
"... It is painfully clear that she traded access and favors for money and reciprocal favors. It is painfully clear that she made little distinction between working for the State Department, the Clinton foundation and her family and tried to keep the records of what was going on inaccessible. The more honest defense would be, all politicians do it, and you have to suck it up because Trump is worse. Which is true. But trying to downplay this and explain it away is offensive, not all of the public are complete idiots. ..."
"... Her brazen air of arrogance and entitlement is about to fade as she comes to realise, that albeit Comey having been got at, he has still succeeded in striking a severe blow against her, and in addition, at the not-so-tin-hat conspiracy of inappropriate, and increasingly overt, institutional support. ..."
"... All this in the face of documented lies, in your face hypocrisy, and unbridled corruption, oozing from every orifice of a maverick administration. ..."
"... Clinton is the one waging war in the middle east. She is the one being bullish and provocative with Russia. Trump has only been conciliatory with these issues, he has been against the war on Iraq ..."
"... HRC is still likely to be the next President, but this scandal does have legs. She put herself in a corner by claiming lack of recall due to a medical condition (i.e., the concussion). This leaves two possibilities, neither of which is helpful to her cause, to wit: either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired. ..."
"... Reagan was certainly not someone I admired but at least he tried to reduce the chance of nuclear war. Clinton is an out and out Hawke with the blood of many innocent people on her hands in both Syria and Libya. She is hiding her communications because she does not want to be exposed for the role she played in The destruction of Libya and the gun running of weapons to terrorists in Syria. That is to Al Qaeda and ISIS. World War 3 is more likely under Clinton than any other world leader. Even Trump. ..."
"... Not forgetting that she was key in making sure the US didn't side with Assad. Had the US done at the beginning, instead of being at the behest of the Saudis and the petrodollar, then the whole thing would have been over in 6 months and IS would never have got more than a dusty district of northern Iraq. ..."
"... So the applicant to the US presidency does not know what (c) stands for in her emails, archives high security data on a laptop and then losses it for years, uploads same emails on Google's gmail account and then losses devices again. She does not recall many things, not even the training she received on handling the confidential and secure communication. She couldn't recall the procces of drone strikes. (Will she be killing people at a whim, without an accountable protocol?) She is either demented or dangerously reckless or lying. All of these conditions disbar her form her candidacy. ..."
"... If she could only manage a couple of hours a day because of concussion and a blood clot she should have temporarily stood down until she recovered fully, and had a senior official take over her duties until she was well. You can't have a brain-damaged person in charge of the US's affairs - even though there is a long history of nutters the State Dept. ( ie the Military Industrial Complex HQ). ..."
"... the clinton foundation does not pay taxes..and dont forget that slick willie has been on the paedophile plane more times than the pilot ..."
"... She failed to keep up with recordkeeping she agreed to, then when asked to turn over records, somebody destroyed them, but Clinton did not order destruction, or does not remember having done so. Turned over all records-oops I thought WE did! She either lied or has alzheimers ..."
"... Political baggage is a bitch. If this election cycle has demonstrated anything it is that the leadership of both parties is totally out of touch with the voters and really has no interest except supporting the Neoliberal tenet of fiscal nonintervention. This laissez-faire attitude toward corporate interests is paralysing the American government. ..."
"... I cannot believe Clinton has got this far in the election, I believe Obama wants her in to hide many of his embarrassing warmongering mistakes. ..."
"... Today of all days Hillary Clinton puts out a tweet with the following: 'America needs leadership in the White House, not a liability' -- As we have to assume she's not referring to herself it confirms people's suspicion that the person who writes Hillary's tweets is a hostile to her campaign. The tweets are often completely off the mark. ..."
"... Either Comey is on their payroll, or they have threatened his family. Either way it is business as usual. The NWO decided a long time ago that Hillary was their next puppet PONTUS. ..."
"... I was a low-level officer at US Embassies and Consulates in various foreign countries. Clinton's claim that she didn't know what (C) was, or that she "she did not pay attention to the difference between top secret, secret and confidential" and "could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the retention of federal records or handling of classified information." Are beyond ridiculous. Any fool knows enough to be aware of different levels of classified info, and the obvious fact that you don't get sloppy with classified info. ..."
"... to paraphrase Leona Helmsley's comment about paying taxes, "security is for little people." So in that respect Hillary is no different from the rest of them. ..."
"... You'd better hope she's lying, because if the incompetence is genuine she shouldn't be allowed near any confidential information ever again. I hate to admit it but Trump is right on this one. Jesus wept. ..."
"... The fact that the Sec State could have an email server built at her home and operate with such laughable gross negligence when it comes to national security is surreal and appalling. ..."
"... If the FBI were not themselves co-conspirators and hopelessly corrupt, they would indict some of the lower level actors and offer them immunity. They could start with the imbecile who put that laptop in the mail and couldn't remember if it was UPS or USPS. ..."
"... Caddell has voiced an interesting concern that others are beginning to share: that the news media has crawled so far in bed with Hillary Clinton they won't be able to get back out. That the news media in America has lost its soul. Even Jake Tapper started asking this question several weeks ago in the middle of his own show. ..."
"... The pyramid scheme of created debt has destroyed capitalism and democracy within 40 years of full operation. Captured Govt has bailed out incompetence and failure at every turn, and in so doing, inverted the yield curve and destroyed the future. It is for this reason alone I cannot respect these financial paedophiles or support anything they do. In this contest for the White House, Clinton is the manifestation of the establishment. ..."
"... "The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's private server, including what appeared to be a frantic effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested they be preserved." -NY Times ..."
"... Hillary's treatment of top-secret US documents was willful and uncorrected. If she had done the same thing with medical records, the individuals whose medical records had been mishandled could have filed charges and Hillary would have been personally liable for up to $50,000 fine per incident. ..."
"... Clinton is an absolute liability. Apart from this scandal she's a status quo candidate for a status quo that no longer exists. She stands for neo-liberalism, US hegemony and capitalist globalization all of which are deader than the dodo. That makes her very dangerous in terms of world peace and of course she will do absolutely nothing for the millions of Americans facing joblessness, hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness except make things worse ..."
"... The entire corrupt establishment want Clinton at all cost, so that they can continue fleecing the future and enslaving the entire world in created debt. All right minded individuals should this as a flashing red light to turn round and vote the other way. ..."
A Clinton Foundation laptop and a thumb drive used to archive
Hillary
Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state are missing, according to FBI notes released on Friday.
The phrase "Clinton could not recall" litters the summary of the FBI's investigation, which concluded in July
that
she should not face charges. Amid fierce Republican criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate, the party's nominee,
Donald Trump released a statement which said "Hillary Clinton's answers to the FBI about her private email server defy belief" and
added that he did not "understand how she was able to get away from prosecution".
he FBI documents describe how Monica Hanley, a former Clinton aide, received assistance in spring 2013 from Justin Cooper, a former
aide to Bill Clinton, in creating an archive of Hillary Clinton's emails. Cooper provided Hanley with an Apple MacBook laptop from
the Clinton Foundation – the family organisation currently
embroiled in controversy – and talked her through the process of transferring emails from Clinton's private server to the laptop
and a thumb drive.
"Hanley completed this task from her personal residence," the notes record. The devices were intended to be stored at Clinton's
homes in New York and Washington. However, Hanley "forgot" to provide the archive laptop and thumb drive to Clinton's staff.
In early 2014, Hanley located the laptop at her home and tried to transfer the email archive to an IT company, apparently without
success. It appears the emails were then transferred to an unnamed person's personal Gmail account and there were problems around
Apple software not being compatible with that of Microsoft.
The unnamed person "told the FBI that, after the transfer was complete, he deleted the emails from the archive laptop but did
not wipe the laptop. The laptop was then put in the mail, only to go missing. [Redacted] told the FBI that she never received the
laptop from [redacted]; however, she advised that Clinton's staff was moving offices at the time, and it would have been easy for
the package to get lost during the transition period.
"Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts of the archive laptop or thumb drive containing the archive,
and the FBI does not have either item in its possession."
... ... ...
The FBI identified a total of 13 mobile devices associated with Clinton's two known phone numbers that potentially were used to
send emails using clintonemail.com addresses.
The 58 pages of notes released on Friday, several of which were redacted, also related that Hanley often purchased replacement
BlackBerry devices for Clinton during Clinton's time at the state department. Hanley recalled buying most of them at AT&T stores
in the Washington area. Cooper was usually responsible for setting them up and synching them to the server.
Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and Hanley "indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's devices would frequently become unknown
once she transitioned to a new device", the documents state. "Cooper did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton's old mobile
devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer."
The notes also contain a string of admissions by Clinton about points she did not know or could not recall: "When asked about
the email chain containing '(C)' portion markings that state determined to currently contain CONFIDENTIAL information, Clinton stated
that she did not know what the '(C)' meant at the beginning of the paragraphs and speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked
in alphabetical order."
Clinton said she did not pay attention to the difference between top secret, secret and confidential but "took all classified
information seriously". She did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not have been on an unclassified system. She also
stated she received no particular guidance as to how she should use the president's email address.
In addition, the notes say: "Clinton could not recall when she first received her security clearance and if she carried it with
her to state via reciprocity from her time in the Senate. Clinton could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the
retention of federal records or handling of classified information."
Clinton was aware she was an original classification authority at the state department, but again "could not recall how often
she used this authority or any training or guidance provided by state. Clinton could not give an example of how classification of
a document was determined."
... ... ...
The House speaker, Paul Ryan, said: "These documents demonstrate Hillary Clinton's reckless and downright dangerous handling of
classified information during her tenure as secretary of state. They also cast further doubt on the justice department's decision
to avoid prosecuting what is a clear violation of the law. This is exactly why I have called for her to be denied access to classified
information."
Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said: "The FBI's summary of their interview with Hillary Clinton is
a devastating indictment of her judgment, honesty and basic competency. Clinton's answers either show she is completely incompetent
or blatantly lied to the FBI or the public.
"Either way it's clear that, through her own actions, she has disqualified herself from the presidency."
The Clinton campaign insisted that it was pleased the notes had been made public. Spokesman Brian Fallon said: "While her use
of a single email account was clearly a mistake and she has taken responsibility for it, these materials make clear why the justice
department believed there was no basis to move forward with this case."
Terrence James 3h ago
This is the equivalent of the dog ate my homework. This woman could not utter an honest sentence if her life depended on it.
She is a corrupt and evil person, I cannot stand Trump but I think I hate her more. Trump is just crazy and cannot help himself
but she is calculatingly evil. We are doomed either way, but he would be more darkly entertaining.
Smallworld5 3h ago
Has any of Clinton's state department employees purposely built their own server in their basement on which to conduct official
government business, in gross violation of department policy, protocols, and regulations, they would have been summarily fired
at a minimum and, yes, quite possibly prosecuted. That's a fact.
The issue at hand is why Clinton sycophants are so agreeable to the Clinton Double Standard.
The presumptive next president of the U.S. being held to a lower standard than the average U.S. civil servant. Sickening.
Laurence Johnson 8h ago
Hillary's use of gender has no place in politics. When it comes to the top job, the people need the best person for the job,
not someone who is given a GO because they represent a group that are encouraged to feel discriminated against.
foggy2 9h ago
For the FBI's (or Comey's) this is also a devastating indictment of their or his judgment, honesty and basic competency.
YANKSOPINION 10h ago
Perhaps she has early onset of Alzheimers and should not be considered for the job of POTUS. Or maybe she is just a liar.
AlexLeo 10h ago
It is painfully clear that she traded access and favors for money and reciprocal favors. It is painfully clear that she
made little distinction between working for the State Department, the Clinton foundation and her family and tried to keep the
records of what was going on inaccessible. The more honest defense would be, all politicians do it, and you have to suck it up
because Trump is worse. Which is true. But trying to downplay this and explain it away is offensive, not all of the public are
complete idiots.
KaleidoscopeWars
Actually, after you get over all of the baffooning around Trump has done, he actually would make an ideal president. He loves
his country, he delegates jobs well to people who show the best results, he's good at building stuff and he wants to do a good
job. I'm sure after he purges the terribly corrupted system that he'll be given, he'll have the very best advisors around him
to make good decisions for the American people. I'm sure Theresa May and her cabinet will be quick to welcome him and re-solidify
the relationship that has affected British politics so much in the past decade. Boris Johnson is perfect for our relations with
America under a Trump administration. Shame on you Barack and Hillary. Hopefully Trump will say ''I came, I saw, they died!''
Ullu001 12h ago
Ah, The Clintons. They have done it all: destruction of evidence, witness tampering, fraud, lying under oath, murder, witness
disappearance. Did I leave anything? Yet, they go unpunished. Too clever, I guess too clever for their own good!
samwoods77 12h ago
Hillary wants to be the most powerful person on earth yet claims she doesn't understand the classification system that even
the most most junior secretary can....deeply troubling.
Mistaron 13h ago
The 'masters' in the shadows are about to throw the harridan under the bus. Her brazen air of arrogance and entitlement
is about to fade as she comes to realise, that albeit Comey having been got at, he has still succeeded in striking a severe blow
against her, and in addition, at the not-so-tin-hat conspiracy of inappropriate, and increasingly overt, institutional support.
All this in the face of documented lies, in your face hypocrisy, and unbridled corruption, oozing from every orifice of
a maverick administration.
The seeds have been planted for a defense of diminished responsibility. Don't fall for it! Hillary, (and her illustrious spouse),
deserve not a smidgen of pity.
''We came, we saw, he died'', she enthusiastically and unempathically cackled.
Just about sums her up.
wtfbollos 14h ago
hiliary clinton beheaded libya and created a hell on earth. here is the proof:
Again, total misunderstanding about what is going on. Clinton is the one waging war in the middle east. She is the one
being bullish and provocative with Russia. Trump has only been conciliatory with these issues, he has been against the war on
Iraq. So far all evidences point to the fact that the Clintons want another big war and all evidence points to the fact that
Trump wants co operation. This has totally escape your analysis. It is a choice between the Plague and the Cholera, I agree, but
FGS try to be a little less biased.
ungruntled 15h ago
The best case for HC looks pretty grim.
She has no recollection of......??
Laptops and Thumb drives laying about unattended
Total lack of understanding about even the most basic of Data Securit arrangements
All of these things giver her the benefit of the doubt....That she wasnt a liar and a corrupted politician manipulating events
and people to suit her own ends.
So, with the benefit of the doubt given, ask yourself if this level of incompetance and unreliabilty makes a suitable candidate
for office?
In both cases, with and without BOTD, she shouldnt be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power, let alone the White House.
IAtheist 17h ago
Mrs Clinton is deeply divisive. Bought out since her husbands presidency by vested interests in Wall Street and the HMO's (private
healthcare insurance management businesses) and having shown lamentable judgement, Benghazi, private Email server used for classified
documents and material.
She has failed to motivate the Democrats white and blue collar working voters male and female. These are the voting demographic
who have turned to Trump is significant numbers as he does address their concerns, iniquitous tax rules meaning multi millionaires
pay less tax on capital gains and share dividends than employees do on their basic wages, immigration and high levels of drug
and gun crime in working class communities Black, White and Hispanic, funding illegal immigrants and failed American youth living
on a black economy in the absence of affordable healthcare or a basic welfare system.
Trump may very well win and is likely to be better for the US than Hilary Clinton.
digamey 18h ago
I sympathize with the American electorate - they have to choose between the Devil and the deep blue sea. Given their situation,
however, I would definitely choose the Devil I know over the Devil I don't! And that Devil is - - - ?
MoneyCircus -> digamey 10h ago
That willful ignorance is your choice! A public businessman can be examined more closely than most.
Besides, there is a long history of "placemen" presidents whose performance is determined by those they appoint to do the work.
Just look in the White House right now.
As for the Clinton record (they come, incontrovertibly, as a package) from Mena, Arkansas, to her husband's deregulation of
the banks which heralded the financial crash that devastated millions of lives... the same banks that are currently HRC's most
enthusiastic funders... is something that any genuine Democrat should not be able to stomach...
ID9761679 19h ago
My feeling is that she had more to worry about than the location of a thumb drive (I can't recall how many of those I've lost)
or even a laptop. When a Secretary of State moves around, I doubt that look after their own appliances. Has anyone asked her where
the fan is?
Karega ID9761679 18h ago
Problem is she handled top secret and classified information which would endanger her country's security and strategic interests.
She was then US Secretary of State. That is why how she handled her thumb drive, laptop nd desktops matter. And there lies the
difference between your numerous lost thumb drives and hers. I thought this was obvious?
EightEyedSpy 23h ago
HRC is still likely to be the next President, but this scandal does have legs. She put herself in a corner by claiming
lack of recall due to a medical condition (i.e., the concussion). This leaves two possibilities, neither of which is helpful to
her cause, to wit: either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired.
1iJack -> EightEyedSpy 22h ago
either she was being dishonest or she was (and could still be) cognitively impaired.
Its entirely possible its both.
Dick York 24h ago
California survived Arnold Schwarzenegger, the U.S. survived Ronald Reagan, Minnesota survived Jesse "The Body" Ventura and
I believe that we will survive Donald Trump. He's only one more celebrity on the road.
providenciales -> Dick York 23h ago
You forgot Al Franken.
antipodes -> Dick York 21h ago
Reagan was certainly not someone I admired but at least he tried to reduce the chance of nuclear war. Clinton is an out
and out Hawke with the blood of many innocent people on her hands in both Syria and Libya. She is hiding her communications because
she does not want to be exposed for the role she played in The destruction of Libya and the gun running of weapons to terrorists
in Syria. That is to Al Qaeda and ISIS. World War 3 is more likely under Clinton than any other world leader. Even Trump.
The Democrats must disendorse her because the details of her criminality are now becoming available and unless she can stop it
Trump will win. Get rid of her Democrats and bring back Bernie Sanders.
Sam3456 1d ago
We cannot afford a lying, neo-liberal who is more than willing to make her role in government a for profit endeavor.
Four years of anyone else is preferable to someone who is more than willing for the right contribution to her foundation, sell
out the American worker and middle class.
MakeBeerNotWar 1d ago
I'm more interested $250k a pop speeches HRC gave to the unindicted Wall St bankster felon scum who nearly took down their
country and the global economy yet received a taxpayer bailout and their bonuses paid for being greedy incompetent crooks. How
soon we forget....
Its seems there is just one scandal after another with this women but she seems to be bullet proof mainly because the msm media
will not go after her for reasons best known to themselves this is causing them to lose credibility and readers who are deserting
them for alternative media .
bashh1 1d ago
Finally today in an article in The NY Times we learn where Clinton has been for a good part of the summer. In the Hamptons
and elsewhere at receptions for celebrities and her biggest donors like Calvin Klein and Harvey Weinstein, raking in the millions
for her campaign. Trump on the other hand has appeared in towns in Pennsylvania like Scranton, Erie and Altoona where job are
disappearing and times can be tough. Coronations cost money I guess.
chiefwiley -> bashh1 1d ago
She is doing what she does best --- raise money.
ksenak 1d ago
Not forgetting that she was key in making sure the US didn't side with Assad. Had the US done at the beginning, instead
of being at the behest of the Saudis and the petrodollar, then the whole thing would have been over in 6 months and IS would never
have got more than a dusty district of northern Iraq.
ksenak 1d ago
Hillary is humiliated woman. Humiliated to the core by her cheating hubby she would rather kill than let him go. She is paying
her evil revenge to the whole world. As a president of USA Hillary Clinton would destabilise the world and lead it to conflicts
that threaten to be very heavy.
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was part of the "Arab Spring" (also part of the "Jasmine Revolution), which overthrew
leaders such as Gaddafi to Mubarak. Before Gaddafi was overthrown he told the US that without him IS will take over Libya. They
did.
-Benghazi Scandal which ended up killing a US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans.
The Arab Spring destabilized the Middle East, contributed to the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS and the exodus of Middle Eastern
Muslims.
Sam3456 OXIOXI20 1d ago
Meh. Obama characterized ISIS as the "JV Team" and refused to acknowledge the threat. I assume he was acting on information
provided by his Secretary of State, Clinton.
Michael109 1d ago
It's quite possible that Clinton, because she had a fall in 2012 and bonked her head, believes she is telling the truth when
she is lying, except that it is not lying when you believe you are telling the truth even though you are lying.
She said she did not recall 30 times in her interviews with the FBI. She could be suffering from some sort of early degeneration
disease. Either way, between her health and the lying and corruption she should be withdrawn as the Dem frontrunner.
1iJack -> LakumbaDaGreat 1d ago
She's going to blow it.
I think she already did. Its like all the shit in her life is coming back on her at once.
Early on, when it was announced she would run again, I remember one Democrat pundit in particular that didn't think she could
survive the existence of the Internet in the general election (I can't remember who it was, though). But it has turned out to
be a pretty astute prediction.
When asked what he meant by that remark, he went on to say "the staying power of the Internet will overwhelm Clinton with her
dirty laundry once she gets to the general election. The Clintons were made for the 24 hour news cycles of the past and not the
permanent unmanaged exposure of the digital world. Everything is new again on the internet. Its Groundhog Day forever on the Internet."
That's my best paraphrase of his thoughts. He felt Clinton was the last of the "old school" politicians bringing too much baggage
to an election. That with digital "bread crumbs" of some kind or another (email, microphones and cameras in phones, etc) the new
generation of politicians will be a cleaner lot, not through virtue, but out of necessity.
I've often thought back to his remarks while watching Hillary head into the general.
ImperialAhmed 1d ago
So the applicant to the US presidency does not know what (c) stands for in her emails, archives high security data on a
laptop and then losses it for years, uploads same emails on Google's gmail account and then losses devices again.
She does not recall many things, not even the training she received on handling the confidential and secure communication.
She couldn't recall the procces of drone strikes. (Will she be killing people at a whim, without an accountable protocol?)
She is either demented or dangerously reckless or lying. All of these conditions disbar her form her candidacy.
AudieTer 1d ago
If she could only manage a couple of hours a day because of concussion and a blood clot she should have temporarily stood
down until she recovered fully, and had a senior official take over her duties until she was well. You can't have a brain-damaged
person in charge of the US's affairs - even though there is a long history of nutters the State Dept. ( ie the Military Industrial
Complex HQ). And in the White House for that matter ...Nurse -- nurse -- Dubya needs his meds!
thedingo8 -> Lenthelurker 1d ago
the clinton foundation does not pay taxes..and dont forget that slick willie has been on the paedophile plane more times
than the pilot
Littlefella 1d ago
She destroyed devices and emails after they were told that all evidence had to be preserved. There are then two issues and
the FBI and DOJ have not taken any action on either.
It's no longer just about the emails, it's the corruption.
DaveG123 1d ago
Clinton's closest aide, Huma Abedin, and Hanley "indicated the whereabouts of Clinton's devices would frequently become unknown
once she transitioned to a new device"
-------------
Probably in the hands of a foreign government. Pretty careless behaviour. Incompetent. Part of a pattern of incompetance that
includes bad foreign policy decisions (Libya) and disrespect for rules surrounding conflict of interest (Clinton Foundation).
YANKSOPINION -> HansB09 1d ago
She failed to keep up with recordkeeping she agreed to, then when asked to turn over records, somebody destroyed them,
but Clinton did not order destruction, or does not remember having done so. Turned over all records-oops I thought WE did! She
either lied or has alzheimers
Andy White 1d ago
In addition, the notes say:
"Clinton could not recall when she first received her security clearance and if she carried it with her to state via reciprocity
from her time in the Senate. Clinton could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the retention of federal
records or handling of classified information."
Clinton was aware she was an original classification authority at the state department, but again "could not recall how often
she used this authority or any training or guidance provided by state. Clinton could not give an example of how classification
of a document was determined." ...................secretary of state and could not recall basic security protocols???
....and people complain about trump....this basic security was mentioned in the bloody west wing series for god's sake.....in
comparison even trump is a f'ing genius.......love him or hate him trump has to win over clinton,there is something very,very
wrong with her....she should NEVER be in charge of a till at asda......and she is a clinton so we all know a very practised liar
but this beggers belief,i can see why trump is angry if that was him he would have been publicly burnt at the stake.....this clinton
crap just stink's of the political elite....a total joke cover up and a terrible obvious one to....clinton is just a liar and
mentally i think she is very unstable....makes the DON look like hawking lol.....
namora 1d ago
Political baggage is a bitch. If this election cycle has demonstrated anything it is that the leadership of both parties
is totally out of touch with the voters and really has no interest except supporting the Neoliberal tenet of fiscal nonintervention.
This laissez-faire attitude toward corporate interests is paralysing the American government.
duncandunnit 1d ago
I cannot believe Clinton has got this far in the election, I believe Obama wants her in to hide many of his embarrassing
warmongering mistakes.
fedback 1d ago
Today of all days Hillary Clinton puts out a tweet with the following: 'America needs leadership in the White House, not
a liability' -- As we have to assume she's not referring to herself it confirms people's suspicion that the person who writes
Hillary's tweets is a hostile to her campaign. The tweets are often completely off the mark.
Hercolubus 1d ago
Either Comey is on their payroll, or they have threatened his family. Either way it is business as usual. The NWO decided
a long time ago that Hillary was their next puppet PONTUS.
BG Davis 2d ago
Clinton has always been a devious weasel, but this reveals a new low. I was a low-level officer at US Embassies and Consulates
in various foreign countries. Clinton's claim that she didn't know what (C) was, or that she "she did not pay attention to the
difference between top secret, secret and confidential" and "could not recall any briefing or training by state related to the
retention of federal records or handling of classified information." Are beyond ridiculous. Any fool knows enough to be aware
of different levels of classified info, and the obvious fact that you don't get sloppy with classified info.
That said, over the past few years the entire handling of classified info has become beyond sloppy - laptops left in taxis,
General Petraeus was sharing classified info with his mistress, etc. I guess nowadays, to paraphrase Leona Helmsley's comment
about paying taxes, "security is for little people." So in that respect Hillary is no different from the rest of them.
Scaff1 2d ago
You'd better hope she's lying, because if the incompetence is genuine she shouldn't be allowed near any confidential information
ever again. I hate to admit it but Trump is right on this one. Jesus wept. I said it before: Clinton is the only candidate
who could possibly make a tyrant like Trump electable.
charlieblue -> gizadog 2d ago
Where are you getting "looses 13 devices"? (Try loses, nobody is accusing Sec.Clinton of making things loose) I actually read
the article, so my information might not be as exciting as yours, but this article states that from the 13 devices that had access
to the Clinton server, two (a laptop and a thumb drive) used by one of her aids, are missing. This article doesn't specify whether
any "classified" information was on either of them. The FBI doesn't know, because, well... they are missing.
What the fuck is it with you people and your loose relationship with actual facts? Do you realize that just making shit up
undermines whatever point you imagine you are trying to make?
gizadog 2d ago
Also: Clinton told FBI she thought classified markings were alphabetical paragraphs
"When asked what the parenthetical 'C' meant before a paragraph ... Clinton stated she did not know and could only speculate
it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order," the FBI wrote in notes from its interview with her."
Wow...and there are people that want her to be president.
Casey13 2d ago
In my job as a government contractor we are extremely vigilant about not connecting removable devices to work computers, no
work email access outside of work, software algorithms that scan our work mails for any sensitive information, and regular required
training on information security. The fact that the Sec State could have an email server built at her home and operate with
such laughable gross negligence when it comes to national security is surreal and appalling. I could never vote for her and
neither could I vote for Trump.
MonotonousLanguor 2d ago
>>> A Clinton Foundation laptop and a thumb drive used to archive Hillary Clinton's emails from her time as secretary of state
are missing, according to FBI notes released on Friday.<<<
Oh golly gee, what a surprise. Should we offer a reward??? Maybe Amelia Earhart has the laptop and thumb drive. Were these
missing items taken by the Great Right Wing Conspiracy???
Dani Jenkins 2d ago
Wtf, from the sublime to the ridiculous, springs to mind..
Time to get a grip of the gravity involved, here at the Guardian.. This is a total whitewash of the absurd kind.. That leaves
people laughing in pure unadultered astonishment..
SHE lost not just a MacBook & thumb drive with such BS..
So Trump it is then , like many of us have stated ALL ALONG. Sanders was the only serious contender.. A complete mockery of
democracy & the so called Democrats have made the way for Trump to cruise all the way to the Whitewash House..
Well done Debbie , did the Don pay you?
chiefwiley -> Lenthelurker 2d ago
Because the revelations are essentially contradicting all of Hillary's defenses regarding her handling of highly classified
information. None of the requirements of the State Department mattered to her or her personal staff. It won't go away --- it will
get worse as information trickles out.
Casey13 2d ago
Being President of the USA used to be about communicating a vision and inspiring Americans to get behind that dream . Think
Lincoln abolishing slavery or JFK setting a goal to put man on the moon. Hillary is boring,has no charisma,and no vision for her
Presidency beyond using corruption and intimidation to secure greater power for her and her cronies . Nobody wants to listen to
her speeches because she is boring, uninspiring, and has no wit beyond tired cliches. Trump has a vision but that vision is a
nightmare for many Americans.
imperfetto 2d ago
Clinton is a dangerous warmonger. She is a danger to us Europeans, as she might drag us into a conflict with Russia. We must
get rid of her, politically, and re-educate the Americas to respect other nations, and give up exporting their corrupting values.
"After reading these documents, I really don't understand how she was able to get away from prosecution."
If the FBI were not themselves co-conspirators and hopelessly corrupt, they would indict some of the lower level actors
and offer them immunity. They could start with the imbecile who put that laptop in the mail and couldn't remember if it was UPS
or USPS. Or did he actually send it to the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK by accident?
1iJack 2d ago
"The job of the media historically, in terms of the First Amendment – what I call the unspoken compact in the First Amendment
– is that the free press, without restraint, without checks and balances, is there in order to protect the people from power.
Its job is to be a check on government, and those who rule the country, and not to be their lapdogs, and their support system.
That's what we're seeing in this election.
There is an argument to make that the major news media in this country, the mainstream media, is essentially serving against
the people's interest. They have made themselves an open ally of protecting a political order that the American people are
rejecting, by three quarters or more of the American people. That makes them a legitimate issue, in a sense they never have
been before, if Trump takes advantage of it."
Pat Caddell, 2 Sept 2016
Caddell has voiced an interesting concern that others are beginning to share: that the news media has crawled so far in
bed with Hillary Clinton they won't be able to get back out. That the news media in America has lost its soul. Even Jake Tapper
started asking this question several weeks ago in the middle of his own show.
Will the American press ever have credibility with Americans again? Even Democrats see it and will remember this the next time
the press turns against them. There was a new and overt power grab in this election that is still being processed by the American
people: the American press "saving" America from Donald Trump. They may never recover from this.
It even scares my Democrat friends.
ConBrio 2d ago
"An unknown individual using the encrypted privacy tool Tor to hide their tracks accessed an email account on a Clinton family
server, the FBI revealed Friday.
"The incident appears to be the first confirmed intrusion into a piece of hardware associated with Hillary Clinton's private
email system, which originated with a server established for her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
The FBI disclosed the event in its newly released report on the former secretary of state's handling of classified information.
Clinton is a very dodgy character and cannot be trusted.
Boris Johnson, UK Foreign Secretary on Clinton: "She's got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a
sadistic nurse in a mental hospital"
CleanPool330 2d ago
The collective mind of the establishment is mentally ill and spinning out of control. In all rites they should be removed but
their arrogance, corruption and self-entitlement mean they are incapable of admitting guilt. They have corrupted the weak minds
of the majority and will take everybody down with them.
The pyramid scheme of created debt has destroyed capitalism and democracy within 40 years of full operation. Captured Govt
has bailed out incompetence and failure at every turn, and in so doing, inverted the yield curve and destroyed the future. It
is for this reason alone I cannot respect these financial paedophiles or support anything they do. In this contest for the White
House, Clinton is the manifestation of the establishment.
unusedusername 2d ago
If I understand this correctly a laptop and a flashdrive full of classified emails was put in a jiffy bag and stuck in the
post and now they're missing and this is, apparently, just one of those things? Amazing!
Blair Hess 2d ago
I'm in the military. Not a high rank mind you. It defies all common logic that HRC has never had a briefing, training, or just
side conversation about classified information handling when i have about 50 trainings a year on it and i barely handle it. Sheeple
wake up and stop drinking the kool aid
Ullu001 2d ago
The Clintons have always operated on the edge of the law: extremely clever and dangerous lawyers they are.
USADanny -> Ullu001
Hillary may be criminally clever but legally: not so much. You do know that she failed the Washington DC bar exam and all of
her legal "success" after that was a result of being very spouse of a powerful politician.
calderonparalapaz 2d ago
"The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's private server, including what appeared to be a frantic
effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested they be
preserved." -NY Times
Virtually every American healthcare worker has to take annual HIPAA training, pass a multiple-choice test and signed a document
attesting that they have taken the training and are fully aware of the serious consequences of inadvertent and willful violations
of HIPAA. Oh the irony – HIPAA is a Clinton era law.
Hillary's treatment of top-secret US documents was willful and uncorrected. If she had done the same thing with medical
records, the individuals whose medical records had been mishandled could have filed charges and Hillary would have been personally
liable for up to $50,000 fine per incident.
Other than Hillary negligently handling top-secret documents, having a head injury that by her own admission has impaired her
memory and using her relationship with the Clinton foundation when she was Secretary of State to extort hundreds of millions of
dollars, she is an excellent candidate for the president.
oeparty 2d ago
Clinton is an absolute liability. Apart from this scandal she's a status quo candidate for a status quo that no longer
exists. She stands for neo-liberalism, US hegemony and capitalist globalization all of which are deader than the dodo. That makes
her very dangerous in terms of world peace and of course she will do absolutely nothing for the millions of Americans facing joblessness,
hunger, bankruptcy and homelessness except make things worse.
And yet, and yet, we must vote Clinton simply to Stop Trump. He is a proto-fascist determined to smash resistance to the 1%
in America and abroad via military means. He is a realist who realises capitalism is over and only the purest and most overwhelming
violence can save the super rich and the elites now. Certainly their economy gives them nothing any more. The American Dream is
toast. The Green Stein will simply draw a few votes from Clinton and give Trump the victory and it is not like she is a genuinely
progressive candidate herself being something of a Putin fan just like Trump. No, vote Clinton to Stop Trump but only so that
we can use the next four years to build the revolutionary socialist alternative. To build the future.
dongerdo 2d ago
The Americans are screwed anyways because both easily are the most despicable and awful front runners I can think of in any
election of a western democracy in decades (and that is quite an achievement in itself to be honest), the only thing left to hope
for is a winner not outright horrible for the rest of the world on which front Clinton loses big time: electing her equals pouring
gasoline over half the world, she is up for finishing the disastrous job in the Middle East and North Africa started by her as
Secretary of State. Her stance on relations with Russia and China are utterly horrific, listening to her makes even the die-hard
GOP neo-cons faction sound like peace corps ambassadors.
If the choice is between that and some isolationist dimwit busy with making America great again I truly hope for the latter.
Who would have thought that one day world peace would depend on the vote of the American redneck.....
Michael109 2d ago
Clinton's "dog ate my server", I can't (30 times) remember, didn't know what C meant on top of emails - why it means Coventry
City, M'amm - excuses are the Dems trying to stagger over the line, everyone holding their noses. But even if she is elected,
which is doubtful, this is not going away and she could be arrested as USA President.
The FBI will rue the day they did not recommend charges against her when they had the chance. She's make Tony Soprano look
like the Dalia Lama.
CleanPool330 2d ago
The entire corrupt establishment want Clinton at all cost, so that they can continue fleecing the future and enslaving
the entire world in created debt. All right minded individuals should this as a flashing red light to turn round and vote the
other way.
FBI officials failed to aggressively question Hillary Clinton about her intentions in setting up a private email system, Rep.
Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) claimed this week, exposing a potential key vulnerability in the bureau's investigation.
"I didn't see that many questions on that issue," Gowdy told Fox News's "The Kelly File" on Wednesday evening.
The detail could be crucial for Republican critics of the FBI's decision not to recommend charges be filed against the former
secretary of State for mishandling classified information.
... ... ...
"I looked to see what witnesses were questioned on the issue of intent, including her," he said on Fox News. "I didn't see that
many questions on that issue."
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz(R-Utah) has called for the FBI to create unclassified versions of the Clinton
case file that it gave to Congress, so that the material can be released publicly. Gowdy reiterated the call on Fox News.
"There's no reason in the world you could not and should not be able to look at the same witness interviews that I had to go to
Washington and look at in a classified setting," he said.
It is amazing how partisan and brainwashed commenters are. Reminds me "letter of workers and peasants
to Pravda" type of mails.
Notable quotes:
"... "There's no need to distract the public's attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," Putin said in an interview with Bloomberg . ..."
"... The DNC is desperate to put the focus on who hacked their email rather than on the email's content. The story is in what the Democrats really think and how it's different then their public persona. ..."
"... I hate to admit it but .... Putin Dropped The Truth Bomb! ..Look at the content ..."
"... Who cares where the TRUTH comes from? as long as it is the truth! The real SHAME is that our own press has been out to lunch on finding the truth. Putin , Assage, Snowden...I'll take truth from them over HRC lies any day! ..."
"... It doesn't matter either way. There's no law anyone's willing to prosecute and no law enforcement agency who will investigate. This is all for nothing more than archival purposes. But it won't change anything. Hillary could be caught trading Cartel drugs for sex slaves in order to generate cash to give to Iran to pay the US government secretly to procure an atomic weapon and it would make no difference. ..."
"... The US politicos always need a bogeyman to blame. Today, it's Russia. ..."
"... It was Russia yesterday too. ..."
"... Yea, we are familiar with using Russia. It's an old playbook. ..."
"... To quote the democratic nominee ... 'what difference, at this point, does it make?" ..."
Russian leader Vladimir Putin denied that his country had any involvement in the email hacks and
WikiLeaks releases that led to the resignations of several Democratic Party officials.
"There's no need to distract the public's attention from the essence of the problem by raising
some minor issues connected with the search for who did it," Putin said in an interview with
Bloomberg.
"But I want to tell you again, I don't know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has
never done this."
Addison Jacobs
The DNC is desperate to put the focus on who hacked their email rather than on the email's
content. The story is in what the Democrats really think and how it's different then their public
persona.
Hard Little Machine • a day ago
Perfect retort to Hillary's Retards.
only1j > Hard Little Machine • a day ago
I hate to admit it but .... Putin Dropped The Truth Bomb! ..Look at the content
lostinnm > Hard Little Machine • a day ago
Who cares where the TRUTH comes from? as long as it is the truth! The real SHAME is that our
own press has been out to lunch on finding the truth. Putin , Assage, Snowden...I'll take truth
from them over HRC lies any day!
Hard Little Machine > lostinnm • a day ago
It doesn't matter either way. There's no law anyone's willing to prosecute and no law enforcement
agency who will investigate. This is all for nothing more than archival purposes. But it won't
change anything. Hillary could be caught trading Cartel drugs for sex slaves in order to generate
cash to give to Iran to pay the US government secretly to procure an atomic weapon and it would
make no difference.
Depending on how old you are - this is not the country or A country
you're familiar with. That one was shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave.
KhadijahMuhammad • a day ago
The US politicos always need a bogeyman to blame. Today, it's Russia.
BecauseReasons > KhadijahMuhammad • a day ago
It was Russia yesterday too.
KhadijahMuhammad > BecauseReasons • a day ago
Yea, we are familiar with using Russia. It's an old playbook.
Rich Dudley
To quote the democratic nominee ... 'what difference, at this point, does it make?"
Just as we predicted on a sleepy Friday afternoon ahead of a long weekend, The FBI has released a detailed report on its
investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, as well as a
summary of her interview with agents, providing, what The Washington Post says is the most thorough look yet at
the probe that has dogged the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee.
Today the FBI is releasing a summary of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's July 2, 2016 interview with the
FBI concerning allegations that classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on a personal e-mail server she used
during her tenure .
We also are releasing a factual summary of the FBI's investigation into this matter. We are making these materials
available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Appropriate redactions have been made for classified information or other material exempt from disclosure under FOIA.
Additional information related to this investigation that the FBI releases in the future will be placed on The Vault,
the FBI's electronic FOIA library.
As The Washington Post adds, the documents released total 58 pages, though large portions and sometimes entire pages are
redacted.
FBI Director James B. Comey announced in July that his agency would not recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her
use of a private email server. Comey said that Clinton and her staffers were "extremely careless" in how they treated
classified information, but investigators did not find they intended to mishandle such material. Nor did investigators
uncover exacerbating factors - like efforts to obstruct justice - that often lead to charges in similar cases, Comey said.
The FBI turned over to several Congressional committees documents related to the probe and required they only be viewed
by those with appropriate security clearances, even though not all of the material was classified, legislators and their staffers
have said.
Those documents included an investigative report and summaries of interviews with more than a dozen senior Clinton staffers,
other State Department officials, former secretary of state Colin Powell and at least one other person. The documents released
Friday appear to be but a fraction of those.
...
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon has said turning over the documents was "an extraordinarily rare step that
was sought solely by Republicans for the purposes of further second-guessing the career professionals at the FBI."
But he has said if the material were going to be shared outside the Justice Department, "they should be released widely
so that the public can see them for themselves, rather than allow Republicans to mischaracterize them through selective, partisan
leaks."
Though Fallon seems to have gotten his wish, the public release of the documents will undoubtedly draw more attention
to a topic that seems to have fueled negative perceptions of Clinton . A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found 41
percent of Americans had a favorable impression of Clinton, while 56 percent had an unfavorable one.
Key Excerpts...
*CLINTON DENIED USING PRIVATE EMAIL TO AVOID FEDERAL RECORDS ACT
*CLINTON KNEW SHE HAD DUTY TO PRESERVE FEDERAL RECORDS: FBI
*COLIN POWELL WARNED CLINTON PRIVATE E-MAILS COULD BE PUBLIC:FBI
*FBI SAYS CLINTON LAWYERS UNABLE TO LOCATE ANY OF 13 DEVICES
*AT LEAST 100 STATE DEPT. WORKERS HAD CLINTON'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
CLINTON SAID SHE NEVER DELETED, NOR INSTRUCTED ANYONE TO DELETE, HER EMAIL TO AVOID COMPLYING WITH FEDERAL RECORDS LAWS OR FBI
OR STATE REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION
CLINTON AIDES SAID SHE FREQUENTLY REPLACED HER BLACKBERRY PHONE AND THE WHEREABOUTS OF THE OLD DEVICE WOULD "FREQUENTLY
BECOME UNKOWN"
CLINTON CONTACTED POWELL IN JANUARY 2009 TO INQUIRE ABOUT HIS USE OF A BLACKBERRY WHILE IN OFFICE; POWELL ADVISED CLINTON
TO 'BE VERY CAREFUL
Hillary Clinton used 13 mobile devices and 5 iPads to access clintonemail.com. The FBI only had access to 2 of
the iPads and The FBI found no evidence of hacking on those 2...
And here is the email from Colin Powell telling her that emails would need to be part of the "government records"
...
And here is Clinton denying that she used a private server to "avoid [the] Federal Records Act" as she just assumed
that "based on her practice of emailing staff on their state.gov accounts, [that] communications were captured by State systems."
Yes, well what about the "official" communications had with people outside of the State Department? Did retention
of those emails ever cross Hillary's mind? * * * Full Report below...
Heh, maybe some of us figure the wrath beats the alternative to sitting
through another presidential cycle of sternly worded letters and petitions
from the left.
*sigh*
It would be so much easier if I could get an HMO approved frontal lobotomy
than I could either join the GOp lynch mob who thinks everything is some
liberal plot or be hunky dory with representation that tells you to your
face that they've rigged the system to thwart you ever actually having an
individual that you actually want representing you.
They lost... Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was re-elected.
Notable quotes:
"... Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders' campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30. ..."
"... While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort. The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman Schultz effort. ..."
The consulting firm that made Bernie Sanders' ads in the 2016 presidential race
is going to work for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's primary challenger.
Tad Devine, Mark Longabaugh, and Julian Mulvey, who helped lead Sanders'
campaign and drove his highly acclaimed media presence, will help Democrat Tim
Canova's campaign in the closing days of his race against Wasserman Schultz
in South Florida, where congressional primaries will be held Aug. 30.
It's the latest move from Sanders supporters to go after Wasserman Schultz,
after their outrage stemming from leaked emails drove her to resign as chairman
of the Democratic National Committee this week.
The move is a concrete step forward in Sanders' attempt to spread his "political
revolution" after the end of his presidential campaign and another boost to
Canova, a previously little-known law professor who has raised millions of dollars
for his run against Wasserman Schultz. It's also the first tangible sign of
heavier involvement from his political circles in down-ballot races between
now and November. Sanders had previously endorsed Canova and raised money online
for him and a selection of other congressional candidates.
While Wasserman Schultz is still the favorite in her race, people aligned
with Sanders have seized on Canova's candidacy as a proxy for their disapproval
of Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC, pouring money into his effort.
The addition of DML signals an increasing professionalization of the anti-Wasserman
Schultz effort.
The consultants' firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh, was behind spots like the
famous "America" ad that helped define Sanders' campaign as he rose to prominence
against Hillary Clinton, and it has worked for a wide range of down-ballot campaigns
this cycle. Canova's campaign was already working with Revolution Messaging,
Sanders' digital firm, as well.
I prefer /dev/random and three passes, if I have any intention of using the drive later. If
I were involved in anything seriously malfeasant where using the drive later were not a consideration,
I'd be following the
established procedures of the masters of the art. (NSA)
The Senate minority leader,
Harry Reid of Nevada, asked the
F.B.I. on Monday to investigate evidence suggesting that Russia may try to manipulate voting
results in November.
In a letter to the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey Jr., Mr. Reid wrote that the threat of Russian
interference "is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official
election results." Recent classified briefings from senior intelligence officials, Mr. Reid said
in an interview, have left him fearful that President Vladimir V. Putin's "goal is tampering with
this election."
News reports on Monday said the F.B.I. warned state election officials several weeks ago that
foreign hackers had exported voter registration data from computer systems in at least one state,
and had pierced the systems of a second one.
The bureau did not name the states, but
Yahoo News , which first reported the confidential F.B.I. warning, said they were Arizona and
Illinois. Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona's secretary of state, said the F.B.I. had told state
officials that Russians were behind the Arizona attack.
After the F.B.I. warning, Arizona took its voter registration database offline from June 28 to
July 8 to allow for a forensic exam of its systems, Mr. Roberts said.
The F.B.I., in its notice to states, said the voter information had been "exfiltrated," which
means that it was shipped out of the state systems to another computer. But it does not mean that
the data itself was tampered with.
It is unclear whether the hackers intended to affect the election or pursued the data for other
purposes, like gaining personal identifying information about voters. The F.B.I. warning referred
to "targeting activity" against state boards of elections, but did not discuss the intent of the
hackers.
Wait a minute! They ID'd the hacker and it's a business in Israel? And it forced Apple to an
emergency software upgrade. But I thought all the evil hackers were Russians working for the government.
"When the Democratic National Committee announced its $32 million fundraising
haul last month, it touted the result as evidence of 'energy and excitement'
for Hillary Clinton's nomination for the White House and other races down the
ballot. The influx of money, however, also owes in part to an unprecedented
workaround of political spending limits that lets the party tap into millions
of dollars more from Clinton's wealthiest donors" [
Bloomberg ]. "At least $7.3 million of the DNC's July total originated with
payments from hundreds of major donors who had already contributed the maximum
$33,400 to the national committee, a review of Federal Election Commission filings
shows. The contributions, many of which were made months earlier, were first
bundled by the Hillary Victory Fund and then transferred to the state Democratic
parties, which effectively stripped the donors' names and sent the money to
the DNC as a lump sum. Of the transfers that state parties made to the DNC for
which donor information was available, an overwhelming proportion came from
contributions from maxed-out donors."
Lovely. Doubling down on the Victory Fund scam. Word of the day: Effrontery.
Re: Clintons campaign possible strategy of making a vote for Clinton
'a vote for a winner'.
I know its conventional opinion that when in doubt, people prefer to
vote for who they perceive to be a 'winner', but I wonder if this really
applies with two such disliked candidates. I've a theory that one reason
Brexit won is that the polls beforehand saying it would be a narrow 'no',
gave 'permission' for people to vote with their conscience rather than their
pragmatism. In other words, presented with a 'pragmatic, but dirty' vote
for X, but a 'fun, but risky' vote for Y', people will vote X if its very
close or it looks like Y will win, but may be tempted to vote Y if they
are pretty sure X will win.
Part of me thinks the Clinton campaign would have tested the theory to
the limit before going for a strategy like this, but the evidence from the
nomination campaign is that they are all tactics, no strategy. It seems
to me to be a very risky game to play, not least because promoting Clinton
as a sure winner may make wavering progressives simply opt to stay at home.
I don't even think you have to be a progressive for that to be a concern
if you are the Clinton campaign.
They know the public is not enthusiastic about voting for her for the most
part, and yet they are setting up a meme where she is unbeatable. It isn't
necessarily going to just keep Trump voters home. But how many people who
don't want Clinton but really don't want Trump will be able to convince
themselves that there is no need to go hold their nose and vote for her.
Republicans who think she is too far left, but he is crazy for instance
will be just as likely to stay home as the lefties who know she is lying
Neoliberal War Criminal, but not fascist like Trump. (And I know the real
fascism signs are all with Clinton, but some may have missed it).
On fascism I had the exact same thought after reading Adolph Reeds "Vote
For the Lying, NeoLiberal War-Monger, It's Important" link last week.
Reed's critique was that communist leader Thallman failed to anticipate
Hitler's liquidation of all opposition, but frankly with Hillary's and Donald's
respective histories its hard for me to see how Trump is more dangerous
on this: Hillary has a deep and proven lethal track record and wherever
she could justify violent action in the past she has, she keeps an enemies
list, holds grudges and acts on them, all thoroughly documented.
I certainly won't speculate that Trump couldn't do the same or worse,
given the state of our propaganda and lawlessness amongst the elite, but
like all the other negatives in this campaign its hard to ascertain who
really will be worse. Lambert's bet on gridlock in a Trump administration
has the further advantage of re-activating the simulation of "anti-war,
anti-violence" amongst Dem nomenklatura.
We have collectively known Donald Trump and much of his family for the
last 30 or 40 years. Over the years, he has evoked different emotions in
me. (Usually being appalled by his big-city, realestate tycoon posturing
etc). However, I have never been frightened by him. To
me, he is more like a bombastic, well loved, show-off uncle.
Today I see Trump as a modern day prophet (spiritual teacher). A bringer
of light (clarity) to the masses. We live in a rigged system that gives
Nobel Peace Prizes to mass murderers; that charges a poor child $600 for
a $1 lifesaving Epipen. Trump is waking up The People. Finalllyyyyyy!!
In my experience, people usually do not change for the better as they
age. However, it does happen!; peasant girl (Joan of Arc), patent inspector
(Einstein)
It's not about what Trump will or won't do. It's about not handing all
three branches of government over to the GOP, which has the Libertarian
agenda of eliminating said government altogether. I find it interesting
that so many people scornful of identity politics nevertheless seem to be
as addicted as anyone to making this a horse race between two candidates
that has no real far-reaching consequences beyond with each will or won't
do in the Oval Office.
So true: "My view is that triumphalism from the Clinton campaign - which
now includes most of the political class, including the press and both party
establishments, and ignores event risk - is engineered to get early voters
to "go with the winner."–Lambert
I have noticed on Google News several "Clinton weighing cabinet choices"
articles, to me there is whistling past the graveyard quality to all this.
They want the election over now-the votes are just a formality.
They really really do not have any short term memory do they? I mean
it took sticking both thumbs on the scale and some handy dandy shenanigans
with voters to get her past the Primary finish line. And her opponent there
was much nicer about pointing out her flaws than her current opponent. It
is true they won't have any obvious elections that disprove their position
out there, but when you are spending millions and your opponent nothing
and he is still within the margin of error with you in the states that people
are watching the closest…
Although that isn't considering the fears of what other shoes have to
drop both in the world and in the news that could derail her victory parade,
they may have more to fear from that.
One of the problems Democrats have and the 50 state strategy addressed
is voting in very Democratic precincts. Without constant pressure, many
proud Democrats won't vote because they don't know any Republicans. It's
in the bag. College kids are the worst voters alive. They will forget come
election day or not be registered because they moved. Dean squeezed these
districts. These districts are where Democrats , out in 2010 and 2014 and
even a little in 2012. Mittens is a robber baron.
If Democratic turnout is low and Hillary wins with crossover votes, what
happens? It's very likely those Republicans vote for down ticket Republicans.
Even for the people who have to vote against Trump, if they believe he is
a special kind of super fascist will they bother to vote for the allies
of a crook such as Hillary? It's possible Hillary wins and drops a seat
in the Senate depending on turnout.
I think it's clear Hillary isn't going to bring out any kind of voter
activism. Judging from photos in Virginia where one would hope a commanding
Hillary victory could jump start the Democrats for next year's governors
and legislative races, the Democratic Party is dead or very close to it.
What if Hillary wins but does the unthinkable and delivers a Republican
pickup in the Senate? She needs to keep Republicans from coming out because
she isn't going to drive Democratic turnout to a spot where that can win
on its own.
Hillary needs to win to keep the never Trump crowd in the GOP from voting
because she knows the Democratic side which relies on very Democratic districts
and transient voters will not impress. An emboldened GOP congress will be
a tough environment for Hillary, and GOP voters won't tolerate bipartisanship
especially for anyone suspected of not helping the party 100%. Those House
Republicans have to face 2018 and the smaller but arguably more motivated
electorate. They will come down hard on Hillary if she can't win the Senate
which a literal donkey could do.
Hell I don't want Clinton to win by any margin. But if anyone thinks
that the bipartisan nature of her possible victory will mean anything but
Republicans hunting her scalp, and dare I say getting it, they are not paying
attention. As much as both the Benghazi and the email thing has them all
flummoxed because the real crimes involved with both are crimes they either
agree with or want to use. The Foundation on the other hand, not so much,
they will make the case that this is a global slush fund because it is.
And the McDonnell decision is not going to save her Presidency, much as
it would if she were indicted in a Court.
I should add, that is with or without winning the Senate. Much of the
loyalty any Dems there have towards her will disappear when it is obvious
that she keeps most of the money AND has no coattails. Oh, they might not
vote to impeach her, but that is about it.
Hillary's only defense is to win the Senate and to be able to stifle
investigations through the appearance of a mandate. 2018 is the 2012 cycle,
and that is 2006 which should be a good year for the Republicans (a credit
to Howard Dean). It's a tough map for Team Blue. If they don't win the Senate
in November, they won't win it in 2018.
With 2018 on its way, a weak Democratic situation will make the Democrats
very jumpy as Hillary is clearly not delivering the coattails they imagined.
She isn't going to have a mandate. Oh, the electoral college count might
look good. But regardless of who wins this sucker, I'm betting this is going
to be one of the lowest, if not the lowest, voter turnout for any Presidential
election in the last century. I would not be surpised if more people stay
home than vote. And that is not a mandate.
The Senate isn't going to stifle investigations. She doesn't even have
to help the Dems get a majority for that problem of conviction if impeached
to rear its ugly head. No way is there going to be 2/3 of the Senate in
one party or the other. That still won't stop the House. Just as it didn't
for her husband.
I know it is a bit picky of me, but I am getting really tired of Democrats
trying to take the high road on immigration. It ignores that our current
Democratic President has deported more 'illegal' immigrants than any previous
President before him. In 2014 he deported nine times more people than had
been deported twenty years earlier. Some years it was nearly double the
numbers under George W. Bush. And yes, I know it was not strict fillibuster
proof majority in the Senate for his first two years, but damn close and
the only thing we got was a half assed stimulus made up largely of tax stimulus
AND that gift to for profit medicine and insurance, the ACA. With all their
concern, couldn't the Democrats have made some token stab at immigration
reform? Instead there has been a huge gift to the for profit prison operators
who now count their immigration detention centers as their biggest profit
centers.
Trump says mean things, but the Democrats, well once again actions should
speak louder than words but it isn't happening.
The Dems want to have their cake and eat it too. They want cheap labor
and they want virtue. They sell out my friends and neighbors and think themselves
noble for empowering foreign nationals.
I guess this is one way for a supposedly pro-labor party to liquidate
its working class elements.
"... But the party's latest generation of "New Democrats" - self-described "moderates" who are funded by Wall Street and are aggressively trying to steer the party to the right - have noticed this trend and are now fighting back. Third Way, a "centrist" think tank that serves as the hub for contemporary New Democrats, has recently published a sizable policy paper, " Ready for the New Economy ," urging the Democratic Party to avoid focusing on economic inequality. Former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, a Third Way trustee, recently argued that Sanders' influence on the primary "is a recipe for disaster" for Democrats. ..."
"... The DLC's goal was to advance "a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic issues," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in a 2001 article in The American Prospect . "The DLC thundered against the 'liberal fundamentalism' of the party's base - unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally." ..."
"... Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed. The organization had virtually no grassroots supporters; it was funded almost entirely by corporate donors. Its executive council, Dreyfuss reported , was made up of companies that donated at least $25,000 and included Enron and Koch Industries. A list of its known donors includes scores of the United States' most powerful corporations, all of whom benefit from a Democratic Party that embraces big business and is less reliant on labor unions and the grassroots for support. ..."
"... The height of the DLC's triumph may well have been in the 1990s, when it claimed President Bill Clinton as its most prominent advocate, celebrating his disastrous welfare cuts (which were supported by Hillary Clinton as the first lady), his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement and his speech declaring that the "era of big government is over." These initiatives had the DLC's footprint all over them. ..."
"... The DLC's prescribed Third Way also found a home on Downing Street in England. Tony Blair, a major Clinton ally, was a staunch advocate of the DLC, adopted its strategies and lent his name to its website. According to the book Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the Third Way , he said in 1998 that it "is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied by state control, high taxation and producer interests." ..."
"... When Bill Clinton left the White House, Hillary Clinton entered the Senate. She quickly became a major player for the DLC, serving as a prominent member of the New Democratic Caucus in the Senate, speaking at conferences on multiple occasions and serving as chair of a key initiative for the 2006 and 2008 elections. ..."
"... She also adopted the DLC's hawkish military stance. The DLC was feverishly in favor of Bush's "war on terror" and his invasion of Iraq. Will Marshall, one of the group's founders, was a signatory of many of the now infamous documents from the Project for the New American Century, which urged the United States to radically increase its use of force in Iraq and beyond. ..."
"... The DLC led efforts to take down Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq as an example of his weakness. Two years later, the organization played a similar role against Ned Lamont's antiwar challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which the DLC decried as "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism." ..."
"... However, the DLC's influence eventually waned . A formal affiliation with the organization became something of a deal breaker for some progressive voters. When Barack Obama first ran for the Senate in 2004, he had no affiliation with the DLC. So, when they wrongly included him in their directory of New Democrats, he asked the DLC to remove his name. In explaining this, he also publicly shunned the organization in an interview with Black Commentator. "You are undoubtedly correct that these positions make me an unlikely candidate for membership in the DLC," he wrote when pressed by the magazine . "That is why I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC." ..."
"... When the DLC closed, it records were acquired by the Clinton Foundation, which DLC founder Al From called an "appropriate and fitting repository." To this day, the Clinton Foundation continues to promote the work of the DLC's founding members. In September 2015, the foundation hosted an event to promote From's book The New Democrats and the Return to Power ..."
"... Citizens United ..."
"... So while the DLC may be a dirty word among many progressives, this didn't stop Obama from appointing New Democrats to key posts in his White House. The same Bill Daley who works for a hedge fund and is on the board of trustees for Third Way was also President Obama's White House chief of staff . And, as was noted above, he is now actively trying to influence the Democratic Party's direction in the 2016 election. ..."
"... The remaining champions of the DLC agenda have been increasingly active in trying to push back against populism. On October 28, 2015, Third Way published an ambitious paper, "Ready for the New Economy," that aims to do just that. The paper falsely argues that "the narrative of fairness and inequality has, to put it mildly, failed to excite voters," and says "these trends should compel the party to rigorously question the electoral value of today's populist agenda." ..."
"... When Clinton announced her tax plan, Dow Jones quoted Jim Kessler, a Third Way staffer, praising the plan. On social media , Third Way staffers are routinely cheering on Clinton and attacking Sanders and O'Malley . ..."
"... and where she will be ..."
"... Consider the case of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president . Dean's reputation as a fiery progressive has always been wildly overstated , but there was a rich irony about Dean's endorsement. His centrist record aside, Dean was once the face of the party's progressive base. During his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2003 and 2004, Dean used his opposition to the war in Iraq to garner progressive support. He attracted a large group of partisan liberal bloggers, who coined the term "Netroots" in support of his candidacy . For a time, Dean was leading in the polls during the primary. ..."
"... Remember: The Dean campaign was taken down by the DLC, who attacked him for running a campaign from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the Democratic Party, "defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." The rift between the DLC and Dean's supporters was so intense that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas described it as a "civil war" between Democrats. Of course, when Dean announced his support for Clinton, he made no mention of the fact that she was the leader of the same group that ambushed his candidacy precisely because it appealed to the party's left-leaning base. ..."
"... The tendency of some progressives to downplay, ignore or deflect populist critiques of Clinton's record was observed by Doug Henwood in his 2014 Harper's piece "Stop Hillary." ..."
"... In the article, he describes the "widespread liberal fantasy of [Clinton] as a progressive paragon" as misguided. "In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations," Henwood writes. "The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only antidote, since most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most general, flattering terms." ..."
A discussion about how the Democrats could be compromised by their relationship with the
financial institutions that fund their campaigns was unthinkable in past presidential debates.
Such a discussion falls way outside the narrow parameters of debate that have dominated political
discourse in the mainstream media for decades. But at the
Democratic
debate in Iowa this November, this issue was front and center: Hillary Clinton was forced to
defend her financial relationship with Wall Street
numerous times on network television.
Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed.
Clinton's response to populist attacks on her Wall Street connections has largely been to adopt
similar language and policy positions as her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. In many ways she is
trying to minimize the differences between her and Sanders, rather than emphasize them. "The differences
among us," she said of her opponents at the
Iowa debate , "pale in comparison to what's happening on the Republican [side]."
But the party's latest generation of
"New Democrats" - self-described
"moderates" who
are funded by Wall Street and are aggressively trying to steer the party to the right - have
noticed this trend and are now fighting back. Third Way, a "centrist" think tank that serves as the
hub for contemporary New Democrats, has recently published a sizable policy paper, "
Ready for the
New Economy ," urging the Democratic Party to avoid focusing on economic inequality. Former Obama
chief of staff Bill Daley, a Third Way trustee, recently
argued that Sanders' influence on the primary "is a recipe for disaster" for Democrats.
This "ideological gulf" inside the party, as The Washington Post's
Ruth Marcus describes it , is not a new phenomenon. Before there was Third Way, there was the
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). And before there was Bill Daley, there was Hillary Clinton -
a key member of the
DLC's leadership team during her entire tenure in the US Senate (2000-2008). As Clinton seeks
progressive support, it is important to consider her role in the influential movement to, as
The American Prospect describes
it , "reinvent the [Democratic] party as one pledged to fiscal restraint, less government, and
a pro-business, pro-free market outlook." This fairly recent history is an important part of Clinton's
record, and she owes it to primary voters to answer for it.
But before all of these events shaped public opinion, the party was largely guided by the ideas
of the Democratic Leadership Council.
Founded by Southern Democrats in 1985 , the group sought to transform the party by pushing it
to embrace more conservative positions and win support from big business.
Clinton adopted the DLC strategy in the way she governed.
The DLC's goal was to advance "a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less
radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic
issues," wrote Robert Dreyfuss in a 2001
article in The American Prospect
. "The DLC thundered against the 'liberal fundamentalism' of the party's base - unionists, blacks,
feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally."
Within the DLC, populism was not merely out of favor; it was militantly opposed. The organization
had virtually no grassroots supporters; it was funded almost entirely by corporate donors. Its executive
council, Dreyfuss reported
, was made up of companies that donated at least $25,000 and included Enron and Koch Industries.
A list of its known donors includes scores of the United States' most powerful corporations, all
of whom benefit from a Democratic Party that embraces big business and is less reliant on labor unions
and the grassroots for support.
The organization's influence was significant, especially in the 1990s. The New York Times
reported
that during that era "the Democratic Leadership Council was a maker of presidents." Its influence
continued into the post-Clinton years. Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt
and countless others all
lent their names in support of the organization. The DLC and its think tank, the
Progressive Policy Institute (PPI),
were well financed and published a seemingly endless barrage of
policy papers , op-eds
and declarations
in their numerous publications.
"It is almost hard to find anyone who wasn't involved with [the DLC]" said Mark Schmitt, a staffer
for the nonpartisan New America Foundation think tank, in an interview with Truthout. "This was before
there were a lot of organizations, and the DLC provided a way for politicians to get involved and
to be in the same room with important people."
The DLC's prescribed Third Way also
found a home on Downing
Street in England. Tony Blair, a major Clinton ally, was a staunch advocate of the DLC,
adopted its strategies and lent
his name to its website. According to the book Clinton and Blair: The Political Economy of the
Third Way ,
he said in 1998 that it "is a third way because it moves decisively beyond an Old Left preoccupied
by state control, high taxation and producer interests."
As recently as 2014, Blair has continued to urge the UK's Labour Party to remain committed to
these ideals. "Former UK prime minister Tony Blair has urged Labour leader Ed Miliband to stick to
the political centre ground, warning that the public has not 'fallen back in love with the state'
despite the global financial crisis,"
according to the Financial Times , which noted that the left-wing base of his party has rejected
his centrist leanings. "His decision as prime minister to join the US in its invasion of Iraq - as
well as his free-market leanings - have made him a
hate figure among the most leftwing Labour activists."
Hillary Clinton as a New Democrat
When Bill Clinton left the White House, Hillary Clinton entered the Senate. She quickly became
a major player for the DLC, serving as a
prominent member of
the New Democratic Caucus in the Senate, speaking at
conferences
on multiple occasions
and serving as
chair of a key initiative for the 2006 and 2008 elections.
New Democrats were never really about popular support; they were about bringing together big
business and the Democrats.
More importantly, Clinton adopted the DLC strategy in the way she governed. She tried to portray
herself as a crusader for family values when she
introduced legislation to ban violent video games and
flag burning in 2005.
She also
adopted the DLC's hawkish military stance. The DLC was feverishly in favor of Bush's "war on
terror" and his invasion of Iraq. Will Marshall, one of the group's founders, was a signatory of
many of the now infamous
documents from the Project for the New American Century, which urged the United States to radically
increase its use of force in Iraq and beyond.
The DLC led efforts to take down Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, citing his opposition
to the war in Iraq as an example of his weakness. Two years later, the organization played a
similar role against
Ned Lamont's antiwar challenge to Sen. Joe Lieberman, which the DLC decried as
"The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism."
However, the DLC's influence eventually
waned
. A formal affiliation with the organization became something of a deal breaker for some progressive
voters. When Barack Obama first ran for the Senate in 2004, he had no affiliation with the DLC. So,
when they wrongly included him in their directory of New Democrats, he asked the DLC to remove his
name. In explaining this, he also publicly shunned the organization in an interview with Black Commentator.
"You are undoubtedly correct that these positions make me an unlikely candidate for membership in
the DLC," he wrote when
pressed by the magazine
. "That is why I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a member of the DLC."
The DLC's decline continued: A growing sense of discontent among progressives, Clinton's loss
in 2008 and the economic crisis that followed turned the DLC into something of a political liability.
And in 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council
shuttered
its doors .
When the DLC closed, it records were
acquired by the Clinton Foundation, which DLC founder Al From called an "appropriate and fitting
repository." To this day, the Clinton Foundation continues to promote the work of the DLC's founding
members. In September 2015, the foundation
hosted an event to promote From's book The New Democrats and the Return to Power . Amazingly,
O'Malley provided a
favorable
blurb for the book, praising it as a "reminder of the core principles that still drive Democratic
success today."
The 2016 Election and New Democrats
The DLC's demise was seen as a victory by many progressives, and the populist tone of the 2016
primary is being celebrated as a sign of rising progressivism as well. But it is probably too soon
to declare that the "battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is coming to an end," as Adam Green,
cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, recently
told the Guardian .
Consider the way Marshall spun the closing of the DLC. "With President Obama consciously reconstructing
a winning coalition by reconnecting with the progressive center, the pragmatic ideas of PPI and other
organizations are more vital than ever," he said in an
interview with Politico .
His reference to "PPI and other organizations" refers to the still-existing Progressive Policy
Institute and Third Way. These institutions have the same
Wall Street support and continue to push the same agenda that their predecessor did.
New Democrats' guns are aimed firmly at Sanders, and they are quick to defend Clinton.
Many of these "centrist" ideas lack popular support these days. But New Democrats were never really
about popular support; they were about bringing together big business and the Democrats. The group's
board of trustees is almost
entirely made up of Wall Street executives. Further, in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens
United Supreme Court decision, these same moneyed interests
have more influence over the political process than ever before.
"These organizations now are basically just corporate lobbyists today," Schmitt said.
So while the DLC may be a dirty word among many progressives, this didn't stop Obama from appointing
New Democrats to key posts in his White House. The same Bill Daley who
works for a hedge fund and is on the
board of trustees for Third Way
was also President Obama's
White House chief of
staff . And, as was noted above, he is now actively trying to influence the Democratic Party's
direction in the 2016 election.
The remaining champions of the DLC agenda have been increasingly active in trying to push back
against populism. On October 28, 2015, Third Way published an ambitious paper,
"Ready for the
New Economy," that aims to do just that. The paper
falsely
argues that "the narrative of fairness and inequality has, to put it mildly, failed to excite
voters," and says "these trends should compel the party to rigorously question the electoral value
of today's populist agenda."
The report attacks Sanders' proposals for expanding Social Security and implementing a single-payer
health-care system directly, making
faulty
claims about both proposals. It also advises Democrats to avoid the "singular focus on income
inequality" because its "actual impact on the middle class may be small."
"Third Way and its allies are gravely misreading the economic and political moment," said Richard
Eskow, a writer for Campaign for America's Future, in a
rebuttal
to the paper. "If their influence continues to wane, perhaps one day Americans can stop paying
the price for their ill-conceived, corporation- and billionaire-friendly agenda."
Eskow is right to use the word "if" instead of "when." Progressives ignore these efforts at their
own peril. Despite their archaic and flawed ideas, Third Way's reports and speakers still get undue
attention in the mainstream media. For instance, The Washington Post
devoted 913 words to Third Way's new paper, describing it as part of a "big economic fight in
the Democratic Party." The article provided a platform for Third Way's president Jonathan Cowan to
attack Sanders. "We propose that Democrats be Democrats, not socialists," he said. This tone is the
status quo for New Democrats in the media. Their guns are aimed firmly at Sanders, and they are quick
to defend Clinton.
When Clinton was attacked for working with former Wall Street executives, The Wall Street Journal
quoted PPI president Will Marshall, defending her. "The idea that you have to excommunicate anybody
who ever worked in the financial sector is ridiculous,"
he said .
"The Necessities of the Moment": Will Clinton Run Back to the Right?
Of course, the New Democrats' preference for Clinton shouldn't surprise anyone. She has been an
ally for years. And while they have expressed concern over her leftward tilt, they are confident,
as
the Post reported , that "she'll tack back their way in a general election." For instance,
her recent opposition to the
Trans-Pacific Partnership - which Third Way is
supporting aggressively - has centrists "disappointed" but not worried.
"Everyone knew where she was on that and where she will be , but given the necessities
of the moment and a tough Democratic primary, she felt she needed to go there initially," New Democratic
Coalition chairman Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisconsin)
told the Guardian (emphasis added).
Politics isn't a sporting event. It is important to be critical, even of candidates for whom
you will likely vote.
If New Democrats aren't worried that Clinton's populist rhetoric is sincere, progressives probably
should be worried that it isn't. As DLC founder Al From
told the Guardian : "Hillary will bend a little bit but not so much that she can't get herself
back on course in the general [election] and when she is governing."
Some, however, are confident that if elected, Clinton will have to spend political capital on
the very populist ideas she is now embracing.
"When you make these kind of promises it will be difficult to just go back on them," said the
New America Foundation's Mark Schmitt. "She will have to work on many of these issues if she is elected."
Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told Truthout that his group's
emphasis is to make any Democratic candidate responsive to the issues important to what he calls
the
"Warren wing" of the party, which espouses the more populist economic beliefs of Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Massachusetts). Like Warren, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hasn't endorsed
a candidate in the race as of now.
"It is not about one candidate; it is about trying to make all the candidates address the issues
we care about," Green said, citing debt-free education, expanding Social Security benefits and supporting
Black Lives Matter as key issues.
Liberals, Clinton and Partisan Amnesia
It is understandable why some progressives are hesitant to be critical of Clinton: They fully
expect that soon she will be the only thing standing between them and some candidate from the "Republican
clown car," as Green described the GOP field.
But voting pragmatically in a general election is one thing. Ignoring or apologizing for Clinton's
very recent and troubling record is another. Too many progressives are engaged in a sort of willful
partisan amnesia and are accepting the false narrative that Clinton is "a populist fighter who for
decades has been an advocate for families and children," as some unnamed
Clinton advisers told The New York Times.
Consider the case of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, who
has
endorsed Hillary Clinton for president . Dean's reputation as a fiery progressive has always
been
wildly overstated , but there was a rich irony about Dean's endorsement. His centrist record
aside, Dean was once the face of the party's progressive base. During his campaign for the Democratic
nomination in 2003 and 2004, Dean used his opposition to the war in Iraq to garner progressive support.
He attracted a large group of partisan liberal bloggers, who coined the term
"Netroots" in
support of his candidacy . For a time, Dean was
leading in the polls during the primary.
Remember: The Dean campaign was taken down by the DLC, who
attacked him
for running a campaign from the "McGovern-Mondale wing" of the Democratic Party, "defined principally
by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home." The rift between the DLC and
Dean's supporters was so intense that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas
described it as a "civil war" between Democrats. Of course, when Dean announced his support for
Clinton, he made no mention of the fact that she was the leader of the same group that ambushed his
candidacy precisely because it appealed to the party's left-leaning base.
Once the primary is over, the chance to force Clinton to respond to left critiques will likely
not come again soon.
Yet Moulitsas recently
endorsed Clinton in a column for The Hill. Moulitsas was one of the key bloggers who supported
Dean in 2004 and helped create the Netroots in its infancy. His goal, he said often, was
"crashing the gate" of the Democratic establishment. But his uncritical support for Clinton,
the quintessential establishment candidate, has turned much of
his own blog into evidence of how some progressives are dismissing recent history for partisan
reasons. In the last contested Democratic primary, Moulitsas was extremely
critical
of Clinton. Now, he is helping her
do to Sanders what the DLC did to Dean.
Why are the likes of Dean and Moulitsas so quick to embrace Clinton after years of battling with
her and her allies in the so-called "vital center?" Only they know for sure. In the case of Dean,
it may well be because he was never a real populist to begin with. In 2003, Bloomberg did a story
asking Vermonters to talk about Dean's ideology. "Howard is not a liberal. He's a pro-business, Rockefeller
Republican,"
said Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont. This sentiment
is shared by many Vermonters, on both the
left
and
right .
But for other self-identified progressives who have embraced the establishment candidate, such
as Moulitsas, the answers may be simpler: partisan loyalty and ambition. The fact is the odds of
Clinton winning the nomination are very good. And for the likes of Moulitsas - who now writes columns
for an establishment
DC paper and is a
major fundraiser for Democrats - being on the side of the winner will certainly make him more
friends in DC than supporting the self-identified socialist that opposes her.
Moulitsas argues that Clinton has dismissed "her husband's ideological baggage" and is "aiming
for a truly progressive presidency." He is now a true believer, he claims. It is up to readers to
decide if they find his argument to be credible, especially compared to the conflicting statements
he has made for many years. Many on
his own blog are skeptical.
But, lastly, the main reason many progressives are willing to overlook Clinton's record is simply
fear. They are afraid of a Republican president, and it is hard to blame them. The idea of a President
Trump - or Carson or Cruz - is extremely frightening for many people. This is entirely understandable.
But even if one feels obligated to vote for Clinton in the general election, should she win the nomination,
that does not mean her record ought to be ignored. Politics isn't a sporting event. It is important
to be critical, even of candidates for whom you will likely vote.
The Historical Record: "The Only Antidote"
The tendency of some progressives to downplay, ignore or deflect populist critiques of Clinton's
record was observed by Doug Henwood in his 2014 Harper's piece
"Stop Hillary."
In the article, he describes the "widespread liberal fantasy of [Clinton] as a progressive paragon"
as misguided. "In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these
great expectations," Henwood writes. "The historical record, such as it is, may also be the only
antidote, since most progressives are unwilling to discuss Hillary in anything but the most general,
flattering terms."
Cleary, Clinton's historical record reveals much to be concerned about, including her long career
as a New Democrat. For the first time in recent memory, however, progressives actually have some
leverage to make her answer for this record.
Clinton has a reasonably competitive opponent who has challenged her on her record of Wall Street
support, her
dismissal of the Glass-Steagall Act and her
vote for war in Iraq . She should also be challenged vigorously on her role with the DLC.
Circumstances have created a unique moment where Clinton has to answer these tough questions.
But it may be a fleeting moment. Once the primary is over, the chance to force Clinton - or any major
establishment politician - to respond to left critiques will likely not come again soon. Copyright,
Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission .
Michael Corcoran
is a journalist based in Boston. He has written for The Boston Globe, The Nation,
The Christian Science Monitor, Extra!, NACLA Report on the Americas and other publications. Follow
him on Twitter: @mcorcoran3 .
"... an article loaded with innuendo has appeared on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, located in Washington, DC, stating that Russia is engaged in widespread subversion in Europe and is trying to do the same on behalf of Donald Trump in the United States. But the evidence presented in the story does not support what is being suggested, and spreading tales about foreign-government misbehavior can have unintended consequences. It is particularly shortsighted and even dangerous in this case, as a stable relationship with a nuclear-armed and militarily very capable Moscow should rightly be regarded as critical. ..."
"... It is almost as if some journalists believe that deliberately damaging relations with Russia is a price worth paying to embarrass and defeat Trump. If that is so, they are delusional. ..."
But there is a certain danger inherent in the media's slanting its coverage to such an extent
as to be making the news rather than just reporting it. And when it comes to Russia, the way the
stories are reported becomes critically important, as there is a real risk that
media hostility toward Putin, even if deployed as a way to get at Trump, could produce a conflict
no one actually wants-just as the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers' yellow journalism,
rife with "melodrama,
romance, and hyperbole," more or less brought about the Spanish-American War.
... ... ...
So an article loaded with innuendo has appeared on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, located
in Washington, DC, stating that Russia is engaged in widespread subversion in Europe and is trying
to do the same on behalf of Donald Trump in the United States. But the evidence presented in the
story does not support what is being suggested, and spreading tales about foreign-government misbehavior
can have unintended consequences. It is particularly shortsighted and even dangerous in this case,
as a stable relationship with a nuclear-armed and militarily very capable Moscow should rightly be
regarded as critical.
It is almost as if some journalists believe that deliberately damaging relations with Russia is
a price worth paying to embarrass and defeat Trump. If that is so, they are delusional.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National
Interest.
"... links to Russia were one of the most consistent messages of the 'Remain' campaign's 'Project Fear' strategy to keep Britain in the European Union. Even the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, invoked the threat of Russia to try and convince Britons to stay in. ..."
"... The Clinton campaign's briefings on how Donald Trump is " Helping Putin Consolidate Control of Ukraine ", and how Russia is " meddling in U.S. election " (there's that word again) are Project Fear 101. The journalists willfully writing up these stories are ignoring critical points; such as how Secretary of State Clinton's connections with the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs helped Russia buy up U.S. uranium interests . The New York Times reported in April 2015: ..."
Aug 23, 2016 | www.breitbart.com
The Clinton campaign alongside the establishment media have begun blowing the Vladimir Putin
dog-whistle, just as their European counterparts did during the United Kingdom's referendum on its
membership of the European Union (EU).
Almost as if on cue, news outlets have begun parroting the same old lines used by Britain's political
establishment before June of this year, when they accused anti-establishment 'Leave' campaigners
of doing the bidding for, if not being directly linked to, the Russian president and the Kremlin.
From questioning
the marriage of one of the key donors to the Leave campaign , to using
Britain's public broadcaster
to float conspiracy theories about Russian influence, the Cold War-esque scare tactics of 'Reds
Under the Bed' not only reveals the lack of originality in the Clinton camp, it reveals hypocrisy,
foreign policy flippancy , and perhaps even a serious misestimation of where the
public stands on the issue.
In the run up to the Brexit referendum, U.S. outlets even went as far as to call Mr. Putin's (lack
of) interventions "
meddling ". The same charge was never levelled by the media at U.S. President Barack Obama when
he flew to the United Kingdom and lectured Britons on how they should vote. In fact,
he
threatened the country's economy and
trade position in the world if they refused to follow his advice. But this was deemed appropriate.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin and Mr. Putin were broadly absent from the debate, possibly because they
knew full well the 'Remain' camp would use any public pronouncements against the Leave camp, but
also because they are unlikely to have had a clear-cut position on the issue. Mr Putin is a grand
strategist and could have dealt with either outcome. The U.S. establishment, however, has all of
its eggs in the globalism basket.
In March a Kremlin spokesman
said
: "Russia is being dragged into the domestic debate on Brexit. Why is the wicked Russia thesis
used to explain a Government policy?"
"We'd like the British people to know that those pronouncements have nothing to do with Russia's
policy," the embassy said. "As a matter of fact, our Government doesn't have an opinion on Britain's
place in the EU."
Despite this far less "meddling" tactic, links to Russia were one of the most consistent messages
of the 'Remain' campaign's 'Project Fear' strategy to keep Britain in the European Union. Even the
Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, invoked the threat of Russia to try and convince Britons
to stay in.
"At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have
been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President
Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off
to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One."
This is barely scratching the surface, as Clinton
Cash author Peter Schweizer
wrote in the Wall Street Journal in July:
"In May 2010, the State Department
facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital-and weeks later
the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.
"By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan-who had
previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation-recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian,
American and European
"Key Partners." Of the 28 "partners," 17, or 60%, have made financial commitments to the Clinton
Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton."
Nevertheless, you will likely find more references to Putin and Trump in the past week alone than
you will to these dubious affairs in their totality.
Indeed arch-establishment mouthpiece, Legatum Institute
leader, and all-round George Soros activist Anne Applebaum went so far as to declare Donald Trump
"a Russian oligarch" in the Washington Post
this week.
And perhaps far worse than her connections to the Kremlin – a relationship which has evidently
soured in recent months – are her connections to the fascist, authoritarian, pseudo-monarchical,
Islamist dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. In 2015 the WSJ
reported :
" the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has given between $10 million and $25 million since the foundation
was created in 1999. Part of that came in 2014, although the database doesn't specify how much."
But few column inches or broadcast air minutes are used to discuss these matters.
FOREIGN POLICY FLIPPANCY
In drafting in Russia as a talking point, Mrs. Clinton makes it very difficult for her to deal
with President Putin and the Kremlin should she find herself in the Oval Office in 2017.
Her campaign's claims that Mr. Trump is somehow untrustworthy because he wants to work with Mr.
Putin, not against him, is difficult to take seriously given her lauding of Russia as "an ally" in
2012:
She said, in an attempt to mock then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who called the country
America's greatest geopolitical foe:
"Russia has been an ally. They're in the P-5+1 talks with us, they have worked with us in Afghanistan
and have been very helpful in the Northern Distribution Network and in other ways. So I think
it's somewhat dated to be looking backwards instead of being realistic about where we agree, where
we don't agree, but looking for ways to bridge the disagreements and then to maximize the cooperation".
In March 2010 she said:
"One of the fears that I hear from Russia is that somehow the United States wants Russia to
be weak. That could not be farther from the truth. Our goal is to help strengthen Russia."
Even in Ukraine the picture is less clear than U.S. journalists would have you think. Pew (2015)
showed :
"Western Ukrainians are much more likely to say Russia is the sole culprit (56%), while those
in the east see the problem as more complicated. A third of Ukrainians in the east think Russia
is primarily to blame, but 36% fault more than one of the groups.
"Roughly half of Ukrainians (47%) believe Russia is a major military threat to other neighboring
countries. Another 34% say the former Cold War power is a minor threat. Western Ukrainians are
much more concerned about Russia's territorial ambitions (61% major threat) than those in the
east (30%)."
This is a drastically different scenario from the one portrayed in the U.S. media, which usually
comes down to "Russia bad. Everywhere else good". But even the American people are growing weary
of this slant.
Pew (2016)
demonstrated that while U.S. public opinion towards Russia slumped in 2014 around the time of
the Crimea annexation, those numbers have now halved. People don't view Russia as an outright adversary,
though they are perhaps rightly wary of its status as a geopolitical competitor.
Most of anti-russian hysteria is directed toward instilling fear and increasing solidarity, with
neoliberals trying to scare low-information dumb voters away from Trump
Notable quotes:
"... The FBI is investigating whether Russian hackers have carried out a series of cyber attacks on the New York Times, officials have told US media. ..."
"... New York Times was whinging that Chinese hackers had breached and infiltrated their servers a few years ago. NYT is always bitching about something. ..."
"... Isn't it cute, the way the Americans have lost their minds, and they don't even notice? Here's the Washington Post , blatting about how Putin's meddling in the American elections has backfired on him . Just as if that were actually happening. It's a good thing they have focused on another actual country which is part of this planet, I guess, rather than aliens from another world, because then we would have to lock them up. ..."
"... Some of it is just agitating for Hillary, trying to scare low-information dumb voters away from Trump. But there is a definite tendency to blame even routine American problems on Russia. They don't seem to get how crazy it makes them look, it's like actual national mental illness. The whole election process should be frozen right here until the country comes to its senses. ..."
Yes, the Chinese in chinked-out China would be very likely to want to tap into a newspaper that
doesn't report anything which is true except for the Catholic Bean Supper at St. Patrick's. China
can hear US government propaganda along with everyone else, while it is valuable to have advance
notice of news only if what is being reported is actually true.
Isn't it cute, the way the Americans have lost their minds, and they don't even notice? Here's
the Washington Post , blatting about how
Putin's meddling in the American elections has backfired on him . Just as if that were actually
happening. It's a good thing they have focused on another actual country which is part of this
planet, I guess, rather than aliens from another world, because then we would have to lock them
up.
Not even during the coldest depths of the Cold War did the United States so crazily blame all
of its problems on the Russians. If America can't have global war against Russia, it is going
to be so disappointed.
Some of it is just agitating for Hillary, trying to scare low-information dumb voters away
from Trump. But there is a definite tendency to blame even routine American problems on Russia.
They don't seem to get how crazy it makes them look, it's like actual national mental illness.
The whole election process should be frozen right here until the country comes to its senses.
"... The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting
malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The
draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character
string, "ace02468bdf13579." That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code
associated with the same program, SECONDDATE. ..."
On Monday, a hacking group calling itself the "ShadowBrokers" announced an auction for what it claimed
were "cyber weapons" made by the NSA. Based on never-before-published documents provided by the whistleblower
Edward Snowden, The Intercept can confirm that the arsenal contains authentic NSA software,
part of a powerful constellation of tools used to covertly infect computers worldwide.
The provenance
of the code has been a matter of heated debate this week among cybersecurity experts, and while it
remains unclear how the software leaked, one thing is now beyond speculation: The malware is covered
with the NSA's virtual fingerprints and clearly originates from the agency.
The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting
malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public.
The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific
16-character string, "ace02468bdf13579." That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers
leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE.
SECONDDATE plays a specialized role inside a complex global system built by the U.S. government
to infect and monitor what one document
estimated to be millions of computers around the world. Its release by ShadowBrokers, alongside
dozens of other malicious tools, marks the first time any full copies of the NSA's offensive software
have been available to the public, providing a glimpse at how an elaborate system outlined in the
Snowden documents looks when deployed in the real world, as well as concrete evidence that NSA hackers
don't always have the last word when it comes to computer exploitation.
But malicious software of this sophistication doesn't just pose a threat to foreign governments,
Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green told The Intercept:
The danger of these exploits is that they can be used to target anyone who is using a vulnerable
router. This is the equivalent of leaving lockpicking tools lying around a high school cafeteria.
It's worse, in fact, because many of these exploits are not available through any other means,
so they're just now coming to the attention of the firewall and router manufacturers that need
to fix them, as well as the customers that are vulnerable.
So the risk is twofold: first, that the person or persons who stole this information might
have used them against us. If this is indeed Russia, then one assumes that they probably have
their own exploits, but there's no need to give them any more. And now that the exploits have
been released, we run the risk that ordinary criminals will use them against corporate targets.
The NSA did not respond to questions concerning ShadowBrokers, the Snowden documents, or its malware.
A Memorable SECONDDATE
The offensive tools released by ShadowBrokers are organized under a litany of code names such
as POLARSNEEZE and ELIGIBLE BOMBSHELL, and their exact purpose is still being assessed. But we do
know more about one of the weapons: SECONDDATE.
SECONDDATE is a tool designed to intercept web requests and redirect browsers on target computers
to an NSA web server. That server, in turn, is designed to infect them with malware. SECONDDATE's
existence was
first reported by The Intercept in 2014, as part of a look at a global computer exploitation
effort code-named TURBINE. The malware server, known as FOXACID, has also been
described in previously released Snowden documents.
Other documents released by The Intercept today not only tie SECONDDATE to the ShadowBrokers
leak but also provide new detail on how it fits into the NSA's broader surveillance and infection
network. They also show how SECONDDATE has been used, including to spy on Pakistan and a computer
system in Lebanon.
The top-secret manual that authenticates the SECONDDATE found in the wild as the same one used
within the NSA is a 31-page document titled "FOXACID
SOP for Operational Management" and marked as a draft. It dates to no earlier than 2010. A section
within the manual describes administrative tools for tracking how victims are funneled into FOXACID,
including a set of tags used to catalogue servers. When such a tag is created in relation to a SECONDDATE-related
infection, the document says, a certain distinctive identifier must be used:
The same SECONDDATE MSGID string appears in 14 different files throughout the ShadowBrokers leak,
including in a file titled SecondDate-3021.exe. Viewed through a code-editing program (screenshot
below), the NSA's secret number can be found hiding in plain sight:
All told, throughout many of the folders contained in the ShadowBrokers' package (screenshot below),
there are 47 files with SECONDDATE-related names, including different versions of the raw code required
to execute a SECONDDATE attack, instructions for how to use it, and other related files.
.
After viewing the code, Green told The Intercept the MSGID string's occurrence in both
an NSA training document and this week's leak is "unlikely to be a coincidence." Computer security
researcher Matt Suiche, founder of UAE-based cybersecurity startup Comae Technologies, who has been
particularly vocal in his analysis of the ShadowBrokers this week, told The Intercept "there
is no way" the MSGID string's appearance in both places is a coincidence.
Where SECONDDATE Fits In
This overview jibes with previously unpublished classified files provided by Snowden that illustrate
how SECONDDATE is a component of BADDECISION, a broader NSA infiltration tool. SECONDDATE helps the
NSA pull off a "man in the middle" attack against users on a wireless network, tricking them into
thinking they're talking to a safe website when in reality they've been sent a malicious payload
from an NSA server.
According to one December 2010 PowerPoint presentation titled "Introduction
to BADDECISION," that tool is also designed to send users of a wireless network, sometimes referred
to as an 802.11 network, to FOXACID malware servers. Or, as the presentation puts it, BADDECISION
is an "802.11 CNE [computer network exploitation] tool that uses a true man-in-the-middle attack
and a frame injection technique to redirect a target client to a FOXACID server." As another
top-secret slide puts it, the attack homes in on "the greatest vulnerability to your computer:
your web browser."
One slide points out that the attack works on users with an encrypted wireless connection to the
internet.
That trick, it seems, often involves BADDECISION and SECONDDATE, with the latter described as
a "component" for the former. A series of diagrams in the "Introduction to BADDECISION" presentation
show how an NSA operator "uses SECONDDATE to inject a redirection payload at [a] Target Client,"
invisibly hijacking a user's web browser as the user attempts to visit a benign website (in the example
given, it's CNN.com). Executed correctly, the file explains, a "Target Client continues normal webpage
browsing, completely unaware," lands on a malware-filled NSA server, and becomes infected with as
much of that malware as possible - or as the presentation puts it, the user will be left "WHACKED!"
In the other top-secret presentations, it's put plainly: "How
do we redirect the target to the FOXACID server without being noticed"? Simple: "Use NIGHTSTAND
or BADDECISION."
The sheer number of interlocking tools available to crack a computer is dizzying. In the
FOXACID manual, government hackers are told an NSA hacker ought to be familiar with using SECONDDATE
along with similar man-in-the-middle wi-fi attacks code-named MAGIC SQUIRREL and MAGICBEAN. A top-secret
presentation on FOXACID lists further ways to redirect targets to the malware server system.
To position themselves within range of a vulnerable wireless network, NSA operators can use a
mobile antenna system running software code-named BLINDDATE, depicted in the field in what appears
to be Kabul. The software can even be attached to a drone. BLINDDATE in turn can run BADDECISION,
which allows for a SECONDDATE attack:
Elsewhere in these files, there are at least two documented cases of SECONDDATE being used to
successfully infect computers overseas: An April 2013
presentation boasts of successful attacks against computer systems in both Pakistan and Lebanon.
In the first, NSA hackers used SECONDDATE to breach "targets in Pakistan's National Telecommunications
Corporation's (NTC) VIP Division," which contained documents pertaining to "the backbone of Pakistan's
Green Line communications network" used by "civilian and military leadership."
In the latter, the NSA used SECONDDATE to pull off a man-in-the-middle attack in Lebanon "for
the first time ever," infecting a Lebanese ISP to extract "100+ MB of Hizballah Unit 1800 data,"
a special subset of the terrorist group dedicated to aiding Palestinian militants.
SECONDDATE is just one method that the NSA uses to get its target's browser pointed at a FOXACID
server. Other methods include sending spam that attempts to exploit bugs in popular web-based email
providers or entices targets to click on malicious links that lead to a FOXACID server. One
document, a newsletter for the NSA's Special Source Operations division, describes how NSA software
other than SECONDDATE was used to repeatedly direct targets in Pakistan to FOXACID malware web servers,
eventually infecting the targets' computers.
A Potentially Mundane Hack
Snowden, who worked for NSA contractors Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, has offered some context
and a relatively mundane possible explanation for the leak: that the NSA headquarters was not hacked,
but rather one of the computers the agency uses to plan and execute attacks was compromised. In a
series of tweets,
he pointed out that the NSA often lurks on systems that are supposed to be controlled by others,
and it's possible someone at the agency took control of a server and failed to clean up after themselves.
A regime, hacker group, or intelligence agency could have seized the files and the opportunity to
embarrass the agency.
"... We here in CT comments lead a quiet, parochial life. In the larger world, the disclosure of the DNC emails required a preposterous story of Russian hacking, followed by a gotcha accusing Trump of asking Putin to become a latter day Watergate burglar. ..."
We here in CT comments lead a quiet, parochial life. In the larger world, the disclosure
of the DNC emails required a preposterous story of Russian hacking, followed by a gotcha accusing
Trump of asking Putin to become a latter day Watergate burglar.
I have no sympathy for Trump, who made his bones as birther-in-chief. Live by the sword, die
by the sword.
But, I do have some sympathy for the rest of us, who are the objects of these manipulations.
The email discussing whether they can push the atheist hot-button or the Jew hot-button and get
a predictable response from voters disturbs me because it seems that the propaganda has drowned
out everything else.
It is one thing when they're wearing out the gay hot-button or the xenophobia hot-button or
trying to get the anti-semite hot-button to work again, but I get the idea that there's only hot-buttons,
only manipulation. There's no considered, deliberate purpose behind any of it. Hillary Clinton
is so pre-occupied affirming support for Israel and condemning Iran or ISIS or Russia, that there's
no room left for formulating reality-based policy or explaining such a policy to the American
people.
Moreover story about the Russkies carrying out a plot to influence the US election is so much juicier
than a real story about Clinton's minions doing the humdrum work of influencing US elections by unethical
means. It is somewhat similar to "Romney dog" story.
Notable quotes:
"... It is a story offered without proof for the purposes of creating a distraction, since it becomes an excuse for pundits engaging in groundless speculation and poses of outrage. Because a far-fetched story about the Russkies carrying out an 11-dimensional plot to influence the U.S. election is so much juicier than a pedestrian story about Clinton's minions doing the humdrum work of . . . influencing U.S. elections by unethical means. ..."
"... The convoluted and imaginative stories about Guccifer and so on are just that, stories. The U.S. has an enormous and expensive surveillance state apparatus in place. So proof is, presumably, readily available if someone in authority wants to offer it. In the meantime, we have self-styled consultants blowing smoke ..."
Lanny Davis, longtime Clinton ally and DNC hack, explaining in great detail ( on Fox no less)
why the Romney dog story makes the Republican candidate (is a Mormon the same as an atheist, Debbie?)
unfit for the office of the President.
awy @ 389: why is russian hacking of the dnc a preposterous story?
It is a story offered without proof for the purposes of creating a distraction, since it
becomes an excuse for pundits engaging in groundless speculation and poses of outrage.
Because a far-fetched story about the Russkies carrying out an 11-dimensional plot to influence
the U.S. election is so much juicier than a pedestrian story about Clinton's minions doing the
humdrum work of . . . influencing U.S. elections by unethical means.
The convoluted and imaginative stories about Guccifer and so on are just that, stories.
The U.S. has an enormous and expensive surveillance state apparatus in place. So proof is, presumably,
readily available if someone in authority wants to offer it. In the meantime, we have self-styled
consultants blowing smoke.
But, hey, the Democrat's Platform promises: "Democrats will protect our industry, infrastructure,
and government from cyberattacks." Hillary is going to get on that real soon now.
"... The violation of norms was similar, but Tom DeLay invented his scheme as a way of strengthening his Party and making it more
powerful in Congress, which was kinda his job, and he was quite successful in adding Republicans to the Texas delegation. ..."
"... Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn't just violating the norms; she was trying to weaken her Party, draining away resources to the
Clinton campaign that they had no legitimate claim to from parts of the Party that needed those resources. And, it is part of a pattern
of leadership action to weaken the Party. (Patrick Murphy, her hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida is exhibit one.) ..."
"... I think it is fair and accurate to describe the HVF transfer arrangements as a means of circumventing campaign financing limits
and using the State parties to subsidize the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had brought in $142 million, . . . 44
percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000 of all the
cash brought in by the committee - or only 0.56 percent. ..."
"... Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit
the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties ..."
"... The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses" to reimburse it for fundraising efforts.
And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital consultant Bully
Pulpit Interactive - both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes closely resemble Clinton
campaign materials. ..."
Wasn't Tom DeLay indicted and driven from Congress over a similar sort of money shuffle?
The violation of norms was similar, but Tom DeLay invented his scheme as a way of strengthening his Party and making it
more powerful in Congress, which was kinda his job, and he was quite successful in adding Republicans to the Texas delegation.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn't just violating the norms; she was trying to weaken her Party, draining away resources to
the Clinton campaign that they had no legitimate claim to from parts of the Party that needed those resources. And, it is part
of a pattern of leadership action to weaken the Party. (Patrick Murphy, her hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida
is exhibit one.)
bruce wilder 08.03.16 at 1:08 am
Layman @ 79
I am not interested in a prolonged back and forth, but I will lay out a bare outline of facts. I do not find much support for
your characterization of these arrangements, which give new meaning to the fungibility of funds. I think it is fair and accurate
to describe the HVF transfer arrangements as a means of circumventing campaign financing limits and using the State parties to
subsidize the Clinton campaign. Court rulings have made aggregate fund raising legal and invites this means of circumventing
the $2700 limit on individual Presidential campaign donations. Whether the circumvention is legal - whether it violates the law
to invite nominal contributions to State Parties of $10,000 and channel those contributions wholly to operations in support of
Clinton, while leaving nothing in State Party coffers is actually illegal, I couldn't say; it certainly violates the norms of
a putative joint fundraising effort. It wasn't hard for POLITICO to find State officials who said as much. The rest of this comment
quotes POLITICO reports dated July 2016.
Hillary Victory Fund, which now includes 40 state Democratic Party committees, theoretically could accept checks as large as
$436,100 - based on the individual limits of $10,000 per state party, $33,400 for the DNC, and $2,700 for Clinton's campaign.
Between the creation of the victory fund in September and the end of [June], the fund had brought in $142 million, . .
. 44 percent [to] DNC ($24.4 million) and Hillary for America ($37.6 million), . . . state parties have kept less than $800,000
of all the cash brought in by the committee - or only 0.56 percent.
. . . state parties have received $7.7 million in transfers, but within a few days of most transfers, almost all of the cash
- $6.9 million - was transferred to the DNC . . .
The only date on which most state parties received money from the victory fund and didn't pass any of it on to the DNC was
May 2, the same day that POLITICO published an article exposing the arrangement.
Beyond the transfers, much of the fund's $42 million in direct spending also appears to have been done to directly benefit
the Clinton campaign, as opposed to the state parties.
The fund has paid $4.1 million to the Clinton campaign for "salary and overhead expenses" to reimburse it for fundraising
efforts. And it has directed $38 million to vendors such as direct marketing company Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey and digital
consultant Bully Pulpit Interactive - both of which also serve the Clinton campaign - for mailings and online ads that sometimes
closely resemble Clinton campaign materials.
After disappearing for a couple of weeks, the hacker "Guccifer 2.0" returned late this afternoon to provide a new headache
for Democrats.
In a post to his WordPress blog, the vandal–who previously provided nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee e-mails
to Wikileaks–uploaded an Excel file that includes the cell phone numbers and private e-mail addresses of nearly every Democratic
member of the House of Representatives.
The Excel file also includes similar contact information for hundreds of congressional staff members (chiefs of staff, press
secretaries, legislative directors, schedulers) and campaign personnel.
In announcing the leak of the document, "Guccifer 2.0" reported that the spreadsheet was stolen during a hack of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee. " As you see I wasn't wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach,"
the hacker wrote.
"... What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible Clinton hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident that Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that anyone hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to leave any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did it. A personal server; a real pro job. ..."
What struck me in the article was a conflict between attributing the DNC hack and a possible
Clinton hack that the authors didn't even attempt to address. They claim analysts are very confident
that Russian hackers, working for the government, hacked the DNC. But as to the possibility that
anyone hacked Clinton's private server; well, if they did, they would have been way to savvy to
leave any traces that they'd done so. A DNC hack; those sloppy Russian government hackers did
it. A personal server; a real pro job.
IhaveLittleToAdd | Aug 11, 2016 12:00:03 PM | 2
I actually find it possible, namely that the firewall in DNC was sloppy, and paranoid Hillary
had best computer security consultants she could find. Moreover, hers was a small operation and
easier to keep secure, unlike DNC with many employees and many interactive activities. I speculate
here, but this is plausible.
========
More importantly, was there a public opprobrium, "How did they dare!" about the putative Russian
hack? This is actually an interesting angle. Sometimes public suspects that the government is
doing illegal stuff in other countries, it is thinly denied (or "our policy is no to comment"),
and most of the citizens are glad that our leaders are so resourceful. But the side effect is
that this type of activity becomes "normal", and detecting or convincingly suspecting it exits
yawning response.
For example, there were two assassination or "near assassination" attempts on Israeli diplomatic
personal and Iran was suspected. "Sure, didn't they have a string of assassination of nuclear
assassinations in Tehran? By the way, what is the weather this weekend?" If I recall, Tehran assassinations
stopped.
Similarly, after American cyber-successes, cyber attacks became a new normal.
"... WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant. ..."
"... In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the risks of being a source for his organization. Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks. ..."
"... The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established a motive for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he likely died during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told Omaha CBS-affiliate KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was stolen: his watch, money, credit cards and phone were still with him. ..."
"... The WikiLeaks founder said that others have suggested that Rich was killed for political reasons and that his organization is investigating the incident. ..."
"... "I think it is a concerning situation. There isn't a conclusion yet. We wouldn't be able to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it," he continued. "More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens." ..."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the
Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington
last month had been targeted because the operative was an informant.
In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked
the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the
risks of being a source for his organization.
Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich
was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal
DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government
officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated
the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks.
But Assange was apparently interested in hinting about an even darker theory.
"Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very
significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in
the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington," Assange said on Nieuwsuur. BuzzFeed drew more
attention to the interview in the U.S.
Somewhat startled, news anchor Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal said, "That was
just a robbery, I believe - wasn't it?"
"No, there's no finding," Assange responded. "I'm suggesting that our sources
take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
"Why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?"
van Rosenthal asked.
"Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States,"
Assange said, "and that our sources face serious risks. That's why they come
to us, so we can protect their anonymity."
The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established a motive
for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he likely died
during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told Omaha CBS-affiliate
KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was stolen: his watch,
money, credit cards and phone were still with him.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday floated a theory that the Democratic
National Committee staffer who was shot dead in the streets of Washington last
month had been targeted because the operative was an informant.
In an interview on Dutch television, the Australian cyberactivist invoked
the unsolved killing of Seth Rich, 27, earlier this summer to illustrate the
risks of being a source for his organization.
Citing WikiLeaks protocol, Assange refused to confirm whether or not Rich
was in fact a source for WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of internal
DNC emails, some of them politically embarrassing. Experts and U.S. government
officials reportedly believe that hackers linked to the Russian government infiltrated
the DNC and gave the email trove to WikiLeaks.
But Assange was apparently interested in hinting about an even darker theory.
"Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very
significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in
the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington," Assange said on Nieuwsuur. BuzzFeed drew more
attention to the interview in the U.S.
Somewhat startled, news anchor Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal said, "That was
just a robbery, I believe - wasn't it?"
"No, there's no finding," Assange responded. "I'm suggesting that our sources
take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that."
"Why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?"
van Rosenthal asked.
"Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States,"
Assange said, "and that our sources face serious risks. That's why they come
to us, so we can protect their anonymity."
The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington has not established
a motive for the killing but reportedly told the young man's family that he
likely died during a robbery attempt turned tragic. His father, however, told
Omaha CBS-affiliate KMTV he did not think it was a robbery because nothing was
stolen: his watch, money, credit cards and phone were still with him.
The WikiLeaks founder said that others have suggested that Rich was killed
for political reasons and that his organization is investigating the incident.
"I think it is a concerning situation. There isn't a conclusion yet.
We wouldn't be able to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it," he
continued. "More importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when
that kind of thing happens."
WikiLeaks further fanned the flames of conspiracy by offering a $20,000 reward
for anyone with information leading to the conviction of the person responsible
for killing Rich.
"... "From Claudia Kash: I know why Seth Rich had to die. There were 2 sets of polling places this primary season -- one set for most of the voters, who went on state websites to find their polling locations -- a second set for Hillary Clinton supporters who looked on Hillary Clinton's website to find their polling location. The Secretary of State for each state had one set of locations on >the record; the other set of locations, the ones listed on Hillary's website, were not on the state record. I know this because I looked on her website to find where a friend should vote -- then double-checked the state >website, which showed a different address. I thought there must be a mistake -- I kept checking, right up to election day. ..."
"... But until they killed Seth Rich, I couldn't figure out why there would be two different polling places. This is how I think the scam worked: While most voters look up their location on their state website, voters who were signed up as Hillary Clinton supporters would be directed to her site to find their polling place. It was set up the same as any other DNC polling place -- with DNC volunteers, regular voting machines, etc. -- and a duplicate voter roster, the same as the roster at the other polling place. Voters would be checked off on the roster, same as at the other polling place... and after the polls closed, the DNC supervisor would pick up the roster and the ballots. ..."
"... Seems a straight Machiavellian operation. Murder the young insider, Seth Rich, that leaked the emails to Assange's Wikileaks and then blame it on an enemy that none can fact check on. DNC= Deep National Control ..."
The media reporting on keeps making the statement from the police 'that nothing was missing from his body or belongings'. The
guy was walking around at 4 AM, and apparently no one but his killers actually saw him. So, I guess he couldn't be carrying anything
outside of his pockets? In has hands?
"From Claudia Kash: I know why Seth Rich had to die. There were 2 sets of polling places this primary season -- one set
for most of the voters, who went on state websites to find their polling locations -- a second set for Hillary Clinton supporters
who looked on Hillary Clinton's website to find their polling location. The Secretary of State for each state had one set of locations
on >the record; the other set of locations, the ones listed on Hillary's website, were not on the state record. I know this because
I looked on her website to find where a friend should vote -- then double-checked the state >website, which showed a different
address. I thought there must be a mistake -- I kept checking, right up to election day.
But until they killed Seth Rich, I couldn't figure out why there would be two different polling places. This is how I think
the scam worked: While most voters look up their location on their state website, voters who were signed up as Hillary Clinton
supporters would be directed to her site to find their polling place. It was set up the same as any other DNC polling place --
with DNC volunteers, regular voting machines, etc. -- and a duplicate voter roster, the same as the roster at the other polling
place. Voters would be checked off on the roster, same as at the other polling place... and after the polls closed, the DNC supervisor
would pick up the roster and the ballots.
The supervisor would then pick up the roster at the legitimate polling place and the ballots there. He(or she) >would
then replace a number of Bernie Sanders ballots with an equal number of the ballots from the Hillary >Clinton voting location.
Then the duplicate roster from the HRC would be shredded and thrown away, along >with all the Bernie Sanders ballots that had
been replaced. That way the number of people who voted (on the >remaining roster) still matches the number of ballots. This is
why so many states reported a "lower than expected voter turnout".
Seth Rich, who was responsible for the app that helped voters find their polling places, did not realize that there were two
sets of polling places until he himself went to vote. He lived in Washington DC, which voted at the end of the primary season,
a week after Clinton had already been declared the winner. I believe he discovered it then, and had started asking questions about
why the polling places on Hillary's website didn't match the ones on the DC website.
But even if he didn't say a word to anybody, it would have been dangerous to let him live. He would have >figured it out sooner
or later -- and he would have reported it when he did."
Seems a straight Machiavellian operation. Murder the young insider, Seth Rich, that leaked the emails to Assange's Wikileaks
and then blame it on an enemy that none can fact check on. DNC= Deep National Control.
It wasn't yesterday but it was determined to be suicide by train...because a brilliant attorney
could not think of any easier way to commit suicide than throw himself in front of a moving train.
I can forsee a number of FBI agents also being hit by trains in the near future."
If they've had the proper training they won't be standing near the track or watching the train
as it approaches. If they've had the proper training, the person who tries to push them will go
under the train.
Martial arts, firearms, pursuit and evasive driving, general situational awareness - all part
of FBI training. Not as easy as bumping a lawyer or journalist.
I've never understood people who stand toes to the line when a train enters the station. You
know it's going to stop, so what's the rush? Situational Awareness demands that you stand well
back from any potential danger, near an exit, facing the entrance, etc.
Police and military are well aware of these principles - even in defensive driving you have
the slogan "where is the present danger?" Walk facing oncoming traffic, step out and away from
dark doorways, back alleys, bridge pillars etc.
Take the stairs sometimes, take the elevator other times - drive to work one route, drive a
different route home - mix them up. Take a taxi, get out at a random location and take a bus the
rest of the way. Eat at different restaurants at different times. Do not establish a pattern.
At all times carry a firearm.
These principles should be part of basic lawyer training, especially when taking on dangerous
cases. Same goes for journalists. There are professional courses that deal with these subjects.
Take one.
Whatever your goals in life, you can't achieve them if you don't survive. Last night I passed
a fatal traffic accident where it was obvious the person turning left was killed by someone running
a red light. Don't move off on the green right away.... pause and look around. That person is
dead because he didn't follow that basic rule. So much for his life goals.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but maybe someone who doesn't know will read this and it will
help them survive. As the Donald said, it's all about winning and you can't win if you don't survive.
"... "The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign - both through the support Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated, more affluent voters - has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Once a class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and, importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income" ..."
"Democrats' Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S." [The
Intercept].
The party left me
"The larger conclusion from the data is that the Trump campaign - both through the support
Trump generates among working-class whites and the opposition he generates among better educated,
more affluent voters - has accelerated the ongoing transformation of the Democratic Party.
Once a
class-based coalition, the party has become an alliance between upscale well-educated whites and,
importantly, ethnic and racial minorities, many of them low income"
FITRAKIS: Well one of the obvious things in this election was the visible hijacking of Bernie Sanders
voters. Bernie brought in what political scientists would call an asymmetrical entrance of new voters.
He went out and got a lot of people that hadn�t voted previously and at first emerged in New York
City, in Brooklyn where you had 126 thousand people. Overwhelmingly new voters supporting Bernie
that were purged at the last second from the voting rolls. And that�s being investigated but it turned
out to be a clerk said to have Republican leanings. But just prior to the purge, the daughter of
a Clinton super delegate had bought property from her. A million and a half dollars over the street
value that wasn�t even being listed. So at least it calls into question, whether it was an old fashioned
Tammany Hall bribe for purging voters.
So it�s what me and my co-author Harvey [Wasserman] call
vote stripping, right? I think before this is all through the leaks by the Democratic National Committee,
you�ll find that somebody had access to those databases and were targeting the Bernie people to purge
them.
NOOR: And can you talk about what the tactics were that were used in order to target these Bernie
supporters and as youre saying, discount their votes?
FITRAKIS: Well, you simply purge them from the voting rolls. And that can be done in a variety of
ways depending upon the state. In most states people dont realize it but you privatize with companies,
the voter databases. And also you have often these poll books. Many of them are electronic that are
also created by proprietary companies.
So the US is the only democracy in the world that allows private for profit partisan companies
those that actually make contributions as did Dominion, the remnants of [Depolled] that went out
of business for worldwide fraud following the 04 election and Hart Intercivic. So Hart Intercivic
and Dominion both made contributions to the Clinton foundation. So you wonder, when a candidates
running for president, why are voting machine companies making donations to their campaigns?
So we allow these private, for-profit partisan companies to count our vote, to set our databases
with secret proprietary software that nobody can look at. It violates every principle of transparency.
And the only person on a high level willing to talk about this is Jimmy Carter, who says to Der Spiegel
that America has a dysfunctional democracy and that we dont meet minimum standards of transparency.
... ... ...
So all the evidence says were the absolute worst. But youve got this enculturation. Youve got
two parties and both historically corporate capitalists parties, particularly since the Koch brothers
decided we needed a DLC following the 84 election that they wanted a corporate wing of the Republican
Party and they got that in 1992 in the form of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, which were both DLC people.
Two corporate capitalist free trade parties. People wouldnt even, many people think Sanders was very
progressive and he was and he spoke as a democratic socialist.
But Jerry Brown in 1992 called for a 50% cut in the U.S. military. I mean, thats territory. But George
Herbert Walker Bush actually talked about a peace dividend. We dont even talk anymore about nearly
half of the money on planet earth beings spent in the U.S. military. And weve got soldier arguably
or advisers in 181 out of 203 nations no one wants to say in great detail. And Sanders was touching
on all these issues that that appears to be imperialism.
But these the Stein campaign has enormous room to actually talk about what is happening in the United
States. She asked people on the stage at this convention actually used the correct term, imperialism.
And they actually do talk about a rigged election system. Because its systematically rigged when
you bring these private contractors in and then they say its a computer glitch. In 2004 [D Bolt]
two weeks before the election, accidentally glitched 10,000 voters in the city of Cleveland who were
going to vote 95% for John Kerry.
I dont believe those are glitches. I believe private contractors in this privatization has allowed
big money to come in in the form of the corporation. And theres an old axiom, theres not much money
in counting vote but theres a lot of money in the voting results.
Last month Seth Rich, a data analyst who worked for the DNC, was shot near his home in Washington DC. He was on the
phone to his girlfriend when it happened. Police were called to the scene and discovered the young man's body at roughly
4.20am. It was reported that Rich was "covered in bruises", shot "several times" and "at least once in the back".
[Rich's] hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and
yet they never took anything."
On August 9th Julian Assange gave an interview on Dutch television in which he seemed to imply that Rich's death was
politically motivated, and perhaps suggest he had been a source for the DNC e-mail leak:
That same day wikileaks tweeted that they were offering a $20,000 dollar reward for information on the killing of Mr
Rich.
These are the facts of the case, so far. And they are undisputed.
I'm not going to take a position on the motive for Mr Rich's killing, or possible suspects. But I do want to point
out the general level of media silence. Take these facts and change the names – imagine Trump's email had been hacked,
and then a staffer with possible ties to wikileaks was inexplicably shot dead. Imagine this poor young man had been a
Kremlin whistleblower, or a Chinese hacker, or an Iranian blogger.
If this, as yet unsolved, murder had ties to anyone other than Hillary Clinton, would it be being so ritually and
rigourously ignored by the MSM?
Seth was bruised, and shot twice in the back; there was no robbery. Former Clinton partner James MacDougall was
separated from his heart medication by prison guards; he died in solitary confinement.
And these suspicious deaths aren't connected? Who do they think they're kidding? We weren't all born stupid! Is
this a massive cover up? You bet it is, and we're eventually going to find out who ordered those killings!
The Washington Post said, "Nothing was taken, but robbery has not been ruled out????"
What does that mean? If
nothing was taken, then there is no robbery. Who wrote this for the Washington Post? Is English their native
language?
Julian Assange did not say Rich was a source. It is highly unlikely Rich was a source, I can't see Wikileaks
revealing a source regardless of circumstance. Wikileaks obviously have information pointing to the idea that this
was a politically motivated killing. He is concerned that this, in turn will lead to all dissidents being
frightened to stand up and speak out.
Maybe wikileaks doesn't know who their source was. The DNC authenticated the e-mails by their response, then
they float the "Russia influencing US elections narrative" to distract from Seth's murder.
Has there be ANY
evidence that Russia was behind the hack? Where did that rumer start?? WikiLeaks has a vested interest in
Seth's murder being solved because they don't want people being afraid to give them information, so I
understand them offering a reward, even if he wasn't their source, once the rumors started, they wouldn't want
to scare off the real source, or futur sources.
http://www.prosewestand.org
Don't be afraid! The "Problem" will not come after you because True Americans are watching every political
detail and the Problem knows that! If common people start dying for their free speech–many American's are
waiting for a reason to make a stand against the Problem, their constituency and their conspiracies! If you
think about it, some of the press is helping the Problem take away your free speech as well! This is not going
unnoticed. CNN is the worst conspirator out there!!
The Problem is afraid of Donald Trump because he will
shake up their house! Mrs. Clinton and the press want to put you in politically-correct bondage experienced in
much of the world. Those countries are ruled by their Problem and worse. The only way to maintain the balance
of powers in America is that True Americans exercise their constitutional leverage with free speech! Exercise
it freely every day!
In this day and age any unprotected informant should have a concealed carry permit and a gun! I will refrain
from getting into the 2nd Amendment discussion–may not be appropriate for this discussion ..
No matter how it turns out, my condolences to the family of Seth Rich
Also, around the same time of Rich Seth and Shawn Lucas deaths, Victor Thorn, who wrote at least 20
anti-Clinton books, supposedly committed suicide. Makes one wonder what is really going on
So many theories and those, who appear to want to profit. This young man is dead with an on going investigation.
Given his connection whatever verdict is reached will be a whitewash, can we blame those who disbelieve? A history
of victims with throats cut, gunshot wounds to the back, judged as suicides or bizarrely as natural causes? We are
surrounded by the most callous whose trade is 'the good of society', are we to be a part of that? Whatever the
motive a lost life and decimated family cannot be used for gain, whether it be ratings, publicity or a
confirmation of ones own theories.
the road to the clinton power regime is littered with bodies. vince foster and ron brown. and more recently john
ashe and shawn lucas. add seth rich to the list. good luck if you work for the dnc or in her campaign. the
clintons are completely corrupt and morally bankrupt.
The Clinton rumors have been around for over 20 years. Clintons had nothing to do with this. He was probably
involved in something deeper. There are no missing bodies. Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and
Ken Starr are all still around and they would be the ones to go. Get a clue. No one's missing and Foster
suffered from severe depression. Do some research.
The lead investigator, Manuel Rodriguez, resigned from the case because when he followed the leads that
clearly showed MURDER he found HIMSELF investigated! Here, read his resignation letter:
http://www.dcdave.com/article5/MiguelRodriguezLetter.htm
Quick quote (USPP stands for US Park Police. THAT is who had jurisdiction on the possible murder of a United
States politician. The Park Police):
(10) the existing FBI interview reports and USPP interview reports do not accurately reflect witness
statements; (11) four emergency medical personnel identified, having refreshed their recollection with
new photographic evidence, trauma each had observed on Foster's right neck area; and (12) blurred and
obscured blow-ups of copies of (polaroid [sic] and 35mm) photographs have been offered and utilized.
After uncovering this information, among other facts, my own conduct was questioned and I was internally
investigated.
All of those people you mentioned were constantly in yhe public eye. In fact, they've been household names
for over 20 years. If they were to die "mysteriously," it would shoot up too many red flags and would make
it a lot easier to connect the dots to the Clintons. They might have wanted these people to disappear, but
it would have been way too risky to make that happen. .. which is why some of them went out of their ways to
remain relevant. As far as the murdered individuals are concerned I think you should consider this fact.
During the course of a very lengthy political career, it's entirely possible for one or two people to die of
unnatural, non disease related causes, but when the death toll surpasses 50 and is still counting, that just
might be the smoke from a fire raging out of control. Hence, the so called conspiracy theories.
Please keep this brutal murder in the spotlight. Julian isn't offering $20.000 without an inkling it's tied to
the Clinton's campaign.
The press are too busy destroying trump.
It's rather scary.
Is Ecuador some kind of Shangri La anarchist freedom republic or
"The administration of President Rafael Correa has expanded state control over media and civil society and
abused its power to harass, intimidate, and punish critics. In 2015, thousands of people participated in public
demonstrations against government policies, and security forces on multiple occasions responded with excessive
force. Abuses against protesters, including arbitrary arrests, have not been adequately investigated."
I was being sarcastic. Assange was supposed to be some way out there anarchist, anti capitalist hacker. He
might have been before he was busted and 'pardoned' from a 10 year prison sentence in Australia.
"In 1991,
at the age of 20, Assange and some fellow hackers broke into the master terminal of Nortel, the Canadian
telecom company. He was caught and pleaded guilty to 25 charges; six other charges were dropped. Citing
Assange's "intelligent inquisitiveness," the judge sentenced him only to pay the Australian state a small
sum in damages".
A crazy hasbaranik has landed! 'Human Rights Watch, in my very firm opinion, are a rabble of mostly
Judeofascist hypocrites who work hand in glove with the US regime to blackguard and vilify states targeted for
regime change for attempting to create decent societies for their people. I wouldn't cross the street to piss
on them if they were on fire.
"But the group ran in to problems even before WikiLeaks was launched. The organisers approached John Young, who
ran another website that posted leaked documents, Cryptome, and asked him to register the WikiLeaks website in his
name. Young obliged and was initially an enthusiastic supporter but when the organisers announced their intention
to try and raise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money could only come from the CIA or George
Soros. Then he walked away.
"WikiLeaks is a fraud," he wrote in an email when he quit. "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign
against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." Young then leaked all of his email
correspondence with WikiLeak's founders, including the messages to Ellsberg."
Wikileaks pretty plainly started as a US tool to attack the likes of China, but then Assange may or may not
have gone 'off reservation', so he was set up by US stooge regime Sweden, in the usual blatant fashion. And
Assange's little buddies at the Guardian cess-pool turned against him with Old Testament fury, in particular
unleashing their pack of feminazi Harpies to vilify him. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.
Wikileaks was created to foment internal trouble in the Middle East states and trigger the Arab Spring. It's
basically the NSA's own conspiracy generator.
elenits:
Tried to "like" your post, but for some reason I can only reply, and face the login screen when I try
to "like." Loved the comment. Twang! (I'm using that!)
Killing it! It seems more and more like Trump's the plant, huh? A true know-nothing that can ONLY do what his
advisors tell him to. And the Trump election is likely to bring whatever Americans can muster up as a race war
into being (comment directed at the fact everybody's fluoridated to the gills these days and likely UNABLE to
really riot). I think the controllers really, really, really want that.
My GUT told me all this about Assange
when he first appeared. Same thing with "please-employ-encryption-so-we-know-who-to-watch" Snowden.
Encryption's just about the FIRST thing I was interested in when I bought my first laptop, so the LAW barring
encryption past a certain strength on the open market was one of the first things I found out about! Whatever
encryption you can get is hacked. Period.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard is in the forefront of the Clinton exposure:
Wikipedia:
"During his time as the Sunday Telegraph's Washington, D.C. bureau chief in the early 1990s, Evans-Pritchard
became known for his controversial stories about President Bill Clinton, the 1993 death of Vincent Foster, and
the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
He is the author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories
(1997) which was published by conservative publishing firm Regnery Publishing.[1] In this book, he elaborates
on assertions that the Oklahoma City bombing was a sting operation by the FBI that went horribly wrong, that
ATF agents were warned against reporting to work in the Murrah Building the morning of the attack, and that the
Justice Department subsequently engaged in a cover-up.[2]
Coverage of US politics
During his time in Washington, his stories often attracted the ire of the Clinton administration, and on
Evans-Pritchard's departure from Washington in 1997, a White House aide was quoted in George saying, "That's
another British invasion we're glad is over. The guy was nothing but a pain in the ass". His efforts in
ferreting out the witness, Patrick Knowlton, whose last name had been spelled "Nolton" in the Park Police
report on Foster's death, resulted eventually in a lawsuit by Knowlton against the FBI and the inclusion of
Knowlton's lawyer's letter as an appendix to Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death.[3] In his book,
Evans-Pritchard responded vigorously to White House charges against him.
It's hard to overstate the amount of caution we should all display with this story, but it's too newsworthy to ignore.
It starts
with this interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange where he brings up
murdered DNC staffer,
Seth Rich, unprompted.
Here's the juicy part:
ASSANGE: Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27 year
old that works for the DNC, he was shot in the back. Murdered, uh just a few weeks ago, uh, for unknown reasons as he was walking
down the street in Washington. So...
INTERVIEWER: That was, that was just a robbery I believe. Wasn't it?
ASSANGE: No. There's no finding. So...
INTERVIEWER: What are you suggesting? What are you suggesting?
ASSANGE: I'm suggesting our sources take risks and they uh, become concerned, uh to see things occurring, like that.
INTERVIEWER: Was he one of your sources then? I mean...
ASSANGE: We don't comment on who our sources are.
INTERVIEWER: Then why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
ASSANGE: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. And our sources are ... you know... our
sources face serious risks. That's why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.
Then comes the news that Wikileaks is offering a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the capture of Rich's murderer.
Dr. Holland also gets the endocrinology wrong (hope she's got it right in
her book) when she refers to estrogen a "stress hormone that helps a woman be
resilient during her fertile years."
Stress hormones are part of the "flight or fight" response, and the major
stress hormones include
cortisol and epinephrine. Stress hormones can be released rapidly by the
body in response to a threat of some kind (running the gamut from a broken toe
to reading an article on how hormones make or break a woman's ability to be
president). This is not estrogen. Estrogen thickens the lining of the uterus,
affects breast tissue, and of course (like most hormones) has a multitude of
effects everywhere in the body. It is not, however, a stress hormone. It may
be able to counteract oxidative stress in some tissues, but that doesn't make
it a stress hormone).
The major source of estrogen before menopause is the developing egg and how
far the egg is in the cycle is what governs the release of estrogen, not stress.
The female endocrine system is just not built to churn out large amounts of
estrogen in response to stress. Also, girls don't have estrogen before puberty
so it would be a pretty poor evolutionary design for a stress hormones to only
kick in at puberty. Bad luck if you get chased by a saber-toothed tiger at the
age of eight!
... ... ...
Postmenopausal women are not biologically primed to handle stress any more
or less than premenopausal women. Hillary Clinton's hormones have nothing to
do with her qualifications, and I find any connection between the two, whether
well-intentioned or simply a book plug, an insult.
To say a woman's hormones are in some way related to her fitness to be president
then also means at some time you think she is less fit to be president. You
can't have it both ways.
There is no wisdom in menopause. There is wisdom, and then there is menopause.
All I care about is Ms. Clinton's wisdom, and that's all you should care about
too.
Jennifer Gunter is an obstetrician-gynecologist and author of
The Preemie Primer. She blogs at her self-titled site,
Dr. Jen Gunter.
Hillary Clinton reportedly has chronic health issues that may interfere with
the presidency, according to one political insider. The 68-year-old presumptive
Democratic nominee has never been too open about her medical history, but the
coughing fits alone may be enough to indicate that Clinton has some
serious health problems. Radar Online issued a report on Wednesday
that has an insider close to Hillary Clinton saying the presidential hopeful
is facing "mounting health issues."
Several coughing fits have been caught on camera as Hillary Clinton has campaigned
across the nation for the 2016 primary elections and caucuses. The Washington
Post reported in April that Clinton had
two public coughing fits in one week, leaving Democratic constituents wondering
if she's even healthy enough to become president. Actress Susan Sarandon even
said in May during an interview with Larry King that she won't endorse Hillary
Clinton as a presidential candidate because "she may have health issues."
... ... ...
In April, an article published on
KevinMD.com outlined some concerns about Hillary Clinton's health records,
but said that Clinton's health risks aren't anything that should disqualify
her from being president. However, "they are certainly something to ponder."
"... I know a bit about Russian people and one thing I know is this; the U.S. is ignorant of their culture, values and intelligence; a gross miscalculation of an adversary. ..."
"... The neo-cons are crazy (like rabid dogs) but not overtly suicidal, I think (not sure actually). ..."
Stephen Cohen got it. He got shut down. And the talking head at CNN made a note never to have
this guy on again. CNN's just had all the conversation - and then some - that they ever want to
have with this guy. We'll never see Stephen Cohen on TNC TV again.
Yes, both. I'm well aware of the long and somewhat "bumpy" history going back decades (many)
and see this as a mutual joust against a common enemy/hegemon. Russia is well aware of it's vast
area and consequent resources making it a prize like no other on the planet.
It's Russia's curse and wealth at the same time. It's there's to lose if they play badly.
I know a bit about Russian people and one thing I know is this; the U.S. is ignorant of their
culture, values and intelligence; a gross miscalculation of an adversary.
Together they (PRC and Russia) are the perfect foil to the U.S. aggression.
The neo-cons are crazy (like rabid dogs) but not overtly suicidal, I think (not sure actually).
"... The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process. ..."
"... Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account." ..."
"... At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America. ..."
"... Unlike the Defense Department's Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA's headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police force and post office. ..."
"... One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a "capability for building a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time." Another operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing "millions of implants" - malware - in computer systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks. ..."
"... Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying and cyberwarfare. ..."
"... The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America ..."
National attention is focused on Russian eavesdroppers' possible targeting of U.S. presidential candidates
and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Yet, leaked top-secret National Security Agency
documents show that the Obama administration has long been involved in major bugging operations against
the election campaigns -- and the presidents -- of even its closest allies.
The United States is,
by far, the world's
most aggressive
nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping
on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers
in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new
is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.
There is a strange irony in this. Russia, if it is actually involved in the hacking of the computers
of the Democratic National Committee, could be attempting to influence a U.S. election by leaking
to the American public the falsehoods of its leaders. This is a tactic Washington used against the
Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War.
In the 1950s, for example, President Harry S Truman created the Campaign of Truth to reveal to
the Russian people the "Big Lies" of their government. Washington had often discovered these lies
through eavesdropping and other espionage.
Today, the United States has morphed from a Cold War, and in some cases a hot war, into a cyberwar,
with computer coding replacing bullets and bombs. Yet the American public manages to be "shocked,
shocked" that a foreign country would attempt to conduct cyberespionage on the United States.
NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its
last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA
contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's
leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peńa Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peńa won
that election and is now Mexico's president.
The NSA identified Peńa's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can
filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The
technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it
as "a repeatable and efficient" process.
Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor,
President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to
President Felipe Calderon's public email account."
At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection
Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world.
It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional
eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San
Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America.
Unlike the Defense Department's Pentagon, the headquarters of the cyberspies fills an entire secret
city. Located in Fort Meade, Maryland, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, Maryland, NSA's
headquarters consists of scores of heavily guarded buildings. The site even boasts its own police
force and post office.
And it is about to grow considerably bigger, now that the NSA cyberspies have merged with the
cyberwarriors of U.S. Cyber Command, which controls its own Cyber Army, Cyber Navy, Cyber Air Force
and Cyber Marine Corps, all armed with state-of-the-art cyberweapons. In charge of it all is a four-star
admiral, Michael S. Rogers.
Now under construction inside NSA's secret city, Cyber Command's new $3.2- billion headquarters
is to include 14 buildings, 11 parking garages and an enormous cyberbrain - a 600,000-square-foot,
$896.5-million supercomputer facility that will eat up an enormous amount of power, about 60 megawatts.
This is enough electricity to power a city of more than 40,000 homes.
In 2014, for a cover story in Wired and a PBS documentary, I spent three days in Moscow
with Snowden, whose last NSA job was as a contract cyberwarrior. I was also granted rare access to
his archive of documents. "Cyber Command itself has always been branded in a sort of misleading way
from its very inception," Snowden told me. "It's an attack agency. … It's all about computer-network
attack and computer-network exploitation at Cyber Command."
The idea is to turn the Internet from a worldwide web of information into a global battlefield
for war. "The next major conflict will start in cyberspace," says one of the secret NSA documents.
One key phrase within Cyber Command documents is "Information Dominance."
The Cyber Navy, for example, calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. The Cyber Army is providing
frontline troops with the option of requesting "cyberfire support" from Cyber Command, in much the
same way it requests air and artillery support. And the Cyber Air Force is pledged to "dominate cyberspace"
just as "today we dominate air and space."
Among the tools at their disposal is one called Passionatepolka, designed to "remotely brick network
cards." "Bricking" a computer means destroying it – turning it into a brick.
One such situation took place in war-torn Syria in 2012, according to Snowden, when the NSA attempted
to remotely and secretly install an "exploit," or bug, into the computer system of a major Internet
provider. This was expected to provide access to email and other Internet traffic across much of
Syria. But something went wrong. Instead, the computers were bricked. It
took down the Internet across the country for a period of time.
While Cyber Command executes attacks, the National Security Agency seems more interested in tracking
virtually everyone connected to the Internet, according to the documents.
One top-secret operation, code-named TreasureMap, is designed to have a "capability for building
a near real-time interactive map of the global Internet. … Any device, anywhere, all the time." Another
operation, codenamed Turbine, involves secretly placing "millions of implants" - malware - in computer
systems worldwide for either spying or cyberattacks.
Yet, even as the U.S. government continues building robust eavesdropping and attack systems, it
looks like there has been far less focus on security at home. One benefit of the cyber-theft of the
Democratic National Committee emails might be that it helps open a public dialogue about the dangerous
potential of cyberwarfare. This is long overdue. The
possible security problems for the U.S. presidential election in November are already being discussed.
Yet there can never be a useful discussion on the topic if the Obama administration continues
to point fingers at other countries without admitting that Washington is engaged heavily in cyberspying
and cyberwarfare.
In fact, the United States is the only country ever to launch an actual cyberwar -- when the Obama
administration used a cyberattack to destroy thousands of centrifuges, used for nuclear enrichment,
in Iran. This was an illegal act of war, according to the Defense Department's own definition.
Given the news reports that many more DNC emails are waiting to be leaked as the presidential
election draws closer, there will likely be many more reminders of the need for a public dialogue
on cybersecurity and cyberwarfare before November.
(James Bamford is the author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the
Eavesdropping on America. He is a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine.)
However, there are a significant number of voters who supported Sen. Bernie
Sanders during the Democratic primary who now say they will either vote for
Dr. Stein, Mr. Trump, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson or not at all–in that
order.
Below is an interactive chart based on more than 400 responses conducted
last night (7/30/2016) via our Internet panel and live interviews. It provides
cross tab data to determine the presidential preference for primary voters based
on the candidate they voted for in the primaries. While these results are particularly
strong for Dr. Stein–there were also an unusually high number of 18 to 29 year-old
samples–the total results include the 7-day rolling average, are weighted based
on demographics from the U.S. Census Current Population Survey and show Mr.
Trump ahead 46.8% to 42.2%.
The sub-sample shown in the chart paints pretty much the same picture as
the overall result. The polling data indicate Mr. Trump did a better job winning
over those Republicans who did not vote for him in the Republican presidential
primary (88%), as well as maintain those who did (97.8%). Mrs. Clinton is maintaining
94.4% of Democratic voters who cast their primary ballot for her, but less than
half (47.7%) of those who voted for Sen. Sanders say they are certain they will
be on board.
Now to Dr. Stein's bump. Again, we do not believe Mrs. Clinton will only
end up with half of Sen. Sanders' voters. Last night was an unusual response.
But we are saying many, many voters are very, very angry.
Nearly 16% of Sanders supporters say they will vote for Mr. Trump, but more
than a quarter are at least giving Dr. Stein a serious look. Sanders' voters
also have a largely favorable view of Dr. Stein (56%), compared to only 33%
who say the same for Mrs. Clinton. Not surprisingly, these voters are markedly
more likely to say they don't believe the federal government acts in the interest
of the people. Another 5.6% of her support comes from the small pool of voters
who supported another candidate in the Democratic presidential primary.
Whether Dr. Stein can maintain that level of support is uncertain and worth
debating as we collect and digest more polling data in the upcoming days and
weeks. But what isn't up for debate is the fact that a significant number of
Sen. Sanders' voters have extremely negative views of Mrs. Clinton and are not
quite ready to just suck it up and move on.
"... Similar to the styling of the British vote to leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit. ..."
"... After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw. ..."
There's a push to make green the new blue. As some Bernie Sanders supporters
are jumping ship from the democratic party, opting instead to vote for green
party candidate Jill Stein.
Similar to the styling of the British vote to
leave the European Union, they're calling the movement #DemExit.
Some Sanders supporters see the choice between the Democratic and Republican
presidential nominees as simple: "Whether we get Hillary or we get Trump, we
get just as dangerous on either side just-in different ways," Sanders supporter
Erik Rydberg said.
After the Democratic National Convention brought some Sanders supporters
into the fold, others are refusing to settle viewing the leaked emails, indicating
the DNC's preference for Hillary Clinton over Sanders as the final straw.
Progressives who are fed up with the Democratic leadership's adherence to the status quo are
calling for a major #DemExit on July 29. However, progressive groups, such as Black Men for
Bernie, are urging voters to stay in the party until they have a chance to vote in their states'
primaries, especially if they live in closed or semi-closed primary states.
Abstaining from #DemExit until after state and local primaries is especially important for Florida,
which has a closed primary. On August 30, Professor and legal expert Tim Canova has a chance to unseat
Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, whose tenure as the head of the Democratic
Party has been fraught with controversy and more recently, allegations of election fraud and rigging.
A mass exodus, therefore, could sabotage progressives' own agenda to elect officials who are challenging
incumbents and establishment candidates. As of now, 23 states and territories have local and state
primaries up until September 13, so it is imperative for current members of the Democratic party
to stay until they've voted and then commit to #DemExit.
"... Why do we see such an orchestrated attempt to preemptively accuse Russia of potentially manipulating U.S. voting? This without ANY evidence that Russia ever has or would attempt to do so? Are there already plans for such manipulations that need a plausible foreign culprit as cover up story? Or is there a color revolution in preparation to eventually disenfranchise the election winner? ..."
"... "hacking", or rather, snooping and leaking, is business as usual... remember when the Sanders and Clinton campaigns were fighting over DNC server data? ..."
"... The source of the DNC email leak is irrelevant. The Orwellian chant "Putin bad; US good!" is the point of the whole thing, and the media is just a bullhorn for the party/parties. ..."
"... But I do look forward to the show when the emails Trump referred to are released. What is Hillary afraid of? it's not like nobody knows what she's done... and wants to do next. ..."
"... the United States has been a failed state from the perspective of voting integrity from at least 2000. The lunatics are running the asylum here and we voters are only allowed to participate as a hollow form of placation. ..."
"... Our famous "free press," so totally controlled by Big Corporations. Always looking for a way to try to persuade the public that any political and social actions is bad and of no importance. ACK! ..."
"... My immediate thought was of the White House managed meetings with mayors of cities where Occupy was very much not "crushed," and how they coordinated their attacks by knocking down tents, dumped books into dupsters, which were part of the free lending library in some cities, and forcing people out of sites long occupied with the persuasion of threatened force and physical harm. ..."
"... we know the neocons intend to cheat to get Hillary elected. Sounds like a warning to Russia to keep out of the way or else. ..."
"... This video below shows that the pressure of the Russian hacking lies worked on Trump. What kind of genius is that b ? Trump: Putin has no respect for the US. Starts at 1min 20 sec : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=riuduXz5Y2I Trump on Russia finding Hillays emails : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa2B5zHfbQ ..."
"... If Trump is such a genius then why would he make so many idiotic and contradictory statements, and then cave it so easily into pressure of lies like this against Russia ? Immediately antagonizing Russia. ..."
"... The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it. It runs right into his 'America First' that the same people have been complaining about. In the absence of hard evidence, actually shared with the public, the Putin connection will eventually fall apart. ..."
"... Bruce Schneier has been having a neolibcon bias for years with a blind spot for NSA activities. I stopped reading his stupid blog, with little to no added value regarding security news, when it became too obvious. ..."
"... 'The only reason not to have paper copies is to allow fraud.' ..."
"... Very well and concisely put. Except for the 'copies' bit. The only reason not to have paper ballots ..."
"... To me the answer seems obvious: voters registered and elections administered, ballots tallied and stored at the precinct level. There are about 175,000 precincts in the USA, each composed of 1,000 to 2,000 people. A workable size for real, participatory democracy, the basis for all constituencies - municipal, county, state, federal - erected upon them. First come the people , then come our governments. ..."
"... Russia told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party emails bordered on "total stupidity" and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. ..."
"... Michael Connell - who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids - was a computer networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which he identified Connell as a principal witness. ..."
"... the missing deleted emails would most likely also reveal the innards of the Clinton family Foundation. Not really missing. It would be a great disappointment if copies are not in a few 3 letter agencies. ..."
"... Great George Carlin probably did not know many actual names of the "big owners" when he wrote ..."
"... ...The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice you don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. ..."
"... They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying, to get what they want Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking... ..."
"... The perfidy of Manly is that he does not say how to _prevent_ possible breaches, but creates perception of "Russians having access to everything" instead. So he does not really care about solving the problem, but about maintaining the notion that the problem magically persist. ..."
"... "As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours," he said. "The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out what it's all about." ..."
"... The DNC was "hacked "by some of Killary's Israeli chums/clients... Lets look at the proffered "evidence" for a Russian Hack.. The hackers "seem to have been following a schedule of "Russian" holdiays... Half (or more) of the people in Israel follow that same schedule of holdiays... ..."
"... Article on Gen. Breedlove: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/breedlove-network-sought-weapons-deliveries-for-ukraine-a-1104837.html Defense contractors, think tanks, and Breedlove feared Congress would cut U.S. troop levels in Europe. ..."
"... desperate ..."
"... The Americans are beginning to tell themselves another 'real' war will solve their problems ... look at the DNC convention ... and it'll be OK because it will be another war 'over there'. It won't be over there, it'll be right here no matter where that is. ..."
"... Bruce Schneier used to charge the Chinese in every hacking incident, I guess there is now a "pivot" in the propaganda world. ..."
"... It is obvious that our elections are hacked: Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004, and now Brooklyn, Nevada, Arizona, California and other locations this year. They were hacked by our own crooks who would never allow Rooskies to muscle in on the action. Few polling stations in crowded districts, removing names from voter lists, private companies contracted to "count", voter suppression ID laws, jailing of voting populations, gerrymandering, etc. The Rooskies can only bring a rubber chicken to a gun fight. ..."
"... I have said many times: "We must abolish election machines, such as voting computers. If they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as well. Which can we truly afford?" ..."
"... I can't for the life of me understand why so many hawks in the State Dept and elsewhere are sooooo afraid of Putin. They still mad he nationalized oil companies? ..."
"... Just suppose the emails of the DNC were released by the Clinton Machine, what a creative tactic, and certainly there is no reason to doubt that...a great media firestorm ensues, DWS had to fall on her sword but quickly gets hoisted on the Clinton petard..as a campaign manager ..."
"... The evil that we face is an alternate philosophical position which rejects all the moral tenets of the world's 7 great religions. The goal is the rule of a tiny sect which imagines itself a godhead over humanity. ..."
The Clinton campaign and some pseudo experts assert that Russia is somehow guilty of hacking the
Democratic National Committee and of revealing DNC emails via Wikileaks. There is
zero hard evidence for that. The Clinton campaign also
claims that Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton's emails. That is also not the case.
But two "liberal" computer experts, who are taken serious in the security scene, now build on
those false assertions to say that Russia might manipulate voting machines in the November 9 elections.
It would do so, presumably, to change the vote count in favor of Trump.
That headline alone is already dumb. ANY hacker could target and manipulate the easy to deceive
voting machines - should those be connected to the Internet. Local administrators of such machines
can manipulate them any time.
Schneier is, untypically for him, in war mongering mode.
If the intelligence community has indeed ascertained that Russia is to blame, our government needs
to decide what to do in response. This is difficult because the attacks are politically partisan,
but it is essential. If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity,
this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that
we see and more subtle manipulations that we don't see.
The U.S. manipulates foreign elections all the time,
according to Bush administration
lawyer Jack Goldsmith. It may not feel nice to suddenly be the target of manipulation attempts instead
of the perpetrator, but manipulation attempts in elections are normal everywhere and no reason to
start a war or other "response" measures.
Schneier:
[W]e need to secure our election systems before autumn. If Putin's government has already used
a cyberattack to attempt to help Trump win, there's no reason to believe he won't do it again
- especially now that Trump is inviting the "help."
What a joke. Trump has not invited Russian "help" to manipulate voting computers. Trump also did
not ask Russia to "hack" the Clinton email sever. That server no longer exists. If the Clinton email-server
was secure, as Clinton asserts, and if the emails in question have been deleted, as Clinton also
asserts, how could Russia "hack" for them?
Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What does
she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should it
by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a part of
the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails. Trump then
made a joke in directing the request to Russia.
Trump did get the furious media "outrage" response he intended to get. He thereby ruined the PR
effect of the last night of the Democratic Convention. That was likely the sole intention of his
stunt and
again shows his marketing genius.
But back to the Schneier op-ed. That one is now joined
by
a piece at Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is like Schneier a famous person in the computer
scene. He quotes the Schneier piece and adds:
Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for
Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely
destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election).
The Doctorow sentence neglects, like Schneier, that the entities with the most obvious interest
and capabilities to manipulate U.S. voting machines are not foreign countries. U.S. presidential
candidates and their parties have much more at stake. The candidates and the money and interests
behind them have stronger motives as well as more potential to change the voting results.
Why do we see such an orchestrated attempt to preemptively accuse Russia
of potentially manipulating U.S. voting? This without ANY evidence that Russia ever has or would
attempt to do so? Are there already plans for such manipulations that need a plausible foreign culprit
as cover up story? Or is there a color revolution in preparation to eventually disenfranchise the
election winner?
Cory Doctorow also sees destabilization as a possible motive and outcome of voting manipulations.
Already back in March John Robb
warned of a scenario this fall in which election results come into serious doubt and where a
conflict over voting results escalates into a civil war.
I do not foresee such a scenario (yet). But should large scale voting manipulations take place,
and be blamed on Russia, more than a civil war enters the realm of possibilities.
The source of the DNC email leak is irrelevant. The Orwellian chant "Putin bad; US good!"
is the point of the whole thing, and the media is just a bullhorn for the party/parties.
The voting machine rumor is probably aimed at the actual corruption in some places that was designed
to favor republicans in swing states. (ironic!) watch them call for more honest verification this
time around.
But I do look forward to the show when the emails Trump referred to are released. What
is Hillary afraid of? it's not like nobody knows what she's done... and wants to do next.
For all intents and purposes, the United States has been a failed state from the perspective
of voting integrity from at least 2000. The lunatics are running the asylum here and we voters
are only allowed to participate as a hollow form of placation.
Our famous "free press," so totally controlled by Big Corporations. Always looking for a way
to try to persuade the public that any political and social actions is bad and of no importance.
ACK!
On Tuesday night, iirc, but could have been Wednesday, the discussion mentioned Occupy as a
failed political/social movement. PBS's Gwen Ifill said that it was "crushed by its own weight."
It was part of the MCM (Mainstream Corporate Media) declaring the Sanders' promoted political
revolution dead and nearly buried.
My immediate thought was of the White House managed meetings with mayors of cities where
Occupy was very much not "crushed," and how they coordinated their attacks by knocking down tents,
dumped books into dupsters, which were part of the free lending library in some cities, and forcing
people out of sites long occupied with the persuasion of threatened force and physical harm.
But her statement was part and parcel of how the actual left of any type is dismissed and disrespected
by the Corporatist Dems and their Repub allies.
The neo-cons realized how easy it was to rig the election in 2000 after which both sides do it.
Now it's down to who who rigs it best. It's a one-party state anyway, two cheeks on the same ass,
but every politician wants to be the one who does the telling not the told.
I think the neo-cons impeached Clinton to ruin the Democrat run because 9/11 was ready to go,
and they needed to be in power or they risked being uncovered by the security services of a Gore
White House. When the impeachment failed they had no choice but to go in and steal it, because
they'd have gone down for their treason. Look what it did to the world.
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the US intelligence authorities
are not ready to say who is responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee emails.
I do not think we are quite ready yet to make a call on attribution," Clapper stated
at the Aspen Security Forum.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Why not and when will he be ready? Oh never mind. If Schneier is so concerned the election
voting machines can be hacked -(Notice no mention of pre-programmed votes) - let's return to paper
ballots and pencils. And who counts the votes?
Oh wait... the Supreme Court may issue a decree to stop the count as they did on December 12,
2000.
In a desperate attempt for bs stupid assertion of Trumps genius, b refuses to give a link for
what Trump actually said. B also refuses to give us a sentenced quote from Trump. How weak.
This video below shows that the pressure of the Russian hacking lies worked on Trump. What
kind of genius is that b ?
Trump: Putin has no respect for the US. Starts at 1min 20 sec :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=riuduXz5Y2I
If Trump is such a genius then why would he make so many idiotic and contradictory statements,
and then cave it so easily into pressure of lies like this against Russia ? Immediately antagonizing
Russia.
Also if trump really understands how corrupt the US voting system is, then what kind of genius
would not hedge himself against that voting corruption surely to be done against Trump and for
Hitlery - by saying insanely incessant stupid moronic things that expose him to attacks.
Wouldn't you hedge yourself by keeping on core message and not dragging yourself back into
the pack with stupidity.
Trump said that Putin called Trump a genius, and pathetically that's all b needs to know.
The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people (even Democrats)
deep down, probably don't really believe it. It runs right into his 'America First' that the same
people have been complaining about. In the absence of hard evidence, actually shared with the
public, the Putin connection will eventually fall apart.
Trumps MO is to say something that generates a lot of outrage that dominates the news cycle
at opportune moments. He does this when there is something else he doesn't want you to pay attention
to. Remember when Trump University was in the news? He comes back with those statements about
the judge. Last night, you had the president, the vice-president among the heavy hitters - what
better time to pull a stunt like that? For a party that prides themselves as being the 'smart'
one, the Democrats have been remarkably slow in figuring this out.
Trump probably won't pull anything like this with Hillary - the thing with her is that the
more people see her, the less they like her - so let her have her hour of shouting a speech at
us.
For voting machine issues, watch the Stephen Spoonamore series on YouTube. Each segment is about
3-4 minutes. Think there are eight segments. The series is 10 years old but extremely timely.
Velvet Revolution Interviews Stephen Spoonamore (segment 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyEfovA404
THEN watch his 2008 series, search YouTube. Warning: Annoying white noise in background. His
solution to vote fraud specified in the later segments is ingenious. Spoonamore was the guy American
Express and major banks called when they are hacked.
A cyber attack has been given the status of a conventional military attack by NATO on
14th June in a major policy change that increases the likelihood of a world war against Russia.
Bruce Schneier has been having a neolibcon bias for years with a blind spot for NSA activities.
I stopped reading his stupid blog, with little to no added value regarding security news, when
it became too obvious.
PS: when will you remove the embedded links to google, yahoo, ...?
The democrats are warning loud and clear that Russia may hack the voting machines in favor of
Trump. In fact, they are preparing the terrain to use this argument in case Trump is elected.
To make such stupid statements, it shows that the dems are seriously worried that Hillary is quickly
loosing ground.
@27 cresty, 'The only reason not to have paper copies is to allow fraud.'
Very well and concisely put. Except for the 'copies' bit. The only reason not to have paper
ballots is to allow fraud.
To me the answer seems obvious: voters registered and elections administered, ballots tallied
and stored at the precinct level.
There are about
175,000 precincts in the USA, each composed of 1,000 to 2,000 people. A workable size for
real, participatory democracy, the basis for all constituencies - municipal, county, state, federal
- erected upon them. First come
the people , then
come our governments.
2004, not 2008. Obama and Dems won Ohio in 2008. The Republicans' computer expert in Ohio died
afterwards in a fishy small plane accident just as he was about to testify.
from Russia (with Love). Russia To US: "Sort Out Your Own Hacking Scandal; It Is Not Our Headache"
As the silly farce over whether Russia hacked the DNC continues, earlier today the Kremlin had
some harsh words for the US.
Russia told the United States on Thursday to get to the bottom of of its own hacking scandal.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said accusations of a Russian hand in hacking Democratic Party
emails bordered on "total stupidity" and were motivated by anti-Russian sentiment. Suggestions
of Russian involvement riled the Kremlin, which has categorically denied this and accused U.S.
politicians of seeking to play on Cold War-style U.S. fears of Moscow by fabricating stories for
electoral purposes.
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses into
others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours,"
he said.
"The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and find out
what it's all about."
"... Trump made a FOIA request for emails that, Hillary Clinton claims, have been deleted. What
does she fear about that? Trump asked Russia to give the deleted Clinton emails to the FBI, should
it by chance have a copy of them. Such a Freedom of Information Act request usually goes to a
part of the U.S. administration. But the Obama administration says it does not have those emails.
Trump then made a joke in directing the request to Russia ..."
What Clinton fears is that the deleted emails are emails related to the work she did (or supposedly
did) while she was US Secretary of State and therefore they would be proof that she violated federal
US laws on recordkeeping. Some of these emails might cast light on the 2012 Benghazi consulate
attack and whether she can be held partly responsible for the deaths of four Americans during
that attack.
Jessia @3. Schneier is an insider - Harvard and the US DoD. It is also ironic that he wrote a
book titled: Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.
If voter fraud is the criterion of a failed state (and why not), the US failed in 1960 when
John Kennedy not only stole the Democratic nomination through voter fraud in West Virginia but
also stole the general election through voter fraud in Illinois.
Tricky Dick Nixon was urged to contest the Illinois vote and contest the outcome of the election.
He pointedly refused to do so saying that a contested election would do more harm to the country
than allowing a fraudulent victory for JFK.
Well, it does appear the U.S. is in full Loon mode (my apologies to the bird). The Clinton campaign
is doing a fantastic job of deflection and distraction and the idiots are falling for it. It would
seem Russia's Pres. Putin is indeed omnipotent.
The missing Hitlary Killton's deleted emails would reveal most probably that the current war against
Libya, Syria, Iraq has been mostly her private endeavor (plus Petreaus, CIA, Raytheon) at the
request of her Bilderberg/City of London Crown Corporation masters, outside Obama's control.
@23 Thank you Noirette for that missing piece of the puzzle.
I forgot abut that in my reply on earlier thread.
The scenario deep state/global criminal cabal has been preparing against the US people and
the world would go like this:
Hitlary looses to Trump
Russia is blamed with fabricated evidence for rigging the election
civil unrest in incited (Israeli snipers shooting civilians at random + police trained
by the Israeli advisors brutalizes protesters)
hot spots in conflict zones (Turkey, Ukraine, Pribaltica) are set on fire - blamed on Russia
(Phillipines blamed on China)
nukes going off in Chicago
NATO considers "Russian cyber attack" as an act of war and responds
In order to avoid this at this point anybody who supports the Hell Bitch should be boycotted
and ostracized, including all the celebrities (who obviously pay their dues for their dark, secret
deals) not only that filth
Sarah Silverman and alike, who lower themselves to such a sewer level, also companies, local
politicians and so on...
Web guru was potential witness in Ohio voting fraud case
Shannon Connell of Madison says her brother Michael rarely talked about work. She knew he
ran an Ohio company called New Media Communications that set up websites for Republicans including
former President George H.W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. But it wasn't until after he died
last December, when the small plane he was piloting crashed, that she learned via the Internet
of his tie to a voter fraud case and to allegations that presidential adviser Karl Rove had
made threats against him.
"At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him
dead," says Shannon, a buyer for a local children's resale shop. "But as time goes on, it's
hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it."
A native of Illinois, Shannon moved to Madison in 2002, the same year as her sister, Mary
Jo Walker. Walker, a former Dane County Humane Society employee, has similar concerns about
their brother's death: "It doesn't seem right to me at all."
Michael Connell - who died at age 45, leaving a wife and four kids - was a computer
networking expert who lived near Akron. Last July 17, an attorney who's filed a federal civil
rights lawsuit alleging a conspiracy to rig elections in Ohio held a press conference at which
he identified Connell as a principal witness.
The attorney, Cliff Arnebeck of Columbus, Ohio, tells Isthmus he doesn't believe Connell
was engaged in criminal activity but may have been a "data-processing implementer" for those
who were. "I was told he was at the table when some criminal things were discussed."
A week after the press conference, on July 24, Arnebeck wrote U.S. Attorney General Michael
Mukasey seeking protection for Connell, whom he said had been "threatened" by Rove, a key player
in the campaigns of George W. Bush. Arenebeck says Connell was told through an intermediary
that unless he agreed to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife [and New Media
partner] faced prosecution for lobby law violations. There was no claim of a threat on Connell's
person.
Arnebeck was permitted to depose Connell last Nov. 3. The portion of this deposition that
dealt with the alleged threats was sealed, but Arnebeck is preparing a motion to make it all
public. He affirms that Connell denied any involvement in voter fraud, but thinks Rove still
had reason to regard him as a threat.
"The problem that Mike Connell represented is [he was] a guy of conscience," says Arnebeck.
"If it came right down to it, he would not commit perjury." Arnebeck "absolutely" would have
called Connell as a witness in his lawsuit.
Shannon and Mary Jo both say their brother, a devout Catholic, seemed upset in the weeks
before his death. Mary Jo feels he was "stressed out and depressed" on his birthday last November;
Shannon says he atypically did not respond to an email she'd sent.
On Dec. 19, Connell flew alone in his single-engine Piper Supercub from a small airport
near Washington, D.C. The plane crashed on its final approach to his hometown Akron-Canton
Airport, between two houses. The cause is still under investigation but is presumed accidental.
The blogosphere refuses to accept this. "Mike was getting ready to talk," writes one online
journalist who labels Connell a source. "He was frightened."
Going viral and encouraging disgruntled Democrats to leave the party in all states without
upcoming primaries. This does not mean that a percentage of these people won't still vote Democrat
in the general election but there is also an active effort coming from the Green Party to recruit
these people. Sanders very publicly leaving the Democrat Party to return to Independent was
very significant and a signal to his supporters to give the Demexit go sign. Many states have
a deadline of August 1st for pre-election party switches, so that leaves only a couple days
for many.
The interactive map and Demexit instruction page being circulated is here. As is customary
with the left, alot of work and coordination went into putting this together.
Sanders is an Independent in the Senate but also a member of the Democratic Party, according
to his spokesman, Michael Briggs.
Notice Biggs said member?
= = = =
the missing deleted emails would most likely also reveal the innards of the Clinton family
Foundation. Not really missing. It would be a great disappointment if copies are not in a few
3 letter agencies.
FBI investigates hacking of Democratic congressional group – sources
[.] Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid,
said the possibility of the DCCC being hacked was cause for great concern.
"Until proven otherwise, I would suggest that everyone involved with the campaign committee
operate under the assumption Russians have access to everything in their computer systems," Manley
said.
[. ] The disclosure of the DCCC breach is likely to further stoke concerns among Democratic
Party operatives, many of whom have acknowledged they fear further dumps of hacked files that
could harm their candidates. WikiLeaks has said it has more material related to the U.S. election
that it intends to release.[.]
= = = =
"They fear" Wikileaks intends to release the big one?
Great George Carlin probably did not know many actual names of the "big owners" when he wrote
...The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice
you don't.
You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the
important land. They own, and control the corporations. They've long since bought, and paid
for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their
back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the
news and information you get to hear.
They got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying, to get what they want Well,
we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll
tell you what they don't want they don't want a population of citizens capable of critical
thinking...
Blackstone is one of them, others being Fidelity, PIMCO, StateStreet...
Blackstone, the giant Wall Street private equity firm, will hold an invitation-only reception
before the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The event, at
the swanky Barnes Foundation art museum, includes the usual perks for attendees: free food,
drink, and complimentary shuttle buses to the final night of the convention.
What's unusual is that the host is precisely the kind of "shadow banker" that Hillary Clinton
has singled out as needing more regulation in her rhetoric about getting tough on Wall Street.
But Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Hamilton "Tony" James doesn't seem
the least bit intimidated...
... The head-scratcher here is that James runs a private equity firm, exactly the kind of
"shadow bank" that Clinton has derided as a scourge to the financial system. Shadow banks are
financial institutions that do bank-like activities (such as lending or investing for clients)
but aren't chartered as banks, existing outside of the traditional regulatory perimeter.
Clinton argued during the primaries with Bernie Sanders that they were more dangerous than
the big banks, because of the lack of scrutiny on their risk-taking. That was the linchpin
of her argument that Sanders's plan was too myopic, and thather plan, which sought to crack
down on shadow banking and deny it sources of funds, was more comprehensive.
James has not only actively engaged in defending the whole concept of shadow banking, he
created the original private equity trade group, formerly known as the Private Equity Council.
The group later quietly changed its name to the more innocuous-sounding American Investment
Council.
In 2014, James penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed where he called shadow banking an "Orwellian
term that can undermine critical thought." It was the regulated entities, not shadow banks,
that were "the source of almost all the systemic risk in the financial crisis," he wrote. James
explicitly sought to steer policymakers away from "regulations that undermine the many thousands
of companies and jobs that need market-based financing to survive and grow."
That term, "market-based financing," is a Tony James original. He prefers it because it
removes the more sinister connotations associated with the shadows. "Private equity sounds
bad, but shadow banking is worse," he told NPR.
Blackstone operates in leveraged buyouts, asset management, and real estate transactions.
It is the largest real estate private equity firm in the world, holding over $103 billion in
assets. After the housing bubble collapsed, Blackstone bought 43,000 single-family homes over
a two-year period, at one point buying more than $100 million worth of homes per week. They
converted most of these into rentals, becoming one of the largest landlords in the world.
Renters have sued Blackstone's real estate unit, Invitation Homes, for renting out homes
in shoddy condition. They've also been accused of jacking up rents to satisfy investors, charging
as high as 180 percent of the market rent value. Nevertheless, Blackstone plans to spin off
Invitation Homes with an initial public offering next year.
James's company also benefits from taking business lines from regulated banks, such as one
of the trading businesses of global firm Credit Suisse. Blackstone then runs that company without
government interference; assets in the Credit Suisse group have doubled since 2013.
So Clapper did not call it, but Manley has already "suggestion" blaming Russia... LOL.
The perfidy of Manly is that he does not say how to _prevent_ possible breaches, but creates perception
of "Russians having access to everything" instead. So he does not really care about solving the
problem, but about maintaining the notion that the problem magically persist.
Obviously to use that notion/perception later for some sinister goals.
This is just agitprop disinformation. Since the 'hanging chad' soft coup, all US voting machines
have backdoors to allow thevotes to be flipped, and since the Patriot Act, an Israeli subcontractor
and AT&T have had an NSA contract to 'hack' all US cell phone and internet traffic, but now there
is no need...GOOG and FB have apps on your tablet, your phone, and your sports band that record
and database all your thoughts and actions.
If you following computing, significant breakthroughs have been made in database manipulation,
to where terabytes of information can now be ground down to streaming focus group metrics on the
entire herd of so-called Little People. They can literally 'read your mind'.
'Russia' is just a Zionist mind-meld 'shiney object' whatever cognitive dissociation memes
they need to blunt-force eye-socket rape we and our children have to endure ... FOREVER
And to further make my point about the emails there is this quote from a Kremlin spokesman
Dmitry Peskov:
"As regards these (email) batches, that is not our headache. We never poke our noses
into others' affairs and we really don't like it when people try to poke their nose into ours,"
he said. "The Americans needs to get to the bottom of what these emails are themselves and
find out what it's all about."
The toxicity of this (2016) election has only been equalled by the election of 1860. Republicans
and Democrats were involved then also though the rôles have substantially changed, the results
are yet to be seen. What will 156 years of experience bring?
The DNC was "hacked "by some of Killary's Israeli chums/clients... Lets look at the proffered
"evidence" for a Russian Hack.. The hackers "seem to have been following a schedule of "Russian"
holdiays... Half (or more) of the people in Israel follow that same schedule of holdiays...
There are "clues" 'suggesting connections" with known Russian hacker groups..right..again,
any Russian hacker group "known" this well and this long, is not an active hacker group any more...
Except when Israelis, or whoever, are gaslighting them....The rest of the evidence, where any
one has even bothered to offer it, is just as weak, or even weaker.
"Nowhere on the intertubes that I frequent are stories about implications of the CONTENT of
the DNC emails. The only angle of the story that is allowed to be covered in excruciating detail
is who done it."
That is the whole point of the 'Putin did it' exercise. It is to distract the people from the
content. Contrast with the Panama Papers release where the target, Putin, was immediately targeted
indirectly in carefully selected releases. There was very little interest in who was behind the
hack. The info was publicly released via a US-government funded entity.
It should also be seen in context of the earlier public declaration that such hacking would
constitute an act of war. Trump has played into USG hands creating a 'reality' that 'Putin did
it' - after saying that "Russia should release the emails, if it has them". Was this done wittingly
or unwittingly?
ian @ 20: The problem with the 'Trump as Manchurian Candidate' narrative is that most people
(even Democrats) deep down, probably don't really believe it.
I agree! .. hogwash. Trump is the Donald and not more. Yet, after thinking about ian's post,
there is an oblique argument to be made: that this election is in fact IS all about Putin. Not
Putin as Vladimir, but Putin as a stand-in for Russia. The central issue, the ginormous elephant
in the room that is not being discussed is foreign policy - it only shows up in some remarks and
many are oblivious to it.
camps
Killary and escalation - the continuation of Bush-Obama foreign policy on speed
+ steroids, which involves destroying places and going for one 'enemy' after another and flailing
about (e.g. Iraq) - now aimed at the higher-stake ones (e.g. weakening Europe, dividing it
from Russia, and attacking Russia with all means at hand.) The backers are neo-cons, neo-libs,
the MIC, Wall Street (gingerly), and others, long list, some/many are criminal enterprises.
Going on strong is the meme.
Trump, with a nationalistic bent (partly calculated and not the most important)
shows at the same time an isolationist stance (as opposed to conquering position)
e.g. walls, anti-globalization on trade (ostensibly), America first of a certain flavor, and
going so far! as to question the existence of NATO and to have a neutral or positive attitude
towards the latest green-clawed fire-breathing devil. Reversing decline is the meme.
Arguably, foreign policy in terms of life/death of its citizens is the most crucial point,
but it is sub rosa. That is partly why all the talk/analysis in terms of ethnicity-race-religious
identities / values in this election (black / brown voters, abortion..), class (economic), tribal
political belonging, has become utterly confused, as these archaic divisions become meaningless,
while upheld in political discourse (with endless switcheroos) by all, to confuse and gather votes
here 'n there.
The US public is left adrift with two despised candidates, who do or might represent
two very different paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.
Your summary is excellent. Reading it, the choice between the two (excluding 3rd choices) is
clear. There exists a chance for peace or the guarantee of perpetual war.
@64 noirette, 'two despised candidates, who do or might represent two very different
paths forward if one can even contemplate 'the forward' at present.'
Yeah. Absolutely. My italics on the might. Hillary has a record. She can lie, but not to me.
Trump has ... a mouth. When he says reasonable things - given Hillary - people are desperate
to believe him. I can't.
I don't think we can, or should. Trump seems far more likely to be another Obama than
not. I think we have wasted far too many of these quadrennial exercises and that the time to do
something different is now. Look what happened in Libya. That could happen in Russia ... and a
lot more people than a US Ambassador will die. The Europeans are mad not to abrogate the US at
this point. The Americans are beginning to tell themselves another 'real' war will solve their
problems ... look at the DNC convention ... and it'll be OK because it will be another war 'over
there'. It won't be over there, it'll be right here no matter where that is.
Concerted action by our atomized selves is the only option left open to us. Let us Americans
envision a different future and simply effect it.
No
to Clinton, not to Trump . Let's
emulate a higher life form
. We can make it we try.
Bruce Schneier used to charge the Chinese in every hacking incident, I guess there is now
a "pivot" in the propaganda world.
It is obvious that our elections are hacked: Florida in 2000, Ohio 2004, and now Brooklyn,
Nevada, Arizona, California and other locations this year. They were hacked by our own crooks
who would never allow Rooskies to muscle in on the action. Few polling stations in crowded districts,
removing names from voter lists, private companies contracted to "count", voter suppression ID
laws, jailing of voting populations, gerrymandering, etc. The Rooskies can only bring a rubber
chicken to a gun fight.
I keep dreaming of a "dream" (or a "nightmare") scenario in which a) Trump wins on the election
night, just, maybe by 10-20 electoral votes; and b) on the day the Electoral College actually
meets, 10-20 electors from "Trump" states, quote, "vote their conscience", end quote, and Hillary
becomes president. Which, legally, they can do - remember the electors aren't formally bound by
anything other than "tradition" (read: what their local party officials would do to them were
they to change their vote).
I know, I know, slim chance. But it would be a thing of beauty to behold were it to actually
happen. For those of us who revel in chaos and anarchy, of course, the types who wished for a
Sarah Palin presidency just for the sheer amount of comedy material involved; the rest of the
population might well differ. In any event, the "Russian voting machine fraud" story would fit
in very well with this particular sequence of events - the electors "voting their conscience"
could then be portrayed as patriotic anti-communists (or whatever), for example.
For those 10-20 electors to vote for Hillary would be regarded as a betrayal of the system and
make her an illegitimate, crippled president.
What those 10-20 electors could do instead is to vote for some third candidate. Say, Gary Johnson
or John Kasich. When no candidate wins a majority of electors, the election is thrown into the
House of Representatives, in which each state's delegation has one vote and the vote must be among
the three candidates who got the greatest number of electoral votes.
He makes a good point: " From inception, America proved itself the cruelest, most ruthless
nation in world history, harming more people over a longer duration than any other. Tens of millions
of corpses attest to its barbarity."
"If elected, Hillary risks committing greater high crimes of state than her predecessors, including
possible nuclear war - why it's crucial to defeat her in November. Humanity's fate hangs in the
balance."
All the rest is just rhetoric ... and the primary reason AmeriKKKans have Clinton as President
in the first place. AmeriKKKans know that their best interests, even when jobless, are with continued
murder, rape and theft!
Proof? You want proof? Each of you AmeriKKKans who post to this site. Not that other are blameless,
they just don't vote.
I have stated here and "everywhere" that automated elections are not really elections at all.
While the USA buys more and more election computers, most of the rest of the (ostensibly democratic)
world has tossed out election computers, and moved to using had counted paper ballots.
I have said many times: "We must abolish election machines, such as voting computers. If
they make casting and tallying 10 times faster, they make organized cheating 10 times easier as
well. Which can we truly afford?"
I read several computer programmer's blogs, and comments almost every day, and I am sure most
of these professionals are aware of the fact that their machines can never be made safe for use
in elections. Yet, they virtually never come out and say that. Job security trumps having democracy
for nearly all of them. Most of these programmers are depressing examples of self-centeredness.
@58 "It is worth to mention that Bruce Schneier is part of the "Tor Project" board of directors
since July 2016."
That's indeed worth mentioning since one of the TOR founders, Jacob Appelbaum, was ejected
from the board in June by a phony sex scandal identical to the one of Julian Assange. There was
also the recent departure in July of one of the major TOR contributors, Lucky Green, who didn't
disclose a lot about his reasons ("I feel that I have no reasonable choice left within the bounds
of ethics")
http://thehackernews.com/2016/07/tor-anonymity-node.html . The departures of Jacob Appelbaum
and Lucky Green and the welcoming of sellout Bruce Schneier who's opinions were always in line
with US foreign policy spell doom and gloom for TOR's security reliability.
A lot of people outside the US are probably unaware of some very important features of federal
elections here. Many of these people may assume that the US has a single presidential election,
run by the federal government, as is the case in their own countries (Australia, for example).
But in reality, there are 51 presidential elections, and only one of them (the one in the District
of Columbia) is run by the federal government.
Each state has its own way of collecting and counting ballots, and its own laws about voter
eligibility, absentee voting, ballot access for third parties, voting procedures, etc. Because
the counties within each state actually run the polling places, these state election laws are
mainly instructions for county election officials. So there are ample opportunities for election
fraud at the county and state levels, but not at the federal level (except for mass media mind
control).
In unusual situations, state election laws can be challenged in federal courts. In my home
state of Tennessee, Republicans and Democrats many years ago passed a law that essentially makes
it impossible for third parties to appear on the ballot. And for all those many years, the Tennessee
Green Party has routinely gone to federal court, claiming that the state law unreasonably restricts
Tennesseans' voting rights, and the court routinely rules in their favor. Thus my ability to vote
for Jill Stein exists only because a federal court has intervened in Tennessee's election system.
But judicial intervention like this is essentially the only power the federal government can exercise
over voting.
I can't for the life of me understand why so many hawks in the State Dept and elsewhere are
sooooo afraid of Putin. They still mad he nationalized oil companies?
Just suppose the emails of the DNC were released by the Clinton Machine, what a creative
tactic, and certainly there is no reason to doubt that...a great media firestorm ensues, DWS had
to fall on her sword but quickly gets hoisted on the Clinton petard..as a campaign manager
It is possible that Schneier and Doctorow may not have an anti-Russia agenda but are using the
Russia angle because then the U.S. press will report on the security problems with electronic
voting. Russia should just tell the U.S. to switch to mechanical voting if they are worried. How
is Russia responsible for our insecure voting?
Thanks for so much intelligent commentary this thread.
Your comment, "As I have often mentioned on these pages previously, I do believe pedophiles
and various other perverts are actively recruited into positions of power so that they can be
compromised and controlled by the criminal cabal." I don't think that the pedophiles are recruited
into power so that they can be controlled by fear of disclosure. In fact nothing happens to them
when they're found out: the records are "lost", evidence is "insufficient", etc. Rather, the explanation
I think is that the secret societies and higher levels of Masonry all use sexual deviancy as a
means of bonding their initiates into a criminal cabal outside of the norms of society. There
is a philosophical embracing of the destruction of innocence just as there is a glorification
of the chaos produced by war.
The evil that we face is an alternate philosophical position which rejects all the moral
tenets of the world's 7 great religions. The goal is the rule of a tiny sect which imagines itself
a godhead over humanity. Their main tools against us are informational and moral. Many of
the novels of the 20s, the 30s and especially the late 19th century reveal by contrast how greatly
they've degraded the very idea of living one's life informed by a moral ideal.
The examined life has been swept away, replaced by the exclusively material and physical. Did
you know that one of the early objectives was to control the appointment of divinity school teachers?
The Rockefellers personally championed Unitarianism, which helped to trivialize religion. Without
religion or an organized system of moral limits and the complete absence of the idealization of
the moral and the possession of moral purpose, that great generational sink of morality once so
vibrant among the American people has long-since sprung a leak now become a torrent. One looks
in vain for that which would nourish the soul of the very young. The moral ideal has vanished
from our culture. How could it not? The Rockefellers alone control over 2,000 domestic NGOs, foundations
and think tanks. Even the culturally trivial is now being replaced by the overtly destructive.
The human eclipsed by the bestial.
Enough people, armed simply with knowledge and the resolution to look for the truth wherever
it leads, can still stop it.
The problem wit this comment is why it was made at all. You do not announce forthcoming explosive
information for several reasons: 1. You may be assassinated. 2. You may be blackmailed. 3. You
allow the people time to respond 4. The information may be stolen. Think about it. When has an
individual promised ahead of time a release of blockbuster info, and then delivered. Perhaps Assange
is waiting to be paid off not to release the information.
The NWO is the only benefiting entity of war. Who owns the companies that manufactures and sells
all armament to both side? the same ones that supplied WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the American
Civil war, and revolutions all over the world for the last two-hundred years... need I go on.
They have made trillions on weapons, armament, and armored vehicles to lock down America and take
everything. The biggest land grab in history. Who always comes out on top in every Wall Street
crash? They keep pushing for war because its the only means for unending power and profit. Know
one wants a war because no one sees a need. We are all saner than the NWO thugs. You realize,
there are 7.5 billion of us in the world, all manipulated, killed, and blamed for all those thugs
do. They are only a drop in the toilet. WE don't comply, their reality vaporizes over night. Know
where they are right now? under ground. Their scared to death because they've been discovered
and tracked. They should be. Don't believe the network media. Rely on your own best judgement.
Nothing can fall that we can't rebuild stronger and better. Who needs them? Is humanity better
off without the Devil? There's only one answer.
Daly Jones
I randomly found this video and realized that you made one of my favorite documentaries!!!!
I try to get everyone I know to watch it....The Money Masters! It's one of the best/horrifyingly
true documentaries I've ever watched. Thank you sir! You have just earned another subscriber
Rudy Hassen
Question: why do entrenched entities hate dissemination of information? As reference....see
North Korea......or DNC.
Rudy Hassen
BTW....unlikely Russia is behind the leaks. Putin is a much better chess player the Obama,
Clinton and probably Trump as well. Don't he surprised if it's DNC insiders behind this.
Da Guy
How can anyone trust someone that lied, cheated and conned to get the nomination, just because
they now say they won't lie, cheat and con anymore now that they got what they wanted by lying,
cheating and conning & got caught w/evidence proving it, otherwise they would still be denying
it. All I hear and see now is how Hillary and the DNC can spin what they got caught & proven doing
to get votes from the very people they lied to, cheated and conned. I would no longer trust anything
Hillary or the DNC said or promised unless someone like Bernie cleaned it up of corrupt people.
Why isn't the FBI investigating/attacking/prosecuting this coup??? The email leaks, college &
research analysis of elections and results did a lot of their job already.
If a con, lied, cheated and conned you out of your life savings, would you trust them a few
days later w/your kids life savings just because they say: sure that guy exposed our personal
communications that proved we lied, cheated & conned you out of your life saving but were different
now and you can trust us w/your kids life savings, now that we got what we wanted. (note to self):
make sure no one can get a hold of our personal communications in the future so no one can prove
anything we do, this way we can blame anything &/or anyone else for the loss of their kids life
savings. "take Hillary's lead, delete and scrub the memories so nothing is retrievable and all
released info has to go through our lawyers. We can tell them our lawyers are looking out for
their best interest not ours". Once a con, always a con. This is an attempted theft of a country
or a coup.
I would not only feel a traitor to my Country, kids & future generations if I just accepted
this and joined the coup: I WOULD BE A TRAITOR. If this coup fails and Trump gets elected, it's
on you, the collaborators and coup member, not anyone else. Look what the leaders or the head
person of other countries do to the people that attempt a coup in their country. We pretend it's
not happening. And if this coup succeeds, we all live under false pretenses and have allowed our
country to betray what it's supposed to stand for "again", the spiral down from there will be
easy. I've never been so ashamed of my country & worried about the future of this planet as I
am now.
Clinton campaign is trying to hide their very serious domestic allegation tried to play "Russians
are coming" trick... Sanders campaign was sabotages by crooks in DNC.
Also does this presstitute who interviewed Julian Assange any moral right to ask question about
the legitimacy of foreign interference if this interference is the cornerstone of the US foreign policy.
As in color revolutions and similar subversive actions against "not neoliberal enough" government of
countries with natural resources or of some geopolitical value.
This is the situation of "king is naked" -- the state that teaches other countries about democracy
has completely corrupted election process, like a typical banana republic.
Notable quotes:
"... According to the leaked emails, he, Chuck Todd, is part of the rigging process. ..."
"... Their Motive is to tell the truth. Clearly that why they released the information before the convention and delegates still went forward with corruption. That defies the DNC, case closed ..."
"... Because we've never interfered in another government or anything right? what a joke! ..."
Chuck Todd, Establishment Gatekeeper and Chief Presstitute. He proves that the Fourth Estate needs
a total overhaul, and that the MSM needs to be broken-up like the banks & other institutions need
to be in order to become truly competitive rather than in name only. The tightening grip
of oligarchs must be pried apart! Assange is doing his part to expose the powers that oppress
us, and should be commended for his work!
Loki7072
This interviewer is obviously a democrat , trying to blame the Russians for the content of
the emails , so sad the democratic corruption in this country runs so deep
Charles W
According to the leaked emails, he, Chuck Todd, is part of the rigging process.
Anthony Marin
Chuck Todd isn't a journalist, just another government PR person. Corporate media is a joke.
Rafael Reyes
Their Motive is to tell the truth. Clearly that why they released the information before
the convention and delegates still went forward with corruption. That defies the DNC, case closed.
Now do the constituents of that party still have faith in staying with that party? That's totally
up to the ppl. Whether of not it was domestic or foreign info isn't important, due to the fact
that the information was authentic and proven true by our own officials who investigated the digital
encryption of the files.
Frank Rizzo
Because we've never interfered in another government or anything right? what a joke!
Notecrusher
So what if the Russian government was the source? I have gratitude to WHOEVER provided the
leak. Now we know the truth about the DNC's crimes and corruption. I hope they burn.
Guardian presstitutes are trying hard to please their owners...
Notable quotes:
"... Joe Biden's son has major business interests in Ukraine. Is that why Biden is so supportive of Ukraine? Paul Manafort is a rat, like all the major league campaign operatives ..."
"... Under globalism, it is only natural for corporations and their CEOs to have more contact with foreign entities and their leaders. Apple and CEO Tim Cook has made a huge commitment to communist China, one that he told President Obama will not be shaken or reduced. ..."
"... This is all so entertaining for as much as they try they cannot lay a finger on Putin.. the PBS special on Putin wealth ended an hour of innuendo with this.. ''How much is a matter of speculation and some educated guesswork.'' ..."
"... I have family in the military and the last thing we need is Clinton leading us into another cold war. ..."
"... Clinton: corruption you can believe in. ..."
"... Well looks like Hillary has stared the cold war again before she ever got into office. This is worse than anything Trump could do...but very beneficial to her military/security industrial complex backers. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney ..."
"... Julian Assange is not a Republican. He's an Australian with no vested interest in the election. I'd be worried if I were a Clinton supporter. ..."
"... The extremely well informed Israeli website Debkafile is confident that the Russians didn't hack the DNC or any aspect of the Democrats. Debka believes the signatures on the hack are so easy to find and so obviously intended to be found that the real culprit lies somewhere within an anti-Clinton faction of the Democrats. ..."
"... This is a fantasy article, pie in the sky stuff. I can't stand Trump and I am sure neither can the Russian government, he's unpredictable, unstable, what he says today he changes his mind on tomorrow and so on. Now, Clinton isn't much better all said. Anyone who would trust either needs to see a psychiatrist urgently. Russia is but a bystander in the US presidential race, except for the conspiracy theorists at The Guardian. ..."
"... So a former official of that russophobic neocon infested State Department which ran both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 coup in Kiev also member of the US-Ukraine business council is now supposed to have helped Yanokovich in 2010 and be in bed with Putin. How gullible do you think we are? ..."
"... Stop the presses! Trump and people associated with him have had dealings with people from the LARGEST country in the world. If that doesn't prove he's an active Manchurian candidate on The Kremlin payroll, then nothing will. ..."
"... What it really proves is that by going the low road of McCarthyist red-baiting, the Democrats seemed determined to blow another election by not running a campaign on Hillary's supposed merits and attacking Trump for rational, verifiable reasons. ..."
"... You are all a school of piranhas waiting to tear the flesh of anyone who is against 'Her'. I have noticed your comments towards any rational reply is met with condescending and abusive tones. You've probably realised I am poorly educated. However, I have common sense which I believe most of you don't. Most of you comment in order to receive recognition and votes in order to make you feel good because of low self esteem and belonging issues. ..."
"... I believe we in the west currently live in a pluralist society for now. If Hillary is elected I reckon she will lay the foundation for sharia law, Merkel is doing her bit. Anyway, how can anyone vote for this vile human being? ..."
"... Hillary Rodman Clinton does not care about YOU! Its all about her wanting power to control YOU. Have you ever asked yourself why does she want to be President? What is her motivation? ..."
"... Oh, come on, Hillary has all 30 of the admirals and generals that previously endorsed Jeb. Can't Donald have one general? The US military is in schism between the moderates (represented by Flynn) and the hawks (represented by Allen, presumably). Hillary's hawks got booed off the stage at the convention. Allen was trying to shout down the protesters but they were pretty feisty. ..."
"... Follow the money. The Clinton elite and the military/security industrial complex will MAKE BILLIONS with a new cold war. As much as they made off of Iraq and MORE! ..."
"... Julian Assange showed to the DNC who they are, but they are not angry at him, they are angry at Donald Trump. Of course, how can anyone be angry at the mirror because it has shown its ugly face.:-))) ..."
"... A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Trump any more than a vote against the Iraq War was a vote for Saddam Hussein. ..."
"... Hilarious. This Red Scare is ridiculous, will only carry weight with the over 60s. It is just one of the many missteps in Hillary's tone deaf campaign which is going to cost her the presidency. ..."
"... Not a Trump supporter, but this shitty rag attacks everyone except the Red Queen...who is responsible for many acts of terror and murder...documented. ..."
"... Ta, much of the information, especially what Tom Curley (formerly AP chief) revealed, has been removed from the net. I wish I had saved the pdf of his Kansas speech before it vanished everywhere. There was also something on a British server, but that stopped being fed. ..."
"... Often we could see it on the posters' string, how many in how many hours, hence the attempts to hide it through multi ID facility. For disqus, they block the string. We know we are being manipulated. And very few people take things at face value these days, or do they? ..."
"... That single sentence exposes the Guardian as a completely fraudulent news reporting medium. With tears in my eyes I ask you "How does Putin releasing e-mails about the secret and illegal American electoral shenanigans amount to an attack on western democracy?" ..."
"... The old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time" is demonstrated by the Guardians reporting without sources, other than anonymous so-called "experts". Your journalistic integrity is little higher than the height of Hillary Clinton's honesty, or the level of the Donald's business ethics. Shame on you. Double shame for being so blatantly easy to expose. ..."
"... The western media, controlled by special interest groups, are driving your low-level sputum which tries to pass for accurate and unbiased reportage. ..."
"... On the whole I would have to agree with you. The picture painted by the Western News Media is that the US is the White Knight when it comes to democracy, they never interfere in other countries political affairs, never try to break into computer systems of other countries, try to topple or assassinate leaders of other countries. They never carry out torture and they ignore the 30m on the poverty line in their own country. ..."
"... Well at least Trump is fostering positive relations with Russia - Hillary Clinton is pushing us to the brink of nuclear war with them. You Tube it. Wishing Good Luck to all people of courage and honesty. ..."
"... Reuters/Ipsos changed it polling methodology as soon as they saw a 17 point swing in favor of Donald the Drumpf. When the methodology by their own admission was under reporting Trump support and over reporting Hillbilly's numbers they did nothing. So don't believe any polls. There is no enthusiasm for Hillbilly in the Democratic party, so the Democratic turn out will be low, on the other hand people want to shake things up, they will vote for Drumpf. I just wished Donald had half a brain in his head to see how much good he could do, with the opportunity he has. ..."
"... A lot of associations and coincidences have been listed here. But no hard evidence linking the hacking to Putin, nor Putin to Trump. It sounds like a load of muckraking. ..."
"... True. If it was the other way round, Guardian journalists and establishment shills would be screaming 'tin-foil' when they should be holding that woman to account. ..."
Joe Biden's son has major business interests in Ukraine. Is that why Biden is so supportive
of Ukraine? Paul Manafort is a rat, like all the major league campaign operatives. All that
is important to them is the win and those that can jump over each other to rent their expertise
around the globe to whatever scumbag has money. It is a bipartisan gig. To spin this in such a
partisan manner when the entire political machinery on both sides operates like this is is either
knowingly deceitful or just plain ignorant. When it is nearly impossible to just get straight
balanced news from a newspaper, when the coverage is just so obviously slanted, real journalism
is dead. This style of news by innuendo and the selective parsing of fact is shoddy reportage.
Shame.
macmarco
Under globalism, it is only natural for corporations and their CEOs to have more contact
with foreign entities and their leaders. Apple and CEO Tim Cook has made a huge commitment to
communist China, one that he told President Obama will not be shaken or reduced.
US tax laws that allow 'profit centers' to be claimed anywhere around the world will almost
certainly bring corporate leaders and foreign leaders closer together as their interests merge
and intertwine.
Political parties will have difficulty claiming this or that country is now an enemy depending
on how much corporate investment and profit holdings were made in the new 'enemy'. One could see
the enormous difficulty the DNC/Hillary would have if they had to make a case against communist
China hacking their emails. Apple, Walmart etal would be working overtime to protect the relationship
at all costs.
notindoctrinated
Has it ever occurred to you Yanks that Putin may be playing global political chess. I'm sure
he is shrewd enough to realize that open support to Trump could be a "kiss of death". A Democratic
presidency may be in Russia's long-term interest, if they want the US to go further down the drain:
Overrunning of the US by Hispanics, as well as Muslims from North Africa and the Mideast,
the latter resulting in increasing insecurity and terrorist attacks at home
Destruction of US economy by the pursuit of green fanatic policies.
Of course a trigger-happy Clinton presidency increases the risk for WW3, therefore Putin's
finger will never be far from the nuke-button.
2. The number one US economic strain is War.....not windfarms.
3. Clinton is a bit more hawkish than I would like, but she is far from trigger happy. Also,
she can handle an insult without declaring the need to punch someone in the face :p
Sam3456
I love the entitled Hillary fans are trying to stifle any dissent of the Queen with "You're
a Putin Bot, You're a commie, your a Trumpster."
Stifling dissent allows for corruption and abuse of power and is what got us into the Iraq
War.
Their condescending attitude is what we can expect from a Clinton Administration?
JohnManyjars
Putin bashing idiots...choke on your spittle! At least he puts the interests of his country
first, unlike US/UK sell outs to Israel-First traitors.
R. Ben Madison -> JohnManyjars
Yet another antisemitic diatribe from the Hillary-haters.
Lee Van Over -> JohnManyjars
Lol, the US supports Israel because its in the best interests of the US, not Israel. They,
unfortunately, are our little forward base of operations in the Mid-east.
John Smith
Burisma is the largest non-governmental gas producer in Ukraine, it was incorporated in 2006
and is based in Limassol, Cyprus - a European tax haven
April 18, 2014, Burisma Holdings announced us VP Biden's son Hunter Biden appointed to the board
Aleksander Kwaśniewski,took up in a director's post named in January.[27] Kwaśniewski was President
of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 permitted the CIA torture ops in Poland during the
G. W. Bush presidency
Chairman of Burisma is the Wall Street former Merrill Lynch investment banker Alan Apter
Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's partner at the US investment firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, and
a manager of the family wealth fund of Secretary of State John Kerry's wife Theresa Heinz Kerry,
And all friends together in a company that should be helping Ukraine recover nestled away in
a tax haven!
The director of the US-Ukraine Business Council Morgan Williams pointed to an "American tradition
that frowns on close family members of government working for organizations with business links
to active politics". Williams stated Biden appears to have violated this unwritten principle:
"... when you're trying to keep the political sector separate from the business sector, and reduce
corruption, then it's not just about holding down corruption, it's also the appearance.
This is all so entertaining for as much as they try they cannot lay a finger on Putin..
the PBS special on Putin wealth ended an hour of innuendo with this.. ''How much is a matter of
speculation and some educated guesswork.''
And thats what it was speculation & guesswork!
he may be the richest man on the planet.. he may be richer than god... but they just can't
find it.. they can't find a bankstatement with billions or trillions in it they can't even find
the shoebox with all his cash under his bed... they got nothing!
MtnClimber -> John Smith
They found Putin's money. It's cared for by "friends". One is a concert cellist with over a
billion dollars. They must pay musicians well in Russia.
You seem to like dictators. Do you like the complete censorship of the media in Russia? Do
you like the new laws that allow Putin to jail anyone that denounces him or Russia?
Given that Russians are only allowed to post good things about Putin, what do you expect to
see from them?
John Smith -> MtnClimber
there were plenty of russians in that PBS 'show' complaining about putin and they are still
alive n well..
the only time russian critics become endangered is when they are of no further use to the yankee
and then they come to a sticky end and then the finger gets pointed at putin.. then they have
fully 'outlived' their usefulness.. more useful dead!
annberk
It is obvious that Trump will benefit financially from being nice to Putin and his inner circle.
Trump combs the world for projects and money and Russia must be seen as a target. Win or lose
the election he'll be seen as a friend who deserves to be rewarded. At some point in the next
year or so, the Trump Corporation will announce at least one landmark Russian hotel/condo tower.
I'd bet money on it. Meanwhile, poor old Hillary who has devoted her life to doing good, is being
bullied and lied about by the serfs who want to elect him. (Read 'Dark Money' to see what I mean
by serfs. Trump's adherents won't benefit in the slightest from his policies.)
Sam3456
I have family in the military and the last thing we need is Clinton leading us into another
cold war.
delphicvi
What a lame lead in i.e. "Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time.
Donald Trump travelled to Moscow in 2013 to meet Vladimir Putin hoping to discuss plans for
a Trump Tower near Red Square."
Did it really take four 'journalists' viz. Peter Stone, David Smith, Ben Jacobs, Alec Luhn
and Rupert Neate to write this fluff? More worthy of a supermarket check out rag than a serious
newspaper. This facile attempt to stitch together the incongruous and the bizarre is downright
amazing for a paper that puffs itself as the leaker of truth. By the bye, Ukraine is not Russia.
And Russia is not Ukraine.
Sam3456
The Director of National Intelligence says Washington is still unsure of who might be behind
the latest WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, while urging that
an end be put to the "reactionary mode" blaming it all on Russia.
"We don't know enough to ascribe motivation regardless of who it might have been," Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper said speaking at Aspen's Security Forum in Colorado, when
asked if the media was getting ahead of themselves in fingering the perpetrator of the hack.
John Smith -> Sam3456
Anonymous have been quietly busy in the background... laughing at the merkins blaming everything
on Russia..
clintons corrupt... and its Russia's fault??
''The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts
during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton,
according to a newly released Inspector General report.
I know billions don't mean much today after the american laundering of Trillions of $s worth
of their bad mortgage debt causing the 2008 crash....... BUT SURELY $6 Billion missing must count
for something!
So again...
what really happened in Benghazi? in September 2012
Were they sending gaddafi's weapons to unsavouries in Syria and Assad got wind of it & sent a
team to stop it?
Because it was not a youtube vid or some people on a friday night out deciding to kill americans
as clinton would have us believe. What we have is a clandestine operation.. a democrat version
of reagans ''Arms for Iran''.. or shall we say 'Arms for ISIS' Did they get Ollie North out of
retirement for this??
Having failed this gun running operation...
They then went to Plan B..
''claimed 3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads
from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November (2012).'' 3000 tons of weapons!!......
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9918785/US-and-Europe-in-major-airlift-of-arms-to-Syrian-rebels-through-Zagreb.html
But When they arrived in Jordan..
''Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended
for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold
to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials.'' I mean
can the CIA be that incompetent? or is this incompetence covering up something else...?
Well looks like Hillary has stared the cold war again before she ever got into office.
This is worse than anything Trump could do...but very beneficial to her military/security industrial
complex backers.
Hillary Clinton = Dick Cheney.
Oldiebutgoodie
With all the tension and volatility in the world, we need mature, rational people leading our
countries. Let's hope that's what we get -- * Vote thoughtfully.
While we watch campaign circuses, a serious situation is taking place in Turkey that will effect
Europe, the West, and the Middle East.
- Erdogan has taken control of, and is purging all sectors of Turkish society.
Julian Assange is not a Republican. He's an Australian with no vested interest in the election.
I'd be worried if I were a Clinton supporter.
spraydrift
'Trump's links to Russia are under scrutiny after a hack of Democratic national committee emails,'
The extremely well informed Israeli website Debkafile is confident that the Russians didn't
hack the DNC or any aspect of the Democrats. Debka believes the signatures on the hack are so
easy to find and so obviously intended to be found that the real culprit lies somewhere within
an anti-Clinton faction of the Democrats. Now who might that be?
Greg Popa -> spraydrift
Wired.com's Noah Shachtman wrote in 2001 that the site "clearly reports with a point of view;
the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli politics".[4] Yediot Achronot investigative
reporter Ronen Bergman states that the site relies on information from sources with an agenda,
such as neo-conservative elements of the US Republican Party, "whose worldview is that the situation
is bad and is only going to get worse," and that Israeli intelligence officials do not consider
even 10 percent of the site's content to be reliable.[1] Cornell Law professor Michael C. Dorf
calls Debka his "favorite alarmist Israeli website trading in rumors."[5]
The site's operators, in contrast, state that 80 percent of what Debka reports turns out to
be true, and point to its year 2000 prediction that al-Qaeda would again strike the World Trade
Center, and that it had warned well before the 2006 war in Lebanon that Hezbollah had amassed
12,000 Katyusha rockets pointed at northern Israel.[1]
mandzorp
This is a fantasy article, pie in the sky stuff. I can't stand Trump and I am sure neither
can the Russian government, he's unpredictable, unstable, what he says today he changes his mind
on tomorrow and so on. Now, Clinton isn't much better all said. Anyone who would trust either
needs to see a psychiatrist urgently. Russia is but a bystander in the US presidential race, except
for the conspiracy theorists at The Guardian.
errovi
"The coordinator of the Washington diplomatic corps for the Republicans in Cleveland was Frank
Mermoud, a former state department official involved in business ventures in Ukraine via Cub Energy,
a Black Sea-focused oil and gas company of which he is a director. He is also on the board of
the US Ukraine Business Council."
So a former official of that russophobic neocon infested State Department which ran both
the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 coup in Kiev also member of the US-Ukraine business council
is now supposed to have helped Yanokovich in 2010 and be in bed with Putin. How gullible do you
think we are?
Oldiebutgoodie -> errovi
Seems every news media outlet and reporter is looking into his Russian business dealings and
funding.
Stop the presses! Trump and people associated with him have had dealings with people from
the LARGEST country in the world. If that doesn't prove he's an active Manchurian candidate on
The Kremlin payroll, then nothing will.
What it really proves is that by going the low road of McCarthyist red-baiting, the Democrats
seemed determined to blow another election by not running a campaign on Hillary's supposed merits
and attacking Trump for rational, verifiable reasons.
John Smith -> MentalToo
drivel.. Nuland admitted/boasted about spendin $5 billion in ''bring democracy to ukraine..
$5 Billion is a lot of money in Ukraine..
Did they build schools No
Did they build hospitals No!
They just destabilised the country...
So $5 billion wasted and the yanks wonder why they don't really have a space program... coz $5
Billion would have bought 3 Space shuttles!
jezzam -> John Smith
The US spent 5 billion over 25 years - trying to encourage the basic institutions of democracy
in Ukraine. Without these corruption cannot be eliminated. Without the elimination of corruption,
none of the things you mention are possible. Non-coincidentally such institutions have been eliminated
in Russia since Putin came to power.
Brian Burman -> jezzam
Yes, those NGOs encouraged democracy so well that they instigated a violent coup against the
elected government. Halt, you say, that government was corrupt!?! But by all standards, the current
government is more corrupt than the one that was overthrown, and polls in the last year show that
Ukrainians are convinced of that fact. Infact, the man hand-picked by Victoria Nuland to be Prime
Minister, "Yats" Yatesenyuk, had to resign under accusations of corruption. Andbthe current Kiev
reginme continues to bomb the civilian population of Donbass and terrorize them with neo-Nazi
militias...ah, the wonders of US funded "democracy".
Виктор Захаров
I wonder, if you say that you are democrats why you are not interested in truth about Malaysian
Boing? Now in the West, Merkel, Obama etc, no one worried about this tragedy because now it's
clear that Ukrainian authorities did it. It's barbarian blasphemous....
Henrychan
Hello all Hillary supporters,
You are all a school of piranhas waiting to tear the flesh of anyone who is against 'Her'.
I have noticed your comments towards any rational reply is met with condescending and abusive
tones. You've probably realised I am poorly educated. However, I have common sense which I believe
most of you don't. Most of you comment in order to receive recognition and votes in order to make
you feel good because of low self esteem and belonging issues.
I believe we in the west currently live in a pluralist society for now. If Hillary is elected
I reckon she will lay the foundation for sharia law, Merkel is doing her bit. Anyway, how can
anyone vote for this vile human being?
You must be either:
Ignorant
Misinformed
Lack common sense or
Mentally ill
Hillary Rodman Clinton does not care about YOU! Its all about her wanting power to control
YOU. Have you ever asked yourself why does she want to be President? What is her motivation?
Comment all you like, you Hillary supporter are defending a witch. I'm not with HER.
Oilyheart
Bernie Sanders visited the USSR. Does that make him a communist? Bernie Sanders visited the
Vatican. Does that make him a Catholic? Gen. Flynn visited RT. Does that make him Scott Pelley?
Bill visits a lot of places.
Виктор Захаров
First of all why Obama calls yourself democrat? It's nonsense, by definition democrats those
who against the coup! Having lied once who would believe you ( Russian saying ). Obama continued
to lie. Malaysian Boing had been shot down by Ukrainian jet, radars neither in Dnepro nor in Rostov
hadn't seen buk missile, buk missile weighs 700 kg radar could not to see it. But radars had seen
Ukrainian jet, Ukrainian authorities restricted access to records....
Oilyheart
Oh, come on, Hillary has all 30 of the admirals and generals that previously endorsed Jeb.
Can't Donald have one general? The US military is in schism between the moderates (represented
by Flynn) and the hawks (represented by Allen, presumably). Hillary's hawks got booed off the
stage at the convention. Allen was trying to shout down the protesters but they were pretty feisty.
Try not to bogart all the retired general officers, Democrats. The moderates are trying to
de-escalate tensions with Russia, is that so wrong? Does gangsterism have to proliferate all over
the place? Does the whole world have to break bad like Walter White into gangsterism and chaos
because it's cool?
GODsaysBRESCAPE
Clinton wants a new cold war with Russia, forget the real enemy the Islamists. She is showing
her warmongering stripes again already. Shame on you Sanders for your betrayal of your supporters,
that will now be your ever lasting and shameful legacy.
Sam3456 -> GODsaysBRESCAPE
Follow the money. The Clinton elite and the military/security industrial complex will MAKE
BILLIONS with a new cold war. As much as they made off of Iraq and MORE!
HRC is Dick Cheney in a pants suit.
GODsaysBRESCAPE
The media, big business and the pentagon: "a web that grows more tangled all the time"
dikcheney
I have to do this. #canthackHillary.
I cant hack her lies
I cant hack her faux ignorance of IT security
I cant hack her unbelievability
I cant hack her attacks on any challenger
I cant hack the cloth she didn't use to wipe her server
I cant hack the way she puts USA security at risk to protect her "private" shenanigans
I cant hack her capacity to corrupt any decent process associated with democray
I cant hack her network of "get out of jail free cards"
I cant hack her transparent deceptions
I cant hack her associates
I cant hack her war criminal mentors
I cant hack her media admirers and shills
I cant hack her Wall Street buddies
I cant hack her mate Obama
Is there anyone out there who can hack Hillary?
Shatford Shatford -> dikcheney
You left out Clinton Foundation donors who receive lucrative contracts in disaster zones or
in African dictatorships.
nnedjo
Julian Assange showed to the DNC who they are, but they are not angry at him, they are
angry at Donald Trump. Of course, how can anyone be angry at the mirror because it has shown its
ugly face.:-)))
Shatford Shatford -> nnedjo
Bless cognitive dissonance for keeping everyone from seeing the truth.
Shatford Shatford -> NewWorldWatcher
I'm sure once Hillary cheats her way into the White House, she'll sick the IRS on him since
she does that to all of her enemies. And naturally, all of her and her husband's crimes will go
unpunished as they always have. Her husband almost got impeached. Not for getting a hummer from
an intern, but because there was so much other bullshit they wanted to nail him on and lying under
oath was the only thing they could use because the Clintons are very good at buying people off.
nnedjo
The Democratic Party and its vassal media proves for the umpteenth time that they have nothing
to do with democracy. If the opposition is called traitors and accused of collaboration with foreign
governments without any evidence, then it is not a democracy, it is called a dictatorship.
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him. Otherwise,
they have to admit that Donald Trump is genuine representative of American democracy, and that
they would rather belong to a kind of dictatorship.
gondwanaboy -> nnedjo
So if they think they have evidence that Trump is a traitor, they should arrest him.
They don't have any evidence. This is mud slinging and a diversion from the DNC email corruption
scandal that actually has proof
miri84
Analysts suggest three primary motivations for the WikiLeaks email dump, quite probably overlapping:
doing harm to the US political process to undermine its credibility; doing harm to Clinton (WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange is no friend); and boosting Trump
The hack would not have succeeded in any of these areas, had the DNC been conducting its operations
fairly and with integrity.
guest88888
Donald Trump and Russia: a web that grows more tangled all the time
Only if you're full of BS, and lack even a shred of journalistic integrity.
McCarthy would be proud. After years of pretending otherwise, it seems the US government has
finally returned to its old and proud tradition of smearing anyone it finds undesirable as in
cahoots with the ever-changing 'enemy.'
All of this is merely a diversion to avoid talking about the mountain of corruption revealed
about both parties in recent days. Not to mention a diversion from talking about the key issue,
that the US is increasingly antagonizing nuclear armed powers like Russia and China, which if
not stopped will lead to a war capable of killing millions.
selvak
I am not Trump but I would much rather ally with Russia than Saudi Arabia. Both have plenty
of oil by the way. Only one is spreading a Death cult over the Globe but still Presidents Bush
and Obama bowed for the Saudi king. More money the be made out of Arab oil for a few uber rich
in the US Establishment I guess. Less 'competition" for the Pentagon from Riyadh too.
sejong -> selvak
Bibi and King Salman will get joint custody of Clinton, so don't worry.
PCollens
100% bullshit, lies and a psy-op being fed to us from all sides on this.
Seriously Graun, what gives with this bullshit? Confirms my conclusion that the Graun, like the
rest of the MSM, has been infiltrated by an Operation Mockingbird as well.
So many psychopaths - GOP, DNC, Trump, the US deep state petro-nazis, the oligarchs in all countries
- all panicking more and more now, out of control.
Here comes some kind of armagedon. Sorry, sheeple - but its bad news for us all.
Alec Dacyczyn
It's worth mentioning the context of the "the US would not automatically come to the aid of
Nato allies" thing. He wants for other Nato countries to either pull their own weight militarily
(2% of GDP) or pay to cover the costs of other countries for defend them. The threat of willingness
to "walk away" is negotiating leverage. He's making a gamble that they will capitulate rather
than be left defenseless.
I believe it's a reasonable safe bet. So until these Nato countries indicate that they'd rather
not spend that much on their militarizes I reject the argument that a President Trump would result
in a weaker Nato alliance and that Putin want Trump to win for that reason (I suspect Putin would
indeed prefer Trump, but because he views Clinton as a neo-con warmonger who would rather bomb
someone than negotiate a deal).
Bruno Costa Alec Dacyczyn
I hate Trump, but this is a VERY safe bet.
Russia will not invade Poland or the Baltic. The world change. Putin has an agenda different from
Ivan the Terrible...
NATO countries will pay their bills and psychopaths like Erdogan will think twice before put down
a Russian fighter.
That was insane. The most dangerous act since the 80's!
Made by a religious fanatical dictator who is ending Turkey secular tradition.
If Russia had responded, protecting Erdogan would've been fair? NATO starting 3rd WW because of
a authoritarian guy that should be expelled is reasonable?
Sam3456
A vote against Hillary is not a vote for Trump any more than a vote against the Iraq War
was a vote for Saddam Hussein.
niftydude
Hilarious. This Red Scare is ridiculous, will only carry weight with the over 60s. It is
just one of the many missteps in Hillary's tone deaf campaign which is going to cost her the presidency.
livingstonfc
Not a Trump supporter, but this shitty rag attacks everyone except the Red Queen...who
is responsible for many acts of terror and murder...documented.
BSchwartz
Trump is married to a woman who grew up under communism. Some his closest advisors have worked
for communists. Many of his own business dealings are with Russians. He has claimed a relationshp
with Putin and says he admires him. He has amended Republican policies to favour Russia. He called
on the Russian's to undertake espionage into Hillary Clinton. There is a pattern here.
A man like Trump, who believed in the conspiracy theory that Obama was Kenyan, should understand
that conspiracies grow as evidence build. There was no evidence to sustain Trump's conspiracy
regarding Obama.
But Trump himself provides much evidence to sustain the theory that his interests are closer
to the Russians than to much of America.
Sam3456 -> BSchwartz
Really? Democrats red baiting and calling people "commies" how shameful and ignorant of you
history. What next Hillary comes out with a "list of Trump/Putin sympathizers"? Shame.
Bruno Costa -> BSchwartz
Hahahahahahahahahaha OMG! Are you going beyond Manchurian Candidate and saying that Trump is
communist? Do you really understand how funny this is?
PCollens -> BSchwartz
A-ha! I see it now! Trump is a commie Manchurian candidate, cleverly hidden as a son of a rich
guy who became a billionaire, spreading capitalist ideology to the masses as a front for his USSR
commie masters. Its obvious! Wake up sheeple!
Gem59
The Clinton-Media machine in full force....Those Russians are in bed with Trump! It must be
the barbarians! Shame on you traitor Donald! Whatever it takes, corrupted Media! Here is an interview
with Julian Assange who argues there is no evidence of any hacking by Russians
Russian literature, the language, the culture...all quite beautiful. OK, and maybe the women
too. But this 'relationship' between Trump and Russia makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm willing
to admit that I may simply be conditioned to be wary of Russian involvement because of all those
Cold War years. Still...creepy!
Ta, much of the information, especially what Tom Curley (formerly AP chief) revealed, has
been removed from the net. I wish I had saved the pdf of his Kansas speech before it vanished
everywhere. There was also something on a British server, but that stopped being fed.
Often we could see it on the posters' string, how many in how many hours, hence the attempts
to hide it through multi ID facility. For disqus, they block the string. We know we are being
manipulated. And very few people take things at face value these days, or do they?
Ping2fyoutoo
"experts argue Vladimir Putin has attempted in the past to damage western democracy."
That single sentence exposes the Guardian as a completely fraudulent news reporting medium.
With tears in my eyes I ask you "How does Putin releasing e-mails about the secret and illegal
American electoral shenanigans amount to an attack on western democracy?"
It doesn't. It's something the western mainstream media should be doing to enlighten the people
about the depths of the crookedness and the evil chicanery surrounding "western democracy" (as
practised today in the US). That omission is what weakens and threatens western democracy.
The old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all
of the people all of the time" is demonstrated by the Guardians reporting without sources, other
than anonymous so-called "experts". Your journalistic integrity is little higher than the height
of Hillary Clinton's honesty, or the level of the Donald's business ethics. Shame on you. Double
shame for being so blatantly easy to expose.
The western media, controlled by special interest groups, are driving your low-level sputum
which tries to pass for accurate and unbiased reportage.
And please let us know who these "experts" are that you say that you are quoting.
Alexander Dunnett -> Ping2fyoutoo
On the whole I would have to agree with you. The picture painted by the Western News Media
is that the US is the White Knight when it comes to democracy, they never interfere in other countries
political affairs, never try to break into computer systems of other countries, try to topple
or assassinate leaders of other countries. They never carry out torture and they ignore the 30m
on the poverty line in their own country.
PCollens -> Ping2fyoutoo
Agreed. There is a Deep State mole inside the Graun.
Its Operation Mockingbird for sure.
normankirk
So Starbucks is in Russia,sinister? or is it just that globalisation means financial interests
are worldwide.
And why is no one mentioning that James Clapper head of the NSA, who should know, says that he
is "taken aback by the media's hyperventilations" and that no one knows who was behind the hack
of the DNC.
Suga
Whatever Lies you believe or even think of HRC...
Clinton is our only hope of keeping the White House from The Insane Republican Party!.
Please...Check-out this excellent interview with Michael Ruppert, who tracked exactly what took
place under The Horrible Bush/Cheney Reign Of Terror that brought down America on 9/11!
(Ruppert supposedly committed suicide in 2014) It's amazing this interview is still available...it
will absolutely shock you into realizing that we cannot give the White House back to the GOP...they
are surrounded by Pure Evil!
Brilliant! - Bless you. Mike Ruppert is the greatest hero to emerge from all this.
Copy-paste the following - it is pure fact, forensic level evidence, of the most serious issues,
yet it always gets taken down. I've concluded that this is by the moles in the MSM, including
the Graun, sadly:
Chapter and verse on the drills of terror attacks being run on 911 which removed the air defences
– an coordinated by Cheney: 9/11 Synthetic Terror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar6I0jUg6Vs
The Chief CIA back-channel asset who exposed the fore-knowledge of 911 survived the attempts
to rub her out, and finally told the truth:
CIA WhistleBlower Susan Lindauer EXPOSES Everything - "Extreme Prejudice" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68LUHa_-OlA
Well at least Trump is fostering positive relations with Russia - Hillary Clinton is pushing
us to the brink of nuclear war with them. You Tube it. Wishing Good Luck to all people of courage
and honesty.
Eddie2000
Reds under the bed! Reds under the bed! Surely they can beat Trump without resorting to this
nonsense?
woof92105
****warning - This comment area is infested with russian trolls. It becomes easy to spot their
bizarre but consistent pro-putin statements. They reply to each other and uprate each other, etc.
These people are in Russia and are paid by Putin's cronies. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=0
sejong -> woof92105
Accuracy score 1/10.
normankirk -> woof92105
and how do we know you aren't part of the cyber warrior force thats become a growth industry
in the US and UK?
Gina Mihajlovska -> woof92105
Your an idiot. It's not about Putin it's about how the public is being played. No matter where
the leak came from the dnc is corrupt.focus on the prize. Not on the BS....
shaftedpig
Trump might have his faults, like being a motor mouth but he's not even in the same category
as GW Bush or HR Clinton when it comes to corruption, the Democrats haven't got much on Trump,
so they resort to tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, when what is staring at us directly in the
face is out-and-out full-on corruption by HRC.
This is not about left vs right, it's about right vs wrong. Read any book by investigative
journalist, Roger Stone who nails HRC. If you're on the left and feel let down by Bernie, at least
consider Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, I can't for the life of me understand why Americans revere
corrupt officials when you got decent potential presidents who aren't in the pockets of banksters
like HRC.
Reuters/Ipsos changed it polling methodology as soon as they saw a 17 point swing in favor
of Donald the Drumpf. When the methodology by their own admission was under reporting Trump support
and over reporting Hillbilly's numbers they did nothing. So don't believe any polls. There is
no enthusiasm for Hillbilly in the Democratic party, so the Democratic turn out will be low, on
the other hand people want to shake things up, they will vote for Drumpf. I just wished Donald
had half a brain in his head to see how much good he could do, with the opportunity he has.
So the dreaded ruskies are trying to help Trump? Oh my goodness!
Meanwhile, Clinton's big love for Israel remains unmentioned during most of the Primaries and
even now. I've done a lot of work around the Middle East. The reason certain people hate us is
because the US has vetoed all UN efforts to right the wrongs committed by Israel against the Palestinians.
And with Netanyahu in his 4th term, gelding the news media, and rolling more completely fascist,
we can expect more rubber stamping of territory occupation (that seems like a very simple and
illegal act, but since the USA - and only the USA - disagrees, it's okay) and abuses that will
further fuel hatred from people who'd, at minimum, appreciate it if justice could apply to them.
Let the candidate without sin cast the first stone of superiority!
BTW - What the Russians want is more cash for their wealthiest, trusted oligarchs. That's exactly
what Clinton and Trump are working to do. So why can't they all just be friends?
ahmedfez
A lot of associations and coincidences have been listed here. But no hard evidence linking
the hacking to Putin, nor Putin to Trump. It sounds like a load of muckraking.
shaftedpig -> ahmedfez
True. If it was the other way round, Guardian journalists and establishment shills would
be screaming 'tin-foil' when they should be holding that woman to account.
Bernie Sanders delegates were forcefully locked out of a DNC meeting
on Saturday as the Democratic National Committee attempted to block superdelegate
reforms.
The meeting of 187 rules committee members took place in a small room at
the Wells Fargo Center where they unceremoniously voted to reject a proposal
that would ban superdelegates in future primaries.
The DNC's Rules Committee,
which is co-chaired by former Massachusetts Congressman and outspoken
Clinton surrogate Barney Frank, is made up of representatives of both campaigns
in proportion to how many delegates each campaign won during the primary
process.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also appointed 25 members of the Rules
Committee who are able to vote on each proposal. The superdelegate elimination
proposal and related measures were easily the most high-profile votes of
the day.
On Saturday afternoon, the committee voted to reject a proposal eliminating
the role of superdelegates in future Democratic presidential primaries -
something that
multiple state Democratic conventions voted in favor of earlier this
year. Similar proposals to minimize or limit the power of superdelegates
were also defeated.
"... However, to ease tensions with the Clinton wing of the party, Obama selected Clinton to be his Secretary of State, one of the first and most fateful decisions of his presidency. He also kept on George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon members of the military high command, such as Gen. David Petraeus. ..."
"... Inside Obama's foreign policy councils, Clinton routinely took the most neoconservative positions, such as defending a 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a progressive president. ..."
"... Clinton also sabotaged early efforts to work out an agreement in which Iran surrendered much of its low-enriched uranium, including an initiative in 2010 organized at Obama's request by the leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Clinton sank that deal and escalated tensions with Iran along the lines favored by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Clinton favorite. ..."
"... But no one should be gullible enough to believe that Clinton's invasion of Syria would stop at a "safe zone." As with Libya, once the camel's nose was into the tent, pretty soon the animal would be filling up the whole tent. ..."
"... Perhaps even scarier is what a President Clinton would do regarding Iran and Ukraine, two countries where belligerent U.S. behavior could start much bigger wars. ..."
"... In Ukraine, would Clinton escalate U.S. military support for the post-coup anti-Russian Ukrainian government, encouraging its forces to annihilate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and to "liberate" the people of Crimea from "Russian aggression" (though they voted by 96 percent to leave the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia)? ..."
"... Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the new American Century, has endorsed Clinton, saying "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." [See Consortiumnews.com's " Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon. "] ..."
"... So, by selecting Clinton, the Democrats have made a full 360-degree swing back to the pre-1968 days of the Vietnam War. After nearly a half century of favoring a more peaceful foreign policy – and somewhat less weapons spending – than the Republicans, the Democrats are America's new aggressive war party. ..."
... But former Secretary of State Clinton has made it clear that she is eager to use military
force to achieve "regime change" in countries that get in the way of U.S. desires. She abides by
neoconservative strategies of violent interventions especially in the Middle East and she strikes
a belligerent posture as well toward nuclear-armed Russia and, to a lesser extent, China.
Amid the celebrations about picking the first woman as a major party's presumptive nominee, Democrats
appear to have given little thought to the fact that they have abandoned a near half-century standing
as the party more skeptical about the use of military force. Clinton is an unabashed war hawk who
has shown no inclination to rethink her pro-war attitudes.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton voted for and avidly supported the Iraq War, only cooling
her enthusiasm in 2006 when it became clear that the Democratic base had turned decisively against
the war and her hawkish position endangered her chances for the 2008 presidential nomination, which
she lost to Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent.
However, to ease tensions with the Clinton wing of the party, Obama selected Clinton to be
his Secretary of State, one of the first and most fateful decisions of his presidency. He also kept
on George W. Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates and neocon members of the military high command,
such as Gen. David Petraeus.
This "Team of Rivals" – named after Abraham Lincoln's initial Civil War cabinet – ensured a powerful
bloc of pro-war sentiment, which pushed Obama toward more militaristic solutions than he otherwise
favored, notably the wasteful counterinsurgency "surge" in Afghanistan in 2009 which did little beyond
get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed and many more Afghans.
Clinton was a strong supporter of that "surge" – and Gates
reported in his memoir that she acknowledged only opposing the Iraq War "surge" in 2007
for political reasons. Inside Obama's foreign policy councils, Clinton routinely took the most
neoconservative positions, such as defending a 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted a progressive president.
Clinton also sabotaged early efforts to work out an agreement in which Iran surrendered much
of its low-enriched uranium, including an initiative in 2010 organized at Obama's request by the
leaders of Brazil and Turkey. Clinton
sank that deal and escalated
tensions with Iran along the lines favored by Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
a Clinton favorite.
Pumping for War in Libya
In 2011, Clinton successfully lobbied Obama to go to war against Libya to achieve another "regime
change," albeit cloaked in the more modest goal of establishing only a "no-fly zone" to "protect
civilians."
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had claimed he was battling jihadists and terrorists who were building
strongholds around Benghazi, but Clinton and her State Department underlings accused him of slaughtering
civilians and (in one of the more colorful lies used to justify the war) distributing Viagra to his
troops so they could rape more women.
Despite resistance from Russia and China, the United Nations Security Council fell for the deception
about protecting civilians. Russia and China agreed to abstain from the vote, giving Clinton her
"no-fly zone." Once that was secured, however, the Obama administration and several European allies
unveiled their real plan, to destroy the Libyan army and pave the way for the violent overthrow of
Gaddafi.
Privately, Clinton's senior aides viewed the Libyan "regime change" as a chance to establish what
they called the "Clinton Doctrine" on using "smart power" with plans for Clinton to rush
to the fore and claim credit once Gaddafi was ousted. But that scheme failed when President Obama
grabbed the limelight after Gaddafi's government collapsed.
But Clinton would not be denied her second opportunity to claim the glory when jihadist rebels
captured Gaddafi on Oct. 20, 2011, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Hearing of Gaddafi's
demise, Clinton went into a network interview and
declared , "we came,
we saw, he died" and clapped her hands in glee.
Clinton's glee was short-lived, however. Libya soon descended into chaos with Islamic extremists
gaining control of large swaths of the country. On Sept. 11, 2012, jihadists attacked the U.S. consulate
in Benghazi killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel. It turned
out Gaddafi had been right about the nature of his enemies.
Undaunted by the mess in Libya, Clinton made similar plans for Syria where again she marched in
lock-step with the neocons and their "liberal interventionist" sidekicks in support of another violent
"regime change," ousting the Assad dynasty,
a top neocon/Israeli goal since the 1990s.
Clinton pressed Obama to escalate weapons shipments and training for anti-government rebels who
were deemed "moderate" but in reality
collaborated closely with radical Islamic forces, including Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda's Syrian
franchise) and some even more extreme jihadists (who coalesced into the Islamic State).
Again, Clinton's war plans were cloaked in humanitarian language, such as the need to create a
"safe zone" inside Syria to save civilians. But her plans would have required a major U.S. invasion
of a sovereign country, the destruction of its air force and much of its military, and the creation
of conditions for another "regime change."
In the case of Syria, however, Obama resisted the pressure from Clinton and other hawks inside
his own administration. The President did approve some covert assistance to the rebels and allowed
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf states to do much more, but he did not agree to an outright U.S.-led
invasion to Clinton's disappointment.
Parting Ways
Clinton finally left the Obama administration at the start of his second term in 2013, some say
voluntarily and others say in line with Obama's desire to finally move ahead with serious negotiations
with Iran over its nuclear program and to apply more pressure on Israel to reach a long-delayed peace
settlement with the Palestinians. Secretary of State John Kerry was willing to do some of the politically
risky work that Clinton was not.
Many on the Left deride Obama as "Obomber" and mock his hypocritical acceptance of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2009. And there is no doubt that Obama has waged war his entire presidency, bombing at least
seven countries by his own count. But the truth is that he has generally been among the most dovish
members of his administration, advocating a "realistic" (or restrained) application of American power.
By contrast, Clinton was among the most hawkish senior officials.
A major testing moment for Obama came in August 2013 after a sarin gas attack outside Damascus,
Syria, that killed hundreds of Syrians and that the State Department and the mainstream U.S. media
immediately blamed on the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There was almost universal pressure inside Official Washington to militarily enforce Obama's "red
line" against Assad using chemical weapons. Amid this intense momentum toward war, it was widely
assumed that Obama would order a harsh retaliatory strike against the Syrian military. But U.S. intelligence
and key figures in the U.S. military smelled a rat, a provocation carried out by Islamic extremists
to draw the United States into the Syrian war on their side.
At the last minute and at great political cost to himself, Obama listened to the doubts of his
intelligence advisers and called off the attack, referring the issue to the U.S. Congress and then
accepting a Russian-brokered deal in which Assad surrendered all his chemical weapons though continuing
to deny a role in the sarin attack.
Eventually, the sarin
case against Assad would collapse. Only one rocket was found to have carried sarin and
it had a very limited range placing its firing position likely within rebel-controlled territory.
But Official Washington's conventional wisdom never budged. To this day, politicians and pundits
denounce Obama for not enforcing his "red line."
There's little doubt, however, what Hillary Clinton would have done. She has been eager for a
much more aggressive U.S. military role in Syria since the civil war began in 2011. Much as she used
propaganda and deception to achieve "regime change" in Libya, she surely would have done the same
in Syria, embracing the pretext of the sarin attack – "killing innocent children" – to destroy the
Syrian military even if the rebels were the guilty parties.
Still Lusting for War
Indeed, during the 2016 campaign – in those few moments that have touched on foreign policy –
Clinton declared that as President she would order the U.S. military to invade Syria. "Yes, I do
still support a no-fly zone," she said during the April 14 debate. She also wants a "safe zone" that
would require seizing territory inside Syria.
But no one should be gullible enough to believe that Clinton's invasion of Syria would stop
at a "safe zone." As with Libya, once the camel's nose was into the tent, pretty soon the animal
would be filling up the whole tent.
Perhaps even scarier is what a President Clinton would do regarding Iran and Ukraine, two
countries where belligerent U.S. behavior could start much bigger wars.
For instance, would President Hillary Clinton push the Iranians so hard – in line with what Netanyahu
favors – that they would renounce the nuclear deal and give Clinton an excuse to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran?
In Ukraine, would Clinton escalate U.S. military support for the post-coup anti-Russian Ukrainian
government, encouraging its forces to annihilate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and
to "liberate" the people of Crimea from "Russian aggression" (though they voted by 96 percent to
leave the failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia)?
Would President Clinton expect the Russians to stand down and accept these massacres? Would she
take matters to the next level to demonstrate how tough she can be against Russian President Vladimir
Putin whom she has compared to Hitler? Might she buy into the latest neocon dream of achieving "regime
change" in Moscow? Would she be wise enough to recognize how dangerous such instability could be?
Of course, one would expect that all of Clinton's actions would be clothed in the crocodile tears
of "humanitarian" warfare, starting wars to "save the children" or to stop the evil enemy from "raping
defenseless girls." The truth of such emotional allegations would be left for the post-war historians
to try to sort out. In the meantime, President Clinton would have her wars.
Having covered Washington for nearly four decades, I always marvel at how selective concerns for
human rights can be. When "friendly" civilians are dying, we are told that we have a "responsibility
to protect," but when pro-U.S. forces are slaughtering civilians of an adversary country or movement,
reports of those atrocities are dismissed as "enemy propaganda" or ignored altogether. Clinton is
among the most cynical in this regard.
Trading Places
But the larger picture for the Democrats is that they have just adopted an extraordinary historical
reversal whether they understand it or not. They have replaced the Republicans as the party of aggressive
war, though clearly many Republicans still dance to the neocon drummer just as Clinton and "liberal
interventionists" do. Still, Donald Trump, for all his faults, has adopted a relatively peaceful
point of view, especially in the Mideast and with Russia.
While today many Democrats are congratulating themselves for becoming the first major party to
make a woman the presumptive nominee, they may soon have to decide whether that distinction justifies
putting an aggressive war hawk in the White House. In a way, the issue is an old one for Democrats,
whether "identity politics" or anti-war policies are more important.
At least since 1968 and the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago, the party has advanced,
sometimes haltingly, those two agendas, pushing for broader rights for all and seeking to restrain
the nation's militaristic impulses.
In the 1970s, Democrats largely repudiated the Vietnam War while the Republicans waved the flag
and equated anti-war positions with treason. By the 1980s and early 1990s, Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush were making war fun again – Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama and the Persian Gulf, all relatively
low-cost conflicts with victorious conclusions.
By the 1990s, Bill Clinton (along with Hillary Clinton) saw militarism as just another issue to
be triangulated. With the Soviet Union's collapse, the Clinton-42 administration saw the opportunity
for more low-cost tough-guy/gal-ism – continuing a harsh embargo and periodic air strikes against
Iraq (causing the deaths of a U.N.-estimated half million children); blasting Serbia into submission
over Kosovo; and expanding NATO to the east toward Russia's borders.
But Bill Clinton did balk at the more extreme neocon ideas, such as the one from the Project for
the New American Century for a militarily enforced "regime change" in Iraq. That had to wait for
George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As a New York senator, Hillary Clinton made sure
she was onboard for war on Iraq just as she sided with Israel's pummeling of Lebanon and the Palestinians
in Gaza.
Hillary Clinton was taking triangulation to an even more acute angle as she sided with virtually
every position of the Netanyahu government in Israel and moved in tandem with the neocons as they
cemented their control of Washington's foreign policy establishment. Her only brief flirtation with
an anti-war position came in 2006 when her political advisers informed her that her continued support
for Bush's Iraq War would doom her in the Democratic presidential race.
But she let her hawkish plumage show again as Obama's Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 – and
once she felt she had the 2016 Democratic race in hand (after her success in the southern primaries)
she pivoted back to her hard-line positions in full support of Israel and in a full-throated defense
of her war on Libya, which she still won't view as a failure.
The smarter neocons are already lining up to endorse Clinton, especially given Donald Trump's
hostile takeover of the Republican Party and his disdain for neocon strategies that he views as simply
spreading chaos around the globe. As The New York Times has
reported, Clinton is "the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes."
Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the neocon Project for the new American Century, has endorsed
Clinton, saying "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we
think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters
are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." [See Consortiumnews.com's
"Yes,
Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon."]
So, by selecting Clinton, the Democrats have made a full 360-degree swing back to the pre-1968
days of the Vietnam War. After nearly a half century of favoring a more peaceful foreign policy –
and somewhat less weapons spending – than the Republicans, the Democrats are America's new aggressive
war party.
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).
How about WAPO does some real reporting and compares the two candidate on the issues at hand and
leaves out all the speculation"
Judging from comments the level of brainwashing of WaPo readship is just staggering... Far above
that existed in soviet Russia (were most people were supciously about Soviet nomeklatura and did not
trust them).
Notable quotes:
"... In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to, if she becomes president. ..."
"... And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia. ..."
"... This year, the Clinton team is accusing Putin of waging information warfare against the Democratic candidate in order to help elect the Republican candidate. Clinton is also running ads claiming she stood up to Putin. Meanwhile, Trump is called for a weakening of NATO and his staff worked to remove an anti-Russia stance on Ukraine from the GOP platform. ..."
"... Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that means. What would Clinton do about Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks? Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama's plan to deepen U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria? ..."
"... if Clinton wins, she will be committed to implementing the anti-Putin, tough-on-Russia policy she is running on and Democrats will need to fall in line ..."
"... I am not a national security expert but it does not look intelligent to antagonize Russia and China at the same time. But I think it is unfair to blame Hillary for this, Obama has been antagonizing Russia and China for some time now. He has being very successful at that, for the first time in many years now Russia and China are BFF doing naval exercises together. ..."
"... In other words, her use of a homebrew email server constituted a threat to national security? ..."
"... The Dems and their Washington Post surrogates are apoplectic over Donald Trump's supposed affinity for the Russians. Russia is now America's mortal enemy in the current Dem narrative. ..."
"... Mook's claim of Russian involvement would be more convincing if he had offered any proof. Otherwise it just looks like pure deflection and distraction and disinformation. ..."
In their zeal to portray Donald Trump as a dangerous threat to national security, the Clinton
campaign has taken a starkly anti-Russian stance, one that completes a total role reversal for the
two major American parties on U.S.-Russian relations that Hillary Clinton will now be committed to,
if she becomes president.
The side switching between the parties on Russia is the result of two converging trends. U.S.-Russian
relations have gone downhill since Russian President Vladimir Putin came back to power in 2012, torpedoing
the Obama administration's first term outreach to Moscow, which Clinton led. Then, in the past year,
Trump's Russia-friendly policy has filled the pro-engagement space that Democrats once occupied.
And now, for mostly political reasons, the Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric
on Russia. After Trump
suggested Wednesday that if Russia had indeed hacked Clinton's private email server it should
release the emails, the Clinton campaign sent out its Democratic surrogates to bash Russia and Trump
in a manner traditionally reserved for Republicans.
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national
security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
Set to one side that Trump was probably joking. Russia clearly does not need Trump's permission
to hack U.S. political organizations or government institutions. And there's no consensus that Russia
released the Democratic National Committee emails in order to disrupt the presidential election.
In fact, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has his own personal vendetta against Clinton, claimed
that he alone chose the timing of the release of the DNC emails.
Regardless, the idea that a GOP presidential nominee would endorse Russian cyber-espionage was
too tempting for the Clinton campaign to resist, especially on the day their convention was dedicated
to painting Trump as dangerous on national security.
At an event on the sidelines of the convention Wednesday, several top Clinton national security
surrogates focused on Trump's latest comments to argue that they embolden Russia in its plan to destabilize
and dominate the West. Former national security adviser Tom Donilon said that Russia is interfering
with elections all over Europe and said Trump is helping Russia directly.
"The Russians have engaged in cyberattacks in a number of places that we know about, in Georgia,
in Estonia and in Ukraine. . . . In the Russian takeover of Crimea, information warfare was a
central part of their operations," Donilon said. "To dangerously embrace a set of strategies by
the Russian Federation that are intent on undermining key Western institutions . . . is playing
into the hands of Russian strategy."
Former defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said that if Donilon was still in the White
House, he would have tasked the CIA to retaliate against Moscow. Panetta then doubled down on Sullivan's
argument that Trump's comments by themselves are making the United States less safe.
"This is crazy stuff, and yet somehow you get the sense that people think it's a joke. It has
already represented a threat to our national security," Panetta said. "Because if you go abroad
and talk to people, they are very worried that someone like this could become president of the
United States."
In 2008, the Russian government was definitely not rooting for the Republican candidate for president.
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) had made a feature of his campaign a pledge to stand up to Russian aggression
and dispatched two top surrogates to Georgia after the Russian invasion.
In 2012, Mitt Romney warned that Russia was the United States' "number one geopolitical foe."
Then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry mocked Romney at the Democratic National
Convention in Charlotte, saying that Romney got his information about Russia from the movie "Rocky
IV."
This year, the Clinton team is accusing Putin of waging information warfare against the Democratic
candidate in order to help elect the Republican candidate. Clinton is also running ads claiming she
stood up to Putin. Meanwhile, Trump is called for a weakening of NATO and his staff worked to remove
an anti-Russia stance on Ukraine from the GOP platform.
Now that the Democrats are the tough-on-Russia party, they should explain exactly what that
means. What would Clinton do about Russia's increasingly aggressive cyber-espionage and information
warfare in Europe and around the world? Would she expand sanctions on Russia in response to the hacks?
Would she use U.S. cyber forces to retaliate? Would she abandon President Obama's plan to deepen
U.S.-Russian military and intelligence cooperation in Syria?
The Clinton team hasn't said. For now, they are content to use Trump's statements about Russia
to make the argument that he's not commander-in-chief material. But if Clinton wins, she will
be committed to implementing the anti-Putin, tough-on-Russia policy she is running on and Democrats
will need to fall in line . If Putin wasn't rooting for Trump before, he is now.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 6:25 PM EDT
So TRUMP is threat to NATIONAL SECURITY for asking RUSSIA for the emails she destroyed? Because
they would be the one likely to have them since she completely ignored Security protocol while
in Russia? WOW they get better every day. They have already explain Russia could have been in
and out of her accounts all along because of her complete lack of security of her devises. She
had less security than a commercial account using the private server the way she did. And she
did cause a breach in national security. She fwd classified email to an intern and it did get
hacked. Whether or not Russia got any info from her we will never know. Because the lack of security
on her server Russia could have got her password and and the info leaving no tracks.
NotaClinton , 7/28/2016 5:22 PM EDT
People agree with PUTIN you know like the ones in CRIMEA and SYRIA. I'd rather see a PUTIN
TRUMP ticket. I like what I see in PUTIN doing in the world. He seems to be the one SAVING people
around the world. Assad let the people have freedom of religion. These Sunni the USA is arming
want to force Sharia law. I don't approve of my tax dollars being spent arming those terrorists
nor do I consider Saudi Arabia an ally!!! I would rather see a TRUMP PUTIN ticket and add 75 more
stars to our flag. Than what the current government is. Although I would more so like to see the
USA government take a much more democratic stance. Change our government to be more like Switzerland
Norway and the Netherlands. Who were inspired by the USA constitution. Our constitution and democracy
has been lost to corruption!!!!
George1955, 7/28/2016 5:08 PM EDT
I am not a national security expert but it does not look intelligent to antagonize Russia
and China at the same time. But I think it is unfair to blame Hillary for this, Obama has been
antagonizing Russia and China for some time now. He has being very successful at that, for the
first time in many years now Russia and China are BFF doing naval exercises together. Maybe
there is a very profound strategy in that (everybody says that Obama is a genius) but I cannot
see what is the logic of provoking at the same time the two biggest military powers apart of the
United States while weakening our military forces with budget cuts.
It is the worst foreign policy since the Arab Spring brought us ISIS. They are incapable of
intelligent policy. Their whole idea was to "not do stupid stuff" and here they are. They just
can't help themselves.
chayapartiya, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
The only thing standing between a highly productive US/Russian relationship are the other relationships
the United States has, both institutional and personal among our elites.
Russia is the sworn enemy of many US allies and has barred our richest citizens from taking
charge of large sectors of the Russian economy. That is the source of our new Cold War.
Lacking Communist ideology Russia will never be an existential threat to the United States
or our way of life. On the other hand, Islam is. On the other hand, Red China is.
You have to be willing to abandon the entire US foreign policy establishment to turn our relationship
with Russia around, and if we did maintaining our relationships with Poland, the Baltics, Georgia,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia and more would become vastly more difficult.
But the idea is too good of one to abandon, Russia is far too influential to ignore. I'm glad
one major party is going to recognize that now.
invention13, 7/28/2016 5:01 PM EDT
"This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national
security issue," Clinton senior foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In other words, her use of a homebrew email server constituted a threat to national security?
I'm finding this whole flap just too funny. The whole point was probably to step on the news
coverage of the convention on the night that the president and vice president were to speak. Trump
is happy to fan the flames a bit. This is what he does when there is something he doesn't want
people to pay attention to (whether it is unfavorable coverage of Trump University, or a convention).
He throws out something outrageous that sucks the oxygen out of the news cycle. This whole thing
will die down, simply because in the absence of hard evidence, most people don't believe it is
true that Trump is Putin's agent. He may admire him, but work for him? I doubt it.
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 5:44 PM EDT
Her actions DID once agains threaten NATIONAL SECURITY there was no doubt about that. She fwd
classified email to her interns who got hacked. That is definitely a threat to national security.
She carried her Blackberry and laptop into countries while acting as head of state. Which was
not recommended for anyone to do even if there devices were secured by the state. She took hers
to countries with her personal server that had zero security less than a commercial account. Then
there was the fact she deleted and kept her business out of reach of FOIA. Zero respect for those
laws. All federal employees are allowed to have a personal email for there person life. But Hilary
decides she is above the law. Those federal laws don't apply to her and got away with it. When
Comey was asked about that. He said he wasn't asked to investigate whether she broke those federal
laws. He wasn't investigating whether she broke the law. But only if he should charge her for
violating security. His conclusion was yes she violated the law. But he sees the law meant nothing
so why file a criminal charge.
Trump only requested information that they very well may have. Because Hilary handed it to
them. it's hard to believe the Russians hacked the DNC. They most likely had the passwords from
Hilary's accounts. Which would leave no footprints.
OswegoTex , 7/28/2016 2:54 PM EDT
The Dems and their Washington Post surrogates are apoplectic over Donald Trump's supposed
affinity for the Russians. Russia is now America's mortal enemy in the current Dem narrative.
Wasn't Romney ridiculed by a snarky and arrogant Obama and his press sycophants for identifying
Russia as a major geopolitical threat in the 2012 election cycle. What happened? Oh-- I know---
the Clinton/Obama "reset".
stella blue, 7/28/2016 2:45 PM EDT
Very interesting article. Hillary is a neocon. She never saw a war she didn't like. I don't
know what would be so wrong with having good relations with Russia. Wasn't that what Hillary's
stupid reset button was all about?
NotaClinton, 7/28/2016 6:11 PM EDT [Edited]
I admire PUTIN and so do a lot of people. If you are a Citizens and believe in our values and
the constitution. He held a democratic Legal election in Crimea. Where the people voted unanimously
in favor of Belonging to Russia, A Vote that would be exactly the same today. The USA invades
Syria with terrorists from countries whose own people wouldn't vote them in.
All I have seen Putin do is save people. He saved Syria finally. i don't know what took him
so long. Maybe WMDs he knew the opposition would use and some more dirty filthy rotten tricks
that have been happening there. He turned the war around on less money than a shipment of weapons
and training to the rebels forces costed the USA. those shipments and training was going on since
before the conflict broke out. What was the point?
Why has the USA spent a dime in that country other than they should have immediately neutralized,
destroyed or recovered all the military equipment that was stolen from Iraq. I you like Russian
your anti american? If you don't like illegal Immigrants your a racist. That is to be expected
from those educated Hilary Voters...
Nikdo, 7/28/2016 4:26 PM EDT
Mook's claim of Russian involvement would be more convincing if he had offered any proof.
Otherwise it just looks like pure deflection and distraction and disinformation.
The video accompanying the article is actually better the the text. John Bolton made some interesting
remarks. For example he said that it is stunning that Hillary Clinton said something about damage from
hack of DNC server. What she though by engaging in her reckless behaviors with bathroom server four
years while she were in office. He also suggested that points to Russia might be just attempt if disinformation
from a real perpetuator.
Notable quotes:
"... In her acceptance speech, Clinton reaffirmed a commitment to NATO, saying she was "proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia." ..."
"... As U.S. secretary of state, Clinton in 2009 presented her Russian counterpart with a red button intended to symbolize a "reset" in relations between the two countries, one of U.S. President Barack Obama's initiatives. In Russia, the gesture is best remembered for the misspelling of the word in Russian, while the reset itself failed in the face of Putin's return as Russian president in 2012 and Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine two years later. ..."
"... Clinton once compared the annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's moves into Eastern Europe at the start of World War II, a comparison that was deeply offensive in Russia, where the country's victory over Nazi Germany remains a prime source of national pride. ..."
"... "And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it's a mess. And that's under the Obama's administration with his strong ties to NATO. So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess," Trump said. "Crimea has been taken. Don't blame Donald Trump for that." ..."
"... Putin was outraged by U.S. support for Ukraine and by U.S. military intervention around the world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton's watch. But it was what he saw as interference in Russia that really rankled. ..."
"... When Clinton described Russia's 2011 parliamentary elections as rigged, Putin said she was "sending a signal" to his critics. He then accused the U.S. State Department of financially supporting the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow to demand free elections and an end to Putin's rule. ..."
"... Channel One began its report by introducing Clinton as "a politician who puts herself above the law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political situation." The anchorwoman couched the description by saying that was how Clinton is seen by Trump's supporters - but it was a nuance viewers could easily miss. ..."
MOSCOW – To understand what the Kremlin thinks about the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming
the U.S. president, it was enough to watch Russian state television coverage of her accepting the
Democratic nomination.
Viewers were told that Clinton sees Russia as an enemy and cannot be trusted, while the Democratic
Party convention was portrayed as further proof that American democracy is a sham.
In her acceptance speech, Clinton reaffirmed a commitment to NATO, saying she was "proud to
stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia."
In doing so, she was implicitly rebuking her rival, Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has questioned
the need for the Western alliance and suggested that if he is elected president, the United States
might not honor its NATO military commitments, in particular regarding former Soviet republics in
the Baltics.
While Trump's position on NATO has delighted the Kremlin, Clinton's statement clearly stung.
"She mentioned Russia only once, but it was enough to see that the era of the reset is over,"
Channel One said in its report.
As U.S. secretary of state, Clinton in 2009 presented her Russian counterpart with a red button
intended to symbolize a "reset" in relations between the two countries, one of U.S. President Barack
Obama's initiatives. In Russia, the gesture is best remembered for the misspelling of the word in
Russian, while the reset itself failed in the face of Putin's return as Russian president in 2012
and Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine two years later.
Clinton once compared the annexation of Crimea to Adolf Hitler's moves into Eastern Europe
at the start of World War II, a comparison that was deeply offensive in Russia, where the country's
victory over Nazi Germany remains a prime source of national pride.
Trump, on the other hand, told ABC's "This Week" in a broadcast Sunday that he wants to take a
look at whether the U.S. should recognize Crimea as part of Russia. "You know, the people of Crimea,
from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were," Trump said.
This runs counter to the position of the Obama administration and the European Union, which have
imposed punishing sanctions on Russia in response to the annexation.
"And as far as the Ukraine is concerned, it's a mess. And that's under the Obama's administration
with his strong ties to NATO. So with all of these strong ties to NATO, Ukraine is a mess," Trump
said. "Crimea has been taken. Don't blame Donald Trump for that."
Putin was outraged by U.S. support for Ukraine and by U.S. military intervention around the
world, particularly in Libya, on Clinton's watch. But it was what he saw as interference in Russia
that really rankled.
When Clinton described Russia's 2011 parliamentary elections as rigged, Putin said she was
"sending a signal" to his critics. He then accused the U.S. State Department of financially supporting
the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the streets of Moscow to demand free elections
and an end to Putin's rule.
In the years since, the Kremlin has defended Russian elections in part by implying they are no
different than in the United States, a country it says promotes democracy around the world while
allowing its business and political elite to determine who wins at home.
The Democratic Convention, which ended Friday morning Moscow time, was given wide coverage throughout
the day on the nearly hourly news reports on state television, the Kremlin's most powerful tool for
shaping public opinion.
Channel One began its report by introducing Clinton as "a politician who puts herself above the
law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political
situation." The anchorwoman couched the description by saying that was how Clinton is seen by Trump's
supporters - but it was a nuance viewers could easily miss.
The reports ran excerpts of Clinton's speech, but the camera swung repeatedly to a sullen Sen.
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her Democratic challenger, and his disappointed supporters. The Rossiya
channel also showed anti-Clinton protesters outside the convention hall who it said "felt they have
been betrayed after the email leak that showed Bernie Sanders was pushed out of the race."
Russia is a prime suspect in the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers, which led
to the release of emails showing that party officials favored Clinton over Sanders for the presidential
nomination.
The Kremlin has denied interfering in the U.S. election. A columnist at Russia's best-selling
newspaper, however, said it would have been a smart move.
"I would welcome the Kremlin helping those forces in the United States that stand for peace with
Russia and democracy in America," Israel Shamir wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged Russia to seek and release more than 30,000 other missing emails
deleted by Clinton. Democrats accused him of trying to get a foreign adversary to conduct espionage
that could affect this November's election, but Trump later said he was merely being sarcastic.
whollop
Putin has tried to remind the world what a mistake break up of Yugoslavia was and corruption
involved and lies, no one listens. Next leader of Russia might not be so restrained and patient.
Sad we are letting such bad minds lead US now. What is it about Clinton's that make ppl so gullible?
whollop
Read "how the srebrenica massacre redefined US policy," by US professor. Media distorts truth
everywhere, all the time. Bought and paid for.
Russians didn't start last 2 WW's either. You can bet if ISIS attacks Russia, Pres O won't
go to their aid.
This constant demonizing of Russia has pushed them closer to China. Obama and Clinton and Bill
Clinton (from earlier and beyond) have made a mess of the world because their values are built
on wrong philosophy. German rationalism does not mesh with American freedom and love of law.
Trump17
Her and Obama interfered in their affairs and now without any proof they are blaming Russia
for a hacking of the DNC. Back in March the FBI told the DNC it was hacked and wanted information
to conduct an investigation which Hillary of course blocked. Now they are crying the blues..
HmmIsee
Dems have hated Russia ever since Reagan disbanded their beloved USSR
teabone
Russia and the U.S. used to have a common enemy, radical/extremist Islamism.
Not anymore since Obama and Clinton loves Muslims more than they like American citizens.
Looks like this is a new part of Hillary strategy to take Trump down
Notable quotes:
"... "We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC," Clinton said, in her first interview with Fox in more than five years. "And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin." ..."
Clinton answered tough questions on Benghazi, her emails and her campaign and policies, and focused
her own attack on her opponent's alleged links to Russia and Putin.
"We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC," Clinton said, in her first interview
with Fox in more than five years. "And we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be
released and we know that
Donald Trump has shown
a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin."
Asked if she believed Putin wanted Trump to win the presidency, Clinton said she would not make
that conclusion. "But I think laying out the facts raises serious issues about Russian interference
in our elections, in our democracy," she said.
The US would not tolerate that from any other country, Clinton said, adding: "For Trump to both
encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect
the election, I think, raises national security issues."
"... Shame on you Bernie. You stain yourself by endorsing crooked, lying, corrupt
and immoral Hillary. Bernie, you are part of the corrupt establishment and SOLD
OUT your supporters. ..."
"... Crooked Hillary is a criminal and should go to jail. "LOCK HER UP". How
could you let a criminal running for US president? This b**** has no morals, is
a world-class pathological liar and corrupt to the bone. Look at what the Clintons
DID not what they preached. The cancerous corruption of Democrats is so widespread
all the way to the top. Below are just some of many immoral things that the corrupt
Clintons did: ..."
"... What's dark and negative is that Hillary won't have a press conference.....is
she afraid of the questions that she'll have to answer? Ya know, like, why did you
lie to the American people about basically EVERYTHING regarding your personal, unsecured
server? ..."
"... Hillary faces hacking and heckling, and the heckling are mostly from within
the party supporters ..."
"Remember this," Trump said during a rally Friday in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
"Trump is going to be no more Mr. Nice Guy." And for the first time he encouraged
his supporters' anti-Clinton chants of "lock her up."
"I've been saying let's just beat her on Nov. 8," Trump said, "but you know
what? I'm starting to agree with you."
TT
WOW! The DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS NOMINATED CROOKED, LYING, IMMORAL AND CORRUPT
HILLARY. The Democrats' primary was totally rigged behind the scenes to
PRE-SELECT crooked Hillary as the only nominee from the beginning according
to leaked DNC emails. This is an election CRIME committed by the Democratic
Party. CROOKED HILLARY should be a DISQUALIFIED DEMOCRAT CANDIDATE from
the beginning. The Clintons are evil people and corrupt to the bone. SATAN
IS TAKING OVER THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
Shame on you Bernie. You stain yourself by endorsing crooked, lying,
corrupt and immoral Hillary. Bernie, you are part of the corrupt establishment
and SOLD OUT your supporters.
Crooked Hillary is a criminal and should go to jail. "LOCK HER UP".
How could you let a criminal running for US president? This b**** has no
morals, is a world-class pathological liar and corrupt to the bone. Look
at what the Clintons DID not what they preached. The cancerous corruption
of Democrats is so widespread all the way to the top. Below are just some
of many immoral things that the corrupt Clintons did:
HOME EMAIL SYSTEM - Crooked Clinton installed a home email system
FOR WORK while secretary of state to hide shady communications between
her and unfriendly foreign governments related to quid pro quo transactions
to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for influence on U.S. policy while
she was Secretary of State. Crooked HILLARY DELETED 33,000 emails to
avoid criminal prosecution. This crooked would not delete these emails
if they were truly personal. This b**** sold out USA and committed TREASON.
LIES AFTER LIES - Crooked Clinton's lies after lies to Congress,
FBI and Americans on Bosnia sniper fire, Benghazi attack, her home email
system, etc.
ELECTION RIGGING – Crooked Clinton colluded with DNC to rig 2016
primary according to 19,000 leaked DNC emails released by WikiLeaks.
DNC PRE-ANOINTED crooked Hillary as the only nominee from the beginning
according to leaked DNC emails.
CLINTON FOUNDATION – this is basically a front company so immoral
Clintons can pocket through implicit bribery and money laundering. While
abusing the public office, the Clintons have used the Clinton Foundation,
which is based in Canada for non-disclosure policy of charitable contributors,
to make "quid pro quo" deals with special interests and foreign governments.
The Clinton Crime Syndicate (Foundation) KEEPS 93% OF DONATIONS and
only donates 7% to the charities. They list 93% of the income taken
in as used for "Administrative Expenses".
CORRUPTION OF DEMOCRATS ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP - A FIX was in through
a SECRET meeting between immoral Bill Clinton and corrupt AG Loretta
Lynch NOT to charge Crooked Hillary on home-based emails and made her
ABOVE THE LAW. AG Loretta Lynch is the boss of FBI director James Comey.
CROOKED HILLARY IS TRULY AN IMMORAL LOW-LIFE WHITE TRASH - After
leaving the White House, crooked Hillary was forced to return an estimated
$200,000 in White House furniture, china, silverware, and artwork that
she had stolen. HOW COULD YOU VOTE FOR THIS TRASH TO BE US PRESIDENT?
QUID PRO QUO case out of many - THE CLINTON SCHOOL KICKBACKS. In
April 2015, Bill Clinton was forced to abruptly resign from his lucrative
perch as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit college
company. The reason for Clinton's immediate departure: Clinton Cash
revealed, and Bloomberg confirmed, that Laureate funneled Bill Clinton
$16.46 million over five years while Hillary Clinton's State Department
pumped at least $55 million to a group run by Laureate's founder and
chairman, Douglas Becker, a man with strong ties to the Clinton Global
Initiative. Laureate has donated between $1 million and $5 million (donations
are reported in ranges, not exact amounts) to the Clinton Foundation.
CLINTON THEFT OF RELIEF FUNDS FOR HAITI EARTHQUAKE - Here's what
really happened. The Clinton Foundation selected Clayton Homes, a construction
company owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, to build temporary
shelters in Haiti. Buffett is an active member of the Clinton Global
Initiative who has donated generously to the Clintons as well as the
Clinton Foundation. The contract was supposed to be given through the
normal United Nations bidding process, with the deal going to the lowest
bidder who met the project's standards. UN officials said, however,
that the contract was never competitively bid for. Clayton offered to
build "hurricane-proof trailers" but what they actually delivered turned
out to be a disaster. The trailers were structurally unsafe, with high
levels of formaldehyde and insulation coming out of the walls. There
were problems with mold and fumes. The stifling heat inside made Haitians
sick and many of them abandoned the trailers because they were ill-constructed
and unusable.
The Clintons also funneled $10 million in federal loans to a firm called
InnoVida, headed by Clinton donor Claudio Osorio. Osorio had loaded its
board with Clinton cronies, including longtime Clinton ally General Wesley
Clark; Hillary's 2008 finance director Jonathan Mantz; and Democratic fundraiser
Chris Korge who has helped raise millions for the Clintons. Normally the
loan approval process takes months or even years. But in this case, a government
official wrote, "Former President Bill Clinton is personally in contact
with the company to organize its logistical and support needs. And as Secretary
of State, Hillary Clinton has made available State Department resources
to assist with logistical arrangements." InnoVida had not even provided
an independently audited financial report that is normally a requirement
for such applications. On the basis of the Clinton connection, InnoVida's
application was fast-tracked and approved in two weeks. The company defaulted
on the loan and never built any houses. An investigation revealed that Osorio
had diverted company funds to pay for his Miami Beach mansion, his Maserati,
and his Colorado ski chalet. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering
in 2013, and is currently serving a twelve-year prison term on fraud charges
related to the loan.
And these are only 2 examples of the dozens of thefts the Clintons and
their cronies did just to Haiti.
DONALD TRUMP, as the Republican presidential candidate, is truly an OUTSIDER
who goes against the corrupt PROFESSIONAL DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS who have
led USA in a wrong track of economic and military disadvantage for the last
eight years. SINCE CROOKED HILLARY BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE IN 2009 WITH
FAILED FOREIGN POLICY, USA has been unsafe and being attacked by RADICAL
ISLAMIC TERRORISTS MORE THAN EVER BEFORE. American citizens are ANGRY of
these corrupt PROFESSIONAL politicians like crooked, lying, immoral and
corrupt HILLARY. VOTE TRUMP 2016.
The West has been blinded and lured by the big Chinese market. However,
it forgot that it has been dealing with a Communist China inside its disguising
Capitalist shell. The Chinese GDP has increased from $303B in 1980 to current
around $11,000B, an increase of more than 35 times along with Intellectual
Property thefts from the West worth a few trillions of dollars and millions
and millions of job losses in the West. Only top few % in the West including
the corrupt CLINTONS were significantly benefited from the BAD trade deals
with China. The Americans are getting poorer while the Chinese are getting
MUCH richer due to BAD trades deals with the West.
That was why Donald Trump, who is NOT racist but puts USA first, said
the trade deals with China are all BAD that cost millions and millions of
domestic jobs. BOYCOTT Chinese-made products and BRING BACK JOBS FROM CHINA.
VOTE TRUMP 2016 AND TRUMP WILL RE-NEGOTIATE ALL BAD TRADE DEALS, BRING JOBS
BACK AND REBUILD US MANUFACTURING.
The liberal mainstream media is pro-Clinton. It is getting paid big from
the crooked Clinton campaign and putting out LYING POLL NUMBERS and ARTICLES
TO BASH TRUMP. A majority of people thought crooked Hillary should have
been INDICTED. People in government would be in JAIL or lose their jobs
at least if they just have done 10% of what crooked Hillary has done. This
is a tremendous US national security implication. HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT
USA HAS BEEN ON A DOWN HILL BIG TIME IN TERMS OF BEING RESPECTED BY PEOPLE
AROUND THE WORLD AND FOREIGN DIPLOMACY SINCE CROOKED HILLARY BECAME SECRETARY
OF STATE IN 2009 ??? Hacking of the crooked Clinton's home, low-secured
private email system by foreign agents would have caused tremendous damage
to USA since 2009.
Russian agents along with agents from other countries like China or Iran
most likely have hacked the crooked Clinton's home, low-secured private
email system and retrieved all her emails including nationally sensitive
emails, shady communications between her and unfriendly foreign governments
related to quid pro quo transactions to the Clinton Foundation in exchange
for influence on U.S. policy while she was Secretary of State. Crooked HILLARY
DELETED 33,000 emails to avoid criminal prosecution, sold out USA and committed
TREASON.
Chitta
Did HRC say that these new jobs will be created offshore?
The 23 million jobs in Bill C's time that she brags about have long been
shipped offshore with the support of Bill and Hillary. What a hypocrite!
anonymous
Mr. Trump: the convention is over, the nominees are in place.
Take the gloves off.
Clinton has literally endless amounts of factual material you can work
with.
Stick to the documented facts:
• No hyperbole
• No exaggeration
• No undocumented assumptions
• Vet everything first
Then, unload on her with all barrels.
Relentlessly.
Maggie
She should be facing jail time with all the money she and Bill were given
for favors to big business, foreign countries and personal friends. Remember
in 1978 when she turned $1,000 into $100,000 in one year playing the commodities
market? Pretty good for someone who never played the market before. Maybe
if we all had some insider info, we'd be "lucky," too.
Tomahawk
Hillary is horribly amazing. She wants to con her sheep into believing
Trump cannot be trusted with the nuclear codes when she can't even be trusted
with emails.....lol
Stathis
What's dark and negative is that Hillary won't have a press conference.....is
she afraid of the questions that she'll have to answer? Ya know, like, why
did you lie to the American people about basically EVERYTHING regarding
your personal, unsecured server?
AAR
Correction
Hillary faces hacking and heckling, and the heckling are mostly from
within the party supporters
The Russian theme has expectedly become one of the most important in the US presidential election.
Democrats are unsurprisingly engaged in anti-Russian hysteria. Donald Trump says that he will establish
good relations with Russia and is ready to discuss the issue of recognition of the referendum in
the Crimea.
Noise and hysteria
Mass hysteria on the part of the Democrats, neocons, ultra-liberals and plain and simple Russophobes,
was provoked by the recent statements of Donald Trump. Speaking at a press conference in Florida,
Trump called on Russia to hand over the 30,000 emails "missing" from the Hillary Clinton's email
server in the US. Their absence is a clear sign that Clinton destroyed evidence proving that she
used her personal e-mail server to send sensitive information. Democrats immediately accused Trump
of pandering to Russian hackers, although in reality the multi-billionaire rhetorically hinted that
the data that Clinton hid from the American investigation is in the hands of foreign intelligence
services. So, Clinton is a possible target for blackmail.
Trump's statement that he is ready to
discuss the status of Crimea and the removal of anti-Russian sanctions caused even more noise. This
view is not accepted either in the Democrat or in the Republican mainstream. Trump also said that
Vladimir Putin does not respect Clinton and Obama, while Trump himself hopes to find a common language
with him. Trump appreciates Putin's leadership and believes that the US must work together with Russia
to deal with common threats, particularly against Islamic extremism.
The establishment's tantrum
Both Democrats and Republicans are taking aim at Trump. The vice-presidential candidate, Mike Pence,
made threats to Russia. The head of the Republican majority in Congress, Paul Ryan, became somewhat
hysterical. He said that Putin is "a thug and should stay out of these elections."
It is Putin
personally, and the Russian security services, who are accused of leaking correspondences of top
employees of the National Committee of the Democratic Party. This unverified story united part of
the Republicans and all of the Democrats, including the Clinton and Barack Obama themselves. Trump
supporters note that the Russian threat is used to divert attention from the content of these letters.
And these show the fraud carried out during the primaries which favored Hillary Clinton.
The pro-American candidate
The "Russian scandal" demonstrates that on the one hand the thesis of the normalization of relations
with Russia, despite the propaganda, is becoming popular in US society. It is unlikely that Donald
Trump has made campaign statements that are not designed to gain the support of the public in this
election. On the other hand - Trump - a hard realist, like Putin, is not pro-Russian, but a pro-American
politician, and therefore the improvement of relations with Russia in his eyes corresponds to the
US's national interests. Trump has never to date done anything that would not be to his advantage.
Sometimes he even said he would order US fighter jets to engage with Russian ones, and declared he
would have a hard stance in relations with Russia.
Another thing is that his understanding of US
national interests is fundamentally different from the dominant American globalist elite consensus.
For Trump, the US should not be the source of a global liberal remaking of the world, but a national
power, which optimizes its position just as efficiently as any commercial project. And in terms of
optimizing the position of the United States, he says there should be a normal American interaction
with Putin and Russia in the field of combating terrorism and preventing the sliding of the two countries
into a global war. He claims this is to be the priority instead of issues relating to the promotion
of democracy and the so-called fight against "authoritarian regimes".
"... Westen is a Democrat and he basically wrote this book to try and help Democrats win more presidential election, though the research portion in the beginning of the book shows how people in both parties are biased in their interpretation of political events based on their political party allegiance. ..."
"... Then a year or two later he wrote some follow up articles whining and complaining about how disappointed he was in Obama not being much different from Bush, etc, etc ..."
"... The fact that Mr. Western could wake up to Obama's basic Bushness in only one or two years means that Mr. Western had a freer mind than most Obama supporters. ..."
"... Good find. Yes and yes. They never stop manipulating. Now the MSM will finally have to admit that the machines are compromised ONLY when it serves the interests of th few. ..."
Two "liberal" IT luminaries today pick up the (totally unproven) assertion that Russia hacked
and published via wikileaks the DNC shennigens of preferring Clinton.
The used this to (preemptively) accuse Russia of manipulating the U.S. election via voting
computers on November 9.
I think this is a sign that both Schneier and Doctorow are democrats who fear Trump. Tribal allegiance
exerts a very powerful, and irrational, force on the so-called rational mind.
Warning, Westen is a Democrat and he basically wrote this book to try and help Democrats
win more presidential election, though the research portion in the beginning of the book shows
how people in both parties are biased in their interpretation of political events based on their
political party allegiance.
When Obama first ran in 2007-2008, Westen had clearly been drinking the glorious pro-Obama
koolaid as was evident in some HuffPo articles he wrote at the time.
Then a year or two later he wrote some follow up articles whining and complaining about
how disappointed he was in Obama not being much different from Bush, etc, etc.
Clearly this man was so caught up in his tribal allegiance he couldn't recognize the very biases
his research showed. Btw, he is still a consultant to the Democrats... attempting to be the Frank
Luntz of the left.
The fact that Mr. Western could wake up to Obama's basic Bushness in only one or two years
means that Mr. Western had a freer mind than most Obama supporters.
Good find. Yes and yes. They never stop manipulating. Now the MSM will finally have to
admit that the machines are compromised ONLY when it serves the interests of th few.
If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. The public's interest
is the content of the e-mails and the dirty tricks played by the DNC and Clinton. The e-mails
clearly show that the journalists are in bed with the DNC/Clinton and this article is just another
example of this corruption of the media
Notable quotes:
"... Reading the comments it is hard to understand what is wrong with a lot of you commenters. You seem to swallow whole one side or the other and march off the cliff just like lemming. This argument is a few sentences and is about proper handling of the leaks, not the leaks themselves. The leaks show Hillary supporters helped steal the primary votes from Sanders when the DNC was supposed to be neutral. That is a crime against democracy, an attack on you, it is third world corruption. If you believe Hillary is for you than you are just hopeless. ..."
"... All the noise about Russian plots and secret agendas is a bit ironic as it seems the truth is that the DNC and their presidential candidate are the ones with a secret agenda that was made public. ..."
"... The collapse of the government and Google as a-censor is imminent. ¨ Everyone is switching to Duckduckgo.com ..."
"... How this backfire ??? We just get proof how the DNC establishment nominate what candidate they want not what people want. If after this Sanders supporters will still vote for Hillary, they just simply give the establishment green lite to do it same thing anytime they want and democracy really is just the empty word...... ..."
"... Wikileaks only confirms that DNC has rigged the primaries to help Hillary Clinton, that's why Debbie W. Schultz had to resign her Chair. Whether that will cost Clinton her election depends on how many of the Bernie Sanders supporters are angry enough to boycott the election. ..."
"... The problem in America is that we have a two party political system that can be easily manipulated by the wealthy and those with evil intent .When that happens you have basically one party speaking double talk , controlled by the few and sewing confusion among the voters in order to divide and polarize the country . ..."
"... It is interesting (albeit unsurprising) that since the leak makes Hillary Clinton's backers in the DNC look bad, the media is so interested in the motives of the leakers. This was never the case with the anti-Bush crowd in the 2000's. Going back a bit further, anyone involved in exposing the Watergate break-in is practically treated like a national hero. Suddenly, the "truth to power" crowd has become the "can't handle the truth" crowd. ..."
"... This #$%$ article is just ridiculous! "Oh, well, the leak hasn't revealed anything important". Hello! Wake up! It has shown how crooked the DNC was during this election cycle ..."
"... Did you notice there's no (By-Line) for this article? Because what is IN the emails is most important. Firstly, they blame the Russians. Then they blame Trump. Then they blame the Russians and Trump. Now they don't know who to blame. But, the FBI said for certain the server was hacked and there were indications of who hacked it. This was established in a couple of short weeks - or less. The FBI had Hillary's server for a year and couldn't make a determination. ..."
"... The most important question to ask is about the motives of American Journalists is there report a distraction from the truth are they in fact trying to do damage control are they being controlled by a political party as these E-MAILS seem to suggest . The motive of the leaker is less important than the truth. ..."
"... The DNC had to hire actors at $50 a pop by advertising on Craigslist so Hillary Clinton wouldn't look like the clown she is in front of a half-empty DNC stadium during her acceptance speech. ..."
"... The exodus of hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders supporters from the convention made crystal clear the extent of discord among Democratic voters. ..."
"... It's a sad state of affairs in that we are depending on Julian Assange to save the Republic from corrupt Hillary and the Clinton foundation. If Clinton becomes President she will basically place the United States up for sale so that the globalists can destroy what little remains of the American middle class. America will truly become a third world nation with only rich and poor. ..."
"... We can not allow this to happen. Trump may be a little "rough around the edges" however he is a true American who will bring back jobs, try his best to eliminate illegal immigration, and take America back from the globalists. This will help middle class Americans to thrive -- Vote Trump for President in 2016 -- ..."
"... I think most commenters are missing the point that Snowden made: what is the intent of the leak? If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. ..."
"... All look at the bang up job the FBI did with Clinton's email wrong doings. She broke the law and lied and the FBI tip toed around it by not taking her statements under oath so she wouldn't be charged. ..."
"... Another article to divert from the content of the emails, which were so damning that the DNC used all their Media contacts to create the "Russia Hack" scenario and then accused Trump of conspiring with Russia. As of yet not one DNC official has denied the facts or content in the e-mails. ..."
"... I found it interesting you didn't mention that Politico was found in cahoots with the DNC as well in the emails.. Just like the mainstream media didn't hardly cover the protesters at the DNC convention but surely did at the RNC convention. You pick & choose what you want to report don't you. ..."
Reading the comments it is hard to understand what is wrong with a lot of you commenters.
You seem to swallow whole one side or the other and march off the cliff just like lemming. This
argument is a few sentences and is about proper handling of the leaks, not the leaks themselves.
The leaks show Hillary supporters helped steal the primary votes from Sanders when the DNC was
supposed to be neutral. That is a crime against democracy, an attack on you, it is third world
corruption. If you believe Hillary is for you than you are just hopeless.
DoctorNoDoctorNo
At what point in civilization did the truth become unethical? No one is denying that the information
contained in these e-mails is not true. All the noise about Russian plots and secret agendas
is a bit ironic as it seems the truth is that the DNC and their presidential candidate are the
ones with a secret agenda that was made public.
We have one presidential candidate under IRS, FBI and State Department investigation and another
who opens their mouth only to change feet placing the American voter in an untenable position
come November.
fudmer
@ Tim Schultze Humanity refuses to be ruled by the few! ¨
The collapse of the government and Google as a-censor is imminent. ¨ Everyone is switching
to Duckduckgo.com
Enough Oligarch monopoly and control. Yesterday 40 civilians bombed to death and 50 more injured
in Syria by US Air force and marines killed in actions in Yemen. What the hell is the USA doing
in Syria or Yemen?
Democracy is freedom of movement, action and thought, not controlled, restricted and regulated
movement, not punishment for each action that challenges the established monopolies, and not mind
control and media propaganda as a total cultural environment.
Everywhere world wide humanity, Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Moslem [except the wabahi Sunni]
are rising to the challenge the few.
nobodynobody
"The DNC email leak has backfired on WikiLeaks, and arguably Russia and Trump, because
theorizing about who leaked these emails has been far more intriguing to journalists and the
general public than the emails themselves."
How this backfire ??? We just get proof how the DNC establishment nominate what candidate
they want not what people want. If after this Sanders supporters will still vote for Hillary,
they just simply give the establishment green lite to do it same thing anytime they want and democracy
really is just the empty word......
AlitaAlita,
Wikileaks only confirms that DNC has rigged the primaries to help Hillary Clinton, that's
why Debbie W. Schultz had to resign her Chair. Whether that will cost Clinton her election depends
on how many of the Bernie Sanders supporters are angry enough to boycott the election.
JohnJohn
The problem in America is that we have a two party political system that can be easily
manipulated by the wealthy and those with evil intent .When that happens you have basically one
party speaking double talk , controlled by the few and sewing confusion among the voters in order
to divide and polarize the country . Which leads to a lack of unity and everyone for him
or her self . What we need is not more or fewer political parties but a more informed public
Scotty P.Scotty P.
It is interesting (albeit unsurprising) that since the leak makes Hillary Clinton's backers
in the DNC look bad, the media is so interested in the motives of the leakers. This was never
the case with the anti-Bush crowd in the 2000's. Going back a bit further, anyone involved in
exposing the Watergate break-in is practically treated like a national hero. Suddenly, the "truth
to power" crowd has become the "can't handle the truth" crowd.
Similarly, Edward Snowden proudly violated national security laws, in the name of exposing
government corruption. But now that someone else has done it to a politcal base Snowden finds
more tolerable (he's a known liberal), he takes issue with it? Get over yourself, Ed. You're no
better than WikiLeaks, and your agenda is no more "pure" than theirs.
Lastly, the author of this article saying the leak has "backfired" is truly rich. This isn't
the 90's, when feckless partisans tried to take down the Clintons, only to have disgraced themselves-
although Newt Gingrich still ATTEMPTS to be relevant. (But I digress.) This time, the Clintons
have angered a lot of people on the left, who see that the Democrats are no more a "party of the
people" than the Republicans are- although anyone paying attentions wouldn't need WikiLeaks to
tell them that.
SomeSome
Talk about playing it down, this proved media collusion further evidenced by the blackout of
delegates lack of media coverage when over 1,000 walked out after roll call and stormed the media
tents. (Video's all over YouTube)
My Revolution brothers and sisters, even though we are separated by #DemExit, I understand
and appreciate your fight from within. I am fighting to build a new home in the Green party. We
are still together even when we are apart.
If you can't fly then run,
If you can't run then walk,
If you can't walk then crawl,
But whatever you do you have to keep moving forward!
michael
Another is a long line of distortion and lies by the establishment to make the establishment
Queen elected. The lies just never stop. Snowden tweeted a sentence and Wikileaks tweeted by another.
from this a whole pyramid of lies and distortions was written. There is zero evidence the Russians
government hacked these emails, zero, nada, nothing. What is important is the DNC was for Hillary
and was trying to sabotage another Democrat, Sanders, running for the same office. That is corruption
pure and simple, nothing less. Third world corruption going on at the DNC.
TimmyTimmy
This #$%$ article is just ridiculous! "Oh, well, the leak hasn't revealed anything important".
Hello! Wake up! It has shown how crooked the DNC was during this election cycle, and in truth
the RNC probably isn't any better. But here we have PROOF of just how crooked hilary and her cronies
are, and they are all getting a free pass. No one sees a problem with this?
Gordon
Did you notice there's no (By-Line) for this article? Because what is IN the emails is
most important. Firstly, they blame the Russians. Then they blame Trump. Then they blame the Russians
and Trump. Now they don't know who to blame. But, the FBI said for certain the server was hacked
and there were indications of who hacked it. This was established in a couple of short weeks -
or less. The FBI had Hillary's server for a year and couldn't make a determination.
Too much of this just doesn't add up. The Democrats went into immediate Damage Control mode
when the emails came out and Not ONE person was screaming, "This ain't True!". Nope, not even
a whisper. We can't tell who's pulling the strings on this. But, there's dammed sure someone behind
the curtain.
Richard
The most important question to ask is about the motives of American Journalists is there
report a distraction from the truth are they in fact trying to do damage control are they being
controlled by a political party as these E-MAILS seem to suggest . The motive of the leaker is
less important than the truth. Wiki-leaks hates Clinton , Russia hacked the DNC server that
is another subject . The fact weather or not the DNC acted in a unethical manner is the subject.
JULEA
There is nothing wrong with Transparency. We need MORE of it. How long did WE Hack and Spy
on Germany, Merkel? They were suing US. What ever happened about this? We ALSO need more transparency
about TPP and who can be sued for some Corporation losing profits..even if they are doing wrong
to make their profits. I think something falls on States, counties, even citizens. Even SCIENCE
for proving harmful things involved. We just need Transparency and who is giving money to who
and why. The DNC became VERY Undemocratic and this just a BIG BIG BIG No to every Liberal and
should not be covered up for anything. WE HACK EVERY COUNTRY.
DickDick
Nobody except America's enemies wants vital secrets that jeopardize our well being hacked.
On the other hand we have a national interest in finding out what our leaders have been hiding
that jeopardize our liberties. Snowden exposed extreme violations of the fourth amendment by the
NSA. Wikileaks exposed political chicanery by the democrat central committee. Hiding information
like this is harmful and only benefits those who are trying to cover up something just to protect
themselves. Both Snowden and wikileaks have done good deeds.
Snowden, who risked his life to spill the beans, said he would reveal all in return for immunity.
But too many people have reason to fear the truth so I doubt if he will be granted it. A shame.
mike
Democrat or Republican they both pull this kind of #$%$. The only answer is to vote all of
them out of office and put term limits in place . We need to stop the Life long politicians who
are in it for their own riches. And we know its "All" of them, they find out how easy it is to
rip the American people off and get by with it.
DavidSDavidS
This attempt to paint Clinton the victim is sooooo over played. She has been the "victim" all
her life. Focus on just how corrupt she and everyone around her is. DWS didn't get punished for
what she did (or allowed), she was rewarded. Doesn't that speak volumes about Clinton? The more
corrupt you are, the more she and hers will reward. Wake up people, there was a time when a single
lie told to the public was a career ending blotch. Now it's who can tell the biggest.
Ron
I love how this story tries to downplay the content of the emails and focus on the hackers.
The emails exposed a coordinated effort to rob Bernie. Journalists may be having more fun speculating
on who hacked them, but Bernies followers could care less. They know the old man got robbed.
Lord Doom
The Leak disclosed how the main stream media has bias with the DNC. Yahoo news wants to blow
down the story and mask its importance it seems to me.
Idontwanngiveit
Dan Seitz.... Do you practice being a political dolt or does it come naturally?
The DNC had to hire actors at $50 a pop by advertising on Craigslist so Hillary Clinton
wouldn't look like the clown she is in front of a half-empty DNC stadium during her acceptance
speech.
The exodus of hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders supporters from the convention
made crystal clear the extent of discord among Democratic voters.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the devastating fall-out of the WikiLeaks
e-mail dump on Hillary Clinton's election bid. She is the No. 1 casualty -- albeit "collateral
damage" -- inflicted by the party upon itself!
Prior to the WikiLeaks e-mail showing how Bernie got jerked around by a rigged system, most
of his supporters would have held their nose and grudgingly voted for Hillary in November. Now,
since learning how party officials conspired against them, they want and deserve blood!
The disgruntled masses who stormed out of the DNC represent a microcosm of the equally disgruntled
masses of Democrats nation-wide who are incensed over the party's machinations and shenanigans.
The ones in Pennsylvania and those watching on TV, following events on the Internet and reading
newspapers at home are fully informed about what took place and will now do one of three things:
Sit out the election entirely our of frustration over a status-quo system that's patently
rigged against them, which benefits Donald Trump.
Vote for a third-candidate, which splits the Democratic ticket and, again, benefits Trump.
Vote for Donald Trump directly out of shear spite to show the Democratic Party exactly what
it deserves for screwing with them, which also Trump.
Even if all those people constitute just 5 or 10 percent of the Party's voting base, their
loss and its effect on Hillary's chances of winning the White House will be devastating!
So, as a staunch Trump supporter myself, Thank you, Julian Assange! Thank you very much for
your generous and very helpful assistance in securing the Oval Office for Donald J. Trump on Nov.
8.
Oh yeah. And one other thing.... Please keep those Democratic Party internal e-mails coming.
They're absolutely fascinating!
Joseph
It's a sad state of affairs in that we are depending on Julian Assange to save the Republic
from corrupt Hillary and the Clinton foundation. If Clinton becomes President she will basically
place the United States up for sale so that the globalists can destroy what little remains of
the American middle class. America will truly become a third world nation with only rich and poor.
We can not allow this to happen. Trump may be a little "rough around the edges" however
he is a true American who will bring back jobs, try his best to eliminate illegal immigration,
and take America back from the globalists. This will help middle class Americans to thrive -- Vote
Trump for President in 2016 !
Elizabeth
I think most commenters are missing the point that Snowden made: what is the intent of
the leak? If the intent is to expose corruption then that is doing a public service. Leaking
private information like credit card numbers and SS numbers only makes the victims vulnerable
to thieves and does not fall in the "need to know" category. Wiki could have edited the leak to
expose the DNC while protecting private information.
joanjoan
All look at the bang up job the FBI did with Clinton's email wrong doings. She broke the
law and lied and the FBI tip toed around it by not taking her statements under oath so she wouldn't
be charged.
A Yahoo reader
What could be more hypocritical of this pro-Clinton commentary questioning the objectivity
of documents released with no commentary at all. Any rational person appreciates being provided
the truth. It's of no consequence that the truth provider doesn't like Clinton. There's no law
that says people have to like Clinton, at least not yet.
alfredalfred
Nice try to discredit the emails. They happened. She resigned. Democrats are terrible people.
They get away with it because we are stupid and believe everything this media tells us.
Danny
OK, you won't listen to a guy (Edward Snowden) about issues, when he releases information that
the public NEEDS to know, but "MAY BE" detrimental to the people in National Security, you put
him on the World's MOST WANTED LIST, take his citizenship away. So what is his choice, he HAS
NO CHOICE, he goes on the offense, obtaining and releasing even more information, and working
with whomever will protect him.
There is no evidence Russia is holding him prison, just protecting him. There is no evidence
he can't leave anytime he wants, even come back to his own country. Yet our government continues
to villanize Snowden.
Look at the data released - It is true, it proves ALL the crooks are in our own government
and politics, there is no evidence Russia is doing anything but helping people find, obtain and
release material our politicians create.
So, Killary, DNC, Obama, one and all attack Snowden and Russia, even adding Trump to the mix.
I think we need to pack up all these crooked Democrats, including Obama, and ship them off to
another country and tell them to GET A JOB. Then, let Snowden back into his country and let him
do his job of protecting the United States of America. And Trump doesn't have anything to do with
Killary, Obama and DNCs crooked politics.
krainkrain
Then there is the language issue. "I hate being attributed to Russia," the Guccifer 2.0 account
told Motherboard, probably accurately. The person at the keyboard then claimed in a chat with
Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai that Guccifer 2.0 was from Romania, like the original
Guccifer, a well-known hacker. But when asked to explain his hack in Romanian, he was unable to
respond colloquially and without errors. Guccifer 2.0's English initially was also weak, but in
subsequent posts the quality improved sharply, albeit only on political subjects, not in technical
matters-an indication of a team of operators at work behind the scenes.
VernyVerny
The government is protecting Hillary and the Clinton Gang, so "leaks and hacks" are the only methodology of showing Americans the truth about Hillary, the most corrupt politician in American history.
Jayster b
Another article to divert from the content of the emails, which were so damning that
the DNC used all their Media contacts to create the "Russia Hack" scenario and then accused
Trump of conspiring with Russia. As of yet not one DNC official has denied the facts or
content in the e-mails. So, Assange scored in this first round so much that Debbie is no
longer head of the DNC, and the FBI has demanded access to the DNC server to analyze it,
meaning they will have access to all the donor information from foreign countries that are
helping the Democrats steal the nomination from Bernie. What a crazy world. Assange 1, DNC 0
TomTom
I found it interesting you didn't mention that Politico was found in cahoots with the
DNC as well in the emails.. Just like the mainstream media didn't hardly cover the protesters
at the DNC convention but surely did at the RNC convention. You pick & choose what you want to
report don't you.
As my colleague Glenn Greenwald
told
WNYC on Monday, while there may never be conclusive evidence that the Democratic National Committee
was hacked by Russian intelligence operatives to extract
the trove of embarrassing emails
published by WikiLeaks, it would hardly be shocking if that was what happened.
"Governments do spy on each other and do try to influence events in other countries," Glenn noted.
"Certainly the U.S. government has
a very long and
successful history of doing exactly that."
Even so, he added, given the ease with which we were misled into war in Iraq by false claims about
weapons of mass destruction - and
the long history
of Russophobia in American politics - it is vital to cast a skeptical eye over whatever evidence
is presented to support the claim, made by Hillary Clinton's aide Robby Mook, that this is all part
of a Russian plot to sabotage the Democrats and help Donald Trump win the election.
The theory
gained some traction , particularly among Trump's detractors, in part because the candidate has
seemed obsessed at times with reminding crowds that Russian President Vladimir Putin once said
something sort of nice about him (though
not, as Trump falsely
claims , that the American is "a genius"). Then last week, Trump's campaign staff watered down
a pledge to help Ukraine defend its territory from Russian-backed rebels and the candidate
told the New York Times he would not necessarily honor the NATO treaty commitment that
requires the United States military to defend other member states from a direct attack by Russia.
Since Trump has refused to release his tax returns, there are also questions about whether or
not his businesses might depend to some extent on Russian investors. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate
cross-section of a lot of our assets," Trump's son Donald Jr. told a real estate conference in 2008,
the Washington Post reported last month. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."
Paul Manafort, who is directing Trump's campaign and was for years a close adviser of a Putin
ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine,
called the theory that Trump's campaign had ties to the Russian government "absurd." (On Monday,
Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News
reported that a DNC researcher looking into Manafort's ties to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine
in May had been warned that her personal Yahoo email account was under attack. "We strongly suspect
that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors," the warning from the email service
security team read.)
Unhelpfully for Trump, his most senior adviser with knowledge of the world of hacking, retired
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
told Bloomberg View that he "would not be surprised at all" to learn that Russia was
behind the breach of the DNC network. "Both China and Russia have the full capability to do this,"
he said.
Later on Monday, Trump himself then
attributed
the attack on the DNC to "China, Russia, one of our many, many 'friends,'" who "came in and hacked
the hell out of us."
Since very few of us are cybersecurity experts, and the Iraq debacle is a reminder of how dangerous
it can be to put blind faith in experts whose claims might reinforce our own political positions,
there is also the question of who we can trust to provide reliable evidence.
One expert in the field, who is well aware of the evidence-gathering capabilities of the U.S.
government, is Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency technician and National Security
Agency whistleblower who exposed the extent of mass surveillance and has been given temporary asylum
in Russia.
"If Russia hacked the #DNC, they should be condemned for it,"
Snowden wrote
on Twitter on Monday, with a link to
a 2015 report on the U.S. government's response to the hacking of Sony Pictures. In that case,
he noted, "the FBI presented evidence" for its conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the
hacking and subsequent release of internal emails. (The FBI is now investigating the breach of the
DNC's network, which officials
told the Daily Beast they first made the committee aware of in April.)
What's more, Snowden added, the NSA has tools that should make it possible to trace the source
of the hack. Even though the Director of National Intelligence usually opposes making such evidence
public, he argued, this is a case in which the agency should do so, if only to discourage future
attacks.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
Even if the attackers try to obfuscate origin, #XKEYSCORE makes following exfiltrated data easy.
I did this personally against Chinese ops.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists at #NSA,
but DNI traditionally objects to sharing.
Edward Snowden
✔ @Snowden
The aversion to sharing #NSA evidence is fear of revealing "sources and methods" of intel collection,
but #XKEYSCORE is now publicly known.
Edward Snowden2 Verified account ?
@Snowden
Without a credible threat that USG can and will use #NSA capabilities to publicly attribute responsibility,
such hacks will become common.
We should not believe any reporting of MSM. Even 'Guccifer 2.0' can be just
a smoke screen designed to protect a disgruntled insider, who leaked this information
to Wikileaks. Moreover intelligence agencies understand the NSA intercept all the
communication and store at least "envelope" for a long time. Large download is instantly
noticeable. I am not sure the Putin does not want to see Clinton as the president.
She is compromised enough to face impeachment, and that might prevent her from unleashing
new wars. In any case with republican congress she needs to fight for her life.
They really want her in jail.
Notable quotes:
"... 'The true identity of the hacker that sent the cat among the Democratic
party pigeons, at the most damaging moment for Hillary Clinton, remains the subject
of conjecture for lack of firm proof. The leading suspects may well be one or more
of her party opponents.' ..."
"... The evidence presented so far that the hack is by the Russian government
reminds me of the Iraq WMD evidence. Very dodgy. But, the media did its job. Russia
has been convicted. My twitter feed is fully convinced since the "experts" have
said so. ..."
With a situation which is changing so rapidly as the present, assessments
of Russian 'intentions' are very difficult.
However, before making conjectures about what the Russian authorities
might do in the future, it is prudent to start by trying to make as accurate
assessment as we can of what they have, and have not, done up until now.
If indeed the GRU are responsible for supplying WikiLeaks with the DNC
materials, that would represent a very major 'escalation' in 'political
warfare'.
At the moment, however, while it is perfectly possible that either they,
or the SVR or FSB – whose 'patch' this would more normally be – are responsible,
the available evidence is a mess.
In relation to 'Debka File', the Colonel's injunction to assess source
and content separately applies in spades.
So without simply accepting it, one should also not simply dismiss claims
made in a recent piece on their site entitled 'The DNC e-mails were not
hacked by Russian GRU.'
'The true identity of the hacker that sent the cat among the Democratic
party pigeons, at the most damaging moment for Hillary Clinton, remains
the subject of conjecture for lack of firm proof. The leading suspects may
well be one or more of her party opponents.'
What 'DebkaFile' point to is a central tension in the claims by 'CrowdStrike'
and others.
On one hand, according to the conventional wisdom – recycled on SST by
'herb' – the hacks into the DNC networks are likely to have required much
more than the capabilities of a solitary hacker, but were the product of
the kind of sophisticated operation which points to a state agency.
On the other, apparently this very sophisticated operation could be cracked
by 'CrowdStrike' in two hours – and had left obvious signatures.
A more general claim is made in the 'DebkaFile' piece on which people
better informed than myself may have a view:
'Russia's cyber warfare system is still mostly a "black hole" for the
West. Although it is highly effective, very little is known about its methods
of operation, organizational structures, scale of cooperation with counterparts
in other countries, and the tools and resources at its disposal.
"Had any branch of Russian intelligence been responsible for the hacking
the Democratic party's servers, no obvious signatures, such as the terms
'Fancy Bear, and 'Cozy Bear' that were discovered, would have been left
behind for investigators to find."
In exchanges in response to the analysis by 'TTG', who clearly has an
extensive familiarity with this whole field, 'herb' linked to a widely-quoted
analysis by Professor Thomas Rits of King's College, London. A cybersecurity
expert to whom I linked, Jeffrey Carr, has now produced a detailed critique
of Rits, under the title 'Can Facts Slow the DNC Breach Runaway Train?'
At the end of the piece are links to his two earlier articles, 'Faith-Based
Attribution' and 'The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense', which
I would most strongly recommend to anyone interested in the problems of
attributing responsibility for the hack.
The three pieces by Carr produce, in my view, highly cogent support for
the scepticism expressed by 'DebkaFile' about the notion that 'CrowdStrike'
had actually established that either the GRU, or the FSB/SVR, had hacked
the DNC servers.
Of course, this does not mean that one can discount the possibility that
Russian state authorities had hacked into them. It would seem to me extremely
probable that some of them had.
However, the 'CrowdStrike' report is smelling to me more and more of
an 'information operation' aimed at 'damage limitation'.
A key reason for this is that the report, and discussion of this, obfuscates
an absolutely central problem. Even if the company had, within two hours,
identified penetration operations by the GRU and the FSB/SVR, this would
quite clearly not establish beyond reasonable doubt that the only possible
suspect in relation to the handing over of the materials to WikiLeaks was
either or both of these agencies.
One could only assert this with confidence, if CrowdStrike could guarantee
1. that they were able to identify all possible successful hackings into
the system over the relevant period, and 2. that they could rule out the
possibility that successful hacks had been made by people who could have
obtained the relevant materials and handed them over to WikiLeaks.
The question of whether they were said anything to the DNC about how
they had ruled out these possibilities has barely been discussed in the
MSM coverage.
But this also brings us to the question of what 'Guccifer 2.0' is attempting
to hide. That at the minimum he is not quite what he portrays himself as
being is evident.
That said, any one of a multitude of plausible hypotheses about his role
– including, incidentally, the possibility that he is actually acting on
behalf of Americans who want to see Hillary Clinton exposed – suggests he
would be to a greater or lesser extent 'making smoke'.
What the observations of 'TTG' and Sam Peralta suggested was that the
self-portrait by 'Guccifer 2.0' of himself as a particularly brilliant hacker
obscures the actual situation.
When I put their observations to a software engineer acquaintance who
is well versed in the technicalities, he strongly agreed, and elaborated
on some of the technical issues.
A key problem seems to be that, for a range of reasons, crucial networks
go on using old software. Keeping old software secure, in the face of constantly
evolving threats, requires relevant expertise and hard work. Commonly it
doesn't get it – and it seems that the DNC servers were a pretty easy target.
But in relation to hacking into such systems, what counts is not sheer
brilliance. It is a combination of thorough technical knowledge and sheer
persistence and hard graft.
Now it may well be the case that the claims by 'Guccifer 2.0' about his
own brilliance are simply a case of vainglory. However, it may also be possible
that both 'CrowdStrike' and he have a disguised common interest in obscuring
the fact that the range of people who had the technical competence to hack
into the DNC servers was great.
By the same token, the range of people who had a motive to hack into
these servers and were in a position to employ people with the relevant
technical competence may also have been very considerable.
This has all kinds of implications. For one thing, if the suggestion
that the hacking required the capabilities of a state organisation is false,
then the obvious way for a state organisation to preserve 'deniability'
would be to get hold of competent individuals, using systems and approaches
which had not been used in previous hacks.
What is not obvious is why such any competent intelligence organisation
should leave the kind of easily accessible 'metadata' on documents which
are supposed to establish that 'Guccifer 2.0' is a front for the GRU. It
is not clear to me whether the documents in question have been subjected
to critical examination by competent – and independent – analysts.
However, if the 'metadata' really can be shown to exist, I think the
comment by Carr about the use of the name of Dzerzhinsky is to the point:
"OK. Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released
it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly
had a wicked sense of humor."
In his most recent piece, Carr links to remarks from a 1968 paper by
Sherman Kent, founder of the analytical tradition in the CIA, entitled 'Estimates
and Influence.'
In it, Kent used the metaphor of 'pyramid'. Good intelligence assessment
starts off with a 'base' of reliably ascertainable fact – on the basis of
which it may be possible to construct a structure which ends up with a definite
'apex', but may not.
The reverse method is to start with a desired 'apex' and then attempt
to construct a 'pyramid' which will support it. As Kent puts it:
"There it floats, a simple assertion screaming for a rationale. This,
then, is worked out from the top down. The difficulty of the maneuver comes
to a climax when the last stage in the perverse downward deduction must
be joined up smoothly and naturally with the reality of the base. This operation
requires a very considerable skill, particularly where there is a rich supply
of factual base-material. Without an artfully contrived joint, the whole
structure can be made to proclaim its bastardy, to the chagrin of its progenitor."
Of course, one can simply fabricate large elements of the 'base'.
As the release of 'hacked' material seems likely to continue, establishing
a reliable 'base' on which we can begin to build a structure leading to
a credible 'apex' seems a matter of some moment.
A key part of it, obviously, is working out what kinds of people might
have had a motive.
In relation to Putin, I think one needs to keep in mind both that he
may very much want to avoid seeing a new Clinton Presidency – for reasons
with which I have every sympathy. Equally, however, there are strong 'downsides'
in using this kind of means to prevent it, and if they are involved, it
will have been through means preserving 'deniability.'
The 'metadata' claims, however, make me think that the suggestion by
'DebkaFile' that people should be looking closer to home should be taken
seriously.
The evidence presented so far that the hack is by the Russian government
reminds me of the Iraq WMD evidence. Very dodgy. But, the media did its
job. Russia has been convicted. My twitter feed is fully convinced since
the "experts" have said so.
July 26th, 2016 |
LawNewz
A high profile law firm is now caught up in the DNC WikiLeaks mess. A group of
Bernie Sanders
supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the Democratic
National Committee, and the now-former chairwoman,
Debbie Wasserman-Shultz
.
In a letter sent Monday
, they are demanding that attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP be
removed from the case due to a conflict of interest. New emails discovered through the
WikiLeaks dump show that attorneys from the law firm have given strategy advice to hurt
Sanders, well before he dropped out. To add fuel to their claim, they've now discovered
that attorneys from Perkins Coie are representing both the Democratic National Committee
and Clinton's campaign.
The
lawsuit
, which was actually filed before the leaks, claims that the DNC "actively
concealed its bias" from its donors and supporters backing
Bernie Sanders
. The
plaintiffs say the recent emails only give them more evidence that the Democratic
National Committee was on board with
Hillary Clinton
from the start.
My suggestion is that the DNC put out a statement saying that the
accusations the Sanders campaign are not true. The fact that CNN notes
that you aren't getting between the two campaigns is the problem. Here,
Sanders is attacking the DNC and its current practice, its past practice
with the POTUS and with Sec Kerry. Just as the RNC pushes back directly
on Trump over "rigged system",
the DNC should push back DIRECTLY
at Sanders
and say that what he is saying is false and harmful
the Democratic party. [emphasis added]
"What we have here is evidence from the Wikileaks
database that the same attorneys that are appearing in our case and representing the DNC
in the Southern District of Florida were previously attorneys for the Clinton campaign
or they were providing advice to the DNC that was adverse to Bernie Sanders," attorney
Jared Beck
said in a video posted on line.
While it might "smell" funny, the fact that Elias gave "advice" to the DNC is not
illegal, according to the Campaign Legal Center.
"This email exchange pertains to a perfectly legal joint fundraising committee that
includes the Clinton campaign, the DNC and a bunch of state Democratic Party committees.
The coordination laws/rules don't restrict this type of interaction,"
Paul Ryan,
the Campaign Legal Center's deputy executive director told
LawNewz.com
.
However, attorneys for Bernie Sanders supporters contend that the federal court rules
bar Perkins Coie lawyers from representing the DNC as defense counsel in the case. They
say that the Perkins Coie attorneys may become "potential material witnesses" or
"defendants" in the case and should be disqualified. They plan to file an official
motion in court.
Beck's firm
is
representing about 150 supporters of Bernie Sanders in the proposed class action
lawsuit.
"My email account shows that I've been getting 10 emails per minute from people
around the country that want to join the lawsuit," Beck said. The DNC is attempting
to get the lawsuit dismissed on procedural grounds, they contend that it was never
properly served. Several emails sent to Clinton's lawyer Marc Elias have not been
returned. (He is also listed as the attorney for the DNC on the class action
lawsuit). If we hear back from him, we will update this article accordingly.
Why those unknown forces (probably a disgruntled insider) leaked this bombshell so late. At this
point it does not affect Sanders chances to beat Hillary.
Notable quotes:
"... "The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email server-which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months, including during trips to China and Russia, and which contained top-secret national-security data-was not hacked by the Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians" http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unpacking-the-dnc-emails/ ..."
"... The British government has learned that Vladimir Putin recently sought significant quantities of malware from Africa. ..."
"... Well, golly, if you're going to create a bright, shiny object to distract people from the actual content of the e-mails, why not blame little green men from Mars? I mean, seriously, isn't what this is all about – deflecting away from what the DNC was up to, so as to keep as much of it as possible from further tarnishing the already-clouded view of both the process and the major candidate whom it benefited? ..."
"... And in addition to this little bit of obviousness, how can it possible have escaped anyone with a functioning brain that this escalating hysteria about the DNC hack was noticeably absent with respect to Clinton's own email operation? ..."
"... I also find it deeply and almost-hilariously ironic that we're all supposed to be livid at the idea of some foreign government trying to manipulate the US elections when not only is the Democratic Party's flagship organization flagrantly engaged in trying to manipulate the outcome, but the AMERICAN MEDIA wouldn't know what to do with itself if it wasn't constantly fking around with the entire process. ..."
"... Looks like another false flag propaganda ploy. The Obama Admin flares up with phony indignation and immediately swears there will be more sanctions. The FBI wants to prosecute ( or is it persecute) the messenger instead of investigating the real crimes. The e-mails and their contents are real. The noise is to cover up this fact! ..."
"... The CNN poll in yesterday's Links shows Trump beats Hillary by huge margins (12 points) on the economy and terrorism. She beats him on foreign policy (and nothing else). Dragging in Russian hackers and foreign intelligence services plays to her strength. ..."
"... In reality, politically motivated attacks like this are almost always domestic in origin. To go to Wikileaks specifically I expect an inside whistleblower is responsible. The same thing happened to Sony and the Swiss banks. Elites simply don't understand how many people they work with are disgusted by their policies. To them this is a perfectly believable thing. ..."
"... It reminds me very much of the French Fries to Freedom Fries movement. If you have a critical mass of people in on the fun, it can work, at least for a time. But what happens when most people don't care about being excommunicated from the DNC Serious People List? ..."
"... Obvious clues pointing back at a known adversary…strategically-timed leaks from anonymous intelligence sources…vague statements on the record from the President and other high-level officials…stories fed to sympathetic media outlets…yep, sounds a lot like the playbook used by the Bush White House for the run-up to the Iraq War. Except there's no way that the Democrats would ever ..."
"... No matter who is responsible for the hack, I'm just glad that the information about the DNC corruption is out in the open. I'm disappointed that this didn't happen before June 7, when California, New Jersey, and several other states had their primaries. Better late than never, I guess. ..."
"... why hadn't our press revealed this? ..."
"... It's now so routine to spin-doctor aggressively that the elites have lost any sense of whether what they are saying is credible or not. ..."
"... I thought Trump's comments today about wanting the Russians to find Hillary's emails were genius. He fans the flames of this whole Russia-Putin thing on day 3 of the Dem convention and what are the media outlets talking about? Plus, Hillary's campaign, in it's rebuttal to Trump, is indirectly reminding everyone that her homebrew server was putting national security at risk. ..."
Washington's Blog asked the highest-level NSA whistleblower in history, William Binney – the NSA
executive who created the agency's mass surveillance program for digital information, who served
as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year
NSA veteran widely regarded as a "legend" within the agency and the NSA's best-ever analyst and code-breaker,
who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted
Soviet invasions before they happened ("in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union's command system,
which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and
Russian atomic weapons") – what he thinks of such claims:
Edward Snowden says the NSA could easily determine who hacked Hillary Clinton's emails:
Evidence that could publicly attribute responsibility for the DNC hack certainly exists
at #NSA , but DNI traditionally
objects to sharing.
The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it
wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the
email leaks are to Clinton's character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html
Who's right?
Binney responded:
Snowden is right and the MSM is clueless. Here's what I said to Ray McGovern and VIPS with
a little humor at the end. [McGovern is a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence
Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other
senior government officials. McGovern is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity ("VIPS" for short).]
Ray, I am suspicious that they may have looked for known hacking code (used by Russians). And,
I'm sure they were one probably of many to hack her stuff. But, does that mean that they checked
to see if others also hacked in?
Further, do they have evidence that the Russians downloaded and later forwarded those emails
to wikileaks? Seems to me that they need to answer those questions to be sure that their assertion
is correct. Otherwise, HRC and her political activities are and I am sure have been prime targets
for the Russians (as well as many others) but without intent of course.
I would add that we proposed to do a program that would monitor all activity on the world-wide
NSA network back in 1991/92. We called it "Wellgrounded." NSA did not want anyone (especially
congress) to know what was going on inside NSA and therefore rejected that proposal. I have not
read what Ed has said, but, I do know that every line of code that goes across the network is
logged in the network log. This is where a little software could scan, analyze and find the intruders
initially and then compile all the code sent by them to determine the type of attack. This is
what we wanted to do back in 1991/92.
The newest allegation tying the Clinton email hack to Russia seems to be
all innuendo .
Binney explained to us:
My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site.
I suspect that's because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks.
Of course, this brings up another question; if it's a know attack, why did the DNC not have
software to stop it? You can tell from the network log who is going into a site. I used that on
networks that I had. I looked to see who came into my LAN, where they went, how long they stayed
and what they did while in my network.
Further, if you needed to, you could trace back approaches through other servers etc. Trace
Route and Trace Watch are good examples of monitoring software that help do these things. Others
of course exist … probably the best are in NSA/GCHQ and the other Five Eyes countries. But, these
countries have no monopoly on smart people that could do similar detection software.
Question is do they want to fix the problems with existing protection software. If the DNC
and OPM are examples, then obviously, they don't care to fix weakness probably because the want
to use these weaknesses to their own advantage.
Why is this newsworthy?
Well, the mainstream narrative alleges that the Clinton emails are not important … and that it's
a conspiracy between Putin and Trump to make sure Trump – and not Clinton – is elected.
But there are other issues, as well …
For example, an allegation of hacking could
literally lead to
war .
So we should be skeptical of such serious and potentially far-reaching allegations – which may
be true or may be false – unless and until they are proven .
Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular
until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal
log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then –
once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over
*those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat
ad infinitum)
For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi
hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another
box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous
cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then
RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP
them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account
previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from
a completely different set of servers.
In many cases where I did this sort of analysis I still ended up with a complete dead end:
some sysadmins at remote companies or orgs would be sympathetic and give me actual related log
files. Others would be sympathetic but would not give files, and instead do their own analysis
to give me tips. Many never responded, and most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal
PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway.
If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky
– but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather
then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things
that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily
'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt
at obfuscation.
Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log
files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack
to anyone at this point.
So, I guess I am reduced to LOL OMG WTF its fer the LULZ!!!!!
hah, well I had a nice long answer but cloudflare blocked me. heh…apparently it doesnt like
certain words one uses when describing this stuff. Understandable!
I guess try looking up 'phishing' and 'privilege elevation' on wikipedia. Former is easiest,
latter gives you street cred.
Just to clarify on the "…If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence…"
– this is basically what I have seen reported as 'evidence' pointing to Russia: the Cyrillic keyboard
signature, the 'appeared to cease work on Russian holidays' stuff, and the association with 'known
Russian hacking groups'.
Thats great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten
me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools
get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the
community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent
hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things
into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery)
I guess I have a lot more respect for the kinds of people I expect to be getting a paycheck
from foreign Intelligence agencies then to believe that they would leave such obvious clues behind
'accidentally'. But if we are going to be starting wars over this stuff w/Russia, or China, I
guess I would hope the adults in the room don't go all apesh*t and start chanting COMMIES, THE
RUSSIANS ARE COMING!, etc. before the ink is dry on the 'crime'.
Even then, I fail to see why this person (foreign, domestic, professional, amateur, state-sponsored,
or otherwise) hasn't done us a great service by exposing the DNC corruption in the first place.
Hell, I would love to give them the Medal of Freedom for this and (hopefully) the next boot to
drop! :)
There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers
and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that,
among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some
of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack
analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to.
Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those
arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded
or corrupted by their own political agenda.
Oh, "they" just use the system management features baked right into the embedded computers
either the ones inside the "secure server" itself or (much more convenient and easy to do), they
attack the cheap-ish COTS lapdog that the support techie will be using to access the "secure server"
with:
– if there's a non-NSA evidence the attacks originated from Russia, then someone wanted the
world to know it was from Russia (or was just a private snoop).
– even if there was a technical evidence that the attack originated from Russia, unless it
could be tied very specifically to an institution (as opposed to a "PC in Russia"), it does not
prove that it was Russia. All it proves that someone using a computer in Russia initiated it.
Well phooey. My theory now goes up in smoke: Here we can clearly see an attempt at disinformation
from a Russian Operative, likely FSB – possibly from Putin's inner circle.
We know this through 2 things:
A.) The name, 'Vlad' – inequivocally a Russian given name, and not a common one at that.
B.) Note the slightly wrong grammar: "…a non-NSA evidence…" & "..was a technical evidence".
Clearly not a native English speaker.
See how easy that was? Yves, no need for log files to track IP here…case closed. In Soviet
Russia, crow eats me.
Anyone gots some nuke launch codes handy? 00000000 doesn't work for me anymore…
The recently murdered DNC Date Director Seth Rich being the leaker, or at least knowing who
the leaker was, as was hinted at recently by Julian Assange himself, makes a far more interesting
conspiracy theory.
Ten days after the murder of promising Democratic staffer Seth Rich, the Washington D.C.
slaying remains unsolved and police say they have no suspects in the crime.
Rich, a Jewish data analyst for the Democratic National Committee who worked on polling
station expansion, was shot and killed as he walked home on Sunday, July 10.
Police told Rich's parents that they believed his death was the result of a botched robbery.
Though Rich's killer did not take his wallet or phone, D.C. Police Commander William Fitzgerald
said that "there is no other reason (other than robbery) for an altercation at 4:30 in the
morning" at a community meeting on Monday.
The meeting was meant to address the recent uptick in robberies in the Bloomingdale neighborhood
near Howard University. Police reports say robberies in the area are down 20%, but an investigation
by the Washington Post found that armed robberies are actually up over 20% compared
with July 2015.
Of course there is absolutely no proof of Seth Rich's involvement, but I suppose it is a reasonable
surmise, as George Will recently said about the Russia allegations! In any case a possible crypto-BernieBro
tech-guy mole from within the DNC, as the source of the DNCLeaks, would make a much better made-for-TV
movie than the Russian theory. And if it was an internal mole, what better way to cover their
tracks than to leave some "traces" of a Russian hack.
Its one thing for Republicans to resort to the old chestnut of red scare mongering, but for
the Democrats to use the same ammo they once had lobed at them is surreal….
"The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email
server-which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months, including during trips to
China and Russia, and which contained top-secret national-security data-was not hacked by the
Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unpacking-the-dnc-emails/
Well, golly, if you're going to create a bright, shiny object to distract people from the
actual content of the e-mails, why not blame little green men from Mars? I mean, seriously, isn't
what this is all about – deflecting away from what the DNC was up to, so as to keep as much of
it as possible from further tarnishing the already-clouded view of both the process and the major
candidate whom it benefited?
And in addition to this little bit of obviousness, how can it possible have escaped
anyone with a functioning brain that this escalating hysteria about the DNC hack was noticeably
absent with respect to Clinton's own email operation?
I also find it deeply and almost-hilariously ironic that we're all supposed to be livid
at the idea of some foreign government trying to manipulate the US elections when not only is
the Democratic Party's flagship organization flagrantly engaged in trying to manipulate the outcome,
but the AMERICAN MEDIA wouldn't know what to do with itself if it wasn't constantly fking around
with the entire process.
I'm not sure we're ever coming out of this rabbit-hole-to-hell.
Looks like another false flag propaganda ploy. The Obama Admin flares up with phony indignation
and immediately swears there will be more sanctions. The FBI wants to prosecute ( or is it persecute)
the messenger instead of investigating the real crimes. The e-mails and their contents are real.
The noise is to cover up this fact!
"Why play the Russian/Putin/Trump card with the DNC email hack?" – An excellent question for
which you have provided a logical potential answer. Beyond that, this generally seems like an
act of desperation. I am nowhere near an expert on the details of hacking like the two who have
commented above, but what I see is a desperate attempt to capture the "stupid" vote. The whole
Democrat dog and pony show being put on now only serves to make those who will vote for Hillary
no matter what, feel self satisfied that they are right minded. What matters though is how they
connect with those not inclined to vote for her. In their logic it follows that the HIllary crowd
basically believes that anyone who would consider voting for Trump is very stupid, and this is
a desperate attempt to convince the "stupid's" to vote for Hillary. I have no idea how Trump will
act if he is elected President, but the critical factor for me is that there is now overwhelming
evidence that the entire Democrat establishment is just like Hillary (as made clear by Mr. Comey):
They are either grossly negligent and incompetent, or criminals who are not being prosecuted.
Anyone but her and her merry band of thieves will leave us all better off after November.
The association the Dems want to create is "scary foreign people support Trump".
The CNN poll in yesterday's Links shows Trump beats Hillary by huge margins (12 points)
on the economy and terrorism. She beats him on foreign policy (and nothing else). Dragging in
Russian hackers and foreign intelligence services plays to her strength.
In reality, politically motivated attacks like this are almost always domestic in origin.
To go to Wikileaks specifically I expect an inside whistleblower is responsible. The same thing
happened to Sony and the Swiss banks. Elites simply don't understand how many people they work
with are disgusted by their policies. To them this is a perfectly believable thing.
I also wonder whether there are significant numbers of Poles and Eastern Europeans generally
in the industrial precincts in some swing states; a vote against Russia in the form of a vote
against Trump might appeal to them.
I doubt it's that strategic–looks more like classic red-baiting (minus any communism but saying
"Russia" still evokes the same emotional response for people of a certain age) of the sort a former
Goldwater girl like Hillary would understand all too well.
Linking the hack and delivery of DNC emails to WIkiLeaks by Putin as a way of helping Trump
may strategically backfire.
Agreed. There are so many moving parts at this point the blowback looks to happen more rapidly
than they can manage perception, especially with things online. They spent so much time segmenting
and dismissing the various developments as disparate conspiracy theories, and now in one fell
swoop they've both legitimized critiques and connected them together (they run the risk that even
criticism that isn't true will still stick more than it otherwise would have). I'm not sure they
fully realize what they've done yet. It's a simple equation to them: Wikileaks = Bad. Russia =
Bad. Wikileaks + Russia = DoubleBad.
It reminds me very much of the French Fries to Freedom Fries movement. If you have a critical
mass of people in on the fun, it can work, at least for a time. But what happens when most people
don't care about being excommunicated from the DNC Serious People List?
Obvious clues pointing back at a known adversary…strategically-timed leaks from anonymous
intelligence sources…vague statements on the record from the President and other high-level officials…stories
fed to sympathetic media outlets…yep, sounds a lot like the playbook used by the Bush White House
for the run-up to the Iraq War. Except there's no way that the Democrats would ever do
something so shady.
Admin feeds story to crony media –> media report story as if independently sourced –> admin
then uses those reports to corroborate its own claims
It's not like they can reasonably deny anymore that they do this. The DNC leak provides hard
evidence. So plant your stories now, before there's a run!
Hey why fix our cybersecurity problems when we can just bomb Russia instead? To a hammer with
bombs everything looks like a nail.
Perhaps the biggest tell regarding our clueless, and mostly geriatric, establishment is their
superstitious misunderstanding of modern technology. Every toddler these days probably knows that
you don't put controversial material in emails or on cellphones unless you are willing to take
the kind of precautions Snowden talks about. The notion of ginning up an international conflict
over hacking is like Hollywood's idea of five years in jail for stealing one of Meryl Streep's
movies. The punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Plus of course there's the immense irony of the US, home of the NSA, getting huffy about other
countries doing the same thing. As always with out elites it's "do as we say, not as we do."
No matter who is responsible for the hack, I'm just glad that the information about the
DNC corruption is out in the open. I'm disappointed that this didn't happen before June 7, when
California, New Jersey, and several other states had their primaries. Better late than never,
I guess.
1. Before the evidence comes out: "The DNC is secretly sabotaging Sanders? Laughable conspiracy
theory!"
2. After the evidence comes out: "There's nothing new here, everyone knew this was happening,
it made no difference anyway! Sore loser."
Was flipping through 'convention' last night and happened upon Bernie's face as they try to
thank/bury him. It was the look of resignation to corruption, like Mr. Smith's just before Claude
Rains goes extra-Hollywood, tries to off himself, then says 'Arrest me', etc.
Bernie, you should have just run against both of them, damn the torpedoes.
It doesn't matter if Russia hacked it or someone else. The really important issue this brings
up is why hadn't our press revealed this? Why do we need to here about this from outsiders? And
why, now that it has been released, do they spend the bulk of their time speculating on the source
and not the content? Me thinks it's because our corporate main stream media, that merely masquerades
as a press entity, was complicit.
I think the leaked emails establish that the DNC was working closely with the 'press'. Anyone
who watched CNN during the primary season would not be surprised at the revelation that the 'press'
was complicit in the coronation of Hillary.
The DNCLeaks showed that the DNC (aka the Clinton Machine) was heavily influencing,
if not totally controlling, much of the mass media, using it to smear HRC's rivals and to
whitewash her crimes.
This fascist totalitarian control of the mass media by the DNC/Clinton campaign
has been exposed but that doesn't mean it has stopped! It hasn't. Ergo, one
will see minimal to no coverage, or whitewashing or diversionary coverage.
Why isn't it just as grave a concern that the primary contest of one of the 2 major political
parties was rigged to favor one candidate? Heck, people worried more about deflategate.
an aside: "A separate story pointed out that Trump's primary banking relationships are with
mid-sized players, and that makes sense too. He's be a third-tier account at a too-big-to-fail
banks (see here on how a much richer billionaire was abused by JP Morgan). Trump would get much
better service at a smaller institution. "
From what I've read at NC I think everyone would get much better service at a smaller
bank than at a TBTF.
"I joked early on that in the Obama administration that its solution to every problem was
better propaganda. What is troubling is how so many other players have emulated that strategy.
It's now so routine to spin-doctor aggressively that the elites have lost any sense of
whether what they are saying is credible or not. And as a skeptical consumer of media,
I find it uncomfortable to be living in an informational hall of mirrors."
It's no coincidence that trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
Eroded public trust translates to crappy, Banana Republic economies - and politics so venal that
it requires constant deceit to (mal)function.
On the upside, the dwindling credibility of institutions is providing opportunities for outlets
like The Young Turks (via YouTube), which take a lot of time unpacking propaganda and looking
for alternative perspectives. Ditto 'The Real News Network' (RNN). And ditto NC.
When I hear the "reporters" and "newscasters" on our American MSM speak, it reminds me of something
Wolfgang Leonhard taught: "Pravda lies in such a a way that not even the opposite of what they
say is true."
Huh. It is clear and irrefutable that the NSA (ie, the USA) has hacked Germany, France, Britain,
Japan, etc, etc, etc, etc. So…since hacking is an "act of war" we are now at war with our allies.
Yes?
Or does a war-worthy hack HAVE to originate in Russia (or China) to be an "act of war"? If
the USA is doing it it's an act of peacylove?
If the issue is the hack itself and its perpetrator(s), as opposed to the content of the hack,
I remain curious about the inattention to this fact: One of the documents in the DNC cache released
by Wikileaks was an excel spreadsheet of Trump donors. I haven't heard
anyone question the origin of a document that would itself appear to be the product of a hack
by the DNC (the only other possibility that comes to mind is a mole inside the Trump campaign).
I certainly haven't seen a request by the Trump campaign or anybody else for an FBI investigation
of what would seem to be prima facie evidence of a hack by the DNC of Trump computers in violation
of 18 U.S.C. § 1030.
But, then, there's been relative silence, generally, by the DNC with regard to leaks of donor
information. At least I haven't seen any PR-ly apology by the DNC, or Trump's organization for
that matter, for the insecure storing of donor information and a promise that steps have been
taken to make sure it doesn't happen again. Maybe I just missed that public apology. But I also
wonder if there isn't a reluctance to draw any attention whatsoever to that now public information.
Trump's affection for Putin and all things Russian has been known for years. In Russia, however,
Trump is considered to be clownish. Putin's affection for Trump might best be characterized as
condescending. Trump is the preference of the Putin crowd. And why not? Russian oligarch money
has been flowing into Trump's coffers for at least a decade. Why? Well, after four bankruptcies,
where else is Trump going to borrow money? There is solid evidence of financial ties between Trump
advisors and Putin's circle. Try the website Ballotpedia and look up "Carter Page," Trump's advisor
on all things Russian. Other examples are out there.
That said, I would not absolutely eliminate Putin and his operatives of conspiring with hackers
to obtain and then release documents that would denigrate the Democratic party and HRC.
I find it interesting that Trump telegraphed to the world a skeptical view of NATO allies,
especially the Putin-coveted Baltics, and signaled that he might not come to their defense if
attacked. Those views were expressed in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday, July
21. These comments, predictably, set off alarms all across Europe, and had Republicans scrambling
to backpedal. And then the next day, come the DNC leaks.
And now rumors of Scalia's assassination are being floated again! Distraction after distraction!
KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, etc al, have bankrupted HUNDREDS of companies each. Yet they not only
do they have no trouble borrowing money, they are eagerly pursued by Wall Street.
Trump has never gone bankrupt personally. He had four companies go bankrupt. Trump has started
and operated hundreds of corporate entities. That makes his ratio of bankruptcies way lower than
average and thus means he's a good credit, and much better than private equity. I'm not about
to waste time tracking it down, but the media has already reported on who Trump's regular lender
is, and it's a domestic financial institution, but not one of the TBTF banks.
In addition, I had a major NYC real estate developer/syndicator, a billionaire, in the late
1980s. The early 1990s recession hit NYC real estate very hard and every developer was in serious
trouble. My former client and Trump were the only big NYC developers not to have to give up major
NY properties to the banks.
And as far as your NATO remarks are concerned, you've clearly not been paying attention. Trump
has been critical of the US role in NATO for months, and has already gotten plenty of heat for
that.
Finally, as even the New York Times was forced to concede, the timing of the hacks was all
wrong to be intended to help Trump. It started long before he was a factor on the Republican side.
The DNC hired Crowdstrike to get 2 major Russian hacks off the DNC network prior to this guccifer2.0
nonsense.
You write: "Binney explained to us:
My problem is that they have not listed intruders or attempted intrusions to the DNC site. I suspect
that's because they did a quick and dirty look for known attacks."
But they have listed the initial intruders, see links below.
Binny keeps describing how he would check his LAN back in 1991. His experience is that of a
dinosaur. This article is a mess, conflating the Hrc email scandal with the DNC scandal. What
is at issue, as stated in the FAIR link, is whether the leak to gawker and wiki etc was perpetrated
by a lone Romanian hacker or by the Russian government, not whether the DNC was spied upon by
the Russian; it was.
I am not arguing the the Clinton campaign did not figure out how to use this to their advantage,
guccifer 2.0 and crowd strike stuff both came out in June but was not the subject of much crowing
until now…
> not whether the DNC was spied upon by the Russian; it was.
Based on what evidence? So many blanket statements we're supposed to accept as fact. No.
Guccifer 1.0, who is Romanian, hacked Sidney Blumenthal's email. Generally speaking, Romanians
like many Eastern Europeans hate Russia. Guccifer 1.0 was extradited to the US and made various
statements to the press about Clinton's private email server. I'm not aware of anything he said
about the DNC.
Guccifer 2.0 released DNC documents to the public and apparently to WikiLeaks. There is no
evidence he is Russian or connected to the Russians.
The mainstream media is also trumpeting the meme that Russia was behind the hack, because it
wants to help Trump get elected. In other words, the media is trying to deflect how damaging the
email leaks are to Clinton's character by trying to somehow associate Trump with Putin. See e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/kremlin-donald-trump-vladimir-putin.html "
don't you mean MSM wants to get Clinton elected, not Trump?
think the sentence was trying to express the idea that "Russia" "wants to help Trump get elected–the
"it" referring to "Russia" and not to "mainstream media"–as that idea is the predicate of a meme
that the mainstream media is trumpeting.
Always better to repeat the noun you are referring to, rather than use a pronoun, where use
of a pronoun could create ambiguity, as "it" (or should I have said, " such use" ?) did here.
Did any one see the recent docu ' Zero days' re STUXNET worm (invented by combined efforts
of US _NSA,CIA + Israeli intelligent +?UK) introduced into the NET to take down the Nulc program
in IRAN!
There is fascinating discussion and the threat of cyber terrorism from any one from any where
to the infra structures – Energy grid, transportation ++
It has lot of bearing on this Hillary E-mail gate scandal
Did you bother reading the comments earlier in this thread by JacobiteInTraining and Hacker,
who confirm that the claims don't stand up to scrutiny?
And you appear not to have been following this at all. Right after the story broke, a hacker
who called himself Guccifer 2.0 posted two sets of DNC docs and said more were coming, which was
presumed even then to be a Wikileaks releases (Assange had separately said lots of material on
Clinton was coming).
Because Hillary's campaign has insisted that national security was not compromised with her
use of a homebrew email server. Which would be the higher value target to a foreign intelligence
service – email she used as sec state, or the DNC server? Which would probably have better security
– the homebrew server, or the DNC server? If you buy into the idea that the Russians hacked the
DNC server, you have to admit there is a _strong_ probability they hacked her personal server
as well. I find it kindof amusing that her campaign, in it's response to Trump today, is basically
making the same point (even though it hasn't sunk in yet).
That's why it's relevant.
I can't speak to what security Hillary had in place. But I can say with 100% certainty that
it is I direly easier to secure a small network for one or two people over a large network that
has 100s or 1000s.
I have been working in network security for 20 years. I guarantee that I could build a small
network that would be close to impossible to break into regardless of the ability of the attacker.
So I reject the premise that we should presume that Hillary was hacked
I suggest you get up to speed on this story before making assumptions and assertions based
on them. It has been widely reported that Hillary's tech had no experience in network security
whatsoever, so the issue re the size of the network is irrelevant.
Bryan Pagliano's
resume , which the State Department recently turned over to Judicial Watch, shows he had
neither experience nor certification in protecting email systems against cyber security threats
His main qualification seems to be that he had been an IT director for the Clinton campaign
in 2006. CNN points out he was hired at State as a "political appointee":
Again, irrelevant to my point. The fact that the DNC mail servers were hacked does NOT mean
that Clinton's mail servers were hacked. Clinton's mail servers may have been hacked and Assange
is claiming that he has documents that prove it was. But, to date, no evidence has been provided
to show that her mail servers were hacked.
What we DO know is that the State Department mail servers were hacked, at least twice and at
least once by the Russians.
Regardless, none of this has anything to do with whether the Russians hacked the DNC mail servers
and whether they gave that information to Wikileaks.
Crowdstrike ,
Fiedlis Cybersecurity , and Mandiant all independently corroborated that it was the Russians.
The German government corroborated that an SSL cert found on the DNC servers was the same cert
that was used to infiltrate the German Parliament.
guccifer 2.0 is some guy that made a claim that made a claim the day AFTER Crowdstrike released
their report. He/She offered no evidence to support their claim.
So perhaps 3 different professional IT security companies are incompetent, despite all evidence
to the contrary, or Guccifer 2.0 is just some guy trying to take credit for something they didn't
do or it is a Russian agent trying to actively distract people from the actual culprits.
It is possible that the Russians weren't the ones to give the docs to wikileaks. But they almost
certainly were the ones who perpetrated an attack into the DNC mail servers. That in itself is
a huge problem.
I'm curious, is your background on the computer side or the policy side? You're making some
leaps where I think I follow your meaning, but the actual logic/evidence/warrant isn't there,
so I'm not sure exactly what you're claiming.
Aside from questions of whether elements of the Russian government attacked the DNC,
for example, you imply that the Russians were the only people attacking the DNC. Do you
have any technical reason to conclude that? Or is it just sloppy sentence construction, and you
didn't mean to imply that? Because at a policy level, it seems a reasonably solid understanding
of the world we inhabit that elements of many foreign governments attack US computer
systems, both for active penetration of documents and for more passive denial of service by legitimate
users. For goodness sakes, elements of the USFG itself attack US computer systems.
Anyone who can stand up straight for 5 minutes without falling over backwards and has half
a brain and an ounce of institutional memory knows it wasn't the Russkies who dropped the email
dime on the DNC shenanigans…
I thought Trump's comments today about wanting the Russians to find Hillary's emails were
genius. He fans the flames of this whole Russia-Putin thing on day 3 of the Dem convention and
what are the media outlets talking about? Plus, Hillary's campaign, in it's rebuttal to Trump,
is indirectly reminding everyone that her homebrew server was putting national security at risk.
This whole Russia-Putin connection thing won't work – it really isn't that believable in the
first place, the timing is suspect, and a lot of people in this country really don't care that
deeply about Putin one way or the other.
After Flame and Stixnet worms as well as Snowden revelations, the US now is on receiving end its
own sophisticated method of attacks which make finding the origin almost impossible.
Notable quotes:
"... Mook's "Russians under the bed" gaslighting is useful on a number of fronts: Ginning up war fever for an October surprise ; setting up a later McCarthy-ite purge of Trump supporters, Clinton skeptics, or even those prematurely anti-Trump ; and if we're truly blessed, a real shooting war ; some damned thing in the Baltic or the Black Sea, or wherever the Kagan clan points to on the map in the war room. And it's always useful to be able to convert one's opponents to enemies by accusing them of treason, especially in an election year. ..."
"... Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then – once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over *those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat ad infinitum). ..."
"... For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from a completely different set of servers. ..."
"... most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway. ..."
"... If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky – but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily 'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt at obfuscation. ..."
"... Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack to anyone at this point ..."
"... That's great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery) ..."
"... There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that, among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to. ..."
"... Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded or corrupted by their own political agenda. ..."
"... Problem #1: The IP address 176.31.112[.]10 used in the Bundestag breach as a Command and Control server has never been connected to the Russian intelligence services. In fact, Claudio Guarnieri , a highly regarded security researcher, whose technical analysis was referenced by Rid, stated that "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country." ..."
"... This post is not about today's ..."
"... Carr makes the point that even supposed clues about Russian involvement ("the default language is Cyrillic!") are meaningless as all these could be spoofed by another party. ..."
"... Separately it just shows again Team Clinton's (and DNC's) political deviousness and expertise how they –with the full support of the MSM of course –have managed to deflect the discussion to Trump and Russia from how the DNC subverted US democracy. ..."
"... Absent any other evidence to work with, I can accept it as credible that a clumsy Russian or Baltic user posted viewed and saved docs instead of the originals; par for the course in public and private bureaucracies the world over. It would have been useful to see the original Properties metadata; instead we get crapped up copies. That only tells me the poster is something of a lightweight, and it at least somewhat suggests that these docs passed through multiple hands ..."
"... Absolutely agree. Breed the stupid, use the stupid. how long can an idiocratic system last. I need to emigrate. ..."
"... "If the electorate doesn't meet your standards, lower them." ..."
"... One guy on Twitter, even with 10 million followers, can't overcome the Mighty Wurlitzer of the media all blasting the "Looke, over there! Baddie Rooskies!" tout ensemble ..."
"... The thing that most bothers me is that this is supportive of the Kagans and Hillary's push to foment a shooting war with Russia. The so-called metadata that they point to is all something that could very easily be created by an amateur who was actually given access to the DNC's server(s). The "investigator" who issued the conclusion has no record of integrity. ..."
"... Yes, the logical endgame of a 'Trump is a Russian stooge' strategy is that the stronger Trump is in the polls, the greater the incentive to stage an October Surprise with Russia. Something tells me that this lot would quite happily risk a nuclear war if it gave them a better chance of winning an election. ..."
"... … all of which does indeed show a smoking gun, but not the same smoking gun as is being reported. What is shown is that, in addition to the fact that a technical investigation being made by reasonably competent people, a PR team has also been brought in to design the messaging, disseminate the message to the public and create the "right" optics for the story. Such PR / media management teams are fully-paid up members of the Credentialed Class. As such, they want to be seen to earn their money and prove they should get more of it from their elite benefactors in the future. This has an almost inevitable consequence that they will seize on what was probably a suggestive-but-not-conclusive piece of evidence from an investigating team and embellish it with a conclusion which isn't proven or even supported by the actual evidence. Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" (which, of course, didn't exist) is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomena. ..."
"... When you set up a new computer, one of the things a setup routine gets the user to answer is the location of the PC and the input language. This, amongst many other things, sets the code pages used for backwards compatibility in text files which don't support Unicode. It is so easy to forget this has ever been set by a hacker who then merrily goes on to write their hack completely oblivious to the fact they've given - if they are not very careful - the location of their home country away. Or, at least, their native language. If I get chance I'll send a screen shot of a typical application and how a user might be completely unaware of how they are disclosing their location / language if I can hook up to an anonymous hosting service) which might make it a bit clearer for readers. ..."
"... As I've described above, it is a trivial task to "spoof" a PC into looking like it was being used by a Russian, Korean, Chinese, whatever, based person or group. You either do it during the PC setup process or else you can with a few clicks change the default locale on any PC or other operating system. Hey-presto. You can now produce what looks like "Russian" (or any other language) flavoured text and cunningly have these tell-tale code pages appear in your malicious code or similar. ..."
"... In other words, the Cyrillic attribute indicates that the posted docs are not originals ..."
"... Which is telling. The DNC never disavowed the e-mails. They just simply said "See, it's those damn Russians up to their old tricks again". It's like watching an episode of "Maury" when someone gets caught cheating, then try to 1) blame someone/something else for the cheating 2) then apologize for said cheating (ONLY because they got caught) and say "c'mon, baby, let's move on from this"… ..."
"... I wonder if it would be overly technodeterminist to argue one of the primary reasons for displacement of journalists and other human knowledge interpreters by machines and algorithms was the NSA's secret need to make sense of their massive telemetry and data as the Cold War ended and the Information Age and Comparative Advantage became ossified neoclassical economic theory and practice. ..."
"... The Russians are trying to rig the elections by exposing how we tried to rig the elections! THIS MEANS WAR! ..."
"... The childish, credulous, transparently Machevellian propagandizing by the DNC here, especially the deflection in place of serious scientific analysis, is beyond contemptible: it's staggering. But it works because over a quarter century after PCs started showing up on desks the vast majority of the public still don't know as much about how these machines work as most of those living in the 1930's groked about their automobiles (which were in far shorter supply). The world is becoming more complex by the minute, and unless folks start to knuckle down and start learning how it really works they're going to be doomed to be mere passengers on a runaway train. ..."
"... Even if there was a way to determine exactly when and were the malicious code was made, wouldn't there be a good chance it could have been used by someone else. I would imagine everyone in that "industry" would find bits of the others work and incorporate it into their own. What better way to throw people off the trail than to incorporate pieces from different groups for just that purpose. Especially if you know a forensic examination would be looking for those clues. Also how about a "script kiddie" or non-sophisticated actor getting ahold of it and using it like any other tool. ..."
"... Hacker's link to the ars technica article below is the most detailed explanation I have seen relating these intruders to previous attacks, and Yves link to the Carr article is handy for readers because he includes a chart to cross reference the various names that each of the known russian intruders. ..."
"... "Symbol manipulators - like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe that real economy systems are as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are." ..."
"... "One cannot stress enough the point about APTs being, first and foremost, a new attack doctrine built to circumvent the existing perimeter and endpoint defenses. It's a little similar to stealth air fighters: for decades you've based your air defense on radar technology, but now you have those sneaky stealth fighters built with odd angles and strange composite materials. You can try building bigger and better radars, or, as someone I talked to said, you can try staring more closely at your existing radars in hope of catching some faint signs of something flying by, but this isn't going to turn the tide on stealthy attackers. Instead you have to think of a new defense doctrine." ..."
"... Really the DNC and Hill-bots are looking foolish on this. I have some very well-educated friends going full "red scare" on Facebook. Too easy to troll them by agreeing and exaggerating just a little too much! ..."
"... Besides wasn't Hillary the one against xenophobia? Wasn't she all about building bridges and not (fire!) walls? Now it seems it's OK to blame shiit on foreigners! So it becomes a question of WHICH foreigners we should blame. Trump says Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China while Clinton says Russia. Let the voters decide! ..."
"... But while the comparisons to McCarthyism write themselves, another uncanny historic parallel is the run-up to the Iraq War. First we have these damn Hackers of Mass Disruption (HMD) trying to manipulate a US election (by showing the DNC actually did manipulate an election!). Next we will have our intelligence services and perhaps "trusted sources" like Curveball informing us Putin did it. Will Theresa May quickly crank out a dossier and some posh-sounding Brits confirm the HWD allegations? Obama will have to hurry to get the war going in time but Colin Powell will be called out of retirement to present the hacking evidence to the UN. Putin will be given a deadline for surrendering ALL his HMD. UN inspectors will sent in but not find any traces of HMD. Debka and the New York Times will insist Putin is hiding his HMD in the Moscow metro or perhaps he has sent them all to a third-party nation for safekeeping? The Washington Post will remind us of how the Kurds were brutalized by HMD cracking into the PKK's main servers. The tension will build to an unbearable crescendo. ..."
"... One of the e mails said the price of a private dinner with Hill is $200,000. Wow. In my case, I wouldn't give two cents for this. In fact, she would have to pay me at least a few grand, and I would split the scene as soon as possible. ..."
"... That article also goes into stated Russian doctrine about intent to use whatever means necessary to, in my words, protect themselves. As it is pretty obvious to me that America is the global bully these days. ..."
"... I'm not sure where this Jeffrey Carr guy came from but his company previously indicated the Russians were behind the Sony hack. And his argument was based on linguistic comparisons of the errors made in the English statements issued by the fake group claiming the hack. Not based on code at all. Seems like he's a character that shows up to muddy the waters. Don't assume he's an ally just because his arguments support your thesis. ..."
"... Clinton is trying to market herself as the Serious/Safe candidate, and instead her campaign is acting all CT hysterical. This whole Putin-hack thing is sabotaging her own brand. ..."
"... Hillary's brand was always just branding. In 2007, she ran as the candidate ready to take that 3 am phone call because of her experience. What experience? Selecting White House China for state functions? Raising money for the White House restoration? I liked the Christmas decorations Hillary had. Her followers believed her brand would win the day, and they simply ignored Obama largely won because of Hillary's poor foreign policy record. ..."
"... So she went out and bargained herself into State to get the foreign policy experience and now has a record on it that should have every sane person saying keep her away from sharp objects and things that go boom. Instead we once again have her running on taking that 3 am phone call while her team is acting like the twelve year old whose parents told her there are monsters home alone for the first time thinking that the refrigerator is a monster because she never heard it cycle on before. ..."
"... After the hackers were "shocked, shocked" when they saw the true operation of the DNC, then they decided to leak the information. This could suggest the leak may have been done, not to harm USA democracy, but to improve it by getting the DNC to behave in a fair and ethical manner in the future. ..."
"... The Democratic Party establishment is selling a used car knowing there's no way of getting a verifiable title history for the vehicle. To weave the narrative here, a few basic statements are made which may (perhaps) be technically true, as a foundation, but perhaps grossly misleadingly so. ..."
"... Perhaps at least one Russian at some point hacked the DNC. It is implied that _only_ this/these Russians hacked the DNC. It is implied that the WikiLeaks doc-dump came from this same set of people. "An IP address was found" is a very passive statement then used similarly. It's possible a templatized kit had a default address (maybe even commented out) and was used in more than one place. Kits like this may be used by a single player or entity (in the case of a state actor, perhaps, though it seems potentially sloppy) or may be used by someone who purchased them or stole them from someone else. Only a few leading statements, eliding particular details, are necessary to promulgate a crafted narrative, when injected into the echo chamber and laundered through friendly or credulous security firms for expert confirmation. ..."
"... Some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Russian hackers who broke into Democratic Party computers may have deliberately left digital fingerprints to show Moscow is a "cyberpower" that Washington should respect. ..."
"... If one watches ' ZERO DAYS' docu on how STUXNET/worm/olypic game was invented/manufactured by the combined efforts of US – cyber command @NSA, +CIA and Isralei intelligence +UK?) and planted into the NET in bringing down the Iran's Nucl program, most of us are way, way behind in understanding cyber terrorism! They were clueless and firing their Nucl experts for incompetence! ..."
Hillary Clinton's campaign manager is alleging that Russian hackers are leaking Democratic
National Committee emails critical of Bernie Sanders in an effort to help Donald Trump win the
election in November.
It comes on the heels of "changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian,"
Robby Mook told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" Sunday.
"I don't think it's coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention
here, and I think that's disturbing," he said.
Mook's "Russians under the bed"
gaslighting is useful on a number of fronts: Ginning up war fever for
an October surprise
; setting up a later McCarthy-ite
purge of Trump supporters, Clinton skeptics, or even those
prematurely anti-Trump
; and
if
we're truly blessed, a real shooting war ; some damned thing in the Baltic or the Black Sea,
or wherever
the
Kagan clan points to on the map in the war room. And it's always useful to be able to convert
one's opponents to enemies by accusing them of treason, especially in an election year.
However, in this short post I want to focus on a much narrower question: Can we ever know who
hacked the DNC email? Because if we can't, then clearly we can't know the Russians did. And so I
want to hoist
this by alert reader JacobiteInTraining from comments :
Yup, as a former server admin it is patently absurd to attribute a hack to anyone in particular
until a substantial amount of forensic work has been done. (read, poring over multiple internal
log files…gathering yet more log files of yet more internal devices, poring over them, then –
once the request hops out of your org – requesting logfiles from remote entities, poring over
*those* log files, requesting further log files from yet more upstream entities, wash rinse repeat
ad infinitum).
For example, at its simplest, I would expect a middling-competency hacker to find an open wifi
hub across town to connect to, then VPN to server in, say, Tonga, then VPN from there to another
box in Sweden, then connect to a PC previously compromised in Iowa, then VPN to yet another anonymous
cloud server in Latvia, and (assuming the mountain dew is running low, gotta get cracking) then
RDP to the target server and grab as many docs as possible. RAR those up and encrypt them, FTP
them to a compromised media server in South Korea, email them from there to someones gmail account
previously hacked, xfer them to a P2P file sharing app, and then finally access them later from
a completely different set of servers.
In many cases where I did this sort of analysis I still ended up with a complete dead end:
some sysadmins at remote companies or orgs would be sympathetic and give me actual related log
files. Others would be sympathetic but would not give files, and instead do their own analysis
to give me tips. Many never responded, and most IPs ended up at unknown (compromised) personal
PCs, or devices where the owner could not be found anyway.
If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence you might get lucky
– but that demographic mostly points back to script kiddies and/or criminal dweebs – i.e., rather
then just surreptitiously exfiltrating the goods they instead left messages or altered things
that seemed to indicate their own backgrounds or prejudices, or left a message that was more easily
'traced'. If, of course, you took that evidence at face value and it was not itself an attempt
at obfuscation.
Short of a state actor such as an NSA who captures it ALL anyway, and/or can access any log
files at any public or private network at its own whim – its completely silly to attribute a hack
to anyone at this point.
So, I guess I am reduced to LOL OMG WTF its fer the LULZ!!!!!
Just to clarify on the "…If the hacker was sloppy and left other types of circumstantial evidence…"
– this is basically what I have seen reported as 'evidence' pointing to Russia: the Cyrillic keyboard
signature, the 'appeared to cease work on Russian holidays' stuff, and the association with 'known
Russian hacking groups'.
That's great and all, but in past work I am sure my own 'research' could easily have gotten
me 'associated' with known hacking groups. Presumably various 'sophisticated' methods and tools
get you closer to possible suspects…but that kind of stuff is cycled and recycled throughout the
community worldwide – as soon as anything like that is known and published, any reasonably competent
hacker (or org of hackers) is learning how to do the same thing and incorporating such things
into their own methods. (imitation being the sincerest form of flattery)
I guess I have a lot more respect for the kinds of people I expect to be getting a paycheck
from foreign Intelligence agencies then to believe that they would leave such obvious clues behind
'accidentally'. But if we are going to be starting wars over this stuff w/Russia, or China, I
guess I would hope the adults in the room don't go all apesh*t and start chanting COMMIES, THE
RUSSIANS ARE COMING!, etc. before the ink is dry on the 'crime'.
The whole episode reminds me of
the Sony hack , for which Obama
also blamed a demonized foreign power. Interestingly - to beg the question here - the blaming
was also based on a foreign character set in the data (though Hangul, not Korean). Look! A clue!
JacobiteInTraining's methodology also reminds me of NC's coverage of Grexit. Symbol manipulators
- like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe that real economy systems are
as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are. In Greece, for example, it really was a difficult technical
challenge for Greece to reintroduce the drachma, especially given the time-frame, as contributor
Clive remorselessly showed. Similarly, it's really not credible to hire a consultant and get a hacking
report with a turnaround time of less than a week, even leaving aside the idea that the DNC just
might have hired a consultant that would give them the result they wanted (because who among
us, etc.) What JacobiteInTraining shows us is that computer forensics is laborious, takes time, and
is very unlikely to yield results suitable for framing in the narratives proffered by the political
class. Of course, that does confirm all my priors!
There is a problem with those who argue that these are sophisticated Nation State attackers
and then point to the most basic circumstantial evidence to support their case. I'd bet that,
among others, the Israelis have hacked some Russian servers to launch attacks from and have some
of their workers on a Russian holiday schedule. Those things have been written about in attack
analysis so much over the last 15-20 years that they'd be stupid not to.
Now, I'm not saying the Israelis did it. I'm saying that the evidence provided so far by those
arguing it is Russia is so flaky as to prove that the Russia accusers are blinded
or corrupted by their own political agenda.
Update [Yves, courtesy Richard Smith] 7:45 AM. Another Medium piece by Jeffrey
Carr,
Can Facts Slow The DNC Breach Runaway Train? who has been fact-checking this story and comes
away Not Happy. For instance:
Thomas Rid wrote:
One of the strongest pieces of evidence linking GRU to the DNC hack is the equivalent of
identical fingerprints found in two burglarized buildings: a reused command-and-control address - 176.31.112[.]10 - that
was hard coded
in a piece of malware found both in the German parliament as well as on the DNC's servers.
Russian military intelligence was identified by the German domestic security agency BfV as
the actor responsible for the Bundestag breach. The infrastructure behind the fake MIS Department
domain was also linked to the Berlin intrusion through at least one other element, a
shared SSL
certificate.
This paragraph sounds quite damning if you take it at face value, but if you invest a little
time into checking the source material, its carefully constructed narrative falls apart.
Problem #1: The IP address 176.31.112[.]10 used in the Bundestag breach as a Command and Control
server has never been connected to the Russian intelligence services. In fact,
Claudio Guarnieri , a highly regarded security researcher,
whose technical analysis was
referenced by
Rid, stated that "no evidence allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country."
Mind you, he has two additional problems with that claim alone.
This piece is a must read if you want to dig further into this topic.
NOTES
[1] More than a talking point but, really, less than a narrative. It's like we need a new word
for these bite-sized, meme-ready, disposable, "throw 'em against the wall and see if they stick"
stories; mini-narrative, or narrativelette, perhaps. "All the crunch of a real narrative, but none
of the nutrition!"
[2] This post is not about today's Trump moral panic, where the political class is frothing
and stamping about The Donald's humorous (or ballbusting, take your pick) statement that he
"hoped" the Russians had hacked the 30,000 emails that Clinton supposedly deleted from the email
server she privatized in her public capacity as Secretary of State before handing the whole flaming
and steaming mess over to investigators. First, who cares? Those emails are all about yoga lessons
and Chelsea's wedding. Right? Second, Clinton didn't secure the server for three months. What did
she expect? Third, Trump's suggestion is just dumb; the NSA has to have that data, so just ask them?
Finally, to be fair, Trump shouldn't have uttered the word "Russia." He should have said "Liechtenstein,"
or "Tonga," because it's hard to believe that there's a country too small to hack as fat a target
as Clinton presented; Trump was being inflammatory. Points off. Bad show.
For those interested, the excellent interviewer Scott Horton just spoke with Jeffrey Carr,
an IT security expert about all this. It's about 30 mins:
Jeffrey Carr, a cyber intelligence expert and CEO of Taia Global, Inc., discusses his fact-checking
of Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo article that claims a close alliance between Trump and
Putin; and why the individuals blaming Russia for the DNC email hack are more motivated by
politics than solid evidence.
Carr makes the point that even supposed clues about Russian involvement ("the default language
is Cyrillic!") are meaningless as all these could be spoofed by another party.
Separately it just shows again Team Clinton's (and DNC's) political deviousness and expertise
how they –with the full support of the MSM of course –have managed to deflect the discussion to
Trump and Russia from how the DNC subverted US democracy.
and again, we see the cavalier attitude about national security from the clinton camp, aggravating
the already tense relationship with russia over this bullshit, all to avoid some political disadvantage.
clinton doesn't care if russia gets the nuclear launch codes seemingly, but impact her chances
to win the race and it's all guns firing.
Well yeah, and I could be a bot, how do you know I'm not?
Absent any other evidence to work with, I can accept it as credible that a clumsy Russian or
Baltic user posted viewed and saved docs instead of the originals; par for the course in public
and private bureaucracies the world over. It would have been useful to see the original Properties
metadata; instead we get crapped up copies. That only tells me the poster is something of a lightweight,
and it at least somewhat suggests that these docs passed through multiple hands.
But that doesn't mean A) the original penetration occurred under state control (or even in
Russia proper), much less B) that Putin Himself ordered the hack attempts, which is the searing
retinal afterimage that the the media name-dropping and photo-illustrating conflation produces.
Unspoofed, the Cyrillic fingerprints still do not closely constrain conclusion to A, and even
less to B.
Yes, I made the same point below in terms of the intrusion ("hack") on the DNC itself too.
The running away with a conclusion based on easily-created evidence says a lot about the people
saying it.
"The running away with a conclusion based on easily-created evidence says a lot about the people
saying it." Clive, I don't think that this can be emphasized enough. These are the people representing
to be competent to run our country. I made the point yesterday: Trump voters are mostly stupid;
this kind of argument will attract those stupid people to Hillary; let's run with it. God help
us.
1. Who cares if the Russians did it?
2. Why were they able to?
3. Are the releases real? Are these actual emails from the DNC? Appears so given their response.
4. Trump once again bungled a prime opportunity. I'm pretty concerned that if a political strategy
cannot be summed up in 140 characters, it's beyond his ability to cope.
It's getting harder and harder to place limits on the catastrophe that either of these "choices"
will be.
One guy on Twitter, even with 10 million followers, can't overcome the Mighty Wurlitzer of
the media all blasting the "Looke, over there! Baddie Rooskies!" tout ensemble to divert
attention from the content of the DNC e-mails. And the Dems were hitting that theme regularly
in the convention speeches, which meant the MSM could replay it that way too.
The thing that most bothers me is that this is supportive of the Kagans and Hillary's push
to foment a shooting war with Russia. The so-called metadata that they point to is all something
that could very easily be created by an amateur who was actually given access to the DNC's server(s).
The "investigator" who issued the conclusion has no record of integrity.
Yes, the logical endgame of a 'Trump is a Russian stooge' strategy is that the stronger Trump
is in the polls, the greater the incentive to stage an October Surprise with Russia. Something
tells me that this lot would quite happily risk a nuclear war if it gave them a better chance
of winning an election.
The comment I wanted to make was around the "Cyrillic keyboard". This is interesting because
it has all the characteristics of:
a) an investigation into an intrusion incident being undertaken by someone who is pretty
skilled and knows a reasonable amount about how to start their analysis and what to look for,
where to look for it and so on
b) the investigator or investigators finding something interesting - in this case the "Cyrillic
keyboard"
c) non-technical people being told of the investigator's findings but not getting the technicalities
of it or some PR type saying "yeah, but can you tell me what this means in simple terms" and
ending up missing an important subtlety and then telling equally ignorant reporters the mis-information
who repeat it verbatim
d) the story or stories, as published, then being wrong in a way that the media outlets
telling the stories don't realise makes them embarrassingly inept to people who really understand
the technical side of things
… all of which does indeed show a smoking gun, but not the same smoking gun as is being reported.
What is shown is that, in addition to the fact that a technical investigation being made by reasonably
competent people, a PR team has also been brought in to design the messaging, disseminate the
message to the public and create the "right" optics for the story. Such PR / media management
teams are fully-paid up members of the Credentialed Class. As such, they want to be seen to earn
their money and prove they should get more of it from their elite benefactors in the future. This
has an almost inevitable consequence that they will seize on what was probably a suggestive-but-not-conclusive
piece of evidence from an investigating team and embellish it with a conclusion which isn't proven
or even supported by the actual evidence.
Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" (which, of course, didn't exist) is perhaps
the best-known example of this phenomena.
To try to set the record straight, what I think was discovered in the DNC email hack was a
file or files (or code in a malicious payload) - the specifics depend on the hack itself and what
attack vector it used - which had a Cyrillic code page set.
This goes back to the mechanics of how you actually write a hack / virus / malicious web page
/ whatever. You have to, at its most basic, write the code. You don't do this using a word processor.
You do it using a text editor (albeit often a very fancy one in an Integrated Development Environment
- a special piece of software to help you write code). But regardless, the code itself is in "plain
text".
But "plain text" isn't actually that plain. Non Latin languages use different code pages for
8-bit plain text (I'll have to skim over the lower level complexity here for the sake of brevity).
But this means that a subtle footprint can get left behind on certain types of files which may
be used as the payload for an intrusion into a computer system or even end up being compiled into
code which delivered into the target system.
When you set up a new computer, one of the things a setup routine gets the user to answer is
the location of the PC and the input language. This, amongst many other things, sets the code
pages used for backwards compatibility in text files which don't support Unicode. It is so easy
to forget this has ever been set by a hacker who then merrily goes on to write their hack completely
oblivious to the fact they've given - if they are not very careful - the location of their home
country away. Or, at least, their native language. If I get chance I'll send a screen shot of
a typical application and how a user might be completely unaware of how they are disclosing their
location / language if I can hook up to an anonymous hosting service) which might make it a bit
clearer for readers.
(and this can so easily catch out the unwary; I recall one horrid incident I gave Yves when,
in trying to submit an article for her to run on Naked Capitalism, I tried to make life easier
by submitting it in "plain text" so that WordPress wouldn't find it so difficult to handle the
formatting. Big mistake! I didn't realise until much grief had been caused that because I'd set
my PC up with a Japanese locale, my supposedly nice, simple "plain text" files I was sending had
Japanese encoding. WordPress, expecting US English encoding, was completely befuddled and Yves
had to try to manually correct dozens of spurious / misplaced characters).
This is not, though, a "keyboard". It does affect the "keyboard" setup. But no reasonably sophisticated
technical person would ever describe this as a "keyboard". Hence my conclusion that, following
an explanation which I've just given readers above (and I'll happily concede it is a rather tortuous
subject to get ones head around if you're not an IT expert), some fairly inept media manager ran
away with the idea this was something to do with a Russian PC being used, because of the "Cyrillic
keyboard".
So it was the pesky Russians then ?
Erm, no, not necessarily. As I've described above, it is a trivial task to "spoof" a PC into
looking like it was being used by a Russian, Korean, Chinese, whatever, based person or group.
You either do it during the PC setup process or else you can with a few clicks change the default
locale on any PC or other operating system. Hey-presto. You can now produce what looks like "Russian"
(or any other language) flavoured text and cunningly have these tell-tale code pages appear in
your malicious code or similar.
But as the comment in the above article makes clear, this is really dumb and not at all the
sort of thing a sophisticated state-backed actor would end up doing. It is however precisely the
sort of thing that a sophisticated state-backed actor would do if they wanted to make it *appear*
as if the Russians were responsible.
It makes me cry to see clicking on "Properties" equated with "pretty skilled".
Also, the docs were last saved through an older version of MSWord, one that the DNC is almost
certainly not running in-house (because of licensing and Microsoft Office Update, although it
can probably be found on the odd State or County level Party desktop).
In other words, the Cyrillic attribute indicates that the posted docs are not originals
. The DNC could have disavowed the docs as partially or completely fabricated, on that basis
alone.
The DNC could have disavowed the docs as partially or completely fabricated, on that
basis alone.
Which is telling.
The DNC never disavowed the e-mails. They just simply said "See, it's those damn Russians up
to their old tricks again". It's like watching an episode of "Maury" when someone gets caught
cheating, then try to 1) blame someone/something else for the cheating 2) then apologize for said
cheating (ONLY because they got caught) and say "c'mon, baby, let's move on from this"…
Ha, great minds, my friend… this is what I edited out of that post:
And in the larger context, it's like my neighbor peering across their driveway seeing me
in bed with somebody else's spouse, and when they tell the not-my-spouse's spouse about it
I respond with "You're not supposed to be looking in my window!" and calling the cops to arrest
my neighbor for snooping (without a FISA permit, egads).
It's a deflection. It discredits my neighbor's story to the not-my-spouse's spouse.
And snooping is wrong! Not supposed to do it! Somebody mention this to the NSA as well! Although,
granted, so far the NSA seem to be a lot better at keeping everybody's secrets (assuming they
can even sort meaning out of their data, which I question).
In other words, it's okay when the NSA does it, because they don't tell what they know, the
way those awful awful Russians do.
the NSA seem to be a lot better at keeping everybody's secrets (assuming they can even sort
meaning out of their data, which I question).
Between 1984 and 1987 I was stationed at Offutt AFB as a satellite operator. Because my off
base roommate worked for Electronic Security Command(ESC) as a cryptologic linguist flying around
in unpressurized planes with earphones on, my military social circle consisted largely of airmen(all
men) who worked for NSA and some of them would go to Ft. Meade on TDY. They were an elite, heterogeneous,
cosmopolitan bunch who shared a common belief that their jobs weren't directly evil because it
was impossible to find the man hours to analyze it: "last night the best thing I picked up in
Nicaragua was an abuela giving tips for mole."
I wonder if it would be overly technodeterminist to argue one of the primary reasons for displacement
of journalists and other human knowledge interpreters by machines and algorithms was the NSA's
secret need to make sense of their massive telemetry and data as the Cold War ended and the Information
Age and Comparative Advantage became ossified neoclassical economic theory and practice.
Aren't these whiners (Weiners? See, selfie dicks on display) the same set of people who tell
us the Security State is just fine, because, "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing
to hide, and no reason to be afraid!"?
Combining two comments as I worry about our country, our democracy: Where have we gone wrong?
"It makes me cry" as "It's getting harder and harder to place limits on the catastrophe that either
of these "choices" will be."
Absolutely accurate. I fell into the simplification trap myself with my own 'Cyrillic keyboard'
reference in comment, but your explanation is perfect.
Admittedly I am getting a little older (and don't do much work anymore with International OSes)
but my own first introduction to a variant of this issue was with older IIS web server ISAPI extensions
and other widgets where using something as prosaic as notepad.exe (which you normally don't expect
to do anything nefarious) causing prod web servers at a large corporation to all go 'boom' and
fall over, dead.
Turns out that when you modified a previously-working plain-text extension config file originally
in (as I recall) ANSI, update it, then accidentally saved it as UNICODE things like quotation
marks et al become…different…even, threatening… ;)
Long since patched of course. Perhaps I need to patch myself too – perhaps with some fine Scotch!
Used wordpad for that, eh. Could have been worse. I've seen HR guys in the UK running a localized
version of Office copy and paste "text" from an Excel sheet originally composed on in a Scandanavian
locale completely wreck the rendering of their data. For awhile I tried getting people to use
Sublime or Notepad++ set to UTF-8 for that sort of exercise, but the ubiquity of text mangling
tools out there is overwhelming.
The childish, credulous, transparently Machevellian propagandizing by the DNC here, especially
the deflection in place of serious scientific analysis, is beyond contemptible: it's staggering.
But it works because over a quarter century after PCs started showing up on desks the vast majority
of the public still don't know as much about how these machines work as most of those living in
the 1930's groked about their automobiles (which were in far shorter supply). The world is becoming
more complex by the minute, and unless folks start to knuckle down and start learning how it really
works they're going to be doomed to be mere passengers on a runaway train.
And, it's not that hard. But I think people's mental bandwidths are overloaded with:
a) work (not pay, just work),
b) "entertainment",
c) media deluge (info+fiction=media!),
d) magical thinking / myths (only geeks can understand it!),
e) ever smaller devices with little tiny screens!!!
Well, that sort of thing makes life interesting eh? Clive's horror story of Japanese locale
mucking up an article submission made me cringe in sympathy.
GEDIT OR BUST!!!
or wait – did gedit go ahead and withdraw, thus endorsing Hillery? In which case I guess its
back to the typewriter… :p
This is a good point. They are shamelessly preying on naive peoples' lack of understanding
of computers. They are also shamelessly preying on naive peoples' trust in experts, which has
serious downstream effects when these "experts" are debunked.
Even if there was a way to determine exactly when and were the malicious code was made, wouldn't
there be a good chance it could have been used by someone else. I would imagine
everyone in that "industry" would find bits of the others work and incorporate it into their own.
What better way to throw people off the trail than to incorporate pieces from different groups
for just that purpose. Especially if you know a forensic examination would be looking for those
clues. Also how about a "script kiddie" or non-sophisticated actor getting ahold of it and using
it like any other tool.
Clive: Also, there are varieties of Cyrillic, depending on the language. Bulgarian has a few
more characters, as does Ukrainian. So would "Russian" even be identifiable from the settings?
Maybe it all went through Montenegro and we are seeing ghosts of Montenengrin.
To extend the question: If the computer has as its setting the Roman alphabet, I'm assuming
that language isn't identified, because language on a computer is aseparate setting (for the user)
from alphabet. So are we in a situation where someone is seeing a Roman letter and then announces
that the document was originally in Hungarian?
(yep, Clive's cut-out-and-keep guide to pretending you're a nefarious Russian sneakypants trying
to besmirch the good name of the DNC. Or Trump. Or whoever:
1) Set up your PC as being located in Russia and having a language of Russian (Cyrillic).
2) Open notepad (in windows, similar for other O/S'es)
3) Create your incriminating text (e.g. "I think Bernie is really stinky and we really should
make sure Hillary wins because she is a woman and so on, all those other really good reasons…
signed Debbie Wasserman Schultz").
4) Click "Save"
5) Change the encoding to something not Unicode-ey e.g.
ANSI
6) Get out your Rolodex and hit the phones of your favourite friendly media outlets
Clive, I'm interested in what you think about the apt28 and apt29 intrusions on the DNC servers.
Hacker's link to the ars technica article below is the most detailed explanation I have seen
relating these intruders to previous attacks, and Yves link to the Carr article is handy for readers
because he includes a chart to cross reference the various names that each of the known russian
intruders.
For your convenience, here is the link I am referring to:
"Symbol manipulators - like those in the Democrat-leaning creative class - often believe
that real economy systems are as easy to manipulate as symbol systems are."
What a great observation! This speaks to so much of what ails modern western society.
"Symbol manipulators" reflects the way lawyers and most policy wonks are trained to believe
that the social construction of reality is all that matters.
"One cannot stress enough the point about APTs being, first and foremost, a new attack doctrine
built to circumvent the existing perimeter and endpoint defenses. It's a little similar to stealth
air fighters: for decades you've based your air defense on radar technology, but now you have
those sneaky stealth fighters built with odd angles and strange composite materials. You can try
building bigger and better radars, or, as someone I talked to said, you can try staring more closely
at your existing radars in hope of catching some faint signs of something flying by, but this
isn't going to turn the tide on stealthy attackers. Instead you have to think of a new defense
doctrine."
Really the DNC and Hill-bots are looking foolish on this. I have some very well-educated friends
going full "red scare" on Facebook. Too easy to troll them by agreeing and exaggerating just a
little too much!
Besides wasn't Hillary the one against xenophobia? Wasn't she all about building bridges and
not (fire!) walls? Now it seems it's OK to blame shiit on foreigners! So it becomes a question
of WHICH foreigners we should blame. Trump says Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and China while Clinton
says Russia. Let the voters decide!
But while the comparisons to McCarthyism write themselves, another uncanny historic parallel
is the run-up to the Iraq War. First we have these damn Hackers of Mass Disruption (HMD) trying
to manipulate a US election (by showing the DNC actually did manipulate an election!). Next we
will have our intelligence services and perhaps "trusted sources" like Curveball informing us
Putin did it. Will Theresa May quickly crank out a dossier and some posh-sounding Brits confirm
the HWD allegations? Obama will have to hurry to get the war going in time but Colin Powell will
be called out of retirement to present the hacking evidence to the UN. Putin will be given a deadline
for surrendering ALL his HMD. UN inspectors will sent in but not find any traces of HMD. Debka
and the New York Times will insist Putin is hiding his HMD in the Moscow metro or perhaps he has
sent them all to a third-party nation for safekeeping? The Washington Post will remind us of how
the Kurds were brutalized by HMD cracking into the PKK's main servers. The tension will build
to an unbearable crescendo.
Finally, and regretfully, in October, Operation Data Security will be launched. After a very
brief but exceedingly violent confrontation, In the end no HMD will be found in Russia. On the
other hand since most of the tens of millions of US soldiers who died were drafted from working
class families, the war will be declared a victory anyway since now Trump does not have hardly
any angry working class whites left to vote for him!
There's much more to it than that. If you don't kneejerk it away, it asks you to consider that
the government can't be relied upon to thoroughly pursue the charges against her. It also builds
on what has been, to me, the surprising acceptance that the Wikileaks DNC emails are valid, not
fabricated. It then dissolves the honorific constraints indignantly invoked by the Times re "investigating
a former secretary of state," exposing those invocations as rationalizing a coverup. In short,
it treats her as a perp for whom we need reliable informants to help bring down, and we need to
rely on the Russians/Wikileaks, not the Times, or the Post, or the AG.
I think we're looking at a 5-star legitimation crisis accelerator.
If Russia has Clinton's emails … I do want them to release them.
If Chuck Norris has them I want Chuck to release them.
The very idea that our Government has them (read NSA) and will not release them because they
would damage Clinton scares me a whole lot more than the idea that espionage today includes hacking
unsecured servers.
So … please … pretty please … whoever has them … release them.
One of the e mails said the price of a private dinner with Hill is $200,000. Wow. In my case,
I wouldn't give two cents for this. In fact, she would have to pay me at least a few grand, and
I would split the scene as soon as possible.
1. Donald Trump is a fascist demagogue
2. Donald Trump is Hitler, Super Hitler, a Devil
3. Donald Trump is being aided by Russia and loves Putin
4. Donald Trump is guilt of treason, is a Russian agent
5. Bill Clinton mostly likely gave Trump advice and/or encouragement to run in the 2016 race
I apologize for not being able to dig into this as much as I'd like. Yesterday, the loggers
at my remote doomstead dropped some trees on one of the garden plots and the day job as an Information
Security manager hasn't been much easier.
There is a decent, but still biased thus not linked, article on ArsTechnica "How DNC, Clinton
campaign attacks fit into Russia's cyber-war strategy" that provides better evidence that the
DNC was targeted by the Russians. That alone doesn't link the Russians to the release and I haven't
had the time to dig deeply into the evidence to fully understand it.
That article also goes into stated Russian doctrine about intent to use whatever means necessary
to, in my words, protect themselves. As it is pretty obvious to me that America is the global
bully these days.
So we've got a DNC using whatever underhanded tactics it can draw upon to corrupt democracy.
Yet both Hillary at the State and then the DNC for the primaries do practically nothing to protect
themselves from state actors who have declared an intention to do the same? That sounds like a
foreign policy blindspot that should be a disqualifier.
Not really. Carr is putting down a British professor's sloppy claims that apt28 and apt29 are
related to the GRU. But the agencies analysing the breach never pointed to the GRU. Crowd strike
suggests FSB or SVR, and fidelis agrees on the involvement of apt28 and apt29 but does not attribute
a source. Carr is saying the hack is Russian but could be non governmental.
I'm not sure where this Jeffrey Carr guy came from but his company previously indicated the
Russians were behind the Sony hack. And his argument was based on linguistic comparisons of the
errors made in the English statements issued by the fake group claiming the hack. Not based on
code at all. Seems like he's a character that shows up to muddy the waters. Don't assume he's
an ally just because his arguments support your thesis.
The most interesting thing I ran into when looking up the Sony hack was that Sony told everyone
to shut up about it in December and threatened to sue the media it they persisted with the story.
Kinda makes you go hmmmm.
I suspect the author meant that the encoding used in the files represented the standard Hangul
character set (used in South Korea), and not the variant of the Hangul character set used in North
Korea (which differs in the number and ordering of characters, and hence is encoded differently).
Anyway, CJK character sets and encodings are just hell. I absolutely see Clive's file encoded
in EUC-JP or Shift_JIS royally screwing up the CMS editor of NakedCapitalism.
Clinton is trying to market herself as the Serious/Safe candidate, and instead her campaign
is acting all CT hysterical. This whole Putin-hack thing is sabotaging her own brand.
Today, while reading Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables , I unexpectedly came
across a passage which fittingly describes the DNC:
They are practiced politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary
measures which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers…This
little knot of subtle schemers will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party.
Maybe Will Rogers was off the beam, then, given current events and past performance, with his
comment that "I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat!"
At least as to the people close to the center of the beast, the ones who use the parties as
just a set of tools to keep the mopes in check…
Hillary's brand was always just branding. In 2007, she ran as the candidate ready to take that
3 am phone call because of her experience. What experience? Selecting White House China for state
functions? Raising money for the White House restoration? I liked the Christmas decorations Hillary
had. Her followers believed her brand would win the day, and they simply ignored Obama largely won
because of Hillary's poor foreign policy record.
So she went out and bargained herself into State to get the foreign policy experience and now
has a record on it that should have every sane person saying keep her away from sharp objects
and things that go boom. Instead we once again have her running on taking that 3 am phone call
while her team is acting like the twelve year old whose parents told her there are monsters home
alone for the first time thinking that the refrigerator is a monster because she never heard it
cycle on before.
I have no respect for her average supporter. And even less respect for the press. The contempt
the people who really pull the strings in her camp show they obviously have little regard for
the intelligence of either group.
After all the "democracy" promotion the USA has done around the world, perhaps the entire DNC
hack should be re-cast as an attempt to determine exactly how the USA democracy functions by a
curious group.
This is somewhat akin to an interested grad student, as the hackers may have thought "Why not
find how a professional democratic organization, the Democratic National Committee, works?"
After the hackers were "shocked, shocked" when they saw the true operation of the DNC, then
they decided to leak the information. This could suggest the leak may have been done, not to harm USA democracy, but to improve it
by getting the DNC to behave in a fair and ethical manner in the future.
Instead, we've watched the DNC, while not denying their documented behavior, argue that their
behavior should not have been exposed by an alleged "wrong" group.
Perhaps more damaging blackmail information is being saved to use against HRC if she is elected?
The Democratic Party establishment is selling a used car knowing there's no way of getting
a verifiable title history for the vehicle. To weave the narrative here, a few basic statements
are made which may (perhaps) be technically true, as a foundation, but perhaps grossly misleadingly
so.
Perhaps at least one Russian at some point hacked the DNC. It is implied that _only_ this/these
Russians hacked the DNC. It is implied that the WikiLeaks doc-dump came from this same set of
people. "An IP address was found" is a very passive statement then used similarly. It's possible
a templatized kit had a default address (maybe even commented out) and was used in more than one
place. Kits like this may be used by a single player or entity (in the case of a state actor,
perhaps, though it seems potentially sloppy) or may be used by someone who purchased them or stole
them from someone else. Only a few leading statements, eliding particular details, are necessary
to promulgate a crafted narrative, when injected into the echo chamber and laundered through friendly
or credulous security firms for expert confirmation.
I would be curious to know when the Russian hack was supposed to have happened. I would also
be curious what other hacks of the DNC are believed to have or known to have happened. It might
even be interesting to know whether particular individuals' accounts or machines were compromised
on the way in, as the incestuous relationships between Democratic Party organizations make it
quite possible such a compromise might cross to another organization and increase the likelihood
of compromise there. I'm imagining a future Clinton Foundation document dump, perhaps.
I haven't read any comments that highlight the smell of extreme desperation coming from the
Clinton camp?
Sanders efforts had already gotten the DNC droogs soiling their pants, add Trumps momentum
and likely trajectory to the mix, and this is what you get, panic, and poor judgement.
I expect internal leaks and dissertions from the campaign soon.
While attribution of malware attacks is rarely simple or conclusive, during the course of
this investigation I uncovered evidence that suggests the attacker might be affiliated with
the state-sponsored group known as Sofacy Group (also known as APT28 or Operation Pawn Storm).
Although we are unable to provide details in support of such attribution, previous work by
security vendor FireEye suggests the group might be of Russian origin, however no evidence
allows to tie the attacks to governments of any particular country.
Sofacy, aka Fancy Bear, is a well known Advanced Persistent Threat. APTs are generally regarded
government backed given their abilities and resources but it is not always verifiable. Sofacy
generally focuses on NATO aligned government and military sites and has also focused on Ukrainian
targets in recent years.
So it cannot be 100% confirmed that the Russian government is involved, it is the most likely
backer of the hacking group.
Which does not mean that Trump had any knowledge or involvement in the attack or that the Russians
are necessarily backing Trump.
Some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Russian hackers who broke into Democratic
Party computers may have deliberately left digital fingerprints to show Moscow is a "cyberpower"
that Washington should respect.
Three officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said the breaches of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) were less sophisticated than other cyber intrusions that have been
traced to Russian intelligence agencies or criminals.
NO has no clue re DNC e-mail leak! how or who did it. Just narration of speculations!
If one watches ' ZERO DAYS' docu on how STUXNET/worm/olypic game was invented/manufactured
by the combined efforts of US – cyber command @NSA, +CIA and Isralei intelligence +UK?) and planted
into the NET in bringing down the Iran's Nucl program, most of us are way, way behind in understanding
cyber terrorism! They were clueless and firing their Nucl experts for incompetence!
There is extensive discussion of that subject by various NET security Cos incl Symantec, Kaparnisky
(russia), Israeli cyber terrorism expert, even officials/non officials from NSA, cyber command, CIA,
all over the World
It is NOT THAT EASY to trace the hacker's foot prints! This was about 6-8 years ago! WE all
are just groping in the dark, like 7 blind men describing the 'elephant'!
"... This propaganda is for retards. They make it sound like hacking is trivial.
Maybe if the idiot administrators of the DNC computers left them without passwords.
I have overseen web attached computer systems at a university for over 20 years
and have never had them hacked. Disable all the vulnerable daemons and block most
ports. Run a firewall and regulate SSH access. They have tried but they never succeeded.
..."
"... Then we have the obvious one: if the hackers are from Russia, then so what?
Does Putin tell every Russian hacker what to do. Perhaps Putin personally hacked
these servers. Those system logs have exactly zero to say about who are the hackers.
Only Hollywood fiction does the cyber realm extend into the physical realm. Then
the issue is why is incriminating evidence of Democratic Party wrongdoing Russia's
problem? Seriously, why is the screeching about Russian hacking and not Russian
"fraud" or something else? What happened to transparency? These alleged Russian
hackers did not release personal information. They released information of wrong
doing in a public organization. ..."
"... Same-same likee FireEye, which said almost word-for-word the same tired
old shit back in 2014, when the Russians supposedly hacked some other U.S. system.
Coded during working hours in Moscow, just as if (1) hackers keep normal working
hours like accountants and grocery clerks, and (2) Moscow is the only place in the
world at Moscow's latitude. There's only an hour's difference between Moscow and
Jerusalem, for example. And although the coding of the malware was brilliant, causing
seasoned professionals to shake their heads in admiration…once again, the Russians
slipped up, and coded on Cyrillic keyboards. Sure they did. But I'll let you read
the article. ..."
"... When Captain Dickhead says "I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt", what he
means is, "Nobody can prove I'm not sure, because nobody knows". And everyone in
the west will believe poor Hillary is the victim of the dastardly Russians, no problem,
although the screwing Bernie Sanders got is likely to be much more on their minds
come voting time, and not where the information came from. Is somebody else interested
in the outcome of the U.S. election besides Russia? You decide. ..."
This propaganda is for retards. They make it sound like hacking is trivial.
Maybe if the idiot administrators of the DNC computers left them without
passwords. I have overseen web attached computer systems at a university
for over 20 years and have never had them hacked. Disable all the vulnerable
daemons and block most ports. Run a firewall and regulate SSH access. They
have tried but they never succeeded.
If the DNC computers are configured like Hillary's personal email server
then this is deliberate. They claim that the hackers are from Russia but
they have zero evidence. Some IP logs can be faked without any effort. It's
not like there is some bank level security over system logs.
Then we have the obvious one: if the hackers are from Russia, then
so what? Does Putin tell every Russian hacker what to do. Perhaps Putin
personally hacked these servers. Those system logs have exactly zero to
say about who are the hackers. Only Hollywood fiction does the cyber realm
extend into the physical realm. Then the issue is why is incriminating evidence
of Democratic Party wrongdoing Russia's problem? Seriously, why is the screeching
about Russian hacking and not Russian "fraud" or something else? What happened
to transparency? These alleged Russian hackers did not release personal
information. They released information of wrong doing in a public organization.
Remind you of anything? Same-same likee FireEye, which
said almost word-for-word the same tired old shit back in 2014, when
the Russians supposedly hacked some other U.S. system. Coded during working
hours in Moscow, just as if (1) hackers keep normal working hours like accountants
and grocery clerks, and (2) Moscow is the only place in the world at Moscow's
latitude. There's only an hour's difference between Moscow and Jerusalem,
for example. And although the coding of the malware was brilliant, causing
seasoned professionals to shake their heads in admiration…once again, the
Russians slipped up, and coded on Cyrillic keyboards. Sure they did. But
I'll let you read the article.
When Captain Dickhead says "I'm sure beyond a reasonable doubt",
what he means is, "Nobody can prove I'm not sure, because nobody knows".
And everyone in the west will believe poor Hillary is the victim of the
dastardly Russians, no problem, although the screwing Bernie Sanders got
is likely to be much more on their minds come voting time, and not where
the information came from.
Is somebody else interested in the outcome of the U.S. election besides
Russia? You decide.
Facebook has once again been accused of censoring news, this time having to do with the
Democratic National Committee email leak just hours before the party launches its convention in
Philadelphia.
WikiLeaks released the nearly 20,000 emails on Friday, revealing everything from DNC staffers
seemingly working against Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to staffers using
phrases such as "
no homo
"
and "
taco bowl
engagement
."
The 4 Most Damaging Emails From the DNC WikiLeaks Dump"
Well, NO --- those might be the most damaging emails concerning Sanders,
but they are HARDLY the most damaging emails, considering all the emails
confirming corruption of the media, faking sex-ads concerning Trump, engaging
in what Bernie supporters called "money laundering," a clear plan to reward
large donors with high-level positions in government, and MANY more very
important issues.
Google the article titled, "HERE IT IS=> Detailed List of Findings in
Wikileaks DNC Document Dump," at the Gateway Pundit.
There you will find
an impressive list of misconduct culled by both Bernie supporters and Trump
supporters from the released DNC documents.
You must understand, ABC is part of the DNC propaganda wing, they and all
the other MSM are going to try and reshape this mess to reduce the amount
of damage.
Yeah --- that's why I've been trying to make a point of posting factual
information that the MSM won't report on, instead of doing what most others
are doing, which is just use forums like this to rave on about what a crook
Hillary is --- you know the kind of thing --- posting feel-good opinions
when they SHOULD be posting FACTS that substantiate those opinions.
"... As life exceeds satire, one can imagine that within a week Wikileaks will
produce those "missing e-mails". And later Hillary's Wall Street speeches, following
the next appeal from Trump. ..."
"... PB @ 4, confirming some earlier analysis that trump is playing the media
for suckers over HRC's hysteria. "Trump calls on Kremlin to commit acts of espionage
against Hillary Clinton." omg. ..."
"... they cannot afford to have the truth about ISIS revealed. They need the
next president to continue their lies. It is terrifying. ..."
"... Even if Russia did the hack and leaked that information (no evidence) --
so what? We have done and do the same all the time in other countries. Just doesn't
feel as good when you are at the receiving end. ..."
"... It's like 9/11. What do you desperately want to believe? What are you desperately
afraid to admit? ..."
"... No amount of 'debunking' of the DNC's assertions will affect the beliefs
of those who want to believe, who are afraid to admit that they are going to vote
for the corporate whore who mocks them with her pathetic ruses. The corporate media
have suffered irreparable damage to their credibility over the past decade, at least.
..."
"... What is scary about this campaign is that the anti-Russian hysteria is
being incorporated by Hillary supporters. By the time she is elected there will
be many millions of Democrats crying for war against Russia. The last time a Democrat
ran to the right of the Republican in a presidential election was the Kennedy-Nixon
race. That resulted in Kennedy entering office and believing his own bs. He then
very quickly carried out the Bay of Pigs fiasco but much worse the near start of
WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis. ..."
"... Hillary is definitely stupid enough to listen to her neocon advisers and,
fueled with self righteous Russian hatred, get us involved in some shooting war
with them in Syria, Ukraine or the Baltic region. Very dangerous times ahead I fear.
This why I am moving closer and closer to voting for Trump rather than a third party.
..."
"... Great observation. Cuts to the chase, to bedrock reality. We are the Evil
Empire that Ronald Reagan ranted about. Have been since the Dulles Boys' coup. ..."
"... Trump is beginning to look like the lessor of two evils. And we Americans
are proven suckers for that line of 'reasoning'. The champion poll forecaster now
'shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater
chance of winning if the general election were held today.'. ..."
Usually, the only thing that stops mass- and self-delusion (and the attending
propaganda) on this scale is the massive intervention of reality. I worry
that many casualties will ensue.
Trump apparently said in his press conference that the US should
cooperate to with Russia to destroy ISIS. The panic created in DC by this
man must be incredible.
ELECTION 2016
Trump Calls for Russia's Help to Expose Emails Clinton Deleted
By ASHLEY PARKER 11:44 AM ET (NYT)
"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails
that are missing," Donald J. Trump said, referring to messages deemed personal
by Hillary Clinton and deleted from her private email server.
===
As life exceeds satire, one can imagine that within a week Wikileaks
will produce those "missing e-mails". And later Hillary's Wall Street speeches,
following the next appeal from Trump.
PB @ 4, confirming some earlier analysis that trump is playing the media
for suckers over HRC's hysteria. "Trump calls on Kremlin to commit acts
of espionage against Hillary Clinton." omg.
There is just not enough of Orville Redenbacher's popcorn to last to the
end of this crazy 2016 . I think if Putin came out personally and said that
he did it the world would cheer . yet for some reason Russia needs to be
vilified ...Thanks for the work you do b ...
What cracks me up about the idea that the Russians were behind the DNC hack
is that Putin has little to fear from the accusation. It would probably
help him politically at home and seriously, what are we going to do about
it? Go to war? More sanctions? Denounce Russia in the UN? He's probably
having a good laugh over the whole thing.
Here are a couple of links to techie stories about the issue. They each
have links and educational comments. How deep down the rabbit hole do you
want to go?
Assange Timed WikiLeaks Release of Democratic Emails to Harm Hillary
Clinton
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
5 hrs ago
WASHINGTON - Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks
published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead
of the Democratic convention, the organization's founder, Julian Assange,
foreshadowed the release - and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary
Clinton's chances of winning the presidency.
Mr. Assange's remarks in a June 12 interview underscored that for all
the drama of the...
Essentially: "Even if Russia did the hack and leaked that information
(no evidence) -- so what? We have done and do the same all the time in other
countries. Just doesn't feel as good when you are at the receiving end."
Thanks, b - a very acute analysis. It reminds me of the warning of false
narrative the "Merlin" sponsors were peddling which Control warned George
Smiley about in Le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy":
"They're buying their way in with false money, George."
It's like 9/11. What do you desperately want to believe? What are you
desperately afraid to admit?
Trump made light of the charges with 'hope the Russians find the 30,000
missing emails' crack, but his vp immediately made a show of taking the
claim seriously ... he looks to be the mole set up by the RNC to take down
Trump.
No amount of 'debunking' of the DNC's assertions will affect the
beliefs of those who want to believe, who are afraid to admit that they
are going to vote for the corporate whore who mocks them with her pathetic
ruses. The corporate media have suffered irreparable damage to their credibility
over the past decade, at least.
The D-N-Cee,
the men-a-ger-ie,
they're not for you,
and they're not for me!
They're runnin' in circles,
around the tree.
When they turn to butter, let's make pancakes. I'm so hungry I could
eat one hundred and sixty-nine! Breakfast for us indigenes.
What is scary about this campaign is that the anti-Russian hysteria
is being incorporated by Hillary supporters. By the time she is elected
there will be many millions of Democrats crying for war against Russia.
The last time a Democrat ran to the right of the Republican in a presidential
election was the Kennedy-Nixon race. That resulted in Kennedy entering office
and believing his own bs. He then very quickly carried out the Bay of Pigs
fiasco but much worse the near start of WWIII during the Cuban missile crisis.
Hillary is definitely stupid enough to listen to her neocon advisers
and, fueled with self righteous Russian hatred, get us involved in some
shooting war with them in Syria, Ukraine or the Baltic region. Very dangerous
times ahead I fear. This why I am moving closer and closer to voting for
Trump rather than a third party.
Credit to Julian Assange for having guts. If Clinton should win it's foreseeable
that a major effort to regime-change Ecuador will ensue so they can get
him booted from the London embassy straight into a CIA jet.
Putin knows the zionists hate him, and Trump. I don't believe he would release
this stuff. just because of the anti Russian BS the MSD would stir, which
wo proof, they are anyway.
I read it was Guccifer?somewhere,a Russian? blogger.
This will all backfire,as the American people have been had too many
times by the serial liars.
What if this came from GB,say?What would be the reaction then?
And why is Russia,who has never done a thing to US,in history,an enemy,when
the Zionists spy,bribe and control our whole nation,nakedly,shamelessly,but
there is the ol'crickets only, chirping in the weeds?
Yahoo to Putin; Hey, you are cutting in on our action.
WaPo comment sections are full of people who seem to be true believers in
the ideology of the new Cold War. Or maybe they only say that because they're
being paid to do so. Hard to believe so many people could be so stupid.
I was thinking the other day that Putin should send a squad of angry babushkas
after the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits running the DNC. Evidently
this is already in the works.
#UKRAINE-UA police released warning that the "#HolyCross Procession
includes violent grandmas who provoke Ukrainian youth to beat them up."
Great observation. Cuts to the chase, to bedrock reality. We are
the Evil Empire that Ronald Reagan ranted about. Have been since the Dulles
Boys' coup.
Still I agree with yours and with Toivo S' point just above. Trump
is beginning to look like the lessor of two evils. And we Americans are
proven suckers for that line of 'reasoning'. The
champion poll forecaster now 'shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton
with a shocking 15 percentage point-greater chance of winning if the general
election were held today.'.
Before the Dulles Boy's coup there was the changing of the motto in the
1950's from E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one) to In Gawd We Trust.
Before that in 1913 the Fed was created with the 12 regional banks owned
privately.
Has the City of London and that empire ever died?
Has the City of Rome corner of the global financial system ever been
made clear?
The basic tenets of the Western way are private ownership of property
enhanced by rampant inheritance at the top and private finance owned and
operated by historical families and others unknown. It is sad to me when
commenter here and other places rail on about bankers and corporations and
not the global cabal that own them all.
Why can't humanity evolve beyond private finance to totally sovereign
finance and, at a minimum, neuter inheritance laws globally so that none
can accumulate enough to control social policy? Private finance is a cancer
humanity can no loner afford.
"... A vote for Mrs Clinton will mean a repeat of what we've experienced during these past twenty-four years, and that is not acceptable. ..."
"... Bern lost the nomination last October when he declined to make Hillary's emails, wall street capitulations and warmongering an issue and DID NOT FIGHT TO WIN! ..."
"... yes, I will vote Trump to keep the Clintons from a 3rd and 4th term. ..."
"... The mass media is just as responsible as the DNC for tilting the scale toward Clinton. Did you you hear the fawning by the CNN presenters? Remember how they dissed O'Malley and Lincoln Chaffee. Bernie was intended to be like the "other team" and Clinton the Harlem Globe Trotters, only Bernie kept untying her shoes and shooting baskets. ..."
"... Only a very few Bernie supporters I know, and I know and have informally polled HUNDREDS, is going to vote for Hillary, especially after these latest revelations (which only scratch the surface), and the DNC's "apology", which apologized for language, but not for proven bias and rigging. ..."
"... Hillary is a lying, corrupt neocon. ..."
"... The dem party in America is now fully in the hands of the globalists. At least the repubs had the integrity to not cheat THEIR insurgent candidate. ..."
"... If not for an independent socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders who's upstart campaign is subject to derision and sabotage at a mainstream media and the DNC itself, there would be not a primary, but a coronation (which is in effect what we've been given). ..."
"... Please friends, join me in NOT supporting this sham of an election process and the anointment of Queen Hillary. The stakes for our democracy are just too high to let them get away with it - much worse than 4 years of just about anyone ..."
"... I agree with Trump on few things but he was right when he said the election was rigged. ..."
"... The news blogs have Hillary supporters trashing Bernie and referring to him as undemocratic and just a carpet bagger. During the primaries Hillary stumpers were offering misinformation or false information on Bernie and continue to trash him now. The assumption that Bernie supporters are FOR SALE or Hillary's by a nod from Sanders is not a given. ..."
"... The fact that Hillary's base is still bashing Bernie hardliners is a sign of how little respect they have for his huge voting block. Independents were nervous before the infighting. ..."
"... Trump is a one-term feather-brain and will end up, if president, as somebody's tool. And who or what would use that tool? Fossil fuel companies and other corporations. The same as Hillary, whose foundation receives donations from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Chevron, and many more oil producing corps and States. The difference is between the devil we know and the devil we don't. Hillary- the devil we know ..."
"... She loves wars: ask people in Libya, Iraq and other oil States. She loves Saudi money. Of course she'll go for the TPP no matter what she says. ..."
"... Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption and stupidity guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone "Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter of public record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me." There's only one way the Democrats can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket. It's the only thing between us and Trumpocalypse. ..."
"... Trade deals were supposed to improve and lift wages and job conditions. As it turns out the only trading being done is lowering wages and and less decent jobs. Government buy-up and controlling interest in some major companies is needed to bring the system back to public influence. ..."
A vote for Mrs Clinton will mean a repeat of what we've experienced during these past
twenty-four years, and that is not acceptable. A Senator Sander's vote would be the
opposite, but the Democratic Party doesn't want that, even though a majority of
Democrats does. I won't stand for that, and will vote Green Party with Dr. Stein.
Bern lost the nomination last October when he declined to make Hillary's emails, wall street capitulations
and warmongering an issue and DID NOT FIGHT TO WIN!
I remember being so frustrated during the debates, knowing that he could have torn her a new
one.... LIKE TRUMP WILL when he debuts her.
I just came out of the closet.
My first was Bernie, my second and third choice won't even be allowed on the debate stage, but
I have an open mind if the polls indicate a chance slightly better than a snowballs. . . Sans
that, yes, I will vote Trump to keep the Clintons from a 3rd and 4th term.
Great debate on why to/not vote for Hillary but Jill Stein. After watching that, if I had my ballot,
I'd would have mailed it in for Jill Stein. Another debate on the site with Chris Hedges and Robert
Reich.
The mass media is just as responsible as the DNC for tilting the scale toward Clinton. Did
you you hear the fawning by the CNN presenters? Remember how they dissed O'Malley and Lincoln
Chaffee. Bernie was intended to be like the "other team" and Clinton the Harlem Globe Trotters,
only Bernie kept untying her shoes and shooting baskets.
More promises and bargains at least. And i think that it should be published and re-iterated
that the media declared Hillary the winner, before voting had even happened, California exit polls
and research by Stanford students - say that Bernie won California.
Myself and a friend separately
experienced questionable stuff at the voting booth polls, etc. and Democratic big-wig, now fallen;
Wassermann cannot be ignored.
I understood that Bernie was going to raise the California debacle
at this Convention [ perhaps he had ]. There is a way he could not say that Hillary would be "
an outstanding President" and just say vote for her to defeat Trump and be honest about our situation.
Up until know he has been consistently brave, clear, etc. And the Green Party alternative stuff
is good and Bernie could say " i would join the Greens but i am too worried about Trump".
As an example of brave, please goggle Ted Cruz,in which he also demonstrated courage for his convictions
in his NON-endorsement of Trump, unlike Bernie, who accepted corruption as part of the democratic
ticket, very sad.
Don't get me wrong, I do not agree with Cruz on anything at all, but I do recognize courage
when I see it. Apparently, that attribute is absent among democrats.
Only a very few Bernie supporters I know, and I know and have informally polled HUNDREDS, is going
to vote for Hillary, especially after these latest revelations (which only scratch the surface),
and the DNC's "apology", which apologized for language, but not for proven bias and rigging.
We're
all either voting for Stein or, holding our noses, Trump. It's time to crash this plane with no
survivors.
Hillary is a lying, corrupt neocon. Politics as usual are over, and it's amazing to
me that the crazy cat-lady boomer dems will fall in line for smugly authoritarian DNC corruption
that makes Trump look like an amateur (and he is, compared to sHillary), whereas, if the obvious
lies of the Hillary camp were coming from repubs, the banshee howls would be heard from Marin
County to Martha's Vineyard. DEMS- YA DUN GOOFED. You'll never get us back. You can't spit in
our faces, call us crazy for accusing you of what it has now been proven you did, and then spit
in our faces again with your bogus apology.
The dem party in America is now fully in the hands
of the globalists. At least the repubs had the integrity to not cheat THEIR insurgent candidate.
I never thought I'd live to see this travesty. (BTW, I was born in 66 and a lifelong Dem). NEVER
AGAIN.
Just imagine if those "super-delegates" weren't decided until the convention where this election
would be now. Thanks Debbie Bark Bark Wassermen-Shultz not only do we have a manipulated nominee
but one which may loose.
Let me see if I understand this: The democratic party in the year 2016 puts forward a SINGLE candidate
for it's primary. Out of a population of 330 million, this party could come up with only a SINGLE
candidate, ignoring entirely that we live in a Democracy, and giving the voter but a single choice
in the election, effectively shutting out any other option or any hope of a substantive dialogue
on the issues. If not for an independent socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders who's upstart
campaign is subject to derision and sabotage at a mainstream media and the DNC itself, there
would be not a primary, but a coronation (which is in effect what we've been given).
Now, I'm told, ignoring the fact that this candidate, an individual with dubious ethics and
questionable competence that I MUST vote for this person, and that if I decide that I won't be
play along in the most undemocratic primary possibly in the history of the United States, and
I decide to vote my conscience either by voting a 3rd party or abstaining, that it will be MY
FAULT when things go badly, as I'm promised they will if they other guy wins. I am in effect being
told by the establishment that I'm beholden to their single-choice candidate, a person who in
my view stinks to high heavens of corruption and incompetence, or else.
IS THAT what I'm being told ? Because that sounds like the kind of sham elections they have
in the 3rd world and far, far beneath the standard of electoral decision making we should have
in this country. Now, I think that's what I'm hearing, and I'm telling you that I don't play that
sh*t. I'm not selling my conscience to play along with this sham - especially not to elect this
LOUSY candidate. And, frankly, it's a disgrace that anyone would imply that I should - worse even
- that people are so complicit in the utter destruction of their own political system and don't
see how utterly foul the stink of corruption is.
Please friends, join me in NOT supporting this sham of an election process and the anointment
of Queen Hillary. The stakes for our democracy are just too high to let them get away with it
- much worse than 4 years of just about anyone
The news blogs have Hillary supporters trashing Bernie and referring to him as undemocratic and
just a carpet bagger. During the primaries Hillary stumpers were offering misinformation or false
information on Bernie and continue to trash him now. The assumption that Bernie supporters are
FOR SALE or Hillary's by a nod from Sanders is not a given.
Supporting Bernie, then voting the
party ticket because Bernie has caved in to a rigged system, won't guarantee his base. The
fact that Hillary's base is still bashing Bernie hardliners is a sign of how little respect they
have for his huge voting block. Independents were nervous before the infighting.
Trump is a one-term feather-brain and will end up, if president, as somebody's tool. And who or
what would use that tool? Fossil fuel companies and other corporations. The same as Hillary, whose
foundation receives donations from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Chevron, and many more oil producing
corps and States. The difference is between the devil we know and the devil we don't. Hillary-
the devil we know because we can read her record and see what she's done, loves fracking in the
US and has exported it to the rest of the world. She loves wars: ask people in Libya, Iraq and
other oil States. She loves Saudi money. Of course she'll go for the TPP no matter what she says.
Donald is the devil we don't know, his one virtue is that he'll probably one-term unless he becomes
a very effective corporate tool indeed. Then he'll be just another fossil fuel puppet like Clinton.
There is really only one over-riding issue: and that is climate change. If we can't manage to
survive as a species then all other problems are moot. Scientists are in despair because political
wrangling and greed are dooming all life on earth to extinction- and it's happening very quickly.
So- what that means is that we have two candidates and neither will do squat to keep fossil fuels
in the ground. Hillary will probably pretend to do something about it which will of course fall
pathetically short of what we'll need to have any chance of survival. And, of course, she'll have
two terms- she knows the ropes and will pay off her corporate donors well.
So which one of these two candidates, both of whom will doom my children and grandchildren to
death, and yours too, should I vote for?
Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption and stupidity
guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck
you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone
"Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter
of public record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me." There's only one
way the Democrats can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket.
It's the only thing between us and Trumpocalypse.
Trade deals were supposed to improve and lift wages and job conditions. As it turns out the only
trading being done is lowering wages and and less decent jobs.
Government buy-up and controlling interest in some major companies is needed to bring the system
back to public influence.
"... We all know Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) was the co-chair of Hillary's 2008 presidential run, where she lost the nomination to Obama. So, in order to lock down the nomination for 2016, Hillary was able to get DWS in charge of the DNC and manipulate it from within ..."
We all know Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS) was the co-chair of Hillary's 2008 presidential
run, where she lost the nomination to Obama. So, in order to lock down the nomination for 2016,
Hillary was able to get DWS in charge of the DNC and manipulate it from within. That's the
theory anyway, except....
In order for this to work, they would first have to, not only get the DNC chair to step down,
but also get them to recommend DWS for the position. The Clinton's would have to promise something
to that person, something more prestigious than being head of the Democratic party. So who was
that person and what did they get in return?
It would appear that Donna Brazile was in-line
to get the position, but she was only the interim chair after the previous chair left, served
only one month. According to this, http://rulers.org/usgovt.html#parties
, the previous chair of the DNC prior to DWS was Tim Kaine.
"... by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying "Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs ..."
"... DWS was Hillary Boo Clinton's campaign manager last time around. DWS then ran the crooked DNC and lied to America 24x7 about its lack of neutrality. ..."
"... And as a reward for her bias Hillary Boo Clinton just rehired DWS as honorary campaign chair. ..."
Trump's going to win. Clinton's staggeringly self-destructive combination of corruption
and stupidity guarantees it; by making Debbie Wassermann Schultz her campaign manager, Hillary's saying
"Fuck you" to millions of people whose votes she desperately needs, not to mention telling everyone
"Yes, it's true. My loyalty to Debbie, whose dishonesty and corruption has just become a matter of public
record, shows exactly why people don't like me and don't trust me."
There's only one way the Democrats
can win: drop Hillary for vote-rigging, and put up a /bernie_sanders.Warren ticket. It's the only thing between
us and Trumpocalypse.
Mike5000 -> HurtTurtle
Please do some research before *you* vent.
DWS was Hillary Boo Clinton's campaign manager last time around. DWS then ran the
crooked DNC and lied to America 24x7 about its lack of neutrality.
And as a reward for her bias Hillary Boo Clinton just rehired DWS as honorary campaign
chair.
Some at MOA predicted early on that Sanders was a sheepherder from the start. His latest remarks
provide additional evidence that this is the case. No question about it.
Notable quotes:
"... They are invested in the status quo, are smart enough to realize that their investment is fast becoming worthless, have fallen for the siren song of salvation through warfare, that old FDR tune. No more reasoning. ..."
"... What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right after she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics. Is she just that stupid, or are the elections just that rigged? ..."
@48 Toivo S 'Democratic Party partisans are losing their common sense in this effort to back Clinton.'
They are invested in the status quo, are smart enough to realize that their investment
is fast becoming worthless, have fallen for the siren song of salvation through warfare, that
old FDR tune. No more reasoning. They only ever rationalized instead anyway, and have now
come to the end of their collective rope. Hope to hang the other guy. Think 'we' can fight the
war 'over there' again, just as we 'always have'. The Germans, marvelous to relate, seem willing
to comply. 'Cause we're both on the same side this time? Japan too, against China. Obama/Clinton
and the All-Stars.
We must do all we can to prevent the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right after
she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics. Is she just that stupid, or are the
elections just that rigged?
"What's particularly confusing to me is that Clinton just gave Wasserman a top job right
after she was dismissed from the DNC without a care to the optics."
Michael, please un-confuse.
DWS was HRC's campaign chief while sitting in the DNC chair ---working for Hillary to be the
standard-bearer of the status quo.
Notice DWS' new job title? Honorary Chair of the HRC's Campaign.
What has changed? Not the job description; just the physical chairs - brown or grey leather
in a new corner office.
"... More than 1,000 people from as far as Seattle and Florida participated in the first of what are expected to be many Sanders rallies during the convention, which formally begins Monday. ..."
"... anger at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment was not cooled ..."
"... At the front of the parade was a flag with the Democratic donkey flying upside down. Further animating the protest was the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee showing party efforts to undermine Mr. Sanders's candidacy, reinforcing a widespread view among marchers that party leaders had stacked the deck against him. ..."
"... "It's not just young people who are furious. There are people who have been Democrats for decades and are completely angry," said Kimberly Cooper, 59, of Florida. "Now with the WikiLeaks thing, I am finished supporting her." ..."
"... Numerous marchers said they would support Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. They rejected the argument that not voting for Mrs. Clinton would help Mr. Trump. ..."
More than 1,000 people from as far as Seattle and Florida participated in the first of what are
expected to be many Sanders rallies during the convention, which formally begins Monday. The march,
led by a banner proclaiming "Help End Establishment Politics, Vote No on Hillary," was far larger
than any of the protest marches last week in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention.
... ... ...
But the unreconstructed anger at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment was not cooled,
despite Mr. Sanders's endorsement of Mrs. Clinton two weeks ago.
At the front of the parade was a flag with the Democratic donkey flying upside down. Further animating
the protest was the release by WikiLeaks of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee
showing party efforts to undermine Mr. Sanders's candidacy, reinforcing a widespread view among marchers
that party leaders had stacked the deck against him.
"It's not just young people who are furious. There are people who have been Democrats for
decades and are completely angry," said Kimberly Cooper, 59, of Florida. "Now with the WikiLeaks
thing, I am finished supporting her."
Brandon Gorcheff, of Youngstown, Ohio, who held a handmade sign reading "Move Left" that spoofed
the Clinton campaign's arrow logo, said nothing could get him to support Mrs. Clinton. Michelle
Cyr, who flew to Philadelphia from Bath, Me., said, "The Democratic Party is so out of touch with
its constituents."
Joshua Brown, an alternate delegate from North Carolina who supports Mr. Sanders, a Vermont senator,
said he was concerned that people would desert the party in the fall, either abstaining or voting
for a third-party candidate and bolstering Mr. Trump's chances.
... ... ...
Numerous marchers said they would support Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. They rejected
the argument that not voting for Mrs. Clinton would help Mr. Trump.
It is interesting how quickly the elite lost control. Revolutionary situation indeed.
Notable quotes:
"... Every time Clinton's name was mentioned thereafter, the crowd erupted into chaos: Sanders supporters shouting against Clinton supporters. ..."
"... As Cummings talked about how proud his late father would be of the people in the room, Sanders' supporters shouted, "No TPP, No TPP," in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. ..."
When Rev. Cynthia Hale mentioned Hillary Clinton for the first time during the invocation, the
floor erupted into boos.
Clinton supporters began chanting, "Hil-la-ry, Hil-la-ry," but they were quickly drowned out
by chants of "Bernie, Bernie!"
Bernie Sanders supporter and organizer Billy Taylor held a coffin painted with donkeys during a
march Sunday in Philadelphia. He told NPR he applied for protest permits to "stop any Hillary
supporters from obtaining permits."
Every time Clinton's name was mentioned thereafter, the crowd erupted into chaos: Sanders
supporters shouting against Clinton supporters.
... ... ...
A Democratic Party official tells Tamara that the Sanders and Clinton campaigns have tried to
work together to present a united front. Early into the convention, it was clear those talks and
the message from Sanders had not swayed the delegations.
Rep. Marcia Fudge, from Ohio, was shouted down many times as she tried to get through some
procedural motions.
"I intend to be fair," she said as the crowd booed. "I am going to be respectful of you and I
want you to be respectful of me. We are all Democrats and we need to act like it."
The same thing happened as Rep. Elijah Cummings delivered a speech centering on social
justice.
As Cummings talked about how proud his late father would be of the people in the room,
Sanders' supporters shouted, "No TPP, No TPP," in reference to the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement.
Seems the Clinton and her assorted groupies just need a scapegoat :-). Seems Putin controls Trump
and Clinton! The man is amazing.
Notable quotes:
"... From Bloomberg - "If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies, they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person familiar with the party's thinking said' ..."
"... Ha! Fat chance. I'm thinking the American voter is going to start sending Thank You notes to the Kremlin! As usual, their heads are stuck so far up the arse of their donkey they incapable of gauging Main Street sentiment. ..."
"... She is just a symptom of the DNC disease. And yes, she'll take the fall for the team, but make no mistake, the cancer remains and will continue to metastasize. ..."
Russia is weaponizing everything : Word files, federalism, finance and Jedi mind tricks - everything
is transformed into a weapon if Russia or its president Putin is imagined to come near it.
Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, is influencing, manipulating and controlling many
"western" politicians, parties and movements - in Europe AND in the United States.
Here are,
thanks
to Mark Sleboda , a partial list
of political entities and issue Putin secretly manipulates and controls:
Putin is
in cahoots with the Republican presidential candidate Trump -
claims the Clinton
campaign . Putin is behind, it asserts, the leak of the DNC emails which prove that the Democratic
National Committee
has been working against Sanders to promote Hillary Clinton. The leak of the DNC emails, says
the Clinton campaign, is ..:
.. further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.
The Clinton campaign has not looked thoroughly enough into Putin's schemes. Reveal we can that
Putin has penetrated U.S. politics even deeper than thought - right down into the Clinton Foundation
and the
Clinton family itself:
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009
to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium
One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million.
That money, surely, had no influence on then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's decisions? And
what about her husband?
Mr. Clinton received $500,000 ... from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin
These undisputed facts demonstrate that Putin is indeed waging influence by bribing U.S. politicians.
But the Clinton campaign is be a bit more hesitant in pointing these out.
Clinton/Kaine certainly confident that the MSM will not report.
For all the money given to the Clinton's it didn't prevent the Ukraine disasters. Of course,
Ukraine may not have been a concern among the particular oligarchs who made these bribes.
HOw could this anti-russian hysteria/bashing go on, I mean the level of paranoia and disinformation
against Russia and Putin is plain crazy.
From Bloomberg - "If the Democrats can show the hidden hand of Russian intelligence agencies,
they believe that voter outrage will probably outweigh any embarrassing revelations, a person
familiar with the party's thinking said'
Ha! Fat chance. I'm thinking the American voter is going to start sending Thank You notes
to the Kremlin! As usual, their heads are stuck so far up the arse of their donkey they incapable
of gauging Main Street sentiment.
Funny though, Schultz takes her orders from Obama, as the Chairman of the Party, the DNC Board
of Directors and team Hillary. Period. If any blame should go around it should splash onto all
individuals NOT just Schultz.
She is just a symptom of the DNC disease. And yes, she'll take the fall for the team, but
make no mistake, the cancer remains and will continue to metastasize.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, speaking to her Florida delegation, was loudly booed this
morning. At least per tape of the meeting used on WNYC pubic radio broadcast this morning. An NBC
video had microphones which captured DWS's speaking, but barely caught the crowd noise.
In a YouTube video about the lawsuit, Jason Beck said there were six claims to the case. The
first is fraud against the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stating that they broke legally
binding agreements by strategizing for Clinton.
The second is negligent misrepresentation.
The third is deceptive conduct by claiming they were remaining neutral when they were not. The
fourth is is retribution for monetary donations to Sanders' campaign.
The fifth is that the DNC broke its fiduciary duties during the primaries by not holding a
fair process. And the sixth is for negligence, claiming that the DNC did not protect donor
information from hackers.
"... What matters is what the emails said . They said, let's sink a decent candidate by telling the Stupid Classes that Bernie's an atheist Jew . ..."
"... So instead of addressing the urgent concerns of working Americans, let's manipulate Mr. and Mrs. Paycheck by playing to their antisemitism. ..."
"... We'll pretend working people matter, but we'll just be using them to make ourselves richer and more powerful! ..."
"... Let's not let HRC and the rest of the Democratic leadership change the subject to" the Russians did it". Let us, instead, stay focused on the content of those emails. That the DNC under Schultz did, in fact, rig the game. ..."
"... The rigging of the 2016 election has clarified to all of these people why they were weary about going to the polls...the system is rigged and they already knew it. Bernie Sanders got everyone unified and no other politician has that ability. It infuriates me to think that the Democratic party is angry at Bernie for revolutionizing a nation! ..."
"... I supported Bernie to the max even though I live on a smallish pension. I could never support HC. I sort of understand that Bernie had to endorse HC but I wish he would not be at all enthusiastic about it. She is still the candidate he criticized so strongly. The Clintons always make everyone who comes into contact with them look sleazy. They themselves are very clever at getting away with murder (figuratively speaking). ..."
"... Sort of like the Soviet Union - the Party is everything. The people unimportant. ..."
"... Russian involvement is a straw man. The importance is in the accuracy of the reports and so far there seems to have been no evidence produced to show that the emails were tampered with. If I had not already been dead set against supporting the corrupt and dishonest Hillary the Horrible this would certainly clinch the deal! Those being willing to swallow the "lesser of evils" deserve what they get. But then, despite the talk, is she really less evil? ..."
"... Other experts are now saying that the current Democratic Party is just as fascist as the Republicans and that we should vote our conscience. Vote Green. ..."
"... These #DNCleaks are another great example of the corruption and collusion in journalism. No ethics whatsoever. ..."
"... They also swindle the millions of Americans who donated $27 to Bernie's campaign on the basis that it was a fair contest... ..."
"... This convert may also have noticed the corruption at the DNC. The strange requests to create narratives to discredit Sanders ands then feed them to the media. This is how whistleblowers are made. ..."
"... We shouldn't get roped into discussing spurious allegations about who leaked the emails. That's what she wants the conversation to be about. The fact is these emails show the DNC fixed the nomination for Hillary. And Hillary has just appointed the chief culprit to chair her presidential campaign. Politics doesn't get much more dirty and shameless than that. ..."
"... DWS is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire DNC leadership needs to go, and to be replaced with people who will go back to Dean's 50 state strategy. But it is too late for this election. ..."
"... Jesus wept. How did we sleepwalk into this strange world where all the politicians are lying, thieving, murderous idiots? Before there were at least some of them who were impressive human beings able to inspire great progress, this bunch sounds like all of them were created by a wizard whose favourite material is a boy cow excrement. ..."
"... These people have no shame. Vote Trump! ..."
"... If you can't pull yourself to vote for Trump, please vote for Jill stein in protest, but Hilary can't win. ..."
"... This has been so downplayed by the mainstream media as it shows them in their true light. Compare this to the coverage Melania Trump's plagiarized speech got. ..."
"... Like clockwork, we have Clinton supporters, paid or otherwise, demonstrating in this comment board their utter contempt for logic, integrity, and any ideology other than team ..."
"... Billy Kristol - the neo-con skank and the likes already declared they will vote for the fellow warmonger. ..."
"... Hank Paulson - Ex Goldman chief and treasury secretary responsible for TARP under shrub junior also switching sides for the dems. ..."
"... Yep that's what our current foreign policy does, we topple governments. We need a common enemy to unite the EA and Nato, Russia makes a good scape goat! Who armed Osama Bin Laden against Russia in the 1980's? Then Arab Spring? Any country that practices Sharia Law can not allow Free Speech or democracy. Women will never be equal or have the vote in these countries we arm with weapons. Our arms dealers make money! We destabilize countries and keep the world in fear, united for causes we create. ..."
"... Clinton has dragged the party into the sewer with her. They should have told her to step down months ago. This is a shameful Dem convention ..."
"... "His son, Donald Trump Jr, appeared on CNN's State of the Union. "They should be ashamed of themselves," he said of the Clinton campaign. "If we did that … if my father did that, they'd have people calling for the electric chair." ..."
Oh, you mean our emails are not secure ?
Maybe the DNC honchos didn't see all those stories about Snowden, the NSA and ole 'Gentleman'
Jimmy Clapper. Maybe the Russians were involved. Maybe the NSA and all the other spook agencies are too honest
to tap the DNC's emails and use them for political advantage.
What matters is what the emails said .
They said, let's sink a decent candidate by telling the Stupid Classes that Bernie's an atheist
Jew .
So instead of addressing the urgent concerns of working Americans, let's manipulate
Mr. and Mrs. Paycheck by playing to their antisemitism.
We'll pretend working people matter, but we'll just be using them to make ourselves
richer and more powerful!
Let's not let HRC and the rest of the Democratic leadership change the subject to" the Russians
did it". Let us, instead, stay focused on the content of those emails. That the DNC under Schultz
did, in fact, rig the game. HRC needs to cut Schultz loose and repudiate this conduct if the party
is to have any hope of true unification. Let us hope that HRC appoints Sen. Warren as DNC chair.
She is a person with real integrity.
Rigged, rigged, rigged...took 'em 8 years to perfect it, but they (Dem. underground) sure got
it all nailed down didn't they? They put Sen. Sanders in a chokehold and he had to make a choice,
bless his heart. What will go down in history regarding the 2016 election, is what it did to ALL
the disenfranchised and young voters who were moved by Bernie Sanders and become lit up and excited
about politics.
The rigging of the 2016 election has clarified to all of these people why they
were weary about going to the polls...the system is rigged and they already knew it. Bernie Sanders
got everyone unified and no other politician has that ability. It infuriates me to think that
the Democratic party is angry at Bernie for revolutionizing a nation!
How right you are. This is the very reason that I can't get my 28 year old son to register to
vote. His constant mantra every time I try is that his vote doesn't matter because the game is
rigged. How terribly sad that he is proven right.
Ever decreasing circles..
Of the meaningless kind ..
Security?:)
Just trust the Democrats.
The bastions of oxymorons, eulogising hyperbolic denialistic gaga.
Who has contributed more to global security of the private kind..
Snowden or HRC ??
What not to do!
Really, she always Knew....
Is there anything the Russian government is not responsible for??
Yes, Democratic email systems of security, that are quite clearly insecure, untrustworthy, unreliable
& incompetent , just like their sponsors Goldman Sachs.. Surely the US people don't wish to bail
them out again to the tune of $814 Billion??
What a farcical circus, calling themselves politicians, oxymoronic.
How can Trump lose?
The system is bankrupt both morally & financially: Shrillary, our living proof! Gawd, just her
voice..
It is being found out that is the bad thing - according to HC.
I supported Bernie to the max even though I live on a smallish pension. I could never support
HC. I sort of understand that Bernie had to endorse HC but I wish he would not be at all enthusiastic
about it. She is still the candidate he criticized so strongly. The Clintons always make everyone
who comes into contact with them look sleazy. They themselves are very clever at getting away
with murder (figuratively speaking).
Not sure why the religion thing is singled out as most shocking by the press. Not that it was
acceptable, but how about calling MSNBC in the middle of a program and ordering them to stop a
coverage? How about all the other slimy tricks they pulled? And DWS was not just a bystander on
some of them . . . she initiated them. The arrogance of that machine in assuming that kind of
power is astonishing, but Sanders supporters have known about it for months.
Try running a race uphill with someone who's being carried like a queen?
Where was Yuhas 2 days ago on this scandal Oh that's right, he was flacking for the Clinton campaign
by focusing on the evil Putin. it was Putin's fault the DNC screwed its base over.
So Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US both actively using all party mechanisms to fix
the decision of their own members about who leads them.
Have these people the slightest clue what democracy means? At least in Labour's case, the result
is still out.
I think the candidates' relative positions on enabling corporate rule may have been a bigger factor
in the DNC's antics than any principles about how long they'd been big D Democrats.
Russian involvement is a straw man. The importance is in the accuracy of the reports and so far
there seems to have been no evidence produced to show that the emails were tampered with. If I
had not already been dead set against supporting the corrupt and dishonest Hillary the Horrible
this would certainly clinch the deal! Those being willing to swallow the "lesser of evils" deserve
what they get. But then, despite the talk, is she really less evil?
Experts are telling us that the Democrats are only embarrassed they got caught rigging the primary
process before the convention. Other experts are now saying that the current Democratic Party
is just as fascist as the Republicans and that we should vote our conscience. Vote Green.
These #DNCleaks are another great example of the corruption and collusion in journalism. No ethics
whatsoever. They swindled Bernie Sanders of the chance to run for President. CNN comes out of
this looking pretty bad. And there is MORE to come. Panic stations for dodgy journalists, and
all those journalists who claim "impartiality", but are in collusion to push narratives. Just
as GamerGaters exposed.
have to disagree with Bernie, DWS didn't do the right thing - she just got caught, the right thing
would have been to put a stop to planted stories with no attribution and ensure a level playing
field. Anyone US side want to tell me if the thing about Bill Clinton meeting Epstein on numerous
occasions is actually true?
At some point they are going to have to provide some evidence, until then I reserve the right
to assume she's lying based on everything she has said over the last 30 years.
If not the Russians then Who? Maybe a DNC worker, who, over time got to respect Sanders, he
listened to a few speeches and thought "Hey, this guy gets it!". This happened to millions of
Americans over the last year so it's not too hard to believe that some DNC staffer, even if he
was originally vetted for 'being with her' he could change his mind once he saw the better option
that was available.
This convert may also have noticed the corruption at the DNC. The strange requests to create
narratives to discredit Sanders ands then feed them to the media. This is how whistleblowers are
made.
Gucifer 1 was Romanian and he hacked Clinton's private server and apparently gave it to the
Russians. Gucifer 2, is responsible for the DNC leak and we've no idea who they are. Could it
be another Putin supported hacker? Sure, but it's even more likely that it was a DNC staffer who
didn't like what he saw.
I say this because if Putin's task was to destroy Hillary he could have release the 30,000
emails (about yoga and wedding planning - lol). Everyone knows what these contain, the evidence
that the Clinton foundation was engaged in cash for favours schemes that were mainly used by human
rights abusing petro-monarchies.
We shouldn't get roped into discussing spurious allegations about who leaked the emails. That's
what she wants the conversation to be about. The fact is these emails show the DNC fixed the nomination
for Hillary. And Hillary has just appointed the chief culprit to chair her presidential campaign.
Politics doesn't get much more dirty and shameless than that.
....."I think I read he is an atheist," the DNC chief financial officer, Brad Marshall, wrote
in one email. "This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps
would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.".....
Sigh!.....Oh Alfred Dreyfus, Henri Bergson, Benjamin Disraeli and so on and so on....
(Do not tell the Southern Baptists and the fundamentalist nutters that TRUTH is another name
for GOD-want a reference? Here you go: El Emet - The God Of Truth: (Psalm 31:6)- they will not
know whether to s**t or wind their watch".
DWS is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire DNC leadership needs to go, and to be replaced
with people who will go back to Dean's 50 state strategy. But it is too late for this election.
If Trump wins, God help us all, but it won't be the fault of the Sanders supporters. HRC was
chosen by the DNC in advance of any of the primaries, with the expectation that any other contenders
would drop out early in the process. That did not happen, and that is why the DNC took increasingly
desperate measures to insure her victory.
What this election has proven is just how far the Democratic establishment will go to crush
any opposition within the party, and how unhappy the members of both parties are with the status
quo. They have no one to blame but themselves for ignoring the needs of the American people. After
this election, for the first time in over 100 years, I think that new political parties have a
chance to succeed.
So, instead of addressing this shocking corruption openly and honestly, DNC is blaming....Russia?
Jesus wept. How did we sleepwalk into this strange world where all the politicians are lying,
thieving, murderous idiots? Before there were at least some of them who were impressive human
beings able to inspire great progress, this bunch sounds like all of them were created by a wizard
whose favourite material is a boy cow excrement.
One resignation is not enough. The party is still corrupt, they still cheated Bernie and by proxy
his supporters yet they want our unity against Trump. Screw that. Its time to show the party that
they can not treat their constituents with a complete lack of respect. If you can't pull yourself
to vote for Trump, please vote for Jill stein in protest, but Hilary can't win.
This has been so downplayed by the mainstream media as it shows them in their true light.
Compare this to the coverage Melania Trump's plagiarized speech got.
There is no Debbie Wasserman. There has never been any Debbie Wasserman. The Party is unified.
The Party has always been unified. The Great Leader, Hillary...
Indeed. That woman behind the curtain, who's just been appointed chair of Hillary's campaign,
just coincidentally happens to have the same name as DWS, and look exactly like her. But do not
look at her. You will not remember having seen her.
Like clockwork, we have Clinton supporters, paid or otherwise, demonstrating in this comment board
their utter contempt for logic, integrity, and any ideology other than team.
I'm guessing a scan of their brain activity would show such kinship with Trump supporters that
it would shock them -- assuming fact had any sway, which, of course, it doesn't.
So they don't think anything is wrong with kneecapping a democratic candidate! They don't think
anything is wrong with subverting US politics. NO they are disgusted that someone revealed the
TRUTH!
WOW anyone who votes for the DNC OR GOP deserves everything that is coming! If ever there was
a time where a 3rd party candidate is needed this is it! Just look at the crap Clinton gives to
other countries not having free and fair elections! HOW DARE THE US LECTURE OTHER COUNTRIES!
Clinton supporters are a DISGRACE worse than Trump - at least trump fans don't PRETEND to be
something they aren't!
There is so much talk about the DNC e-mail about promoting Bernie as atheist so that they could
get church going low information people in the South to vote for Hillary. But, then they said
they didn't do anything about it. Wait a second in South Carolina, no one knew who Bernie Sanders
was, but apparently they all knew he was a "communist Jew". I personally heard this in South Carolina,
and it was a whisper campaign initiated by Hillary crowds. Now it is proven the whole DNC was
behind it.
I don't for a minute believe Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or Hillary Clinton are anti-Semites.
But these Clinton mafia goes to any length, employ any dirty trickery to win. The corrupt warmonger
Hillary should quit and take Debbie Wasserman-Schultz with her. I am sure Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
won't get through her primary, why? Because most of her constituents are just like Bernie, and
they won't appreciate what she has become.
"On Sunday, the Trump campaign rejected Mook's allegations, ... telling... they were "absurd"
and "pure obfuscation on the part of the Clinton campaign".
"What those emails show is that it was a clearly rigged system, and that Bernie Sanders
never had a chance..."
Even Trump campaign is more truthful about this. It is horrifying to think someone like Clinton
could become the president.
According to the NYT, Michael Bloomberg, who bypassed his own run for the presidency this election
cycle, will back Hillary Clinton in a speech at the Democratic convention. The news was unexpected
from Mr. Bloomberg, who has not been a member of the Democratic Party since 2000.
I wonder who else they are going to drag out to endorse their lying ways.
I wonder who else they are going to drag out to endorse their lying ways?
Billy Kristol - the neo-con skank and the likes already declared they will vote for the fellow
warmonger. Hank Paulson - Ex Goldman chief and treasury secretary responsible for TARP under shrub junior
also switching sides for the dems.
These two are the major red flag for any progressive voter.
1. Blame your own private server for leaks Hillary.
2. Blame Wasserman Schulz for rigging primaries
3. Blame yourself for not being trustworthy
4. Blame US foreign policy for making it a norm meddling in other countries elections.
Yep that's what our current foreign policy does, we topple governments. We need a common enemy
to unite the EA and Nato, Russia makes a good scape goat! Who armed Osama Bin Laden against Russia
in the 1980's? Then Arab Spring? Any country that practices Sharia Law can not allow Free Speech
or democracy. Women will never be equal or have the vote in these countries we arm with weapons.
Our arms dealers make money! We destabilize countries and keep the world in fear, united for causes
we create.
Russia like us has a migration issue of Muslims, 11.7% now. The USA backs Muslim regimes
and usually the more radical. Syria is in the middle of a civil war, Assad is Aliwee and they
are only 20%, they allow Christians and various Muslims faiths. If we arm the rebels, the educated
Aliwee closer to the coast will be exterminated in favor of the more extreme.
Assad is not a good
guy, but if Russia had armed the South in our civil war, how would we feel? In 2001 Bush Senior
headed up the Carlyle Group which sold weapons, 29 weapon companies, with investors like the Bin
Laden Construction Company is Saudi Arabia, Bin Ladens brother. Both sides have profited from
a destabilized middle east. They don't tell on each other, because both sides do it.
In the Soviet times, they used to blame all their short comings on US. Sounds like the Clinton
campaign has alot in common with Soviet Union. This is just an obfuscation. They aren't questioning
the validity of the e-mails but blaming their mafia control over DNC on Russia. If Russia or whoever
disclosed the e-mails, more power to them. The Clinton mafia in the Democratic party needs to
get purged. Hillary cheated to get nominated, she will hand the presidency to Drumpf. She is an
awful candidate besides being a corrupt war monger.
Clinton, who received 3.1m from Wall Street for speeches last year, and who was "extremely careless"
with national security and who clearly lied under oath to Congress had the entire system rigged
in her favour and millions of mostly younger people who supported Sanders have received a slap
in the face by a corrupt Dem Party.
Clinton has dragged the party into the sewer with her. They should have told her to step down
months ago. This is a shameful Dem convention
Typical tactic to divert attention away from the real issue which is the corruption exposed by
the Democratic party..There are rumours of another leak to come..hopefully the contents of Clintons
personal and the Clinton Foundation emails.. Sunlight is a wonderful disinfectant..
well this is what we've been talking about. Mainstream media, including the Guardian, the one
source of information I could trust , are also complicit in their unwavering support of the Hillary
machine and the stars quo for the 1%.
Just waiting for the promised emails from Hilary's server that wiki leaks has promised.
Citizens have the right to know.
saying its hackers stole Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails and released them to
foment disunity in the party and aid Donald Trump.
It's so pathetic, it's sad really. No introspection whatsoever. No, like a little snotty kid
that refuse to take any responsibility whatsoever for their own fuck-ups.
Come on, Hillary. You used dirty tactics to get rid of Sanders. I'm sure you've got more tricks
up your sleeve. We all know Bush Jr. wasn't suppose to be the President of the US. But he became
one anyway. That's how the Plutocrats play the game and you've been in the pipeline for a long
time now. Don't worry. We know where you've been.
The issue is not whether they were leaked by Russia, but that they were written and sent in the
first place. Clear collusion and vote-rigging between DNC and Clinton campaign to obstruct, disparage
and hinder Sanders.
This is how the Clinton machine works and why people don't like/trust her. 70% negative ratings
should tell the myopic DNC something. They are just as bent as she is.
You spin it right round, baby round round like a record, baby right round round round.
Unfortunately (for her), Americans have their bullshit metre *ON* let alone they don't believe
a word said any longer. Americans are eagerly waiting for the decision about the email server
thingy where lies and more lies were delivered.
You spin it right round, baby round round like a record, baby right round round round. :)
That's it from the Clinton cabal? "Look over there! It's the shiny Russian's fault!"
How about denouncing the HORRIBLE behavior of individuals and CLEAR bias by the DNC?...crickets....
The email the press is not mentioning shows the DNC had materials for HILLARY as the nominee
prepared before the primary was over! How is that just individuals showing their personal opinions
inappropriately? That was work that was PAID FOR, TIME that APPROVED and USED!
And the go-Hillary weenie Chuck Todd had a phone conversation with DWS about an entirely different
show...Mika on Morning Joe ticked her off and she wanted Chuck to handle it for her...
I am done with this party of corruption and Hillary cronies unless some pink slips start flying
and Bernie gets the Superdelegates.
He's the Cowardly Lion, sad to say. But what he tapped shall not be bought off. I say it again,
a mass walkout by the Sanders delegates would send a clear signal to Hillary, the DNC, and the
nation.
Guardian is still not getting the significance of this story. The DNC chair cannot preside over
the DNC convention. She can't even show her face. This is huge and it completely vindicates Bernies
mistrust of her. This isn't about the nationality of the hackers. It's about a crooked DNC rigging
the system.
Never mind the real issue is the content of the e-mails not who leaked them, but who are those
"experts" who tell us those were Russians? Are those the same "experts" who found weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq?
Ironic that Sanders would sit with Jake Tapper on the C orrupt C linton N
etwork for an interview...Tapper was named in the Wikileaks DNC emails as being in collusion with
the DNC for Hillary.
We know there were at least two leakers. The first, Guccifer, real name Marcel Lazăr Lehel,
is Romanian. He is now supposedly safely in federal prison incommunicado, so he won't be telling
anyone anything he knows any time soon, if he is even still alive that is.
There is circumstantial reason to believe that Guccifer II is Romanian or Moldovan also.
The Russians probably have all this and a lot more, but the chances of them leaking it are
essentially zero.
Clinton is desperate to lurk voters by anything, then let it be those Russians that hacked her
mail. A Russian proverb to the point - "A bad dancer always blames his balls that hamper him".
"His son, Donald Trump Jr, appeared on CNN's State of the Union. "They should be
ashamed of themselves," he said of the Clinton campaign. "If we did that … if my father did
that, they'd have people calling for the electric chair."
Grateful for what? For sinking Sanders? Look Obama, the Clintons are criminals, and their affiliate
entities, including the DNC, could be considered criminal enterprises or co-conspirators at this point.
Notable quotes:
"... Obama issued a statement, saying, "For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful." ..."
Obama issued a statement, saying, "For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz
has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful."
"... "And I'm talking about the establishment Democrats and the establishment Republicans who are much more interested in holding on to power and their positions than they are about their party or about their country." "This is really very sad, and I hope that more people will wake up and see what's happening," Carson said. ..."
"I knew that there was corruption, but the level of corruption throughout the political system
is overwhelming," Carson said Sunday on Fox News. "And I'm talking about the
establishment
Democrats and the establishment Republicans who are much more interested in holding on to power
and their positions than they are about their party or about their country." "This is
really very sad, and I hope that more people will wake up and see what's happening," Carson said.
"... FBI agents who worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server reportedly had to sign an unusual non-disclosure form banning them from talking about the case unless they were called to testify. ..."
"... Unnamed sources tell the New York Post they'd never heard of the special form - known as a "case briefing acknowledgment" - being used before, though all agents initially have to sign nondisclosure agreements to obtain security clearance. ..."
FBI agents who worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server reportedly had to sign an unusual
non-disclosure form banning them from talking about the case unless they were called to testify.
Unnamed
sources tell the New York Post they'd never heard of the special form - known as a "case briefing acknowledgment" - being
used before, though all agents initially have to sign nondisclosure agreements to obtain security clearance.
"This is very, very unusual. I've never signed one, never circulated one to others," one unnamed retired FBI chief tells the Post.
"I have never heard of such a form. Sounds strange," an anonymous FBI agent said.
The Post additionally reports some FBI agents are disappointed that Director James Comey decided against recommending that
charges be broughtagainst Clinton for her mishandling of classified information.
"FBI agents believe there was an inside deal put in place after the [Attorney
General] Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting" just hours before the release of a House report on the Benghazi, Libya
terror attack in 2012, one unnamed source tells the Post.
Another Justice Department source tells the newspaper he was "furious" with Comey, deriding him for having "managed to piss off right
and left."
"... Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday - two vital pillars of her presidential candidacy - and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year. ..."
Hillary Clinton may not be indicted on criminal charges over her handling of classified email, but the
F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, all but indicted her judgment and competence on Tuesday - two vital pillars of her presidential
candidacy - and in the kind of terms that would be politically devastating in a normal election year.
... ... ...
To her charge that he is "reckless," Mr. Trump may now respond by citing Mr. Comey's rebuke: that Mrs. Clinton and her team "were
extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
To her promises to defend the United States, Mr. Trump may now retort with Mr. Comey's warning that "it is possible that hostile
actors gained access" to Mrs. Clinton's email account and the top secret information it contained.
And to her reproofs about his temperament and responsibility, Mr. Trump may now point to Mr. Comey's finding that "there is evidence
of potential violations of the statutes" on handling classified information - though Mr. Comey said that other factors, like Mrs.
Clinton's intent, argued against criminal charges.
Worst of all was the totality of Mr. Comey's judgment about Mrs. Clinton's judgment.
She is running as a supremely competent candidate and portraying Mr. Trump, in essence, as irresponsible and dangerous. Yet the
director of the F.B.I. basically just called her out for having committed one of the most irresponsible moves in the modern history
of the State Department.
... ... ...
Her clearest selling point - that she, unlike Mr. Trump, can manage challenging relationships with allies and adversaries - has
now been undercut because she personally mismanaged the safeguarding of national security information.
"... The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. ..."
"... We can say, accurately, that the judgment of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. ..."
"... whether criminal statutes on the books had been violated ..."
"... criminal statutes had been violated ..."
"... So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing" mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton violated, that wasn't it. ..."
"... specific intent ..."
"... Black's Law Dictionary ..."
"... First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space. ..."
"... Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? ..."
"... And indeed, the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was, by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience." ..."
"... completely different and more stringent protocols and requirements for data storage ..."
1. According to Comey, Clinton committed multiple federal felonies and misdemeanors.
Many people will miss this in the wash of punditry from non-attorneys in the mainstream media that
has followed Comey's public remarks and Congressional testimony.
The issue for Comey wasn't that
Clinton hadn't committed any federal crimes, but that in his personal opinion the federal felony
statute Clinton violated (18 U.S.C. 793f) has been too rarely applied for him to feel comfortable
applying it to Clinton. This is quite different from saying that no crime was committed; rather,
Comey's position is that crimes were committed, but he has decided not to prosecute those crimes
because (a) the statute he focused most on has only been used once in the last century (keeping in
mind how relatively rare cases like these are in the first instance, and therefore how rarely we
would naturally expect a statute like this to apply in any case), and (b) he personally believes
that the statute in question might be unconstitutional because, as he put it, it might punish people
for crimes they didn't specifically intend to commit (specifically, it requires only a finding of
"gross negligence," which Comey conceded he could prove). Comey appears to have taken the extraordinary
step of researching the legislative history of this particular criminal statute in order to render
this latter assessment.
The reality is that prosecutors don't normally consider the legislative history or possible
unconstitutionality of criminal statutes. Why? Because that's not their job. Their job is to
apply the laws as written, unless and until they are superseded by new legislation or struck down
by the judicial branch. In Comey's case, this deep dive into the history books is even more
puzzling as, prior to Attorney General Loretta Lynch unethically having a private meeting with Bill
Clinton on an airport tarmac, Comey wasn't even slated to be the final arbiter of whether Clinton
was prosecuted or not. He would have been expected, in a case like this, to note to the Department
of Justice's career prosecutors that the FBI had found evidence of multiple federal crimes, and then
leave it to their prosecutorial discretion as to whether or not to pursue a prosecution. But more
broadly, we must note that when Comey gave his public justification for not bringing charges ― a
public justification in itself highly unusual, and suggestive of the possibility that Comey knew
his inaction was extraordinary, and therefore felt the need to defend himself in equally extraordinary
fashion ― he did not state the truth: that Clinton had committed multiple federal crimes per statutes
presently on the books, and that the lack of a recommendation for prosecution was based not on the
lack of a crime but the lack of prosecutorial will (or, as he might otherwise have put it, the exercise
of prosecutorial discretion).
The danger here is that Americans will now believe many untrue things about the executive branch
of their government. For instance, watching Comey's testimony one might believe that if the executive
branch exercises its prosecutorial discretion and declines to prosecute crimes it determines have
been committed, it means no crimes were committed. In fact, what it means (in a case like this) is
that crimes were committed but will not be prosecuted. We can say, accurately, that the judgment
of the FBI in its investigation into Clinton and her associates ― and Comey confirmed Clinton was
indeed a "subject" of the investigation ― is that Clinton is a criminal. She simply shouldn't,
in the view of the FBI, be prosecuted for her crimes. Prosecutorial discretion of this sort is relatively
common, and indeed should be much more common when it comes to criminal cases involving
poor Americans; instead, we find it most commonly in law enforcement's treatment of Americans with
substantial personal, financial, sociocultural, and legal resources.
Americans might also wrongly believe, watching Comey's testimony, that it is the job of executive-branch
employees to determine which criminal statutes written by the legislative branch will be acknowledged.
While one could argue that this task does fall to the head of the prosecuting authority in a given
instance ― here, Attorney General Loretta Lynch; had an independent prosecutor been secured in this
case, as should have happened, that person, instead ― one could not argue that James Comey's
role in this scenario was to decide which on-the-books criminal statutes matter and which don't.
Indeed, Comey himself said, during his announcement of the FBI's recommendation, that his role was
to refer the case to the DOJ for a "prosecutive decision" ― in other words, the decision on whether
to prosecute wasn't his. His job was only to determine whether criminal statutes on the books
had been violated.
By this test, Comey didn't just not do the job he set out to do, he wildly and irresponsibly
exceeded it, to the point where its original contours were unrecognizable. To be blunt: by obscuring,
in his public remarks and advice to the DOJ, the fact that criminal statutes had been violated
― in favor of observing, more broadly, that there should be no prosecution ― he made it not just
easy but a fait accompli for the media and workaday Americans to think that not only would no prosecution
commence, but that indeed there had been no statutory violations.
Which there were.
Americans might also wrongly take at face value Comey's contention that the felony statute Clinton
violated was unconstitutional ― on the grounds that it criminalizes behavior that does not
include a specific intent to do wrong. This is, as every attorney knows, laughable. Every single
day in America, prosecutors prosecute Americans ― usually but not exclusively poor people ― for crimes
whose governing statutes lack the requirement of "specific intent." Ever heard of negligent homicide?
That's a statute that doesn't require what lawyers call (depending on the jurisdiction) an "intentional"
or "purposeful" mental state. Rather, it requires "negligence." Many other statutes require only
a showing of "recklessness," which likewise is dramatically distinct from "purposeful" or "intentional"
conduct. And an even larger number of statutes have a "knowing" mental state, which Comey well knows
― but the average American does not ― is a general- rather than specific-intent mental state (mens
rea, in legal terms).
And the term "knowingly" is absolutely key to the misdemeanors Comey appears to concede
Clinton committed, but has declined to charge her for.
To discuss what "knowingly" means in the law, I'll start with an example. When I practiced criminal
law in New Hampshire, it was a crime punishable by up to a year in jail to "knowingly cause unprivileged
physical contact with another person." The three key elements to this particular crime, which is
known as Simple Assault, are "knowingly," "unprivileged," and "physical contact." If a prosecutor
can prove each of these elements beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant could, at the discretion
of a judge, find themselves locked in a cage for a year. "Physical contact" means just about exactly
what you'd expect, as does "unprivileged" ― contact for which you have no claim of privilege, such
as self-defense, defense of another, permission of the alleged victim, and so on. But what the heck
does "knowingly" mean? Well, as any law student can tell you, it means that you were aware of the
physical act you were engaged in, even if you didn't intend the consequences that act caused. For
instance, say you're in the pit at a particularly raucous speed-metal concert, leaping about, as
one does, in close proximity with many other people. Now let's say that after one of your leaps you
land on a young woman's foot and break it. If charged with Simple Assault, your defense won't be
as to your mental state, because you were "knowingly" leaping about, even if you intended no harm
in doing so. Instead, your defense will probably be that the contact (which you also wouldn't contest)
was "privileged," because the young lady had implicitly taken on, as had you, the risks of being
in a pit in the middle of a speed-metal concert. See the difference between knowingly engaging in
a physical act that has hurtful consequences, and "intending" or having as your "purpose" those consequences?
Just so, I've seen juveniles prosecuted for Simple Assault for throwing food during an in-school
cafeteria food fight; in that instance, no one was hurt, nor did anyone intend to hurt anybody, but
"unprivileged physical contact" was "knowingly" made all the same (in this case, via the instrument
of, say, a chicken nugget).
So, my first point: for Comey to imply that there is any prosecutor in America uncomfortable
with the "constitutionality" of criminal statutes predicated on "negligent," "reckless," or "knowing"
mental states is not just laughable but an insult to both the prosecutorial class and our entire
criminal justice system. Whatever issue Comey may have had with the felony statute he agrees Clinton
violated, that wasn't it.
What about the misdemeanor statute?
Well, there's now terrifying evidence available for public consumption to the effect that Director
Comey doesn't understand the use of the word "knowingly" in the law ― indeed, understands it less
than even a law student in his or her first semester would. Just over an hour (at 1:06) into the
six-hour
C-SPAN video of Comey's Congressional testimony, Representative Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) makes a
brief but absolutely unimpeachable case that, using the term "knowingly" as I have here and as it
is used in every courtroom in America, Secretary Clinton committed multiple federal misdemeanors
inasmuch as she, per the relevant statute (Title 18 U.S.C. 1924), "became possessed of documents
or materials containing classified information of the United States....and knowingly removed such
documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials
at an unauthorized location." Comey, misunderstanding the word "knowingly" in a way any law school
student would scream at their TV over, states that the FBI would still, under that statutory language,
need to prove specific intent to convict Clinton of a Title 18 U.S.C. 1924 violation. Lummis
points out that Comey is dead wrong ― and she's right, he is wrong. Per the above, all Clinton
had to be aware of is that (a) she was in possession of classified documents, and (b) she had removed
them to an unauthorized location. Comey admits these two facts are true, and yet he won't prosecute
because he's added a clause that's not in the statute. I can't emphasize this enough: Comey makes
clear with his answers throughout his testimony that Clinton committed this federal misdemeanor,
but equally makes clear that he didn't charge her with it because he didn't understand the statute.
(At 1:53 in the video linked to above, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado goes back to the topic
of Title 18 U.S.C. 1924, locking down that Comey is indeed deliberately adding language to that federal
criminal statute that quite literally is not there.)
Yes, it's true. Watch the video for yourself,
look up the word "knowingly" in Black's Law Dictionary, and you'll see that I'm right.
This is scary stuff for an attorney like me, or really for any of us, to see on television ― a government
attorney with less knowledge of criminal law than a first-year law student.
2. Comey has dramatically misrepresented what prosecutorial discretion looks like.
The result of this is that Americans will fundamentally misunderstand our adversarial system of justice.
Things like our Fourth and Fifth Amendment are part and parcel of our "adversarial" system of
justice. We could have elected, as a nation, to have an "inquisitorial" system of justice ― as some
countries in Europe, with far fewer protections for criminal defendants, do ― but we made the decision
that the best truth-seeking mechanism is one in which two reflexively zealous advocates, a prosecutor
and a defense attorney, push their cases to the utmost of their ability (within certain well-established
ethical strictures).
James Comey, in his testimony before Congress, left the impression that his job as a prosecutor
was to weigh his ability to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt not as a prosecutor, but as a
member of a prospective jury. That's not how things work in America; it certainly, and quite spectacularly,
isn't how it works for poor black men. In fact, what American prosecutors are charged to do is imagine
a situation in which (a) they present their case to a jury as zealously as humanly possible within
the well-established ethical code of the American courtroom, (b) all facts and inferences are taken
by that jury in the prosecution's favor, and then (c) whether, given all those conditions, there
is a reasonable likelihood that all twelve jurors would vote for a conviction.
That is not the standard James Comey used to determine whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
What Comey did was something else altogether.
First he asked, "What would other prosecutors do?" That's not a question prosecutors are charged
to ask, and we now see why: as Comey himself concedes, countless prosecutors have already come out
in public to say that, had they been investigating Clinton, they would have prosecuted her. A standard
for prosecutorial discretion in which you weigh what others in your shoes might do based on some
sort of a census leads immediately to madness, not just for the reasons I'm articulating here but
many others too numerous to go into in detail in this space.
The second thing Comey did was ask, "Am I guaranteed to win this case at trial?" Would that
this slowed the roll of prosecutors when dealing with poor black men! Instead, as I discuss later
on, prosecutors ― via the blunt instrument of the grand jury ― usually use the mere fact of misdemeanor
or felony charges against a defendant as a mechanism for ending a case short of trial. Even prosecutors
who ultimately drop a case will charge (misdemeanor) or indict (felony) it first, if only to give
themselves time ― because defendants do have speedy trial rights, and statutes of limitation do sometimes
intercede ― to plan their next move.
Third, Comey imagined his case at trial through the following lens: "How would we do at trial
if the jury took every fact and presumption ― as we already have ― in Clinton's favor?" Indeed, I'm
having more than a hard time ― actually an impossible time ― finding a single unknown or unclear
fact that Comey took in a light unfavorable to Clinton (including, incredibly, the facts that became
unknowable because of Clinton's own actions and evasions). Instead, Hillary was given the benefit
of the doubt at every turn, so much so that it was obvious that the only evidence of "intent" Comey
would accept was a full confession from Clinton. That's something prosecutors rarely get, and certainly
(therefore) never make a prerequisite for prosecution. But Comey clearly did here.
I have never seen this standard used in the prosecution of a poor person. Not once.
3. Comey left the indelible impression, with American news-watchers, that prosecutors
only prosecute specific-intent crimes, and will only find a sufficient mens
rea (mental state) if and when a defendant has confessed. Imagine, for a moment, if
police officers only shot unarmed black men who were in the process of confessing either verbally
("I'm about to pull a gun on you!") or physically (e.g., by assaulting the officer). Impossible to
imagine, right? That's because that's not how this works; indeed, that's not how any of this works.
Prosecutors, like police officers, are, in seeking signs of intent, trained to read ― and conceding
here that some of them do it poorly ― contextual clues that precede, are contemporaneous with, and/or
follow the commission of a crime.
But this apparently doesn't apply to Hillary Clinton.
It would be easier to identify the contextual clues that don't suggest Clinton had consciousness
of guilt than those that do ― as there are exponentially more of the latter than the former.
But let's do our best, and consider just a few of the clear signs that Clinton and her team, judging
them solely by their words and actions, knew that what they were doing was unlawful.
For instance, Clinton repeatedly said she used one server and only one device ― not that she
thought that that was the correct information, but that she knew it was. Yet the
FBI found, per Comey's July 5th statement, that Clinton used "several different servers" and "numerous
mobile devices." So either Clinton didn't know the truth but pretended in all her public statements
that she did; or she was given bad information which she then repeated uncritically, in which case
a prosecutor would demand to know from whom she received that information (as surely that
person would know they'd spread misinformation); or she knew the truth and was lying. A prosecutor
would want clear, on-the-record answers on these issues; instead, Comey let other FBI agents have
an unrecorded, untranscripted interview with Clinton that he himself didn't bother to attend. It's
not even clear that that interview was much considered by the FBI; Comey declared his decision just
a few dozen hours after the interview was over, and word leaked that there would be no indictment
just two hours after the interview. Which, again, incredibly ― and not in keeping with any
law enforcement policy regarding subject interviews I'm aware of ― was unrecorded, untranscripted,
unsworn, and unattended by the lead prosecutor.
This in the context of a year-long investigation for which Clinton was the primary subject.
Since when is an hours-long interview with an investigation's subject so immaterial to the charging
decision? And since when is such an interview treated as such a casual event? Since never. At least
for poor people.
And since when are false exculpatory statements not strong evidence of intent?
Since never - at least for poor people.
Comey found credible that Clinton had created her private basement server set-up purely out
of "convenience"; yet he also found that old servers, once replaced, were "stored and decommissioned
in various ways." Wait, "various ways"? If Clinton was trying to create a streamlined, convenient
personal process for data storage, why were things handled so haphazardly that Comey himself would
say that the servers were dealt with "in various ways" over time? Just so, Comey would naturally
want to test Clinton's narrative by seeing whether or not all FOIA requests were fully responded
to by Clinton and her staff in the four years she was the head of the State Department. Surely, Clinton
and her staff had been fully briefed on their legal obligations under FOIA ― that's provable ― so
if Clinton's "convenience" had caused a conflict with the Secretary's FOIA obligations that would
have been immediately obvious to both Clinton and her staff, and would have been remedied immediately
if the purpose of the server was not to avoid FOIA requests but mere convenience. At a minimum, Comey
would find evidence (either hard or testimonial) that such conversations occurred. And indeed,
the evidence Comey turned up showed that Clinton's staff was aware ― was repeatedly and systematically
made aware ― that the Secretary's set-up had the effect of evading FOIA requests. And Clinton was,
by her own admission, clear with her inferiors that "avoiding access to the personal" was key to
her private basement-server set-up. That's very different from "convenience."
Even if Comey believed that "avoiding access to the personal," rather than "convenience," was
the reason for Clinton's server set-up, that explanation would have imploded under the weight
of evidence Clinton, her team, and her attorneys exercised no due caution whatsoever in determining
what was "personal" and what was not personal when they were wiping those servers clean. If Clinton's
concern was privacy, there's no evidence that much attention was paid to accurately and narrowly
protecting that interest ― rather, the weight of the evidence suggests that the aim, at all times,
was to keep the maximum amount of information away from FOIA discovery, not just "personal" information
but (as Comey found) a wealth of work-related information.
But let's pull back for a moment and be a little less legalistic. Clinton claimed the reason for
her set-up was ― exclusively ― "convenience"; nevertheless, Comey said it took "thousands of hours
of painstaking effort" to "piece back together" exactly what Clinton was up to. Wouldn't that fact
alone give the lie to the claim that this system was more "convenient" than the protocols State already
had in place? "Millions of email fragments ended up in the server's 'slack space'," Comey said of
Clinton's "convenient" email-storage arrangement. See the contradiction? How would "millions of email
fragments ending up in a server's 'slack space'" in any way have served Clinton's presumptive desire
for both (a) convenience, (b) FOIA complicance, (c) a securing of her privacy, and (d) compliance
with State Department email-storage regulations? Would any reasonable person have found this set-up
convenient? And if not ― and Comey explicitly found not ― why in the world didn't that help
to establish the real intent of Clinton's private basement servers? Indeed, had Clinton
intended on complying with FOIA, presumably her own staff would have had to do the very same painstaking
work it took the FBI a year to do. But FOIA requests come in too fast and furious, at State, for
Clinton's staff to do the work it took the FBI a year to do in a matter of days; wouldn't this in
itself establish that Clinton and her staff had no ability, and therefore well knew they had no intention,
of acceding to any of the Department's hundreds or even thousands of annual FOIA requests in full?
And wouldn't ignoring all those requests be not just illegal but "inconvenient" in the extreme? And
speak to the question of intent?
It took Clinton two years to hand over work emails she was supposed to hand over the day she left
office; and during that time, she and her lawyers, some of whom appear to have looked at classified
material without clearance, deleted thousands of "personal" emails ― many of which turned out the
be exactly the sort of work emails she was supposed to turn over the day she left State. In this
situation, an actor acting in good faith would have (a) erred on the side of caution in deleting
emails, (b) responded with far, far more alacrity to the valid demands of State to see all work-related
emails, and (c) having erroneously deleted certain emails, would have rushed to correct the mistake
themselves rather than seeing if they could get away with deleting ― mind you ― not just work emails
but work emails with (in several instances) classified information in them. How in the world was
none of this taken toward the question of intent? Certainly, it was taken toward the finding of "gross
negligence" Comey made, but how in the world was none of it seen as relevant to Clinton's
specific intent also? Why does it seem the only evidence of specific intent Comey would've looked
at was a smoking gun? Does he realize how few criminal cases would ever be brought against anyone
in America if a "smoking gun" standard was in effect? Does anyone realize how many poor black men
wouldn't be in prison if that standard was in effect for them as well as Secretary Clinton?
4. Comey made it seem that the amount and quality of prosecutorial consideration he gave
Clinton was normal. The mere fact that Comey gave public statements justifying his prosecutorial
discretion misleads the public into thinking that, say, poor black men receive this level of care
when prosecutors are choosing whether to indict them.
While at least he had the good grace to call the fact of his making a public statement "unusual"
― chalking it up to the "intense public interest" that meant Clinton (and the public) "deserved"
an explanation for his behavior ― that grace ultimately obscured, rather than underscored, that what
Comey did in publicly justifying his behavior is unheard of in cases involving poor people. In the
real America, prosecutors are basically unaccountable to anyone but their bosses in terms of their
prosecutorial discretion, as cases in which abuse of prosecutorial discretion is successfully alleged
are vanishingly rare. Many are the mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers of poor black men who
would love to have had their sons' (or brothers', or fathers') over-charged criminal cases explained
to them with the sort of care and detail Hillary Clinton naturally receives when she's being investigated.
Clinton and the public "deserve" prosecutorial transparency when the defendant is a Clinton; just
about no one else deserves this level of not just transparency but also ― given the year-long length
of the FBI investigation ― prosecutorial and investigative caution.
What's amazing is how little use Comey actually made of all the extra time and effort. For instance,
on July 5th he said that every email the FBI uncovered was sent to the "owning" organization to see
if they wanted to "up-classify" it ― in other words, declare that it should have been classified
at the time it was sent and/or received, even if not marked that way at the time. One might think
Comey would want this information, the better to determine Clinton's intent with respect to those
emails (i.e., given Clinton's training, knowledge, and experience, how frequently did she "miss"
the classified nature of an email, relative to the assessment of owning agencies that a given email
was effectively and/or should have been considered classified ― even if not marked so ― at the time
Clinton handled it?) Keep in mind, here, that certain types of information, as Clinton without a
doubt knew, are "born classified" whether marked as such or not. And yet, just two days after July
5th, Comey testified before Congress that he "didn't pay much attention" to "up-classified" emails.
Why? Because, said Comey, they couldn't tell him anything about Clinton's intent. Bluntly,
this is an astonishing and indeed embarrassing statement for any prosecutor to make.
Whereas every day knowledge and motives are imparted to poor black men that are, as the poet Claudia
Rankine has observed, purely the product of a police officer's "imagination," the actual and indisputable
knowledge and motives and ― yes ― responsibilities held by Clinton were "downgraded" by Comey to
that of merely an average American. That is, despite the fact that Clinton was one of the most powerful
people on Earth, charged with managing an agency that collects among the highest number of classified
pieces of information of any agency anywhere; despite the fact that Clinton's agency had the strictest
policies for data storage for this very reason; despite the fact that State is, as Clinton well knew,
daily subjected to FOIA requests; despite all this, Comey actually said the following: "Like many
email users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted emails..."
What?
How in the world does the "many email users" standard come into play here? Clinton's server, unlike
anyone else's server, was set up in a way that permitted no archiving, an arrangement that one now
imagines led (in part) to the person who set up that server taking the Fifth more than a hundred
times in interviews with the FBI; even assuming Clinton didn't know, and didn't request, for her
server to be set up in this astonishing way ― a way, again, that her own employees believe could
incriminate them ― how in the world could she have been sanguine about deleting emails "like many
email users" when the agency she headed had completely different and more stringent protocols
and requirements for data storage than just about any government agency on Earth? Just so, once
it was clear that Clinton had deleted (per Comey) "thousands of emails that were work-related" instead
of turning them over to State, in what universe can no intent be implied from the fact that her attorneys
purged 30,000 emails simply by looking at their headers? At what point does Clinton, as
former Secretary of State, begin to have ill intent imputed to her by not directing her attorneys
to actually read emails before permanently destroying them and making them unavailable to the FBI
as evidence? If you were in her situation, and instead of saying to your team either (a) "don't delete
any more emails," or (b) "if you delete any emails, make sure you've read them in full first," would
you expect anyone to impute "no specific intent" to your behavior?
The result: despite saying she never sent or received emails on her private basement server that
were classified "at the time," the FBI found that 52 email chains on Clinton's server ― including
110 emails ― contained information that was classified at the time (eight chains contained
"top secret" information; 36, "secret" information; and another eight "confidential" information).
Moreover, Clinton's team wrongly purged ― at a minimum ― "thousands" of work-related emails. (And
I'm putting aside entirely here the 2,000 emails on Clinton's server that were later "up-classified.")
At what point does this harm become foreseeable, and not seeing it ― when you're one of the best-educated,
smartest, most experienced public servants in U.S. history, as your political team keeps reminding
us ― become evidence of "intent"? Comey's answer? Never.
Indeed, Comey instead makes the positively fantastical observation that "none [of the emails Clinton
didn't turn over but was supposed to] were intentionally deleted." The problem is, by Comey's own
admission all of those emails were intentionally deleted, under circumstances in which the
problems with that deletion would not just have been evident to "any reasonable person" but specifically
were clear ― the context proves it ― to Clinton herself. During her four years as Secretary of State
Clinton routinely expressed concern to staff about her own and others' email-storage practices, establishing
beyond any doubt that not only was Clinton's literal key-pressing deliberate ― the "knowing" standard
― but also its repeated, systemic effect was fully appreciated by her in advance. Likewise, that
her attorneys were acting entirely on their own prerogative, without her knowledge, is a claim no
jury would credit.
Clinton's attorneys worked Clinton's case in consultation with Clinton ― that's how things work.
In other words, Clinton's lawyers are not rogue actors here. So when Comey says, "They [Clinton and
her team] deleted all emails they did not produce for State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices
in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery," we have to ask, what possible reason would
an attorney have for wiping a server entirely within their control to ensure that no future court
order could access the permanently deleted information? In what universe is such behavior not
actual consciousness of guilt with respect to the destruction of evidence? Because we must be clear:
Comey isn't saying Clinton and her lawyers accidentally put these emails outside even a hypothetical
future judicial review; they did so intentionally.
There's that word again.
The result of these actions? The same as every other action Clinton took that Comey somehow
attributes no intent to: a clear legal benefit to Clinton and a frustration, indeed an obstruction,
of the FBI's investigation. As Comey said on July 5th, the FBI can't know how many emails are "gone"
(i.e., permanently) because of Clinton and her team's intentional acts after-the-fact. So Comey is
quite literally telling us that the FBI couldn't conclude their investigation with absolute confidence
that they had all the relevant facts, and that the reason for this was the intentional destruction
of evidence by the subject of the investigation at a time when there was no earthly reason to destroy
evidence except to keep it from the FBI.
In case you're wondering, no, you don't need a legal degree to see the problem there.
As an attorney, I can't imagine destroying evidence at a time I knew it was the subject of a federal
investigation. And if I ever were to do something like that, I would certainly assume that all such
actions would later be deemed "intentional" by law enforcement, as my intent would be inferred from
my training, knowledge, and experience as an attorney, as well as my specific awareness of a pending
federal investigation in which the items I was destroying might later become key evidence. That Clinton
and her team repeatedly (and falsely) claimed the FBI investigation was a mere "security review"
― yet another assertion whose falseness was resoundingly noted by Comey in his public statements
― was clearly a transparent attempt to negate intent in destroying those emails. (The theory being,
"Well, yes, I destroyed possible evidence just by looking at email headers, but this was all just
a 'security review,' right? Not a federal investigation? Even though I knew the three grounds
for referral of the case to the FBI, and knew that only one of them involved anything like a 'security
review'?")
And certainly, none of this explains Comey's (again) gymnastic avoidance of stating the obvious:
that crimes were committed.
Listen to his language on July 5th: "Although we did not find clear evidence that Clinton or her
colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information" (emphasis
in original) ― actually, let's stop there. You'd expect the second half of that sentence to be something
like, "...they nevertheless did violate those laws, despite not intending to." It's the natural continuation
of the thought. Instead, Comey, who had prepared his remarks in advance, finished the thought this
way: "....there is evidence that they were extremely careless with very sensitive, highly
classified information" (emphasis in original).
Note that Comey now uses the phrase "extremely careless" instead of "gross negligence," despite
using the latter phrase ― a legal phrase ― at the beginning of his July 5th remarks. That matters
because at the beginning of those remarks he conceded "gross negligence" would lead to a statutory
violation. So why the sudden shift in language, when from a legal standpoint "extreme carelessness"
and "gross negligence" are synonymous ― both indicating the presence of a duty of care, the failure
to meet that duty, and moreover a repeated failure on this score? Comey also avoids finishing
his sentence with the obvious thought: that they may not have intended to violate criminal
statutes, but they did nonetheless. Remember that, just like our hypothetical raver may not have
intended to commit a Simple Assault by stepping on that poor young woman's foot, he nevertheless
could be found to have done so; just so, had Comey accepted the statute as written, Clinton's "gross
negligence" would have forced him to end the above sentence with the finding of a statutory violation,
even if there had been no "specific intent" to do so.
This is how the law works. For poor black men, just not for rich white women.
5. Comey, along with the rest of Congress, left the impression, much like the Supreme
Court did in 2000, that legal analyses are fundamentally political analyses. Not only is
this untrue, it also is unspeakably damaging to both our legal system and Americans' understanding
of that system's operations.
I'm a staunch Democrat, but I'm also an attorney. Watching fellow Democrats twist themselves into
pretzels to analyze Clinton's actions through a farcically slapdash legal framework, rather than
merely acknowledging that Clinton is a human being and, like any human being, can both (a) commit
crimes, and (b) be replaced on a political ticket if need be, makes me sick as both a Democrat and
a lawyer. Just so, watching Republicans who had no issue with George W. Bush declaring unilateral
war in contravention of international law, and who had no issue with the obviously illegal behavior
of Scooter Libby in another recent high-profile intel-related criminal case, acting like the rule
of law is anything they care about makes me sick. Our government is dirty as all get-out, but the
one thing it's apparently clean of is anyone with both (a) legal training, and (b) a sense of the
ethics that govern legal practice. Over and over during Comey's Congressional testimony I heard politicians
noting their legal experience, and then going on to either shame their association with that august
profession or honor it but (in doing so) call into question their inability or unwillingness to do
so in other instances.
When Comey says, "any reasonable person should have known" not to act as Clinton did, many don't
realize he's quoting a legal standard ― the "reasonable person standard." A failure to meet that
standard can be used to establish either negligence or recklessness in a court of law. But here,
Clinton wasn't in the position of a "reasonable person" ― the average fellow or lady ― and Comey
wasn't looking merely at a "reasonableness" standard, but rather a "purposeful" standard that requires
Comey to ask all sorts of questions about Clinton's specific, fully contextualized situation and
background that he doesn't appear to have asked. One might argue that, in keeping with Clinton's
campaign theme, no one in American political history was more richly prepared ― by knowledge, training,
experience, and innate gifts ― to know how to act properly in the situations Clinton found herself.
That in those situations she failed to act even as a man or woman taken off the street and put in
a similar situation would have acted is not indicative of innocence or a lack of specific intent,
but the opposite. If a reasonable person wouldn't have done what Clinton did, the most exquisitely
prepared person for the situations in which Clinton found herself must in fact have been providing
prosecutors with prima facie evidence of intent by failing to meet even the lowest threshold
for proper conduct. Comey knows this; any prosecutor knows this. Maybe a jury would disagree with
Comey on this point, but his job is to assume that, if he zealously advocates for this extremely
powerful circumstantial case, a reasonable jury, taking the facts in the light most favorable to
the government, would see things his way.
Look, I can't possibly summarize for anyone reading this the silly nonsense I have seen prosecutors
indict people for; a common saying in the law is that the average grand jury "would indict a ham
sandwich," and to be clear that happens not because the run-of-the-mill citizens who sit on grand
juries are bloodthirsty, but because the habitual practice of American prosecutors is to indict first
and ask questions later ― and because indictments are absurdly easy to acquire. In other words, I've
seen thousands of poor people get over-charged for either nonsense or nothing at all, only to have
their prosecutors attempt to leverage their flimsy cases into a plea deal to a lesser charge. By
comparison, it is evident to every defense attorney of my acquaintance that I've spoken to that James
Comey bent over backwards to not indict Hillary Clinton ― much like the hundreds of state
and federal prosecutors who have bent over backwards not to indict police officers over the past
few decades. Every attorney who's practiced in criminal courts for years can smell when the fix is
in ― can hear and see when the court's usual actors are acting highly unusually ― and that's what's
happened here. The tragedy is that it will convince Americans that our legal system is fundamentally
about what a prosecutor feels they can and should be able to get away with, an answer informed largely,
it will seem to many, by various attorneys' personal temperaments and political prejudices.
No one in America who's dedicated their life to the law can feel any satisfaction with how Hillary
Clinton's case was investigated or ultimately disposed of, no more than we can feel sanguine about
prosecutors whose approach to poor black defendants is draconian and to embattled police officers
positively beatific. What we need in Congress, and in prosecutor's offices, are men and women of
principle who act in accordance with their ethical charge no matter the circumstances. While James
Comey is not a political hack, and was not, I don't believe, in any sense acting conspiratorially
in not bringing charges against Hillary Clinton, I believe that, much like SCOTUS did not
decide in the 2000 voting rights case Bush v. Gore, Comey felt that this was a bad time
for an executive-branch officer to interfere with the workings of domestic politics. Perhaps Comey
had the best of intentions in not doing his duty; perhaps he thought letting voters, not prosecutors,
decide the 2016 election was his civic duty. Many Democrats could wish the Supreme Court had felt
the same way in 2000 with respect to the role of judges. But the fact remains that the non-indictment
of Hillary Clinton is as much a stain on the fair and equal administration of justice as is the disparate
treatment of poor black males at all stages of the criminal justice system. I witnessed the latter
injustice close up, nearly every day, during my seven years working as a public defender; now America
has seen the same thing, albeit on a very different stage, involving a defendant of a very different
class and hue.
To have prosecuted Clinton, said Comey, he would need to have seen "clearly intentional and willful
mishandling of classified information, or vast quantities of information exposed in such a way as
to support an inference of intentional misconduct, or....efforts to obstruct justice..." When Comey
concludes, "we do not see those things here," America should ― and indeed must ― wonder what facts
he could possibly be looking at, and, moreover, what understanding of his role in American life he
could possibly be acting upon. The answers to these two questions would take us at least two steps
forward in discussing how average Americans are treated by our increasingly dysfunctional system
of justice.
Seth Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University)
and the author, most recently, of
DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
Neoliberal MSM response to latest FBI director Comey testimony is a textbook example of brainwashing (or groupthink). It shows to
me again that you need to go to the source watch at least the fragments of the testimony on YouTube. It deadly serious situation for
Hillary. No person with even cursory knowledge of security can avoid thinking that she should be in jail. Republicans know it and will
not let her off the hook. Probably special prosecutor will be appointed. See for example
https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/House-Letter-to-FBI-Director-1.pdf
Now Comey is under strong fire and need to save his own skin. You can tell anything about Republican members of House of Representative,
but it is now quite clear to me that several of them are brilliant former lawyers/prosecutor/judges.
From now on they will block all attempt to swipe this matter under the carpet and unless Hillary withdraw they might try to implicate
Obama in the cover-up (and they have facts: he recklessly corresponded with her on this account).
They already requested all FBI files on Clinton. Soon they will have all the dirty laundering from Hillary server and FBI probably
recovered most of it.
From this point it is up-hill battle for Obama, and might well think about finding appropriate sacrificial lamp NOW. My impression
is that she lost her chance to became the President. With FBI files in hand, In four month they can do so much damage that she would
be better to take her toys and leave the playground.
And this topic hopefully already influence super-delegates. I think her best option now is give Sanders a chance. Because the real
threat now is not that she will go to jail. She belongs to the elite and is above the law. Now the real threat is that all her close
associates might.
On Tuesday, the FBI assumed the role of prosecutor and not simply investigator and took the unprecedented act of proclaiming that
no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Based on the perception that a decision has been made by the FBI that has seemingly
ignored facts that the FBI itself found in its own investigation, we have additional questions that are aimed at ensuring that the
cloud which now hovers over our justice system is at least minimally pierced:
1) As a former prosecutor, please explain your understanding of the legal difference between actions performed with "gross negligence"
and those done "extremely carelessly." How did you determine that "extreme carelessness" did not equate to "gross negligence?"
2) You said that no reasonable prosecutor would decide to prosecute the Clinton case on the evidence found by FBI agents during
the Bureau's investigation over the past year. We have multiple former prosecutors in Congress, and it is not far-fetched for many
of us to envision a successful prosecution of someone for doing far less than that which was committed by Secretary Clinton. Is your
statement not an indictment and prejudgment against any Assistant United States Attorney who is now tasked with reviewing the evidence
you presented Tuesday? In your judgment, does it not follow that you would think that a prosecutor who moved forward with the instant
prosecution of Secretary Clinton would be "unreasonable?"
3) Are you aware of any internal opinions by FBI agents or management who were intimately aware of the Clinton investigation which
differed from your eventual decision to not recommend the case for prosecution?
4) You mentioned that Top Secret Special Access Programs (SAPs) were included in emails sent and received by Secretary Clinton. SAP
material is some of the most highly classified and controlled material of the U.S. Government. If an agency of the U.S. Government
were to encounter similar information from a foreign adversary, it would be extremely valuable data for us to exploit. Did the FBI
assess how SAP information, due to its controlled nature, ever made it onto unclassified systems that were not air-gapped or physically
blocked from outside Internet access? Is it not "gross negligence" to permit such SAP data to leave the confines of the most protective
and secure governmental enclaves? Or even "intentional" conduct that allowed that to happen?
5) You mentioned that this investigation
stemmed from a referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community to determine whether classified information had
been transmitted on an unclassified personal system. Following your investigation, it is clear that Secretary Clinton transmitted
classified information on an unclassified system. Secretary Clinton on multiple occasions has said that she did not send or receive
classified information or information marked as classified.3 In light of your decision to also not refer a false statements charge
under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 for prosecution, we can only presume that Secretary Clinton admitted during her interview with your agents
that she, in fact, sent and received emails containing classified information. Please confirm.
6) Are you aware of whether any deleted emails which the FBI was able to forensically recover from Secretary Clinton's servers
pertained to the Clinton Foundation?
7) You stated Tuesday, "Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary
Clinton's personal e-mail account." Is the FBI's Counterintelligence Division still involved in determining the level of damage related
to possible exploitation of Secretary Clinton's or her associates' email accounts and other communications?
8) If the FBI performed a background check on an applicant for employment with the FBI or elsewhere in the U.S. Government, and
that applicant engaged in conduct committed by Secretary Clinton, would a security clearance ever be granted to that person?
Mr. Comey said the emails included eight chains of emails and replies, some written by her, that contained information classified
as "top secret: special access programs." That classification is the highest level, reserved for the nation's most highly guarded
intelligence operations or sources.
Another 36 chains were "secret," which is defined as including information that "could be expected to cause serious damage to
the national security"; eight others had information classified at the lowest level, "confidential."
"... House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) formally requested Thursday that Clinton's security clearance be revoked because of the careless handling of classified material that the FBI investigation revealed. ..."
"... Clinton's personal system did not have full-time security staff ensuring that its protection was up to date. ..."
"... Comey said as many as ten people who did not have clearance had access to the system. ..."
"... Unconfirmed media reports had indicated that the FBI investigation spread to look at the activities of the Clinton Foundation as well ..."
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) formally requested Thursday that Clinton's security clearance be revoked because of the careless
handling of classified material that the FBI investigation revealed.
... ... ...
While Comey maintained that nobody else would face criminal prosecution for doing the same things Clinton did, he emphasized in
his testimony that there would be consequences if a current government employee did it. This could include termination, administrative
sanctions, or losing clearance.
He refused to definitively assess a hypothetical situation where someone like Clinton was seeking security clearance for an FBI
job, though.
... ... ...
Gmail: One aspect of Clinton's actions that Comey said was particularly troubling was that he could not completely exclude
the possibility that her email account was hacked. Unlike the State Department or even email providers like Gmail, Clinton's
personal system did not have full-time security staff ensuring that its protection was up to date.
... ... ...
Clearance: Clinton and her top aides had security clearance to view the classified material that was improperly being transmitted
on the server, but Comey said as many as ten people who did not have clearance had access to the system.
... ... ...
Clinton Foundation:Unconfirmed media reports had indicated that the FBI investigation spread to look at the activities
of the Clinton Foundation as well
Trey Gowdy GRILLS James Comey On Hillary Clinton Emails. Hillary Clinton Email Investigation FBI Director James Comey testified
at a hearing on the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers while serving as secretary of state,
as well as the decision to not recommend criminal charges against her. Rep. Gowdy Q&A - Oversight of the State Department.
At a congressional hearing Thursday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) grilled FBI director James Comey about several of Hillary Clinton's
statements to the public, which the FBI investigation revealed to be untrue. For instance, Clinton had previously claimed that she
had never received or sent classified information to or from her private email server; Comey conceded to Rep. Gowdy that that was
not true.
Another claim of Clinton's, which the investigation revealed to be untrue, was that she had retained all work-related emails.
Comey noted that they had uncovered "thousands" of work-related emails not returned to the State Department. "In the interest of
time and because I have a plane to catch tomorrow afternoon," Gowdy concluded after running through a catalogue of Clinton's claims,
"I'm not going to go through any more of the false statements."
But Gowdy determined that "false exculpatory statements" can be used to determine intention and consciousness of guilt.
Wesley Eskildsen
Is this guy a Starfish from Bikini Bottom!? If Hillary gave her Lawyer, or anyone without the proper Security Clearance AND
the "Need to know", access to her Server containing classified information then she is in violation of Federal Law. If she were
on active Duty she would be court-martialed. that is Chaffetz point exactly!
John Doe
As a democrat, I am disgusted that every member of my party, when givin the opportunity to ask some questions, not one of these
cowards asked a real question and instead focussed on basically explaining about what a wonderful human being Hillary Clinton
is, and what terrible people the republicans are....
Wayne Paul
This chick Maloney just throwing softballs I have no clue why she is even talking.
aadrgtagtwe aaqerytwerhywerytqery
Comey is a liar, look at his reaction when asked about what questions did FBI ask hillary during the 3 and a half hour interview.
He said he couldn't remember at the moment. How is that possible? The only question to ask hillary during the fbi interview was:
"Did you send and receive classified top secret emails through your servers?"
Both answers Hillary could have given, would have been enough to indict her. If she said "Yes", then she would have been indicted
for sending top secret info. If she said "No" , she would have lied, because the report that Comey presented said that "top secret
emails were sent and received, and they were top secret at the time they were sent and received. Fbi didn't ask that question
at all. That tells you that the whole interview was a sham, Hillary was never interviewed.
The propaganda-media reported "hillary was grilled by fbi during 3 and a half hour interview". What unbelievable bullshit!
WE WANT JUSTICE!!!!!!!!! For all those people who are now in jail for the rest of their lives for doing much less than the criminal-hillary!!!!!!!
"... At a contentious hearing of the House oversight committee, Mr. Comey acknowledged under questioning that a number of key assertions that Mrs. Clinton made for months in defending her email system were contradicted by the FBI's investigation. ..."
"... Mr. Comey said that Mrs. Clinton had failed to return "thousands" of work-related emails to the State Department, despite her public insistence to the contrary, and that her lawyers may have destroyed classified material that the F.B.I. was unable to recover. He also described her handling of classified material as secretary of state as "negligent" - a legal term he avoided using when he announced on Tuesday that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against her. ..."
... He also provided new details that could prove damaging to her just weeks before she is to be named the Democrats' presidential
nominee.
At a contentious hearing of the House oversight committee, Mr. Comey acknowledged under questioning that a number of key assertions
that Mrs. Clinton made for months in defending her email system were contradicted by the FBI's investigation.
Mr. Comey said that Mrs. Clinton had failed to return "thousands" of work-related emails to the State Department, despite her
public insistence to the contrary, and that her lawyers may have destroyed classified material that the F.B.I. was unable to recover.
He also described her handling of classified material as secretary of state as "negligent" - a legal term he avoided using when he
announced on Tuesday that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring a case against her.
"... I also made this comment during the morning links, but I think it bears repeating. Robinson considers this to be a great day for Clinton? By what standard? The FBI director went on national television and described her as "extremely careless," and then essentially called her a liar. Is a politician considered to be ethical if he or she is not indicted? ..."
"... Called her a liar? Un-indicted liar or perjurer because the investigators are reasonable. ..."
"... What an inversion – this must be the first time it was good for Hillary that her husband had a scandalous private meeting with a younger woman. ..."
"... In Hillary's nomination victory speech a month ago she argued she has the moral high ground and Trump's response was to focus on the problems in the economy. If the recession starts to hit hard enough late this year, Trump will win, and he will tell Hillary and Bill, "Its the economy stupid!" ..."
"... It is a SAD day when a President of the US cheers for an "extremely careless" leaker after being the most aggressive prosecutor of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act ever. Can I haz my money back? ..."
"... When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't a likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance? ..."
"... Can a president operate without having a security clearance? ..."
"... "Mere mortals" get indicted. Here is the complaint filed in U.S.A v. Bryan Nishimura, July 24, 2015 ..."
"... BRYAN H. NISHIMURA, defendant herein, from on or about January 2007 through April 2012, while deployed outside of the United States on active military duty with the United States Navy Reserve in Afghanistan and thereafter at his residence located in the County of Sacramento, State and Eastern District of California, being an officer and employee of the United States, specifically: a United States Navy Reserve Commander, and, by virtue of his office and employment as such, becoming possessed of documents and materials containing classified information of the United States, specifically: CLASSIFIED United States Army records, did knowingly remove such documents and materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents and materials at his residence in the County of Sacramento, an unauthorized location, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1924(a), a Class A misdemeanor. ..."
"... In a decision Tuesday in a case not involving Clinton directly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that messages contained in a personal email account can sometimes be considered government records subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. ..."
"... Apparently Hillary's problems with the FOIA cases will worsen. ..."
"Comey and Lynch asked to testify before Congress on Clinton probe" [MarketWatch].
From my armchair at 30,000 feet: If the Republicans really want to make Lynch squirm, they just have to ask Lynch one question, which
Comey - strong passive-aggressive move, there, Jim! - handed to them on a silver platter at his presser, yesterday. I've helpfully
written it down (quoted phrases
from Comey's press release, parsed here):
Q: Attorney General Lynch, what "security or administrative sanctions" do you feel are appropriate for Secretary Clinton's
"extremely careless" handling of her email communications at the State Department?
No speeches instead of questions, no primping on camera for the folks back home, nothing about the endless lying, no Benghazi
red meat, no sphincter-driven ranting about "security", tie gormless Trey Gowdy up in a canvas bag and stuff him under a desk. Just
ask that one question. And when Lynch dodges, as she will, ask it again. I don't ever recall having written a sentence that
includes "the American people want," but what the American people want is to see some member of the elite, some time, any time, held
accountable for wrong-doing. If it's Clinton's "turn" for that, then so be it. She should look at the big picture and consider the
larger benefit of continued legitimacy for the Republic and take one for the team. So let's see if the Republicans overplay their
hand. They always have. UPDATE This
is a good, that
is, sane letter from Bob Goodlatte (pdf), chair of the House Judiciary Committee (via MsExPat). But don't get down in the goddamned
weeds!! K.I.S.S.!!!
"Comey's solo appearance Tuesday stood out for historical reasons, because it's highly unusual for the FBI to make public findings
when investigators have decided no charges should be brought" [CNN].
This purports to be the inside story of how Comey "stood alone" to make the announcement. But there are some holes in the narrative:
Matthew Miller, the former top Justice spokesman under Attorney General Eric Holder, called Comey's announcement "outrageous."
"The FBI's job is to investigate cases and when it's appropriate to work with the Justice Department to bring charges," he said
on CNN. House Republican
sides with Comey over Trump on Clinton emails. Instead, Miller said: "Jim Comey is the final arbiter in determining the appropriateness
of Hillary Clinton's conduct. That's not his job."
When you've lost Eric Holder's spokesperson And then there's this. After Clinton's "long-awaited" Fourth-of-July weekend three
hours of testimony:
Officials said it was already clear that there wasn't enough evidence to bring criminal charges. The interview cemented that
decision among FBI and Justice officials who were present.
By Monday night, Comey and other FBI officials decided the public announcement should come at the earliest opportunity.
The fact that Tuesday would also mark the first public campaign appearance by Obama alongside Hillary Clinton didn't enter
in the calculation, officials said.
But as Yves points out, there was no time to write an official report of Clinton's "interview" over the weekend. So for this narrative
to work, you've got to form a mental picture of high FBI officials scanning the transcript of Clinton's "interview," throwing up
their hands, and saying "We got nuthin'. You take it from here, Jim." That doesn't scan. I mean, the FBI is called a
bureau for good reason. So to me, the obvious process violation means that political pressure was brought
to bear on Comey, most likely by Obama, despite the denials (those being subject to the Rice-Davies Rule). But Comey did the bare
minimum to comply, in essence carefully building a three-scoop Sundae of Accountability, and then handing it, with the cherry ("security
or administrative sanctions"), to Lynch, so Lynch could have the pleasant task of making the decision about whether to put the cherry
on top. Or not. Of course, if our elites were as dedicated to public service as they were in Nixon's day, there would have been a
second Saturday Night Massacre (link for those who
came in late), but these are different times. (Extending the sundae metaphor even further, it will be interesting to see if the
ice cream shop staff knows what else is back in the freezer, the nuts and syrups that Comey decided not to add; Comey certainly made
the ethical case for leaks.)
"Hillary Clinton's email problems might be even worse than we thought " [Chris Cilizza,
WaPo]. Cillizza, for whom I confess a sneaking affection, as for Nooners, isn't the most combative writer in WaPo's stable
voteforno6, July 6, 2016 at 2:12 pm
Re: "Hillary Clinton's great day"
I also made this comment during the morning links, but I think it bears repeating. Robinson considers this to be a great day
for Clinton? By what standard? The FBI director went on national television and described her as "extremely careless," and then essentially
called her a liar. Is a politician considered to be ethical if he or she is not indicted?
MyLessThanPrimeBeef, July 6, 2016 at 3:29 pm
Called her a liar? Un-indicted liar or perjurer because the investigators are reasonable.
Elizabeth Burton, July 6, 2016 at 6:17 pm
The cultish nature of Clinton followers struck me months ago; it's quite plain to anyone who's done any amount of study of cults.
The giddy insistence now that the Comey statement is total vindication is a case in point, and any attempt to point out how damning
it actually was only brings an "innocent until proven guilty" reply.
One can only surmise that a large number of people have been so inured to corruption they no longer consider it a negative unless
the perpetrator goes to jail; and even then there would likely be more insistence that person was railroaded.
Tertium Squid, July 6, 2016 at 2:15 pm
What an inversion – this must be the first time it was good for Hillary that her husband had a scandalous private meeting
with a younger woman.
Tim, July 6, 2016 at 2:40 pm
On election day hindsight will show the real inversion with the Clintons is:
In 1990s Bob Dole ran on a platform of having the moral high ground, while Bill Clinton said "it's the economy stupid", and Bill
won.
In Hillary's nomination victory speech a month ago she argued she has the moral high ground and Trump's response was to focus
on the problems in the economy. If the recession starts to hit hard enough late this year, Trump will win, and he will tell Hillary
and Bill, "Its the economy stupid!"
Isolato, July 6, 2016 at 2:18 pm
It is a SAD day when a President of the US cheers for an "extremely careless" leaker after being the most aggressive prosecutor
of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act ever. Can I haz my money back?
Kokuanani, July 6, 2016 at 3:19 pm
When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't a
likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance?
Can we hope for that to happen to Clinton? [Why not?]
Can a president operate without having a security clearance?
3.14e-9, July 6, 2016 at 6:05 pm
When "mere mortals" undertake the kind of reckless action with regard to classified material that Clinton did, wouldn't
a likely and appropriate sanction be to pull that person's security clearance?
"Mere mortals" get indicted. Here is the complaint filed in U.S.A v. Bryan Nishimura, July 24, 2015:
The United States Attorney charges: THAT BRYAN H. NISHIMURA, defendant herein, from on or about January 2007 through April
2012, while deployed outside of the United States on active military duty with the United States Navy Reserve in Afghanistan and
thereafter at his residence located in the County of Sacramento, State and Eastern District of California, being an officer and
employee of the United States, specifically: a United States Navy Reserve Commander, and, by virtue of his office and employment
as such, becoming possessed of documents and materials containing classified information of the United States, specifically: CLASSIFIED
United States Army records, did knowingly remove such documents and materials without authority and with the intent to retain
such documents and materials at his residence in the County of Sacramento, an unauthorized location, in violation of Title 18,
United States Code, Section 1924(a), a Class A misdemeanor.
voteforno6, July 6, 2016 at 6:13 pm
Since the classification program falls under the President by law, it is impossible for a President to not have a security clearance.
Pookah Harvey, July 6, 2016 at 2:54 pm
Clinton supporters seem to feel the fat lady has sung but it might be they are only hearing someone who is slightly chunky. From
Politico:
On the same day that the FBI announced that the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server is
likely to conclude without any charges, a federal appeals court issued a ruling that could complicate and prolong a slew of ongoing
civil lawsuits over access to the messages Clinton and her top aides traded on personal accounts.
In a decision Tuesday in a case not involving Clinton directly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that
messages contained in a personal email account can sometimes be considered government records subject to Freedom of Information
Act requests.
Apparently Hillary's problems with the FOIA cases will worsen.
Rep. Ken Buck questions FBI Director James Comey about his insertion of the term "willfully"
into 18 U.S. Code § 1924. Comey says he "imputes" the term in line with the Department of
Justice's history/tradition of enforcing the statute.
The above clip is taken from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's hearing
regarding Hillary Clinton's criminal email conduct.
"... ...Mr. Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of the Espionage Act that has little to do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through "gross negligence." ..."
"... But the crime of "gross negligence" in the Espionage Act doesn't appear to require proof of any intentional mishandling of documents, according to Stephen I. Vladeck , a national security scholar at the University of Texas. ..."
"... Specifically, the law makes it a felony to permit classified information relating to national defense to be "removed from its proper place of custody" through gross negligence. ..."
"... Why are you focusing on the gross negligence aspect? ..."
"... Where is the removal from the proper place of custody? I've seen nothing in any legal analysis in this paper that talks about it. Is the presence of classified material on a private server of one who is authorized to have it equivalent to such a removal? ..."
"... She was specifically not authorized to have a private server. ..."
"... "From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was TOP SECRET at the time they were sent; 36 of those chains contained SECRET information at the time; and eight contained CONFIDENTIAL information at the time. That's the lowest level of classification." ..."
"... "We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account." ..."
"... Making an argument for the difference between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness" is the sort of semantic hair-splitting that Hillary Clinton ought to have been compelled to do in court - in the same way that her husband prevaricated over "what the meaning of the word 'is' is," shortly before he lost his law license. ..."
...Mr. Comey also referenced a more obscure provision of
the Espionage Act that has little to
do with intent or state of mind, but rather makes it a crime to disclose classified information through
"gross negligence."
That provision of the Espionage Act, the primary law governing the handling of classified information,
could require at least proof that the offender knew the classified information disclosed could harm
the United States or benefit a foreign power if it got into the wrong hands.
But the crime of "gross negligence" in the Espionage Act doesn't appear to require proof of any
intentional mishandling of documents, according to
Stephen I. Vladeck, a national security scholar at the University of Texas.
Specifically, the law makes it a felony to permit classified information relating to national
defense to be "removed from its proper place of custody" through gross negligence.
What would constitute a degree of recklessness that rises to gross negligence? Mr. Vladeck offered
an example of accidentally leaving a briefcase stuffed with classified national security secrets
on a busy sidewalk in Washington, D.C.
... ... ...
Charles Silva
Why are you focusing on the gross negligence aspect?
Where is the removal from the proper place of custody? I've seen nothing in any legal analysis
in this paper that talks about it. Is the presence of classified material on a private server
of one who is authorized to have it equivalent to such a removal?
Lee Hartwig
@Charles Silva She was specifically not authorized to have a private server.
Clifford Crouch
@Michael Piston
"From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department in 2014, 110 emails in 52
email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the
time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was TOP SECRET
at the time they were sent; 36 of those chains contained SECRET information at the time; and eight
contained CONFIDENTIAL information at the time. That's the lowest level of classification."
-FBI Director James Comey, July 5, 2016
"We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal
email account."
-James Comey, July 5, 2016
Making an argument for the difference between "gross negligence" and "extreme carelessness"
is the sort of semantic hair-splitting that Hillary Clinton ought to have been compelled to do
in court - in the same way that her husband prevaricated over "what the meaning of the word 'is'
is," shortly before he lost his law license.
Hillary coped her emails and gave all of the to her private lawyer, who has no security clearance, on the USB stick.
That's alone qualifies for gross negligence.
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton also used the department's secure email system for transmitting classified information, but the FBI found that some of the regular communications with her staff on the personal server involved facts and details that she should have known were classified. In a few cases, the emails bore markings to indicate they contained classified information. ..."
"... Stewart Baker, a top national security lawyer in the Bush administration, called Comey's statement "pretty damning for Secretary Clinton, even if the facts don't make for an impressive criminal case. He suggests that she should have been, or arguably could still be, subjected to 'security or administrative sanctions.' What he doesn't say, but what we can infer, is that she ran those incredible risks with national security information because she was more worried about the GOP reading her mail than of Russian or Chinese spies reading it. That's appalling," he said. ..."
"... HIllary lied about her servers, she lied about sending classified information, she lied about the re-classification of confidential, secret and SAP documents. Some two hours after Comey's announcement, she and Obama took off on Air Force One for a rally together. ..."
"... But a new security regimen is dawning for those who hold security clearances. According to the FBI, they are now free to transfer data between secure and non-secure networks without punishment, as long as the INTENT is not to harm the United States. ..."
"... A retired FBI agent on Fox said this : The Comey conference was to take the heat off of Lynch - because if the FBI had just been quiet with their results, and it would have been Lynch who came out and said...No charges - AFTER the Phoenix scandal, people would really be skeptical. end - ..."
"... Of course this took AG-LL off the hook. NOW - for all of this to fall in place? Had to be some meetings beforehand - AG - FBI and Whitehouse general council - 3 US government lawyers colluding this event - to make SURE they have jobs the next 4 years and the GRATITUDE of Potus Hillary. ..."
"... Corrupt? I would not go that far...let's just say DIRTY. ..."
"... "Gross negligence" is the standard under 18 U.S.C., section 793-f. FBI Director Comey said Hillary Clinton was "extremely careless" in her handling of highly classified information. What's the difference, other than semantics, between "gross negligence" and "extremely careless?" ..."
"... Hillary's emails may be great confirmation of Hillary's war role in the Mid-east and even Ukraine. However, more to the point they confirm for all Democrats that Hillary's agenda is the Neo-con one of Geo. W. Bush's handlers from PNAC, Chicago School of Economics, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland. (The Neo-con/Neo-liberal company includes Larry Summers, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) She is not a run of the mill hawk like John McCain, she is a New World Order marionette just as Geo W was. She needs to be dumped as she is beholden to anti-democratic values of elitism. ..."
"... Bill Kristol is attacking Donald Trump because his candidate is Hillary. ..."
"... This was historical. Law enforcement does not make decisions on prosecution. That is left to prosecutors. Law enforcement are fact finders who should have presented the case to a career professional prosecutor to make a decision. ..."
"... The question is, why was well established policy and protocol violated and the case not presented to a prosecutor for a decision? Ask any local D.A. If they reject a case, they write a "reject" documenting their rationale. In a very public or complicated case, that reject is written in great detail regarding each and every potential charge. ..."
"... The Obama Administration has prosecuted more people under the same WW I espionage act than all other administrations COMBINED. Comey has prosecuted a person under this act for a 21-word email .not 30,000 destroyed emails. ..."
"... Everybody knows this was fixed. The examples of similar incidents, putting people in jail, are coming out of the shadows. It is time to vote the career politicians out of office and take our country back. ..."
"... NSA has copies of every email sent to/from US, & likely most others, for last 10+ years. So they have all 30,000+ of the emails she deleted. ..."
"... When in the Navy I saw a LT. career destroyed for leaving a top secret safe open over night. We did not know who maybe got in. The assumption by NCIS was that someone did enter and Top Secret information was taken. He was prosecuted for maybe forgetting and Clinton no prosecution for being dumb? ..."
"It's just not a crime under current law to do nothing more than share sensitive information over unsecured networks," said Stephen
Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. "Maybe it should be, but that's something for Congress to decide going forward."
John M. Deutch, another former CIA director, narrowly avoided a misdemeanor charge for having taken hundreds of top secret files
home on his laptop computer. He was pardoned by Clinton before charges were filed.
... ... ...
Hillary Clinton also used the department's secure email system for transmitting classified information, but the FBI found
that some of the regular communications with her staff on the personal server involved facts and details that she should have known
were classified. In a few cases, the emails bore markings to indicate they contained classified information.
However, investigators did not find evidence she knowingly or intentionally disclosed government secrets or that she exposed secrets
through gross negligence. Clinton's apparent interest was in maintaining her privacy.
... ... ...
Stewart Baker, a top national security lawyer in the Bush administration, called Comey's statement "pretty damning for Secretary
Clinton, even if the facts don't make for an impressive criminal case. He suggests that she should have been, or arguably could still
be, subjected to 'security or administrative sanctions.' What he doesn't say, but what we can infer, is that she ran those incredible
risks with national security information because she was more worried about the GOP reading her mail than of Russian or Chinese spies
reading it. That's appalling," he said.
knox.bob.xpg
No amount of facts, no amount of evidence, and no amount of lies will change the minds of supporters of Hillary Clinton. Her
coronation was pre-determined. Ideology is more important to her supporters than the quality of the candidate. While brash, Trump
nailed it yesterday. The fix was in and the optics played out.
HIllary lied about her servers, she lied about sending classified information, she lied about the re-classification of
confidential, secret and SAP documents. Some two hours after Comey's announcement, she and Obama took off on Air Force One for
a rally together.
Obama would have never done this if Comey's decision was to seek criminal charges. Presidential travel is not spur
of the moment, it is carefully planned weeks in advance. So what happened here ? I believe Comey knew that DOJ would not seek
criminal charges against her despite the overwhelming evidence of gross negligence.
Comey "fried" her yesterday and now she will be tried in the court of public opinion. There are simply some people who believe
that global warming, income inequality, and transgender bathrooms are more important than ISIS, our economy, terror, or national
debt.
unclesmrgol
Hillary has been freed from any punishment, for some animals are more important than others.
But a new security regimen is dawning for those who hold security clearances. According to the FBI, they are now free to
transfer data between secure and non-secure networks without punishment, as long as the INTENT is not to harm the United States.
That is the new standard, and a mighty fine one it is -- right?
SandyDago
A retired FBI agent on Fox said this : The Comey conference was to take the heat off of Lynch - because if the FBI had
just been quiet with their results, and it would have been Lynch who came out and said...No charges - AFTER the Phoenix scandal,
people would really be skeptical. end -
That seems very obvious at this point...The FBI does not do - what James Comey did yesterday. No comment is how they roll -
Yet we get a play by play yesterday.
Of course this took AG-LL off the hook. NOW - for all of this to fall in place? Had to be some meetings beforehand - AG
- FBI and Whitehouse general council - 3 US government lawyers colluding this event - to make SURE they have jobs the next 4 years
and the GRATITUDE of Potus Hillary.
Corrupt? I would not go that far...let's just say DIRTY.
Chris Crusade
"Gross negligence" is the standard under 18 U.S.C., section 793-f. FBI Director Comey said Hillary Clinton was "extremely
careless" in her handling of highly classified information. What's the difference, other than semantics, between "gross negligence"
and "extremely careless?"
lon.ball
Hillary's emails may be great confirmation of Hillary's war role in the Mid-east and even Ukraine.
However, more to the point they confirm for all Democrats that Hillary's agenda is the Neo-con one of Geo. W. Bush's handlers
from PNAC, Chicago School of Economics, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland. (The Neo-con/Neo-liberal company
includes Larry Summers, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) She is not a run of the mill hawk like John McCain, she is a New
World Order marionette just as Geo W was. She needs to be dumped as she is beholden to anti-democratic values of elitism.
Bill Kristol is attacking Donald Trump because his candidate is Hillary. (See this article
in this issue.) So, it is not about Democrat vs. Republican. The new political dichotomy is Centralization (corporatism, totalitarian,
collectivism) vs. Personal Constitutional freedom. I am a lifelong Democrat and Sanders man who is "never Hillary" for good reason.
I cannot sit by idly and watch as our national Democracy continues to devolve into world fascism with the Neo-cons. Hillary is
a traitor to the Nation and to the late great Democratic Party.
It is time for the old right and old progressive left to unite for preservation of the US Constitution
and personal freedom. Never Hillary; never New World Order!"
less
tommy501
This was historical. Law enforcement does not make decisions on prosecution. That is left to prosecutors. Law enforcement
are fact finders who should have presented the case to a career professional prosecutor to make a decision.
The question is, why was well established policy and protocol violated and the case not presented to a prosecutor for a
decision? Ask any local D.A. If they reject a case, they write a "reject" documenting their rationale. In a very public or complicated
case, that reject is written in great detail regarding each and every potential charge.
Something's fishy.
andytek2
@tommy501 he didn't make a prosecutorial decision he only said that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges.
DennisWV
The Obama Administration has prosecuted more people under the same WW I espionage act than all other administrations COMBINED.
Comey has prosecuted a person under this act for a 21-word email .not 30,000 destroyed emails.
Everybody knows this was fixed. The examples of similar incidents, putting people in jail, are coming out of the shadows.
It is time to vote the career politicians out of office and take our country back.
Outside the Herd
NSA has copies of every email sent to/from US, & likely most others, for last 10+ years. So they have all 30,000+ of the
emails she deleted.
FBI & O knew months ago what was in all of them, & delayed looking away until primaries were clinched. Which was also crooked,
ask Bernie's peep's.
Andre-Leonard
"A second law makes it a crime to "remove" secret documents kept by the government or to allow them to be stolen through
"gross negligence."
Funny how they went after Edward Snowden for the very same thing. Yet no one in their 'right' mind expected a Justice Department
led by Obama to allow for Billary to be indicted. It's all about favorites here and justice is 'not' really blind.
kenwrite9
When she was in foreign countries she should have known that those countries spy on American officials. I now that, why she
did not is strange. When in the Navy I saw a LT. career destroyed for leaving a top secret safe open over night. We did not
know who maybe got in. The assumption by NCIS was that someone did enter and Top Secret information was taken. He was prosecuted
for maybe forgetting and Clinton no prosecution for being dumb?
"... Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18) ..."
"... The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence. ..."
"... It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has not committed. ..."
"... Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration of the crimes that actually have been charged. ..."
"... Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of classified information, we've decided she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information. ..."
"... To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case. ..."
Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18):
With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from
its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent
violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was "extremely careless" and strongly suggested
that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence
services.
In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not
require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence
is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry
out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant.
People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
... ... ...
It is a common tactic of defense lawyers in criminal trials to set up a straw-man for the jury: a crime the defendant has
not committed. The idea is that by knocking down a crime the prosecution does not allege and cannot prove, the defense may confuse
the jury into believing the defendant is not guilty of the crime charged.
Judges generally do not allow such sleight-of-hand because innocence on an uncharged crime is irrelevant to the consideration
of the crimes that actually have been charged. It seems to me that this is what the FBI has done today. It has told the public
that because Mrs. Clinton did not have intent to harm the United States we should not prosecute her on a felony that does not require
proof of intent to harm the United States.
Meanwhile, although there may have been profound harm to national security caused by her grossly negligent mishandling of
classified information, we've decided she shouldn't be prosecuted for grossly negligent mishandling of classified information.
I think highly of Jim Comey personally and professionally, but this makes no sense to me. Finally, I was especially unpersuaded
by Director Comey's claim that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case based on the evidence uncovered by the FBI.
To my mind, a reasonable prosecutor would ask: Why did Congress criminalize the mishandling of classified information through
gross negligence? The answer, obviously, is to prevent harm to national security. So then the reasonable prosecutor asks: Was the
statute clearly violated, and if yes, is it likely that Mrs. Clinton's conduct caused harm to national security? If those two questions
are answered in the affirmative, I believe many, if not most, reasonable prosecutors would feel obliged to bring the case.
"... Wasserman is a great replacement for him as a stunningly inept strategist. "In the summer of 1994, Coelho was the principal Democratic political strategist during the run-up to the mid-term Congressional elections. Officially, he was Senior Advisor to the Democratic National Committee. ..."
"... The Republican Party won a landslide victory in the fall congressional elections, capturing both the House and Senate by commanding margins." ..."
"... I was trying to be "polite" to temper the rage I feel at these dishonest people who pretend they even comprehend the word progressive and neatly sidestep the role the Koch Brothers played. ..."
Bill and Obama seem to follow the strategy to lose the house and senate. But the smug Clinton
acolytes blame the voters. Always deflect blame eh?
Wasserman is a great replacement for him as a stunningly inept strategist. "In the summer
of 1994, Coelho was the principal Democratic political strategist during the run-up to the mid-term
Congressional elections. Officially, he was Senior Advisor to the Democratic National Committee.
The Republican Party won a landslide victory in the fall congressional elections, capturing
both the House and Senate by commanding margins."
I was trying to be "polite" to temper the rage I feel at these dishonest people who pretend
they even comprehend the word progressive and neatly sidestep the role the Koch Brothers played.
Now we get more of the same. I am part of the 1% financially but I was raised to understand
it was all going to get better for the poor.
But yeah must have been Fox news who MADE Bill get into bed with these creeps. I can't sit
back smugly and proclaim I am alright jack I have 4 kids and I am horrified the world they will
inherit.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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